It groans again, this time in regret. It should’ve known: the moronic boy had smelled awful, and he tasted of sour milk and rancid meat. He was more pompous than the others, too. Hurling insults until the monster finally ate his face.
Now, staring up into the canopy of green and listening to the music of the forest, with a bellyache from the deepest circle of hell, the monster can feel the change in the air that marks the approach of an interloper—and potential meal. Perhaps this one will be better. A stomach-settler. It’s happened before: the relatively nice boy who tried to use kind words to lure the monster into a rather obvious trap had been like a dose of milk of magnesia after the havoc wreaked on the monster’s gut by the blustering, ruddy-faced chap the monster had previously eaten. That boy had attempted a curse-filled sword attack and tasted like dog dung.
A breeze rustles the leaves overhead, and the monster sits up. Inhales. There’s something…different. About this intruder. Different than the dumb-as-bricks boy-humans with their clubs and spears and bows and arrows—all objects now strung up around the monster’s tree as an unheeded warning. The monster had devoured those boys in a blink and with abandon, though the monster is smaller than the boys had been. And they—the boys—were always so much less filling than they looked. Instead of heart and meat, full of hot air and utterly lacking in substance.
The scent in the air now is missing the mustiness of puffed-up ego and the pungency of presumed victory. There is…sweetness. With a smack of spice. Like a bouquet of flowers wrapped in a string of cinnamon sticks.
The monster hasn’t smelled something so sweet in…well, it can’t remember how long. It brings to mind someone the monster used to know but hasn’t thought of in as long as it could think: a girl.
And she was a girl. Dare had been this girl’s name, the monster recalls, and despite not fully comprehending the word princess, it arises beside the girl in the monster’s mind. And she felt settled in her body and skin, though the monster knew, somehow, that there were many who assumed this girl not fully “girl” because of the way she refused to embrace frivolous things the silly townspeople decided were part and parcel to girlhood. Dresses and dolls and tea parties and stolen glances at their—presumed—boy counterparts.
What the monster does understand is that princess, whatever it means, didn’t seem to fit this Dare girl. Her shoulders had stooped as though she carried the weight of a relentlessly cruel world on them. And her eyes rarely lifted from the ground around her feet. And beneath this Dare girl’s sweet scent, there had been something incongruous. A tang. Something tinged with despair and broken dreams.
But what, the monster ponders, pushing up to its feet, had happened to Dare?
The monster is just about certain that it didn’t eat her. It couldn’t have.
The sweetness dancing up the tree trunks and spinning on the leaves intensifies, and the atmosphere crackles as warm, honeyed air rushes over the monster. It stumbles, shaken to its core—the monster has never experienced anything so pleasant, is the word that comes to mind. (It’s a new one.) It lifts its rough hands and sucks in the monster equivalent of a gasp. The air burns going down the monster’s throat, but that’s nothing compared to the stinging fissures now snaking up, down, and all around the monster’s body, leaving jagged gaps in its tree bark–like shell—skin?
Its gut rumbles, but there’s something more.
An opening of the monster’s mind.
Where had the Dare girl gone? And who is this delicious-smelling newcomer?
Without thinking too much about it, the monster leaps down from the treehouse.
* * *
Dream kicks a rock out of her path.
Most of the people back home—though she’d be lying if she said that word feels like it still fits when she thinks of the town she left behind—think Dream is no more than her name implies: cloudy-headed and moony-eyed. She has skin the color of coffee-splashed rooibos tea, and dark eyes typically turned skyward. A tendency that makes them sparkle like black sapphires in both sun and moonlight.
But those eyes are keener than anyone realized. They pick up on things overlooked by those too consumed with chasing the future to enjoy the present.
They are eyes that alight on the faint trail along the forest floor masked by an increase of broken twigs and divots in the earth that could only come from heavy boots.
It’s true that even without these signs, Dream would’ve found her way through the woods just fine. Even now, with the sky beginning to darken as the sun makes its descent toward a horizon Dream can’t see for the trees, Dream knows where she is going.
By Mother’s orders, Dream stopped her daily jaunts into these woods when the town baker’s right hand—as distinguished by a crescent moon–shaped burn scar along his palm—was found atop a pile of dead leaves three days after he took to the woods in search of his missing (Pursuer) son.
Prior to the monster’s arrival, however, Dream had spent most of her time in these woods. As a young(er) girl, Dream loved nothing more than to spend her days slaying pine dragons with her stick sword while riding on the back of her stump steed. In a beautiful gown, no less.
Though the light is low now, Dream moves with certainty. A random gust of warm air caresses her face, and Dream knows she has almost reached the spot where she last saw Princess Dare with her own eyes.
On that afternoon, Dream remembers dreamily, Dare was wearing leather trousers tucked into boots that tied up to the knee. Her unruly black curls were pushed back from her face with a headband, and her skin, a deep bronze that glimmered in the sunlight, was exposed from neck to breastbone by her half-unbuttoned white shirt and glistened with sweat and confidence. Princess Dare’s sleeves were shoved up above her elbows, and as she climbed a massive oak, her forearms flexed and pulsed.
It had warmed Dream in places that brought a flush to her cheeks.
Dream would never admit it to a soul, but she’d followed Princess Dare into the woods that day. In fact, Dream had been following Princess Dare for months, and though Dream was sure the princess would’ve welcomed the company—Princess Dare seemed so lonely back then—Dream could never work up the courage to step out from behind the bushes.
Dream had watched Princess Dare change as both girls got older. The same boys who tugged at Dream’s skirts and whispered sugar-coated deceptions to her in passing would shout obscenities at Princess Dare and touch the princess without permission. Being a royal daughter meant nothing: Princess Dare’s lack of interest in boys and refusal to wear the admittedly absurd fluffy froufrou dresses (the ones Dream couldn’t get enough of) were treated as an abdication.
During their primary school days, Princess Dare appeared unfazed by the sidelong glances thrown in her direction as she blew by in her signature trousers, wild hair billowing like a lion’s mane. But as they pushed into those years when a girl begins to blossom with the parts people claim make her a woman, the glances at Princess Dare turned to glares turned to whispers turned to outright disdain. By the time Dream and Dare hit thirteen, the princess walked with her head down and shoulders hunched.