Once Upon a Curse

by Peter Beagle

  “A peasant woman in the east. Who is said to be able to spin straw into diamonds.”

  He was gone, his rich velvets trembling. I thought of all the gold stacked in the palace—skeins and skeins of it, filling room after room, sewn into garment after garment, used for curtain pulls and fish nets and finally even to tie up the feet of the chickens for roasting. The gold thread emerged blackened and charred from the ovens, but there was always so much more. And more. And more.

  Diamonds were very rare.

  Carefully I took the hand of my son. The law was clear—he was the heir. And the raising of him was mine. As long as I lived. Or he did.

  My son looked up at me. His name was Dirk, but I thought he had another name as well. A true name, that I had never been allowed to hear. I couldn’t prove this.

  “Come, Dirk,” I said, as steadily as I could. “We’ll go play in the garden.”

  He thrust out his lip. “Mama spin!”

  “No, dearest, not today. No spinning today.”

  He threw himself full length on the floor. “Mama spin!”

  One thing my mother, damn her lying soul, had never permitted was tantrums. “No.”

  The baby sprang up. His intense blue eyes glittered. With a wild yell he rushed at me, and too late I saw that his chubby fist clutched a miniature knife, garish with jewels, twisted with carving. He thrust it at my belly.

  I gasped and pulled it free—there was not much blood, the aim of a two-year-old is not good. Dirk screamed and hit me with his little fists. His gold-shod feet kicked me. I tried to grab him, but it was like holding a wild thing. No one came—no one, although I am usually surrounded by so many bodies I can hardly breathe. Finally I caught his two arms in one hand and his two flailing legs in the other. He stopped screaming and glared at me with such intensity, such hatred in his bright blue eyes, that I staggered against the wall. A carved gargoyle pressed into my back. We stayed like that, both of us pinned.

  “Dirk,” I whispered, “what is your true name?”

  They write things down. All of them, all things. Births, deaths, recipes, letters, battles, buyings and sellings, sizes, stories—none of them can remember anything without writing it down, maybe because all of it is so endlessly complicated. Or maybe because they take pride in their handwriting, which is also complicated: swooping dense curlicues traced in black or gold or scarlet. They write everything down, and sometimes the ladies embroider what has been written down on sleeves or doublets or arras. Then the stonemasons carve what has been embroidered into designs across a lintel or mantel or font. Even the cook pipes stylized letters in marzipan across cakes and candies. They fill their bellies with their frantic writing.

  Somewhere in all this was Dirk’s true name. I didn’t know how much time I had. Around a turn of the privy stairs I had overheard two ladies whisper that the girl who could spin straw into diamonds had already been captured and was imprisoned in a caravan traveling toward the palace.

  I couldn’t read. But I could remember. Even shapes, even of curlicued letters. But which curlicues were important? There were so many, so much excess corrupting the true.

  The day after the privy stairs, the prince came to me. His blue eyes were cold. “You are not raising Dirk properly. The law says you cannot be replaced as his mother…unless, of course, you should happen to die.”

  I kept my voice steady. “In what way have I failed Dirk?”

  He didn’t mention the screaming, the knives, the cruelty. Last week Dirk cut the finger off a peasant child. Dirk’s father merely smiled. Instead, the prince said, “He has been seen playing with rats. Those are filthy animals; they carry disease.”

  My heart leaped. Rats. Sometimes, in the hour just before dawn, I had the dream again. Even if it wasn’t true, I was always glad to have it. The rat-boy bending over me, and the baby with pale, quiet eyes.

  The prince said, “Don’t let it happen again.” He strode away, magnificent in gold-embroidered leather like a gilded cow.

  I found Dirk and took him to the walled garden. Nothing. We searched my chambers, Dirk puzzled but not yet angry. Nothing. The nobility have always taken great care to exterminate rats.

  But in the stable, where the groom lay drunk on his pallet, were holes in the wall, and droppings, and the thin sour smell of rodent.

  For days I caught rats. I brought each to my room hidden in the ugly-rich folds of my gown, barred the door, and let the rat loose. There was no one to see us; since the rumors of the girl who can spin diamonds, I was very often left alone. Each rat sniffed the entire room, searching for a way out. There was none. Hours later, each rat was still a rat.

  Dirk watched warily, his bright blue eyes darting and cold.

  On the sixth day, I woke to find a pale, long-nosed girl sitting quietly on the floor. She watched me from unsurprised eyes that were the simplest and oldest things I’d ever seen.

  I climbed down from my high bed, clutching my nightshift around me. I sat on the floor facing her, nose-to-nose. In his trundle Dirk whimpered.

  “Listen to me, Old One. I know what you are, and what you need. I can get you out of the palace.” For the first time, I wondered why they came into the palace at all. “No one will see you. But in return you must tell me two things. The true name of my son. And of one other: one like yourself, a boy who was here three years ago, who was carried out by a page because he taught a washerwoman’s daughter to spin straw into gold.”

  “Your mother is dead,” the rat-girl said calmly. “She died a fortnight ago, of fire in the belly.”

  “Good riddance,” I said harshly. “Will you do as I ask? In exchange for your freedom?”

  The rat-girl didn’t change expression. “Your son’s true name would do you no good. The blood is so hectic, so tainted”—she twitched her nose in contempt—“that it would give you no power over him. They keep the old names just for ritual.”

  Ritual. One more gaudy emptiness in place of the real thing. One more hope gone. “Then just tell me the name of the Old One who taught me to spin gold!”

  “I would sooner die,” she said.

  And then I said it. Spare me, God, I said it, unthinking of anything but my own need: “Do it or you will die a slow and painful death.”

  The rat-girl didn’t answer. She looked at me with bone-white understanding in her pale eyes.

  I staggered to my feet and left the room.

  It was as if I couldn’t see; I stumbled blindly toward my husband’s Council Chamber. This, then, was how it happened. You spun enough straw into gold, and the power to do that did not change you. But when that power was threatened, weakened by circumstance—that changed you. You turned cruel, to protect not what you had, but what you might not have.

  For the first time…I understood why my mother lied.

  The prince was at his desk, surrounded by his councillors. I swept in, the only one in the room whose clothes were not embroidered with threads of gold. He looked up coldly.

  “This girl who can spin diamonds,” I said. “When does she arrive?”

  He scowled. The councillors all became very busy with papers and quills. “Escort the princess from the Council Chamber,” my prince said. “She isn’t feeling well.”

  Three guards sprang forward. Their armor cover was woven of gold thread.

  I couldn’t find the young page of three years ago, who at any rate was a page no longer. But in the stable I found the stablemaster’s boy, a slim youth about my height, dressed in plain, warm clothing he probably thought was rags. “In my chamber, there is a rat. If you come with me I will give it to you wrapped in a cloth. You will take it through the courtyard gate and into the forest. I will watch you do this from the highest tower. When you’re done, I’ll give you doublet and hose and slippers all embroidered with skeins of gold.”

  His eyes shone with greed, and his color flushed high.

  “If you kill the rat, I’ll know. I have ways to know,” I told him, lying.

  “I would
n’t do that,” he said, lying.

  He didn’t. I know because when he came to my chambers from the forest, he was shaken and almost pale. He handed me a stone, clean and smooth and light as a single word. He didn’t look at me.

  But nonetheless he took the gold-embroidered clothes.

  That night, I woke from the old dream. It was just before dawn. The two pale stones lay side by side on my crimson-and-gold coverlet, and on each was writing, the letters not curlicued and ornate but simple straight lines that soothed the mind, eased it, like lying on warm rock in the elemental sunshine.

  I couldn’t read them. It didn’t matter. I knew what they said. The words were in my mind, my breath, my bone, as if they had always been there. As they had: rampel, the real; stillskin, with quiet skin.

  The forest disappeared, copse by copse, tree by tree. The ground rose, and Dirk and I rode over low hills covered with grass. I dismounted and touched some stalks. It was tough-fibered, low, dull green. The kind of grass you can scythe but never kill off, not even by burning.

  Beyond the hills the forest resumed, the trees squat but thick-bodied, moss growing at their base, fungus on their sides. They looked as if they had been there forever. Sometimes pale fire moved over the ground, as no-colored as mist but with a dull glow, looking very old. I shuddered; fire should not be old. This was not a place for the daughter of a washerwoman. Dirk squirmed and fretted in front of me on the saddle.

  “You’re going to learn, Dirk,” I said to him. “To be still. To know the power of quiet. To portion your words and your makings to what is real.”

  As my mother had not. Nor the prince, nor his councillors, nor anyone but the rat-boy and rat-girl, who, I now knew, crept back into the corrupted palace because the Old Ones didn’t ever let go of what was theirs. Nor claim what was not. To do either would be to name the real as unreal.

  Dirk couldn’t have understood me, but he twisted to scowl at me. His dark brows rushed together. His vivid blue eyes under thick dark lashes blinked furiously.

  “In the real, first design is the power, Dirk.”

  And when I finished those words he was there, sitting quietly on a gnarled root, his pale eyes steady. “No,” he said. “We don’t teach children with fevered and corrupted blood.”

  For just a second I clutched Dirk to me. I didn’t want to give him up, not even to his own good. He was better off with me, I was his mother, I could hide him and teach him, work for him, cheat and steal and lie for him…

  I couldn’t save my son. I had no powers but the tiny, disposable ones, like turning straw into gold.

  “This time you will teach such a child,” I said.

  “I will not.” The Old One rose. Pale fire sprang around him, rising from the solid earth. Dirk whimpered.

  “Yes, you will,” I said, and closed my eyes against what I was about to do: Become less real myself. Less powerful. For Dirk. “I can force you to take him. Rampel stillskin is your name.”

  The Old One looked at me, sadness in his pale eyes. Then Dirk was no longer in my arms. He stood on the ground beside the boy, already quieter, his fidgeting gone. The pale fire moved up from the ground and onto my fingers, charring them to stumps. A vision burned in my head. I screamed, but only from pain: Dirk was saved, and I didn’t care that I would never spin again, nor that every gold thread in the kingdom had suddenly become stone, pale, and smooth and ordinary as a true word.

  Every Word I Speak

  by

  Cindy Lynn Speer

  My husband is gone. I can be silent today, tomorrow, and until his return. There’s freedom in that, knowing that I can go and sew by the lake, perhaps, or take meals in my room by myself.

  In my dressing table there is a secret compartment. In it I have hidden slips of paper, even though paper and ink are forbidden. They are one of my rare rebellions, a way to make my wishes known in silence.

  “Please bring my dinner.”

  “Please fetch my maid.”

  “Please prepare a coach.”

  Please. A habit, from my destitute youth when I believed sweet words were more precious than pearls.

  I’ll do anything not to speak, these days. In my youth I could not speak enough.

  “Your majesty?” I turn, slips ready in my hands, fingers light without jewels. I nod for her to speak.

  Deirdre, my lady in waiting, gives me a sad look.

  “A diplomat from Andovia is here to see you.”

  I nod again, put aside my papers. Together we go to meet him.

  “Queen Sarah,” the diplomat murmurs over my hand. I recognize him, though to my knowledge we have never been formally introduced. He is Amon, the Grand Duke of Andovia.

  I look at him, his dark hair tied smoothly back, his carefully fitted clothes expensive. He smiles charmingly, and I remember what I have heard about the way he uses his handsome looks to good advantage.

  “Amon,” I say, and with that one word, a pearl, perfect and creamy, iridescent, rolls from my mouth, falling from the curve of my lower lip, and into the bosom of my gown. I blush, but he is watching with such avid interest that he does not seem to notice.

  “So it is true,” he whispers, amazed. “You have been enchanted by the fairies.”

  “Every word I speak,” I reply, and one rose, pink as a blush, another pearl and two diamonds cascade from my mouth.

  A page hurries forward, a basket in his hand. He ignores the flower, going straight for the treasure. The diamond lands next to Amon’s feet. Before the page can pick it up, it is in his hands, being rolled thoughtfully, tested for reality. He pinches it between thumb and forefinger and peers at me through its fractured light. He laughs a little, a man playing at a boy’s mischief, and hands the jewel to the page. He smiles at me, inviting me to share in his silliness, but I do not smile back. I do not trust handsome men.

  I find myself thinking in the ensuing silence of the old woman at the well. She looked so weary, (as weary as I now feel, staring at this man) that I fetched a drink of the coolest, cleanest water I could find for her. In return, she confessed to be one of the Fair Folk, and granted me this gift.

  This gift. I say it over and over, to remind myself, to convince myself. This is the gift that gave me my husband, who in turn saved me from my family, who has professed to love me deeply. Love me, I fear, only as long as I continue talking.

  The duke knows the story well. I can see in his eyes that he has speculated long upon it, and I realize that the timing of his arrival is no coincidence.

  “Your husband, I hear, is fond of Andovian cherry wine. It has come to my attention that he might wish to own some of our orchards for himself.”

  My heart sinks. The negotiation for land and the rights to sell the produce from it will make for a long and tricky process. Talking makes me so hungry and my mouth so dry, and my lips cannot always form words properly, even though I have had plenty of time to learn how to talk around the jewels. I am tempted to send him away, but my husband would be ill pleased to lose such an opportunity.

  “Is this of interest to you, milady?” He mocks me, I think.

  “I shall be honored to discuss terms with you, sir, but perhaps you would be better pleased to speak with my husband? He will return in a few days.”

  He kneels to pick up an orchid, which he tucks behind my ear. I allow my eyes to tell him how I feel about this familiarity. My skirts rustle as the page goes through them, looking for lost jewels, anxious not to miss one pearl.

  He smiles a little. “You’ll do, my lady queen.”

  A gentle rejoinder forms in my mind, but I smother it, the first word sounding in my throat. Something else forms, a diamond from the feel of it. I tuck it behind my teeth and smile.

  “If you can’t say something nice,” my mother told me once when I was very little, “say nothing at all.” She’d told me this with a gentle slap. My sister received no such advice, nor treatment. She did not believe in the magic of kind words.

  He turns and leaves wi
thout asking my permission. As I signal a guard to lead him to his chambers, I wonder if he is really so confident of his charms.

  I spit the diamond at the wall.

  “I have traveled far, Queen Sarah, to hear from your lips the story of your gift,” Amon says as we sit at dinner. I nod to Deirdre.

  “My lady queen prefers not to speak at supper. Sometimes the flowers and the jewels get into her food. And her diamonds are of such fine, clear quality that she might drink one accidentally.”

  I look down at my plate, wanting to scoop the food down as quickly as possible, for I am starving from speaking so much, but I force myself to dawdle. Once dinner is over, I will doubtless need to talk.

  “Perhaps she fears a poison flower will land on her plate?”

  “No, my lord, nothing poisonous has ever come from my lady’s mouth.” Deirdre looks at him, truly hurt and angry, despite her breeding, which is far better than mine.

  “Perhaps so,” he whispers, then smiles. He looks around the chamber at the gilded torches with their dwarf stones, glowing constantly without need for fire, at the tapestries and paintings. There is too much gold for my taste, and the mirrors that I had once loved, enjoying their reflected colors, horrify me. I avoid them for fear of seeing myself speak.

  “You gift has provided well for your husband. But what has it done for you?”

  I know what he’s about. He says such things to make me speak, to leave me no choice. I lift a napkin to my mouth. I choose my words carefully. “We have been most fortunate. And it will serve you, as well, should my husband decide he wants your orchards.”

  He shakes his head and sighs, “Ah, for shame, to begin negotiations already, before we’ve even been served dessert. Is this how you’ve been taught?”

  His words sting. “I know you’re not here to discuss the orchards, and I will not play the dancing bear to a swaggering opportunist.” I collect my words in the napkin, amazed at their power, their strength.