Fallen Princeborn: Chosen

by Jean Lee

  She pulls away into silence, shoulders shaking. She moves quickly toward the table. Her hand lingers a moment over the webbed foot, then tosses it into the farthest corner of the theater. “Seaweed’s supposed to be good for skin, right?” she asks. She rubs her sleeve under her nose. She continuously uses only the one hand. The other hand’s fingers are swollen, twitching. Those Stellaqui broke her fingers, and I have no comfrey, damn them all.

  Liam measures his steps towards her. “I do not know. Magic of the land works with land’s gifts, not the water’s.”

  “Worth a shot, anyway.” She holds the plate up, takes a quick sniff. “Think there’s much bacteria from the duck meat?”

  “Bacteria?”

  Because magical guys who’ve lived a millennium are really worried about salmonella, Charlie. “Never mind.” She picks up the clay bottle and smells. Hmm. Sips. Rather summery, like lemonade. It chills her throat and stomach, then moves quickly to her limbs with a running lightness that, well, makes her feel pretty damn good. Even the broken hand’s throbbing slows a bit. She dumps some on the seaweed. “You should drink that veli.”

  Liam swallows once and gags. “By Aether, this stuff worsens with every drink.” He studies the sparkling lavender liquid for a moment. “Actually, there might…” he spreads the seaweed across the table, then drizzles it with veli. “Now help me put some on. Somewhere awful.”

  Charlotte gives him a look.

  “Somewhere hideous, then.” He sits on the edge of the table while Charlotte carefully picks up one soaked leaf and presses it against a cluster of welts near his gash from Captain’s spear. “I feel a tingling over the pain. Better than nothing.”

  “Oh!” Charlotte races back to their bench and comes back with the blood dagger. “This stopped the bleeding before. Maybe if we hold it together you can do one of your magic lullabies.”

  Liam crooks an eyebrow. “’Magic lullabies’?”

  “You know what I mean.” She holds the dagger’s blade in the air between them, and concentrates. Momentary embers flash inside its feathers.

  Liam bites back his questions. Why this cracking in her, this burning? Why? He is too thankful to see Charlotte’s attention wholly upon him and not inward. The set of her jaw as she presses blade to weed inspires a dozen sculptures in his mind.

  “Now, your hand here.” She places his hand, full of disgusting bile, upon her own, and holds it. “Start singing.”

  He turns his head just enough that his curls rest upon Charlotte’s arm. The Gaelic starts hollow in his belly, but as it travels through his heart’s fire to his hand so firmly held, a rich warmth swells and seeps into his skin. Charlotte must surely feel it as well, for her face and neck flush a rose’s pink.

  A sly ribbon of gold travels through the engraved feathers. Once it hisses away at the tip, Charlotte pulls the blood dagger back. The seaweed is bloated brown, sopping. Liam’s bruises and gash remain, but the welts that were beneath the leaf are gone.

  “Water cure for a water hurt.” Charlotte smiles briskly and grabs another leaf. “Bet they didn’t think we could do this.”

  “I didn’t think we could do this.” Her smile infects him.

  “Because you forgot about the power of lo—hope. Never mind. .” Charlotte continues patting a leaf on more welts.

  Liam works his spells twice, thrice more. Were this a war, and I a prisoner, I would be required to steal an enemy blade to douse my own heart’s fire. I cannot swim, let alone out of these unknown depths. We know not where we are or what trial awaits us under a sovereign’s decree. Yet here we are, upon the table where they wish to dissect me, defying the elements. Healing. Such should not be possible. And yet—he closes his eyes to feel Charlotte’s delicate fingers spreading the leaf upon his back—here we are, in defiance of all that should be.

  “Perhaps, since we are breaking so many rules of elemental magic today,” Liam says, pushing the light tone a bit too much, “we could try the seaweed and dagger upon your hand next.”

  Charlotte’s fingertips pull away. “Any welts on your legs? I see some on your feet.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Don’t you start imping on me.”

  “That is not a word.”

  “Says you. Now I’m going to close my eyes. Take your pants off, and check yourself.” Charlotte turns around, her legs and arms crossed over each other.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Liam takes a nip of the starlight to clean that nasty taste of veli off his tongue. Did it ever taste acceptable? He’s certain it did once, when there was some lilac and honey. But now his appetite is so…limited.

  His denim trousers and underclothes fared better than the tunic. Only a few rips, the snap still holds. He sees the welts stretched themselves partly up his calves, but otherwise, his legs, groin, and buttocks are clean. “I may have missed something, if you care to see for yourself.”

  Charlotte snorts. “Just get your pants on, will you?”

  Thankfully, it only takes a few more leaves to heal Liam’s feet and calves. Both are hot and exhausted from magic’s constant coursing, and they soon finish the last of the starlight together while they lean against the operating table.

  Still, Liam tries, one last time. “Let us try your hand now. Please.”

  Charlotte wearily holds the swollen, bruised extremity. Liam wraps the seaweed as a bandage, eyes ever on Charlotte’s face to catch the slightest wince. Finished, Charlotte holds the dagger upon herself, and Liam begins.

  Charlotte stops him halfway through the spell. “Nothing’s happening. We’ll have to fix it topside.” She sets the blood dagger down and shakes out her good hand. “Guess seaweed’s not much for bones.”

  “Then perhaps…” Liam swallows, his words uncertain though his feelings are true. “Your burns are not on your bones.”

  A pause. “They are what they are, Liam. Leave it.” She doesn’t look at him, her head drooping to the other side, eyes unfocused. He can tell she’s too tired to fight, inside and out.

  He can see the splintering start afresh. Leather cracks against the door.

  “Where did your scars come from?”

  No answer.

  Liam turns around to sit facing her. Slow, gentle as a feather, his fingertips touch upon a tear in her tunic, revealing a small portion of the pink burn scars he knows cover Charlotte’s left arm and chest.

  She does not stop him.

  “Who did this to you?”

  Her voice so very, very small… “Don’t.”

  But Liam stays close, because the splintering becomes a breaking, and the door crumbles to cackles echoing louder and louder between old bones. A shadow now stands in the doorway, a powerful shadow with locks of his own. “They sewed their violence into you, a man, and some hag. Theirs was the violence you showed me before we fought Orna.” He doesn’t say unleashed, though that is the truer of the words. “It was their words you spat upon me, not your own..” He thinks of the woman he saw in Charlotte’s memory, the woman who held her daughters close after a fiend attempted to abduct one. “Did your mother not protect you?”

  Charlotte’s head pivots to reveal a look so cold Liam shudders. “As far as me and Anna were concerned, Mom died when the captain gave her Dad’s badge. Know what she did to that badge when we got to Bismarck? Chucked it into the Missouri. Didn’t ask Anna or me if we wanted it; just threw it like it was nothing. And the more meds she got her hands on, the more she blamed Dad for dying, blamed him for caring about strangers more than her.”

  Liam looks down, knowing he had punished Charlotte for caring about family more than him—a stranger. “Maybe his was the only love she knew.”

  “But what about us?” Charlotte snaps back. “Her daughters? We were desperate for her; we cried for her, but she just tuned us out, just swallowed another pill and curled up in the room she grew up in with its moldy dolls and torn lace and fucking mirror covered with hair ribbons. Oh, Grandma loved nothing more than having her kids back h
ome and to go on living like they were kids. Anna and me, the real kids? We didn’t exist. The only times she spoke to us was if she needed something from us, like a fucking whipping bitch to blame for anything she decided was going wrong in her life.”

  Liam thinks of his father, who only spoke to him if he needed something, or…worse. “Then it is good you could look after your sister.” His jealousy of Charlotte’s love for Anna, that could not be denied. But it had never occurred to him that perhaps such love was born of desperate necessity. Even he understood this situation, his own brother still with his parents, being forced into Who Knows What.

  The shadow in Charlotte’s inner doorway begins to take shape. It is a male wearing golden spectacles. He enters the bedroom of Charlotte, warrior queen of the tower, so brave, so defiant.

  Now scared. Shaking. Pretending to sleep.

  Liam imagines himself hot as fire, heavy as iron, a fortress wall—but the shadow walks through him, this permanent piece of Charlotte’s childhood.

  Charlotte lets out a sick laugh. “Oh, we weren’t alone. We had Uncle Mattie.”

  The shadow smiles with ghostly white teeth.

  “Uncle Mattie promised he knew how to take care of Mom. He promised he’d take care of us. And I just, I wanted to have that back, you know? To be cared for.”

  The shadow sits on the bed. Liam’s fists can’t break a single tooth.

  “I got special time with him because I was his favorite. I used to be daddy’s girl, now I could be his girl. He took me to concerts and boxing matches, all the things I liked, just me, and it felt…nice. You know? Special.”

  Orna…she had won Liam because she wouldn’t stop telling him how special he was…

  “And then he put a lock on my door. ‘I don’t want anyone else having you,’ he said. And then, then his hands, and he’d, make me open, and—"

  Liam wants space to tear. He wants time to burn. He wants to throw himself over his little warrior trapped, helpless. She’s so helpless, and he can do nothing to stop the hands on her hips turning her, spreading her, pulling up her nightdress, unbuckling his belt. This is what family does for each other—

  Liam rips Charlotte from those last words and cradles her in his lap, almost smothering her against his chest. Her tears stream down his skin, leaving goose pimples in their wake. He buries his face in her hair and rocks them both, inner talons fixed on those golden spectacles and what they’d do to that monstrous shadow, slowly, with the greatest of pains.

  “All I wanted was to die,” Charlotte sobs. “I got into fight after fight in high school, just hoping someone would finally bring a gun and put me out of my misery. But then one day Anna saw me fighting, and that stupid sweet dummy picked four wallets off the Ninth Circle Gang and got them running after her, right into school security. She was trying to save me. Me. I had beat the life out of those bastards just for talking about my sister. And I thought of Dad, and it just, I figured out why he never let us near Mom’s family. He wanted to keep the monsters out of our lives, but now they were destroying us.

  “I had to do something, and it had to start with Uncle Mattie. When I finally got the courage to tell Grandma and Mom? They didn’t believe me.”

  The cackle rips out of Charlotte’s inner doorway like a storm’s wind. It brings colors with it, sick and muted, pooling together to show a young Charlotte far too old in the face, body rigid with fear beneath sagging male clothes. Two humans sit in a shabby parlor, one young, one old, both thin and sallow like starving cattle. The young one looks like she had once been pretty—mac an donais, is that woman really the same mother who embraced the little warrior queen in Chalotte’s memory of the child thief?

  “No, not little Mattie,” the old one says.

  “Mattie loves you girls,” the young one says.

  “You can’t call the police, you want to embarrass us?” The old one says.

  “Cops ruin lives!” The young one says.

  “How could you do that to us?”

  How can they not see the pain, hear her cries at night? But these are the permanent pieces of Charlotte’s childhood.

  “And Uncle Mattie found out I told, and he got mad. Oh, he’s strong, too, but he didn’t want to bruise those swift and silent hands of his. He—”

  The shadow cracks lightning over little Charlotte again and again. She cries for help, begs him to stop. Liam weeps, a shadow in a shadow’s land.

  “—whipped me so hard with his belt I had to go to the hospital by myself and tell the doctor I had fallen down the cellar stairs. And Anna believed Mom, that everything was fine, and I was just hurting myself for attention. For attention.”

  Liam crouches with child Charlotte on the stairs and listens to the once-mother talking to the red-haired whelp. “Your sister just wants to make things hard for us, sweetie. You listen to your Uncle Mattie, and everything will be fine.” Rage burns in Charlotte. A warrior’s rage.

  “That was it. She did her damndest to erase Dad. She let her brother rip my body inside out. But she would not turn Anna against me.” Charlotte’s body shakes wildly against Liam’s, her temples visibly throbbing. “I had to show them all what a piece of shit Mattie was. When he tried to come to me that night, I got him first, good and hard, right in the groin, and ran downstairs, screaming for them to look, to look at him with his fucking pants down in my room.”

  Liam sees her run down the stairs in slow motion, screaming in silence, pointing upwards.

  “But Anna wasn’t there, they had sent her to a friend’s, and Mom was too strung out to care, and Grandma called me—”

  “—You whore.” The shadow runs naked down the stairs, golden spectacles crooked. Runs past Charlotte to the kitchen—

  “—and he grabbed the frying oil from the stove and threw it right at me.”

  Liam stops breathing. His little warrior, she’s shrieking, falling. Oh for all his heart’s fire to burn through his ribs and onto this wretched place and send it down, down to The Pits and beyond where no light can reach.

  “And Grandma said—”

  “That’ll teach your little whore mouth.” The shadow laughs.

  “I ran almost a mile to Anna’s friend’s; her parents took me to the hospital. Anna stayed by me. She knew something bad happened, but she was just too damn confused to understand.”

  Hurtful light floods a cold room. Charlotte lays back, covered in bandages, the lights in her eyes all but burned out as she holds her good hand to the whelp, tears on her face, and…anger? This sister dared scowl over Charlotte’s pain?

  The girl does even not take Charlotte’s hand.

  Liam would have taken Charlotte’s hand. He does now, so very thankful the welts are gone, and his fingers can fit into the rise and fall of her knuckles, the elegant lattices of her palm.

  “After that, he just acted like my grandmother, made me his whipping bitch.” She snorts, blowing snot all over Liam’s chest. “Only now he’s got Anna with him everywhere. Coming home from stores with way more than they can afford. Packets of new and worse shit to ‘make Mom better.’” Charlotte uses her sleeve to clean Liam’s chest with small, slow, circular motions. “A teacher at school helped me connect with Aunt Gail after all those years of Uncle Mattie cutting us off. The next day she’s flying in, roaring for custody, but Uncle Mattie’s got all these connections, and no judge would give her a hearing. She had to go back without us. And that…fuck no. I knew I had to make Anna leave with me for Appleton. I couldn’t leave her alone. Not there. Then I almost get her killed here…oh Liam, I miss her so much.” She turns limp in his arms and cries again.

  Liam combs Charlotte’s hair away from her face and presses his lips against her forehead. Holds them there. She tastes of sunlight and lilacs, summer on the sea at Cairine, his teacher Arlen’s home. He doesn’t want to lose this. Not after so much hurt. Please, what must I do to return the lights to her eyes? But all he can think to say is, “I should not have forced you.”

  Charlotte
pulls away just enough so he can see her shake her head. “Remember that first night you thought I’d model? You said our past doesn’t define us, and you’re right. What happened to me, that can’t change. But like hell is Uncle Mattie going to define what I am. I couldn’t be scared for Anna, and I can’t be scared here, not when there’s folks like Arlen and Dorjan and the others counting on us.”

  “You, afraid? You’ve walked into unknown danger time and again for the sake of an innocent life. I think you’ve done that more than you’ve played piano.”

  “So ‘self-destructive’ would be more appropriate.”

  Liam hand spreads across Charlotte’s cheek. His thumb graces the corner of her mouth, her chin. “You are the bravest person I have ever or will ever know.”

  Tears brim. Cheeks blotch. Lip quivers.

  Eyes light.

  Foreheads touch.

  Hearts burn.

  7

  Here Comes the Sage

  Sweat. Not-chlorine—lake-ish. Blood. Vomit. Who threw up? Urine, too. Do mer-janitors scream messes into oblivion or have jellyfish for mops?

  Something else. Liam. That smell he carries in the quiet moments.

  How long they slept next to one another on the floor, Charlotte can’t be sure. After all the tears and dumping her life out like that, she was so damn tired she didn’t care Liam wrapped her up tight next to him, tucking her head gently against his neck. The dagger lay hidden between them. No dream filled her as he murmured in Gaelic. Maybe it was a spell, or a legit lullaby. Maybe both.

  Liam does not move when Charlotte goes to piss once more onto that stupid webbed foot. She wonders how many merfolk it takes to change an angler bulb. How obnoxious it’d be to ask for a glass of water in this fish bowl.

  Enough, Charlie. Time to focus. She uses her unbroken hand to finger-comb her hair, the broken hand to at least sort of help rebraid it. Liam’s spear-gash still has an ugly dark redness to it, and the bruises make him look like he ran through a downpour of blackberries, but the welts haven’t returned to his ripped arms, abs sculpted by magic STOP THAT.