Chapter Three: The Princess and the Handmaiden

"The poison… it's… it must have shrouded your memory, princess. It will get better," the young woman said.

When I rubbed my head, hair tumbled across my vision, unnatural, silvery blue hair. "My memory's fine," I said. If I wasn't dreaming, then my voice - and, presumably, the rest of me, had become utterly feminine. I would have thought it impossible, but I'd slipped the mortal coil not so long ago. It might take a while to re-evaluate what 'impossible' no longer included. I rose to my feet with the casual grace of a gymnast. "I'm not a princess. The name's Larry Born, and I was a farmer. Where am I?"

The rose-haired young woman looked at me, terror in her eyes, lips trembling. She resumed her bawling, crumpling back to a little heap on the floor, her satiny green gown pooling around her. I'd always been a stoical man, and I could be downright ornery at times, but if anything ever tugged at my heartstrings, it was heartfelt crying. Anybody, really - Abigail and Audrey (my wife and my little girl), of course. But my little boy Leonard, too - Doc Boyd once accused me of mollycoddling the boy. And when Private Francis Briggs thought he was dying and blubbered for his momma, I was there by his side as soon as the fighting stopped. Francis didn't die, though he wound up losing his arm. I suppose that made him a luckier man than me. But now, it seemed that I was not a man at all… and I had a beautiful, heartbroken woman crying right in front of me.

I crouched down - my body moved differently, but it felt natural. I rubbed a hand along her back in the way that always calmed Audrey down. "There, there. I'm sorry about whatever's happened. Can you tell me your name? Maybe tell me a little bit about what happened? Maybe if we put our heads together, we can fix it."

The woman looked up, meeting my eyes with her teary emerald ones before glancing away deferentially. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her gown and let me help her up. My mitt and its slim, smooth fingers were no larger than her delicate little hand. "This is true? You're… you have a lifetime of memories as this Lariborn?"

"Larry Born," I corrected. "Lawrence if you ask my maw when she's cross."

"Lariborn," she said carefully and incorrectly. "I am Meliswe, handmaiden to Princess Laeanna, whose body you now inhabit. I… this is my fault. I should have fetched Surburrus or your mother… the queen, rather. But time was of the essence and I feared that you… she… would be lost forever. When I entered and found the princess recently dead, the victim of some accursed poison, I feared that each second was crucial, so I performed the resurrection ritual myself. I am but an adept, but I have talent enough for that, or so I thought… I called into limbo for Princess Laeanna of Vernal, purest of souls, to reinhabit her purified body. And yet you came, instead."

"I have my moments, but definitely not the purest of souls, I'm sad to say. So this Laeanna… she's in limbo still?"

The woman looked at me like I was a slow child. "All souls go to limbo until they are claimed by the demiurges. I panicked… I should have waited. My lady is a pure soul, but also strong. She could have fended them off until Surburrus could arrange a ritual himself. I… what will they do to me? This is a disaster." Meliswe teared up again and looked about to descend into another bout of sobbing.

I pulled her into a hug. I was taller and slenderer than her, though not by much on either count. "There, there. It's not your fault. I figure your resurrection worked like a champ - no poison in this body and a soul right where it belongs. I'm…" I looked around the domed expanse of the room, the antechamber to the opulent suites of a princess, I supposed. "This isn't my world. I died in a war, blown to bits I imagine, and this is all some cosmic foul-up. It can't be your fault, Meliswe. Look… you say this Laeanna is a tough cookie. Well maybe she's still floating around the limbo, right?"

Meliswe wiped at her tears again. "What… yes… yes!" She kissed me on the cheek and giggled. "We have but to repeat the ritual. I'm sure she'll have survived this long… she has to have. Please, Lariborn, sit on the altar while I prepare the ritual."

She scurried off to a little chest of ingredients and busily rummaged through them. Setting jars to the side and cursing to herself when she couldn't find what she wanted, she looked to know what she was doing. I wandered over to watch - the chest was about the size of our foot lockers from Camp Funston, maybe three feet by two, and filled with dozens of glass jars carefully labeled in a script I couldn't read. It looked more like Arabic than, say, English or Chinese.

"Please, Lariborn, go to the altar. This will take but a moment."

I nodded. "And what happens to me if this works? Am I sharing a body with your princess or am I… what? Limbo? Somewhere else?"

"I… I do not know. I am not a priestess," Meliswe admitted. "Though you have already died once and have no further claim to life, I do not wish to kill you… perhaps…" she bit her lip. "The princess is a far better sorceress than me. She may have one…"

Before I could ask what the princess had one of, Meliswe darted off, her green gown billowing behind her. I crouched down and chose a jar at random from her collection. It was full of what looked to be small eyeballs - gelatinous and clear, a bit like frog's eggs but with a distinct iris and pupil. And the eyes tracked me as I moved the jar around. In my surprise, I very nearly dropped it, but my slim hands were very agile. I wondered what I looked like - what Princess Laeanna of Vernal looked like, rather. Certainly, she was slim with fair skin. Her bust was large enough that I'd have noticed her in a crowd, especially with that trim waist. Though I couldn't see her face, if the princess was the woman I'd seen in Limbo, and I suspected she was, I was now riding around in a buggy with a hell of a paint job. Hell, I'd probably give Meliswe a run for her money, and the handmaiden was a looker. Speaking of whom…

"I found it!" she shouted. She jogged back out from the back, a smile on her face that could have lit up a whole ballpark. She showed me what 'it' was - a time-yellowed human skull with strange black symbols etched all over it. I imagine my eyes bugged out at the sight. "Right, you don't know what that is… it's an grimkey skull. Used to conjure daemonic familiars, but a good sorceress can use it to house just about any soul… like yours!"

I ran my fingers along the skull - it gave off an aura that gave me the heebie-jeebies, but let it never be said that I'm a squeamish person. "So… let me get this straight… when you summon Laeanna back, I'm going into… an inked-up skull?"

"Just until we can find a better vessel for you. Princess Laeanna is much better at necromancy than I am. Maybe she'll even know how to send you back to your world! But this ritual will now require your help, Lariborn." She pressed the grimkey skull into my hands and ushered me back to the altar. "You must hold the skull upon your lap and focus your concentration upon it. When you hear me slap the floor with my hands…" she clapped her hands. "You must focus all your effort upon it and make this exact hand motion." It looked a lot like the sign language I'd seen a handful of times. "Let me see you make it."

"I'm not sure I can…" I lifted my hands from the skull, tried to remember what Meliswe had done, and lo! My hands whizzed around like they had a life of their own. Even the handmaiden looked a bit surprised.

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"You've never done this before?"

"We don't have magic back on Earth. Not real magic. I think I've got some of Laeanna's muscle memory kicking around in my noggin."

"Muscle memory?" Meliswe frowned - I guess they didn't have that term wherever we were. "Muscle memory. Good. Let us proceed."

There were already candles around the altar. They were all extinguished, but they flickered to life with a wave of Meliswe's hand. She paced around the circle once and then paced in and up to me, dribbling some bluish liquid onto the grimkey skull and handing the rest of the bowl to me.

"Drink this to cleanse your body of corruption."

I did so - it wasn't the worst thing ever, though it was pretty bad. It tasted a lot like sasparilla mixed up with collard greens, slightly clumpy and running down my throat, soon to be Laeanna's throat again. Then Meliswe painted out some symbols in front of herself and proceeded to chant. It wasn't in any language that I understood which was actually a little odd. I mean, considering that I'd been blown to bits near the French-Belgian border and wound up in some fairytale palace, how much sense did it make that Meliswe spoke English with a slight southern accent and understood my clipped midwestern just fine? But I didn't understand her chanting. I sure felt the energy of it, though, circling the room, whipping wind through my hair and sending my gown to fluttering. A violet circle of strange pulsing geometries surged into being below me, and I finally remembered to focus on the skull, to focus on being the skull rather than a beautiful princess. I heard Meliswe's hands slap against the marble floor and my hands jumped to life, almost of their own accord, tracing out symbols that sent a swirl of aquamarine around the circle. So I guess I'd done my part…

A sudden rush of wind sent my hair flying in all directions and nearly pushed me off my seat on the little altar. Then, for a split second, my view flickered from looking down at the painted dome of the skull to looking out from its empty eyes. I saw Meliswe bowing toward me, her mane of rose-pink hair dangerously close to the candles, and then she looked up, her eyes the same violet and pulsing aquamarine of the circle's energy. Then she screamed, the candles all winked out, and the grimkey skull tumbled out of my hands as I snapped back into the princess's body. I know, it sounds like a tall tale, but that's what happened.

I rose from my seat and approached the handmaiden, nudging her with a slippered foot. "I'm sorry," I said. "It didn't work."

"But… but I felt it work. I felt a soul go into the grimkey…"

"I did for a moment, but I snapped right back. I figure the princess wasn't out there in limbo to fill this body."

"Then my princess is lost," she said. And, to my surprise, she didn't cry. Maybe she was too exhausted.

"I'm so sorry."

+++++

Meliswe was so exhausted that I had to basically drag her to the big bed in the room beyond the antechamber. She wasn't any bigger than me, however big that was, but I was also a lot weaker than I'd been as Lawrence Born, so it took some work. As I tucked her in, she protested the whole time, stating that it wasn't right for her to sleep in the princess's bed and definitely not right for the princess to put her there. Whether she was aware enough to remember that her princess was gone, maybe forever, I don't care to guess. Exhaustion hit me like a freight train not long after that and I curled up beside her and dozed for what felt like days.

I awoke before Meliswe - the ritual had really taken it out of her - and inspected the bedroom. It was lavish, pretty much what I'd expect the bedchambers of a princess to look like, from the ornate woodwork to the elegant tapestries to a jewelry box with enough valuables in it to buy the whole town of Green Haven a few times over. There was a big mirror, too, and I took the chance to really inspect the body I'd be riding around in for the foreseeable future.

First off, even with her slightly-rumpled gown and case of bed-head, the princess was, bar none, the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. Don't get me wrong - Meliswe was a real looker, maybe the next prettiest woman I'd ever seen. But it was like comparing a beautiful woman to the idea of a beautiful woman. Things in the real world can never be quite as perfect as they are in your mind… only Laeanna was. Slender but not skinny. Fair but not pale. Exactly enough curve to promise feminine fertility without suggesting motherhood. And no sculptor had ever chiseled out a face so delicate. And - this bit is important - she wasn't human. I wasn't human. If the unnatural blue tint of the hair hadn't given it away, the ears did. As I brushed her hair - my hair - as capably as if I'd been dealing with long hair all my life, I spotted her ears and then pulled my hair back behind them. I traced a finger along one, feeling my slim finger all the way up. My ears drew up into a point a full inch higher than they ought to have.

That got me to thinking about the wings I'd seen in my vision of the 'angel' when I was in limbo. She'd looked exactly like I did now, except she'd also had these strange, gossamer wings. And, at that very thought, they unfurled. They seemed to come from out of nowhere, simply unfolding into the space behind my back until they extended from the floor to well above my head - four silvery wings studded with countless tiny jewels. I shrieked, which is what woke Meliswe up.

She shot out of bed, rushing to my side and brandishing a silver candelabrum. "What? What is it, my princess?"

"Wings? I have wings!" I touched them. I could feel them, could feel my fingers running against them, could feel the subtle currents in the air around me.

"Of course you have wings," she said. "Laeanna is a princess of the fae. You are a princess of the fae."

"Are you fae? Whatever that even is."

Meliswe shook her head - and then, as if to confuse me, she unfurled her own wings, nearly as large and as beautiful as mine. "My great-grandfather was a human, so I cannot be true fae. Not by fae law. But Laeanna is a kind soul… she never thought less of me for my ancestry, though many of our kind do."

"Our kind… are you fae or not?"

"I am seven-eighths fae by blood. I would feel foolish if I claimed to be human by virtue of one great-grandfather. The pure fae… well, most of them… say a drop of blood from the lesser races disqualifies any of us from standing in court…"

"We've got that in America, too," I said. "That's the, uh, kingdom I come from. Only for us, it's light and dark skin. And sometimes other things." I shook my head. "I'm an American, you know… not a princess."

Meliswe gently took the hairbrush from my hand and moved behind me. With a little push, she brought my wings down and they slowly folded back up into nothingness. She brushed my hair in what surely must have been a ritual between the princess and her handmaiden, because if felt deeply comforting even though it should have been strange, having a woman I barely knew brushing hair I shouldn't have had. "You're wrong, Lariborn. I am no prophetess, but I am close enough to the ways of magic to know a true vision…"

Then Meliswe recounted to me her dream. She was curled up in a cool cave, weeping for her lost princess. The ground was wet around her and the water was rising. As it rose, she started to swim, and she started to panic as the water rose up to the ceiling and surely she would drown. Except she then spotted a shaft of light, and she swam through crystal-clear water until she emerged in a place of pure luminance, where she saw the spirit of Laeanna, princess of the fae, floating in the light-filled space before her, and the princess spoke, saying:

'I am not lost, my dearest friend - I have gone to Elysheim, from whence I may some day be reborn, for none of us ever really dies, certainly none who does not wish it… but this may be the last we see one another, so heed my last order to you: Laeanna is too important to be lost to the realm. This new person who occupies my body… this stranger from beyond any realm known to us… she would not reside within my shell if the purifying powers deemed her unworthy. She must become the princess, and perhaps some day the queen that I never got to be. Otherwise, we shall descend into a darkness not seen since the end of the Sylvan Age.'

That introduced a lot of questions for me to mull over, but foremost among them was: "She called me 'she'… doesn't sound much like a true vision."

"You're wrong," Meliswe stated. "Think about it - if this was some fantastic rumination from my own mind, surely my princess would have known to call you 'he'… but my Laeanna would not have considered that possibility."

"I'm not sure I want to be a princess…"

Meliswe placed the hair brush on the vanity. "There are worse things to be. I take it you were a human before - I am part human and have admiration for their endurance and determination, even if these things often drive them to ruin. Their ingenuity with devices is second to none. And they have so, so many children. But you are fae now… even among us, your family's talent for magic is highly-regarded, and you will enjoy long life…"

"Unless whoever poisoned me… poisoned Laeanna… comes back to finish the job."

Meliswe's eyes went wide. "I hadn't thought of that."