Princess Briallen Radegon awoke in her own bed with the same crushing anxieties as always followed the morning after fumbling another suitor; that had been mortifying, that had been avoidable; why couldn’t she just suck it up and play pretend like everyone else? It wasn’t like she needed anyone to love her anyway. Being a princess should be enough. After all, what was going to prove she had the kingdom’s best interests at heart? A fairytale or a strategic and strengthened bond with their allies?

Briallen pulled her arms out from under her covers to drag her hands over her face. But her nails hadn’t been that long or so sharp as of yesterday—she chewed them; her mother hated it. Nor her face quite so oblong.

With a gasp, Briallen threw back the covers. Or, she watched spindly little grabby green goblin arms do what she thought her own should be doing, then found the rest of the body—her body—swimming in her nightshirt. It had worked.

Another gasp, though this one bordered on being a squeal, and she looked to the armchair by the fire. Gran Milly slept soundly with her chin tucked into her chest. It had worked!

Briallen hopped down from her bed—just that felt taller now—and continued hoping around experimentally on her odd little goblin feet. With the way her back sloped now, loping around on all fours just came naturally. It was delightfully creature-like. Briallen cackled, and even that sounded more like a hyena’s laughter.

The growl of her stomach cut it short. Ravenous hunger, like she’d never felt before, hit Briallen as if she had swallowed a stone. There weren’t any tea sandwiches left from the night before, and they wouldn’t have satiated her now anyway. She’d have to sneak into the kitchens again. But that had to be even easier now than ever before.

✨

Briallen’s hair had always been long—she’d always hated it too, but her mother said she couldn’t cut it, so that was that—but never so long and so on the same level that it snagged pan handles from beneath the kitchen island. The copper clattered behind her, sending her scrambling away from the noise with a startled hiss, only to be cut short by a face full of broom straw and another before Briallen could even recover from the first.

“Out!” The cook barked at her. Briallen had been hoping to have just beat the woman to the kitchen; fond of her or not, that was when she still looked like a human, and Briallen definitely hadn’t thought about how she intended to explain this to anyone yet. She couldn’t do that on an empty stomach.

Another wallop from the broom knocked Briallen into a corner. She didn’t know how Cook expected her to ‘go on!’ or ‘get!’ like that, or when still being pummeled by a broom.

“Ow!” Briallen snarled and grabbed for the broom, but she did still sound like herself. “It’s me! It’s the princess!”

“The princess isn’t a goblin!” The cook argued back with another smack of her broom.

"Well, I am now!” Briallen lunged for the broom again, just for Cook to sidestep out of the way. Broom bristles pinned her to the floor before she was hauled up by the wrist.

“The nerve!” Cook hauled Briallen from the kitchens. With her newly shortened stature, Briallen struggled to keep from being outright dragged down the halls.

“I really am me!” She protested even while struggling to think of how to prove it; she guessed it would sort itself out in the end, when nobody could find her human-looking self.

Taking a strange goblin to the princess’s chambers to prove a point would have been borderline dangerous, but lucky for Cook, things had worked out the way they had. Even if Briallen was still herself, she would have been thrilled to have a real, live goblin brought to her.

Unfortunately for Briallen, the door to her room was wide open; her mother’s distressed voice filtered clearly into the corridor.

“You know, you could probably just..." Briallen tried to wriggle free before she was dragged back into her room. She really hadn’t planned on running away, but neither had she planned on what to tell anyone if this whole goblin thing had really worked. And she really didn’t see herself coming up with it in the next few moments, especially not on an empty stomach.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“There she is!” Gran Milly sounded truly relieved. Briallen could only imagine the telling-off that had begun. And it wouldn’t be stopping now either.

Briallen’s mother, the queen, did not look or sound relieved at all. In fact, she shrieked.

It had been a while since Briallen had caused her mother to outright shriek. Back when the princess was still in the habit of collecting things like frogs, beetles, and snakes, there had been a lot more shrieking.

Briallen winced and wriggled her wrist away from Cook to stuff her fists in her ears—they were so long now! And sensitive.

“What did you do?!” The queen’s words weren’t any less loud or panicked when she found them. But they were directed at Gran Milly, not Briallen.

“It was an accident.” Briallen answered. She could stomach her mother being upset with her; she did it all the time, but she’d never intentionally gotten someone else in trouble before. And Gran Milly had warned her... “I was upset about how poorly things went with Calland. I only asked her to help me.”

“How was this supposed to help you?” The queen gestured to Briallen as a whole as she shuffled further away from Cook and a little closer to Gran Milly. As if she might save Briallen once again.

“I don’t know.” Briallen shrugged, but that was a bit too emotionally vulnerable of an answer. She still didn’t know how this all actually solved anything. She just knew that she had been angry, and it had worked, and she hadn’t lost her nerve about it. Why couldn’t that have been enough?

“I suppose it was the magic giving the princess what she thought she wanted.” Grand Milly caught on quick. Or maybe Briallen was the one who caught on; she wasn’t sure. “Now she really will have to find someone who loves her for her honest self, in spite of all this.”

Briallen’s stomach twisted at the idea, but maybe she was just hungry again. Gran Milly hadn’t been able to tell her the exact curse-breaking conditions; that wasn’t how curses worked, allegedly. But Briallen had requested that it not have anything to do with true love. She hoped that was just part of getting her mother off their backs.

“What did you do to him?” Her mother demanded. That was more like it. Even if she had been cursed in a more traditional manner, her mother would have believed it to be Briallen’s fault.

“Nothing!”

"Obviously, you had to have done something to necessitate a curse!” The queen looked to the ceiling and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I told you something like this would happen if you didn’t knock it off, Briallen, gods... Just wait until your father finds out.”

That got Briallen’s hackles up more than anything—she had some to raise now, for real. “Well, if you call something a monster long enough...”

“What?” The queen asked, but she had that tone that meant she had heard Briallen perfectly; she just wanted to make her say it again and get angrier.

Briallen looked askance. “Nothing.”

“There’s nothing anyone can do?” The queen turned to Gran Milly again.

Gran Milly looked like she had to think about it. Or maybe she really did. “The only way for a curse to be broken is for the princess to have a change of heart.”

Briallen scowled in thought. At least that didn’t necessitate true love. Or Gran Milly was still making things up to soothe her mother, but if that were the case, then Gran Milly really didn’t know Briallen’s mother well.

The queen sighed as if on cue. She didn’t have faith in her daughter’s ability to have a change of heart; Briallen already knew it.

“You’re not off the hook, you know? You’re still going to the ball. With Calland Baltasaros.”

“What? No! I can’t go anywhere looking like this.” Briallen gestured down at herself. It really hadn’t been on her mind when she’d asked Gran Milly to curse her. If anything, Briallen figured the way she’d turned Cal off the idea of marrying her at all solved the question of whether she’d have to attend the ball in one fell swoop.

But the queen stood her ground, “That’s too bad.”

“He won’t want to go with me.” He would. That was the problem. Briallen could just hear him saying more about making him work for it. She didn’t need that in actuality.

The queen nearly smiled; even Briallen could see it. “That’s a problem for you to solve, then.”

“Mother!” Briallen’s howl really did sound like one now.

“Maybe you should have thought of that before getting yourself cursed.”

She would. Her mother would find a way to suck the fun out of being cursed.

“That’s- That’s not what you’re supposed to do with me!” Briallen seethed, then looked to Gran Milly. Thank goodness she hadn’t left. “Tell her!”

“Tell her?” Gran Milly echoed.

“Aren’t you supposed to lock me in a tower now or something? And guard me with a dragon?”

“Is that what you wanted?” Her mother nearly sounded horrified. That was more like it.

Briallen shrugged. She still really hadn’t thought this through, but maybe that was why cursed princesses got sent to a tower anyway. To think. “The dragon part sounded fun.”

“Go… Go to your room.”

“So that’s a definite no on the dragon, then?”

“Briallen!”

“We’re already in my room!” Briallen growled. It sounded a lot better when she did it as a goblin.