Blossom

It’s been a long, awkward week since the Rorthaginian envoy came to stay with us. Though I’ve been busy organizing the transfer of grain to the waiting ships, it seems I can’t escape the persistent attention and affections of the emperor’s son, Prince Malchus Zenobia.

Every day he puts himself in my line of sight, forcing me to confront his ridiculous marriage proposal. Today he meets me in the courtyard with a handful of sloppily arranged and slightly wilted blue flowers.

A giant that towers over me, his wild orange, unkempt mane seems to glow in the sunlight. His yellow-green eyes are piercing and so direct it threatens to make me blush.  

“Here,” he says in his gruff voice, thrusting the flowers at my breast. “I hear women like these smelly things.”

“You’re the smelly one,” I retort, pushing the flowers back at him. And that’s all it takes to trigger his now predictable response.

“Shut up and take em!” he thunders at me, thrusting them back so they smack me in the chest, sending a small flurry of petals flying into the air. “And while you’re at it, marry me!”

“Is that your idea of a marriage proposal?! You oversized orangutan!”

Just then we both catch sight of Carthalo standing a ways off, signaling desperately to his friend. Coming to himself, Malchus grits his teeth and fixes his posture with stiff, deliberate motions. Then he clears his throat and tries again.

“Forgive me, Princess. I understand these delphinium are your namesake. I…picked them myself,” he adds, and his already red face turns red completely with his blush.

I look down at the bouquet of wilted, now half naked flowers, and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes. Ugh, this clueless idiot. I think I’ll reject them, then a better idea comes to me.

“You picked these for me? Oh, I didn’t realize—how thoughtful!” I snatch them from his hand with my most dazzling smile just before I hike up my skirts and dropkick the whole bouquet right over the palace wall. Malchus’ momentarily dazed expression transforms to one of flaming rage as he screams at me like a furious ape.

“What’d you do that for?!”

“Because I don’t want them!”

“You could have just said so!”

“Would you have taken the hint?!”

With his hands raised like he means to throttle me, Malchus starts to lunge forward. I side-step him easily and march off while Carthalo puts in his best effort at holding him back.

This entitled jerk. When’s he going to get it through his head I’ve rejected him?

While it’s true the man’s good looking in a gruff, piratey sort of way, Malchus is just not my type. His wild appearance and violent personality, his rude manners and his hairy, smelly old body, all of it is so incredibly off-putting, it’s all I can do just to stomach being in the same room as him, to say nothing of entertaining the idea of marrying such a brute. But that hasn’t slowed his advances. Every day, it’s a new gimmick to win my affection, each more ridiculous than the last.

The first day he drug huge pallets of bricks around the courtyard, tearing up flowerbeds and leaving skid marks in the lawn to impress me with his strength. The next day he showed up at my door holding a jackal subdued in his arms to announce he’d caught it roaming outside the city and assured me I was safe now from the attacks of wild beasts. And that was just the beginning.

Nothing this hothead does surprises me anymore. At this point, I wouldn’t even be shocked if he showed up with my name tattooed on his forehead...

Malchus isn’t the first man to take an interest in me. I am a princess, so I’ve had no shortage of suitors over the years. But marriage was always out of the question because of my curse. So was fooling around. Any child born from me is destined to be the future heir of the kingdom, so I can’t let myself get pregnant with just any man’s child.

Needless to say I’ve had a lot of practice rejecting men’s advances. So it doesn’t matter what grand romantic gesture the emperor’s son makes for me, it’s not going to move me to marry him.

And anyway, personal preferences aside, it simply wouldn’t work between us. A man as important as Malchus Zenobia would expect me to come away with him and build my life around his. But I have a duty to the crown and to my people. My life is here, and my duty comes first, before my feelings, before everything.

That isn’t to say I won’t be able to marry the one I love. The royals of Sanos have a long history of marrying their lovers, often commoners, people without a lot of wealth and responsibilities who can easily assimilate into their roles as the crown’s partner and helpmate.

The man I choose will have to be accepting of my authority, not contentious and resentful of it, as I’m sure Malchus would be. As my father was.

He never said so, but Mother could tell he felt bitter about her being in charge. He favored traditional gender roles, and I think he felt that as the man, he ought to be the one running the kingdom. Of course, Mother couldn’t have that, and she was forced to put him firmly in his place. She was sovereign of Sanos. Not him. And very soon, I will be too. 

Or at least, I would be. If not for the curse getting in my way.

Until now I’d held out hope of it being broken one day. But as more and more time goes by, as Father makes plans for starting a new family with Philomela, that hope has been confronted with a serious reality check.

I’ve accepted the fact that I may very well spend half of the rest of my days as a mermaid. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up my right to the throne. It simply means I need to become more creative with the way I manage it.

I’ll start by picking my own councilors, I decide. Until now I’ve let Father handle everything, but it’s clear the people he’s picked have no respect for me. Since firing Kleon I’ve made a point of learning the names and dispositions of the other administrators Father’s left in power, and I’ve learned less than half of them treat me with the respect I’m due. I’ve begun dismissing them left and right and assuming more and more of their duties. It’s a lot more work than I’d like to handle, but I get it done with my usual speed and perfect efficiency, leaving the remaining palace administrators scratching their heads in disbelief.

At Father’s insistence I’ve kept my administrative talents hidden until now, but no more. They’ll come to understand this is just the way the palace will be run under my regime, and they’ll get used to my methods soon enough.

Curse or no curse, I am going to be queen one day. I won’t let anyone disrespect me, or look down on me again.

And as for that orangutan, Malchus Zenobia, well—he’ll figure it out sooner or later.

He and I, we’re just not meant to be.

Malchus

What’s a man got to do to win the heart of the girl he loves?

All week I’ve been trying different methods, without success. Today I even caved and took Carthalo’s advice to give her flowers, only to have her kick them over the fence.

“You’re trying too hard,” my old friend advises me. “You have to put some distance between you, make her think you’re disinterested. That’s how you get a girl’s attention.”

“Distance isn’t the problem,” I determine. “It’s just that she’s yet to be sufficiently impressed by my manliness.”

“Gods, save us from this idiot…”

“I heard the guards talking, Carthalo, now listen to this. These islanders have a traditional sports festival that takes place every four years. The men get naked and oil themselves up, then compete with each other in tests of strength. So I was thinking…”

“Here we go again…”

I spend the rest of the day arranging the games. I’ve managed to round up a few healthy looking competitors, men who will put up a real fight, and partition out a wrestling ring within the palace grounds. Though it wasn’t my intention to draw a crowd, I think the entire palace has showed up to watch our mock Olympics. Including Delphine, who stands a ways off, doing her best to pretend she’s not curious.

Ha, I think as I whip off my shirt. Let’s see her resist me after this.