The Writer, Chapter 3: Daegan

As for Princess Penelope’s brother, Prince Elden, he was a hero from a young age. Not only a gifted warrior, he was kind and generous, and it was clear from the start that he would be a good, strong ruler one day.

But all was not well, for the King’s brother was jealous. It was he who had been in line for the throne until the happy surprise that had been Prince Elden’s birth. Jealous and angry in his own castle, not so very far and not nearly so lovely, he began to scheme –

“Penny! How are you, kid?”

My uncle snatched me up and swung me around, his big, meaty arms strong. The Prince Daegen looked much like my father, except with a beard and about twice as wide. He always dressed in decadent fabrics and rich colors, his hands sparkling with rings.

I loved the yearly summer visits to his castle, set in the mountains a six day journey from ours. It was smaller, but cozier, and I always loved riding up in the mountains with him. He didn’t care if I didn’t wear a dress the entire stay, even at dinner, which drove my father mad. However long we stayed, it was never enough.

Uncle Daegen put me down and turned to my brother, now almost fourteen and a mop of thick dark hair on his head, skinny but strong. “And look at you, Eld, all grown up! My god, you’re almost a man!”

My brother straightened himself. “That’s right,” he agreed, and Daegen laughed, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Atta boy. You’ve got a pair of bright kiddos, there, Lloyd,” he said with a grin to my father, smacking him on the shoulder.

“They’ll make a wonderful story one day,” my father agreed, and Uncle Daegen sighed.

“There you go again with the story thing. Can’t you give it a rest for once?” I had heard the debate before and always quietly sided with my Uncle.

“What’s more important?” my father argued. “Life is fleeting, but stories live on forever.”

“What’s more important?” Uncle Daegen repeated incredulously. “Wine, man! Food! Riding! No?”

“There are things more noble — “

“Oh posh, more noble. Ever since the whole thing with the dr-“ Daegen began.

“The horses are tired,” my father cut in suddenly, his voice abruptly sharp. “I’ll get them to the stables.”

Uncle Daegen rolled his eyes at me. “Sure, brother. Let me help.”

Curious and confused, I watched the two of them, my father the handsome one and my Uncle the laughing one, take the horses away. Although I’d heard the debate before, there was a new piece there I hadn’t heard before, and I was intrigued.

“What was he talking about at the end?” I asked my brother.

“Who knows? Uncle Daegen has strange ideas. Father’s right, stories live forever,” Elden replied primly.

“Oh, why did I even bother,” I muttered, and pushed past him into the castle.

As usual, there was a feast that night to welcome our court, and it lasted late into the night. I was still thinking about what my father had stopped my uncle from saying, and said little during the meal. Afterwards, I had trouble sleeping, and headed up to the rampart tower.

As I had hoped I might, I found my uncle there. It had always been our secret meeting spot to sit, look at the stars, and make up silly stories about the patterns we found there, the watchman sleeping in the corner. Tonight the stars were drowned by the bright light of the moon, high in the sky and almost full.

“Good thing I don’t have to worry about invaders, eh?” Uncle Daegen said with a mischievous grin, nodding at the sleeping guard. “I doubt he even knows I come up here.”

I nodded, looking up at the peaks, still snow-covered even in midsummer.

“You all right, Penny? You were quiet at the feast tonight.”

It was funny, I saw my uncle once a year, and yet he knew me far better than my close family. “You mean besides all the talk about how I’m getting to the marrying age?”

It had indeed been a popular subject, along with a list of the various Princes that could be suitable matches and the various trials he could be put through to ensure he was worthy (this was actually discussed seriously, I’m not kidding), until Uncle Daegen, sensing I was profoundly uncomfortable by the whole subject, had come to the rescue by saying, “Come on, Lloyd, the girl is barely sixteen. Give her some time to live before you marry her off.”

“I mean besides that, usually you just laugh that off.”

I paused, a little uncomfortable, then decided to go for it, and asked, “What were you talking about earlier? To my father?”

It clearly wasn’t the question he was expecting, and he shuffled his feet a bit, shifting his bulk side to side. “Lloyd wouldn’t want me telling you,” he said after a second.

“He doesn’t need to know you told me, come on, I can keep a secret,” I insisted, immediately intrigued further, but Daegen still hesitated.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up, it was unkind,” he said.

“Oh, come on, Uncle Daegen, tell me!”

There was a long pause, then he sighed. “All right. Okay. But promise not to tell him I told you.”

“I promise,” I said immediately, and a little smile flickered over his face.

“Right. So, when your father was a young man, he had this…idea in his head, that he was going to be some kind of hero and get in the storybooks. I don’t really know where he got it from, but it was…an obsession, shall we say. You know, our father always liked me better, even though I was the younger brother, and — well, he was a bit of an asshole about it, to be honest, he was a bit of an asshole about everything. Anyway, Lloyd always got the short shift. I guess he thought if he was a hero and the next Prince Charming or whatever, Dad would like him better.”

Daegen shrugged, and his face was more solemn than I’d ever seen it. “Anyway, he heard about some far off realm that was supposedly being terrorized by a dragon, and the King was offering the hand of his daughter to whoever slayed it. Lloyd was over the moon, it was everything he’d ever dreamed of. So, off he went, on this grand adventure.”

“And?”

“Well, that’s where things get sticky. Essentially he vanished for several months, then turned up one day with this tiny little fairy-like girl he was calling his wife. No mention of the dragon, like it hadn’t even existed. That was kind of mystifying, and dear old Dad wasn’t too happy — he thought the whole thing was pot from the beginning anyway.”

“Finally the story came out, according to Lloyd, that he had been on his way to the realm but found Eleanore being forced to marry some dick worse than Dad, and decided to rescue her instead. Says he fell in love at first sight, didn’t even bother with the dragon and fought the fiancé instead. Way he told, fiancé was part troll.”

He paused, but I sensed that wasn’t the whole story. “Well, that was right about the time my mother died. She’d been sick a long time, fell ill while Lloyd was away, and when that happened, Dad went ballistic. Blamed the whole thing on Lloyd, got somewhere in his head Lloyd’s absence was responsible for the illness.”

“That’s — -not very fair,” I said after a moment.

“It wasn’t,” Daegen agreed. “So, they’re fighting, and since things weren’t bad enough, the asshole who did marry the Princess — I mean the one with the dragon problem — decided it would be a good idea to send messengers to every realm detailing which Princes failed to slay the dragon. I guess there had been a bunch, and he didn’t want competition for the title of Prince Charming.”

“And my father was on the list.”

“He sure was. So Dad went ballistic again — having not believed anything before, he was pretty quick to believe some random stranger sent from some ass trying to put himself on a pedestal. Anyways, he called Lloyd a coward, embarrassed him in front of the whole court, and announced he was going to give the crown to me instead and Lloyd could go live in the country with his ‘fairy-slut,’ I quote.” Uncle Daegen made a terrible face at this.

“But — Father is King, not you.”

“Precisely. Because I don’t give a rat’s ass about ruling. Seriously. The Kingdom would be an awful place if I was in charge, because all I care about is wine and food and good company,” Daegen said, completely shamelessly, rubbing his stomach. “So I told Father some crap about something, I don’t remember now, but I managed to convince him it was very bad luck to give the crown to the younger brother.”

“But they were still fighting?”

“Sure they were. All the time. Dad’s solution was to drink himself to death a few months later.” Daegen paused, considering. “Charming man.”

I was silent for a long time. “And what do you think happened?”

“Honestly? I think it was a setup.”

“Come again?”

“I think the Prince and the King were in cahoots, and they decided to set it all up. I don’t think there was a dragon, or if so, it was a bit of charm. You know what’s weird about that list? All the Princes on it were alive. You’d think the dragon would have killed at least a couple, don’t you think?”

“I suppose…” I said uncertainly.

“So I think some ass decided to prey on that, put himself into the storybooks, and get rid of a lot of competition at the same time. It was far too convenient. And far too easy.” Uncle Daegen smiled, a little sadly. “People in this corner of the world are obsessed with stories. You know it, you live with it every day. Everyone wants to be the next Prince Charming, the next Cinderella, find their names in the storybooks. It’s a kind of a sickness.”

“And you don’t believe it.” It wasn’t a question.

“Listen, kid, maybe there were Writers hanging around a few hundred years ago, those strange people gifted with magic pens that could write stories across worlds, but there sure ain’t any more of them now.”

I was suddenly and forcibly reminded of my childhood fight with Biddy about this. “My best friend thinks Cinderella wasn’t even real,” I said.

“Who knows? If she was, she’s long dead now.”

“I thought — I thought she just lived far away.”

“Have you ever asked anyone when or where she lived? They’ll say a hundred years, ten years, two hundred years, in the North, the South, the East, the West, the sky. Hard to believe someone’s real when no one agrees when or where she was. “

I stared down at my shoes. For all I hated hearing about how I was not a Good Princess, I guess I did always think there was something to it.

“Aw, chin up kid. Stories are stories, and life is life.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately — and, well, considering everything I guess it’s understandable — Lloyd never got over the embarrassment, so he passed the obsession to his children. Looks like he succeeded with Elden, at least.”

I glowered at the mention of my brother. “Apparently.”

“I told you I shouldn’t have brought it up. Listen, kid, your father is a good King. I was right about that. The Kingdom is healthy and safe. If he could just see that — but instead he’s just concerned about stories. Drives me mad, but I shouldn’t have brought up the dragon. I know it still hurts him.”

I stared up at the moon. “Yeah.”

“Don’t tell him I told you.”

“I won’t.”

“Come on, dear, let’s get you back to bed and stop disturbing poor Wesley’s sleep here.” Uncle Daegen put a gentle hand on my shoulder and escorted me down the steep, spiraling steps, leaving the moon and talk of my father’s dragon behind us.

Sometime during the visit, my dear, caring brother made a point to come up to me in the garden and tell me, very seriously, that I shouldn’t spent so much time talking with Uncle Daegen.

I was used to strange things coming from my brother’s mouth, but this was so out-of-the-blue, and he looked so solemn, that I stared at him in blank shock.

“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked.

“Uncle Daegen has strange ideas. I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but –“ at this, he made a great show of peering around the garden for onlookers — “I think he wants to take over.”

There was a pause as I stared at him, then burst out laughing.

“Are you serious?” I snorted.

My brother was not pleased at this outburst. “Oh come on, isn’t it obvious?”

“No, I’m sorry, it’s not. Please, do tell, where you got this ridiculous idea from.”

“Well, he’s always loved you better,” Elden began, and there was something so strange about his voice that I turned to look at him, actually look at him, with great surprise, as the oddest thought occurred to me: my brother, my perfect, Prince Charming brother, was jealous of me.

But before I could get much further in this line of thought, he continued. “ — because I’m a threat. He was in line for the throne until I came along, and he’s been bitter ever since.”

I thought about my Uncle, laughing at dinner, frowning at the moon talking about his father, and thought that ‘bitter’ was perhaps the last word I would think of in describing him.

“You’re delusional,” I said.

“And you’re blind. You just like him because he encourages you to go along in your ridiculous fancies, because that helps him, you know –“

“Elden,” I said, cutting my brother off, “you are such an asshole.”

Quite unfortunately for me, our father, coming out to find us, overheard.

Calling your brother anything referring to ass is very clearly not on the list of things a Good Princess should do.