Unearned Luck | Alexis Hall #5
From my position near the statue that I had been coincidentally close to, I transformed into a swallow and followed Miss Penworthy as she dashed for the exit.
A troll tried to catch hold of her as she fled but she took the golden comb she’d been given by the second old woman and raked it hard down the monster’s arm. It released her, and she ran.
* * *
Miss Penworthy made her way cautiously through the Troll Queen’s castle.
And although there were many wonders, delights and distractions that might have delayed her on the way, she ignored them all and went with the unerring instinct of pigeons, lovers, and fairytale heroines, up the stairs of the tallest tower to the room where her princess was imprisoned.
She was not chained. Chains would, in any case, have been unlikely to hold her in bear shape. She was sitting glumly at the foot of the bed, looking longingly out of the window.
“Princess!” cried Miss Penworthy, who had grown rather used to her lover not having a name per se. “I’m here to rescue you!”
The Bear Princess turned a melancholy head towards her. She blinked, but said nothing.
“I said, I’m here to rescue you.”
But the Bear Princess shook her great head and said, “No.”
It wasn’t the answer Miss Penworthy had been hoping for. Or expecting. “What do you mean, no?”
“Nothing has changed. I am still cursed. I am still promised to the Troll Queen. Your being here only makes things worse.”
Fearing that the trolls were close behind her, Miss Penworthy approached the Bear Princess, took tight hold of her fur, and made a spirited effort to pull her out of the door. This failed spectacularly. Because bear. “Come on,” she insisted. “You don’t have to stay anywhere you don’t want to.”
“I do,” replied the Bear Princess. “When you brought the candle to my room, you proved that love is not blind and that—”
She was interrupted by Miss Penworthy shrieking, “Stop it.”
The Bear Princess, unlike most royals, actually stopped it.
“I am so tired,” Miss Penworthy went on, somehow managing to sound weary and passionate at once, “of rules. My father’s rules. Society’s rules. The silly story-rules that Lizzie is so fond of and that you seem to live by. Why can’t we just… why can’t we just say fuck it?”
The Bear Princess gazed up into Miss Penworthy’s eyes. “Fuck it?”
Letting go of her wife’s fur, Miss Penworthy nodded. “Yes. Fuck it. Fuck curses and trolls and who we’re meant to love and who we’re meant to marry. Fuck symbols and rituals and having to leave me because I crossed a line you couldn’t even tell me about. Let’s just go. Let’s just be happy.”
“I will still be a bear,” the Bear Princess pointed out. “By day, at least.”
To which Miss Penworthy replied, “So?”
“You cannot wish to be married to a beast.”
“Princess” – to weary and passionate, Miss Penworthy’s voice now added ‘scolding’ – “don’t tell me what I can and can’t wish.
” And then, because it felt very much like the thing to do, she knelt in front of the Bear Princess, gazed up at her, and said, “I love you. I love you no matter what shape or what skin you’re wearing.
If you want to stop being a bear because you don’t like being a bear, then that’s fine.
But if it’s about me, well…” – she folded her arms across her bosom in a gesture I was sure she’d learned from Miss Bickle – “I’ll thank you to trust that I know my own mind. ”
With timing that I would have thought was implausible had I not witnessed it instead of making it up, two large trolls burst through the door at the most dramatic possible moment.
What followed was… violent. As with sex, violence bores me more than it thrills me, so I won’t give a blow-by-blow account of the struggle that followed (especially since I’m already over wordcount). I’ll only say that in a fight, you should always bet on the enchanted bear.
With Miss Penworthy on her back, the Bear Princess fought her way through the castle to the throne room, where Miss Bickle, with characteristic insensibility to danger, was doing her best to defend herself with a golden spindle.
Perched on her throne, the Troll Queen was watching the chaos with a look of horror that I found deeply personally gratifying. “What are you doing? If you leave now, the curse will never be undone.”
The Bear Princess and Miss Penworthy stood together before the Troll Queen. “I am leaving,” said the princess. “And I am taking my wife with me.”
“I will not allow it,” said the Troll Queen.
“Funnily enough,” replied Miss Penworthy, “we don’t care.”
And without further comment, she and Miss Bickle both climbed onto the back of the Bear Princess and, with a last glance over their shoulders at the enraged Troll Queen and her castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, they rode away all three of them to freedom.
This is a shorter tale than most I have shared with my mortal readers. And since I have of necessity adopted a more folkloric idiom in telling it, I shall leave it here. It falls to me to say only that they did, indeed, all live happily ever after.
Well. Mostly.
I, meanwhile, remain exiled to your dismal reality, forced to sell my stories for scraps. I trust that you, in your own life, will have better fortune.
Fare thee well, reader.
And remember to always trust talking animals.