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Once upon a time—
No.
Cassandra isn’t a fairytale. She is not some maudlin ballad, not a performance upon the stage, not a princess out of her tower for whom all existence bows. She is Cassandra, and every scrap of dignity and power she possesses she had to rip out of the unforgiving earth with blood in her teeth and grit beneath her fingernails.
She is angry and she is powerful and she is right.
It’s spring when she vaults down from the wall and her feet touch Coronan soil for the first time in almost two years.
Spring.
The cleansing of the year, when the scars of winter melt away.
Moonlight hums in her veins. There is thunder in the sky and her chest and the ground beneath her feet. She breathes in deep the rain-soaked air, and bares her teeth to the distant shadow of the palace.
Ready or not, Rapunzel.
Here I come.
❖
Cassandra dreams.
When she wakes it is always with a sensation of loss; of a rarefied glimpse of some higher beauty, fading now from sight. Sometimes tears slick her cheeks; sometimes she sits on the ice-glazed earth and stares in numb distraction until the spirit appears to rouse her.
“Where do you go, when you aren’t here?” she asks.
The girl clasps her hands together and studies Cass, her gaze sharp and evaluating. “It is called the Realm of the Lost,” she says at length.
“What’s it like?”
“Unpleasant.”
There is a crispness to her voice that brooks no further questions; still, Cassandra ventures, “Could you… I mean, is there— can I… help?”
Sighing, the spirit murmurs, “Our destinies have been intertwined since the day we met, Cassandra. Pursue yours; let me attend to mine.”
She doesn’t ask again. But it sits uneasily in her mind; like a sliver in her flesh, festering, stuck.
❖
“I miss her,” she says. “Rapunzel.”
It is easy to miss Rapunzel in the daylight, with the sunshine soaking into her armor and the spirit just a smudge of darker blue against the shining autumn sky. They are a few weeks out of the Dark Kingdom now, and even the bitter knowledge of the power shared between her and the princess cannot allay her homesickness.
“She does not miss you,” the spirit replies, quietly.
She flinches. “You don’t know—”
“I do.” The girl curves through the air and settles around Cassandra’s shoulders, a wash of cold against the sun’s seeping warmth. “She misses the constancy and competence of her lady in waiting. Did she ever see you, Cassandra? Did she ever grant you her thoughts as you gave her yours?”
Cassandra has no answer for that, and that’s answer enough.
Softly, the spirit continues, “You miss the illusion of her friendship. It was a comfort to you, wasn’t it?”
“…Yes.” But it fractured long ago; charred with the rest of her inside the Great Tree, and she can’t ever get it back. “But it… wasn’t real.”
“No.” A small hand ghosts against her cheek, no more than smoke, before the spirit drifts away to float at her side. “Friendship is like a garden, Cassandra, and she never cared much to tend it. There is nothing to gain in mourning what you never had.”
❖
Cassandra can’t say just when the change comes. Somewhere in the blurred days, weeks, months on the road after the rocks painted the wilderness scarlet with her fear; like a twinkle of starlight on still water, like the incision of the crescent moon against the midnight blackness of the sky.
Perhaps it is the rocks themselves that teach her. They burn crimson whenever she thinks of Rapunzel, but Cassandra learns to ride her fear; balancing on the knife’s edge of it, knowing she will bleed if she falls, and finding a new clarity in the danger.
“You were wrong,” she says, one night while she is coaxing a fire out of snow-damped twigs; the whole world gleams a frosted white beneath the moon. “About the opal.”
“Oh?”
The spirit has adopted more lifelike mannerisms of late, and now she sits on the frozen, half-rotted lump of a fallen tree, kicking her insubstantial toes through the drifted snow. Crystalline ice glitters in the swirling mists of her skirt, like snowflakes trapped in a languid breeze.
“It’s not about anger,” Cassandra elaborates. “Or fear. It… comes when I don’t think about it. When I let it happen, instead of forcing it.”
“Show me.”
A spark of flint catches at last, and her paltry tinder flames into curling red cinders and smoke flavored sweet by pine resin. Cassandra chuffs, victorious, blowing gently on the fledgling flame to coax it into the larger branches. She clicks her fingers; a short distance from their camp the frozen earth bursts as the sleek claws of the moonstone leap to answer. Magic sluices like ice-water through her veins; easy, like the first day.
Her friend laughs. “Well done, Cassandra. I knew you could.”
Rare praise from an exacting taskmaster; it warms as even the fire couldn’t.
❖
“Get up. Get up!” The girl’s snarl rings in her ears like the clash of blades and spurting of blood; Cassandra digs her fingers into the ash of the Great Tree. “You are called to greater things than to die whimpering in the dirt, Cassandra. Get. Up.”
Cassandra gets up.
Her legs do not want to hold her, but she marshals her flagging strength and rises, stumbling, to glare into the granite face of her pursuer. Adira studies her along the plane of a longsword, and there is sorrow mingled with the steel in her eyes. The spirit whirls between them, galvanized by the battle, a streak of blue only Cass can see.
“She hates you, she hates you, but she won’t strike a disarmed opponent! Mercy.” The girl grins with vicious mirth over Adira’s shoulder. “Show her you don’t need her pity!”
“Short-Hair,” Adira says. Her voice grinds; stone upon stone; weary. “Cassandra. Return the moonstone. There’s still time to make this right.”
Cassandra wipes her mouth and her hand comes away bloody. “I am never going back,” she spits.
A flare of white in the corner of her eye. The shadowblade, fallen aside when Adira struck it out of her hands with a blow so shattering Cassandra can still feel its echo in her wrist. The old warrior charges, and Cass throws out her hand and thinks, Come to me!
It leaps into her outstretched fingers like a lightning flash, and thunder booms as stone meets steel. Cassandra hears herself growl and sees Adira’s eyes widen with gratifying surprise in the infinitesimal moment of that bind; and then the tide of magic in her flesh in her blood in her bones surges, and Adira slams into a broken slab of petrified wood a dozen paces away with a cry of pain and the loud and unmistakable crack of breaking ribs.
Reeling in the cold backwash of power, Cassandra watches Adira slide to the ground, crumpling; watches her curl an arm protectively around her side.
“Don’t,” Cassandra says, “follow me again.”
“Cassandra.” Her teeth are gritted against the pain; but Adira’s voice flows clear. “Please, think about what you’re doing. This—ngh—isn’t who you are.”
Cass spares her an ugly laugh. “And you’re the expert on who I am?”
Adira just stares, eyes fogged with pain and something too much like sympathy, until Cassandra sneers and stalks away.
The spirit flits around her as she goes, fretful; now pressing a chill touch to her bleeding lip, now brushing misty hands against the bruises blossoming on her brow. “Leaving an enemy alive behind you—”
“There has to be a line,” Cass says. “Somewhere. This is mine. I won; that’s enough.”
“It will not be enough with Rapunzel.”
No. It won’t, will it? She’s never known the princess to surrender. To know when she is beaten. To let go of something that belonged to her.
(Thief. Traitor.)
Why have you turned your back on—
I command you to SURRENDER—!
Cassandra takes a deep breath, and sheathes the shadowblade against her back. More than anything, she wants to be free. “I will do what it takes. Whatever it takes.”
“Good,” the spirit says. “Do not let your… line become your weakness. Failure is not an option, Cassandra, dear.”
❖
Once upon a time—
When Cassandra believed in fairytales.
Oh, she pretended not to, but when her father promised she could earn her spot in the royal guard if only she upheld her duties and worked (hard, harder, just a little harder than that)—when Rapunzel smiled her golden smiles and pantomimed the friendship Cass so desperately craved—
Fairytales.
Once upon a time, Cassandra smiled and wore dresses and held her tongue and smiled, and every day died another inch. She waited for her story to unfold; waited to stop being the breathless pause before the next verse in Rapunzel’s song; waited, for the tearing feeling in her chest to end.
(“Does it ever end?” she asks, a lifetime later; the sky is grey and weeping icy rain. She is hungry and exhausted and the world feels heartlessly bleak.
The spirit takes her hand and says, “Everything ends.” A bitter candle-flame against the midwinter chill.)
She remembers the performance of happiness. A masked player, wearing her own painted face, and the creaking of the hollow boards beneath her feet; she remembers pretending until she believed the pretense, until it shattered and left her bleeding.
Enough, Cassandra.
Fool her once…
❖
It is spring.
The spirit hovers with her hands on Cassandra’s shoulders while she stands on the crest of the hills overlooking Corona. Golden lights twinkle in the palace windows defiant of the crystalline stars, and the abrasive smell of the sea scrubs the air clean. There is a dreamlike quality to the night.
“Once you have the scroll, all of the moonstone’s power will be yours to command,” the girl murmurs. Her voice is cold against Cassandra’s ear; a glimmer of cobalt chimes. “Provoke Rapunzel. Make her come to you—force her to acknowledge your power—then take what is rightfully yours.”
“I know.”
She can almost feel the slow curl of the spirit’s smile against her cheek. “Good. You’re ready, Cassandra.”
I’m ready.