“Black hair, white skin, red lips,” Bianca started. “That’s my thing. The thing my mother gave me when she died.” A strand of Bianca’s darkest black hair fell forward, and she brushed it behind her shoulder with a graceful motion. “That is considered the most beautiful combination in my kingdom, Forest Spire, and there has been no small amount of jealousy from other women. Not exactly from girls my age, but from their mothers, afraid I’ll steal a man they wanted as a husband for their daughters.”

  “You’re a man-eater?” the prince said with a sly grin.

  “Not exactly, Tristram.”

  “Call me Tris. I hate formality, and it’s only you and I here.”

  “Call me Bianca. I never get called that.”

  “What do you get called?”

  “Snow White, White Snow, down the hill I go, into a pile of snow,” she rhymed as if in a trance. “Rose Trine gets called The Three Roses, and I get called Snow White, but I hate it, and if you ever call me that, I will consider it the end of our friendship.”

  She glared at him and, to her surprise, her sudden movement made him jump. She smiled, and he did too.

  She stopped and suddenly looked at him. “The way you look at me is different.”

  “Different from what? Your adoring subjects?”

  “Yes,” Bianca agreed. “The women look at me, and their expressions prove they hate me. They think I’m a porcelain doll, and every man must be dying inside for want of me, but the feeling those men have is not love.”

  “What is it?”

  Bianca hesitated before spilling the beans. “This is going to sound gross, but it feels like every man who meets me wants to see what I look like under my dress.”

  Tris looked palpably disgusted. “What are you guys doing up north?”

  “Hear me out. It’s because of the second time I was cursed. The first time was when my mother blessed me to look like the perfect girl, but the second was bestowed upon me by a necromancer on loan from Spectral Shade.”

  “You have dealings with people that much further north?”

  Bianca nodded. “He was visiting our kingdom as a special advisor regarding some particularly foul weather we were destined to receive. He came to stay with us, and the snow fell. It boxed in the whole castle. We were snowed in, so no one could leave. It was so stormy, it was dark like night in the middle of the day. I was sixteen, and I was so beautiful to his sight that he said he fell in love with me.”

  Tris paused. “Stop. I’m having a hard time envisioning a necromancer. Please describe him for me.”

  Bianca waved a dismissive hand. “He wore black, but everyone in my kingdom wears dark colors half the year. You often can’t see a necromancer’s face well because they wear a black mask. That’s their only distinguishing feature. His mask covered a lot of his face. I still don’t know what he truly looked like.”

  “Creepy,” Tris said with an obvious shiver. “What happened?”

  “Do you see my dress? Do you see how it covers my wrists and my arms and my throat and my collarbone and everything?”

  “Isn’t that the style in Forest Spire?”

  “No. It isn’t. That necromancer said that when he looked at my skin, he thought he could see words.”

  Tris moved closer to Bianca on his chair. “What sort of words?”

  Bianca went on slowly with marked hesitation. “Words like ‘touch me’ or ‘kiss me here.’ Words like those. I’m still not exactly sure what his intentions were when he undid the back of my dress. He said there were instructions written on my neck, and they continued down and were hidden behind the fabric of my dress. He had resisted undressing me in order to see them dozens of times before he gave in. Perhaps he only wanted to read the words and not violate me.”

  Tris’s eyes were hollow. “Did he? Did he hurt you?”

  Bianca shook her head. “It’s not as though we were alone in the castle. There were soldiers everywhere, and he was taken to the pits at the bottom of the castle for what he’d done. He was kept there, in prison, until the roads were cleared. Then he was taken to the edge of our kingdom and banished, but not before he placed his curse on me.”

  Tris wetted his lips. “What was his curse?”

  “That everyone would be able to see the words written on my skin that only he could read before. He did it to prove his innocence. It’s a curse much harder to bear than the black, white, and red curse my mother placed on me. Do you know what every doctor says after he sees my curse that writes on my skin?”

  “What?”

  “He says that I am very lucky that the words don’t show on my face. Do you know what he asks for after that?”

  “What?”

  “He says he’s a doctor and I can trust him. He asks me to take more of my clothes off, so he can see the words. It’s not just one or two words, but the print can get very small, and there are paragraphs and stories all down my back, all down my chest. Down my legs and even on the bottoms of my feet.”

  “What does it say? You must know.”

  “Reading it at any given moment means nothing. The words change all the time. That’s why everyone is always so curious. It’s not because they haven’t seen a very white girl without her clothing before. What is written on me is written with the intention of entrancing the reader.”

  “So it says something different for everyone?”

  “No,” Bianca said. “Men are not special. Their feelings are not individual. Most men want to read the same things when it comes to what they would want to read on a woman’s skin. I wear gloves a lot too, because sometimes it creeps down my fingers, even sometimes on the backs of my ears.”

  “What does it say on the back of your ear?”

  “You can look if you’d like,” she offered, pulling her hair back.

  Tris got up, and when he saw it, he gawked.

  “What does it say?” Bianca asked with very little curiosity in her tone.

  “It says, ‘Pull my hair until I scream’.” Tris put his head closer. “That is really creepy! But what’s more creepy is that the words go down your earlobe and disappear under your collar. It says, ‘Pull my hair, until I scream. Drag me across the floor and...’ and the rest is hidden under your lace collar.” He did not touch her collar and stepped back. He returned to his seat at the table and leaned forward, tenting his fingers. “I think your curse might be worse than mine. I’m just alone. I can be alone. You must worry about nearly every person you meet.”

  Bianca arranged her hair to cover her ears again. “I’m a princess, and my father is a king, so the problems I would have had if I were a commoner are minimized. After the incident with the necromancer, my father decided to remarry, so he would have a woman nearby to act as a watchdog for me.”

  “Yeah, how did that go?” Tris asked skeptically.

  Bianca was careful as she said her stepmother’s name. “Angelique? Until recently, everything was fine. We managed to convince most of the kingdom that either the words on my body had stopped appearing or that it was a rumor that had never been true in the first place. We made the way I dress fashionable. It was a trend we made up. Angelique is gifted at keeping the men at bay. However, she’s terrible at protecting me from other mothers. I’ve had dozens of smaller curses placed on me because those mothers believe that if the eligible bachelors see me, they won’t want their daughters, even if they can’t have me. I have only been to two balls since I came out as a debutant, which is crazy because there have been close to thirty, because of ‘the season’. I have accidents and misfortunes right before a ball. My dress rips, and there is nothing for me to wear instead. I started bringing backup gowns, and they started going missing, too. Sometimes I’d break my ankle only to find it miraculously healed the next day. The women will go to mad lengths to get rid of me. Sometimes they claim that I’m an unnatural creature.”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Like a ghost?” Tris supplied.

  “Like a demon,” Bianca clarified. “More than once, I have been accused of being the physical incarnation of Swaneve, the Demon Goddess.”

  “But that can’t be as bad as the letters on your skin!” Tris insisted.

  “Why can’t it be? Are you already curious about them?” Bianca asked, her hands clasped to hide anything written on her fingers from his view.

  “No,” he said firmly, turning his face away. “It sounds like they’re lies, and anyone who wants to look at them is the type of idiot who is entertained by lies.”

  Bianca nodded. “You sound very wise. For many years, that was how I thought of them, too, but something happened to change my mind.”

  Interested, Tris leaned forward. “What?”

  “Something happened to my stepmother. I don’t know what shifted her feelings, but she was suddenly very unhappy about my curses. Something unfortunate would happen before a ball, and she suddenly thought it was her fault, and she would stay away from the ball to care for me, which, honestly, was completely unnecessary. Angelique would conduct a lot of the kingdom’s business at a ball, smoothing things over and greasing wheels—that sort of thing. Having her miss the event practically ground affairs to a halt. That was all the lead-up there was, when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “A man from the army came to see me, a knight. At first, I was under the impression that he was there to court me, which was kind of nonsensical because he wasn’t a high enough-ranking knight to wed me. His name was Blackwell. He invited me into the woods with him. I wouldn’t have gone, but Angelique encouraged me to go with him. She said that I had had so little fun with all the misfortune that had befallen me and told me that an outing was just what the doctor ordered. He said he was leading the way to a lookout point where you could see the Waterfall of Gilbriath, which was something I had always wanted to see.”

  Tris’s throat tightened as he listened.

  Bianca set down her bread and leaned in toward Tris. “But he didn’t take me to the waterfall. He led me into the blackest portion of wood I had ever seen, and when it was obvious that we were completely alone… he took out his knife and put the point to my neck. When I say that, I don’t mean that he placed the steel next to my skin; I mean that he drew blood immediately.”

  “What did you do?” Tris asked impatiently.

  “He told me to stand still, and I did. Immediately, he forced me to the ground, and with the point of his knife still gouging in my skin, he got on top of me. He started undoing the buttons on my dress.”

  “And you still didn’t move?”

  Bianca raised the curtain of her black hair and pulled at her collar, showing him a bandage in the crook of her neck. “Blackwell was nicking me with the knife as he clumsily undid my buttons with one hand. When he finally got down to the middle of my chest, he stopped, took the knife away from my neck, and opened my dress. He breathed one word, ‘Beautiful.’ Then he raised the knife. It was in that moment that I realized he was not going to rape me, and he was not taking my clothes off because he wanted to read what was written on my skin. He was going to cut my heart out.”

  Tris leaned back and scoffed with disgust. “People have really got to stop doing that! No magician I have ever met has ever said that a heart has any particularly special magical properties. It’s ignorant and barbaric.”

  Bianca shook her head in disappointment. “Don’t you want to know what saved me?”

  “I’m assuming that the pinhead realized that cutting apart a young woman’s body is insane, even if she looks like she’s already dead.”

  “Har har!” Bianca fake-laughed while she loaded her plate up with whatever she could reach from the dishes on the table.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re the fairest in the land,” Tris said, attempting to sound serious. “Did the sight of your bare skin undo him and make him look on you with compassion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” Tris asked in disbelief.

  “Yes. Something like that. Though I don’t think it was my flawless skin that changed his mind.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was the words that appeared on my chest.”

  “You didn’t get a chance to read them?”

  “No. My head was tilted so far back, and I couldn’t. He leaped off me and told me to run. He told me to run away and never come back to Forest Spire as long as I lived. He said that was the only way I would be safe.”

  “So you ran?”

  “I did not run. The deep forest is hard enough to walk through. You need to watch where you’re going. I hurried, and soon I was out of Blackwell’s sight. I walked for hours. The first place I found was a hut where a hermit lived.”

  “What happened with him?”

  “When he saw I was hurt, he gave me medicine and bandages, but told me to move on. He said he’d cut my heart out if I came back.”

  “So, you didn’t sleep at his place?” Tris interrupted.

  “I did not.”

  “When did you last sleep?”

  “Back at the castle, at home. I wandered around aimlessly, hoping I could find someone reasonable, which was when I found this castle.”

  Tris raised his eyebrows. “Have you found someone reasonable?”

  She looked at him. “You are obviously reasonable.”

  “Why?” he asked curiously.

  Bianca stopped. Tris had appeared reasonable from the first moment she had seen him perched on his stone throne, like someone she could talk to and someone who could talk to her. Why? The answer was immediate. “Because you’re too good-looking,” she replied.

  “Why should that count for anything?” he scoffed.

  “Your looks have exposed you to persecution, haven’t they? You’re here because you wouldn’t give Rose Trine what she wanted. We are kindred. Royalty who are merely pawns. Me, because my destiny is to wed a prince who will only want to marry me because of the position he hopes to gain in Forest Spire and for the renown of marrying the ‘fairest in the land’. Well,” she said, rethinking what she was saying, “that was my destiny until the day before yesterday. You, because you are a second son, and unless I am mistaken, you are not in direct line for the throne because your brother’s wife gave birth to a son last year.”

  “Did she? I didn’t know,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Yes. She did.”

  “I have a nephew? What’s his name?” Tris asked eagerly.

  Her shoulders dropped. “I don’t remember. Something that started with an H.”

  “Honorable,” he supplied. “That was what they were going to name him. A name fit for a king.” Tris let the air balloons in his cheeks fill before letting them out in a huff and tugging on the string that held his ponytail in place. He shook out his hair and massaged the spot where the knot had sat. “So, we’re the same?”

  “I feel like we are. At the very least, I feel that you are enough of a gentleman that you won’t try anything on me and that you’ll help me.”

  “Yes, I’ll help you. I’m disgusted that you’ve led such a difficult life, but frankly, I’m a little baffled as to why you told me all that.”

  She rounded on him. “You asked me to!”

  “Yes, but I didn’t expect that much detail. I would have accepted the story that your stepmother was jealous of your beauty and asked the knight to cut your heart out, that you escaped and ran here. It sounds like a good story, doesn’t it?”

  “How could I have given less detail?” Bianca refuted, squirming in embarrassment. “The curse on my skin is serious, and it’s very hard to hide when I can’t wear gloves. And these collars are the pits!” she huffed, pulling on it and undoing three buttons that were so close together, undoing them didn’t even expose her collarbone.

  “It says, ‘Love me’ on your neck,” Tris pointed out gently.

  She ignored him. “Can I please stay here until my throat is healed? I need new clothes, and I can sew them myself if you have fabric.”

  “I doubt you’ll need to go that far. There are plenty of bedrooms here. You should be able to find clothes that fit you. I didn’t choose these clothes. Can you imagine a prince from Sun Vine wearing a cravat? I’d throw it in the fire if my neck wasn’t cold sometimes.”

  “And you can’t leave the castle?” Bianca wanted to confirm.

  “No. I can’t even get near the door that leads out. The only rooms I can go to are the bedrooms, the throne room, and this dining room. If I try to leave, I just walk in place without moving forward.”

  “You must be very bored,” Bianca observed.

  “Yes. I have been very bored, which is why I must ask you for something.”

  “What?”

  “When I take you upstairs, there is a line of bedrooms. Rooms on either side of the hall. You can choose whichever one you like, and you can trust me, I will stay out of it. In exchange, I need you to stay out of my room. At the end of the hallway, there is another staircase. It leads to a room at the top of a tower, and avoiding it should be easy.”

  “What do you take me for? Some idiot who can’t follow one instruction?”

  “It’s not what I think of you. It’s because I require reassurance that you won’t violate my trust. Think of it like your skin,” he said, walking his fingertips across the tablecloth. “I won’t be curious. I won’t wonder about you. And if you go up those stairs and look in my room, I’ll consider it an act of treason. For me, it would feel like how you would feel if I ripped your dress off you. Understand?”

  She nodded.

  “You must be tired,” he said.