“Shouldn’t you be getting the presents?” said Bess, as she fixed the cage to the ceiling of her cloister. “Being your birthday and all.”
“I got responsibility for half the kingdom,” said Harold. “I don’t need another cage.”
It made a good joke, because they both knew how much he’d looked forward to serving his kingdom.
For Harold’s seventeenth birthday, after a year of successful co-rule, his father threw a ball and invited every eligible maiden in the kingdom to attend. Though Harold found his father’s definitions of “every” and “eligible” suspect, he danced the night and even managed to enjoy himself, though his most frequent dance partner vanished even before the midnight toast. He spent the second half of the night in the library, reminiscing with his schoolmates. The girl did not return.
“You let her go?” said Yancey the next morning, over a late breakfast. “You danced all night! She outshone everyone—almost everyone—” he corrected hastily, glancing at Celiura. His wife returned him an amused smile. “You didn’t even get her name?”
“I got her name,” said Harold. “I think it was an alias. She dropped her shoe on the way out.” He gestured at the lost-and-found box, a clutter of fans and tiaras and jackets and medals and more than one matchless shoe. “One of those. A fancy one.”
“She left a shoe?” said Yancey. “Harold—that means she wants you to find her. She’s probably a princess in disguise!”
“I told you a thousand times,” said Harold. “I’m not interested in getting married. Especially not if it means chasing all over the kingdom for an anonymous woman with one shoe. We’ve got alms to distribute today, don’t we? I’m not letting people go hungry just to run after a girl who leaves me with a false name and half a pair of shoes.”
The mystery woman turned up again, on her own, three months later, at a ball in a neighboring kingdom. She danced all night with the young Prince Dourff and gave Harold nothing but a sweet, sympathetic smile before leaving her slipper on the stairs and speeding into the night.
“Enchanting!” said Dourff. “I must know who she is. Let the search begin at once. Harold, are you coming?”
“Go ahead,” said Harold. “I’ve got to visit an irrigation site this week. Very exciting stuff.”
“Suit yourself,” said Dourff. His eyes shone. “I don’t even know her real name. Isn’t it perfect?”
Perfect, thought Harold, for Dourff the dedicated hunter, but a maniacal way to arrange a marriage.
On the way home Harold helped a girl pluck apples from an overladen tree, but wouldn’t take her silver comb in thanks, and gave some leftover party food to a crone sitting by the lake, but politely ignored her suggestion to try the scenic route instead of the usual path. The irrigation site was a marvel; Harold arranged for influential farmers from various regions to take a look, and that harvest season was the most bountiful on record.
Three balls and a month of courtship later, Dourff married the mystery girl, and Harold sent twenty unmatched shoes (along with two very nicely embroidered pairs) as a wedding gift.
His school friends continued to disperse. Tom went to war and came back married to the daughter of an enemy general: just the thing for Tom, who preferred compromise and lasting peace. Frank the gambling fiend won his fortune seeking a monster who, it was told, would reward anyone willing to treat its beastly form with love. The unenchanted woman was as contrite as she was relieved, but Frank’s account chilled Harold’s blood.
“It’s mad,” he told Bess the chapel girl, who sometimes waited for him after confession. “All the other princes I know are going on these insane adventures, up towers and glass mountains and heaven-knows-where else, just to bring back wives! Peasants have wives! Businessmen and soldiers and junior statesmen have wives! You don’t see them wearing donkeyskin and letting their beards grow for ten miserable years.”
“Peasants and junior statesmen don’t marry princesses,” the chapel girl observed. “Generally.”
“Anyone a prince marries is a princess,” said Harold. “That’s how it works.”
“Princesses are special,” Bess insisted.
“I’ve met them,” said Harold, “and yes, they’re all lovely, and they’re all perfect for their princes, individually, but you know, a lot of girls are lovely and you don’t have to break curses to find them. You’re lovely. Someone’s going to come marry you, only they won’t have to kiss frogs and slay giants for the privilege.”
The chapel girl’s eyes glinted. “How do you know?” she teased. “Maybe I’ve sworn only to marry the man who can bring me my true name.”
She laughed, but Harold looked at her thoughtfully. “Bess isn’t your true name?”
“I’m a ward,” she said. “The chaplain made it up. Elizabeth, properly. But I like Bess.”
“Oh, well,” he said. “It’s a pretty good name.”
“I think so,” she agreed.
When the royal family next met to discuss the running of the country, Harold volunteered to oversee the ongoing census. That morning he rode out with humble kit, through dreary rains and melancholy winds, and started circling nearby hamlets, collecting names and stories.
Every town had at least one story.
He heard about a princess sleeping in a coffin of glass. He heard about a peasant who could spin straw to gold. He heard about a girl with no hands, a girl raised by wolves, a girl whose brother was trapped in the form of a deer.
“Fascinating,” he said, making notes, “but I’m looking for girls who might have had daughters they didn’t keep. Do you know anyone like that?”
Stories about those girls, he found, were almost as plentiful as stories about princesses.
After a month full of hardships on the road, interviews, and record-searching, Harold returned to the castle with the completed census rolls and a few new ideas regarding charitable initiatives for young women in trouble. After he made his report to the king, he stopped by the chapel. Bess was trimming candles; when she spotted him, her face lit up.
“And where’ve you been?” she said, climbing down to meet him. “Off gathering stories, I heard.”
He told her what he’d learned: the story about a new widow with three children who found herself with a fourth and an empty cupboard. How she’d made her way to the castle and found shelter in the chapel just in time to make sure the child, which turned out to be a girl, never spent a cold night outdoors. The woman was dead, but the children went to the neighbors and thrived. One of them remembered what her sister’s name would have been.
“Gertrude,” he told her.
Bess wiped her eyes. “I don’t like it.”
“I prefer Bess,” he agreed.
Their eyes met.
“I don’t mean to be forward,” she said, “but I have a new theory.”
He was developing theories too, he realized, theories that tumbled over and around in his head, but he wanted to hear her theories, and to give his a little more time to grow. “Go on.”
“Well—those friends of yours, with the dragons and things—are they the sort of person who likes danger and adventure?”
Harold reflected. “To a man,” he said.
“And those princesses… I don’t mean anything by it, but…”
“They do seem to like that their princes went to all that trouble,” said Harold. “They’re the kind of girl who can survive serving a dragon or living as a beast. A good match, every one.”
“Maybe,” said Bess, “it’s not so mad to find a princess by doing what you do best, with someone who appreciates it. You do the quest that brings you to the best person at the end of it. Both sides. It’s the only quest that fits.”
Harold said, “How did you come up with this theory, exactly?” although he thought he knew.
Her cheeks reddened.
“So what you’re saying,” said Harold, “is that not everyone has to fight a dragon.”
The chapel girl grinned. “I told you so.”
So Harold learned that decisions made at the age of six don’t always last. His schoolmates sent him a variety of hilarious engagement presents; Bess brought her estranged siblings and nephews and nieces and parents-in-law to live in three neat cottages beside the castle, and the king and queen and Yancey and Celiura welcomed them into the family. And Harold prayed deep thanks that he never ever ever had to fight a fire-breathing dragon… because sometimes he looked at Bess and knew that if that was the quest that led to her, heaven help him, he probably would have done it anyway.
Review this Book
Don’t forget to leave a review of this book online at Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, or wherever you buy books or discuss them online.
And turn the page to find questions to get your book club talking and an interview with sisters and authors Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt to hear their thoughts on where these fairy tale retellings came from!
Book Club Questions
1.) In “The Gold in the Straw,” instead of guessing Rumpelstiltskin’s name, the maiden guesses her own and says, “the dwarf winks with your eye, smiles with your lips.” What do you think of this alternative ending? Did Rumpelstiltskin exist? What do you think he represented to the maiden?
2.) “Untruths About the Desirability of Wolves” shows a more grown up Little Red Riding Hood. Why do you think she defends herself against the “sexy wolf” statements and then becomes a wolf hunter?
3.) In the modern adaptations of “The Little Mermaid,” she temporarily gives up her voice for love, while in both the original fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson and “Lure,” she permanently gives up her life. Why do you think so many modern adaptations of fairytales mask the darker side of the original story? Do you think the original or adapted versions are more effective?
4.) Who do you imagine “For Taylor, On the Occasion of Her Fourteenth Birthday with Love” to be written for? What was your favorite piece of advice?
5.) Both “Bones in the Branches” and “A Letter Concerning Shoes” depict a man of so-called lower social status seeking a relationship with a princess out of his league. What do the soldier and the cobbler have in common? What are their differences? What do these two stories say about love and the human condition?
6.) In many stories like “The Long Con” and “The Peril of Stories,” magical creatures, such as the witch and Rumpelstiltskin, exchange something for a child. Why do you think these “villains” want a human baby so badly?
Authors Spotlight & Interview
by Annie Locke
Megan Engelhardt and Amanda C. Davis reveal how storytelling can be a family affair.
Many people remember growing up playing make-believe with their siblings, yet Megan Engelhardt and Amanda C. Davis recall their playtime taking a more colorful approach. These two sisters’ childhood games somehow organically formed into a structured narrative full of protagonists and conflict. They played Tom and Huck, explorers, dinosaurs, and when they ran out of money in Monopoly, the “Rug Fairy” would replenish their cash. “If we played house, it was weird house,” says Davis.
From a young age, they shared a love for storytelling—two budding authors waiting to happen. They started writing early in their childhood. Davis can find samples of her fiction from the first and second grade, and Engelhardt started writing early as well but really picked up her passion for writing in college.
According to Davis, Engelhardt was her first reader. “She was a captive audience,” says Davis, “so a lot of my early fiction was for her in some sense, and it sort of still is… She’s been my first, best reader forever.”
Although both have developed satisfying careers as authors, Wolves and Witches is their first conjoined project. They did appear in three previous anthologies together, but this short story collection marks their first co-authored full-length work.
As they decided to grant their long-time wish to publish together, fairytales seemed an obvious choice. Both authors loved fairytales and wrote many on their own before starting this project. In fact, many of the Wolves and Witches stories were written before Engelhardt and Davis first considered the idea of a short story collection. Their inspiration stemmed from their already growing independent pools of classic fairytales reimagined.
“I think we’ve always had it in our heads that we ‘should’ do something together, but never really had it figured out what would work,” says Engelhardt. “Our styles are very similar, but we do have some differences that don’t always mesh together… we looked around and thought ‘Huh, we both have a lot of fairy tale stories! Maybe we should do something with that!’”
The result was Wolves and Witches, a collection of short stories and poems that allows us to see our favorite fairytales from different angles. Some stories make us unexpectedly chuckle. Others leave haunting images in our minds long after we put the book down. And many of the stories cultivate the same heartwarming nostalgia present in the original fairytales we know so well. Whether the stories reveal a sassy Little Red Riding Hood or a reluctant Prince Charming, they offer an enjoyable, alternative view to these classic tales.
Inevitably, every reader has a collection of questions for the authors that created this memorable world. Megan Engelhardt and Amanda C. Davis agreed to answer just a few…
Sit Down with Megan Engelhardt
How did you become interested in fairy tales and horror fiction?
I’m not much into horror stuff, actually—that’s Amanda’s area! But there is an inherent horrific quality to fairy tales, isn’t there, and I do really love—and have always loved!—fairytales. In elementary school I checked out every single fairy tale and folklore related book in the school library. One of my proudest moments in fourth grade, actually, was playing The Hog Man in a very elementary version of the tale of the volcano goddess Pele from Hawaii. I’m not sure how much it had in common with the actual folktale, but I got to wear a cape and act villainous so that was pretty cool.
What’s your favorite classic fairy tale and why? What is your favorite story in Wolves and Witches and why?
Oof, it’s hard to choose a favorite. Currently I like Rumpelstiltskin a lot, but I’ve always been a fan of Bearskin, too. I like tales with clever people! From Wolves and Witches, I’m most proud of “Diamond and Toad,” I would really love to see it performed! And Amanda’s “The Instructions” is just so simple and succinct and then that last line hits you with a snap. Excellent.
Your two writing styles complement each other seamlessly. Do you think your sister has influenced your style over the years? In what ways do you think you are different?
We grew up on the same books, movies, music, stories, so we’re bound to have a lot of the same influences floating around. And since we’ve been bouncing ideas off of each other for years, we’ve had a long time to learn how the other works! We definitely have some differences, though. For one, Amanda is better than I am! I’m also less methodical and thoughtful about things; I’m definitely more of a “shoot from the hip” writer.
What is the biggest challenge in reworking fairy tales?
Everyone knows the ending! And everyone has their favorite version. You’re going up against not only what the reader expects from the tale, but also what you yourself have internalized. Could I give Cinderella shoes that weren’t made of glass? Maybe, but it would feel really weird.
In “Bones in the Branches” and “A Letter Concerning Shoes,” you both chose to rework the tale of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” from new perspectives. What made you want to write from the cobbler’s point of view? I was particularly intrigued by the choice of the cobbler as he’s a character who isn’t “on stage” in most versions of this tale. What sparked your interest in making him the lovelorn character he became?
There are two characters that are sort of invisible major players in the tale of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”—the witch and the cobbler. They both play really important roles in the story, but you hear almost no
thing about them. Out of the two the witch at least gets a speaking role sometimes in her dealings with the soldier, but no one ever talks about where all those shoes came from. SOMEONE is making them, right? I started wondering what that person thought about the whole weird thing going on up at the castle and realized pretty quickly that they had to have some sort of personal interest. I’m a sucker for unrequited love, so that seemed an obvious direction to take things.
What other types of writing can we expect from you in the future? Will you collaborate with your sister again?
My short stories have somehow turned into novellas lately, so I’ve got a few longer-form projects in the works. I’ve got another collaborative work, a series of fantasy novels, which is shaping up nicely as well. I’d love to work with Amanda again on a project, although currently the only thing we’re working on is our informal tag-team comedy show that happens when we chat with each other on Twitter.
Whom did you write “For Taylor, On the Occasion of Her Fourteenth Birthday with Love” for? Who is Taylor and why did you want to give her this advice?
Taylor was a young girl in the church youth group I helped lead several years ago. For her fourteenth birthday, her mom reached out to several women who were involved in Taylor’s life and asked us to write letters about growing up, being a woman, anything like that. Taylor and I shared a love of reading and fairytales in particular, so I felt the best way to share my advice for her was something full of literary references. A lot of the advice in the poem is stuff I wish someone had told me when I was her age!
In “The Long Con,” what did you hope to reveal about Rumpelstiltskin by offering a new perspective of the original fairy tale?
Rumpelstiltskin is a smooth dude. He’s clearly run this sort of scam before, so it always bothered me that he so easily gives up his name. He knows the princess has her men scouring the countryside, so why in the world would he just shout out his name in the woods one night when someone was bound to hear him? The story was my way of trying to reconcile my image of Rumpelstiltskin—the accomplished conman—with that out-of-character move.
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