by Tia Nevitt
The Sevenfold Spell
By Tia Nevitt
Have you ever wondered what happens to the other people in the fairy tale?
Things look grim for Talia and her mother. By royal proclamation, the constables and those annoying “good” fairies have taken away their livelihood by confiscating their spinning wheel. Something to do with a curse on the princess, they said.
Not every young lady has a fairy godmother rushing to her rescue.
Without the promise of an income from spinning, Talia’s prospects for marriage disappear, and she and her mother face destitution. Past caring about breaking an arbitrary and cruel law, rebellious Talia determines to build a new spinning wheel, the only one in the nation—which plays right into the evil fairy’s diabolical plan. Talia discovers that finding a happy ending requires sacrifice. But is it a sacrifice she’s willing to make?
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Dedication
For Chuck, who never stopped believing that I could do this.
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank Carole McDonnell and Cassy Gray, both who read and critiqued several early drafts of this story.
I am especially grateful to Janet Lorimer, who in addition to her critique encouraged me to expand this story to novella length and market it as an e-book. Additional special thanks go to Sandra McDonald, for her impromptu coffee shop writing lessons, especially the lessons on “everything must come in threes,” without which there would have been no Andrew, and “bring everything full circle,” which inspired the ending.
Thanks to Alissa Davis, my first fiction editor, for her enthusiasm for this story and for helping make it better. And many apologies to Angela James, whom I mistook for a pesky insurance agent when she first called to acquire this story.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, for being so accepting of my geeky dreams, Kristy Baxter, for being an awesome critique partner, and Lisa Nevin, for being the first person to call herself my fan.
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One: The Curse
Chapter Two: Liaisons
Chapter Three: Arguments
Chapter Four: Lean Times
Chapter Five: Rose
Chapter Six: Andrew
Chapter Seven: Year of the Curse
Chapter Eight: Sleeping Ugly
Chapter Nine: Purchasing Chastity
About the Author
Chapter One
The Curse
The booted feet stopped before me as I sat on the ground, hugging my knees. A well-worn, black military boot kicked forward, thumping against my shins. It smarted, but it could have hurt far worse. I looked up at the harried constable. He frowned down at us—a troubled frown, but not an angry one. He was portly and balding, and was a common sight in our part of town. This wasn’t an evil man, but a good man who had been sent out to do an evil task.
“Get up,” he said, his voice so dispirited I almost felt sorry for him.
“Don’t move,” Mama said. It had been her idea that we wedge ourselves hip to hip in the narrow doorway of our shop.
He sighed. “Come now, I don’t like this a bit more than you do.”
“You’ll have to move us,” Mama said.
The constable looked over his shoulder. The fairy hovered there. She was tiny—no larger than my hand—with shimmery pale green leggings and tunic. Her beauty made it difficult to look away.
“Can you move them?” he asked her.
“I am not here to do your job, Constable,” the fairy said, “only to see that you do it honestly.”
The constable’s sigh was exasperated now. He gestured to his men. “Move them.”
Mama and I were both slight. Moving us took no great effort. Suddenly, as I sprawled in the dirt of the street, our defiant gesture seemed pathetic. I could feel the heavy gaze of our neighbors, and like any young maid, I was mortified.
Mama screamed and raised a holy fuss. She went charging back into our shop after the constable’s men. I jumped up and ran in to make sure they didn’t harm her, but I need not have feared. They ignored her as if she were a fly. She hauled on their arms and flailed on their backs as they picked up the spinning wheel and carried it out, and her efforts made little difference.
“My daughter,” she said at one point, grabbing me. “Look at her. Do you think her face will ever get her a husband? That spinning wheel is her future.”
The humiliation of it sent what I knew to be an uncomely flush to my face.
“You will be well-paid,” the constable said, “as soon as it’s destroyed.”
“What about Willard?” I asked my mother, hoping to salvage my injured pride. Willard wasn’t much to look at, but there was no question he was mine.
“Willard!” She snorted in disgust. “I’ll believe he’s willing to marry you when I see you march down the aisle.”
They brought out the spinning wheel and flung it into the back of the wagon. Mama and I both winced as it crashed atop the heap of spinning wheel parts. I had no love for the contraption but had spent many hours dusting the spokes, polishing the surfaces and greasing the axle. The constable’s men, however, had no regard for its fragile structure, its delicate beauty. They had no care that our lives depended upon the simple wooden structure.
The fairy darted out of our shop and hovered near us. She aimed her wand at our spinning wheel and a burst of colors flew out. The colors hit the wheel and buzzed around it like angry bees. When they dissipated, the spinning wheel collapsed into all its various parts, no longer distinguishable from the wreckage surrounding it. I blinked away tears I’d never expected to shed and thought of my fellow spinsters scattered all over the city, mourning, as we did, the loss of our livelihood.
My mother raised her arm to swat the fairy. I grabbed her and hissed. “Remember Widow Harla!” Widow Harla had attacked the fairy with her broom, and she had received the fairy’s vengeful spell. She was still unable to speak.
I felt the tension in Mama’s arm relax. The fairy turned, glared at us and buzzed out of our reach.
The constable offered my mother a chinking pouch. Mama ignored it as she held herself erect. I could tell she was determined to show no weakness. With a glance at the fairy, he tossed it at our feet. I shifted so I stood on the pouch strings. The guards climbed onto the back of the wagon while the constable and the official got in on either side of the driver. They rumbled off down the street, undoubtedly headed toward another spinster who, like us, would dread their arrival.
A few of our neighbors looked at us in pity, but also with a bit of trepidation. They knew that if we were to fall on hard times, they would be obliged to show us Christian charity.
It all made no sense to me. I knew there was a curse involved, but it seemed pointless to attempt to get around it by banning spinning wheels. Fairies were not so stupid as to make their spells so easily circumvented. Why bring misery to families such as ours by taking away our only means of income?
I bent down and picked up the pouch. “What will we do now?” I asked.
Mama took the pouch and hefted it. “We’ll buy a loom. If we cannot spin, we will weave.”
I hid my misgivings. I had no idea how to weave. Neither did she.
I didn’t get any impression that she was as frightened as I was until late that night, when I passed by her room to make use of the privy. I heard a low moaning, so I stopped and listened at the door. It took long moments for me to realize she wasn’t moaning—she was crying. And while she cried, she repeated over and over, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”
***
Mama purchased a fine loom. We were still struggling to learn how to weave a month later, when Widow Harla—her voice now restored—started visiting us.
Mama and Widow Harla had been bitter enemies while they both had their spinning wheels. The street where we lived—a dead-end nook called Tallow’s End—was not really large enough to support the output of two spinsters. Now that they had a shared misfortune, they became bosom friends. Since the spell was heavy on their minds, they spoke of it often, and of the curse.
“I heard that one part of the spell could not be cast,” Mama said, “because the seventh fairy had to weaken the evil fairy’s curse with the sleeping spell.”
“Yes, some people say she will be flawed because of it.” Widow Harla’s eyes were aglow with the possibility. “They say the magic doesn’t work correctly unless all seven parts are cast as planned.”
“I wonder what her flaw will be,” Mama said. “Maybe she’ll have warts.”
As if reminded of my own wart problem, Widow Harla looked over at me.
“It’s too bad Talia is so plain,” she said, as if I were not in the same room with them. “But that would be nothing if she had charm.”
“It’s true,” Mama said with a sigh. “Men will forgive a lack of beauty if there is charm, for charm will always outlast beauty.”
It was a familiar refrain but I still had hope, even if they did not. For every plain, dull girl, there is a plain, dull boy, and mine was Willard, the son of a farmer who lived just outside of town. He attended church in our parish and sold grain, fruits and vegetables at the local market. That’s how we met.
I was thirteen, and my mother had just given me the task of shopping for food. At the same time, she put me in charge of my own dowry.
“Any money you save can go to your dowry,” she said, providing me incentive to learn to bargain. One day, I went to Willard’s cart to buy some apples. As I touched one, another fell off the cart and bounced at my feet. We both reached for it at the same time.
Bonk! His head felt hard enough to dent my skull. We leaped apart, each grabbing our foreheads.
“Ow,” he said. “You have a hard head for a girl.”
I didn’t know how to respond. We both leaned against the cart for a moment, until the pain and dizziness passed.
“Here,” he said, “the least I can do after hurting you is give you some apples.”
“But—”
“You can pay for everything else,” he said. “Is six enough?”
It was two more than I’d intended to get, so I just nodded.
After that first meeting, he gave me a discount, so with an eye for increasing my dowry, I shopped at his cart exclusively. We didn’t exactly become friends, but I felt comfortable around him—he accepted me for who I was, despite my ugliness. He was homely, as well, with a long face, bright red hair and dark freckles. Sometimes when I was avoiding Mama, I would linger around his cart, listening to him talk about life on the farm.
On one such day, shortly before I turned eighteen, he interrupted his own description of the birth of a calf to say, “We should get married, you know.”
I gawked at him. “Why?”
He shrugged, and then blushed to the tips of his ears. “We get on well. You don’t seem like a henpecker, and I’m not likely to be an adulterer.”
I understood what he was trying to say. I was plain and he was homely. Neither of us was likely to find anyone else. As I considered his suggestion, I tried to imagine kissing him. It seemed like such a strange idea. Then I tried to imagine doing some of those other things that I had heard the young married women talk about, and failed.
But still, he wanted me, even if it was only in an “I’ll never find anyone else” sort of way. And I knew how he felt. The savings for my dowry had, in recent years, transformed into saving for my future. Besides, as he pointed out, we got on well together. Many of the couples in and around Tallow’s End didn’t even have that much.
“I guess it’s a good idea,” I said.
He looked satisfied. And even—much to my surprise—happy.
We each went home to our respective parents and proposed the match to them. Willard’s father was convinced that he could do better than me, and Mama said there was no point in giving her consent without Old Man Farmer’s approval. Still, we were reasonably sure they would, in time, agree.
With this unexpected new hope, I dared to dream of a future that wasn’t filled with endless spinning and the hoarding of coins. I imagined a brood of fat children, my mother happy at last among them, and a dependable income. I watched new mothers suckling their babes, and wondered what it felt like. I could almost envision my own little girl. She would have Willard’s red hair and my green eyes, and would be much more beautiful than either one of us. The only thing I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about was life as Willard’s wife. Perhaps I was still getting used to the idea.
However, these happy daydreams had taken place before the ban when I still had savings for my dowry. After the ban, Willard’s father started dithering. The dowry had partially financed the loom purchase, and the rest was dwindling away, spent on food and supplies and the other necessities of life while we taught ourselves weaving. In the meantime, I saw less and less of Willard, except on market day.
When he finally came to visit one day, I knew from his expression that something was wrong. Mama must have known, as well, for she went down into the cellar on some pretext. Leaving me alone with Willard had never been cause for concern.
He sat on the far side of the sofa from me. There was only room for two people, but a third person could have squeezed between us without much discomfort. We waited there in silence and I wondered why he’d come.
At last he heaved a sigh and said, “My father is sending me to join the Church.”
I stared at him, unable to comprehend his words. “The Church?”
“Yes, a monastery.”
“But why?”
“Second sons traditionally join the Church if they cannot find a wife, and since I am almost twenty, I must go.”
This was a shock, if not to my heart, at least to my plans of escaping Mama one day. I was, at this time, eighteen years old. Many of the girls I had grown up with were married. The rest of us were in more danger of becoming spinsters with every passing year. “But you have found a wife,” I said. “What of our marriage?”
“Father won’t permit it. Once he might have, but he can’t provide anything for our household, since he must provide for my sisters. Without your dowry we would have nothing to start with. Your mother cannot spin, and we would have to support her, as well.”
Something wild took hold of me, a romantic fancy, perhaps. Or, more likely, desperation. “Let’s run away together,” I said. “Let’s go to a foreign land, where I can spin and you can till.”
He gaped at me as if I had lost all reason. “Withou
t money, how would we purchase a spinning wheel? How would I purchase land to till? I wouldn’t even own so much as a goat!”
I could think of a hundred ways. He could take a job as a farm laborer and I could assist anyone in the clothing industry, from spinsters to seamstresses.
“Besides,” he added. “I couldn’t dishonor my father like that. I must…do my duty.” He looked at me with a doleful expression. “And without you, what would become of your mother?”
He was right. Even though my mother would have hated to admit it, she was now depending upon me—or at least my dowry—to survive. I sighed and acceded what I wanted to what must be. “When are you leaving?” I asked.
“When I turn twenty. In three weeks.”
We fell silent. We were both inclined to be silent, and when we did speak, I let him do most the talking. He spoke of cattle and crops, and of tinkering on his favorite wagon, and I mostly just listened with honest interest. I was a city girl and it was as if he described a different world, even if it was only just a few miles down the road.
Now it seemed that we had nothing to say at all.
I looked at him. He looked at the floor. My disappointment was keener than I would have expected. He was plain, certainly, but he had other things in his favor. At the top of the list was his interest in me. It couldn’t have only been because of the dowry; other girls had dowries, after all. He must have found something in me to admire. He certainly didn’t look any happier than I.
I again tried to imagine kissing him, and doing other things with him. It was difficult. He had never even attempted to hold my hand. We had only danced together once, on the night of the princess’s christening, and even then, my mother had forced us to do it.
What I did next surprised even me.
“Would you like to kiss me?” I asked.
“What?” Willard’s voice squeaked with shock.