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“Know what?”
“You know that you are…” He takes in a deep breath and speaks the next word with perfect derision. “Common.”
I get the sense I should be offended by that, but I’m not, because I’m from Chicago, and whatever class system is in place here, is not in place there.
“King Charming thinks I am a princess,” I say.
“Yes, well, he would. Poor boy was always a bit thick.”
Balthazar is clearly one of those people who think they’re better than literally everybody literally all the time. Kings included, apparently.
“Do you know King Charming?”
“Know him? I was present at his birth.”
Oh shit. It suddenly occurs to me that this must be Charming’s dad. It makes total sense. He’s old, and he’s clearly a royal of some kind, and… fuck, I am making a terrible impression.
“Oh. Okay. I didn’t know, sorry.”
“Why should you have known?” He speaks those words with a hint of derision as well, as if I might be too much of an idiot to work things out, like his allegedly thick son.
“I just got here,” I say. “I’m still new.”
“Ah,” he says. “It makes sense now.”
“What makes sense, precisely? I’d say very little makes sense.”
“You do not belong here. You are not from this realm. Your presence here is a corruption. The king’s attachment to you can only lead to pain and death. You will be forever barren, and your vows shall come to nothing, because you are not of this place, and it will reject you at every turn.”
He makes this pronouncement in a very eloquent English way, rolling his R’s and taking deep breaths. The wizard is not afraid to boom a terrible prophecy at a complete stranger, I will give him that.
“You must return to where you came from. You must leave this place. Do not say another word to Charming, do not interfere further in the poor delusional boy’s attempts to find a princess in a world where none exist.”
“There are no princesses in the Ever After?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “Dragons consume princesses as soon as they find them. There is nothing more delicious to a dragon than a princess.”
“The dragon caught me when I fell and put me safely on the ground,” I say. “It didn’t eat me.”
“Of course not. Because you are no princess.”
I am beginning to feel very silly. I am starting to feel like a little girl caught playing make-believe who had started to think that she actually was a princess, and that maybe she was magical, and maybe a king really did love her. Balthazar has brought the clear light of rationality to the situation, and I feel myself crumple under his withering stare. At this point, he lowers me to the ground.
“I don’t have any way of getting home, even if I wanted to.”
“And do you want to?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then you should go away from here. To the Far Far Away. Where you will not be a nuisance to the king, or the cause of all this misery.”
“This is my fault?”
“Of course it is. This corruption stemmed from your attempted marriage. Don’t you understand, Emma?” He uses the contracted version of my name, the plain version, the mundane kind. “This is all your fault. All this suffering. All the villagers afraid to leave their homes. The pain. The damage. The rot. It is all down to you.”
If he had not let me down from my state of levitation himself, I am certain the guilt would have brought me down regardless. I feel heavy, and weak at the same time. I feel unfortunate and corrupt, and yes, very much to blame. It makes complete sense that the state of the world would be my fault. It did seem fine upon my arrival. It is only since I have been here interfering with the king that all has gone so very wrong.
“I can set this mistake right,” he says, his tone kinder now. “Just hold still…”
8
When I open my eyes, I am standing outside a tavern. Lute music is coming from the interior. There’s a cheerful forest to one side, and then not a lot to the other. It’s very odd to look at, because it’s not nothing, you can’t see nothing. But it’s also not something. My eyes can hardly make sense of it, so they stop trying.
“Welcome to The End! It’s almost closing time, but you might be able to get a pint if you’re fortunate!”
The greeting is cheerful and comes from a ruddy-faced woman who looks close enough to human for me to feel a sudden pang of homesickness. She is dressed in a medieval style dress and apron, with a scarf over her graying hair. She is not old, just not quite young anymore, occupying that middle space between ages.
“A pint sounds amazing!”
“Come in,” she says. “Have a seat.”
