Chapter Forty-One Sweet and Savage Clover #2
I dropped six inches to the ground—I hadn’t noticed I’d been floating—and nearly twisted my ankle. The stench of sulfur lingered in the air.
Had she been hurt I wouldn’t call her my mother?
“Are you planning to continue?” she asked. “Or does this sorcerous duel stop at the need to make repairs to the floor?”
I hadn’t thought of her as someone who could be hurt.
I’d never really seen her as a person. More a force of nature, like a storm or a forest fire. A disaster that struck without reason or care. Omnipotent and merciless.
I’d told myself a story about a mother and father who were perfect in their loving kindness and a wicked stepmother driven purely by malice.
But it hadn’t been a fair comparison, because it wasn’t true, not completely.
My parents, I was coming to realize, had their flaws.
And my stepmother was more complicated than I’d been willing to admit.
There were many accusations I could fairly level against the queen. She was indeed manipulative. She was also ruthless, autocratic, intransigent, demanding, and overly secretive. But that wasn’t the whole of it.
Ogres in her kingdom no longer ate human flesh. The fairies no longer stole children. The people of Skalla were peaceful and prosperous, and while they might quake in terror at the thought of stealing a peach from her garden, my father had escaped with his sweet clover unscathed.
I had seen what a truly mad and evil sorceress looked like, and it wasn’t the woman on the throne in front of me.
“Locking someone in a tower is terrible pedagogy,” I said. “Just the absolute worst. Bitter resentment doesn’t encourage learning.”
“Nothing else was working.” She sounded almost plaintive. Less the almighty queen, more the woman who’d fallen for the doctor next door and found herself raising a rebellious stepdaughter. A memory stirred of a voice in a prison cell. Never good enough for you, no matter what I do.
“What wasn’t working?” I asked. “Sending me off on an absurd quest to trap lightning in a bottle? Or to find an acre of land between the sea and the shore?”
“Yes.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Queen Hellebore.” When was the last time I had called her by her name? I couldn’t remember. “Maybe you could have asked for my help, if you needed it.”
Because of course she had. She’d needed, and wanted, my help, along with Jonquil’s and Calla’s.
It was obvious now that I’d given it a moment’s thought.
She acted as if she were holding the kingdom together all by herself, but then she sent her children off to find dragons and tooth guards and magical tools.
Even my latest misadventure had deposited another magic mirror, obnoxious though it might have been, into her arsenal of enchanted artifacts.
“That is the last thing I could have asked for.” The words came out slowly, as if reluctant to leave her mouth. “A queen cannot ever show weakness.”
“Being terrifying isn’t the same thing as being strong.”
“It is for me.” She fixed me with her gaze. It was as disconcerting as always. “I am not only a queen but a sorceress. I will be seen as terrifying whether I wish it or not. No other path is open to me. So I must be as terrifying as possible, if I am to rule.”
“To rule,” I repeated flatly. “So why were you like that with your daughters, too?”
The slightest of tremors crossed her face, a crack in her facade, like stone splintering.
Then it was gone. I’d never noticed how much effort it took her to steady those dark, carved-basalt features—Jonquil’s face with Calla’s eyes.
What had it cost the queen to keep up that front at all times? I knew what it had cost me.
“If you couldn’t ask for my help,” I told her, “then you might have tried asking what I wanted. Or showing I could trust you. Or just letting me miss my mom.”
She didn’t answer.
Maybe she wasn’t driven by spitefulness and cruelty.
Maybe it was more complicated than that.
But whenever I’d pushed against her, the only thing she’d known how to do was push back harder.
She could see a thousand thousand futures, and she’d still had no idea what to do with a grieving seven-year-old girl.
I turned on my heel and walked away. “I’m leaving.”
“I haven’t been the worst of mothers,” she called out after me. “I did my best. Have you forgotten our morning teas together? Or how I saved you from that prince?”
Even now, she wouldn’t acknowledge the whole truth of it. “You misremember, my queen. I saved you.”
“What exactly are you leaving?” she asked, speaking more softly. “The throne room? The palace? Skalla?”
I paused for only a moment. “I don’t know yet.”
When I reached the bronze doors, they had already been wrenched halfway open. On the other side, Sam had Femus in a choke hold with one arm and was fending off Humba’s mighty fists with the other. The ogre froze mid-swing when I stepped forward.
“Are you all right?” Sam asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Is there a problem here?”
“Oh, no,” he reassured me, releasing Femus, who gasped with relief. “Not anymore, at least. They wouldn’t let me in when the palace started shaking. They were very nice about it, but—”
“STANDING ORDERS,” Humba screamed apologetically. “NO ONE IS TO INTERRUPT WHEN THE QUEEN IS IN PRIVATE CONFERENCE.”
Although all three looked rather bruised, there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings; the ogres spent the next few minutes thanking Sam profusely for his tip about whey protein. I suspected they’d rather enjoyed the break in their routine.
It wasn’t until we were halfway down the stairs, well out of earshot of any curious eavesdroppers, that Sam asked, “How did it go?”
“Surprisingly well,” I told him. “I’m not going back to the tower. She and I are both still alive. And…I understand her a little better than I used to, for what it’s worth.”
“Good.”
“Yes, I thought so, too.”
My stepmother wasn’t all-knowing, after all. And far from all-powerful. Which meant that she wasn’t the only person I’d been comparing to an illusion. Suddenly, I had a lot less to live up to.
It was very freeing.
“So,” Sam said, “what happens now?”
I contemplated my answer as we made our slow way to the garden.
If I wasn’t obeying the queen’s whims any longer, I could go anywhere.
Do anything. If I undertook quests in the future, they would be of my own choosing.
And they would not involve trapping lightning in a bottle.
That one nearly killed me. I can still taste copper on my tongue during bad storms.
“I might like to travel for a while,” I said. “Visit a few places without any royal commands compelling me.”
“You hate traveling. You complained about the rain the whole way here.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
“All right, yes, I hate traveling,” I admitted. “But I do like reaching a destination. Want to show me around Ecossia? I’ve never been there.”
Sam smiled. “I’d love to. And where after that?”
“Who knows?”
“East of the sun and west of the moon?”
“It’s not that great,” I said. “The trolls aren’t good company, and the food is terrible.”
I would come back to Skalla someday, I had no doubt.
My family lived there. Perhaps it would just be for a visit, if I fell in love with Ecossia’s windswept moors as strongly as I’d fallen for Sam.
Or perhaps we’d return to Skalla after years away and clean out the little cottage where my father and mother had lived.
I could offer my skills as an apothecary. Or a sorceress.
“Once upon a time,” I murmured, “when the world was younger and the horizon was a little wider, a princess ran off with a huntsman into the great and boundless unknown….”
“Sounds like an intriguing story,” Sam said.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
I linked my arm through his and clutched the four-leaf clover in my hand. Sam and I stepped into the garden, where the rest of my family waited to hear my tale.
It didn’t feel like I was walking into happily ever after. Not exactly. Those are reserved for the ends of stories, and this was the beginning.