The Kindness Curse

by Michelle L. Levigne

  "A soldier, newly released from the army and still young enough to enjoy the rest of his life. He's staying here at the inn. Rolf here has an interesting story. He and his brothers take turns going into the palace every night to fetch Princess Dulcibella back here to the inn for their master."

  "To do what?"

  "My master is a romantic," Rolf said. "He is wooing the princess. They play checkers or walk, while he listens to her silly chatter and tells her she's smarter than everyone thinks she is."

  "Is she?"

  "Everyone in Seafoam expects her to be an absolute dunce, so of course, any brains she was born with are fading away." The big dog snorted. "Like seafoam."

  "Why do they expect her to be stupid?" Merrigan climbed over the foot of the bed and sat on the mattress. She hoped Miles' story lasted a good deal longer and Elli stayed downstairs, so they wouldn't be interrupted.

  "That's the curse of the kingdom. The king was a younger son, cast off by his stepfather and robbed by his older brothers and stepbrothers. He came to Seafoam, which was in ruins. Generations ago, some upstart who wanted to be king tried to dismantle the protective magic. It turned everything inside out. Someone in the royal family had created a spell to keep them from ever losing the throne. Essentially, Seafoam will vanish if there isn't someone of the royal bloodline in residence, at all times. The royal family thought they were clever, and when everything started falling apart, they whipped up magic to let them sleep until someone fixed things. They slept for maybe five years, until the current king got through a wall of briars, found the princesses, and kissed the oldest and smartest." The big dog snorted, his mouth dropping open in a wide, wet canine grin, so his tongue lolled out for several seconds before he licked his chops and resumed speaking.

  "The former king and queen decided they would rather be sailor merchants, so they took off on a ship and haven't been heard from since. The two younger princesses grabbed a chest of gold and set off in search of a king to marry, and haven't been heard from since, either. They're probably prisoners of an enchanter who collects princesses."

  "So what is the curse that makes this princess stupid?" Merrigan asked, to keep from remarking that she had met the two princesses, and she felt sorry for whoever had captured them.

  "Well, it became tangled with the magic that requires a member of the royal family in residence. As the heir is, so will the rest of the kingdom be. Someone tried to trick the heir into marriage, and when she outsmarted him, he warped the spell, to turn all the royal women into dunces. Arabella married the first prince who came along and crossed the ocean to get as far from Windward as she could. Proved she had some brains. Everyone expects Dulcibella to be incredibly stupid. Every time she hears someone say how silly she is, she grows more silly. Honestly, the soldier I work for is good for her, and good for the kingdom."

  "As soon as Rolf and his brothers sensed my presence," Bib explained, "they decided to come to me for advice."

  "What sort of advice?" Merrigan asked.

  "Our master is smart enough to know he doesn't want to be in charge of a kingdom, or be stuck with a silly princess. He likes her, but how much work will it take to convince her she's smarter than she thinks she is? It takes all the king's hard work and concentration to counteract the queen's silliness, otherwise Seafoam would be in a horrid mess. She does silly things and he wears himself out fixing her messes and keeping people from believing she is an idiot. What they believe becomes reality. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

  "All too clearly. What do you expect me to do?"

  "Our master is hesitating too much. Dulcibella likes him. She wants to marry him, but can you imagine the ruckus if she tells her parents she's in love with a soldier? Just wait until she tells them she goes to bed, and the next thing she knows she's waking up in a bedroom somewhere, with this man, and they sit and play checkers and talk. Then she curls up on his bed and when she wakes up she's in her own bed."

  "Well, I imagine they will employ several tactics to try to figure out where the princess goes each night, or prove that she's just having a strange, recurring dream."

  "And you know how that will go." Rolf shook his head, threatening to knock Bib off the bed. "They'll find our soldier and lock him up for kidnapping Dulcibella. He's 'nothing' but a soldier. They've conveniently forgotten that the king was a youngest son and started out with nothing but his wits and a magical handkerchief that granted three wishes."

  "What do you think I can do?" Merrigan wondered if the king still had that handkerchief. Once magical objects with a wish limit went into a new set of hands, the magic started all over again. What she could do with three wishes ... She wondered what the king had wasted his three wishes on. Definitely, one wasn't making the queen and his daughters smarter, or trying to unravel the spell affecting them.

  "Teach the soldier how to act like a prince, and dress him up like a prince," Bib said, when Merrigan looked at the dog and the dog looked back at her, leaning closer. She cringed away, expecting drool to fall on her at any moment.

  "Talk to my master and convince him that it isn't so hard being king. Dulcibella only had to mention once that whoever she marries will be king, and my master panicked. She didn't say anything more about it. She's actually clever when it comes to wheedling and teasing and wearing people down to do what she wants. But in a nice way," Rolf hurried to add. "You might even like her, if she didn't think she was utterly stupid. It makes her cry a lot. My master is the only one who can make her laugh, lately."

  "Sounds like she's in love," Bib offered in a cheerful tone.

  "Why would you think I could convince a battle-hardened soldier that he wants to take on all the drudgery and finicky, headachy work of being king of Seafoam?" Merrigan asked.

  "Your father is a powerful king and you were married to a king. Surely you picked up something along the way."

  "My late husband made quite a few stupid mistakes," she retorted.

  "Then tell my master all the mistakes he made, so he can avoid them," Rolf responded and grinned at her.

  Merrigan wished dogs wouldn't grin. It always entailed their drippy tongues hanging out. She didn't want to know what the floor looked like underneath Rolf's mouth.

  Still, so many possibilities had opened in front of her. Rolf had some freedom to move about. Could she borrow him to help her? Could she get him to look for the knife that would let Elli's hair grow back? Could he find the wishing handkerchief for her? Could he bring them out of the palace? Or since his master sent him for the princess, was she all he could retrieve from the palace?

  "Oh, there he goes," Rolf said, sitting up and glancing toward the other side of the inn, as if he could see through the walls. "He's getting ready to strike the tinderbox and light the candle. Tonight is my turn, so I'll have to be going soon."

  "Can you get me into the palace?" Merrigan asked. "Since you're going in to get the princess, could you take me with you, leave me there, and pick me up when you bring her back?"

  "Don't see why not," he said, and a second later turned transparent and dashed through the wall.

  "What are you going to do?" Bib asked.

  "Look for Elli's knife." Merrigan slid off the bed and went to the pegs on the far wall where her and Elli's few changes of clothes had been hung up to air out and lose some of their wrinkles. The dark gray was perfect for pretending to be a servant in the palace. No one paid attention to servants, except other servants. This late into the evening, chances were good most of the servants would be settling in for the night, or they had gone home.

  First, she would determine if there was a uniform for the servants. If so, she would take a set for herself, to help her blend in better. Then she could walk about more freely. Merrigan doubted the palace would be even one-fourth the size of her father's palace. She doubted it would take her very long to locate the throne room or the treasure chamber in the Windward palace. Likely this little country of fishermen might not even have enough treasure to require a treasure
chamber. Probably the king kept it in a large chest. If she was lucky, the knife and the magic handkerchief would be stored together.

  "Ready?" Rolf said, sliding to a stop in the room again, just as she finished buttoning the high collar of her gray dress.

  "Umm ... how ..." Merrigan stepped up close to the big dog and gulped delicately. His back was higher than her head. She supposed she could step up on the bed to climb up on his back, but how was she to hold onto him? He did have a collar under all that tangled hair, didn't he? Falling off him before she got into the palace, or even while going through a solid stone wall, would be highly inconvenient.

  "Just hop up and touch my collar. I tuck the princess's hand under my collar and she stays on with no problem at all."

  "Very well." Merrigan raised her skirts and stepped up onto the bed. The mattress sagged slightly under her feet, but she had no fear of stepping through the gaps between the ropes that supported the mattress. With a hop, she got up onto Rolf's back, digging both hands into the thick, tangled fur around his neck. She found the collar and immediately stopped sliding.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  "Good luck!" Bib cried, before Merrigan could respond.

  Then they were off, moving in a blur. Every time Merrigan thought she could see a wall coming toward them, they were through it before she could brace herself for impact. It was a somewhat exhilarating way to travel, but she wouldn't recommend it to anyone. In what felt like only a few galloping steps, they stood inside the small courtyard of what would be a manor house of a prosperous merchant in Avylyn. Merrigan slid off, revising her estimate of how long it would take to search this palace.

  Rolf nodded to her, then reared back on his hind legs and leaped, up onto the roof of the wing directly to her right. Two more leaps took him up two more stories, to a balcony that Merrigan thought sure would snap under the dog's weight. He passed through the wall. She found it rather disturbing to watch in the moonlight, so she turned away. Now, where was she in relation to the throne room or wherever treasures would be kept?

  She chose the nearest, most likely door. It led her into what she assumed was the receiving room, where petitioners awaited their chance to stand before the king. There were padded benches along both walls, several doors leading off the long room, and a decent runner down the middle to soften the sound of boots on the flagstone floor. Merrigan found the furnishings rather charming in their simplicity, though she could never understand the attraction of decorating with nets and seashells. The long murals of ocean vistas, however, she found soothing. They would be even lovelier in the daylight, rather than in the long streaks of moonlight from the windows high on both walls.

  She took the first door to her right off the reception room, deciding to take her search counterclockwise. It would be easier to remember where she had been if she did things systematically. The first room looked like a secretary's chamber, shelves of stacked papers, inkwells, quill pens, blotters, and an entire wall of drawers with abbreviated words marked on little bits of paper attached to the front of each drawer. Not a likely place to hide magical items. There might be more to this room than appeared in the moonlight that spilled over her shoulder, but she couldn't take the time to find a candle or lantern, or risk someone seeing the light and coming to investigate.

  Merrigan suspected it would take her several trips to do even a basic search.

  The second room looked like a sort of miniature kitchen, or a pantry for serving visitors. She saw stacks of plates and shelves of cups and pitchers. The third door on the right wall turned out to be a long passageway from another wing of the palace. Merrigan saved that for another night of exploring, and hoped there wouldn't be any need. She might walk into the servants' wing. Granted, that would shorten her search, because no one hid treasures in the servants' domain, with all the dirty clothes and dirty dishes and mending and tools. Then again, that passageway might lead to the royal family's living quarters. She could imagine the king hiding treasures there. Perhaps a hole under the floor of his sitting room? Or perhaps it would have been safer to hide something under the nursery floor? The queen's sitting room? The schoolroom?

  There was only one door in the wall directly opposite where she had entered the receiving room. The throne room. She was mildly impressed. The craftsmanship was simple and dignified. The woodwork gleamed, in the cornices and the beams decorating the vaulted ceiling, the high-backed throne wide enough for two to sit, the dais with one step—high enough to signal the presence of royalty, but not too high. Quiet dignity. She wondered if the current king had designed this throne room, or it was a holdover from a previous king who had ruled with austere dignity. The decorations of a throne room could reveal quite a lot about the king.

  She was wasting time, critiquing the fashion sense of the very people she needed to steal from. Merrigan walked the perimeter of the room, trying to decipher through gray shadows and black shadows and silvery streaks of moonlight where a good hiding place might be for a magic knife and an enchanted handkerchief. The knife was supposed to be encrusted with jewels. Where would a king of fishermen display something so gaudy, so out of character for his kingdom, or would he hide it?

  "No, please," she whispered. If King Devon stayed in character, he would have had the jewels removed, sold, and the money used for the good of the kingdom.

  Hadn't Quincy pointed out repairs to the cobblestoned streets and the new breakwater and docks, built since his last trip to Seafoam? Where would the money for such things have come from, other than adding to the taxes? The people wouldn't speak of their rulers with honest admiration and respect if the king had raised their taxes. The money had come from somewhere else. If the king sold the jewels, where was the knife?

  "Please, please," she whispered as she sped up her walking tour of the perimeter of the room, "please don't have melted it down, or worse, given it to one of your guards? Or decided to use it for a filleting knife when you went fishing!"

  She flinched and pressed both hands over her mouth, and it seemed that her voice, though a whisper, was still shrill enough to ring off the vaulted ceiling.

  Discretion urged her to retreat, out of the throne room, out of the receiving room, and back to the courtyard where Rolf had left her. Merrigan spent the rest of the night curled up in the shadows on a bench, until the moon slid behind the high roofs of the palace. She thought long and hard until she started to doze, then jerked herself awake, and repeated the process.

  She needed to get into the palace in daylight, when she could see details better. How was she going to gain not just admittance, but the freedom to wander around and poke into things, open doors and raise lids? She needed to be invited to sew for the queen and princess. Tomorrow, she would make some noise, get some attention, let the entire city know a master seamstress, worthy of royalty, had come to Windward.

  However, Merrigan had learned the hard way that no plan was entirely flawless. Something always destroyed a plan, simply because other people operated by their own choices and reasons, and they could not be controlled. More the pity. She needed a backup plan.

  Starting tomorrow, she would confront Rolf's master. It was useless to try to convince him he would enjoy being a king. She would have to play upon his sense of duty and honor as a soldier, so eventually, he would march up to the doors of the palace and demand Princess Dulcibella in marriage. With the support of the soldier—what had Rolf said his name was, anyway?—Merrigan would have open access to the palace. She might even be able to simply ask for the knife and have it handed to her.

  First, she had to make sure the solder looked worthy of becoming heir to the throne.

  Contemplating all that work, just to get hold of the knife, exhausted her. Merrigan had nearly fallen asleep, for the fourth time, when Rolf dropped down to land in the courtyard in front of her. She was so delighted to see him, because it was cold in the courtyard, she hugged him before she climbed up onto his back. At the inn, Elli was stunned at the sight of Rolf filling up
their room, but had the good sense not to scream.

  She burst into tears when she heard Merrigan's plan, hugged her, and swore she was the most wonderful, kind, clever, generous woman in the entire world. She promised once she had her tail back, she would swim to the deepest crushing depths of the sea to find the rare green pearl that was reputed to counteract any poison, heal any wound, and break any curse. No matter how long it took her, and it had taken the last successful hunter eighty years, she would find the pearl, to thank good, kind, generous, clever, brave Princess Merrigan.

  Eighty years? Merrigan shuddered and told Elli to wash her face and go back to bed. By the time the grateful little mermaid found the pearl, it wouldn't do her any good because Clara's curse would nearly have run its course. In eighty years' time, what good would it do her to return to Carlion to reclaim her throne? No one who had sneered and found joy in her downfall would be there to grind their teeth in frustration, chagrin, and fear.

  "Well, we have a long day and a lot of work ahead of us," Merrigan said, once Rolf had left and there was air to breathe in the room again. She picked up Bib and put him on the low table by the window, as he had requested, so the rays from the rising sun would touch him in the morning. "It's best we all get a good night's sleep, what's left of it. We need to find a way to convince the soldier—"

  "His name is Warden," Bib said.

  "Thank you. Convince Warden that we are here to help him, and we aren't madwomen trying to complicate his life."

  "We could tell him the truth," Elli offered, as she slid back under her blankets.

  "The truth?" Merrigan bit her tongue to hold back the bitter chuckle and the retort that the truth was a pitiful tool used by those who had no other resources. That was something Leffisand would say, and look where his cynical attitude and outlook had gotten him.

  "Tell him we need a hero to help us find the knife so I can get my tail back and we can break the curse on you. This kingdom needs a strong king, and he's so kind and honorable. Princess Dulcibella is so much in love with him that if he doesn't marry her, she'll probably die of a broken heart."