They flick through my prison in iridescent circles, less tangible than a soap bubble. Though they do not say it, I think they’re grateful they’re not me.

“A queen should know how to write.”

I raise a careful look between my lashes and smile at the doctor who’d spoken. My new teeth are blunt and perfect and white as salt, a strange weight that I cannot cease exploring with my tongue, like an old woman and a spiced knot of boiled sinew. The doctor could be male, female, a combination of both, or perhaps neither, a sexless thing unlike the prince.

“We will deal with that soon. For now, there are other concerns,” my prince replies, sullen. He rubs more olive oil into my skin. Once, his touch would have made me nauseous, but I’ve grown accustomed to his presence, his endless attention. “I won’t tax her. I’m already asking for too much. But soon.”

“So, she is to be illiterate and a captive until you’ve beget her with your spawn?”

He tenses his arm. “I am not a monster. The pregnancy is necessary. It will free her. It will—”

The doctor sighs. The sound whistles peculiarly through its mask, the top half of some dead bird, bruise-blue and sunset-orange. The doctor drums fingernails against the crook of an elbow, head cocked just so. There is no fear in its stance.

“Turn her into a proper wife?”

To my surprise, the prince supplies no admonishment, only a cold stare. I offer him no comfort, of course, a glance and little more. After everything that has happened, not even my father would be able to demand such an obscenity from me. So, instead I slope forward, leaning into my curiosity. Who was this person? And why did they dare to speak so boldly to my prince?

“But since you insist—” The doctor stares straight at me. “—I suppose I should be the first to congratulate you on your fatherhood. The princess is pregnant.”

In his euphoria, my prince takes no notice of my indifference, or the way the doctor tilts its skull one way and then another, as though to say it knows. I touch my belly, press down. Under my fingertips, I can feel the myriad pebbling of a thousand eggs.

In my dreams, I see the Sea Witch, sometimes.

She is not terrible, not magnificent.

Just old.

It takes exactly three months for my condition to become unmistakable. In that time, my prince transformed from captor to curator, perennially hungry to discuss how he met and loved the mute girl he found on the beach, how he saved her from sea, how a new joy—a future, he gushed once—was now gestating in my belly. To display me where and when possible, on the balconies of the palace, in a banquet of dignitaries, anywhere so long that people can look and exult in our matrimonial glory.