Prologue 1

prologue 1

Once upon a time…

There was a princess who lost her crown. She was so young when it happened, barely four turns, that she didn't know she was a princess. All she knew was that she lived in a palace by a purple sea, with her parents and her nurse, her sisters and her brothers, and more cousins than she could count.

Then one day her father and brothers went away. Not long after that, her mother and sisters left, too. Then she and Nurse went to live in a different palace that was not nearly as nice as the palace by the sea, even though there were lots of other children who lived there. She slept in a big dormitory underground with all the girls and their nurses. Sometimes they played, but sometimes they had to be very quiet and hide.

She rarely saw the boys. Although one day, Nurse dressed her in a scratchy dress and spent hours brushing her hair and twisting it into loops. That day she got to meet each of the boys, one by one, until she met a boy with wavy dark hair and leaf-green eyes who made her laugh and who didn't think she was too young, even though he was twice her age.

She wished then that she didn't have to live in the dormitory with all the other girls, because what she wanted most was to see him again. Even more than that, she wanted to go home to the palace by the sea.

But she never did see him again.

Because one night, the palace shook, and the alarm bells rang, and all the nurses gathered up the girls and put them on a shuttle.

Nurse told her that she was going some place far away, where they would be safe, but that she had to forget everything and everyone she'd ever known. As the princess sat on the floor of the shuttle, with one hand clutching her sacred amulet, and the other wrapped tight around her legs, she told herself that she would never forget her parents and siblings and cousins. She would never forget the palace by the sea, or even the underground palace. And she would certainly never forget the boy who made her laugh with the tousled brown hair and the leaf-green eyes.

But many years passed, and children grow up. Eventually she did forget. Even him.