Chapter 2- Alive
Queen Roslyn is the one they call Sleeping Beauty, and my mother. Her godmothers cursed her, the fools. She didn't want to be effortlessly perfect. She just wanted to live, and she couldn't, because as far as the natural world was concerned, she already had. When she was seven, she had woven ten tapestries of a quality no weaver or seamstress could hope to match. At eleven, she had cooked a feast in under two hours, she out danced the most proficient ambassador's wife, she could speak eight languages, she had won every single debate she ever deigned to enter against my grandfather's advisers, and helped her country avoid a war. By the time she was sixteen, she had done nearly everything expected of a royal prodigy twice over and the unexpected things as well. She never failed. She'd never been unkind either, which may have been how she averted that war.
Those idiot fairies gave her beauty, cleverness, grace, a good disposition, and everything else they thought a princess ought to have. They took away her normalcy, boxed in her personality, and worse, made her completely aware of just how chained she really was. Ironic that Desde had meant to have revenge by the curse, when Mother saw it as the only blessing her birth had given her. Imagine her disappointment when she was woken by a strange prince, her country long since gone and her home crumbling and overgrown with thickets of thorns and half-bloomed roses!
I believe the one untruth in her legend at present is the rumor that true love's kiss would break the curse. One of those dim-witted godmothers was able to alter the spell enough that the "poor dear" would only sleep for a century, true enough, but there was never any kiss mentioned in the counter-spell. Love had nothing to do with my parents' marriage. My father, at twenty-seven, had been pressured from all sides to marry, and here was this lady he had inadvertently rescued. She was graceful, poised, beautiful. She was royal. The two were friends, and Father liked none of the simpering court adornments that prestige-loving families presented to him. It was a sensible course of action, and an agreeable one. But they have never loved each other, and never will. How could they? She had grown up in a since-forgotten era, burdened with gifts and good intentions that had made her world-weary. His heart was light, his mind unfettered by magic. She was moving inexorably towards death, he had always been vigorously alive.
They're both worn thin, now. In another year, I will take the throne. Father has finally tired, and Mother is happy to relinquish her title to the empty throne next to the one I will soon occupy. It's meant, I suppose, for the wife I'm expectedto find at some point in the distant future (most likely, I will never find one, much to the councilors dismay). I'm afraid I'm rather a disappointment after my enchanted mother and heroic father. I inherited neither of their good natures, none of Mother's kindness, or Father's easy charm. I have her aptitude for learning, his practicality. She gave me the cynical humor she was never allowed to have, he, the love of the land he has such deeps roots in. But I do not always listen attentively to the aging lords' boasting, or respond appropriately to foreign diplomats' veiled threats. (I have a predisposition towards dealing with things in a distinctly blunt manner. At some point this may result in a war, in which case I will have an excuse to send off a few of those aging regiment leaders with a fanfare. I'm sure they'll like it rather more than dying drunken and insensate on a tavern floor.) I have no patience for the court games or intrigues that I am expected to maneuver through. I do not share my father's everlasting joviality, and if the outlook is bleak, I will not rally the people through sheer optimism or inspire the doddering generals with my hope. If my taste-tester survives his first month of service, I will very much impressed. I believe I may have been indirectly responsible for the death of Father's two years back, actually. (Something that I could have found amusing, had it not been for the repercussions that it wrought.)
I bear no un-sought blessings, I have never encountered a sleepily disoriented maiden in my roamings amongst the eroded stones of the past. Nor, I think, will I ever find a bad-tempered Desde this side of the veil. The power it took to sustain such a long spell will have drained her. Does she know now, I wonder, that her pride has cost her more than it should have? Mayhap the fairy and I are more alike than would be comfortable to suppose. Nasty tempers, pride enough for ten men, and no compromises in our ways of thinking. Albeit, I have no magic about me, and she is rather too old and too female- if still living- to be mistaken for Roslyn's only child. I am content, for now, in my parents' shadows. Father will become an honorable, dutiful, durable symbol. I will be treacherously human. She will be legend someday, no doubt. I will be alive. In that, I believe, I will live up to my father, and surpass my mother.