Palace Walls

Part Two

 Queen Clotilda Hua struggled to sit still. It was portrait day, and her parents commissioned a great artist to paint one to celebrate her coronation. Yet they were also careful to ensure that the portrait celebrated the Queen's Welsh and Chinese heritage. She sat on a luscious jade-colored armchair behind a banner of a red dragon. On each side of her, two ebony tables held two blue Ming bowls of leeks and daffodils. She wore a green-and-black checkered dress with a close-fitted lacy color and a high veiled headdress, with rainbow beads dangling before her rouge-smeared face, and her black hair parted between the elaborate silver designs. Between two emerald-ringed, ruby-clawed hands, she held a glossy oval mirror. Her dark-brown eyes gleamed without a soul, yet delicately so, like a doll. Her sticky red mouth was set in a line too firm for a fourteen-year-old girl. The painter stood back, lifting his brush.

"Are you doing well, Your Majesty?" he asked.

The Queen nodded stiffly. She couldn't believe what she had gotten herself into, or rather, what her parents had gotten her into. For the land of giants, Splendora was not large in population, but it was diverse and wealthy, and with wealth and diversity came higher standards. Standards of living. Of loving. Naturally, Clotilda's heart pounded-- how could she, a mere teenager, rise to such an occasion? It reminded her of an old song-- "All those names I've spoken, were pieces of the hearts I've broken. Will I put them back together? Maybe. They are soft and sweet on the tongue, yet hard and sour in the throat, in the heart, in the blood. Wake up and hear your name, that I might mend something in you...."

                    --from Under the Road, documenting the young Queen following her coronation.

There were two figures robed in black-- one skinny, the other fat. Black birdcage veils shielded their faces except for their eyes, which were bright and brown. These shadowy figures glided through the small gray Execution Museum, where brittle locks of hair of Splendora's most heartless criminals were kept framed behind glossy sheets of painted glass, labeled SLAIN BY.... and naming each Executioner in hard, blocky letters. Ancient wooden torture machines clanked and swirled, reminding them of executions from years ago. On the walls, pearl-handled knives were crusted with old blood. Wax figures filled a glass case, with anatomical markings and a key to identify injuries: gashes, stab wounds, red-finger marks of strangling.... The woman smirked; the man shuddered.

They approached the painted, powdered, pregnant figure on the throne, the one who gripped a bladed fan in her hand. Sharp crimson nails glowed in the fading light. They bowed before speaking.

"Your Majesty," murmured the bony one, a woman, "Why have you summoned us at such a time?"

"Yeah, it's awfully sensitive," snorted the fat man.

The Queen leaned forward. She wouldn't stop shaking, and her breath was fast and shallow. Her eyes were red and streaked her mascara into oily black streams down her white-powdered cheeks.

"I-I am terrified," she gasped, "Please, you're the only ones who can help."

"But, Cousin!" cried the male, "You never ask us!"

"Can't you take another tranquilizer and think it over?" asked the woman.

She leaned forward, setting a hand on each one's shoulder. The odd trembling of her hands tempted them to pull away.

"My Executioners," she whispered, "I have a situation none can know, not even Eryx, Grippina, or Historian Oltu!"

"What is it?" asked the woman.