Excerpt
This Princess Kills Monsters
Chapter OneThe Irritating Riddle of the SphinxesI was going to get myself eaten. I could tell. It was just one of those days.
The field beyond the low rise was guarded by three stone sphinxes. A sphinx, as you might be aware, is a terrifying creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and a mouth full of sharp fangs it uses to rip off the limbs of slow-witted travelers. When found in nature, sphinxes are about as large as a cow. Whoever had sculpted their likenesses here hadn’t been concerned with realism, and all three were roughly the size of a barn.
Whether made of flesh or made of stone, sphinxes adore riddles and games. The best way to avoid losing any limbs is to correctly answer whatever they ask. But in this case, I was having a difficult time figuring out what the question was in the first place. So far, I had managed to determine that one of them always lied and one of them always told the truth—although I wasn’t entirely certain which one was which—while the third one, for some reason, only recited nature poetry.
I remembered there was a way to solve this kind of puzzle, but I couldn’t for the life of me recall what it was.
“Will you answer this question with a lie?” I asked.
“No,” said the first sphinx, grinning to reveal its pointed stone teeth.
“No,” the second sphinx replied as well.
“A lone fallen leaf / Floats across the placid pond / Autumn has arrived,” said the third one.
I’d been hoping one of the sphinxes would say it was lying, get caught in a paradox, and . . . I don’t know. Explode, maybe.
There might have been no solution at all. I didn’t think the third one was working quite right. It was noticeably more chipped and weathered than its fellows, and its nose had fallen off. If it had been a patient of mine and not a statue, I would have diagnosed it with late-stage syphilis.
Treat with a carefully measured mixture of arsenical compounds and elemental bismuth, I thought automatically. Keep watch for signs of toxicity; the medicine can be as dangerous as the disease unless the dosage is precise.
But the sphinx was not my patient, statues could not catch syphilis—or at least, I very much hoped they could not—and arsenic would have had little effect on natural erosion. I didn’t treat patients anymore anyway. To be honest, I never really had; I’d only assisted my mother and father in their work.
My job was to go on nonsensical quests and solve annoying puzzles. Although I’d been failing at that here, and I was beginning to fear my wits were about to prove fatally slow.
“You have two questions remaining,” said the first sphinx.
“And then,” said the second, “we will not eat you.”
It was probably unreasonable to hope that the first one was the liar and the second was telling the truth.
“A blanket of snow,” said the third, “Untouched by morning footsteps / Glitters like granite.”
“That’s hardly a relevant verse at the moment,” I told the sphinx with a huff. “It’s not even cold yet. There won’t be any snow for months.”
It tried to sniff disdainfully through its missing nose, scrunching its face up so tightly that a few more pebbles cracked off and fell to the ground.
The day was, in fact, bright and clear, a crisp morning in early autumn that for once promised no rain. A lone cloud stretched across the sky, a thick white line with wisps reaching out from the center in straight, regular rows. It looked like the spine and ribs of some enormous skeleton suspended in midair. Behind the sphinxes, a single row of trees topped the rise, their leaves just beginning to show the first hints of red and gold. And beyond, on the other side of the slope, spread a broad flat field overrun by tall, yellowing grass.
Which made the sphinxes a problem, because I was supposed to plough that field and sow it with teeth.
A thousand teeth, to be precise. I had no idea why; my stepmother hadn’t bothered to explain. She never did before sending me or my sisters off on one of her bizarre quests. But when the queen says go, you go. I had tried refusing once, and it wasn’t an experience I cared to repeat anytime soon.
All three of us, Jonquil and Calla and me, had been assigned the tooth task. But my stepmother hadn’t told any of us where the field was, if she even knew. Calla, my younger half sister—we’re a blended family—had set off for the east. My stepsister, Jonquil, the eldest, had set off for the west. Both of them left their spouses behind at the palace and traveled far and wide across the earth in search of the proper location.
I, in the meantime, decided to get a start on the tedious process of gathering a thousand teeth. After a few days spent dickering with dentists, I didn’t have anywhere near enough, so I started going door to door. As it turns out, people exhibit a wide variety of reactions to a stranger asking if they happen to have any spare teeth lying around, but none of them could be described as delight.
The sphinxes were waiting for my next question with unconcealed impatience. “If I asked whether I could just walk past you, what would you say?” I hazarded in ill-considered desperation.
“I would say no,” said the sphinx I thought was telling the truth, crouching down and lashing its tail.
“I would say yes,” said the sphinx I thought was lying, rearing up and stretching its claws.
“The sun-dappled grass / Beneath the windblown branches—”
“I get it,” I told them with a tired sigh. “One more question and then you’ll eat me. Or maybe you won’t. Or maybe you’ll describe the ocean waves crashing against the rocky shore.”
“Oh, that’s a good one!” said the sphinx with no nose.
“Feel free to use it if you want.” Perhaps playing muse to the sphinx would help somehow. It seemed unlikely.
I had managed to obtain enough teeth for the ploughing, although only because I’d had a lucky break the week before. In the middle of my tooth-collecting rounds, I’d been accosted by a fairy who accused me of trying to muscle in on her turf. She’d been gathering children’s teeth for centuries. In exchange, she left small coins under their pillows. An odd hobby, but the habits of fairies were often difficult to understand. For instance, my sister-in-law, Gnoflwhogir, made necklaces out of the left ears of her enemies. I tried very hard not to be Gnoflwhogir’s enemy.
When I explained my quest to the weird orthodontic fairy, she forgave my effrontery and took me down a road made of teeth and through a gate made of teeth to her mansion made of teeth so we could sit on her tooth couch and drink tea from a pair of enormous hollowed-out molars pulled from some young giant’s mouth. She was eager to off-load her surplus, honestly. But even so, she refused to let me have any unless we made some kind of trade. Some further chat revealed she was almost out of under-pillow coins; she didn’t earn any income apart from teeth, which made me question her business model.
I went out to fetch some money for her and came across a cave where a troll was hoarding an enormous pile of small change. He was primed to eat me until I mentioned I was willing to strike a deal for cash, and he revealed that he was a collector of rare manuscripts with a desperate desire for first editions. It ended up turning into a whole . . . thing, and by the end I had traded the jewels of a princess (my earrings, since I am a princess, technically) for a fiddle that played itself for a goat with a golden fleece for a musty pile of handwritten pages for a sack full of coins for a whole lot of teeth. As an added bonus, the fairy directed me to the field where the teeth needed to be sown; she was an expert on all matters dental.
She didn’t mention the stone sphinxes, though. And by the time I discovered their presence, I was utterly exhausted from travel and dealmaking.
But exhausted or not, I had a task to perform. I was about to take a stab at my final question—one that I was fairly sure would result in my being chomped to bits—when I noticed the field had begun ploughing itself.
I watched in astonishment as neat furrows opened in the dirt, in lines as even and parallel as musical staves. They ripped right through the grass and undergrowth without pause. In less than a minute, anyone would have thought a farmer with a team of oxen had been working the field over for days on end.
I opened my mouth to ask if that was supposed to be happening and then snapped it shut just in time. That would have been a depressingly bad final question to get eaten for.
“Hi, Melilot!” came a voice from behind me, startling me so much that I jumped.
“Calla,” I said, closing my eyes.
I had a half-formed hope that if I didn’t look at her, my younger sister would turn out not to be there after all, her voice merely a hallucination brought on by stress and fatigue.
“How’s your quest been going?” she asked, persistently real. “Have you been getting on well with the sphinxes?”
“Swimmingly.” I swung around, wrenching my eyes back open and plastering a smile on my face. “We’ve become the best of friends.”
“A lie!” said Probably Truthful Sphinx.
