Page 16 of The Abandoned Princess

Once I felt clarity in my thoughts again, I stood up and forced myself to walk briskly up and down the large room that filled the top of the tower. Physical activity could also help drive away the cloud, as did directing my thoughts in more helpful directions.

I stopped beside the chest that stood at the foot of my bed. It was a large one, big enough to fit all my extra blankets and bedding, as well as my full collection of clothing.

Pulling back the lid, I took out each of the dresses and laid them across my bed. I handled them with affection since I had made each of them myself after a great deal of trial and error. My parents had allowed me to learn many skills outside the normal scope of a princess—usually because I badgered them into permitting lessons—but dress creation hadn’t been one of my interests.

Charli and the other girls would have helped me, but since they didn’t know of my royal background, I hadn’t wanted to admit my ignorance to them. Charli at least suspected me of coming from a wealthy or even noble family, but I didn’t think she’d guessed the full truth.

Thankfully she had been quite willing to smuggle me one of her sister’s old dresses—a specimen that was too worn to be passed down after her sister outgrew it. And Eulalie had left a basic sewing kit and some lengths of material in the chest. After carefully taking the dress apart, I was able to use it as a pattern for future dresses and was inordinately proud of some of the resulting creations.

And since I had plenty of time and a proper princess’s skill at embroidery, the gowns had no lack of ornamentation. That embroidery was the reason for laying out the dresses when I needed a happier direction for my thoughts.

I ran my fingers over the symbols and scenes that I had worked into the skirts, bodices, and sometimes even sleeves. Eulalie knew I needed something to fill my time in the tower, and she seemed to accept embroidery as a suitable occupation. But while she delivered large batches of thread, I didn’t have enough material to make decorative wall hangings. So my dresses had become the canvas for the pictures I created with my needle and thread.

Over time, I had decorated a dress for each of the princesses I had known growing up—the ones I had looked up to, the fortunate recipients of thrilling adventures. I saw their lives differently now, but the dresses still felt like an echo of my old friends.

My fingers swept over a group of dancing figures in bright, cheerful colors, my fingers lingering on the leaves of a large potted plant. A potted plant was a strange thing to embroider on a dress, but I hadn’t been able to help myself. I had often watched the balls of Lily’s Princess Tourney from behind sheltering leaves, wishing I could join the older princesses as they left the ballroom for secret adventures underground.

At the time I had thought it wildly unfair that I was too young to be caught up in the enchantment, but after five years under an enchantment of my own, I saw it differently. How terrified had the other girls been at the start of each new event? Were there times they had despaired of completing the Tourney alive? Did they still wake up in their sleep, gasping with dread from frightening memories that haunted their rest?

My fingers skipped onto the next dress, a stark white creation that was unsuited to life in a forest clearing. I had been unable to resist the pristine material, though, or the desire to decorate it with wild green stems, and deep crimson roses. I had never seen the now-fabled snowy rose garden of beastly Prince Dominic’s cursed castle, but seeing the dress always reminded me of Sophie. I wasn’t the only princess who had found herself a prisoner, alone and far from home. How foolish that I had once considered her situation romantic.

I always laid the dresses out in chronological order, and my lips curved upward at the fire motif on the next one. Celine’s fireballs were a godmother gift desired by adventurous children everywhere, and I was no exception. But she had received her fire in order to fight a cold so great it had nearly consumed an entire kingdom. As a child, my lack of experience with physical discomfort had led me to skim over that part of the story, believing it merely a necessary prequel to glorious triumph. Living that discomfort turned out to be far less glorious than hearing tales about it.

The apples decorating Snow’s dress made my stomach twinge. How long had it been since I ate? I couldn’t remember, but I didn’t stop my progress down the line of dresses. There would be plenty of time to eat later. There was always plenty of time.

Snow reminded me of myself as much as Sophie did—she had lost her family and been offered refuge by a clan of children. Charli and the others hadn’t given me physical haven, but they had provided me refuge all the same. They saw me and heard my voice, and I now understood what a great gift that was. Back home I had thought myself alone and unseen, but that had never really been the case. I had been loved and protected—my mind full of dreams of adventure because of the deep security of my actual life.

I didn’t resent my past self’s foolishness, though. Childhood was supposed to be full of protected innocence.

The next dress was made of the softest material Eulalie had ever left me and was decorated with embroidered feathers. Addie—my favorite of the older princesses—at least had a flock of swans to keep her company. Would a single animal companion have been too much for me to ask for? Perhaps a cute owl? I was desperate enough that I would have even accepted some sort of lizard, but the few who had found their way up the side of my tower had never shown the least interest in me.

I sighed and moved on to the sea-green dress that represented both my sister and my sister-in-law. I had gotten ambitious with this one and attempted a trumpet skirt because the shape reminded me of a mermaid’s tail. I had failed miserably, of course, but I kept the dress because I couldn’t bear to abandon the reminder of my sisters. Did they worry about me? Did they think I was dead?

I skipped quickly to the next one before I could become too distracted by thoughts of my family. The remaining five gowns also depicted the adventures of girls like me, but these ones were products of my imagination—or rather of the vivid dreams that seemed to be a consolation prize for the lack of entertainment in my tower.

The dress for Giselle showed a princess with a blonde braid riding a magnificent horse at full gallop. The detailed depiction of the horse had taken me several attempts and finishing it had filled me with so much pride I had worn the dress for nearly a month straight.

I liked the dreams of Giselle in the guise of a goose girl, whiling away her days in a vast royal park. They were peaceful, and I always woke up from them in a good mood. As far-fetched as it was to think that the Eldonian princess could have ended up caring for geese, I liked to pretend it was true.

Daria’s dress had strings of tiny wagons along all the hems, a decorative caravan that resembled one Lori and I had passed during our journey north. Of course Snow’s old friend couldn’t have ended up with a caravan of traveling merchants, but the dreams of their bonfires and dances were so much fun that I never fought the fancy.

Given her preferred occupation, Cassie’s dress should have been a simple creation, designed for fitting into a crowd. But instead it was one of my most elaborate. Almost the entire surface was covered in bright flowers and vines—some of which I had never seen outside my dreams. I knew my dream version of Cassie couldn’t be real since my friend had apparently spent the years of my captivity discovering new kingdoms across the Great Desert. It made no sense to imagine her surrounded by startlingly verdant gardens. But at least my subconscious sometimes threw out a more realistic story—one where Cassie hunted for treasure through the dusty and abandoned corridors of a city carved into a cliff.

The last two dresses were for girls who existed only in my dreams, inhabitants my imagination had created to populate the new kingdoms. But after five years disconnected from reality, they felt no less real than the others.

I touched the long sleeves of Zaria’s dress, admiring the embroidered effect that emulated a row of bracelets. I couldn’t be surprised my imagination had created a girl who discovered hidden treasure caves full of thieves—it was exactly the sort of adventure I had dreamed of as a child. But I had learned from bitter experience that the reality of such an adventure would have been far from my imagining. The fictional Zaria could have her treasure. I just wanted to be free from my tower.

The last dress kept my attention the longest. I had worked hard on it, but it still didn’t look right.

“What if I moved the seam that way?” I traced my finger over a line of stitching with narrowed eyes. If Zaria was the embodiment of my childish dreams, Kali came from a deeper, more wild part of my imagination. She didn’t just have the animal companion I desired—her cat actually talked. And the dresses she wore in my dreams bore no resemblance to anything I had seen while awake. I still hadn’t quite worked out how to mimic the creations of my imagination, and my current project wasn’t ready to be worn.

A gurgle from my stomach reminded me that I needed to eat. I stepped back and ran my eye down the line of dresses.

“I thought you were all living my dream,” I said to the gowns, although in actuality I was speaking to the distant women they represented. “But you must have all been frightened and lonely and uncomfortable, just like me. And yet, you endured. You conquered the enchantments that threatened your lives and your kingdoms. And I will endure as well. No matter how many years I’m trapped here, I will one day shatter my enchantment and find my happy ending.”

The last of the black cloud lifted as it always did after the reminder that I wasn’t the first to face pain, difficulty, and despair. I would never admit to anyone, even Charli, that I talked to my dresses. But I had once been a thirteen-year-old locked alone in a tower. I could have come up with sillier ways to ground myself and fight back the darkness.

The hours I spent embroidering those scenes were spent reminding myself that the girls of my past memory and my current dreams had overcome their trials. After so many hours of repetition, those thoughts had become sufficiently ingrained that just seeing the dresses let me step out of the cloud and back into a place of hope.

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