Never bargain with a man clad in unknown intentions. (Unless one is quite desperate.)
Poppet is desperate. Her mother eternally sleeps. Her father eternally weeps. And Poppet herself must perch on a strict little chair every day and feed them both to keep them alive.
She’s at the point where she would even welcome a villain to alleviate the dire tedium of her life.
And then.
A tormented stranger breaches her castle walls and offers her one of her dreams.
For one day, he will lift her out of her pit of loneliness.
If only he hadn’t turned her father’s endless tears to endless blood, Poppet might even trust him…
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A Villain Would Be Welcome
Poppet was the most alive thing in the castle (that was, if one defined ‘living’ as walking and breathing, which seemed woefully unambitious, although Poppet had little basis for comparison, since, for years, she had been tasked only with tending to the others here who breathed).
She must do this, mustn’t she? Sit on this strict little chair. Hold the chipped porcelain bowl in her lap, and dribble, dribble porridge into her mother queen’s slack mouth. Glean that escaped bit from its drip down the papery royal cheek and spoon it back between the slack lips.
Miraculously, the queen never choked, for magic made her swallow, but nothing made her wake.
She had not flittered open her eyes since Poppet was born.
The head of the maid staff had told Poppet the ghoulish tale. How, at first, everyone believed the queen had simply descended into a post-birth nap. But then days had passed, then weeks, then months, and as if all her moments of wakefulness had been stolen, the royal eyelashes remained ensnared in slumber even as the royal lungs expanded and the royal heart beat.
The king, grief-stricken, sorrow-ridden, hunched, forlorn, beside his wife’s sleeping body, with his own body molded into a silent wail. And, oh, how he wept!
His beard grew past his knees, his ermine ruff went matted with tears, his hair went white as snow, and the servants muttered behind their hands, their irritation flitting around their mouths like insects around flowers. A king should rule, or at least name his newborn child, the newborn princess, yet all he did was pour out salt and sorrow, sniffs and snivels.
Inevitably, one by one, the servants left, and with no one remaining to mop up the floor and soak up the tears, those tears formed puddles, and those puddles formed a stream, and that stream flowed from the king’s bedchamber and spiraled down the stairs, winding down and down and down again until it splashed over the grand staircase and out of the castle, out across the cobblestones, and into a brook that flowed to the village.
There, when the villagers hauled out water for cooking or drinking, they drank his sorrow.
“And, lo!” the head of the maid staff had warbled to little Poppet at this part of the tale. “His vast ocean of despondency proved so great that everyone else’s troubles shrank in comparison. Which meant, of sorts, that his stream of tears has become a remedy for grief, because next to his sadness, everyone else’s travails become as insignificant as foam. But, still, no one wants to live here in the castle anymore.”
And then she, too, left.
Poppet had been five. Fortunately, an enchantment over the castle renewed the orchards and larders each night, and, although she would never remember later, a cowled figure appeared every afternoon and taught her how to read and write and do arithmetic, and how to tend her mother, her father, and herself. But otherwise, left parentless, she became wild.
As her mother slumbered and her father bent in mourning, years passed and Poppet became an assemblage of profound yearning and uncaught dreams, stuffed into a haphazard princess in fraying fabric.
She squandered her days, roving the echoing chambers of a castle overgrown with ivy and woven through with abandonment; she danced through the orchard with the wind, her fingers stained dark with blueberries, her giggles off-wit, her humming off-key, and her songs quite tuneless.
Her despondent smiles strove to be redcurrant-bright, of course, but too many evenings, she flattened her nose to the apathetic glass of the library windows and peered down on the village lanterns in the sooty night, where lights welled out of the dark like fey apparitions of festivity, beckoning to her. Come join us, human princess. Abandon all mortal woe… and she wished that someone, anyone, would come whisk her away.
Had the portcullis not been down, preventing her escape (for she couldn’t raise it alone—and come to think of it, she had no idea who had even put it down), she might try to whisk herself away, but in truth?
If she could run, and did run, she might never run back to this place, and who would tend to her parents then?
A sniffle in the present drew her emptied gaze from her empty mother to her weeping father.
Sunbeams from the arched window glittered over the tears that trailed off the king’s long white beard in crystal rivulets and soaked through his robes, then dripped onto his feet, where his shoes had long washed away. Those shoes must have simply slipped off his feet one day and sailed off out of the castle on their own adventure. But her father?
No adventuring for him. Even now, he wept.
One day, she thought, he would look at her and cry, “Daughter!” And he would wipe his tears and decide to continue with life and—
Lies.
She should feed him next.
Truculently, though, she flew to her feet, the bowl of porridge clattering onto the fuzz of dust on the bed-stand, then she was flitting through the halls, her heart and mind and body all in a symphony of dishevelment.
How awfully her days here waxed and waned and waxed and waned as her sanity waned and she waxed older while her hope—barely—lived.
Or, rather, it lived as little as anything else in this forsaken place.
Not to mention that the increasing pressure in the air of a coming storm was driving her mad.
By the time she reached the library, raindrops were jabbing the mullioned windowpanes in a rhythm of tap tap STAB, tap tap STAB.
Poppet flung herself onto the castle’s library floor, an obsequious supplicant for entertainment, amusement—or company! Anyone! How was she to endure this for decades to come?
At this point, even a villain would be welcome. Better that than her only companions being the books she read.
She heaped them on the carpet around her—not villains, but books: books portraying adventures she would never live, heroines she would never be, with charming rogues she would never engage.
Outside raged a tempest as formidable as a hero’s despair. Enraged witches of wind rode in on furious gusts and rattled the windows, with thunder reverberating behind them in the cauldron of the gale. Intricate flares of lightning drew labyrinths across the sky and lit up the rain, which shot from the clouds in pins and needles that would sew up the ground with moisture.
Inside the library knelt Poppet alone. With knotty hair, astute eyes, and insultingly large feet, she had long outgrown her shoes and last-made gown. The dress’s once-azure had grayed like a filmy window, its buttons were dangling by exhausted strings, and its laces had split into threads like tassels.
She could have made herself a new gown, but she despised sewing—loathed it!—and who was here to judge her anyway?
Taking up her favorite romance—aptly titled All Things Fatal and Sinful—Poppet flipped it open to her favorite part.
The heroine had just awoken, debauched on the villain’s bed, her hair tousled, her innocence gone—as gone as the gown that had dispersed into mist and magic beneath the dastard’s gloved fingers in the night.
However, the resilient heroine had a secret, a trick (as clever women always had), and unperceived by the mortal fiend, a vital treasure lay near the heroine’s naked hip, concealed in the bedsheets’ rumpled terrain…
Poppet read:
In front of the open tower window, in the thrall of pernicious glee, Badthazar threw back his head and laughed in sinister victory. Thunder crashed as lightning split the shadows beneath his eyes: his elements ascending to his command. “What a day to wreak savagery!” He drained his wineglass with a single iniquitous swallow. “Even the impotent heavens weep, toothless against me!”
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he abruptly swooped toward her. “Come, my despoiled love.” He beckoned. “Come to me!”
How his triumph glutted on her surrender, like a vulture would plunder entrails.
The fine hairs on her skin tingled in the breeze that swept through the window.
Lovely.
Enticing.
Hurling away her modesty, she unfolded herself from the untidy stage of her downfall.
He may have pillaged her virtue, but afterward, he had kissed the toxin from her lips, and as he had slumbered in the clutches of that flavorless distillate, she of cunning intellect and crafty fingers had found the cabinet door above his heart. She had opened it…
Now, all unsuspecting of her guiltless guile, he benevolently watched her while his long, gently tapered fingers caressed the flute of his wineglass. “Mine,” he whispered.
“No,” she whispered back. “Mine.” And artlessly she uncoiled her crafty fingers to reveal the vital prize in her cupped palms.
“No.” His hand flew to his chest, his body tensing in pain. Failure! “No!” he shrieked. “No!”
As his triumph drowned, her smile surfaced. “After you took mine,” she breathed the daintiest kiss of all across the limestone heart in her hand, “I stole yours.”
Lightning struck a gargoyle outside, startling Poppet like a fallen teacup toppled out of a world of tapestries and seduction.
Back into excruciating solitude.
Mercy. She resolutely bent back toward the book.
But wait.
How odd. The library floor shuddering beneath her was sending vibrations all the way up to her jaw.
No. That wasn’t lightning causing such a mighty shaking of the carpeted floor, but—
Blinking, she bounded up as though her feet had been pricked by nettles.
The colossal castle doors were being forced apart!
Someone arriving here on the day before her twentieth birthday?
She darted through the hallways, down the stairs—but she was getting close now—Quiet!—her breath held as she approached the entryway…
As stealthily as spider-silk, she peeked into the gallery just as the corner of a black silk cloak billowed out of sight through the door opposite.
Someone was heading deeper into the castle!
A mystery.
Hushed and creeping, sneaking, Poppet tracked this caped figure through lightning-lit passages, veering around corner after corner until they reached her father’s room.
As she dithered in the doorframe, the intruder advanced on the weeping king, sidestepped the tendrils of trailing white beard on the carpet, raised his gloved hands, spread his spidery fingers, and—
A flurry of lightning lit her father’s robed figure and chalky skin, illuminating the spindly skeleton underneath as crackling embers sprayed from his eyes.
His scream tore the air. Garish scarlet runnels streaked down his cheeks, staining his beard like slopped red wine.
Blood.
A scream pulled itself unbidden from Poppet’s lips.
Another flare of lightning showed the cloaked visitor swinging toward her.
His face possessed black eyes and red, red lips.
Poppet fled—what else? Nimble, swift, reckless, sleek, she fled with the rapid footfalls of hunted game.
The hunter pursued her.
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Sonya Lano 