Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 52915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52915 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
“Have you seen the princess?”
“No,” Lady Feathering says. “Though I believe some of the others here in this benighted location have had the honor of her acquaintance. That young woman especially.”
She extends a feathered arm in the direction of a sobbing woman who is leaning against a wall and wailing with the kind of despair one generally only hears in the direst of situations. I approach, risking my hearing in an effort to ascertain what is wrong with the girl.
“Annabelle,” she screeches. “She told me my name was Annabelle and I just needed to believe in myself. I was never made to believe in myself. I was a convenient device for a hero to find his heroine.”
I see the problem immediately, of course. A loose end does not mind being a loose end. They are not made with any more substance than that. Emmaline has unintentionally thrust purpose on someone nearly entirely purposeless, and that is a cruelty few comprehend.
Fortunately, fate has seen fit to provide a solution to fit the problem perfectly.
“Would you like to help me find my heroine?”
The pretty young woman, whose name will never be Annabelle, dries her tears almost immediately. “Oh, yes. Absolutely. Thank you, thank you, kind prince!”
“Come, Lady Feathering, gather your maids. We are returning to the Ever After as soon as we find Emmaline. Add this one to your number.”
It has been a long time since a humanoid-type personage served in my retinue. I had forgotten what it is like to be surrounded by those in their original forms. So many of these people could fit in Emmaline’s world without any apparent issue whatsoever. It used to be this way in the Ever After, until… well, until me.
“Spread out and try to find any trace of the princess,” I instruct. “If anybody gives you trouble, call for me and I will crack their skulls directly. We must find her. She does not understand the forces she is meddling with, and she might easily find herself in trouble if we are not careful to find her.”
The process of questioning the villagers is remarkably tedious. Many refuse to answer questions at all, and the fact that I am an impatient king ready to slaughter them seems entirely lost on them. No matter how much I rage and demand, they flow around me as if I am an irrelevance. It is tempting to grab one of them and perform a summary execution, but I know that is the impulse of the beast, and not how I find my way to Happily Ever After.
Annabelle, the woman burdened by purpose, is first to find a lead.
“Over here, your highness,” she calls, waving me over to a gnarled old blacksmith, lurking in the corner of his forge. “He says he saw your princess!”
“Saw ’er sword,” the blacksmith corrects her. “Fine sword that, hard to miss.”
“Where is she? Where did she go?”
He huffs for a moment, as if the effort of thinking takes breath, and he looks up at me under one brow.
“I told her not to go up into the mountains. I told her they’re not passable from this side, but she kept talking about the Ever After and some buffoon named Charming, and she insisted on going up there alone. Be frozen in a drift by now, I imagine.”
“You would do well not to speak so insolently,” I growl. “The woman we speak of is the highest in the land. She is my princess, and she will one day be my queen.”
“Wasn’t when I met her. Was just a wench with a sword, ruining everyone’s stories by stirring up trouble. If you’re the king you seem to think you are, better claim her before she ruins the Far Far Away completely with her ideas.”
“Ideas?”
“Tellin’ perfectly good loose ends they have purpose,” he snorts. “Look at me here. She saw fit to tell me that I didn’t have to be a blacksmith if it made me so grumpy all the time. Said I could retrain as something else. Something else! I was born a blacksmith, I was, and a blacksmith I’ll always be, happy, sad or indifferent. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Now see, she saw this little painting back here…” He points to a red tulip painted with delicacy upon the side wall of his forge shack. “And she asked me if I’d done that, and I said I had a long time ago, and she said did I want to be a painter, and I said, I said, do I WANT TO BE A PAINTER?!”
He takes a deep breath to steady his nerves, clearly jangled by the entire encounter.
“I do want to be a painter,” he says. “But I’m a blacksmith, ain’t I?”
There’s a long pause.
“So she went toward the mountains?”
“She did. Yes.”
“Alright.”
12
Emmaline
I don’t like the cold, so I don’t go up into the mountains. I walk out of Resolution and find a narrow path that is very poorly signposted. It appears to track down from the mountain pass, a loose and gravelly path that invites one to break one’s neck. In the distance I can see the flash of ocean, bright blue through rocks and trees. If I venture down, I think I’ll find some new place to be.