The Exiled Gem

Three Cape Ladies Club

Alexandra didn't know Doveland would be so different. It was the morning of eleventh November and she was back in her _________. She had no idea what to fill that blank with.

What was Doveland?

Motherland? No.

Homeland? Even bigger No.

Nation? No.

Love? No.

Pride? No.

Sanctuary? No.

Then maybe... it was her posting.

That was better. Posting.

Alexandra walked around the streets, so painfully familiar. She held her cloak around herself - though there wasn't much need to do so - it was deserted. Cool, dry winds slapped her face and the back of her palms. She kept placing one foot after the other - just like she had, in the night of her exile.

I had expected him to be more understanding. A better person. Reality? He is painfully like the rest. There's no difference, Mabel.

That had been the special comment of Watson for Liam. Alexandra had wanted to laugh, but Watson looked so serious only for a very few, chance times. His seriousness, in such a case, equated to another person's graveness.

There's more to him, Alexandra had replied, there's more to everybody. Like you appear an incendiary - I believed you were an incendiary. Until I got to know you better, and I realized you weren't.

Watson had not agreed. Alexandra hadn't expected him to. They were good friends, but Alexandra and Watson had two completely different ways of looking at things. And people.

Alexandra resurfaced from those thoughts. She had a quick look around herself... all fine. Doveland... was certainly not the old Doveland anymore.

What Alexandra had left behind, had been a country sitting on the crux of an economic explosion. That Doveland had been a rising power. A rising threat.

Now, it seemed like something had been sucked out from it. Like everything had been sucked out from it. The common Dovish, called it Alexandra's Curse.

Somehow word had got out that after being exiled, the youngest Princess Alexandra had uttered a deadly curse. Nobody knew its exact contents, but she had said Doveland would pay. She had left ill luck upon it. And now, it seemed to be working. In the past ten years, Doveland had not seen many happy days. Two years after she had left, the Queen had died.

Alexandra didn't know what to feel. She was oddly disconnected from Doveland. She had just given a gasp of realization learning of her mother's death. She didn't even felt hurt. Or scared. Or upset. If that could happen to her in ten years, then certainly it was NOT Diana Fannel's fault she had become out of society in those nineteen years.

Five months after that, the King had departed. And only eight months later, Doveland had been hit by its worst famine ever. And that famine, was still continuing.

Subsistence crisis. Malnutrition. Starvation and death. An average Dovish could live... what? Fifty five years? Extremely low. And the worst part? Whenever there was a problem - people found somebody to blame. Here, Alexandra was that somebody.

Just half an hour ago, she had seen a group of old men, all gaunt, talking about how a girl who could kill a perfectly fine nine year old could definitely curse them. That she was definitely a witch.