Baby Julianna was a sweet kid. Not abnormally cranky nor surprisingly mellow. She was just pretty much a normal newborn. Except that she was a cursed princess. But, that detail was surprisingly irrelevant in her early years. Conroy and Lillian had been obsessing about the curse and its implications since the beginning of the pregnancy, but now the new parents were so caught up in the joys of new parenthood that the curse didn’t even cross their mind at first.
It wasn’t until Julianna started to become noticeably observant of her surroundings that her mother began to wish she could take Julianna outside to watch waves crash up on the shore or look at the trees which were sprouting fresh green leaves. But the best they could do was bring in fresh flowers and cuttings from tree branches, and put them in all the vases that Daisy had supplied for this exact purpose all over the child’s living quarters.
The change from infant to toddler to child who actually might start questioning her situation and desiring a different one was so gradual, and life at the palace was so demanding, that over the course of time the King and Queen actually found that the curse wasn’t on their minds too much on a day-to-day basis. The only time they thought about it was at the weekly meeting with the spy they had placed in charge of trying to find a boy to break the curse.
Really, so what if their daughter couldn’t go outside? That meant they knew where she was all the time, and that she was safe, which is a load off the mind of any parent certainly, but especially so for royal parents who usually have to fret about their kids being taken for ransom and revenge and those sorts of dreadful things. When Julianna got to be a teenager, Conroy in particular was glad his daughter was contained within the safe sphere of the palace instead of roaming about the city at large being flirted at by knights.
There is a little part of probably every parent that would like to keep their kids safe from the evils and temptations of the world until they’re adults, and Lillian and Conroy were living the unhealthy, overprotective dream. One or the other of them would every so often comment in a vaguely guilty manner about how Farland had actually done them a bit of a favor.
And so it went until the fall of Julianna’s 19th year.
#
It was the middle of the night and the Princess’s living quarters were silent except for the snoring of her nurse and companion, Delia. The woman was fast asleep in a rocking chair in the central chamber that had once housed the torture devices, and now was lined instead with bookshelves.
Peace reigned supreme this calm and tranquil night.
Unless you happened to be a person who could hear ghosts, as Julianna could. (As far back as she could remember, she had been able to see the three ghosts who haunted her rooms. The ghosts had been really excited about this, especially Montague who at long last had a shot at being able to communicate with a person who didn’t hate him. As she grew, they had just as much, if not more, involvement with her upbringing than her nurse, parents, and tutors. When she was too small to understand that she should keep them a secret, they told her they were her imaginary friends so people wouldn’t think she was too crazy, since imaginary friends are acceptable for kids to have but seeing people who aren’t there is schizophrenic. When she got too old for imaginary friends, she started to have to pretend that she didn’t see them anymore, which was tough; imagine living in close quarters with three other people and not being able to show that you hear and see them.
But whenever Delia was gone and Julianna had no visitors, she was able to converse with the ghosts freely, and had a lot of fun with them learning all sorts of stuff that she’d otherwise never have learned as a severely over-protected princess.
This midnight found our long-suffering heroine crouched at the end of a tunnel she’d been digging as an escape out of the dungeon ever since Curtis had let slip that when he’d been alive he’d been digging a tunnel behind a loose stone in his cell. Horrified, the other ghosts had begged him not to let her know where the tunnel was, but at the time Julianna had been eight years old and thus highly skilled at the fine art of whining and nagging, and she hadn't give him a moment of peace until he finally folded and revealed to her the stone’s exact location.
From that day onward digging to freedom had been her dream, and every night that she wanted to work on the tunnel she drugged Delia’s nighttime tea and climbed into the tunnel with her digging implements (Dexter had been imprisoned for his involvement in the seedy underworld of smuggling and drug trafficking. Being the unscrupulous character that he sometimes was, he had passed his knowledge of the nonlethal stuff on Julianna over the years; the sleeping potion he had taught her to make had been by far the most helpful). She had made so much progress with the tunnel over the years that her ghost companions could no longer accompany her to the end since their spectral tethers held them back.
So, if they wanted to speak to her they had to yell. And yell Curtis was doing. The further along the tunnel she progressed, the more he regretted letting her know it was there. It’s not like he didn’t want her to have freedom, and he knew she hated being confined down in the depths of the castle when there was a whole world to see, but he also didn’t want to be the reason that she escaped to the outdoors. If that’s where the tunnel ever was to end up going anyway. And his biggest fear was not that she would finish the tunnel, but that the thing would cave in. She’d read a book on mining, and both Dexter and Montague could offer plenty of practical advice since they had had brief stints working in the country’s infamous coal mines before moving on to safer professions -- Dexter to thievery/poisoning and Montague to prison guardery (though as they had both perished in their 20s maybe they should have stuck with mining after all. However, general consensus among the population of Fritillary was that mining was a profession best left to the desperate, and was also best left behind the moment your finances were in order, otherwise odds were whatever savings you accumulated would just end up going toward your funeral anyway.) So, in theory Julianna had the basics of digging a tunnel down, but still Curtis couldn’t keep himself from fretting every night she crawled into that ‘dark dangerous deathtrap’ as he called it, quite alliteratiously.
Curtis was, that night, standing as high up the gently sloping tunnel as he could, yelling, “Seriously Julianna, you need to give it up for the night! You’ve been up there for hours! You’re going to get sleepy, and then you’ll make a silly mistake!”
Wayyyyy up at the top of the tunnel, Julianna could barely make out the words he was yelling, but she knew the gist of it anyway because he’d been hollering the same stuff up at her for more than half of her life now. And, she had to admit, as she paused to scratch an itch on her nose, thus smearing it with dirt, Curtis was right. No need to get stupid and cause a situation she couldn’t fix. Sighing, she gently, almost lovingly, laid down her garden trowel. Her dear trowel had been her digging tool since one of the gardeners had come down to the dungeon a few years back to check on some of her potted plants and she’d managed to swipe it off his tool belt while the gardener had been distracted by an interesting fungus that had taken root in the soil of one of her plants. The trowel, a huge step up from the serving spoon she’d been using up until that point, had sped up her work by at least 50%. She gave it a fond pat as though it were a pet dog, and scooted over to a skateboard-esque device she had constructed by putting the wheels from an old rolling toy horse she’d used as a toddler on the bottom of a plank of wood she’d taken from the underside of her bed. Then, she rolled over so that she was laying on her back on the wheeled board. She reached up to grab the line made of tied-together bits of fabric, and guided herself down to the bottom of the tunnel. The wheeled board saved her tons of crawling time, and made it so she didn’t have to build the tunnel too high, since she had to only accommodate her supine position and not her crawling position.
Once at the bottom she stood, gave Curtis a grin, stretched her cramped limbs, and slid the three bags of dirt from that night’s work off the board, then pushed the loose stone back into place.
“I’ve told you not to spend so much time up there!” Curtis said.
Julianna glanced at her still-sleeping nurse and grumbled back at him, “I know what I’m doing.” But then she smiled apologetically when she saw his downcast face. “Listen, I’m sorry. I know you’re just worried.” She picked up the two bags and walked across the room. “But, Curtis,” she said, suddenly excited, “up there, digging those last few feet, I swear --” and she whispered the last bit, “I swear the air felt -- different. And I noticed that the soil wasn’t as hard. I -- I think I may be close to the end.”
Curtis squinched his ghostly nose up disbelievingly. His expression was so full of doubt that he might as well have just said aloud that he thought she was crazy.
“Well what’s so crazy about that?” she asked, perturbed. “I mean, I’ve been working on that tunnel ten years now. I figure the thing’s got to have an end at some point!”
Montague floated over and interjected, “Odds aren’t really that great that you’ll find the end. The dungeon’s really deep. Really, really deep. ”
Of course it was. It was a dungeon. “But I’ve studied blueprints of the castle and topographical maps of the city,” she sighed, explaining yet again how she knew there was hope, “and the castle is on a hill. And when I look at the castle blueprints and compare them to the layout of the building on the topographical map, it clearly shows that my tunnel is going the right direction to eventually end at the edge of the hill on the ocean side!”
“Geez, guys,” Dexter said from where he was trying to read a book nearby, “Let the kid have some hope. Could you turn the page for me?” he then asked her.
As she walked over to the table where Dexter was hovering over an open book, she said, “Yeah, I need a project or I’ll go mad, right?” to Montague, who had told her that very thing not too long ago, drawing on his observations from his stint as a prison guard as evidence. She gave Dexter a smile and flipped the page. Dexter continued reading. Of the three, he was the one most likely to side with and defend her against the others, probably because he’d led such a life of danger and excitement before he’d been imprisoned; he had had a lot of fun skirting the law and taking risks, and thought that being daring and having as much adventure as she could was just the thing for Julianna to keep her mind off her troubles.
Montague nodded but said, “Yes, but it’s just that the tunnel... well it might cave in.” He had a great skill for stating the obvious.
“You have no faith in me,” she sighed as she slung a bag of dirt over her shoulder and hefted it to the bathroom, then did the same with the other two bags, turning a page for the waiting Dexter on the way. Once back in the bathroom, she started to run the tub, then pried the grate off the floor -- the grate she assumed led to some sort of sewer system and had only not crawled into long ago to explore because by the time it occurred to her to do so her shoulders were too wide to squeeze through -- she asked, “Could one of you make sure Delia is still out?”
Montague floated over to investigate, and Julianna began to carefully pour the bags’ contents down into the depths of the space below the grate. Once the bags were all empty and each speck of dirt swept of the floor, Julianna went to hide the bags behind some books in her library, passing Montague as she went through the doorway.
“She’s coming out of it,” he said and she nodded. After hiding the bags, she went to another shelf, and pulled out a thick book entitled, “An Unabridged History of Mulch.” She opened it up, and it was (surprise, surprise!) hollowed out -- and housing an array of glass vials wrapped in cloth to stop them breaking or clattering around. These were the concoctions that she had brewed with Dexter on the sly. Some were for drugging her nurse, and some were pain killers. The pain killer she had found to be quite handy when she got hurt in the tunnel and had to pretend that she was fine, since her injuries were unexplainable to people who thought she frittered her days away doing nothing more dangerous than cross stitching, playing her clarinet, and reading.
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“One drop is all you’ll need,” Dexter said from his place by the book he was trying to read, though he had to rely on her to turn the pages, which was irritating because she was scurrying all around, and he was just getting to a good part.
She nodded, grabbed the vial, and hurried over to her sleeping nurse. She tilted Delia’s head back and dropped one drop onto the elderly woman’s tongue.
“You’ll need to lay off the drugs for a night,” Dexter added. “You’ve used it five nights in a row. Another night and you get into the danger zone.”
She sighed and nodded, having known from years of experience that he was going to say that. And he was right, of course. She didn’t want to endanger Delia. Delia was a sweet, kind old lady. And heck, even if she was mean and crabby, one still doesn’t drug people willynilly.
Her nurse duly neutralized long enough for Julianna to wipe all traces of her tunneling excursion from her person and the rooms, she turned another page for Dexter, took a bath, then scoured the tub, since Delia would otherwise wonder how she’d gotten so dirty. Julianna had, as a byproduct of the tunneling, developed much better housecleaning skills than any royalty in the history of Fritillary. She was so proficient sweeping, scouring, and scrubbing any evidence of dirt around the dungeon and any appearance of hard labor on herself that Delia had not found anything suspicious in years.
Though, even if Delia had found suspicious dirt on the floor, she might not have thought too much of it anyway since there were already so many odd things about Julianna. For one thing, the girl mysteriously exhibited knowledge and language that was shockingly inappropriate (all things Julianna had picked up from her ghost companions, but of course Delia couldn't know that). And then there were the odd quirks she had like leaving books open on the desk and not reading them, but at regular intervals turning the pages; and seeming to be watching something that wasn’t there; and muttering quietly when she thought Delia wasn’t listening. Also, in consequence of her never having once been touched by the sunlight, she had a fierce vitamin D deficiency which resulted in depression, forgetfulness, and icky problems with her gums. The vitamin D deficiency also caused another quirk of hers, which was a constant craving for fish. (Fun fact: fish is pretty much the only naturally occurring source of vitamin D besides sunlight.) But, nutrition science didn’t really exist in Fritillary, since it and every other science were viewed with extreme suspicion by a populace that much preferred to explain away every ailment and trouble by saying it was because the sick person had angered some wizard; consequently, everyone assumed it was Farland’s curse that was causing all her symptoms.
Yes, all in all Delia thought Julianna was a weird child, and would not have been overly suspicious of a bit of unexplained dirt; she probably would have just assumed that Julianna liked to play in the potted plants in the middle of the night.
Julianna hopped out of the tub, got into her PJs, turned another page for Dexter, and then at long last succumbed to her exhaustion and went to her bedroom, where she collapsed into her four poster canopy bed. She fell asleep quickly, dreaming of reaching the end of her tunnel. After a few hours, Delia woke her for lunch.
“Rise and shine, Sweetheart,” Delia trilled. “Remember your mother is coming down for lunch today.”
The older Julianna got, the less her parents visited her. It was to the point where Conroy came down for a chat about once a week, and her mother visited once every few days for lunch. Julianna knew her dad was super busy dealing with an increasingly unhappy populace (they’d been getting more and more unhappy ever since Lillian had released that huge influx of prisoners into the city and had thrown off the delicate balance); and Julianna knew her mom was really into being the figurehead of the women’s rights movement, but still she felt that if they loved her like parents should love their kids they’d be down in the dungeon every single day playing chess, reading books with her, and asking her what was going on in her life.
It didn’t help that the visits had really dropped off since her little uncursed heir-to-the-throne brother, Conroy Jr., had been born seven years earlier, just when she was getting into her moody early teen years. Eventually, she had grown out of the resentment she had felt from that period of her life. Rationally, she realized that perhaps part of the reason they had stopped visiting so much was that she yelled at them and gave them the cold shoulder whenever they stopped by, but, all the same, they were her parents, and if they weren’t going to put any effort into helping her deal with her emotional distress, then who the heck was going to? There was no psychiatry in Fritillary (yet another field that people looked at with suspicion and tended to burn its practitioners at the stake for).
So, Julianna was sort of happy and sort of not that her mom was coming for lunch. The older Julianna got the more her mom talked about her future -- a subject that made Julianna really, really uncomfortable. Would she languish away in the dungeon, a spinster to the end of her days? Would they find someone willing to marry her? Marriage was a chilling thought, because the way she looked at it, only a super-weirdo or a creep would consent to be alright with having a cursed wife who was confined for life to an underground chamber.
Over the course of her life she had met all the potential marriage candidates in the aristocracy pool and hadn’t connected with any of them. They had been brought down to visit her whenever their parents had come to town for royal business, but none of them had been the types that she’d even want to be friends with, let alone marry. They tended to talk an awful lot about swords and archery and horses, and most of them had not read one single book in their lives that had not been assigned to them by their tutors. None of them had the slightest interest in philosophy or math or any of the subjects she’d developed a fondness for over the years thanks to her extensive library.
It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to talk about swords and archery and horses, but that there was so much more she would have liked to discuss in addition. But warfare and related subjects seemed to be all these noblemen’s sons seemed to care about. It did make sense, since that was what their professions were going to be when they grew up, so of course it was the primary focus of their parents and teachers, but it sure made them boring. She couldn’t feel too superior to them though because she supposed that if she hadn’t been cursed she might well have turned out to be just as one-dimensional, obsessed with dresses and hairstyles and parties and boys, since that was what a normal princess’s life revolved around.
But since she was cursed she got to pursue whatever interest she wanted; her parents wished to do whatever they could to keep her from going stir crazy.
Thankfully, though, the subject of husbands didn’t come up nearly as much as might be expected. Lillian wasn’t one of those fairytale queens Juliana had read about who obsessed about marrying her daughter off -- this was, unbeknownst to Julianna, because her parents were still assuming that they’d find the man who’d break the curse, that she would marry him, and that she would be able to live a normal life; they were still using every available resource to search for him, and wouldn’t allow themselves yet to think about an alternative fate for her. Her parents had decided early on not to tell her about this mystery man who was the key to breaking the curse, because it would only cause her anxiety, and there was nothing she could do anyway to aid the search.
So, matrimony was not a subject that Lillian was likely to pester her about, but there was a heckava lot more to life than boys. Lillian’s favorite topic lately had been how Julianna was going to fill her adult life in the dungeon. She was not a child anymore, and was done with her formal education, and now, according to her mother, it was time to consider adulthood.
Adulthood is a stressful thing to consider for most young adults because of the myriad of options available to them; what if they make the wrong choice? It was stressful to Julianna for quite the opposite reason; it made her feel ill to think about languishing about in her dungeon contributing nothing, doing nothing of consequence, and pretty much leading a life that had so little impact on the world that (as far as the world was concerned) she might as well not exist at all. Julianna tried hard to block out all thought on the subject, but every time Lillian came to visit these days she tended to talk of nothing else, thus forcing Julianna, for the duration of each visit, to dwell on what she felt was her meaningless existence. Lillian would totally depress her daughter with no notion that she was even doing so, then she would kiss her on the nose, flit off upstairs, and go live her life in the sunshine doing her queenly job having well-publicized visits with peasants where she would distribute food and talk about women’s rights.
Julianna sighed and walked to the dining area -- a space right off the main chamber that used to be a large cell where the new prisoners had lived until the guards had gotten around to processing them. Once the bars had been removed and Daisy had worked her decorating magic, it had been transformed into a lovely little alcove with tapestries of forest scenes on the walls, lush potted plants in the corners, a beautiful rug in earth tones on the stone floor, and a dining table and chairs that seated far more guests than Julianna had ever had down in the dungeon at one time, even counting when the ghosts sat in seats too.
She plopped down in her big golden chair with comfy green upholstery, stared down into her empty golden plate, twiddled her golden fork around distractedly in her fingers, and let herself daydream about the possibility that she really was about to reach the end of the tunnel. Her daydream-self was just digging out of the tunnel and taking her first breath of fresh air when Lillian finally came down into the dungeon more than an hour late, and snapped her daughter out of her fantasy.
“Sweetheart!” Lillian crooned.
“Mama,” Julianna answered, happy to see her mother but also suddenly distracted because it had just occurred to her that she had to do some packing before going up into the tunnel. She couldn’t just go scampering out into the world unprepared – reading fairytales had taught her that princesses venturing out into the world on their own tended to get into all sorts of trouble, and, while she knew those stories were fictional, she still saw some sense in them. She’d need food, money, a weapon of some sort, and probably tons of other things too – she’d do some brainstorming with the ghosts at night once Delia had fallen asleep.
They ate their dinner and chatted about what was going on in Lillian’s life; they did not talk about what was going on in Julianna’s life since Lillian always assumed (and usually rightly) that there was nothing to report. Their conversation shifted to small talk too boring to waste ink on, and then Lillian left, but not before Julianna covertly reached into her mother’s pocket when they hugged each other goodbye and found a little pouch of what felt like money – she had never held or even seen money before so she couldn’t be sure, but the ghosts would certainly confirm it. Assuming that it was money, then she already had one item to cross off her list of things to pack! Hooray!
Feeling pretty good about herself, she went off to her bedroom to have a whispered conversation with her friends.
#
After chatting with the ghosts about her escape plans, Julianna felt she had a good list of necessities to spend the day tracking down. She also decided it would be wise to take Dexter with her -- a while back, she had discovered through reading a book about ghosts that ghosts were thought to be tethered at the time of their death to something in the material world; this is what held our three ghosts to a clearly defined perimeter around the dungeon. This habit of ghosts’ spirits to be tied to a physical thing that was nearby when they died was surely why the majority of the dungeon’s ghosts had disappeared when the dungeon had been cleaned out; since soldiers had hauled away the majority of the dungeon stuff to a waste management facility on the outskirts of the city, there must be a very haunted trash pile out there somewhere full of prisoner ghosts.
Through some trial and error exploring around the dungeon and measuring how far the ghosts could go in each direction, Julianna had discovered that Montague’s spirit was stuck to a big rock on the bathroom wall, Curtis was stuck to a big steel ring that had been anchored so firmly into the wall that the interior decorator, Daisy, had not been able to have it removed, and Dexter was tethered to a slightly protruding brick in the hallway.
Since the brick, when pried loose, was small enough to be carried around without trouble, it was only a matter of time before Julianna’s curiosity got the better of her and she loosened it from the wall and found that, if she moved the brick around the dungeon, Dexter’s perimeter changed from its usual one to a new one, always with the brick as the epicenter. Through the day she kept the brick in the wall, since it was right at eye level and Delia would surely notice its absence, but at night she sometimes removed the brick so that Dexter could accompany her up the tunnel. However, he rarely went up with her anymore since the novelty of being able to move beyond his usual range had worn off for him long ago, and now he thought the tunnel too boring.
And speaking of boring, while her plans and her gathering of supplies were quite important and essential to her imminent escape from the dungeon, they were not all that interesting from a storytelling perspective.
But! If we take our focus from the castle dungeon out across the Bay of Fritillary and then a few miles north into the ocean, we will be fortunate enough to find that which neither Farland nor Mirabella nor Julianna’s parents have thus far been able to locate: the ship that was home to the strapping young lad who was the antidote to the spell that cursed Conroy’s firstborn child. The ship was, coincidentally (or steered by fate), making its way into the Bay that very day in order for its crew to do a bit of shopping.