Gothel and the Maiden Prince (A Villain's Ever After) Read online

  Gothel and the Maiden Prince

  W.R. Gingell

  Copyright © 2021 by W.R. Gingell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Moor Books

  Created with Vellum

  For all the boys with kind eyes and sweet smiles.

  Contents

  1. The Tower

  2. The Maiden

  3. The Prince

  1

  The Tower

  The tower grew one day while the villagers slept, spindly and corkscrewing slightly through the trees around it, pushing against the foliage and the very air of the forest as it carved a new place in the world for itself. Doorless, impenetrable, and cold, it drew all the shadows in the forest to itself with a magic that crawled with evil and settled into the ground around the tower, confusing the steps of any villager so unwise as to venture too close. In contrast to that concentration of evil, the top of the tower, with its conical, tapering roof, fairly glowed with gold, as though radiating an inner goodness held captive by the evil below.

  That was what the legend said, at any rate, and even if most of the villagers didn’t quite believe that the tower had sprung from nothing, they didn’t care to get too close to that side of the road when they travelled through the forest.

  The lady presently striding decidedly through the mossy green shadows in a red gown that glowed richly in that environment, did not seem worried by the reputation of the tower, however—an insouciance that could perhaps be explained by the fact that she had come from the direction of the tower.

  Had, in fact, exited from it, despite the lack of doors or windows at anything like ground level, her unruly mane of black curls rippling with the tarnish of magic that she had passed through, though the platinum streak that sprang from her right temple remained untouched.

  Gothel wasn’t afraid of the tower because she had been there at its inception. She knew every inch of it, every skerrick of magic that made it up; she had seen it spring from the ground and climb toward the sky, with shadows gathering at its roots as magic bound it to the land and sank into every part of it like tar.

  Gothel, in fact, had made the tower.

  Seeing her walk through the forest, any non-magical person who wasn’t a villager might have thought her just another woman: forbidding and come-not-hither though she appeared to be with her straight back, direct eyes, and gaze that passed right through a person, she was neither startlingly beautiful nor dressed better than any of the villagers nearby might have dressed for a party.

  A magic-user, on the other hand, would have seen exactly what kind of power roiled behind her, streaming and coiling from her dark curls and billowing monstrously behind her. Power that was too strong not to draw from everything around it, leaving the world a little paler in its wake. To a magic user, she appeared powerful, dangerous, and—perhaps most importantly—corrupt.

  Gothel was indeed powerful and dangerous. Today particularly, she was powerful and dangerous, but more than anything, Gothel felt annoyed. She had not been intending to leave the tower today—or any day soon, really. She was comfortable in the tower. Everything in the tower was where it ought to be—not to be confused with everything being tidy. There was a particularly comfortable seat in her favourite part, and there was always tea brewing; and, most importantly, no one in the tower either babbled in her ear or looked at her with revulsion and fear.

  Gothel wasn’t necessarily against being considered with a healthy amount of fear—in fact, she encouraged it—but it did become somewhat wearying at times. However, if the person who had come calling at the tower today had had a modicum of fear, she felt there was a much better chance that she would not have had to go out.

  Princes, Gothel had found, weren’t usually magically gifted enough to regard a magic user with fear, and when that magic user was a woman, they were even less likely to do so. If they had been magically gifted enough to know their danger, she liked to think that their seemingly inborn prejudices against commoners and women might have been overcome by a healthy respect. Since princes were not, in general, magically gifted, that meant that Gothel periodically had to fight off a prince who was far too assured of his own prowess and had far too little respect for the prowess of anyone else.

  Gothel took a cursory sort of look at her magic, but it had not changed. Black as tar and deeper than the night sky, it coiled in on itself in never-ending movement that had had a beginning but seemed to have no end.

  It had been nearly two years since she had killed the prince of Angilles, but his magic still tainted and coiled amidst her own; it bore all the hallmarks of cruelty, evil, and debauchery, but none of that evil was Gothel’s own. She had her own sins to answer for, but nothing in the magic surrounding her was naturally of her, although she certainly used the magic when it was needed. She would never have chosen to be born with the involuntary talent for drawing in other people’s magic, but she had been so born and Gothel knew no other way to live. Any magic releasing from a dying body came to her—any magic not well enough anchored to its master came to her—and Gothel took it all in. She had tried, several times, to push it away; to send it elsewhere. It had never worked, and each time she received magic from a dying person or siphoned it from a living person who wasn’t quite well-versed enough in keeping their magic to themselves, it worked its way naturally through her system, and eventually left.

  Lombargy didn’t officially confine magic into categories of good and bad, but there was a very neat and tidy system in practical use when it came to Lombargians judging for themselves. Anything that took life, magic, or had no perceived good use, was bad.

  If she could have used that way of thought against the villagers, Gothel would have: she wanted privacy, but not at the expense of the villagers learning who she was. It was far too easy for word to get around about a magic eater—no, far better that the villagers thought her dangerous and unstable for different reasons. Fortunately for Gothel, the magic she had drained from the prince of Angilles at his death gave her the ability to achieve exactly that effect.

  In Gothel’s experience, even such a thorough draining of magic as she had achieved with the Prince of Angilles should have worked its way through her system by now, leaving her with the barest traces of magic to remember him by every now and then on a dark night. Only one other source of magic had also not done so, and still remained until today.

  She wasn’t entirely sorry those sources hadn’t disappeared: Gothel didn’t quite like to think what would happen when she no longer had that dreadful strength to draw on. How would she defend herself? More importantly, how would she defend the tower and its occupant? Princes already came every few months, seeking to find the tower that had sprung from the earth in the forest, and the treasure that reportedly awaited at the top. That rumour had been the first warning that Gothel needed to establish a more dangerous presence, and she had done so ruthlessly, destructively, and comprehensively.

  When the villagers had finished rebuilding the half of the town that had sunk into the earth, Gothel found an assortment of gifts, offerings, and letters at the edge of the forest. Their offerings had remained in a small room at the very bottom of the tower for quite some time until Gothel made herself open and catalogue them. After all, if she was going to terrify the villagers, the least she could do was open their offerings and accept their letters.

  After that incident,
no one had dared to bring up the rumour again, or to give it wings, but it still existed. More, just recently, someone from the village had given information to another prince—which meant it was time for Gothel to visit the village again. Her last visit had been peaceful—evidently too peaceful—but she would not make that mistake this time.

  Today, Gothel was planning on making an impact.

  If Gothel had walked just a touch slower, she might perhaps have met with the young man currently strolling through the Lombargy Blue Forest. She did not—was almost incapable of doing so—and so the young man had a reasonably pleasant stroll of it until he was almost at the outskirts of Blue Hill Village. He was tired and sore, but that was to be expected after walking for the last day and a half, following the river down through the forest from the village upstream of Blue Hill.

  The village had been his latest home. Originally, Lucien had come from the direction of Golden Hill, his back to the Golden Fortress until he was too deeply forested to see it, whereupon he had promptly lost his bearings and continued walking without knowing exactly where he was going except that it was toward whatever pull of magic was strongest.

  He was aware of his deficiency when it came to cardinal directions, but Lucien had other talents: most notably, he could follow a trail of magic right to its source once he was familiar enough with it. He could also interact with other magic users’ powers if they chose to allow it, and he was capable of differentiating between different people’s power—something, he had repeatedly been assured by the mages’ guild, that was not possible. It was only possible to generalise about the type of magic produced by a practitioner, or so ran the common knowledge. Lucien had almost given up trying to tell them otherwise. In fact, he thought, one could possibly say that he had actually given up, because here he was in the woods with no idea of where he was instead of at home, avoiding the head mage and his father alike, tracking down magic.

  Of course, at this moment in time, he was not snatching at merely any magic he could find: he was searching for a strain of magic in particular. Unfortunately for him, he had felt only the faintest touch of it in a bare instant a month ago, and he had spent the last month picking up on any strain of magic strong enough to be that for which he was searching. There had been rumours for some time of a strong magic coming out of the Blue Hills area, and Lucien had set himself the task of finding out from where or whom that magic was coming.

  In aid of that goal, he now wandered, lost and hungry, somewhere in the Blue Hills, wishing that he had either packed himself something to eat or taken more thought before abandoning the road for the trail of magic. That trail had become suddenly obfuscated at the very moment he hoped it was growing so strong as to indicate he was close to its source, bursting out into a hundred small trails that led away from where he was.

  Lucien had sat in the pine needles for a good hour, trying to puzzle out which of the trails was the correct one, before his hunger pangs got the best of him and sent him back in the direction that he fervently hoped was back, and could be trusted to lead to the road.

  Some hours later, he still hadn’t found the road and his stomach had passed from an angry growling to sullen silence. Just as he was about to sit down and rethink his options, Lucien heard the sound of footsteps against, if he wasn’t mistaken, a hard, gravelly road. His heart jumped, and he hurried toward the sound, angling himself just a little to the right. Within a few moments, Lucien found, to his chagrin, that he had been walking parallel with the road for probably some time now.

  The someone currently responsible for his newfound knowledge was a woman in a gown of deep, blood red who strode along the road alone, first fifty yards behind him, then drawing level, then, swiftly about twenty yards ahead of him. Her footsteps were louder on the gravel than his were in the moss, and he had the advantage of height, so he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t see him in his soft browns and greens.

  Lucien’s footsteps slowed, though he didn’t quite stop. If he stopped, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with the walker, and he rather thought he would like to. It was possibly a bit much to say that the woman striding along the road ahead of him was exactly his ideal of womanhood, but it was certain that her straight-backed, confident walk was exactly what generally attracted him, and the mane of black curls flowing down her back and streaked over the right temple with white was only slightly more appealing to him than the enormous cloud of magic that stormed along in her wake.

  Who, wondered Lucien, was this woman, and how in the world had she amassed such an astonishing amount of power? How, moreover, had she not come to the attention of the crown, who for obvious reasons preferred to know who and where the most powerful magic users in the country were?

  And how did she have magic that was at once similar to and utterly alien from the magic he had been tracking through the forest for the last few days?

  He was still wondering about that when someone threw a stone at the sorceress.

  It was a weak throw, and bounced off the sorceress’ shoulder with barely an impact, but the woman stopped at once. Lucien came to a more gentle halt just a few, quiet steps after her, closing the gap between them a little. His eyes roamed over the embankment across the road, from whence, if he was not mistaken, the stone had come, and there it was: a slight hole in the foliage.

  It would not have been visible from the woman’s vantage point, down on the road as she was, but Lucien saw it quite clearly: a child, crouching between the bushes with another couple of stones in its fists and a scowl etched into its dirty brow.

  Lucien sensed rather than saw a gathering of magic—dark magic, deadly magic, bound tight together and straining to explode outward in a devastating tide of death. He flicked a cold, terrified look toward the woman in red, and saw the vague miasma forming between her palms just a moment before she sent it tearing outward in a circle around her.

  He leaped for the road in a vain attempt to get to the child before the woman’s magic could reach it, but was thrown backwards into the grassy bank and tumbled down into the ditch as the thrumming wave of magic expanded exponentially. When he was clear-minded enough to shake his head at the effortless power of that blast, Lucien found himself sitting in a puddle and the child from the bushes ahead floating in the air at roughly head height.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asked the woman, as Lucien stared stupidly at the floating child.

  He had seen the death in the magic: how was the child still alive, still wriggling with an angry, almost feral look to its face?

  “I want my dog!” it yelled. There was enough ferocity to the words and facial expression, that it was still impossible to tell if the child was a boy or girl. “You give me my dog!”

  “I haven’t got your dog,” said the woman, stepping forward until she was almost nose-to-nose with the child. Lucien applauded her bravery: he wasn’t sure the child wouldn’t bite any nose close enough to serve so in its anger. “I suppose someone told you I took it.”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  “I want my dog.”

  “I don’t care,” the woman said. She lowered the child to the road as she started down the road again. Over her shoulder, she added, “Don’t throw stones at me,” as she strode away, leaving the child to throw itself in the dust in wordless rage, then clamber to its feet and trot after her.

  Lucien was quite sure that the child wouldn’t catch up—nor did he think the woman would slow down for it. At any rate, if the child could follow magic there was no way it would lose her: the woman’s magic was terrifying, far too strong, and what might have been referred to as dangerous if not downright evil. Lucien didn’t believe in good and bad magic, just good and bad people and the way they used their gifts. Unfortunately, not many other magic practitioners seemed to think so, and the number of politically gifted as well as magically gifted people in government who did think the same way could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Laws
and mandates dealing with magic, therefore, didn’t exactly align with what Lucien himself believed, and he found himself wondering anew how this woman had kept out of sight of the authorities.

  Her blast of magic had been as powerful and deadly as it was personally embarrassing for him. A battle-mage prince might have taken that as a challenge and gone after the strange woman, though a wise one would certainly realise she was far too strong for him and bide his time. A magically inept prince might have started thinking seriously about going home to the castle and returning with a decent cohort of mages to take care of what was obviously an embarrassing hole in the national security.

  Lucien Armand deMere, third prince of Lombargy and known to friends and foes alike as the Maiden Prince, merely sat thoughtfully in his puddle and wondered what he had stumbled across.

  Lucien might have stayed in his puddle far longer than was consistent with either his dignity or his health if it hadn’t occurred to him mid-thought that the glorious woman who had been responsible for putting him in the aforesaid puddle wasn’t slowing down and was very nearly out of sight though the road was quite straight.

  That made him get up rather swiftly and soggily, and start out after her with the rueful hope that his trousers would dry in the warmth of the sunlight before he got to the next village. It seemed unlikely that the woman ahead was going anywhere but to the village or to her home: if she was going to the village, Lucien would be glad to find it. If she was going to her home, perhaps he would ask her for a meal in exchange for some kind of work. Provided she didn’t toss him into another puddle, he wouldn’t be the worse for asking.

  He was surprised to see the child disappear into the forest on the right hand side of the road, but when the road itself began to curve away to the right—was that south, wondered Lucien dubiously, or west?—and began to descend toward what was clearly the village he had been hoping to find for the last few hours, he understood. The child had taken a short cut. He rather wondered that the bright spot of red far ahead of him hadn’t done the same: she seemed like a straightforward kind of woman. Perhaps she didn’t particularly care for where she was going and was taking the long way around deliberately.