For Delia. It matched the prompt a great deal closer when I began it, I swear.
The Outrageous Ashley Winding
Ashley Winding's fire
A sound like a strong wind, a strong wind blowing. And tongues of fire cackling into the face of the night sky.
Ashley Winding stood with one booted foot on a crumbling crennelation that surrounded the roof of the burning prison. The fire pressed from behind, a solid wall of heat pushing to the edge of the precipice – deep shadows below as black as the sky above.
Then a voice came from overhead.
"Oh, dearie, what have you gotten yourself into now?"
Fredrick Fredrickson's birthday
The prince had been sitting unhappily on his throne, watching his birthday throng, hoping to push the nausea in his stomach and weakness in his limbs down to manageable levels, when a young man leant one elbow upon the throne's gilded mahogany arm.
"If you want to throw up, I wouldn't mind ruining this hat," he said.
The young man's hat was a very tall top hat of green velvet, and included an ostrich feather.
"That's the first nice thing anyone has said to me this evening," said the prince.
"No one's even wished you a happy birthday? The peasants."
The young man looked out over the birthday throng with a look of such disgust, the prince had to smile, just a little.
"Unknowable numbers have told me happy birthday, but I don't really count it a nice thing," confessed the prince, and sucked in a sudden breath. "Oh. And now they're all looking at again; I really am going to cast my accounts."
The young man whipped his hat off his head and held it under the prince's chin with one hand, and with the other grabbed the prince by the elbow, levered him out of his throne and through a curtained archway to the left.
The new room fortunately held fewer people than the ballroom, and all of them intent on the games of chance taking place on the tables before them. The pulse in the prince's neck stopped trying to hammer its way into the open. He was deposited in the chair on one side of an empty table and the young man quickly seated himself in its opposite. There was a pause and the deck of cards in the middle of the table looked at them accusingly.
"Damn it," said the young man emphatically, in a voice that held something more like glee than wrath. "I don't know how to play poker. Do you know? Someone might try and talk to us if it doesn't look like we know what we're doing."
"It's been my experience that people will invariably tell me what I'm doing wrong if I seem to know what I'm doing or no."
"Cheer up. It's only going to get worse but then you'll be king and you can kill them all."
"Who are you?" said the prince, picking up the deck of cards and shuffling them, for the first time falling in with the plans of a person – though he didn't know it yet – who would lead him into more trouble and more happiness than he had ever dared hope for.
"Ashley Winding," said the young man. "And you're His Royal Highness Fredrick Fredrickson. How do you play cards?"
"I have never met a person like you," said Freddy.
"I'm sure you have – only they didn't make a promise to themselves to do the most outrageous thing they could before they got shut up in a kitchen forever. If I hadn't met you on this particular night, I never would have let you think about throwing up in my hat or kidnapped you to teach me poker."
"Are you a commoner? A kitchen hand or something?"
"Not quite. Just fallen into reduced circumstances for a bit."
Freddy dealt their cards and laid his on the table so that Ashley could begin learning the rules and codes and strategies. "Then I will un-reduce them. I'm not very good at making friends but I would like for you to be one."
Ashley Winding laughed so hard he almost fell backwards out of his chair, but he agreed to be the best of friends, the most sworn of brothers.
Florentine Mast's dream
The shopkeeper of Mr Winding's Fine Things Emporium was more than a little surprised when Mr Winding knelt down on the stones beside her and fetched the extra scrubbing brush out of the pail of warm, soapy water.
"You see..." he continued to instruct her but she couldn't hear him over the sound of her own shock.
Hadn't she just yesterday been scoffing about the Outrageous Ashley Winding – for what'd be real outrageous for a toff to do would be an honest day's work like the rest of us?
He left off his scrubbing to grin at her frozen face, and held out a hand for her inspection. "Calluses, Mistress Mast, and no trumpery, I promise. I knew what work was before I caught the eye of the prince."
Florentine shook herself like a disgruntled hen and set her scrubbing brush back to the flagstones of Winding's "Well, that'll explain it then. Why you opened a shop with all your money. Outrageous for a toff to be in trade, but for you it's just what you were born to. Just as I thought."
"You thought not!" Winding protested. "You had no idea of it 'til I showed you."
"I didn't think of your calluses, but I've always known there's nothing really new in this world – all will return to its proper place. Some may be taken in by you, Mr Winding, but I know your secret: you're just as rageous as the rest of us.
"Mistress, I do protest, not least because you made up a word – stultified might be a better antonym. You're a very good shopkeeper, the best a person could hope for, but you're a dreadful judge of the world. People do extraordinary things on a daily basis, and damn all proper places."
"Mr Winding, the shop's doing well and the prince would give you the blood from his veins if you'd let him. If I had that kind of money and not a place in the world, you wouldn't see me here scrubbing at the floor, no. Did you see those tigers over at the exhibition hall a couple of weeks back? I'd go so far out the people'd have tigers for tabby cats and walk around in grass skirts with not a stone floor in sight."
"Mistress Mast," said Ashley Winding with an air of great realisation. "I do believe you're on to something. But first we must finish these stones which seem lamentable unwilling to vanish on us."
The prince's refusal
"You should come anyway and damn the consequence!" said Ashley. "It's not like they can do anything really serious to punish you."
"They could do a lot of things: not least, punish you," said Freddy.
"By the time they notice, we'll be three countries over and scot-free. Come on, you hate it here anyway."
"Ashley, I can't make a round trip of the castle walls without my lungs feeling like they'll collapse on me."
"Damn your lungs. So we'll take it easy, find the best sprung motorcarriages to be had and wrap you up snug as a bug."
"No."
Ashley swept his arms across the prince's desk, spilling papers all over the floor, and kicked the desk until, it seemed, he felt better. "You're the worst. I'll bring you back a present."
Lyndsey Tight's delivery
In a small watering hole, so far from the Outrageous Ashley Winding's home it was actually on the way back towards it again, a dusty boy ran in and gave the barkeep a telegram for the man. Lyndsey Tight opened it at once and read it because he had never prescribed to notions of privacy when it came to gossip. He scrubbed one hand up the back of his head and sighed. Ashley Winding had been good for business, bringing people in to listen to his stories, and now he was almost certainly leaving.
Squinting as he stepped out under the searing sun in the flat blue sky, Tight found Winding leaning back against the rough wooden wall of his watering hole, rubbing the ears of the pet lion and entertaining a group of grubby, useless children who wouldn't have a note to spend.
"You see, I began by doing one outrageous thing – so outrageous I was sure someone would stop me and send me back to the kitchens where I belonged. But no one did, so I did another and another until people accepted it as a matter of course and never tried to stop me. And that's the secret, my darlings, of changing the world, for good or bad."
Tight coughed into his fist in the pause and held out the telegram. "For you, sir. From a Mistress Mast."
Tight watched the man open it and read news of the uprising that had happened with the death of King Fredrickson, his son thought too weak to hold the throne, the nobility torn apart in the anarchy, the civil rule now shakily in place, the prince imprisoned.
"Damn it," said Winding, and again like a lost child, "damn it. Where's the nearest conveyance?"
A godmother's concern
"Was that really necessary, dearie?"
"Felt like it at the time," Ashley Winding told her.
The strong wind pushed flames closer to the edge of the roof. Intense heat through the roof tiles softened the soles of Ashley's shoes.
"How did you get the prison to burn? Is it not made of stone?"
One of the things Ashley liked about the godmother was that she asked the important questions.
"The cells for royal prisoners are all furnished to a pink; plenty to burn."
"What about Prince Frederick?"
"He was already gone, damn it. Being stripped to his underthings and paraded through the streets was no help for his lungs." Ashley kicked the stony crennelations and considered the drop over again. "Do you know what happens when you travel the world?"
The godmother shook her head.
"You collect stories, almost by accident. And every so often you run across ones that sound familiar: the youngest of three brothers saving the day, iron shoes and glass mountains, girls in straightened circumstances receiving the help of a mysterious benefactor and marrying a prince."
"Well, dearie, we know that doesn't happen all the time, don't we?" said the godmother, fluffing her wings like a disgruntled chook.
"You should have helped Freddy!" Ashley cried. "I was fine, I would have been fine even if you hadn't showed up. It was Freddie who didn't belong where he'd been put. He's the one who needed a damn fairy godmother."
"He got one, just didn't listen any better than you did," said the godmother gathering her up in her arms. "And mind your language, dearie, there's a good girl now."
.oOo.
With a wave of her fairy godmother's wand, she suddenly couldn't breathe. Well, she could, technically, if she breathed shallowly into the top of her lungs. However the movement made her breasts rise out of the tight-fitting corset in a way that, while interesting, did not entirely suit the image she had been hoping to achieve.
The rest of her was more modestly covered: a stiff, short collar covered the back of her neck, and her arms were clasped by tight-fitting sleeves that ended in deep French cuffs detailed with white. Her backside was impossible to discern under a voluptuous bustle. The dress itself was deep blue, almost black. Silver buttons marched down the front of the bodice and white embroidery twined between them before tumbling to the hem and budding into overblown roses.
"Well, dearie, what do you think?" asked the godmother.
Beneath the modest sweep of the skirt were layers of petticoats that clung warmly to her legs when she stood still, and tangled about her ankles when she tried to take a step. She took a deep breath and gasped as the corset strangled it in her chest. The fire, dying to cinders in the kitchen grate, cackled at her discomfort.
"The dress is lovely," said Ashley Winding, "but might I suggest we might try something a little bit different?"
Perhaps you didn't know, but tigers can't be tamed for pets – they're too wild. But a lion can be if you adopt it young.
Also, the royal cells are some distance from the rest of the prison so by setting them on fire, Ashley wasn't burning to death people who couldn't escape.
And Ashley Winding is partly based on Julie d'Aubigny, who was badass.