Y’all, I am SO. MUCH. LESS. AGITATED! I still have anxiety out the wazoo, but I’m used to dealing with anxiety out the wazoo. The agitation was making me insane, though. A crisis every five minutes! No, you can’t even sit still for more than 60 seconds! Up! Down! Yes! No! My windows are still all taped up, but the day is approaching when THERE WILL BE SUNLIGHT again. In the meantime, my bank card, credit card, and public transport pass all collectively decided to take a two-hour romp through my washing machine on the highest heat. They’re all warped AF but are still trucking along paying for things. Yay miracle cards. For your enjoyment or exasperation, you may find my new tikTok video at the bottom of this post. Before that, BEHOLD the continuation of the Proud Princess fairy tale I wrote in Czech and is getting turned into English. Writing news –> Heiress of Secrets is coming along but slooooooooooooooooooooooow. It’s intense, though, especially the couple in their late 30s/early 40s in it that has been together for a few decades and they are still working against each other–lol forget enemies-to-lovers; here is enemies-WHILE-lovers! Bookish news –> My bro and I are buddy-reading Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries.
And now! Continuing the fairy tale (which I wrote in Czech and am translating into English for fun). What’s happened so far is SO CLICHE! All the cliches, y’all. A dastardly masked stranger ruined a spoiled, proud princess’s ball with a magic ring and a contract that claims her father gave her to him in marriage to save his kingdom. Oh, dear, what will she do with such a cliched problem?
If you want to start from the beginning, all the previous parts are here: The Proud Princess and the Masked Mage. Otherwise lol–>
IN THE PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT:
“I’m not going with you without my cat!” Princess Damarishka cried at the masked wizard.
“Not a problem.” With a flick of his finger, the wizard sailed said cat into the air and steered the wildly meowing creature straight to him, after which he securely tucked the tom under his arm.
Then he angled his cockiness at Damarishka. Will you come with me now? his arrogantly raised brow indubitably inquired. I have your cat.
The continuation:
Damarishka, desperately delaying, looked at his outstretched hand.
Long, slender fingers. No gloves, no golden rings, no gleaming gems, no glitter to detract from the beautiful hands of an artist—if only an artist of magic.
So help her, why was she waxing poetic about his hands? She shouldn’t like how he looked. (Her mother had warned her. No magic. Stay hidden.) She should run. She wasn’t marrying his hands.
Presumably, though, those hands would touch her, would languidly stroke—
Wiping that thought away like a discarded, dirty rag, she tried to glare hard enough to incinerate the ring that had slipped itself on her finger when she’d opened the wizard’s gift (for surely that had been his gift).
Incinerating it with her eyes, though, didn’t work; she wasn’t the sun; her glare wasn’t that fierce.
There was truly nothing more for it. Her father the king had promised her to this wizard—this villain. And if she broke the promise, the entire kingdom and all its riches would fall to the wizard anyway. Her father had bargained everything, which meant that, even if Damarishka refused this villain’s hand, she and her father would be left with nothing at all. They would—what? Live here on the wizard’s sufferance?
She would rather be banished.
But then she would have to beg for food, money, shelter, bread—and how could she beg on bended knee when her pride refused to let her even bow her head? Would she romantically waste away upon some pastoral hill? A princessly remnant languishing in silken wreckage in some poet’s prose?
As a last resort, she glanced at her proud father, still thrashing like a hooked worm above his gawping noble fish-heads.
She could expect no salvation from him.
Wretched man. Selling his kingdom through greedy stupidity, now hoisted in the air like a gonfalon for his enemy. Anyone who wanted to could look under his waistcoat.
Damarishka had no choice. No matter what her mother had warned her of, her father had sold her to it.
And so, bracing, shuddering, she thrust her fingertips into the wizard’s.
His fingers tightened around her hand—around her agreement to this—and his hold was firm, implacable, the beginning of whatever her mother had warned her against. But his flesh pressed against hers as if bidding her not to tremble.
Then he was urging her with him, corner after corner through the castle, guiding her away from what she knew, away from her guardedly empty life.
Out the castle’s carven door.
Down the grey-veined marble steps.
Through the slanting beams of sunset.
To where, in the center of the courtyard, his black carriage shone as sleekly as a glossy beetle.
He helped her—or hefted her—into his glistening vessel.
She expected to land in the raw belly of an actual insect, but, instead, she plopped in an anticlimactic oomph on plump red upholstery swathed in velvet, where copper lanterns above the door lambently illumined gilded walls.
The wizard followed her in, eyeing her there in his conveyance as if the view gratified him.
His eyes glowed like burning black coals set in his rich gold mask.
Unceremoniously, he evicted her hissing cat from the crook of his arm and into an arbitrary corner.
Damarishka opened her mouth.
The carriage jolted into motion—starting her journey of no return with this husband.
Her question jerked out like a string yanked from her fear. “Why me?” Her tone emerged a little agonized. “Why didn’t you take, instead, the kingdom—our riches?”
“Maybe I value the princess more.”
“So I’m an object to own.”
“Or you’re a dream unexpectedly offered for sale,” he said, his tone rough.
Something in her viscerally reacted to his answer, and she gripped the edge of the seat.
“And,” he went on, “I am not so controlled that I wouldn’t use any means to get what I want.”
Damarishka’s feelings didn’t know how to react to this. Should she feel trapped by his devious, insinuating charm? Titillated the tiniest bit that he’d apparently pined for her from afar?
Or not deceived by what was an obvious lie intended to weaken her defenses?
Cynically, she winched out, “But what godforsaken reason would you have for choosing me?”
He bestowed upon her an infuriating smile. “I like you.”
Damarishka snorted and scowled at the city flashing by outside the window. “You don’t know me.”
“Don’t I?”
She swerved her attention back to him, trying to discern from his too-soft inflection what he meant. But his eyes only reflected enigmatic shadows in the eyeholes of his mask, and mocking secrets played at the corners of his lips.
Abruptly, the blood drained from her cheeks. “Have you been spying on me?”
His rather mysterious smile could easily have been malicious or merely mild. “Do you want me to have done such a dastardly thing? You have already cast me as your villain. Shall I comply and be one? The spurned evil skulking behind screens, obsessed with the unwitting princess?”
Damarishka, for all her vaunted lessons on reading facial expressions, could discern nothing from his. She worked her way around an answer. “It is a villainous thing to do, to peep on a person who’s unaware.”
“Maybe you were aware. As a wizard, I can take many forms.”
She blinked. He had disguised himself as someone else?
For a dozen panicked moments, her mind leaped from kitchen wench to maid to noblewoman to suitors—everyone she had come into contact with on a daily basis and who could have secretly been him.
She catalogued the things she’d demanded, commanded, given, taken, confessed.
She stingily thinned her lips. “Can you impersonate women, too?”
His eyelids idly lowered. “Are you now rethinking the words you speak daily? Would things you have said harden a heart, soften a heart, or win a heart—or perhaps incite someone to marry you just to teach you a lesson?”
BLAAAAAAAH lol That was me, not the story. Find the next section here if you want to know what happens next in this cliche-fest!
Here is my newest tiktok video (it’s the same text as last week, just with one line added to the end of the vid and different music):
Thrice the Shadow. [nope, no idea what that means still]
Thanks for reading! Be kind this week. And if you want to support me(!), you can:
- read my books and yell about how great they are EVERYWHERE lol
- OR sign up to my ARC list if it’s still open at the bottom of this page
- OR if you want to throw money at me, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ via buy me a coffee
- OR support me regularly via the patreon (though I never post anything there cuz I suuuuuuuuck). However, the funds from this regularly feed me when I run out of money, so if you want to help me financially, this is probably the best way.
When I was twenty-two, I ran away to Prague, where I now sing to my black cat (who collects dustballs in her whiskers), eat chocolate for breakfast, and have lemon tarts every Thursday.
Sonya Lano 
[…] DUN DUN DUN!!!! Find the next section here. […]