A booming voice rolls out behind me. I turn as a man stomps in, dusting snow from his hair. The loose flakes melt into my skin, raising shivers that tingle along my arms. I know him. His dark-blue eyes and gray-speckled beard and white hair pulled back in a tight knot …
Alysson is my mother—which means Sir is my father.
Joy chokes me, hot tears pool in my eyes. He’s my father. Of course he is—I’ve always wanted him to be my father.
A swell of pain breaks through my joy and I fall forward, knees cracking onto the wooden floor.
I called him Father once and yes, Sir, no, Sir. You are not my father and I am not your daughter and all I ever wanted was for you to look at me….
This isn’t right. He exists, I know he exists, but not like this.
“Meira.” Sir drops to his knees too, his hands cupping my head and pulling me to look at him. His face is gentle and worried, his forehead wrinkling. “Are you all right?”
He’s wrong. He’s not supposed to be here … something happened to him, something horrible. “I dreamed you died,” I whisper.
Sir’s worry melts into a smile and he pulls me into him, wrapping his thick arms around my shoulders and letting me rest against his chest. “There’s my sweet girl. It was just a dream.”
He’s cold from the outside air and smells like snow, clean and crisp. The buttons on his shirt pinch my cheek when I press my face into his chest, absorbing the feel of him all around me. This is what love is like. He loves me. He’s my father and I’m his daughter and he’s all I have, all I’ll ever need.
“He’s coming!” Alysson cries. “Take your seats. The prince is here!”
Sir eases me into a chair facing the front door. The darkness of the snowstorm beyond the open door looks like a dream from which anything could materialize, and Nessa takes my hand from her chair beside me as a man appears. A sharp blue military uniform covers him, his polished black boots gleaming in the firelight. The snowstorm pushes him to us like it created him, morphed him from the deepest recesses of my mind.
“Thank you for having me,” he says, and bows his head, every part of him the proper prince he’s always been. Strong, confident face, eyes vibrant and alert and memorizing each person in the room like he wants to know us by heart.
He stops in front of me. Nessa’s hand tightens around mine, cutting off the blood to my fingers.
“Meira,” Mather says. My name, just once, just those two syllables echoing to me like no other words exist. Just us. Like it should have been.
Explosions. Mather, terrified, screaming my name. Screaming and screaming …
I don’t love him. I can’t love him, so I don’t, not anymore. It’s too hard to love him.
Mather sits across from me, his eyes never leaving mine. Alysson moves to the fire, shooing away Garrigan and his wife and sons. They join the table, Conall and Garrigan and their wives, and Nessa with her happy family, and me with my happy family.
The front door is still open. Beyond the snowflakes, a flash of white hair makes me spring from the chair and rip my hand from Nessa’s.
Alysson ladles stew into bowls. “Meira, sit, please. Dinner has started.”
But I can’t sit. I can’t tear my eyes away from the door, from the snow, from the white hair that’s caught in the wind and tangling up around a face—who is that?
Sir touches my arm. “What do you see, my sweet girl?”
He yelled at me when I was small and Mather and I were found giggling in the meeting tent, covered in ink….
No—why would I have been with the prince as a child? I step around the table, the white hair beyond the door drawing me like I’m tethered to it and she’s winding me in.
“Meira.” Mather leans back in the chair, his fingers trailing down my arm. “What happened?”
It’s so safe here. Everything I could possibly want. How could anything bad ever happen? This is perfect, this is right, and I have to tell Mather everything because he is perfect.
“I healed a boy,” I hear myself say. I think the white hair outside belongs to Mather’s mother, the queen. I hear she’s beautiful. “I matter.”
“You do, Meira.” Mather stands, his chair sliding across the wood. “Of course you matter. Why?”
He takes my hand but the feel of it, of him, is a sharp, sudden break in the perfect picture around me. “No, I’m wrong for you,” I hear myself tell him. “I’m not good enough.”
Sir folds his hands on the table and looks up at us. “I only told you that so you wouldn’t jeopardize our future. Lies are stronger than truth sometimes.”