“You said that you’re not above avenging yourself. Then you made my mother what she is,” he stammered. “You haunted her and drove her mad because of what she did to you.”
“No. She’s got no one else to blame but herself. Rather ironic, really, but then again, she’s always been blinded by her ambitions. Now it’s her conscience that’s taken over, and no small wonder at that. I’ve watched her without making my presence known. She speaks to me all the time, but she looks elsewhere when she does. I’m sure that she sees me standing somewhere in the room, perhaps accusing her of what she’d done to me. Perhaps simply being in the same room as her causes her to see me as her mind could only see her murdered sister.”
“You said you’re not above avenging yourself!” Alarick insisted.
“That’s quite true, yes. My revenge is to simply watch your mother’s guilt define her existence for the rest of her life. So you see, Nephew, I don’t even need to lift a finger. It’s really quite convenient for me in the end.” Amara’s burned specter gradually vanished, the nightmarish sight a macabre foil to the playful liveliness of the way she spoke.
Alarick sat alone for several moments, his mind overcome by the revelation. A loud pop in the direction of the hearth startled him out of his stunned state, and without much thought, he stood up and walked over to the fire, stoking the burning wood with the fire iron.
Was madness in his blood as well? With a shudder, he set the fire iron aside and climbed into bed. His dreams that night were jumbled and frightening, but what he could remember made him sick. Alarick awoke the following morning with the image of a young woman—a princess at that—being tied to the stake, pale and defiant as she glared at her murderers till the executioner drove a knife into her heart to kill her before the pyre was lit.
“That knife in my heart was the greatest mercy anyone could have showed me,” Amara’s voice said in his dream. “I didn’t have to feel the horrific agony of being burned alive.”
While he sat in confusion the previous night, wondering if he should laugh or cry, the answer came easily and clearly enough that morning. Sitting up in bed, Alarick bent his head and wept bitterly for his aunt.
* * *
Several more days passed since that evening. Alarick and Roald continued their trysts, and people around them couldn’t help but notice their fierce closeness. Who could ignore them? At eighteen and nineteen, they weren’t exactly subtle about their friendship. Inseparable even more, petulant and wretched bores when forced to be apart, Alarick and Roald began to alarm some of their closest allies.
“Find them girls! It shouldn’t be too hard! Just look at all those damned peasants breeding without shame! There’s bound to be at least half a dozen girls in every cottage!” a handful of their peers said, elbowing each other while stealing confused glances in the direction of the young lovers. “Don’t any of you idiots know anyone? He’s the prince! Why would any girl not want him so badly?”
“Well, considering who his father is, don’t you think that any girl in her right mind would think twice?” the more logical boys replied.
“Which father are you referring to?” the saucy ones couldn’t help but ask.
“Considering who his living father is, do you think there’s a virgin left in the land?” the more virtuous boys asked. Silence met this question, and everyone thought it a very clever remark, quietly cataloguing it for future use.
“Considering who his dead father was, do you even find his getting fucked by Roald a surprise?” the jokers retaliated. Another moment of silence met this question, and everyone thought how stupid an idea it was.
“Frankly, I’d rather go to bed with Roald than with those filthy, toothless peasants,” other boys retorted, looking sick.
“Anyone in court then?” It proved to be another question that couldn’t be answered, for all of the young men who were being trained alongside Alarick and Roald had long placed hopes on young ladies in court. They’d be damned if they were to let their prizes be used to cure the prince’s perverted turns.
Some of their combat masters echoed their sentiments, though they did so along more practical lines. “This is a disgrace! How can we win battles with limp wrists leading the charge?”
Those who cared little about bedroom propensities merely rolled their eyes and argued that Alarick and Roald showed great skill with weapons. Besides, good warriors in practice were good warriors in the battlefield, and that was that. Why quibble over details?
Unhappily, a good number of spiritual ministers concurred with the protesters. “They’ll abuse their positions—take advantage of the younger soldiers!”
“They’ll be too busy hacking away or being hacked at to feel sordid urges if the situation gets desperate enough on the battlefield,” their detractors argued back. “And any idiot knows that war will cure them of any base desires. Just watch.”
“We’d rather not, thank you,” those who objected snapped.
The king, again drunk in the meantime, heeded his ministers’ nervous advice. In fact, he salivated over the possibilities. “The little bastard needs girls? Is that right? Oh, yes,” he whispered, rubbing his sagging chin in glee once he was left alone in the massive drawing-room room. “I look forward to this!”
How long had it been, after all, since his last out-of-palace debauch? Must have been at least a fortnight now, which was a remarkable feat to him. Hopefully he wouldn’t be running into filthy, irate fathers again, demanding compensation for their daughters’ shame. Lambrecht’s prisons in the filthiest bowels of town had suffered from overpopulation the past few years. A fourth of the inmates were angry fathers who, once upon a time, had the gall to demand justice for their children’s soiling. How they must hate themselves now for their rashness. Indeed, they were angry once. Not anymore.
Then again, perhaps it was because a number of those wretches had been dispatched by disease, starvation, madness, or rats. There ought to be room enough for newcomers, should trouble cross the king’s paths again.
“Bah,” Lambrecht said, waving a dismissive hand at the empty drawing-room. “Trifling matters entirely! What could be better than guiding one’s adopted son and heir down the direction of true manhood, anyway?”
He couldn’t think of a better rite of passage than that, though he also couldn’t help but dissolve in fits of inebriated laughter at the idea that Alarick was his heir. A stupid idea, to be sure, though a bitter reminder of his own failure as well. Five years of bedding Ulrike with nothing to show for it, while Bittan von Eisenberg pranced into the picture, dabbled with the queen for less than half a year (or was it more than that?—Lambrecht had long lost track of time), and he was rewarded with fatherhood—posthumously, of course.
No, Alarick wasn’t Lambrecht’s heir, and he would never be on the throne. Prince only in name, he was, and Lambrecht would ensure that that was as far as the boy could go.
“So…” he gurgled, blinking hazy eyes at the painted idyll in the ceiling. “Why on earth am I keeping that little monster again?” All around, tall panels of mirrors set in the walls with gold, elaborately carved frames captured the tottering, braying figure with its powdered wig askew, its richly embroidered coat and laces sporting a few discolored stains from questionable sources, its stockinged feet clumsily ridding themselves of their buckled shoes, for they made the world spin too much for a drunk man to stomach.
Chapter Six
A very timely war broke out, much to Lambrecht’s chagrin. “Damn,” he hissed, glaring at the circle of grim ministers and commanders before him. Maps, notes, small chests packed with gems and coins—bribes, tributes, and whatnot from different corners of the kingdom—littered the polished marble floor.
Yes, damn. Some upstart region from the east had thought it a worthwhile venture to attack, burn, and decimate every town and village on their way to the northern lands, where they believed greater power and treasures awaited them.
“Marshall our forces, Your Majesty,” the old
est commander said, his voice still loud and powerful after all those years. “Gather them in the southern and eastern borders, where…” The words and the voices all melted together into one continuous hum of battlefield nonsense till everything that was spoken sounded the same to a pair of tired, distracted ears.
The filth of war just invaded Paradies’s pristine calm, and the gold and white ballroom now sagged under the weight of an unnatural presence as men who normally wouldn’t be caught dead within the wrought iron borders now gathered before Lambrecht, grim, ugly, and caked with dirt and sun. Though the windows were tall and allowed a good amount of sunlight in, the glow captured and reflected back by the mirrored panels that lined the ballroom, it seemed as though a cloak of drabness had descended upon the room, chasing away the sparkling charm with its dreary shade.
Shadows cast by the presence of these unwanted visitors threw every man’s face into distorted nightmarish forms. Like demons, Lambrecht told himself, cloaked in mortal flesh.
To amuse himself, Lambrecht glanced up at the painted ceiling and toyed with his imagination, pretending as though he stood in the kind of old-fashioned throne room associated with armored knights and bearded, velvet-robed kings. Instead of florid, painted pastoral scenes above, brightly colored pennants bearing those great symbols and accomplishments of the royal family hung from the ceiling. In the flickering torchlight, they looked like a hundred jagged teeth about to come down on the men gathered before the king. Wolves’ teeth about to tear flesh, muscle, and bone into shreds. Like war.
“Bah,” Lambrecht muttered, shaking his head and clearing the ongoing fog from it. When he opened his eyes, he was once again back in Paradies’s ballroom.
“We’re doing our best to recruit and train every able-bodied man of sixteen and above,” someone was in the middle of saying.
“Not quickly enough for what we need,” another said, his voice hard as he cut in. In another moment, the two arguing voices multiplied to several, a grating chorus of war terms.
Lambrecht tried hard not to roll his eyes at the passionate debate that now took place before him, though he felt some relief at being momentarily ignored.
As his commanders and ministers went back and forth over tactics, the king allowed his mind to wander again, the regret of failing to follow through on the prince’s sexual rite of passage gnawing away at his belly. Had Alarick been his real son, Lambrecht wouldn’t think twice about keeping the boy out of the war, but the lad was expendable at best in troubled times. All the same, the delight in watching Alarick prove himself as a man in bed was a luxury Lambrecht was loath to give up, for Ulrike and Bittan von Eisenberg’s disgrace would have been complete, and the court would be gifted with such tantalizing fodder for gossip and speculation for years to come. If Alarick were to go to war, he could be lost to his…father…and Lambrecht surely couldn’t count on his mad wife to spawn him a true heir.
He grimaced at the prospects. “What, bed her?” he muttered, shuddering in disgust. “I’d rather be drawn and quartered.” He’d already had enough of her, even if she weren’t insane.
He tried to think about duchesses, countesses, other princesses—even daughters of the gentry—drawing a list in his head of names of women he knew who could offer him a second chance in giving the land a rightful heir. Details? Who cared about details at this point? Not he, of course! As long as the child was his, it would be enough, as he’d always believed that a king’s bastard far outweighed a queen’s; no one in court dared to argue against such a preposterous idea, of course. Any future squabbles over anyone’s rightful place on the throne would have to be dealt with when the time came, but for now, the sharp reminders of his failure in providing the land a proper heir made bile rise to his throat.
“The queen’s mad, besides,” he murmured with growing satisfaction. “I’ve got a legitimate excuse.”
Trumped-up charges against Ulrike would certainly take care of things once and for all, but even in his near-drunken state, Lambrecht had enough sense to realize that he should have done that when Ulrike was caught in bed with Bittan.
“Ah, how stupid of me,” he muttered, shaking his head at himself.
In the meantime, Lambrecht’s men brainstormed, hatched foolproof schemes, congratulated themselves for their cleverness, and hoped for success as a means of ingratiating themselves to the king, for all his uselessness as the land’s ruler. The cleverer ones hoped for defeat and a reason to force their idiot of a monarch from the throne. Discontent among certain nobles had been steadily rising, especially after that scandalous hour of the queen’s affair and bloody aftermath. It wouldn’t be too difficult to rally the opposition outside the palace walls into a full-scale revolution of sorts.
* * *
With the real threat of war now bearing down on the land, Alarick threw himself into his training. So did Roald. With the air now edged with the sharp stench of blood and death, the young trainees immersed themselves in their lessons with renewed zeal. Their commanders did their jobs well. There was a lot of shouting and screaming, the prince not immune to public embarrassments when he’d falter and fumble. There was so much glory to be had. A bruise or two, scraped limbs, deflated pride—they were a small price to pay.
From the shadows of the pleasure garden, a familiar wailing could be heard, the plaintive cries high and distant as they wafted out from the cottage’s upper windows.
“Not his!” the drooping figure screamed from under the thick layers of black netting that serve as a mocking reminder of where a crown used to be. “Not his to use in battle! Never his!”
And whose fault is it, Sister, that your precious boy’s about to be sent out to be butchered? The dead princess’ specter continued to whisper from the darkest corners of abandoned rooms of Ulrike’s cottage. Its accusations had long grown irrational, but then again, the queen could barely tell either way.
Whose fault was it that he was born at all?
Whose fault was it that a young lord now lies rotting in an unmarked grave?
Who was stupid enough to think so highly of herself that lives had to be cut short for her benefit?
Sometimes the dead princess would show herself to Ulrike, beautiful and unmarked as when she was still alive, smiling with profound pity for the cowering, veiled figure. Sometimes the apparition would take on its favorite form, that of the princess in death, burned beyond recognition, laughing and taunting and leaving the scent of burned and rotting flesh in its wake.
From one dark room of the cottage to another, the veiled figure wandered. Crying, singing, muttering gibberish under her breath—sometimes she paused in her meandering and swayed in time to a song none of the servants who waited on her could hear. The long, black gown trailed behind Ulrike, and the years hadn’t been kind.
Even before Ulrike’s exile from the palace, servants had long complained of the madwoman refusing their help in cleaning her and changing her dress, so she continued to haunt the unlit and vacant rooms in her old, old gown. An occasional servant would be dispatched to see to it that she hadn’t come to harm yet, and it was rather easy to find her. All one needed to do was to raise a candelabrum high and scan the bare floors for bits of tattered and faded cloth. Sometimes the dark stone walls would be marked with bloody fingerprints or an occasional broken nail.
To calm her down, Lambrecht had ordered a mirror to be placed in every empty room of the cottage. Their presence would keep her busy enough, and she’d stay away from the rest of the court, who’d sooner forget about her existence at this point. These mirrors would also make the drudgery of looking after her a touch more bearable for the despairing servants. Every so often, the king would ask after her, and servants would dutifully recount their observations and experiences.
“She can’t get enough of the mirrors, Your Majesty,” they’d say.
“She talks to her reflection a good deal. Sometimes she sings to it.”
“I’ve watched her cry in front of it, Your Majesty. She’s lookin
g for her baby.”
“Aye, I’ve heard her ask why her perfect little princess hasn’t come yet.”
Lambrecht would nod, vaguely interested. “Does she hurt herself still?”
“Not anymore, Your Majesty. At least not while we’re there.”
“Good. That’s all I need to know.” With a satisfied grunt, Lambrecht would then order more wine to be brought to him.
The mirror trick seemed to have worked, yes, unless the veiled madwoman happened to look out of the cottage’s topmost window to watch the activity below.
When she’d spot vague movements of shadows among the trees, she’d scream for her lover, urging him to hurry back to her side, for she’d been waiting for too long.
“Wear the red coat, my love!” she’d cry, weeping and laughing at the same time as she leaned out the window and waved at the trees’ branches or the birds flying here and there. “I’ll be here! Do hurry before that pig returns and finds us!”
If Ulrike had her wits about her, what would she say at the sight of Alarick mounting his horse and charging off to war? The banners flying high, the trumpets blaring, the seasoned soldiers, the frightened peasants, and the noblemen in proud battle regalia—off to defend their homes against a threat they knew very little about. The poor watched, wide-eyed and slack-jawed in their usual simple way, as the men rode off in a long, ceremonial line. Servants, women, and those of the king’s council chambers too old or deemed unfit for combat stood in grim silence. A few children threw flowers in the soldiers’ path, only to watch them get trampled beyond recognition under horses’ hooves and men’s stomping boots.
“Mine! Don’t take him away!” the madwoman shrieked from one of the cottage’s rooms. She continued to scream those lines, and those who chose to listen to her had long lost count of how many times. “Please don’t take him away from me! He’s not yours, you filthy pig!”
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