Unrescued: A Broken Fairytale [Twisted Fairytales Book 1]

[Julian POV]

The Prince arrives at the appointed hour. Candles have been lit. The maiden waits, lovely and silent as a held breath, and lifts her eyes to his — and in that moment—

“No,” I said.

—in that moment the Prince knows—

“I really don’t.”

The maiden across the table blinked at me. Not at the empty air past my left shoulder, where I had, apparently, just told nobody anything. At me. Which was fair. I was the one who’d sat down, said good evening, and immediately begun bickering with a candle.

I cleared my throat. “Sorry. It’s — nothing. You look — ” I caught myself before lovely, because lovely was on the menu the Narrator was trying to hand me, and I’d made a policy of not ordering off it. “You look well.”

She did not look well. She looked like a deer that had walked into a kitchen and was now being addressed by the cook.

Behind her, four tables over — close enough to reach us in three strides, far enough that a casual observer would not read us as together — Lara was systematically dismantling a whole roast fowl with her hands. She had a mug of something in front of her that the innkeeper had brought without being asked, on the theory, I suspected, that a woman built like that was going to drink whatever she wanted and it was better to be helpful about it. She caught my eye over a drumstick. Lifted her eyebrows. Everything all right?

I did the smallest possible shake of my head. Define all right.

She went back to the bird.

The maiden’s beauty is such that the Prince finds himself, for a moment, unable to—

“I can speak,” I muttered. “I am, in fact, speaking. Right now.”

The maiden’s eyes went wider. I redirected the mutter into a cough.

“So,” I said, at a volume meant for a human being seated across a table and not for the ambient organizing principle of the evening, “I’m — glad you agreed to this. Which — I want to say — is not — ” I stopped. Started again. This part I had rehearsed. “This is not a date.”

She stared at me.

“It’s dinner,” I clarified. “Dinner. Between — people. Who have met. Just now.”

The Prince’s modesty—

“It’s not modesty,” I said, “it is a factual clarification, and I would appreciate — ”

The maiden made a small, wounded sound.

I shut my mouth. Every muscle above my collar went hot. I was, I registered distantly, being rude to a young woman who had come to dinner with a stranger and been rewarded with the stranger arguing, aloud, with a voice she could not hear, about the technical status of a meal she had presumably been looking forward to. She was so still she was almost trembling with it. Her hands were folded in her lap so tightly the knuckles had gone the color of bone.

The candle guttered between us. The seawater smell — which I had noticed three times now and each time attributed to the inn being near a coast that it was not, in fact, near — rose again, faintly, off her hair.

I softened my voice. Set my hand near hers on the table without touching it. “Forgive me. I’m — the evening got away from me. Let’s start again. Would you tell me your name?”

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

She closed it. Opened it. Her throat worked. She looked at me with an expression I had, up to that instant, been filing under shy.

I stopped filing it under shy.

The maiden, overcome, cannot yet—

“Quiet,” I said, and I did not say it to her.

She closed her mouth. Swallowed. Tried again. Her lips shaped something — a word, a name, I couldn’t tell — and no sound came with it. Her eyes filled.

“All right,” I said, quickly, quietly. “All right. It’s all right. Don’t — please don’t — ”

The maiden’s silence is the sweetest of virtues in a—

“It is not," I said, through my teeth, “and you will stop."

Her hand jerked on the tablecloth. I had, I realized, just snarled — out loud, at nothing, in front of a woman who could not speak and had begun to cry. I was doing so well. I was, in the running annals of Julian’s attempts to not make things worse for imperiled young women, having what could charitably be called a personal best.

I turned my hand palm-up on the table. Slow. The way you’d offer a hand to a horse. “I am — I am so sorry. I promise you I am not — that was not for you. Nothing I have said in the — you know what, let’s — let’s set the last five minutes on fire and try again. Yes?”

She looked at my hand.

She looked at my face.

After a long moment, and with the deliberateness of someone conducting a diplomatic experiment, she put two fingertips against my palm.

They were cold. Not shivering-cold — sea-cold. The kind of cold that came from inside someone.

I did not react to it. I had been trained, by two years of romantic and domestic proximity to a woman whose baseline body temperature could preserve meat, to not react to a cold hand. This was, it turned out, a transferable skill.

“There,” I said, gently. “Hello. I’m Julian. Most people call me Jules.” A pause. “Would you — is there any way you can tell me your name?”

She withdrew her fingers. Considered. Then, with the air of someone attempting a task that had not been on the day’s agenda, she picked up a spoon.

She dipped it in the water pitcher.

She drew, on the dark wood of the table, a shape. A curve. Another curve joining it. A tail. Her hand shook slightly, and the water-line wobbled, but the picture was legible before it began to fade: a fish.

She looked up at me. Waiting.

“Fish,” I said.

She nodded, urgent.

“Your name is — Fish.” I heard how that came out. “Which is — a fine name. Uncommon. I’ve never met a — ”

She shook her head, hard, and jabbed the spoon at the fading drawing. Drew it again. Bigger this time. A body, a tail, and — she added, carefully — a suggestion of long streaming hair, coming off the top of it. She underlined the hair. Twice.

Something in my chest went very still.

“Ah,” I said.

The Prince begins to understand—

"Shut up," I said, without looking up, and to my mild surprise it did.

I looked at the woman across the table. At her too-pale skin. At the seawater smell. At her deer-in-a-kitchen posture, which I had, God help me, been reading as nerves, and which was in fact the posture of a creature that had been walking, all evening, on ground that was actively wrong for it.

I did not look down at her feet. I very deliberately did not look down at her feet.

“I need,” I said, in the calm, level voice I had learned to use in rooms where things were about to go badly, “to ask you a question, and I need you to nod or shake your head. Can you do that?”

She nodded.

“Are you,” I said, “in trouble.”

She nodded. Once. Small.

“Are you,” I said, “in trouble now."

She nodded again. Faster. Her eyes filled a second time and this time a tear got loose and made it as far as her jaw before she caught it on the back of her wrist. She was still trying, I noticed, to be polite about it.

I sat back very slowly in my chair. Across the room, Lara had gone still over her bird. She had not looked up. She did not need to look up. Lara could feel the temperature of a table from four away the same way she could feel weather coming.

The Prince, moved by the maiden’s plight, resolves to—

“No,” I said, softly, “I don’t think you get to narrate this part.”

The candle guttered. The seawater smell rose. The maiden across from me — whose name I did not know, whose story I did know, and whose story was one of the worst ones — watched my face with the patient, terrible hope of someone who had been told, by something very persuasive, that a stranger’s kindness was the only thing standing between her and death.

I looked at her. I made my face gentle. I said, “All right. All right. We’re going to figure this out. You are going to be all right.”

I did not know, when I said it, whether it was true.

I stood up, dropped coin on the table for a meal we had not eaten, and went to get Lara.

I crossed the room. Lara was already licking her fingers, one at a time, methodical, in the way of a person clearing the decks. She didn’t ask. She waited.

“I need you,” I said, low, “to come and be extremely calm at a woman for me.”

“Mm.”

“She can’t speak. I don’t want to say more here.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And she’s — ” I glanced back. The maiden was still sitting exactly as I’d left her, hands folded, waiting for the Prince to return and resume being the only thing between her and death. “She’s very frightened. Of the wrong things. Please do not — ”

“Do not what.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. What I had been about to say was do not be alarming, which was — Lara was not alarming, Lara was a woman calmly finishing a bird, and if she was alarming to a stranger that was the stranger’s problem and not something I got to manage on her behalf. I had lectured a baron about this exact category of assumption not four months ago.

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind. Just — come.”

She stood. She was, as she was always, a great deal of person to have stand up next to you. The maiden, across the room, saw her and did a small full-body flinch that she tried very hard to convert, mid-flinch, into a polite smile.

The Prince returns with a companion, and the maiden—

“You,” I said, under my breath, “are on notice.”

“Who is on notice,” said Lara, pleasantly, walking beside me.

“Nobody. The concept of narrative causality. Please keep walking.”

“Mm.”

We reached the table. I sat. Lara did not sit — Lara took the chair from the empty table beside ours, turned it around, and straddled it backward, arms folded across the top, which put her at approximately the maiden’s eye level and also communicated, without a word spoken, that she was not here to eat. The maiden had gone the color of a page.

“This is Lara,” I said. “She is my — ”

I stopped.

I had, in the last two years, become very fluent in what Lara was not. She was not my wife. She was not my mistress. She was not my lady, God’s blood, she’d have laughed for a week. She was not my escort, she was not my companion in the delicate sense the word had picked up in certain courts, she was not — and here was the tricky part, the part I could feel the Narrator leaning in for — she was not my friend, which was true in the sense that friend was a laughably inadequate word for what she was, and which the Narrator would hear and immediately try to make into ah, then what IS she, and set a candle down on it. I had once, at a checkpoint, told a bored guard she was my associate, and Lara had made me pay for that in small, deniable ways for a month.

The maiden was staring at me. Waiting for the end of the sentence.

Lara was also waiting for the end of the sentence, with the specific serene patience of a person who was going to be interested to hear what I picked.

" — she’s with me,” I said. “She helps. She is very good at helping. And she is not — ” I gestured, vaguely, at the candle, at the ruined evening, at the whole apparatus of the not-a-date — “part of this. This is — this was — ”

I could feel my face getting hot. The maiden’s eyes were tracking between us with the polite bewilderment of a person watching a man try to explain, to a woman she had assumed was his wife, that his wife was not his wife, at the dinner where he had ostensibly been intending to propose to her.

“This isn’t a date,” I said, finally, weakly, to the maiden. “I want to be very clear about that. This was never — I brought Lara because — the last one bit me, and — ”

“Julian.”

“Yes.”

“You are making it worse.”

“I am aware.”

Lara turned to the maiden. Her voice, when she spoke to her, was different — not softer, exactly. Lower. The register a person used with a spooked animal, minus any of the condescension. “Hello,” she said. “I am not going to touch you. You do not have to smile at me. Nod if you understand.”

The maiden nodded.

“He is having a difficult evening,” Lara said, “as you have noticed. He is a good man. He is going to help you. I am going to help him help you. We are going to leave this room now, together, and go somewhere you can — ” she glanced at the drawing, fading on the wood, and her face did something small and complicated that was gone before I could read it — “somewhere you can rest. Nod if that is all right.”

The maiden nodded. A tear got loose again. She did not try to catch it this time.

“Good,” Lara said. She stood. She held out one hand, palm up, the same gesture I had used, and did not close the distance — waited for the maiden to close it. The maiden did, slowly, and Lara’s fingers folded around hers with the exact, controlled gentleness of a woman who could crush a man’s hand to paste and had spent her whole life not doing so.

I put more coin on the table. Enough for the meal, and the trouble, and the story the innkeeper was going to be telling for a week.

We went out into the night.

The Prince, with the maiden safely at his side—

“I swear to every god listening,” I muttered, “including the ones I have specifically asked not to listen — ”

“Who are you talking to,” Lara said, absently, scanning the yard.

“Nobody. The — you know.”

“Mm.”

Behind us, the inn door swung shut on its hinges. In front of us, the road went pale under a rising moon, and somewhere out along it was a cabin, and a man in chronic pain who was going to have opinions, and a working nobody in their right mind would ask a dragon to do; and beside me was a woman who had walked out of the warm room without asking a single question, because I had asked her to; and beside her, holding her hand with the careful grip of a drowning sailor, was a girl who thought she was going to die at dawn if I did not marry her.

I had not, I reflected, wanted to come to dinner.