Asking you directly was out of the question, and I didn’t want to needle Magdalena for information either. If you found out I had gone behind your back to ask questions about your behavior you would be furious, and I was loathe to disrupt the idyllic family life we three had in those early days. Perhaps, my lord, I was simply a coward.
You must forgive me. You had overstepped so many of my boundaries and left me so little of my own privacy that it didn’t seem unfair for me to deny you a little of yours.
We were staying in a rented house in the Danish countryside, with a repurposed barn in the back for your workshop. You spent more time out there than you did in your own bedroom. I waited for you and Magdalena to go out on the hunt together before I went looking for your letters. You two loved hunting together, the thrill and the sport of it. You left me to my misguided sense of justice in those days, having given up on converting me to killing for any other reason.
I let myself into the barn quietly, careful not to leave so much as a footprint in the dirt or a fingerprint in the dust. This is where you hoarded all the new inventions flooding the scientific markets, barometers and handheld spyglasses and calculating machines. They were lined up carefully on your worktables. You also had laid out human bones, harvested from victims and hand-washed, and had somehow acquired an entire skull laid out next to a pair of forceps and scribbled notes.
I ignored the evidence of your grisly work and set about searching for something more precious; a simple wooden cigar box where you kept stationary and letters of sentimental value. I had never so much as seen the inside of this box, but I knew it was cherished by you, because I was forbidden from going near it.
My heart hammered at the weight of my indiscretion as I looked under papers and stooped below the tables to rummage through wooden crates. Touching that box was a sin worthy of excommunication from your good graces, I was sure. But then again, I was strictly forbidden from ever entering your workshop unaccompanied. What was one more sin to add to my litany?
I found the cigar box laying out in the middle of a table, carelessly exposed. You never once thought I would have the strength to disobey you, did you? The possibility that my will was stronger than yours never even crossed your mind.
I opened the lid so, so delicately. My reward for my tenacity was sheaves of letters in your tight, prim hand. I flipped through the papers, looking for ones addressed to Magdalena. I only wanted to know how long you had been in contact with her, I swear it. I just needed to know if you had been courting her for years, right under my nose, or if your fascination with her was as recent as you claimed.
I found her letters, my love. And I found so many more.
At first, I was confused. I couldn’t read with your lightning efficiency, but I had taught myself well enough to know that there was correspondence here dating back centuries, since before you and I had even known each other. Some of it was written in strange alphabets, in any of the many languages you spoke and I didn’t, but there were a few I could decipher.
They were love letters. Written to absolute strangers, stretching across time and space. Strangers that you called husband. Lover. Wife.
I recoiled from the box as though I were Pandora herself, pouring woe out into the world. The letters spilled from my hands and hit the table. Impossible. You had never mentioned other spouses. I was your firstborn, your Constanta. I had sacrificed everything for the crown and you had raised me into queenship in return. I was unique in your eyes. Special, even after we brought Magdalena into our world. I was the love that started it all.
Wasn’t I?
It wasn’t that I didn’t expect you to have taken lovers, to have sought out human companionship during the many years you spent wandering the world. But I had thought you had truly been alone, without an equal at your side possessing your same power, your same sweet-edged curse. But you had turned these people, at least a half dozen of them, and the evidence was right there in your own hand. You seduced them from afar and then coached them through first meetings and first seductions, promising whole worlds if only they would allow you to take that fatal bite. You even used some of the same language when you convinced them to take up with you.
A gift.
A life without laws, without limits.
The choice is yours.
You had specifically sought them out; poets and scientists and princesses, all wracked by some recent trauma. There were fire survivors, victims of brutal marriages, starving artists, and wounded soldiers among your ranks. All exceptional in some way, all vulnerable. It made me sick to think of them, to imagine their glassy-eyed faces when you finally appeared and told them you had come to raise them up out of the dirt and into an immortal life of ease. And you had kept meticulous record of all of them, the same way you kept meticulous record of your little experiments.