stakebait | (no subject)

For

reunion, who asked in

fandom_charity for The Goose Girl from the handmaid's perspective. I hope this is the kind of thing you had in mind.

They say the divine right of kings is in the blood. But then, they say a lot of tom fool things. My father's the king, right enough, but I've seen my blood let often enough to know it's red as any other woman's. Lashed my back, they did, when the goat broke the rope the chatelaine was too miserly to replace. Boxed my ears for stealing scraps from the great silver platters I carried to table.

Too heavy them things is, heaped high with venison, for a girl turned eight years old, and her had nothing to eat since noontide but the parched corn I kept back from the geese I fed. But them scraps is for the royal hounds, and nothing for the royal bastard. Hounds is useful, see. Bastards is like dogshit, what's left when the useful's all used up.

My mother said I was lucky to go to court. Never run short of a crust of bread or a dipper of water, a hearth all winter never run out of wood, for all the forests is the king-my-father's.

That what she called him, the princess, my sister. The king-my-father, like it was all one word. Many's the time I wanted to scream at her, he's the king-my-bleeding-father too, and what did that ever get me but kicked and cursed? But I held my tongue, because it was a good post, as these things go. A pallet of hay in a high chamber, old gowns as often as she cast them off.

The queen, she knew. The spit and image of me mum, they always said in the village. She never forgets a face, not if they done her wrong. What she thought my mum could say when the king come calling, don't nobody know. You don't say no to the king, even she must know that. She bore him a daughter, after all, when he tired of mum's breasts grown sore and her belly big and came back to her royal bed.

The princess is six months younger than me. Primogeniture, that's what they call it here, like big words makes it better. The oldest gets the most, just like in the village, just like the meanest and the strongest. Well, I'm older and meaner and stronger, too. Had to be. Nobody ever handed me nothing on a silver plate. Way I see it, that means everything she has, by rights, is mine.

Keep your eyes open and your mouth closed and you might have a chance to advance, mum said, when she kissed me goodbye. I knew what she meant. Do what she did, catch the right man's eye and bargain just hard enough that he'd pay up to get within my legs willing, not so much that he'd get sick of haggling and just take. I know how it's done. I seen it before, to get meat in a hard winter, and of course, when she sold me away.

Didn't think she did it for nothing, did you?

Well I kept my eyes open and my mouth closed and when I saw my chance I grabbed it with both hands. Took her cup and her gown and her nasty tattle tale horse with its precious mane wrapped in ribbons could feed a drudge for half a year. Took her name, took her husband, took her place. Took my place. One thing I knew for sure, I was never gonna birth no bastards printed with a king's face like so many counterfeit coins.

I laughed when she had to keep the geese like a commoner. Let her know what it's like, what it takes to make the fine featherbeds she slept on and the roast fowl she pushed away half eaten. But she never learned anything.

I learned. I learned it don't hurt no less when a man takes you has a piece of gold on his finger. I learned a princess can't change nothing, not without someone starts wondering what's wrong with her and shuts her up in a tower and starts visiting the village maidens to make worthless little copies of his own. I learned to be her, to wait like there was nothing needed doing, to primp and prettify and princess like my life depended on it. So when he asked me, I had to answer like her. I had to be her. Because I would rather die than be me anymore.

They had to kill me, I know that. I might be a thief and a bastard and a liar, but I was as wedded to their princling as the truest lady that ever walked a cloister. If he was to marry again, they needed me dead as dead, and make it look like justice. But I've been good to my serving maid, since I got here, and she is loyal to me. She will cut the babe from my belly and take it out in her cloak, back to her village, with my marriage lines. They'll never notice when they pull me from the barrel, not with all that royal blood. And when my sister's boy is grown, he'll find his brother waiting.