Cailleach

Chapter III ~ Narrated

And so Boudicca and Fion had a child. A girl, which is disappointing by political standards, but probably still better than Percival. The couple decided to name their child 'Cailleach'.

Boudicca never told Fion or Cailleach any of this, but her fear of Malicia grew with every day Cailleach grew older. She started thinking Malicia would enslave Cailleach, or worse. Her first plan was to warn her so she could escape herself. So Boudicca wrote a story, the one you have just been reading, and while it didn't have an ending, Cailleach fell in love with the story. It was all she'd ever do, reading the book. She would spend her entire day in the palace library in the armchair, reading the book over and over.

At parties, Fion would boast that his daughter could recite the whole story by memory, but Boudicca worried that Cailleach would become Queen and would forget about her kingdom, Upper Dous, because she would read the book over and over. The worst part was that she never figured out the story was about her.

One week before her 16th birthday, Boudicca realised that she could stop Malicia by getting Cailleach out. Out of Upper Dous, into some place Malicia would never find her. She decided on the northernmost kingdom, Franeth. The place was disease and criminals. The Franethian royal family had long given up hope of fixing it, and ruled from Capriaj (so many kingdoms, but you don't expect Tarialia to be made up of just one kingdom, do you?) If the Franethian royal family could be smuggled out, then surely a princess from Upper Dous could be smuggled in.

The carriage was the standard fairytale mode of transportation, horse-drawn. Useful sometimes, but not in this instance. "But Mother!" Cailleach complained, "Why does my birthday party need to be in Franeth? Why do I even need a birthday party? I just want to read my book!"

"Because, Cailleach, you are nearly sixteen, and you need to be married," Boudicca responded, sick of the complaining.
"Well, do I get to bring my book along?"
Boudicca sighed, and gave her daughter a rucksack filled with snacks and her book. Cailleach's smile lit up, and she wasted no time in rereading the book.

The journey was expected to have to cut through the Halkiney woods, where Malicia lived. Boudicca begged for an alternate route, but somehow going through a dangerous wood with dangerous witches and mists and rainfall (oh, you didn't know? Well, the rain and mist was so thick, you wouldn't be able to see your hands in front of you, so many died) was safer than a long road through a wasteland. Cailleach couldn't care less, as long as she could read her book.

The carriage was going up a mountain when it happened. There must have been a lizard scuttling across the road or something, because the horse pulling the carriage spooked and ran off the cliff.

The carriage rolled over and over, smashing into trees every second. The glass windows shattered, and the driver was killed with one of the shards. Eventually, the carriage got wedged in between two rocks, which stopped it.

The horse had been knocked against the trees so many times that it died. Not a death like that of the driver, but still was deeply saddening. If you were to find the body, you would see his eye bashed out, his body covered in bruises, and his legs broken.

Many ask of what happened to Cailleach in this time. Well, passersby had found the body of the horse and the body of the driver, and gave them both a proper burial. But they never found the princess. She had been knocked out when the carriage first started to roll. As said prior, the carriage was wedged between two rocks, so the door was jammed. The windows were too small to escape from. Cailleach had survived, but was trapped inside. When she finally awoke, she knew that this would be how she died, but she was wrong.