Chapter Text
There's something about a curse. Dean got that much. Details follow, likely damn important, but he’s struggling to focus.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” he has to ask for the second time.
“I was explaining how I have been cursed for decades, doomed to blah blah blah, Prince Dean? Your Highness? Are you listening?”
“I… sorry, this is my first time getting important quest information from a bird,” Dean admits. “Also, hate to break it to you, but… the beak? Not helping. Bit of a speech impediment. Uh, can you go back to being a guy?”
The large white swan gives Dean a beady-eyed look - not that it has much choice in the matter - and ruffles its feathers. “I was trying to illustrate the gravity of my situation.”
“I think I got it,” Dean understates. “Yeah. Consider that gravity completely gotten. Now can you… uh…” he waves his fingers around in a way that hopefully translates what he’s trying to say, because his brain and mouth are still playing catch-up.
The swan gives an ungainly hop that splashes it from the bank back into the water, where it floats with a stark contrasting grace. The light of a gibbous moon pouring over the lake touches its feathers, which shine ghostly white in the darkness of the night.
There ensues your standard magical transformation, a little wetter than usual, and the man who caught Dean’s eye a few minutes ago is now standing knee-deep in the reed-dotted silt, looking a bit put out.
“Better.” Dean’s back to his usual brusque down-to-business attitude. Typically, he’s more on the ball than this, but the preceding sequence of events threw him off his stride. His first impression, on riding into this pleasant clearing, was: ‘Whoa, hot guy wading in the lake’, followed by ‘hey, he’s coming over to say hi, this is my lucky day,’ but then derailed by an unexpected ‘-whatthefuckSWAN??!’ the moment the stranger set both feet on dry land and went poof, from hot guy to feathered fowl in an eyeblink. All this on the twilight cusp of an exhausting day following a solid month of adventuring. No wonder Dean needed a minute. But now he’s dealing with a good-looking guy seeking his help with a supernatural problem, and that’s right down Dean’s alley.
“So, a curse turned you into a swan, you can only turn back into a dude when-”
“A prince,” corrects the swan automatically. The word ‘dude’ has been putting him off balance from the start. Dean doesn’t think it’s elitism so much as not actually knowing what the word means; swan-guy’s vocabulary and accent suggest he’s been stuck in aquatic-bird-mode for quite a long stretch of years and hasn’t had the chance to catch up with current vocabulary trends.
“You can only turn back into a prince,” corrects Dean in deference to the tidy white uniform with gold epaulettes, shining buttons, coat of arms picked out in gems on the breast pocket and regal circlet on top of the guy’s nut - “when you’re standing in the water of this lake under the light of the moon. Otherwise you’re stuck as a swan. But you can still talk.”
“Only at night, when I feel more like myself,” sighs the prince. “When dawn breaks, I’m… I don’t remember the days. Only flashes. Swimming. Flying.”
“When you’re back to being a mute swan,” says Dean with a snicker.
The prince gives him a puzzled look.
“Mute swan. Get it?”
The prince gives him a double helping of puzzled look, forcing Dean to elaborate. “That’s what you are when you have feathers, you’re a mute swan.”
“No, I can talk at night, I just demonstrated that.”
“The species, it’s called the mute- never mind. Not much of a hunter before this happened, I take it.”
The other man looks vague. “No, I preferred mathematics and astronomy.”
“...okay, we’re two very different kinda princes.” Dean’s spent almost every day hunting since turning twelve; the only geometry he’s ever cared about was the arched drop of an arrow's flight, and his grasp of natural philosophy centers around “What is that?” and “How do I kill it?”
“I have sought help over the years, of course. But this forest is vast, and I have seen nary a soul near my lake for a very long time.”
“Can’t imagine why,” says Dean, glancing around. The swan’s watery habitat is ensconced in a clearing smack dab in the middle of the Dread Forbidden Forest where the sun only pierces the canopy at high noon and entire armies have disappeared without a trace, which is of course the reason Dean is here, and most sane people are not. The lake itself is pleasant: clear enough to count the duckweed in its depths, bejeweled with lily pads and small emerald frogs, while on the shore where Dean dismounted, a venerable old hunting lodge leads to a delicate gazebo plunging marble steps straight into the water. ‘Pretty’, is what Dean would call it (Advanced Aesthetics is one of many closed books in his study back in Lawrence’s royal palace.) But the scenery is ringed all around with a wall of thick gnarled trees as twisted and dark as despair, which cuts down a lot on its appeal as a tourist destination. Dean only happened upon the lake by chance; he’s been adventuring in and around the dreaded woods for over a month now, helping out the local populace, battling unforgiving undergrowth, maze-like hawthorne groves and bramble bushes, exploring the forest at large while fighting the vegetation as well as various garden variety monsters. Sammy, for his part, gave up on day two, claiming he preferred inns and towns with nice libraries to camping out in a forest which obviously did not welcome visitors.
Moonlight shines over the lake’s pure, placid water, the lodge’s ivy mantle and the marble of the gazebo. It's magical, charming - maybe even romantic if Dean allowed that kind of word into his vocabulary. The swan dude looks around at the scenery like one looks at prison walls.
“I have flown far and wide many a night,” he says in a very tired voice. “But it takes me hours just to reach the forest’s edge, and there has so far not been many who could help beyond its borders. Most of this region’s inhabitants are superstitious and illiterate peasants who run away from anything unnatural emerging from the forest. A few knights I have met in my wanderings have tried to help me over the years, so far without success. Others have tried to kill me on sight, fearing I was the product of sorcery attempting to lure them to their doom. And a few years back, an enterprising wandering merchant of medicine named Crowley tried to capture me for-… I believe the term he used was ‘freak show’? I… was more cautious about revealing myself after that.”
“No kidding.”
“I only have a few hours to search for a would-be rescuer each night, you see. When dawn breaks, the swan takes over again, and instinct brings it back to the lake without fail. I awaken here night after night, decade after decade, each time with a little less hope…”
The mood, already pretty bleak with tales of fowl curses and woes, takes a definite nosedive into dark and broody territory. Dean breaks it up by tying his horse to the lodge’s hitching post, getting his boots off and sitting on the steps of the gazebo with his feet dangling in the water, inviting the swan to join him with a tilt of his chin. Swan guy, to his credit, makes wading through silt and reeds look regal and even kinda hot… hey, knock it off, Dean chides himself. Poor guy’s up the crapper without a paddle, time to help, not get dirty thoughts about tousled dark hair, nice blue peepers and a well built bod under that tidy white uniform- No, bad prince! Down!
“Back to basics,” says Dean, almost more to himself than to the swan, now sitting quietly on the step by his side, feet still in the moonlit water. “Got a name?”
The dude looks, if anything, even more depressed. “...My memory… is fuzzy after so many years. I no longer remember my name. You may call me Oddity.”
“Say what now?”
“It is how that merchant Crowley would have labeled me for his show: Oddity. Or if you prefer, you may call me Swan Prince.”
“Bit on the nose, but fine.” Better than ‘Oddity’ at any rate.
Sitting on the bank, Swan Prince gives Dean a summary of what he does remember, and it's a not-so-unusual sob story, really. Once upon a time, this dark-haired blue-eyed prince with a really nice set of lips was the heir to a large, thriving kingdom. Now he’s a bird most of the time and his domain consists of a riot of evergreens, marshy ground and nigh impassable bramble walls. It’s been like that for a good long while, Dean can tell from the old growth trees surrounding them. This timeline matches Swan Prince’s mannerisms, vocabulary and lack of recent historical knowledge. Dean puts him and the whole place at ‘well over a century old’; Sam would be able to pinpoint the actual year or decade.
So, happy kingdom one day, and then wham! Everything went to pot overnight at the same time the prince sprouted feathers and an appetite for bread crusts.
“Sucks,” Dean summarizes. “Hey,” he adds in reaction to Swan Prince’s slightly put out air, “you’d be surprised how often shit like this happens on our continent. Pliny the Really Old called us the Land of a Thousand Kingdoms in his Histories, which sounds awful pretty and all, but let me tell you, it’s really just one thousand flavors of weird magical problems. You can’t ride three days in any direction without tripping over some nasty old spell, curse or monster. Trust me, I know; in the past fifteen years, I’ve travelled from Saxony to the far east, from the Blood Red Sea to the endless Twisting Steppes, and I’ve dropped by that bedlam of Fairy Land a dozen times to boot. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve seen. So, in your particular case, what did it for your kingdom?”
“An evil warlock.”
“Like there’s any other kind.”
“He’d been imprisoned in a tower for years due to his use of foul magic, ever since I was a child.” Swan Prince looks like he’s searching through ragged snippets of long past memories. “Unfortunate that my royal father did not simply execute him… The damned wretch escaped, unleashed his powers, killed my royal parents, snared our subjects in endless sleep and walls of bramble thorns, and turned me into a swan.”
“Sounds on brand. So how can you break the curse? There’s always a loophole.”
“Indeed. Er, how do you know so much about-”
“Is it true love’s kiss? That’s so classic, it’s practically boilerplate.”
Swan Prince gapes, then turns a flustered shade of pink in the moonlight. “Ah. Well, close, I suppose.”
“Do you remember what it is?”
“Um, yes. To quote: Thy one true love, of royal blood blessed, must promise you their faith and heart within a church as dawn breaks through the stained glass window.”
“Ah, we got an extra-credit type of evil sorcerer.”
“Yes. I... Prince Dean…”
“Yeah, sorry, I ain’t got no sister. Only two brothers, and neither of them are into dudes. Or birds.”
“Uh…” It seems Swan Prince has some kind of message he’s trying to impart, yet something in Dean’s attitude is throwing him off. “Prince Dean, you may not know this but… shortly after you arrived in this region, I came upon you being celebrated in one of the nearby villages. I returned night after night to watch you in secret as you made your way in and around this forest.”
Dean stops trying to drop-kick lilly pads into a patch of reflected moonlight in order to give Swan Prince a narrow-eyed look. “You know that sounds slightly creepy, right?”
“I- Im sorry, in perfect innocence!”
“Really? You must have missed the best parts then,” Dean grumbles. As is his habit when he gets away from his father’s prying eyes and his well intentioned younger brother’s inevitable if accidental intrusions, Dean’s been practicing his dalliance skills among the willing and most enthusiastic members of the local populace, whether in inns, camps or logging huts, and sometimes availing himself of local hay bales, barns or a patch of not-so-hostile forest if his partner is truly eager and nothing else presents itself. Fortunately he’s not the shy type, because he’s pretty sure Swan Prince must have gotten an eyeful over the past few weeks. The prince is just being polite and discreet about it; for starters, he’d have seen Dean with the occasional guy, and that was something which, in this dude’s day and age, was probably Not Talked About, even if it’d happened all the same.
Swan Prince is fiddling with his gold-embroidered hem and studiously avoiding Dean’s gaze. “You… are a great man, a great prince. I’ve heard villagers and loggers on the outskirts praising your exploits around their campfires, I’ve seen with my own eyes how you’ve defeated predators and monsters in this area with much courage and devotion to protecting the common man and woman.”
“S’what I do.”
“I was still a little nervous about addressing you…”
“Yeah, with the threat of becoming a circus act hanging over your head. Or maybe just an arrow through the gullet.”
“Precisely. But tonight, when fate brought you to the lake just as I transformed… I… my heart told me that finally-”
“Of course I can help break your curse, dude. Prince, I mean.”
A light of hope, rather disbelieving, shines just as much as the silvery moonlight over those very fine features. “R-Really?”
“Yeah, it’s no problem at all.”
The other prince has gone that fetching shade of pink again. “Oh, Dean. I… I don’t know what to say, this-”
“Hell, I’d sort it out tonight if Sammy hadn’t pussied out and gone back to town.”
“...Uh… Sammy?”
“My brother.”
The swan seems to be recalibrating his thoughts a good one hundred and eighty degrees. “Your brother…?”
“Yeah, he got all the magic talent in the family, see. Our mom was Queen Mary of Lawrence, kickassiest magician in the entire central lands. She’s passed, alas, but Sammy has picked up the mantle well enough. He’s untangled a few curses in his day, he can have a crack at yours.”
The Swan Prince gapes at Dean as if the latter has rather missed the point. People do that a lot.
---
Prince Dean has hunted everything tough enough to put up a fight since he could ride a horse. When he wasn’t hunting, he was being mercilessly drilled by John, the renown warrior-king of Lawrence. John knew from experience how hard this world is; life in the Thousand Kingdoms is a goddamn fairy-tale, after all, and those are notoriously full of misfortunes, dragons, wicked coincidences, cruel spells and other such bullshit on the path to Legend. His sons would be winners in this enchanted wonderland race, they’d be the ones to end up with magic kingdoms and princesses at their side, not turned to stone or with the heads of an ass.
So Dean was well prepared when, shortly after his fifteen’s birthday, a terrible ogre captured an allied duchy and held the duke, the duchess and their beautiful young marriageable daughter hostage. The motivation for such a maneuver on the ogre's part was a mystery, but young prince Samuel’s request to study this phenomena was shot down, along with his suggestion to use diplomacy to find out what the creature wanted. Instead, Dean suited up in chainmail and leather, and rode off beneath the proud look of his royal father and the inhabitants of Lawrence. They all knew just how strong their prince was, he wasn’t going to fall to a mere ogre, and as for the rest, well, it was obvious what would happen next.
In which great expectations they turned out to be wrong, since Dean came back with a belt buckle carved from an ogre fang rather than the beautiful marriageable daughter. Apparently she'd been very nice to him, and Dean had certainly basked in her regard, even stole a few kisses when the chaperones weren’t looking, but then he’d taken his ogre belt and left.
Okay, fine, thought King John along with the common folk of Lawrence. Maybe the daughter of a duke wasn’t enough of a prize anyway. Or maybe she had an annoying laugh, who knew. This was just a minor setback.
Sure enough, sixteen year old Dean was begged by a neighboring kingdom to come rid them of a wyvern. Dean suited up and rode off.
This time he came back with a really nice magical sword the king had parted with. The king, the proud father of three accomplished daughters, each more beautiful than the last, had said ‘thank you, our savior, you can have anything that is mine to give’, yet he seemed a trifle put out when Dean asked him for his blade.
True, the princesses were all a little older than Dean, and, well, this is an important decision in a prince’s life. A magic sword could be seen as an investment. Imagine what he could get with it down the line.
It certainly came in handy when the demon Abaddon captured the queen of Moondoor and her castle in Fairy Land. Egads, thought the Lawrencien courtiers, talk about trading up! Forget a barony or a small kingdom, this was an entire land of magic!! And the damsel in distress was already a queen, not a princess, you didn’t have to wait for some royal parents to kick the can in order to benefit.
Dean came back with a new best friend forever and still no spouse, but in this instance he couldn’t be said to be entirely to blame; turned out the queen had her own preferences, specifically towards Dean’s rather unconventional lady squire Jo… That story is rather complicated and most people tell it separately, giving Jo and queen Charlie the greater part of the glory and the romance, leaving Dean almost as a sidekick. It wasn’t meant to be, that’s all, but Dean was now eighteen, so any moment now...
And the moment arrived: the daughter of the empress of Saxony had fallen into an enchanted slumber, only to be awoken by a loving kiss, so surely even Dean couldn’t foul- that is, said the Lawrenciens, surely their prince would find their future queen and bring her home.
Turned out, Dean had learned chivalry, thank you very much, and didn’t feel like macking on some unconscious chick, so he went to find the witch who’d cast the spell to convince her, with the help of a few pointy arguments, to undo it. He came back with a strong alliance signed by the empress´ own hand, but no daughter, and at that point the wiser heads in Lawrence began to suspect there was a problem.
Prince Dean, it seemed, was rather adept at not spotting a fairytale romance and missing the point…
---
Dean finds Sam in the most boring place in town. He first stopped by the mage school, thinking his brother was brushing up on his spellwork. The maesters there had seen Sam, worked with him for a week, with the scorch marks on their walls to prove it, but then he’d moved on to the capital’s small library and university. There, a reeling librarian - who’d seen most of his precious volumes dismissed with ‘read that already, read that too, good god, man, you have this piece of crap? I wouldn't use this for kindling’ - pointed Dean in the direction of the local fiefdom’s record rooms in an offshoot of the palace.
At the far back of the latter, Sam is ensconced in a pleasant nook out of direct sunlight, a glass of wine at hand and a crumbling old book of the fiefdom’s Odde Fenomenones open on the table before him. He barely glances up at Dean’s grumbled “Finally found you,” as if his brother just left that morning instead of rummaging through a forest for the past month and change.
“Hey, Dean, I was wondering when-” Sam does a rather theatrical double take to scrutinize his brother properly. “Good grief! What chewed you up like that?!”
Dean’s scowl deepens, but for answer, he takes the large blanket-wrapped bird from under his arm and thrusts it in his brother’s direction. “Here, fix it.”
The swan’s neck lunges forward like a spring unloading, and a fearsome gaped-beak hiss sends Sam pressing back against the far wall.
“It doesn’t seem to be broken,” he says acidly. “Dean, what the hell happened to you? And why are you carrying around a bird, for crying out loud?”
“It’s a dude, a prince, he’s cursed, fix it.” Dean puts the swaddled swan back under his arm with a grimace.
Sam gives the bird a keen look, then turns the same on his brother. “I don’t see a lot of magic in his aura. No more than any other creature that lives in that blasted magical forest.”
“Bugger. That probably means I have to drag him and you back to that stupid lake. Let’s just hope it’s not the new moon when we get there.”
“Dean… how hard did you hit your head?”
“What, this?” Dean stops rubbing the bruise on his temple. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. Got buffeted by a wing.”
“…Did you stumble into some rotten old magic before you decided to ride back here with a bird in a blanket? Or eat any strange mushrooms in the forest? I’m always telling you to-”
“I am not hallucinating, damn it, come on, having a prince turn into a swan is not even the fifth strangest thing we’ve seen this year. But if you can’t feel the magic on him, that means the curse is tied to the lake. We need to head back.” Dean sighs, and then dodges a beak thrust with the habit of practice he’s garnered the last few days.
Yes, Swan Prince does indeed forget who he is at the break of dawn. That first night he led Dean through the dense wood by flying overhead and showing him a faster route back to the border, one that sheared days off Dean’s return, turning a week-long trek into a three-day jaunt. Dean was congratulating himself on the time saved, when the sun peeked over the nearest tree, and he went from being guided smoothly through the forest to having to fight his way through brambles and bushes to catch a swan suddenly gone feral, trying to wing its way back to the lake post-haste. Following an early start in the martial arts as well as years of adventures and travails, Dean’s grown to become one of the best hunters in the Thousand Kingdoms, no boast, but he tends to be rather better at killing things than catching them unharmed…
Now he stands before his brother after several days of wrestling with a bird whose wing blows can bruise bone; he’s black and blue in places, well pecked in others, he’s sweaty, he’s tired from travelling at night but keeping an eye on the swan during the day to foil escape attempts, and the bird has copiously crapped on his jerkin as revenge for all the manhandling.
Sammy considers the tableau before him. Then regretfully closes his book, shoots back the wine in one large gulp, and gets to his feet. “Lead me to wherever we need to go,” says he, like the tall level-headed brother that he is, “and tell me all about it while we ride.”
“Cool. Follow me. Where’d you leave your horse?”
“Oh, hold up. We should send for Adam.”
Dean freezes with one foot out the records room door. “Adam? What now?”
Sam directs a sour expression at him. “Remember we promised dad?”
“...Oh.”
“We already didn’t take Adam with us when we went to fight that giant spider.”
“He’s allergic to bugs.”
“He swells up a bit when stung by bees, that’s hardly the same thing. We also didn’t take him to that ruined castle the time before that, when dad first asked us to let him squire for us.”
“We already knew we were dealing with a high level haunting in that one. It was the ghost of a jester, for pete’s sake, it even gave you nightmares for weeks, we-”
“Did not.”
“- weren’t going to expose a kid to that.”
“He’s eighteen now. Dad had us go out and kill stuff when we were barely able to reach the saddle. You murdered your first monster at twelve.” Sam sounds slightly sour. Not only has he never agreed with John’s ‘medieval’ methods for dealing with the unnatural, he does not approve of just about anything their dad does, or what he made his very young sons do. John would have brought Adam up the same way, presumably, but Adam’s mom, Lady Kate, didn’t die and leave him alone to be raised by a royal fighting and killing machine like Mary did. No, Kate is alive and well, and she put her foot down. Adam’s had the chance to grow up unscarred, practicing his battle skills in classes with proper instructors, and recently gaining continent-wide renown for his jousting skills. Dean’s never jousted in his life; when he puts a lance through a target, it’s not a well-armored opponent with a safe coronal-tipped spear coming at him, it’s something that will rip his throat out if he misses.
“Dean,” Sam grouses, running after him. Dean can’t even remember accelerating, but he’s busting through the streets at a good trot, heading towards where he left his mount. The bird beneath his arm makes an ungainly honking noise and tries to eat his armpit.
“Dean! I’m the one who always gets dad’s angry letters when we ignore him! We are not-”
“Fine! Go and get your damned gear ready, I’ll send a pigeon, okay?!”
Half an hour later, Dean is ignoring the aviary attendant’s incredulous stare at the swan beneath his arm as he scribbles a quick message.
“Dealing with a cursed swan, dad, only magic involved, don’t need help on this one- damn it, prince, stop pecking at my elbow - I’ll send for Adam when we have a real problem. HRH Dean blah blah done, that will get the whiny bitch off my back.” He carelessly folds the small paper, shoves it at the attendant, drops a generous number of coins on the counter and leaves.
---
Sam’s voice rises to an impressive crescendo of gibberish (he insists it’s Latin) until one final proclamation rings out over the peaceful waters of the lake: “Confractus!”
Right on cue, the swan blurs and grows, feathers fusing and flowing into a white uniform. Dean lets out a whoop. “Finally!”
Sam is quiet for a sparse second, then sighs and shakes his head, the sanctified bell he’d been swinging now sinking to his side. “No, it failed, sorry.”
“What do you mean? He’s a dude again.” All of Sammy’s previous attempts, from the first moment at the forest’s edge (after some explanations), to the first night on the way back, to this last ditch attempt just now on the lake, had all resulted in diddly with a side of squat.
With a bare motion of his eyes, Sam directs Dean’s attention to the slice of moon that has just appeared in the twilight sky. “No, that’s why he changed back. I’m sorry, your highness, the curse is still set on you, I could feel it operate the transformation. My efforts had no effect.”
He sounds honestly regretful. It took a further three days to get back to the magical lake through the thick forest, even with Dean’s now greater knowledge of the terrain. During the day, Sammy had the displeasure of sharing in swan wrangling duties, but at night he was able to be properly introduced to a talking bird. Half of Swan Prince’s nightly dialogue consisted of profuse apologies for every new bruise and guano stain on his would-rescuers, but after that, he and Sam got along well based on their shared love of study and astronomy.
The Swan Prince wades slowly towards them, eyes downcast, though his voice is gentle and even as he says: “I understand, Prince Samuel, and thank you again for trying. And Dean… thank you too. I… thank you.”
“Didn’t do much.” Dean’s also had the time to deepen his acquaintance with Swan Prince on the way to town and back, and the guy is a really nice dude, quiet and studious rather than loud and bold, but he and Dean still get along well, and the latter hoped they could break the spell sooner rather than later. But it’s not to be.
“So I guess it's my turn,” he says with a hand clap.
The other two princes both turn towards him, Swan Prince somewhat incredulously. “You… wish to help, um… help me break the curse…?”
“Of course! What, you think I can leave you like this? After I bundle someone off in a blanket and ride with them under my arm for a week, we get kinda close,” Dean jokes, mostly jokes.
“I… um, prince Dean, what exactly do you intend to do?” The Swan Prince asks with a trickle of hesitation, hope battling against another expression on his face as he examines Dean.
“You said the evil sorcerer still lives to the north, closer to the center of the forbidden forest, right?”
“Yes?”
“Other than exploiting a loophole, the best way to end a curse is to kill the caster, everybody knows that. To be honest, Sammy here is the one who likes unraveling spells the dainty way.”
“I don’t like it, it’s just the smart way of-”
“I always say it’s easier to deal with the root of the problem than jumping through all those hoops, and less likely to blow up in your face or dump you into a lifelong commitment with the first rando royalty who comes trotting your way.”
“Ah,” says Swan Prince as if he somehow expected something in that vein. But then he shakes his head, a frown gathering like thunder. “I would rather you didn’t try.”
“Why not?”
“In the time I have come to know you, know you both, I have, that is, I would like to think we have become friends, and I… I would not wish to see you come to harm.”
The brothers exchange a glance. “Uh-huh. Worry about the warlock’s continued health, not mine,” says Dean with a snort.
“My brother sounds like an overconfident ass-”
“Do not, bitch.”
“Shut up, jerk - but he’s right, Swan Prince, we really can help. This will sound strange coming from two scions of a royal family, but we have a lot of experience helping people with monsters and other magical plights. And yes, we have gotten to know you these past days, and we don’t leave our friends covered in feathers if we can possibly help it. Trust us.”
“But I’m worried about what it could cost you.” Swan Prince bites his lips and wrings his hands. “Heroes have tried to kill him before, you see. Shortly after my kingdom was overtaken, once he became, well, the de facto ruler of it, a lot of challengers came his way.”
“Yeah, a bunch of lowly knights wanted to roll themselves a kingdom, I bet,” snorts Dean. “To be fair, that’s how my dad scored Lawrence back when he was practically a nobody. That is, my mom scored it with her magic when she went up against a horde of undead and a cursed kettle - long story. But dad helped, and since the kingdom had lost all its royal family in the kerfuffle, they were crowned by right of conquest. It’s pretty much the only way to become rulers nowadays if you haven’t had the luck to be pushed out of the right cooch.”
“Dean! Language!”
“I suppose that was the ambition of my would-be rescuers, yes,” says Swan Prince, delicately ignoring the aside. His expression turns somber as he starts pacing around, raising a ring of mud in the shallows of the lake. “Lord knows, I would have gladly given them my kingdom if they could have ensured the release of my people and my own liberation. But they all failed. I presume some died. I found others at night fleeing through the forest, yelling garbled warnings about the danger they’d escaped. I begged them to come back with more help, or an army, but they never returned. You see, my captor is not just a strong warlock, Dean, he’s not human at all. He’s a monster, a hideous creature like a chimera, changing shapes at will, adopting the form of feral animals to tear you to shreds.”
The brothers swap an appraising glance. “Odd combo for a sorcerer. They don’t usually go for the physical ‘rip your head off’ approach, they prefer to set you on fire from a distance. The only shape-changing magic-using monster I can think of are dragons. Uh, it’s not a dragon, is it?” Dean’s faced a few before, they’re something of a right of passage to the highest tier of fairy-tale knighthood, but they’re not his favorite type of critter to kill…
“No. That is, I’m pretty sure he’s not.” Swan Prince doesn’t sound quite as sure as Dean would like a guy to be when talking about the possibility of two tons of angry fire-breathing magic-wielding reptile with a pissy temper.
“Have you actually seen him change shape?” probes Sam. “Second hand accounts are often mangled, especially by cowards who’ve had their behinds handed to them.”
“Alas, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. He takes the shape of a monstrous bird of prey to fly here from his tower, before changing to-”
“He comes here??” Dean’s hand leaps to his sword. “When? How often?”
“Only once a year, at the summer equinox.”
“Shit,” grumbles Dean, fist going back to gripping his belt. “That was almost a month ago. We missed it.”
“What kind of bird?” asks the detail-oriented mutton-head at Dean’s side.
“...An owl, I think. Some kind of bird of prey.” Swan Prince speaks with the vagueness of one who’s never gone hawking before because it would interfere with his book reading. “It’s hard to tell,” he adds, correctly interpreting Dean’s raised eyebrow, “for when he appears, I revert to a swan in his presence, and all my animal instincts can perceive is predator. What I can say is that the creature is the size of a house, black as pitch, with a sharp crooked beak and talons as hard as diamond.”
He waves distractedly off to one side when he says that, leading Dean and Sam to glance that way. There was a large willow tree standing near the water once upon a time, its trunk as big as a barrel, now felled, rotting and covered in mushrooms and moss. Dean didn’t pay a dead tree much mind before, but the gesture brings his attention to the place where stump and trunk were separated. The break is old, but it is still one clean swipe without a single saw mark to be seen: cut in twain by a single blow.
“He did that in a fit of anger once. I think... ” Swan Prince rubs his head as if to jog his bird-befuddled memory. “I was being...rude…? Stubborn…? For years, he came to intimidate me, to… I can’t quite remember. Trying to persuade me to submit, to swear fealty to him, I think. To give him my kingdom, in essence.”
“Sounds to me like he already has it,” says Dean, and gets elbowed in the ribs by Sam.
“He’s always so… cold, but that time, he got angry. It had something to do about the citizenry, the ones asleep in the beds of brambles, but I… I can’t remember. Nowadays, he only comes to ask me once again to reconsider pledging him my loyalty. When I refuse, he…”
“Yeah?” Dean prompts, voice gentle and sympathetic, but his fingers curl dangerously around his sword hilt. “What does he do?”
“He feeds me cake crumbs,” grumbles Swan Prince, flushing in the twilight. “It’s humiliating. Then he checks the state of the pond, takes a dollop of the water, a drop of my blood-” Sam looks up like a hunting hound hearing the halloo, “and tells me once more the terms of my curse. Which is why I remember them so clearly. I don’t know why he does that.”
“Reinforcing the spell, probably,” Sam blurts out, “though why the samples- he shouldn’t need that, this is not blood magic. And the fact that he asks you to respect his authority voluntarily- must be some kind of submission element to the spell, maybe to make it permanent, or-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” interrupts Dean. “Doesn’t really matter. What does he look like when he’s not a fucking big owl? Does he have a heart I can skewer? A head I can lop off?”
“Are there any other monstrous features that can help us identify the species?” Sam tags on.
“Oh dear.” Swan Prince sounds on the verge of panic in his pool of moonlight and water. “I don’t really know. In his human form, he wears a deep cowl and cloak. And during all the years he was locked in that tower, it was forbidden on pain of death for anyone to look upon him.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because… because there’s something dangerous about his appearance, I think. I… Yes, I remember. In the early days, a knight found me here a few days before the equinox. This was before the forest grew quite so out of control. I was able to explain my plight, and she laid in ambush here, waiting for the fiend to arrive. She fought most valiantly, for hours, the entire night, but then… he threw back his hood… or she tore it off… and yes, I remember! The sight of him paralyzed her! She stood there, sword poised, but unable to strike!”
“Whoa. The old basilisk trick… What happened then?”
“Then the sun rose, and the cursed swan took over my mind again. I never saw her die. By the time I returned to myself the next night, she had disappeared, the body disposed of, her murderer gone. The sorcerer came back a year later as if nothing had happened. When I threw accusations at him, he showed not a hint of remorse. He simply told me to stop trying to get help if I didn’t want more people to get hurt, and to accept my situation. You see how dangerous he is?”
“Wait,” says Sam, the one who usually catches inconsistencies, “if he can defeat his enemies with just one look, why did he fight for hours? Why does he hide under a cowl rather than leading with petrification out of the gate?”
Swan Prince frowns down at a lily pad. “I… don't know. He hates how hideous he is, I’d think. He has flown me back to his tower a few times over the years, to hold me in a cage awhile, and I remember how every pane of glass and mirror in the place is cracked and broken.”
Dean scratches the back of his neck beneath his helmet. “A bashful basilisk with delicate feelings of self-consciousness. Right. First time I killed one of those.”
“Maybe it’s a type of gorgon,” muses Sam. “That might explain a lot, including the breaking of the mirrors. Not the shape shifting, though… this might be an entirely new kind of creature. Dean, promise me I can dissect this one before you do your usual salting and burning.”
“Sure,” grunts Dean, ever generous, “but first things first. Let’s go kill ourselves a bastard.”
“I’ll lead the way,” says Swan Prince, putting a decided foot ashore.
“No!” both brothers yelp.
“Don’t need to, I’m sure we can find the place,” blurts out Dean, while Sammy, for his part, goes with a much more reasonable, “As the victim of the curse, you should not be anywhere near the caster when we attack him, the results can be unpredictable.” Both brothers shuffle around and hide their beak-savaged and shit-stained jerkins as much as they can under their cloaks.
It takes some persuading; Swan Prince never had much latitude to take matters into his own hands before, or wings for that matter, so now he wants to be in on the battle for his freedom. But that would just be too complicated. Finally he has to concede.
“Don’t worry.” Dean can’t help but reach up and further ruffle that dark hair. “We’ll be back before you know it, and you’ll be human by the end of the week, I promise.”
“Just… please be careful, Dean. I couldn’t bear it if you came to harm, either of you.” Swan Prince really has beautiful blue eyes, Dean can’t help noticing, especially when they gaze at him earnestly like that…
“No worries. Come on, Sammy.” Dean tears himself away with some effort. “There’s a warlock out there to kill.”
“You liiiiike him,” snickers Sam when they’re a few dozen feet away from the lake and starting to push their horses through undergrowth.
“Shut up. Do not. None of your business.”
“Huh-uh.”
“I said shut up!”
“But I didn’t say anything,” says Sammy, an obvious lie as his whole smarmy expression is one long soliloquy. He ruins it even further by adding, “I bet dad would be happy to know how our ‘useless wandering’ has turned into one more attempt to get you hooked to royalty. At this point the old man is so desperate, he won’t even care that Swan Prince is a guy, he’ll take the opportunity to get you settled down whatever it takes. This place may not seem like much at this juncture, after a century of neglect, but it could become an important waypoint for merchants traveling east to west once this cursed forest is dealt with, so it would even make a decent dowry… Hmm, Dean, do you think we should detour by town first?
“Detour a week? Why the hell for?”
“For Adam, doofus. He might be there by now. He could help.”
“His Royal Highness Adam the Jouster? Don’t make me laugh,” Dean laughs sourly. “He’d be more in the way than Swan Prince, even without wings and a beak.”
Sam sighs. There’s a whole conversation about tangled family relations in that one windy exhale. Dean ignores it and glares at his horse’s ears.
“If dad is in enough of a hurry to get Adam on the field, he’ll have told him to find us no matter what.”
“Then tracking us will be a good training lesson for a real-life situation.”
Sam glances around at the gloomy woods, branches snagging their clothes and mounts. “And I thought dad was a hard-ass… You know, it’d be good to bring Adam up to speed. I’ll need someone to come with me if you’re no longer around.”
“Dude, I don’t care if he’s an owl or an ostrich, this sorcerer is not going to be the one to clean my clock.”
“I didn’t mean that way, idiot. I meant if you settle down. If that guy back there happens to be The One for you.” You can almost hear the clunky capitals.
Dean scoffs and calls him a romantic pussy bitch, and bickers with his brother on automatic while thinking of blue eyes and tousled dark hair and beautiful lips, and how he could very well be The One for Dean… but how Dean, however many royal princesses and princes he saves, is never their One in the end, not the Ever After kind. Not so far. And in his heart, he knows, probably Never.
You see, Dean’s batting thirty, now; he’s old for a prince-adventurer. He’s more scars than skin at this juncture, he’s faced Death up close so many times he knows all the bastard’s chess moves, he’s learned a thing or three. And one thing above all he’s gleaned from his life of hard knocks and fairy-tales - which are considerably tougher and less wondrous than the bards make it seem… the one thing he’s learned is that there’s some people who are just not meant for a storybook ending. They can see it at times, glimmering ahead like a golden shore, but somehow they never get there. Hunters like him, they don’t get a Happy Ever After. That’s just the way it is.