She could carry herself as though the sea was an old friend, as though she’d been everywhere and seen it all. In the Port Capital, she was not the princess who had never left her kingdom. She loved it here she loved that her footsteps on the cobbles became a part of the city’s hard beating pulse. Just over its edge, the ocean’s waves were some ten feet below, slapping against the stone and then rolling back into their depths. The Port Capital ended where the sidewalk was hemmed by a low stone wall. She went past the storefronts and cafes, straight to the vendors whose carts lined the Port Capital’s edge. Rawhide bag slung across her chest, Wil pushed into the crowd. The day you were born, it shrank away in fear.”

On many nights in Wil’s childhood, the queen would hold her and rock her to sleep, and she would whisper, “Death itself is no match for you. But they did not die, despite what the doctors had murmured. For days after her birth, both mother and child lay in the shadow of sheets that hung over the windows, curled up small together in the wealth of blankets damp with sweat. Something that did not belong to this world at all. But in this child’s eyes, he saw something very much unlike his other children. When his sons were born, they had been perfect dolls of boys. The king had always been fearless, but he feared her. It was a clean white line, as though someone had cut her open, torn out her heart, and returned it. She didn’t cry as her brothers had, but the most peculiar thing about her was the birthmark that lay between the spread of her ribs. Wil came out bloody and white, with purple veins marbling her cheeks, and no promises that she would live. The queen knew this child could well kill her.

In her efforts to have a daughter, the queen had given the king three sons, and it was against the advisement of the king’s finest doctors that she have a fourth child at all. It was a song that only the queen could hear, calling sweetly in the rustle of the October leaves-for it had come to take her away as well. It was an old superstition from her wanderer’s upbringing, to keep fragile spirits from being lured off by the beautiful song of death. ON THE MORNING WIL WAS born, the queen ordered that sheets be hung across every window of the castle. For Aprilynne, who takes ideas and turns them into gold

The Glass Spare by Lauren DeStefano