The Proud Princess and the Wild Boy

“I’m sorry, princess!” the boy shouted, seizing her hand.

And then the ground opened up beneath her.

It was simply gone.

Screaming, she toppled with him into a void.

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 mage ruins a spoiled princess’s ball with the news that she must marry him and then he spirits her away in his flying carriage to his black castle. Oh, dear, what will she do with such a cliched problem?

If you want to read all the previous parts at once, they’re here: The Proud Princess and the Masked Mage. Or if you want bite-sized bits instead of all at once, you can start with the first and then go one after the other. Or you can just jump right in lol–>

IN THE PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT:

“Do you remember,” he asked, “when you sneaked out of the castle to fly a kite?”

“When I was twelve?” Her lips twitched a little at the clandestine incident. “Yes.”

“You met me then.”

Her brow crinkled. “But…”

“I misted over your memory afterward. I can remove the mist-spell so that the past clears, but I must touch you as I touched you when I cast the spell upon you and speak the same words. May I?”

Bewildered, but with her heart in a strangely anticipatory rhythm, she nodded.

He stepped close (her heart syncopating even faster) and he touched his fingertips to her lips. Her emotions beat like wings against her ribs.

As his eyes held hers, he murmured: “Your loving heart is greater magic than theirs.”

And her mind opened up.

The continuation:

Like a flower chain, old memories threaded through other ones and…

“Out here all alone, are you?”

Twelve-year-old Damarishka whipped around, her gasp jumping out of her mouth like a butterfly flown from her tongue.

Through her tangled hair and the drizzle misting the world, she stared at a boy around her age. The only person visible in all the hills around her, he resembled a wild thing that had fallen from a nomad’s wagon. All spiky hair and rambunctious grin, torn black trousers and scruffy black boots, his unbuttoned black vest whipping around his ivory linen shirt in the wind.

And here she was facing him with her arms stretched high, too involved in grappling with the spool of her kite, a magnificent scarlet dragon that was navigating the stormy sky with its tail and wings of ribbons buffeted by the air. Its weight kept tugging her upward even though she was too heavy to be dragged off, with her damp skirts heavy and spangled with rain and flapping around her calves in the ferocious wind.

“Who are you?” she blurted out.

Instead of answering, the boy leaned more into the vicious wind—toward her, his entire focus honed like a blade. “Nice weather you have here. Beats you in the face.”

Ah. Damarishka relaxed somewhat, relieved because he was talking about the weather. The weather was a socially acceptable topic, and boring, which meant he was safe, technically—or that’s what it would mean in a parlor; she wasn’t certain what protocol ruled out here, and so she hoped her belligerent chin would disguise her racing heart. “What’s it like where you live?” Because the way he’d said ‘here’ made it clear he wasn’t from here.

“Worse.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers and squinted into the wind. “Sometimes knocks you flat on your ass.”

Her eyes rounded. “What?”

“I got a nasty mouth, sorry not sorry.”

She blinked rapidly, ignoring the tug-tug of the kite pulling her up.

“You gonna tell me why a princess is out here alone?” he went on.

And the look he slid toward her then lifted the hairs on the nape of her neck, because she swore he looked as if he were thinking of snatching her. Something about the reflexively wolfish way he leaned again, and how his gaze flicked rapidly from side to side as if gauging this place for witnesses.

She jerked her chin toward the kite. “I’m here because of this?”

“Why didn’t anyone come with you?”

“Because it’s storming!” (That was patently untrue; she had actually sneaked out, a trifling matter whose significant peril was becoming increasingly evident.)

His dark brows lowered, his grin falling into a scowl. “They don’t beat you, do they?”

“What? Where’d you get that from? No!”

His shoulders relaxed. “Good.” Then he tensed again. “They say mean things to you?”

“No!”

“They do mean things?”

“N—” She stopped on the cusp of ‘no’. Her father didn’t always treat the servants or his subjects well. “Not mean things to me,” she amended. “Were your parents mean to you?” she hastily turned the tables.

“Not my parents.” His head ducked, his hair lashing cheeks turned red as apples from the elements.

“Servants?” she guessed.

“Had no servants. You play piano?”

“No, but I sing. You?”

“Play piano. I sing like a caterwauling cat regrettably.”

She couldn’t stop the laugh that poofed out of her at that.

He grinned, shaking his hair back and dislodging specks of rain. “You embroider?”

“Not willingly.”

“Can’t blame you. You draw?”

“Rarely.”

“Paint?”

“Badly.”

“You gotta be better than my cat.”

“Your cat!”

“He tries. Paws don’t hold brushes well.”

She covered her mouth (with her upper arm, since her hands were wrapped up with the kite spool) on another escaped laugh.

“You like sweet foods or salty more.”

“Sweets!” she answered decisively. “Fruits, cakes—”

“Candies.”

“Yes! And cheeses.”

He laughed. “I got a sweet tooth, too. We used to pick blueberries in the wood near our castle and then cook pies and tarts from ’em.”

“We have strawberries in the castle garden! I used to help Cook pick them.” She smiled impishly. “Till she discovered more ended in my tummy than in her basket.”

His eyes crinkled. “How many would you eat?”

“Enough for a stomachache.”

“Me, same.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’d always have blue teeth and a poochy stomach after picking blueberries. But we’d also pick mushrooms, too, which made the best soup. So delicious I still dream of it.”

“Oh, yum. Don’t make my mouth water,” she teased, an intended wordplay referring to the rain on her lips and salivating about his mushroom soup, but the jest seemed more clever before she said it than when she thought about it after it was out.

Nevertheless, his face lit up with absolute delight. “You joke, too!”

“Not well. I’m working on it.”

That surprised a laugh out of him, which warmed the cockles of her heart, which got her wondering—what even were the cockles of a heart? When she posed this question to him, faux-somberly, of course, he replied with equal faux-somberness, and as she was giggling about that, he asked if she read books, and then they were both lost, talking one over the other about this adventure or that villain or this annoying hero or that mad rescue, and she didn’t even know how he’d done it, but she completely lost track of the fact that she was holding a kite until the sky opened its belly and dashed all its storm on her at once.

Pelting rain was suddenly striking her kite like missiles from the clouds, and her scarlet dragon was falling toward the earth, bucking side to side in the deluge.

Damarishka could barely see beyond the sheets of rain streaming over her.

“Reel it in!” The boy thrust his arms around her, both shocking her and jolting her into action, and they both worked together to turn, turn, turn the string to drag the kite in before it could plummet down to be crumpled on the ground.

Once they got it in close enough, the boy leaped forth and caught it, then grabbed her hand. “Hurry!” He dragged her behind him, her sodden skirts draggling and tripping her over and over until he cursed and shoved the kite into her arms and then he was carrying her, running and slipping on the wet grassland and nearly falling himself, which forced her to shriek and grab him around the shoulders and neck—and was he laughing? She heard the telltale huff of it and felt the warmth of his expelled breath on her cheek, an inarguable contrast to the cold drip of the rain.

Then he was swinging her down, standing her back upright on a spot that barely dripped, beside the trunk of a thick oak.

She should chastise him for daring to mishandle her person, she supposed, but how idiotic was that when he’d actually handled her quite well by hastening her to a dry spot?

Well, drier, anyway. The ancient tree shielded them from the worst of the downpour, though not from raindrops that mazed through the branches overhead, landed in her hair, and slid in runnels down her nose and lips.

Whooping, the boy flopped down, his back to the tree, legs stretched out, and smiled up.

And Damarishka, looking down, was possessed of the oddest thought. As the blustery wind lashed the tree and dislodged the leaves, making them spiral down around him like coins traded for wishes, she thought he was a wish she had somehow traded for, though she hadn’t known she’d wished for anything, and she didn’t know what price she’d paid.

But then something started happening to his face. A glaring, angry welt appeared and puckered across one side, stretching from his chin, across his mouth, and up to his opposite temple.

She dragged in a breath, her gaze riveted on that violently wrought wound. “What…”

His hand flew to his face, probed the wound, and he cursed. “Is the spell fading?”

“Spell?” she squeaked. “What spell? Are you a wizard?”

“Jag it!” He scrambled to his feet, his gaze thrust up to the sky visible between the wind-thrashed branches. “They must’ve—”

A bolt of lightning scorched the grass nearby. Damarishka screamed and whirled away, but even so, clods of displaced dirt scraped her cheeks and lodged between her teeth.

The boy belatedly tried to shield her, deprecations coming in a torrent from his lips.

Another lightning strike deafened her almost completely, her ears ringing so loudly she could hardly even hear the boy’s curses as he knelt above her.

Above her? When had she collapsed?

The next lightning strike exploded around them. Her eyes stung, her nostrils burned, and she smelled scorched hair, singed bark, and—

“I’m sorry, princess!” the boy shouted, seizing her hand.

And then the ground opened up beneath her.

It was simply gone.

Screaming, she toppled with him into a void.

DUN DUN DUNNNNN! Sorry to end it there, but it was getting so looooong lol. Here is the next part, though.

And, you know, I’m not even translating this anymore, just adding things as the characters tyrannically dictate it 😀 They’ve decided there’s A LOT more to the story than I wrote in Czech. In any case, thank you for reading and stay tuned next time for more!

It took me so long to do this part because I was actually editing Heiress of Secrets and I finished the first major edit! HOPEFULLY this means I just need to read through it a few more times for minor things, but NOT another ungodly two years of slogging through it like this current edit demanded.

My favorite line from my edits this week: “Dare it, and you will not be the one who pays the price. You will never,” he whispers, “be the one who pays the price.”

Thrice the Shadow, y’all! Be kind to everyone this week.

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