Tarnish weighs heavy on her mind.
As does the crown, but it’s the tarnish she’s most worried about. Can the advisors see the first creeping signs of it? Someone will have to polish the crown tonight.
A queen needs to have a strong grip on her castle. She needs to shine. If her crown is as dull as the stones behind her throne, she won’t have control. A queen needs control.
When lunchtime comes, the queen inspects the silverware. She calls for a servant. They bring in a polishing cloth. The silver is shining once she says it’s fit to eat with, but the food is cold. She picks at a salad, and inspects the fork’s tines after every bite.
The queen can’t sleep that night. She hears the clock chime midnight, then one. Her blood is too hot, the covers are too heavy, the air is too warm. Does humidity affect silver? She climbs out of her four-poster bed, and pads across the stone floor in her slippers. Her maid sleeps in a room next door. If the queen were to light a lamp, the maid might wake up. Instead, the queen carefully and quietly removes the mirror from where it hangs on the wall.
The queen sits on her window seat in the moonlight and inspects her hair. She’s checking the roots. She’s methodical, sifting through a lock by her ear. Everything is silver in the moonlight, but some things are about to be gray. Then she sees one, hidden, and curls her fingers around the gray hair, the loops biting into her fingers. She yanks it out, and hides it under a cushion.
“Make the dark circles go away,” she tells the maid in the morning. The younger woman tries to follow the order, but no matter how many layers of makeup she applies under the queen’s eyes, she can’t get the dark patches to vanish.
The queen hires a new maid that day.
She can’t keep her mind on the political matters. Every time she glances off the face of whoever is presented to her, she sees gray walls. She sees herself, tarnished.
She can’t sleep that night, again. The queen sits in her window seat with the silver mirror and combs through her hair. The maid finds her there in the morning, asleep, and is promptly fired when the queen wakes.
There are whispers about her in the castle. Some wonder what happened to their leader, and others claim they saw this coming. The queen walks down the halls and servants cease talking, but she knows. She can see their words hanging like smoke in the air. Gray. Tarnish.
Nothing happens in the kingdom for a week. No progress is made. The footmen have to turn away people who come to seek help from the queen. The citizens return to families, homes, towns that need a leader, and try to ignore the growing unease in the kingdom that’s ground to a halt. They return to their fields, and pretend to sleep at night.
Guards, maids and knights: they waited, standing at attention, for the first few days. Now the servants have chairs of their own in the throne room, and yet the queen hasn’t commented on the disrespect. She sits on her throne every day staring at the red carpet. She tries to shrink her vision so it’s all she can see, but it doesn’t help.
Her advisors are too uneasy to call in the physician.
The one thing that moves at the castle is the steady hiring and firing of the queen’s maids.
Moonlight is the only one she confides in. It washes everything to silver, but she still doesn’t trust it completely. Gray can hide under it, shining and fake. Fake silver.
On the ninth night, the queen doesn’t bother moving the mirror to her spot by the window. She sits at her vanity and watches her reflection until the moonlight touches it. The mirror glows, the brightest silver the queen has ever seen.
She can’t help but reach for it. To try to take that silver for herself.
The maid for that night comes running at the sound of the scream. She screams in turn, and two guards charge in from the hall. The three stand in the doorway, awash in moonlight. They’re staring at the floor.
The body is metallic, as if it were dipped in silver. Surrounded by shards of mirror lies the queen — dead. She’s the one dark patch in the pool of moonlight. The body is metallic, dipped in silver, and yet . . .
It’s coated in tarnish.
As does the crown, but it’s the tarnish she’s most worried about. Can the advisors see the first creeping signs of it? Someone will have to polish the crown tonight.
A queen needs to have a strong grip on her castle. She needs to shine. If her crown is as dull as the stones behind her throne, she won’t have control. A queen needs control.
When lunchtime comes, the queen inspects the silverware. She calls for a servant. They bring in a polishing cloth. The silver is shining once she says it’s fit to eat with, but the food is cold. She picks at a salad, and inspects the fork’s tines after every bite.
The queen can’t sleep that night. She hears the clock chime midnight, then one. Her blood is too hot, the covers are too heavy, the air is too warm. Does humidity affect silver? She climbs out of her four-poster bed, and pads across the stone floor in her slippers. Her maid sleeps in a room next door. If the queen were to light a lamp, the maid might wake up. Instead, the queen carefully and quietly removes the mirror from where it hangs on the wall.
The queen sits on her window seat in the moonlight and inspects her hair. She’s checking the roots. She’s methodical, sifting through a lock by her ear. Everything is silver in the moonlight, but some things are about to be gray. Then she sees one, hidden, and curls her fingers around the gray hair, the loops biting into her fingers. She yanks it out, and hides it under a cushion.
“Make the dark circles go away,” she tells the maid in the morning. The younger woman tries to follow the order, but no matter how many layers of makeup she applies under the queen’s eyes, she can’t get the dark patches to vanish.
The queen hires a new maid that day.
She can’t keep her mind on the political matters. Every time she glances off the face of whoever is presented to her, she sees gray walls. She sees herself, tarnished.
She can’t sleep that night, again. The queen sits in her window seat with the silver mirror and combs through her hair. The maid finds her there in the morning, asleep, and is promptly fired when the queen wakes.
There are whispers about her in the castle. Some wonder what happened to their leader, and others claim they saw this coming. The queen walks down the halls and servants cease talking, but she knows. She can see their words hanging like smoke in the air. Gray. Tarnish.
Nothing happens in the kingdom for a week. No progress is made. The footmen have to turn away people who come to seek help from the queen. The citizens return to families, homes, towns that need a leader, and try to ignore the growing unease in the kingdom that’s ground to a halt. They return to their fields, and pretend to sleep at night.
Guards, maids and knights: they waited, standing at attention, for the first few days. Now the servants have chairs of their own in the throne room, and yet the queen hasn’t commented on the disrespect. She sits on her throne every day staring at the red carpet. She tries to shrink her vision so it’s all she can see, but it doesn’t help.
Her advisors are too uneasy to call in the physician.
The one thing that moves at the castle is the steady hiring and firing of the queen’s maids.
Moonlight is the only one she confides in. It washes everything to silver, but she still doesn’t trust it completely. Gray can hide under it, shining and fake. Fake silver.
On the ninth night, the queen doesn’t bother moving the mirror to her spot by the window. She sits at her vanity and watches her reflection until the moonlight touches it. The mirror glows, the brightest silver the queen has ever seen.
She can’t help but reach for it. To try to take that silver for herself.
The maid for that night comes running at the sound of the scream. She screams in turn, and two guards charge in from the hall. The three stand in the doorway, awash in moonlight. They’re staring at the floor.
The body is metallic, as if it were dipped in silver. Surrounded by shards of mirror lies the queen — dead. She’s the one dark patch in the pool of moonlight. The body is metallic, dipped in silver, and yet . . .
It’s coated in tarnish.