You, the queen of a fairy tale kingdom, got cursed to give birth to a princess who’s going to live her life isolated in a tower the first 20 years of her life. Narrate how you avoid your daughter’s fate.
She laughed, when she placed the curse on me. Laughed and laughed. She called me a fool for coming to her, for wanting children who would sap my strength and steal my power.
One child to take my kingdom, she promised me. Well, I’d wanted an heir. It didn’t have to be a curse.
One child the sea would steal. There was room in that. They didn’t have to die, only to love the sea. I would buy the finest ships.
And the third would suffer my grandmother’s fate.
The tower.
Grandmother told me stories about that tower, shuddering. About the isolation almost driving her mad. About the desperate longing for escape. I know what that escape cost her, and my grandfather as well, with his scarred face and limping gait.
That was going to be difficult.
The sorceress’s curse worked. Within the year, I held my first babe in my arms, a sturdy boy who kicked and cried and cuddled against his mother as if he hadn’t been made only to bring me grief. Well, all mothers grieve.
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The sorceress’ mistake was in casting the same curse as was on the Queen’s grandmother. You think she didn’t spend her life thinking “If only grandmama has done this, had tried that,” nibbling away at the words like a mouse at a rope, until it gives way? The sorceress barely thought about that curse; she copied and pasted. The Queen had received that very rare and special gift; a lifetime of if-onlies that actually paid off
