Unearned Luck | Alexis Hall #3
If she hadn’t been so frustrated, Miss Penworthy would have found that rather funny. “But whose rules are they?”
“I can’t say.”
With a stifled shriek, Miss Penworthy kicked the wall, causing a somewhat less stifled shriek, and some unladylike cursing.
“Be careful.”
“I agreed to marry a bear. I think we can safely say caution isn’t one of my virtues.”
The Bear Princess carried on staring out to sea. “Are you not happy here?”
“No. I mean yes. I mean… well, I’m happy most of the time. Extremely happy some of the time and” – she spread her arms wide and rotated in a slow, horizon-encompassing circle – “all of this is beautiful. But… it’s empty.”
“You’re lonely then?”
“No!” protest-too-muched Miss Penworthy. “Well… a little.”
“I could send for your parents,” the Bear Princess suggested. “And your friend?”
To say Miss Penworthy had mixed emotions would be redundant.
Mortals always have mixed emotions. It’s a weakness of your kind.
Right now, her sense of isolation and desire for community was very much at war with her sense that if she was going to be a not-exactly-prisoner in a quasi-real palace over an otherworldly ocean, not having to see her father ever again was actually a pretty major perk.
In the end, isolation and community won.
“Yes,” she replied, “I would like that.”
The Bear Princess nodded her great head, and said, “But be warned. If your friend Miss Bickle comes, she will try to draw you aside and speak with you privately. You must not let her.”
“I don’t suppose,” said Miss Penworthy with a sigh, “you’re allowed to tell me why?”
* * *
To, I’m sure, your tremendous unsurprise, the Bear Princess was not allowed to tell her why.
Which made it very awkward when the day of her family’s visit came and Mr Penworthy, Mrs Penworthy, and Miss Bickle were all sitting around in an uncomfortable silence in a parlour hung with golden tapestries and furnished with golden chairs upholstered in golden cloth.
“Well,” said Miss Bickle very loudly, “isn’t this nice?”
Mr Penworthy, who had never liked Miss Bickle and, since he had no son he wished to marry to her, didn’t mind showing it, shot her a venomous look. “Is it, Lysistrata? Although I will confess, Erica, that your match was advantageous financially, it has been socially detrimental.”
“We had to tell the Arbuthnotts that you’d died,” added her mother. “It seemed simplest.”
It would have been impossible for the mortals, so accustomed to having only one physiology (your species is so strangely reticent about shapeshifting), to tell, but the Bear Princess gave Mrs Penworthy an extremely dirty look. “You liked my riches well enough.”
Mr Penworthy stiffened. “That’s a very vulgar observation to make. Really Erica, though I am glad you have at last consented to marry, I cannot congratulate you on your choice of husband.”
To which Miss Penworthy replied simply, “Wife.”
The parlour echoed with the rattle of china-on-china as Mrs Penworthy set down her teacup and I nobly resisted the urge to spill it in her lap. “I beg your pardon.”
“Wife,” Miss Penworthy said again.
“Are you telling me,” said Mrs Penworthy, her voice thick with outrage, “that thing is a female?”
“I’m telling you that she’s a woman.”
The Bear Princess nodded at this.
“Erica.” Mrs Penworthy’s tone was growing more vicious by the moment. “You clearly do not know what a woman is.”
At this stage, Miss Penworthy was notably quivering, and the Bear Princess looked none best pleased either.
So Miss Bickle, ever sensitive to the needs of others, rose, crossed the room to where Miss Penworthy was sitting and hoisted her up by the arm.
“I think she might,” she pointed out, “what with her being one and everything. Come, Erica, let us take a walk together. I believe the air would do me good.”
This came as such a relief to Miss Penworthy that it wasn’t until the two of them were in the long gallery that she remembered her wife’s admonition against doing the thing she’d just done.
And it wasn’t until they were halfway out the long gallery (which was, it must be said, extremely long) that she plucked up the courage to tell Miss Bickle about it.
“Oh, but this is perfect,” Miss Bickle said, to the surprise of neither Miss Penworthy nor myself. “This is exactly what one must do in the castle of an enchanted lover.”
Miss Penworthy eyed her friend warily. “What is?”
“Disobey their instructions. Especially if they give you exactly one instruction, and that instruction is simul taneously vague and highly specific. Like don’t go into the west wing or don’t ask me my name or don’t look at me after midnight.
” She stopped a moment. “Unless of course the instruction is don’t go into this one locked room in the tower, because then you’re quite likely to get murdered. ”
“But her only instruction to me was that I wasn’t to speak to you alone,” Miss Penworthy pointed out, “and I’ve done that now.”
Miss Bickle nodded like her neck was on springs.
“So you must listen very carefully to everything I say. Your princess is clearly under a curse. Equally clearly, it is your job to break the curse. Now of course technically the curse will probably break by itself if you just carry on being terribly quiet and incurious for another year or so—”
Another year or so seemed like an awfully long time to Miss Penworthy, and she said as much.
“Exactly. Nobody ever breaks a curse by just waiting it out. I mean then it would hardly even be a curse. No, what you have to do is violate her trust in some terrible way—”
“Lysistrata, I’m not sure I like where this is going.”
“Oh, but don’t you see? Then you get to repent. You’ll go on a long journey to prove your love and devotion and at the end of it things will be better than ever!”
This sounded, to borrow an anachronistic phrase, shonky. “Will they, though?”
“Certainly.” Miss Bickle nodded again, like her neck was on springs that had been adjusted to oscillate at an even higher frequency.
“My recommendation is to either find the princess’ bearskin while she’s not wearing it, and throw it on the fire, or else to track her down while she’s sleeping and look at her by candlelight. ”
It sounded like nonsense. Then again, something Miss Pen-worthy had learned over her years of friendship with Miss Bickle was that nonsense sometimes had a strange way of being practical. “I’ll give it a go,” she said, “but you’d better be fucking right about this.”
* * *
That night, after she and the Bear Princess had banged each other senseless as they had taken to doing most nights, Miss Penworthy pretended to sleep and, when the Bear Princess left her bed, she took an unlighted candle and followed her.
Over her many days in the palace, Miss Penworthy had learned its rooms well, and she had deduced – correctly, as it happened – that her wife’s bedroom must be the one room she had never been shown.
A chamber at the very top of the northernmost tower.
A chamber that, from the outside, had no windows.
Gently, so very gently, Miss Penworthy opened the door and, with her hands shaking and her breath quickening and her every instinct telling her that listening to Lysistrata Bickle’s schemes was a terrible, terrible idea, lit the candle.
The room was bathed in a soft orange light, just bright enough for Miss Penworthy to make her way to the place where her lover was sleeping.
It wasn’t a bed. Given that the princess trans formed back into a bear at dawn, a bed would be impractical. Instead, she slept in a tousle of silks and pillows, some of them gashed by claws and spilling feathers into the room like confetti. And there amongst them she lay. The Bear Princess.
She did not look the way a storybook would want her to look.
Her beauty – and she was beautiful after her fashion – did not inspire metaphors about milk and rubies and spun gold.
Her hair was brown and a little wavy. Her skin an unremarkable shade between dark and light.
Her hands – hands that had touched Miss Penworthy in so many ways on so many nights – looked strong and capable, not dainty and delicate as some might suppose a princess’ hands should be.
Still, in that moment, Miss Penworthy knew that she loved her.
And then a drop of tallow fell.
And the Bear Princess awoke.
* * *
The next morning (I’ve jumped ahead, reader, it’s a narrative trick, you’ll work it out) the Bear Princess was gone. As was the castle. Miss Penworthy, her parents, and Miss Bickle awoke on a cold, bare pinnacle, a storm lashing around them.
“Well,” said Mrs Penworthy primly, if also damply, “I’m just glad that nonsense is over.”
Her father nodded. “Once we’ve got off of this rock, we can head back to London and the less said about this sorry business the better.”
But Miss Penworthy didn’t move.
“What did she say to you?” asked Miss Bickle, who had a sense of these things.
“She said that I’d broken the bargain,” Miss Penworthy replied. You see reader, this is where you catch up with the part of the story I jumped over. “And that she would have to leave me, to go to another woman. A witch who lives in a castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon.”
“Erica,” Mr Penworthy snapped. “I don’t know what you’re wittering about, but I have had about enough of—”
And before he could finish, Miss Penworthy stepped forward, looked him in the eye, and said, “No.”
“No?”
“No, Father. I am a married woman. And I am going to find my wife.”
Mrs Penworthy, shading once again towards apoplexy, got as far as, “You most certainly are n—”
“I am,” said Miss Penworthy, very calmly. “You and Papa have wanted to be rid of me for as long as I can remember. Well, now you have your wish.” She turned to Miss Bickle and held out her arm. “Come on Lizzie, let’s go and find where east of the sun and west of the moon is.”
Miss Bickle took her friend’s arm enthusiastically. “Absolutely. Although… I think we might need to stop on the way and pick you up three pairs of iron shoes.”