The Rules of Ever After (8 page)

“Kitty?” Peter began to wail as he fanned the smoke away from his face and looked frantically about the room. “Where is Kitty?”

“Father! Father!” Phillip screamed as he rocked his father back and forth in his arms. Looking around the room with tears and panic in his eyes, he pleaded, “Daniel! Peter! Someone help me! Oh, Father. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Someone help!”

Daniel turned to James. “What kind of castle did you bring me to?”

I
n Cantera, Queen Evelyn’s chamber had stood
empty
and unnoticed for almost twenty years, but time needed no audience to take its toll on the scattered belongings within. The lace curtains hanging in the windows had aged into the yellow of an old woman’s teeth. Moths had eaten at the red damask that barely clung to the canopy railing around the top of the bed, like the last desperate strands of oily hair hanging on an old man’s head. The heavy velvet bed covers were mottled and bruised by sunlight sucking away at the oxblood dyes that had once made it as plush as a new rose petal. On the vanity across from the bed, pink and yellow perfume bottles had toppled over; their precious oils had long since evaporated into the room. No trace of the sweet perfumes could be sensed over the musk of dust and neglect.

The lace curtains fluttered as the first wisps of burgundy smoke seeped from the rafters above and the stones below. The fireplace that had lain cold and dark suddenly burst forth with flames. The cobwebs along its edges hissed as they curled away from the heat and disappeared. The burgundy smoke grew thicker and thicker as it crept from each darkened corner. A crack loud as thunder broke the silence of the chamber, and the figures of two women appeared.

“Peter?” Katerina screamed, as she clawed her way into clearer air. Her shoe caught on the jagged edge of a stone in the floor and sent her toppling forward. On the cold, hard floor, she put her head down between her arms and vomited.

“You will not find that babbling dolt here, child,” Cauchemar growled. She waved the last traces of smoke away from her face. “He has interfered in our lives for the last time. As for how you know his name and how he came to know my plans, well, those are the secrets of a young girl’s heart, I guess. But I
will
know them, and any others you may be hiding in your heart, if I have to reach in and pull them out whole. Now get up, you simpering twit, and clean that dreck from your face.”

Katerina stayed on her hands and knees and stared at the stones beneath her hands. She gagged, then sobbed. “What did you do?” she bellowed, as she jerked her face over her shoulder toward the woman. “Where are we?” she screamed. “Where are Peter and Phillip? What did you do to King Henry? Answer me!”

“Well,” Cauchemar purred, as she raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms across her chest, “it appears the little kitten has decided she can roar.”

“Tell me! Tell me now!”

Cauchemar knelt beside the sobbing girl and rested her hand softly on the top of her head. “My dear,” she cooed, then grabbed a clump of the girl’s blonde hair and pulled it sharply upward. Katerina whimpered as the woman pulled her to her feet by her hair and then spun her around to stand eye to eye. “That mouth has caused enough damage, and if you are wise you will keep it shut!”

“You’re hurting me!” Katerina reached up to push the woman’s hands away from her hair.

“I’m hurting you?
I
am hurting
you
? What about the pain you have caused me? You lied to me, child! I protected you from this cruel world in my warm little tower. I asked nothing of you in return, except to learn the lessons I taught you and prepare for the life I’d planned for you! And now those plans are as tattered as the curtains on this bed. You have deceived me and ruined everything.” Cauchemar dropped the girl’s hair and turned to study her reflection in the vanity mirror. Looking at the items scattered along the top, she ran her finger across the bristles of a dusty silver hairbrush. “Your pain is nothing compared to my disappointment.”

“Then why didn’t you just leave me there?”

“Leave you?” Cauchemar grabbed the hairbrush and spun to face the girl. Shaking the brush toward Katerina, she bellowed, “How could I leave you? You are like a daughter to me. I have sacrificed and lived my life merely for you for all these years! Leave you. Ha! Had I known that it would lead to this, I would have left you in this very room years ago!”

“This room?” Katerina sniffled. She stared at her aunt in confusion.

“Yes. This is your mother’s room.” Dropping the brush onto the floor, she turned and spread out her arms. “Welcome home, princess.”

“Home? My mother?”

Cauchemar walked slowly across the room, the train of her gown dragging a trail in the thick dust. Paying no attention to the girl’s questions, she pulled a torch from the wall beside the chamber door and snapped her fingers at its tip. A bright flame flared and illuminated the room. She carried the torch to the wall across from the bed and stared at the portrait that appeared in the flickering light of the flames. Katerina rose from the floor, walked up behind her aunt and looked over her shoulder at the image of four smiling faces. A bearded young man with blond hair and a golden crown draped his arm across the shoulders of a beautiful young woman whose crown adorned long, curling blonde locks, which spilled over her shoulders. A little boy with white-blond hair leaned on the woman’s knee. All three stared lovingly at the baby in the woman’s arms. Katerina squinted to see the image in the dim light; she noticed that the woman looked a lot like herself.

“The first painting of you.” Cauchemar turned to walk back toward door to put the torch into a mount on the wall.

Katerina stood silently staring until the image faded as the torch moved farther away. She crossed the room and sat on the stool in front of the vanity. Looking at her reflection, she pulled her curls forward and let them drop over her shoulders like the woman in the painting. “That woman looks like me.”

“She should. She’s your mother.”

“That’s my family?”

“Was.”

“I still don’t understand,” Katerina said, as she shifted her gaze to the eyes of her aunt’s reflection.

“Little girl, you’re not the only one with secrets in her heart. The story I told King Henry about your royal heritage was not a complete lie. You’re in the castle of the queen of Cantera, where you were born. Well, it
was
her castle until the invasion of the troll king, Thrigor. I was here when it happened.”

“Yes, you said you were walking with me in the woods.”

“Well, that part was a little untrue. Here,” Cauchemar said as she reached over and ran her fingers along the mirror. “See.”

The glass began to wobble and hum. Katerina watched as her reflection faded and the reflected room grew bright. The tattered furnishings around the room in the mirror were suddenly whole and clean. The white lace curtains fluttered lazily in the windows, and sunlight streamed into the room. The woman from the painting rushed into the mirrored room holding a baby and dragging a boy behind her. Katerina turned around to look at the room. It was the same dilapidated room with no one but Cauchemar behind her.

Cauchemar grabbed her head and turned her face back to the mirror. “These are reflections of the past. Watch your mother.”

Katerina watched the woman in the mirror as she flitted about the room in a panic. Dropping the little boy’s hand, she ran to a large trunk at the foot of the bed and flung it open with her one free hand. She dropped to her knees and put the baby in the open trunk. Grabbing the little boy’s hand again, she lifted him into the trunk and urged him to sit down. She raced to the door and pushed it shut. As she reached for the key, the door flung open, knocking the young woman to the floor. Katerina gasped as Cauchemar stalked in. However, this was not the Cauchemar she knew; her face lacked the familiar wrinkles and lines, and her now-silver hair was a cascade of raven curls. The blonde woman jumped up and flung her arms around the other woman. Katerina noticed that the Cauchemar in the mirror did not hug back. The two women hurried to the bed and began a frenzied conversation, with the young queen pointing at the children in the trunk again and again. The young queen dropped to her knees before Cauchemar and clasped her hands in front of her face in a pleading motion.

“What is she saying?” Katerina kept her eyes glued to the images in the mirror.

“She was begging. She begged me to take you and your brother out of the castle. It was really quite pathetic. She thought she could hide you both in that silly trunk, and you would survive the attack.”

In the mirror, young Cauchemar nodded her head in assent and reached her hand out to the boy cowering inside the trunk. He shook his head and wriggled lower into the trunk. The young queen pulled the boy out onto the floor in front of her. Wiping tears from her eyes, she kissed his cheek and pushed him gently toward the other woman. Cauchemar drew him tightly to her side. The queen reached into the trunk and pulled the baby out and up to her breast. She placed her forehead against the baby’s face; her shoulders shook with sobs. She kissed the baby’s cheek, then handed her over to Cauchemar’s outstretched arms. As Katerina watched the woman sob, she touched her own cheek, on the spot where the queen had kissed her baby.

A single tear rolled down Katerina’s cheek as she turned to look at Cauchemar in the room behind her. “She gave us to you?”

“She knew I could get you out. My powers were still young and new, so I didn’t know if I could carry her as well. We had little time.” Cauchemar shrugged and stepped forward to place her hands on Katerina’s shoulders. “So I did what I could.”

Katerina turned back to the mirror to see the room fill with burgundy smoke. The smoke surrounded Cauchemar, the boy and the baby in her arms, until it was too thick for Katerina to see them anymore. The young queen took a few steps backwards until the backs of her knees hit the trunk, making the lid slam shut. She flopped down onto the trunk lid and blew a kiss toward the billowing smoke, then dropped her head into her hands and sobbed. A bright flash enveloped the room as the smoke suddenly disappeared, taking Cauchemar and the children with it.

“She just gave us to you?”

“She saved your lives.
I
saved your lives.”

Katerina stared at the woman in the mirror. She could no longer see her face, because the woman had buried it in her hands. She began to yell to the woman to show her face again, but realized the image could not hear her. Katerina reached out to touch the mirror above her mother’s hair. As if reacting to the touch, the woman in the mirror suddenly jerked her head up and stared toward the door. Raising her arms defensively, she opened her mouth in what Katerina could only assume was a scream of terror. The young queen began crawling backwards over the trunk and toward the head of the bed. Katerina gasped in horror as she watched her mother scramble up the headboard. Suddenly, Cauchemar’s hand appeared on the mirror and swiped across the image. The mirror shuddered and hummed again until Katerina was staring at nothing but the reflection of her own tear- and vomit-stained face and the dilapidated room behind her.

“Trust me, child. You don’t want to see what happened next.”

“Mother.” Katerina sobbed and dropped her head to her chest.

“Come now, dear. No point in mourning a woman you hardly even knew.”

“But she gave us to you? Why?”

“Stupid woman trusted her dear, dear stepsister. Little did she realize that I was the one who let the attackers into the castle.”

“You what?”

“I served up a meal of those wonderful little sleeping-peas that the troll king had given me. It was a feast to celebrate your first birthday. The guards all slept, and Thrigor just walked right in. It was really quite beautiful in its simplicity, if a little bloodier than I had expected.”

“But she was your sister.”

“Stepsister. And the bonds of sisterhood meant nothing to her when your grandfather died. She and your father shoved my mother off the throne, and I went from being the child of a queen to being someone the family barely tolerated. My mother was sent to live in your tower in the woods, and your parents would not give me a title, offering me the pathetic position of Mistress of Magic. They showed no mercy to my mother or me so, I showed none in return, besides saving her children. When Thrigor first appeared to me and suggested his plans, it became perfectly clear to me what I should do. I knew my other stepsister in Bellemer had a son about your age. I would raise you, marry you to him and take over Bellemer. Thrigor and I would unite Cantera and Bellemer and eventually begin a campaign to take over the other five kingdoms of Clarameer. We would rule the entire land together. So I stashed you safely away in my little tower retreat, sealed all the doors and set out to take care of my other stepsister.”

Katerina raised her head and stared at her aunt in horror. “But my brother—”

“Well, he didn’t really fit in my plan, now did he? And I couldn’t have some boy who could claim the Canteran throne just lolling about the kingdoms, now could I?”

“So you killed him?”

Cauchemar’s temples pulsed and her eyes flashed as her anger flared. “I am not a killer! How could you think such a thing! No. I simply dropped him in the woods of Sylvania and let nature take its course. There are many creatures not known to man in those woods. Creatures that would find a squalling little boy to be quite the feast. Everything was going perfectly to plan, until that absurd little boy of my stepsister’s turned out to prefer men. And then your little scribbling friend ruined it completely. All my hard work ruined by stupid little boys.”

“I’m glad you failed!” Katerina screamed. She slammed her fists onto the top of the vanity, causing one of the perfume bottles to roll off and shatter on the stone floor. “You’re a horrible woman! I should avenge my mother and kill you myself!”

Flames burst out around Cauchemar’s head as she lunged at the girl and grabbed her arm. “I’d like to see you try. You’d best remember, young lady, that you’re only alive because of
this
horrible woman. And that’s a state I could change with a snap of my fingers.”

Katerina jerked her arm away from her aunt’s grasp and stood up to face her eye-to-eye. “Fine. Kill me. I don’t care. At least I know your plan has failed and Peter, Phillip and Bellemer are safe from you now!”

Leaning her face closer to Katerina’s, Cauchemar hissed, “Little girl, that was one plan.” As she leaned forward, the flames dancing about her head singed Katerina’s face, causing the girl to lean back against the vanity table. “I promised Thrigor a kingdom. True, I cannot deliver on that now, so it’s time for plan B. I can’t give him a kingdom, but I can give him a princess. Now pick up that brush and fix your hair. It’s time you met your future husband.” As the flames died down, Cauchemar spun on her heel and stomped to the chamber door. “I will be back for you in a few moments. You will keep your mouth shut, smile and look pretty. Do you understand?”