If I was going to try anything, I would need to pick my moment with care. “All right, I promise. No drowning.”
“Good.” She opened the lid and set it carefully down. “Come out and have a seat. I’d like to tell you a story.”
“A story?” I stood, arching my back to get the kinks out. When I stepped out of the coffin, the shallow water at the bottom rippled back and forth. I thought about the castle by thesea. How long would it be before it fell? Or had it fallen already, while I wandered through the maze of mirrors?
“There,” she said. “That’s better, isn’t it?”
My red cloak dripped onto the stone floor. Frankly, it had benefited from the rinse. It wasn’t as good as Jonquil’s clothes-cleaning spell, but at least the water had washed some of the ichor out.
“What kind of story?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.” She considered. “Perhaps it will turn out to be a love story.”
“My favorite.” I looked out a window. Outside, there was nothing but trees and snow. The room was warm, although there was no glass to keep out the chill, and no fire had been lit within. More of her magic.
I brushed my hair out of the way so I could sit on the sill, bringing the whole sodden heap of it forward over my shoulder. I fidgeted with it, fussing at the tangles, as if undoing a few of the knots would make any difference.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m listening.”
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.
