Stinking Beauty

by Elizabeth A Reeves

  “And Justice,” Astraea said with a grin pointing at herself. “And Mercy,” she continued, pointing at her brother.

  “And me,” Gloriana said with a head toss and flip of her glorious hair, refusing to be left out.

  “And me, whatever use that is,” I grumbled.

  Astraea pinched me.

  “Hey,” I protested.

  “Enough with the wimpy self-pity,” she said sternly, pointing her finger at my nose. “You’re tough, start remembering that.” Like her brother, she pulled up the hood of her cape and covered her face.

  “If anyone sees us, they’ll die of fright,” Gloriana whispered to me, giving the twins a wide-eyed stare.

  I giggled nervously, but she was right. Anyone who knew anything about the twins would panic the moment they caught sight of those flowing, creepy cloaks.

  Good.

  The temperature in the carriage slowly dropped, until we could see our breaths. I was glad that Flit had decided to stay behind. I knew some of the Great Dragons had ways of handling the cold, but their smaller cousins had none of those defenses.

  I pulled my cloak tighter around me and murmured a quick warming spell I had learned as a child. I could tell by the steam rising off of my companions that they had done the same. There was something cozy about the tip of my nose being cold while the rest of me was toasty warm. I drew in a deep breath and enjoyed the sharpness of the air.

  “You’re all about silver linings,” Gloriana said fondly. It was a saying she had learned from the humans and she loved to repeat it.

  “How so?” I asked, trying to peer out of the carriage window to see outside. It was too dark to see much of anything except more darkness.

  “You enjoy experiences,” she said. “If it’s cold, you’re grinning and blowing out steam-clouds of breath. If it’s hot, you drink lemonade and lie out in the sun. Not that anyone could tell by looking at you.”

  I looked at my pale blue-white toned skin and laughed. “No. No one would ever guess I love the sun.”

  “You never seem to get mad or lose your temper… not for long, anyway. Your family is just plain cruel to you and it just slides off of you like water off a hippogriff's back.” She stared at me as if she as my dad with a new insect to study.

  I wrinkled my nose at her. “You’re thinking too hard. I’m nothing special.”

  All three of my companions snorted in unison.

  I rolled my eyes. A flicker of light caught my eye through the window. I leaned forward for a better look. “I think we’re here,” I said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The wooded spot inside of the city walls was just as Gloriana had described. It was the perfect place to leave the carriage and longma while we ventured closer to the castle.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been this cold. I had tried to be prepared, but, despite the warming spell I was using on my clothing, the icy wind cut straight through me, making me shiver.

  “If anything feels wrong,” I told the longma, patting them on the neck by turn, “you get out of here and go home. Don’t put yourselves at risk on my account.”

  The lead longma nudged me gently and made a nickering sound just like a horse.

  I gave him a last pat and scratch under his mane and joined my companions further under the trees.

  Silently, Astraea lifted me into her arms and the three of them took to the sky.

  Normally, I would have craned my neck in all directions, seeing and experiencing as much as I could while in the air. This time I was too cold to attempt looking around. I buried my face deep in my hood and turned that towards Astraea’s neck. Unlike me, she seemed to be warm, maybe even a little on the hot side.

  I wondered if that was part of being whatever mysterious creature she was, or if it was just her Magic and exercise combining forces.

  Whatever the reason, I was much warmer by the time we landed on top of one of the walks near the top of the castle.

  The castle was everything that one would expect for a frozen land. It was made of heavy, dark stone, which peered out sullenly at us from under a thick coating of ice. Everything about it looked cold and miserable. My new home was made of black stone, but it had never felt as gloomy as this place.

  “Magic doesn’t like it here,” I murmured to Astraea as she set me back on my feet. “Can’t you feel it?”

  She gave me a curious look but shook her head.

  “There’s a door just around the corner,” Gloriana whispered. She had tucked her flowing hair into her cloak, but long strands kept getting whipped around her face. She gave up the struggle and pushed her hood back, letting the wind take control.

  She looked like some ancient battle goddess, I thought with a shiver.

  We followed Gloriana and found the door just where she said it would be. She tried the latch and found it open. Within moments, we stumbled inside and closed it again behind us.

  “I’ll be right back,” Gloriana said, her cheeks pink from the chill and her eyes sparkling with excitement. “I will find someone who can talk to us.”

  Before we could say anything, she had disappeared down the narrow stone corridor.

  Dallan glanced at the door, at least his hood turned in that direction. “I suppose we can always escape through this,” he said. “Do you trust your cousin implicitly?”

  I stared at him. “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I trust her?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about her character. If she was wily, she could be leading us into a trap right now. We would have the disadvantage in a potentially hostile environment.”

  “Gloriana would never betray us,” I protested hotly. “Have you forgotten that she’s a fairy and she can’t lie? She said she’d be right back. She’ll be back.”

  “She didn’t say she wouldn’t bring armed soldiers to attack us,” Dallan said in a reasonable voice.

  I snorted. “Do you have to see the bad in everyone?”

  He shrugged. “It is in my job description. Do you have to be so honeyfuggled by everything?”

  I narrowed my eyes at the spot where I guessed his eyes were. “I am not honeyfuggled. I am reasonably suspicious.”

  “Can you save the flirtation for when you are alone?” Astraea protested. “The two of you are making my heart palpitate and I don’t like it. It’s gross.”

  “It’s not fair when you gang up on me like this,” I said, motioning to their cloaks. “I can’t see your faces, so I don’t know if you’re making fun of me or not.”

  “Assume that we’re always teasing,” Astraea said instantly, “but we would never, ever, mock you.”

  Somehow I was not reassured.

  Now that I was away from Astraea’s body heat, I started to shiver again. Dallan reached out and pulled me closer to him. I sighed in relief at the warmth that enveloped him.

  “I bet I could bake a cake on you,” I said happily.

  “Please don’t,” he said, distressed.

  “Hmm.”

  We heard footsteps approaching and Gloriana appeared around the corner with a woman and two men, just as Dallan was reaching for the latch of the door. He only relaxed slightly when he saw Gloriana’s companions.

  “Come this way,” the woman said in a strangely accented voice, gesturing for us to follow her further down the hall.

  In a few minutes, we were all sequestered in a small chamber. It was a cheerless place, but it had a roaring fireplace so I was predisposed to adore it.

  My needs were simple like that.

  The local men and the woman glanced uneasily at the twins and shifted so that they could stand as far from their looming shapes as possible while still in the same tiny room.

  I rubbed my hands together and presented them to the fire for baking. “You’ve terrified them appropriately,” I told the twins. “Maybe pull down those hoods so we can ask some questions without them feeling like you are monsters waiting to eat them.”

  My remarks were just what was needed to cut the
tension in the room. One of the men barked out a laugh and the other two relaxed visibly.

  “Fine,” Dallan muttered and he pushed back his cloak. The firelight highlighted his sharp features and gave him an otherworldly beauty. Perhaps he should have left the cloak on after all.

  Astraea pushed back her own hood and displayed her equally inhuman face to the room. Unlike her brother, she wore that slight enigmatic smile of hers.

  Gloriana gestured for someone to speak.

  To my dismay, the twins looked at me.

  I sighed. “I have no idea what question to ask, so I suppose I’ll tell my story, and you three can speak up if it sounds like you can help us. Is that agreeable?”

  The two men and the woman looked at each other and shrugged. The woman looked a little cold, so I gestured her closer to the fire.

  I started with my visit to the tower and my not-so-charming discovery of a rotting corpse and continued on until I mentioned the badge we had found where Brunhild had been killed.

  The three locals exchanged frightened looks. The woman raised her chin resolutely.

  “Our king is a bad man,” she said. The men made panicked moves to hush her, but she waved them off. “It is true. He is a bad man.” She frowned into the fire. “He thinks it is a game, a sport? Yes, a sport to find young, beautiful women and make them fall in love with him. He tells them beautiful lies and he makes love to them and he laughs at their tears when he leaves.” She pulled her eyes away from the fire to meet mine. “My daughter was one of these. She was a good girl, a lovely girl. My daughter was a treasure.” She turned her head towards the two men. “Yes? Wasn’t she?”

  They murmured in assent.

  “She was very lovely,” one of them volunteered. “And so sweet birds would come when she called them.”

  “He killed her,” the woman said without preamble. “She is dead. My beauty, my heart is dead because he had her head cut off. And when it was done he laughed.” She turned her grief-stricken face back to the fire and breathed until she could control her voice again. “I have heard him speak of this Talia. He was joking with his men about her with the golden hair from the land of warm sunshine.” She shuddered. She pointed a gnarled hand at the men. “They know the rest. You find the king, make him pay. Bring my daughter justice.”

  “We will,” said Astraea, the Song of Justice.

  I did not know if the woman knew who she was speaking to, but she accepted the promise with dignity. She slipped out of the room.

  “Our Queen,” one man started, “is an angel.”

  I startled. Those were not the words I had been expecting.

  His companion nodded eagerly. “She is gentle and beautiful with hair like midnight and eyes like stars. She is loved by everyone in this kingdom. We wish that she could lead us, but it is the law that a king must rule.”

  “The king is angry because she will not give him children,” the first man said. “She would do anything to have a child, but she has not been so blessed.”

  I glanced at her Godmother and raised an eyebrow.

  Gloriana shook her head.

  “We know that the king will find a way for him to be rid of her,” the second man said. “We can do nothing but watch and it makes us angry. Because our Queen is not evil, she is not a witch, and she has never betrayed her husband. He will say all those things, but none of them are true.”

  I wished for a moment that humans were like fairies and could not lie. I wondered if that would make them more honest or more devious.

  “The Queen learned of this lovely Talia,” the first man said. “She was hurt and angry. She had her trusted few men, and us, take her to the warm country where she could spy her rival.”

  “But the queen has a soft heart,” the second man said. “She wanted to hate the girl, to slap her, to shake her! But when she met the girl she did none of those things. She heard the girl weeping and consoled her. And together they devised a plan, a very clever plan.”

  I leaned forward, my heart racing violently in my chest.

  “They decided that the queen herself would trigger the Sleeping Spell and carry Talia away to a safe place where her true love would be able to find her, but our cruel king would not. She said she would find the princess and the prince a place to hide until they could explain to their families what had happened. They would not be able to do that, of course, until the king was dead.”

  I wondered at how cold-bloodedly they spoke of their king’s demise. From what he had done, it sounded as if he deserved it.

  “They even picked a maiden from the queen’s ladies to take Talia’s place,” the man said. “So that the king would see that girl sleeping and think it was Talia.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We do not know. Our beautiful queen left, but she did not return with Princess Talia or her prince.”

  “Seraphina did not return either,” the other man interjected.

  “Seraphina?” I asked.

  “The handmaiden that was chosen to take Talia’s place,” the man said.

  I looked at Gloriana and the twins. “Is it hopeless? Have we hit another dead end.”

  “Li,” the first man said. “No. For the King is as clever as he is wicked. He has Talia.”

  I nearly choked on my gasp. I could hear my companions react behind me. “He does? Where? Here?”

  “Juo,” his companion said. “It is a hidden place, but the king trusts us. We know the way and the secrets to enter.”

  I squeezed my hands together. Could this be it? Could we truly be this close to finding Talia and returning her to her family?

  “We must be careful,” the first man said. “The king must not know we are coming. He cares nothing for Talia. If he knows you want to rescue her, he will kill her.”

  “Cut her throat,” the second man said, running his hand across his neck in the universal gesture of murder.

  My blood ran cold at the thought.

  “We must hurry,” the first man said. “Every moment she is with him, the danger is that much greater. He has only kept her alive this long for the sake of the babies, but I heard her screaming. Once they are born, he has no reason to save her.”

  I let out a sound that sounded like a whimper. Gloriana and Dallan both reached for me at the same time. I gestured them away.

  “We must do this,” I told them. “I promised Talia and her parents that I would take care of them. I have her Godmother. I can do whatever I need to make sure she’s safe and home.”

  The two men’s eyes widened, and they bowed respectfully. I wondered what they do if they realized who the other beings in the room were.

  “We must go now,” the men said, urging us to follow them. “The night is good, the guards know us and will allow us to enter. Come!”

  Not even Dallan hesitated to follow, though I could almost hear him warning us that this could be a trap that we were walking into. Somehow, I didn’t believe that was the case. There was something honest about the way the men had spoken that led me to believe that they were good men under the thumbs of a truly evil king.

  We hurried down back hallways, pausing when our guides gestured for us to stop. Several times groups of soldiers passed where we would have been without their guidance. By the time they told us we were drawing close to where Talia was being held, I felt as if we had climbed down deep into the mountain that the castle had been built into. I clutched my wand in my hands. I had no other weapon but that, and Magic itself, if it chose to cooperate with this fight.

  Dallan and Astraea had revealed weapons from under their cloaks. Dallan carried twin knives that gleamed like burnished stars even in the flickering torchlight of these back passages. Astraea carried a long, thin blade. I had never seen a sword like it, but when she drew it, it sang a high, sweet note.

  I remembered that they called her the Song of Justice.

  Like me, Gloriana only had a wand for a weapon, but she was far more adept with it than I ever had b
een. The two guards showing us the way were both armed with swords and knives. They looked as if they were used to using both.

  Our leader let out a soft cry and dropped to his knees. I hurried to his side and found him kneeling by another guard, who was lying in a pool of blood. The scent of blood filled the air. I was not surprised to look a step further and find another guard also slain.

  Our guides abandoned us, running on ahead with their swords drawn, their eyes full of fear and revenge. We followed closely behind them.

  There were many more bodies as we ran, most of them guarding a single narrow door that had swung open to reveal and narrow, winding stairway of stone.

  Always stairs. I hoped that meant that Magic was with us.

  Dallan took the lead and we followed him quickly down the stairs, so many stairs. Astraea followed in the rear in case we were attacked from behind.

  We passed from the steps right into a wide chamber. I looked up and saw stalactites hanging like glistening teeth far above our heads and realized that we were in a natural cavern inside of the mountain.

  The two guards that had guided us surrounded a woman who stood in the middle of the cavern. She had a sword drawn and was standing over the prone form of a young man.

  I started to rush forward, but Dallan caught my arm. “Easy,” he cautioned. I realized he had drawn his hood back up.

  I was desperate to do something, but I understood the need to register what was happening in front of us.

  A tall man, with beautiful golden curls and an angelic face, stood on a sort of dais in the middle of the room. Beside him, on a bed of sorts, lay the body of a pale girl. Blood marred the blankets of the bed and dripped onto the stone floor. The man I assumed was the king, looked down at her with a distant sort of expression, almost bemused by the sight of that still form.

  Somewhere, a wailing, high newborn cry filled the air. It was joined after a moment by another wailing cry.

  “Well?” the king demanded, grinning at the woman with the sword and her guards. “Do you want the babies for yourself, since you never could seem to carry even a bastard yourself?”