Birthday Wishes

We're drinking tea, because she thinks it's grown-up, and it's her birthday, and I'm to keep her happy, and out of the way, until the party. Once the party has begun, it will be my turn to keep out of the way, because she isn't my sister, except by blood. The riding master says my mother was pretty.

The tea is black, but sweet, laced with cinnamon. Giggling, the princess helps herself to lumps of sugar. The cups are so fine they weigh almost nothing. A pattern of delicate golden branches ring porcelain whiter than fresh snow. In the forest, I would brew tea from birch bark, heating stones to warm the water, and straining the mixture through my teeth. There's a tray of dainties: pink glazed cakes no bigger than one of my thumbnails, candied violets, marzipan cherries, macaroons, and gingered almond tartlets filled with soft cheese.

What's so adult about having a staff of dozens to cook and care for you as though you were a child?

But she is a child. I don't want to burden her. Not today.

I slide the tray to the side so she can set her gameboard down on the glass tabletop. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't be playing in here, but she wanted to, and who's watching anyway? Everyone is so busy with party preparations. Our reflections are captured in every surface, sometimes together, sometimes alone, but always trapped. The tea room is all glass and mirrors. After all, "The proprieties must be observed."

I wish we were someplace else.

She rolls a nine. I tell her so. But she shakes her head so the beaded tails of her braids rake the back of her chair and thwack against her neck.

"Nuh-uh. It's a six. You're reading it upside down."

I pause.

Then I duck beneath the table: a two, and a three. One short. What gives?

I catch a flash of something in her expression, some fleeting emotion I last saw there years earlier, as she pranced across the yard, an exuberant little cloud of gossamer lace dancing through the gathering crowd of leather-clad hunters, to tell me that she was a unicorn. My companions laughed. Sev knelt down and told her that, with those branches she'd tucked behind her ears, she could just be a six-point doe. Still, she shook her head and held her ground, "Unicorn."

We all just grinned at her. I mussed her hair and called her a wild girl of the forest. But late that afternoon, as the hills began to glow with the dying sun, a pure white hart with a crown of proud antlers stepped into the clearing before me, and I felt somehow, that she was watching me through its dark eyes. 

So I played along with her, even as she rolled threes that were eights, and twos that were fours. She let me win. And when the men came to take us away, I went along with them without a fight.