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CHAPTER ELEVEN: NO ONE'S DAMSEL
Pix sat up to glare at the bound prince. “Game? You think this is a game?” She scoffed. “This is our lives.” She glared at his self-righteously smug face. “When Cinderella rode off into the sunset with her happily ever after magically secured—through no real action on her part, mind you—you think she gave one thought to her family? You think she provided for them after she left?”
Pix shook her head. “Tish had to move into town and open shop just so she and her mother and sister could survive. That goop—that game—puts food on her family’s table and keeps a roof over their heads—not to mention, currently, our own. If some gullible royal’s desire to reclaim her glory days or catch the eye of some stuck-up, silver-spooned noble can keep Tish’s family from starving, isn’t that worth the price of the lie?”
“I thought it wasn’t lying,” the arrogant royal jeered, rolling his eyes. “It must be so easy, making up your own morals as you go.”
“Easy?” she barked back. “You think my life is easy? I’ve had to fight for everything I have.” Through the corner of her eye, she saw the flames in the lanterns flicker and flare with her anger. “Everything I have, I have because I took it from someone else who wanted it just as badly as I did but didn’t have the sense, smarts, or strength to keep it.”
“You steal,” he corrected. “And you think that because you do it in the name of survival that makes it right.” He snorted with an inflated sense of dignity. “Cheating is cheating, it doesn’t matter what you do it for.”
She shook her head, jutting out her jaw. “You think you and your precious little princess are any different?” She laughed. “You forget that I was there for her birth too, throne-boy. You think I’m playing unfair by giving Tish a little magical coverup? What about when the oh-so-good fairy Ava wished her goddaughter a happy birthday with the enchanted gift of beauty? How fair was that?”
“That’s different,” the prince insisted, even as he frowned and his bound body squirmed a bit. “It’s not like she asked for it. It was a gift.”
Pix rolled her eyes. “Please,” she said as her wings twitched. “You royals think that just because you all struck life’s lottery at birth that the deck isn’t stacked.” She shook her head and pinned him with a condescending glare. “We all play the cards that we’re dealt, however we have to—even cheating—you just can’t tell because you were born already holding a winning hand.”
The princeling pouted, his face scrunched into a royal snit. “What do you know?” he grumbled.
“More than you.” She snorted as she lay down, settling back on the crate. “You think just because your parents or some flittering, little fairy promised, or even gave, you something that you deserve it. You think, just because you were born with a silver spoon jammed down your privileged, entitled throat, that life owes you a happy ending, like that’s the only inevitable conclusion.”
She laughed bitterly. “Truth is, happy is just a fleeting moment—gone, then here, and gone again, all before you know it—and you’d better be ready and willing to fight—to lie, cheat, steal, whatever—for every moment. At least when I take something, I earned it. At least then, I’ve proven that I deserve what’s mine.” She growled as she turned her back on him. “All your little princess ever did right was being born into the right family.” She sneered. “And as you said, that wasn’t her fault. It was a gift.”
“That’s not true,” the love-struck prince argued. “She’s perfect, princess or not. She’s everything anyone could ever want in a wife.”
“And what exactly is that? Why do you even want her?” Pix asked him, genuinely if a little exasperatedly curious. “You’d be bored stiff with her in a week.”
The shadowed room was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “You’ve never seen her singing in the woods. She has this beautiful voice.”
Pix snickered bitterly and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure it was her singing that caught your attention.
“Meaning what?” he asked, but Pix just waved off his question as she curled tighter, trying to feign sleep even as her wings fluttered in reflexive irritation. “Pix?” She could hear him shuffling over the storage room’s well-swept floor before he struck her crate with a thump. She stiffened as her box shook slightly, but still wouldn’t look at him. “Meaning what?” he insisted as he shook her makeshift bed again.
She turned to him and pinned him with a piercing glance. “Meaning, if her beautiful voice wasn’t coming out of such a beautiful mouth, you’d never have stopped long enough for a second verse.”
“I would too,” he argued. She rolled her eyes and turned away again. “I would have.”
Sure, sure. She scoffed and closed her eyes tiredly, wondering if she had enough power to knock him out again.
“What do you know?” He huffed and sat back against the stacks again. “You don’t even know her.”
“I’ve met enough princesses.” Pix scoffed into the shadowed wall. “Prissy, chipper little things that go around singing and dancing through life as if the world were all weddings and sunshine; and they wonder why dragons and wolves and ogres constantly want to eat them. They do it just to shut them up.” She turned again, pushing herself up, when she heard Fallon laugh. But, by the time she rolled over, he was trying to cover it up with a cough. “They’re completely useless,” she continued on, “every last one of them.” She sat up, her legs dangling off the edge of her wooden bed. “You say I’ve done some pretty awful things in my life—and, yeah, okay, I have—but at least I’ve done something.” She shook her head. “Those girls, all they do is wait around in their towers or cottages, twiddling their thumbs and singing until some princeling with more bravery than brains shows up to marry them.”
* * *
Fallon winced as he remembered all the times he’d stopped to listen to Helena sing. While he’d rarely paid attention to the lyrics, thinking more about how beautiful she was or how perfect their lives together would be, he did remember true love, happy endings, and oddly chickadees featuring an awful lot.
“They don’t even make good wives or mothers—much less queens,” Pix continued, building steam to her rant. “They don’t know how to take care of themselves—protect or save themselves—who would trust an entire kingdom to these girls? They’re just career brides! How could they be anything else when they’ve never been out in the world—never had to deal with it? They’ve never lived, not really. All they know is their small, little woodland prisons.”
“And whose fault is that?” Fallon countered as he sidled up against the boxes to face her. “It’s people like you who put them in there, locking them away for some,” he shook his head as he spat out, “nefarious reason.” He ignored her impertinent snort. “If the roles were reversed, you’d do the same.”
With a sharp, irritated sound, Pix bounded off her box so fast Fallon recoiled instinctively. Looking at her, he wished he could back up a bit more into the boxes, could sink and hide in the storage room’s shadowed space. The tension coming off of the tiny pixie towering over his bound, pretty helpless form crackled around her, causing her hair to literally swirl like some menacing storm cloud in the lamplight. He swallowed hard as he stared into her hardened, glittering black eyes that glowed like lightning ready to strike.
When finally she spoke, her voice was disturbingly soft and calm, such a contrast from her form, like the deadly quiet before a tempest. “No one,” she all but whispered as she bent at the waist to lean over him, “could ever put me in a cage. I’d kill them first.”
He stared into her electric eyes and shivered at the truth he saw there, remembering the way her wand sank sickly into the hulking water beast. Fallon recalled the exhilarated, intimidating look on her face when the river bull had bled water onto the thirsty ground. Involuntarily, his gaze faltered at the memory as a chill swept over him.
Catching himself, he steeled himself, forcing his eyes to bravely meet hers again.
But it was too late.
She’d seen. She’d grinningly caught that flicker of fear and Fallon knew she wasn’t the type of girl who ever gave things back. She would keep it—clutch and claw into that small bit of him—feeding off of it. Making herself strong on his brief moment of weakness.
She stood tall again, her wings waving in smug victory. “That’s the real difference between those twittering girls and me,” she told him, her tone dark and low. “I don’t need anyone to be my savior.”
Forcing his voice not to waver—unwilling to give up any more of himself to her—he asked, “So you’re punishing them for being weak?”
“No,” she said with a dismissive shake of her head as she hopped back up on her box, her back turned to him even as her voice echoed through the quiet space, “I’m just not going to reward them for not being strong either.”
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