King Blowhard looked up from the magazine section of the Sunday newspaper. Queen Nagandscold poked holes in his focus with the fine blue bore of her lively eyes. Her mouth opened and he could now no longer ignore her.
-It’s not nice to keep her cooped up. She has a right to have friends.
-I refuse to have those freaks in my home.
-They’re just kids, silly. You act like you’re afraid of them.
-And who could blame me? Have you ever seen so many pins? Both girls and boys. Least I think they are. And the language.
-I still say she has a right to choose her own friends.
-If that’s the best she can do then she’ll just have to try again, won’t she?
Sunday morning in the palace was always a time of sweet enchantment. The give and take and back and forth and all of it for playful parental show. Fey closed the door to her room, closed her eyes and let the tintam of dulcimer and drum float round her like river mist.
Behind every fairy tale she glimpsed the not-so-perfect infrastructure. Its decline and ruination or just as often, for fair’s fair in the fairiest of tales, glistening with new sweat and the promise of dynasties impregnable as clean carved stone, snow swept aside like so much feathery frost or gathered up like summer’s outlaw flowers. She looked out of windows, barred and narrow and hidden sexlike in the tower’s scaleribbed curve.
What room was behind her she didn’t know and words failed any attempted inventory of possibilities. Sanctuary or torture chamber or bridal suite. The words came and went like winter blossoms from her lips and through her fingers, prodigals lacey with maps. Troubadours sang in the deserted villages below, their rhyme schemes too neat, too modern for her liking. Words buzzed like flies on burst melons: gravel, spill, inch, throat, cheat, hook, silver, water, lock, time. Her back ached with virtue, her eyelids sore and swollen with chained up tears. The dark forest began below her and stretched away to the sky’s white and gloomy edge, several days journey at a simple glance. From between the bars of her window the forest looked like a beautiful, slept-in bed. A wanton snowdrop hissed in the hot candlewax.
If she could climb to the turret-top she would strip off her heavy robes and all the frillies underneath and naked against the prudewhite sky, execute a prim dance step or two, exposed to all who might look up, but in her innocence of their number and their straining eyes under no obligation to do more than tread the light air. And ankle-deep in moss and fox droppings and peering up through frozen branches and quivering leaves clicking in their gloves of ice perhaps their whispered obscenities would rise to warm her, needy as prayers.