Page 4 of Of Brides Of Queens

Upon the sensory greeting of thyme underfoot, undereye, and undernose, I could only mourn the lack of peace that used to greet me when entering the conservatory, back when I was naught but a peasant monster.

Yet no matter that King See had sparked a small rage in me, and no matter that a queen was purposeless—and constantly pushing up this bothersome crown!—in one ambition I was determined.

I took care to avoid stepping on the glass panel entrance to King Raise’s underground stairway kingdom. I did not relish the idea of a topple down there again, and how inconvenient that the entrance sat in the exact middle of my conservatory.

I approached the mirror hanging on the far copper wall. Though dust and creeping thyme and tarnish otherwise shrouded many of the windows and walls of this place, the mirror was obscenely and brutally clean.

A person looking in the mirror could not help but see everything she was.

She had decided to do just that.

So she started at her toes.

Each toe was a different skin tone. I could tell that the fourth toe on my left foot had been broken—the top half leaned away from the third toe as if they’d had an argument. A few blonde hairs spiked out of my second toe on my left foot, while black streaked through my big toe on the same side in a way that made me wonder if that ancestor hadn’t eaten well for a time before she eventually withered.

Fifty ancestral mothers had made me, and as irritated and floundering as I felt as queen, my true form nearly always inspired awe in me. For seven nights, I had done this same thing—looked at myself in the mirror. For seven nights, curiosity had grown in me.

I wanted to know the mothers who had made me.

I wanted to know why I was made of so many stitches. Why all of them were different.

Mother had connected my pelvis to the rest of my monstrous body with neat and regular stitches. I trailed my fingertips over her stitches, feeling the bumps through my gauzy dress. In them I felt her love and her attentiveness and devotion.

But other stitches were ugly and others rushed. Some were complicated or a little too small. Whomever stitched my left forearm to my upper arm had missed the skin in a couple of places.

I lifted my gaze, and the moonlight streaming into the conservatory illuminated me from behind so that the outline of my body was evident through the white dress. I could see that my left leg was thicker than the other—I could feel that leg was stronger and more muscular. Indeed, this was the leg I tended to jump off if I didn’t wish to use the stairs to get here.

One arm was noticeably longer, and I smiled, for while I couldn’t reach the top shelves in the kitchen with my other arm, I always could with the right side.

How I longed for a picture of the mothers who’d withered to make me. The mothers who’d made a deal with King Raise twelve hundred years ago.

“How did you know to make a queen?” I whispered.

The thickest stitches of all slashed across the base of my neck. I hummed a wordless melody as I touched the monstrous sewing. I didn’t sense any ire or bitterness in the stitches.

I sensed function. I sensed that this mother had been determined my head would remain atop my shoulders. I could only feel grateful for her work.

What a great pity that fifty mothers were not here to guide me this dusk. Purpose wasn’t as easy as I had assumed before queendom.

The thing was, I wanted monsters to live. I wanted humans to live, as much as their convention concerned me. I could envision a world of fairy tales and myth thriving with animals bounding and lush meadows extending as far as the unblinking eye could see.

Once creatures had explored this world without fear of the inhospitable nothingness that existed outside of the seven hundred and thirteen walled cities—orpulses—as immortals liked to call them.

If the matter was as simple as declaring my purpose, then I would have happily declared my decision to help save the world. If I could even do such a thing.

But I was more certain that I couldn’t, and that fifty mothers had made a towering and catastrophic mistake in withering, just so I could walk into the toothed beast’s yawn and become queen.

And if I could?

If I figured out how to save the world by bumbling and fumbling through curiosities and challenges, then what about everything between now and then?

What of the king who would send his beasts to battle at my gates if I chose to save the world?

What of the king who would triple his efforts to concubine me? Would he also send the soldiers of his one-fifth kingdom to protect me from King Change?

I could not fathom that King See might protect me tonight, then abandon me tomorrow if our deal of pleasure went awry over months or decades, but I was young in the experience of immortality.

King Take would surely attempt to torment me along the way.