The Stepsister's Lament

by S R Nulton

  “Three blind mice, three blind mice! See how they run. See how they run!” I may or may not have included a second verse about the danger of mixing rodent tails and alcohol. I’ve always thought that the farmer’s wife was either mad, drunk, sadistic, or all three. Maybe it is my unfortunate history and my grandmother’s obsession with the song, but seriously, who cuts off mouse-tails? Sadly, no one I’ve spoken to ever seems to share my opinion or even knew what I was talking about. Which just goes to show how little people pay attention to song lyrics. It also proves how traumatic it can be to listen to that song while your grandmother cooks dinner.

  After finishing my improvised warning about liquor causing you to harm small animals, I dropped to the ground and crossed my legs. Finally, I threw a small piece of chocolate in my mouth. I had stashed some in my bag for emergencies and figured that making a magical hat that was given to me by an insane Fey somehow work definitely qualified.

  As I sat there, humming gibberish, a strange sensation flooded my body. I felt like I was floating. A compass appeared in my mind and pointed due west. The directions were pretty clear, despite the thing being made out of grass and gold sovereigns. Then the image shifted to a manor made out of what looked like jewels and surrounded by a rose garden that rivaled the palace’s. It looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it, no matter how much I tried. A moment later, it all faded.

  I opened my eyes, realizing suddenly that I had actually closed them, and pointed in the direction the compass had given me. “That way.”

  The silly grin Reese disappeared in a blink. “You mean that actually worked?”

  “Well, yeah! What? You didn’t actually think that there was a normal solution, did you?”

  “Not really, but how did you know what to do?” He gently helped me to my feet and we started moving through the trees.

  “What was it you said when we were at Mallie’s? Oh yes! ‘Perspective, Joy. Perspective. If you look at it like a thorn, all it will be is a thorn. If you look at it as it really is, than you see what is there and not what you expect to see.’”

  Reese glared at me, but couldn’t quite stop the corners of his mouth from twitching. “Very funny. Now seriously, how did you know?”

  I grinned at him unrepentantly, but deigned to answer. “Merriweather said that my grandmother thought things too linearly to make the hat work. He said I was more spirally. And I am. When I was little, my logic always drove her crazy. That was the trick. You have to appease the chaos, flatter it like you would a mad Fey.” I could see he wasn’t quite following, so I simplified it further. “Make a fool out of yourself to entertain a sentient magic. I stopped doing that after she nearly killed me. It’s not much fun when your life is on the line.”

  He waited a beat. “Oh, come on, you have to give me more than that! You can’t just dangle your near death over my head and not tell the whole tale,” Reese demanded.

  A sigh slipped out, but he probably deserved a little explanation. “Long story short, my grandmother did not approve of my methods when dealing with enchanted objects. In fact, our disagreement became rather violent when I was playing with my grandfather’s watch one day.”

  Reese nodded. “Ah,” he said before pausing. I could actually see the moment he chose to be tactful and avoid asking any more questions about the incident. Instead, he chose to comment, “That makes some sense. It is the same way with mirrors, although they are far more vain and much less fun.”

  I smirked. It figured that a mirror would be concerned with appearance. At least a magic one would. Then something occurred to me.

  “Reese, how do you know so much about magic mirrors?”

  “I mentioned my grandfather is an expert, right?” I nodded. “Well, it is a family responsibility to manage the upkeep of magic mirrors on this continent. Everyone in my family is trained for it. Even my sister, who is awful at dealing with enchanted objects.”

  “Your sister? Tell me about her! Is she older or younger?”

  As we wove our way through the trees, always heading northeast, Reese regaled me with stories of his family.

  He was the oldest of three children. Apparently, after giving birth to twins, his mother refused to have any more kids and threatened to find a curse for his father’s manhood. And that was after she’d given birth, not during like most women! Reese’s father took her seriously and she never got pregnant again. It’s probably a good thing, considering all the trouble Reese and his siblings got into.

  Apparently, when he was ten, Reese convinced his little brother to climb to the top of the tallest tree in the forest. The kid was so scared that he couldn’t get all the way back down and was stuck there for three hours while their sister and mother were out shopping. Both boys were incapable of sitting properly for a week afterward, and Reese’s brother never climbed anything besides stairs ever again.

  From the stories, it sounded like his family lived in a sparsely populated country, but not one I was familiar with. He even went so far as to say that there was only one proper city there. It was a strange sounding place. Either way, you could see how much Reese loved it by the look in his eyes and the passion in his voice as he described the forests, grassy hills, powerful rivers, and breathtaking views of his homeland.

  He told me he hadn’t always loved it so much, but when he turned 16 he was required to live off the land for three years. After three years of crafting his own shelters and walking the length and breadth of his country, he had grown to appreciate not only the beauty of where he lived, but also his responsibility to protect it as best he could. It was comforting to me, walking through the forest and listening to his stories, particularly when they reminded me of my own experiences. We were not as different as I thought.

  When I was young, my aunt Grace had shown me everything about how to survive in the woods. She showed me how to tell which trees were alive, dead, and which ones were sentient. She taught me which herbs and plants were dangerous to ingest and which were best for curing a case of croup. She taught me how to read and how to climb, how to live, really.

  I had often disappeared into it for days at a time when I was younger. It was the simplest way to avoid the villagers and their ridiculous ideas about what was good and kind, particularly after I started helping Cindy out. Instead of standing around being snubbed, I would walk into the woods and find a dryad to play with. They were the ones that taught me to dance. It was a shame, really, because everyone thought I was a poor dancer. In reality, I just couldn’t understand human dances all that well. Trees dance differently. Their feet don’t move as much, but the rest of their body moves quite a bit. Human dances seem to be the reverse and I end up looking like an idiot who can’t move her feet. I should have gone to more parties the fauns hosted. I’d only ever gone to a few, but they loved to kick up their hooves.

  That’s the reason why I loved living in Aunt Grace’s cottage. I could go wander the forest as much as I wanted and no one would get angry about it. In fact, it forced me out more regularly to find the ingredients I needed for my poultices and remedies. To be surrounded by my personal sanctuary on a daily basis was freeing. Even more so in light of how infrequently I had been able to make it out before I left home. In the year leading up to that fateful ball, I could only make it into the woods once every two months. Mother had insisted that my courtship training with her intensify. In other words, she was trying to teach me how to catch a husband. It was about as much fun as leashing a feral badger. For both of us. Still, she felt it was her only skill and must be imparted on her children.

  “What are you thinking about?” Reese asked, cutting into my musings.

  I blinked. I must have been silent for too long after his story trailed off. I hope he didn’t think I was ignoring him. “The woods and everything I learned out here in them.”

  “Like what?”

  So I told him about the dryad dance lessons and my adventures with my aunt. “There was this one time, she took me out to find and id
entify safe and poisonous plants. I guess I had been a bit too distracted, because she decided to teach me a lesson. She told me to ready a fire and left to gather some food to make lunch. We did that a lot, so I didn’t think anything of it. When she came back, she made me cut and add things to a stew pot as she directed. After we had eaten, she went through several samples that she had kept to the side. They were all highly dangerous to ingest and could kill a man in an hour or less. They also looked identical to the herbs she had me put into the pot.

  “Well, I was in a tizzy, worried about dying in some horrific manner. Aunt Grace laughed and pulled out another group of herbs she had stashed in her pocket. She told me that I had to be careful because there were several dangerous plants that look a lot like savory herbs. We used the safe ones, or the safe parts of dangerous plants. I never had a problem paying attention again.”

  My husband threw back his head and laughed. The tone was rich, much more so than when he had laughed in the past. Ever since we walked through that garden door, it was like a part of his carefully maintained façade was cracking. I liked what I was seeing underneath the politician’s face he’d used. Granted, it was usually a less potent version of the one he gave Queen Caillte, but it was still eerie to witness how well he could hide his real feelings and reactions. One moment he was a practiced flirt, the next he was a brotherly friend, the next he was sullen and silent and the next he was prim and proper. How could you ever expect to know someone who changed their personality like that?

  It made me wonder. “Reese.” He grunted by way of reply, concentrating on his feet. “Tell me again about how Prince Christopher married us. I was so surprised when you told me that I believe I forgot to ask you about it.”

  “Well, it was short. Not really a ceremony, you understand. I doubt such a thing would have occurred to Chris, and his new wife was much too worried about you to even think about such things.”

  I blinked at his back. He had walked ahead of me while speaking, helping me over various obstacles, giving him a good reason to avoid my gaze, but something in the way he was holding himself, in the careful way things were worded made my stomach knot. Things had gotten better between us after our conversation that morning, but he was still putting up walls, holding himself away from me. He was so good at putting up a front. It was becoming a problem.

  Sometimes it felt as though we had known each other much longer than a few days. I rarely spoke about myself to anyone. Sharing intimate details of my past with a stranger was completely unheard of; it invited too much chance of my actually getting emotionally attached. That always caused problems when they inevitably grew to hate me. That’s what made it was so out of character, my feeling so comfortable with him. Despite all the uneasiness I had felt while watching him interact with the queen, I still felt compelled to trust him. Maybe even enough to tell him my ultimate plan. But, no, that would be asking for trouble. Best to concentrate on the discrepancies I’d witnessed.

  Just as I prepared to launch another question at Reese, my attention was grabbed by something that looked remarkably familiar!

  Without another word, I darted left and through a particularly thick patch of ferns. In less than a moment, I stumbled into the middle of a clearing. It was a perfect circle of grass surrounded by a perfect circle of trees. Each trunk was the same distance away from the last, each one unique from its neighbors but uniform. What space there was between the silent sentinels was taken up by everything from ferns to a particularly aggressive blackberry bush.

  The center of the clearing was filled with carefully tended grasses. They had been kept short enough for a croquet match, but such a staid game was the farthest thing from the mind of anyone looking across the pitch. No, the manicured lawn seemed to stir your blood and spur on movement. This was a satyr dance ground! Even if it had been overgrown, I would have recognized the draft horse sized rock in the southwest side, just like in every dance space they made. This one was formed from a mass of black granite with veins of gold quartz spidering through it. I’d been there before.

  “Joy? What’s wrong?” Reese asked me as he stumbled into the meadow.

  I turned and smiled at him. “I know where we are! We lived near here before mother remarried. Aunt Grace brought me to meet my neighbors one day and we danced with them here!”

  “So are we near the capital then?”

  “No,” I said, apologetically. “We are actually pretty far south. About four miles from my old home and six or seven from Crysallia.”

  He seemed to freeze when I mentioned the second largest city in Alenia. It didn’t surprise me much, though. It wasn’t exactly the most inviting place to visit.

  Reese grabbed the back of his head with both hands and sighed. “Well, at least I have a better idea what we are walking into.” Then he groaned and asked me to lead the way. Despite how confusing he was acting about the whole thing, I nodded and continued moving westward. Reese seemed to have a lot of secrets. Something about his response… there was more to his words than just a general disdain for the infamous city. Well, we’d have about two-and-a-half hours of walking for me to think it all over. Who knows, maybe I’d finally understand how men’s minds work! Yeah, not likely.

  Chapter 11: The Facets of Family

  We approached the city gate about two hours before sunset, the diminishing light made the rooftops and towers glow slightly and painting them pink and orange. Whoever designed Crysallia clearly worked very hard to make it look like its namesake. With the sun sitting just so low on the horizon, it glittered off the buildings, making them look like a massive crystal formation. The city was not known for its subtlety.

  The city had been a mining town from its conception. Situated at the base of one of the most mineral rich mountains in the world, it expanded beyond its humble origins and became home to mining consortiums, artisans, and gambling establishments by the dozens, not to mention being the center of one of the most well-known crime organizations in the country. That same organization had since spread to almost every large city on the continent. At least, that was the popular rumor. No one outside the organization knew for sure, but we all had a pretty good idea just how far their reach extended.

  On a less villainous note, Crysallia was also home to one of the most beautiful sights in the world: the Crystal Garden.

  Shortly after the city was formed, some miners found a pathway into a new cavern situated just beneath the eastern wall of the city. According to the history books, a group of miners had been working late and broken through the mine wall into what they initially thought was a small cave. By morning, they had realized that it was something quite a bit different. The cavern floor was perfectly smooth, almost polished, and it moved steadily downward. Later they would discover that the improbable formation actually led out of the mountains instead of further in, but at that point they had no idea.

  Naturally, the men who spent their entire lives working under a mountain were curious and decided to see just where the mysterious pathway led. After walking for half the night and passing by any number of interesting caves, they finally found the final room. Inside that cavern was the largest cache of quartz that anyone had ever seen.

  The cavern was actually of a network of fifty interconnecting caves that split off from one main pathway. Every color of quartz you could imagine grew there in every pattern or formation you could dream. People have speculated that it was due to an interfering magician as nothing like it had ever been seen before. Adding further weight to the theory was the fact that whatever was mined from the Crystal Garden, as it became known, regrew within a month or two. It was a massive tourist attraction for the city and there was even a museum that explained the history of the cavern and a special pathway into the un-mined rooms for people to view when they come to visit.

  Too bad we were headed somewhere decidedly less… pleasant.

  ~

  “State your names and business,” demanded a city guard. From the glazed look of his eyes and
shifting of weight, he was at the end of a long shift at the entrance to the city.

  Reese smiled at him tiredly. “My bride and I were visiting friends and stayed a bit longer than we realized. We just need to find a place for the night before we continue on our way home tomorrow.”

  The guard nodded and let us through without another word, despite our not giving any names. Apparently we didn’t look like we were lying. Which is good, since we weren’t. Not technically anyway. While it was odd that Reese called me his ‘bride’ instead of his ‘wife’, we really did stay with several friends, longer than expected. We were headed toward my home, and he never said what place we were finding. Still, the lack of follow through on the guard’s part did not paint a good picture of the safety in the city.

  When we were a street or two away from the gates, I leaned against Reese’s arm and whispered, “You are terrifyingly good at telling the truth and bluffing at the same time. I’m glad that I don’t have to go against you in a card game.”

  He smirked and whispered back, “You have no idea, little gem.”

  I fought off a shiver as his lips brushed my ear while he spoke. The man was as dangerous as he was handsome. He could probably get a stranger to do just about anything and make them believe that it was their idea the whole time. It made me wonder how Christopher convinced him to marry me sight unseen. Before I could ask, Reese redirected us down a new street leaving the shops and offices behind. Suddenly there were homes lining both sides of the road, beautiful but still fairly modest It was amazing how moving one street over could change your surroundings so drastically. Still, I knew that much more interesting places lay further in.

  As we continued through the slowly darkening streets, we wound our way closer to the heart of the city and found where the wealthier denizens of the city lived. For some reason, when Crysallia was in its infancy, the farmers were the ones who became the wealthiest people in the area. Their little farmhouses were built up into manors and their farmland was changed to a mix of flower gardens and fruit orchards. The rest of the city grew around them, each ring getting less and less land.