Chapter Two A Modest Proposal #2
I did not add that the king of Tailliz was, as far as I could remember, three times my age.
That argument was unlikely to have any effect on her judgment.
No argument would, not once her decision had been made.
Try sometime to convince the queen she doesn’t actually need the smallest toenail of a dragon.
See how far you get. And then, once you’ve been released from your doorless tower prison, watch as your sister rides by on a grateful dragon cured of its painful hangnail and handily saves your kingdom from an invading army.
My stepmother hadn’t even had the grace to look smug about it.
She always turned out to have excellent reasons for her bizarre, complicated, wheels-within-wheels plans.
Although she’d never bother to tell you what they were.
Or shield you from the consequences of carrying those plans out.
Jonquil had been dismembered and beheaded while fighting a grootslang in the Summerlands.
She’s fine now. Except for the scars. And the nightmares.
“You are thinking,” my stepmother said, “of King Estienne. He is king no longer. He has died after a lingering illness. His son, Gervase, sent word to ask for your hand.”
That did not make me feel any better about the situation.
If anything, it troubled me more. I knew something of Estienne from my occasional lessons in statecraft.
Tailliz was one of a dozen or so small kingdoms on the shores of the western sea, and its aging king had been a peaceful and conservative monarch, although one of no particular note.
His son was scarcely more than a name to me, a footnote on a list my tutors had made me memorize in case I ever had cause to travel west.
Which now, I supposed, I did.
She rose from the obsidian throne and walked toward an oval mirror that hung from a nearby pillar. When she tapped the glass, her reflection was replaced by a forest scene. Dense trees and underbrush and, in the far distance, a castle on an island in the sea. Tailliz?
Now that she was no longer sitting, it was permitted for me to stand as well, much to the gratitude of my throbbing knees. As a princess, I had been given years of training in grace and deportment, so I was able to lurch to my feet with only a tiny bit of a stagger.
“Why is this happening so rapidly?” I asked.
“Is he that desperate for an heir? Does he know I barely count as a princess?” I wasn’t even in line for the throne; that was reserved for the queen’s blood relatives.
Calla sometimes grumbled that this was unfair to me, but I had a hard time believing it would ever matter.
I expected that my stepmother would still be ruling Skalla hundreds of years after I had perished of old age.
I thought I remembered Gervase had been a younger son at the time of his birth. Some of his siblings must have died. That didn’t seem like a promising portent. What had they died of? Could I be heading into danger of some kind?
My stepmother’s eyes remained fixed on the scene in the mirror. “It is possible he is unaware of your parentage. He did not ask for you by name.”
“How charming. What did he request, then? Any spare girls you might happen to have lying around?”
“He specified his bride should be of age and as of yet unmarried.”
“What luck,” I spat, “that I qualify.”
“Yes.” Her reply contained no acknowledgment of my sarcasm.
She did not turn from her contemplation of the forest in the glass.
Her features might as well have been carved out of the same raw mountain rock as the palace.
She seemed as ageless and eternal as the columns supporting the ceiling, and her expression was just as impenetrable.
He must have dispatched a messenger immediately after his coronation if I was hearing about his proposal before I’d even known Tailliz had changed rulers.
I hadn’t been out on the tooth quest for more than a few weeks.
What was the cause of all this speed and urgency?
It was odd that my stepmother had accepted so quickly.
Had the messenger already been sent back with her agreement?
And without mine. My assent had been neither asked for nor required.
Since I was the queen’s stepdaughter, my fate was shaped by the obligations of politics and the caprices of sorcery, not by lesser concerns like my own preferences. I’d always assumed my marriage wouldn’t be of my own choosing. I’d hoped, though, that I would at least have some say in the matter.
My sister Jonquil was married to a fairy princess from the Summerlands.
It was a political arrangement, accompanied by a trade agreement reducing the tariffs on honey, blood, and hen’s teeth and containing a codicil that stopped the theft of babies and their replacement by changelings, an issue that had brought Skalla and the Summerlands to the brink of war.
But Jonquil and Gnoflwhogir had had a chance to meet, and fight a grootslang together, and save each other’s lives before the treaty was finalized.
Calla’s fate sounded worse on the surface; when she turned eighteen the year before, the queen had offered her hand to all comers in a contest, as if she were a prize cow.
But for all practical purposes, she’d made a love match.
Technically, Liam had won the competition by crossing the world and sailing the seas and bringing back a golden feather from the undying firebird.
Everyone knew, though, that Calla had liked him better than any of the others and had blatantly cheated to help him out.
The queen pretended not to notice. Calla is the baby of the family and can get away with things that would see me clapped into the tower again in an instant.
My fate, it appeared, was to be shipped off to some complete stranger, with no opportunity to make my own choice. As usual, I was about to be stuck with the worst of three bad deals.
I had my suspicions as to why things tended to turn out that way. And just where I stood in my stepmother’s regard. I was an afterthought. I always had been. At best, a disappointment. At worst, an irrelevancy.
The middle child. The only one with no blood relationship to the queen; when she took my father as her consort, the daughter from his previous marriage came along as part of the bargain.
I was the least magical of her three children.
Not so enchanted, or enchanting, as Calla, so beloved by nature’s creatures that mice do her sewing and raccoons wash her dishes.
Not so powerful in spell craft as Jonquil, who turned herself into a lake once when she was courting Gnoflwhogir.
A whole lake. With ducks. Where did the ducks come from, I ask you?
When I tried to turn into a lake, I only managed to transform myself into a puddle.
That was after hours of effort that left my ears ringing.
It goes without saying I failed to produce any waterfowl.
And I doubted anything would ever strengthen my power—not the Golden Key, or True Love’s First Kiss, or a hair plucked from a devil’s tail.
A sow’s ear will not become a silk purse no matter how much effort goes into the sewing.
My greatest achievement as a sorceress thus far was making my hair grow, which, as you might imagine, has limited utility.
But I was burdened with a stepmother who routinely performed six impossible acts before breakfast and had little patience for those who couldn’t.
In the face of that unattainable standard, I’d only ever had two options: Try to live up to it, and fail.
Or try to rebel against it, and fail even harder.
My stepmother moved away from the mirror and reached over to cup my chin with her fingers, turning my head until her storm-cloud-dark eyes met mine.
It took every ounce of my self-control not to flinch.
I’m not sure what shocked me more—her touching me or her meeting my gaze.
She didn’t generally do either. She seldom looked at people.
She looked around them, above them, and very often through them, her attention fixed on matters far beyond their petty understanding.
If there was a time, during my childhood, when I’d longed for her to hug me, that feeling had withered away years before.
Now I mostly hoped she would leave me alone.
Possibly after first telling me I was as capable and worthy as my sisters.
And as long as I was imagining the preposterous, maybe then she’d grant me three wishes and a magic porridge pot.
“Melilot,” she said. “I would like you to trust me.”
I was unable to stifle a short nervous laugh.
Five heartbeats passed before she released my chin. Her eyes slid away from mine, which honestly came as a relief.
Was she serious?
I couldn’t afford to trust her. Not when Jonquil still had scars circling her neck and joints, ragged marks that never faded. Not with my stepmother’s history of poisoning, of trickery, of dark and dangerous magic.
My stepmother, queen of Skalla and Sorceress of the Mountain, had been on that black burnished throne for a long, long time.
Threats to her kingdom and impediments to her rule were dealt with.
Pawns were put at risk whenever necessary.
After the tower, I had tried to accept being a pawn for fear that if I did not, she might begin to see me as an impediment.
My trust had never been required by her before. I wondered why she was asking for it now.
“If you told me why you were sending me off,” I said to my stepmother, “if you told me anything, for once, then I might believe it wasn’t simply because you can’t stand the sight of me.”
“And what would I tell you? I see a thousand thousand futures where you go and a thousand thousand futures where you do not. To speak of the one I desire most is to well-nigh guarantee it will never come to pass.”
“A very convenient excuse for not saying anything.”
“Yes.”
I sighed. There would be no answer. I didn’t know why I’d tried. “Will that be all, or did you want something else of me? Perhaps you need a pin fetched from the bottom of the ocean or a hundred lost pearls gathered in a night?”
She gestured my dismissal. I turned and walked off, all the long way across the throne room and out through the great bronze doors.
Humba and Femus, seeing the anger plain on my face, said nothing as I tried to slam the doors behind me.
They weighed a quarter ton together, so I was only able to push hard enough to produce a quiet thump.
Even the horrible squeal sounded muffled. I am no ogre.
Senseless rage would do me no good. I clenched my teeth until my breathing slowed, and I was able to think rationally about what was happening.
If I was going to run, this was the time.
Maybe I could make a go of it, at least for a while.
I might stumble across a cave full of robbers or a cottage full of dwarves and keep house for them in exchange for a place to stay.
Which didn’t strike me as being a wonderful life, but there was a chance I wouldn’t utterly hate it.
I was no stranger to cleaning up messes—it was a useful habit in a place where Calla’s helpful animals were constantly rampaging through on one errand or another.
It sounds cute until you find what the rats have left on your floor and the doves have left on your bedsheets.
But even if I found somewhere to hide, how long would it be before my stepmother showed up with a clever disguise and a shiny red apple?
I’d probably end up lying in a glass coffin until the trump of doom.
Or at best, I’d find myself engaged to a different prince.
One with a tendency toward necrophilia. The coffin kissers are the worst.
The queen had tamed giants and destroyed armies. I doubted it would take an eternity for her to track me down. Running away would only be putting off my fate, not escaping it.
Instead of heading down the thousand steps to the town, I went up to my room to prepare for the journey to Tailliz.