by Angela Kulig
Wishes She Roars
A Neverafter Tale
Angela Kulig
Angela Sanders
Contents
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
About the Authors
Wishes, She Roars: A Dark and Twisted Aladdin Retelling (A Never After Tale) © 2019 Angela Kulig and Angela Sanders
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Preface
Wishes, She Roars
Princess Cyra isn't cursed, and she doesn't need Aladdin's wishes to save her kingdom.
People are starving in Henjanan but in the palace on the mountain, otherworldly parties continue almost every night. In the middle of the crowd where colorful veiled ladies dance with young lords, whispering lies and secrets, sits a sultan with a devil on his shoulder—The Grand Vizier—who does far worse than lie, cheat, and kill.
Absent from most of these parties is Princess Cyra al-Budur, who seeks to root out the evil inside her country by whatever means necessary—even if it means never marrying or finding love, even if it means donning claws and fur, even if it means giving up everything she has. She doesn't dare fail.
In the middle of a monsoon, with the world raging around her, a chance meeting with the handsome son of wealthy merchants leaves Cryra attempting to outwit a kind soul.
Aladdin refuses to believe she doesn't need to be saved and tries to prevent the inevitable fallout of wishes three.
Prologue
Night claimed the city’s streets past midday. Shadows seeped from the walls and flowed like spindly veins of black blood. Each day when the sun was more than halfway across the blue-and-yellow sky, it could no longer keep the darkness of Henjanan hidden. Nothing could. Because in that darkness, wild and evil things grew—like vines in dreadful shades. Hunger gnawed on both the souls and bones of men.
The palace on the mountain towered above the whole of Henjanan, carving out so much of the sky, the poor couldn’t even afford to glimpse at it most of the day. The palace bred gloom worse than the shadows, and yet in both places, the city and the sky, kindness could still linger, heroes could still win, but even the pure of heart should remain wary of what they wish for.
Chapter 1
Sand struck my face, a cloud of gleaming gold knives. Biting at me, scratching me, too, but my claws were bigger, and returning would be much, much worse than braving the desert wind.
The sun was at my back, the last embers of daylight throbbing and choking out of existence by the blurry sheets of brown that rose up in steady, angry waves. Waves that would lap at the walls of the castle on the hill, but never beat it back, as though the world itself didn’t approve of what went on behind those stone borders any more than I did.
When I thought of it like that, it was hard not to smile, even if it earned me a mouth full of grit and regret.
The castle made the greatest peak seem so much larger than it was.
The haboob, a giant wall of wind and dust, wasn’t as strong as it seemed at its core. I could see where it began and ended. The inky darkness of a young night pooled at the edge of the world, which was exactly where I was headed. I glanced back nervously at the town behind the castle and said a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t as severe as it could have been. For it wouldn’t be my grandfather, the king, who suffered, but our people who already went without a great deal.
And then I could smell the rain.
Haboobs only formed in the crosswinds of a thunderstorm, but the cruel heat of the desert often robbed us of the relief a cloudburst could bring. Drying the rain before it could offer more than a whisper of scent, and a mere memory.
It was monsoon season, but not a drop had fallen since it began. Yet, I dared to hope, because hope was all I did these days. It had yet to let me down.
A great sand-stone temple pulsed to life in a sea of mirages. To reach the sacred place, you had to know the way with your heart, because in this place, you could never trust your eyes.
And if you saw a giant striped tiger running through the desert, kicking up sand as harsh as any gust of wind, it could only be the heat getting to you. If you closed your eyes for a moment to rub wildly at them, imagining you’d possibly seen a mirage, when you again looked for that great cat, I’d either be gone, or you’d be dead.
I reached the lip of the outer temple, just as the light was snuffed out entirely. The storm was rising all around me like a vortex of angry whispers and shouts, but I didn’t stop.
On paws, I passed through archway after archway, and though many of the attendants stopped and turned my way, not one of them was surprised to see me in this form. We were safe here, in the middle of the temple where even the rage of the storm couldn’t strike us. We were safer here than anywhere else in the kingdom, because even though the thick walls of the palace kept the wind and sand from the people inside, nothing, it seemed, could be done about the rot and ruin coming from the men within.
A festering wound, one bad day away from destroying it all. In a way, I supposed that meant I was something like a balm—tiger form and all.
Abbas was bent at the middle, hurriedly lighting candles in the dark brought on by the storm outside. With my sensitive cat hearing, I could hear each grain striking the temple with a scrape and a drag. The older man eyed me sharply but said nothing, as he lit wick after wick with the smoldering end of his incense.
Wall carvings sparked to life in the dimness of the altar room as if they were made of light themselves.
Swirling marks and writing so old very few could read it, told stories of turbulence and triumphs.
I wanted nothing more than, for one day, my story to be held here. For my own tale to be worthy of it. I wasn’t just a bloodline and a pretty smile. I was justice incarnate, and I wanted other people to know it as well.
“Cyra,” Abbas said, looking at me through a tendril of smoke as thick as a man’s arm.
I supposed that was my cue to talk to him.
The transformation from tiger back to girl was like pulling in your claws without stopping. Pulling and pulling until every bit of you was a solid knot and then letting go.
Then, there I stood in a silken turquoise dress and bronze-colored skin, midnight-black hair, and eyes dark as a raven’s feather—just a girl. My mother’s amethyst amulet hot around my thin neck, the very thing that made the change possible. Gift or curse, my grandfather could never know. For it, like all other forms of freedom, would be taken from me.
“I won’t say I am surprised to see you.” Abbas’s smooth chin hardly seemed to move in the low light as he turned away from me. As all unmarried men were, he was without a beard, but age hung in the creases of his
eyes, marking his years with his own sort of tiger stripes.
Other than my grandfather, he was my only living relative—my mother’s cousin—and apart from my handmaid and dearest friend, he was my only protector. He was the one who showed me the depths of my power, the one who gave me wings.
Though, the look he was giving me now clearly said he was still startled with what I’d decided to do with it.
“Your mother used to transform herself into a tiny little butterfly to come and visit me. Must you always cloak yourself in the skin of that great beast?” There was a laugh in his throat, and I suspected a smile on his lips, though he busied himself with more candles.
It didn’t matter how many he set alight, however, this deep into the temple couldn’t be well lit without the aid of the sun, and it was currently in a fight for its life, much like me.
“A butterfly, Abbas, really? It would take me half the year to cross the desert to get here, and I’d die of dehydration.” I wrapped my arms around myself tightly. I hated being so small, so delicate. It wasn’t me.
“Well, in those days,” Abbas said, eyes finally meeting mine, “she only had to travel across the street.”
My mother had come from a neighboring kingdom, the daughter of a nobleman who had caught the eye of a young king at a party. It sounded so much like a work of fiction, I cringed. How I’d hate to be a fairytale.
I couldn’t hear the sound of the sand as clearly anymore, just a low whistle, and I thought about asking Abbas if it had truly been like that for my parents—a love that transcended time. Romantic sounding, if the tale had only been an embellished story imparted to a child before bed for so long it had become legend.
When my mother told me the story, as my head lay on a goose-down pillow in my palace bedroom, it was as though she was telling a tale of someone else. Another young girl who had become the bride of a king, who then became Queen and lived happily ever after.
But ever-afters weren’t forever, and both my father and mother had been dead for many years.
My father had died in a war, and his own father had returned to the throne. It was only supposed to be temporary. Until I found a husband, but I…
“That’s never a good look.” Abbas’s voice pulled me from my thoughts with a poignant expression that said far too much.
I took a deep breath, and I swore I could still feel grit in my mouth. Though sorrow tended to feel the same, somehow both sharp and full at once.
“I was just thinking of the story my mother used to tell me as a young girl, her story, with the handsome king and the young maiden.”
Abbas did chuckle at that.
Footsteps sounded from the corridor behind us, but as they passed the doorway, I said: “I just wish she was here so I could ask her if it was truly as she’d said, all stars and earth-shattering, or if it only seemed that way in words and after the fact.”
I could feel the tiger within me—it made me want to pace the small room as though I were trapped in a cage.
My grandfather liked to say I was too romantic, that I held suitors to some unobtainable and fictitious standard that no man could ever live up to, because no man ever had. Not even my father.
And there were those within the court who said worse things about my unwillingness to marry, and even embellished their own opinions further.
“Oh, it was very much like that,” Abbas said, seating himself on a low stone pew. “Perfect, praiseworthy.” He nodded and scratched his chin and looked so sure of it that, I, too wanted to believe.
“Really?” I breathed.
“Really.” He patted his leg and laughed. “Though one thing I am sure your mother, Saint that she was, is how much your father stuttered around her, shy and uncertain. No one had ever seen a Sultan so. I wouldn’t have believed it, either, if I hadn’t witnessed it myself.”
What I remembered of my father could not be trusted. My memory hadn’t been solid enough when I was so young. He’d been on campaign after campaign against the ottomans, and a scroll worth of enemies since before I was born. Peace had never come to the kingdom, and during one such fruitless battle, he’d received a wound that had become infected.
He died on the road before returning to me and my mother, and the story books would rightly say that she died of a broken heart. They’d both been nothing more than ghosts to me ever since. Something that spooked my childhood and haunted me even now.
“Cyra, is this about—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, cutting him off, and I knew deep down he wouldn’t press me further. He was the only one who never did.
Chapter 2
It had been nice to visit the Temple, to leave the palace behind even for a little while.
But it wasn’t enough. It had stopped being enough the day I learned what power I could wield.
Thunder rumbled, and lightning struck a place nearby, but not a single bolt was enough to cut back at the shadows I now lurked in.
The scent of rain was heavy here, as I stood waiting. The storm was nearly on top of me, but I couldn’t return to the palace. Not yet.
A group of guards, five men who I’d never seen before, were moving something in heavy cloth sacks. Over the smell of an approaching storm, another scent hung in the air. Something tangy, something metallic. It seemed as though these men were moving a great amount of gold, and they were the Grand Vizier’s own soldiers. They wore a red sash around their waist, as all his men did, and they were obviously up to no good.
I’d squeezed my tiger form on top of a nearby awning between two buildings. I’d made the leap cleanly, without incident, and on completely silent paws. Something I could never have accomplished as a mere girl. I sat on my haunches, waiting, watching, and deciding what I would do next. I could follow them, but not very far.
Grand parties filled the palace almost every night, but the weather would certainly force an early end to festivities, and then people may begin to look at me. My dear Imani could only say I was in the bath so many times before it would raise suspicion, but she had been trained well enough to make excuses, but no excuse could last forever. Otherwise, I’d have taken a trip to another kingdom and never told a soul.
I could kill the men, and it wouldn’t have been the first time. I could still taste the blood of the ones who’d come before—the ones who’d thought the Vizier’s men weren’t fit to wear the uniform of the palace guards. However, I did always attempt to presume them as innocent beforehand. Although, actions spoke far louder than words.
Afterall, it wasn’t these men who made the decisions. It wasn’t these men who had my grandfather’s ear. Likely not a single noble soul could tell you one of their names, and yet, I couldn’t help but despise them simply for what they represented: a man who did so much worse than lie and cheat and steal.
A man who, by all accounts, was ruining everything I’d ever loved.
One of the men stumbled but righted his load before tumbling to the ground. The contents of his sack were jarred, causing the coins inside to clink together.
Definitely gold.
Another man hissed at him to be quiet.
The street was motionless and quieter than I’d ever seen it, even in the middle of the night.
All the windows were closed, all the doors were barred, and the shutters if they had them, were shut tight.
But this was the slums—the walls were cracked in nearly every building. You could see some corners where the poor had stuffed wads of rags into holes to keep the weather from entering their tiny hovels.
Although a soul didn’t stir, the street itself still reeked of heavy spices and unwashed bodies.
Even the market two streets over was silent.
Yes, this was the perfect night to do the deeds you didn’t want witnessed.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, but I only forced myself deeper into the dark.
That was when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, coming from the opposite direction.
&
nbsp; It was a very small someone, not even half the size of the slightest soldier and wearing a ragged-looking woolen blanket. A street child, most likely an orphan, judging by the fact they were out alone with the storm threatening at any moment.
The Grand Vizier had convinced Grandfather that the orphanages were a waste of funding. There was only one left in the entire city, and with so many war orphans, it was far too small. By the time they were old enough to realize how cruel the cards were that had been dealt to them, they typically took to the streets. Most, like this child must, preferred to roam the streets rather than stay in such a cramped space with only scraps to eat.
It was shameful how we treated children when there were men such as these who were sending whole sacs of wealth to what were likely selfish, dreadful causes.
I felt my claws dig into the shade but pulled them back in before I’d sliced it through.
Though I would never tell Abbas, sometimes this form was a detriment. I considered changing into something else, something smaller to get a better look, or in this case, listen in on whatever they were whispering about.
But shifting took energy and I was already so tired.
I’d changed into my tiger form twice today and run through the desert the same number of times. I’d climbed walls, slunk into tight spaces, and I didn’t have much left to give before I’d fall asleep on the street, just like this orphan no doubt would.
I expected the men to pay the child no heed. The way all men in this kingdom treated those who they deemed less than, but to my surprise and horror, they stopped and stared.