For the sorcerous princess judged herself ready to enact her plans.
Regardless of her dabbling in other enchantments, her twisted creatures remained the centerpiece of her magic and her greatest pride. At last, they had grown large enough and deadly enough to kill at her command.
She targeted the oldest of the brothers first, largely because she liked him least. While he led a hunt through the woods, talking incessantly of his skill at slaying beasts, she set beasts upon him that proved him more prey than predator. She had bred them from timber wolves and huntsman spiders. So much effort! So many failures! In the beginning she was only able to produce tiny useless, hairless wolves, bursting from their egg sacs and scuttling out the windows. Or grotesque mistakes whose chitinous legs were unable to support their lupine bodies; they collapsed and died within a day. At long last, though, she achieved her vision—monsters of dangerous elegance and deadly speed. And she watched from the treetops as they tore her brother and his hunting party into bloody shreds.
Their deaths were blamed on the unknown dangers of the forest. Thanks to the escape of some of the princess’s lesser experiments, strange creatures had been spotted lurking there for years. They had come to be regarded as a predictable hazard. Even her failures provided unexpected benefits.
But the next brother was so frightened by the incident he refused to step outside the castle walls. Indeed, he spent most of his days cowering in terror within his rooms. He ventured forth to take the air upon the battlements only onceeach day. So the princess unleashed a bird she had bred from a shrike and a thornbush. So much effort! So many failures! She’d made bleeding horrors rooted to the ground by their talons, shrieking their despair. Or feathered shrubs capable of nothing more violent than tickling a foe who chanced to fall into one. At long last, though, she achieved her vision—amonster that could fly like a butcher-bird and stab like a knife. And she watched from a window as it bore her brother off and impaled him in midair on its spiky head.
The king and his remaining sons began to suspect something was amiss. But the next brother was easily misled. It took nothing but a few carefully planted rumors of a secret sorcerer’s lair—The best lies,the princess thought,have a ring of truth—and he stormed off into the forest, heedless of any danger. Upon his arrival at the rumored spot, he fell into the hole where the princess had concealed her cross between an antlion and a regular lion.
Disturbed as I might have been by the current narrative, my curiosity compelled me to ask, “What do you call that? A lionantlion?”
“An antlionlion, actually.”
I tried to imagine what such a thing might look like. “I didn’t see any of those at the siege.”
“I didn’t use any. They’re wonderful against someone foolish enough to walk directly into a pit, but they’re of limited usefulness otherwise.”
The king himself was cannier than his children, and by this time he refused to venture out for any reason. It took weeks before the princess was able to secrete an assassin beneath his bed—a deadly mix of a cobra, a devil firefish, and a duck-billed platypus. You don’t want to know what the failures looked like. But the final success was a snake with fur and finsthat combined the venom of three different species in a single bite.
The king’s guards dispatched the creature before it had time to sink its fangs into him more than once, but the damage had already been done. The poison worked its way through his system, condemning him to a slow, painful death. He clung to his life just long enough to summon his last remaining son and issue a final command. To protect the royal line, he ordered, Gervase must break off his engagement and instead marry a sorceress from a foreign land, a woman with magic potent enough to defeat whatever enemy had been plaguing their family.
Upon his father’s death, Gervase was crowned, albeit with some reluctance on the part of the council of nobles. They feared he might have picked up distasteful foreign customs during his years abroad, but having no other alternative, or so they thought, they allowed the coronation to proceed. To their dismay, he soon defied convention by seeking out his older sister for conversation. Gervase was distraught by the death of his father and his estrangement from his beloved; he didn’t much like being kept apart from the only relative he had left. Not long after he was crowned, he created a new administrative position for her with considerable say in affairs of state, adding her to his privy council and giving her a ring of keys to symbolize her freedom to move about the castle.
This caused much consternation, but it was a great boon to the princess’s machinations. Where before she had thought to slay the entire council of nobles in order to clear her wayto the throne, now another pathway had been opened for her. She could win the nobles over to considering her as a suitable regent if Gervase ever happened to die.
“None of Gervase’s actions inclined you to be more charitable to him?”
“Should I have groveled at his feet in exchange for a pittance?” Angelique scoffed. “I want the throne. I can’t afford to be fainthearted.”
However, for the first time since her plan had been set in motion, the princess began to worry. The old king’s scheme had born fruit, and a sorceress was on her way from another kingdom to wed Gervase. The princess was fearful this would bring all her hard work to naught, but she resolved to be patient. The journey was long, and it would take some weeks for her opponent to arrive—time during which she could ingratiate herself with the lords and prove herself invaluable to the functioning of the kingdom before she killed her brother.
Her delay in committing fratricide proved to be her one great mistake. For while she bided her time, a dozen mysterious huntsmen arrived from a distant land, masked, dressed in green, and identical in appearance. They presented themselves at court, and Gervase brought them into his service. The princess, of course, recognized that they all looked somewhat like Gervase’s former fiancée, but she didn’t trouble herself over it. She did wonder exactly what he was doing with twelve identical copies of his beloved in fancy dress, but it was surely no business of hers.
Not until they made it her business, that is. For when the princess sent her spider wolves to slay Gervase while he was out hunting—and the ridiculous man did insist on going hunting, despite the danger—they were pierced by dozens of arrows before they could venture close, and the hunting party returned unharmed.
The serpents she sent next were frozen to death. Her thorn birds were blown out of the sky. Again and again, while she watched from the trees, the hunters defeated every creature she pitted against them with strength, or with speed, or with poisonous frogs.
Before long, she stopped being able to find the hunters. They took twisty paths through the woods to evade her attacks. When she tried to pursue them in her transformed state, she discovered their tracks had been covered so well no beast or bird was able to follow. The princess spent many days crafting a magic mirror that would let her lead her bestial armies to her victims once more.
Even so, she was starting to grow desperate. She thought if she managed to murder the actual ex-fiancée, the others might give up, but neither she nor her magic mirror could tell them apart from one another. It probably didn’t help that the princess could not for the life of her remember the former fiancée’s name.
It occurred to her that the laws that had stymied her own advancement might help her now. She began to circulate rumors that the so-called huntsmen were, in fact, women in disguise. Much to her delight, the lion latched on to these tales and decided it was his duty to expel them from the kingdom.
In the meantime, her magic mirror informed her a visitor was soon to arrive from Skalla. So while the lion laid his plans to expose the hunters, the princess set a trap for the new arrival, planning to slay her before she ever set foot in the castle. If both proved successful, the way would at last be clear for another swift regicide.
But at that point everything went a bit pear-shaped.
The hunters were on the alert for attacks against the Skallan and came to her rescue. Soon after, the lion’s first attempt at revealing the hunters’ secret proved to be disastrously nonsensical, doing more harm than good to his own cause. Thereafter, events unfolded that need not be recounted to one who lived through them. Events that saw the princess given the regency—her hard work cozying up to the nobility paying off—only to see it wrenched away after only a month. Her planswere foiled once again, her hiding place discovered, and her magic mirror snatched by thieves.
But these events also led, at long last, to the rival sorceress lying entirely in the princess’s power, asleep for all eternity in a coffin made of glass. No longer a problem, no longer a threat.
And yet.
The princess could not help feeling a certain kinship with the woman in the glass coffin. From everything she had pieced together, sought out, or overheard, their stories were far from dissimilar. Both of them forced into roles they did not seek, subject to authorities who cared little for them.
She already had hints of how powerful they might become if they combined their power and knowledge. An offhand comment by the other sorceress led the princess to envision ripping monsters from the living rock of the earth, her most powerful creations yet.
