by Jane Yolen
PHILOMEL BOOKS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yolen, Jane. Curse of the thirteenth fey / Jane Yolen. p. cm. Summary: Accident-prone, thirteen-year-old Gorse, the youngest fairy in her family, falls into a trap while on her way to the palace to bless the newborn princess, Talia, but arrives in time to give a gift which, although seemingly horrific, may prove to be a real blessing in this take-off on the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty. [1. Fairy tales. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Elves—Fiction. 5. Family life—Fiction. 6. Prophecies—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ8.Y78Th 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011038847
ISBN 978-1-101-59151-2
The True Tale of Sleeping Beauty
JANE YOLEN
ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Snow in Summer
Girl in a Cage
The Devil’s Arithmetic
Queen’s Own Fool
For those Fey friends in Scotland: Deborah Turner Harris, Bob Harris, Elizabeth Wein, Elizabeth Kerner, Lisa Tuttle—never seen enough, but your e-mails, postings, friendships keep me writing.
Also for editor Jill Santopolo and my daughter Heidi Stemple, who keep me honest. For Debby Harris, beta reader extraordinaire. For Marcel Sislowitz, who did the plot dance around the tribal fire and shook some gourds at the sky for me, as well as offering me guano. For Adam Stemple, who suggested how the guano might be used. And for my Facebook friends, especially Steven Beard, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Tanja Wooten, and Geoffrey A. Landis, who helped make things go Boom!
An earlier version of this story was published as a short story called “The Thirteenth Fey” © 1985 in Dragonfield and Other Stories. For those interested in more about the Shouting Fey, two other short stories have been published: “The Uncorking of Uncle Finn” (© 1986, in F&SF magazine and reprinted in two of my collections, Storyteller and Sister Emily’s Lightship) and “Dusty Loves” (© 1988, F&SF magazine and also reprinted in Sister Emily’s Lightship).
Contents
Copyright
Title Page
Also by Jane Yolen
Dedication
The Fey
PART I
• 1 •
• 2 •
• 3 •
• 4 •
• 5 •
PART II
• 6 •
• 7 •
• 8 •
• 9 •
• 10 •
• 11 •
• 12 •
• 13 •
• 14 •
• 15 •
PART III
• 16 •
• 17 •
• 18 •
TO THE READER
OF THIS BOOK
These are the names
of the Shouting Fey in this story
and in Gorse’s life.
Speak of them with respect,
for they can become your best friends
or your worst enemies.
Never, ever challenge them
to a Shout Off, for you will lose—
your hair, your voice, your home,
and possibly your life.
You have been warned.
•THE SHOUTING FEY•
Great-grandfather Fergus, long dead.
Great-grandmother Banshee, Fergus’s wife, long dead.
Great-great-aunt Loireg, patroness of Hebridean spinners and spinsters, long dead.
Great-aunts Gemma and Gerne (Gorse’s Grandmother), long dead.
Great-aunt Gilda, the only Great still alive,
the Family’s healer, who never had children.
The Aunts, children of Fergus and Banshee:
Galda, Glade, Granne, Grania, Gardenia, Goldie,
and Mother, the seventh daughter.
•THE COUSINS•
Alliford, he of the twisted toes and bright
red hair, much of a weeper.
Cousin Mallow, whey-faced and whiny.
Cousin Maribel, who refused to pull
any bow, soon to declare for vegetarianism.
And seven other unnamed others,
three boys and four girls.
•GORSE’S IMMEDIATE FAMILY•
Father, of Irish elven ancestry.
Mother, whose birth name was Grete.
•THE THIRTEEN ELVEN-FEY CHILDREN•
(seven girls, six boys)
1. Necrops: firstborn son,
noble of bearing, boisterous and burning.
2. Darna: firstborn daughter,
works hard, and all with a certain elegance.
3. Carnell: brother,
does silly walks and silly talks
but has a strong right hand.
4. Willow: sister,
sexy and secretive at the same time.
5. Thorn: sister,
as prickly as her namesake.
6. Arian: brother,
a bit slow but with the sweetest smile.
7. Solange: the beauty,
seventh child of a seventh child.
8. Bobbin: eldest
of the twin boys by a minute.
9. Robbin: youngest
of the twin boys by a minute.
10. Cambria: sister,
pert, sometimes to the point of silliness.
11. Aster: sister,
Great-aunt Gilda’s favorite and most like her.
12. Dusty: brother,
the Romeo of the Shouting Fey and Gorse’s best friend.
13.
Gorse: the youngest,
who tells this story, later Keeper of Books.
Part I
A SPELL AGAINST AGUE
Fever, favor someone else,
Let peace be mine this day.
Leave my child, remove yourself,
For she is just a little Fey.
Take away the chills and sweats,
The vivid dreams that shake her sleep.
Leave my child, remove yourself,
Or I will give you cause to weep.
Out, out, damned fever,
Leave her! Leave her!
• 1 •
THE FAMILY
In the middle of a stand of white birch sits a decaying pavilion. The white columns have been pocked by generations of our peashooters. Several kite strings, quite stained by the local birds, still twine around the capitals. The kites themselves are long gone, torn off and taken by the weather imps to line their own drafty halls.
In late spring, west winds whistle through the thin pavilion walls. The rains—quite heavy in November and April—have left runnels in the wallpaper that look like patterns one should be able to identify and never quite can. It’s very old wallpaper anyway. As a child I used to see different pictures there after every rain.
But I would change nothing about the house. Nothing about the birch trees. Nothing about the small hill on which the pavilion stands.
This perfect place is familiar. It is family. It is where I want to be and nowhere else.
It is home.
• • • • • • • •
“A girl!” Great-aunt Gilda cried, for once modulating her voice. “The thirteenth fey.”
“That’s important,” Aunt Galda added, as if she alone could have known. “Thirteenth.”
“The thirteenth!” Aunts Grania and Glade repeated, lest no one miss the fact.
Mother sighed, with exhaustion, with hope. “Maybe she’s—”
“No maybe about it.” Great-aunt Gilda’s voice was always certain, even in modulation. “She’s the thirteenth. Are you unable to count your own children, Grete?”
“I was going to say maybe she’s the One.”
“I meant that, too.” Great-aunt Gilda’s voice was rising. Nobody wanted that, not there, with a vulnerable newborn who’d only cried once.
The other Aunts quickly cleaned me up and wrapped me in a gown, the long lacy naming gown each of the children had worn in turn. I began another cry, this one high and cranky, a complaint about the light or the Aunts’ loud voices, or maybe it was hunger or anger or fear. But once tightly wrapped, my limbs stilled, I lay quiet, as if bespelled. The Aunts, too, said nothing more. In that small quietness, Mother named me, quickly, before anyone else had a chance to.
“Gorse,” she said.
The Aunts all looked appalled, their faces pinched.
“Hardly euphonious,” said Aunt Glade, always a stickler for proper sounds. “It rhymes with coarse and horse. I don’t dare imagine the spells.”
“Gorse,” Mother said again.
“Are you sure?” Aunt Gardenia asked. “Gorse is such a weed, and I am always pulling it up out of the flower beds. Besides, it’s prickly.”
“Gorse!” Mother said firmly, and—as it was the third time—the magick held. “She’ll need to be as hardy as a weed, to make her way through twelve brothers and sisters, not to mention the cousins. And the Aunts.” She drew a deep breath. “Besides, I like the sunny yellow flowers.”
“It’s a weed,” Aunt Gardenia grumbled again, but the other Aunts overruled her.
“Hardy it is, then,” they agreed, and went off to make a spell for me.
Along the way, they got distracted by my brother Dusty falling out of the tree house, where he was much too young to have been taken without yet knowing how to use his wings to break his fall.
At the very same moment, my sister Solange had said a Curse, though as she was considered a child, not yet sixteen, it could still be reversed, but that had to be done before it could set.
So half of the Aunts went to reverse the spell and half to mend whatever might have been broken by Dusty’s fall, which turned out to be only his pride, or as much pride as a two-year-old has. The hardiness the Aunts were going to confer on me got delayed, and by the time they got back, I was already whatever I was going to be anyway, and so I spent a childhood in and out of fevers and headaches and agues of one kind or another, some brought about by an allergy to different kinds of magick, some by sitting in damp places. But I was hardy in all other ways.
Or at least that’s the story they told me years later. Like all fey stories, this one has grown in the telling. We in the Family all do that: we make Family stories better. Better than they are, better than they were, better than the truth. After a while, the story becomes the truth because no one actually remembers how things really happened.
• • • • • • • •
The one true thing I know about my birth is that I was born in my parents’ pavilion, on the same marble and velvet couch they’d used for the lying-in of each of my brothers and sisters. We ate, slept, argued, and played in that pavilion, under wall plaques emblazoned with Family mottoes. Curses begin with lies ran one. Spells begin with the truth was another. The pair hung on either side of the big fireplace. Every Oath leads to the stars was a third; it was hanging in the kitchen. A fourth—Bad thoughts warp magick—was in Father’s library, over a collection of books about ogres and trolls. And above my bed, along with a list of my siblings, beginning with number one, Necrops, and ending with me, number thirteen, Gorse, hung a plaque that said simply Be careful around magick.
Like my siblings, I spent hours strapped to my baby board in the lower branches of the birch trees. There I was watched over by butterflies, dragonflies, and of course ladybugs that sat on my nose and made me sneeze. The mourning doves sang me to sleep with their soft coo-coo-roos. A murder of crows woke me each morning with their shrieks.
Father told me about all that, and—unlike the fey—elves do not lie. It is an old Curse set upon them, so old that even Father, who knows everything, does not know how and when it was laid. Sometimes elvish truth telling is so harsh, one would wish they could couch it more softly the way we fey do—in story or fib or fabulation. But elves simply cannot tell an untruth.
We thirteen children of Mother and Father are an odd mix, truth and lies coming alternately from our mouths, sometimes at the same moment, sometimes months and years apart, and even we don’t always know the difference.
Like most faerie childhoods, mine included much that was beautiful, with only the occasional night fright. The woods, the sky, the trees, the creatures, the wind through my wings, the murmuration of the nearby brook . . . what could be better than that?
Yet it was all to come to an end one fateful day, or at least an end to what the Family knew best, though it was a long, slow unwinding to get us to that day. Much as we had hoped for that ending, we fey don’t like or understand change. But even for us, as long-lived as we are, change is inevitable. Spring becomes summer, summer becomes fall, and even the fey finally grow old.
• • • • • • • •
The Family was awash with cousins and Aunts, though Uncles were in short supply. They tended to stay only for a short while and then disappear, heading back to the human world, which was where they belonged. Off they’d go through the part of the woods we called the Wooing Path. Though it was the straightest route to the castle, we fey were forbidden to travel it, though occasionally, when he was older, Dusty liked to fly high above it. He always had a wild streak in him. That can make a scoundrel or a hero, and which he would become was always a topic of conversation among the Aunts until the very end of this story.
That the Uncles disappeared after a year or two didn’t seem to matter to the Aunts, who had the babies
they’d always wanted, which was the usual Shouting Fey way, since marriageable male fey were in short supply.
“I’m afraid most of you will have to make do with humans,” was the way Great-aunt Gilda put it. “We did.”
Not Mother. She’d chosen Father in a contest of some sort, and the prize had been the actual marriage. The Aunts, though, believed Mother had married beneath her, and they weren’t slow in letting Father know how they felt about him being only an elf, and an Irish one at that, and therefore not a full fey.
“Elf-knot,” Great-aunt Gilda often called him witheringly.
The Aunts bantered with names for his ears, like “Elephant Man.” Aunt Galda even said, “You could learn to fly with those ears,” which meant she was pointing to his winglessness as well. Faeries have gorgeous wings, some batlike with flexible pinions, and some with dragonfly wings as veined as cathedral windows. But elves—well, they don’t have wings at all.
But Father never responded in kind to the taunts from the Family, retreating instead to his library, which was stocked with books of the past, present, and future, the only library of its kind in the known universe. That library was both a place of study and a refuge for him.
And for me.
Father had long collected books through a small hole in the wall of the pavilion, which only he’d discovered and only he seemed to be able to work. He would reach in, feel around, then say, “Got you!” and pull out a volume, never knowing what he would get. It was a hole, after all, not a window, and he daren’t stick a candle or lantern down there for fear of setting the rest of the books on fire, wherever they were.
The dates on the books Father found were so varied, he eventually came to understand that he was reaching into different times and climes, different libraries or bookshops around the known and unknown world. Slowly—because he could not retrieve a book every time he tried—he built up quite a collection and began putting it in order. In fact, ordering that library became his life’s work. He was the first Keeper of Books the Family had ever had.