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Elody can’t sit still. Once upon a time, she was the only daughter and princess of royalty who valued tradition, forced into hours upon hours of lessons on manners and statecraft. While she had always longed to be doing something, she had eventually learned the importance of being able to keep your cool, schooling yourself into a picture of propriety no matter how hard you were raging against yourself inside, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. Once upon a time not so long ago, she would have been able to resist the urge to climb the walls, to throw something, to busy her hands so that she wouldn’t have to think.
But in a blink her life has changed, she has changed, filled with uncontrollable restless energy.
Gerard has changed too.
Or so he says.
Thinking about it makes her want to pull her hair out. Princess Elody of Greenleigh had loved, comforted, placated, conceded to, resented, and even mourned her husband. She had found his half-transformed body, infested with rot, an awful shard sticking out of his chest– a wound mirrored by an equally dead fairy. It wasn’t easy to make any sense of. Her husband was a coward, her husband was dead, her husband ran from his problems, her husband was fighting on a battlefield. Elody had been expected to reconcile those facts, to decide if her anger outweighed her grief.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. She’d found allies who kept her hands plenty busy, who gave her enough to think about so that she could think around her dead husband. When the other princesses had explained where they were going, of course she thought of her husband– was he always destined to die, whether it be by crane, fairy, or some other tragedy?
But even in her brief considerations, the thought had never really crossed her mind that Gerard might be twice-upon-a-time, that she would be confronted with him. And now she had spoken with her dead husband twice since his death, and she was the furthest from any sense of closure she had ever been.
Gerard claims to have changed, but here he is trying to split her attention once again. He claims her allies, her fellow princesses, are planning an apocalypse. He claims that she’s in danger, that everything she’s been working toward has been for some sinister goal, that he really must believe her despite barely a shred of proof.
He’d written her a letter explaining everything, and the rough parchment trembles in her hand now. Perhaps she’d been harsh with some of the things she’d said, but really, what evidence had he given her that she should believe him?
You know me, he’d said, Can’t you tell I’m scared?
Her first instinct had been to snap that he’s always scared, but as she sits in her chamber, exhaling harshly against the biting cold air, she does have to admit…Gerard had never tried to warn her of danger before. Maybe she should read…
“To arms!” a grating cry erupts, the letter crumpling in her hand in surprise, “To arms!”
It should be concerning that it is the herald of a fight that allows a sigh of relief to escape her. Of course, she doesn’t dwell on it. She picks up her mace and jogs toward the sound of fighting. Cinderella had sounded like she was outside, but Elody hears the clash of metal in a nearby hallway and heads toward that. As she runs, Snow White’s voice echoes in her mind, “We’ve been betrayed. Our guests have turned on us and are trying to flee with the book, stop them!”
Elody ignores the way her rhythm stumbles for a moment, grunting her assent to Snow. She can’t mean Gerard…the others in his party had to have fooled him, intending to disrupt their mission under the guise of escorting him. They must have convinced him of the princesses’ deceit to try to pull her away from the others. Now it was starting to make sense.
That old rage bubbles within Elody, at how naive Gerard had to have been to let this happen, and she lets it travel through her muscles as she slides into the corridor where shouts are erupting.
And stops.
Snow’s dwarves stand between her and her husband, as well as the little girl from his party and Princess Rosamund. The three of them are already ragged from the fight, open wounds coursing blood that steams as it drops onto the frozen floor. They’re certainly attacking, but they seem to be heading deeper into the castle…why would they do that if they were escaping?
Princess Rosamund cries out as another blow throws off her aim, her eyes flickering as she’s clearly fighting to stay conscious. The little girl, Ylfa, looks more monstrous than before, her eyes large and teeth sharp as she snarls at the dwarves. Ylfa calls, “This isn’t looking great!”
And there is Gerard in the middle of it, panting and clearly favoring his right side. None of them seem to have noticed Elody yet, frozen as she watches the battle unfold. But she sees them–she sees Gerard.
She watches as he glances between his allies and their opponents.
She watches as he swallows before taking a deep breath and standing straighter.
She watches as he throws up his blade to block Princess Rosamund from being hit again.
“We’re not– we can’t get to Elody,” he says, and he sounds defeated, “They’ll kill us first. We have to join the others!”
At the mention of her own name, she takes an involuntary step forward, her mace slack in her hand. The two women seem…disappointed that Gerard has made the call to retreat. She doesn’t understand. The others still don’t notice Elody, wrapped up in the intensity of kill or be killed.
But suddenly Ylfa sniffs the air and locks eyes with her. Elody tenses, awareness that she’s in the middle of an attack in her temporary home flooding through her as she swings her mace up to shield herself. But the wolf girl smiles, and what big teeth she has. “Gerard! There she is,” Ylfa barks, nodding at him and then to Elody, “Plight of the honeybee!”
Elody has entirely no idea what that means, but in a blink of understanding, her husband seems to. He shifts as he recognizes his wife, and in turn Elody barely recognizes him in that moment. “No!” Gerard booms, and though there is fear in his voice, it is distinctly uncowardly. “Ylfa, no!”
The wolf girl doesn’t listen, already crouching to leap at their attackers, straight between them all, forcing all their attention on her. Maybe, in another life, Elody would have thought it looked brave. But to her, the preteen looks too much like a sacrifice.
And maybe that is the truth of it, because Gerard rips his gaze away from Elody and uses the power in his legs to leap forward, reaching out and catching Ylfa’s hood at the last moment. With a strength she didn’t know he possessed, he throws the girl backward with a yelp, using the momentum to propel himself forward instead.
Elody is used to seeing Gerard weak, mildly pathetic, and maybe slightly bitchy at best. But as he faces the strength of undead dwarves with nothing to lose, she sees Gerard steel himself and crouch into a defensive stance. One of the dwarves uses the confusion to swipe at Princess Rosamund once more, and the woman staggers back into the arms of the younger girl, unable to stand any longer. “We have to get out of here,” Princess Rosamund says faintly, “I’m sorry, Gerard.”
“Don’t touch him!” Ylfa snarls, using half of her weight to support the princess and looking desperate. “Get out of there, you should have let me–”
However much his prowess in battle has improved, Gerard is not immune to losing concentration. He parries one blow from an undead dwarf, shouting back at the preteen, “You’re a child, Ylfa! Your life is not worth any less than–” It take a millisecond for him to begin to turn his attention away from the threat in front of him, for one of stout dwarves to see the opening and swing his axe toward it.
“Gerard!” His name is ripped from ELody’s throat before she really even recognizes what she’s saying, as she watches her husband knocked prone, spraying blood across the hallway. She moves to action, raising her mace as she approaches.
“They’re trying to escape!” One of the dwarves grunts at her, shifting to make space for her in the fray. She knows they see her as an ally, she knows that the other women were trying to reach her, and she knows her dead husband is bleeding heavily onto the floor, gritting his teeth up at their blades. But she can’t– she can’t make sense of it, she has years of experience strategizing, but it occurs to her that since losing everything she has been reduced to a weapon meant to be pointed and unleashed on the nearest target.
She is torn here. “What is going on here?” she roars, once she is finally able to find her voice, “We’ve been betrayed?”
The other princess exhales sharply through her nose as pain tears through her, “Our…sisters are the ones betraying all the people in the Neverafter. We can’t let them have the book, not with their plan as it is.”
“The princesses are fighting the Times of Shadow!” A dwarf snarls, but he holds his action, waiting for Elody to strike.
Elody glances down at Gerard and is shocked by his gaze– how serious it is. “Princess Elody,” Ylfa begs, inching closer to them, “Please come with us. You might be in danger if you stay here.”
“Danger?” Elody repeats, her grip tightening on her mace, “Why would my allies pose any danger to me?”
Ylfa snorts and Elody realizes she might have underestimated the young girl as Ylfa flies forward before she can react, surging toward Gerard and half pulling him to his feet. Princess Rosamund looses an arrow into the group, but it only bounces off one of the dwarves. In retaliation, he strikes out, catching Ylfa heavily in the shoulder. The young girl doesn’t cry out, only gnashing her fangs and shifting herself further in between her party and the dwarves.
“Elody,” her husband says, recapturing her attention. His voice sounds so sad, which isn’t all that new, but there is also a tinge of solemnity to it, which is new. He waits until she meets his gaze, deep green eyes meeting bulbous red, before he continues. “I am sorry,” he says, willing her to understand. “Please know that.”
Before she can respond, he throws an arm around each of his companions and with a grimace, leaps out of the nearest window. The dwarves follow, still intent on cutting down the betrayers. But for all her battle-hardening, for all her suffering, for all the shit she’s had to swallow with a smile, Princess Elody of Greenleigh feels as though the air has become sludge as she moves slowly to the window.
The sight should be familiar to her. Whether her husband is dead or whether he’s run away, neither is new to her.
She watches him, a bright spot of red and green as he and his allies bound away. And she’s surprised by how much it hurts, to know that for all that he has changed…some things never will.