Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ > Books: fairy-tale‎ (96)

Princess Miserella was a beautiful princess if you counted her eyes and nose and mouth and all the way down to her toes. But inside, where it was hard to see, she was the meanest, wickedest, and most worthless princess around. She liked stepping on dogs. She kicked kittens. She threw pies in the cook’s face.

“Heed me well, Fairest. When you stand before that thing, when you peer into its depths, you also allow it to peer into you. It will see the very darkest of your fears; it will sup on them and find them delicious. And it will use them against you in terrible ways.”

"Now I will believe that there are unicorns."
- The Tempest, William Shakespeare

"Now I will believe that there are unicorns."
- The Tempest, William Shakespeare

What could one do with a unicorn? Look at it and long for it, and love it.

Bert and Dehlia had planted the seed of thought in her mind, and it was growing away busily and putting out new shoots of thought, all of which were quite bothersome, because they were about things like responsibility and fairness, and thinking about others, and why being a princess perhaps should be about more than just having a nice library and three meals a day, particularly when other people didn’t have these things …

The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.

Freight got moved, more or less. Sometimes it wound up in the wrong place or was summarily dumped in the middle of nowhere. The machines were capricious gods. (This was part of the reason for the price of coffee.)

They were very good about letters, though. Anna’s grandson was the current train-priest, and he said that his god thought letters were prayers and moved them as a kind of professional courtesy.

You appreciated that sort of thing in a god.

“Why didn’t you go to the ball?” squawked the bird. “That was the point!”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. What would I do at a ball? A bunch of people standing around being snippy at each other and not talking about anything of any purpose. I caught a bit of it from the servants as I was passing through the manor. No thank you.”

“There’s dancing, though!”

“I don’t dance,” said Hannah shortly. “Dancing’s not a thing you just pick up in a garden.”

There was a girl who died every morning, and it would not have been a problem except that she kept bees.

Sleep like death and death like sleep are common curses. It is inevitable that they become tangled. Fair folk and wicked queens are not always precise in their diction.

There are consequences for imprecision, and it is always someone else who has to pay.

Real fear came upon the town. In the past, girls had vanished every few years. True, there were rumors of girls being taken from other villages from time to time, but those children hardly seemed real. Now, as the famine deepened and the people of Duva went without, it was as if whatever waited in the woods had grown greedier and more desperate, too.

When her father returned to the palace and Yeva heard what he had done, she said, “Papa, forgive me, but what way is this to find a husband? Soon I will have a fine mirror, but will I have a good man?”

Now, if you have been foolish enough to wander from the path, it is up to you to make your way back to the road… If you are lucky, you will find your friends again. They will pat you on the back and soothe you with their laughter. But as you leave that dark gap in the trees behind, remember that to use a thing is not to own it.

This is the problem with even lesser demons. They come to your doorstep in velvet coat and polished shoes. They tip their hats and smile and demonstrate good table manners. They never show you their tails.

Magic flowed through all of them, a song no mortal could hear, that only the water folk could reproduce. In some it seemed to rush in and out like the tide, leaving little in its wake. But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there, forming deep pools of power.

The wondering burned inside them both but took different shapes because of what they believed. Rose wanted to know why their father had been taken, and Snow wanted to know how to get him back. Their wondering touched the edges of things they could never know, about this place that had changed their fortunes once and would change them again.

There was one thing [the king] wanted, and such a simple thing, too, such a compassionate desire. More than anything else, my husband yearned for me to love his son. The little prince was all that remained of the boy’s venerated mother; a pale wraith, sweet if slightly stupid, given to whimsy. She was beloved by the court, I’m told, an overgrown pet whom no one saw reason to censure, charming enough in brief doses. When she died, they mourned for weeks.

Small wonder they feared me: the flint-eyed, sharp-mouthed wildling the king brought home from a distant land, mere months after the tender one’s tragic demise—midnight and bone to my noonday predecessor.

Surely a price will be demanded, he thought feverishly. Witches promise you sweets and then shove you in the oven.

Managing Your Flamingo

So there she is, Alice underground,
life more complex than imagined.
A game, she’s told, though without
rules or white lines or a sense of finality.
They hand her a bird, the pink of longing,
beak as sharp as an executioner’s sword,
its gangle of legs tangling her skirt.
The queen growls: Manage your flamingo,
and the others shout: Play on, play through.
As if it were life.
As perhaps it is.