The wooden man watched the naked prince in the tub, smiling at the sight of manhood caught in between soft and awkward youthfulness and the hardened and more sculpted lines of maturity.
He moved along the wall, a slow, creeping walk as he pushed through wood, his gaze still fixed on the pensive young man in the tub, till he reached that part of the wall just behind Alarick. The tub stood close enough to the wall for the watcher to steal a touch or two. With a tremulous sigh, the watcher reached out a wooden hand and ran hungry fingers over Alarick’s wet and tangled hair, catching his breath at the feel of those black strands against what used to be skin once upon a time.
“I’ll keep you longer than seven days,” the wooden man whispered. “I sense that you’re strong enough to withstand a few more days locked away from the world. I don’t know what it is you’re made of…” He paused, chuckling, giving off faint creaks along the walls that startled Alarick out of his thoughts for a brief moment. The prince looked around him, holding his breath, clearly straining to hear more unsettling sounds around him. “It’s definitely sterner stuff than what I’ve long been used to in these past centuries. Peasants are strong in their own way, but their dreams are stunted and lacking, many of which are too diluted by poor men’s vices to give me much enjoyment. You, however, are unique—like a magnificent banquet spread out after centuries of starvation and neglect. Your Highness, I’ll have to take all I can from you. Only the heavens know how long before I’ll be blessed with another lost treasure like this unnatural prince.”
Alarick picked up a clean rag that was draped on the edge of the tub and began scrubbing his arms idly. He didn’t feel the touch of those cursed fingers, encouraging the watcher to continue his soft petting. Eventually, Alarick finished, and after wringing the rag and draping it back on the edge of the tub, he stood up in one smooth, easy move.
The wooden man couldn’t help himself, and he leaned as far away from the wall as he could, opening his mouth and pressing a wooden tongue against Alarick’s right buttock, following the firm, wet swell of the prince’s warm flesh in a line from the crease beneath it to the enticing dimple above. He tasted water and skin, his own excitement spiking at the simple, lurid act and especially the lustful impulse that goaded him into a momentary indulgence. He was trapped in the wall, however, just as the prince was trapped inside the cottage, and he couldn’t separate himself from the wood past his shoulders. If he wished to touch something, he could do so, but only if the rest of his body remained fixed in the wall while he stretched an arm out up to his elbow in order to reach something. The wooden man could only suppress a snarl of frustration at not being at liberty to take what was so easily his.
He eyed the cleft between those enticing cheeks, forced himself to picture the pucker hidden there, awaiting the most passionate, sordid attentions with which one could ever hope to shower it. Tongue, lips, fingers, a swollen, dripping prick—they were most welcome in drawing strangled sounds of pleasure from the young prince who’d be pinned beneath him.
“I was a devout man once upon a time,” the watcher said, grinding his wooden teeth as anger—ancient, indefinable, a cacophony of hundreds of memories from men and women long gone—surged through him. “Upright, virtuous, fearful of the gods, a humble servant of theirs. This boy will be shown the road back to virtue.” Apparently it would take the watcher more than seven days to accomplish that, but what soul wasn’t worth the time, where salvation was concerned?
“Yes, for the good of his soul,” the watcher murmured, stretching out his neck and attempting to taste Alarick’s backside one more time, but his tongue only touched air, for Alarick had moved. “I’m serving the gods. I’m their champion on earth. I’ll save this boy.”
It was all he could do to withdraw back into the wall, wooden eyes wide and hungry in the way they watched Alarick step out of the tub, naked and dripping wet, and then walk over to a chair on which was piled a clean set of clothes as well as a towel. Every fluid motion in the course of wiping himself dry fed Alarick’s jailer’s excitement, fueling the watcher’s impatience for the evening hours.
* * *
It was with some trepidation that Alarick ate from the crystal dish. His earlier musings regarding the shifting nature of the cottage kept their hold on him, and he found it more and more difficult to keep his mask on as he ate dinner and then listened to the cottage tell him more stories.
The cottage exerted a strange power over him; it kept him in place with its root-barred windows and door. It spoiled him with its feasts and fine clothes, but it monitored his movements, chided him for his occasional wistful remembrances of Roald, which tended to happen whenever Alarick’s defenses slipped, and loneliness and hopelessness emerged from the shadowy corners of his mind.
Was it also punishing him for small transgressions? He couldn’t tell, but he felt that those subtle little accidents—a finger pricked against something sharp that he’d never seen before, a toe stubbed against a piece of furniture that seemed to have been moved into his path when he had his back turned, a cupboard’s door suddenly swinging out and slamming against his face, nearly breaking his nose—were the cottage’s reminders that he shouldn’t be straying off and into disapproved territory.
“Why do you think of him so much? What did he give you besides this? Imprisonment? Nightmares? Madness, perhaps?” At times Alarick thought that he heard this question whispered from dark corners of the cottage.
“What did you just say?” he’d demand, but the voices would fall silent, the question left hanging and unanswered, tickling the edges of Alarick’s mind with unsettling meaning.
Was the cottage jealous? He shuddered at the grotesque thought. Day after day, night after night, it had been force-feeding him stories about men and women finding true love, never men and men. His dreams, which were once his only escape from physical imprisonment, were now tainted by some unknown, malevolent force that continued to punish him for dreaming about rescuing other princes, not princesses, at times showing him how his nature, even as he tried to save a young lady, only ended up wreaking more havoc.
I’m not giving him up, he thought, glaring as he looked around him, taking care to sweep his gaze over every piece of furniture or panel of wood or scrap of cloth. I know who I am—what I am. You can drive me mad or kill me, but you can’t change me.
Alarick’s blood ran cold at the final thought, but as he pondered it some more, his conviction also hardened.
Yes. I’ll die for him if it comes down to that—if my salvation requires it.
It appeared that his destiny was to die a prisoner who remained unbowed and unrepentant. Would that be considered a virtue expected in all princes? He tried to remember all those nursery tales from years long gone, and he couldn’t come up with a single story in which the hero chose death over surrender.
It looks like I’m about to live out a new nursery tale. Perhaps my story will be told to children down the line. What a way to be immortalized!
“You’re too pensive for your own good, Your Highness,” the cottage broke in, scattering his thoughts. “Come along and sit before the fire before going to bed if you’d like one more story.”
Proper rest. That was what he needed above everything else. Sleep undisturbed by images from which he couldn’t run, even in his waking hours.
What complicated matters was the fact that his previous dreams recurred, oftentimes weaving themselves into new ones, and he found himself doubly punished with unhappy conclusions to those thickly intertwined stories.
“You’re this way for a reason,” the dreams seemed to say to him. “Was it your nurse? Did she do something to you—feed you all kinds of vile, perverted ideas in your childhood—to make you grow up to be this? Was it your isolation, your loneliness, that turned you into the kind of young man who’d be taken in by a forest renowned for its black legends? Do you think that you belong here, Your Highness? Your dreams seem to say so.”
Alarick couldn’t think of anythin
g to say to that. He’d learned—or at least he’d learn to try—to close his mind against that nagging, taunting idea. He didn’t need to dignify it with a response.
Something had also changed in the cottage. He could sense it, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. He walked around—wandered through two familiar rooms—touched familiar surfaces—and he knew that something was different.
Your mind! Your mind! All in your mind! a quiet voice told him, but that something always followed those words with mocking, ill-suppressed laughter.
Amusement at his expense? Contempt? Pity? Boredom? He sure couldn’t tell.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked, but a hollow silence met his question.
“You should eat from the flower bowl today,” the cottage noted with forced humor when the prince stirred from his sleep. In fact, Alarick was sure that the cottage was growing quite tired of his presence and growing impatient with its task. “And tonight you should sleep on the flower bed.”
The bowl of tightly-pressed and joined flowers intoxicated him with its fragrance. And what an odd variety it offered with the stew cradled against its petaled insides—spices and vegetables and meat—all commingling with subtle floral aroma. Alarick couldn’t help but sniff more and eat less, and the cottage chided him for his neglect.
“Had your mother been around, she’d scold you for your childish idiocy. Do as you’re told. Eat.”
Unlike the crystal bed, the bed of flowers was soft and gently yielded under his weight. Alarick crawled under the blankets and felt his mind and body suddenly awash with the sensually soft smell of spring blooms. He shifted restlessly under the covers, his body reacting to the sensations, his mind, once again feeling the crippling loneliness of his imprisonment, fixing itself on memories of Roald and all those glorious moments spent in the privacy of their idyllic glade. Within seconds his nightshirt was pulled up, his hand busy between his legs, eyes pressed shut and mouth opened and slack. He thought of Roald’s weight pressing upon him, the way his lover forced his mouth open in those somewhat awkward, demanding, and very, very thorough kisses. He remembered Roald’s taste, his smell, the texture of his skin and the scars it sported from war, the incredible experience of pressing his face against the coarse, springy hair in Roald’s groin before taking his lover’s erection in his mouth.
Body moving against his hand as he pleasured himself, Alarick whispered Roald’s name again and again, sweeping his tongue over his slack lips before wetting the fingers of his free hand, coating them as thickly as he could, and then bringing them under and behind. Alarick bit back a groan as his fingers penetrated his body. It was a bit uncomfortable and clumsy, for he’d never done this before, and his arm was starting to ache from such an awkward position, but his body craved it, and he was soon moving against both hands, moaning and sighing and seeing Roald’s sweaty, lust-filled face hovering above him, encouraging him with whispers and an occasional filthy word tossed in. Alarick wished to be drowned completely in this strange intoxication, and the cottage allowed him his moment. He turned his head further to the side and pressed his sweat-dampened face against his fragrant pillow to muffle his groans. He came in a rush of white heat and helpless cries, felt himself falling, faintly wishing that Roald could be there, experiencing the cottage’s remarkable and frightening magic with him. The last thing that filled his senses as he drifted off to sleep was the delicious smell of semen and flowers.
If Alarick were to look long and hard at the wall against his headboard, he’d have spotted the wooden man lost in his own self-pleasuring, for Alarick’s lustful imaginings were simply too much to ignore, and if the watcher couldn’t have the young man on all fours, his wood-grain prick plunging rhythmically inside that beautiful, willing body, the least he could do was to enjoy his noble prisoner from a distance.
* * *
Perhaps it was nothing more than sheer willpower that allowed her this, but Ulrike awoke earlier that day to a curious state of lucidity, one that she knew wouldn’t last for too long. The gods must have taken pity on her at last, for all those years spent in punishment, living no better than a caged animal. Stained with her own urine and feces, tears, dirt, and the ravaging effects of a burdened conscience—emerging from sleep at dawn with her mind suddenly intact could only be seen as a final act of grace from immortals, if not her own will because her son was out there and in danger.
Ulrike stood by the window, pressing a hand against the glass as she looked outside, her mind marveling at the sunlit clarity of her world. Closing her eyes, she whispered a silent prayer of thanks and another for strength to carry through her scheme. “Let me go through with it,” she said, “and you may do what you will to me afterward.”
Ulrike had a good enough idea of what was in store for her, given what she’d done with her life—as well as what she’d done to others’.
“Allow me this one thing,” she added, and that was the end of her prayer.
She went through her day calmly, after knowing how short her time was now. She knew what to do to redeem herself, even if it were her last act on earth, and she wouldn’t have anyone—mortal, that is—stand in her way.
“If they force my hand, by the gods, I’ll hew them all down,” she muttered, pinching her mouth into a tight, determined line. She glanced down at her hands. It had been years since she’d last wielded dark magic purposefully while sinking under the heavy effects of her powers’ ruthless, consuming force. She didn’t even know if weaving would’ve helped her long enough. Perhaps the day might have come for her suppressed powers to break the dam and override the cathartic nature of the loom.
Ulrike smiled humorlessly at the realization. “It would’ve devoured me all the same.”
She pretended madness, therefore, giving her servants nothing to be alarmed about and further lulling their senses and expectations with the same old drudgery in keeping a hopeless madwoman from turning completely into an animal. The hours dragged, and her impatience swelled, but she needed to wait out the time and pretend to be a lost soul, sitting by the window and staring out, even taking care to hold a doll against her chest as though she were nurturing a baby, humming a lullaby as she tried to put it to sleep. She’d asked for one a couple of days ago and was granted a male doll.
She tried not to think about the past, for it had already destroyed her. What little reprieve she enjoyed in the present could only be sustained by her thoughts firmly fixed on the future.
“Independence, my little darling,” she whispered to the doll she held. “Rest for me. Vengeance for Bittan. The scales balanced for Amara. You’ll live and love as none of us could. If any burden ever falls on your shoulders because of our sins, let it be that, my sweet boy. Now wait for me.”
When the palace retired for the night, the queen got out of bed and immediately changed to her walking-dress, throwing a thick cape around her shoulders to help stave off the chill. She even put on an old powdered wig of hers—one she’d worn on several occasions before her wedding. The powder was nothing more than dust now, of course, but the wig was still intact, and she powdered her face and even pressed a beauty mark against her cheek after carefully applying rogue and regarding the effects with pleasure. She might have lived a life of luxury, pampered and waited upon hand and foot, but at least she wasn’t too helpless in all things.
She gave herself a few more careful cosmetic embellishments, the mere act offering her some measure of comfort in its faded familiarity. Before long she considered herself ready for her final adventure. Without another glance back, she slipped out the door of her bedroom and hurried through the glittering hallways and down the grand staircase.
Ulrike paused in the middle of the stairs when she saw her sister standing at the bottom, watching her descend. The dead princess didn’t appear in her usual burned state and in fact looked as though nothing had ever happened to her at all, and she was still alive.
In the darkness of the grand staircase and hall, with those countless mirrors
and gold candelabra somehow reflecting dim light from within their deepest recesses, Amara looked quite beautiful, very much the image of the queen’s sister at the height of her youth. She watched Ulrike in silence, her face a picture of serene melancholy and expectation.
“You know where he is,” Ulrike at length said, her voice hushed.
“I do.”
“Lead me to him, then.”
“I can’t go beyond these walls, but I’ll guide you in your head, and you won’t see me till the final moment.” The ghost regarded her in silence for another moment. “I know what’s in your heart. Do you really wish this, Sister?”
Ulrike nodded, drawing herself up proudly. Even in death, that confounded little chit insisted on questioning her? She couldn’t help but suppress a grin, however, because this also brought back far too many familiar and comforting sensations. For a few seconds, in fact, Ulrike thought that she and her sister were young girls again, taunting and challenging each other as only silly youngsters did.
“If you had a child, wouldn’t you do the same?”
The ghost gave her a faint little smile and stepped away, allowing her room to go down the rest of the way and in the direction of the front doors.
Ulrike found the doors locked, and she took a deep breath. “Help me, Amara,” she whispered tremulously. “I don’t have much time left.”
The doors immediately opened without her giving the handles another try. They swung outward without a sound, and Ulrike stood on the threshold, glancing up to look at the cloudless sky and the full moon above.
When she felt something round and cold pressing against one of her hands, she looked down and found a red apple that gave off a strong and most delectable scent. “Amara?” she asked, looking around.
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