Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [43]
"Such as?"
She faced me now, forcing the princess to scurry to her other side. "We want your bride's stepmother and sisters executed."
I could hardly believe my ears. I searched Cinderella's face for a trace of the horror I felt myself. But in the countenance she raised to the queen's, I saw only adoration. "Three lives lost for honor's sake?" I could not hide my outrage. "What sort of honor is it, Mother, that requires human sacrifice?" The basket of lilies dipped as I raised my voice, the ponderous heads rolling around its rim. "If honor breeds such schemes, I would hate to see the work of knaves."
"Is it knavish, then, to right wrongs?" The queen, hooking her shears to a chain around her waist, bore down on me, and the princess backed away. "To avenge the trials and strife your wife has undergone?"
"Those are avenged in her every day with me." I stepped to my bride, forcing her to face me and look into my eyes. "My friend," I told her, "you are my princess and my wife. Do you need to draw blood in confirmation of our love?"
Like the sun drawn to the earth, my wife's eyes left mine and sought support in my mother's tranquil smile. "I—I only want to know that love is stronger than fear, that those horrible women can never hurt me again.
"Last night while you were sleeping, I thought I woke beside the grate again, covered with ashes. My eyes were filled with smoke and my head ached from the names they had hurled at me like stones." She lowered her head now, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "'Cinderella' was the least of them. I cannot tell the rest."
I took the basket from her and would have put my arms around her, but the queen drew her aside. "You shall not suffer so again," she said, an overblown, theatrical pity in her voice. She looked back at me as she led the princess away. "Not if you have a consort who will strike a blow for love." She paused, and both women turned to face me. "Not if he can overcome his fine scruples long enough to set us free from the past."
They left me with the blank-faced lilies. I circled the garden until the flowers had closed and the grass was wet with dew. "To set us free," my mother had said. I remembered now the stone house where I'd found Cinderella, and the three women who had stood, open-mouthed, as I carried her off. My bride's stepmother, I realized with a dawning horror, might have been the very widow in whose easy embrace my father found solace so long ago. I thought of the simpering pair who had called Cinderella sister and kissed her farewell as we rode away. Perhaps those sorry women were more my sisters than hers! Had my mother waited, biding her time until she could work this hideous revenge? Had it been in her mind the night of the ball, when she'd leaned over the balcony and pointed out my love?
***
I did not go to supper that night but spent hours in my father's deserted chambers, reading his old decrees. There were edicts governing taxes and farming, commerce and war. There were gifts to churches and convents and bans on unfair tolls and tithing. In all these instruments, I found a voice I dimly recognized. Though many of these documents had been canceled by the queen's council, they spoke with kindness and respect to people who supported the crown through long days of endless toil.
This voice, this kindness, brought back a moment that until now had been lost to me. I saw myself and my father, on one of his rare stays at home, a brief sojourn between foreign wars. I was perhaps three or four years old and had played all day, without remonstrance, by his side. "You shall be a dandy prince, will you not, lad?" he asked, laughing as I put both my small feet into one of his boots. I laughed, too, hopping about in that giant buskin until I tumbled to the floor.
"You must not be a cruel king, eh?" He leaned down from above me, his smile suddenly vanished. "You must not rise by oppressing those below you."