Page 82 of The Queen's Box

Harrow clapped his hands, a single sharp pop that echoed off the cottage walls. “And look! The band!”

There had been no band a moment before, but now a brass ensemble came marching around the corner of amarzipan-colored cottage. Their uniforms gleamed—leaf-green coats with split tails and golden piping, each cuff adorned with a trio of burnished acorns that jingled with every step. Their instruments were polished to a mirror shine: trumpets that curled like fern fronds, drums shaped like honeypots, a tuba with the faint shimmer of a soap bubble at its bell.

At their head strode the bandleader, a woman of commanding presence and impossible height—at least seven feet tall. Her uniform, while matching the others in color, featured epaulets made from gilded thistle heads and a collar stiff with embroidered vines. She wore a monocle over one eye, though Willow couldn’t imagine what it was for. She marched with perfect confidence, chin up, baton whirling like a wand.

With a flourish, she turned in place and lifted her baton high, and the band launched into a tune that sounded like a lullaby performed at double time. One of the tuba players—a fae child no older than seven—looked exhausted and glassy-eyed, his cheeks puffing with effort. A glittering ribbon wrapped tight around his wrist, tugging him upright whenever he sagged.

The rest of the ride passed in a blur of polished streets, curated wonder, and relentless musical accompaniment, now with accordions. Willow felt less like a visitor and more like someone being presented with a portfolio. Every corner, every turn, every glimmering lantern seemed chosen for her benefit. It was lovely, all of it, but she missed Poppy’s ridiculous gowns and Jace’s sly willingness to break Aesra’s rules—as long as she felt sure she could get away with it.

Just that morning—before the pond, before the bird—Willow had been bemoaning the wildness of her curls. Eryth’s humidity was perhaps the one aspect of this enchanted realm that refused to bend to magic, and as deft as Poppy was with combs and pins and pearlescent oils, Willow longed for something simpler. Anelastic hair tie—nothing more—so that she could twist her hair into a messy bun and be done with it.

“A hair tie?” Poppy had exclaimed, scandalized. “For the love of the queen, is that some cruel mortal custom where you bind your hair with a length of rubber until it screams and gives up?”

Willow had laughed. “Poppy, no. It’s not like torture. It’s just a little stretchy band you wrap around your hair.”

“The way mortals wrap thread around a baby’s toe to make it shrivel up and fall off?”

“What? Poppy. I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but nobody wraps a...” Her words trickled off because her mother had done exactly that to Juniper when Juniper was a baby. Willow had completely forgotten.

Juniper had been born with more than the usual number of toes, a sixth one tucked like a pearl beside the others on her right foot, and Willow and Ash had watched from the edge of the bed as their mother had looped a length of white thread around it.

“It’s actually a sign of good luck,” she’d said, voice light. “A sixth toe means fairy blood. But in elementary school, at a pool party, or in the summer if she wants to wear sandals...”

She’d glanced at them both. “You understand, don’t you?”

Ash had nodded first. Willow, slower.

Juniper’s sixth toe had turned purple over the next few days. Then black. And then one morning it had simply been gone.

Willow had felt a little sad. She’d asked if they’d buried it or at least marked the day.

“Absolutely not,” her mother had said. “Why dwell on things best forgotten?”

From the floor of Willow’s palace bedroom, Jace cleared her throat. She’d been crouched over a music box, working on a jammed mechanism that no longer allowed a decorative butterfly to twirl around and around. With a slim rod clampedbetween her teeth and a jeweler’s loupe perched over one eye, she’d concentrated on the task with the focus of a lock picker.

“If a piece of stretchy cord is all you need, I can fetch one,” she’d said. “Might take a day or two, but I know a guy.”

Jace, it seemed, knew a guy for everything.

After the Hospitality Tour, with its endless perfect delights came dinner, which was also perfect, though Willow couldn’t remember half of what she ate. And after dinner came Evening Rites: fragrant oil dabbed on Willow’s wrists, a short poem recited over her head, a circle walked counterclockwise three times under the supervision of a curvy woman with cat ears who called herself a Nip.

By the time Willow was tucked into bed, her limbs were heavy with weariness—but sleep wouldn’t come. Unlike the deep, bewitched rest of her first night, she tossed and turned. Her body craved something. Not food, not fragrant oils, and certainly not another poem. Comfort, maybe?

When Poppy and Jace popped in to check on her, Willow sat up and said, “Could I have another hot chocolate?”

Poppy clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, bless! Isn’t she darling, Jace? Like a kitten pawing at the milk dish.”

“On it, miss,” Jace said, already doubling back the way she’d come.

When she returned, it was with the same ceramic pot and strawberry-dotted mug from the other nights. Willow smiled. Jace set the silver tray on the bedside table and poured the steaming chocolate with an exaggerated up-and-down tilt that sent the liquid arcing in a perfect ribbon from pot to cup.

At the last moment, the spoon she always wore tucked behind her ear clattered onto the tray with a bright, unmistakable ring.

“What is it with you and that spoon?” Willow asked. “You’re never without it.”

Poppy groaned. “Don’t get her started. That spoon of hers? Jace says it listens. She says it sees.”

“Only on Thursdays,” Jace replied, giving Willow a wink as she reclaimed the spoon.

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