31_days | January 6th-Original

Title: The Mad Princess Finette
Prompt: You cannot save people, you can only love them.
Series: Original
Words: 421
Rating: T for violence and death.
Summary: Finette recalls the deaths of her sisters.
Note: This drabble is based off of the French fairy tale Finette Cendron

The Mad Princess Finette

She heard them whisper as she walked silently through the castle.

“I heard her family fell into despair and lost everything.”

“I heard she left one sister to die of starvation.”

“I heard that the other was eaten by ogres.”

Half-truths, most of them. Her family had lost everything, squandered it in the war. Their mother was the one who decided to abandon them in the woods when they could no longer feed all five of them. The two eldest took their misfortune out on her. Finette remembered harsh words, harsh blows.

Fleur was the first of the sisters to die. She refused to eat anything that had even a speck of dirt on it. She would not drink from the river because she “did not want her breath to stink of fish.”

She lasted like that for four days. On the morning of the fifth, she was dead. The two remaining sisters buried her in a shallow grave under a large tree by the river.

It was when they were seeking shelter in a nearby cave that they ran into the ogres. Finette was fast, but they’d managed to catch her sister because of the heavy dress she wore. Belle was ripped apart and roasted on a spit. All Finette could do was wait in silence, wait for them to drop their guard.

The men of a neighboring kingdom found her bathed in ogre’s blood, clutching the severed hand of her sister. She loved them, but she could not save them.

he was brought before the ruler of that kingdom. When he asked her what had happened, she did not say a word. She did not want to speak of it.

The King thought she was bewitched and should be burned.

It was his son who saved her life, who ordered her a bathed and fed and sheltered.

The servants often whispered of how she was cursing the prince, sapping his life little by little. But his nurse said he had always been sick, even as a boy. His recent encounter with the fair folk worsened his health. It was thanks to Finette’s knowledge of their ways that the prince had not succumbed to it completely.

It was because the prince was kind to her that she tried speaking again. The words were soft, but she told him all of it. He said nothing while she spoke, only held her and comforted her like a child as she sobbed for the loss of her loved ones.