Pix shook her head. “Luci had to move into town and open shop just so she and her mother and sister could survive. That goop—that game—puts food on her family’s table and keeps a roof over their heads—not to mention, currently, our own. If some gullible royal’s desire to reclaim her glory days or catch the eye of some stuck-up, silver-spooned noble can keep Luci’s family from starving, isn’t that worth the price of the lie?”
“I thought it wasn’t lying,” the little royal jeered, rolling his eyes. “It must be so easy, making up your own morals as you go.”
“Easy?” she barked back. “You think my life is easy? I’ve had to fight for everything I have.” Through the corner of her eye, she saw the flames in the lanterns flicker and flare with her anger. “Everything I have, I have because I took it from someone else who wanted it just as badly as I did but didn’t have the sense, smarts, or strength to keep it.”
“You steal,” he corrected. “And you think that because you do it in the name of survival that makes it right.” He snorted with an inflated sense of dignity. “Cheating is cheating, it doesn’t matter what you do it for.”
She shook her head, jutting out her jaw. “You think you and your precious little princess are any different?” She laughed. “You forget that I was there for her birth too, throne-boy. You think I’m playing unfair by giving Luci a little magical coverup? What about when the oh-so good fairy Ava wished her goddaughter a happy birthday with the enchanted gift of beauty? How fair was that?”
“That’s different,” the prince insisted, even as he frowned and his bound body squirmed a bit. “It’s not like she asked for it. It was a gift.”
Pix rolled her eyes. “Please,” she said as her wings twitched. “You royals think that just because you all struck life’s lottery at birth that the deck isn’t stacked.” She shook her head and pinned him with a condescending glare. “We all cheat; you just can’t tell because you were born already holding a winning hand.”
The princeling pouted, his face scrunched into a royal snit. “What do you know?” he grumbled.
“More than you,” she assured as she lay down, settling back on the crate. “You think just because your parents or some flittering, little fairy promised, or even gave, you something that you deserve it. You think, just because you were born with a silver spoon jammed down your privileged, entitled throat, that life owes you a happy ending, like that’s the only inevitable conclusion.”
She laughed bitterly. “Truth is, happy is just a fleeting moment—gone then here and gone again, all before you know it—and you’d better be ready and willing to fight—to lie, cheat, steal, whatever—for every moment. At least when I take something, I earned it. At least then, I’ve proven that I deserve what’s mine.”
She growled as she turned her back on him. “All your little princess ever did right was being born into the right family.” She sneered. “And as you said, that wasn’t her fault. It was a gift.”
“That’s not true,” the love-struck prince argued. “She’s perfect, princess or not. She’s everything anyone could ever want in a wife.”
“And what exactly is that? Why do you even want her?” Pix asked him, genuinely if a little exasperatedly curious. “You’d be bored stiff with her in a week.”
The shadowed room was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “You’ve never seen her singing in the woods. She has this beautiful voice.”
Pix snickered bitterly and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure it was her singing that caught your attention.”
“Meaning what?” he asked, but Pix just waved off his question as she curled tighter, trying to feign sleep even as her wings fluttered in reflexive irritation. “Pix?” She could hear him shuffling over the storage room’s well-swept floor before he struck her crate with a thump. She stiffened as her box shook slightly, but still wouldn’t look at him. “Meaning what?” he insisted as he shook her makeshift bed again.
She turned to him and pinned him with a piercing glance. “Meaning, if her beautiful voice wasn’t coming out of such a beautiful mouth, you’d never have stopped long enough for a second verse.”
“I would too,” he argued. She rolled her eyes and turned away again. “I would have.”
Sure, sure. She scoffed and closed her eyes tiredly, wondering if she had enough power to knock him out again.
“What do you know?” he asked as he huffed and sat back against the stacks again. “You don’t even know her.”
“I’ve met enough princesses,” Pix growled into the shadowed wall. “Prissy, chipper little things that go around singing and dancing through life as if the world were all weddings and sunshine; and they wonder why dragons and wolves and ogres constantly want to eat them. They do it just to shut them up.”
She turned again, pushing herself up, when she heard Phillip laugh. But, by the time she rolled over, he was trying to cover it up with a cough. “They’re completely useless,” she continued on, “every last one of them.” She sat up, her legs dangling off the edge of her wooden bed. “You say I’ve done some pretty awful things in my life—and, yeah, okay, I have—but at least I’ve done something.” She shook her head. “Those girls, all they do is wait around in their towers or cottages, twiddling their thumbs and singing until some bone-headed princeling shows up to marry them.”
READ PART THREE HERE
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