Chapter Four ~ A Queen's Troubles

"Where were you?! I was looking all over for you!"

The adjutant made his way down the hall towards me, almost on the border of franticness. I suddenly felt guilty. I must have really worried him, when he raised his hand to knock on her door and then turned and discovered that I was nowhere.

"Sorry," I apologized lamely.

I followed him back to a large white door with golden decorations carved into it. This has to be the Queen's chamber! I positioned myself accordingly in front of the door and did my best to straighten myself out. My heart beat ten times quicker and I fidgeted more than ever. Sharn was behind this door!

The adjutant cleared his throat elaborately and rapped smartly three times on the door.

"My queen!" he announced. "The guest from Ayortha is here!"

The door began to open, and I was about ready to jump on the girl when she appeared.

"Sha-"

I was stopped in mid-word as a hairy beast bounded toward me and pushed me over. Next thing I knew I was on the floor, being harassed by a large dog growling close to my face. Its face was menacing, and I could smell the canine saliva dripping from its tongue. Ugh! Dogs are okay, but not when they're breathing in your face!

"Rogreen! Stop it, Rogreen! Let her go now!"

The dog grudgingly got off of me and stood away back, still content to growl.

"I'm sorry! He's always like this to strangers!"

I picked myself up and turned to look at the door. Standing inside, with the sinking sun's light haloing her golden hair, was Sharn, or rather, Queen Janelle. She was dressed in a simple day gown - nothing elaborate, yet it cleverly emphasized her looks rather than her clothes. It suited her well.

"Sharn..."

"Mari!"

We fell to a tight embrace, which felt awkward at first, but once I melted into my friend's arms, it felt as natural as rain.

"I missed you so much!" I squealed delightedly.

"Ah!"

"Step back," I said. "Let's see your face."

She pulled back and I saw her. Her blond curls, her blue eyes, they all showed her Kyrrian lineage. She indeed looked like royalty in itself. Sharn smiled goofily. I hugged her again.

"Ah! You haven't changed at all! Perhaps a bit older, but you're still the same Sharn, even though you're queen now."

I was led into the room with a maid trailing behind me, carrying a tray of tea. Her room was enormous. Our whole house was as large as the bedroom Sharn now slept in. I never stopped turning around and looking, so luxurious was her room. The maid behind me thought it was hard enough trying to carry the tea tray without me twirling in front of her, so she made discreet gestures for me to get going or get out of the way. I got out of the way so I could return to admiring the richly furnished room I saw in front of me. When the tea was all set out, I returned to Sharn, who was watching me, amused, from her cushioned red chair.

"Come, have a seat Mari. I dare say you've had a taste of Frell's exquisite tea." She grinned as she poured me a cup.

"Sharn! You're even talking like a queen now!"

She chuckled. "Yeah, well it kinda rubs off on you, the palace talk." She handed me the cup, and I graciously accepted.

"So how are your parents doing? Are they well?"

"Oh yes. Quite fine actually. They wouldn't believe me when I told them I had fallen in love with a prince. He was only a prince then. But when we married a year later...I guess now they don't quite mind, living in the palace!"

"Of course! It's so beautiful here!" I looked around breathlessly. Then I said, a bit more quietly, "I can't believe it! You're a queen now!"

Sharn blushed a bit. "It was only a coincidence that the person I fell in love with was a prince..."

"Yeah, you were really lucky," I said. To tell you the truth, I was a bit jealous. As much as I tried not to be, I just couldn't help it. I grinned as best I could.

But Sharn didn't seem to notice and she went on. "I met Edward in town!" she sighed. "And it was love at first sight!" She giggled like a little girl.

I nodded and smiled, keeping the jealously within me. Why couldn't I be like her? Why wasn't I good enough? Inside, I felt so lonely. I was craving for someone to love me. But no! I got mad at myself. How can you think such things?! You finally meet Sharn, at last, and next you get jealous! The nerve of me.

"He's very nice, but his family..." Sharn worried. "Even my parents were against it..."

What? Cinderella doesn't have a happily ever after? I listened more attentively.

"But the biggest problem is Edward's mother... In other words, my mother- in-law is really against this marriage, since I'm not of noble blood."

Boy, mother-in-laws everywhere were the same.

"She is Edward's second mother, coming from a Morgench aristocratic family, so she's very fanatic about social class differences. Not to mention her daughter, who is also my responsibility now... She's just like her mother."

"Oh, so there's a daughter," I thought aloud. I raised the teacup to my lips.

"One daughter and two sons," Sharn corrected.

I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise. Three in-laws! It's not easy being Cinderella!

Sharn put her tea down and stood up, walking around her bedroom, looking around with a bit of sadness in her eyes. No! It couldn't be sadness. Queens are never sad - they have so much money and people worshipping them. How can they be sad?

Sharn stared at a rug spread across the floor in front of her bed.

"But..." she whispered, "sometimes...scary things...happen around here." She gulped, fighting to keep composure. "Maybe," she said, quietest of all, "it's a mistake I became queen."

I got up and walked uncertainly over to Jane. "Sharn?"

Suddenly she whirled around and grabbed my shoulders, desperately, with a hint of wildness in her eyes.

"Listen, Mari...!"

I stared into her eyes, bewildered. This was definitely not a Jane I knew. She had changed perhaps this much while we last saw each other - she had taken up the burdens of an adult.

She began to speak; I heard her draw in breath to do so, but in that instant, a knock came at the door. It came so suddenly that Jane jumped away from me and looked fearfully at the door. I looked, too, but I couldn't help the feelings of disappointment take over. She was about to tell me something important - I knew it - but she had been stopped short. Now I was dying to know what she would have told me, and I glanced for an instant in Jane's direction, where she was walking up to the door to answer it. If only the knocker could have paused for just a few seconds! Oh, how I hated cliffhangers!

It was the maid who had arrived. She stood in the doorway, looking over in my direction, curiously. Then she turned back to the Queen.

"Excuse me, Your Majesty. You must get ready for the dinner reception..."

Jane shuddered a sigh of relief. "Oh, is it time already?" She turned in my direction. "Marika, you will come, too? I can introduce you to my family."

I barely noticed the formality of her tone. "Alright," I said quietly.

"This way," said the maid. "I'll show you to your room."

I picked up my pack again and followed her downstairs. Then she turned into a corridor and led me to a door. Once I thought about it, I realized that Sharn's room would be directly above me. I tossed my head upwards and stared, while the maid looked at me like I was an idiot. No, she didn't really notice. I just have a strange hobby of pretending people think I'm stupid when they don't.

Once the maid had finished fumbling with her keys and had jammed the fitting key into place, the door swung open and I found myself in a stunning guest room. Of course, the furnishings weren't nearly as great as the queen's room, but this room was designed to hold royal guests, even princes from a far away land would stay here. And I felt honored in that sort of thought, at the very least. At least they didn't give me some KEs and shove me inside a stuffy inn with the crotchety folk. Well, I guess there's nothing wrong with that, considering where I'm from, but I felt honored since I hadn't a trace of noble blood besides the Lady who Sits like a Commoner's. And that doesn't really count.

The maid stayed by the door as I immersed myself in the room. I used to be the "interior decorator" and maid service for our inn back home, so of course I was interested in the layout and design of the room. In fact, the maid thought me quite dull to watch, so she ended up leaving.

"This is your room," she said. "Your bed is further on past the curtains."

Whoa! This room is so big, you had to find the bed!

I walked up to each piece of furniture, each piece of decoration, admiring its workmanship. Fruits were laid in a glass bowl on top of a gold-trimmed stand with a gold-framed mirror behind it. My bed's canopy and sheets had gold tassels dangling off the sides while they themselves had scarlet designs running up them. The walls were painted gold. Basically, you were overwhelmed in gold.

There was a vase of large, exotic flowers on the floor, for that was how large the flowers were. And there were maps and paintings and tapestries laid out all around the room, and I went up to each one and ran my hand through the fabric, ran my eyes through the color, even though I wasn't supposed to. There was a balcony which looked out onto another wing of the castle, and I walked out into the fresh air and savored the nice breeze coming in from the west. The sun was setting fast, and I watched it dip below the horizon, setting the sky aflame. Soon the dinner reception would start, and I would need to get ready.

But I put it off for a little while longer. I could get ready in a minute if I had to. Flinging my pack onto the bed and flopping on the mattress after it, I drew out the magic book and lay it out in front of me. I stared at the cover for a few seconds - it was a beat up thing, with worn corners and white edges, but it remained elegant in a sense that it retained its original cover design. A rune, a symbol, was painted in flecked gold in the center, and a blackish-greenish paint formed a filled in circle around it and it and tentacles reaching out from the center, stretching all the way to the spine. For a moment I looked at the book, contemplating its design. I don't know, because right now, I feel like contemplating on everything's figure and shape. It's just the mood I'm in right now. Perhaps someday you'll meet me in a bad mood and I toss out various things at you with no contemplated thought. We'll see.

I opened the book with a creak and found a convenient little family tree on the lineage of the royal family. I felt it little voice in my head go, 'Memorize that! Now!!'

"Okay, so Queen Catherine was King Edward's mother. When Catherine died, King Alexis remarried to Queen Rosamund, who had Prince Luke, Princess Vivian, and Prince Sharell. Then Alexis died."

Wow! So confusing! And Sharn really has an evil stepmother-in-law with three other step-in-laws. How unfortunate!

A hasty knock sounded at the door. I got up and checked the clock in my room. A quarter to seven. Dinner started at seven, so I would have to think about getting ready after answering the door. When I opened it, an older looking maid of some sort was standing in the hallway. She didn't even say anything. She just took one look at me, then swept in uninvited, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me off to the bathroom.

"H-hey!" I protested.

To my horror, she began tossing off my worn clothing and pushed me naked into the bathroom. Trying to cover myself up with a towel, she walked in and bent over a large tub, one that I hadn't previously seen before when I walked into my room. A minute later, when she drew back, she was pocketing something and looking satisfied at the tub of water, which was suddenly filled and steaming. I blinked. This couldn't be magic. Magic was very rare in humans. Then I looked at the old maid again and slid my eyes downward, to her feet. Drat! Covered by a long skirt.

"Come, now, child. Into the tub. Oh, for the fairies' sake! I know what the female body looks like, thank you. Now if you had gotten ready earlier in the first place, then I wouldn't have been sent up here to dress you up properly. There you go! That's it, nice and easy into the water. See, that's not so bad is it?" the woman kept talking like this, whether it was to me or to herself, she kept at it.

When I slid into the tub, I was surprised to find that the water was the right temperature. Hot, but not scalding. The woman began to pour various herbal substances into the water, and it began to stink the place up, though it was a good smell. She began to attack my hair viciously with soap and a comb, running through the knots and messaging it straight. She took a sponge and scrubbed my body out with some more soap, and whenever she ran into a dirt spot that had crusted over, she would murder it with her scouring and leave a tender red spot on my skin.

At first I struggled a bit, uncomfortable with having another person wash my body. But she only reprimanded me fiercely and held me down to keep me from splashing soap suds everywhere. In the end I succumbed, and by the time I had gotten out of the tub and dried off, I was as docile as a doe.

When I was in my new underclothes, which were, by the way, silk, and which made me feel chillier, I asked the woman, "Who are you? At first I thought you were a maid, but then again, a maid wouldn't push around a queen's guest, not that I'm trying to sound high up there, but..."

The woman only laughed. The upper half of her body was rummaging through a wardrobe, so I couldn't see what was happening in there.

"I am simply Mandy; just an old cook. Now, which one would you prefer, this red one, or the green one with the flowers? I think both would go nicely with your black hair. It all depends on whether you favor the warmer look or the cooler one."

She held up two Kyrrian dresses. I stared blankly at them, truly wishing to wear none of them. I frowned and asked, "Mightn't you have anything else...?"

Mandy studied me, and I felt she was boring into my mind.

"Well," she said at last. "I might have this one..."

She turned around and put the two dresses back. Taking out another one, she held it in front of me.

"It's a bit simple, but I have a feeling you might take a fancy to it."

Simple, maybe, for an Ayorthaian formal garment. This was, indeed, more elaborate than the Kyrrian dresses Mandy had shown me earlier. It was beautiful. It was traditional. I liked it.

I nodded happily to Mandy the cook, and she flung the dress over me and fitted me into it. To my utter surprise, it fit perfectly. When she had fastened everything into place, I turned to her and started, "Are you a - never mind." I frowned at the floor, a bit embaraced at myself. Perhaps I should ask Sharn about it later.

Mandy twirled me around and looked at me with a beaming smile. "Oh, Marika, you look simply breathtaking!"

Breathtaking? Jane was breathtaking. Me? Never in a lifetime. I strode over to the mirror on the other side of the room, the large one with a golden frame. As I walked closer, my face seemed to distort a bit, and then when I was right up close to it, I saw that it wasn't my face I was looking at.

I screamed in fright. Within the glass world of the mirror I was looking at was a chalk white face. It was the face of a dead man.