shoulder the sky
(read on ao3)
Here is how the story goes on: mud up to her ankles, the buzz of magic lingering in the air like gulping down static, and the stench of rot. Elody is more than familiar with the smell, knows her way around a battlefield, knows the ways in which death announces itself. It blows in from ahead of her, on the road, and she almost—almost—goes around.
There are times when a fight is needed. There are times when a fight is best avoided. Her numbers are few; she picked a handful of her knights to accompany her, on this one, last, desperate search for allies. If she leads them into a trap, walks them into something for which they are unprepared, then that will be the end.
She is tired. But she is not ready for that.
So she almost gives the order to find a different path. But the rot is thick, and smells like not just flesh, but also wood and cloth and perhaps fruit, something growing that undoubtedly is no longer. And that buzz of magic—difficult to ignore, that. She is here for anything that could give her an edge. Anything to reclaim her kingdom, save her people.
She calls her knights to a halt.
“I’m going to investigate,” she says. “If I do not return, or if you hear me give the order to do so, proceed back to Shoeberg. I don’t want anyone taking foolish risks.”
They want to protest, she can tell. They will not. She is their princess.
(armor is so much heavier than a gown, but she has learned that a crown and a helm weigh much the same)
It is raining, a steady drizzle. The mud sucks at her boots. Mace in hand, she walks forward, and the buzz grows stronger. Rattling her bones, her teeth. She grimaces.
She sees the pumpkin first, massive and dead, hollowed out and falling apart. There is furniture scattered about here, and it sends shivers up her spine even before she understands what she is seeing, sees the twisted malformity, sees a human face here and a human arm there and she can only hope that this was furniture transformed and not people, because either way is grotesque and terrible but the latter would be worse.
There are bodies. People. Animals. Much of it not fresh. Splintered wagons. Remnants of armor, swords. Torn clothing, bones picked clean and bones still glistening. It is easy to guess what they fell victim to, and she watches the furniture warily, her arm loose and ready, mace held steadily. But it does not stir, and though the magic still hangs here like a plague of locusts, it feels purposeless. Aimless. An aftershock, a release, a last violent cry.
She picks through the battlefield. This is familiar. It is not only mud on her boots. She finds fresher bodies; a few days old at most, only just begun to decompose. An old man, clutching a book to his chest; she wonders if it was worth dying for. A young woman, briars curling around her skin, and further inspection reveals that the thorns grow from her flesh rather than the ground. They weave around her like an embrace, and Elody does not try to move her.
She finds the young girl between two hills. Her stoicism cracks; she has seen many corpses. Not so many dead children. The girl is surrounded by furniture, some of it whole, some of it hacked to pieces. She fought.
Elody crouches. Closes the girl’s eyes. Breathes in and out.
There are more bodies, older. Dead horses. A cat wearing a cape and boots, someone’s beloved pet or a sentient creature in its own right; impossible to say which. Torn belongings, rusted swords, a child’s doll, a puppet half devoured by termites and covered in moss.
She finds the fairy. Dead. Dead for a long time, by the looks of her, though the strength of the magic here tells her that that cannot be right. The fairy’s face is frozen in a howl, her eyes glassy and wild and something deeply unnatural about her state of decay.
Elody does not think that there is a threat here. Not anymore. She feels a bit of relief,
(she does not hold with fairies, not their promises and not their curses)
but mostly just an emptiness. Perhaps determination, if she is feeling generous.
One last time, she inspects the fairy. Just to be sure that she is dead. No threat.
Satisfied that she has discerned the source of the rot, she almost does not see Gerard.
Almost.
(here is how the story goes on, and here is why: the story must go on because the story is ever after, and there is no beginning to that and there is no end, because the ever after is implied in the once upon a time and no beginning is true and no ending either because there is always another story and it does not stop)
(once upon a time, there was a frog prince in a pond)
(once upon a time, there was a boy who was a child who was a child around the wrong person)
(once upon a time, there was a princess with a golden ball)
(once upon a time, there was a girl who made a friend)
It doesn’t register, at first. She sees him. Knows him. Thinks, what is he doing here? Thinks, that’s odd, because she doesn’t know where her husband is because the castle has fallen and her people are scattered and she has had so many other things to worry about than tracking down which group of refugees Gerard fled with, which band of children and elderly. Because Gerard fled, of course; she never considered he would do anything else.
(because he is alive, of course; she never considered he could be anything else)
The image is so incongruous. Gerard belongs in the castle, eyes shining and cheeks flushed with wine. Gerard belongs in the castle, willfully ignoring the rest of the world and all it has come to. Gerard belongs in the castle, trying to pretend that his eyes have not changed and his skin has not grown sallow
(she is not blind)
and that everything is just fine.
Gerard has never belonged on a battlefield. No matter how often she wished that he could just be there for her, with her, at her side. He does not belong on a battlefield.
She takes a step. Stumbles. Her knees sink into the mud next to him. The mud is not just mud.
“Gerard,” she says. Her voice is a whisper, a rasp. She puts her hand on his chest, just over where the glass shard protrudes. His body is stiff. Flies land on his face; she bats them aside, but they come back.
He is far more froglike than the last time she saw him. How long ago was that? She doesn’t remember.
(she does)
His hands are bloody, torn to shreds. One of them lies near the glass—a spear, if anything, though no spear she has ever seen the like of.
The flies keep returning. She can’t get them off.
“Gerard,” she says again, like that will do anything, like saying his name will call him to her, will force life into a heart that stopped beating days ago when she wasn’t there. She feels a scream in her throat, and she swallows it, swallows the scream and swallows the nausea and the only noises that escape her are little hitching gasps, because it has been a very long time since she cried and it seems that she cannot allow herself to do so even now, not properly.
This is no place for you, she wants to tell him. Wants to shout. She has never shouted at him. Not even when she was angry. And she used to be angry, used to resent him, and all of that is suddenly gone because he is gone and there will be no chance to be angry at him again, and there will be no chance to fix what they had or even decide if she wanted to, if the war ever ended and she came home alive.
This is no place for you. What were you doing here?
She reaches for the shard. She does not want the shard to be in him. She reaches for it, slices her hand open. Retreats.
The damn flies are—
And he didn’t even know how to fight.
He didn’t know how to fight, and this fight found him all the same, and he is dead. He has laid here for days, and he is going to lay here longer, because this glass spear pins him to the ground and she cannot take it out. So ends Prince Gerard of Greenleigh, far from home, far from family, far from anyone who lo—
Even her mind cannot form around the word.
(this is no place for you she wants to scream and something in her wails and this is no place for me and it is no place for you or me but she has not had the luxury of caring about that for so long and she cannot start now and she cannot go back to when things were easy and good and falling in love with a frog was the simplest thing in the world and when she looked at him she felt sparks and fireworks and not hollow frustration and not this, not this gaping wound this gaping nothing where a person should be)
(this is how the story goes on, and who dictates, in the end, what is a place for a prince and princess?)
The flies—
“Get off of him,” she says. Barely a noise at all. “Leave him be.”
She swats at them. They return. She leans over his face, holds him. Holds him like she should have been here to hold him days ago, because she does not remember the last time she held him, and now, this will be the last time, and he is dead.
Hitching gasps. Nausea rolling in her stomach. A bleeding hand. An embrace unfelt. The whisper of his name.
This is what she can offer. Her eyes are dry. She can’t keep the flies away.
(the story goes on, and this world does not end because Gerard has left it)
----------
(When she departs from the castle for the final time, she has not slept in the same bed as him for more than three weeks. He still comes to see her off. He has taken to wearing shirts with increasingly high collars. She has pretended not to notice his lack of a nose, or the way his eyes are drifting slowly apart.
She has wondered, occasionally, if it hurts. She has not asked. Asking would require talking about it. She has not talked to her husband about anything in a while. She’s stopped trying.
“You won’t be gone long, right?” he asks. He shifts from foot to foot. Agitation. Maybe discomfort. He seems to be having a little more trouble with his stance today, with standing up straight.
A million responses flit to her tongue. She chooses a more neutral one.
“I’ll be gone for as long as it takes to eradicate the threat Snowhold poses us,” she says.
“Right, but like—that’s not gonna take—” He trails off, gesturing.
There is so much fear in his eyes. And it’s not that she didn’t know. Not that she didn’t know Gerard has never been able to stop looking over his shoulder whenever the dogs bray. Not that she didn’t know that some part of Gerard has always stayed in that pond.
It’s just that she dismissed it. Thought the past was in the past. And for a long time, that worked fine, until the shadows knocked at their door.
How much can she blame him, really, for wanting to draw the curtains and hide in the illusion of safety?
“It will take however long it takes,” she says. “I’ll—I’ll try not to be long.”
It’s the only comfort she’s willing to give him. She knows very well that this might take months, or years. Snowhold’s might is nothing to scoff at, and Greenleigh is not a large kingdom. This will not be an easy war; there is no such thing as an easy war to begin with.
She might not return at all.
But Gerard can’t confront that. She looks at him and feels nothing, and she does not have the energy to try, once again, to explain to him how important this is, how great the danger and how heavy her duty. She certainly does not have the energy to try, once again, to persuade him to take on some of the burden that she once thought they would share.
So: pithy words that she knows he’ll accept and wishes he wouldn’t.
“Okay,” Gerard says. So easily. Bitterness flares in her chest. “Just—stay safe, alright?” And then, he tacks on, “We’ll have a celebration when you get back. A big one. Party of the year. We’ll make all your favorites.”
Do you know what those are? she thinks, which is uncharitable, because he does. And then, Do you understand how little that matters to me right now? which is far closer to the mark.
“Alright, Gerard,” she says. She mounts her horse. She rides out, her knights behind her, her banner streaming. She does not look back.)
----------
(The bitter truth: she knows he loved her. Dearly. Above all else, if not enough to confront responsibility, if not enough to be what she needed.
An even more bitter truth: there are times she wishes that it could have been enough. That she could have allowed herself to stay, to shut out the Times of Shadow and dance until the morning came. To drink and be merry and charm all the people and fall into his arms and sleep soundly.
There are times when she wonders if she was the problem.)
----------
For the first time, she meets a princess who wears armor, like her.
“Princess Elody?” the other princess says. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
And Princess Cinderella of Elegy tells her a story.
(a story of stories, and this is how it goes on)
Elody considers the idea that she has lost the capacity to feel. Lost it in the mud and the blood next to her husband’s corpse, or before that in the swing of her mace into an enemy combatant’s head, or when she rode away from home and did not look back then or ever again, or the first time she woke up and stared at Gerard and her chest was empty and the sparks were gone.
She understands, now. Everything about her life suddenly makes sense. She had a fate written out for her, a love story prescribed. And the story went on, and she lost the happily but not the ever after, and all of her fighting has meant nothing at all. It’s not the part of the story that matters. She has lost everything and gained nothing, and the only thing that will be remembered about her is that she kissed a frog and made him into a prince.
And she feels numb.
“I’m sorry,” Cinderella says. “I know this is a lot to take in.”
“Yes,” she allows. “Why have you come to me?”
“There’s a group of us,” Cinderella says. “We’re not—content, let’s say, to let the fairies shove us back into our stories. We’re tired of destiny, tired of their little project. We intend to stop them, by whatever means possible, and we’d like you to join us.”
(elody, too, is tired)
“Because I’m a princess?” she says.
Cinderella’s lips twitch. “We do have a bit of a theme,” she says. “But it’s more that—you deserve to know. We all deserve to know that we don’t get to make our own choices. And we deserve the chance to change that.”
She considers the idea.
“I don’t know if I can believe you,” she says.
“That’s okay,” Cinderella says. “You don’t need to. I’ve given you a lot to ponder.”
“Where would we be going?”
“I told you about the other worlds,” Cinderella says. “One of our number, Sleeping Beauty, has awoken in a different one. We would need to go there to find her; we think that continuing our efforts in this world would be immensely more difficult than trying to move on to the next.”
Intentions, efforts. It’s all so very vague.
“I would abandon my people here,” she says, chewing on the words. Tasting them. “My duty.”
Cinderella’s gaze is even. But it is deep, and there is a vast sadness there. And an understanding. True understanding. Elody has craved understanding for so long
(though perhaps not like this, not this terrible knowledge, not fate and destiny and world upon worlds pressing down upon her, not the dawning realization that none of it, none of it at all really matters)
and here it is, in this woman’s eyes and her stance and the way she grips her polearm and holds her helm beneath her arm in a perfect mirror of how Elody has carried herself for years now.
“It’s your choice,” Cinderella says. “If you don’t want to come, that’s alright. I understand completely.”
And here is the thing: she looks at Cinderella and sees glass. Glass armor, glass helm, glass polearm. That last, in particular, catches her attention. She can trace a pattern, all the way back to the shard in Gerard’s chest.
And so, another understanding: Gerard was caught in a fight he should never have been near, that he know nothing of. A war that was never his. A casualty of circumstance, of forces far bigger than him, far greater than he could ever hope to match. Senseless loss. Meaningless.
“There’s nothing left for me here,” she says, and it tastes like truth.
She meets Cinderella’s eyes, and sees that she understands that, too.
----------
(A meeting: other princesses. A woman with lips red as the rose, skin white as snow and cold as ice, footsteps dogged by the dead. A woman smiling, a woman vivacious and bubbly and a mask to face the world, hair a whirl and words calculating. A woman who ate the beast and became the beast and who holds books so gently in her hands.
They tell her who they’re looking for. A princess by the sea. A princess of thorns.
She tells them much. She finds understanding. Company. Friends. Sisters. She does not tell them about Gerard.
By a count of years, she is older than all of them, older by a decade at least. But some of them have eyes that are ancient, and sometimes, she feels like she is the child among them, fumbling her way alone in the dark. But she is not alone, because they are there; or maybe it is that they are all alone together, all alone in the dark.
And so.
A journey: the gaps between the worlds, horrible to comprehend, difficult to walk, the shadow of the gander’s wings, beating them down into the earth. Troubled dreams; a woman’s face enters her mind, a book and a name—Scheherazade.
She is not alone. That is the most important thing. She is no longer alone. And if she is, she is alone with them.)
----------
They take the castle at dawn. The Snow Queen refuses to relent, and Elody finds that she has little mercy in her heart for her. She has lost everything to Snowhold, has little inclination to give quarter to Snowhold’s allies. There is no beauty in death, little satisfaction, but at the end of the day the castle is theirs, the library is theirs, and Snow White finally has the time to tell them why her mood has been almost warm.
“Sleeping Beauty was here,” she says. “She and her friends knew where the princess by the sea is. They’re going to find her and come back.” A smile, an eager twirl of her hands, more emotion than Elody has ever seen from her.
“We’ll be seven,” Cinderella breathes.
Elody knows that these princesses have been waiting longer than she has. The relief in Cinderella’s voice is palpable. Despite that, there is little hope—but perhaps that is to be expected.
Snow White keeps darting glances at her.
“It’s not just that,” Snow White says. “Several of her companions possess true books. One of them, an old witch has one, and it’s almost entirely blank. I offered to take a look at it for him, but he bargained dearly for it, didn’t want to part with it—but with this library here, we’ll be able to discern its nature and how best to use it. And, and—the place I saw in my mirror, the palace made of books, they’ve been there. They know where it is. It’s not in the Neverafter at all, but somewhere in between worlds.”
It’s positively an effusive speech, from her. The Beast looks intrigued; books are her wheelhouse. Rapunzel’s hair drifts about her head, some strands slow and ponderous and others moving whip-coil fast.
“She does move quick,” Cinderella says. Surprise, even a bit of awe. Affection. How easily, these women accept others into their fold. How easily they show warmth. Elody finds herself looking forward to meeting this Sleeping Beauty.
(she has never had sisters before, only distant parents and then even they were gone and she was alone in the castle and her closest connection after that was a frog in a pond a frog who was her friend once upon a time)
“She’s not kept idle,” Snow White agrees. Another glance at Elody—why is she doing that? But then, another glance at Cinderella, even less certain. “There were other things they said. Other things that—well, I’m not certain if now is the time. We’ve already so much to think about, so much to do.”
“One problem at a time,” the Beast says. “The library is large; cataloging anything of use to us will take some days.”
“Time is something we may not have much of,” Cinderella says. “But if we await Sleeping Beauty and her companions—perhaps we can afford a little.”
Rapunzel’s eyes in particular gleam brightly; already, she has sent her hair spinning throughout the castle, and Elody knows that she will leap at the chance to become more entrenched, to make it hers, to weave through the rooms and make tea for the five of them, for the seven of them, for seven of them and more.
And for her part—there is much to do, yes. So much left to fight. To plan. But for a time, they will stay, and Elody has not relaxed in a very long time, has forgotten how to let down her guard, and even here, she cannot do it. None of them can.
But maybe, for a little while, some rest.
---
(and this is how the story goes on)
---
(and cinderella walks into the hall and with her is a princess that elody has seen somewhere before like an itch in the back of her mind and with her is)
---
It’s not a gut-punch, seeing him again. It’s not a revelation. It’s not all the air leaving the room, or sparks suddenly bursting in a dead heart, or tears welling up and overflowing. She has not cried in a long time; now is not an exception.
What it is, is going for a breath to find that her lungs have forgotten what air is. It is the long-ago scream, still trapped but making itself known, beating at the cage of her throat like a rabid thing. It is hands that do not shake and knees that do not tremble, because her muscles don’t see movement as an option and the marrow of her bones is as frozen as the crown on the decapitated head out on the balcony upstairs.
Gerard walks in—alive. He is not quite the same. He is all frog and almost no man, for all that he still strides on two feet. He wears a sword sheathed at his hip; it appears functional rather than decorative. He is a little rougher, a little more ragged, something a little shadowed in his eyes.
He hugs her. She hugs him back.
(she is holding a corpse, and the flies won’t stop landing on his face, and she has never felt more powerless)
She means to keep herself distant. It should be easy; this is not her world, not her Gerard. She’d even thought about it in a vague way, the possibility that she might see him somewhere here, alive and well. Steeled herself against it. She means to be aloof, to speak to him civilly and cordially and without any weight to their interactions at all. But then he talks about the bigger picture and the things of him and—
She can’t.
She can’t—
She maintains her composure. She’s good at that. But she asks for privacy, clears the room, because—well. He obviously has things to say. Things he should be saying to the Elody of this world, no doubt. But he says that he won’t trouble her with the things of him, and it’s such a Gerard thing to say and so very not a Gerard thing to say all at the same time, clumsy and awkward as ever and self-deprecating in a way that is entirely new, and something in her shatters a little more just from the way he’s looking at her.
(the bitter truth: he loves her. that’s the way the story goes. that’s always the way the story goes. and maybe she is the problem, if he can keep loving her and she can’t keep loving him, but if she is the problem then it is because the problem has been put on her shoulders without her looking for it, written into her story without her permission, and she has never asked to be remembered as the princess who fell in love with a frog)
(it’s so hard to parse out questions of fault when she doesn’t know if anything of herself is her own)
He apologizes. It’s difficult to listen to.
Because here is the thing: they made it to the end of their story. They made it to the happily ever after. And then it didn’t end, and everything in her life that has been hardest for her is everything that will not be remembered, will not be written. Everything that was struggle, everything that was difficult, that is what the fairies want to erase.
(once upon a time, there was a princess who went to war, but that is not how the story starts, isn’t even in the middle, so who can give those words weight?)
She cannot be angry with him for being what their story made him to be. She cannot be angry with him for supposing the story was over, because if not for the Times of Shadow and the incessant beat of the Gander’s wings, it would have been. She cannot be angry with him.
But she still cannot explain. Not really. She can try, and hope that he hears what she means. But she still lacks the energy.
Words are just words. She doesn’t have the strength to be someone’s inspiration
(not when all she ever wanted was for him to stand by her side of his own volition, because he decided it was right, because he wanted to do it, not when all she ever wanted was an equal partner on equal ground)
and she does not have the voice to express her disappointment when he tells her he would have done nothing, nothing at all, if he didn’t know she was here.
Words are just words. And so many of his—are the right ones. Are, maybe, things she wanted to hear. Maybe he has changed. Maybe he has grown. Maybe there are coals here that can be fanned back to life; maybe the embers aren’t dead just yet.
But this isn’t even her Gerard.
At the end of the day, she doesn’t know what to feel. Doesn’t know what to do with a husband-not-hers who apologizes and claims her as inspiration and professes to be better and puts the ball entirely in her court.
(doesn’t know what to do with a husband that breathes, with a story that continues, and she’s sick of ever after, would rather just live happily, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, it seems)
(once upon a time, a frog pushed a golden ball out of a lily pond, and it’s not because he was kind or funny or someone worth befriending but rather because that’s just how the story goes)
So she leaves the room. That’s easier. To leave him behind, to pretend he never came back in the first place.
----------
(They have time, now. Of that, she is certain. Ever after never ends. They’ll have all the time in the world to figure this out. If there’s anything to figure out.
Part of her wants that. Part of her wants nothing more than to learn this new version of him, to allow herself to hope that he really has changed. Part of her wants to learn his friends, too, this motley assembly that he came in with, that were so eager to jump to his cause and who he is—comfortable with, at the very least. These people with whom he seems to be a little more settled in his skin.
They will have time. She will have time. She can afford to take this slowly, inch by inch. To be certain before she allows him anywhere near her heart. To let down her walls as painlessly as possible, and to have time to build them back up again if that’s what she needs, what she decides.
They’re all together in this castle, now. They will have time.)
----------
She should have known better. Is there anyone to blame but herself for allowing her to hope?
(she hadn’t even realized, how much she was hoping)
Maybe this is just how the story goes, though in her heart of hearts, she knows that this isn’t written in any book. Her narrative was never supposed to twist toward war. His was never supposed to lead beyond the pond. And so here they are, another castle but the same old song; she stays, and he flees.
(after what was perhaps the most frustrating conversation of her life and really, what was she supposed to do with any of what he was telling her, and she can’t possibly believe that he was being truthful, not now, not like this, even if there’s a voice in the back of her mind that takes his words and takes the looks in her friends’ eyes and whispers doubt and whispers what if)
“It’ll be alright,” Cinderella says. She doesn’t sound like she believes herself. Elody shakes her head.
She thinks he looks back. Does he look back? It’s so hard to tell; the sunlight gleams on the snow and renders her blind.
Does it matter? Does any of it?
(he has left her so many times, and what is one more in the face of that, what is an emotion as foolish as hope)
The ramparts are the only thing holding her up as she watches them go, a party of six fading into dots against the snow, and then vanishing. Cinderella and Snow White are steady presences at her side, bulwarks of empathy and compassion, and they know. They understand. They have lived so many lives and she only one, but they still understand the loss. They understand what it is to be the one who has to keep fighting. They understand what it is to be left behind.
They understand, but she’s still so cold.
It’s not until she goes back inside that she realizes she’s been weeping. She is capable of crying after all; whether she’s crying for this fresh betrayal or a corpse pinned to the mud or the loss of all her innocence or the joy she once felt in a castle that was hers as light spilled from every room and fireworks burst overhead and Gerard cracked a stupid joke and she laughed and laughed and laughed—whether she is crying for one of those things or all of them or none of them, she couldn’t say.
And it’s all too little, too late, in the end.
----------
(“Hey, Elody?” the whisper comes. She’s snuffed her candle. Her room is lit by moonlight.
“Yeah?” she whispers back. Gerard is a formless lump in his little bed on her nightstand, but she thinks she can make out the yellow gleam of his eyes.
“Are you okay?” he says. “It’s just that you seem a little stressed.”
“I’m okay,” she says. “It’s just, with my parents gone—and sometimes I feel—”
Like I have no idea what I’m doing. Like I’m all alone in the world. Like this is a position I wasn’t made for, and now I have no choice but to fill it, to grow and to twist and to force myself into a shape that will fit the empty space that my people need. Like I’m not strong enough to become who I think I’ll need to become.
“Oh,” Gerard says. “I’m sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I think you’re pretty great.”
Something in her chest unclenches; something in her breathing eases.
“Thank you, Gerard,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” he replies. “You should probably get some sleep. I remember sleeping at night. Pretty important.”
“Pretty important,” she agrees.
The moonlight drifts in, gentle and sweet. Frogs are largely nocturnal; Gerard will probably stay up for a long time yet. She likes to think that staying up in here, with her, is less lonely for him than staying up by himself, in the frog pond, surrounded by nobody that understands him.
“Gerard?”
“Uh huh?”
“Thank you,” she says again. “I’m glad you’re here.”
And that is how the story goes.)
