The Fairest of Them All

by Carolyn Turgeon

  “Why?” I looked up at her.

  “To honor him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He was a powerful man. Though you didn’t mean to, you took his life, and now you must honor him, take his strength into you. We both must.”

  I looked down, feeling suddenly faint. I stuffed the flower into my mouth. Its tang extended out like fingers, making me shiver with pleasure. I felt something drip from my lips, and without thinking wiped my chin with the back of my hand.

  A strange, woozy feeling went through me, as I stood in the liquid sunlight and saw Mathena cupping the flower in her palms and drinking it in. For a moment I was sure we were underwater, that the birds passing overhead were fish, the trees’ spears reaching for the surface.

  I looked down, and my hands were stained red.

  We walked to the river, and bent down to wash our hands and arms in it, splash the water on our faces. Every water droplet like a diamond, suspended in the air and on our skin.

  I don’t know if it was because of the flower we ate or not, but I felt better that spring. I was filled with the pleasure of moving my fists into the earth, burying seeds within it, knowing that those seeds would grow into the lush fruits and herbs the summer would bring. It was arduous work, especially with my expanding belly, but I reveled in the exhaustion that blotted out everything else. We planted the seeds we’d gathered the autumn before, and we saved scraps of food to turn back into the earth. Mathena bent over the garden, thinning the vegetables, while I did less taxing work in the kitchen, cooking our meals and brewing teas for the garden with the skins of onions, cucumbers, and quince, the ends of carrots and cabbage and wild celery, feathers and bones that I’d burnt down to ash. The earth was thirsty, starving it seemed. Every afternoon I’d tromp through the garden, pour in the compost tea, and add in the droppings of our horse, piles of leaves, anything we could find, while overhead the sun beat down and the world came to life all around us.

  Our garden grew more bountifully than it ever had. We ate great piles of spinach topped with vinegar, oil, and salt, and I boiled delicious stews of potherbs and meat while bread baked in the oven. It was far too much bounty for two women, even with a child growing inside me, and so we gave out food by the basketful to the ladies who came to see us, often in the evening hours, when their own work was done.

  One morning I woke and found spots of blood on my nightgown and the sheets under me. I dressed and carried the linens to the river, let the blood wash out in the clear water.

  Over the course of the morning, I realized that my baby seemed unusually still. Mathena was off hunting with Brune, and so I sent up a quick prayer to Artemis and kept at my tasks. At midafternoon I was standing over the fire, inhaling the scent of boiling beets and porrettes, when the cramping came, so strongly that the room began to spin around me. I dropped the spoon I was using, which clattered on the hard floor.

  Something was horribly wrong.

  I crumpled to the floor, doubling over and holding my belly.

  “Mathena!” I cried.

  As the cramping began to subside, I reached under my skirts, to the center of my body. When I pulled my hand away, it was covered in blood.

  I forced myself up, and reached for a cloth to wad up and press between my legs.

  Another wave of pain moved through me and I bent over again, grasping the back of the couch. Sweat poured down my face as I slumped back to the floor, twisted to my side, and pressed my face into the cool dirt.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there, moaning and crying as the pain assaulted me and retreated, and then came back again.

  I could feel him leaving me, this child I loved too much already, and it might as well have been my heart slipping from my chest. My body was coming apart, my insides wrenching themselves. I was like bread dipped in water, unloosening. It was so real to me that I am sure, even now, that there was a whole child there, screaming and flailing and looking up at me, something deeply wrong with it, it was all wrong, though I know it was my own being screaming like that as the makings of my child fell from me and left me scraped out and bare.

  When Mathena found me, the blood and tissue had seeped through my gown, staining it bright red.

  I had dreamt him, I knew his face, his bright eyes.

  I was on the floor, balled up, my legs knotted together around that ruined dress drenched in blood. Too exhausted to speak.

  She lifted me into her arms, carried me outside, into the fresh air, onto the grass.

  I was sobbing, talking gibberish, and Mathena just sang and soothed me and cleaned me the best she could, and finally, when I had exhausted myself, she pulled the dress from my body, and took it away.

  “Shhhh,” she said, moving her hand along my forehead, smoothing back my hair.

  She washed me gently as if I myself were a child—and I suppose I was—cleaning me and putting me back together, the way she’d always done, as far back as I could remember.

  Later, much later, she would tell me that it was a boy, as I’d known it would be. “It is better that he slipped away,” she would say then, “rather than live the life it would have lived. He was not . . . shaped the way children should be shaped.”

  The day my son died, Mathena took my soiled dress, along with all that was wrapped inside it, and placed it on the fire. As it burned, she whispered spells, prayers, and sprinkled the fire with potions and oils. I was not conscious enough to know what was happening, but I could feel it, smell the scent of the burning, the anguish of what was left of my son disappearing from this earth.

  She buried his ashes at the edge of the garden.

  For several days, I slipped in and out of a dream state, and in my dreams my son came to life. I could hold him and smell his milky scent, I could walk up the steps of the palace and present the child to the king. And in my dreams, the court recognized him and took him to soft beds, to places where he’d never be cold, where he’d grow strong and ferocious and never die. Imagine! Being able to move through time as if it were water, and change the course of things, prevent the coming of grief. I dreamed of Josef standing over him, saying, “My son.”

  “My son.”

  Sometimes I’d dream that I was holding him in my arms, his soft soft skin folding into mine, the smell of him infusing everything, entering me, my whole body, every cell of it filled with love and relief and a crazy new happiness, and then I would wake up, the whole world going flat when I remembered he was dead.

  And then one by one I’d see the stone walls of our cottage, the fire dying in the hearth, Mathena curled up next to me for warmth, my hair blanketing us both.

  I’m surprised it didn’t choke us to death.

  When I finally rose from the bed and rejoined the waking world, I begged Mathena to give me that ancient potion that would make me forget: forget my lost child, forget the prince who was now king, forget his wife the queen and the child who would be born when my own child had died. I longed to go back to the time when all I knew was the woods around us.

  “You gave it to me once,” I said. “The forgetting potion. Please do it again. Let me start over the way I did before.”

  But she refused. “Better things await you,” she said, as we opened the shutters and stared out at the melting world. Because finally, too late, the world began to warm. “You need only to be patient.”

  I stared at her blankly. The word had no meaning to me when my anguish swallowed me whole, when all I could see was grief unfurling in front of me.

  I began to think that if she wouldn’t perform the spell, I could find it and do it myself. I started poring over the book she had given me. It was slow going. I knew how to read, of course, Mathena had taught me that, but I had not done very much book learning before then. Now I welcomed the relief the words offered me, the opportunity they gave me to disappear, at least a little, the promise they gave me of forgetting everything altogether.

  I came upon spells I had not encountered before in our pra
ctice. Spells to change the color of one’s eyes, to call forth a storm, to enter someone’s dreams, to transform a stone into gold, a leaf into a feather, a rose into a bird. There were endless spells, and the more they meddled with the substance of a thing, or sought to change a human fate or heart, the more difficult they were to decipher. Warnings abounded, scribbled throughout. Do not cast this spell during the full moon, or while the crops are being harvested. Do not cast this spell with a black heart. I came, too, upon new spells for things I had seen plenty of times before: spells to seduce, to call a love to you, to end a pregnancy or help create one.

  It was something I saw in one of those spells that first made me suspicious of Mathena, and the teas she had fed me while I was pregnant. When women came to see us desperate to end their pregnancy, we’d always given them pennyroyal and mugwort, with their distinctive, sharp scents. In the book, I saw herbs like tansy, parsley, cotton root bark, and had a visceral memory, the spice of parsley on my tongue. She would have been very careful, wouldn’t she? Feeding me herbs I did not know, in small amounts. Would she have done that to me? I knew I had had parsley, and the more I read about tansy and cotton root bark, the more I suspected that these were the herbs I’d been given. I stole into the root cellar and sifted carefully through the baskets of dried herbs we kept there. But I did not find what I was looking for.

  When I confronted her, she denied it.

  “Why would I want to harm you, Rapunzel?” she asked, looking at me. “When I have given up my whole life for you?”

  I remained silent after that.

  As spring shifted to summer, our garden became more and more lush, filled with vegetables and fruits so large and bright they were almost obscene. We kept the garden watered and fed and were able to start harvesting, filling baskets with bright vegetables and storing them for colder months.

  And every day I visited my baby’s grave. Soon enough, a twisting, green-leafed plant grew from that spot, with beautiful crimson flowers bursting from it, like hearts. I stroked its leaves and petals, whispered into its roots, watered it with my tears.

  In the fine weather, women started appearing at the house regularly again. We were constantly working to tend to them as well as the garden, which everyone who came to us whispered had to be the work of pure magic. No one could imagine vegetables like that growing from the earth on their own.

  I threw myself into my work. What else was there for me to do? I knew now the grief of those women, with their unrequited loves, their fatherless children, their falls in fortune, their barren gardens and fields.

  It occurred to me one day to take down a lock of my hair and brush it along the arm of a woman sitting in front of us, her sick child on her lap. I moved my hair from her to her child, and it happened just as it had happened with the prince and the man in the forest: I could feel them. The woman, who until that moment had been like any other woman from one of the kingdom’s villages, now had a life and soul to her as vivid as Mathena’s or my own. I could see her memories, the years she’d spent caring for her sick mother, her sick children, her husband who’d gone into the king’s army and never come home. I could feel their hot, wet foreheads under her palms, under my palms. I could feel the illness that even now was wending its way through her boy’s body, draining him of the little strength he had left.

  Without even thinking I told her what to do. “Wash him with vinegar and rosewater,” I said, momentarily possessed. “And burn rosemary as an incense around his bed. Also, you must roast eggshells and grind them into a powder. Add the powder and chopped rosehips into a pot of ale, warm the mixture, and let the child drink it.”

  “I will get you the rosewater, incense, and flowers,” Mathena said, her face registering her deep shock, and she quickly left the room.

  “Could you get some angelica as well?” I called out after her. I turned back to the woman. “You will weave the leaves into necklaces, for protection. Let everyone in your household wear one.”

  She nodded. The boy moaned and shifted in her arms.

  “You will be well again,” I said softly, taking her hand, as Mathena had so often taken mine.

  When the woman and child left, I was exhausted. Her sadness had latched onto my own.

  Mathena was uncharacteristically quiet as we ate our stew and prepared for bed that night.

  “Your hair is a great gift,” she said, finally. “I didn’t realize how great. You can be more powerful than me, or any of my teachers.”

  “You believe that?” I asked, taken aback.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you always know what it could do?”

  “I suspected,” she said. “When you were . . . a child, I saw the way feelings came to you, through your hair. You were so sensitive. I thought it was safer for you to keep it up.”

  “Have you hidden yourself from it?” I asked. “I cannot feel anything when you touch me, the way I can with others.”

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “I thought Josef was special,” I said. “I thought it was only him I could feel that way. But I suppose it is most everyone, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I did not warn you. You might have seen him differently.”

  I nodded, and remained quiet.

  Over the next day, and all the days to follow, I focused on this gift that I’d been given, and took solace in it. If I couldn’t have Josef or my baby or any other happiness in the world, then through my gift and through my own suffering, I could help others. If I couldn’t redeem myself by giving my son a beautiful life, loving him more than any child had ever been loved before, I could do this.

  Between the garden and the ladies who came to see us, and the work that was so much more exhausting for me now, we were so busy that I almost managed to forget the king and queen. I even began to imagine that I would be all right living my whole life in the forest, taking over for Mathena one day, spending all my days helping those who needed help, healing, relief.

  And then came more news from the palace. “Isn’t it wonderful?” a peasant woman asked. She had come to us because her family’s crop was failing and her children were starving. I was packing a basket of vegetables and meat for her to take home when her voice shifted, the way everyone’s did when there was news like this to share. “About the new princess?”

  “The new what?” I stopped, my hand clasped around a cucumber.

  “The queen has had a child. A perfect pale baby with a tuft of black hair. The very image of her mother.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. My knees nearly buckled under me. “Yes.”

  In all my own grief, I’d forgotten about this other child.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, my heart twisting in my chest.

  “They call the child Snow White.”

  We were told that the infant’s christening was a great event. Queen Teresa’s father and mother—the king and queen of the East—came with their entire court to celebrate the result of the union of kingdoms, and there were celebrations for days.

  As woman after woman told us about the festivities, I listened without saying a word.

  They told us how beautiful the infant was, with jet-black hair, skin as white as snow, lips as red as cherries in the height of summer.

  Sometimes, in those moments, I was sure it was my own child in the palace, that there was some mistake.

  And as soon as I could, I’d hurry up the tower stairs and stand looking out over the trees to the distant palace, imagining my son there in a golden crib, surrounded by adoring courtiers, swathed in expensive silks. They were dangerous thoughts but when they came, less and less often through the next years, I found them comforting. Imagining that somewhere, he lived still.

  And so the years passed. Our garden flourished and died and then flourished again. Women came to see us complaining of broken hearts and unfaithful husbands and lovers, and later their daughters came to us with the same troubles. We heard news, eventually, that the queen mother died,
and reports that the princess Snow White was growing into an uncommonly intelligent child. Crimson flowers bloomed on my child’s grave every spring, vanished again every autumn. The seasons passed and the world did not stop the way, sometimes, I was sure my own heart had.

  The king never came to see me, though I often thought of him, and sometimes tried to call him to me the way I had once. By all accounts, my beauty only grew greater with each passing day, but it did me little good. I would avoid the tower for weeks on end and then find myself gripped by passion, nostalgia, running up those stone stairs to the room where our child had been made. There, sometimes, in the mirror, I found him. I’d look at my own reflection and see the prince—now king—sitting behind me on the bed, holding our child on his lap.

  “You’re really here,” I’d say, the way I had before. “Aren’t you?”

  But he never answered, though every year he grew more distinguished, and every year my child grew bigger, with bright blond hair like his mother’s. I’d see them in flashes, behind my face in the glass, but whenever I’d turn to them, my heart swelling, my eyes burning with tears and hope, the vision would vanish and the real world, with its constant needs and ever-present hunger—of the earth, the body, and the heart—asserted itself once again.

  Seven winters had come and buried us in snow when one afternoon an unusual woman came to see us.

  It was nearly dark outside, despite the time of day. Mathena and I were indoors by a massive growling fire, mixing batches of herbs into poultices. It was easy, soothing work that allowed each of us to only be half there—until a knock on the door yanked us into the present.

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  Outside, a figure stood hunched over, the wind whipping around her, furs pulled tightly against her body. Behind her, the trees swayed, shaking snow into the air.

  “Come in,” I said, stepping back to give her room.