by Jessa Lucas
“That’s the palace. It glows all the way from Lithron, turned on at night by the moonlight so that even a thousand miles away, it shines like a lighthouse for the princess to come home.”
I frowned at the lyricism. It was beautiful and way too much at the same time— and very probably not true.
“Are you ready to face it?” he asked.
“How is someone who can’t remember anything about her life supposed to fight to get it back?”
Jude’s fingers tightened around my shoulder. “Perhaps your memories of this life will come back with time.”
“Or maybe it’s a part of the spell that can never be broken,” I considered aloud, “in which case I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for all of that.” I motioned toward everything beyond with a great sweeping gesture. I didn’t know the first thing about being a princess, and I wasn’t so sure it was going to come to me naturally.
Jude pressed in closer. Whether he was immune to me or not didn’t matter so much when I wasn’t so immune to him. His touch made my ladybits hungry for all sorts of things which I was fairly certain wouldn’t be a good idea, and my ladybits— in fantasyland or otherwise— hadn’t indulged their hunger in a long, long time.
“Sy said strange things happened on the ship that brought us here. Is that true?” I asked softly, not able to help the temptress in me even if she was magically ineffective. “Did you all fall for me? Is that what Sy meant?”
Jude rested his chin on my head, his breath ruffling my hair. “I venture to reason that why you were truly locked away was not that you possessed dangerous power, but that you woke dangerous power in men. Not with a touch or a look, but with something in your very being that has nothing to do with magic.”
It was a line, but oh how it worked.
I turned to him swiftly and rested both hands on either side of his face. The stubble was misleading; Jude was a pretty boy through and through. My breath caught as his head bent closer to mine.
“Saylora?”
“Mmm?” I said, trying to tune into the sound of a name I wasn’t used to when my eyes were so transfixed on those lips.
“I’m very glad that you are awake.”
I swallowed, wanting him to say those words again so I could watch them move his lips. Or better yet, mine could do the job.
I inched closer, wondering how long it was possible to draw out a single kiss…
As Jude’s breath brushed my face, I suddenly drew back. What was I doing? I didn’t know this man at all! Hell-- I didn’t even know myself apparently.
I sighed as I stepped out of his arms and gazed out into the night, not about to apologize or qualify the moment. It was such a silly thing to be preoccupied with handsome men when all that extended beyond my sight in that impressive darkness allegedly had my name on it.
It was legitimately starting to get chilly up here. I huddled into Jude’s cloak and he swung an arm around me as I tried to figure out how the fuck I was supposed face an evil queen and survive long enough to make it to happily ever after.
Jude parted ways with me at the landing below, probably to convince me I had some sort of autonomy in this tower or something. It was hard to believe when I didn’t know who to believe.
I was headed back to my room to mull over the massiveness of what was ahead without the distractingly good looking (and possibly untrustworthy) men when I heard it.
A trilling melody floated through the shadowy halls, a chant of sorts, a song... a song which I felt certain I knew. The voice was female and I’d been under the impression that I was the only one of those around here.
Like sings to like.
My feet halted as I considered the path I would take, but no sooner had they paused did they find pace again, meandering down the halls, passing by chamber after chamber to follow the sound. It was haunting but it was true, and in my gut... in my gut, I knew the song held answers.
The sound cut off at an arched wooden door. The woman stopped singing abruptly, as if she could sense my presence on the other side of it. I stood there for far longer than I intended as if under a spell. I was certain that opening this door would open up something bigger which I could never go back from.
But what the hell.
I’d fought the system my whole life— or whatever I thought had been my whole life— and now I was a goddamn princess. I would do what I wanted. My hand reached for the metal handle and tugged until the door swung open.
At first, there was almost nothing but pitch black. A skylight above sent a sharp beam of light directly down and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a little fountain trickling in the center of the room. Vines clung to the cold stone, and all sorts of plants and flowers blossomed along the walls. Just across from the doorway, I could see myself cast in silhouette, the light from the hall reflecting into a huge gilded mirror.
But there was no one in the room.
It was all I could do to keep myself from jumping when the voice spoke from out of the darkness. “Sneaky princesses don’t know what they will find when they enter through doors with memories blind.”
“What?” I said, crinkling my nose at the rhyme. “Who are you?”
Where are you, more like. In “normal” circumstances, a bodiless voice would’ve given me chills. But her voice... her singing... it hadn’t scared me. It had called to me.
“Step inside, Princess, and close the door tight, for your questions have answers in the dead of this night.”
What the actual fuck. Called to or not, I wasn’t stupid.
“I’d prefer not to,” I answered.
I looked around again, ready for a cloaked old hag to pull away from the wall or a creature to coalesce from the waters of the fountain.
“Step into the light, songbird, and let me see your face. Long has it been without another woken woman in this place...”
This time I obeyed. Morbid curiosity, I suppose.
The door thudded to a close behind me as I moved deeper into the conservatory. As I did, I realized I’d been waiting for the owner of the voice to appear in the most obvious of places. Anywhere but where she actually was: inside the mirror. Something shimmered and took form in the surface of the glass like a hologram, and the reflection of a tremendously devastating face stared out at me.
I looked behind me, but there was no one there. “What the…”
The woman clucked her tongue. “Ah, songbird, wings to fly and yet eyes which do not easily spy.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
The Reflection’s face was mesmerizing; her skin glowed with pale light and her hair floated around her heart-shaped face as though tossed in billowing currents. I knew instantly, like an invisible string was pulled taut between us, exactly what she was.
“Secrets in your mind, secrets along your spine, secrets I cannot betray, secrets which must stay mine.”
I frowned at her, trying to assess what sort of magic I had stumbled upon. Her lullaby voice certainly carried tune, even in mere speech.
“Do you always speak in rhyme?” I asked, to which she nodded. My eyes narrowed and, the morbid curiosity growing by the second, I said, “I’m going to start a phrase, you finish it... mirror, mirror on the wall...”
“By the true queen, all men will fall.”
I raised my eyebrows, pleasantly surprised. “That’s a new one.”
“The princess has found her way awake, what of the curse does such a thing make…?” she pondered to herself as she stared out at me.
My eyes dropped from that terrible blue-eyed stare down to the palm she pressed against the glass as though it was merely a window between us. I could see each of her fingerprints so clearly... surely she was no mere enchantment.
I slipped a finger between the wall and the frame just to verify, but sure enough— stone cold wall. I touched a finger tentatively to the glass, too. Cold, hard surface. “What on earth,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Earth the place that once was, the place which now l
ives… in dusty books and tales which only oldest memory gives.”
So the rhyming, that was starting to get on my nerves.
“Do you have a name or are you only an enchantment?”
Her eyes grew wide, her voice drawn tight to conceal her whisper: “My name most do not think to query, but of the answer I have not grown weary, for though I am but reflection today, Aiayla I was before the queen I betrayed.”
“You’re— you’re the queen’s sister?” I said, not hiding my surprise very well. The Reflection bowed her head in solemn confirmation. “She trapped you... in a mirror?” I tried to wrap my brain around why the queen had such an affinity for caging sirens in glass.
“For so treacherous a crime it might have been worse; I prophesy in rhyme but am not dead from a curse,” she answered quietly.
“So about that curse...” I said. “Help a fellow seductress out. I sleep for half a century, my kingdom moves on, blah blah blah, but I’m still confused on the point of it all. Why not just kill me? Why trap me in a tower?”
“Valtronya was a cunning, spiteful queen, but required was she by rules unseen—”
“—Any chance you can not do the Doctor Seuss Spark Notes version of this for me?”
Earth references aside, the Reflection seemed to pick up on my meaning. She lifted long fingers up and for a moment I swore they were going to come straight out of the mirror and strangle me, then I realized she was only gesturing at the fountain in the center of the room.
I walked over to it just as a current of cool air swept through, and I became acutely aware that I was still wearing only my nightgown and robe. I silently swore at myself for having begged Jude to take the cloak back after my momentary lapse of judgement. Boundaries had felt important at that point, but this drafty tower was seriously making me regret it.
I stared down at the water, waiting with apprehension. Trapped reflections, tall towers. I couldn’t tell if I was in Snow White or Rapunzel or all of the above.
The water began to eddy in great sweeping circles, the air around it gathering speed and whisking my hair around my face. And then everything settled as if there had never been disturbance to begin with. Images formed in the water, two women in a luxurious room. One I recognized as Aiayla with the cold blue eyes. The other woman— she had the same eyes, but her coloring was opposite. Raven black hair sat piled on her head, ruby lips tight as though blood she’d drawn herself had painted them. Those gleaming eyes sparkled with cunning. With silent rage.
I looked over my shoulder at the Reflection. “You’re doing this?”
“Yes,” she breathed in a low, ominous voice.
I’d always wondered how the old sages in the stories always knew everything, as if they were in communion with some great wisdom no other player could touch. As if she could read my mind, the Reflection said: “In the immortal existence of neither life nor death, time holds me not, nor sleep nor breath. There are no boundaries to attaining the knowledge which those of the living mind could never acknowledge.”
I frowned, confounded by the nonsense. It was almost hard to take her seriously with all the rhyming.
“Now a siren, a siren is a different thing entirely,” a deadly voice boomed. My heart lurched forward and I realized it wasn’t coming from the Reflection. I turned and found that the voice was coming from the pool.
Such an interesting lack of technology in this tower, what with the torches and the draftiness, et cetera, et cetera. Never would’ve guessed it’d have surround sound.
The dark haired woman was speaking, pacing back and forth as she unveiled her diatribe. The crown slipped modestly between the threads of her hair and her elaborate gown made it easy enough to tell who she was. Her wardrobe seemed an unnecessary clue, though; regality was encapsulated in the queen regent’s sharp beauty, in her confident posture.
“Not man, not fae, not godspawn. Do you know, Aiayla, what the myths say sirens began as?” the queen asked, malice filling her voice. “The sirens were once the dreamers among the people. They envisioned a world where women did not require talents for persuasion in order to be heard by men. Ironic, is it not, that persuasion is their gift, no? Persuasion and death. You see, so devastated is the siren woman by the disparity between her dream and her reality— by the cost of such a gift— that she copes through the violent ends of her pursuits. She might dream in truth, but find truth in the face of men she cannot.
“And so the siren resigns herself to being the monster nature made of her. In selfishness, she perverts a worthy dream to the spite all. Men fall at her feet, and she destroys them. The great paradox of the siren is that while her kind once dreamed, she makes men all the wearier of the woman, and in her fury with such an outcome, she destroys the few decent ones we are given.”
“You do not even love him,” Aiayla breathed.
The beautiful queen laughed. It was hard, mirthless. “And you do, little sister?”
Aiayla was silent.
“I didn’t think so,” Valtronya snarled. “He is your king. How dare you! He could have you executed for your little song. I could have you executed.”
The tension was palpable, even as the scene played out on mere water. Aiayla’s face became a mask of fear, and she took off for the door. It slammed shut on a surge of power and she stepped back, shock on her face as she stared at her sister in awe and horror.
“Your powers have grown,” Aiayla said quietly.
“Much. You cannot begin to imagine the things I can do to warp a body, to confound a mind…”
“You wouldn’t.”
“It is not a creative enough punishment,” the queen smiled. “Tell me, what exactly did you mean to accomplish, Aiayla? What pretty little secrets were you going to whisper in my husband’s ear while the two of you laid together until daybreak like young lovers?”
“What things do you whisper, Valtronya, in the dead of night when he cannot hear the curses you slip into his sleeping ears? It has become very clear what sort of game you play, the kind of dark magic you toy with like a kitten tangled in its own ball of yarn. You have been ensnared by it. I don’t even recognize you anymore.”
Aiayla stepped forward, prodding her finger at the space between herself and the queen. “You think people out there don’t know what it is you do from the king’s side? Your marriage stood for an alliance you wanted nothing to do with until your beauty caught a royal’s eye. But beauty is not enough anymore, is it Onya? Now you need power. You need more power than those born with it.”
The queen pursed her blood red lips. For all the obvious beauty she held, the expression was full of enough contempt to spoil it.
“You are driving division in our lands,” Aiayla continued, “fashioning a secret loyalty for yourself. Convenient for Dramon Dagma, where scum with far more dangerous powers than I dwell. You are feeding on their wickedness, and they on your influence.”
Queen Valtronya’s gaze was steely. “You will pay for challenging me,” she said, the hushed words sharper than a blade. “And he will pay for making a fool of me.”
At that moment, the doors burst open and a guard stepped in, escorting a tall man in black.
“Aiayla, meet the Carver.”
Aiayla looked wide-eyed at the innocuous seeming man as though his name preceded him. The queen motioned for the Carver to draw near, and he withdrew a long blade.
“Cut off her wings,” the queen commanded. “My sister will no longer have use for them.”
“Why are you doing this, Onya?” Aiayla cried.
“Lest you try to fly away again, like the last time we had this little conversation about you interfering with what and whom is mine. My mercy has run dry in this matter.”
Aiayla turned to the man in black, and I recognized the silky smooth tone that came to her voice. “You needn’t do this, Carver—”
“He is immune to your vile powers,” the queen hissed, beckoning the Carver forward.
Aiayla looked back and forth between the
two of them, and began to weep when she realized there was no escape from her fate.
She shook her head sadly at Valtronya. “I see the grapple for power every day in you, Onya. Your eyes have grown heavy with the toil of it. One day it will kill you, and no one will mourn.”
Valtronya shrugged, and the Carver moved in on Aiayla. I looked away for the duration of the shrieks, wondering if anyone else in the tower could hear the siren’s screams or if this playback was for my viewing pleasure only.
“Such a price to pay for a man you did not even love,” the queen said after the wailing waned to pained whimpers. I peered back at the water hesitantly, only to see Valtronya shaking her head in mock disappointment. Aiayla was crouched on the floor, soaked in blood where I assumed her wings would’ve been. I hadn’t even known sirens could have wings. I certainly didn’t.
“No, but I love what he has made of the Five Realms, and I know the end you fight to see.”
“I dare a siren to love a man,” Valtronya seethed. “To truly love one, more than she loves controlling him. I am afraid the siren is nothing but feeble bone and weeping soul underneath the power she claims. And who would love that?”
“And I,” Aiayla said softly, “dare you, sister, to love anything more than you love the opportunity your cursed beauty gives you.”
The queen’s eyes flashed and she raised her arms like vipers ready to strike, the clawed nails fangs. And when she brought them down violently with words in a language like thunder, the pool of water went dark. As it cleared, I saw what I thought was a soul being siphoned from Aiayla’s human form and funneling into her reflection in the large mirror across the room. A loud thump sounded from it: Aiayla’s fists against the inside of the mirror as she tried to beat her way out of her new prison. “Valtronya, please. Please!”
The queen approached with deliberate steps. “Since you so love to sing, sister, you can now sing to me every day. In fact, from now on you shall only speak in verse. That seems a fitting plague on your tongue.”
The queen spread her fingers wide and with a poof, something imperceptible seemed to shift in the room... the aftershocks of a dark magic.
