The Proud Princess and His Music

“You loved ravens. You fed them from our bedroom window every eve, with the sunset around you like a blazing stage as you leaned out in your gauzy night things, your hair unbound, shimmering in the breeze…” His gaze misted over with imagery of her…

Continuing the fairy tale which I wrote in Czech and am translating into English for fun! Although at this point I’m just adding ALL THE STUFF! A dastardly masked mage kidnaps a spoiled princess from her birthday ball and spirits her away in his flying carriage to his black castle to marry her. But there is more to him than she knows…

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 –>

She wrapped herself in quietness. “Why did you choose me, though?”

“Did I choose you?” he whispered. “Do we ever choose our favorite soul in the world?”

The continuation:

“How can you say such things?” Damarishka murmured, alarmed by Darian’s admission, not only at its depth (for they had hardly met), but at its effect on her despite her barely knowing him. Not to mention her mother’s warnings… Stay hidden. Shun dark-haired boys. Avoid dark-haired men. Especially any who knows magic. Be content…

“It is this book.” An unvoiced curse roughened Darian’s tone as he traced his fingertips along the spine of Futures Eluded. “Every life we lived together flows through its pages, and I have known of it since I was a boy of twelve. Desolate, wishful, lonely, resentful—how could a boy such as I not open its pages to discover my fate? Some evenings, I read about our lives voraciously, while other nights, I howled and strove to destroy every page, for I was sure it was all lies, atrocious traps lain in ink to foment my helplessness. Imagine—” He dragged his hand viciously through his hair. “Imagine if you had read a chapter of our lives almost every day until you knew my every weakness. My awful strength. As I learned every one of yours.”

“Perhaps, then,” Damarishka ventured, “I should read it—so that I know you.”

“Not…” He flattened his palm to cover the embossed title. “There are things I would rather you not discover there. Things I would hide forever if I could.”

Damarishka hesitated, then pushed out: “Things you’ve done to me in our other lives?” Things you plan to do to me in this one?

“Not… not only those.” He slipped his fingers around hers, startling and intimate, and he breathed devastatingly hotly across her knuckles: “Indulge me in this, I pray.”

Her lips tightened. “Have I a choice?”

He kissed her captive hands, one after the other. “Yes. Any time you demand the book, I will hand it to you. I am asking first, however, for you to resist knowing.”

“Why?” She shouldn’t let him do this, shouldn’t acknowledge how weak his fervent kisses on her knuckles rendered her, and how she longed to indulge him simply because the potency of his desire thrummed into her, his wish as powerful as her own blood. Their shared past as boy and girl had burrowed powerful roots into her after mere hours. His youthful charm had charmed her too well.

His face now, too, seemed to hide nothing, only showing naked and brutal honesty. “Because I hope that this life, here, will be the one we can finally have together. One where you don’t live in fear.”

Fear of what? she wondered. Fear of him? Were my mother’s warnings about you? Or did he fear something? The people who hunted him? The sorcerers who had attacked them both when he’d found her with her kite at twelve summers old?

She only knew that she trusted he meant what she said, and so she summoned up the mildest of smiles. “I concede to your wish then—for now. But do tell,” she teased lightly, “if you know them all, then what are my favorite things?”

He grinned. “Books. Plum pie. Standing in the courtyard in the sun and tossing seeds to the birds until they flock around you as if you were an enchantress of all the winged creatures on earth. You love living in a castle full of cats—especially black ones. In one of my iterations, I had a black tom that loved my lap, and you couldn’t resist his catty golden eyes, and when you finally crawled close and knelt by me to pet him, I—dastardly, wicked—got to triumphantly pet you in return.” His devious half smile invited Damarishka to accept the memory as one playful, not hurtful.

In truth, she was struggling not to imagine how he would have petted her—innocently, or not—and even more tellingly, which would she have preferred—in that iteration? “Crows, too,” she offered. “I’ve always been partial to their glossy black plumage.”

 “Yes.” Darian fractionally grinned. “And ravens. You fed them from our bedroom window every eve, with the sunset around you like a blazing stage as you leaned out in your gauzy night things, your hair unbound, shimmering in the breeze…” His gaze misted over with imagery of her, and Damarishka’s throat went dry.

To distract herself, she swiveled away and seated herself on a velvet-upholstered chair beside the table where the tray of delicacies sat. There, she plucked a cherry tart and sank her teeth into it, its sour sweetness puckering her mouth.

It could not distract her from Darian quietly shifting behind her, though, nor from the knowledge that he had known her intimately in their every single potential life, and it seemed inevitable that they would know each other equally intimately in this one, too.

He paused behind her, his presence palpable, his fingertips a handbreadth away from her shoulders. “Will you listen to me play? You… love that, too.”

She was already rising, tart in hand, her answer blatantly obvious in her unthinking reaction. Always, she had loved music. But—“Do you love it?” she asked, wanting to discover him, too, despite her mother’s warnings.

His smile offered her secrets without telling any. “You will discover all of my loves and weaknesses in time. You always do.” Laughing softly at her huff, he ambled toward the door. At a crook of his finger, the tray of sweetbreads and tea levered into the air behind him.

To Damarishka’s unspoken joy, the tray floated alongside them like a pet on a leash through the candlelit corridors and accompanied them into a dimly lit music room.

Here, a single candle flickered on a grand piano near an open window. Around the piano, sheet music fluttered like roosting doves on metallic music stands. In the dark wings of the room, cellos, harps, and other instruments formed rapt and shadowy spectators.

Every alcove hosted an air of waiting stillness, reminiscent of an audience of a thousand bated onlookers.

Darian slid onto the piano bench, followed by the faintest of angling his head. “Sit where you please.”

A cozy window nook beckoned, but something of Darian’s too-quick glance drew her instead to a veritable nest of cushions beside the piano. She settled there like a dragon on a tasseled pillow hoard.

Poising his fingers above the keys, Darian released an indrawn breath, and his hands descended.

Thus commenced the ascent of a melody that was almost familiar, almost…

Every part of it defied encapsulation, until Damarishka simply shut her eyes lest she go mad attempting to pin down its indomitable spirit—its emotion, its ardency. It swirled in a place in her mind that was misty and nostalgic, a… comfort.

A haven only between them.

No marvel that she loved this, not for its mere music, but as a sanctuary from everything else.

As it gentled to silence, the final notes drifting, she thought it a kind of asylum not for the mad, but for the wounded, for those injured by their nearest and dearest.

Like her father had become estranged to her.

The idea jarred, and she opened her eyes.

Darian’s smile twisted. “Yes. When the music stops, your defenses are lowered. Do you want to speak of the hurt?”

“Of how my father became a tyrant to everyone behind my back while smiling to my face and telling me all was well? Condescending to me until I dulled to complacency? No, I do not.” What she did not actually want to speak of was her inaction, how she had let herself be shut away in the devastation of her own mind and done nothing at all.

It made her wish to hurt herself. “I find myself weary.”

Darian instantly rose, his lean figure as smooth as water. “I’ll show you to the chamber prepared for you then.” The tea tray bobbed along behind them again, and Darian, noticing her noticing it, impishly crinkled his eyes. “Never let it be said that I do not plan for every contingency, including midnight hunger.”

“Truly I would never accuse you of so very egregious an omission as discourtesy.”

His roguish grin turned him boyish. “Maybe not in this life.”

She couldn’t decide whether to bluster or laugh.

His grin slipped into a wistful smile. “Maybe this life will be the one where we both grow plump and…” His mirth snuffed out.

“Plump and what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

A lie, she named the response, or at least a deflection, but the day had strung her too taut for too long, and enough secrets had tested her endurance, and so she didn’t press him for this one.

Upon reaching her chambers, he instructed her on how the baths tapped heated water, and where to find soaps and towels, and he showed her which wardrobes held her stolen clothes.

Then they were facing one another in her bedroom door, and she was fending off a sleepy yawn while he stared down—and leaned down, his hand lifted, his head lowering—

Her breath caught.

But he swiveled away.

No kiss. No touch. Not even a whisper.

An enigma.

Was he the terror her mother warned her of? Or just a hunted boy? A man haunted by his countless luckless lives with Damarishka?

A skeleton encased in magic—magic that ate his skin away…

Too much, Damarishka decided, her exhausted eyelids entwining and easing any rumination from her mind.

She sank welcomingly into the sheets, and instantly fell into dreams… but her dreams were never tranquil, and the screams that were sold there every night—the nightmares, her mother’s shrieks and muttered warnings, the falling rocks—all bubbled up in Damarishka’s mind—

Until the strains of a piano swept them away like coins from her tongue, and the melody bore them aloft, above the dream monsters’ claws, and the music would not let the monsters buy her nightmares.

Not this time.

And thus she slumped into the nectar of a deep and dreamless sleep.

When sunrise breached her bedchamber, the first well-rested awakening in years enlivened her.

Darian, she realized. He had played her to sleep in order to keep her nightmares at bay.

But who, her aching heart asked, was staving off his?

Aaaand there you have today’s bit! Hopefully you enjoyed reading it! You can find the next part here.

As to other things in my life, I have uber-anxiety about the world, all the wars, the weird people in power, the unevenness of those in need and those stepping on the rest.

Yeah. Anyway. I have semi-paused work on Heiress of Secrets to work on a story about my wicked queen’s past when she feel in love with a carnival boy…

I hope you are all holding up okay. Remember that we are all on this planet together and we are not alone. Help one another, accept help in return, love; don’t hate, and be kind, y’all!

Thrice the Shadow.

And if you want to support me(support meeeeee!), 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.