Original Fic: Quill & Parchment
Jul. 31st, 2023 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babygustyWordcount: 2324
Note: I wrote this for the NYC Midnight short story contest a few years back. I didn't win the round, but I did get honourable mention, which made me so happy!
Chapter One: Love and Marriage and a Kraken in the Moat
Castle Galwynnydd stood on a low hill by what the superstitious peasants called Good Luck Forest – because one needed quite a handful of good luck to cross it and emerge hale and hearty on the other side. The good people of Galwynnydd knew better than to try and hunt game there. The castle was next to a river, which would have made up for the scarcity of meat on the table, but the fish in it were spiteful, and the kraken, which had once wandered there all the way from the Big Salt Water and had taken up residence in the moat, was cranky. The good people of Galwynnydd tended not to fish in the river; or swim in it. The good people of Galwynnydd were mostly farmers and vegetarians.
There weren’t very many of them either, as the kingdom was rather small. The kingdom was also rather undesirable, because of the kraken situation and because most of the land was covered by a malevolent forest. It helped, of course, that King Horst was a nice ruler. His people liked him, his kingdom was not fought-after, and he tended not to annoy the neighbouring kings and queens, which was why he had been royal ruler for a good many years, undisturbed by usurpers and assassination attempts.
King Horst lived in the castle with his daughter, Princess Breen. Princess Breen had just turned seventeen, and King Horst, eager to marry her off and merge his kingdom with somebody else’s, had invited all eligible princes and princesses he could get a hold on to an engagement party. With any luck, he had told Breen a few weeks earlier, she would be engaged to at least one person by the end of the party. Breen had reacted quite temperamentally at the time but had cooled off since then.
On the evening of the party she had almost accepted the fact that she had no say in the matter and was ready to meet the marriage candidates. She was getting dressed in her room under the bashful, watchful eye of poor servant girl Gallandra. Poor servant girl Gallandra, the royal window washer, loved Breen with all her heart. This evening she was scrubbing the rough stones that formed the princess’s bedroom window quite distractedly. She was watching Breen, who was one year her junior, put on a dress that brought out the colour of her hair just beautifully. She was daydreaming of a time when royalty was allowed to love servants, and this, in her mind, was far more important than scrubbing down stones around a hole in the wall.
Because Breen and Gallandra were of almost the same age, and because they had known each other from birth, they had always been friends. Gallandra often thought there was more between them, a spark, a deeper connection, but she dared only dream of this in the dark of night.
“Can you even believe he invited twenty-five of those idiots?” Breen ranted, continuing a topic she had been ranting about for weeks. Gallandra never tired of listening to her. “I mean, who even does that anymore? Come to an engagement party to see if you like what’s on offer? Like I’m a cake or something! Even if I find someone who’s remotely nice, I could never respect them, because they came here to look at me and decide if they maybe want to get married based on my outer appearance and the state of my father’s kingdom. Oooh, I should just run away like my mother did, but apparently – and I checked with the priestess – apparently that’s a crime now.”
“It’s a crime to run away?” asked Gallandra incredulously.
Breen shrugged. “Not running away. I think running away is generally kind of fine, but if your father wants to marry you off, and has invited a bunch of royal nitwits, and had to take out a loan to afford putting all those nitwits up and feeding them for three days, and if your father is basically broke and needs this marriage to upgrade his kingdom from ‘sad’ to ‘marginally bigger and richer’ – under these very specific circumstances it’s apparently a crime to run away. If you’re the princess who’s supposed to be married off to save the kingdom. If you’re anybody else, I guess it’s still fine. Help me with the ribbons, will you, Gally.”
Gallandra put down the dirty rag, clapped her hands as clean as she could, and diligently began to tighten Breen’s corset in the back.
“You look gorgeous”, she sighed, but Breen waved the compliment away.
“Listen, Gally, can you do me a favour?”
“Just name it!”
“I need you to spy for me.”
“Pardon?”
Breen turned around to look into Gallandra’s eyes with dead seriousness. “I’ll be on my own down there, and I can’t possibly decide which one of these jesters to throw into the moat as kraken fodder first. I’ll need all the information I can get, and you can help me with that.”
Chapter Two: Nobody Notices the Window Washer
Being a servant was a lot like having the magical ability to turn into a ghost at will. Gallandra, equipped with a wet cloth that strengthened the invisibility field around her, quietly moved between the party guests and gathered information. She felt like a spy, except that she gathered way more information than a spy, on account of her invisibility: nobody wanted to notice a window washer, so nobody did.
Gallandra, on the other hand, took notice of everything. The tables laden with all kinds of expensive food. The decorations that had been custom made for the engagement. The lavish dresses, the embroidered waistcoats, the hats, the veils, the gloves, the fat-bellied people that always seemed to gather close to the food, and the vain sneers of those who liked to pretend they were nobler than their royal rank suggested.
“It is my opinion that they shouldn’t wear hats at all. Not at all!” Gallandra caught the Duke of Yur saying as he and the Prince of Dshamidistan stopped by the buffet for some thrice stuffed potatoes. “It interferes with their ability to think straight. You know what I’m saying. I’d marry her, but she’d have to get rid of the hats.” The Duke laughed idiotically, an unpleasant noise that sent shivers down Gallandra’s spine.
***
The Countess of Nimh, a snivelling woman in her forties, fanned herself dramatically as Gallandra squeezed past behind her and pretend-washed the stones around the eastern window. “She’s the cutest little thing, of course,” the countess stated, and the four noble ladies surrounding her nodded eagerly, “but I prefer my women more mature. And she’s not really a good catch, politically, is she? Galwynnydd is a terrible location, King Horst is broke, and I’ve heard that the peasants are terrified of the fish in the river. How utterly ridiculous!” Then she added, “I’d marry her, naturally, but out of pity.”
Prince Amhin, ignoring the presence of the window washer next to him, elaborated on the terrible state of affairs of the kingdom of Galwynnydd, stated that the place was a latrine, and concluded that although Princess Breen was somewhat attractive, she had obviously not inherited her mother’s good looks.
“I’ve never met her mother,” replied Count Gunyr, who looked like he was thirteen years old, which would make him two years Prince Amhin’s senior.
“Oh, haven’t you,” Amhin said. “Queen Gwizilla. Beautiful woman. She ran away years ago. Lives somewhere in the south now, by the Big Salt Water. Mad, of course, though I can’t blame her. I mean, just look at this shithole kingdom!”
“Does that mean you wouldn’t marry Princess Breen, if King Horst made you an offer?” naïve Count Gunyr asked.
Prince Amhin clicked his tongue in derision. “Make no mistake, Gunyr, everyone here would marry her, even though we all pretend we don’t want to. It’s politics.”
****
“Politics. Phshaw,” Breen said darkly when Gallandra, hours later, related all information she had gathered. The two of them were in the royal bedchamber, and Gallandra, still clutching her wet cloth, sat on the floor and watched Breen braid her hair for the night.
“The Duke of Vazeem is an inbred idiot. Princess Tahina wanted to kiss me behind the curtains while her hands wandered all over me,” Breen told her friend in disgust. “The widowed Queen of North Maurolia is a hundred years old and just wants me to breed children for her using the men in her harem. And Prince Golwen is as nasty as he is handsome. No, Gally, I won’t marry any of them. I’d rather run away and sleep in trees for the rest of my years.”
“There’s something else I heard, Breen,” Gallandra tentatively said. She wasn’t sure how to phrase it, but she felt she needed to let Breen know. One of the people who hadn’t noticed Gallandra’s presence had been King Horst himself. And what she had heard him tell the moon that night had filled her with dread. She told Breen as tactfully as she could.
King Horst was broke. He wasn’t just the kind of broke kings and queens sometimes find out they are and then figure out how to keep going until the problem gets ignored into oblivion. He was the kind of broke people got just before they jumped into a lake or sold their own children. No marriage could upgrade the kingdom’s status – Galwynnydd was doomed to become a province.
“I had no idea!” Breen declared, shocked and suddenly tearful. “My poor, poor father! It sounds like… well, it sounds like we should both run away.”
“All three of us,” corrected Gallandra.
Breen looked at her. “You’d come with me?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t let you sleep in trees for the rest of your years all by yourself. Anyway, if I stay much longer, mother will find someone else for me to marry.” Gallandra had been promised to a potato farmer who had died of typhoid fever the year before.
“But what about all the people who came to marry you?” Gallandra pondered.
“Hm,” said Breen. “We can’t just sneak away like this, they’d hunt us down and put us in prison. What to do…?”
They schemed and pondered until someone fell into the moat just before sunrise and was noisily caught and eaten by the kraken.
“I need a quill and parchment,” Breen said, undisturbed by the noises wafting up to their chamber from the moat – royals screaming, a drunk Duke vowing revenge, the confused crowing of the cockerel, who wasn’t used to people being up before him.
Chapter Three: Twenty-Five Marriages and a Funeral
Shortly after breakfast, every single one of the twenty-five assembled royal bluebloods received a letter. In secret. Asking them to not tell anybody just yet.
And then, one after the other, in secret, the royals made their way to Galwynnydd's temple, where the priestess, who was, like everyone else, a firm believer in polygamy, married each of them to Princess Breen. Each of them got a sweet kiss on their cheek, a soft promise for more, and they each vowed to keep it secret until the evening when King Horst would announce the wedding publicly.
Prince Amhin had been right: They were all happy to marry Breen and become the future ruler of Galwynnydd, the shithole kingdom with the fear-inducing fish and the vegetarian peasants.
When King Horst had gathered everyone in the ballroom for the evening’s wedding party, each of the guests secretly thinking they would be called upon any moment to present themselves as Breen’s new spouse, a loud splash coming from the moat could be heard. It was quickly followed by the terrified voice of a girl screaming: “By the Gods – Princess Breen! She fell into the moat! The kraken! The kraken!”
King Horst blanched dramatically. He was supported outside by the Duchess of Nimh and the Prince of Poltonia, but it was too late. Sobbing, the young window washer told the tale of the Princess who had been skipping happily towards the ballroom and had stumbled and fallen into the moat. After what had happened just a few hours before in the same spot, nobody questioned the story. Princess Breen had been eaten alive by the cranky kraken.
King Horst swooned, groaned, sighed, and fell into the surprisingly strong arms of the window washer, who patted him gently on the back. “There, there,” she said whilst heroically fighting back her own tears. “There, there, my king.”
“My daughter…” moaned King Horst. “My wife! Oh, I have lost both of them now! This place…. I cannot stay a moment longer. I must become a lonesome wanderer, a hermit, an eremite. My shoulders cannot bear this burden. My gathered friends,” he spoke to the gathered royals, “this morning my daughter got married in secret. Celebrate her happiness, and celebrate her death! Rule this kingdom with love. I leave Galwynnydd in your capable hands!”
And in the brouhaha, that erupted like a volcano as twenty-five men and women who were used to getting things their way tried to convince each other that each of them was the new ruler of Galwynnydd, King Horst, aided by Gallandra hastened away.
They met Princess Breen in Good Luck Forest waiting for them. She had three horses by the reins and three bags strapped to their saddles.
“Time to go,” she laughed merrily. “Let them sort out the mess. They’ll all have to rule over Galwynnydd now, and we’re better off without it, I believe. Aren’t we, father?”
“Absolutely!” her father agreed mounting his steed. “My clever, clever daughter. You have your mother’s wits about you. But, child, where to now?”
“South!” exclaimed Gallandra. “To the Big Salt Water!”
“South!” they all said with one voice. They spurned their horses and rode into the forest.
Note: I wrote this for the NYC Midnight short story contest a few years back. I didn't win the round, but I did get honourable mention, which made me so happy!
Chapter One: Love and Marriage and a Kraken in the Moat
Castle Galwynnydd stood on a low hill by what the superstitious peasants called Good Luck Forest – because one needed quite a handful of good luck to cross it and emerge hale and hearty on the other side. The good people of Galwynnydd knew better than to try and hunt game there. The castle was next to a river, which would have made up for the scarcity of meat on the table, but the fish in it were spiteful, and the kraken, which had once wandered there all the way from the Big Salt Water and had taken up residence in the moat, was cranky. The good people of Galwynnydd tended not to fish in the river; or swim in it. The good people of Galwynnydd were mostly farmers and vegetarians.
There weren’t very many of them either, as the kingdom was rather small. The kingdom was also rather undesirable, because of the kraken situation and because most of the land was covered by a malevolent forest. It helped, of course, that King Horst was a nice ruler. His people liked him, his kingdom was not fought-after, and he tended not to annoy the neighbouring kings and queens, which was why he had been royal ruler for a good many years, undisturbed by usurpers and assassination attempts.
King Horst lived in the castle with his daughter, Princess Breen. Princess Breen had just turned seventeen, and King Horst, eager to marry her off and merge his kingdom with somebody else’s, had invited all eligible princes and princesses he could get a hold on to an engagement party. With any luck, he had told Breen a few weeks earlier, she would be engaged to at least one person by the end of the party. Breen had reacted quite temperamentally at the time but had cooled off since then.
On the evening of the party she had almost accepted the fact that she had no say in the matter and was ready to meet the marriage candidates. She was getting dressed in her room under the bashful, watchful eye of poor servant girl Gallandra. Poor servant girl Gallandra, the royal window washer, loved Breen with all her heart. This evening she was scrubbing the rough stones that formed the princess’s bedroom window quite distractedly. She was watching Breen, who was one year her junior, put on a dress that brought out the colour of her hair just beautifully. She was daydreaming of a time when royalty was allowed to love servants, and this, in her mind, was far more important than scrubbing down stones around a hole in the wall.
Because Breen and Gallandra were of almost the same age, and because they had known each other from birth, they had always been friends. Gallandra often thought there was more between them, a spark, a deeper connection, but she dared only dream of this in the dark of night.
“Can you even believe he invited twenty-five of those idiots?” Breen ranted, continuing a topic she had been ranting about for weeks. Gallandra never tired of listening to her. “I mean, who even does that anymore? Come to an engagement party to see if you like what’s on offer? Like I’m a cake or something! Even if I find someone who’s remotely nice, I could never respect them, because they came here to look at me and decide if they maybe want to get married based on my outer appearance and the state of my father’s kingdom. Oooh, I should just run away like my mother did, but apparently – and I checked with the priestess – apparently that’s a crime now.”
“It’s a crime to run away?” asked Gallandra incredulously.
Breen shrugged. “Not running away. I think running away is generally kind of fine, but if your father wants to marry you off, and has invited a bunch of royal nitwits, and had to take out a loan to afford putting all those nitwits up and feeding them for three days, and if your father is basically broke and needs this marriage to upgrade his kingdom from ‘sad’ to ‘marginally bigger and richer’ – under these very specific circumstances it’s apparently a crime to run away. If you’re the princess who’s supposed to be married off to save the kingdom. If you’re anybody else, I guess it’s still fine. Help me with the ribbons, will you, Gally.”
Gallandra put down the dirty rag, clapped her hands as clean as she could, and diligently began to tighten Breen’s corset in the back.
“You look gorgeous”, she sighed, but Breen waved the compliment away.
“Listen, Gally, can you do me a favour?”
“Just name it!”
“I need you to spy for me.”
“Pardon?”
Breen turned around to look into Gallandra’s eyes with dead seriousness. “I’ll be on my own down there, and I can’t possibly decide which one of these jesters to throw into the moat as kraken fodder first. I’ll need all the information I can get, and you can help me with that.”
Chapter Two: Nobody Notices the Window Washer
Being a servant was a lot like having the magical ability to turn into a ghost at will. Gallandra, equipped with a wet cloth that strengthened the invisibility field around her, quietly moved between the party guests and gathered information. She felt like a spy, except that she gathered way more information than a spy, on account of her invisibility: nobody wanted to notice a window washer, so nobody did.
Gallandra, on the other hand, took notice of everything. The tables laden with all kinds of expensive food. The decorations that had been custom made for the engagement. The lavish dresses, the embroidered waistcoats, the hats, the veils, the gloves, the fat-bellied people that always seemed to gather close to the food, and the vain sneers of those who liked to pretend they were nobler than their royal rank suggested.
“It is my opinion that they shouldn’t wear hats at all. Not at all!” Gallandra caught the Duke of Yur saying as he and the Prince of Dshamidistan stopped by the buffet for some thrice stuffed potatoes. “It interferes with their ability to think straight. You know what I’m saying. I’d marry her, but she’d have to get rid of the hats.” The Duke laughed idiotically, an unpleasant noise that sent shivers down Gallandra’s spine.
***
The Countess of Nimh, a snivelling woman in her forties, fanned herself dramatically as Gallandra squeezed past behind her and pretend-washed the stones around the eastern window. “She’s the cutest little thing, of course,” the countess stated, and the four noble ladies surrounding her nodded eagerly, “but I prefer my women more mature. And she’s not really a good catch, politically, is she? Galwynnydd is a terrible location, King Horst is broke, and I’ve heard that the peasants are terrified of the fish in the river. How utterly ridiculous!” Then she added, “I’d marry her, naturally, but out of pity.”
Prince Amhin, ignoring the presence of the window washer next to him, elaborated on the terrible state of affairs of the kingdom of Galwynnydd, stated that the place was a latrine, and concluded that although Princess Breen was somewhat attractive, she had obviously not inherited her mother’s good looks.
“I’ve never met her mother,” replied Count Gunyr, who looked like he was thirteen years old, which would make him two years Prince Amhin’s senior.
“Oh, haven’t you,” Amhin said. “Queen Gwizilla. Beautiful woman. She ran away years ago. Lives somewhere in the south now, by the Big Salt Water. Mad, of course, though I can’t blame her. I mean, just look at this shithole kingdom!”
“Does that mean you wouldn’t marry Princess Breen, if King Horst made you an offer?” naïve Count Gunyr asked.
Prince Amhin clicked his tongue in derision. “Make no mistake, Gunyr, everyone here would marry her, even though we all pretend we don’t want to. It’s politics.”
****
“Politics. Phshaw,” Breen said darkly when Gallandra, hours later, related all information she had gathered. The two of them were in the royal bedchamber, and Gallandra, still clutching her wet cloth, sat on the floor and watched Breen braid her hair for the night.
“The Duke of Vazeem is an inbred idiot. Princess Tahina wanted to kiss me behind the curtains while her hands wandered all over me,” Breen told her friend in disgust. “The widowed Queen of North Maurolia is a hundred years old and just wants me to breed children for her using the men in her harem. And Prince Golwen is as nasty as he is handsome. No, Gally, I won’t marry any of them. I’d rather run away and sleep in trees for the rest of my years.”
“There’s something else I heard, Breen,” Gallandra tentatively said. She wasn’t sure how to phrase it, but she felt she needed to let Breen know. One of the people who hadn’t noticed Gallandra’s presence had been King Horst himself. And what she had heard him tell the moon that night had filled her with dread. She told Breen as tactfully as she could.
King Horst was broke. He wasn’t just the kind of broke kings and queens sometimes find out they are and then figure out how to keep going until the problem gets ignored into oblivion. He was the kind of broke people got just before they jumped into a lake or sold their own children. No marriage could upgrade the kingdom’s status – Galwynnydd was doomed to become a province.
“I had no idea!” Breen declared, shocked and suddenly tearful. “My poor, poor father! It sounds like… well, it sounds like we should both run away.”
“All three of us,” corrected Gallandra.
Breen looked at her. “You’d come with me?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t let you sleep in trees for the rest of your years all by yourself. Anyway, if I stay much longer, mother will find someone else for me to marry.” Gallandra had been promised to a potato farmer who had died of typhoid fever the year before.
“But what about all the people who came to marry you?” Gallandra pondered.
“Hm,” said Breen. “We can’t just sneak away like this, they’d hunt us down and put us in prison. What to do…?”
They schemed and pondered until someone fell into the moat just before sunrise and was noisily caught and eaten by the kraken.
“I need a quill and parchment,” Breen said, undisturbed by the noises wafting up to their chamber from the moat – royals screaming, a drunk Duke vowing revenge, the confused crowing of the cockerel, who wasn’t used to people being up before him.
Chapter Three: Twenty-Five Marriages and a Funeral
Shortly after breakfast, every single one of the twenty-five assembled royal bluebloods received a letter. In secret. Asking them to not tell anybody just yet.
And then, one after the other, in secret, the royals made their way to Galwynnydd's temple, where the priestess, who was, like everyone else, a firm believer in polygamy, married each of them to Princess Breen. Each of them got a sweet kiss on their cheek, a soft promise for more, and they each vowed to keep it secret until the evening when King Horst would announce the wedding publicly.
Prince Amhin had been right: They were all happy to marry Breen and become the future ruler of Galwynnydd, the shithole kingdom with the fear-inducing fish and the vegetarian peasants.
When King Horst had gathered everyone in the ballroom for the evening’s wedding party, each of the guests secretly thinking they would be called upon any moment to present themselves as Breen’s new spouse, a loud splash coming from the moat could be heard. It was quickly followed by the terrified voice of a girl screaming: “By the Gods – Princess Breen! She fell into the moat! The kraken! The kraken!”
King Horst blanched dramatically. He was supported outside by the Duchess of Nimh and the Prince of Poltonia, but it was too late. Sobbing, the young window washer told the tale of the Princess who had been skipping happily towards the ballroom and had stumbled and fallen into the moat. After what had happened just a few hours before in the same spot, nobody questioned the story. Princess Breen had been eaten alive by the cranky kraken.
King Horst swooned, groaned, sighed, and fell into the surprisingly strong arms of the window washer, who patted him gently on the back. “There, there,” she said whilst heroically fighting back her own tears. “There, there, my king.”
“My daughter…” moaned King Horst. “My wife! Oh, I have lost both of them now! This place…. I cannot stay a moment longer. I must become a lonesome wanderer, a hermit, an eremite. My shoulders cannot bear this burden. My gathered friends,” he spoke to the gathered royals, “this morning my daughter got married in secret. Celebrate her happiness, and celebrate her death! Rule this kingdom with love. I leave Galwynnydd in your capable hands!”
And in the brouhaha, that erupted like a volcano as twenty-five men and women who were used to getting things their way tried to convince each other that each of them was the new ruler of Galwynnydd, King Horst, aided by Gallandra hastened away.
They met Princess Breen in Good Luck Forest waiting for them. She had three horses by the reins and three bags strapped to their saddles.
“Time to go,” she laughed merrily. “Let them sort out the mess. They’ll all have to rule over Galwynnydd now, and we’re better off without it, I believe. Aren’t we, father?”
“Absolutely!” her father agreed mounting his steed. “My clever, clever daughter. You have your mother’s wits about you. But, child, where to now?”
“South!” exclaimed Gallandra. “To the Big Salt Water!”
“South!” they all said with one voice. They spurned their horses and rode into the forest.
