Chapter 62: The Beast of All Princesses
Snip.
The scissors moved, snapping shut.
The room sat deep in the mountain's warm halls. A gold-framed standing mirror stood at the side of her private chamber, taken from the treasury with a lot of persuasion having been required in order for her to get it. Barjuchne was very possessive of just about everything.
Snip.
A lock of curled wool fell away.
Bruschetta stared, unfocused, into the mirror. Her sight was lost in her own eyes. The scissors rose and fell, cutting another strand of knotted wool. The wool had been failing her for months now. It had gone matted and flat where the sickness had worked through it, the curl losing its spring.
Snip.
Knots came away. The little pile on the vanity grew.
She looked at the mirror, at the girl inside it. Her eyes stayed open through all of it, dry and wide.
She was somewhere else entirely.
Years ago, someplace else.
Rain had pattered against the tall window of the tower, heavy, the glass running with water in long crawling lines. It was dark outside. The gardens below were drowned and shapeless. The storm moved across the hills with a low, continuous growl. The princess stood at the window with her face held close to it, and in her hand she held a rag. The rag was bloodied through. Smears of red still marked the corner of her mouth where she had pressed it.
Outside, thunder.
She drew on the fogged glass with one finger. Nothing in particular. A circle. A curl. Shapes for the sake of the motion.
They could not afford paints because of her.
Her fever sat behind her eyes and softened all the edges of the world.
Lightning came. A flash.
The window became opaque. Her own reflection stared back at her for one brief instant, making eye contact with her.
She froze, seeing herself.
Disgust rose in her gut. She wanted to vomit.
Her finger fell from the glass.
Snip.
A lock of curled hair fell down, and the scissors rose again. Bruschetta cut out another knot. Her eyes remained unblinking.
"And it was so, that brave Sir Knight manifested from another world at the sound of her desperate cry," Bruschetta read, quietly, aloud, to herself.
She lay on her stomach across her old bed with her feet kicking in the air, the book propped on her elbows, the one candle down to a guttering stub.
"He was not a good knight, chivalrous and noble. He was a wicked, evil spirit. But he was hers. The Black Knight. He heard Princess Acacia across time and across the worlds themselves, their hearts aligned from afar, and he arose at her feet. She was the least of all princesses, plagued by the Consumption. But despite her lack of power, it was her desperately boiling blood that called his heart to hers."
Bruschetta smiled into the well-worn pages of the historical legend, her feet kicking behind her.
She loved this one.
It was an old tale, from history long past, of a princess who had suffered her exact illness. The same fevers. The same rags. The same careful voices around the bed. Abandoned and sent to die, that princess had summoned a great being into the world, and the being had stayed at her side through everything until she rose to become the dark queen of the nation.
Of course Bruschetta felt connected to it. How could she not?
She looked up at the dark corner of her room. Every candle had burnt out but one. She sat upright, set the book down, and held both hands out in front of her.
"Arise, Sir Knight!"
Nothing.
Not that she had expected anything. She was only playing.
Then, a noise. A stomping. Rattling. The candlestick on the nightstand shook.
Her door slammed open, the handle smashing into the brick wall and cracking the stone, a chip of it skittering across the floor.
"SHUT UP!" Her father filled the doorway, then crossed the room in a few strides. "IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!"
Bruschetta quickly bowed her head. "I'm sor-"
A crack. The book came off the bed and struck down over her head.
She lay there, holding her head. "I'm sorry!" she said.
He brought it down again.
“I said be quiet!”
Snip.
Bruschetta stared, unblinking, into the mirror. Her hands tightened around the scissors.
"It would be better for us if she were dead," said her older brother's voice from inside the room. He did not even bother to lower his tone.
Bruschetta stood in the hallway, holding an old doll that smelt of mildew. Its dress had been washed so many times the printed flowers had faded to ghosts. She had owned it since she was four. It was used even then, gifted to her by one of the servants.
Candlelight and shadows poured through the doorway beside her. "The cost of her treatments is more than we can afford," her brother went on. "She's holding us back."
Inside the room, wine was poured. Glass met glass.
Bruschetta looked down at the doll. She turned it over in her hands, carefully, and pressed it against her chest, and stood in the hallway a long while, in the strip of light spilling out around her feet.
Snip.
A droplet of blood ran down from her scalp, where the scissors had slipped too deeply, staining the tip of the woollen curl red.
Her eyes stared, not flinching at all.
"She's so gross," whispered the baroness' daughter. "You can smell her too, right?" She looked around the small table at the clique of girls gathered for it.
"Yes! I did not want to say anything, but..." started one of them.
"Can you imagine being covered in hair all over?" asked the young sister of a countess from the east. "I want to vomit just thinking about it."
"I'd just die if I were her. They have hooves, you know? They're actual animals."
"Well," said the first girl, and smiled. "She's going to, you know."
It had been meant as a social gathering. The young of the noble houses of the region were arranged around a little table in the garden, the summer bright, the tea fresh.
Bruschetta was actually sitting there too. At the same table. Looking down into her cup in quiet shame.
One of them looked her way. “Hey. Really. Why don’t you just kill yourself?” she asked, the others gasping and then snickering to themselves.
Bruschetta’s downward eyes that never found the strength to rise drifted in aversion away to the side.
Her hand rose from her lap, slowly, and hovered over the cake knife that lay by the tea.
Her fingers gripped around it.
Screaming. Shattering. A crash.
Bruschetta lay on the fallen standing mirror, on top of it, screaming, bending the scissors bluntly as she stabbed down through the glass and through the frame, killing what she saw inside. The blade struck the stone beneath the knocked-over mirror and slid upward with a long shriek. Her palm, her knees, and her hands opened on the glass all around her. Broken reflections lay in the shards on every side, dozens of her, each one wrong in its own particular way, and she struck out at them, fracturing them, screaming as she drove the scissors down again and again.
She saw her own eyes in a long sliver of mirror and stabbed at them.
Something grabbed her wrist and turned it aside.
The scissors made a final impact, the vibration carrying down her forearm.
Bruschetta sat there in the wreckage, her eyes and her hand shaking together, and looked. The bent scissor’s tips were stuck fast in the narrow gap between two black scales.
She looked up, staring at a pair of red eyes.
Her grip slowly loosened. The princess came back to herself from somewhere very far away. The blood-covered scissors clattered down into the shards.
Bruschetta stared at Barjuchne. Her mouth opened, then closed, then found its words.
"I don't know why," said Bruschetta, quietly. "I didn't mean to be bad. But I was, and everyone always hated me because I kept being me all the time. I shouldn't have gotten sick so much. I should have tried harder to be prettier."
Her face began to change.
"So why did you make me come here?" she asked. Her features contorted, and she lifted her bleeding hand against her woollen torso, smearing red across it. "My lungs feel better. But I still don't feel good." Then she broke, the same as the mirror. "So why couldn't you have just let me die?" she yelled, grasping and shaking her head violently with her free hand as if it were filled with things she was trying to physically rattle out of it.
It was just that for a moment.
Then, slowly, the hand that had secured Bruschetta’s wrist let go and slid to her shoulders. The dragon girl took Bruschetta against herself before slowly lifting her up out of the glass in both arms. Fragments of it clung to her wool and hung there, catching the light, shimmering.
Barjuchne did not speak gently. She did not use the careful, pretending soft voice that everyone else used when trying to console her. She simply gathered her up, like anything else, like any other normal thing.
"Because you are mine," was all that the dragon replied with. "And I prefer it when you're here."
She carried the princess away, cradled against her chest, stepping through the glass and back out through the broken-down door and cracked wall.
A droplet of black blood slid down from the gap in the dragon’s scales and mingled with the red on Bruschetta's wool, staining it darker still.