A Cracked Jewel Outshines a Stone

“Miss,” Ana started, testing the waters, “You used me. I was an object. Or an… an animal.”

“Used? We were fornicating. Copulating. Knobbing. Or whatever it is Yulinaeans call it. If I 'used' you, then you 'used' me as well.”

"How can you say that? You hurt me."

“I know that! I saw your tears and I dread thinking about it more, and try as I might, I cannot comprehend why you were like that.”

“Are you joking?” Ana’s blood was boiling now, and pushing the limits of this engagement, she stood up to let her iron rage be known. “Are you just toying with me? This is just another game of yours, isn't it?"

“No!”

Without thinking, she stepped towards the princess. It must have been frightening, because she picked her feet off the floor and retreated slightly onto the bedspread. She crossed her legs over her lap.

“Is it so difficult for you to speak to me?”

“What makes you think I want to speak to you?”

A realization dawned on Ana, one more insane than any mystic art she had been schooled in back home. As she recollected on those events she failed to forget, disparate pieces fell into place like the fortress’s rainboe wallglasses. The more she understood, the greater her urge to wretch became, especially with the lingering aroma of sex permeating the room and forcing her to remember and remember and remember.

“You really do think that we’re the same. That we’re equals,” she said. “You actually, truly believe that.”

“A poor lover you would make if we had nothing in common,” mumbled the princess.

A manic chuckle escaped Ana’s lips. She stumbled around the room on full display, motioning wildly with her hands to process the sheer stupidity she was allowing herself to entertain. “Goddess. You have it in your head that we’re some starstruck young couple having their wonderful first union under providence.”

“That was what I wanted this to be,” the woman mumbled.

“Yes, that’s what you wanted.” She pointed an accusatory finger. All her inhibitions were slowly melting away from her inner heat, even if she recognized fruitlessly that she was trying to prosecute an imperial princess—an incarnation of the Stone Goddess as they claimed. “You never bothered with what I wanted. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Wh— how dare you? I have fantasized about courting you for months,” said the princess.

Ana looked her straight in the eye. “You don’t even know my name.”

This finally, truly broke through her shield. The princess tried to look anywhere but at Ana, thinking hard and hoping that she could buy enough time until she landed on a correct guess.

She had never once spoken it. It was servant this, and servant that. What a joke.

“Fine,” said the princess. “Let us formally introduce ourselves. I am Princess Dianthel Vonnegis Henriet—”

“Stop. Stop it. Stop acting like you care about me.”

“Just because your name escapes me does not imply my lack of care.”

"You blackmailed me and held a sword to my throat!”

“I was being assertive! And you played along!”

“I was afraid you’d chop my fucking head off!”

Their voices had risen in alternation until reaching a crescendo, and Ana struck with so much power that the princess was forced into silence. She wanted to do it over again. She was abusing the emergent opportunity, just like she had the night before.

"And then you almost—" She choked down a sob and her fingers hovered to the thin line on her neck that was raw to the touch. “I’m not a person. I haven’t been for three years. I’m just a body that survives you. And you look at a slave and think she can play along?”

She was crying again. It wasn't sorrowful, or furious—Goddess knows it wasn’t happy. It just was.

The princess was quiet, in a way she wasn’t well-known for. Despite the verbal assault, she was a receptive listener, and if Ana had stepped too far beyond the border that had been drawn in the sand, she didn’t let her know, aside from a guilt-ridden gaze wandering to the saber on the floor.

“When you were looking at yourself in the mirror,” said Ana, “I nearly believed you were someone else. And I was almost…”

Enjoying it? Was that what she was going to say?

To say she wasn’t pleasured by the previous night wasn’t wholly correct. She wouldn’t verbalize it, and she was too afraid of herself to confront it, but there was a fundamental aspect of her person—maybe that was the person she had stopped being—that considered the previous night from a horribly different lens. And for a few scant moments, the danger had dissolved, Ana had stopped seeing her as a princess, and she was allowed to live.

Not survive. Live.

She slumped forward, exhausted. “And I didn’t lie when I said you were a woman. I would never disrespect you, even if I despise you.”

They stood on opposite sides of the world. Ana had placed an impossible distance between them and no longer expected anything to make the journey between them. She didn’t know what to do now, knowing that the Steward considered her missing, and returning would only earn punishment for abandoning her morning duties. Still, any punishment for tardiness was better than staying here. She made for the door and ran her palm along the cracked crystal.

The doors groaned under Ana’s wait as she pushed outward. She didn’t even care that she was unclothed and soiled—as long as she could be away from this place.

“I want to care about you,” called the Princess. “You said I do not, but I want to. How can I?”

“You can let me go.”

“Please.”

And for but a moment, she was back. The lonely, shivering girl. Ana knew it was an illusion, just like the previous time—mirages only led to death in the desert sands. But she couldn’t stop herself from craning her neck towards nude princess trying her damnedest to pull her limbs inside herself so no one could see her.

The princess asked her to answer a question. Not a request, which she long ago learned meant ‘order’.

Though she could barely wrack her thoughts about how the past dozen hours had led her to where she was, the truth remained that a loathsome child with a broken toy was asking for her help.

Goddess, she was actually considering this. The thought wouldn’t have even crossed her normally, but this was the longest she’d been away from chores and requests and insults and threats in a very long time. After a long age of contemplation, Ana pulled the doors flush again, pushed her back to them, and slid down to a cold-assed, cross-legged seat.

A tense moment passed. Ana said, “Try.”

The princess failed to do even that.

Another moment. Another wasted choice. Ana was ready to stand, bow, and bid her farewell as the princess agitatedly rocked back and forth from her perch. She opened her mouth multiple times to speak, only to snap it shut as she realized the futility of each word unsaid.

Ana's inner candor knew that she didn’t have a proper response to that either. The feeling was essentially foreign to her now too—like the Garnedian language, she comprehended it but she did not understand it.

“I meant not to hurt you. I was not myself,” whispered the princess.

Ana looked her dead in the eye, so deeply that she forced the seventeenth imperial princess to wither. “Weren’t you?”

“I— I loved everything you did to me, but in the midst of it, I was… scared.”

“Scared?” Ana scoffed. She was continuously mystified by this woman, who had no sense or worse, the exact opposite of sense itself, which is why she decided to let her speak. “How?”

The princess's tension was eased by that push, and she took a deep breath. “When I was a child, my mother invited me on a trip to see the surface. She finally decided I was old enough to channel a lawstone, and I had begged her to let me see the sun. We organized a caravan and traveled for days to reach it, and when we finally arrived, I was… overjoyed. So much so that I wandered far beyond her reach, and ignored her warning about the length of the channeling protection.”

She held out her hands, burns tracing well up her forearms, though the marks had faded with age and time. Parts of her chest, legs, neck, and head were also marred with the same. They darkened her already richly-colored skin.

“And I lied there, crying for her. It was the only thing I could do,” she said. “I felt that for a moment, last night.”

“You believe there’s some grand history that should make me forgive you?”

“No.” She defensively hid behind her knees and hands. “But I wish I did not get scared.”

I decline to hold you in contempt.

Ana considered those words carefully, as they could be no more trustworthy than the woman who spoke them. But she had forgotten in a few short hours how to keep herself alive.

“I fought back on your terms, and it made you feel so powerless that you threatened me, held me down, and—” Ana choked on her words, but it made the princess cower further. “You have everything the world could ever give you, yet all you can do is wish that you were someone else. You're pathetic.”

Ana just stared at her, waiting for her to finally grow up. She wanted to care, or so she said, yet she made no attempt to imply otherwise in the language of her mouth or body. Maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she really, truly, didn’t know how, and if that was the case, there was only one more thought she could spare for the seventeenth.

Pity.

“I have work to do. Princess.” said Ana.

The princess lowered her head and pointed weakly to one of her encrusted wardrobes lining the walls of her chambers. Inside were some exceptionally-decorated, impossibly expensive articles that were no doubt too small for her to wear. Still, she took the offering and dressed herself in silence, frowning at how nice they felt to wear after years of the same re-washed rags.

She cleaned herself off as best she could and tried to forget it all. Maybe it would eventually rinse itself from her history and one day she could remember the night like one of celebration and rice-liquor—that is to say, not at all.

As she prepared her things, the princess approached her timidly with a small piece of parchment drawn between her fingers. Unreadable traces of gel soaking into its fibers. “For the steward. If he takes punitive action, I will hear about it.”

Ana held it between her fingers and realized it meant she was finally free, loathe as she was to go back.

“How can I help you… heal?”

Ana tightened the note in her hand, and tried not to see the weakened child instead of the royal tyrant she had learned to be. But, try as she might, the person she almost wanted to see was still standing there. Waiting.

“You can't, princess," she said. “Maybe someone else can.”

The doors echoed throughout the palace as they opened. The frigid air of the princess’s quarters rushed out behind her, and she stood in the doorway for a second too long, considering one too many things that she knew she was stupid for. She kept her back to the princess so as not to think too hard about who she might be.

“Ana.”

“What?” asked the princess.

“My name. It’s Ana.”

“You are Yulinaean.”

The underlying meaning was clear. Why did she wear such a badge around herself, hailing someone who did not exist with such a vapidly Garnedian name?

Why Ana?

Why not Hanahamari Emiko?

“It’s Ana. For now.”

The princess must have thought long on this. In place of ‘dismissed’, she said, “Thank you, Ana.”

The doors ground closed behind her. Ana didn’t turn to see her, even though she knew that she was standing there and watching her go.

She escaped from somewhere she didn’t want to be to someplace that she never wanted to return, silently praying that the moments she spent in that awful room meant more than she realized.

As chains of glowing dress cascaded down her shoulders, Princess Dianthel’s heart was empty in her chest. The chamberlain untwirled the enchanted layers as if she were pulling rotten crops after a plague, and the princess was a limp body in her hands. She wasn’t unhappy—certainly not, borderline impossible—but it wasn’t often that she considered why she might be.

“Please lift your arms, majesty,” said the chamberlain. The process proceeded as it did every day, the monotony of which she had only begun to realize in the past week.

Her imagination was blank and void recently. It disgusted her to stare at the miles of the chamberlain’s smooth leg, just as it disgusted her to know she might be staring back.

“Your majesty, I will remove your brassiere now. I wish to avoid agitating the lawstones.” The same warning, as always.

As she raised her arms above her head, Dianthel said, dispassionately, “What dinner plans does father have tonight?”

“My apologies, Majesty. He’s meeting with a vassal embassy for the foreseeable future.”

That made fifty-six. She wasn’t really certain the number mattered anymore.

“Chamberlain, do you believe I am a good person?” asked Dianthel.

“Of course, your Majesty. Those of the imperial house are blessed with—”

“Not a royal, chamberlain. I asked if I am a good person.”

The woman was taken aback by this, though her work did not slow. Their conversation abruptly ended as she struggled to find words, no doubt searching for words that weren’t worthy of reprimand.

Dianthel wasn’t sure what she meant to gain from asking. A hollow reassurance? A friend? Hardly. The only benefit to hearing the chamberlain’s lies was to hopefully drown out the two words that had taken place of her fantasies.

You're pathetic.

Every day, every hour, every minute.

You’re pathetic.

Why couldn’t she… not believe that?

“Majesty,” started the chamberlain in a quiet voice, “may I have your permission to speak freely?”

“Go ahead,” said Dianthel.

She gathered her breath and spoke as she removed the last piece of Dianthel’s dress, leaving her nude, cold, and quiet. “I don’t believe in good people. I believe in kindness and wrongdoing, and anyone is capable of either. I’ve committed wrongdoing myself, and… you may have too.”

Her voice trailed off so the last few words were barely audible. She clearly wanted to say it, but was still afraid of it being heard.

Dianthel sighed and accepted her word, as well as a nightgown that the woman deftly prepared. As she finished her nightly rounds and tidied what had been unset—tenderly handling the damage that lingered from last week, from what Dianthal had explained was the result of wine—the princess had one more question to ask.

“Chamberlain.” Her breath was unsteady. “Would you like me more… if I was someone else?”

And after finding some courage within her, the woman said, “Perhaps that depends on who that is.”

“Hmm.”

The woman ground the door shut and left the princess alone to lie in bed and think of the servant girl—Ana.

You’re pathetic.

She no longer wanted to deny that.

Dianthel was a failure. A brute. A princess of no worth and a person of less. None of her academic studies and hobby pursuits would change that she was, and had always been, pathetic.

But, for Ana to offer her name, she must have believed that someone else was not.

Thanks for reading! I've definitely set the story up so there's room for continuation where Dianthel can attempt to atone and Ana can guide her, and I'm considering writing an ongoing story as a sequel. It'd probably be a little less sexy and more action/political drama

Please leave reviews and comments, and I hope your week treats you well. See you someday!