Her voice had cracked dangerously at the end, and the Prince started at it, marveled at the things which must have passed in the kingdom without his knowledge, to find exiled deep in the forest a woman who had known the dead Queen. Oh, the name of his mother was written neatly on the genealogical rolls and trilled in country songs which mostly praised her long and yellow hair—but that same name was forbidden within the rooms of government, and within any room his father might hazard to step. Yet the Witch knew her.
She rubbed her long bony fingers, a sound like branches rasping together in the wind, and grinned up at him again, under the gray and greasy curtain of her hair.
“You think I am so wicked, don’t you? A monster. Unnatural. How cruel of me to keep you here and rattle on about my dead grandmother whom you care nothing about. To hold back the doom I keep in store for you and tease you about your mother. I am telling you all this for a reason, you curdle-brained child. Didn’t you ever have a tutor? I am teaching dead, dull history—so that you will understand why your feet carried you here instead of towards some other broken old woman’s hut, and what you ended when you snapped my daughter’s neck. Don’t keep looking at me with that same idiot stare. Listen, or you will comprehend nothing, not even your mother. Shall I just kill you now and have my revenge? It would certainly save breath, and at my age every breath is named and numbered. I entertain you at the expense of not a few figures in that scroll of sighs, boy; do not test me.” She paused, grimacing as if she truly were tallying the accounts of her lungs. “And never assume that a woman is wicked simply because she is ugly and behaves unfavorably towards you. It is unbecoming behavior for a Prince.”
She slurped her tea noisily. When she spoke again, her voice had softened from a dagger point to a smooth, hand-warmed pommel.
“But I can see that you are in pain, and that is the province of monsters. You drag your mother’s corpse with you—it leaves a great furrow in the earth. If it is important enough to very rudely interrupt a woman who already owns two fingers she did not have this morning just to exhume those old bones, I will listen to you instead. It matters nothing to me. Believe me, it will not go easier for you if you come to feel warmly towards me because you have unburdened your soul. We have all the nights the world has ever made ahead of us. Speak of the dead in the dark, boy, and I will take her body from you, if you want to be rid of it.”
The Prince looked up at her, hunched as though whipped, his ribs creaking within him, as though chipped by thousands of tiny blades. He could not breathe, his heart slammed against his chest, his throat flamed. He wanted to tell her what he knew, his soul scorched itself black in the effort, but he could not speak.
And the Witch was laughing at him.
But it was not a vicious laugh; rather, the old hag’s chuckle had gone sad and soft and sorry.
She leaned in, her movement like a door closing. “You tell him her name. You tell him, when you see him again.”
She placed her leathery hand on his forehead, and the other over his lips, cradling his head between her hands like a beloved doll. He wanted to loathe her touch, to spit at her, but as soon as her dry flesh touched his, peace flowed over him like a rippling river, his muscles unlocked and his breath returned. Her hands on him were like the paws of a bear on her cub, strong and cool. When she let him go, he was wide-eyed and straight-backed, his forehead cool.
“Grass and leaves?” he whispered.
“Quite so,” said the Witch.
And with a smooth throat he let fall the words that had long since rusted in him:
“My father killed her.” He shook his head. “It seems like an easy thing to admit, now, but no one speaks of it. No one. I was only a baby when she died, but my nurse told me the way of it, over and over like a lullaby. She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart—something irremovable and constant. She would hold me to her, and whisper the same story, endlessly repeated. I remember her hair, like a forest of straight, white birches all around me, and her dark eyes above…”
YOUR MOTHER WAS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE summer sun, little one. They’ll tell you she weren’t, that she were ugly as a frog’s gullet, but it’s a lie. Yaya tells the truth to her boys, always and always.
All of gold she was, her hair, her skin, even her eyes, like a lion’s. She was called Helia, and that’s as good a name as any I’ve heard.
Your father guarded her, jealous as a jackal, and kept her in a tower room. But her reputation as a beauty for the books filled the countryside. He weren’t married to her too long before you were born—that’s usually the way of it when the wife looks like a lion or a sun—and when you came out of her, easy as nothing, she loved you terribly. You were as dark as she was light, the tiny little moon to her sun. I was her maid then, and she was full of light. I tell you, darling-duck, it hurt to look at her sometimes, when she stood at her tower window with you at her breast, and her hair all filled up with fire. I used to wonder if she gave you milk, or if the sun just emptied into your mouth through her teat.
But one night she was not in her tower. You were almost a boy and the fat was still on your cheeks, then. You waddled about her empty room—your father didn’t even give her a chair, I swear it. She stood all day, and lay on the stones to sleep, and I never heard the woman complain. And I can’t say, since I’d have no way of knowing, what she did that strange night (the rich don’t tell us but how they like their ribbons tied and their tea brewed, and Yaya doesn’t mind, it’s their way), but in the yellow morning your father’s anger clouded up heaven and shook the thatch from the ceiling.
He and his old fortune-teller blustered about the Castle, full of their own huffing wind, blaming me for letting her free, as though a Queen ought not to do as she pleases. He seized me by the arm hard as an iron cuff and we raced up the rickety staircase to the tower where your mother stood, as calm as can be, and you a-sleeping in her arms with not a care in your head. She looked at your father with the glance of a tiger with a full belly, her golden eyes all bright with hate and happiness.
I won’t forget that look, not for all the apples I could eat. Helia hated the King, and that’s the truth; you ask him when you’re grown and see if he calls your old Yaya a liar. You woke up with a cry when your father ripped you from her and shoved you into my arms, just before he hit your mother so strong that she spat a tooth onto the floor—how do you like that? But she didn’t hardly blink, and that awful look never left her eyes. He hissed at her, and it was a strange, black, dark thing he said:
“Woman, you will not make me a fool again. I should have cut your throat when I first saw you.”
“Probably true,” purred your mother. And then the King smiled, and I began to be afraid that there was something secret and rotten in my master—but I said nothing. A servant never says nothing unless she’s asked, and who ever asked Yaya a thing but when the supper was coming?
“Do you remember?” he spat. “With your death I instruct your son.”
She grinned horribly at his purple face and whispered just as sweet as cream, “And he will learn, oh husband mine. He will learn.”
She died the next morning. I couldn’t guess why or for what crime, but she was executed like a thief caught with a slab of butter. I was there, in the courtyard, and I held you close, and like a good nurse I turned your face away at the last moment.
It was before dawn, in the sleepy gray, and your father pulled poor Helia out of the Castle, in a plain white shift with her hair streaming like fire in the fog. The batty old conjurer was there, in his fine blue robes, but he never spoke a word—a servant never says nothing unless he’s asked—just smiled softly all the while. The King tied your poor dam onto a pile of fresh-cut logs and tied her to it with rough-hewn ropes. She didn’t struggle, not even when the ropes were so tight her wrists bled. But when she saw you, well, no mother is so strong she doesn’t care if her babe sees her burn. She wept, then, and screamed, trying to reach out to you, her little chick a-
peeping away in the morning, though she never begged to live, no, not once.
I wanted to help her, Yaya did, but I would have burned beside her, and you would be all alone with no one to love you and stand up between you and the rotten thing in your father.
The King drew a long knife and hacked off her magnificent hair, handing the length to his addle-brained Wizard. They stood over her for a moment, and your sire’s face was dark as dirt. Then, he lit the branches of ash and oak with a great crackling torch, and she was still screaming, but it had a terrible, terrible keening sound, like a song, a frightful death-song that came out of her bones, and you cried even harder, so scared you were by that screeching, singing noise. The fire licked at her feet and caught her dress; it lit up her head like an angel’s.
Now, your Yaya wouldn’t lie, no matter what they tell you at dinner, so listen when I say what I saw. When the fire had wrapped her all up in red, through the wriggling flames I saw your mother change. Her hair went from gold to black and the shape of her body wobbled in the scald, looking now like the Helia I knew, and now like someone else, someone ugly and horrible and dark as anything.
They’ll tell you Yaya is off her head and drinks too much bad red beer, but I think the Wizard saw it, too, and his eyes went angry. He rushed us all out of the cold, saying that someone would come clean up her bones, but that the baby shouldn’t see—I told him right out if he didn’t want you to see he ought not to have dragged you out of bed to watch, but he ignored me like that ragged old stork always does.
But, dear-as-dumplings, her crying followed me, clawing at my back, and behind the cries, behind them I could swear I heard rustling, and flapping, and fluttering, and it only got louder, louder and louder until I had to hold my hands over my ears as we ran from her, from your mother, burning like meat.
“IS THAT ALL?” THE WITCH ASKED, HER TONE BORED.
The Prince nodded dumbly, though something small and calculating had entered his heart, as though he had caught the scent of a stag in the brush, a stag he was sure to catch, if he could creep silently enough. Knife arranged herself on her fur-covered stool and began again.
TIME RAN ALONG LIKE A LEOPARD WITH EIGHT LEGS in those cells—we could not see it, could not hear its passing, but it crept by on those spotted paws and ate us whole just the same. I grew round as a harvest moon, though my limbs were like birch twigs and my cheeks sunk in my face. Hunger and darkness watched over us like worried nurses.
And one night I lay down among the mildewed straw and the scurrying, squeaking rats to give birth to my child. My grandmother held me in a nest of her limbs, bracing me against the stone walls, her face pressed against mine, whispering while I whimpered and wiping away my dirt-blackened tears. She rubbed my swollen belly with her wrinkled brown hands in a swirling motion like the patterns of birds migrating.
The pain was its own world, its own landscape drawn in red and black and flashes of sobbing white. I screamed—but everyone screamed in the prisons. I cursed everything I could think of—but curses are common in jails as gangrene. My hair was matted to my skull with sweat and my bare feet slipped on the floor as I kicked and thrashed like a sick bullfrog. My body ate itself, tearing its own bones apart. I cried and cried. I clutched at Grandmother and she clutched at me, trying to calm me down, nuzzling me like a wolf cub in the snow.
I couldn’t feel her, I could only feel myself coming apart.
But my daughter was born, perfect and whole, with a shock of black hair and calm black eyes. I held her in my arms, her wet, shaking little body, born in the darkness far from our home. Smiling into her face I rocked back and forth, beyond words, beyond despair.
And then my grandmother’s voice slid into me like a needle drawn through linen.
“But we cannot keep her, Knife, you must know we cannot keep her.”
I shrank away and drew my daughter tightly to me. Grandmother hushed me and began to move her hands over me again, to make it better, as if I were a child with a stubbed toe.
“She would never survive. The King would have such a tiny thing killed, even if she did not starve to death in this place. She cannot stay with us. You know it, you just don’t want to know it—no mother would.”
I am so ashamed of my tears that night, hot and thick, dripping like candle wax from a thousand temples, but they would not stop.
“No, no, she’s mine, I love her already. If you loved her, you wouldn’t ask me to give her up. I won’t give her up, I won’t.” I looked up helplessly. “She doesn’t even have a name! How can I?”
Grandmother’s eyes creased with pain, a book read too often, and by rough hands. She shrugged, knowing how stubborn I could be, and for the first time went away from me in the dark, and huddled in a far corner of the cell, hugging her knees to her chest on a pile of mold-greened bones. After a while, I heard her snoring.
After all her talk, the next weeks in Grandmother’s silence were like being plunged into cold water without a chestful of air. She would not speak to me, and I was, for the first time, really and truly imprisoned. We squatted in our separate corners like prizefighters. I nursed my baby girl as best I knew how, her fierce little mouth tugging my breast, her fierce little cries tugging at my ears. She tired me, oh, how she tired me! I could only nap, like a sick cat, awake and asleep, awake and asleep—flagstones are no cradle, and they are no bed, and I had no horse milk to teach her the taste of them, and no steppe grass to teach her the feel of it. She would never know any of the things I knew.
And her black eyes were always open in the dark. Her skin was always pale and clammy, and she shivered so, she shivered so in the damp. She was thin and chilled, thin as a window, and I wept while she suckled, rocking back and forth against the slimy wall. She never cried at all. She just watched me with those hollow black eyes.
“Aerie,” I sniffled one night, into the shadows where Grandmother hunched. “I’m calling her Aerie.”
“That’s a hopeful name, for a girl who will probably never see daylight, let alone a high nest between snowy mountains.”
I stroked her soft cheek, which had no color at all, just a shallow grayness beneath the skin. She turned her mouth to my finger, and for the thousandth time, I began to cry. I was so weary of crying, by then. My milk and my tears spilled out of me every day and I thought every day that I must have no wetness left in me to give, but every day I wept again, and nursed again.
“I can’t, Grandmother, I can’t. You want me to put her down like a horse with a shattered knee and I can’t. Even if it would be better for her, I couldn’t, I couldn’t even keep myself from going to her the moment she cried—her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.”
“Oh, little one, I would never ask you that. How could you think I would? Not for nothing have you heard me rattle on like a tortoise shell blown from stone to stone. What we can give her is better than that, and certainly better than what we will manage for ourselves. Knife, let me have her; trust that the tale I told was to a point. You want to call her Aerie? Well enough. We’ll see what we can do about getting her one.”
She had to pry Aerie from me like a jewel from its setting, and she smiled, sad and small, at her great-grandchild’s slight weight in her arms, touching her for the first time since she took the child from my body. Grandmother laid the baby out on what rags we could gather, to protect her from the cold floor. Aerie began, then, finally, to cry, sucking great icy breaths and sobbing to the rafters.
The old woman began to prepare herself—for what I could not think—shutting her eyes like veiled doors, and instructed me to do the same.
I saw no point. All I had was the power to kill a few deer and ride a horse, bind up a rotted limb and set a bone. If we weren’t going to kill my child, I had no help to offer. She told me what I am. Grass and leaves. My tiny girl continued to wail; it disturbed the worms and roaches and spiders that crawled happily over our cell. I ached to reach for her, to wrap her again and hold her to my breast, no matter how dry a
nd exhausted that breast might be.
Grandmother let her fingers fall over Aerie’s solemn face. “I’m… I’m not sure this is going to work, you know.” She cleared her throat. “I have never done it, and the Wolf never told me if it was allowed. A hole is nothing but space, but a filled hole is a Star. I am full, and she is empty. That should be enough.”
I had never heard my grandmother doubt a single thing under the red sun. If she had said that one rabbit should be enough to feed the world, I would have nodded and set about stripping its fur.
Grandmother bent her head to the floor as if in prayer, and slowly thumped her skull against it, over and over, harder and harder. I tried to catch her and pull her up but she shoved me aside and kept at it, slamming her face into the stones. A dark, wet mark spread beneath her, and the sound of her bone hitting rock grew thick and ugly before, finally, she stopped and raised up her face again.
It was bloody, yes, but among the black streaks of blood were streaks of silver, streaks of light, like gray growing in a young woman’s hair. It covered her cheeks and ran trickling over her eyes, dripping from her chin. She touched her finger to the soggy mess that had been her forehead, and seeing the light on her fingers, bent her brow to my daughter’s mouth.
Aerie did not seem to understand at first, but the silver and the black dribbled into her mouth, and she had never needed much prodding to suckle. She fastened her mouth to Grandmother and patted her tiny hands against the old woman’s hair with a hungry baby’s glee. The light went into her, and the blood, all together, and in the dark, my daughter glowed.
Grandmother pulled away, and wiped Aerie’s mouth like any other child’s. She put her hands on her poor, pale body and clamped her eyes shut, breathing hard and harsh, grinding her fingers against my child’s flesh as though she were shaping her like clay.
The Orphan's Tales Page 7