To Make Bloody a Sweetbrier

In which the Sandman becomes important to Gwen’s character arc accidentally.

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Gwen—Ensanguine is her name, actually, but it’s much too long to bother with—is seven when she first gets taken to see Rusalka.

The trip into Prague happens with much jostling and shouting, but children tend to enjoy ruckus and chaos. Adults, not nearly as much, and Mr. Egregious Charming is of the majority when he rubs his temples and sighs. They miraculously make it onto the compartment coach (yes, a public train; D-list royalty make do) and Lan—Eglantine, who also wishes to refer to herself with one syllable instead of three—argues for eldest privilege. Id est, the window seat.

Gwen lets her have it (not at all begrudgingly, why do you ask?) and ends up amusing herself with the lightbulb in their compartment until the Sandman comes and weighs her eyelashes down with sleep. When it’s finally time for coats to be buttoned and hats to be put on and shoes to step off the train and onto the platform, Prague had fallen into evening.

The walk through the city is absolutely breathtaking, snowflakes drifting down like sugar through a sieve and dusting every building with fairytale wonder, the kind that makes children’s eyes go as round as dinner plates. Gwen needs to hold her arm a little too high for her liking just so she can reach her father’s hand.

“Papa Bear’s porridge is too cold,” she sings, wiggling her free left hand in a wave. “And Baby Bear’s is just right!” She swings her right.

The opera house is majestic, like a grand castle, the type that might have been their home had their great grandfather been born a third son instead of a second. To the two shrimpy little girls, it looms far higher than any beanstalk. With columns and statues and great big windows you could peek through to see the pixie-lit chandeliers damasked walls, it really looks like a wonderland.

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What a contrast, Gwen thinks wearily.

She had come into the theatre all prim and proper, smoothing her skirts out on the plush chair like a lady, in some almost laughable imitation of adult formality. Yes, indeed, she was here, she was mature for her age, and she was going to enjoy this fine piece of art among these fancy and important ladies and gentlemen.

Yes, indeed.

Yes...

Actually, no, she wasn’t, because she does not understand this language and opera is actually incredibly boring, and frankly, she doesn’t want to be up after her bedtime.

From the corner of her eye she sees the Sandman arrive again, umbrella in his hand and fine golden stars trailing in his wake. He tosses a handful of twinkling sand, glamour that matches his playful grin and knowing eyes, a graceful honey-colored arc that showers Gwen in drowsy warmth.

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In hindsight, Egregious Charming should have realized that seven year-olds were not usually of a finding-operas-engaging-and-impressive calibre. But Rusalka was a story so dear to his heart, so full of workmanship and emotion and passion, he had momentarily forgotten that the only things his daughters inherited from him were his eyes and his last name.

He turns, diamonds in his eyes (from the tragedy of the show) and frogs in his throat (from the multitude of “Brava!”s shouted). Eglantine, his eldest, was clapping with fervor. Ensanguine, his youngest, was fast asleep.

Something twinges in his heart. It feels like annoyance. Maybe disappointment. He wipes it away like a finger along a waterline.

At least one of them enjoyed it, he thinks sadly (and incorrectly).

-

When he next goes to a performance of Rusalka, he leaves Eglantine and Ensanguine back at the apartment with a babysitter.

At the theatre, he is acquainted with Archduchess White.

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Some many (but not too many) pages flipped ahead in the future, Archduchess White becomes Stepmother. ''Please, Mother. Or even Mom, as the commoners do'', she suggests, but that does not stop an indignant Gwen from christening her with a title of her own invention.

‘’Evil Stepmother’’, the nine year old snips inside her head (rather uncreatively I may add, I do believe this to be plagiarized) when she gets locked inside the tower for coming home with cat fur all over her again. ‘’Archduchess? More like arch nemesis’’. Perhaps it is karma that the one who gives new names gets one for herself.

-

Everyone claps at the coronation ceremony of Princesses Ilandere and Adoette White.

-

Gw—Adoette, she still needs to remind herself—does not think it fair to her sister to use the term “Evil Stepsister” because Lan—IlandereIlandereIlanderenotEglantine—isn’t well, evil. She really isn’t, but at the same time Adoette wants so badly to blame her.

I must be going mad, she idly writes on her book.

It’s yet another tower session (they’re biweekly at this point), this time due to breaking curfew. She’d been staring at the same passage of the same book for a little over half an hour. It wasn’t a dull story by any means, but she had already been far too well-acquainted with this specific Fairy Book for her liking. One could only read the same thing so many times.

Technically, she could bring something else from their grand new private library (and get scolded for marking up Lang), but Adoette refuses to step foot in the tower when she did not need to. It may be childish (she’d like to think that she was usually rather mature for her twelve years), but she would not let them win.

Them being the adults she called Mother and Father. Evil Mother and Evil Father do not quite have the same ring to it but they will do.

“Being locked in a tower has always been a quintessential exercise in disciplining princesses. I went through it, as did my sister—yes, the Snow White, now you see how important this is?—and my mother and my grandmother and my great—”

Despite Adoette not having a destiny, let alone one of a tower princess, she could not argue her way out of it. The first time she had, she had been severely shot down, dismissed as unreasonably angry and unfitting to be a princess. Child’s rage, they say, ''the mark of a young one who does not understand how good they have it. You need to make them learn before it is too late.''

When it had happened the first time (and the second and the third), she spent her time in the tower crying. Her tears were burning hot, she reasoned, for they were ones of anger, not melancholy. Indeed, she would turn every soft pang of the heart, every ache that felt too helpless for existence, into something sharper and fiercer. She was facing injustice, but to be pitied would be even worse. ''Do not stand and point and console me, I beg of you. Free me.''

Nowadays, she no longer shed tears. No soup, no spices, simply a pot over a fire, her white-hot stone of a heart left alone at the bottom.

-

She does end up getting a destiny, and at first it fills her up with a smug sort of joy to see that it wasn’t she wasn’t to be a tower princess. In fact, she was to be a prince, the prince from Rusalka. Destinies from Rusalka, her father had immediately decided. It was obvious and it was obviously vicarious.

(A destiny does not change all those years wasted in the tower, though)

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There’s a realization.

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Adoette sobs as she watches. She is not the only one in the theatre that is crying, but she must be the loudest. Why else would it feel like everyone’s eyes are on her?

They know, someone coos, they’re all awaiting you. It is not the Sandman speaking, no glorious amber-tinted vision, no down-soft embrace. How she wishes she could wake a few years younger to see his disapproving face and an umbrella, a frightening but false web of dreams (simply dreams!) above her.

But that is a wish, as the Sandman has scarcely visited her for the past few days. When he does, he brings umbrellas with nothing inside them. Blank as sheets of parchment, an endless foggy road with muffled noises that no amount of ear straining could decipher. It’s anxiety-inducing in how sterile they are, and Adoette cannot tell which is better. When he visits, or when he doesn’t?

Czech is the language Rusalka is performed in, and it is a language Adoette has studied for two years to understand. She echoes the duet between the prince and Rusalka, lips moving silently with every line, every melody engraved into her head. Salt catches on her tongue but she pays no mind.

Her tears are so cold nowadays, so incredibly, incredibly cold.

-

When she exits the theatre, there are autographs to be given. Even the cast comes up to her, though they are also quickly bombarded with requests from the audience. The wood nymphs have changed already, but the prince remains in his final scene’s costume, terrible gashes all over his prince’s outfit and gaunt, ghostly makeup.

“Why look, you’re twins!” One actress calls out jokingly, gesturing to him and the teenager he’s stood next to, the only non-cast member in the vicinity. The people around them, including the actor in question, chuckle at her statement.

Adoette smiles politely.

The prince’s actor is a young man born to a baker and a florist. He has no destiny.

-

There’s a suspicion.

-

She watches Ilandere’s interview again, but she doesn’t know why (that’s a lie).

Ilandere is in a dorm room that is quite far from hers, and probably asleep considering it has just struck midnight. But even if she were awake and closer, it is not Ilandere herself that Adoette wants to see.

She pauses the video and tears her gaze from the screen to the room’s blank white ceiling, blinking the itchiness away. It reminds her of the fog-filled dreams she used to have a few years ago, when she was fourteen, but her multiple attempts to paint the walls at home were the ones that led to the longest times in the tower. She doesn’t want Headmaster Grimm to alert her parents that she’d continued at school.

Do I remember correctly? Adoette finds her memories as hazy as her dreams. She doesn’t recall noticing the Sandman nor his umbrella, but clearly he must have come.

In her dream, she and Ilandere have a picnic in a meadow, chatting cliche teenage conversations she’s only ever heard in movies. Ilandere looks and sounds a little strange, but that’s only because Adoette sees her through a screen more often than not. Nevertheless, Adoette’s imagination fills in the gaps for her. She knows what food she likes and what books she likes and how her laugh sounds.

When she wakes, she wonders if the Sandman wanted to reward or punish her.

-

I am not going mad, she presses down harshly with her pen, ink blots seeping through the page and distorting the words.

I have never been mad.

I have only ever been right, is what Ensanguine Charming writes in the libretto of Rusalka.

-

Ilandere—the next White Doe—and Adoette—the next Prince—are mid-tier celebrities, bearers of destinies, students at a prestigious school for future fairy tales. Sisters, as close as twined rope.

Eglantine—sweetbrier—and Ensanguine—to make bloody—are not.