The sound of Dawn screaming rips Marianne out of sleep. She sits bolt upright, immediately on the alert, reaching automatically for any sort of weapon that may be at hand, but her sword is on the other side of the room, and she comes up with nothing but her pillow.
She sees the creature perched at the foot of her bed before she sees Dawn frantically pointing at it. The creature makes a chittering noise and leaps off of the bed; Marianne's pillow catches it in midair, knocking it to the ground.
Something small and hard falls from its paw and rolls over the stone floor with a tinkling noise.
Dawn is still screaming, her wings flapping wildly. Marianne is nearly smacked in the face by one as she launches herself off the bed at the creature. She lands on the floor in a crouch and the little creature makes an alarmed screech of its own and scrabbles over the floor, claws skittering on the stone.
"The window! The window!" Dawn shrieks.
Marianne makes a grab at the creature, just barely missing it as it scrambles out the window. Half in and half out of the window herself, leaning over the ledge, she sees the creature clinging to the outer wall from a few feet away.
It makes a scolding kind of chattering sound at her. Marianne bares her teeth and snarls at it threateningly, leaning a little further out of the window to take a swipe at it. The creature scurries away, clinging to the grooves and the cracks in the stone, disappearing beyond the curve of the tower.
Marianne lets out a breath and collapses on the window seat.
"—what was that thing?" Dawn asks, standing near the window now, too, her eyes wide and one hand on her chest, over her heart, her wings trembling a bit.
Marianne rakes one hand through her hair and looks at Dawn.
"I have no idea," Marianne says, arching an eyebrow, "but whatever it was, that was a hell of a way to start to your wedding day."
The two of them look at each other for a moment, and then burst out laughing at the same time.
"You! You tried to kill it with a pillow!" Dawn says. "A pillow!"
"I couldn't find my sword!"
"A pillow!"
"Oh, and you were a whole lot of help!" Marianne says. "At least I did attack it with the pillow; all you did was scream!"
"I," says Dawn with an attempt at dignity, in between giggles, "alerted you to the presence of the intruder!"
"You probably alerted the entire palace, the way you were shrieking," Marianne says, and, as if on cue, her bedroom doors slam open and five members of the palace guard burst in.
Dawn shrieks again and grabs for the blanket on Marianne's bed to cover her nightgown.
"Your Majesty!"
"Everything is fine," Marianne says, slouched on the window seat. She waves dismissively at them. "Everything's fine; we won't be needing you, thank you."
The guards look baffled, but do retreat from the room, closing the doors behind themselves.
Marianne scrubs a hand over her face. Now that the excitement of her sudden awakening is fading, she's starting to feel the effects of too much walking and too little sleep the night before. And of—
There's a kind of sticky, twisting feeling in the center of her chest, deep inside.
Bog's going to divorce her today.
Her heart twists again, a horrible, sick, hurting sensation. Marianne vividly imagines clawing it out of her chest and the image gives her some slight comfort.
"What's this?" Dawn says.
Marianne looks at her, eyes focusing again.
"What's what?" she asks.
Dawn, bent over, stretches her hand out to something on the floor that—
"This," she says, picking it up. "That weird thing dropped it when you hit it with the pillow."
She straightens up and holds it out for Marianne to see.
Marianne takes a sharp breath, on her feet without even meaning to stand.
"It's nothing," she says, snatching Bog's bottle quickly from Dawn's hand. "It's nothing; it's mine."
Dawn gives her a look that indicates she thinks Marianne may have lost her mind. Marianne sympathizes with her sister. She has lost her mind.
"Oookay," Dawn says, in a I-am-humoring-you tone.
Marianne forces a smile and curls her fingers around the bottle, hiding it from view.
The Imp scuttles along the outer wall of the palace, its tail lashing behind it and its ears flat to its head.
The flying one with the pretty purple wings was much more fierce than she appeared! The Imp had not at all liked being hit with the pillow! And it had especially not liked the way the purple winged one had bared her teeth and growled at it—as though she meant to eat the Imp!
A shiver ripples over the Imp's back, making its fur stand up.
Having reached another window, now, the Imp pauses above it. Hanging upside down, the Imp peers cautiously inside. An empty hallway.
The Imp jumps down onto the ledge and then the floor, then shakes itself all over.
In spite of the alarming encounter with the purple winged one, the temptation to return to that room and try again for the little bottle of Love Potion is very great. The Imp could—
The Imp cocks its head, ears twitching.
That had been a very small bottle of potion. Much too small to be the main source of the delicious smell that twines all through the rooms and halls of this place! Has all of the rest of the potion been used up already?
The Imp balances on its hind legs and scents the air as it moves down the hall. It takes a turn, and then another, sniffing the air all the while.
No—no, the potion hasn't been used up! The scent is a trail, a kind of ribbon through the air; it isn't concentrated in splashes, the way it would be if it had been used. The only splash of the potion smell in the palace is the one the Imp had found outside the room of the purple winged one. It had thought that this must mean the rest of the potion was inside the room, but—
The Imp scurries down the corridor at a rapid pace, heading again in the direction of the bedroom it had been forced to exit so hastily.
When it reaches the room in question, the Imp hides cautiously in an alcove, behind a curtain, wary of another unexpected attack by the fierce purple winged one.
It hides itself just in time, too, because someone pushing a wheeled cart passes by the alcove just after, making the velvet curtain wave gently. The wheels rattle, and the Imp can smell food on the cart.
The Imp hears the bedroom's doors open—the low murmur of voices inside the room—the sound of the doors shutting—and then the cart rattles by again, the smell of the food gone.
A moment longer of waiting, and then the Imp pokes its nose out from beneath the curtain. The rest of its body follows and it scampers up to the doors.
Yes, the potion was used here; the Imp can certainly smell it, a heady, sweet scent, that, even now that it has faded so much, makes the Imp sigh with pleasure.
The potion was used here, and a bit of it is inside the room there, but the rest of it—
The Imp scents the air, then stands up on its hind legs, ears and nose twitching with excitement.
—the rest of the Love Potion was taken away!
The Imp makes a quiet chattering noise of glee.
Taken away—this way!
The Imp races off, following the trail of the scent.
They eat breakfast in Marianne's room that morning, just her and Dawn. Marianne is on pins and needles the entire time, expecting Bog to appear at any moment—the two of them almost always have breakfast together.
(She dreads what his appearance will mean even as she can't stop herself from longing to see him.)
When her bedroom door finally opens, Marianne tenses—but it's her father who enters, not Bog.
"Good morning," he says, smiling at both of them.
Dawn smiles back brightly and gets up from the table to embrace him. Marianne stretches her mouth into a smile too, and takes a sip of tea.
She has never been more grateful for Dawn's ability to carry a conversation; it means she's free to be silent as Dawn tells their father the story of their early morning encounter with the strange creature.
(Dawn doesn't mention the little bottle—the one that Marianne still holds in her lap, beneath the table, and Marianne is grateful for that, as well.)
"—only awake for an hour, and you've already had an adventure!" her father says, and he and Dawn both laugh.
Marianne flinches, from the laughter, and from the memory—
(what's an adventure without a little danger, and Bog's arms around her and the way she'd actually felt safe when he held her and—)
"—don't you think, Marianne?" her father says, still laughing.
Marianne comes to herself with a jerk, realizing she's missed several minutes of their conversation. She smiles and laughs and takes a sip of tea, and fortunately this seems to be an adequate answer to whatever question she'd been asked.
"Agh! I'm running late!" Dawn says, "I have to start getting ready!"
She gets to her feet and kisses her father's cheek, and then Marianne's, and then she puts her hands on Marianne's shoulders and shakes them lightly.
"I'm getting married today!" she says.
Marianne rolls her eyes and shoos her off.
"You'll be getting married in your nightgown if you don't go and get dressed," she tells Dawn, who grins at her brightly, and then practically skips out of the room, singing to herself.
Marianne shakes her head, the smile fading slowly from her lips.
"…Marianne."
Marianne glances over at her father. He's looking at her with an expression that makes her frown. He looks…uncomfortable? apologetic? And then he seems to make an effort to lighten his expression.
"Hard to believe Dawn really is getting married today," he says.
"Yes," Marianne agrees.
An uncomfortable kind of silence follows her agreement.
"She's very happy about it," Marianne offers, unable to think of anything else to say.
"Yes," her father says.
Another silence follows.
This is why she's been avoiding spending time alone with her father lately, Marianne knows. Conversations between the two of them, without Dawn, inevitably falter into these stilted staccato silences.
When was it, she wonders, that she stopped knowing how to talk to her father?
Probably somewhere around the time he sold you into a political marriage for the sake of peace, a nasty, bitter part of her mind says, and Marianne flinches at the truth in the words.
"Why didn't you let me lead the army during the war?" she asks, voice a little too loud.
Her father blinks at her.
"…let you lead the army during the war?" he repeats, and from his tone, it is clear that he's never before even considered such a possibility, and that, now that it has been called to his attention, he finds the suggestion ludicrous. "Oh, Marianne, of course I couldn't make you lead the army during the war! Roland is an excellent commander—"
"Roland lost," Marianne says. "I wouldn't have lost."
Her father's expression turns deeply uncomfortable.
"Yes, well—there were—perhaps some ideas of his that—might have led to a different outcome of the war, but which I didn't feel comfortable condoning—destruction—too much bloodshed on both sides—"
Marianne rises from the breakfast table abruptly, crosses to her window, fingers clenched around the bottle in her hand as she looks blindly out at the sunshine.
"And you didn't think that perhaps," she says, "these—destructive, frightening ideas of Roland's might be indicative of who he is as a person? You didn't think that perhaps it might be wise to let someone else lead instead? I could have done it, father!"
She turns to look at her father; he's risen to his feet now as well.
"I had to keep you safe, Marianne," he says.
Marianne laughs, the sound joyless and edged with hysteria.
"Oh, and what a wonderful job you've done of it," she says, feeling cold all over in spite of the sunlight streaming through the window.
Her father flinches.
"Marianne—"
"Did you know I would be safe, then," she asks, "did you know I would be safe when you married me to our conqueror?"
"Marianne, I'm sorry; it was the only—"
"I understand the necessity of it," Marianne says. "What I do not understand is why you agreed to it without my consent. I was in the throne room when the Dowager Queen brought the message; did it not occur to you to let me answer for myself?"
"Don't let's fight," her father says pleadingly, "Don't let's fight, Marianne, darling, please, not on Dawn's wedding day."
"Oh, yes, by all means, don't let's fight," Marianne snarls. "Don't let's fight on Dawn's wedding day, and don't let's fight on mine, and don't let's ever ever fight, let's just lie down and surrender and let things just happen to us because it's easier that way."
Her father lays his hand on her arm; Marianne shakes it off impatiently.
"Fighting is what I am good at, Father," she says. "I just wish that you'd given me a chance to prove that."
He blinks at her, clearly at a loss.
"We could have won the war," she says, "if I had been the one to lead the army."
She sees his disbelief, reads it in his eyes, his automatic dismissal of the words.
"Marianne, Roland and I did our—"
"You don't believe that, do you?" she says, with a bright, hard little laugh, "You don't; I can tell that you don't. But do you know who does believe that? Do you know who told me that?"
Her father opens his mouth, but Marianne does not give him a chance to speak.
"Bog is the one who told me that," she says, "And since he did win the war, I'd say his opinion on the matter carries a bit more weight than either yours or Roland's."
"Oh, Marianne," her father says, "I am sorry, my dear. I am sorry for the way things have—turned out for you, but—"
Marianne makes a noise of frustration, wings giving a quick flutter of repressed agitation.
"I do not regret my marriage," she says forcefully, the terrible truth of the words hurting her heart. "What I resent is that I had no say in its happening. Do you not understand, father? Do you not understand that?"
He doesn't see. She can tell by his expression: apologetic and bewildered and utterly at sea, and Marianne feels the distance between herself and her father as a great gulf, suddenly, no matter that he's standing next to her.
She closes her eyes briefly, then opens them again and looks at him once more.
He seems—so much smaller to her than he was before.
Marianne swallows down her disappointment in him as she swallows down her tears. She reaches out to pat his arm.
I forgive you for being less than I thought you, she thinks, and, for the first time, she feels no guilt at thinking this.
"That's all right," Marianne tells her father gently, a terrible compassion for him tightening her throat. "That's all right, father. It turned out well enough in the end. You're right—it's Dawn's wedding day. Don't let's fight about it any more."
He looks relieved, and she reaches out to embrace him so that he will not see her face.
...to be continued.
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