Chapter Forty-Five: Love's A Curious Thing...
Vivienne gently touched the cold, ashy cheek of the red-haired girl lying still and lifeless in front of her.
She had not forseen this outcome.
Originally, when she had cursed the prince all those years ago, she had expected him to fail, as countless others had before him.
Oh, she hadn't wanted him to fail - quite the contrary!
It was simply that very few people, once Vivienne had cursed them, successfully managed to meet the requirements to break said curses.
But this man had truly surprised her.
It was true that his relationship with the girl had started rather pathetically, all things considered.
He really did need to work on his temper...
But eventually, a slow friendship formed between the two.
And then this happened.
At first everything seemed to be going smoothly.
The prince had fallen in love with the girl, and she seemed to be well on her way to returning his feelings.
But then their fates changed.
The girl was never meant to get shot, that pesky Vicomte was supposed to stab the prince in the back with a dagger that he'd hidden in his boot.
Vivienne frowned slightly.
Maybe there was hope for some of the others she had cursed, those whose time hadn't run out yet...
There was still that princess from the kingdom of Delphi.
As an only child who had whose father had catered to her every whim, her mother having passed away in childbirth with her younger brother, who had been stillborn, Princess Luciana was a spoilt, arrogant little brat who truly believed that the world didn't revolve around the sun, but instead that the sun, moon and stars all revolved around her, and the rest of the world was just too stupid to understand that.
So Vivienne had given the girl a firm wake-up call by casting a powerful spell that caused the king to forget that he'd ever had a living child and made everyone else believe that the princess was a newly-hired scullery maid.
Previously unaccustomed to actually doing anything for herself, Luciana was now forced to do the most lowly and disgusting of tasks - washing dishes, scrubbing floors, emptying out chamberpots, etc, etc...
Hearing footsteps in the chapel, Vivienne knew she had to work fast.
She had allowed the girl to remain dead for so long, even though she knew it was against the Fates' original design, in order to test the prince one last time.
Cruel?
Probably.
But she needed to know for certain whether the prince's love for the girl was genuine, or just born out of convenience.
And so, she cast a mild invisibility spell on herself just as the door opened, then moved backwards into the farthest corner of the room where she could watch and observe.
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