by E. Archer
“Oh, hello!” Chessie said.
Ralph picked himself off the thicket and bowed slightly. “Hello, Duchess of Cheshire.”
“Please. Call me Duchess.”
“Okay, sure.”
Chessie waited patiently.
“Duchess.”
“Very good. Now tell me — would you like to ride in my carriage?”
Ralph glanced at the four menacingly braying unicorns and at the driver, convulsing on the ground beside his unicorn-horn stiletto. Then he took in the sharp-edged carriage and Chessie, whose expression was filled with an intensity that he couldn’t quite attribute to good will. “I’m not sure I do, actually, if that’s okay,” he said. And then, as Chessie’s expression darkened, “Why did he try to kill me?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Now, come on, up you go, into the carriage.” She threw open the door.
“Are you a good duchess or a bad duchess?”
Chessie squinted. “You are such a weird little Yank, aren’t you?”
“Where’s Cecil?”
“Up, up! Up into the carriage.”
By now the driver had managed to brush off the mote and most of Ralph’s fluids, and had regained his feet. Stiletto in hand, he started forward.
Ralph accepted Chessie’s gracious offer and entered the carriage. She ordered the driver to tend to the unicorns and slammed the door closed, locking it soundly.
The carriage was quite roomy. Chessie had a six-room suite, including entrance hall, powder room (where the duchess excused Ralph to go clean up), bedroom, volleyball court, kitchenette, and sitting room, which was complete with a tea tray and fresh pastries. The tea was served by two fairy attendants, who were quite handy for pouring, since by hovering they were able to maintain a steady stream even during the carriage’s frequent jolts.
Once Ralph had returned from the powder room, he sipped his tea, holding the cup far away from him as the vehicle lurched and bumped. It tasted like stones. The drink could very well be poisoned, he realized, but if Chessie really were a sorceress now, and really intended to kill him, she could have already done so in any number of ways. Even if the tea were poisoned, Ralph figured, it was better to die by hot beverage than by unicorn horn. Ralph drew the line at sampling the pastries, however: He saw one crawl forward an inch as he placed his teacup back on its saucer.
“This is a very nice carriage,” Ralph remarked, as politely as he was able under the circumstances.
“It’s not exactly palatial, but it does in a pinch. The roads through this forest are narrow, so I couldn’t bring my larger one.”
“That’s too bad,” Ralph said commiseratively.
“Tell me, have you been enjoying yourself?”
“It’s very nice here, yes,” Ralph said. He picked up his teacup, saw it was empty, and put it back down.
“Where have you been so far?”
“Well, actually I’ve just arrived. I think you know that,” Ralph said.
“Just arrived! Well, we’ll have to show you everything. How exciting.”
“Umm … I got magicked into this quest. You were there when I came in, not ten minutes ago.”
Chessie did nothing to mask her boredom at this tack.
“Thought I’d point that out. See if you had anything to say.”
“I’m sure that’s very good of you,” Chessie said. She transferred two sugar cubes to her teacup. “A stirrer, Vermillion.”
One of the fairies, who was indeed said color, produced a much smaller fairy, who stood stock-still as Chessie inserted him into her tea and swished about. When the stirrer emerged his face was bright red, and Ralph watched his little mouth form a pain-struck O as he was returned to a drawer.
“Oh dear, I forgot to offer,” Chessie said. “Do you take sugar?”
Ralph shook his head.
“This must all be so strange for you,” Chessie said.
Ralph nodded. They rode along in silence. Evidently no elaboration was coming. “Where are we heading?” Ralph finally asked.
“Oh! Sorry. We’re heading to the capital of my kingdom. It’s amazingly beautiful. There are all sorts of charming courtyards and little old shops — you know, spelled o-l-d-e s-h-o-p-p-e-s. You’ll love it there. It’s got all those things foreigners go crazy for.”
“Am I going to live there?”
“For a time, if you like.”
“Where is Cecil?”
“Rather far away, I’m afraid.”
“Do you think you could let me out of the carriage, and I won’t bother you anymore?”
Chessie flounced back on her antique sofa and threw her hands around a knee. “Honestly, Ralph, that seems a trifle rude. I haven’t even said what I intend to do to you yet.”
Not sure how to respond, Ralph looked out the window. They had entered a velvety forest; the woods drew close to the road. “Where are we now?” he asked.
Chessie glanced dismissively at their surroundings. “Chumpy Forest. Which means we’re halfway to your beheading!”
CHAPTER XVII
Ralph had already nodded civilly before Chessie’s words struck him. He gave a strangled little noise.
She fondled a curl, then returned her focus to the passing forest. “It’s a lot of work for an evil duchess to manage her kingdom. The overtaxing of peasantry, the foiling of marriage plots, the hiding away of prophesied jewelry — these all take a lot of effort. With this Cecil hero skirmishing with my forces and trying to unionize the fairies, I’ve been beside myself. Judging by your outlandish clothing and your acquaintance with this Cecil, I assume you are his cohort. Therefore I have determined that you must die.”
“Okay. I can see your point, really I can. But I don’t want to be killed at all. And a little while ago you said it was okay if I was here.”
Chessie nodded sadly and parted her ruby lips to down the rest of her tea. Then her eyes suddenly lit up. She put the cup down and said, brightly, “I suppose we could kill you earlier rather than later, if you’d prefer!”
“No, that’s all right. Thanks, though.”
“You see, Ralph, I’m very sorry about all of this, but I can’t brook having a hero plotting against me in my own duchy, threatening to overthrow my rule, monomaniacal as it may be. Cecil fights a dirty guerrilla war, picking at me from my forests, freeing fairies, and then scampering back to cover. What better way to finally draw him into the open than to publicly behead his own cousin? It also happens to be an efficient way of dealing with your intrusion.”
“Maybe we could have a fake beheading,” Ralph suggested.
“What, an artificial head rolling into the basket? How would that work, do you think?” Chessie asked with genuine interest. “I’m not trying to insult your idea, I just want you to walk me through it.”
“I don’t know how you’d do it,” Ralph said. “But I figure, well, if you have fairies in the carriage, and unicorns out front, then I bet you have whatever magic it takes to fake a beheading. It can’t be too hard. Though I guess you have more experience with these sorts of things.”
“I suppose I do,” Chessie sniffed, suddenly remembering her position.
“How long do I have?” Ralph asked.
“Let me find out. Fuchsia!”
Fuchsia fluttered forward. Fairies don’t generally wear clothing; Fuchsia was decidedly buxom but also a foot tall, pink, and winged, so Ralph found himself struck by a curious mix of feelings. He did his best to stare respectfully into the folds of the curtains. “Yes, mum?” Fuchsia asked.
“Where is Inexorable Pulse?”
“On break, mum.”
In a flash, Chessie had Fuchsia on her lap, the little creature’s neck squeezed between her thumb and forefinger. “I need the time.”
“Yes, mum,” Fuchsia croaked. Chessie released her, whereupon she flitted to the ceiling and coughed.
“Now,” Chessie commanded. Fuchsia skittered out of the oil-paper window.
“Scads of fairies in this duchy, and th
ese were the best I could find. Sweet creatures, but they can’t predict a single need, and literally can’t cook to save their lives. Those silly wings keep catching fire.” Chessie stood and paced the carriage.
Fuchsia returned holding a nervous bespectacled fairy who turned a new color every time he grimaced. When the manacled sprite was delivered to Chessie’s hands, he became a brilliant shade of blue, with an emerging flood of green at the front of his pants.
“Inexorable Pulse,” Chessie intoned. “This is Ralph. He’s asked the time. As he’s about to be killed, you’ll be doing him a special favor.”
Inexorable Pulse pushed back his cuffs so they sat higher on his arms, and nudged his spectacles to the top of his nose. After ducking his head out the window and peering at the sun, he ducked back in and lost himself in his computations. He turned a brilliant shade of maroon. “It’s two thirty-eight, mum, give or take forty minutes.”
“Very good, Inexorable Pulse,” Chessie said. She placed a steadying finger on his waist, slapped his legs, and watched him pinwheel. He let out a yelp as he spun, turning a myriad of colors while the sound strengthened into a scream. His little spectacles tinkled to the floor and shattered. Even though the colors of the torture were amazing — tie-dye on the spin cycle — Ralph dashed a hand out and stopped the spinning sprite. The fairy went limp and turned a shade of the palest yellow in his hand. One of his wings had ripped.
“You hurt him,” Ralph said.
“I’m sure he’s dying, the little fool. I’ll hear none of it,” Chessie snorted. “There are thousands more fairies. It’s like mourning a sugar packet.”
She poured cream into her tea, the silver stirrer ringing out against the porcelain. “And, by the way, you have twelve minutes to live. Well, probably eleven by now.”
A beheading in the undetermined future — even when the head to be removed was his own — was something Ralph found himself capable of procrastinating out of his mind. But in eleven minutes! Once he had learned the precise timing of his demise, Ralph finally started to act sensibly. While Chessie was busy perfecting her tea, he dashed to his feet and tried the door.
It was still locked, of course.
Being unable to turn the knob seemed to Ralph the worst of all possible outcomes, but he didn’t know the half of it. At least Chessie hadn’t yet gotten around to planting a Copper-venom Spider on the underside of the handle. At least the Acid Asp draped over the threshold had fallen asleep. At least the lever to activate the trapdoor was out of her reach.
She cursed this last oversight as she regarded Ralph. Of course she remembered who he really was, though in the magic of the spell she had to obey my commands and couldn’t let her performance reflect it. It seemed a shame to kill him. He was sweet, if addled and unromantic and entirely unsuited for questing.
Still, she had to make this work. Her nephew had asked for a simple wish, and she had a responsibility to buoy the dwindling supply of royal mystique. As the monarchs lost power in politics it became all the more important to exercise it in myth. The days of true enchantment were gone; she couldn’t hope to compare to, say, the Russian czars before they got clobbered, but at least she could grant her own bloody nephew’s greatest desire.
Wish-grantings had never been simple, logistically — the Royal Narratological Guild had a full-time staff of twenty who recorded and collated all the stories, and scores more who were in charge of getting all the necessary temporary employees in line. And they were expensive — five percent of British GDP was spent on extras and animal trainers and magicians and the like, though much of that was recouped in book and film royalties (sales of wish narratives being, incidentally, the origin of the very term “royalties”). Chessie couldn’t very well have the first wish granted in eleven years put at risk by a young American who wasn’t meant to be there.
No, it was unavoidable that Ralph should die — that was the long and the short of it. Preferably publicly, to get Cecil fired up, but if Ralph was going to keep causing this much trouble, a private execution would do.
I’d hoped not to have her perform any more magic in front of Ralph. Foreigners always tended to get unnerved when confronted by a good old Buckingham spell. But I figured that Ralph had already been subjected to unicorns and fairies, so what would some real wizardry matter? She raised her fingertips — she could have shot her arms to the sky, but one needn’t be tawdry — and magically ripped away Ralph’s shirt.
If it seems an odd move, I agree. In fact, it seems frankly predatory, in the TV-movie sense of the word. Chessie had that salacious image, after all. Famously caught cheating on her husband, always wearing skirts a little too short, dyeing her hair the color of tomato sauce, giving the image of having been fantasized about. She shouldn’t go around ripping teenage boys’ shirts off — it could easily be misconstrued. But regardless of what she should have done, this is precisely what she did.
Other narrators might fudge events to smooth over politics with their employers. But I’m a narrator with integrity.
Besides, it’s not as though Chessie removed any other article of Ralph’s clothing. Except his pants.
The shirt and pants danced in front of Ralph, then the shirt split cleanly and soundlessly, as if the fabric had been a pool of water through which Chessie had drawn an inky finger. Then Chessie magically bound the two halves over the struggling boy’s wrists, and used the jeans to bind his ankles.
She rose to her full height (she was a tall duchess) and shoved him to the ground, this time with her own hand. He fell heavily and stared at her with wide eyes. Then she raised her palm, whereby a plank of wood removed itself from the carriage floor and placed itself over his torso. She lowered her palm, and he gasped as the plank warped over his chest and pinned him to the floor. He heaved against the restraint, but he couldn’t budge it, nor could he slide out from beneath.
“Don’t struggle!” Chessie snapped. She could sit through interminable royal processionals, endless knighting ceremonies, and prolonged state weddings, but death scenes made her crotchety. She called out for Ten P.M. Black.
A fairy emerged from a storage closet and flew into Chessie’s outstretched hands. He was muscular for a fairy, and his color was a bruised purple. The edges of his wings glinted silver. When he laid his arms at his sides and clasped his wings, he made a fine approximation of an executioner’s axe. Chessie hefted the fairy axe a couple of times. On each swing he beat his wings, adding speed to the slashes.
For practice, she cleaved the teapot neatly in two. It didn’t shatter; it merely parted for the razor edge. The contents, however, spun out in a hot globe, scalding Fuchsia and Vermillion and the prone Inexorable Pulse. They gave fairy gasps and fled to the ceiling.
Ralph struggled, but each spasm only served to clamp the plank of wood down harder.
Chessie leaped about the carriage, swinging the axe. She cut loose great pennants of curtain that fluttered to the bumping floor; she sliced an unfortunate fairy guard in two on a backswing.
Meanwhile Ralph continued to struggle, and the plank continued to press down harder, until he could no longer breathe. His vision turned gray at the edges as he gasped against the floor. Soon he could see only the most colorful things in the room — the flashing silver of the axe, the wings of Vermillion and Fuchsia hovering near the window. Maybe it was his vision slushing as he passed out, but he saw them begin to beat their wings very oddly. Vermillion held Fuchsia’s hand, but flapped twice as fast; they bobbed with the irregular pitch of their flight. He was lulled by the pattern as he fell into unconsciousness — red, red, pink, red, red, pink. Then he saw Fuchsia peer searchingly out the window. At the very moment that Chessie whipped her hair out of her eyes and approached Ralph with Ten P.M. Black held high, there was a great neighing chaos and the carriage came to a screeching halt before creaking, listing heavily to one side, and finally tumbling through open air.
CHAPTER XVIII
As any aeronautical engineer will confirm, fairies do re
markably well in unicorn-drawn carriage crashes. Their strategy is simple: Keep to the center of the carriage and fly with equivalent speed against the rapidly decreasing velocity of the vehicle.
Prisoners magically trapped beneath planks of flooring do moderately well. The otherwise death-hastening wood serves like the lap restraint on a roller coaster.
Axe-wielding duchesses, however, make out substantially worse. And unfortunately, an axe-wielding duchess careening about a carriage is a problem for everyone.
The ceiling became the floor, then it was the ceiling again, and then it was back to being floor. Ralph, pinioned beneath his restraint, had a comparatively stable vantage point from which to catalog his repeated brushes with death. Ten P.M. Black whizzed before his face uncountable times. Ralph scrunched his eyes and waited to lose an arm or a nose, but his closest shave with the fairy axe resulted only in wisps of his hair joining the tumult.
Chessie clawed at him with her painted nails whenever the carriage’s tumble thrust her close enough. She would near and then be hurled away, fairies and candles and cloven teapots beating around her.
The carriage eventually made its final bounce and came to rest on its side. Those fairies who were able to flew out immediately, and as their great thrashing flock rose into the air, Ralph realized there had been more of them in the carriage than he’d first thought. Fairy feather dusters, fairies whose wings had served as doilies, fairy platters, and fairy forks all swarmed from the wrecked carriage.
Ralph struggled against his restraint and gasped in pain. The wood was leaving deep abrasions on his chest, and he had begun to sniff his own blood. Then there was a heaving sound at the carriage’s door (now its roof, incidentally), and the wood splintered as it was lifted off its hinges. When light flooded the suite of rooms, Ralph saw a figure he recognized silhouetted against the blue sky.
Cecil lowered himself into the carriage and set to work releasing Ralph from his bonds. The plank came away easily in Cecil’s hands. “Thank you,” Ralph said, before promptly plummeting to the bottom of the carriage. “Ouch,” he concluded.
