The Poison Princess (23 page)

Master chimed in again. “He incorrectly
thinks he is better than all of us. That he is the ‘sorcerer
supreme,’ as he puts it. Nonsense.”

Supreme didn’t reply, just raised an eyebrow
and looked at Master. Each of them was clearly the same man, but
they were so radically different than each other. She couldn’t
imagine what bizarre spell had done this to them.

“I don’t understand how you’re even able to
study here though,” the princess replied. “Isn’t this supposed to
be a prison?”

“In a way it is,” Prime replied.

“Your sister has allowed us to continue our
studies,” Master interrupted. “She lets us research but keeps us
here, where she thinks we can do no harm. She expects us to report
all our findings to her for her own devious uses. Thus, we must
give her bits of magic to placate her now and again.”

Ruby backed up a step, her eyes narrowing.
“So you answer to my sister, then?”

“We have no loyalty to her,” Prime assured
her.

“We just want to be left alone,” Overlord
added. “We each have our own hobbies, after all. I for one spend my
time trying to find the best way to conquer Nabiria.” He smiled
pleasantly at her.

“Right,” she found herself saying again.
“Well, it seems we all know that I was supposed to come here and
find you all. What I’m not clear on, is how you’re supposed to help
me.”

“We all know your situation,” Prime
explained. “That you’re infected with a poisonous magic energy,
what your sister has become because of the craggy hand demon, and
even the demon you yourself have now bonded with. We don’t believe
we’re expected to help with any of that though.”

“Then what?”

Supreme finally spoke up again. “We must
remind you of what you are fighting for.”

Ruby narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean
exactly?”

“When you reach the end of your path, you
will be forced to make a decision,” he continued. “That choice has
not yet been made, and even Mad cannot see the outcome. We hope to
shape your decision - to point you toward the proper path.”

“And what path would that be?”

“Choosing to save your sister.”

“I think you might be wasting your time then.
That’s all I want. Saving my sister is what I’ve been striving for
this whole time. She’s why I’ve done everything that I have.”

“Are you sure? Is it love for your sister or
hate for the craggy hand demon that is driving you?”

Ruby didn’t reply.

Supreme continued, “Your path has not been
one of light, princess. You have a terrible darkness inside you.
That is what the spell unleashed. You survived the assassination,
but left as you are, you will never be that same young woman you
were eleven years ago. You are different, and you must recognize
that fact. The darkness in your heart drives you now. You have
succumbed to every dark thought and desire that you’ve come across.
You’ve killed and maimed men and women, as though it meant nothing.
You’ve shackled yourself to a demon that you now lust after. You’ve
sworn vengeance against another demon that you have no way of
harming without also hurting your sister. Your motives must be
questioned, princess, and we are here to push you back on the right
path. Your sister can be saved, but it will require great
sacrifice.”

Ruby took a step forward, turned and walked
back the other way, beginning her ritual of pacing.

“Uh oh,” Scarlett said. “She’s pacing
again.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Prime inquired.

“Only if she’s considering that there’s
anything wrong with her current path. She’s fine the way she
is.”

“Fine?” Master asked. “Not according to what
we’ve seen.”

“She is on a dark path,” Supreme reiterated.
“We must correct it.”

“There’s nothing to correct. She’s perfect
the way she is.”

“What would a demon know?” Overlord suggested
with a certain snarl on his lips.

“More than some little--”

As she paced, the princess drowned out the
argument and thought about what the little men had said. Part of
her denied that there was any motive beyond saving her sister in
her mind, but another part of her recognized all the foul deeds she
had committed since being poisoned. All the death and destruction
she had caused. All the time spent desiring Scarlett. She’d only
recently killed a man just for touching her, though her demon had
found that an endearing gesture. Ruby recalled that it was greed
for power that had driven her down into the tunnels below the
Abyss. She had spent eleven years in a gluttonous dream world,
eating the toxic blissroot and forgetting about the problems of her
real life. There were entire days she didn’t recognize herself.

“What are you proposing exactly?” Ruby asked,
interrupting the argument but not halting her repetitive
movements.

Scarlett knew that no good could come of
this. “You can’t be really listening to this, my princess.”

Ruby raised a finger to silence her demon.
“There is no harm in hearing them out.”

Scarlett did not agree with such sentiments,
but she did as her master instructed and held her tongue. The
princess then turned back to the Hendriks to listen to the rest of
their speech.

Supreme continued, “Your sister has been
corrupted by the craggy hand demon. We believe we can carve through
that layer of darkness to allow you to speak with her.”

“I can… talk to Leina?” she asked.

“That is correct,” Prime answered.

“Unfortunately, it will be short lived,”
Master added. “And after your conversation has ended, she will know
that you are still alive.”

Overlord chimed in. “The craggy hand demon
will have her try to kill you. You’ll be exposed. You’ll have to
fight off many attackers.”

“You will see what he is doing to her,” Mad
said, his speech speeding up. “See the pain she’s in see the
darkness she is enshrouded by see who she used to be see what she’s
become under his influence see why you must save her see the new
color of the castle see the… Well you’ll be seeing a lot… I guess
is my point.”

“That is what we are proposing,” Supreme
finished for them.

Ruby thought about it for a moment. She
looked back to her demon who was already shaking her head. “I need
to see my sister.”

“Princess…” the demon replied. Scarlett loved
the darkness inside her. That was in large part what had attracted
her to the princess to begin with. Telling her that she needed to
think about why she was doing everything might mean weakening their
bond after it had just grown so strong. She couldn’t bear to think
about such a loss.

“Your demon must sit this one out,” Master
said. Turning to Scarlett with a sneer, he added, “You’ll only be a
distraction. Wait over there.” He pointed her to a table behind
them.

She walked by the smarmy sounding Hendrik,
sulking about her potential loss in Ruby’s dark character and sat
down in a chair at the table.

“We’ll need you to sit over here,” Prime
said, pointing to a comfortable looking chair.

The princess, too, complied, and the five
Hendriks formed another arc around the seat. They each closed their
eyes and muttered something under their breath, holding their hands
out toward the princess. Her eyes became quite heavy after a few
moments of watching them work their incantation, and she soon fell
into a slumber.

Ruby found herself in a wholly new but also familiar place. She was
in the same old drafty castle that she kept waking up inside, but
this wasn’t the same, as it had been. Nothing seemed quite real,
and there were significant chunks of the room that were colored
incorrectly or just plain missing. She thought it looked like a
mental reconstruction that wasn’t yet complete. She knew it was a
dream state. The princess recognized that fact immediately. After
eleven years inside a dream world, she now had adeptness for
spotting a fake.

Just as she did in that other dream, though,
Ruby woke up in her bed. This time she knew what she had to do. The
split Hendriks had given her the ability and time to speak with her
sister, as she hadn’t been able to do in over eleven years. Perhaps
this was a shared dream that they were both having, she thought.
Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to waste any time.

The princess hopped out of bed, still wearing
the clothes she had been wearing in the real world. She dropped the
hood of her cloak that she’d picked up from Slip and left her room
to find hallways that were barren of anyone and rather unusual.
They too had sections of the wrong color. They looked like a
combination of two different hallways, split unevenly and randomly
between them. One was what she was used to - the soft grey cobbled
stone lining the floors and walls, but the other was unfamiliar to
her eyes. The stones were blood red with black mortar between them.
Somehow, Ruby knew that this was her sister’s representation of the
castle. Perhaps this was what it looked like now, she thought.
After all the time she’d been queen, maybe she’d redecorated.

She ran down the empty halls towards Leina’s
room and pushed the door open, but found that no one was inside. It
too, looked to be a mixture of the castles. Ruby’s version was what
her sister’s room had looked like as a child, but the red castle
was left empty. That version of the room looked as though no one
had lived in it for some time.

That made sense, the princess realized. Leina
wasn’t a small child any longer. She was the queen of a sprawling
kingdom. Surely, she would spend her nights in the master bedroom,
her parents’ old room. Ruby left the girl’s room and went in search
of the woman’s. Her parents’ bedroom wasn’t that much farther, but
she found herself dreading finding it. She feared what her sister
had become without her and what the craggy hand demon had been
doing to her all those years. Her rage grew and covered up the
fear. The princess soon came to the door and, gripping the handle,
pushed inward.

What she found did not defy her expectations.
Leina and the craggy hand demon shared a bed. The sight may not
have surprised her, but it did disgust her. The thought of this
creature of the nether world taking advantage of a child for its
own purposes, defiling her sister, and killing everyone else she
loved enraged her.

He still wore his cream-white mask, and his
craggy arm and hand stretched over Ruby’s sister. The bed sheets
covered most of his body, but even in his sleep, the craggy hand
demon still wore a black robe with a hood that shadowed over
anything that the mask did not. Looking at him, Ruby couldn’t tell
if the dark entity was actually asleep or if he was really watching
her. It was disconcerting to her, to say the least.

The princess approached Leina’s side of the
bed, and she kneeled down to see her sister’s face. She had grown
so much in her absence. Leina was now a beautiful young woman,
though the corruption of the demon was plainly visible on her face.
Even in her sleep, she scowled, and her body shook and convulsed in
what looked like angry little spasms. Leina’s skin was nearly as
pale as Ruby’s, and her hair was just as dark as the poison the
princess secreted. The veins underneath her flesh stood out in
stark contrast, and there was almost a greasy sheen to her skin.
Seeing her for the first time since her ejection to the Abyss, Ruby
didn’t know if she really could help her sister. She looked to have
been lost to her long ago.

Despite her doubt about saving her sister,
the princess was there, and she had to take advantage of the
situation for whatever it was worth. She hadn’t had the opportunity
to speak with her sister for far too long. Ruby held out her hand
and grabbed her sister’s.

“Leina,” she whispered.

Her sister’s eyelids fluttered a bit, but she
didn’t wake.

Ruby didn’t know how this dream world worked
exactly, but she was worried she might wake the demon and lose this
chance. She shook her sister’s hand and repeated her name.
“Leina.”

Leina’s eyes opened so widely that the
princess nearly fell back in surprise. There was a blackness to her
eyes that was completely unrecognizable, but the darkness began to
recede, replaced by the blue that Ruby had known. The corruption of
her face suddenly vanished. The Hendriks’ sorcery must have started
working, she thought. Leina looked at her sister with such
confusion for a moment, like she couldn’t believe what she was
seeing to be true. She then clasped her eyes shut, and her whole
body shivered terribly. When they opened again, Leina stared into
Ruby’s face searching for the truth in it. She looked at her
sister’s hand on her own. The princess grasped it and smiled.

“Leina?” she repeated once more.

“Ruby?” her sister asked. “What’s happened? I
remember… What have I done?” She looked at the craggy hand sprawled
over her, and her face indicated that she might scream in terror at
any moment, but she held it inside.

“Come on. Let’s get you out of here, so we
can talk.”

Leina nodded and tried to shift out of the
bed. Ruby grabbed the craggy hand of the demon and lifted it up, so
her sister could get all the way out, but touching his craggy flesh
made her skin crawl. The princess then laid it back down and
watched as the demon shifted in his sleep. She wanted to kill him
right then and there. She doubted she could in that place though.
Besides, she thought, her sister would suffer for it. Instead, Ruby
turned back to face her sister who was shivering in a blood red
nightgown. The princess picked up a blanket from a chest at the end
of the bed and threw it over her sister’s shoulders.

“Come on. Let’s take a walk,” she suggested,
keeping her arm around her sister’s shoulders.

The pair of women then made it out into the
hallway and walked through the amalgamated castle structure that
both their minds had created.