Kato continued. “The king and queen didn’t think Blanc was good enough for the prince because of who she was and who her parents were.” He’d brushed on a touchy subject, and I could practically feel Rexi stiffening beside me. “So the king enlisted the help of a warlock to curse her, but it backfired.” And that brushed on a touchy subject for me.
Kato didn’t say anything else and the book took over. The images bounced and sometimes broke with a little static, but it was still clear what was happening. Blanc and her prince held hands and took a stroll in the forest, but a dark figure lurked under a nearby tree. He offered the couple a beautiful white blossom, which the prince accepted and then gave to Blanc. Shifting again, the picture changed to a close-up of the prince kissing Blanc. That’s when things went wrong. The prince started sputtering and coughing. Water trickled from his lips, slow at first, then gushing out. Blanc watched him with a look of helpless horror as he drowned.
I gasped sharply, and I’m sure my expression matched Blanc’s almost exactly. “This can’t be right. The handsome prince never dies. That’s not how it works.”
“Oh wake up,” Rexi said, slamming her hand against the wood. “When are you going to move past your sheltered little palace mind-set and realize that your precious Storymakers aren’t real? They’re stories told to little children so they won’t be afraid of the Jabberwock under the bed and will have nice dreams of happy ever afters. It’s time to grow up. Bad things happen, parents sell their children to pay taxes, dreams only come true if you have enough money, and there’s no one up there answering my prayers. Or yours.” She stormed out of the room.
There was nothing I could do or say to stop her, because in that moment, I realized I knew nothing about Rexi or what pain had scarred her enough to bear such hatred toward her creators.
But she was wrong. She had to be wrong. Life made no sense otherwise. Someone had to author the rules that we lived by. As long as you followed those, the Makers made sure it all worked out. If no one else was guiding this story, then that meant… My home. My parents. Who would bring them back?
“Rule #61: When you are the guest, it is imperative to treat your host with the utmost respect, following his every command. Even the stupid ones.”
—Definitive Fairy-Tale Survival Guide, Politics Edition
19
Princess and the Beast
Rexi’s rant upset and unbalanced me more than I let show on the outside. I tried to match my expression to the woman in the corner: stoic and blank.
Neither one of us followed after Rexi, and when she didn’t come back, Kato scooted into her spot and continued the story. “Like almost everyone, Blanc had worshipped and prayed to the Storymakers her whole life. Now she blamed them for how her story turned out. She lashed out, using the curse and her magic to take revenge.” In the picture, Blanc no longer smiled or laughed. The white, which previously seemed bright and innocent, now looked stark and empty. She stalked toward the shadowy man hiding in the tree. The warlock appeared to beg and plead, but she drew him in and kissed him. Within moments, the warlock lay on the ground—drowned in the middle of the forest.
I had seen enough and turned away.
Clearing his throat softly, Kato brought my attention back to him. “But she wasn’t done yet.” Kato nudged me back to face the book. “Still unhappy, she decided to find the Storymakers and force them to rewrite her story. But to do that, she would need a lot more power and help. She found an ally in a powerful chimera, Bestiamimickos, who was also unhappy with his story. He loved a princess who would not love him back since he wasn’t human royalty. So Blanc showed him how to use life magic to control beasts and named him king of them all. In return, he brought an army of chimeras to make war on the Storymakers and, together, to force them to revise their fates.”
I’d already heard Bob’s history of the first Beast King, and I liked that version, the lovey-dovey one, better. I watched what Kato and the book wanted to show me anyway. The images moved rapidly. Blanc, along with other witches and the chimeras, burned through villages—and Blanc no longer had to kill by kiss. Somehow, she was able to draw all the water out of a person, leaving them mummified.
“She began stealing magic, at first only taking from the wicked. But it twisted her soul. When she realized that the strongest power came from life magic, she started stealing life instead. Drunk on her new power, she decided that the only way to correct her story and bring back her prince was to erase everything and start again. She proclaimed herself the empress of all story and wiped away entire species, whole fairy tales.”
I looked over at the real live Blanc again, behind her wall of flames. There was no evidence of the young girl who wanted to be good despite what her parents were. She had twisted into something else. Maybe the curse had tainted her. Maybe she had always been destined to be evil. I understood a little bit about loss and pain, about pushing and fighting against your destiny. But to take it out on everyday people… “What kind of villain does that?”