by Darryl Fabia
“It isn’t as if we chose this,” Marissa said.
“We cannot stand each other,” Ledine said.
“Why do you think we all married the princes of different cities?” Murdress asked. “It isn’t as if none of our husbands have brothers. We could’ve been together if we wanted.”
“Yes, I can see that you aren’t on the best of terms,” Ica said. “But imagine how the poor troll heads feel. Each head has to be with his brothers all day, every day of every week, of every month of every year, for all the long years this troll will live. Imagine if you three were stitched together at the chest for all time.”
The princesses nodded guiltily. “No wonder he has such terrible headaches,” Princess Marissa said, her tone softening.
“I would have one too if we were all joined abreast,” Princess Ledine said, the haughtiness easing from her voice.
“It’s difficult enough enduring family only some of the time, let alone always,” Princess Murdress said, her growl vanishing.
The three princesses together stepped up to the troll, beckoned his heads to lean close, and each princess petted a troll head’s brow. Three relieved smiles broke over the troll’s faces and the sisters who couldn’t stand each other each gave the troll a little peace.
“From now on, when you’ve given each other a headache, come see me in the night,” Marissa said.
“Or take turns and come see me instead,” Ledine said.
“Or if those two have gotten on your nerves, come see me,” Murdress said. “I know how it feels. But no more rampaging and ravaging, or I’ll sever your heads. You’ll be free of each other forever if I have to bury each at different ends of the kingdom.”
The troll was so soothed and happy that each head fell asleep, first Center, then Right, then Left, and he didn’t awaken for nine days. The princesses departed the castle then and managed to make it all the way to their husbands without arguing, after which they were soon separated again, much to the relief of anyone with ears.
Ica waited to be sure the troll was deep in sleep, and then she went back to the castle chambers. First she retrieved her belongings and then she acquired some new ones—a few handfuls of the troll’s treasure, stuffed into her bag. “Consider this payment for a job unwillingly taken and done well at that,” she whispered to the troll in passing. She then left the castle, hefting her bag of treasure over one shoulder, and went searching for a nicer place to stay, where she could rest until she knew what to do with all her newfound riches.
The House of Dreams and Promises
Delirah mourned from the northern balcony of her home. She mourned the drab, gray castle where she lived with her husband, the warlord Korophel. She mourned the grim city surrounding her, where every house’s pointed roof rose sharply toward the sky like pikes and swords. If a giant ever fell over the outer wall, he would be impaled a dozen and a half times.
She mourned her husband’s devotion to his lords and generals, the crowd of angry men he met on the southern balcony some nights and rode off with at sunrises, sunsets, peacetime and wartime, hungry to conquer all the lands within the ring of red mountains where they lived. Most of all, she mourned this life of hers, wed as a war prize and looked to less fondly than a looted sword or sacked village. Years passed without love or joy.
Her sadness was so strong that the sun was moved to wish for her smile and one evening told the moon all about the wistful woman. The moon was moved as well by the sun’s somewhat embellished description, and surveyed the lands of night. One witching hour, the moon sent a vision plummeting to the world, through clouds and wind, through the roof of the house of dreams and promises, where there lived many strange things, and Ramire the Fool.
Fast asleep, Ramire saw the lady Delirah, beaming joyfully, her teeth glistening like pearls and her eyes radiating like sunshine. When he awoke, he leaped from bed and out the front door, his mind set on meeting this woman and seeing that wonderful smile.
He traveled across the vales within the ring of red mountains, stopping in villages by night, whether intact or burnt by Korophel’s army, and he’d stay anywhere laughter was valued. In Korophel’s time of conquest, it had greater value than food to some folks.
After three days, the fool reached the outer wall of Korophel’s city, where his dream had said the lady would be. The guards wouldn’t permit him through the gates, but one balcony jutted over the northern wall. Using a rope of red handkerchiefs he fished from his sleeve, he climbed up to the balcony, where he found a dismal sight.
Delirah was here, after all his traveling, but her smile was not. If anything, her face was so smooth that she might never have smiled in her life. “Dear lady,” Ramire said. “Why are you so sad?”
For the life of her, Delirah had no answer. She was too surprised—no one had asked her that and she’d lived in this gray castle so long that she believed it was simply normal.
“Have no fear,” Ramire said. “Whatever the reason, laughter and smiles are my specialty.”
A normal fool, or perhaps even the most foolish of fools, would have no hope of watching more than a faint, polite smile cross Delirah’s lips, but Ramire was the fool who lived in the house of dreams and promises. From his head hung bells that summoned a hundred voices if he wished. His handkerchiefs flew and grew and shrank as he commanded. Magic masks gave him fresh new faces and his puppets obeyed his every command.
First he tried a few playful jokes about common folk and the weather, but Delirah only nodded, as if receiving displeasing news. Then Ramire tried slapstick, tossing and turning himself with his handkerchiefs, feigning injury, sickness, and even death at the whim of malevolent cloth, his bells playing at varied screams, but Delirah only clapped, slowly and forcibly, as if someone had instructed the response.
“Perhaps you have a mind for satire,” Ramire suggested. Lastly, he brought out his puppets and he could think of no more deserving a victim than Korophel, whose army had burned so many houses and destroyed so many lives and smiles. The puppet was the warlord’s perfect likeness, so much that Delirah gaped in horror.
“Have no fear,” Ramire said. “This Korophel heeds only me.”
And so proceeded a puppet show where Korophel was too stupid to find a village right in front of him and a capering fool tricked him into believing it was a fallen forest. In another instant, Korophel had stolen too many cattle and overloaded his horse, and he was forced to let the horse ride him all the way back to the castle. In the finale, Korophel captured too many wives, and they began to nag and complain until he beat his own head in with his war maul.
Every passing scene shocked Delirah more, her eyes growing wider, her jaw slackening, her hands trembling, and Ramire would’ve stopped and eased the poor lady’s fearful state, but she was giving her only honest reaction since they met. He would not release her to mourning.
Finally, the puppet show ended with Korophel as king of his own labor under his wives, ruling a newfound land of dung. Delirah couldn’t speak or move, and Ramire placed a puppet into her arms, twisting and reshaping it into the image of Delirah herself, but with a grand smile. “A beautiful keepsake in the fashion of a beautiful lady,” Ramire said. “And if you push her head in, she may take another shape. I will return to you soon.” The fool kissed Delirah’s immobile hand and set off down his rope of handkerchiefs to begin his journey home.
Delirah’s hands regained their movement then and out of curiosity, she pushed down on the doll’s head. The head collapsed into the body, and from its underside sprang into Ramire’s likeness, with a fat grin on his face. Delirah was so surprised that she roared with laughter. Her sound rang through the gray castle halls, over the grim city, and across the grass beyond where it reached Ramire’s ears. He sighed longingly as he departed, intent on seeing Delirah again, and he was in such a reverie that he paid no mind to the warband on horseback that passed him on its way back to the city.
Korophel noticed something wrong immediately, faster than he’d
ever noticed anything about his wife. She smiled pleasantly when he spoke in front of her about beheadings and razing, laughed to herself when alone in her room, and her sighing on the balcony changed from those of despair to some other kind that he did not know.
One evening he met with Ner, his secrets-master, spy, confidant, and assassin, a man so wrapped in cloaks and secrets that no one, not even Korophel, had seen the man but for his eyes. “Something about my wife is amiss,” the warlord told his pet. “Find out what.”
The task was scarcely a challenge to Ner. He knew the hidden passages within the castle walls, and where best to eavesdrop and spy on any room. Some said Korophel told Ner all his secrets because the cloaked man would know them anyway. He discovered Delirah’s secret soon enough—from a crevice in the stone ceiling above her bedroom, he spied her tittering and chattering with her maids and servants. When she was alone, the warlord’s wife drew a puppet from her drawer, at once in her likeness, and then that of the fool.
At a word from Ner, Korophel stormed into his wife’s bedroom and fetched up the doll, now imitating Ramire. “Have you need of a fool, you foolish woman?” he asked.
“Perhaps she has a lover,” said one of the guards.
Korophel laughed. “My homely wife?”
“It is a magic gift,” Delirah said. “It becomes me.”
“And who has given the gift?”
“Only a fool.”
Korophel allowed no fools in his city, but he tried changing the puppet’s form. To his wife’s horror, when he pressed down on the fool’s head, his own likeness appeared from the doll’s underside. “So! Someone dares make a fool of me!” In the sight of his servants and maids, guards and Ner, and particularly in the sight of his wife, Korophel took hold of the cloth body with both hands and ripped in two the doll from the house of dreams and promises.
When he did, the shredded fabric began to writhe and twist around his fingers, lashing together blood and skin and bone, and the mighty warlord screamed and flapped his hands madly. When the rags settled, Korophel’s hands formed jagged claws, with two thick fingers and a thumb on each, the nails glistening like a carapace growing from his wrists. His wife forgotten, Korophel hurried off to the doctors and medicine men, and only Ner looked back on horror-stricken Delirah before leaving her chamber.
She returned to her balcony, mourning her husband’s folly, mourning her lost gift. She returned each day, without laughter or smiles, as she had done before she was given the puppet, until one evening a rope of red handkerchiefs snaked its way up to the balcony, climbed by Ramire the Fool.
“I have found your smile,” he said. “If only I knew the catalyst to such beauty.”
Delirah wiped her smile away and told Ramire of her husband and the doll. “He said someone made a fool of him. He might discover you. Leave, before he kills you.”
“Someone made him a lobster from the sound of it,” Ramire said with a chuckle. “He was already a fool on his own. Do not worry yourself for me. And look, I bring another gift.” He retrieved one of the bells from his motley hat and when he jingled it, a man’s whisper rang, a woman sang, and then a child laughed. “You will hear what you wish when you shake the bell, my lady.”
“No more gifts,” Delirah said. “I’m afraid.”
“It is but a bell.”
“And the other was a doll, but it held curses inside.”
“The puppet was beautiful, like you,” Ramire said. “Beauty comes into being when power comes into the world and must be contained. Your fool husband rent the doll and released the power. Let him never carve you, Delirah, or he’ll be faced with a power he cannot imagine, for your beauty is so strong, it has made a fool more foolish. Who but the most foolish of fools would dare to love?”
Delirah was speechless at Ramire’s declaration, and this was fortunate for her. Ner had been spying, and appeared just at that moment with Korophel and his guards. “Kill him!” the warlord bellowed, pointing a lobster claw at the fool. Ramire hurried down his rope to the grass beyond the city wall, but at the warlord’s command, Ner gave chase across the fields. “Bring his hide to me!” Korophel shouted.
Forgotten in the face of her husband’s wounded pride, Delirah returned to her room. For three nights she waited, hoping Ner would return empty-handed, but on the third dawn, the cloaked man was spotted from the castle walls. He carried a thin stick as tall as a tree, from which a body swung by its neck, knotted by red handkerchiefs.
The man was burned in the city square, amid an uproarious crowd, and Delirah looked on only long enough to see Ramire’s face in the flames. After that she kept to her room while people cheered for the warlord’s wrath, and to drown them out, she commanded Ramire’s voice to ring from the bell he’d given her.
“Laugh his laugh,” she told it, and it obeyed. “Sigh his sigh,” she said, and it did. But when she said, “Have him tell me he loved me,” the bell made only sounds that might’ve mimicked Ramire, but meant nothing. Again she commanded it, and again, and when midnight came and sleep had almost taken her, she instructed the bell to speak one last time. “Bell, have him tell me he loved me.”
“This I cannot do, for I love you now,” Ramire’s voice said.
Delirah sat up, bewildered in the dark. Her bedside candle had worn down to a flicker, and a figure approached from outside its light. The cloaks of Ner glowed orange as the man neared and Delirah scoffed. “What will you with me, demon?”
“I am no demon,” the cloaked man said, unraveling his cover. “Only a fool.”
Delirah became speechless yet again, and Ramire took the moment to steal a kiss before he explained.
“The man who was hanged by the red handkerchiefs was no more than a puppet, its lifeless face hidden by one of the changing masks from the house of dreams and promises,” Ramire said. “And now I am close to you, always. I have left my home and all the dreams it promised to see that beautiful smile of yours. I will spy on you as Korophel likes and tell him what I please, and he’ll tell me his secrets in turn, so we might never be found out. And so, my lady, what will you with me?”
Delirah willed him to her bed, where he was no fool except in that he wanted her to laugh, and so she did. Her laughter boomed through her room, through the secret channels of the castle, to where even Korophel could hear once the roars of the crowd had died, and he did not recognize the sound.
Yet when he summoned his assassin, the disguised Ramire told him all was well. The warlord didn’t know what to make of this change in his solemn wife. At times in his warring he’d forgotten her entirely, but now the laughter nicked at his mind, during his sleep in the castle and during his war raids.
“Something of my wife is amiss,” Korophel told his secrets-master when he returned home from his most recent raid. “All smiles and laughter, even after her fool is killed. She makes me nervous.”
“If I might ask,” the pretend Ner said. “Don’t you wish your wife to be happy?”
“I do not care for her either way, except that I must have a wife, one who won’t dishonor me.” The warlord clenched his claws. “I believe it is time I seek a new wife and remove the old.”
“I will see to it,” Ramire told Korophel from beneath his cloaks, and then he hurried to Delirah. “I am sent to kill you, my lady.”
Delirah’s face took on the destitute nature of their first meeting. “If my husband wants someone dead, he is dead.”
“And is that so with me? Have no fear. We will run to where Korophel cannot go, to the house of dreams and promises.” They sped through the castle’s secret avenues, to where the walls opened into brush and grass outside the city, and then Ramire led Delirah over the vales.
A day and a night passed before Korophel realized both his assassin and his wife were missing, and only when he found the bell beside his wife’s bed did he realize the fool lived. “I have been made a fool again!” he shouted. “Fetch dogs, fetch horses, fetch axes and chains! I will lead the charge myself to the pla
ce of this fool! I will flay him alive and then we’ll see who wears his face!”
Ramire and Delirah stopped in villages along the way, but told none to hide the fool’s visit from pursuers, for the couple were off to live in dreams and promises, not secrets. They ran and ran, the warlord and his warriors dogging their tracks and razing any home that had given them shelter.
After three days, the couple reached the house and its beauty stunned Delirah. She was used to grays only, not reds and whites, greens and yellows. She was used to rooftops that pointed like swords, not a soft, rounded surfaces and pretty wooden arches. “I may live here?”
“You will be within, like you have never been,” Ramire said. “And you will see the truth of dreams and the power of promises. You will be happy.”
The door opened and a chipper bald man waved them inside. “They’re close now. Hurry!”
“Who is that?” Delirah asked.
“The secrets-master, Ner,” Ramire said. “You will find stranger and more wonderful truths within.” He held Delirah’s hand, reassuring her before they stepped through the doorway into a bright, colorful light, and Ner closed the door.
Korophel and his warriors arrived moments later. The house was the most beautiful any had seen, its soft corners inviting, its colors swimming like dye in water across its surface. The warlord was put off for an instant, but quickly remembered why he had ridden so far and hunted so vigorously. He stormed up to the door and gave a great shove, but it wouldn’t budge, in or out. His claws snapped at the knob and his maul pounded, but even that heavy iron hammer could not force the door.
“Chains!” he shouted. “Dig into the walls and rip this house apart!” The warriors did as their warlord commanded, nailing chains into the sides of the house and wrapping them round teams of horses. “Pull!” Korophel screamed and the horses tugged. “Pull!” he demanded and the walls groaned. “Pull!” he screamed and the walls broke from the house of dreams and promises.