They came at me hard, but I was ready. It was amazing what your first meal and a few days rest could do.
I had them right where I wanted them until one of them caught me in my elbow joint. Instead of pain—which I’d never experienced—I caught a new feeling. Discomfort. My arm bent at the elbow incorrectly, but I ignored it. No broken limbs yet. I disarmed one of them and grabbed his sword. A rather nice one.
Now the Wooden Bitch could play properly, too.
They came at me again with curses on their lips and a foul odor in their wake. I took backward shuffling steps, avoiding chairs and scrambling slaves. Three against one should’ve left anyone fearful, but I considered this fight fairer than most. With ease I slammed my fist across one man’s cheek leaving him crumpled on the floor, the next man I kicked into the far wall, and the third—well he dropped his sword and made a run for it.
Now that my opponents were handled, I hurried to check on the children. The boy was unconscious and his poor sister’s wide eyes told me she’d seen far too much for someone her age. Not far from me Craven and Kristos fought. In such cramped quarters, Kristos excelled. He quickly disarmed his opponent and left Craven clutching a stump.
Kristos had cut Craven’s hand off.
“C’mon. Kill me you, bastard!” Craven screamed.
“The hand you used to strike these children belongs to me now,” was all he said as he picked up his squire while I beckoned the girl into my arms. We left and hurried back upstairs. Instead of heading back to the courtyard, Kristos led us to the stables. Twilight greeted us.
“How will we escape?” I asked him. There were too many Daquer sentries.
“There’s a guard post down the road from the courtyard we visited earlier.” The dark look on his face spoke volumes. “It’s heavily guarded, but it’s the only chance we have.”
By the time we stole two horses, the palace grounds had become a hive of activity. Soldiers were everywhere. Kristos placed the boy in front of me, while the girl clutched me from behind. Three riders to one horse would slow us down, but we managed to ride hard to reach the courtyard. I didn’t look back. My charges didn’t either. The boy was far too injured to care.
Far ahead of us, I could see bright torch lights. We’d made it to the guard post Kristos had warned me about.
Kristos looked my way. “Save them, Pynn. Don’t stop. No matter what happens.”
The serious look on his face bothered me. What did he plan to do? I opened my mouth to speak, but he urged his mare to run faster. Soon enough he rode ahead toward the lights. My heart, which now beat so vigorously in my chest, felt like it was crawling up my throat. Everything was happening too fast.
Kristos pulled his sword from his scabbard. The guards did the same. I almost closed my eyes as he crashed into them, bowling them over. I didn’t get a chance to see much more. We safely made it past the guard post. It was all downhill from here to the dark-blue river separating the highlands from the mountains. I couldn’t see him anymore, but I kept going.
“Save them, Pynn. Don’t stop,” he’d said. “No matter what happens.”
The minute I heard the thunderous clop of my horse’s hooves hitting the bridge, I released the breath trapped in my chest. As long as Kristos wasn’t far behind me, I’d have everything I’d wanted. A new life and the man I’d dreamt of. The world was mine to conquer.
Something sharp hit my back. One moment I was on the horse, and in the next, I was flung into the air.
On the day I drew in my first breath I flew, too.
I landed on the bridge’s muddy banks. From there I plopped into the river.
“No!” Someone called for me, but they seemed far away.
I tried to fight against the current, but my limbs were useless. All the power that had carried me through countless fights and battles was gone. I couldn’t catch my breath. My limbs trembled uncontrollably. An icy feeling—like a bucket of winter rainwater—drenched me. The fingers on my good arm reached and brushed against an arrow. An arrow that had pierced King Unaro’s signet medallion.
No, this wasn’t fair.
Instead of sinking, I was carried downriver until long branches along the banks caught my legs. Murky water filled my mouth. I choked. I sputtered. I tried to breathe over and over again, but couldn’t.
Death knocked on my door.
A pair of warm hands reached for me. Then a man’s strong arm held my head above water while he dragged me to the riverbank. Once there, I knew the end was coming. In the twilight I couldn’t see much, just shadows along my rescuer’s worried face. Instead of joy, sorrow drew wrinkles along his handsome face.
“Kristos…” I could barely speak.
He cupped my cheeks and searched along my wound as if he could fix what was irreparable.
“Is the Lady gonna be okay?” the little girl asked from behind him.
Lady. She’d called me a lady.
I wasn’t going to be okay. Those signets had made me real. Without them, I’d become nothing again.
“Kristos.” My vision grew dark along the edges. “You can let me go… for real this time...”
* * *
Kristos
* * *
She looked at me. I looked at her.
Then my creation breathed no more.
The young girl whimpered, and then began to wail.
I touched Pynnelope’s chest, almost willing her to move. “Don’t do this, Pynn…I’m not burying you again,” I hissed.
The arrow came out after a few tugs, but she still didn’t move. The diamond signet was broken. I leaned in and listened to her chest. Nothing. Then I tried again and caught it. A strange sound. A click click click noise. Was there still a spark of life within her?
I leaned over her face. Searching. Hoping. I didn’t know what to do. I’d lost my chance all those years ago to untie Elisia from that post and save her from King Jeffren’s wrath. Right now, Pynnelope was here and like everything I loved, she was being taken away. I drew her close to me, trying to draw my warmth into her cold body. She wasn’t a machine. She was alive and I’d fight until my last breath to save her.
“You’re not leaving me that easily.” I pressed my lips against hers and blew. Her chest expanded. I tried again, this time my tears wetting her rounded cheeks.
When Pynn blinked, I couldn’t believe it. That had never happened before.
She blinked!
My fingers brushed against her eyelids. Her body was still wood—and yet—she breathed and a heart beat inside her chest. I held something precious and miraculous in my arms.
“Did I die?” she finally whispered.
“Not yet, you haven’t.” I rested my chin on the top of her head. “There will be no more burials. No more fighting. Just you and me, Drykola.”
“So I’m alive?” she asked.
“To me you are.” I kissed her again, lingering long enough to feel the smooth curve of her lips. Every exhale she made felt like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings. I was soaking wet and chilled to the bone, but I’d never felt so content.
For hours we walked south along the riverbank until the Daquer army abandoned pursuit. We didn’t have much, but we had each other.
“Should we set up, camp, sir?” my squire asked. “It’s rather late.” The young man was bruised, but smiling.
All this time I’d carried Pynnelope. She stirred as I placed her on the ground. My squire limped about to gather firewood.
“Where are we?” Her eyelids drooped.
I brushed my fingertips along her eyelids to force them shut. “Safe. In the morning, we’ll go south to Andea and keep walking until we find a new home.”
She refused to close her eyes. “All of us?”
I nodded. “Yes, all of us.”
Finally, she closed her eyes and a heavenly sigh escaped from her lips. “I could never dream of anything better.”
Author’s Note
Normally I write about werewolves and other creatures of
the night, but I couldn’t resist writing a re-telling of the tale of Pinocchio. Pynn was one of those characters that sits down next to you and won’t stop talking. To be honest, I could’ve given her a whole book of adventures. I had that much fun! Also, I loved exploring the universal question of what it means to be alive. We all ask ourselves that question once in our lives. If you enjoyed reading this tale, be sure to please join my mailing list. There are more adventures to come in the future.
* * *
~ Shawntelle
* * *
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A Small Magic - Devon Monk
The mattresses were shouting. Adira was used to her mattress talking to itself as she drifted off to sleep, but now that it had been buried beneath nine other much thicker mattresses, it had been complaining non-stop.
“I’m naked. Naked! Where are my sheets? Sheets! Help!”
All the other mattresses were similarly surprised they had been stacked upon her denuded bed. They had exactly two things to say about that, which they were shouting. Repeatedly.
“I am on top!” and “Oooh, it feels so good!”
The combination of “I’m naked!” and “Ooh, it feels so good!” not to mention the whole on-top thing blurred into a pulsing, frankly inappropriate, rhythm.
Adira rolled over carefully, since ten mattresses on a bed made for a bit of a wobble. She pulled the blanket up over her head. The blanket, thankfully, had nothing to say. Neither did her dresser, chair, hairbrush, or any of the other inanimate objects in her room.
She usually liked being able to understand the language of inanimate things. As a child, she had been delighted to hear anything at all, and never minded that it was her porridge bowl and spoon which first struck up a conversation, though that conversation had left her with a lasting fear of dark drawers.
Her parents had tried to communicate with her for all her twenty years, and they did so by moving their mouths. But she could not hear their sounds, nor the sounds of any living person, animal, or thing.
Her inability to hear and speak the language of her parents brought sadness to her mother’s face and a sternness to her father’s brow.
Oh, she tried talking to them using the language the inanimate objects taught her, but whenever she spoke, her parents looked startled and ill and sent her off to a corner with a book to read.
At first, the books read to her, though some of the books had a habit of injecting their own commentary in the story: “Moral: Don’t climb a strange man’s beanstalk no matter how big it is.” “Kissing has ruined a lot of perfectly good frogs.” And “Breaking a curse is easy if you’re willing to die for it.”
She wasn’t sure the books actually understood the stories written in their pages, but she had learned early on not to argue with a novel.
She had also learned that her mother cried less and her father gentled when she kept her mouth shut and smiled. So that is what she did.
Even though they could not speak each other’s language, Adira knew she was loved.
But today they had stacked her bed with mattresses, and tonight they had invited a burly man with perfectly oiled beard and eyebrows to dinner.
He’d spent most of the meal giving her speculative looks more suited to a fox. Looks that took in her face and lips and breasts but never found her eyes.
“Oooh...”
“...I’m naked...”
“...it feels so good!”
Adira groaned. She was never going to get any sleep. She sat and pushed the blanket away from her face. “Could you all quiet down?”
“Help!”
“You don’t need help. You need to be quiet.”
“On top. Ooh...it feels...”
“Shut up!” Seriously. There was no reasoning with these things.
“Sheets! Where are my sheets?”
“Hey, hey now,” a new voice called out. This voice was low and warm. She had never heard it before and she thought she knew all the things in her room.
“Mattresses?” the voice said. “You are indeed on top. Good job. We understand. And you, other mattress? Sheets are on the top mattress. Since that mattress is on top of the next mattress, which is on top of the next mattress, all the way down to you, you are not naked. You are dressed in mattresses and a sheet.”
“Sheet?”
“Yes,” the voice agreed. Something about the way the voice spoke, the humor and rumble of it, set things fluttering in Adira’s chest. “You have a sheet up there, buddy. You’re good.”
The mattress grumbled, then finally, thankfully, was silent. The other mattresses seemed to get the hint, and they slowly quieted, the one in the middle snoring softly.
“Does that help?” the voice called out just loud enough not to get the mattresses going again.
“Um...yes. Yes, it does. Thank you. Where are you?”
“Down here.” The voice seemed to be coming from the floor. But it was not her rug. It never spoke, though it occasionally hummed a song that matched the rhythm of the weaving loom on which it had been made.
Perhaps a rock had been carried into the room on the heel of one of the men who worked for her parents while they were stacking the mattresses.
“Are you a rock?”
“No.”
“A stick?”
“No.”
“A mattress?”
“No, but I am a stuck under ten of them.”
“That must be uncomfortable.”
The voice chuckled. “It’s not bad. They really are fine mattresses, if a bit feather-brained.”
“Yes, well, most things don’t carry on very long or interesting conversations.”
“Oh? Do you speak to most things?”
It was the first thing that had ever asked her that. A surge of excitement rolled through her.
“I only talk to inanimate things. I don’t know any other language.”
“But I’ve seen you reading books at the kitchen table. You must understand words.”
“I understand the way a book reads words, and that the ink on the paper makes words. But when I try to use them, it isn’t something my parents understand.”
“You’ve never spoken to your parents?”
“No. Nor have I heard them.”
“That must be very frustrating. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” Adira’s pulse raced. She hadn’t had this long or pleasant a conversation, in all her life. “Could I meet you?”
“Of course.” The voice sounded happy. “I’m afraid I’m not much to look at though.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“I promise it is true. I’m not a very good liar.”
Adira climbed down the ladder the workmen had left beside her bed. “Where are you?” she whispered.
“Near the middle. Perhaps closer to the headboard.”
Adira knelt and slid her hand under the mattresses.
“A little higher,” the voice said. “Back a bit. Stretch your pinky. There.”
Adira frowned as she pulled out the little pebble and cupped it in her palm. “I thought you said you weren’t a rock. Also, that you didn’t lie.”
“I said I didn’t lie very well. And I am not a rock. I’m a pea. A very shriveled, old pea. I told you I’m not much to look at.”
“No, you’re...very...not bad really...you are nicely round.”
“You don’t lie very well either, Princess.”
“I’m not a princess.”
“Oh? Your father is the son of the king. You have servants, live on a modest, but lovely estate, and if I’m not mistaken, Prince Chadwick was at your dinner table tonight, looking like he’d rather have you on a platter.”
“My grandfather...king. Well.” She blinked hard, her world shifting around her in an instant and falling into new places. “Princess. This is a surprise.”
“You really didn’t know?”
“Who would have told me?” What she meant to say was, how would anyone have
made her understood? Maybe they had tried when she was younger then given up, thinking her incapable of comprehending the title.
“If that’s a surprise, then you might want to brace yourself for this. There is a reason I was stuffed under your bed. Your mother wanted to prove to Prince Chadwick that you were a princess.”
“She was using a pea to prove that?”
“Prince Chadwick is known to be...picky. He has been looking far and wide throughout the lands for a perfect princess who isn’t too clever or too outspoken or too thin or too fat or too humble or too vain. He wasn’t going to stop by here because he had heard that you were....”
Adira tried to wait for the pea to finish what it was saying but she craved conversation and the pea was wonderful at it. Also, that voice. Warm, and with so much laughter and concern and feeling in it. She thirsted for it like water on a summer’s day.
“I was what?”
“Born broken.” The voice was soft with apology.
“There is more, isn’t there? More things they say about me?”
The pea was silent. She shook it softly so that it rolled in her palm. “Tell me what they say.”
“No. I refuse to repeat those words. But I will tell you Prince Chadwick is looking for a wife. If you claim you were unable to sleep because you were bruised by a pea left beneath ten mattresses, you could live with him in his golden castle.”
“Bruised from a pea? What does that have to do with being worthy?”
“It will prove you are delicate enough to be a princess.”
Adira laughed so loud she had to clap one hand—the one without the pea—over her mouth.
She had a strong laugh. She knew that because the hall mirror loved her laugh. The mirror said it came deep from her belly just like her father’s once had.
She, in turn, loved the mirror’s cackle. The mirror told her it was bored flat by all the serious looks people made when they stared at it. So she made an effort to screw up her face into silly expressions whenever she passed by.
The mirror loved it and always dissolved into loud hoots and cackles. Whenever her parents caught her at it, they cast strange, pained glances her way.
Once Upon A Kiss: Seventeen Romantic Faerie Tales Page 46