Wicked Stepmother

Betrayed

I felt as if I was frozen, paralysed. When I saw my father coming I thought he was going to rescue me. Marsha helped by uttering the significant words, "lost the baby". My heart leapt. I would be home soon.

I was not surprised that my father was angry, but I was surprised at his disloyalty to me, that he wanted to disown me or to bury me away in some distant marriage no longer part of the kingdom, no longer his heir. I could  have hated Orion, but Kiora had not hated me and besides he was just as much a pawn as I now saw I had been.

I was weakened and still bleeding and I could move and speak but little. When I saw the coldness of my father's countenance toward me, the way he calmly disposed of my dreams, my very identity and then sat down to lunch richly on food these dwarves had laboured so hard over, eating many times what one of us would have eatern, perhaps more than we would use in a meal for us all.

Since I could do nothing I reflected then, on how much my life had changed and how perhaps before I had struggled over pastry and washing and weeding and fishing I would have been like my father- but not so easily to turn my back on a daughter surely. And then Lara's voice said in my head that the "child" I had got rid of might have been exactly such a daughter so perhaps I was no better than my father. But then I thought of how much better to have never come out of the womb and never taken breath and not experienced such betrayal. That assuming the parasite-thing in the womb of an unwillingly conscripted woman could be called a "child", and assuming even that this "child" had rudimentary consciousness (which I for one feel inclined to doubt) then still better for that child to be choked off at that point than to become nothing more than a judged inconvenience to be married off.

And I thought of Kiora and her family doing the same to her for all that she was blameless (too blameless by half the little priss). But thoughts of Kiora reminded me of her reaction to my plight. She had not agreed with me- she had pleaded with me to do things her way, a series of her ways. She had threatened to abandon me in my stubbornness but she had not. She had come to see that I needed to be faithful not just to some sort of a "choice" but to who I really was and could be. Once realising this she had helped me.

And the cowardly huntsman, but how I had underestimated him and the richness of his life nevertheless. He was to me a plaything, a warm and attractive body, a series of "experiences" but he had also worked as hard as the dwarves worked and his life was more than empty recreations. I wondered then what good I or Kiora or my father did to anyone. But Kiora had done me good. She was more than nothing and therefore it was in me to be more than nothing too. And I had refused to hate Orion, when circumstances had seemed to demand it.

To the royals, such as the misfit, cast-out dwarves were nothing and such as the huntsman were less than us. To anyone who worked for a living perhaps the royals were nothing- or a series of inconveniences and anxieties only. But each of us inside our own secret heart was something and the question was at any moment "Who am I and how do I act as myself?" also "Who is this person and how do I honour that?"

But my pleasant and spiritual seeming reflections were broken into by the prince deciding that I was "beautiful" without me once having spoken or even moved. And I answered my own second question, "this is someone who does not really see me, and I can only dishonour that because I know that I exist." And yet my heart was broken and my tongue tied and I remained silent. My father sold me it seemed for his own reputation and for his own ignorance that he chose to preserve over a once beloved daughter. He did love me, although perhaps like the prince he did not see me.

I was placed upon a horse, a lot of strange men with unfamiliar scents surrounding my bed and moving me onto the litter and the litter balanced on horses that were not Seagull. The dwarves did not even say "goodbye" out of fear of the royals' great need to remain ignorant that dwarves have feelings and real lives that are significant to them no doubt. Lara, in an uncharacteristically rebellious act whispered that she would miss me. And before that moment I would have said it was her pie-crust I was going to miss.

But the simply speaking, pig-headed, gentle and hard-working woman (half a woman in stature I suppose) who constantly set off her sneezing with too much pepper or with the blossoms of any plants whatsoever was a person and saw a person when she looked at me. Only now I realised what a small-minded and insignificant person she probably saw me considering she never insisted I do my share of the work.

But she cared for me, it was in her whisper and in her face. 

I had always gone where I had wanted to go, and left people on my own whim or to pursue my own ends. Now I was carried away and a person who cared for me was powerless to prevent it. For some reason I felt that this made me like Kiora and I dreaded the thought that I would become just like her- imprisoned for life not as a true queen but as someone's pet queen, a consort and a mother.

But I said not a word, neither did I move.