I wake with a start. I am sweating like a sinner in church, and my body is stiff all over. For a dizzying moment, I wonder if I am back in my prison cell again. But the room is bright with sunlight, and somewhere, I can smell breakfast.
Home. My childhood bedroom. I am sitting on the floor, slumped against the side of my bed. Clothes and books are strewn in a semicircle around me, and a suitcase lies open in the corner. I fell asleep? While packing for a trip? If I get up, I can crawl to the tarnished mirror in the corner, and confirm my suspicions…
As soon as I set eyes upon myself, a chill runs down my spine. Perhaps I might have wanted to write off the past seven years of my life—and my death at the executioner’s axe—as nothing more than a troubled dream. I am a girl of eighteen again. My face and hands are smoother, smaller. My raven black hair is long and loose, with bluntly-chopped bangs to hide a widow’s peak that, as a woman of twenty-five, I had honestly stopped caring about. I can even spy the remnants of cheap makeup around my eyes, used in vain to disguise the dark circles that I feared would make me the mockery of other girls. But my reflection returns something far worse than the mere markings of a self-conscious youth. Stretching around the circumference of my neck, like a white ribbon pulled taut, is a scar.
Shakily, my hand floats up to feel it. It is as smooth as if it healed years ago, leaving only a shadow of the wound. By touch alone, it is indistinguishable from the unbroken skin around it, but I can see it plain as day against my dark skin, and I know at once what it means.
I died to the executioner’s axe and regressed seven years into the past. The fates, for whatever reason, have seen fit to grant me a second chance.
I mostly know of regression from my fairy tales. When I told the Crown Prince that a family friend sent me books to read as a child, that was only partially true—in actuality, Mama told me that they were delivered from the royal palace itself. As she put it, even though I was an illegitimate heir of a fourth prince, the royal family still had an interest in ensuring I was literate. So they sent books. More books than I knew what to do with. At times my little bedroom was stuffed floor to ceiling with them, and not having many friends when I was young, I passed the time by reading them all. I liked the fantasy romances most of all, with the fearless heroines who would regress in time to save her lover or stop a war or become the queen in her new life.
Although presented in most of my books as fantasy, regression also appears in science. It is an exceedingly rare, but well-known phenomenon. Scholars call it a wrinkle in the fabric of space-time which can only be “ironed flat” by sending one person back in time…beyond that, no one knows how it happens or why it works. Some of the great saints alleged to be regressors, having seen some doomed future and devoting their second life to averting it. Many kings, queens, and emperors have claimed to do the same. But, though regression is known to be possible, it is exceedingly impossible to prove when it has happened. This leads to more hoaxes than royal scholars know what to do with, and the widespread presumption that if someone claims to be a regressor, you’d be an idiot to believe them. So for someone like me, regression was strictly in the realm of fantasy. Of course a phenomenon so rare could never happen to me, a thoroughly uninteresting commoner whose mentally ill mother only pretended was something special.
But that is where I have to stop myself. No. Not pretended.
Frantic, I run the memory over and over again in my mind. I even upend my room to find a paper and pen where I can write down what I remember of those last fateful moments, every word I exchanged with the Prince, everything Mama shouted in her hysterics. But not once did she say her own name, nor did I say hers, and yet I know what I heard: “ Imogen .”
The Crown Prince knew my mother’s name.
As I look around my room, I remember again what brought me here—seven years ago? yesterday? the night before I fell asleep while packing, I suppose. It is the morning after my eighteenth birthday. That night, Mama and I had a fight. Our last fight.
“I’m going,” I had said, “and you can’t stop me.”
It was late into the night. Mama had offered to throw a big neighborhood party for my birthday, as a consolation prize for the debutante ball that a “proper” lady would have had. I didn’t want her to spend any extra money on something so silly, so I asked instead to have my precious couple of friends over for dinner. We compromised. I had two friends over and Mama went all out decorating the house with paper frills, ribbons, and streamers.
My friends had just gone home and Mama and I were in the kitchen. Like always, she washed the dishes; I dried them and put them away.
“Of course I can’t stop you, but I can tell you why you’re wrong,” Mama responded, elbow-deep in suds.
“Yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. “And why’s that?”
“I was going to keep this a secret. But since you’re forcing my hand, I might as well tell you now. I sent a letter to the royal palace last week, reminding them of your eighteenth birthday—surely they’re already aware of it, of course, but just in case. So the palace knows you’re of age, and they could come by any second now.”
I hardly bothered to hide my sigh of exasperation. Mama used to talk every day about my “father” when I was younger and gullible enough to believe her without question. When I got older, at about eleven or twelve years of age, I told her to stop bringing it up so much. It was unlimited ammunition for the neighborhood kids, who obviously didn’t believe it, and would use anything at their disposal to pick on others. I think Mama was also starting to sense my own disbelief, because she agreed it was best to stop talking about it. After that, she only mentioned him on occasion, every couple of months or so. Now she was bringing it up again. And on the most important night of my life.
“I can’t wait around on account of a letter, Mama,” I told her gently. “This opportunity…well, I don’t know if I’ll get one like it ever again! Master Odric is setting sail from Belsie Port in fourteen days, no exceptions, and he wants one last chance to evaluate my skills before we leave. If he can’t evaluate, I can’t go with him, and I’ve lost my chance to learn from the best merchant in the world.”
“There are other merchants,” Mama responds. “Why must it be this one?”
“Because he’s the best, Mama. And he pays. Most apprenticeships don’t pay. But I’ll get a ten-obol stipend per week.”
“You’ll die on those merchant ships. They sink all the time.”
“Mama.” I put down the stack of dishes, turned to face her, and put a hand on my hip. “You’re catastrophizing again.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“No, you’re not—if sea travel was your only reason for worrying, you’d say so. But what’s the first thing you bring up instead? That fairy story about a prince being my father.”
“It’s not a story,” she muttered. “It’s real too.”
Her tone was so petulant, so like a whiny child who didn’t get what she wanted for a present, that something inside me snapped. I picked up the plates, put them away in the cabinet, and strode across the room to take a deep breath.
“It’s not real,” I said through gritted teeth. “Even if it was! Don’t you think I would have heard from the man by now? That he would have replied to your letter, maybe invited me to the palace for my real eighteenth birthday debutante ball?”
“I’ve told you why he can’t contact us,” Mama snaps back. “But you don’t listen. You never listen. His family—”
“Fuck his family! Isn’t he a prince? Can’t he do what he wants?”
“Eloise, language!”
“I can’t keep living like this,” I laughed bitterly. “Always hoping, wishing, praying that this story of yours has some seed of truth.”
“But it is true!”
“Do you actually believe that? Or is it just something you made up to…to make me feel better about not having a father—”
“Edgar was my husband!” Mama shouted. “We were in love! He promised he would protect us—”
“And a great bloody job he’s done of that!” I spread out my arms. “Letting you slave away for pennies in that washing house, sending me to bed hungry day after day, leaving us to waste away in this dungheap of a slum. Look around you, Mama—we’re alone. My father, whoever he was, isn’t coming to save us.”
She turned her back to me. Her shoulders trembled, and her head bowed to hide in her hands. Automatically, tears sprung to my eyes, too, but I fought them back.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I told her. “I’ve set up a bank account for you, and Master Odric will send my stipends there. Do with the money what you please.”
“You’re a lot like your father, Ellie,” she whispered, her voice high and quivering. “You really think money will fix everything.”
My father scammed the hell out of you. He latched onto your delusion that he was a prince to knock you up and keep you pining after him for eighteen years. I wouldn’t be surprised if he is the reason we’ve been dirt poor ever since. Either way, he came out on top. Whoever he is, he’s off living his life without a care in the world, probably rolling in obols, not even knowing who I am. I would give anything to have his life—living my life, flush with money, and not ever knowing who HE is.
“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” I replied, and headed for my bedroom.
That is how I ended up here, sore and stiff from having fallen asleep sitting up, surrounded with my unfinished packing. In my anger, I had even begun a ledger of all the books I had been gifted throughout the years, intending to trade them for new business-appropriate clothing. Mama never let me sell the books before, no matter how much I tried to convince her. But I was an adult. I had no need for fairy stories about time-traveling princesses; they were my property, mine to do with however I pleased.
Yet I know I cannot sell them now. Nor can I proceed with this life as I vowed to do on my eighteenth birthday. If I leave for Master Odric’s today, I shall embark on a seven-year journey around the world, see all of the same sights I have already seen, and not return to this house on Lavendel Road until the day my mother is arrested. If I leave, I shall not see her again until her fate is sealed.
In a frenzy, I pick up my half-filled suitcase and dump its contents onto the floor. Then I burst out of my room and run downstairs.
My mother is at the stove, cooking eggs. The kitchen is still decorated with paper streamers and ribbons. Last night, in the dark, they seemed forlorn and ragged, but now the morning light glows pink as it catches on them and turns the tiny, cluttered kitchen into the most beautiful place I have ever seen. And my mother—her hair black as calligrapher’s ink, barely a strand of white to be seen; her face round and free of wrinkles; her brown eyes soft and dry of tears—is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
“Mama,” I gasp, “I’m so sorry!”
She is surprised when I launch forward to embrace her, and her petite body tenses up briefly. It is no wonder; I have never been the touchy-feely type, and have not hugged her of my own accord since I was a little girl. But soon she relaxes, and her arms circle around me in turn.
“It’s okay, Ellie,” she murmurs into my hair.
“I believe you, Mama,” I choke out, a sob filling my throat. “About my father. I believe everything now.”