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The white horse galloped through the trees, spurred onward by his rider's heels. Belinda rode blindly, unable to see because of the strands of hair whipping in her face with the wind and the tears of rage and hurt stinging at her eyes. After quite a while of hard riding, the horse stopped at the edge of a large pond, rearing on his hind legs a little as if to give the blonde woman a wake-up call to where she was going, and she was nearly thrown. "Stupid horse," she muttered once he was back on all four hooves. She dismounted, leaving the reins loose for the stallion to graze.
She sat down heavily on a large stone by the water's edge, picking up a stick and angrily breaking it into several pieces before tossing the remnants in the water. After a moment's reflection, she jerked off her engagement ring and threw it into the water as well.
"How could he do this to me?" she asked aloud to no one in particular. "How could he even THINK of courting me with such a hideous enchantment placed on him?"
"Some enchantments can't be helped, you know," a rather saddened sounding voice said from somewhere near the ground. Belinda looked around, startled.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"Just a lonely, enchanted soul," the voice said again. She frowned, looking down at the pond. All she saw was a large, brown eyed frog looking up at her.
"All right, then, WHERE are you?" she asked, becoming annoyed. The frog croaked, then smiled at her.
"Right here," he said. She nearly fell off the rock she was sitting on.
"You can talk," she said simply, shocked.
"Well, yes. You never heard of a frog prince?" he asked, then added hopefully, "I don't suppose you'd like to kiss me, would you?" She looked disgusted, and he sighed. "Oh, well. It was worth a try, wot wot? Besides, I've got my eye on someone else..."
"Being a frog isn't as disgusting as being an OGRE," she replied, spitting out the last word. The frog frowned.
"Er, well, no, I suppose it's not quite as horrible...nasty creatures, ogres," he muttered. "But...well, I'm guessing it's your fiance who's an ogre?" he asked.
"How did you know?" Belinda said, curious. The frog held up the tossed engagement ring in one webbed hand.
"I'd say this provided a fairly accurate indication," he replied. The blonde woman sighed, shaking her head.
"I just can't BELIEVE that someone I thought was so wonderful could turn out to be so awful..." she said, half wondering why she was suddenly pouring out her heart to this amphibian. At the moment, she didn't really care who she talked to.
"Well...is he really any different on the inside?" the frog asked hesitantly. "I mean...well, if you fell in love with him for being wonderful...isn't he still wonderful, except for the whole ogre thing?"
"But he LIED to me!" Belinda insisted.
"Cutting out parts of the truth isn't exactly lying..." the frog argued hesitantly. "I mean, if I had the chance to be human again, just long enough to get a certain fair maiden to kiss me...I must admit, I would probably leave out the part about being a frog. What I'm trying to say is...maybe you should give this ogre of yours a chance to explain himself. Who knows? Maybe the two of you can even work out the whole ogre problem. After all...ever curse has it's countercurse."
"Really?" Belinda asked, finding some small amount of hope in the frog's words.
"Well...I think that's the way it goes, anyway," he admitted. Hopping up on the rock beside her, he placed the engagement ring down on the cool stone. "Here. You don't really want to leave this at the bottom of a pond, do you?"
Belinda looked from the frog to the ring, then smiled a little. "Well, I suppose it is worth a try...perhaps there really is an antidote to whatever hex he's got." She picked up the ring, then stood up and gathered the horse's reins. "Thanks for the advice, pigeon," she added, using the rock to get back up on the horse.
"Er, I'm a frog!" the frog called after her as she rode away. "Hmm. Poor girl. Seems a bit daft," he said aloud to the empty forest. Shrugging his froggy shoulders, he leapt back into the pond with a plop.
Belinda rode the horse a little easier on the return trip, her anger fading to annoyance. She was still upset with Frederick for not telling her about being an ogre, but...perhaps the frog was right. Maybe, just maybe, she and her prince could find a solution to his problem. She HAD run out before giving him a chance to explain himself...maybe the curse was only temporary! The more she thought, the more her spirits lifted; she had never found a problem yet that she couldn't surmount. This would be no different.
As the horse neared the cottage, Belinda heard loud voices in a nearby clearing. She reined the horse in to a stop, listening carefully. The voices all sounded male, and they were shouting. Chewing her lower lip, she debated on whether to continue on to the cottage or investigate the source of the noise. In the end, her female curiousity won out, and she dismounted the horse, tying his reins loosely to a tree branch to prevent him from following her. She adjusted the cloak that she had thrown haphazardly over her robe, and crept forward towards the voices.
The first thing she noticed was a group of men clustered around something hanging from a tree in the same clearing where she and Frederick had stopped the night he had shown her the cottage. A few of them had torches, although why they needed a torch when the sun was up, she didn't know. Almost all of them carried a pitchfork. Biting her lip again, she hid behind a large tree, her hands pressed against the rough bark as she tried to listen without being seen.
"Well, now wot d'we do wiv' 'im?" a slow, drawling voice asked, sounding dumbfounded.
"We kill him, that's what!" a louder voice announced, earning a roar of approval from the other men.
"But George--"
"I said we kill the beast!" the loud voice interrupted again. Another cheer went up. "Stand back, men! This might get messy!"
As the men stepped back from the hanging object, Belinda had to cover her hand with her mouth to keep from gasping out loud in horror for the second time that morning. She still couldn't see everything clearly because of the large crowd, but she saw enough. Hanging from one caught foot from a tree limb was an ogre, already bleeding from several pitchfork wounds. He struggled against the ropes that held his large hands tied behind his back, and a gag kept him from saying anything to the half-wit villagers. 'It's not Frederick,' she told herself, her heart pounding wildly in fear. 'It's some other random ogre, and if they kill him, that's no skin off my back. I can just go home, tell Frederick I'm sorry, and we'll work this out. This doesn't concern me.' Yet she stood rooted to the spot, hands pressing so hard into the rough bark that there would be dents in her palms when she pulled away.
"George, maybe it's not such a good idea to kill him," a third villager put in. "I mean, what if there are others in the woods waiting to come after us once this one is dead?"
"Don't be daft, Sam. If there were others, they would have come to rescue him already," the man called George snapped, throwing down his pitchfork and pulling out a dagger. He looked at the ogre's thick neck, then back down at his short dagger before shouting, "Anyone here got a sword?"
"Whatsamatta, George? Afraid to get ogre blood on your hands?" a rather whiny, thin man said, snickering. George narrowed his eyes and brandished the dagger threateningly in front of the thin man.
"You want to give it a try?" he sneered. The thin man shook his head quickly, and George lowered the blade. "Good. Now come on, men! Surely one of you carries a sword!"
One of the younger men in the group stepped forward hesitantly. "I've got a sword...but I really don't think we should be killing the ogre. I mean, what harm has he done us?"
"Oh, shut up!" Without waiting for permission, the man called George grabbed the sword out of it's bearer's hand. "Stand back, men!" he said, then swung the sword wide.
Belinda opened her mouth to scream, to protest, to do ANYTHING, but it was too late. She could only shut her eyes tightly and hide her face behind the tree trunk when she saw the sword first connect with the ogre's neck, then let out a low moan of agony a second later when she heard a resounding thunk on the ground. The gathered men who weren't cringing at the sight let out a cheer.
Without waiting around to see what they were going to do with the body, Belinda turn and ran back towards the direction of the cottage as fast as her short legs could take her, not bothering to stop and untie Frederick's horse along the way. It wasn't a far journey, but she managed to stumble over every root and bramble along the way, gasping for air. "Frederick!" she called once the cottage was in sight, half shrieking his name as she tore across the footbridge and into the cottage. "Frederick, answer me!" Her calls were in vain; the cottage was empty. As she passed by the table in her rooms upstairs, she noticed a piece of paper propped up against the salt and pepper shakers. With a trembling hand, she snatched the note up and began to read.
'Belle,
I'm so sorry about all of this. I wanted to tell you about the curse, but I was hoping to get it cured before you ever had to know. If you change your mind about hating me, meet me in the clearing by the road whenever you are ready. I'll be waiting for you. Please know that, even if you hate me, I will always love you.
Yours,
Frederick'
She read the words over again three times before slowly crumpling the paper in one fist, her chest heaving with suppressed sobs. An overwhelming sense of helplessness and grief was beginning to seize her, and it was not a feeling that Belinda liked. So she ran again, trying to escape it, down the stairs of the cottage and out the door. She made it to the footbridge spanning the stream that ran in front of the cottage before she tripped and fell, landing hard on her hands. At first, she just stayed there, looking at the planks of the bridge while her insides quaked, before turning to hang her head over the side while her stomach lurched in an attempt to rid itself of contents that weren't even there.
For a moment, she just stayed there, propped up on her hands, before pulling herself up by the widely spaced rails into a sitting position. She didn't cry at first; instead, she stared out at the water, her heart pounding in her ears. He had gone out to wait for her. And no matter how much she wanted to tell herself that it was another ogre and not the one she had woken up beside that morning she had seen in the clearing, a small voice inside her said otherwise. The irony of it all was that she had been on her way to apologize.
The more she thought about the situation, the deeper the sense of loss in her heart grew, and before she even realized it, tears were streaming down her face, earlier held-back sobs suppressed no longer. For nearly half an hour, she sat there, crying numbly as her hands clutched the rails and her knuckles turned white. Finally, a soft popping sound and a voice interrupted her grief.
"Sorry it took so long, my dear, but I was dealing with some other clients..." the fairy godmother said, trailing off when she saw the young blonde's face turn towards her. She could have been made of stone if it weren't for the tears still leaking from her eyes. "Why, my dear...what's the matter? What happened?"
"They killed him," Belinda replied, almost in disbelief, before she even had time to think. She really didn't want to talk about the situation with anyone, much less the woman who had gotten her involved with Frederick in the first place, but she couldn't help explaining things.
"What?" the older woman exclaimed, shocked. "But...he...why was he here at this time of day?" she stammered, but received no answer. "Oh, dear, I TOLD him he should have warned you about the spell..."
"I thought love's first kiss was supposed to reverse spells like that!" Belinda exclaimed harshly, her voice still very unsteady. The fairy godmother shook her head sadly, and the blonde woman buried her face in her hands.
"Not this one, my dear. This spell...well, it was really meant to have no antidote..."
"All curses have countercurses!" Belinda blurted out. The fairy godmother blinked at her, then shook her head again.
"That's a fairytale, my dear. There are some spells that cannot be broken. However, I've been searching for an antidote for this one for the past two years. Frederick's parents thought a kiss would do the trick, but when they found out that his first kiss had done nothing to solve the problem, they came to me. It was only through a lot of research that I discovered a potion that might work a few weeks ago, and I just wasn't able to mix it properly..."
"Potion?" Belinda echoed, lifting her head. "You mean...a potion could have saved him? A POTION could have cured him of this...this horrible mess?"
"Yes, dear, but as I said, I wasn't able--"
"But I would have been! You mean to tell me that you KNEW there was a potion all this time, and you..." Belinda trailed off, staring in disbelief at the woman before her. She stood up slowly until they were face to face; the fairy godmother wasn't all that much taller than Belinda. "Why didn't you tell me? There's never been a potion I couldn't mix! I could have SAVED him!"
"I didn't think it was right for me to tell you...that's why I offered to let you come work for me in the first place, so you would be able to mix the potion without knowing it was for him..." the fairy replied gently, moving to lay a hand on Belinda's shoulder, only to have it shrugged off roughly as the younger woman turned away. "My dear..." she began again with a sigh. "I am truly sorry about this. But...it was doomed from the very beginning, I'm afraid. Ogres don't live happily ever after."
Silence hung heavy in the air as Belinda thought of those words. 'Ogres don't live happily ever after.' They reverberated in her brain, a maddening cadence that seemed to grow louder and louder until she thought her very heart would burst with the pressure that they brought. The pressure built until there was no room left for tears, no room left for remorse or regret...there was only bitterness. Smothering, breathless bitterness that consumed her entirely. It would fade somewhat with time, fade into a throbbing ache that would cause her to force herself to keep busy, leaving no time to let the ache come to the forefront of her mind. But at the moment, it encased her heart in a shell of ice so thick, any tears left in her would freeze before they reached the surface.
"You're a fraud," she announced coldly after several moments, turning once again to face the fairy godmother. "You advertise happily ever after, then you don't come through. You aren't fit to carry that wand in your hand," she spat, her upper lip curling into an ugly expression of distaste. The fairy godmother looked startled, and a little hurt, but Belinda didn't care.
"I...I try my best..." she stammered, her shoulders sagging a little. Belinda advanced on her slowly.
"You don't deserve the title of fairy godmother. You say you try your best? I hate to break it to you, pigeon, but your best is pretty damn rotten," the blonde hissed, fueled on by her anger at the situation, at the fairy godmother, and at herself for running out on Frederick. With her first clenched around her wand, the fairy godmother looked at it, then at Belinda...then she threw the wand at the girl's feet. It clattered on the boards of the bridge.
"Fine, then! If I'm such a rotten fairy godmother, you take the job! I don't want it anymore! I'm retiring!" she announced with an air of one who had just had her feelings deeply injured. Then, before Belinda could argue, she had vanished into the thick forest.
Slowly, the blonde bent to pick up the discarded wand, staring at it for a few moments before turning to look at the cottage. "Well....why not?" she said aloud, gently running the tips of her fingers down the smooth wood. The gears in her mind were beginning to turn, encouraged on by the words 'ogres don't live happily ever after', as though it were becoming a mantra for her. Her own happily ever after had been ruined...but maybe, just maybe, she could get into the happily ever after business heself. There was a good market for spells and enchantments in the area. Who knew? Perhaps one day her business would grow enough to support the entire populace of the largest kingdom nearby, the beautiful Far, Far Away. Being a fairy godmother to a kingdom that huge was much better than being the queen of a smaller kingdom, which was where she had been heading. Out of curiosity, she gave the wand a little swish, watching the small swirl of bubbles that came out of the star-tipped end.
With a smile of grim satisfaction born of the bitterness in her heart, she nodded a little to herself and crossed the footbridge to her cottage. There was work to be done.