Distrust!

The kingdom of Asteria smelled different in spring. That was the first thing I always noticed-before the colors, before the sounds, before anything else. The air turned sweet and heavy, like someone had crushed moonflowers into the wind itself, and it settled over everything: the black-stone towers of our estate, the gardens where luminous moths drifted between thorned roses, the shallow creek behind the eastern wall where the water ran silver and tasted of starlight.

I was seven years old, and I believed the world was made entirely for me.

"Aya, come down from there this instant."

Mama's voice floated up from the terrace below, soft but threaded with the particular note that meant she was trying not to laugh. I was perched on the wide branch of a wisteria tree that grew along the balcony railing, my legs swinging over nothing, my bare feet dangling above a drop that would have frightened any sensible child. I was not, by anyone's measure, a sensible child.

"But I can see the whole city from here!" I called back, leaning forward. And I could-or at least I believed I could. The distant spires of Asteria's capital glittered faintly through the morning haze, and beyond them the Murmuring Sea stretched like a sheet of hammered silver. Somewhere beneath that sea, Papa's people lived in palaces of coral and song. He had told me so. He had told me many things.

"You'll see the whole ground very quickly if you fall." That was Papa, appearing behind Mama on the terrace, resting his chin on the top of her head. His eyes, the color of deep ocean, crinkled at the corners when he smiled at me. He always smiled at me. "Come. Breakfast is ready, little star."

I dropped from the branch with the absolute confidence of a child who has never been hurt and landed in a heap on the balcony tiles. Mama gasped. Papa caught me under the arms and swung me upright, brushing petals from my hair.

"You are going to give your mother a heart attack," he said, though his voice held no real warning.

"She is your daughter," Mama replied, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. Her fingers lingered on my cheek, and for just a moment something passed across her face-something I was too young to name. It happened whenever she looked at my eyes. Everyone looked at my eyes eventually. They would stare and then glance away, as though they had accidentally peered into a room they were not meant to enter. But Mama never looked away. She held my gaze as though daring the world to tell her something was wrong with her child.

Nothing was wrong with me, I decided. Nothing at all.

After breakfast-honeyed bread and fruit that changed flavor with each bite, because Papa enchanted it to amuse me-I ran down the hill toward the iron gate where Reiko was already waiting. He stood with his hands shoved into his pockets, dark hair falling across his forehead, a smear of dirt on his chin that told me he had been climbing the ravine wall again.

"You're late," he said.

"I'm never late. You're just always early."

He grinned-that wide, easy grin that made his whole face rearrange itself into something warm and open. I had known Reiko for two years, since the afternoon he had wandered into our garden chasing a shadow-fox and found me instead. He had not flinched when he saw my eyes. He had stared, tilted his head, and said, "They look like gemstones." I had decided immediately that he was the best person in the entire kingdom.

"Did he bring the book?"

"He said he would."

Yoshio was already there when we arrived, sitting on the crumbling stone rim of the fountain with a heavy leather tome balanced on his knees. He looked up at us with those pale green eyes that always seemed to be calculating something. He was a year older and carried that single year like a decade of additional gravity.

"You're both late," he said.

"See?" I looked at Reiko triumphantly.

He rolled his eyes.

We spent the morning the way we spent most mornings that spring-reading aloud from Yoshio's stolen book of creature lore, arguing about whether basilisks were real, and daring each other to stick our hands into the fountain's dark water where something occasionally moved beneath the surface. None of us ever did. Instead we lay on the warm stones and watched the sky, which in Asteria was never quite the right color-always slightly too violet, slightly too deep, as though the atmosphere itself was bruised.

"Aya," Reiko said after a long silence. He was lying beside me, close enough that his shoulder pressed against mine. "Do you ever think about what you'll do when you grow up?"

"I'm going to be the head of the Sasaki group," I said automatically. That was what Mama told me. That was what was expected.

"But what do you want to do?"

I thought about it. The clouds drifted. A moth with wings like stained glass landed on my knee and then floated away. "I want to stay here," I said. "With you. And Yoshio. Forever."

Reiko turned his head to look at me. Something in his expression was too serious for a nine-year-old boy, and years later I would recognize it as the first quiet seed of something neither of us had a name for yet. "Okay," he said simply. "Then we will."

Yoshio said nothing. He turned a page in his book.

The weeks bled into each other, golden and careless, until the day the older children from the Academy decided that the strange girl with the doll's eyes needed to learn her place.

There were four of them. I did not know their names then and I have made a point of never learning them since. They found me after school one afternoon, near the supply sheds at the edge of the training grounds, and the tallest-a boy with ram's horns curling from his temples-smiled in a way that showed too many teeth.

"We found something amazing," he said. "In the old stable behind the eastern orchards. You should come see. It's full of firefly crystals-the kind that grant wishes."

I should not have believed him. Even then, something cold moved through my stomach, a warning I chose to ignore because I was seven and I wanted to see something beautiful. That was always my weakness-wanting beautiful things more than I wanted to be safe.

The stable was dark. It smelled of rotting hay and rust and something chemical I could not identify. I stepped inside, and the door slammed behind me. Laughter erupted from outside-bright, cruel, delighted laughter. I heard the scrape of a lock.

"Let me out!" I threw myself against the door. The wood was old but the bolt held firm.

Then came the hissing sound.

They had brought firecrackers. Festival firecrackers-the kind that spat colored sparks and shrieked like wounded animals. I heard them being shoved through the gaps in the walls, and then the first one ignited.

Light exploded. Red and gold and screaming white. The hay caught instantly-it went up in a wall of heat so sudden and absolute that I stumbled backward and fell. Smoke filled the stable in seconds, thick and black, pressing against my lungs like hands. I screamed, but the sound disappeared into the roar of the fire. Through the gaps in the burning walls I could see the other children running, their laughter turned to panic as they realized what they had done.

I crawled. The heat was a living thing, pressing against my skin, curling my hair. My hands found the back wall, and there-a loose board, half-rotted, just wide enough. I clawed at it with fingers that were already blistered, pulled and tore until it gave way, and I dragged myself through the gap into cold air and wet grass.

I lay there. The sky above me was the color of a bruise, violet and impossibly deep, and it swam with smoke. My dress was scorched. My hands were bleeding. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass.

"Aya!" Reiko's voice came from far away and then suddenly close, and then his hands were on my shoulders, pulling me upright, and his face was white with terror. Behind him I could see Yoshio sprinting toward the main estate, shouting for help. The stable collapsed inward with a sound like the world breaking.

Reiko was crying. I had never seen him cry before. His tears fell onto my burned hands and I felt them-cool, impossibly cool-against the raw skin.

"You're okay," he said, though it sounded more like a prayer than a statement. "You're okay, you're okay, you're okay."

I wanted to answer him, but my throat was full of smoke and silence.

What followed came in fragments. Healers with glowing hands. Mama's voice breaking. Papa's arms lifting me, carrying me somewhere cool and dark. And then a presence I did not recognize-a tall figure in black, white hair pinned like a crown, sharp violet eyes that looked like mine but held no warmth in them at all. My grandmother. I had never met her before. Mama had made certain of that.

I heard them arguing through the walls. Mama's voice, raw and desperate: "You cannot take her. She is my daughter." And the old woman's reply, cold as deep water: "She is the fourth generation. She carries the bloodline and the curse both. You cannot protect her from what she is, Serayne. You have already proven that."

Silence. Then the sound of my mother weeping.

On the last morning, Reiko came to the gate. He was not supposed to be there-it was barely dawn, the sky streaked with pale gold, and a carriage waited in the courtyard to take me to a port, and from there to a ship, and from there to a cold grey country called England that I had only ever seen in books.

His eyes were red. He stood very straight, the way boys do when they are trying desperately not to break.

"When we grow up," he said, his voice cracking on the words, "I'm going to marry you."

I looked at him through the iron bars. My hands were wrapped in bandages. My throat still burned. And something inside me-something small and bright that had believed the world was made for me-flickered, dimmed, and did not quite go out.

"Promise?" I whispered.

"Promise."

The carriage pulled away. I watched Reiko through the rear window until he was nothing but a dark shape against the violet sky, growing smaller and smaller until Asteria itself seemed to fold shut behind me like the pages of a book I was no longer allowed to read.

I pressed my bandaged hand against the glass and held it there long after there was nothing left to see.

Author's Note:

(Thank you for reading Distrust. If you're enjoying the story, it would help me a lot if you voted and shared it! This is my first work, and I've put a lot of love into it! XOXO!).