The Beautiful Ajatara #5
This whole business was going to set her efforts back a bit.
“I am well aware of Cruel Prince James’s personality, if you want to call it that,” Lucie’s brother said. “Send me in anyway.”
Lucie took a deep breath. She was used to waiting for inspiration to strike, for the perfect words to materialize in her mind as if delivered by an angel—but these were dire circumstances. Gripping the pen, she wrote:
Cruel Prince James followed the Beautiful Cordelia. He would do anything to find her again.
They waited. Nothing happened. James tapped the page, looked at Lucie. “I think you wrote it wrong.”
“There’s no such thing as writing a story wrong,” Lucie said. “Or right, for that matter. It’s not like a mathematical equation with one correct answer. It only has to be true to the characters.”
“Well, it’s not working,” James pointed out. “Perhaps you need to add something about my motivation?”
“Oh, all right,” Lucie said, and wrote:
He would do anything to find her again, because he loved her more than life itself.
“Is that good enough for you?” she asked, turning to her brother, but James didn’t answer her.
He had disappeared.
Cruel Prince James looked sneeringly at the road upon which he had found himself.
It was as he had imagined it, a disgusting jumble of the sorts of things Lucie found pretty—flowery hedgerows, mountains in the distance, whispering willow trees—but it was missing the very beauty of which he had come in search.
Neither the Beautiful Cordelia nor her demon companion were anywhere in sight.
“That’s not fair!” Lucie exclaimed, watching the words unspool across the page.
It seemed she could add to the story, but not wrestle it entirely under her control.
Which meant James was going to have to do a little of the work himself if he wanted to bend the story in the right direction.
Though he shouldn’t have to be entirely by himself; that wouldn’t do. She wrote,
Cruel Prince James was not, of course, alone on the now deserted road. A handsome young man stood beside him, eager to serve his every need.
The page began to take over again, telling the story instead of Lucie.
“Who are you?” Cruel Prince James demanded. (Cruel Prince James did not ask things. He only demanded them, just like he never smiled unless it was wickedly. Perhaps the occasional wolfish grin.)
“Oh, Prince James, you are so cruel to pretend not to know who I am,” the young man said.
“I have served you faithfully, for so many years!” He waited for Cruel Prince James to agree that this was, indeed, a mean-spirited jape.
But there was only silence. Perhaps his master had suffered some form of head injury?
“It is I,” he said helpfully. “Your manservant, Manfred.”
“Manservant Manfred?” Cruel Prince James echoed, with an incredulous twist of his handsome lip. “What fathead gave you such a ridiculous name?”
Manfred shrugged sadly. “I don’t think a lot of thought went into it.”
Lucie sighed. Everyone was a critic.
Passing a bend in the road, Cruel Prince James spied the gleaming spires of a castle on the horizon.
Banners streamed in the wind and, in the distance, trumpets blared.
Signs of a celebration in store. And, as if in answer to the trumpeting call, a procession of finely dressed men and women passed along the road.
Their horse-drawn carts were outfitted in velvet finery, as were they, each of them more elaborately decorated than the last in silk, satin, lace, and tulle.
“Where are they all going?” Cruel Prince James said.
Lucie tightened her grip on the pen and hunched over the manuscript. There wasn’t much time, she could feel it. This book needed its ending. And she finally knew what needed to happen. Seizing control of the narrative (and the pen), she wrote:
The Beautiful Cordelia had had many adventures. Many had adored her. But it was time for her to marry her true love and have a happy ending. A great royal wedding was planned for her and Cruel Prince James—
But even as she wrote his name, the ink bled together, then reconstituted itself into an entirely different set of letters. Lucie’s eyes widened in horror. But she could only watch the story write itself.
A great royal wedding was planned for her and Lord Hawke, her first love—and so, of course, her true love.
Cruel Prince James had no idea. It fell to Manfred to inform him. “These are guests on their way to the royal wedding,” he said. “Lord Hawke is to marry the Beautiful Cordelia.”
Cruel Prince James felt his heart plummet to his feet.
He was not sure why marrying a lord entitled anyone to a royal wedding, but that really wasn’t at the top of his concerns.
He did not know what it would mean for Cordelia to marry someone in this strange realm, but he felt certain it could not be good.
“We must away to the palace and prevent the wedding from happening!” he cried, leaping upon the loyal white stallion that was always by his side.
Even if sometimes he inexplicably failed to notice it for a long stretch of time.
“Standing in the way of a royal wedding tends to be the kind of thing that gets cruel princes executed,” Manfred reminded him. “Along with their manservants.”
But Cruel Prince James paid no heed to danger. He was driven only by love. Seizing the reins of his beloved horse, he set off at a gallop, leaving Manfred behind.
Meanwhile, at the castle, Ajatara was dragging the Beautiful Cordelia—now wearing a floating, spangled gown of silk and tulle—down a long stone corridor and into the palace’s throne room.
Here stood two grand golden thrones, in the center of a hexagonal room filled with mirrors.
Before the leftmost throne stood Lord Hawke.
Lord Hawke had dark hair and a chiseled jaw and was dressed like a mundane bridegroom, all in black and white.
He gazed fiercely upon Cordelia, his eyes blazing.
“My love,” he said. “At last you are here.”
He’s nowhere near as handsome as James, Cordelia thought. In fact, I don’t like the look of him at all. Oh dear. Lucie, what in the world are you doing? Are you even in control of the story?
Lucie perked up. The words had written themselves, but for the first time, they did seem completely like something Cordelia might actually think or say.
She held tight to the pen as more words spilled feverishly across the page, waiting for a moment for the narrative to slow, into which she might slip some sentences of her own design.
“Oh look,” Ajatara said, clearing her throat loudly. “It’s your true love, waiting to take you in his arms. And from the sound of those trumpets, I’d say wedding bells are shortly upon us. Very shortly, hopefully.”
“The Beautiful Cordelia! Looking even more beautiful than when I last saw you.” Lord Hawke bowed. Then preened. “And I? Do I look more handsome?”
When she did not answer, Lord Hawke took off his hat, revealing a magnificent head of chestnut hair. “How about now?”
“Oh, yes,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, to be polite. “Much more handsome.”
“How much more, would you say? Measuring from one to ten?”
“It’s a beautiful thing to see soulmates reunited,” Ajatara said impatiently. “Now, to the wedding chapel?”
“Ah, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen Lord Hawke,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, craftily. “And he’s been on so, so many adventures. Please, tell me of them!”
Ajatara shook her head and clamped an iron grip on the Beautiful Cordelia’s beautiful shoulder. “Wedding first, stories later—”
But Lord Hawke never turned down an opportunity to regale an adoring audience. “There were indeed many, many moments of derring-do,” he said. “And I was very dashing during all of them, I must say.”
“Yes, you must. And say more,” the Beautiful Cordelia said. “Much, much more.”
“Well, as you know, I fell captive to pirates! Then came the derring-do. By which means I was able to free myself. Only to be fallen upon by bandits!”
“No, no, this won’t do,” the Beautiful Cordelia said. “A good story needs concrete sensory details, none of this summarizing. I want to be able to see it for myself. Start again, tell me what the pirates looked like. What their ship smelled like. Tell me slowly.”
Lord Hawke was only too happy to enlighten her about his many feats of bravery.
In great detail. He told her of fleeing the fashionable ice goblins of the north, only to fall into the clutches of a gang of highwaymen who hoped to marry him off to their evil landlady in exchange for free rent.
He told her of rescuing several fair maidens from their cruel fate at the hands of mustachioed villains determined to steal their fortune and imprison them in dungeons or towers or the like.
Each time he set one of these innocent, helpless beauties free, he told her, they begged for his hand in marriage.
Never had they met a man as bold, as charming, as handsome as Lord Hawke, but every one of them was cast aside, heartbroken.
For none of them could hold a candle to his first love, his true love, the Beautiful Cordelia.
As he droned on about her beauty, and what a great complement it would be to his own—in very specific detail—the Beautiful Cordelia stopped listening. She noticed that her demon companion was nearly tearing her hair out in impatience.
“Why are you doing this?” Ajatara whispered. “You know perfectly well I can only keep this pocket dimension open for a limited time. We must have an ending!”