Overpowered

by Kathryn McConaughy

  “When the people of this kingdom know what you’ve done—”

  “Why should they find out? She’s been secluded in her rooms for years—she fell ill and died of consumption. Who will say differently?”

  “I’ll tell everyone who comes to this castle!”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “I reached her tower. Why shouldn’t I go everywhere else? Will you break all the mirrors? Smash all the windows? Let every polished surface go dull with dust? What a castle you’ll have!”

  Her nostrils flared, and her lips went white with rage. “Then I will send my men, and they will take her body and throw it in the deepest pit that they can find. No one will ever see what I’ve done to her. Who will listen to you then, mirror?”

  He shrieked at her, a sound of inhuman frustration. She hissed at him and stormed out of the room. “Guards!” she cried. “Guards!”

  The grand marble staircase was polished and bright. Was it a trick of the light that she saw a step reflected where a step was not? Her skirts were heavy and awkward; once she tripped she could not catch herself. When the guards arrived, she was dead at the foot of the stair.

  A prince’s kiss. The man in the mirror wavered. Where was he to find a prince at a moment’s notice? Yes! He knew! With a wrench he forced himself free of the mirror in the solar, though the enchantment that bound him tore at his insubstantial self.

  There, in the portrait gallery: the picture of a dark-haired prince, looking rather stiff in his court dress, with a look that seemed to say, “I hope he’ll be done soon so that I can have some dinner.” The man in the mirror caught the reflection, forcing himself into the unaccustomed shape.

  No time to lose! But how could he reach Snow White with her mirror shattered?

  Ah. How wise of the queen to cover the princess in glass!

  The glass that covered the girl was clear as crystal, with no silvered back against which the man could appear. Yet he forced himself into the faint glare of sun on crystal, the merest ghost of light. “Be freed by a prince’s kiss,” he whispered weakly.

  If the glass had not run up against her skin, he could never have done it. Yet it had and he did, pressing lips of light to the pale forehead.

  The curse shattered.

  The princess pulled in a long, gasping breath, then another. “Oh,” she said at last. “Thank you.” Then she looked around. Only broken glass lay around her; there was no trace in any shard of the young prince or of the middle-aged man who had visited her. “Mirror?” There was no answer.

  Snow swept the pieces gently into a heap, then lifted down her paper birds and flowers, piling them around and on top of the cursed glass. “Perhaps I only imagined you,” she whispered. “Perhaps I never had such a friend.” She bowed her head for a moment, then sat straight with sudden determination. “No. You were real. And perhaps you’ve flown away like a bird, and not died… How could a mirror die, after all?”

  But then she looked at the glass and shivered. It was clear to her how a mirror could die. “Goodbye,” she said, and picked up the biggest shard of glass and kissed it.

  A princess’ kiss. Long years ago there had been a gift and a curse and a promised remedy. Was there enough magic left for the transformation?

  It seemed that there was. When the servants came up the long tower stair—free of the guards, who had left with most of the queen’s valuables—they were astonished to find the princess sitting on the floor with the old king’s head pillowed on her lap. The two were having an involved conversation about whether the Kingdom of Birds and the Kingdom of Clouds were in the same place or not.

  In the end, the pair were found to be quite mad, though they were wonderfully kind to all they met, and so the kingdom passed into other hands. Snow White and her father—and the Captain of the Guard, who was also freed from his curse with a princess’ kiss—went off to live in a cottage in the woods, where they were very happy for the rest of their days.

  And the old king thought, Today I shall be an old man, with almost no hair and a sizeable paunch, in shabby woolen clothes, with a happy smile and a look that says, “I hope there will be something nice for dinner.”

  And he was. And there was.

  Sneak Peek from "Guardian of Our Beauty"

  And it happened in the days of the great heroes, in the years of the warrior-shepherds, that the king of Gubla had no son. He took young wives and old wives, rich wives and poor wives, wives from the country and wives from the city. He sent for wives from Piyampetcha to the north, and from Uzu to the south. (He even begged a wife from the King of the Four Quarters, the master of the Black-Headed People; but the Great King did not send him a wife. The Great King did not even receive the king of Gubla’s messenger.) But no matter how many wives the king of Gubla wed, they bore only daughters. Daughters, and more daughters.

  “How can I live? I’m drowning in daughters!” the king complained to his chief priest. He sat leaning on one arm of his throne, his back to the wide windows that opened toward the sea. The lesser lords of Gubla stood in ragged clumps on the far side of the white-walled hall, and tried to pretend that they were not listening.

  The chief priest, Kashap by name, shook his head slowly from side to side. His predatory glare terrified every junior priest in Gubla; now, he turned it on the king. “O mighty king, great ox, warlike shepherd,” he began.

  “You aren’t composing an epic, Kashap,” the king grumbled. “I know my own titles. Give me a solution!” The king, who was a veteran of more battles than he could remember, was not afraid of Kashap, priest or no priest.

  “This plague of daughters—it is a curse,” Kashap replied.

  “So you’ve said, but I’ve sacrificed enough sheep to lift a thousand curses. Are the gods not listening? I must have an heir!”

  Kashap ran his fingers through his oil-streaked beard. “Obviously the gods are not disposed to lift the curse. My king, it is time to choose an heir who is not of your house.”

  The king rubbed the horns of the bull that made up his right armrest. “I had . . . thought of that, though the thought is bitter to me.”

  Kashap smiled. “You can either adopt your chosen man as heir directly, or marry him to one of your lovely daughters.”

  “Heir by marriage,” the king said at once, sitting straight. A stranger at the court might have thought the king’s stocky build came from too much royal food; but he would have changed his mind if he had seen the king sparring with the captains of his guard each morning. “But which daughter should the fellow marry? I have so many… Kashap, how many daughters do I have?”

  Kashap blinked, and tried to call the princesses to mind. He knew them only as objects, interchangeable pieces of the royal furniture; he could hardly have named one of them, let alone all of them. “As many as the stars of the heavens, O great ox,” he said smoothly. “The appropriate daughter must be selected by inquiring of the gods, of course.”

  The king growled. “If you’re going to insist on asking the gods, we’ll have a long wait! If they were going to help me, and not just take every sheep in Gubla, they would have given me a son by now.”

  Kashap muttered a quick aversion ritual under his breath, making sure to speak just loudly enough that the king would know what he was doing. “Don’t blaspheme,” he said piously, after he had finished. “Perhaps there is some man, favored of the gods, who has been chosen for the kingship.”

  The king leaned forward over the arm of the throne. “I remember when you said that I was the favored of the gods,” he said in a low voice. “Were you wrong, Kashap? If you were wrong then, why should I believe you now?”

  He leaned back. “Inquire if you must, but bring me an answer!” he boomed, his voice reverberating across the room so that every man present could hear him.

  Kashap bowed and made his way out, shaking with anger. As he passed through the gate and his retinue of lesser priests fell in behind him, he hauled his two chief assistants under the cover of his sunshade. �
�Start the inquiry, as I told you before!” he snarled. “Follow every procedure! Study every omen! But see that the lot falls on the oldest unmarried girl!”

  **

  Thaiyu the divination priest shook the arrows one last time, and let them fall into the circle. He looked at them gloomily, and made a mark on his tablet. It was exactly the same mark he had made the last forty-eight times. He had re-cleansed the circle, changed his arrows, substituted goat’s blood for ram’s blood—but the result was always the same. In all his years as a divination priest he had never seen anything like this.

  Some god was actually answering.

  Generally speaking, Thaiyu divined answers by the tried-and-true “best out of eleven” method—or whatever number he had to reach to make sure that the answer matched what Kashap had ordered the answer should be. This time, though—there wasn’t a single different answer that he could interpret as ambivalence on the part of the gods.

  Leaving the last set of arrows lying on the table, Thaiyu picked up his tablet and left the room, feet dragging.

  The priestly court of the Ladytemple was already filled with diviners. “Fourteen livers I cut open, but it was all the same answer,” one was complaining. “Cow livers! Frog livers! Dolphin livers!”

  “You don’t understand!” one of the astrologers was shouting at a colleague. “The star of the Cave shouldn’t be visible at this time of year! It upsets everything…”

  The chief reader of omens, his arms full of scrolls, swayed from foot to foot, his hair standing on end. “I went through the whole omen cycle! The flight of birds… numbers of pregnant women… the shapes of oil on water… the actions of the temple donkey… I checked everything.”

  Kashap strode out of the temple to stand in the inner gate. “Silence!” he cried, eying them as a snake eyes its prey. The priests’ wild babbling ground to a halt. “What answer have you received?”

  Thaiyu looked at the chief omen reader, who shrank back behind his husky assistant. No one seemed ready to speak.

  “Well?” Kashap demanded.

  The astrologer coughed, tugging nervously at his beard. “The… positions of the stars are quite clear. There can be no doubt.”

  “Yes, yes?”

  The astrologer looked around miserably. Some of his fellow priests were edging away from him. “The next daughter to be born to King Shokorru is the one who should wed the king’s heir!”

  “What?” Kashap roared, flying down the hill to breathe hotly in the astrologer’s face. “A child not even born yet? Incompetent wretch! You don’t know the sun from the moon! I’ll have you banished from Gubla!”

  The liver-examiner raised a hand. “Ah? O-mighty-high-priest-chosen-of-the-gods, this was also the result of my liver omens. Fourteen separate livers, I cut up; all astonishingly similar! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  Kashap whirled to attack this man too, but now every one of the priests began to speak at once. “The daughter not yet born!” “The donkey lay down as if to give birth!” “The wind—“

  “This is a conspiracy!” Kashap shouted.

  “It is a god!” the astrologer insisted shrilly. “A star is there that should not be there! It must be a god!”

  “Which god?” a stocky arrow-shaker growled. “What god answers?”

  “A new star in the heavens!” the astrologer cried. “A new god! One we have not known before!” Then he was on the ground, his mouth open in surprise, a red stain spreading on his robe.

  “There is no new god,” Kashap hissed, holding the bloody sacrificial knife in his shaking hand. “We will report that the eldest unmarried daughter was selected by the omens! Do any of you want to argue?”

  The priests looked at the astrologer’s still body, then looked from Kashap to the skies above. Which was more dangerous, Kashap or the gods? Yesterday, each of them would have named Kashap; but if the gods were starting to pay attention, then—

  A burly figure in a brown hood pushed to the front of the crowd. “You won’t report any such lie.”

  “How dare you!” Kashap sputtered, raising the knife.

  The figure pushed back his hood. “I dare because I’m the king,” Shokorru growled, his grin like the grin of a lion. “Whoever this new god is,” the king went on, “I like him. See that he gets some sacrifices.”

  Kashap swallowed, letting his hand drop until the knife was hidden in his robe. “An unborn daughter to be married to your heir,” he said in a strangled voice. “Eleven years until she can be given in marriage! Would you leave your kingdom without an heir for so long? What if something happened to you? Who would be the guardian of Gubla’s Beauty?”

  “Would something be less likely to happen to me if the marriage took place this year?” the king asked sharply. “Or would I meet with an accident, soon after the bride-price was paid?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the high priest gritted from between clenched teeth. “Eleven years until she can be married!”

  “More than that,” the king said. “My daughter will be a princess, not a worker at the olive-press. Let her be well grown before her marriage.”

  “But you don’t know what might happen!” Kashap cried in anguish, all his plans in disarray.

  The king leaned close. Though shorter than his high priest, at this moment, he loomed. “One thing I can tell you, Kashap,” he said in a soft voice, which nonetheless rang all through the temple’s inner court. “When my daughter reaches her sixteenth birthday, and is married to the man who will be king after me—that man will not be you.”

  Kashap howled. “Curses on you! May the moon be eclipsed toward you! May the sun be eclipsed toward you!” He drew the knife from his cloak and held it high. “I made you king! I will unmake you! I—Let go of me!” But the omen-reader’s large assistant had him by one arm, and Thaiyu had him by the other.

  “Kashap,” the king said. “You are banished from Gubla. My good servants, throw this wretched priest over the cliff. Let the sea-gods deal with him.”

  The king watched steadily as they dragged Kashap away. “Now… who’s in line to be the next high priest?”

  **

  Several of Shokorru’s wives were pregnant at the time of Kashap’s downfall. In seclusion as they were, none of them heard about the priests’ new prediction.

  The first wife to give birth was the girl Perakha. Stolen from a people that lived far south of Gubla, she had been sold to the king by an Ullazan merchant. Enchanted by her huge black eyes, the king had married her.

  Those eyes were brilliant with joy now as Perakha rocked her new daughter in her arms. The midwife went out to deliver the news. Out in the city of Gubla, as the sun rose over the horizon, the king announced a week-long feast.

  Blissfully unaware, Perakha fed her daughter, and sang her a lullaby from her own childhood.

  For forty days, mother and child remained in seclusion; but on the forty-first day, heralded by horns and bull-hide drums, both were placed in a sedan chair and carried from the women’s palace up the main street of the city, through the courtyards of each of the seven temples, and finally to the palace gate, as part of the grandest procession any of the people of Gubla had ever seen.

  The nervous omen-reader, now the new high priest, stood at the edge of the royal dais, frantically gabbling through the newly composed princess-dedication ritual one last time. When the sedan chair arrived, and the king, his nobles, and the important priests had all arranged themselves on and around the dais, the omen-reader began the ritual, spraying the sedan-chair with hyssop flicked from the end of a long rod. One of the king’s nobles, rigid with the honor of participating in the ritual and the dread of doing something wrong, took the baby from her mother and moved to stand before the king.

  After various invocations of the divine (complete with a hastily added hymn to the new god, the God Who Answers), the high priest painted the baby’s hands and feet with white and black ochre, and declared her to be the vessel of the kingship. The whole crow
d cheered.

  Now the king stepped forward. Laying his hand on the head of his baby daughter, who watched him with big, unworried eyes, he called out: “This is my daughter! Her name is Aplati-shamirat-yaftinu—My Heiress, Guardian of Our Beauty! He who marries her will be king in Gubla after me!” All the people cheered, waving palm branches and long brown arms.

  Now was the time for the blessings from the priests of Gubla’s twelve principal gods: the Great Lady of Gubla; the Benevolent Bull; the Thunderer of the Seven Anchors; the Sea; the Sun, Determiner of Destinies; the Warrior Girl; the twins Dusk and Dawn; the sisters Oily, Dewy, and Earthy; and, substituted for the usual god of serpents and scorpions, the new god, the God Who Answers. Each of the twelve had an altar, and a priest standing ready to make that god’s favorite offering, and to proclaim their own, shorter blessings for the princess.

  No one had volunteered to make the sacrifice for the God Who Answers; no one knew what kind of sacrifice he might like. And so, standing by the twelfth altar with his too-big robes pooled on the ground around him, was the most junior priest in all of Gubla, rubbing wretchedly at his nearly invisible beard.

  The first eleven sacrifices went on as steadily as the turning of the seasons. The priests sacrificed their rams, swans, grain, donkeys, lions; they shouted their blessings out toward the crowd. “The reign of her husband will bring peace with the south.” “The reign of her husband will bring the expansion of our borders and the growth of our power.” “The reign of her husband will last year after year and every nation will tremble at his name.” As each one finished, the king’s servants went forward on their knees to pour out bags of gold and silver at the bases of the altars. The king’s nobles followed, bringing other gifts: a necklace of topazes for the Lady Sun, a golden footstool for the Bull.

  When the parade of gifts was finally finished, the priests turned to their youngest member, the just-appointed priest of the God Who Answers. He tugged on the rope that went around the neck of the washed and perfumed goat he was to sacrifice. The goat bawled irritably and refused to move. The young priest, shaking like water in an earthquake, turned his back on the king to wrestle with the goat.