Two and Twenty Dark Tales (6 page)

The king’s lips thinned, but he nodded once before turning and striding on ahead. Amarind followed passively. By the time they reached the throne room, the memories of being a mouse were starting to fade, and she remembered who she was.

But she still didn’t know what to do about it.

By the time they entered the throne room, Cedric was sitting on the throne where her father had once sat, wearing a purple cape her father had once worn. She remembered him as a plump and unimpressive boy, but sitting straight on the throne, with his chin up and the entrapments of regality around him, he looked like a king.

“Lady Amarind,” the king said, and the girl who had been a mouse clenched her fists at her sides. She had meant to be silent until she got her bearings, but a sudden surge of rage and betrayal made her forget her plans.

“
Your Highness
,” she corrected him, and his lips tightened until they were white.

“I am sorry, my lady. But you were believed dead. The throne was passed on.”

“I was not dead,” she said. “I was enchanted.”

A murmur ran through the court. Amarind looked away from the king—who had once been merely her second cousin, and not one she particularly liked—to glance swiftly at the courtiers. Their faces were stiff, or suspicious, or calculating.

So that, at least, had not changed.

“Did you suspect what had happened to me?” Amarind demanded. She could not quite keep the raw edge from her voice, and the courtiers murmured again, even more uneasily this time.

“Of course not,” King Cedric said.

Amarind bit down on her next question:
Where are my parents?
If Cousin Cedric was on the throne, there was only one place they could be.

And it occurred to her, then, that there was no woman at the king’s side. Even though if he really wanted the throne, there was someone he should have married…

Panic rose in her throat. A sudden, vague memory growled at the back of her brain: brown hair covering a still face. Blood. A knife. Her own hand, taking that knife…

The deathblood of a virgin princess.

“Where,” she asked, and the shrillness of her voice made the courtiers go silent, “is my sister?”

The silence stretched on. Then Cedric got off the throne and walked down the aisle toward her. He took both her hands in his, and she let him. Suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter.

“I’m sorry, Cousin,” he said.

Bile rose in Amarind’s throat. She felt only a vague regret for the death of her parents, who had been rare and distant figures in her life. But her sister… Lily had been so sweet, so innocent, so unaware of danger.

Amarind hoped Lily had remained unaware. That death had come swiftly, and her sister had never known fear or betrayal.

Cedric lifted a hand to touch her cheek. Amarind almost shrank away—sideways, a mouse’s movement—and controlled herself just in time, holding herself still, staring at her own hands to remind herself that she was in a human body now.

“Your family was betrayed,” Cedric said. She stood rigid, staring at him, and he took his hand back. She could still feel the indentation of his fingers, right below her eye. “The assassins were hired by Lord Ofil, who has of course been executed. The kingdom was in chaos. Someone had to restore order.”

How noble of you.
“How do you know it was Ofil?” Amarind demanded.

Cedric’s mouth went grim. “What are you implying, Lady Amarind?”

Princess Amarind.
But she had pressed him far enough for one morning. If she presented herself as too much of a threat, he would probably kill her and get away with it.

A tremor of fear ran through her, subdued and familiar. She knew what it was to be prey. She knew she could survive like that, day after endless day, that the fear could sink in and become just another part of her. But she didn’t want to be constantly afraid anymore, not now that she was human.

Yet no one at court would care more about a stray princess’s rights than about maintaining the kingdom’s stability. She didn’t even blame them. Cedric’s position was a lot stronger than hers.

Nothing less than magic would enable her to gain the upper hand.

Luckily, she knew where to find that.

***

It took her three days to get away. She took advantage of that time, getting used to being human again, to walking on two legs, to her lack of a tail. She got used to the heavy tightness of silk covering her body, to the heaviness of her hair when it was twisted above her head, to the endless variety of food she could eat. To the fact that she could eat it as slowly as she liked, and that no one was going to snatch it away or come up on her from behind.

She insisted on dressing herself, which fortunately had been a quirk of hers back before her transformation. Then, it had been because she didn’t want maids to see the strange dyes on her hands, the unattractively bulging muscles of her upper arms, the occasional cuts when she had needed to use her own blood. There had been rumors about her back then, of course, whispers that she snuck out at night to practice witchcraft, that she was apprenticed to a powerful and evil witch. But there was a large difference between whispered rumors and confirmed rumors.

Now that she had been a mouse, none of that mattered. But she still refused to let her maid dress her, even though the endless buttons and ties of her gowns were difficult to master. Because she still carried a knife strapped to her leg, and she certainly didn’t want the maids seeing that.

It was a simple knife with a short handle and a straight blade, nothing ornate or valuable marring its simplicity. Here in her room, she couldn’t tell whether it had been forged by moonlight. But she knew that just touching it made her hands tingle—with memory or magic, she couldn’t tell—and that staring at the shiny blade made her head hurt. She kept it strapped to her leg, hidden beneath voluminous skirts, and waited for her chance to learn more.

She managed to sneak back into the library only once. It required a glamour—a small spell, needing no more than a prick of her own blood and proximity to an hourglass—and then, while her evening maid was distracted by a handsome footman, Amarind slipped invisibly out of her room, down the hall, and into the library.

The grandfather clock chimed slowly as she entered. Amarind waited for the chimes to die, then approached it hesitantly, not sure what exactly she wanted. It was an old, stately, and powerful clock; she was not yet skilled enough to touch her blood to it and control the outcome. But maybe she didn’t need magic that strong to find out what had happened to her.

She dragged over a small, ornate chair, climbed onto it, and touched one hand to the hour hand of the clock.

Time whirled around her, flinging her mind back, into a memory so real it enveloped her. She was lounging on the white couch, playing with the folds of her dress. It was short and stiff, a child’s dress, and her body was a child’s body.

“I saw you do it!” An even younger child was hanging over the back of the couch, all spindly arms and wild brown hair. “You turned Cousin Cedric into a frog. Tell me how you did it!”

“I did no such thing,” Amarind said loftily, though her whole being hummed with secret knowledge. “You have quite an imagination, Lily.”

“Why won’t you tell me?” The younger girl pulled herself over the back of the couch and sprawled into Amarind’s lap. Amarind laughed and pulled her close, hugging her while Lily squirmed to get free.

“I will tell you,” Amarind promised. “I’ll tell you about the magic, and the clocks, and the Witch. When you’re old enough.”

Lily snorted, got free, and stomped away. Amarind laughed and stretched … and time hurtled forward. She stood in front of the clock, balanced on the tiny chair, eyes blurred with tears.

Lily had never gotten old enough.

She could have asked the clock to show her
that
. But her glamour was probably about to wear out. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see her sister die.

She made it back to her room just as the glamour began to fade. Her maid didn’t bother to ask why she was crying.

***

On the third day, Cedric left the castle for a day-long hunting expedition. It was foolish of him, but as Amarind recalled, he had never been one to forgo his pleasures. And maybe he thought she was harmless, now that she had spent the past three days wandering about court in soft-colored gowns.

She worked the glamour again, making it stronger this time. No one stopped her when she left the castle, or when she stepped out of the formal gardens and into the woods. She checked, but no one followed her as she walked along the narrow path lined with dead leaves and mud.

A mouse would never have walked like this, in a straight line, out in the open. Amarind had to force herself to keep putting one foot in front of another, to not dash sideways into the shadows of the trees. Above her, the tree branches crisscrossed the sky, letting in only the occasional, sharp shimmer of white sunlight.

This path, she had learned early, was there for her but not for anyone else. It had been that way since she’d first found it, at the age of twelve, and followed it to the cottage where the Witch was waiting for her.

She didn’t need the clock, this time, for the memory. She would never forget the first time she had walked down this path. It had been more obviously magical then, fairly shimmering with enchantment and wildness and the possibility of escape. She had run down it without a second thought, desperate to get away from the stifling trap that was her life, to find anything—
anything
—that could breathe some magic into her endless, dreary days.

Today she walked slowly, stepping over a fallen sapling, aware that there were worse traps than the constricted life of a princess. At least a princess could dream of something different. A mouse could not dream at all, could not even think past the next bite of food or the next place of safety or the next burst of terror. Every single second of its life was a cage.

Amarind shuddered all over, then set her chin and kept walking. She turned around a bend in the path, and there it was.

Today it wasn’t a cottage. It was a house, tall and stately, made of yellow bricks with crystal windows. The Witch’s home was never at exactly the same place on the path, and it never looked exactly the same either.

Amarind left the path, tramping through ferns. There was no sign of the Witch, and that was also the same. The Witch couldn’t leave the house. Someone had trapped her there long ago.

The door swung open as she raised her hand to knock. Amarind took a deep breath and walked into the empty front room.

It was the only room in the Witch’s home she had ever been allowed into, and it never changed. The wooden floor lined with rushes, the long table and elaborate brocade chairs, the pot in the corner where she had spent so much time stirring and stirring. Amarind’s upper arms ached just looking at that pot.

And at the far end of the room, so immense it should not have fit, a grandfather clock of wood and gold and diamonds. Its base and sides were carved with runes that, Amarind knew from experience, made your vision blur if you stared at them too long. The clockface was carved of diamond, but had no arms. The pendulum and weights were solid gold, and despite the glass covering, the power leaking out of the clock was enough to make Amarind shiver.

“Stepmother?” she said carefully.

“I’m here,” the Witch said. And she was, sitting in the chair at the head of the table.

Amarind dropped into a curtsy. Her heart was pounding, but that, too, was nothing new. Despite all her years of tutelage, the Witch still terrified Amarind.

As a child, she had secretly liked that rush of fear, that sense that anything could happen to her at any moment. It was part of why the Witch’s home was the only place she had ever felt truly alive, away from the sameness and boredom of every day at court, where it felt like nothing new could ever happen.

That had been before she learned what true fear was. Before it was driven into her that anything really
could
happen, including unthinkably terrible things.

When Amarind rose from her curtsy, the Witch was staring right at her, eyes large and dark against her unnaturally white skin. She was as cold and beautiful as ever, and as unmoved by whatever she saw on Amarind’s face. Aside from insisting she be called Stepmother—for whatever reason, that amused her—the Witch had never acted as if she cared what Amarind did, or who she was, or why a princess was willing to stir her cauldron and run her errands in return for a few scraps of spells.

Right now, though, there was anger on her face, vast and terrifying. She looked Amarind up and down and said, “You bring a weapon into my home?”

Amarind’s hand flew to her leg, to the hardness of the knife hilt beneath her skirts. “No. I don’t even know how to use it. I’m just keeping it because it was here when I… when it…” And then the question flew up her throat and out. “Did you turn me?”

“No,” the Witch said.

But she didn’t bother to ask what Amarind meant.

There were no hands on the clock face, and that always meant a spell had been cast, a spell so powerful that the Witch had drawn on the power of Time itself. Transformations were powerful spells. The Witch had taught Amarind how to do them, and Amarind had spent many days turning cats into birds and dogs into cats. Once, in a fit of spite, she had turned Cedric into a frog.

But none of those enchantments had lasted more than a minute or two. Time ruled the spells it lent its power to, always. Only the Witch had ever been able to make any spells last. Only her castings had ever wiped the hands off the face of the great clock.

“If you didn’t turn me,” Amarind said, almost steadily, “who did? Who else has that kind of power?”

“I am hardly the most powerful of my kind,” the Witch said. “Someone trapped me
here
, after all.”

“Who?” Amarind asked.

The Witch’s mouth went flat, and the small, hunted creature in Amarind cringed back, recognizing a powerful predator when it saw one.