Excerpt: The Price of Thorns
As part of moving the newsletter over to here, I decided to break it up into parts and post a bit every week or so. So here’s an excerpt! Next week or the week after I’ll answer some writing advice questions (hit me up on Twitter if you have a question you’d like answered).
This is mostly what I’ve been working on lately, and it’s pretty far along in the book, but this little segment kind of stands on its own. If you’re interested in catching up, the story is being serialized over on my Other Name Patreon, where you can read it from the beginning.
She remained silent as the tree-rat cooked, until it was done. As Nivvy set to carving it up and eating the flesh, he said, “Why don’t you tell us a story? You must know all of them, or nearly.”
Very well. Yes, I shall.
“Wait,” Zein said. “I want to hear, too.”
So Nivvy took the ring off and Zein slid one talon through it and then perched on Nivvy’s leg—carefully—while he ate so that they could both hear the djinn.
This story happened a long, long time ago. It’s the story of two sisters who grew up in the house of a witch and how they came to hate each other.
Her voice fell into a storytelling cadence as she continued on. I do not know how they came to live in the house of the witch. Perhaps she took them as payment, perhaps she stole them. Perhaps they were her own children. However it came to happen, there they lived and there they grew, and there they learned magic, as children in a witch’s house will do.
They differed in more ways than they resembled each other. They grew like two flowers in the same garden, one never more than an inch taller than the other. The fairer one, with golden hair and skin as fresh and clear as a new snowfall, found that her skills lay in healing magic, while the darker one, with hair black as charcoal and skin smooth as polished marble, surpassed even the witch in the art of curses.
Around this time, the king of a neighboring kingdom—there were many kingdoms in the north, some as small as a lake, others as large as a sea, and this one was perhaps the size of a very large lake—fell ill, and none of the healers in the kingdom could find a cure for his sickness, so they claimed it was a curse.
It wasn’t, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell. I wasn’t there, but I know everyone who would have cast a curse on him, and they all say they didn’t.
The witch sisters were brought before the king and ordered to heal him. The darker sister with all her knowledge of curses attempted to undo the curse on the king, but as I have said, it was not a curse and therefore she failed. Then the fairer sister laid her hands on the king, and after mere seconds he rose to his feet and declared himself healed of his mysterious illness. So that he and his might never suffer illness in their lives, he bid his son marry the golden-haired sister and welcomed her into his family.
The golden-haired sister, fair of temperament as well as features, begged that her sister be married into the family as well. The king had no other sons, but his sister, queen of a smaller lake-sized kingdom farther to the east, had one, and so the darker-haired sister was married to this prince and became part of the royal family of that kingdom.
But while the fairer-haired sister lived quite happily with her prince, the darker-haired sister was not content with her prince, who by all accounts was a very kind man, nor her kingdom, which was not the most prosperous in the region but did include enough rich farmland to keep all its people well fed. She believed that her sister had conspired to be married into the more prosperous kingdom and to send her away to this smaller one. This does not seem to be true, but who can tell? One may wear a fair face and conceal horrors within.
A year later, the fairer sister bore a child, a lovely daughter, and of course the darker sister was invited to the consecration, a pointless ritual meant to curry favor with the god that the kingdom supposed to be watching over them. The ritual was beloved by the royal families and by all of the poor people in the kingdom, or at least the poor people enjoyed the free food they received when they attended. It was a great ceremony, three days of feasting and festivities, and of course the darker sister was invited. By now she, who had yet to conceive a child, felt that her sister only invited her to show off and throw her own life into miserable contrast.
So she prepared a curse that would, she felt, make their lives equal again. If you do not know about curses, it is helpful to think of them as a trap you might set in the forest. She could not, for example, use a curse to steal her sister’s daughter outright. But she could curse the child so that when something particular happened in the child’s life, the curse would take effect. And she poured all the hatred and resentment she had into this curse, weaving a trap so complicated and thorough that even her equally-skilled sister would not be able to unravel it.
Her sister’s daughter, the pride of her life, would be taken from her at the point when her sister would be most proud of her, as her daughter flowered into womanhood on her fifteenth birthday. That was when they considered a girl to be a woman in those days. I don’t know when it is now. I haven’t kept up.
On her fifteenth birthday, the curse went, should anyone comment upon the princess’s beauty, she would faint on the spot. When she awoke, she would remember nothing of her life with her family, but would instead believe herself to be the child of the darker-haired sister, all of her memories forever changed.
“I’ve heard this story,” Zein said. “Only not with the memories, it was that she would fall down dead. But the mother found out about the curse and got it changed so she would only sleep for a hundred years.”
How would the mother find out about the curse? Do you think her sister walked into the consecration and announced the curse to everyone in front of all the guests and royalty?
“That’s how I heard it.”
That’s ridiculous. If they’d heard the curse, it would be easy to prevent it. No witch would announce the curse as they cast it.
“I always thought that it was strange that she would be so clever as to create an elaborate curse but not clever enough to not tell people the curse to their faces.”
Do you want to hear my story or not?
Zein fluffed their feathers. “Sorry,” they said.
Nivvy kept quiet as he ate, but he too was familiar with the story, and shared Zein’s memories and objections. But he was enjoying Scarlet’s telling of the tale; when the djinn’s acerbic tone wasn’t directed at him, he enjoyed it. He suspected he knew who the darker-haired sister in the story was, but didn’t want to interrupt to confirm it.
The darker-haired sister went to the consecration and smiled politely and said all the right things, and took a hair from the new princess’s head when nobody was looking. That night she used the hair and a drop of her blood, and she wove the curse. She spent an hour, and when she was done the curse was as strong as any she had ever cast. The festival ended and the queen embraced her sister and told her how lovely it was to see her again.
On the princess’s fifteenth birthday, her father told her she looked more beautiful than the sun. She fell down into a dead faint, and when she awoke, she asked her mother and father why she was at their palace and when she would go home. Nothing they said could dissuade her from what she believed to be the truth, and the harder they tried, the angrier she got. Finally there was nothing they could do but let her go to the darker-haired sister’s kingdom, where she was welcomed as a princess.
Scarlet fell quiet. Both Nivvy and Zein waited, but the djinn didn’t go on. Zein broke first. “Is that all? What happened?”
That’s what happened. What do you want?
“How did the fairer sister get her daughter back? How was the evil queen beaten?”
She didn’t. She wasn’t.
“What, ever?”
Here, Nivvy couldn’t restrain himself. He put down the bones of the rat, stripped clean. “The evil queen is Rose. She’s trying to tell us again how evil she is.”
I thought you should hear a truer story of her childhood than the one you had heard so far.
Zein fluffed their wings again. “I didn’t hear any stories of her childhood, unless you’re talking about the Sleeping Princess story, but you just said this isn’t that one.”
It is a version of this one.
“But,” Zein went on, “what happened to the princess? Did she become queen eventually?”
“I don’t think so.” Nivvy finished chewing the meat from the last bone. Having eaten raw meat the last few days, he wasn’t entirely sure that the work of building a fire and waiting to cook the meat was worth it, but eating raw meat wasn’t something most people did, unless they were savages. “She told Scarlet something about protecting her daughter.”
That was the same daughter, yes, Scarlet said.
“So she just got to keep her sister’s daughter? What happened to the sister?” Zein shifted restlessly.
She died of grief and a great statue was erected in her honor. Now people think she was a goddess worshipped a thousand years ago. Rose has probably already destroyed the statue. She tried to once before she was imprisoned.
“I want to hear that story,” Nivvy said. “How was she imprisoned? Who did it? Why?”
Another time, Scarlet said.
“I don’t like how that story ends,” Zein declared. “The evil queen should be punished, or you should tell us how her curse didn’t work and the princess lived happily ever after.”
I don’t know how happy the princess was. Scarlet sounded bored. I imagine she was happy because the memories she had were happy ones. She married and had a child and lived a boring life, which is as happy as one can expect, isn’t it?
The hawk fluttered their wings, brushing Nivvy’s legs with air. “You shouldn’t be telling that story if it doesn’t have a good ending. That’s what Oigal says. He won’t tell a story that doesn’t end properly. And he says stories should have a lesson.”
When does a story end? Scarlet asked. I could have gone on to tell you about how the fairer sister’s kingdom went to war to get their princess back, how the darker sister negotiated alliances with honey and with nettles, how the war ultimately ended without a clear winner. I could have skipped forward years to the princess’s wedding, which sparked another war, to the fairer sister’s death, to the darker sister taking over the kingdoms, all the way up to the present day. Perhaps Rose’s punishment is yet to come. Perhaps she will die without ever feeling it. And perhaps it has not been her story at all.
“It doesn’t have to be her story,” Zein said. “But ‘jealous person does something bad and gets away with it’ isn’t a good story.”
It is instructive, Scarlet said. The lesson, if you must have one, is that bad people will do things good people don’t expect, and if you are not prepared then you may fall victim to them. That, too, I have seen over and over again in my life. So it is a good story, just not of the sort you recognize. The fault is yours.
Zein huffed and shook the ring free from their talon, then said to Nivvy, “I like Oigal better,” and took flight.