The Princess Beard Read online

  Harkovrita’s nostrils flared and her breath came in quick gasps. She needed to check on something. Carefully, awkwardly, she brought her hands up to her face, but with her fingers pointing away at first, until she tilted them up and placed her palms flat on her cheeks and rubbed. There was hair there. And it was attached. To her jaw.

  “I have a sharting beard?” she said into the silence. Her voice sounded high and panicked and she didn’t like it.

  Harkovrita gave serious consideration to letting loose with a scream after all. But on the cusp of belting out a bloodcurdling holler o’ horror, she stopped: A scream would bring people running. And then they would see her like this, with too much hair everywhere and fingernails as twisted and yellow as an old goat’s horns.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she said.

  She needed to be where other people were not. Probably forever. Because it was becoming clear that this was no prank but her actual condition. She had been asleep or unconscious for so long that she had grown out her hair and fingernails like this—and a beard!—and they had let her. Her parents, the castle denizens—they’d all neglected her completely. The curse that her father had been so worried about had obviously come to pass, foisted on her by an innocent bard with a verboten rose.

  She didn’t want to linger in a cursed tower any longer. Nor did she want to be kept, patronized, sheltered, the subject of mocking songs or the butt of jokes, or given away as a prize to Lord Vas Deference. She just wanted out, which was a feeling she’d had before but never intensely enough to leave comfort and privilege and pie behind—the pastry chef made such an amazing strawberry rhubarb pie! But now she felt as if she couldn’t get out of the castle fast enough. Practical matters would need to be handled first, however. She quietly spoke a list aloud:

  “Fingernails. Chamber pot. Different clothes.”

  How long had she been asleep? Her bladder felt ready to burst. But emptying it would require functioning hands just to deal with the massively poofy dress her parents always forced her to wear.

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and tested them. No tingling, no problems. She stood and tested her weight. That was all fine. And then she took a step—or tried to.

  Harkovrita tripped on her twisted toenails and flailed a bit and clacked her long nails together. The sound was so gross that she felt the gorge rising in her throat. The nails were thick but seemed brittle.

  “Time to break a nail,” she said in a low voice barely above a whisper.

  Sitting down with her rear on the floor, she placed both hands in front of her, with the monstrosities curling up and away. She raised her right leg, cocked a knee, and slammed the heel of her foot down on the nails, just beyond the tips of her fingers. There was a sickening crunch and crackle and a large portion of the nails fell away, luckily with very little to no pain. A couple more strikes and her hands were freed from the bulk of their weight. The nails were jagged, ugly things and still too long, but they were at least manageable. She rose with a shudder of revulsion and hobbled over to her bureau, quietly cursing the weight of her braided hair and feeling it drag through the mess of twisted fingernails behind her. And then it brought her up short; while she had enough slack to reach the edges of the room, it was only just enough, since the rest trailed out the window and obviously snagged on something out there. She was on a leash and would need to free herself of that as well as everything else.

  Harkovrita yanked open the top drawer to find it rearranged since the last time she’d opened it, which was for her that morning but in reality had been who knew how long. She must have slept for years. She didn’t think she could grow this much excess keratin in a couple of months. Maybe the arranged marriage was off now, but no matter: She didn’t want to be given away to anyone, ever, and as long as she was under her father’s roof, he’d assume he could dispose of her as he wished.

  It took some searching, but she found her nail scissors and went to work, first on her crusty toenails and then on what remained of her fingernails. She might have clipped them too aggressively; on a couple of fingers she damaged the cuticles in her desire to be rid of them. No matter; she was relieved. And now needed to relieve herself.

  As she squatted over the chamber pot, she wondered over other practical matters. Had she had her menses while she slept? Had she wet the bed? Why wasn’t she wearing a diaper and a hospital gown covered in hideous ducklings? How had she kept hydrated and fed? Were her teeth entirely mossy, or had some servant diligently brushed the plaque away? And if all that had happened, who had tended to her? She was so mortally embarrassed by the mere thought of what it would take to keep her alive and well all that time that she resolved never to see anyone in Tennebruss again. Farewell, Mother and Father! Farewell, courtiers and guards! Farewell, itinerant gnomeric pudding merchant with the extra-chunky pistachio pudding! The thought of never tasting that treat again, or the pastry chef’s pies, nearly made her reconsider, but she shook her head.

  “No. I’ve been given a chance at a new life, so there’s no use living the old one,” she said into the quiet. “It is time for strange new puddings and fantastic adventures in pie.”

  Finished with her bodily needs and done speaking dramatically to no one, she untied the stays of her formal velvet dress and stepped out of it and the petticoats beneath it, striding to her wardrobe to find more appropriate clothing for the road: breeches, tunic, and belt, which she’d worn during her training sessions with the master-at-arms. These items were hidden in the back so her mother wouldn’t find them. She even had some brown leather boots that would serve well for hikes. As she buttoned up the tunic and belted it, she considered the tug of the long braids anchored to her scalp and running through a hole in her bed and out the window. She wanted to cut it all but had never actually cut her hair before and wasn’t quite ready to take that step.

  She pulled out her blue traveling cloak next and checked the secret pockets sewn into the lining: Yes, her funds were still there, hoarded coins from birthdays and other holidays. She would be well supplied with fickels for a short while. She noticed that two of her plainer cloaks were missing—ones she used for sneaking about—and that the closet smelled like a corpse.

  What else to take? She rummaged in her wardrobe and found the gift from her uncle, a hempen gunnysack emblazoned with the name of Chekkoff’s, a fabled market in Cape Gannet near the Seven Toe Islands. She’d always wanted to go there. Well, why not now? Might as well have a destination in mind.

  She shoved some extra clothes into the Chekkoff’s gunnysack, as well as a gnomeric firebird a pyromaniac cousin had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She added a rapier, a mace, some brass knuckles, a beret, a gryphon’s quill, a saltshaker, a flower press, a grimoire, and a porcelain unicorn. Surely something in there would come in handy at some later moment of great import.

  From her bureau, she pulled out a pair of shears and then moved to the window behind her bed, peering out and down to assess the ridiculous length of her hair dangling down past a discomfitingly overgrown thatch of roses. She might not have quite enough braid for what she hoped to accomplish, but it would be close. Taking the stairs, she knew, would be a mistake. There was no way she could exit without being seen, except out her tower window. And the longer she waited, the more likely it became that she would be discovered by someone tasked to look after her. No time to waste.

  The first thing she did felt utterly delicious: She used her shears to hack off both braids at the nape of her neck, leaving her hair just long enough to brush her shoulders and fit in a stubby nubbin of a ponytail. She stowed the shears in her bag and tied both braids together, using a double-fisherman knot she’d been practicing from her favorite knot book, then secured the braids to one of the heavy posts of her bed. As she tested the knot and found it strong, she felt a little frisson of excitement. Her mother had encouraged her to give up knots and take up tatting instead, and
she was pleased to see evidence that she’d chosen wisely. Tatting wouldn’t save her now.

  Holding on to her braided-hair rope, gunnysack over her shoulder, she straddled her tower window. She had been warned all her life to stay far away from this window, lest she fall out or be attacked by a squirrel, but now she drank in the clear air and noted the dense perfume of roses riding the fair breeze. She hooked the rope around her thigh and began rappelling down, boots pressed against the brick. The braid held, and soon she stopped worriedly staring up at the window and quickened her descent—until she ran out of hair rope, perhaps ten feet above ground. Surrounded by a troubling number of what appeared to be halfling skeletons trapped among the thorns, she dangled from the end of the rope for a moment, let the sack fall first, then let go. Her feet sent prickles of pain up her spine as she landed, and it stung when she stood to walk, but she picked up her sack and headed straight for the nearest road. She’d decided to head south, out of Tennebruss and toward the busy port city of Sullenne. Finding passage on a ship would get her out of Borix quicker than anything else.

  No one stopped her. No shout went up from the tower. She pulled up the hood of her cloak and limped along the road, looking nothing like the Lady Harkovrita but more, she hoped, like a wild young man in need of a razor and a destiny. For the moment, the beard was exactly the disguise she needed, for all that it dangled past her belt and kept getting caught on the buttons of her tunic.

  Her boots, while very fine, proved to be a bit uncomfortable after a couple of miles. She could feel blisters forming on the backs of her heels. Her muscles ached and her back cracked, but not unpleasantly; she felt the exhaustion of that long sleep lift as her body woke up. She began to wonder where she would spend the night as the sun crept toward the horizon, shining in her eyes. She did not have a portable shelter, and for all her reading on maritime life, she had never slept a single day outside. She might be able to fend off a determined groundhog with her shears, but a pack of wolves or a wandering band of rogues would be much more problematic. “Highwaymen,” her father called them, right before damning them. That was, in fact, all she knew about them, because the sum total of what her father said in her hearing was an irritated snort, followed by “Highwaymen. Damn them!” Then again, he said the same thing about goats, children, and bunions, so perhaps her father’s reactions did not adequately reflect the real world.

  The sound of creaking wood, hooves on hard-packed ruts, and the low murmur of a man’s voice caused her to turn around. There was a wagon coming along, pulled by an old brown horse, a single man holding the reins.

  Harkovrita slid over to one side of the road and waited. He might be kind or cruel, but either way he was going to catch up to her. Might as well be prepared.

  He was not a nobleman or even a merchant, judging by his dress. He was most likely a farmer taking a load of vegetables to the coast, since he wore a muck-covered jerkin over mud-splattered pants tucked into boots begrimed with manure. His jaw was strong and clean-shaven, his thick dark eyebrows and hair framing a warm tan face bereft of guile. A stalk of hay, complete with fuzzy seed bundle at the end, bobbed up and down between his teeth. He nodded once at Harkovrita from far off, acknowledging that awkward moment when it was too far to shout greetings, and she nodded back, adding in a wave. He waited until he was closer and then politely asked his horse to halt.

  “Pleasant afternoon, sir,” he said, and Harkovrita almost took insult but then remembered that she was dressed as a man and currently had a beard. She really needed to shave that off. But in the meantime, best to play along. She pitched her voice low to sound like a man’s.

  “Afternoon,” she replied. “Don’t suppose you’d let me ride along?”

  He cocked his head at her. “Well, I sure wouldn’t mind the company, no, sir, but I’m not sure you’d like paying the price.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “You’d have to listen to me talk the whole dang way.”

  Harkovrita blinked. “That’s it?”

  “That’s plenty. I’ve been informed on more than one occasion that I talk too much and the best thing I could possibly do is shut up. I’m a fearful affliction to ears, it seems, to hear other people tell it, not that the animals seem to mind a ding-dang bit. And I like to talk about boring stuff.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “Jam and cows. Other barnyard animals too, but mostly them cows and their heckin’ moos.”

  “I like jam and cows.”

  He grinned. “Then I reckon you might survive the journey without me doin’ any damage to your sanity. Hop on up.” He scooted over on the seat and jerked his chin at the space he’d made for her. She climbed up and settled back with a sigh, grateful to give her feet a rest.

  “My name’s Morvin,” the man said. “What’s yours?”

  Harkovrita gaped. She hadn’t thought at all about what she would tell people. She couldn’t say she was the Lady Harkovrita, recently escaped from the tower at Tennebruss. If she gave him a man’s name now, it wouldn’t hold up well once she shaved her beard. She flailed for a moment, then decided to do something no courtier in the castle had ever done: express genuine vulnerability.

  “I’m not particularly fond of my current name and I’m thinking I’d like to choose a new one. Have you ever felt that way?”

  A small crease appeared between Morvin’s eyes. “Cor, I reckon I haven’t, although once I named a cow Mr. Mutton on accident and tried to get him to change it over to Robbie, and he wouldn’t have none of it. But I can understand well enough that sometimes a body needs a good ol’ redo. I just decided to choose a new life meself, so here I am.”

  Harkovrita grinned at him. “Me too!”

  “Hey, no kidding?”

  “I jest not!”

  “That’s fancy talk, jesting is. Bit like jousting but more bells and less havin’ holes put in you by lances ’n’ such. You should have a fancy name to go with it, eh?”

  “What sort of name do you think would suit me?”

  “Huh. Well.” Morvin examined her face closely. “That is a mighty unusual beard, if you don’t mind me saying, sir.”

  “No, I don’t mind. Unusual how?”

  “Well, it ain’t all scraggly and coarse like most beards you see. That’s like really fine baby hair, all silky, you know, and I ain’t never seen the like. And underneath that, well, you got some features that might almost be, uh…” He stopped talking and looked down.

  “Almost what? Be honest with me, Morvin. I promise not to take offense.”

  “Well, I surely don’t mean none, so I hope you’ll remember that promise. But you have some features that might look a bit like…a woman’s. But I figure you don’t really fit in either camp, and if someone gave me two boxes and told me to check one for you, I’d make a mark somewhere in the middle.”

  Harkovrita beamed at him. “I agree. That’s quite perceptive of you. So what sort of name should I choose?”

  Morvin shrugged. “One that’s neither here nor there. All sorts of folks in the world that don’t fit in one or two boxes, and they have all sorts of names to suit ’em.”

  “Hmm. What do you think of Morgan? It’s a bit close to your name.”

  Morvin squinted at her. “I reckon that would fit you mighty fine. It’s fancy enough and works for ladies and gents as well. Or sheep, probably.”

  Harkovrita held out her hand and the farmer took it, albeit awkwardly, as they sat side by side. She pumped it up and down. “My name’s Morgan, Morvin. Thanks for giving me a ride. Now let’s go, and you can tell me all about jam and cows and why you decided to choose yourself a new life.”

  Morvin clucked at the horse and shook the reins. The wagon lurched forward and he looked pleased.

  “Well, Morgan, you ever heard of invigorated ham jam? It’s the most amazin’ stuff. Got a load of it in the back of the
wagon here. Most folks just put it on toast, but I’m tellin’ ya, there’s so much more you can do with it.”

  And so Morgan settled back against the wagon seat with a new name and a new life and dreamt of the many possibilities of ham jam, every single one of which was better than marrying some reeking lump of a bratling lord of Taynt.

  “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, and…one hundred!” Vic let the barbell fall to the ground with an unnecessary and startling thunk. The gnomes he’d paid to sit on top of the barbell and cheer tumbled off, their hats landing in the dirt. Vic looked around. None of the other centaurs in Ye Olde Krossfitte Gymnasium so much as looked up.

  “You sullied my cardigan!” one of the gnomes shouted, which wasn’t a cheer at all.

  Vic looked down, his eyes roving over acres of his own muscles, both in his human flesh up top and in his horseflesh down below. He was a meaty-man torso stuck on a Clydesdale chassis and bedecked with a yellow crop top, and he’d put a lot of work into his guns, and the gnome should’ve been more appreciative, considering his wee little spaghetti arms.

  “I paid you already,” Vic growled. “Now begone before I stomp you to pudding!”

  The gnome grabbed his hat and scurried out the door with his friends, shaking his tiny fist and shouting, “He who sullies another’s sweater won’t have a day that gets any better!” in a way suggesting that, despite his false bravado, the gnome would spend the rest of his life hiding from anything with hooves.