“Does the wine stay wine inside you?” I blurted out the question before I could think better of it.
He chuckled, setting his glass down.
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that,” I apologized quickly, determined to stay in his good graces until he’d answered all my questions. “It’s just... It's very unusual for me to see someone like you. But I promise not to stare as much, going forward.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Stare all you want. Most avoid looking at me. No one dares to ask questions either. Yet I know they’ve been talking behind my back for years, often making up lies to justify their fears.”
Bitterness slipped into his words. How lonely his life must be, I realized with a tug of compassion that I didn’t want to feel toward the man who was basically my jailer.
He lifted his two-pronged fork and speared a piece of crab meat from his plate. I had a couple of crab legs on mine, with their shells scored for easier cracking. The crab meat on his plate, however, had already been pulled out of its shell and cut into bite-size pieces by the cook or a servant. His people knew their king wouldn’t be able to use his hands without turning the food into a pile of useless glass shards.
“To answer your question, yes,” he continued. “Wine stays wine inside me. Just as food stays food, at least until it goes through the usual transformation during the digestion process. The curse would be too merciful otherwise, wouldn’t it? If it allowed me to eventually die from starvation?”
His tone of voice didn’t change. Yet despair dark as night descended over the table like a suffocating shroud. How horrible one’s life had to be to view death from starvation as an act of mercy?
“Is that what made you the way you are?” I guessed. “A curse? But why? Who cursed you?”
I remembered what he’d said to Leslo,“My mother’s love.”But it made little sense. If his mother truly loved him, why would she condemn him to the life he so clearly loathed?
“Or was the purpose of the curse to make you more powerful?” I speculated. “You can kill a person with a handshake. Many men I know would give their souls to have that power.”
“Hm.” He put a piece of crab into his mouth and chewed while staring out into the ocean through the arched opening to the patio. “There was once a time when I possibly would’ve considered it a power too. But even then, I never asked for it.”
He put his fork down. In the process, his thumb bumped a cherry tomato on his plate. I didn’t even notice any shimmer this time. One moment, it was a normal red tomato, the next, a glass ball rolled around his plate.
With an annoyed grunt, the king picked up the glass tomato and tossed it out onto the patio. The ball bounced off the glass patio stones, then rolled off them toward the ocean.
“If it’s a curse,” I said, staring out into the ocean where the glass tomato had disappeared into the night, “then it could be broken, couldn’t it?”
“That’s what they say,” the king replied between bites of his dinner. “Only no one has found the way to break it yet, and I’m starting to believe no one ever will.”
“But don’t curses always come with conditions attached? Isn’t that the point of cursing someone, to force them to do yourbidding in order to break it? What did your mother want you to do when she cursed you?”
He paused, going completely still. “My mother didn’t curse me.”
“But you said—”
He slammed his fork onto the table a little too hard, snapping the utensil in two.
“My mother, the late queen of Olathana, the most esteemed, merciful ruler of our kingdom, wasmisled,” he said the last word gently as if to soften an insult to the memory of the queen. “She didn’t know what she was doing. Otherwise, I’d have to assume that she hated me, which simply couldn't be true.”
There was something endearing about the mighty king’s faith in his mother. But faith, like love, could be blind. Just because he didn’t believe it, it didn’t mean there hadn't been a malicious intent behind his mother’s actions. However, I feared pointing that out would result in more things being broken or possibly turned to glass, perhaps including myself. So I wisely held my tongue behind my teeth.
“And no,” he continued, “no one left a list ofconditionsfor me when I woke up one fine morning in a bed made of glass with a glass statue next to me that had been a living, breathing woman just a few hours earlier.” He drew in a long breath, fisting his hands on the table. “Over the past century, twenty-seven people have claimed to know how to break the curse. I now have twenty-seven glass figurines to show for all their efforts.”
“You killed them all?” I exhaled, unable to eat a single bite more.
“I promised a fortune to anyone who would free me from the curse,” he explained. “That brought a crowd of liars and charlatans to my palace. I tried everything they offered, but they also had to be the ones to test the results of their efforts. It’s only fair, don’t you think? Every time someone claimed they brokethe curse, I shook their hand in gratitude. And every time, it proved they had lied.”
“Twenty-seven people are dead because of this curse?” I repeated in horror. I was sharing dinner with a serial killer, one that murdered people like flies.
“More than that,” he said gravely. “Far more than that. The twenty-seven charlatans were the ones I killed on purpose. The rest...” He swallowed hard, leaving the last sentence unfinished.
I had a feeling I knew what happened to the rest, though. He didn’t mean to kill them, but they died anyway through contact with him. Like the woman who he said was in his bed on the day he first discovered the curse. The woman he must’ve cared about at least enough to share his bed with her. Was she his lover? His girlfriend? His wife? If so, I couldn’t even imagine what he must’ve felt finding her as a slab of lifeless glass, then learning that he was the cause of her death.
Emotions rose in my throat, but I couldn’t let them take over. Now more than ever I needed a cool head to find a solution out of my predicament, instead of worrying about the king. But maybe his situation offered a resolution for us both?
“What would you give to someone who actually discovers the way to break your curse?” I asked, leaning forward.
