The Four Queens

This story won first place in Dear Diary’s Four Queens short fiction contest. The contest is part of a five month event series called X Y Zine.

Written by James Frierson

Let it be known that I am of sound mind and character. Despite what you may have heard, and what you are about to hear, I insist I be regarded as a man who is in possession of all of his faculties and unmotivated by the act of deception. Indeed, some would argue that after what I experienced to question my sanity is to question Providence or powers of equal mystery. 

What transpired on the night of April the 14th made my constitution quiver. I sought God, but no priest could make sense of my story despite being learned in the deployment of His wisdom and counsel. I sought medicine, but no physician could provide closure and grant me the diagnosis I feared but simultaneously desired  — that I was a lunatic, heartbroken and impressionable, and was under a temporary spell of mental fatigue and anguish. As neither faith nor science could rationalize what occurred, I must conclude that the answer lies somewhere in between.

Seeing that you have offered me gin, and are lending your ear thusly, I shall entertain you. But know that I do not require your judgment, nor do I seek theorizing of any sort, for I assure you that I have heard it all. I have made peace with what happened so far as a man can with a phenomena that exists outside the realm of possibility. 

Allow me to tell you how a card game saved my life in exchange for countless others.

I was a month shy of my nineteenth birthday and Her Majesty’s war had just achieved its seventh. Stalements existed on the four fronts with all forces experiencing attrition. Battles sprung up like weeds only to be prolonged into a draw. For much of the empire, it was easy to forget we were at war at all.  

I was freshly wounded from failing to win the affections of Miss Beatrice Winshaw, an uncompromisable beauty with a wit to match, due to my lowly station and her family’s disapproval. The connection we shared in early Spring was doomed to be a passing memory in her life and a tantalizing agony in mine. I am of simple, working birth, but my admiration was true. I was not after her wealth but only her heart, and as it happened fate determined I was to attain neither.

I set out to enlist, grabbing my father’s hunting rifle, a shoddy weapon that could shoot straight only half the time, and what I could carry in my sack. I brought with me no pen or stationary or mementos of home. It is obvious now that I did not intend to return at all. When I rode down the roads I had trodden for so many years before, I had resolved it to be the last I would see of this country. I had every intention to die on a foreign battlefield without identity, to be a faceless fixture of the soil.

But then it began to rain. It was a downpour, a violent storm, that seemed to materialize supernaturally in a pristine sky. Thunder shook my horse’s muscles and I feared I would soon be toppled and crushed under her weight. She appeared only in flashes of lightning that illuminated her dark mane as well as the pathways into a town that cannot be found on any map.

There I found an inn, its cloudy windows lit by flickering lanterns, that I do not recall the name of. But what I can remember, what is entrenched in my mind so clearly that I dream of it, is the smell. It was a lavender so intense I thought for sure I had stumbled head first into a garden. I could not escape it, not when I boarded my horse and caught wind of the stables, nor when I shook my boots of water and mud and grass. 

After securing a room and bath, I found the soap to be completely scentless. The lavender seemed to be without origin, as if it always permeated the air and the building was simply built to accommodate it. Or as if it was older still, and that land and sea formed an enclosure over a lavender plant that predated the world. 

It was impossible to sleep. The storm’s heavy limbs ravaged the rooftop and pounded the walls. But what was all the more distracting was the smell. I had to find the source or go mad trying.

I descended the stairs by candlelight and found the vestibule completely black and vacant except for the faintly visible outline of a doorway leading down into the cellar. Against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be beckoned further down until the sound from above was muffled to a whisper. The horrible storm that I was sheltering from seemed to utterly vanish. 

I had crossed a threshold into somewhere else entirely, and I felt as if my soul was bisected. Just as a line links a vessel to its dock, one part of me remained secured while the other floated onward. 

The further down I went, the more my tether to reality was slipping. I became dizzy, nauseous, and thirsty simultaneously, all the while passing through the lavender growing in power. The stairs seemed to drop away into nothingness, yet still my feet found where to step.

When I reached the bottom, I found a room that seemed made just for me. 

There was a woman sitting at a round table not three feet in diameter. She wore a cloak and hood of milky-white obscuring the top half of her face. She smiled at me.

“Welcome,” she said, without standing to curtsey. “Please, come in.”

The room was lit only by a candelabra that cast orange light over a deck of cards and two cups of tea.

“What is this place?” I asked the woman, inching towards the chair opposite of her. 

“Share some tea with me,” she said. Before I could answer, the cup was already warming my lips. I found the genesis of the lavender smell – the liquid was hot and herbal and bitter and sweet. I felt calm for the first time in months.

“Who are you?” I said, placing the empty cup back onto the table. 

“Let’s begin,” she said, turning over four cards. “The four queens vie for the land’s loyalty. Pledge your villagers’ lives to them just so,” she said, lining up cards beneath in descending order and of the same suit. She went on to explain the roles of kings, who can shapeshift into any value, and jokers, who eliminate both side’s villagers. 

“I don’t understand.”

“Play,” she said while dealing, “Soon all will become clear.”

The dilating qualities of the tea began to take effect. We played for some time, each card making a cacophony in my head as it landed. The room stretched and compressed and seemed to ripple like ocean waves. 

“Tell me,” she said, drawing a new card to her hand, “Where are you going?”

Words manifested in my vision, I only had to pluck them from the air. “To war, to fight for my queen.”

“Your queen?” she asked. “And what has she done to earn such devotion?”

“I…I don’t know. I suppose it is not my place to ask.”

“I see. You must love her. You must love your country.”

“I do. That is, I’ve never known —”

“You’ve never known of any other way to be? That’s no way to love, sir. Love is a choice, as is violence.”

With that, an entire column of our villagers perished.

“And what is it you intend to do with that rifle of yours?” she asked. “It can scarcely graze a buck at ten paces. How many enemies will succumb to your deadly aim?”

“How did you — I intend to fight. That is all.”

“Poor creature,” she said.

A Ten of Clubs and then a Jack. A Two, Three, and Four of Diamonds. A King of Hearts slotting into where it doesn’t belong.

“Why are we doing this?” I asked. “Who are you? What do you want with me?” The lavender burned in my chest.

“We are almost finished,” she said assuredly. “We all have our part to play in history.”

“But I am nothing.”

“You are morose from your romantic setbacks, what you feel is human and quite common. You are weary and lack a motivating gem of the self to keep you moving. You will feel this pain many more times, but each spell is temporary. You are not destined for war, at least not in the way you think.”

We finished our game. Only the Queen of Hearts was mine while she claimed the other three. 

“You are not nothing,” she said. The room shifted on its side as she disappeared into the darkness. Her voice saturated everything as if it was oxygen itself. “In fact, tonight you are the most important person in the world.”

When I woke, the storm had passed.

Know this, friends. The fear and adrenaline I felt then was enough to send me flying through the air like an arrow. Were it not for my horse, I would have sprinted every mile home barefoot without stopping for a moment’s rest. I quit that cursed town so quickly I abandoned my father’s rifle to the ether. 

When I returned, I redoubled my efforts into my family’s trade. I was imbued with a new strength that blotted out all distractions to the point that when I heard tell of Her Majesty’s dreadful losses overseas and the one, paltry victory I did not register the connection. Endless days passed as households wept over sons fallen in a distant land. I harbored terrible guilt.

But now I look upon that night not with anger or revulsion, but with a remove reserved for one beholding their past-self as a precursor to their present. I would have surely died if not for that card game. Yet it is also true that my actions unwittingly condemned the souls of thousands. 

I feel conflicted about my role as an instrument of fate. To suffer over things I have no control over will surely end in self-destruction. But to frivolously disregard the pain I’ve caused would be equally irresponsible. So instead I live in the gradient, endeavoring to do right by my fellow man so that I may depart this world a gentler place than when I entered. 

But this inner poise is not perfect, and in fact wobbles at the slight detection of lavender. Should you encounter such a dominating aroma in your travels, a lavender that bewitches and commands, I must warn you to stay away. Stay far away lest you bear an insurmountable weight for the remainder of your days.

Copyright 2022 by James Frierson