“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.
And as they rode out of the castle gate with great fanfare and cheering, it occurred to her to ask herself: Why should any of them rule? Why should the throne go to a braggart, a poltroon, a dolt, or a stripling while someone of much greater talents was swept aside?
Indeed, she wondered, why not her?
Attaining such an ambition would take years, but patience she had in abundance. She increased the scope and scale of her experiments, cultivating a reputation for frequent illnesses in order to obtain time and privacy. Eventually her creations grew too large and dangerous to hide within the castle, so she dared to turn her transformative powers on herself. The first attempt nearly killed her, but within a few months, she had perfected a method of slipping away from the castle unseen, so she might continue her practices deep in the woods. There, no one would stumble over the corpses of her failures or intothe teeth of her successes. Or at least, they would not do so before she was ready.
“Am I supposed to find this relatable?” I asked. “Because I’m still not seeing all of these great similarities between us.”
“No? Am I the only one here who concealed the truth about herself to achieve her ends?”
“I did that to protect myself. From you.”
“We are two women not content with the lives laid out for them. Two sorceresses of vast and dangerous power. Two liars.”
I shifted uncomfortably. Even more so than before, this was striking closer to home than I would have liked. Especially the part about not being content with the path I’d been set on. “I’ve never exploded any mice,” I said.
“Oh, you should try it,” she told me. “It’s great fun.”
The princess spent many years learning her craft. No longer content with mere animal transformation, she scoured the land for books of arcane lore. Books she memorized and then burned. She used what she learned to conceal her laboratory from sight, further lessening the risk of discovery—although not, as it later turned out, enough to prevent it entirely.
“I’ve been wondering why you didn’t turn the whole thing invisible. We’d have walked right past it.”
She looked rueful. “I tried that at first, but then I couldn’t find it myself.”
Her research took so long that her youngest brother grew up, traveled far, fell in love, and brought his fiancée back to the castle. But the fiancée was discontented by her days in the women’s wing after a life in the hills and moors of her own country. The prince, in his turn, was distressed by his inability to spend time with his love after their passionate courtship,conducted under the customs of another land. They decided to return to Ecossia, and they had little intention of ever coming to Tailliz again. Perhaps if they’d stayed away, they would have lived happily for the rest of their days, without struggle or strife. But this was not tobe.
