Her Vengeance

Here We Go Again

I woke with a start, sitting up in bed, eyes wide… Then immediately shut them tight. The cell was far brighter than normal, and so much warmer.

    Wait.

    The prison cell. My execution.

    My eyes shot open and my head whipped around fast enough to make me dizzy. Nothing in this room was made of stone; the walls were an uplifting shade of yellow, contrasted by dark oak panelling, and the floor was the same dark oak as was on the walls. I wasn’t sitting on a stone slab, but instead on a feather mattress wider than my arms stretched outwards. The windows were framed with gorgeous green, satin curtains which matched the bed covers.

    This wasn’t a prison cell in Ephagon. This was my bedroom.

    I was back home in Lussaecuria, just as Eris said.

    I pulled myself out of bed and rushed to the window, my blue satin nightgown tickling my ankles as I ran. With one strong pull, the curtains parted, and I could see out into the palace gardens. Yes, I was far from Ephagon, from the King, from anybody who wanted to hurt me. There was no angry mob outside – instead, a rainbow of various flowers as far as the eye could see, from red roses to yellow chrysanthemums, from purple hydrangeas to blue cornflowers.

    My bedroom door opened with a soft click behind me. Then, my mother’s soothing voice whispered in my ear:

    “Welcome home, Mayge.”

    Mayge. Just a silly nickname given to me long ago but hearing it again after so long brought tears to my eyes.

    “I assume Eris told you everything before sending you to sleep?” Mother asked, running her fingers through my hair – my now-waist-length hair.

    “She said,” I reached up to wipe my eyes, “that I wasn’t the only person who wanted to get back at Corwyn. But also, that I could choose to go down a completely different path, should I wish to do so.”

    “That’s correct. Don’t feel under any pressure to go after him, though. You’ve gone through enough under his rule.”

    I sighed, leaning my head back to rest on Mother’s hands. “I have to. For my children.”

    She stopped her movements, instead taking a step forward to cradle my head against her chest. “Darling, you don’t have any children yet, you could easily give them a better father—”

    “But then they wouldn’t be my children,” I said. “They would be children I bear, but they wouldn’t be Isaac and Erick.”

    “Oh, darling girl…” Mother turned me around to face her and cupped my face in her hands. “I can only imagine how you must feel. But you must be strong, alright?” Her kind brown eyes were full of warmth as she looked down at me. “How much did Eris tell you about where you are?”

    “Eris told me that I was back home, and aged seventeen again.”

    “Did she also tell you that it’s less than two weeks until you turn eighteen?”

    I froze. If that’s true, then that must mean…

    “I’m currently engaged to Corwyn. Does that mean we’re leaving for Ephagon tomorrow?”

    She nodded. “I’m afraid so, darling. It’s less than two weeks to the wedding, but we could always break off the engage—”

    “No,” I said, surprising both of us with how firm I was. “I’m going to marry him, Mother.”

    “Mayge—”

    “I have to do it! If not for my children, for you and Father.” I racked my brains to remember why this godforsaken marriage was happening in the first place. “Our treasury is almost empty, right? This marriage would help you prosper like you did when I was Adella’s age.”

    Adella.

    “Good heavens, Margery, how did you know about that?” Mother asked incredulously. “I thought nobody knew except your father, myself, and—”

    “Corwyn told me one day.”

    “Of course, he told you.” With a sigh, she shook her head. “There are always other ways to come up with money, darling. You don’t have to do this.”

    “I’ve made up my mind, Mother. I’m marrying him, again.”

***

Breakfast that morning was one of the most surreal moments of my life. I was living the whole day again, exactly as I had the first time around. Except, when my maid came in to dress me, it wasn’t Celene who walked through the door, but Eris. Only, she looked younger than she did when she visited me in my cell.

    “I’ll be by your side until you no longer need me,” she had said while braiding my hair down my back. “No matter where you are, you’ll always have a friend you can trust. Your mother saw fit that I stay by your side.”

    Now, sitting at the breakfast table in an intricate red gown, I was more than relieved to have her and Mother.

    My father sat at the head of the table, gorging on every morsel he could pile on his plate, boasting about his success while hunting yesterday – “We’ll be feasting like kings! Oh wait, I am a king!” – while Mother sat nodding and offering words of praise when she could get a word in. I sat across from my brother Phyllip, or Pip, as everyone called him. He was Father’s younger double, with his jet black hair and blue eyes. As my father’s heir, he was expected to study hard, hunt well, and be a picture of sovereignty, though like most fourteen-year-olds, he’d much rather play war games with his brothers and friends. He’s a fine actor as well; nobody but me could tell his enthusiastic questioning about my father’s hunt was all a performance.

    And then there was Adella. Six years old, the baby of the family. In just twelve years, she will also be the reason for my execution, should I fail to put Corwyn in his place. Looking at her now, I couldn’t help resenting her already. She had picture perfect blonde pigtails and the roundest baby blue eyes I’d ever seen on anyone. With round, rosy cheeks and a smile that could melt butter, it was easy to see why she was Father’s favourite child, not Pip. Once upon a time, she had also been my favourite sibling. Then she spread a rumour to my husband that I was having an affair and gave him the leverage he needed to get rid of me. The end.

    “Margery,” Father said between bites, “are you excited about your marriage to Prince Corwyn?”

    “No girl is ever excited for her wedding,” Mother butted in, buying me some time. “The wedding jitters take over very quickly.”

    “Just as Mother says, I’m nervous about the marriage.” I looked up the table to face my father. “But I’m sure when the day comes, I’ll be very happy.”

    Father roared with laughter. “I should hope so! Not every woman gets to marry the future King of Ephagon. Just imagine, Mayge, all the finest dresses you could wear and then some, nightly banquets where you can feast with your closest allies and dance the night away afterwards.”

    “I want to marry him, too.” Adella piped up, a wide grin on her face. “When I grow up, I’m going to be Queen of Ephagon, like Maygee.”

    I bit down on my inner cheek before I could snap. When she had said this the first time, the whole table laughed at her silly remark, because how could a child aspire to take her sister’s place? Now, knowing what I know, I couldn’t even bring myself to smile, let alone laugh. Mother, too, stayed silent. In typical fashion, Father didn’t even notice.

    “You’ll find a good husband as well, Adella, I’ll make sure of it. Maybe the newest Prince of Dewre will catch your eye?”

    “Will he give me fine clothing as well? And banquets and balls?”

    Father hesitated. If Ephagon was gold, Dewre was brass. “Maybe, we’ll have to see how well they’re doing when you grow up.”

    “But I want the finest, like Maygee!”

    “How about,” Mother interrupted, “we talk about this later, when you’re a bit older, Adella.”

    Adella kept quiet. Father may be the King, but Mother always had the final say when it comes to the family. Even Father knew it, and he quickly changed the subject.

    “Phyllip, you’re coming with me on tomorrow’s hunt, and I expect you to be…”

***

The summer sun warmed my skin and it took every bit of self-restraint I had to stop myself from taking my shoes off and lying in the grass. For the first time in what felt like forever, I took a moment to stop and smell the roses.

    Birds sang overhead as they soared from branch to branch, feasting on the sweetest berries they could find before returning too their nests. Busy bees buzzed between flowers as they collected nectar for honey, taking a particular interest in the white and lavender foxglove flowers in the corner by the hydrangeas. There wasn’t a path around the garden, not really – Mother always argued that having stone in the garden would detract from the natural beauty. Instead, a natural dirt path had formed after years of frequent footfall, with tiny daisies sprouting in the few grassy patches remaining.

    I sat on a wooden bench in the area we called ‘the Square’, found in the middle of the garden. In the middle of the Square was a flowering dogwood tree, currently sporting gorgeous pink leaves, with four benches under its branches. Each bench faced a different section of the garden; I was currently facing the East section, where, among other things, snapdragons and dog roses grew en masse.

     “Your family has a beautiful garden, Mayge.”

    I kept staring ahead. “Well, you have more than enough time to explore it fully before we leave, Eris.”

    Eris plopped down on the bench beside me. “You have a funny sense of humour.”

    “I beg your pardon?”

    “Of all flowers to favour, you choose snapdragons,” she said, chuckling as though telling the punchline of a joke. “The significance suits you.”

    I rolled my eyes, shuffling forward to perch on the edge of the bench. “How funny. Why did you seek me out, Eris?”

    “How much do you know about all these plants?”

    I thought for a second. “Actually… Not all that much. Mother taught me the meanings of all the flowers, but I don’t know much else about them,” I said. I turned my head to look at her, then saw she was dressed the same way she was when she came to my cell. “You’re going to get in trouble is someone sees you dressed like that.”

    She smirked. “Well then, nobody will see me dressed like this. Except you, obviously.” I blinked, and suddenly she was dressed like a regular servant. “I’m here to give you a quick lesson in plant properties.

    “First, we have,” Eris pulled a handful of dark berries out from under her apron, “belladonna. A handful of these deadly nightshade berries can kill a grown adult, and it doesn’t take all that much either, but just one, single leaf from the belladonna plant is capable of cutting anyone’s life short.”

    “I don’t understand. Why would I need—”

    “—to know about poisons? Well, it’s quite simple. Poison could help you reach your goals much faster. If you know what I mean.” She placed the berries back in their place under her apron, but not before giving me a sly grin and a wink. “This next poison I’m going to show you is my favourite.

    “This is a tincture of wolfbane.” She pulled a small vial, around the same size as the one she had in my cell, except this one contained a clear liquid. “Wolfsbane will kill in only a few short hours, but not before causing extreme distress to its victim. It should suit Prince Corwyn nicely.”

    Though the idea of making Corwyn suffer did appeal to me, I shook the thoughts out of my head. I couldn’t kill him. “It would never work,” I said, staring at the vial in her slim, delicate hand. “I have no access to his food or drink until it’s on the table.”

    “Which is why you befriend the kitchen staff and ask them to lace his food with it, silly.”

    “Eris, why do you want Corwyn dead so badly?”

    My question stopped her dead in her tracks. She pursed her lips tightly. “I have my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”

    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t pry. It’s just that I’m curious why a witch would want the future King of a neighbouring kingdom dead.”

    “It’s a long story,” she deflected. “Anyway, when it comes to poison, if you do decide to go through with it, nightshade berries, belladonna leaves and wolfsbane tinctures are my suggestions.”

    “But what if I don’t want to poison him?”

    “Then,” Eris sat up straight and stared ahead at the flowers, “you have other options.”

***

A knocking on my bedroom door brought me out of my thoughts. Was it already time for dinner? It couldn’t have been past four o’clock. Surely not, I hadn’t been daydreaming for that long… Had I?

    The knocking sounded again. “Mayge, are you in there?”

    Pip.

    “Just come in, Pip. It’s alright,” I said, sitting up on the side of my bed.

    And in he came. Only, he wasn’t his usual self. Normally, Pip was doing everything to keep a hold of his childhood, even if just for a little while longer. Other times, he would trail after Father like a lost puppy, listening to his loud, incessant rambling about ruling, or hunting, or finding a wife, or… something.

    But now, Pip’s eyes were red. He walked with a limp. Instead of standing tall and proud with confident teenage bravado, he shrunk into himself like a snail into its shell. For a moment, I could swear he winced whenever he breathed.

    “I don’t want to be King, Mayge,” he whispered, before bursting into tears.

    “Oh, Pip.” I rushed towards him and cradled him gently in my arms. “It’s going to be alright; you’ll see.” His sobbing only got louder, as did his pained winces with every breath. “Come, sit with me. Lie down if it helps.”

    Once he was settled, lying across the bottom of my bed, for whatever reason, I perched beside him. “What happened to you?”

    “Well, I…” He winced again. “I was out in the city – trying to learn about the inner workings, you know, to be an efficient ruler, like Father always says – and when I was walking by one of the taverns this… This man came stumbling out and he saw me, he looked at me, an-and he said to me that I was in the wrong place and I—”

    “Phyllip.” I raised one hand to stop him. “Slow down. Take a breath.” He nodded and drew in a shaky breath. “Right, you were walking by a tavern, you said?”

    “Yes! Right. Well, I was walking by the tavern, the one opposite the smithy run by Mr Valor and his son, you know it?”

   “I know it, that’s where you got your sword when you turned twelve.”

    “Exactly! Right. Well, I was walking past the tavern, and a man started stumbling towards me. He said something like ‘you’re in the wrong place, son’ and I didn’t know what he meant, so I asked him what he meant, and he said that I didn’t belong in the city. Then he asked me if my bodyguard was around, to which I said no, because I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving the castle—”

    “You did what?!”

    Pip nodded sheepishly. “I know, I know. Bad move. I regret it now. Anyway, I told him I didn’t have a bodyguard, then he hit me! Punched me square in the stomach, he did. And let me tell you it hurt a lot. But, like Father always says, I held my ground and told him to stop what he was doing or else he’d be arrested. But then he smacked me in the head, Mayge. The head! Said he’d ‘rather die for his King than see the other kingdoms prosper’ or something like that, and then I blacked out and when I woke up, I was in Mr Valor’s house. He saved me.”

    I blinked, struggling to keep up with what he was telling me. “So, let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You left the castle grounds, unsupervised, to go into one of the more dangerous areas in the city, and got hurt?”

    Pip nodded again. He didn’t say anything else, just turned his head away in shame as the reality of what he did finally seemed to sink in.

    “You could have been killed out there, Pip. You could have died, and nobody would have known for hours.” I lay down beside him, legs hanging off the side of the bed. A lonely spider in the corner caught my eye. “Becoming King is dangerous. I know it looks like the people love Father, but there’s always going to be at least one person who wishes to do us harm.”

    “Like that man who said he would die from his kingdom?”

    “Precisely. From the sounds of it, he isn’t even from Lussaecuria,” I said, turning my head to look at my baby brother. “There’s a lot more to being King than ruling your kingdom. Politics is a deadly game.”

    “I know.” He paused for a second, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t want to be King. I’m not ready.”

    “I’m afraid you don’t have much choice, unless you think that Adella should rule instead?”

    “God, no.”

    That finally got him to laugh, and keep laughing, despite the pain. We spent what felt like hours joking about what would become of Lussaecuria if it were ruled by a six-year-old girl. Would every banquet just be sweet fruit and desserts? Would our castle be coloured floor to ceiling with pink? Would criminals be pardoned, simply because putting them in prison was too mean? The possibilities were endless. By the time Eris came in to get me ready for dinner, Pip and I were red in the face and clutching our aching stomachs.

    “I’d better get going. If Mother catches me around here, I’ll get a scolding,” Pip said, sliding off the bed. “Thanks for cheering me up, Mayge. I’m going to miss having you around.”

    I smiled weakly at him as Eris unravelled my messy braids. “I’ll miss you, too. But you’ll be coming to Ephagon with me, and staying until the wedding, so you don’t have to miss me just yet.”

    “I suppose… Well, I’m going to get ready.”

    “Love you, Pip.”

    “Love you too, Maygee.”

    He bolted out of the room, leaving Eris and I alone. Neither of us said a word to each other as she dressed me for dinner. Instead of my red dress, I was now dressed in the most beautiful floor-length pale blue dress. It must have been my mother’s, as I’d never seen this dress before in my life, and the sleeves were a tad too long. Eris hadn’t styled my hair in a particularly fancy way; she brushed it out and placed a silver circlet adorned with sapphires on my head.

    “I feel rather overdressed,” I commented as I examined my appearance in the brass mirror. “It’s a lot for going to dinner, is it not?”

    Eris chuckled, placing a pair of white shoes down in front of me. “Yes, it would be, if you were just going to dinner.”

    I slipped my feet into the shoes. “I don’t understand.”

    “The Queen has made last minute arrangements to leave for Ephagon tonight, rather than wait until morning. We’re leaving as soon as you’ve had dinner.”

    “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Does it have to be tonight?” I asked, sitting down on the side of my bed.

    She nodded down at me. “I’m sure the beds in Ephagon will be much more comfortable than your own, my lady.”

    “Oh, please. Just use my name when we’re alone, Eris.”

    “As you wish, Maygee.”

    “Margery will do.”

    I stood up from my place on the bed, walking a careful lap around my room. The dress was, thankfully, at the perfect length to avoid getting caught in my feet. The sleeves covered my hands to my fingers. It shouldn’t be a problem, just a major annoyance. I’ll have to find a dressmaker to take the sleeves up once we settle in Ephagon.

    I took a deep breath. For the second time, I had to say goodbye to my childhood home. Thankfully, unlike last time, I had some idea of what was coming. The palaces of Lussaecuria and Ephagon weren’t all that different; one was larger, grander, and an overall dangerous place to be, but otherwise they were virtually the same.

    As Eris and I made our way to the dining hall for my family’s last supper, I couldn’t get Phyllip’s story out of my head. That man, who said he would ‘rather die for his King than see the other kingdoms prosper’, made the hair on the back of my neck stand on edge. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I couldn’t quite shake.

    I wouldn’t be hearing the last of him.