“Please don’t leave me alone!” His voice was mocking, sneering, cruel. She thought she might vomit.
Nadine Pascal-Said was eighteen years of age. Or, she thought that she might be. She wasn’t sure. The days weren’t the right length, here, and there were never any seasons. Every day ran into the other, because every day was another day of wandering in a wilderness that never seemed to end. She’d tried keeping track, once, with a stick, but it was never very effective. It might have been months, and it might have been years, and she could as easily believe either.
She was covered in the skins and the blood of dead animals. The skins were rabbits, one of the few things she knew how to catch, how to kill, how to skin. It wasn’t the sort of skill she’d ever have admitted to, if she hadn’t thought she was alone. If she hadn’t thought she might die. The blood was that of a bear, of a lion – lions and tigers and bears, oh my. There were no tigers, yet. Not unless this man was a tiger.
He was tall, too fucking tall. Spotless. Bloodless. Dark skin, pointed ears, epicanthic folds to his brown eyes. Long brown hair was braided around his head, covered in gold. Wide pants, a tunic with aspirations toward being a kimono. And gold, everywhere gold, on his wrists and ankles and fingers and weighing down his earlobes. She felt tiny, filthy, disgusting. She was. She despised him utterly.
“Who the fuck are you?” she spat, and her right hand inched back toward her dagger, back towards the bloodied ursine corpse. He stopped her with his foot, crushed her wrist painfully to the ground with a grin so lovely and so awful she wanted to break his perfect white teeth.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked with a flourish, and she ground her teeth as he ground down his heel and her eyes watered. “I’m Prince Charming – here to sweep you off your feet.”
Maahes.
I kissed Maahes.
This is some fucking frog bullshit.
“You were the lion?” she asked, as if she hadn’t given him a name, as if she hadn’t treated him like a carnivorous diary, as if she hadn’t bared her soul in front of what she’d assumed were the eyes of an unknowing animal.
“Oh, not entirely,” he assured her, as he picked up her crude stone dagger with his fingertips, barely deigning to touch it. Her weapon out of reach, he took his foot from her wrist, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of rubbing it. “I wasn’t in control – or I assure you, we’d have been having much more fun.” She tried not to think about what that might mean, what a man like this might do if he’d the body of lion. Did it make it better or worse that he’d never really been her imaginary friend? That whatever force had made him agreeable had disappeared the instant he got opposable thumbs?
“That’s nice, and all, but I’m not much in the mood for being swept by some motherfucker in Hammer pants.” She was fairly certain he didn’t know what that meant, but something in his eyes made his grin look sideways.
“Don’t you know how this works, little heathen? Do they not have stories, where you’re from? You kissed a lion, and now you marry a prince.”
“Yeah, I kissed a lion. If I’d known there was prince involvement, shit might’ve gone down different. I ain’t the marrying type.” Nevermind that she was widow, technically speaking – she didn’t like to think of herself that way, didn’t like to think about that at all even still.
“You seem to be under the impression that you get to say no.” He fiddled with one of his bracelets, and she realized it was some kind of technology, some kind of something. It pulsed blue, and his smile grew yet more self-satisfied.
“Is saying yes not part of the process, here?”
“I am Crown Prince Sado Atahualpa of Ala Ma, little heathen, and my blood is the blood of a god. There is no answer to a god but yes.” Her blood ran cold and her limbs still felt weak, and she wanted so badly to stand, to run, to get away and hide in the woods forever. He observed her like a specimen of insect, and she wished that she could make him afraid.
“I am definitely not agreeing to any goddamn theocratic bullshit.”
“I could still hear you, you know,” he said suddenly, dropping into a crouch before her, his eyes gleaming. She resisted the urge to recoil, to scramble away. “All of your blathering and your nonsense. You thought you were giving secrets to empty ears, didn’t you? But I heard every silly little word. Nadine. Such a strange name. Are they all as small and as helpless as you, where you’re from? I’d like to visit a place like that.”
He was threatening her with his eyes and humiliating her with her own memories and everything about him was repulsive, utterly, except that she’d been alone so long and he was so calculatingly attractive that something visceral inside her couldn’t help but respond to him. She hated him for that, too. Her clothes, insofar as they could be called clothes, were little more than a loincloth and a vest; she wanted to cover herself further, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. That was always the conflict, it seemed, never wanting anyone to know that they’d made her feel something against her will.
It had been too long, was the problem, had been too long since she’d had to be something for other people. Too long since she’d had to put on a face, too long since she’d had to pretend to be anything other than barely sane. It would be so much easier if she had practice, to say the right things and act the right way. Defang his attacks and defend her autonomy.
I am so fucking cool, she told herself. I am too cool for this shit. This shit ain’t even interesting. This shit is boring. I don’t even fucking care. I am cool and hip and so aloof I intimidate the shit out of everyone else in the bar. Try to fucking impress me. I am already bored of your favorite band and I liked everything you like when I was twelve. Because I am so fucking cool.
It shouldn’t have worked. But it helped.
She let herself collapse to the ground the way she’d been wanting to, threw her hands straight out to her sides like she was making a snow angel. “I’m tired,” she pouted, looking at the treetops through her half-broken spectacles, heartrate lowering now that she wasn’t looking him in the eye.
“Are you trying to insult me, Nadine?” It sounded wrong in his mouth, something about the way he hit the consonants, something about the name her parents had given her.
“Were you going to try and fuck me, or are we just gonna have a heart-to-heart about dick all?” Yes, this was how it worked. It was coming back to her, how to be herself. Make the implicit explicit, make nightmares into inanities. Admittedly, it was easier when she had someone large to hide behind.
Mozz isn’t here and Jed isn’t here and Billy isn’t here and Jeff isn’t here and there are no knights in shining armor to protect me but it isn’t as if I can make it any worse.
“What a filthy little heathen you are,” and the disgust and disdain in his voice was almost oppressive. She wanted to be better than this, be glorious and resplendent and rub his face in how much better she was than him. But she was wrapped in dead rabbits and blood and dirt, so she’d cloak herself in his disdain and in her loathing like a force field. He tore through it easily, of course, pulling her to her feet by her ponytail so that she snarled while he sneered. “But I already knew that, didn’t I? I’ve heard your heresies and your guttermouth, and I’ve seen you – oh yes. Seen you in the moonlight, when you thought my eyes unseeing, seen you writhing and heard your little noises. Is that what you’d like, to rut in the dirt like an animal?”
This isn’t real. None of this is real. None of this counts as real life. This is a game, a quest, a test. Level one, chapter one, the woods. Solve the puzzle of the lion. Pretend you’re the protagonist. None of this matters. Beat the game and finish the story and go home, back to real life and away from fake bullshit like princes and magic lions and happily ever afters.
It was like a weight lifting off her shoulders, like an out-of body experience. There were no consequences now, not really, only things that brought her closer to and further from freedom. All she had to do was not die. Not dying was easy. She’d been doing that her whole life.
“With you?” she asked, flirtatious, as if he weren’t threatening her, insulting her. “I mean, it’s not my first choice, but it’s not as if I’ve got a lot of options lining up.” Was that satisfaction in his eyes as he pushed her away from him, let her fall back to the ground?
“You will have to beg more nicely than that,” he noted, and she decided that his voice was too high to be attractive, even though that doesn’t seem to be stopping her from being attracted to it. “But that will have to wait until we are married, little heathen – and until you are bathed. That I would touch you at all, as you are – you ought to count yourself fortunate. More fortunate still that I would take a feral little heretic to wife. I would never be able to get away with it, you know, if I were not going to be King. Mine will be a heathen Queen, who never cries and never screams.” He smiled dreamily, fiddling with her little knife, and the fingers of his other hand danced over something like a scepter at his belt. “Do you know, I couldn’t have planned this better if I’d tried? You will be mine and mine alone – no god in you to give you power, no faith to keep you safe. If I married as I ought to have, you see, my Queen would have been infallible, untouchable. But I can touch you as I please, godless little alien.”
“I can’t wait,” she drolled, but the remark was less biting than it could have been. She was trying to see herself through his eyes, through the eyes of whoever he ruled; tried to imagine someone alien and small, too delicate and boney, all the wrong shape and color. Nadine was used to strange bodies, to bodies large and small and in all the colors of the earth and sky and ocean, to features ill-fitting and the wrong number of limbs. Did that make it easier or harder, to wonder what she looked like? She was practically xenophilic, if there was such a thing, fascinated by the strange, obsessed always with finding something new and interesting to entertain her. Why did she care, whether he found her form pleasing?
“You think that you’re lying,” he observed with a smile, “because you think that lying would be better.” There were a number of things he might mean, but she didn’t bother to dissemble them all. He leaned down, plucked the glasses from her face, the glasses she had managed to cling to against all the odds, on an alien planet in a forest dressed in nothing but dead things because her real clothes had all gone. “What a silly thing you are, that can’t even see.” Where he put them, she could not say, but she pretended to be unperturbed by this development. There was a sound like fire, then, and she turned her face back to the sky; a blur, bright blue, descended. “Our people have come to return their beloved prince to his rightful place,” he preened. “Do try not to bite them, Nadine. I will try to warn them not to make any sudden moves. Shall we have the bear stuffed, do you think?”
Nadine Pascal-Said 