I didn’t care that Fen was different. I didn’t care he was an orphan. I didn’t care than he couldn’t play tag or hide in the halls of the palace while I looked. I thought he was the most brilliant boy in the kingdom. I might have been princess, but he could build tiny trinkets from the wood in the forest and a knife he’d found in the basement of the orphanage. He brought me one every time he was over. Who needed working legs? He was smarter than anyone. One time he brought me a box, that when you lifted the lid, tiny wooden fairies with windup wings burst out, flew around your head, and then landed in the box, where they would be rewound. For a long time, we were inseparable. Then I turned twelve. My parents wanted me to take extra lessons. “So you can be a just queen.” My mother says. I have almost no time of my own. Fen wheels himself to the palace every day though, just like before. He brings gifts too. On my sixteenth birthday. I give him a gift of my own. A kiss. Fen tells me not to kiss him. He isn’t meant for a palace. We become more distant after that. He still comes every day though. Leaves a gift on the stairs of the palace. It always has a note attached. It always says the same thing. ‘To remember me by -Fen’ my room fills with them. I see Fen out my window one day, dropping off a gift. I haven’t seen him in so long. Even from a distance, you can see how handsome he has become. I run down the stairs, hoping to see him, but he’s gone when I reach the entrance. “Fen!” I yell, because he can’t have gone that far. He doesn’t come. I pick up the gift. The note is the same. ‘To remember me by. -Fen’ I look at the gift. It’s a small circle wooden pendant on a silver chain, and when I pop it open, there is the smallest clock inside. It ticks every second, and I can’t imagine the work to make the small gears. There are even words carved on the inside of the tiny clock locket. I have to tilt the pendant into the sun to read the words, but my heart warms when I see them. ‘For I cannot forget you’. The next day, there is no gift. This surprises me. I’m not exactly spoiled, but he has not failed to leave something at my doorstep every day for five years, even if only a stick, which I have gotten. Worry creeps up into my chest when it happens again. On day three, I go looking for him. No one knows where he is, and he hasn’t been at the orphanage for weeks. Day four, My imagination goes wild. The craziest scenarios fill my head, and my dreams seem to bleed that night. Day five, there is a man at the door of the palace. He says he found the boy I described. I hurry after him barefoot. He leads me to the forest, pointing inwards. At first I don’t see him. Then, I catch the wheelchair laying on the ground. I run like I never have, only to find his sick, pale, green, dead body lying in a ditch. He’s holding something. It’s a little wooden girl. Me, as a child. There is a note tied to it. ‘To remember me by. -Fen.’ Sobs wrack my body, and I curl up in the ditch beside him.

The queen is a cruel ruler. She demands that woodcarvers from every corner of the realm bring her trinkets of wood. She beheads those who cannot meet her expectations. Sometimes, it’s because she likes watching them try, other times, because she longs for the thing she always had. Sometimes, she looks at them, and though their work id nowhere close to the perfection that she knows so well, she sees a bit of him in their eyes, and lets them go with their life. She is truly lonely though, for no one can love her the way she once was loved. Sometimes, on the worst of days, she takes out a trinket or two, and watches the gears turn inside of the toy. She reads the notes too, even though they’ve been engraved into her head, the words still bring her tears. ‘To remember me by. -Fen’