If I were as brave as Princess Isabella, I’d run to give Father the cure before fleeing back to the forest to force Shao to tell me the truth.
As it turned out, the courage in my heart was nonexistent for anything other than my Father’s life—and even that had only been because I had nothing to lose.
Now?
I was a manic coward. There was only one thing I could lose—but even that had me as incompetent and inactive as a toad.
Because the thing I had to lose… was my memories with Shao, which I treasured almost as much as my own life.
If I heard what he had to say, the memories could be soiled, and I didn’t want to risk that because it’s what had spoon-fed me courage, hope, and delight over the necessary last few months.
The courage lurched to a final stop in front of my peeling blue door.
A small crowd gathered around us, although they maintained enough of a distance away from us and each other. It wasn’t often that our small, dingy, and poor town had any visitors, and the carriage I came in reeked of money, as did the black-haired lady sitting beside me.
No doubt some of the people had seen me through the windows, too. I’d been missing for months. I must have been the source of much gossip for a time before the townsfolk moved on to other topics—and people who offered more to discuss idly than someone who’d been missing and did nothing of entertainment value.
They gawked at us. I gave them a cursory glance and recognized most of them from my grocery shopping trips, but I’d never said anything but cursory greetings to them. I couldn’t leave Father alone longer than I had to.
We’d only moved here after Father’s illness dived for the worst, and the few friends I’d made at my hometown or the academy were still busy with schoolwork or work—and would never be caught dead in poverty-stricken cities like my new home.
Hesitantly, I slid the door open and hopped out of the carriage. I scrutinized the group once more, trying to decipher their pursed lips and crossed arms.
The group consisted of senior citizens who were dependent on canes, tired housewives, and curious children gripping at their mothers’ legs. The rest of the town must have been off working.
“Thank you,” I mumbled back to the royals as I rushed home. “Goodbye.”
“Wait.”
The two siblings spoke up simultaneously, and I inhaled sharply as I stalled in front of my door, my hand reaching for the doorknob as though I could escape them if I could escape into my home quickly enough.
Prince Solien hopped off his horse. Crumpling down and smacking at his back as he grabbed a cane from the carriage, he approached me.
I quirked my lip at his theatrics.
Whispers gathered and grew from the raindrops of people surrounding us, which I tried to ignore.
The townsfolk wanted to bombard me with questions, no doubt, but they were waiting until the strange old man and his mistress—the variables they couldn’t predict—left us alone.
Prince Solien reached into his pockets, taking out a couple wadded balls of yellow paper. The townsfolk surrounding us muttered to themselves about whether it was letters or some foreign currency, but I gasped because I recognized it.
Talismans.
“Why?” I asked as the prince handed them to me like they were candy.
“They’re from Shao.” He said. “He wanted to protect you. I’d explain more, but…” He shrugged towards the townsfolk, and I nodded in understanding.
While most of them were probably kind-hearted, any amount of money would improve the lives of them by a hundredfold, and at least one of them could go crazy for money—enough to attack me for a talisman or golden rose they could sell.
It was a blessing that the dress I wore today was of a soft, thin, and draping material that shimmered as it flowed down to my feet. It couldn’t have hidden anything like a rose without revealing its shape.
Otherwise, the only thing I was holding was the vial, which was too small for them to make out. People would think my hands were balled into fists out of stress or habit.
“I didn’t think we’d gather a crowd,” he said, and he glanced at the door. Was he wondering if we could talk inside?
“Our walls are paper thin,” I said under my breath. The people closest to us could make out what I said crystal-clear, but hopefully they wouldn’t gossip too much over such a harmless phrase.
Prince Solien sighed. He pushed forward his hand. I took the talismans from him, but crumpled them into my free hand, fisting them away. I could take a thorough glance at them later. I didn’t want anyone eyeing the drawn runes and getting suspicious.
Prince Solien took a deep breath before digging into a different pocket, grumbling to himself, then reaching back into his seat to dig through a fist-size purse sitting there.
He swiftly returned to me before handing me another slip of yellow paper. I blinked up at him.
“This one’s from me,” he said. He gritted his teeth. “For Shao.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he turned back and mounted his horse again, giving them a pat before kicking their sides, ordering them to leave.
I took half a moment to watch them leave; Princess Isabella, the poor forgotten girl, screamed out, “He loves you! Remember that he loves you, he really does, even if he can’t express it—”
And my face turned red as a beet before I scrambled into my house, slamming the door behind me as I collapsed to the ground, my breath heaving and my heart slamming in my chest.
I could hear the crowd yelling questions at me from behind the walls—because the walls were thin—but I tried to pretend the slight dampening of their voices made them inaudible.
Preparing to stand back up, I glanced up at the wall in front of me, and came face-to-face with my mother, whose face was rife with fury and betrayal.
How long had she been standing there? The whole time?
Her eyes were hooded with fatigue and anger and sickness, and her hair was tied in a sloppy bun that looked like it had been slept in for weeks without adjustment.
She rubbed her eye-booger-caked eyes as though she couldn’t believe I was here.
Stomping over towards me, she lifted her hands, and I feared she’d slap me into submission for refusing to return home despite her and my sister’s struggles.
But they were moving too slowly for the momentum necessary to cause me pain, and I wondered if she was going to hug me.
Instead, her hands fled to her eyes as she began to bawl, and she too collapsed onto her knees. She was a wreck like I’d never seen her, and I began to weep, too, because I couldn’t handle the sight of her broken like this.
She was my mother, after all, and I’d once thought she was immortal. She wasn’t supposed to cry. She was supposed to rage at me. Yell at me. Beat me with her slippers or something. Not… Not this, whatever this was.
I tossed the talismans down on the ground next to the door, careful to put them close enough to the wall that no one would step on it by accident, but the vial remained in my hands.
I reached out to hug her, and she greedily embraced me back so tight I could hardly breathe.
She spoke to me in a garbled voice that I couldn’t decipher, but I pat her back as I tightened my hug, wanting to console her but unsure how to best do it. She gurgled out some more words, before she realized how incoherent she was.
“You could have died!” She shrieked, and my heart swelled up at her worry for me.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” I whispered, giving her one last tight squeeze and a pat before lifting myself up to head to Father’s room. At some point, the crowd had gotten bored and dispersed, and I could no longer hear any of their questioning cries. “I have something for Father.”
She scoffed at me, but the effect of her disdain was tremendously weakened by her snot and tears.
Mother’s state of disrepair and her inability to keep herself at all composed while crying reminded me a little of… me, and I realized I must have
picked it up from someone.
“Your Father is in no state to appreciate any kind of gift,” she said in a biting tone, in no way even hoping I could have brought the cure with me.
I considered telling her, but I hated to disappoint her—and myself—by giving her false hope only for the cure to be fake or expired or something.
Besides, knowing my mother’s high-strung personality and her constant doubt for me, I had nagging suspicions that she’d toss away the liquid or shatter it, suspecting it was poisonous. Not that something like that made sense; who would gain anything from murdering an already dying man?
Instead, I crept over to Father’s room, and dry heaved at the pungent reek of death attacking my nostrils. Mother stayed outside, perhaps wanting a break from having to face Father’s impending death—or perhaps she wished to give me time alone with him to bid my farewells.
Gulping, I stepped closer to Father. Before, I’d taken small solace in the tiny stutters of his chest as he struggled to breathe, and the wheezing in his throat reminding me that although he was pained, he was alive.
Right now, there was none of them, and fear skittered up my throat with bile.
He couldn’t be dead, right?
He had to be alive.
There were a thousand things I wanted to do, but instead, I squeezed my eyes shut, counted to ten, and then opened Father’s jaw before spilling the inky liquid down his throat.
Mother yelped and she ran into the room, snatching the glass from my hands; it crashed into the fractured wooden floor, shattering into a thousand pieces as it sprayed droplets of darkness to its surrounding tiles, but she was too late.
The deed had been done; most of the liquid had poured right down his throat.
Mother seized me by my shoulders and wrenched me sideways to face her, and I grimaced in pain.
She screamed a series of obscenities that I promptly wiped from my mind before yelling, “What do you think you’re doing, Beatrice? Did you poison him?”
“Wh—” I sputtered before gagging on the taste of my own vomit, which rose from my throat from my infinite terror and anxiety. “What do you take me for? Of course not! I—”
“He may have been dying, but he was still alive!”
“Why do you think I poisoned him?” I shouted back, although I knew the answer—and I hated that I did.
I understood her suspicions because I’d thought the same thing as her.
Mother stuttered a thousand syllables, but she was unable to form a coherent sentence, because she hated to voice the screwed up question that had plagued our entire family since the day Father could no longer even speak, let alone move an inch out of bed or feed himself or clean himself.
The single question had wrecked me every night and idle second of my days back when I was Father’s caretaker, and the fact that I asked myself something so messed up had torn me apart with guilt.
Was Father better off not… suffering anymore?
That was the question that felt like poison in my mind, in my throat.
It had been obvious Father didn’t want to live. We’d been forcing him to stay alive even though he’d have far preferred starvation, considering we’d long lost hope for his recovery.
We were keeping him alive—if his state could even be called alive—for our own twisted unwillingness to let go… even as that meant the entire family suffered. My overworked mother and sister. My ailing father. And… me.
All of us.
Victims to our own decision. Our own inability to let go.
Selfish or self-destructive?
Evidently both.
We’d soon know whether our broken perseverance proved worth it or… if Father would perish, just as we always knew he would, after an eternity wasted in the prison of his own empty mind.
“The wait was worth it… for me,” a weak male voice wheezed from behind me, and I yelped in shock. Hope. Rage. Years’ worth of pent-up despair.
As I turned around, I saw Mother’s mouth open so wide it popped, and she was at Father’s side, cradling his hand and cheeks as though he were a baby, before I’d even turned towards him.
Mother was sobbing once more, this time into the crook of Father’s neck, and I felt hot trails of my own tears trickling down my cheeks as I froze.
Father reached out to me with the hand Mother wasn’t squeezing hard enough to pop, and I seized it with my mind blanking to the point I could hardly stand.
“I-I-I—”
Mother whispered prayers of gratitude, but it melded with her confessions of love and gratitude for me and my father, growing more aimless and rambling by the second.
Father’s thumb grazed against Mother’s as he whispered a thousand apologies through his hoarse throat. I almost wished to give them some space to make up after all those years, although I was greedy. I wanted Father’s company, too; I’d taken care of him. I deserved him first.
Not that I was going to say anything like that, lest my own mother decide to spank me with a ruler or something at daring to steal her from her husband.
My father’s eyes were open, albeit drooped and heavy. My soul sung and wept at once.
Memories flooded my mind, my heart.
Sitting on his lap as a toddler, his gigantic hand engulfing mine as he taught me how to write the very letters that I’d relied on to speak with Mother and Constance.
We’d filled countless pages until they were utterly black with accursedly beautiful words and phrases that Father deemed important.
Thank you.
Please.
I’m sorry.
Papa. Beatrice.
I love you.
Sneaking into Father’s workroom as a child. Being as impressed by the size of it as I was disgusted by how impossible it was to walk inside, since every inch of the floor and ceiling and walls were covered by his paintings of Constance and me.
Paintings of the first time we crawled. The first time we went to school. How we looked as newborns. My Annoyed face—and Constance’s excited one—as we studied.
Later, after my Father had been first diagnosed with the illness, he’d drawn countless more: some of our wedding, with faceless men by our side; others of Constance and me with excited, hyper children clinging to us like monkeys twirling on a branch.
I saw this scene disintegrate into ashes of memories that whipped around, reshaping and recoloring itself to my family’s new reality: Father lying on what we’d considered his death bed, struggling through his teeth and limp tongue to tell me he was sorry for me and Constance most—and that he loved me.
My father forced every cell he had to rise into a seat, without success. Mother held his back with his permission and helped him up before allowing his back to rest against the wall, since he didn’t have the energy to stay sitting without support.
But he was alive.
He could move.
I wanted to stop crying. I had to.
I couldn’t.
The moment mother left his side to grab tissues to blow her nose with, I swept in to give Father a hug tighter than my mom’s, not caring when he hacked a cough and grumbled that I was hurting him.
I couldn’t help but remember the man who’d made all this possible—Shao—and I wished he were here to share the moment with me, but I brushed the thought away, choosing to drown in happy memories of Father.
So, I basked in the way his heart beat, quiet yet steady and firm, and I smiled at the warmth of his skin through his shirt. He whispered a million apologies to me, which I brushed away. He had nothing to be sorry about.
I wished this moment could continue forever.
Chapter 22
“Connie needs to see this, too,” Mother whispered, rubbing at her damp eyes. “Where is she? When’s she returning? How did you even find the cure?”
I blinked in confusion. “I told you where I got the cure—the beast gave it to me. Why are you asking me about Constance? I’ve been in the beast’s mansion for months. Shouldn’t you know
where she is?”
Mother tilted her head, her eyes narrowing as she took a closer look at me. When she spoke up, her words came out slow and deliberate, as though she were trying to stop herself from crying yet again—but not out of joy this time.
“What do you mean the beast gave it to you? The beast doesn’t even exist—oh, never mind, that’s not what’s important right now. I thought Connie brought you home. She left a week ago to try to find you without my permission, and she still hasn’t returned. I sent you a letter through your raven. Didn’t you receive it?”
Furrowing my brows, I replied, “N-no… I’ve been sick, and I returned here as soon as I could. I never saw Constance on the way. Never got the letter.”
Could Shao have hidden it from me? No. That was unlikely, since he had nothing to gain from that—and so much to lose if I realized he’d hidden yet another thing after my own sister had been eaten by wolves.
The path between the mansion to my home took over twenty-four hours by carriage, and I wondered if Shao had received it too late. But why hadn’t he sent the raven to the carriage, then?
Mother shook her head as if she couldn’t believe my words. I saw her gait shrink and crumple again, and I wanted nothing more than to help her, but how could I?
I dug through my memories for any sign on the tracks of a strawberry blonde girl but found nothing. I’d been asleep for most of the carriage ride for heavens’ sake, and in the moments I’d been awake, my eyes had remained firmly on the vial, since I’d been too terrified I’d lose it… and too shocked that it was real and in my grip.
I took a heavy step back, then another.
“Beatrice—” Father croaked, but I knew he had nothing to offer me other than more inquiries and empty consolations; he’d mean them wholeheartedly, of course, but what did that matter if he had no idea what he was talking about?
“I-I’ll go look for her,” I managed, and mother glared at me.
“You’ll do no such thing!” She shrieked. “I already lost you once, I can’t lose you again—”
“I’ll go myself,” Father thundered. The veins of his hands and wrist, tensed over the small stand beside his bed, pulsed and throbbed as he put every raw strength in his bones into hoisting himself up.
A Kiss like Roses: Fairy Tale Synergy Book 1 Page 18
