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The Consort
The Shadow found ruling the kingdom alongside the Princess, now become Queen, more work than he had expected. He had thought there would be people to take care of everything. But slowly, he began to find it interesting. The Queen still saw many things clearly, but she no longer saw so clearly that it caused her discomfort. She was able to not see things she would rather not see, now.
There were no children from their marriage, and never would, or could be. The Shadow's difficulty growing a beard had been closely related to the reason for this fact. But this was one of the things that the Queen did not want to see, and therefore was able to not see. She spoke on occasion of the heir she would bear who would rule the kingdom after the two of them were gone. The Shadow had no intention of ever being gone, but he chose not to not inform the Queen of this fact.
The Queen's shadow had, of late, become rather independent. The Shadow noticed it, from time to time. But he did not speak to it. It would not do to let it come to understand that they were more the same than they were different.
Several of the members of the court began to worry aloud about the succession. They did not do this where the Queen could hear, out of respect for her, but the Shadow heard them. And, hearing them, the Shadow began to consider how to rid himself of the trouble they could make.
There had been certain words that, hidden in the anteroom of brightly glowing Poetry, the Shadow had heard, and made special note of. He had not really read all her books; that had been a lie he told to the Scholar whose shadow he had begun as; but he had watched her for weeks from afar, and gained from eavesdropping on her some fine true words of power.
There had been one he could use, and it had been what made him real enough to wear clothes. Without that word, anything he put on might have simply fallen through him, as it would through any ordinary shadow who tried to dress herself. In fact he had watched the Queen's shadow make that very attempt, and experience that very failure. But there were several more that the Shadow was simply incapable of using. He had given himself every semblance of being a man, but he could not quite entirely become one. However, he thought there might be a person in the kingdom who would use them on his behalf. He must find just the right person, however.
A Guild of magicians practiced their art of legerdemain in the market squares of the kingdom's capital city. The Shadow wished to spy upon these magicians, for he felt sure that from among them he could find one capable of wielding the words of power. In another kingdom, he might have commanded the Guild to bring its finest magicians to perform for the royal court.
But in this kingdom, whose Princess had been known for her ability to see too clearly, the Guild would never answer such a summons. They had done so in the past, and their Princess had seen behind every trick. A law had been promulgated relegating all magic that was trickery to performances for commoners only. And there was, at that time, no true magic known in the kingdom.
The Shadow planned to change that fact himself, and appoint a court magician with true magic he would provide. He had so much confidence in his ability to influence people that he did not concern himself with any danger such an empowered magician would pose to him.
He was the consort of the Queen, after all, and she ruled the kingdom and its capital city. What did one in such a position have to fear from a common street performer? But that very position which gave the Shadow power was what prevented him from finding the magician he needed. The Queen's Consort was expected to show himself to the people only once each year, but to the court and its functionaries and the nobility, he must be available for what seemed like most of the hours of every day.
And the Queen had begun to require him for most of every night. She truly was sure that soon, an heir might be on the way. The Shadow must indulge her in what she thought would produce such an eventuality: not altogether unpleasant, perhaps, but ineffectual and time-consuming.
Due to which, the Shadow was growing rather tired of the Queen. He considered that her shadow might make a suitable replacement for her, if he could persuade it to this course of action. Why, it had worked so remarkably well for the Shadow, who had made much of himself.
And this thought made the Shadow realize there was another opportunity. He would first have the Queen's shadow do the groundwork, as it were, of finding the right magician.
During those nights when the Queen demanded so much of her Consort, he began to light a candle at their bedside, so her shadow would be present. Then, when the Queen fell asleep, he would lean gently against her shadow and whisper sweet words to it of his affection and high regard.
He felt sure he had succeeded in this seduction when the Queen's shadow began stroking him with its long fingers in the candlelight. It pressed its lips to his ear and tried to whisper, but it had no voice. The Shadow Consort thought he would win its allegiance forever if he granted it that power, and that had been a word he had never used, but had had used on him by happenstance in the anteroom of Poetry.
And it had been traveling the world for him, and finding things out, and could not easily report back what it had found without a voice. So he had not considered it before, but now, he passed the gift on.
The Regent
When the Princess had so willfully discarded the excessive keenness of her vision, it had been granted to her shadow. So it was with only feigned allegiance that the Queen's shadow began to do her husband's bidding; the intensity of the shadow's search, however, was sincere.
The princess-shadow was no more a woman than the Shadow Consort was a man. But the Consort styled himself a man; he wore a man's clothing, spoke in a man's voice, and wished a man's place in the world in all ways. The princess-shadow had no such ambitions to be a woman, or even a princess. They preferred to remain without human this-or-thatness. They did, though, covet human solidity, human speech, and a ruler's power. And there was one aspect of the Queen's femininity that they loved: the Queen had long, flowing hair, and therefore so did her shadow. This wondrous hair enabled the shadow to alter their shape profoundly with a mere tilt of the head, a supremely useful and enjoyable means of disguise.
This shadow could leave the palace in the early mornings, when the sun shone in from a window on one side and cast them tall enough that they fell through the window on the other side. Sliding along the cobblestones of the King's Square, the princess-shadow watched each magic trick performed there, listened to the patter of all the magicians, slipped into the windows of their homes and saw the secret ways there that they shared with no one, or only their family, or their closest fellows.
What they saw of the people, their kindnesses and cruelties, their everyday struggles with life, and most of all, the mistreatment by the nobility, persuaded the princess-shadow that the Queen was an unworthy sovereign. She blithely disposed of any commoner who might gain public sympathy against the high-handedness of the nobility. Her Consort's erstwhile "shadow" had not been the first, nor had he been the last. The knowledge of injustice and desire for fairness grew within the princess-shadow, for the Queen had not wanted that part of herself at all.
But they did not forget their mission had been to find a potential court magician. Though they had begun to doubt the wisdom of giving this power into the hands of the Consort, they still pursued it. The beginnings of a plan for this future true magic had coalesced in the princess-shadow's mind.
There was a girl who seemed the most promising of the magicians. She was openly proud, popular with the crowds and with the Guild, privately cruel to her aging parents and younger sister. She had a taste for power and what it could give her, and wanted more than the streets would ever have to offer. And she wrote poems, in utter secrecy, hiding them within her mattress at night, where only a shadow could slip in to read them. These spoke of her longing for magic to be real, for power she feared forever beyond her grasp.
From the Shadow Consort, the princess-shadow persuaded the least of his words of power, the one that let a shadow speak in a voice that a human being could hear. Then the young magician girl could be spoken to, and persuaded by the princess-shadow to her purpose.
Returning to the Shadow Consort, they explained why this promising girl was the right choice. They were convincing. They asked, then, what true word of power should they teach to the girl, in order to grant her the power that she would then use on behalf of the kingdom.
But the Consort would not entrust the word of power to the princess-shadow. No persuasion they attempted would convince him. So the princess-shadow suggested that he go in their place, while they took over his body. Temporarily.
This suggestion was taken up with eagerness. The body changed, when its animating shadow changed: the hair was much longer, the shape less masculine. When the Queen met this seeming newcomer, she proclaimed this person seemed so familiar, yet she did not know them. Who might they be?
Her shadow claimed to be the Consort's sibling, come to visit, and then asked to stay and assist with the kingdom while the Consort and Queen went to the watering-place, to be cured of their infertility. The Queen found this a brilliant idea. When the supposed younger sibling of her Consort said that their brother had already gone ahead to prepare a welcome for the Queen, the Queen began arranging her own trip immediately.
And declared that her Consort's brother should be Regent, while she and her Consort were away. The Queen had not noticed the careful omission of "brother" or "sister" in her erstwhile shadow's claim of identity, and had come to her own conclusion, which they chose not to dispute.
After the Queen's departure, the girl and the Shadow Consort, the latter without his body, came to the palace. In the chaos of the Queen's retinue and all the arrangements for a royal processional, they were kept in a waiting room for nearly an entire day.
The Narrator
While nearly anyone and anything could be disappeared by the word used by the court magician, the word was powerless against the one who had taught it to the speaker. In this case, it made both the Scholar's ex-Shadow and the Regent who inhabited his former body immune. Both of them, at one time or another, attempted to have the magician use the word against the other; and even attempted to use the word themselves.
The Scholar's ex-Shadow found himself, myself, nothing but a disembodied voice, as the original body that had cast me as a shadow was gone, and the body I had made for myself was someone else's, and only the voice granted to me by Poetry remained. Over time I dwindled into nothing but words spoken in darkness in certain rooms beneath the palace. When I tried to use the words, I had no effect. There was nothing left for me to lose, it seemed, and more than that, I did not ardently desire magic. I only wanted revenge. That proved insufficient.
The Regent used the words twice. The first time, to vanish away the Queen and her retinue, lest she discover her shadow had usurped her when she reached the watering-place and did not find her Consort there before her. They lost something invisible, that time, that they did not even seem to miss, though they had valued it very highly: their sense of fairness to the common folk.
The second time, when the Regent used the word in need, between Court Magicians, to remove an invading army from the borderlands of the kingdom, they lost something they did miss: their long, flowing hair.