dear everyone,

I'm putting the prologue to this story up as sort of a test to see if it's any good and if there's any interest. PLEASE leave reviews with any honest feedback. if it sucks please tell me (But be nice about it :) If you love it and will die if i don't write more, please tell me that too! if there isn't enough interest I probably won't continue. so please voice your opinions!

Love, M

He was the last prince of Latvia.

And I don’t think I shall forget him for as long as I live.

Even though his memory is no longer the final picture that stings my waning consciousness each night before I fall into sleep, nor is he the first thing my eyes ache for when they wake each morning, sometimes I still see him in my dreams, a print so faded that the shadow of him in my mind’s eye is merely a fragment of the boy I once knew like my second self.

On the days I look back, I see him as I choose to remember him, the version of him I like the best: innocent, restless, and wild, like a young bird bound flightless to its nest, aching to be free and to take to the skies and watch the world glide by beneath him with each stroke of his wings. The boyish days when he was passionate and romantic, and devoured Chaucer, Balzac, and The Canterbury Tales like delicious chocolates, licking their luscious residue from his fingers and savoring it against his tongue, as the sun cast his palace into a dizzying prism of sparkling colors. The days he thought he’d see the world and live forever, and wanted me beside him for every step of eternity.

He was the last prince of Latvia, but we did not know it then.

There are three things that I remember most distinctly about the prince, and as the rest of his memory blurs around the edges, it is these things that haunt me the clearest.

The first is his hands. They are always the first thing I remember because they were the first part of him I touched, on the first day I met him, when I climbed the pine tree that had always been mine and found him staring down at me.

“What are you doing here?” I had demanded angrily. “This is my tree.” Because until that day it had been.

“This is my palace,” he had replied.

I was nine. He was ten. Until that moment I had thought it my tree. But now it was his, and always had been. Because he was the prince.

“I’m hiding from my mother,” he informed me. “She wishes me to learn English. It is a most abhorred language which has no practical application and which I will have nothing to do with.”

I told him there were much better places to hide. I told him I would show him some, in a desperate ploy to lure him from my tree, and climbed down nimbly, jumping the last few feet to the ground, calling to him to follow. He clambered awkwardly a few branches down, but seemed unable to make the final leap of faith to solid ground.

“What’s the matter? Are you scared?” I taunted.

He was a prince. I was the daughter of the woman who washed his clothes. But at nine years old, my impudence knew no bounds.

“I don’t think I can jump,” he replied. He didn’t sound scared. In all the years I knew him, he never once showed he was afraid.

“Here,” I knew no way to help but stand on my tip toes and extend a hand. “I’ll help you.”

He looked at me for a long moment of skepticism, then accepted my outstretched hand. His fingers were the smoothest thing I had ever felt, manicured and washed with the finest soap. I was suddenly ashamed of my own calloused, work scabbed palms, like ragged stubble against his, and I thought he would pull away from such filth. But he didn’t.

He just jumped.

And after he had landed before me, he didn’t let go.

The second thing I remember about the prince is his mouth.

Everything about it. From the way it curled when he scowled, to the shape it formed around each word of his expansive vocabulary in six languages, to the way it spread and danced in the beautiful moment as a laugh formed on his lips. He had a peculiar habit of laughing before telling me an amusing story, like he was sharing a private joke with himself before he shared it with me. I would always laugh too, even before he had told the story, because he was laughing, and that made me happy. He made me happy.

The mouth that told me every story I ever knew, every fairytale and fable that passed through his ears became surrogately mine through him. The mouth that read me every novel we could find, and recited from memory passages and poems, and sang me off key songs of which he only knew half the words. The mouth and the hands that taught me how to read Latvian and Russian and broken bits of English and Italian, and write my name.

I loved his mouth the most when it pronounced his name for me. “Mio bella,” he always called me. Or just “belle.” Italian was the most beautiful of his languages. And he thought me beautiful. So it became his name for me. And every time he called me, I believed him.

I loved his mouth the first time it touched mine, and every time after I only loved it more.

“I think I love you,” his lips whispered when they released mine.

I didn’t tell him, but I known I loved him from the day I met him.

The third thing I remember was his eyes.

His eyes at eleven years old, like stabbing knives when we argued, fierce and furious, because I was the first person to ever deny him a wish.

His eyes at twelve, reflected and replicated in the rippling river as we dipped our toes in and splashed at the fish swimming by.

His eyes at thirteen, cloudy and damp as we buried the body of his favorite Pekinese behind the blooming orchard. The only time I ever saw them cry.

His eyes at fourteen, alive with an unquenchable fire that I only ever saw in him as we sat shoulder to shoulder on a the fences that bound us and he dreamed aloud of breaking free of them.

His eyes at fifteen, scanning the pages of Shakespeare, I sat at his feet and he acted aloud Othello and Coriolanus, playing every part single handedly.

His eyes at sixteen, the first time he closed them and leaned towards me, purging the final gap between us.

His eyes at seventeen, steadfast and impassioned, when, on bended knee, he swore to me that he loved me, and would marry me someday, tradition and royal upbringing be damned. We would live forever, and see the world.

His eyes when we said goodbye as my mother sent me away on a train because there were bloody rumors of a coup whispering through the capital. The look of desperate resolution as he swore that he would search the world until he found me, and that someday we would be together once again.

The eyes that never cried for me, even when he loved me.

It was that day, watching my only home and my only love fade into a distant horizon, I realized that even after years of knowing him and loving him and drowning in every exquisite drop of him, I did not know the color of his eyes.

His eyes at twenty five, when I found him again.

They were brown.

Deep, fathomless, beautiful brown.

He was the last prince of Latvia.

And I loved him.