by Mark Jacobs
*****
The tunnel road was as dark and quiet as the pumps of a dead heart. There was no fire spewing from the walls, no rock-falls, no monsters. When the Prince swerved off-center, his front tire did not buckle over the edge of a bottomless precipice.
He wrapped his dead-end arm around the Queen’s legs to prevent her from sliding off his shoulder. Her arms hung limply to either side of the bicycle’s back wheel. Her heart beat quietly between long pauses and the tips of her white hair turned a lifeless brown, like the edges of a wilting flower petal.
The Prince muttered to himself all the way, “White trees, white flowers, white birds… white trees, white flowers, white birds… I’ve not seen a bird like that before, not in one hundred kingdoms, and yes, I have been to the Kingdom of Clouds, I have been to the Kingdom of Things With Wings. I tell you, these omens speak a pale fortune, sister. Sister?”
When the Queen did not answer, the Prince mistook it for dispute, for he squealed with verjuice passion, “You cannot believe something is good just because it is white!”
He gave her time to rejoin while he stewed in his frustration. “The White Tree was cursed and a curse upon it, darn it!” he eventually burst. “You cannot defend it–you have not heard, as I have heard, the stories that surround it!”
The Queen, of course, was not in a position to correct him.
“Is that so?” replied the Prince to his imagining of her denial. “You think you could know better than I? You, imprisoned beyond the reach of a bird’s wings? The White Tree is known far and wide, sister mine, and I have spoken with a man who has been admitted to the garden…” he trailed off as though unconvinced of this himself. “The point is, you see,” he concluded, slightly flustered, “I really did a very good thing when I felled the Holy Tree. And now I’m taking you back to the garden to embrace your lost boy again. And I, I shall embrace him again, too, and won’t that be jolly, and my axe will be glad to finish the feast that your knife started so many seasons ago.”
