Residue of a Torturer
The dower portrait of your mother hung over the dark throne room, a specter between you and your father. He reclined drunk over the ornately carved mahogany throne, his dressing gowns strewn open across his grotesque chest. For the first time in days, you were free from your chambers.
Your mother’s body wasn’t cold when he demanded you be locked in your chambers. No amount of spells, incantations or hexes could quell the grief that hung over you. Days passed listlessly while confined, with each dawn the hate grew behind your eyes and seeped into your veins until it boiled your blood and inhabited every part of your being. Per-tradition, you were now Queen. Even if the repulsive pig draped across your throne wouldn’t abdicate, the title of Queen was yours and any neighboring realm or kingdom would recognize that enough to aid your efforts in disposing him.
“Ah, the bastard Queen!” He greeted you, spitting a wad of tobacco at your feet.“As your father, I hope your time alone has calmed your hysterics. He propelled himself up, standing brazenly before you. “Loosing your mother-“ he faltered as if her ghost caught his guilt ridden attention, “was an unexpected tragedy. And the world isn’t safe for you to rule unmarried, especially with the dubious conditions of your birth.”
Your tongue lay heavy in your mouth, thick with anger and cautiously preventing the bile creeping up your throat. You were a woman grown in truth, but the softer curve of your stomach and thighs made you appear younger. Memories of horrid state dinners crosses your mind, his voice like the sound of rotten soggy wood crumbling, mocking your softness and your size wondering if you were the true born daughter of such a witch, why you didn’t change your shape.
Your mother would always rebuke his insults, as the Queen and a powerful Witch she would pass on her legacy to you just as her mother had. It wasn’t like passing on a sword or a crown but like a flowering inside you, one that discovered things and places inside you that would’ve remained hidden for women outside the blood-line, those not favored by the Goddess.
As he slunk back you surveyed the crumbling room, once so alive with diplomats and feasts the gold had faded from the room through the course of your mother’s short and sudden illness.
There were two of his guards at the back of the hall, beyond the throne, one behind your back poised by the door, and any number of them waiting behind it. You were surrounded, forced to listen to his ramblings.
“I’m certain it was no intention of your mother’s for you to rule unwed. As it stands, she had made provisions for you.” The way his eyes sneered told you that he had made provisions in her name. His audacity loosened your tongue.
“You false, manipulative cur. The women of my family have ruled alone for centuries. When we take a companion it is our decision to award them the title of consort and nothing more. Anything else,” you gestured at him and the forged document he held out to you, “is treason.”
‘Treason’ hung in the air, sparking icy electricity to reverberate in the syllables. The King Regent, had been accused of treason and all the proof was in the lopsided crown he wore as if it was his.
Behind you, the guard at the door unsheathed his sword his hands fumbling to stay quiet amid the deafening tension.
“Silence! You’ll respect your Father and your King. I will see all your mother’s wishes are carried out to the letter. She signed a contract for your marriage. Part of a new, trade treaty.”
The line of his smirk stoked the fire coursing through your veins.
“What of her will? Oh kind and benevolent father,” you mocked him, “will you follow that?” The square of your shoulders never wavered, the resolution unsettling the would-be-tyrant.
“Your mother was not well when she wrote that will, I’m conducting an investigation of her private chambers for a version free of manipulation.”
The only private rooms in the castle were your mother’s sanctuary. Where she taught you how to read from spell books over candle light, how to sense the energy in the air and honor the great stars above who blessed your craft. The last tangible reminder of her legacy, corrupted by his filthy hands. He wouldn’t find another will, but you knew looking at the scroll in his hand, he could fake one.
“If you’re quite done interrupting. I’ve already asked your lady’s maid to prepare your things. You’re leaving within the hour.” He tried not to smile at the shock on your face, forcing the scroll into your hands.
‘By the Order of Queen Rowena, this document once signed promises the hand of my daughter to whomever her benefactor prefers. Due to her dubiously base position I only ask she be treated according to her status therein.’
By the Gods, he’d doomed you. The arrangement of a benefactor for the Queen of an entire kingdom, as if she was a pauper deserving only to serve some fat tax collector until he chose to marry her off for a better piece of property. The language was cold, distinctly unlike your mother’s letters which were always touched by a little magick to ensure a safe delivery. You didn’t recognize the signature next to her’s at the bottom.
You flinched feeling his rank breath on your ear. “See there little bastard? Your mother’s mark. And next to it…that of Odin, Allfather, King of Asgard.”
Your heart dropped, to instruct another royal family, one of considerable power to treat you according to a base status was pleading you to slavery. What use would they find for a commoner in their court?
The Allmother had been a reliable ally of your mother. Although your magicks came from different sources, there was much to learn from each other. By all the gods you prayed she still lived, and could recognize the only child your mother had been so proud of.
Your breathing hitched as he turned to walk away. The fire licked down to your fingertips urging you on to knock him down, the crown flying off his greasy hair. As soon as the blow fell, you felt guards rush and pull you back by your arms, prepared to drag you out of the throne room.
“You vile creature- I hex thee,” your voice trembled with anger as you struggled against the guards intending to finish your curse at any cost.
“To a miserably short life. Filled with all the pain and death you cast upon my mother! You will die forsaken by all in a crumbling and decaying castle, left for the rats to feast upon until even the villages by the river can smell the foulness of your corpse!” As the guards drug you screaming from the room you offered one last promise, “you can’t kill us both!”
He screamed something to the guard dragging you, but the waves of blood pounding in your ears drowned them out. To seal the curse you bit your lip and let the blood trail down your face and to the floor.
Even if you had to murder your way back here, for your mother’s sake, for her memory, you’d see him in ruin.
The euphoria from completing the hex was the last thing you felt before something crashed into your skull, turning the world to black forcing you to the ground like one of the ancient pillars already starting to rot inside the throne room.
You awoke confused in the back of a stage-coach. Your lady’s maid, Halla holding your head in her lap, ensuring the injury wasn’t bumped as you were forced away from home, and into the uncertainty of the future.