Red As Blood

Chapter One

The halls were empty as she liked them, the servants huddled away in their damp, dark quarters for the night. The night was a fearful stranger to them. To her it was an old friend, a constant solace. She retreated to the dark in her weakest moments. It was in the dark that she celebrated her victories and mourned her losses, recovered her strength and plotted her revenge. Yes, the dark had been much better to her than the light had ever been.

            Moonlight bounced off her parchment white skin, revealing a face of extraordinary beauty and disturbing malice. The deep green eyes remembered the centuries past and the battles fought, the blood-covered steps she had climbed to reach her position. She had trampled millions on her ascent.

            The queen looked over her kingdom. To the humans there was nothing but black, but she saw more than humans did. She saw the twinkling of lanterns and candles, smelled the aroma of a thousand warm bodies asleep in their beds, and heard their slow steady breaths. It was overwhelming, the sense of power that she felt. In their eyes she held a fearsome combination of fear and respect. There was no loyalty, but she had no use for that.

            Her bedchamber was a tower built against all reason, lacking in comfort and compensating with its sheer character. It jutted out vertically from the castle walls, beyond the length of all the other towers. It seemed some days she could see till the end of the world from her tower. She dreamed of ruling everything she saw.

            The forests were still filled with rebels, those pesky people that refused to realize their own incompetence, their own inferiority. They stole from her subjects, slayed her guards on sight. She saw the forest, heard the beat of their frantic little hearts. They feared her even in their sleep, yet they kept fighting. She wished she could see them with her own eyes. The nymphs that lived within their ancient trees and flowed as the water in the streams. Those silver creatures of the moon, the unicorns, who would look so regal within her stables. And most of all the wretched dwarfs who led the fight, and kept from her the precious jewels that belonged in her crown.

            Queen Morgan turned away from the window and concentrated on the castle. It was a practice she did every night. Perhaps a tiring practice, but it had saved her life countless times. She counted the heartbeats in the castle. The old slow drum of the child's old nursemaid, the girl's only companion. There were the steady beats of her soldiers, and finally her favorite. The beat most full of life, the one she most would have loved to drain, squeezing the life out of that little body. The little princess slept between her coral pink satin sheets and dreamed of sweet things. She would've quenched her thirst a long time before, but the girl served a purpose. She was a symbol. She was the figurehead to the people, the barricade against a complete revolution. Simona wasn't a very clever child, but she was useful just by being alive.

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            Sim looked around at the high walls and the glass shards that glinted at their tops. She wondered why the queen was so strict, insisting that the villagers would try to steal from her if she was any less careful. The palace was littered with guards, with sentries. All the gateposts were manned, all the rims of the walls lined with glass shards and the moat filled with flesh-eating leeches. She could hear the other children sometimes, laughing and screaming as they ran to the village at sundown. She knew they didn't eat some meals, and Nan told her they never got to wear anything near as beautiful as her velvet dress, the pretty thing Nan told her was midnight blue. She was jealous despite everything Nan told her. They had homes, not castles. Homes were warm, castles were cold. Or it was so at least in her experience. Their palace didn't get snow storms like in the books she read, but on winter mornings the frost gave everything in the garden a glimmering coat. They looked like the million shards of a brilliant mirror.