Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

Lavanya stood aside, a prisoner of war: sweet delight for her sister battled in her heart with the knowledge bitter as karela that again, she was not wanted.

  Deepika glanced from the princess to the prince, from the prince to the princess. She knew the prince’s gratitude for the obligation it was, just as she noted the sword in the princess’s hand and saw the strength it revealed. She nodded, certain.

  “I choose the princess,” Deepika said, weaving her arm through Falguni’s equally muscular one. Falguni smiled the secretive smile of a tigress about to spring and led Deepika to one side.

  Vibhas joined Lavanya under the archway. “I am glad she did not choose me,” he confided, “for she is not the one I desire.”

  Lavanya frowned, fearing to believe.

  “Nor do I believe my sister will be so easily claimed. She, too, enjoys the hunt,” Vibhas continued. “When my parents began amassing the lands of their neighbors, their most trusted advisor tried to dissuade them. But they cared only for their empire, forcing the most robust of their subjects into their army while the rest starved. And so the advisor, also a magician, cursed my sister in the hope that they would reconsider.”

  “But they did not,” Lavanya said, completing the tale.

  “No,” said the prince, his eyes dim with dismay. “Indeed, they were glad for another weapon in their armory.”

  His pain reminded Lavanya of her mother and the long months they had been separated. Her melancholy increased with the memory of the gardens. On a whim, she asked, “Do I not hold the most splendid rose?”

  “You do,” the prince agreed, the enchantment turning his gaze to glass. And it was true; she now clasped a blossom the color of her own strange skin.

  Lavanya caressed the slim stem. “Do I not need to return to my own mother?”

  “You do,” the prince said, dreamily repeating her thoughts. “Daughters belong with their mothers.” The chappals at Lavanya’s crimson feet blazed blue then, a brilliant, restless blue.

  “Do you find me ugly?” the rose woman wondered sadly, stroking Vibhas’s cheek with the petals. “All think my sister is beautiful, thus the one to love.”

  “She is beautiful, that is true,” Vibhas said, wrapping his hand around hers, the hand that held the bloom. The thorns of her arm did not prick him as he drew close, or if they did, he did not seem to mind. Perhaps they had shattered the spell, for his eyes were clear, his words his own. “But you see, she is not a rose.”

  Lavanya donned the chappals and linked hands with the others. Leading their chain, she sprinted toward the horizon, fleet of foot, faster even than the wind itself. They visited villages and cities and settlements to herald the end of the war and scatter the seeds of harmony. Then, weary of heart and of body, they hastened home to rest among the roses of Gulabi’s garden.

  The rani had dispatched with the unwelcome visitors, who had proven no match for her swordplay, and deposited them in the palace dungeon. Vibhas touched Gulabi’s feet in apology for the crimes of his parents. Tears rolling down her face, she touched his forehead in forgiveness.

  At Falguni’s command, the ragged remnants of the army dispersed, impatient to return to the lands they called home. At Vibhas’s command, each soldier carried a rose from Gulabi as a sign of goodwill.

  Deepika introduced Falguni as schooled in the sword, both curved and straight. “It was I who freed her.”

  “It was I who allowed myself to be freed,” Falguni stated, not one to relinquish her tigress’s proud bearing for even a moment. She addressed Gulabi. “The people of the dawn fortress will need a ruler, now that my parents are no longer fit to be such. With your blessing, I would return there in the company of your daughter.”

  Lavanya imagined Deepika a rani amid the pink-and-orange walls, hunting beside Falguni and crooning victory songs to the stars above. “With your blessing, Vibhas and I will remain here with you,” she said, moving closer to her mother.

  Gulabi clapped her hands together in approval and in joy. As one, they kicked off their shoes and danced in celebration of the weddings to come, of the freedom they had won, of the rose-loving rani’s reunion with her daring daughters.

  Seeing this, the courtiers and servants, all the inhabitants of the kingdom, for that matter, forgot their cares, forgot their fears of Lavanya, forgot everything but the chance for merrymaking. The royal musicians struck up a fine tune, and the royal chefs served up a fine feast. As it often does, food led to drink, drink led to song, and song led to laughter that sounded in the air until even the roses swayed blithely on their thorny stems.

  Some say a yaksha with a red-and-black turban wound about his head slipped out from behind a banyan tree that day, stealthy as a snake in the grass, to snatch up the chappals, and never were they seen again in that place.

  Shveta Thakrar is a writer of South Asian-flavored fantasy, social justice activist, and part-time nagini. She draws on her heritage, her experience growing up with two cultures, and her love of myth to spin stories about spider silk and shadows, magic and marauders, and courageous girls illuminated by dancing rainbow flames. Her short fiction and poetry appear in the Kaleidoscope anthology and Uncanny, Faerie, Strange Horizons, and Mythic Delirium magazines. When not hard at work writing, Shveta makes things out of glitter and paper and felt, devours books, daydreams, draws, bakes sweet treats, travels, and occasionally even practices her harp.

  When Theodora Goss writes a fairy tale, she usually grounds the highly fantastic with a least one form of reality. Her fictional, somewhat Eastern European country of Sylvania (which appears in another story she’s authored) seems both familiar and exotic. And, although there are no particular wonder tales that parallel or inform “Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon,” one feels as if there are.

  Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon

  Theodora Goss

  When the Queen learned that she could not have a child, she cried for three days. She cried in the clinic in Switzerland, on the shoulder of the doctor, an expert on women’s complaints, leaving tear stains on his white coat. She cried on the train through Austria, while the Alps slipped past the window of her compartment, their white peaks covered with snow. She cried when the children from the Primary School met her at the station, bringing her bouquets of snowdrops, the first of the season. And after the French teacher presented her with the bouquets, and the children sang the Sylvanian national anthem, their breaths forming a mist on the cold air—she cried especially then.

  “It doesn’t matter, Margarethe,” said King Karel. “My nephew Radomir will make a fine king. Look at how well he’s doing at the Primary School. Look at how much he likes building bridges, and if any country needs bridges, it’s Sylvania.” For the Danube and its tributaries ran through the country, so that wherever you went in Sylvania was over a river, or perhaps two.

  And then Queen Margarethe stopped crying, because it was time to greet the French ambassador, and she was after all the youngest daughter of the King of Greece. She had been trained to restrain her emotions, at least at state functions. And the blue satin of her dress would stain.

  But that night, when the French ambassador was discussing business with the bankers of Sylvania, and her other guests were discussing French innovations in art (for although Sylvania was a small country, it had a fashionable court) or losing at cards in a cloud of cigarette smoke, the Queen walked out to the terrace.

  It was a cold night, and she pulled the blue satin wrap more closely about her shoulders. The full moon above her was wearing a wrap of gray clouds. In its light, she walked down the steps of the terrace, between the topiaries designed by Radomir IV, boxwood swans swimming in a pool of grass, a boxwood stag running from overgrown boxwood hounds. She shivered because her wrap was not particularly warm, but walked on through the rose garden, which was a tangle of canes. She did not want to go back to the castle, or face her guests.

  She reached the croquet lawn, beyond which began the forest that surrounded Karelstad, where c
roquet balls were routinely lost during tournaments between the ministers and the ladies-in-waiting. Suddenly, she heard laughter. She looked around, frightened, and said, “Is anyone there?”

  No one answered. But under a chestnut tree that would be covered with white flowers in spring, she saw a basket. She knelt beside it, although the frost on the grass would stain her dress more certainly than tears, and saw a child. It was so young that the laugh she had heard might have been its first, and it waved its fist, either at the moon above or at the Queen, whose face looked like a second moon in the darkness.

  She lifted the child from its basket. Surely it must be cold, left out on a night like this, when winter still covered Sylvania. Surely whoever had left it here did not deserve a child. She picked it up, with the blanket it was wrapped in, and carried it over the croquet lawn, through the rose garden, between the boxwood swans and the boxwood stag, up the terrace steps, to the castle.

  “Surely she has a mother,” said the King. “I know this has been difficult for you, Margarethe, but we can’t just keep her.”

  “If you could send the Chamberlain out for diapers,” said the Queen. “And tell Countess Agata to warm a bottle.”

  “We’ll have to advertise in the Karelstad Gazette. And when her mother replies, we’ll have to return her.”

  “Look,” said the Queen, holding the child up to the window, for the cook had scattered cake crumbs on the terrace, and pigeons were battling over them. “Look, embroidered on the corner of her blanket. It must be her name: Lucinda.”

  No one answered the advertisement, although it ran for four weeks, with a description of the child and where she had been found. And when the King himself went to look beneath the chestnut tree, even the basket was gone.

  Princess Lucinda was an ordinary child. She liked to read books, not the sort that princesses were supposed to like, but books about airplanes, and mountain climbing, and birds. She liked to play with her dolls, so long as she could make parachutes for them and toss them down from the branches of the chestnut tree. The Queen was afraid that someday Lucinda would fall, but she could not stop her from climbing trees, or putting breadcrumbs on her windowsill for the pigeons, or dropping various objects, including the King’s scepter, out of the palace window, to see if they would fly.

  Lucinda also liked the gardener’s daughter, Bertila, who could climb trees, although not so well as the Princess. She did not like receptions, or formal dresses, or narrow shoes, and she particularly disliked Jaromila, her lady-in-waiting and Countess Agata’s daughter.

  But there were two unusual things about Princess Lucinda. Although her hair was brown, it had a silver sheen, and in summer it became so pale that it seemed purely silver. And the Princess walked in her sleep. When the doctor noticed that it happened only on moonlit nights, the Queen ordered shutters to be placed on Lucinda’s windows, and moonlight was never allowed into her room.

  For the Princess’ sixteenth birthday, the Queen planned a party. Of course she did not know when the Princess had been born, so she chose a day in summer, when the roses would be at their best and her guests could smoke on the terrace.

  Everyone of importance in Sylvania was invited, from the Prime Minister to the French teacher at the Primary School. (Education was considered important in Sylvania, and King Karel had said on several occasions that education would determine Sylvania’s success in the new century.) The Queen hired an orchestra that had been the fashion that winter in Prague, although she confessed to the Chamberlain that she could not understand modern music. And Prince Radomir came home from Oxford.

  “They ought to be engaged,” said the Queen at breakfast. “Look at what an attractive couple they make, and what good friends they are already.” Princess Lucinda and Prince Radomir were walking below the morning room windows, along the terrace. The Queen might have been less optimistic if she had known that they were discussing airplane engines. “And then she would be Queen.”

  She looked steadily at the King, and raised her eyebrows.

  “But I can’t help it, Margarethe,” said King Karel, moving his scrambled eggs nervously around on his plate with a fork. “When the first King Karel was crowned by the Pope himself, he decreed that the throne must always pass to a male heir.”

  “Then it’s about time that women got the vote,” said the Queen, and drank her coffee. Which was usually how she left it. King Karel imagined suffragettes crashing through the castle windows and writing “Votes for Women” on the portraits of Radomir IV and his queen, Olga.

  “How can you not like him?” asked Bertila later, as she and Lucinda sat on the grass, beneath the chestnut tree.

  “Oh, I like him well enough,” said Lucinda. “But I don’t want to marry him. And I’d make a terrible queen. You should have seen me yesterday, during all those speeches. My shoes were hurting so badly that I kept shifting from foot to foot, and Mother kept raising her eyebrows at me. You don’t know how frightening it is, when she raises her eyebrows. It makes me feel like going to live in the dungeon. But I don’t want to stand for hours shaking hands with ambassadors, or listen to speeches, even if they are in my honor. I want—”

  What did she want? That was the problem, really. She did not know.

  “But he’s so handsome, with those long eyelashes, and you know he’s smart.” Bertila lay back on the grass and stared at the chestnut leaves.

  “Then you should marry him yourself. Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. You used to be so sensible, and now you’re worse than Jaromila.”

  “Beast. As though a prince could marry a gardener’s daughter.” Bertila threw a chestnut, rejected by a squirrel the previous autumn because a worm had eaten through its center, at the Princess.

  “Ouch. Stop it, or I’ll start throwing them back at you. And not only do I have more chestnuts, I have much better aim. But seriously, Bertie, you’d make a better queen than I would. You’re so beautifully patient and polite. And since you’re already in love with his eyelashes . . .”

  “There you are,” said Jaromila. “Lying in the dirt as usual, and talking with servants.” She tapped one shoe, as pointed and uncomfortable as fashion demanded, on the grass.

  “You’re not wanted here,” said Lucinda.

  “But you’re wanted at the reception, half an hour ago.”

  “You see?” said Lucinda to Bertila, in dismay. “You’d make a much better queen than I would!”

  “And she’d be just as entitled to it,” said Jaromila. She had also seen Lucinda walking with Radomir on the terrace, but she had reacted quite differently than the Queen. She could not tell you the length of Radomir’s eyelashes, but she knew that one day he would be king.

  “What do you mean?” asked Lucinda.

  “Yes, what do you mean?” asked Bertila. She was usually patient, just as Lucinda had said, but today she would have liked to pull Jaromila’s hair.

  “Well, it’s time someone told you,” said Jaromila, shifting her feet, because it was difficult to stand on the grass, and because she was nervous. “But you can’t tell anyone it was me.” From the day the Princess had been found, Queen Margarethe had implied that Lucinda was her own child, born in Switzerland. No one at court had dared to question the Queen, and the Chamberlain and Countess Agata liked their positions too well to contradict her. But Jaromila had heard them discussing it one night, over glasses of sherry. If anyone found out that Jaromila had told the Princess, she would be sent to her grandmother’s house in Dobromir, which had no electric lights or telephone, not even a phonograph.

  “Told what?” asked Lucinda. “You’d better tell me quickly. I have a whole pile of chestnuts, and you can’t run in those shoes.”

  “That you’re not a princess at all. You were found in a basket under this chestnut tree, like a peasant’s child.”

  That afternoon, the Queen had to tell Lucinda three times not to fidget in front of the French ambassador.

  As soon as the reception was over,
Lucinda ran up to her room and lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Who was she, if she was not the Princess Lucinda? After a while, she got up and took off the dress she had worn to the reception, which had been itching all afternoon. She put on her pajamas. But she could not sleep. For the first time in her life, she opened the shutters on her bedroom windows and looked out. There was the moon, as full as a silver Kroner, casting the shadows of boxwood swans and hounds on the lawn.

  In her slippers, she crept down the stairs and out the French doors to the terrace. She walked between the topiaries and the rose bushes, over the croquet lawn, to edge of the forest. There, she lay on the grass and stared up at the moon, through the branches of the chestnut tree. “Who am I?” she asked. It seemed to smile at her, but gave no answer.

  Lucinda woke shivering, with dew on her pajamas. She had to sneak back into the castle without being seen by the footmen, who were already preparing for the party.

  Jaromila had forgotten to set out the dress she was supposed to wear, a white dress the Queen had chosen, with a train she would probably trip over on the stairs. With a sigh, Lucinda opened the door of her dressing room and started looking through the dresses that hung there, all the dresses she had worn since her christening, for although Lucinda did not care about dresses, Queen Margarethe cared a great deal.

  That was why she missed the excitement.

  Jaromila had been afraid to go to the Princess’ room that morning. Lucinda would certainly tell the Queen what she had said, and when the Queen found out—Jaromila remembered Dobromir. So she stayed in the ballroom, where Queen Margarethe was preparing for the party by changing her mind several times about who should sit where. Countess Agata was writing place cards, and the footmen were setting out the glasses for champagne.

  King Karel, still in his slippers, wandered into the ballroom and said, “Margarethe, have you seen my crown? I thought I left it next to my bureau—”