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The Raven Princess

by Dani Atkinson

“Oh no,” Clarinda muttered, fluttering to the body of the fallen prince. His limp form lay sprawled at the base of a willow tree, the fine embroidery on his clothes gleaming in the shifting patches of sunlight cast between the branches. A basket lay near his feet, and an empty wine goblet lay toppled near his hand. Clarinda pecked his fingers. “No no no…”

Notchbeak flapped down to join her. “Who’s this? Are you going to eat him?” He started pecking the other hand. “Dibs on his eyes.”

“No!” Clarinda cried, hopping to the man’s chest.

Notchbeak ruffled his feathers in a shrug. “Well, fine, we can split the eyes. He has two, after all.”

“No eye eating,” snapped Clarinda. “He’s not dead. The idiot is asleep. What’s the one thing I told him? Don’t eat or drink anything the witch gives you, I said. It’ll be enchanted, I said…” Clarinda nipped the prince’s ear spitefully. He twitched in his sleep, rolled on his back, and began to snore. Clarinda hopped onto the prince’s chest and paced. “I’ll be a raven forever, at this rate.”

Notchbeak cocked his head. “As opposed to what?”

“I told you, I’m a princess!”

“Of what?” Notchbeak was only half listening, still looking longingly towards the prince’s closed eyes.

“Of humans!” Clarinda said, fluffing her throat feathers in annoyance. “I’m a human princess!”

“Mm. Since when?”

“Since whe-…?” Clarinda blinked at him, beak agape. “Since always! I told you!”

“You’ve been a raven as long as I’ve known you, since you were a scruffy half-fledged chick.” Notchbeak scratched the ground, perusing it for stray crumbs. “And that’s been what, ten years?”

Clarinda beat her wings in agitation. “And before that, I was a human girl!”

Notchbeak tugged at a particularly shiny thread of the prince’s cloak. “Why’d you wait so long to kick up a fuss about it then?”

Clarinda hunched her wings awkwardly. “You need a prince to save you. That’s always how it works. But I was too young to marry, before.”

“How young?”

“I was… I think I was eight?” Clarinda said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Ah. So, you’ve been a raven for longer than you’ve been human.”

Clarinda glared. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well for one thing, you’ve been fishing jerky out of his pockets these last five minutes.”

“I’ve been…? Oh, darn it.” Clarinda stared at the strip of dried meat she’d just worked loose from the prince’s jacket. She hesitated, then grumpily finished gulping it down.

Notchbeak turned a sulky eye to look at her sideways. “And not sharing, I see. Say, does the magic food put us to sleep or just him? I smell eggs in that basket.”

Clarinda croaked a defeated sigh. “Go ahead.”

Notchbeak hopped into the basket and began wolfing down deviled egg salad sandwiches. He stuck his head out with his beak full. “Wnn smmph?”

“No,” said Clarinda, turning her beak up at him disdainfully. “I’m not hungry.”

Notchbeak swallowed. “You’re still eating the prince’s jerky.”

“Oh for…” Clarinda glowered at the fresh talonful of jerky she’d apparently filched. She ate it, then hopped up to perch on the prince’s head out of the way of temptation. The prince snorted a little, but still did not wake.

Clarinda fretfully groomed her pinion feathers. “All right, all right… there’s still two more days. Princes always get three chances. He just has to stay awake and resist the food and drink tomorrow. Then he can pour the enchanted wine over my feathers, kiss me on the head, and turn me back into a princess so we can live happily ever after. Easy.”

“I wouldn’t count on it!” Notchbeak called from the basket. “This food is pretty irresistible.”

“He’s not some filthy scavenger bird. He has some self control,” Clarinda retorted.

“Unlike someone who ate all the jerky?”

Clarinda coughed. “Shut up. I’m… under the influence of my enchanted form. That won’t be a problem after tomorrow. He’ll save me and I’ll be human again. You’ll see.”

---

“Oh, come on!!”

The prince was snoring under the tree again, an empty goblet on its side by his hand.

Notchbeak flew straight for the basket. “Ooooh, ham roll ups! With cheese!”

Clarinda flew to the prince and squawked furiously in his sleeping face. “Seriously? Did you think something different would happen if you drank the magical drugged wine? Did you think it would be less drugged and magical on a Tuesday? What?”

“Whapp’s tmmsday?” came a muffled voice from the basket.

“Shut up, Notchbeak,” Clarinda said, flutterhopping to the basket. “And give me one of those roll ups.”

“What, did you eat all his jerky already?”

“YES, okay?”

Notchbeak popped his head out of the basket and dropped a roll up at her feet. “Poor guy. See, that’s why he was probably too hungry to resist the food.”

“He did resist the food, ” Clarinda screeched. “It’s the wine that keeps getting him. The wine I need! To be human again! Like I’m supposed to be!”

Notchbeak shook his head. “Why are you so hung up on what you’re supposed to be? What’s wrong with being a raven?”

Clarinda pecked listlessly at the ham. “It’s not wrong. It’s just… not right. I was born human.”

“Born?… Oh, ew, right, humans are born instead of hatched.” Notchbeak shuddered. “Painful looking process.” He paused, considering. “Sometimes leaves tasty placenta and bloody bits around, though.”

Clarinda shoved the basket. “You’re revolting. I’m revolting. We’re revolting and I hate this.”

Notchbeak ducked back down into the basket to grab more ham. “How’d you end up a raven if you started human, anyway?”

Clarinda hesitated. “… My mother threw me off a tower.”

“Ah well, normal part of growing up, happens to us all eventua-… Wait, humans can’t fly, can they?”

“Nope.”

Notchbeak hopped out of the basket to stare at her. “Why’d your mother throw you out of the nest if you couldn’t fly?”

Clarinda shuffled from foot to foot. “She… got fed up with me, I guess,” she whispered. “I was being noisy, underfoot. She held me up to look at the ravens flying around the tower and said ‘I wish you’d fly away like one of them.'”

“And?”

“And… I did.” Clarinda sighed. “I think she cursed me. Or maybe something in the woods was listening. I turned into a bird, and flew away, and joined your flock.”

Notchbeak huffed. “An Unkindness, dear. It’s an unkindness of ravens. Lesser birds flock.”

Clarinda shrugged. “Unkindness, flock, it’s not what humans have.”

“What do humans have? What’s a flock of princesses?” Notchbeak asked.

“A posse, maybe? I don’t know. At this rate I’ll never find out, because the word for a group of princes is a PRAT.” Clarinda savagely pecked the prince’s kneecap.

“What’s he have to do with this, anyway? Your mother’s the one who cursed you and tossed you into the sky with us. Shouldn’t you take it up with her?”

“She… I couldn’t.” said Clarinda. She crouched down in a miserable huddle. “Anyway, this is just how it works. I remember that much, from the songs and stories they told me at bedtime when I was little. A prince saves you. You find magic that can fix you, you tell a prince where to find it, and he makes it work. I did what I’m supposed to. I found the witch with the magic wine. He’s supposed to love me enough to make it work.”

Notchbeak snorted. “Psh. Sounds like cuckoo thinking. Laying all your eggs in someone else’s nest and hoping they’ll take care of it for you.”

“Well, what would you suggest?” Clarinda snapped.

“I already suggested eating his eyes, but you vetoed that.”

“NO EYE EATING!”

“Fine,” Notchbeak said, and flew up into the willow. He called down to her from the boughs. “We’re ravens, chick. We don’t instruct and wait. We trick. We steal. We pull on wolf tails and rob gull nests and snatch the sun from secret places in the dark.”

“Wait, we what?” Clarinda looked up at him in confusion.

Notchbeak preened himself as he continued. “Ravens have our own stories we tell ourselves, if you’d let yourself be one of us long enough to listen. Be one of us today. Don’t wait for someone to give you magic. Steal it. Think, girl. You’re not a princess yet. What would a raven do?”

“… Hmm…”

---

The next day the old witch heard a tapping at her front door and greeted it with her best smile and a greeting on her lips. “You’re early today, your highness-…” Then she trailed off as she opened the door and found no one outside.

“Strange,” she muttered, looking about. Then she heard a tapping on her back door.

The witch closed the front door and hobbled to the back, grumbling. “You should call at the front like a proper gentlema-…” But there was no one there, either.

The tapping returned to the front door.

The witch hobbled to the front door, then the back, then the front, with mounting irritation. Front, back, front, back, faster and faster and never anyone there. Finally, when she heard the back door knocking, she whirled around and ran to it without bothering to close the front door first. “I’ll catch you, you little…”

She opened the door on Notchbeak, mid peck. He winked up at her and cawed. She stared at him in bewilderment.

Then the witch heard a loud crash.

The witch spun back around. Clarinda had flown through the still open front door and made straight for the bottle of wine, knocking it off the shelf onto the stove and shattering it. Clarinda was bathing in the spilled wine pouring onto the floor as happily as a sparrow in a birdbath.

The witch spluttered. “You little…!”

“Excuse me? Is something the matter? The door was left open.” The prince stood in the front door, squinting in the dim light of the cottage.

Clarinda flapped damply into the air and flew straight at the prince’s face. He widened his eyes and brought his hands up belatedly to defend himself, but he was too late to shield against being headbutted in the mouth by a sticky wet raven in full flight.

There was a boom and a crash and a blaze of light.

When the cacophony cleared, there was a woman standing in front of the prince. She was wearing ragged clothes that had once been fine but were now far too small for her and drenched with wine. Her forehead was pressed to the prince’s lips.

The prince staggered back, eyes wide. He stared at her, mouth smeared with wine and a stray feather. He licked his lips and grinned. “Well, hello gorgeous. Are you…?”

Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled like a felled tree.

Clarinda glared down at the prince as he began to snore. “Really? Really?!”

The witch glared at Clarinda. “You’ve got what you wanted. Now drag your idiot out of here and clean up this mess, bird.”

“I’m not a bird,” said Clarinda. “I’m a princess.”

The witch gave Clarinda a wry look. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, why?”

“You just stole a strip of jerky out of his pocket.”

“… No I didn’t.”

The witch pinched the bridge of her nose. “Get a mop or get out.”

---

Clarinda sat by the snoring prince back under the willow tree. It was a familiar scene, except Clarinda was now viewing it from slightly higher up. Also, the prince was now stripped to his underwear. After she had washed the wine off in a nearby stream and awkwardly ripped her far too small child’s clothes off her far too large adult human body, she’d decided giving her his clothes was the least the prince could do. It was basic chivalry. He probably would have agreed, if he’d been awake. If not, well, not being awake to disagree was his own fault.

She hugged her knees (knees!) and stared into the distance.

Notchbeak flew up and perched on Clarinda’s shoulder. “Save any of that jerky?”

“Am I a princess?” Clarinda whispered. “Really?”

Notchbeak fluttered dismissively. “You keep saying so. Now you look it. Not quite as frilly, but I assume you come into your full adult plumage later.”

“I didn’t get fixed the way a princess should. I did it like a raven. And I thought…” Clarinda stared up at the branches above, too high for her to reach and too small to hold her. “I though everything would feel right once I was what I was supposed to be. But I don’t think it is. Is this what being a princess is supposed to feel like?” She sniffled.

“Should, supposed to,” grumbled Notchbeak. “You enchanted types are always so concerned with supposed-to-be and losing sight of what is.”

Clarinda snorted. “Known a lot of enchanted types, have you?”

“A few.” Notchbeak said, nestling against her neck. “There was one particular flockmate…”

“Don’t you mean unkindnessmate?”

Notchbeak nipped her ear. “Hush, you. She was a bratty little hatchling. Always falling out of trees and wandering into trouble, didn’t have the good sense to fly from fox or fire. Still, she didn’t deserve what happened.”

“What did happen?”

“Her mother cursed her into human shape.”

Clarinda twisted her head to try and look at him, eyes wide. “Wait, what?”

“‘I wish you’d fall out of the tree and stay there,’ I think she said. Something like that. And suddenly the hatchling was a bald, two-legged, wingless, featherless freak. Looked a lot like you.” Notchbeak sighed. “A lot.”

Clarinda got a sinking feeling. “What happened to her?”

“Oh, she never figured out how to fly again, though she wasted far too much of her life trying. Gave up and took a human mate. Became a queen.”

Clarinda froze. Her heart pounded. “Wait, what? What?! Are you… was she?!”

Notchbeak nodded sadly. “Probably so, probably so. Only so many human queens about. So I gather, anyway. Human pecking orders are confusing.”

“But then… oh no. Are you telling me I was supposed to be a raven this whole time?” Clarinda felt her voice rising in a shriek.

Notchbeak batted her cheek lightly with a wing. “Never said that. After all, her own mother was a human enchanted into a raven.”

“Now you’re just making stuff up!”

Notchbeak spread his plumage. “I swear on my right wing. And that one’s mother was a raven enchanted into a human again. Don’t know how far back it goes. Or what species it was they started with.”

Clarinda lay down on the ground, forcing Notchbeak to hop off her shoulder with a squawk. Her head was swimming. She felt like she’d been drinking enchanted wine herself. “But… she… they… Why?”

“Maybe your mother thought she was doing you a favour. Returning you to what you were ‘supposed to be,’ since she couldn’t go herself.” Notchbeak stood on Clarinda’s collarbone. He leaned forward and fixed her gaze with his. “Or maybe she was a mixed-up angry person from a long line of mixed-up angry people, and she hurt you because it’s all she had ever been taught to do. Who knows? Us enchanted folk are a ridiculous lot.”

Clarinda slowly lifted her head to stare at Notchbeak. “Us?”

Notchbeak cawed in exasperation. “You’ve known me for ten years, chick. How long do you think ravens usually live?”

“You were human? You?”

“My father was a human cursed into the shape of a fox. My mother was an immortal shapeshifting fox who took on the shape of a human. I never knew what I was ‘supposed’ to be. Neither did they, though oh how they did argue about it. And neither of them ever sticking to the same side of the argument for two days in a row.” Notchbeak shuddered and shook out his feathers. “It made my head ache.”

Clarinda sat up and flung her arms out in a helpless gesture. “Then why are you a raven? How does that work?”

Notchbeak tutted and flew to strut up and down one of her outstretched arms. “I finally realized that there is no supposed to be. No should. Just is and will be. I turned myself into a raven to spite them both and please myself, and I never looked back. Feathers fit me better than skin or fur ever could. This is what I decided to be, not what I should.”

Clarinda stood up, slowly, and stared down at her feet. “I don’t know how to decide, without a should. If there’s options other than raven or human, I don’t even know what they are.”

Notchbeak walked claw over claw back to her shoulder and started preening her hair. “Well. Find out.” He glanced down at the snoring prince. “I suppose one of those options is waiting for him to wake up and do that whole true love thing you were planning on.”

Clarinda looked at the prince. She sighed, turned away, and started walking into the woods on unsteady legs.

“Wise choice, I think,” said Notchbeak, nodding. “He looked like terrible mate material. You’d come back to the nest to find half the eggs had been eaten by a snake.”

“Definitely,” Clarinda agreed. “He did have good jerky, though.”

“I know where a band of robbers hide their loot and supplies,” Notchbeak said. “They might have jerky.”

Clarinda raised her eyebrows. “Oh really.”

“Us ravens keep track of a lot of such things. Food, shinies, we know all the best spots,” said Notchbeak. “You may regret giving up your wings, change your mind.”

Clarinda snorted. “Why haven’t you taken the food and shinies for yourself?”

Notchbeak became abruptly interested in grooming his wings. “The door of the hideout is closed, and I don’t have thumbs.”

“Ha. Wait, did you help me turn human just so you could take advantage of my thumbs?”

“What? Never! Probably! Almost certainly not! Oh, hey, the path to the robbers’ den is that way.”

And the raven and the creature who might or might not be a princess strode off into the what is and the what will be.

---

Host Commentary

I’ll admit, as an editor, when I see the word “Princess” in the title of a story, I automatically start to question whether I will like it or not. Princess stories are often derivative, or the same old “let’s flip the narrative” – where the princess saves herself, or the prince, or runs off with the dragon… it’s no longer original. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve written my own stories with the word “Princess” in the title. I like princesses. It’s just, I’ve read a lot of stories in this position, but it’s the law of averages, you know? I hold out hope that I’m due for a good story. What we have here is a great story.

Ahem, sidebar, the law of averages is very bad statistics. I, as a scientist, feel obligated to point that out. Anyway…

There are three things that I love about this story. First, Clarinda is confident and goal oriented. She knows what she wants, to be human, and works to make it happen. But when her plan doesn’t work out the way Clarinda expected and she faces failure, she feels a full range of emotions and needs the support and help of her friend Notchbeak to persevere. There’s nothing I dislike more than a character needing nothing more than pluck and luck to succeed all on their own.

Second, I loved that I did not see the twist coming, that maybe Clarinda didn’t start out as a human. But the clues were there! Snacking on the jerky without thinking about it. Not being affected by the enchanted food. Being thrown from the tower by her mother. Great job author, you got me, and that is hard to do!

And lastly, this story is downright funny. It is not easy to write humor well, and here it is done masterfully.