Chapter Thirty The Tale of the Evil Sorceress
Chapter Thirty
The Tale of the Evil Sorceress
Once upon a time, a child was born to the royal family of Tailliz. This was a great disappointment to her parents and considered by most everyone to have been a dreadful waste of time and effort.
The queen, you see, was getting on in years.
So was the king, but no one really cared about that.
The queen’s fertility, on the other hand, had been the talk of the kingdom for nearly two decades.
Or more accurately, her lack of fertility.
The nation gossiped nonstop about the miscarriages, the stillbirths, the cradle deaths, and the queen’s stubborn inability to become pregnant again after every such embarrassment, sometimes for years at a stretch.
This was considered a grave problem for the king, for the royal bloodline had shrunk over the centuries until he and his wife had become the bottleneck for any future generations.
He had no brothers, uncles, nephews, cousins, or even distant relations who might be hastened home to plop their rear ends on the throne should the worst come to pass.
But finally, when the king had all but given up hope, the queen not only became pregnant but also brought the child to term; and the child survived not only the day of its birth but also the week, and the month, and soon enough the year. Unfortunately, the child was a girl.
For the Kingdom of Tailliz had an ancient rule, and the rule was this: Women cannot inherit the throne. The origins of this rule were unknown even to the lion who was the keeper of the laws and traditions of the kingdom—although he had his theories and wrote a ridiculous book about them.
The king bided his time for a few years, holding out hope, perhaps, that the queen might yet produce a son out of some unexpected orifice. But no such son sprang forth, so the king at last went to seek advice from the lion.
“I am in dire need of an heir,” the king apprised his counselor, “and the queen has proven intransigent in this regard. Is there some method by which I might birth one on my own?”
“That is biologically unlikely,” the lion opined. “As I have conclusively proven, humans only reproduce asexually under conditions of extreme stress, usually when their fruiting bodies are triggered to spore by fire.” He eyed the king suspiciously. “Didn’t you say you read that chapter?”
The king grunted in lieu of giving an answer. “I would rather not be lit on fire. What are my other options? Could I find a less incompetent queen?”
“Marrying a second spouse while not yet unmarried from the first spouse is a practice known as philately,” the lion divulged. “It is, I fear, forbidden by the ancient laws of Tailliz.”
The king mulled that over for a great deal of time before he spoke again. “What if the first spouse is no longer alive when the second wedding occurs? Marriage is invalidated by death, is it not?”
“It is,” the lion hesitantly agreed. “But spousal murder, while not historically unknown in Tailliz, is…frowned upon.”
“Frowned upon?”
“Severely frowned upon,” the lion confirmed.
“Well, that’s no good either, then!” the king groused. “I detest being frowned upon. It appears I am out of options.”
“Hm. Possibly not. Are you familiar, perchance, with the ritual known as ‘divorce’?”
Once the lion had explained the meaning of the word and how it might best be accomplished under Tailliziani law, the king was overjoyed.
They talked long into the night, plotting and planning.
For divorce in Tailliz was only allowed if an ironclad reason could be found for it, and a lack of male offspring had been deemed insufficient.
Which meant it was imperative that a different reason be either discovered or invented.
And so it was that wild rumors began to circulate through the court—rumors that the queen held regular tea parties with demonic horse-size rabbits, that she was a porcelain doll animated by clockwork, that she floated three inches above her bed at night babbling in an unknown tongue.
Only one of these things was true, but it mattered little.
By the time the king declared his marriage null and void, few were surprised and most were relieved.
The princess was a notable exception, but no one paid any mind to what she thought.
The former queen was sent packing to a distant estate, where she died some years later in bewildered obscurity.
In the meantime, the king remarried, selecting a bride from a line of minor nobles noted primarily for their fecundity; she was herself the seventh of twelve siblings, which he took as a promising sign.
And indeed, in rapid succession she popped out an heir, a spare, and an extra pair.
Then she died of a chill, and no one cared.
She had served her purpose, everyone agreed, most admirably.
“So you see,” Angelique said, “we have a great deal in common.”
“We do?” I remained dubious. The last time I was in this tower, I’d realized my father hadn’t been the perfect parent I had always imagined, but he never would have cast off my mother like a broken shoe.
“Two princesses,” she continued, “who weren’t ever meant to sit on their parents’ thrones—”
“Oh, that.” I shrugged. “Not being in line for a throne isn’t exactly unique. Most people endure it all their lives. It’s hardly a good enough reason for a ‘We’re not so very different, you and I’ speech.”
“Do most people also live in the shadow of their stepmother’s natural children, eternally envious of the bright future that will never be theirs?”
“Is that how you see me?” She was still missing the mark, I thought. If I was envious of my sisters, it wasn’t because of their place in the order of succession. I’d never been one to spend my days scheming for power and scrambling for a crown.
Then I remembered the Melilot in the mirror with her bone-white cup, and I wondered if Angelique had come nearer to the truth than I wanted to believe.
I leaned against the window embrasure, narrowing my eyes. “You seem to know more about the Skallan royal family than most. Not even Gervase had heard I wasn’t the queen’s daughter by birth.”
She smiled. “We have far more in common than that.”
The princess grew up largely ignored. Of her brothers, only the youngest and least important bothered to spend any time with her, following her about and pestering her with questions.
Or at least, he did until she was old enough to be sequestered in the women’s wing.
If not for one unexpected event, she might have been content to rule over her petty fiefdom of storytelling and embroidery, for she was still the king’s daughter and at the top of the only hierarchy open to her.
But then, one night, she exploded a mouse.
It is fortunate that the creature surprised her when she was alone, for at that time she had neither understanding nor control of her powers.
All she knew was that her bedroom had been invaded by a rodent, and she hated it and wanted it gone.
In an instant, its tiny body bulged, distended, and then inverted, spraying the wall with blood.
Intrigued, the princess stepped forward to examine what she had wrought.
The mouse corpse, she found, had been not merely exsanguinated but transformed.
Tentacles sprouted where its tiny ears had been.
Its paws were clubby stumps of bone, and its tail had grown a spike that glittered like metal in the candlelight.
Needless to say, she was delighted. She wished for nothing more than to do it again.
There was no one she could turn to for instruction.
Sorcery was unknown in Tailliz, and the sole magical being was the lion, who was, frankly, a buffoon.
So she began to practice on her own, in secret.
The secrecy came not from fear or shame; it came, rather, from a desire to have something for herself, at least for a while.
Something that made her more than the superfluous child of a failed mother.
She harbored vague dreams of dazzling her father with her talents, but that, she felt, should wait until she perfected them.
Her experiments started out innocently enough.
Oh, a beloved cat or poodle might have vanished on occasion, with much weeping and wailing from this Yvette or that Yvonne, but sacrifices are necessary in the pursuit of knowledge.
And imagine the joy the princess felt as her knowledge and ability increased.
The triumph when an animal survived a transformation for the very first time.
The thrill when she took a rat and a centipede and squashed them together to form something new.
As her powers grew, and her creations became larger, fiercer, and more difficult to dispose of, she wondered whether the time was growing ripe to reveal her abilities.
But one day, she watched her younger brothers from behind a wooden screen as they prepared for a fraternal hunting expedition—a rare event because they did not like one another overmuch—and she could not help but notice they were all, compared to her, wholly inadequate.
The eldest of them was vain, boastful, and talentless, loudly proclaiming how many animals he would bring home from the forest, although he never managed to return with more than a scrawny hare.
The next eldest was whiny, weak, and cowardly, a spindly fellow who sniffled in the cold and was so frightened of his own horse he could barely sit astride.
The third eldest was dull as a brick, a slack-jawed mannequin with little to say and none of it worthwhile.
The youngest of the brothers, Gervase, had no flaws so obvious, but he was hardly out of boyhood, a blank slate upon which anything might yet be written.