“They were eaten by Garrow-Low. Do you disagree?”
“Garrow-Low ate them because I did not bury them. They did not deserve to be buried.”
“I told you, she’s mad,” muttered my son.
“Why?” asked the inquisitor, his voice curling. “Do you feel pity for the Garrow-Low? Do you hate the Secret Atlas?”
“Because they killed my partner.” Her voice broke. “Owen the Blue. When I saw him dead I knew it was one of you. He was strung up between two trees. Cut open. The way you do. So I hunted your soldiers, as was my right and Owen’s right. When I found them his blood was still on their hands... oh.”
I think at that moment she and I both remembered the day we met at Glory-Arn, when blood had coated her hands. She tugged on the chains that bound her wrists to her ankles, and the sound rang through the courthouse. “Blood on their hands. I heard them say they thought the war had no meaning. What does it matter, they said. They missed their families. They did not think the Garrow-Low would ever be defeated. They were afraid they would die alone in the forest, and Garrow-Low would eat their guts. And I thought, Owen died alone. His life had meaning and they took it from him. Why? Did they need to hurt something?” The taut line that was her mouth crumpled suddenly.
The inquisitor squinted as if it was the sun he stared at, though only a familiar gray fog seeped through the windows. “You could not have killed five of our men on your own.”
Isadore the Blue shrugged. “They were tired. They were unfocused. Sometimes that happens after killing.” She looked at her calloused feet and I wondered if she was as tired as I, if we toiled under the same burden after all.
I closed my eyes and had a vision of Isadore the Blue breaking into my chambers in the dead of night. First she was just a black shadow of a self, and then my eyes adjusted and I saw the handprint on her face—with the curtains billowing, it looked like the hand of retribution as divine as the Secret Atlas, the hand of Stop, the hand of No.
I tried to explain that I had wanted to stop for years, but my lips rebelled and I said nothing. In truth I wanted her to show me her pain, to make a monument out of me. Her hunting knife lit up the room, and then she was stabbing, stabbing, cutting me down. It was a relief. I searched her eyes for relief as well but there was none, for her. She pulled the knife out—I saw it covered in blood and hair and I realized who I was: The Boar. I was the fiend. And she, my hallowed vanquisher. Princess Courage, I heard voices saying, Princess Courage has slain the Boar.
“I had the strangest dream,” I said, upon waking. Valor whispered, uncomfortably, “Father, you have been ill.”
The inquisitor was saying, “Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve driven your people mad. Look at that agitator that called you that ridiculous name. If the Garrow-Low had won the war those brutes would have thanked you.”
Another Doe-in-the-Dark shook off her disguise and shouted, “Princess Courage! Tell them they have no right to speak to you about brutality! Or madness!” She faced the inquisitor; her handprint was red. I leaned forward, remembering a younger sister with a red handprint staying back in the trees. The little one’s right hip had been skimmed by an arrow that day. I leaned further. Did she limp? Valor put his hand on my shoulder as if he was afraid I would tumble over the banister. The Doe-in-the-Dark girl shouted, “You are all—” but with everyone else shouting, I couldn’t hear what we all were.
She jumped over the railing into the well of the court to escape our spectators’ punches—she did limp, just a little—and ran toward her sister, who averted her eyes. “Isadore, tell them!” The guards grabbed her before she could touch her sister’s chains and pulled her away, her heels sliding against the new turquoise tiles. “Say this is just the beginning!”
Isadore the Blue lifted her chin and said, “There are some things bigger than your war.”
Her sister’s face went blank and the inquisitor widened his eyes, but I felt in the echoing cavern where my heart belonged that she was speaking to me. The Boar. My head swung away like a ball on a tether. A bolt of sunlight came blazing through a clerestory window and I stared into the heat until all I could see was light. I felt for my son, to tell him to look, but I slipped. All around me were whispers and shouts of “Courage” but who were they calling? Who would answer to that name now?
* * *
The only thing I asked for when I woke from my long gauzy sleep was to see her, and indeed I woke just in time, because she was to be executed the next day. I would have gone to see her in the dungeons—I would have endured the stink of pus and miserable howling of amputated Garrow-Low prisoners, kept alive for reasons unknown to me—but I was too close to death myself. The ashen people who hovered where the curtains used to be said, “No, King Courage. We will bring the prisoner.”
When I opened my eyes again she was on the floor beside my bed. “My child,” I said, and someone ran weeping from the room.
“I am not yours.” I could see her teeth glowing.
“Your people call you Princess Courage now.”
“My name is Isadore the Blue.”
I could already tell her that her name would be forgotten. Her partner would be forgotten. I knew by the passion on the faces of her compatriots that they had already claimed her as a myth. “I did not choose my name either,” I said. “And I earned it by killing, too. What stories we live, Princess.”
She looked at me at last. “Our stories are over, King.”
I thought I had only blinked but when I opened my eyes she was gone, and the sun was shining. I thought of the gallows, the coir ropes swinging in the sweet morning breeze, and then closed my eyes again. The ropes became pine trees: great churning spindles of that terrifying forest that would never sway to the name of Gloria, not in its deepest of hearts.
Copyright © 2011 Nadia Bulkin
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Nadia Bulkin is a Master’s student in the International Politics program at American University in Washington, DC. She studies post-colonialism and governance; “Princess Courage” is dedicated to William McKinley. Her other fiction can be found in the new anthology Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, ChiZine, Fantasy Magazine , and Strange Horizons. For more information, visit nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.
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COVER ART
“New Lands,” by Rado Javor
Rado Javor is a Slovak artist who splits his time between Bratislava and the UK. His favorite subjects include gothic Colonial America, WWI aircraft, dark science-fiction, and Napoleonic naval engagements, many of which were featured in the game Empire: Total War. See more of his work at http://radojavor.com/.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press
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