Ysabelle didn’t want to complain but she was sick of saving the world from the Great Cataclysm. This would be the – what was it now – seventeenth time? Sir Brill was before this one, Captain Hammerlock before him. Oh, and the Pondu twins! She would never forget the Pondu twins.
Perhaps seventeen was a conservative estimate.
Metal cuffs after this, she thought as she itched her wrists. Cuffs would sell the con as well as rope and be gentler on her skin – a small luxury in an otherwise barren lifestyle. A life opposite that of the one left at the palace many years before. She pushed the straggling hairs that danced in her face back and tightened them beneath the long hairpin holding the bun up. She sighed and slipped her hands through the rope loops tied to the cage around her.
“The Springland’s greatest monster,” Trece shouted, “a creature born of darkness unlike you’ve ever seen! I daresay, scummier than the sludge scraped from beneath a troll’s toenails. Fouler than the breath of silver pine gnolls.”
You’re one to talk, Trece, she thought. He liked going off script, and she admitted he was getting good at improvisation – a necessity in their lives.
“Behold, Princess Ysabelle!”
Showtime.
Trece whisked the cloth away from the cage, and Ysabelle squinted as colored spotlights along the stage flooded her vision. Her eyes focused on him as he stood beside the cage in purple robes and a porcelain mask. In attendance, a sea of monsters flooded the forest around them, grunting and groaning at the sight of her.
“A positively revolting specimen,” said the left head of a two-headed ogre.
The right head chuckled and nodded, “Ugly tasty.”
Steam hissed from tubes along the back of a copper mech and a hatch near the front flipped open revealing a cockpit. A goblin with floppy ears leaned out and adjusted goggles that magnified his yellowed eyes.
“Bah, organic!” he barked. “No salvage, no interest.”
“True, though Grüg has made a particularly valid point, Fizz,” the left head said. “She would make a rather delectable stew if poached in a proper gravy. Perhaps with barley and sprigs of creeping ivy. Yes, quite tasty indeed.”
“Tasty!” Grüg repeated.
Ysabelle disliked the way the ogre’s four eyes looked at her.
“Two brains and still thinking with that gut of yours,” Fizz said. “Stew might warm you through the night, Brüg, but with the right scrap I could build you a place to stay warm the rest of your life.” He tapped on the hull with a wrench, the pinging sound of metal-on-metal piercing through the chatter.
“You’re lucky I don’t control more of this body Fizz, or I’d rip you right out of that tin can of yours and show you this gut from the inside out.”
The goblin chuckled nervously, crawled into the cockpit, and yanked the hatch shut behind him.
“When you two are finished, I would like to lay claim to her bones,” grunted a boar-like creature leaning on a twisted staff. A wet snout and two tusks pierced with various rings stuck out from under her hood. “Princess bone dust is quite rare, and there are some ancient tinctures I could brew with it.”
Ysabelle had never been more aware of how much she wanted to keep the bones inside her body.
From above, a dragon whelp carrying a shadow-knight in black robes swooped down, roaring as it landed near the back of the crowd. It snapped at a nearby pocket of orcs. The shadow-knight dissipated into a cloud of dark ash that swarmed through the air like a scourge of mosquitos searching for blood. Ysabelle slid back against the bars as it reached the stage. He re-formed with one hand on the cage and peered in with icy-blue eyes.
“I agree with the whelp,” he hissed between rotten teeth. “She is worth far more alive. Think of what the plains-folk would pay to see her returned, or what her offspring would go for. Think of the power we would hold over the Springlands.”
“And who here will barter with them, Solthus?” snorted the boar-thing. “Plains men fear bears and wolves – how well do you think they would negotiate with a two-headed ogre or a shadow-knight? No offense, Brüg.”
“Quite all right,” Brüg said. Grüg stared in confusion.
Solthus dissolved and reappeared by the boar-thing. He gripped her robes and pulled her close, “Maybe we should send you first, Malefor – piece by piece.”
“Trece!” Ysabelle hissed as the monsters argued. “This is going on too long. Where is he, do you see him?”
“Patience, he will show.”
“Do what you want with her,” Malefor said. “She ain’t worth the dust.”
Solthus smiled and let her go, watching as she disappeared into the crowd.
“My friends, I am truly sorry, I believe you may have misunderstood,” Trece said. The monsters jeered and he quickly continued, “No need for anger, but the princess is not for sale. We are a traveling act, you see, a freak show.”
“What?” snarled Solthus.
“No tasty?” Grüg scowled.
“My thoughts exactly,” Brüg said, nodding. “My brother here thinks we should acquire the dear princess by force.”
The two-headed ogre pulled a jagged knife from his belt and lumbered toward the stage behind Solthus. One of the mech’s arms unfolded to reveal a cannon, the other extending an electric blade that crackled to life.
A piercing cry stopped their advance. They spun around to see an armor-clad knight driving his sword deeper into the whelp’s head. It whipped through the air, belching belts of flame that singed the treetops and roasted several zombified dwarves in attendance – most of whom barely noticed. The whelp crashed to the ground, dust engulfing them all in an orange wave.
Knights, always so dramatic with their entrances, Ysabelle thought.
She pulled out of the restraints and rubbed the grit from her eyes, no more sense in playing the damsel in distress. When the dust had settled, piles of imps, trolls, and other monsters lay dead around the dragon’s corpse.
Malefor, who found herself between the knight and the stage, dug a glowing bottle from a hip pouch and threw it at the knight. The bottle erupted into blue flames that roiled along his armor and he raised his blade to strike. Malefor snorted, tossing a fine powder into his face. His arm dropped suddenly, and he swayed where he stood.
She laughed and dug through her pouch for another bottle. The knight swung clumsily and connected with it, a blot of multicolored flame escaping the pouch lighting Malefor up like a rainbow ghost.
“Any time now Trece,” Ysabelle said.
Trece nodded and stole his focus away from the carnage long enough to unlock the cage. As she crawled out, Solthus appeared, knocking her away from Trece and digging an ebony sickle into him.
“Sorry, old man,” Solthus said, tugging the sickle free and unleashing a waterfall of blood. “She comes with me.”
Ysabelle screamed as Trece hit the stage. In all the years they had been luring heroes to their deaths, their plans had never gone off the rails this badly. Her confidence had blinded her more than the tears now welling in her eyes.
Solthus hung the sickle at his side and grabbed Ysabelle. He flashed her a black-toothed grin, “Looks like you’re in need of a rescue, princess.”
She pulled out her hairpin and, as her locks unfurled, rammed the poisoned tip through Solthus’s neck. His confidence turned to worry. Ash poured from the wound, and he went limp, melting through her fingers like runny sand.
“No one rescues me,” she said.
Ysabelle dropped the hairpin into the ashy pile that was the shadow-knight. What remained of the audience – what monsters hadn’t yet been slain by the knight – were escaping into the night.
“Grüg! Think something, for sake of the Gods,” cried Brüg, though his words were slurred, as if his tongue had given up, coming out like ‘Hink shomething, fer shake of uh Godsh’.
The ogre lay in a growing pool of blood fed by a gash across their belly. Brüg twisted his head attempting to see Grüg, but the heavy torso slumped against Grüg’s head, driving it into the ground at an unnatural angle out of his brother’s sight.
“Let’sh move. Grüg, I can’t hear your thoughtsh…”
The knight, his armor tarnished with dirt and blood, swung at Fizz’s mech. The sword bounced off the copper plates, leaving little more than a scratch. The mech hissed and swung in a wide arc, the knight rolling away as electricity crackled in the air behind him. An iron ball the size of a melon launched out of the canon in a burp of flame. It grazed the knight’s pauldron and sailed towards Ysabelle – crashing into the stage and raining splinters of wood down around her.
Come on, get him! she thought.
The mech recoiled and searched for the knight, but when it turned, Ysabelle saw him climbing up its back. He took a bottle dangling from his belt and, with his teeth, pulled the cork from its top, then poured the contents down one of the exhaust pipes. Fizz swiped the blade back, catching the knight along the arm and sending him flying.
A muffled pop echoed throughout the clearing and the mech chugged to a stop. The injured knight watched worriedly until the hatch finally lifted, and Fizz tumbled out – his skin littered with newly formed pustules and growing blisters. He choked and curled into a ball, then let out one final gasp and went silent.
The knight limped across the battlefield toward Ysabelle. His sword, coated in blood and dragging in the dirt, hung in his broken arm. As he approached, his face was lit by the ambient glow of the spotlights, and she was surprised by his youthfulness – every year she lived the would-be-adventurers seemed to get younger.
“Princess Ysabelle,” he said. “I am here to rescue you.”
She could count on one hand the number of times she had been in this position before, the adventurer surviving the trap. Knights to necromancers, dwarves to giants, men to women, they all shared one commonality: self-fulfilling obligations to rescue a princess in need. They would appear, covered in all manner of grime, and announce their intentions of stealing her off into the sunset. Ignoring for a moment the very real and very ominous prophecy about her, who would want that.
Ysabelle surely didn’t.
She stepped down from the stage as the knight kneeled, adrenaline shaking his body on the way down. Cupping his head with her hands, she leaned forward and placed her lips against his. His breath stuttered and he tasted sweeter than she imagined he would.
Then his arm pushed her away and he gasped, choking for air. His lips went purple where hers had been and, like spilled ink soaking paper, spread over his body.
“No one rescues me,” she whispered.
As she walked away from the knight’s corpse, she began planning her next trap. Trece would have gone south to the Emerald Vale, so that’s where she would go. The next adventurer would be along soon enough, and as much as she wanted to, there was no time to mourn. Instead, she let the tears flow as she entered the woods, humming the prophecy as best she could:
O’er the plains of the Springland,
From coast through forest,
Cross the seas of beast and man,
A darkness rises from one soul.
A seedling sprung forth,
Sown by king’s greed,
Shall bring upon us the end,
By carrying crown to safety.
Princess, princess, of tragedy,
Her life a weathered stone,
Should one place love upon her lips,
Will find their ever after.