Chapter Two #6
“You will not only take my face. You will be granted knowledge of my life and mannerisms. You will also have yours stolen from you. Names and stories that I, the princess, do not know can’t fall from your lips.
Memories that aren’t mine will fade from your mind.
We will both slowly forget who we are until we become the other completely. ”
Blood drained from my face. “This is madness.”
“Nature requires balance, little whore. There can only be one you, and one princess of Lyrica.”
Horror nearly stole my voice. “Why would you choose this? You will forget who you are. Your entire life gone with one selfish curse. How is that any different than getting married? Your life is still over, with mine added to your casualty count!”
“You weren’t listening.” A strange smile curled her lips. “I said you won’t be able to keep memories I do not have. The same holds true for me—”
“Exactly. So why—”
“Have I spent all this time telling you stories and giving you explanations I do not owe you?” She smiled wider. “Because if you know it, I will too. I will remember the night Princess Emiana told me about a curse that switches bodies, and a man she would not marry. I will remember that she is me.”
My head spun. “But then so will I. I’ll know none of this is real. I’ll warn your father and King Alisdair—”
“How do you expect to do that?” She cocked her head.
“Do you imagine it’s that easy? Mother Meya, Kaelan, you had to bring me a stupid girl.
The consequence of every curse is that the cursed cannot speak of their affliction.
You will warn no one of nothing. Your lips will part and silence will come out.
Your hand will try to form the characters while you glare at a blank page.
Yes, you will remember the truth, but you could do nothing about—”
“Olene, Meliora, Gisela, Jaclan, and Savia!” I rushed. “Remember these names. You love them. You promised you would return to—”
“Kaelan!”
He hurriedly touched a crystal on his lapel and an unseen gag stuffed my mouth, cracking my jaw and trapping garbled speech in my throat.
Fury lit Emiana’s brow, peeling her lips back from her teeth. I thought she might slap me again.
“So you’re not that stupid. But that did you no good.
Fine, you will remember the names of whoever those people are, but I will soon know everything about them.
” She tapped her forehead. “Even if you did manage to tell anyone what I’ve done this night, ask yourself how many of your loved ones I’ll kill before King Alisdair comes for me? ”
“Agh!” The rich food spoiled in my stomach, burning its way back up my throat.
“Do we understand each other?”
Stiffly, I nodded. She would have the means to destroy me more assuredly than I could hurt her. King Alisdair would whisk me away to a land of strangers. While Emiana would march my face and body right into my home... with my unsuspecting mother, sisters, and brother.
“Good. I wanted to be civilized about this, but you’ve left me no choice. Kaelan, keep her silent for the rest of the night. There’s much she must know, and I have no time for her interruptions.”
“Yes, my princess.”
I sat quiet, jaw aching, and chest constricting as she dove into the story of her life and legacy.
I was made to listen to everything from her favorite foods and the names of her horses, to her deepest secrets and enemies.
She spoke of safe places for her to hide and how to get there.
She said in great, terrible detail what to do to the people I loved if anyone questioned her identity or tried to imprison her.
All I could do was sit—trapped and burning with hatred—as she told herself to do something I would never do—abandon my family.
Her plan was so insidious in its simplicity.
I would lose all sense of myself, believing myself to be the princess, while she ran off with the jewels and gold she spent a year hiding away, waiting until she had a new face that would take her safely out of town.
“If something goes wrong, there is only one way to break the curse,” she told herself through me.
“True love. A confession of love for your true self and with your true name.
He must know and love you, the real you, not the borrowed face you wear.
When that love is sealed with a kiss borne of truth and sacrifice, all that you are and once were will return.
“Remember this in case something goes wrong and you have no choice but to reclaim your body. Thankfully, your true love will always be with you.” She held out her hand to Kaelan, a smile as warm on her lips as the one beaming on his.
“Kaelan will protect you, watch over you, and bring you back when the time is right.”
“Yes,” he said. “I will. I love you always, my princess. Forever until the end of time.”
“And after.”
I would’ve vomited if the bile could escape my throat.
Not just for their sickening display, but for the certainty that this was the last night of my life.
True love would never free me. I’d spend the last of my days with a man who believes me to be someone else.
Even if he discovered love somewhere in the depths of his black, twisted soul.
.. My name. He would never know my name.
“I believe that’s it,” Emiana said, rising. “Am I forgetting anything, my love?”
“No, my heart. After the change, we’ll walk straight past the guards into my quarters. They’ll think I took one of the war wives out for a taste. As soon as she’s married, we’ll both be free.”
“Let’s not waste another minute. Father has been sending guards to check on me at night to make sure I haven’t run.”
“Get comfortable,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
Getting comfortable for Princess Emiana was stripping naked and lying down on her silky, voluminous sheets.
Kaelan tugged off my clothes and left me on the cold floor—legs locks and jaw trapped. I shook as chill spread through me, tears stinging my eyes.
How did this happen? Only that morning, I was singing in the garden with Savia, smiling at our garden patch’s healthy, growing vegetables.
Now I was in trouble the likes of which cracked my spirit.
Of course this barbaric spell was named forbidden.
It was a curse that allowed you to steal someone’s life.
To rip away their image, memories, and future, take it for yourself, and leave them stranded in the misery you’re fleeing.
What kind of desperate person created such a spell?
How desperate must you be to use it?
The princess of Lyrica trading lives with a poor, random girl she called “little whore,” she wasn’t desperate. She was terrified... of Alisdair Shadowsoul.
I knew as much about the ruler of our enemy kingdom as anyone in Lyrica did.
All of faekin lived in harmony until Alisdair Shadowsoul. Peace and goodwill throughout the lands wasn’t enough for the peasant faeman. He wanted power, a kingdom, and complete and total dominion over all in his path.
No one knows how he did it, what spell he used, or how he discovered such a terrible spell in the first place. All that was known was that on one terrible day, he tore his heart from his chest, cursed it, and hid it somewhere in the lands that became the kingdom of Wind and Wild.
Our magics—or at least, the magic of those still allowed to use it—were connected to our hearts, feelings, and emotions in so many ways. The explosive destruction of fury. The tenderness and majesty in magic fueled by love. The fits and starts of nerves, and the bubbling, brightness of happiness.
But if all that was taken away, and one was just an empty, soulless vessel of magic who wielded it with cold efficiency? Alisdair Shadowsoul answered that question: you become the most powerful faeman in history... at the expense of everything you are.
Shadowsoul changed.
Without his heart, he began turning into a beast. Half fae, half animal, he became the father of a new race—the faeriken.
On the very spot where he hid his cursed heart, grasping vines, jagged bush, overgrown trees, craggy rocks, and perilous cliffs sprung up surrounding him. A deadly, twisting forest that would one day become the kingdom of Wind and Wild.
If that was the end of his tale, Princess Emiana’s madness would not be the start of mine, but it got worse. So much worse, for the cursed heart was not content to contain its evil.
It spread through the soil and into the closest neighboring villages. At first, no one thought anything of it, until they began to change. Warped from reasoned, normal-mannered faekin turned into feral, snarling beasts—half fae, half animal.
That was when the kings and queens of old realized we were in trouble. If the heart wasn’t found and destroyed, the curse would continue spreading until it struck down every kingdom and every fae. Thus, they went to war. A war that’s lasted a thousand years, with no end in sight.
Shadowsoul did not take well to being attacked. He was certainly unmoved by pleas, treaties, begging, or bribes. Instead, he claimed the faeriken suffering under his curse as his subjects, and set them to fight the very fae trying to save them and themselves.
Our men would come back from the battlefield, speaking of fangs, claws, gills, fur, long ears, and beaks. They spoke of men who lost their souls long ago.
And Shadowsoul was responsible for all of it.
Hundreds of years later, Shadowsoul sat on a throne carved from the land’s misery, ruling over a drooling, snarling pack of cursed beasts, and watching my people die in a war we couldn’t lose, because we fought for our home and our souls.
It wasn’t a choice. Every year, the kingdom of Wind and Wild grew—the cursed land bleeding across the borders of Lyrica, Quatassa, Rajadom, and Sarabai. Even if we gave in and abandoned our crown city, there was nowhere to go.
Across the sea was the human lands, their crown cities were towering death traps of metal and iron—fatal to us.
We couldn’t live there, and with each passing year, we couldn’t live on our natural lands.
Defeating Shadowsoul and his faeriken was the only way.
If only they weren’t proving impossible to beat.
Kaelan sat down beside me, carrying a bowl of spelled ink. I knew not the magics that were performed on the ink to make it able to draw runes of power. Those were the kinds of things you learned in the Academy of Magical Arts. No woman had attended in five hundred years.
Kaelan dipped his fingers in the bowl, then began drawing on my body. Whispering to himself, he repeated the incantations over and over, weaving the spell that would destroy my life.
I screamed and railed against the gag, begging him to stop. Pleading with any trace of goodness in him to let me go.
Kaelan didn’t so much as look me in the eyes. I was nothing to him. Just another pawn in their year-long plot to run away together, and leave the rest of us with the consequences.
Only when I was covered head to toe in runes did he leave me on the hard floor. I had to listen to him repeating the process with Princess Emiana, every symbol and word of power bringing me closer to the inevitable.
What am I going to do? I’ll forget my family.
I’ll forget my promise. Mama is getting sicker every day.
Meliora’s stern face and sharp tongue made it even harder for her to get work.
If things got too desperate, what would become of Jaclan?
Would Mama have to choose between enrolling him in training or watching all the kids starve?
My breaths picked up, chest rising and falling too fast as my family’s ruin materialized before my eyes. Meliora would try her best to take care of Mama and the kids, but she would have something in her way that I didn’t—
—her shit-stain bastard of a father.
This can’t happen. I fisted the rug. Muscles straining, I flipped myself over, and crawled.
My legs were useless sticks trailing behind me. Slowing me down. But I wouldn’t stop.
This was my only chance while he was focused on the princess. She said guards would eventually come to check on her. Let them see a naked girl covered in runes, crawling through the hallway. That was sure to spur them into action.
Come on. I pushed myself up, straining for the handle. Almost.
My body seized. Arms jerking, agony racked me—originating from every rune, and they were everywhere.
I was melting.
White-hot heat burned me to ash. Warped my bones.
Incinerated my insides. And left me nothing.
I was nothing in the face of such terrible, vengeful magic.
It wasn’t just that this curse was forbidden.
The curse was alive. Sentient. It knew its offense against nature, and did not want to be performed.
All who dare ignore this, would know pain that had never been experienced.
Hearing Princess Emiana scream louder than the one lodged in my throat was hollow revenge. I was changing.
My sun-blistered skin paled. Callouses disappeared from my hands. My hair—so unique and reviled—lengthened until it tangled around my jerking arms. Another bind restricting me. Dry, tangled ends smoothed out like the finest spun silk, and I felt it all.
I felt the hair grow from my scalp. Felt my flat, round nose both narrow and shrink. Big feet crumpled with the breaking of a dozen bones, becoming the tiny dainty pair worthy of a princess. Everything I was and could be washed away.
I strained for the handle, tears streaking a face that wasn’t mine. My promise... I won’t break my promise...
My hand fell away. Darkness claimed me before I hit the floor.