The miller complained all the same when he bought her a pair of spectacles that she might keep up her work.
“Can’t marry you off like this,” he lamented. “What man’ll have you looking like a hunchbacked crone?”
She said nothing. Only dipped her brush into blue paint and swirled it across the sky on her flaxen canvas.
And so the years passed and might have passed forever, until the trader came. He had heard of her work in a distant port, he said, and come seeking her art. He spoke their tongue strangely, and his clothes were quite fine, but she only nodded and asked what he would buy.
When he had made his selections from the rainbow piles of scarves, haggled with her father, and finally disappeared into the dust raised by his wagon wheels, she thought no more of it. That is, until the leaves turned from green to flame and gold and overripe apples fell from laden branches. That was when the king’s summons came.
“How is it…,” demanded the king, “…that I have an artist of such skill in my land, but I must buy her goods from a foreigner’s cart?”
Elisse watched her father stutter and stammer and grovel before the throne, tongue-tied with fear. Then she stood straight, pushed her spectacles up, and met the king’s cold, green gaze.
“I thought my humble work too poor for Your Majesty’s taste,” she said. “The error is mine. Let me repay the royal household with what craft I can muster.”
The king looked at her for a long moment, and she saw that behind the lines of duty his face was yet young, his body still hard with muscle. His eyes, green as the forest, were bright as they appraised her faded dress, the plain scarf bundled around her straw-basket of hair.
“This is nonsense,” he replied at last. “Your work is the finest I have ever seen.”
“Yes, yes!” cried the miller. “The finest indeed. She is a true genius, Your Majesty. The best in the land. There is nothing of skill she cannot do.”
She watched the king’s jaw clench as he turned.
“Yes?” he said, and she prayed her father might hold his tongue, but the miller rattled on, as if once his words had begun to fall he could not stop them.
“And tell me,” interrupted the king. “Can she, this genius daughter of yours, better my own alchemists? Can her magical spindle transmute my straw into gold?”
“Aye. Even so,” crowed the miller.
In horror she stared at her father, in mute appeal she shook her head, but the king had already beckoned forward the guards.
“Well then. We shall see what she can do, this weaver of dreams,” he said softly. He turned to her once more as the guards seized her arms, and his words echoed in her head like thunder before rain.
“If you succeed, clever girl, I shall marry you and make you my queen. Your father shall want for nothing so long as he lives. Fail, and both of you shall die.”
Tears served nothing. She would not shed them. For a long time she watched the light cross the dungeon floor. Then she slept a while. If she would never see the waterwheel, the river, and the silent depths of the summer forest, she might at least dream them one last time.
Thus she saw him, for the first time, in the twilight land between slumber and consciousness. And he called her name.
“Wake, Elisse, and tell me why you seek my woods in such distress.”
She sat up and wiped her eyes before settling her spectacles on her nose. In the twilight gloom of the straw-packed dungeon, he knelt beside her, but she couldn’t see his face.
“Your woods? But I do not know you.”
“Yet often I have seen you. Sitting beside the waterwheel alone or picking flowers to braid your hair.”
She raised a hand to touch him and shivered at his cool skin, smooth like stone or the glossy underside of a leaf.
“Why are you here now when I wait upon my death?”
“Death?” he said, though his voice held no emotion, only curiosity at her plight.
“The king will kill me if I do not spin his straw into gold.”
At that he laughed, and she looked in terror at the iron-barred door, but no guard came to rattle it. He lifted a handful of the straw and blew the pieces from his palm.
“Is gold all he desires? Gold is a simple thing. Ugly and bright and the cause of many sorrows. But if it is what he craves, he may have it.”
Elisse scarce dared to breathe. It must be a dream, a desperate fantasy to lull her mind’s fear, yet she felt the heat of his body and smelled the scent of his skin, warm as summer-baked earth, light as a springtime morn.
“It will save my life,” she said at last, and his eyes shone in the half-light like a cat’s as he turned to her.
“But I require something in turn, Elisse.”
“Anything,” she said.
A moment later she thought it had been a very foolish thing to say. Such a promise to one of his ilk she might well regret, but there was only his price or else the executioner’s rope.
“What can I give you?” she asked, between lips as dry as straw as he pulled her to her feet. The rapid thud of her heart told her it had already guessed the answer, even if she herself remained ignorant.
“This,” he replied, and he touched her lower lip, then the hollow of her neck, and then her breast where his fingers lingered until her flesh responded to the weight and heat of his touch. She hadn’t known arousal before. If ever the thought came to her in an unguarded moment, if a breeze washed over her skin while she bathed, she transmuted the craving into pale colors in her mind. Held them away until she could pour them onto cloth or stitch them in fine, dyed thread.
He gave her no such escape. His hand on her breast, he bent and covered her lips with his. She tried to breathe and found only his warm breath and his tongue, and when she thought her legs might fail her from the shock and the lack of air, his hand gripped hard between her thighs, and she broke the kiss with a cry. Now indeed she must fall, but his hand and his arm gave her no room to sink into a maidenly faint.
His fingers dug into her flesh through her clothes, holding her in place, and impossibly, his grip tightened. He massaged her knowingly, roughly, and she felt her skirts grow wet against her flesh, her stomach quiver.
“These you will not need,” he said, releasing her abruptly so that she stumbled and gasped. He lifted the spectacles from her face, and behind him the walls and the straw blurred into a palette of blues and greys. But he filled her vision, his face just above hers. So close that with the tiniest stretch her mouth could meet his again.
But before she could fully make sense of the thought, he turned her about and guided her hands to the cold, uneven surface of the wall. He closed the metal of the shackles hanging there around her wrists with no sign of lock or key. Now her heart raced, and in vain she tried to turn. But he stood behind her, one hand warm on the small of her back, and his hair tickled her cheek as he leaned his head beside hers.
“Only bid me leave you, and I shall go and touch you no more.”
She shook her head, refusing his words and her own fear.
“I have no choice,” she said.
But her body trembled at his breath on her neck, and she wondered, Had she the choice, would she say the words?
The old fabric of her clothes ripped easily, fell in tatters to the straw. Some remaining thought of the Elisse she knew wondered what would happen when he left and she waited for them to open her cell door.
She couldn’t think of it as he untied her scarf and ran his fingers across her scalp and through all the length of her thick, golden hair. It fell warm against her back, not like the cold of the stone before her bare torso, contrasting to the heat of his touch. She tightened her stomach when she felt his hands slide up over her ribs, and a tiny cry escaped her as his fingers closed on her nipples. The swirling sensation first kindled by his touch became hunger, became madness.
She hadn’t known her own flesh could hurt so, or so betray her as the blood beat quick and urgent in her groin, making her twist her hips
and thrash in his embrace. His fingers were steel or stone, their bite on her tender flesh unbearable. She flung her head back and he released her with a last vicious tweak, but before she might even breathe, might even realize the respite, he drew his palms lightly down, across her tingling flesh, and she moaned at the torment.
“Ah. What have you done to me?”
Without seeing it, she knew he smiled.
“Wakened you at last.”
He shackled her ankles next, wider apart than the spread of her hands, and she balanced precariously now on the tips of her toes, for otherwise she must fall against the unforgiving wall or strain her arms in their sockets. She sobbed as he ran his fingers along the back of her taut legs and followed his touch with his tongue: liquid silk and flame. Fists clenched, she waited, but he had pulled away, and though she turned her head this way and that, he might have melted into the shadows and left her, he was so silent.
But she knew he was there. She heard the whisper of straw, the step of a boot behind her, caught the glimpse of motion in the greyness.
“And now to lay you bare,” she heard him say, voice as deep and still as the flagstones under her toes and the ground beneath that. But how much more bare could she become?
Straw whispered across her bare buttocks and thighs, striking her skin gently. A hundred or more tiny fingers that scratched and pricked as he struck her again. Harder this time. He had twisted the straw into a tool, a switch to punish her. Or to please her. The distinction had become blurred, become confused, and with each stroke on her back, her buttocks, the tensed, sensitive muscles of her arms and calves, the confusion deepened.
The tingle turned to stinging, made her eyes water. She flinched as the blows came, but there was no way she might evade them. When he paused to run a finger across her skin, his touch burned like hot iron. Behind eyes closed against the agony, she imagined it branding her flesh with the spirals and knots and lines he traced.
His lips found the places she hurt most: the undersides of her arms, the curve of her buttocks just above her thighs, and she bucked and gasped, rattling the shackles. She screamed as the knotted end of the switch landed hard on the backs of her upraised feet. He trailed the strands up her legs, the stalks like hot needles against her inflamed skin, and she felt her throat constrict with pain. A tight, burning vise that choked her.
He brought the switch around her body, flicked it against her breasts, and she tried to press her body to the cold wall. But he caught a handful of her hair, dragged her back. The stalks caught at her bruised nipples, and she cursed him, railed at him, begged him to stop.
But she did not bid him leave her.
Instead, she looked up, staring into the darkness that hovered at the ceiling. The light was fading fast now. They had left her a candle and tinder box, but she had no way to light it. It didn’t matter, for she was herself burning, melting, floating away, incorporeal as a ghost. She was pain that shivered on the verge of oblivion.
Would death, she wondered, be any different than this?
Then she felt his fingers between her legs, stroking the center of the madness that consumed her. His kisses fell on her neck, and his other hand stroked her nipples, so gently now she felt the pain in her throat break, releasing the dam. The tears trickled hot down her cheeks and the most exquisite sensation flowed into her from his fingers. Despite the shackles, despite the pain, she arched against his hand, seeking more of the sweet, sweet throbbing. Welcomed pain filled her groin with heat and she cried out, trying to spread her legs wider for him though they were stretched already to their limit. His laugh echoed off the walls, triumphant as he moved between them and filled her. Hard as stone, hot as lusty summer.
She heard her voice, but it sounded nothing like she knew, so breathless and so rich with pleasure it couldn’t be hers at all. And yet…and yet, it was.
When they unbolted the door, they found her sitting on the floor with her arms about her knees and her head pillowed upon them.
She’d woken in the hour before dawn and found her clothes, whole and untouched, draped across the wheel, her spectacles atop them. Dressing had been a slow task, agonizing beyond measure, but as the sun rose, she’d finished knotting the scarf around her hair and sat to wait among the glittering skeins that glowed and shimmered across the murky dungeon. Her reward. For which she’d traded body and virtue and breath.
Or perhaps it was her price, and he had paid it gladly.
The buzzing, burbling crowd at the doorway parted for the king, and chin held high, she met his gaze before sinking to her curtsey, though the effort to stifle any cry of pain cost her dearly.
“Here is your gold,” she said. “Does it please you well?”
The king came to stand before her, and she felt his hand on her chin. A mortal man’s touch, flesh against flesh, and she struggled up to her feet again, blinking with surprise.
“I am pleased,” he said and his voice was low and full of wonder. “How you have done it, I cannot tell. And I do not demand the secret. Only know it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen.”
She took a step back, and for a heartbeat his fingers hesitated as if he would touch her still. Then his hand fell to his side.
But she cared nothing for it.
“You are most kind, Majesty,” she said, her voice tight with hidden disdain. “But shall I not now weave it to cloth of gold for you? That you may have tapestries the envy of all other princes?”
“Nay. You have humbled me, Elisse.” His voice deepened, and a pang shot through her heart as she remembered a voice too much like it saying her name. “You are magical and fair and wise, and all I can offer you is a kingdom when you could buy ten times that if you wished. Still I am bold enough to ask if you will have me.”
She wanted no kingdom. No gold. No power. What she desired, she could not put into words. But the light in the king’s eyes turned them green as newborn leaves as he knelt at her feet and reached for her hand. She put one hand over her stomach and felt the morning sun warm on her face.
“Yes, I will marry you and be your queen,” she said.
They loved their new queen well, even if she worried them a little. Her maids noticed the high, unsettled color in her cheeks and the way she never sat still for long. Often she went walking in the woods alone, sending away even the guards, who fidgeted and fretted and peered unhappily at the trees as if they might somehow be granted a vision of her whereabouts and thereby not fail in their duty. But she never came to any harm.
And never smiled. She laughed, but the laughter fell brittle on the ears of those around her. And often she stared out of windows, as if searching for something. But for what, or who, they could not tell.
In due time after the wedding, a child was born and the kingdom rejoiced over its prince. A bonny lad they said: hair as golden as his mother’s and eyes as green and sharp as his father’s. But his mother watched his cherubic face and waving fists silently.
She took him with her to visit her father’s old mill, crooning softly as she walked beside the waterwheel and sat near the river. She picked flowers and let them fall into the water, watched them float away while the babe chuckled and gurgled on her knee and reached chubby arms after the spinning blossoms. But at last she came home and sat many an hour in her private tower, staring out of the windows into the world as if she might discover some answer there hidden from her gold-rimmed spectacles. She grew thin again, as thin as when she first came to the castle, and some worried that she might think herself into nothing.
Not least among them was the king, but to him she spoke least of all.
On a summer morning when the sun seemed to stand still in the sky, she woke early, earlier than any in the castle, and took her paints and a bolt of fine linen to the topmost room in her tower. She shut her door and bolted it well. Then she rolled out her tools and knelt on the floor and swirled her brush through green and russet and ebony and silver.
She painted a forest of autumn with leave
s of silver. With her thinnest brush, she shaped mountains of black against a sky of emerald. From a river of pale blue a flock of white birds took startled flight. She painted until her wrist ached and trembled, and the fierce morning sun stuck her gown to her back with perspiration.
Exhausted at last, she fell asleep on the floor. And there between dream and waking, he came to her again.
“Wake, Elisse. And tell me why you have called me here.”
Through paint-smeared lenses and tired eyes she saw him, a silhouette with broad shoulders against the bright windowpanes, and her heart raced as it had not in an age. She sat up and vainly tried to see his face, but the sun was too bright and her spectacles too spotted with paint.
“The child is yours,” she said at last.
“I know it,” he said, quietly. “He is a beautiful boy.”
She slammed her fist against the wooden planks of the floor. “Is that all?”
“What would you have of me, Queen?”
“Stay.” She sobbed as she saw the lines of his body waver and blur, and she knew it was not just from her tears. “Stay. I beg you.”
But his voice echoed, drifting between the worlds.
“Say my name and I will stay. I will love you as your heart and your body desire, Elisse. But only if you call me by name.”
“But I don’t know your name!” she cried. “How shall I learn it?”
Sunlight flooded the room, and the window was empty.
Now she knew utter despair, for there was no lore in the world she dared try that would give his name to her. She was a scholar and a crafter, neither a sorcerer nor a witch.
Her maids fussed around her when she came down from the tower with slow steps. They clucked their tongues over the paint under her fingernails and the knots in her hair, and she let them wash her and dress her in a gown of turquoise blue. So flattering, they said. A present from His Majesty.
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