The Proud Princess and the Masked Mage

I found a fairy tale I wrote in Czech, so for fun I’m going to translate parts of it every week. It’s very simple (don’t expect literary titillation here), but so far it’s fun! So here you go…

If Damarishka had possessed any personality before her twentieth birthday, she had buried it like people bury childhood embarrassments, and by the time he came, whatever character she’d retained had reduced itself to piteous nothings, shooed off by her pride.

By then, she did nothing but eat and drink and sleep and (not) think and (not) live as she walked her castle day by day, and she strove to be oblivious enough not to notice the dissatisfied subjects occasionally burning royal estates on the periphery.

Of course, she smelled the char and ash while taking breakfast in her castle garden, and the scent of roasted flesh intruded while she tried to swallow her scones, so she would sometimes hum or sing to disguise the distant screams.

And then she would throw up in the greenery.

Her proud cat always departed when she did that, though, since cats reserved the right to vomit, and how dare a princess leave steaming chunks in his pawing ground. Especially without the excuse of expunging a decent hairball.

The king would dispatch soldiers (for the rebels, not the hairball), and Damarishka would employ her apathy. She would regiment one empty thought after the other with the dull regularity of a metronome. Tick-tock, tick-tock, knock-knock.

No one’s home. Once, there was someone here, she thought. But not anymore.

*

Eventually, amid her mechanical mannerisms of eating and drinking and (not) thinking and (not) living, and helplessly wandering her father’s castle garden that smelled of charred people, her twentieth birthday celebration arrived.

Twenty was too old for an unmarried princess, perilously close to putting her on the shelf with other dusty, unwed princesses, but she was too proud (or empty) to be content with anything less than a proper prince (not a pauper prince); someone fetching, not feeble; someone courageous, not cowardly; and gallant, not galling.

Or maybe she just wanted someone to wake her up.

She disdained all suitors who came, letting the ostentatious things gabble until her silence browbeat them into stuttering halts and hangdog retreats.

Today, however, another matter tangled underfoot, because when she descended from her lofty bedroom for breakfast, she found her father transformed from proud and righteous and vengeful to… diminished. His chest had shrunk. His chin hid in his neck. His figure cringed. His beard trembled toward the ground.

“Father,” Damarishka intoned emptily while gliding breezily toward the sideboard of food, “what has happened?”

“I had to solve a problem.” Furiously, the king ogled his egg yolks as if offended that they were so errant as to ogle him yellowly back.

The problem of the people? Damarishka thought, then recalled that she did not think, and so she vacantly puppeted her mother’s old adage. “Where is your pride?”

“My pride is perished!” the dramatic king sighed, entrenched in self-pity while eyeballing his egg yolks. “But tonight, that problem will be yours.”

“How?” Damarishka shivered, unable not to shiver as she thought of her late mother, whose loss would not sleep in Damarishka’s soul. “Are you ill, Father?”

“Don’t be stupid. No illness would dare make me so angry. I do not have time for stupidities like flus.” The king straightened a little.

“So tell me what’s going on.” Other than—

Singed forests; steaming rock; the skeletal remains of expansive estates; an incompetent reign—

No, she did not think of such things.

“Don’t question me!” The king rose from the table, his palms smacked flat on the tablecloth. “You will find out this evening.” Then he left in a kingly pique.

The untouched egg yolks glistened reproachfully at Damarishka.

Proudly, emptily, she cut into them.

You can find the next part here.