A Whole New World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,31

and a house. He had a hut. He wanted a house. I gave him a house. And the sheep. And a wife—who, I might add, was totally into marrying a guy with a bigger flock of sheep. No breaking the laws of magic there. All I had to do was find her. Three nice little wishes and he was happy to let me go. They should all be so modest.”

“Stop!” Jasmine screeched. “Stop with your jokes and stupid little stories! This is my life here—Rajah’s life—the life of everyone in Agrabah—and you’re treating it like it’s just another joke! You’re ridiculous!”

“I’m ridiculous?” the genie growled.

Blue smoke roiled. He grew in size until he was towering over her. Jasmine tried not to cower. Dark clouds filled the room and tiny lightning bolts flashed around the edges.

“I do not think you have been listening to the subtext, Your Highness. I. Am. Trapped. I am a living, thinking, sentient being who has been trapped in that lamp for ten thousand years. Only let out to be ordered around by you ridiculous humans with your greedy, deranged desires. Do you think you could stay sane under those conditions for that long?”

Jasmine had never thought about it that way. Genies were just…magical creatures often caught in lamps you could demand wishes from. She never thought about them as people. They were never people in stories. They just did as they were told.

The genie was far from being done.

“Also? All of my people are gone. The djinn are dead as a race. Disappeared from this world. Completely. Yeah, so that happened sometime in the last ten thousand years. I’m not sure exactly how or when since I was in a lamp when it happened. I’m the only one left. So I’m alone in the world, and even if by some magic I managed to get free, I have no home left to go to and no one to see.

“Oh, yeah, did that little detail escape Your Royal Highness’s notice, too? The ‘get free’ part?” The genie brandished his forearms in her face. She tried not to shrink back from the golden wristbands that came perilously close to breaking her nose. “Enslaved. These are manacles, sweetcheeks.

“But…what would you understand about that?”

Suddenly, he looked exhausted. He physically shrank in size, seeming to somehow draw into himself and away from Jasmine at the same time. “You’re a princess among men. You have no idea what it’s like to feel trapped.”

Jasmine took a deep breath. She walked forward and put a hand on the genie’s arm, right above his manacle.

“Genie.” She looked up into his eyes, set in a face that was larger than a bull’s head and a violent shade of blue. It was difficult trying to see him as a human—no, a person. But she had to try. “I am extremely sorry for not understanding your situation. I had no idea about how genies—or djinn—truly live. Or lived. As you said, I’m a snippy little princess. I’m an idiot. What do I know?”

He started to look contrite but she shook her head to stop him.

“You’ve lived over a hundred lifetimes more than I…it was rude and presumptuous of me to judge you. Grandfather,” she added, a twinkle in her eye.

“Hey, now.…”

“But as long as we’re on the subject of being trapped…before all this with you and Jafar started, my father was going to hand me over, as Jafar so nicely put it, to whichever prince I hated the least. And then my job would be to make babies until there was a male heir. Assuming, you know, I didn’t die in childbirth first. I’d be lucky if I made it to forty, much less ten thousand. And currently I’m locked in my room waiting to be married to a man I hate and will continue hating for the rest of my life unless he finds a spell that will make me love him like a brainless puppet. If that’s not the definition of trapped, what is?”

The genie quietly regarded her for a long moment.

“Apology accepted,” he finally said. Making not quite a joke out of it. But she could see in his alien black eyes that he understood.

Jasmine suddenly felt all of her energy—all of the fear, sadness, hysteria, anger—drain from her. She collapsed as gracefully as she could on her bed and rubbed her eyes. She had a comrade in the same position as she—who was just as powerless as she. They could sympathize with each other