Page 2 of The Yuletide Fairy's Curse
Sometimes, Dalla went out in normal clothes to see it all, to feel something like she used to when she was young. She would not be around to see it again.
This year, she was the Yuletide fairy’s victim.
Hals helped Dalla with the steep step into the carriage. They sat across from one another as the carriage began to rumble its way back to the castle.
The two had long dispensed with formalities. With the impending murder, Dalla had been assigned one special guard to be with her all day, every day, including when she slept, bathed, and pissed.
The same guard had accompanied her older sister, and her even older sister before, and her brother before that. When Dalla died tomorrow, Hals would protect her younger brother, Mjoll, instead.
Dalla met Hals’s eyes. She did not like the look in them. She was being examined, pitied. He was judging her for acquiring the dagger, knowing her efforts were hopeless.
“You seem calm,” Hals said.
“I am calm,” said Dalla.
It wasn’t true, but speaking the words made her feel stronger.
CHAPTER 2
At the castle, Dalla’s two younger brothers rushed her inside, chastising her for leaving. She should have spent her last moments with them and not out buying weaponry. Mjoll watched over her, looking half sick, as she washed her face in a basin and prepared for bed.
“It’s going to happen anyway,” Dalla told him, stretching on her tiptoes to kiss his forehead. “You will be a good king, Mjoll.”
“Until she takes me too,” he said.
“That won’t happen.”
“It will,” said her other brother, Drifa. “It will happen, and then I will be king, and you will both be dead.”
And then he started to cry.
Mjoll was soft, thirty-three years old, and Drifa was softer at only thirty. Mjoll’s girlfriend was somehow undeterred by their royal curse, and Drifa liked to craft jewelry and sculptures, not concern himself with ruling and warfare.
None of them were given a choice. When it became clear that the fairy would come back again and again for the next person to take the throne, the remaining heirs were forced to rule.
Dalla dismissed all of the guards except Hals as she changed for bed. Hals said nothing as she slipped the dagger into a belt ather waist. She pulled a cloak over it all, obscuring the dagger and covering her legs.
She would not be caught underdressed for the kidnapping.
The guards returned. They were packed like bodies during a plague, shoulder to shoulder, lining the wall. Her brothers stood at attention at the doorway.
Guards watched over the sovereign every year, but it never prevented the inevitable.
Dalla did not sleep. The shifting of the guards’ leather and metal was the loudest noise in possibly the entire kingdom.
Eventually, the shifting noises lulled. A soft, musical tinkling of bells took its place—the kidnapper was close.
No one else heard the bells. The guards stood stock-still, frozen in time. A soft mist rolled into the room, condensing and becoming opaque.
The Yuletide fairy emerged from the mist. Her movements were poised as she lowered herself to Dalla’s side. She was just as Dalla remembered her: silver hair held in place under a frosty circlet, eyelashes and eyebrows silver, too, as if lined with fresh snow. Her skin was midnight blue, flickering under the surface. As the fairy bent toward Dalla, Dalla realized that a flurry of snowflakes seemed to spiral under the surface of the fairy’s skin like a projection of the night sky. In one hand, she held a scepter topped with a luminous opal sphere.
Beautiful, ethereal, and lethal.
The fairy swept a sweaty lock of hair from Dalla’s forehead. “Are you ready?” she asked, and her voice was like the coldest night of winter.
“Doesn’t matter if I am or not, does it?” Dalla said. “You will take me anyway.”
The corner of the fairy’s mouth twitched so fast that Dalla could have imagined it. Dalla’s heart thundered.
