The Beautiful Ajatara #6
“You said it had to be a satisfying ending,” the Beautiful Cordelia whispered back.
Lord Hawke had now turned his back on both of them and was examining himself in a large mirror, describing, for the Beautiful Cordelia’s benefit, the smoothness of his skin.
“If I marry Lord Hawke now, it won’t be satisfying.
I don’t even know him. Nobody likes a romance where the hero and heroine don’t take time to get to know each other.
Nobody would really believe I loved him! ”
“But you don’t love him,” Ajatara reminded her. “He’s a fictional character.”
Quickly, Lucie wrote:
The Beautiful Cordelia thought it wise not to point out to the demon that not loving a man was an excellent reason for not marrying him.
“You said the story had to have a happy ending,” said Cordelia. “If I married this idiot, that would not be a happy ending. I think you know that.”
Lord Hawke looked offended.
Ajatara, her time running out, buried her face in her hands. “Why isn’t your friend Lucie doing something about this?”
“I’m trying!” Lucie said aloud. She wrote,
At that moment, Lord Hawke fell dead, stricken by a terrible malady.
The words erased themselves.
She wrote,
There was an earthquake that shook the very foundations of the palace. The floor opened up into a gaping chasm and Lord Hawke disappeared into the bottomless dark.
These words, too, erased themselves.
She tried,
Lord Hawke realized he didn’t believe in marriage, which was more about property law than it was true love. He shook hands with the Beautiful Cordelia, said goodbye, and went on his way.
This didn’t work either.
Lucie told herself to think. What had Ajatara said?
If this was going to work, the ending needed to be earned.
She couldn’t write out of panic, tacking on the ending she wanted even if it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.
She couldn’t think like a loving little sister or a parabatai charging into battle.
This wasn’t the kind of demonic trap she could get out of by beheading a demon.
She had to stop thinking like a Shadowhunter and start thinking like a writer.
She wrote,
The Beautiful Cordelia gazed upon her first love.
The man she had always assumed she would someday end up with.
She had no idea that very nearby lurked another man—a man who had long dwelled in the background of her life story and who, unbeknownst to her, considered himself her truest love.
Cruel Prince James had hid his feelings well, but he could hide no longer.
He was, even now, slipping through a back entrance of the palace that he alone knew of.
He could only hope he was in time. And that when he revealed his heart, the Beautiful Cordelia would finally understand the truth of hers.
Lucie held her breath.
The words remained where she had written them.
She’d gotten James where he needed to be. She suspected he was going to have to fight his own way to his happy ending.
Cruel Prince James burst into the throne room, dashing as ever, if somewhat out of breath.
“James!” the Beautiful Cordelia cried, gasping at his arrival.
For she recognized him instantly, of course, but she had certainly never seen him like this.
He wore his snow-white lace blouse unbuttoned, and it fell open, revealing the rippling muscles of his chest. They glistened in the firelight, making it somewhat impossible to tear one’s gaze away.
If one did, however, one would notice that his hair was perfectly tousled, as if lofted by a nonexistent breeze.
A shining gold sword sat in a scabbard at his waist, clean and unused, for he inhabited a world in which gentlemen had no need for violence, but instead paid other people to be violent on their behalf.
“He looks ridiculous,” Ajatara scoffed.
“I wouldn’t use that particular word,” the Beautiful Cordelia said. Her lips twitched slightly. “All right,” she said to James. “You do look a little ridiculous.”
“It seems to be the way I dress here,” said Prince James, who was looking quite a bit less cruel.
Lucie wrote:
He was gazing at Cordelia as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her—not because she was so beautiful, but because he loved her and had been terrified he would never see her again.
The words remained. Lucie smiled a little. They were true to the characters, after all—perhaps not to Cruel Prince James and the Beautiful Cordelia, but to James and Cordelia, who were slowly, with her help, taking over the story. She went on:
“I don’t recall inviting you to the wedding,” Lord Hawke told Prince James, sounding somewhat cruel himself. Which was out of character, but rather understandable, under the circumstances.
“There will be no wedding,” Prince James snapped.
“And why is that?” Lord Hawke asked.
Cruel Prince James hesitated. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the answer presented itself to him, and he spoke with absolute certainty. “Because you are an impostor!”
The blood drained out of Lord Hawke’s face. “How dare you?”
“You’re not really a lord,” James charged. “You don’t own any land! And you’re already married!”
The Beautiful Cordelia and Ajatara both looked at Lord Hawke in shock. Could it be true?
But James wasn’t done. “Also, you have seven children!”
“Seven?” Cordelia said, as this seemed ever so slightly beyond belief.
Lord Hawke’s head hung low. This was a man who had been unmasked. A fraud and a reprobate. And, yes, father to seven children.
“It’s true,” he admitted. “I need to marry you for the money.”
“You never loved me at all?” Cordelia said, just making sure.
“Never,” Lord Hawke said. “I’m actually quite devoted to my wife. But seven children are very expensive.”
“Get out of here before I chop you up and feed you to Krog,” Ajatara said, glaring at the useless would-be bigamist.
Lord Hawke, who also wasn’t quite as brave as he’d pretended to be, scurried away.
Which left James and Cordelia to face each other. They were both smiling, despite the bizarre situation and their ridiculous clothes.
Lucie bit the end of her pen. Slowly, she wrote:
Sometimes, the first love that presents itself is not the truest; sometimes it is only when we learn the truth of ourselves that we can understand what it means to love.
Long ago, when the Beautiful Cordelia first met Lord Hawke, she had barely been more than a child.
She had been innocent, and rather foolish, and it was no surprise she had fallen for his lies along with his admittedly very handsome face.
But from all her adventures, the Beautiful Cordelia had learned quite a lot…
Lucie wrote, and she was thinking about Cordelia, the fictional one and the real one, but maybe, just a little, she was also thinking about herself, and the foolish young girl she had been when her own love story began. She wrote:
She’d learned about courage, about truth, about love. And also about herself. She was now ready to fall in love for what would truly be the first time. And the last.
“I love you, Cordelia,” James said. “Marry me.”
“I will!” Cordelia said.
It seemed like a perfectly happy ending.
It seemed like the end. But as Lucie stared at the page with a sinking feeling, she knew it very much wasn’t. More was needed—from her. She wrote:
Cordelia turned to Ajatara in confusion. “Why isn’t it working?”
“It’s still not believable,” Ajatara said. “There’s no character development. Cruel Prince James has never met the Beautiful Cordelia before. How can he love her if he doesn’t even know her?”
“I know her perfectly,” James said. “Better than my own heart.”
“Ah, then you must know of the sadness in hers,” Ajatara said. “And as long as there is sadness in her heart, there can be no happy ending.”
Cordelia shook her head, her red hair flying. “No. I have my true love. What could I possibly have to be sad about?”
But James looked into her eyes. Then, without any cruelty at all—with a surprising degree of gentleness, in fact—he touched two fingers lightly to her heart.
“I know you, Cordelia. When you said you wanted to talk to me, I sensed something was troubling you. Ajatara is right. I can sense your sadness. And I know why it’s there. ”
“Why?” Cordelia said. She sounded genuinely curious. Maybe this was the true meaning of love: someone who saw you so clearly that when your feelings swirled in confusion, he could explain you to yourself.
James knelt before her, as if to propose marriage, again. Instead he proposed a solution to the abiding mystery of her melancholy.
“We are the main characters in the stories of our lives,” James said.
“Everyone is. And maybe there’s a part of you that worries what happens, now that it feels as if the love part of the story is over.
Everything we went through—some of it was terrible.
Some of it was wonderful. But there’s a reason books always end at happily ever after.
It’s not because the story doesn’t keep going.
It does—it’s just that nobody wants to read about the business of going about daily life, loving each other while you bicker about who forgot to call for a hansom cab and where are the tea towels and such.
People want to read the exciting part, when it’s all risk and danger and will they or won’t they end up together.
But it doesn’t matter whether anyone else wants to read the rest of our story, Cordelia.
What matters is whether we want to live it together. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“You’re right,” Cordelia said in amazement, and pulled James to his feet. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted, too.”
And she kissed him.
Lucie drew her pen back. This was the end, surely? It was all over. It had to be. For a long moment, in the deserted office, everything was silent, and a sort of terror seized at Lucie. What if she had given the story the wrong ending, and James and Cordelia were trapped in the tale forever?