by Jon Jacks
‘He fishes for kings?’ Crystine said unsurely. ‘He kills them? Kills any king?’
The queen nodded, but accompanied it with a shrug of indifference.
‘The name is a bit of a hint, isn’t it?’ she giggled drunkenly. ‘I’m passed such cares, obviously! But our poor Queen of The Fall, now – she made the ultimate sacrifice, and yet still ended up fearing him!’
‘Then you believe that part of the tale?’
‘The tale?’
The Hag Queen chuckled richly when the source of Crystine’s confusion dawned on her.
‘Oh no, sorry, my dear,’ she apologised with a wicked laugh, ‘I mean she made the ultimate sacrifice when she later gave up her most treasured necklace: otherwise, how else do you think you ended up with it?’
*
‘I’d heard,’ the Hag Queen continued elatedly, ‘that the queen tried to make a deal with the KingFisher; that he could have her most prized possession as long as he returned her love to her. As long as, too, she no longer had anything to fear from him.’
‘Yet he took it – and refused to carry out his side of the bargain?’
The queen nodded.
‘Delicious, isn’t it?’ she squirmed with glee. ‘Oh, the food I mean, obviously,’ she added with another guffaw.
‘So he gave the necklace to the April – I mean, the princess, as she then was?’
‘We can only presume so: although gave is probably stretching it a good mile too far! It wouldn’t come free! No one knows what deal the princess herself made with the KingFisher. We can only hope, can’t we, that it wasn’t similar to the one the elves had forced out of our poor Queen of The Fall?’
She chuckled again.
‘You called them elves in your story,’ Crystine said. ‘The one’s I met – who gave me the necklace – said they were dwarblins!’
The queen laughed again.
‘And why not?’ she said. ‘They, of all people, can call themselves whatever they wish! They can be ogres, they can be giants; whatever they wish to make of themselves, in fact!’
Her manner, if not her beautiful mask of a face, abruptly became more serious as she suddenly sat up straight in her chair.
‘As you, my dear, could be a princess: if you so willed it!’
*
Chapter 14
The queen clicked her fingers, summoning one of the waiting servants. She gave him instructions with another flick of a hand, as if it were all an established code.
She hadn’t given Crystine time to respond to the bizarre declaration that a girl could become a princess on little more than whim.
Naturally, if Crystine had been told this years ago, she would have been enthralled. Now she was simply embarrassed.
‘Why would I want to be a princess? she asked not unreasonably.
‘Why?’ The queen sounded briefly confused. ‘Why wouldn’t you, my dear? Are you entirely unaware of the advantages of being a princess? The lifestyle? The air of authority, of command?’
Crystine laughed: it all sounded so childish – being a princess! In the darkness of her childhood, such a belief had been the only hint of brightness; but now, thankfully, she had long outgrown such silly thoughts.
Amongst everything that was so dull and deliberately blackened within the Hag Queen’s palace, the oncoming glow of the returning servant was indeed like the rising of the morning star against the dark heavens. Of course, it wasn’t the servant himself that glowed so brightly, but the platter he was carrying; or rather (for the platter was naturally dulled) the Golden Apple he carried before him upon the dish.
It glowed so radiantly it could have been a sun dragged down from the whirling cosmos itself.
The servant placed the platter on the table between the queen and Crystine. He then smartly withdrew, taking up in his place standing within the shadows once more.
The queen took off her mask, revealing the person hidden beneath: and when she looked into her reflection within the Golden Apple, she wept tears of gold.
*
The golden tears of the Hag Queen splattered onto the platter.
They ran down the slight angle of the dish, pooled around the base of the Golden Apple: and in the blink of an eye, gold absorbed gold, such that tears and apple were indelibly one.
‘It’s…it’s beautiful!’ an awestruck Crystine stammered.
‘One of many,’ the queen replied nonchalantly, replacing her mask, bringing the falling of her tears to an end. ‘I have a whole courtyard of such apples, I’m afraid. Didn’t you see it on our way in?’
‘Why no, I…’
Crystine paused, doubting herself.
Hadn’t she, in fact, caught a glimmer of something in the corner of an eye as they had descended deep into the darkness?
The queen pushed the Golden Apple closer towards Crystine.
‘It’s worthy of a princess, don’t you think? It’s yours!’
‘But…’
Hadn’t the queen’s own tale warned against accepting an expensive ‘gift’?
The queen couldn’t mistake the mingling of longing and doubt in Crystine’s gaze. She chuckled richly.
‘I’m not expecting anything in return! I’m not some tradesman! Some disreputable elf!’
Her tone of sneering surprise immediately transformed into one of pride, of imperiousness.
‘I’m a queen. And you, when you accept my offer, will be a princess!’
‘I can’t just be a princess!’ Crystine insisted in exasperation. ‘Not just like that!’
‘A daughter of a queen is quite naturally a princess!’
‘My mother…’
Crystine paused, laughing bitterly at the irony of it all. No one could be further from being royalty than her down-at-heel mother.
‘Your mother’s not a queen?’ the queen asked, as if amazed. ‘Why, but here I am!’
She opened her arms wide, as if she were revealing some long hidden secret.
Crystine frowned, wondering if…if this was either some huge joke or some other massive upset in her increasingly strange life.
‘No, no: not the mother in your world, obviously!’ the Hag Queen snapped, recognising the reasoning behind Crystine’s growing confusion. ‘I mean, I can adopt you!’
‘Adopt me? I don’t need you to adopt me! Besides, why would you want to? I’ll be leaving soon, as soon as I find–’
‘Your way out?’ The queen chuckled in amusement. ‘You still think there’s a way back to your world?’
‘Well, if I came here, surely, there’s also a way out!’
‘And does a lobster, do you think, follow that same reasoning whenever one’s caught in a fisherman’s pot?’
‘Are you saying…there’s no way back for me?’
The queen shrugged.
‘Can you even remember how you got here? I’m sure even a captured lobster can think back that far enough!’
Crystine tried to think back to how she had ended up in this world.
‘It was a warehouse: a fairy storey. Then when I opened the doors, I was falling, and–’
‘So, if you could fall upwards…?’
It could, of course, have been the most mocking of comments: and yet the queen not only sounded serious enough but also, with yet another click of her fingers, called upon another servant to draw closer.
The servant approached from out of the darkness, another equally almost invisible servant alongside him. This second carried another platter, but whatever lay upon this dish was as dark if not darker than its surroundings.
Then again, it glittered here and there with dark sparkles of ultramarine, of emerald.
As the servants halted by Crystine, the first servant reached out for the folds of dark lying so neatly upon the platter.
With a sharp shake, he opened it up before her.
Now it glittered with an emerald and sapphire sheen, the glow of the most resplendently beautiful bird feathers.
It was a cloak; a cloak,
Crystine wouldn’t have been surprised to hear, bringing together a feather of every bird that ever flew.
*
Chapter 15
‘Yes, yes: it’s the cloak from the story!’
Once again, the Hag Queen had understood Crystine’s frown of uncertainty.
Crystine didn’t like to ask how the Hag Queen had managed to acquire the Queen of The Fall’s magical cloak.
‘Didn’t I say had a whole orchard of Golden Apples?’ the queen said, as if reading Crystine’s mind once more. ‘Magical apples,’ she added conspiratorially, reaching over to pick up the one lying on the platter.
She threw it up into the air, such that it briefly hovered over a bunch of dark grapes. Here it dissolved, becoming a rain of golden tears once more. The tears splattered over the grapes like so much molten lava cascading over black rocks.
The skin of the grapes became pure velum, its juices a dark red ink. The stalk was now a pen, with a sharply pointed nib.
The sheet of parchment rose up into the air, the quill writing upon it, a flourish that was a vibrant signature.
‘There: I’ve signed it,’ the queen declared with great satisfaction. ‘It’s all officially decreed now!’
‘Wait, wait: you can’t just do that!’ Crystine protested. ‘I haven’t agreed to it yet! I haven’t signed it!’
‘Why, yes you have!’ the queen said, peering closely at another signature lying above her own and drawing Crystine’s attention to it. ‘Correct me if I’m mistaken; but that is your signature, yes?’
Crystine stared in complete bewilderment at the signature.
‘Why, yes, it is! But I don’t see how–’
‘You signed it?’ The queen shook her head, tut-tutting as if scandalised. ‘You really must pay more attention in future to what you’re signing, my dear! Now that you’re a princess, who knows what you could be fooled into signing up to?’
She tapped the pen, which flowed and quivered as it once again went through a transformation, this time turning back into a Golden Apple. But the signed parchment remained, sealed with a golden tear.
‘What do you get out of all this?’ Crystine asked the queen suspiciously.
‘Me? Why, consolation, of course. Now I have a daughter, and a beautiful daughter at that too!’
She looked Crystine’s way, her masked face perfectly similar.
‘We could be mother and daughter, don’t you think?’
She brought Crystine’s attention back to the cloak still dangling from the servant’s hands.
‘Your cloak, my dear: a gift from your equally beautiful mother!’
The servant moved as if to drape the cloak over Crystine’s shoulders.
Crystine nervously slipped to one side. She glanced down sadly at the still sleeping fool.
‘But I can’t just fly off from here!’ she said. ‘I can’t just leave him here!’
The queen looked down at the fool disapprovingly.
‘You can’t?’ The queen sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Surely this is the ideal opportunity to rid yourself of your fool?’
‘He’s not a fool! He’s…he’s…’
Crystine realised she wasn’t at all sure what the young man was.
‘A fool, I’m afraid.’
The young fool had woken up, agreeing with the queen’s estimation of him with a sad, tired yawn.
‘There you have it, my dear,’ the queen announced with only the slightest hint of triumph.
‘Still, I can’t fly away, just leave–’
‘Oh, all right, all right,’ the queen sighed resignedly. ‘If you insist!’
Reaching for the golden apple yet again, she threw it up into the air, where it briefly hovered over the sleepy fool; then became once more a shower of golden tears.
*
Crystine flew up into the darkness, her cloak blending her into the night sky. She soared over her mother’s land, deliberately avoiding the Mountains That Overlooked the World
She was following the road, looking for the point where the ruts of heavy carts began to carve into the packed dust: a sign that the realm of the Hag Queen had come to an end. More importantly, it would be a sign that she was drawing closer to the area where she had first fallen into this bizarre world of lonely queens and hunted kings.
There were other, larger signs that she was leaving the realm of her ‘mother’. Way ahead, she could see lakes and waterfalls, glittering with a slivery sheen as they reflected the moon’s beauty back to her.
Believing she was close to where she had fallen into the dust of the red road, Crystine began to swiftly ascend almost directly upwards, seeking out anything that might even remotely resemble a warehouse, or at least a set of doors: perhaps they were hidden amongst the clouds, as the cave of the Four Dark Elves had been veiled by the darkness of the mountainside?
The cloak of feathers made her weightless, flowing about her like vast wings. They allowed her to fly through the clouds at unbelievable speed, to swoop, to rise, to glide – and yet she found nothing that hinted at a route leading her home.
Coming in particularly low across the road once more, she was surprised to see a lone traveller, heading as swiftly as he was able away from the Hag Queen’s lands. A cumbersome bag barged relentlessly against his legs, yet still he forced himself into a hurried stride that only made the barging of the bag all the worse.
The doctor: it had to be the doctor who had been with the fool when they had discovered her sprawled in the road.
She thought of landing by him, reassuring him that he had nothing to fear now from the Hag Queen.
Then she recalled how he had so greedily stared at her necklace. How much more enviously would he regard the magical cloak?
She decided, instead, to pass silently over him in the darkness: to land some way ahead, and wait for him there.
She wasn’t sure how or why, yet she felt sure that the doctor had something of importance to tell her.
*
Chapter 16
Crystine landed on the road at a point where the doctor wouldn’t be able to see her until at least a few minutes had passed.
This gave her time to remove the cloak, and then her bracelet: the gold bracelet presented to her by the Hag Queen.
She wasn’t one for jewellery, yet she seemed to be gradually accumulating more than she believed to be even remotely attractive.
The bracelet was graced by a charm, glowing with the tiniest of jewels. Yet it was an odd one by any standards; for it was a fruit pie, a dessert of some kind.
An Apple Fool, to be more precise.
As instructed by the Hag Queen, Crystine threw the bracelet up into the air.
Here it ever so briefly hovered before dissolving into a shower of golden tears, the fool himself appearing amongst its glittering waterfall.
‘Were you all right in there?’ Crystine asked him concernedly as a Golden Apple dropped back into her hands.
‘In where?’ the fool asked, looking about himself in disbelief. ‘How did we get back out here?’
‘Never mind,’ Crystine said, lying her cloak down upon the road then throwing the apple into the air to hover over it, ‘your friend’s approaching: the doctor.’
‘The doctor’s not really a friend,’ the fool replied distractedly as, with wide-eyed surprise, he saw the golden rain transform the cloak into a glittering charm bracelet. ‘Just someone I met on the road: a travelling companion.’
Crystine picked up the bracelet, observing the single, bejewelled charm of a sparkling bird as she slipped it onto her wrist.
Being a princess did have its advantages after all.
*
‘Who’s there?’
The doctor’s cry was understandably nervous; he was, after all, drawing closer to two dark shapes patiently waiting for him to approach on a lonely road.
‘It’s only us, doctor,’ the fool announced jovially.
‘But…’ It didn’t sound as if the fool’s brightness had comple
tely allayed the doctor’s edginess. ‘The Hag Queen took you!’
‘Only for a quick talk; she let us go,’ Crystine added, emulating the fool’s brightness of tone, ‘and dropped us off here.’
‘I didn’t see you pass,’ the doctor replied, more suspiciously than ever.
He was now so close to Crystine and the fool that, despite the darkness, they could quite clearly see him looking around and behind him, as if trying to work out how anybody could possibly have passed him on the road.
‘Across land; by horse,’ Crystine tried to explain with a lie.
The doctor glared at her, his scepticism still all too apparent in his frown, the narrowing of his eyes.
‘What did she want to talk to you about? Didn’t she say something about seeing you in a dream?’
‘She’d mistaken me for someone else, obviously,’ Crystine lied again, recalling that the queen had indeed referred to seeing her in a dream. ‘She hoped I might be able to help her interpret a weird dream she’d had.’
Crystine was getting tired of having to explain herself to this man. Tired, too, with having to lie.
At least the doctor was no longer directly glowering at her. His eyes were now greedily focused on the dazzling bracelet.
‘Another fabulous piece of jewellery?’ the doctor demanded. ‘A gift from her, this time?’
‘No, no: not from her.’
She had lied again, which she hated: but what choice did she have. How could she explain by telling the truth to such an obviously untrustworthy man?
‘I was wearing it before,’ she continued. ‘My blouse sleeve must have hidden it from you.’
‘Hmmm, really?’
The doctor didn’t sound as if he had been in anyway persuaded by Crystine’s lies. Unexpectedly reaching out, he clasped the charm in his palm, admiring the sparkling gems.
‘Remarkable,’ he breathed. ‘It could be a gift from the Fisher Queen herself!’
‘Fisher Queen?’ the fool chuckled. ‘I think you must mean the KingFisher!’
Abruptly glancing up, the doctor glared at the fool.
‘I know what I meant!’
