December left her garden cruelly, like she never hoped it would.
All that was left was the smell of death on her doorstep. But she didn’t have a house anymore; all those walls that lived in the past crumbled down in an instant, all defeated by a sense of betrayal. But whom did she betray? She could come up with a few answers at the top of her head, none needing a real reason. Can a queen not make decisions? She can, but a mother, it seemed, had to be more cautious.
One, two. One, two.
She counted the steps that echoed through the prison, each louder than the other.
I won’t look up. There is no point. I will never look up again. I won’t let them see me like this.
“Mother.”
Maria looked up. She could see a purple gown and a crown through the bars that divided her from the world. She rose from where she lay on a dirty old bed slowly and, though the floor was slippery, steadily reached Diane, only the force parting them. Diane could crush it if she wanted to. If she only reached out her hand, she could touch the traitor. Would she caress or strangle her?
Droplets fell on top of Diane’s head. They were cold and dirty. She wondered if they would make her hair smell like corrosion. But the pounding that shook her head shook off the unwanted cries that she feared would drown the prison. She had been there before; it was not the same cell, but the same uneasiness and fear of knowledge. Diane couldn’t see her mother’s face. The light that shone from behind Maria, from the small window, made her face completely black, like it was never there. It provided Diane with relief; she did not know how long she would be able to look at Maria’s eyes without forgiving her everything. And she could not be forgiven. The sin was too important. Maybe Diane hadn’t woken up from her week-long nap. Maybe she never left Carcer; maybe Thomas’s flames had burned her instead.
“Did you come alone?”
“No, Thomas is waiting outside.”
Maria nodded. “Very nice of him. How are you feeling?” she asked, crushing with her mind the bars that divided her from the world.
“Dizzy,” the queen replied, “I slept a lot.”
Maria smiled with misty eyes. “I see. You always took long to wake up, even when you were a Raven.”
“I am still a Raven.”
Maria lowered her head. “In a way, I guess.”
“In every way, yes.”
The mother tried to reach her daughter, but the force stopped her. She could move no further than that cell. It was self-imprisonment, regardless of how you look at it.
“I did it for you,” Maria tried to explain.
Diane pushed her teeth into her tongue; had she been less flabby, she would have bitten it off. “How nice of you. I just can’t remember ever asking for anything similar.” Diane though it fortunate that that was the first thing Maria said; it would be easier to disregard Maria’s attempts at tripping Diane over her sense of morality.
“You will understand once you are a mother,” Maria replied.
Diane was in a mood to offend; she had such spiteful moments when she felt hopeless. “And if I die before that?”
Maria tried to come closer again. “You won’t. I made sure of it.”
“How?”
“I made a deal. My information for your safety.”
“With Him?”
“Yes?”
Diane nodded. “With Him, for me?”
“Yes.”
“No. Not for me. Never with Him for me. For you.” She inhaled; regardless of how big the cracks in the window were, they couldn’t let in enough air to mask that horrible mixture of scents. “You feel gulty for letting them ruin my life. Again and again. So you made up this story… no, you let Him make up this story of possible salvation that you could believe in. There was never any safety in my future.”
The treacherous ex-queen smiled. It could have as well been the truth, but it didn’t feel true. She didn’t feel true, the cell didn’t feel true. Only the wind that snuck in through the cracks in the window was familiar.
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“What information did you give Him?”
“Just your whereabouts and what you were doing. I guess He is as uncertain as you.”
Diane’s nostrils widened and her lips curled downwards. “Don’t you dare compare me to Him.”
Maria smiled. “But you are two sides of the same coin.”
“How can you…”
“You will see it one day. There is no reason to be spiteful.”
“You betrayed me!” Diane cried out.
“I did it for us,” Maria told her daughter, “So we could be happy.” She lowered her head. “ But you were never happy, were you?”
“Not since I was young,” Diane whispered. “The last time I was happy was when you sang to me.”
“Really?” Maria asked as she retreated to the back of her cell and lay on the creaking bed. “Will you sing for me, then?”
“I can’t,” Diane answered in an unusually raspy voice. “I don’t know if I’ll ever sing again.”
The ex-queen nodded. “I see.”
“That’s it?”
“What else were you expecting?”
Diane didn’t have enough strength to keep her head up anymore. “Tell me it was a lie. I will believe it. I will get you out.”
“I have made my bed. Now I must lie in it,” Maria replied. It was that simple. A single choice.
The words got so stuck in Diane’s mind that she had trouble getting rid of them for years to come. “Out of all the things anyone has ever done to me,” she whispered, “this is by far the worst. None of you have ever thought about me. I am nothing but a doll that all of you can toss around as you please. And now… now I have to watch my own mother, the only person in this whole world I was sure would never betray me… And what do I do now? What do I live for? What do I do?” There was silence. “Tell me!” she yelled out.
“Stop daydreaming, Diane.” Maria’s voice was loud and clear. There was no one else in the prison to interrupt its resonance; every wall stored it deep into its existence and repeated it as much as the green queen. “Doesn’t this show you well enough what happens when you disobey them? You may think otherwise now, but I have never, in my life, done anything without putting you first. I genuinely… I though He would keep you alive and that was enough for me. And He has kept His word.”
“But at what cost?”
“Trifling compared to the gain. You are still alive and well. Now be smart, do as you are told, and live the rest of your life in peace.”
“I didn’t want your help,” Diane chocked on her words. The Dove was crying again, but Thomas Hammer was not there to mitigate her sorrow. There was that pride again; even though her face was red and misty, Diane’s eyes showed determination and reproach. “I never asked for it,” Diane said again. She was standing tall, but her voice was trembling; the words she was holding back were so thick they disabled normal airflow. “I don’t want to be this. I just… I just want to feel normal. I don’t want to play any more games. I don’t want any more people to die. I just want…” Diane fell to her knees, the tears she had been bottling for the past fifteen years now flooding the Painron prison. And the worst part was, her mother’s embrace would never soothe her again.
Diane’s cries were so loud they almost didn’t hear the third criminal coming nearer.
“What a lovely place for a family reunion,” Brandon said in that typical smug way of his; only now he didn’t have the looks to back it up.
The frequency of his voice was Diane’s last straw. She accumulated the energy she had collected during the past week into her fist and charged towards her father, filled with such indescribable rage she would have, had he not been the King of Stone, smashed his skull into so many pieces they never would have been completely recovered. Luckily, he was more composed than her. So composed, in fact, that he created a thick stone block in front of his face and partially stopped her attack. She did, however, break his nose as well as smash the block and send a few pieces flying in his direction, so the collision left a few scars on his face. Maria was used to similar situations. She had seen that nose broken more times than she could count. Only this time he would not be able to fix it. The curses that were exchanged were so vile they made Thomas, who was patiently waiting outside, shiver and franticly spin around.
Diane was the color of the brick walls. She grabbed her father’s collar and pulled his head lower. “This is all your fault!”
But who was she really yelling at? Whose brain was she hoping to rip out?
“And how is that?” Brandon asked with a smile.
“You knew! You knew everything and you just let her!”
“I didn’t know it would come to this.”
“Diane Katherine Hunster!” Surprisingly, it was Maria’s voice that now made Thomas shiver. “This not the time nor the place!”
If she were not present, Diane never would have assumed her father was capable of showing such, or any, emotion. “I am afraid your mother is right,” he said. “What must be done, must be done.” If he was so perfectly composed, then why did his voice vibrate so?
“What is that supposed to mean?” Diane asked as she let go.
“It means that Maria has done some… unforgivable things.”
“No,” Diane let out, “no, we can’t let it happen. We must do something. We can hide her and…”
“Enough!” Maria yelled. “I don’t want our last moments together to be spent like this!”
“You will really kill her?!” Diane yelled at Brandon again. Her voice was steadily growing raspier and more masculine as time went on.
“No,” he replied without looking at her, “you will. The council has decided. The monarch will be the one to carry out the execution.”
“Brandon!”
“Yes, Maria?”
Diane went for his throat this time. It wasn’t that she had suddenly grown stronger, but that he didn’t defend himself this time.
She was slowly squeezing the life out of her father with gusto. “And if I kill you first and become a criminal myself? What then? Who will continue your precious bloodline? Can’t answer? Well, that’s a real shame.”
Diane couldn’t hear anything but buzzing and pounding. She was all alone with her father who would soon breathe no more. She had dreamt of that moment countless times when she was a trainee, even more once she became a Raven. He didn’t love, no, care for anyone at all, so she quickly grew dull to his sob story. Her mother was, it seemed to her, the only one able to swallow it. Who knows how that episode in Diane’s life would have ended had Thomas Hammer not have such a knack for timing? Probably not with a queen committing a murder.