Daughters of the King |✓|

Chapter One

The world had gone mad, but madness was the only logical response. It was almost a skill, at this point. A weapon or a tool that could be used for survival.

I watched the madness in my mother's eyes, flaming and burning like a volcano beneath the surface, and I was both terrified and intrigued. I wanted to learn. To cultivate the powers of insanity.

There was very little else to do with your time, out here, in the remote parts of the world that were being overlooked.

We lived in a big house. We lived in a village called Here, or Home. We lived with strangers, even though we'd known them for years. There was one rule that could never be broken: no names. We hadn't broken it yet. I was old enough to understand the reasoning behind this. We were outlaws, my mother and I, and we were being kept here illegally.

It was better for all of us this way, but it also acted as a barrier. A firm reminder of our place in this house, so we'd never forget our outsideness. We weren't part of this village; we weren't part of this family.

We were the nameless ones.

We lived with a married couple, a Husband and Wife, and the wife's Brother and their Nanna.

We lived with a Daughter of the King.

That's what they were calling them by then, the few remaining women who could have children. It was all part of a big government effort to sustain what little chance our species had left, ever since the babies had stopped coming. They'd stopped trying to figure out why. Now it was about salvaging what was left—about promoting marriage and the birth of children in any way they could.

We were running out of time. We had failed to discover the problem, so therefor we had failed to discover the solution.

Like many other Daughters, Wife had been forced into marriage and was expected to produce babies like a factory. She was failing at both, the marriage and the babies. Our king was fierce and unforgiving, and although as a child I didn't take much interest in politics or world leaders, I still knew his name well. King Bastian. One of the few names I was allowed to know, mostly because I'd heard it during the public executions, on the news.

Having the population threatened by infertility and facing potential extinction made people afraid; angry; all sorts of things.

King Bastian's movement, his law, stated that any woman with the ability to carry children had to be married—had to make all attempts to reproduce. My mother was an exception to this rule. She'd slipped under the radar with her cunning and her good looks, seeking to avoid her obligations.

And although it was illegal, our way of life felt normal to me, because I didn't know anything different.

My mother was the mistress, carrying Husband's baby. It must have seemed strange, the wife and mistress living under the same roof. Although they kept to different parts of the house, always careful not to run into each other.

My job was to stay out of sight and not bother anyone, a task I'd grown exceptionally good at. I made a game of it. Sneaking into the library, or the study, or the living room without getting caught. I brought the old lady her meals sometimes, sneaking into the part of the house I wasn't permitted to visit, since she didn't mind my presence like the others. She liked to fuss over me, petting my cheek. I was a symbol of hope. It was unusual in these dark times for people not to like children.

At the age of ten in a world almost without children, I was like Jesus Christ himself, child of Mother Mary. Those were figures from the old religion that I'd learned about during mythology class.

My teacher was a young man—much younger than most at that time—who came over twice a week to give me lessons. Most likely they paid him well and he enjoyed his chance to visit the big house. It was the nicest one in town, a white mansion on a hill. People whispered about it, inventing stories and legends.

He had red hair and brown eyes that I adored. He'd point those eyes at me and challenge me with quizzes, riddles, dares. I never backed down at any of them, not once. He always laughed, always seemed impressed, and I relished every minute of it, eager to soak up as much attention as I could. It wasn't something I was used to. He was the only person who paid attention to me back then—the only person who seemed undeterred by anything I did.

Sometimes I'd make a game of that, too, trying to shock him as much as possible. The point of this game was to lose. If I ever managed to scare him away properly, I would have been devastated. Thankfully, he never seemed to mind my wildness.

At night, I dreamed we would be married at the courthouse. Because at that stage in my life, I was expected to inherit my mother's gifts, and become a Daughter, and marry a man like the teacher. This wasn't a romantic dream, although it wasn't an unromantic one either. Most of all, it was a dream about that unreachable place called adulthood, which I misunderstood to be a place of wisdom and ability. I cursed my useless hands that struggled to do daily tasks—cursed the slowness of learning. I thought adulthood might never come, and I was right, not because I would die young but because the thing which I dreamed of didn't exist. It never had.

It was all an illusion.