Chapter Sixteen The Villainess Versus the Ingenue #2
“How many times have you been betrayed, ladies? How many times have you been belittled? If someone kills for you, he’s loyal to you.
If you’re in trouble, neither castle walls nor morals will stop him from saving you.
In a world of petty selfishness and treachery, he is true.
Great and terrible horrors loom, but you will never endure the small, boring trials that transform life into a mundane nightmare.
No wandering eye. No expectations for you to be a pleasant maid who smooths his whole life out like a sheet.
No relentless dreary wearing-away of yourself to please him by becoming smaller.
All you must do is love and be loyal in return. ”
All you had to do was not be a treacherous bitch like Rae. Surely someone could manage that.
In the hush, several ladies seemed to seriously consider her argument.
“Does he like dogs?” asked Lady Parthenope. “That’s my only criteria in selecting a husband. Must love dogs.”
“I heard they eat dogs in the Cauldron,” warned Mint Green lady in a sepulchral whisper. Lady Parthenope clutched her dog and shook her head in silent horror.
Rae glared. “That was not a helpful thing to say!”
She took the mint-green lady out of the running. Things were bad enough without accusing Key of animal cruelty. In stories, killing people was much more forgivable than killing animals.
“Lady Rahela is right, many suitors wish to confine their brides,” whispered the girl in the corner with a book.
New hope flared. Rae’s head turned with the speed of an owl possessed by a demon. Little Miss Nondescript But Irresistible often made vaguely feminist statements.
The girl sat in the corner in classic wallflower fashion. As Rae drew closer, the wallflower shrank back under the laser-like intensity of the Beauty’s focus.
“Is your book about the joyous prophesied coming of the Emperor?”
“Ah, no,” replied the girl in a tiny voice. “It’s a novel of adventure. I mean no disrespect to the Great Gods, but my mother’s family hails from east Tagar. I follow the Captive Goddess.”
Her timorous demeanour was understandable, since Tagar had just invaded their country. Her timorous demeanour, combined with speaking up for her convictions, was very promising.
This girl wouldn’t worship Key. In fact, if she was loyal to Tagar, and Key was the Emperor of Eyam, they might be initially at odds before learning to understand each other. Tagar was a land of ice; Key had been reborn from an abyss of fire. Ice and fire was a classic romantic set-up.
“Enemies to lovers,” Rae murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
Rae dragged over a delicate little chair and tossed the wallflower a glittering smile. “Don’t worry about that. What’s your name?”
“Lady Glacia. I… I am a recent addition to the tower.”
Better and better. Many stories were built around a character new to the dangerous world around them, gazing around with vacant surprise and asking, “What is this Matrix, or Wonderland, or Land of Oz, or brutally competitive world of Formula One Racing?” This worked fine for a first book, but if the same character was clueless in the second, they came off as tragically slow on the uptake.
A sequel called for a new ingenue. Glacia fit the bill.
Rae leaned her elbow against the chair back, rested her chin against her fist, and announced: “Time for us to be friends, Glacia.”
Glacia blinked, a grey flicker behind her glasses. “I know reading novels is not in fashion, but—”
“You’re not like the other girls! Right?”
This type of heroine was never like the other girls. Ironically, this made them all very similar.
“What I meant to say was, are you fond of reading adventure novels, Lady Rahela?”
“I am. Do you enjoy reading about a romantically dangerous hero?”
Glacia put down her book. “Yes! In my current novel, the hero is an elven dragon who pursues the heroine relentlessly across the moor – this takes time; it’s an enormous moor—”
“You can never have too much moor. More moor, that’s what the people want.” Rae nodded. “How is the hero an elven dragon? Is he from a long line of elven dragons, or was one of his parents an elf who made bad choices… no. That’s not important. Tell me later.”
“You may borrow the book when I’m finished.”
“Great! You intend to enter the Queen’s Trials, correct?”
Glacia wrung her hands together in her primrose-coloured lap. She wore yellow, in a shade that didn’t become her. She also wore spectacles. Rae had the strong impression that if Glacia took off her glasses, she would be suddenly beautiful.
“I’m afraid I will make a poor showing.”
Rae cackled. “Would you call yourself a plucky underdog?”
When Glacia gave Rae a wounded look, Rae reminded herself that even though this world worked by narrative rules Rae could take advantage of, the people in this world were real. Heartless laughter in Glacia’s face wasn’t supportive supporting-character behaviour.
“Don’t worry,” soothed Rae. “I have a good feeling about you that I can’t explain. I’ll help you. Trust me.”
This kept to the rules. People were always mysteriously drawn to main characters, helping them out to further the plot.
Once Glacia met Key, then Key would also be mysteriously drawn to her.
Or he would find her irritating at first but slowly grow to appreciate her.
Key would become disillusioned by his wicked fiancée and unconsciously draw closer to Glacia, until it darted through him with the speed of a burning arrow that this unassuming girl had become the great treasure of his Empire! Or something along those lines.
Then, humbled by beholding their true love, Rae could gracefully accept she had lost Key and retreat from the contest.
“I would like to get to know Key,” confided Glacia. “I mean, His Imperial Highness.”
She knew servants’ names. Heroines were always showing an anachronistic disregard for social class! Or possibly Glacia had noticed Key because she thought he was hot. Either way would work.
“I would like to know the Emperor, too,” sang out a voice behind Rae. “Any advice for me, Lady Rahela?”
Rae rose, then gripped the metal loops of her chair hard. The brunette regarded her quizzically.
“Lady Ninell Almassy,” she prompted.
She was pretty, in a way that was almost more charming than beauty. She wore a softly becoming dress of deep indigo, trimmed with blue. Her tidily arranged hair was nut-brown, her eyes a sweet blue with a sparkle of mischief. She looked like a girl Rae knew from another world.
Lady Ninell. The woman who made the Emperor laugh. The woman who in the original books conspired with a group of ministers to kill Lia, won the new Queen’s Trials, and expected to be the Emperor’s new bride. Ninell, who the Emperor courted, then killed at the Burning Hearts Ball.
Except now Rae was the one who had betrayed the Emperor. Ninell had done nothing. Only Rae knew what Ninell was capable of.
With Lia out of the picture, who knew how close Ninell might draw to Key?
Rae hadn’t known Ninell would look like that.
She mumbled an excuse to Glacia and bolted from the Room of Courtesies and Curtsies, hurtling through the Palace on the Edge to reach the battlements.
She grasped the parapet, desperate for solid support, and drew in lungfuls of brimstone-laced air.
Rae leaned against the stone, staring into the abyss.
The dread ravine alongside the palace yawned wide, flames and shadow performing a bright-and-dark dance before her.
She didn’t see it. What Rae saw was another world.
Rae went to the cancer ward instead of college, and never finished high school. But three years before she walked into another world, Rae was a cheerleader.
A girl named Marlowe was one of the fliers on Rae’s cheerleading team, a bird-boned poppet with brown hair and china-doll blue eyes. Marlowe organized fundraisers for charity and spread word about petitions. Rae believed Marlowe was kind.
When Rae first got diagnosed, everyone was supportive. Her bestie hugged her. Her boyfriend said she could rely on him. Marlowe baked lemon cakes for the chemo ward, including a note saying Rae could ask her for anything.
Then slowly, as if losing blood from a small, deep wound, drop by drop until she bled out, Rae began to lose people.
Rae could rely on her boyfriend – to cheat with her best friend.
Rae’s father deserted their family. And in a dozen small ways, Rae saw sympathy die, as sympathy became inconvenient.
Her friends started making pointed comments about Rae not responding to messages or pulling her weight in group projects.
She told herself she was being oversensitive. Even breathing hurt sometimes. It made sense friends would hurt her as well. They didn’t mean to. Especially not the cheer squad. They were her team.
Her mom’s sick days ran out. Rae had a chemo session scheduled for the day of Alice’s book club, the only social outlet her shy sister had left. So Rae asked kind Marlowe to drive her home after chemotherapy. Marlowe promised she’d be there.
Rae waited a long time, shivering in the sun, until she realized Marlowe wasn’t coming.
Rae got home through a bus and a long walk, swaying, light-headed, remembering how often patients with nobody to drive them fell sick. A cold caught on public transport could turn to a raging fever, then pneumonia. Her new body seemed constructed of dried twigs, tinder waiting for a flame.
A body of twigs, with a head and feet of lead. She couldn’t hold up her heavy head and dragged her feet in the dust as she staggered home. She must have looked like a zombie, the first sighting of the undead who would herald an apocalypse.
Rae’s body was an apocalyptic landscape. Before chemotherapy, she hadn’t realized it was possible to feel churning sickness in your knees and eyeballs, every cell in violent revolt against poison. When you got sick, everybody betrayed you. Even you betrayed you.
When she finally reached home, the spiral staircase of her house spun in Rae’s vision, folding up like a Slinky. She couldn’t climb that.
She should eat. At the hospital they always said, eat, get your strength up.
Rae made it halfway across her kitchen floor until dizziness pulled the floor out from under her like a trickster pulling the rug.
Rae landed on one knee, bit her tongue as she hit, and crumpled.
She curled up on her side and rocked. She thought, clear and cold: I could die here.
Die on the kitchen floor, like a bug somebody had stepped on.
No. Rae uncurled, and crawled with painful, furious determination across a kitchen floor that seemed to stretch as wide as a desert. On the bottom shelf lay a dusty can of Diet Coke, plus a heel of bread. Rae defiantly tore at the bread with her teeth.
When she checked her phone, she expected apologies from Marlowe.
There was nothing.
Marlowe hadn’t even bothered to send a message.
Rae leaned her head back against the kitchen cabinet. The whole world felt unreal, blurring out of reach and too difficult to navigate.
She texted several furious messages to Marlowe, hurled her phone violently at the wall, then threw up and passed out.
A few days later, Rae felt well enough to return to school. She wore the long, dark wig that most resembled her former hair. She was ready to pretend, to keep her team.
When Rae walked into the classroom, she found Marlowe standing backlit by the open windows, reading out Rae’s messages in a soft, wounded voice to a fascinated audience.
“She said she hates me. That she hates all of us.” Marlowe’s eyes met Rae’s. She held Rae’s gaze and continued without missing a beat, “She acts like this over not getting a lift.”
There was no guilt in those wide, blue eyes, only reproach. The scene was neatly reframed as if Rae had got stood up at a movie theatre, and put herself in the wrong by wildly overreacting. Marlowe wasn’t the villain. Rae got cast as the villain instead.
“We all go through rough times. But come on, Rae.” Marlowe called her out, and every head turned. “Aren’t you being terribly unfair to me?”
Everyone turned to look at Rae, the intruder.
“You left me there, and I felt like I was going to die,” Rae spat. She watched all the faces, even the kindest, harden.
You get taught as a child not to act out, told “It’s not life or death.” This leads to an unintended consequence. When it actually is life or death, people act like you’re having a tantrum.
What a fool Rae was, to believe she had a team.
Marlowe recoiled in horror, though Rae hadn’t moved a step towards her. “You’re so angry, you’re frightening me! Are you going to throw me out the window?”
She made Rae sound like the attacker, though Rae was the one left to crawl across that floor. Everybody stared, waiting for Rae to apologize.
Rae turned and walked out the door alone.
She never went back. She never graduated. She kept walking until she collapsed on a bank far from the school grounds, and stared into the splashing sparkle of a creek.
On a school trip to the ocean when they were younger, Rae would fling herself into the waves, get knocked off her feet and laugh.
Marlowe went into the waves with Rae once.
When the first big wave hit above their knees, she cried out.
Rae was taller and stronger than Marlowe.
She planted her feet, refusing to be swept away, even when the waves hit hard.
She supported Marlowe until they could stumble out of the water together.
Marlowe professed eternal gratitude. Rae thought that was just what you did, when a friend couldn’t stand. You held them up.
Not when it was Rae. She wasn’t worth holding up.
There were many greater betrayals, but that was the last. After that, Rae could never really feel sure of anyone again. People might say they loved you and they would help you, but how could she ever believe it?
A friend put her on trial. For being in agony.
On the kitchen floor, Rae thought: I could die here. Beside the water, Rae thought: I wish I had died before I knew how little they cared.
Water rushed away, long past, and turned into sparks flying from the ravine to dance in Rae’s vision. Silver on brown, to red on black. This was another world, and Lady Ninell Almassy another girl.
Still, Rae didn’t trust another girl with those same china-doll blue eyes. She knew in another life, Ninell had betrayed Lia to her death. Key had been betrayed already. Rae wouldn’t let it happen again.
Let it be Glacia for Key. Ice to his fire, him seeing the beauty in a wallflower, her seeing the man where others saw a monster or a god.
If Rae kept her bargain with the goddess, the story would be saved. Key would be the hero of his book, Rae would be alive at home, and the doom of prophecy would never come to pass.