Humour her, her mother had said. Her mothers didn’t miss a beat to do so, plying her Hero with sweet words of support and encouragement and giving her whatever she asked for. That was how her bedroom had been emptied of furniture the night before her birthday.
Now she and a row of resigned guards were waiting against the far wall, the bedroom’s most prominent window ahead of them.
It was the worst wait of her life. If she had had a chair, she could have sat in it to take the pressure off her weakened legs, but she was forced to stop them from trembling now. A book might have let her take at least half of her mind off the fear until the moment was upon her. Instead, she watched the foreboding darkness creep eerily into dawn.
Her Hero seemed calmer, she thought resentfully. She was posted in the corner beside the window with her holy blade drawn. Her plan was to catch the queen off-guard, apparently, and cut her down before she could do more than poke her head into the room.
Vervain knew that she ought to have faith. That she ought to forgive Lorraine for her ignorance, because humans had different ideas about how a world ought to work and she did this out of love for her. She tried, but the feeling festered in her heart.
A lip of sun appeared over the horizon. She closed her eyes, disguising it as a reaction to the light falling into them.
A scream from the guards confirmed her worst fears. The light was gone, but she didn’t dare look. Lorraine roared, no doubt springing forward to do the deed. Something hit the wall.
The hot smell of rot and blood blew into her face. She reluctantly cracked her eyes open.
Oh Goddess, the mouths. Endless, endless mouths with endless, endless teeth. The way it was twisted made sick rise to her throat. She knew there were eyes on her – its eyes, their eyes – but her body wasn’t hers to control anymore. The scream barely made its way out of her body.
It clamped down on her.
She thought that she felt Lorraine try to grab onto the hem of her dress, but she heard a distant rip. The world sped by dizzyingly.
“Wait for me, Vervain! I won’t let them break you!”
She lay on the floor in the darkness. There was never any light, not unless the Demon Queen had something that she wanted to show her. She had long since learned that light should never be looked at.
Closing her eyes wasn’t enough, of course. The Demon Queen preferred to torture her with noise alone, keeping it beyond the walls of her cell, where she was forced to listen intently to guess what was happening. Footsteps in the distance. Heavy breathing and scraping. The screams of Lorraine being disembowelled, followed by the crunch of bone and silence.
She had cried for hours, begging the Demon Queen to spare her. Now that she had collapsed, she came to her again.
“It’s a trick, Vervain. I thought I taught you better than this.” It was her mother’s voice. She heard the carefully measured click of her heels stop beside her head. “Only six months in and you’re reduced to this. How can you call yourself a princess?”
She turned her head to know. Her mother’s feet were really there. “It’s been six months…?” Despite her better judgment, she looked up. It brought fresh tears to her eyes to see her mother’s face.
“No, you fool. One day.”
The blood exploded over her before she could brace herself. The cell shook violently, tossing the head into her lap; an ear-splitting roar drowned out her screams.
Then it was gone. Sobbing, she curled up in a ball to wait for the next one.
Endless silence. Endless darkness. Nothing scraped the walls or hissed in her ear when she tried to sleep. Nothing interrupted her next dozen or so rests. She paced the cell and nothing slithered over her feet. She didn’t put her hand in a single river of blood.
Who knows how long they went on like that. She had half a mind to call out to the Demon Queen, to ask if she was still there, when the door swung open and sunlight blinded her.
“Vervain!” Lorraine’s figure was there. Real or not, there was no knowing. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
Without waiting for her to make up her mind, Lorraine strode into the stale room and swept her into her arms. “I didn’t mean to take so long to rescue you…”
Vervain looped her arms around her to enjoy the contact, even just to delude herself with. “Has it been a year already?” By the Goddess, she hoped so.
“No, only a month.” Her Hero kissed her head. “The journey here was long.”
She prepared herself for another explosion of blood. Perhaps even a more brutal death. “How did you get here so quickly? You have the whole army to fight.”
“They’re just the Demon Queen’s puppets. I cut their strings right when I cut hers.”
“Pardon?”
“See for yourself.” She turned so that Vervain could see the half-rotten mass that had once been the Demon Queen. Bile rose in her throat. “The Demon Queen was never the threat – she was just a sock puppet for the Goddess.”
She shakily turned her head away. “Now that you have defeated the…” It was harder to maintain her persona than it had ever been before. “The evil that was here… The Goddess will bless our marriage…”
“Ah. About that.”
She tried to focus only on Lorraine when she looked back at her. She was glowing with a confidence she’d never seen before. “I defeated her.”
Vervain thought she’d misheard. “Yes, no other Hero has ever defeated the Demon Queen so fast…”
“Not her. Feuvert. Look.”
She shifted Vervain’s weight onto one arm so that she could fish something out of her pocket. She brought out a small purple orb, containing a tiny, unearthly beauty with long, flower-filled hair. She seemed to be sleeping.
“This whole shebang has been done so many times, I thought that somebody had to know a way to cheat the system. So I asked your mothers to tell me all about their time and the first Hero’s.”
She tried to settle the ball in Vervain’s hand, but she wouldn’t take it.
“It turns out that the outsider the princess loved brought more than just a little knowledge. This thing here is the Orb of Heresy, an extremely High Level item. It can trap any deity for… Well, forever?”
“You have to let her go!” This time, when she tried to take the ball, Lorraine moved it far out of her reach. “How could you!? Fleurs depend on her!”
“But you don’t have to.”
To her dismay, Feuvert was slipped easily back into her Hero’s pocket of holding. Lorraine lifted her higher, carrying her out towards what seemed to be the exit.
“Listen, Feuvert was never sustaining this land for you. She’s a lazy goddess – everything on Coerde Femmes will run itself in her absence.”
“But the Demon Army’s destruction!”
“There’s minimal damage this time. Nothing that hard work won’t fix.”
Vervain could feel the air rushing out of her lungs again. Lorraine gave her a small squeeze, continuing to carry her out of the Demon Castle. The hills here were singed from fire and churned up by war machines, but tufts of grass and blooms clung stubbornly in small depressions. The sky was so blue that Vervain thought she might float away into it. She wished she could.
“You’ve lived in fear your whole life, princess. Now she’ll never terrorise you again.” She set her carefully back on her own two feet. They were weak, but Lorraine supported her in her arms. “You can cry or laugh as much as you want. Put flowers in your hair – or cut it. I know you want to.”
“But you love my hair…”
“I love you.” The look in her eyes was so sincere that Vervain’s legs almost gave way beneath her. “The real you, who works hard for her country every day and disagrees with me all the time, and who sneaks out to roll around in flowers when she thinks there’s no one looking.”
She caught her hand to press a kiss to it. Vervain shifted at the uncomfortable heat it sent through her.
“Don’t hide from me, Vervain. Marry me if you want me, but you never have to pretend to be something you’re not to earn my love.”
Tears formed in her eyes again. It was getting pathetic, really, and she wished that she had a free hand to wipe them away. When she looked at Lorraine, she was smiling. It was hard to say what she felt. Was it hope?
She rested her head against her Hero’s strong, reliable chest. Her heart beat against her ear.
“Who will bless our union?”
“Us, of course. We’ll be the ones to write our story now.”
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