Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  Kneeling beside the block, she pressed her palms to its side. She leaned in to touch her tongue to it, so she might know the taste. Before she could, something shifted in its depths. The ice fogged then bubbled then went clear as a mirror, showing not the queen’s face but Alice’s.

  The queen looked into the ice that had become a scrying glass. She held her breath.

  Alice walked, her shadow dragging behind her like a woman’s black hair. She moved past villages full of sleepers whose eyes stretched sudden in the dark, through woods full of hungry creatures who cringed at her passing. Everywhere she stepped her footfall sowed some dark thing: premonitions and killing frost, seedlings that strangled.

  Growing weary, the girl lay beneath a row of acanthus, closing her eyes and dropping into a rest that was less like sleep than stillness. The sun rose and the acanthus wept their heavy lobes and the bees that drowsed over them fell like golden rain, poisoned by the girl’s frozen breath.

  After a time the princess woke. Rose to her feet. With a coal-colored gaze she looked at the queen, and smiled.

  The queen fell back onto the throne room’s hard floor. Her body was stiff. The lantern she’d placed beside herself was out.

  When she looked again at the ice, the vision had wiped itself away. But she knew the part of the woods where Alice slept. It lay on her own land.

  The queen wrapped herself in furs and ascended the castle’s many stairs, climbing to its highest parapet. There was a ticking in her belly where once the infant Alice had seized and swum. She watched as, far below, travelers left and entered the woods. Carts trundled noiselessly over the dirt. The smoke of a distant village turned to haze.

  A figure stepped from the trees, onto the road.

  The queen’s eyes blurred. For a moment it seemed there were three figures looking up at her, too far to see yet she knew them anyway, knew they watched her, too. When she blinked they snapped into the shape of a single girl.

  The queen’s life moved in her a little longer yet. Anything might happen. Any tale could be true. She whispered this to herself, the words dropping like diamonds and rattlesnakes from her whitened lips.

  Down there, on the road, Alice’s mouth moved, too. The queen did not know what stories she told herself, what new endings she might devise.

  It’s not everyone who gets to see their death as it comes. The queen waited for the future, for the end. The cold was already in her.

  THE HOUSE UNDER THE STAIRWELL

  On a knife-bright day at the edge of an overgrown garden, three sisters pricked their fingers on a briar and let their blood fall to the earth.

  Below the briar, it was said, lay the body of a bride who died on her wedding night. She was called the Wicked Wife. If you let your blood drop over the briar that covered her grave, she came to you in dreams to share a vision of the one you’d marry.

  The eldest of the sisters, Isobel, had suffered a broken engagement. In her eagerness to forget the man she loved, she became determined to visit the grave, and her sisters followed after. As their blood disappeared into the briar, the first cold breath of winter came from the mouth of the woods, snow rattling in it like loose teeth. The girls shivered, drawing bloody fingers into their cloaks, and turned their backs to the trees.

  That night, tucked up in bed, they dreamed.

  The youngest sister smiled over a breakfast table at a man with wise eyes, strong hands, and a rambling house filled with beautiful things.

  The middle sister walked with a broad-shouldered man through an orchard. He plucked a fruit off a pear tree and gave it to her.

  Isobel had a stranger dream.

  As her sisters smiled in their sleep, she fretted and turned, her pillow too hot and her blankets stifling. In the days since her jilting, she’d dreamed only of the man who’d humiliated her. Would she fall asleep tonight and dream of him still? After a long restless time, she left her bed and moved to the window. There she watched the snow fall, running the fingers of one hand over the place on the other where an engagement ring had sat.

  When she turned from the window, a woman stood between her and her bed. Moonlight ran through the woman in a thousand silver spearpoints. Her hair was red, her dress was white, her neck was crooked. She wore a wooden mask painted with the golden face of a lioness.

  “You wish to hear of your husband?” Her voice made a cold music. The shush of wind in bare branches, the tapping of a dead girl’s wedding shoes.

  “Am I asleep?” Isobel whispered. “Are you the Wicked Wife?”

  Shadows shaped like fingers crawled up the woman’s skirts; she shook them away. “You wish to hear of your husband?” she said once more. “I’ll take you to meet him this very night.”

  From behind Isobel came a hissing giggle, like cold water on hot coals, and two figures moved to flank her. They were small as children and oddly hunched, their bodies dressed in yellow. They, too, wore wooden masks, painted with the faces of beautiful girls.

  Isobel looked at their curving backs and the ears that twitched over the tops of their masks, fox-red and pointed. She looked at the mournful column of the white-dressed bride and thought of her lost fiancé, set to marry a girl he’d just met.

  “Take me to my husband,” she said.

  The fox girls bobbed around her, chittering with laughter. They ran a bitten berry over her lips and slipped satin dancing shoes onto her feet. Then they led her from the room, down the hall, to an unfamiliar stair.

  Its steps were polished stone, descending past walls hung with paintings rich as marzipan, where ladies danced in gilded rooms and gentlemen hunted in jeweled forests. Isobel walked down and down, until her feet ached and the stairs ended at last in the middle of a rambling moor covered thickly with snow.

  There was no sky here, but a roof of earth, heavy coils of roots running through it. Moths larger than men perched on the roots with their wings open wide, casting a delicate glow. In the distance stood a house with lights shining through every window, and before it a grove of gold and silver trees. A masked figure waited beneath each tree, limbs too long and fingers hidden in dark gloves. Above their masks, each painted with a man’s face, stood wiry gray wolf ears. The nearest bowed to Isobel and offered his hand.

  I am dreaming, she told herself as she took it. I am fast asleep.

  The wolf-eared dancers spun her about the grove, passing her from one to the next. The snow bloomed red as her slippers shredded and her bare feet bloodied themselves on the points of fallen leaves. Snowflakes fell from the metal trees, clotting in her lashes and melting on her tongue.

  Dizzy with dancing and the pain in her feet, Isobel caught herself against the chest of a figure taller than the rest. The eyes behind his mask were amber around a dull black pupil, his ears tawny as a cat’s. His arms came around her, gloved fingers pressing bruises into the small of her back. The scent of him was old bedclothes and vetiver.

  Beneath the drifting snowflakes, bathed in pale mothlight, they danced. After a time he dipped his mouth to her ear.

  “What heartbreak are you running from, that you’ve found your way to me? Happy women do not walk beneath the stairwell.”

  His voice made every part of her prickle with cold caution. “My heartbreak is not so great,” she said faintly. “When I wake from this dream, it will be half healed.”

  The lion-eyed figure laughed, an awful rumble that ran below his skin and caught behind the unyielding smile of his mask. “Do you pretend even now that you’re sleeping? Here, let me wake you up.”

  Pain burst in her back, ten fine points of it, as he flexed fierce claws that stabbed and retreated. She gasped and staggered, and would have fallen if he did not hold her up, still turning, still moving her body through the dance.

  “I think we understand each other now,” he murmured. “So hear this. All you see beneath the stairwell belongs to me, every stone and stick of it. Passing into my lands is free. It’s leaving them that comes with a cost.”

  It took Isobel
three tries to catch her breath. “What cost?”

  “Your hand in marriage.”

  “A high toll for one dance.”

  “Be patient, my unhappy love. We’ll do more than dance on our wedding night.”

  He spun her once more about his moth-lit dreamland, his trap baited with tales of the Wicked Wife. When he let her go, she stumbled to her knees, looking up at his shape traced against the earthen sky.

  His voice mocked her as he turned away. “Hurry, my love, back to your maiden’s bed. I’ll claim you one year hence, when the winter’s first snow falls.”

  The wolf-men were gone, and the fox-eared girls in their yellow clothes. Far overhead, the moths swooped like bats through the growing dark. The shining form of the Wicked Wife reappeared among the trees to hurry Isobel along, through the grove, over the moor, up and up the stairs.

  Pain glittered in her back and feet. The ghost’s nearness chilled her; she felt half sick with cold when at last they reached the threshold of home. Her room was dark and smelled of ashes, and her sisters were lost to different dreams, that made them cry out in their sleep.

  She fell into bed, her head a wilderness of briars and mothlight and masked men. The Wicked Wife lingered beside her, a shape almost lost in the brightening dark.

  Through a scrim of exhaustion, Isobel spoke.

  “What manner of monster are you, to lead me to that place?”

  The dead bride drifted a while before speaking. “One made by the acts of men.”

  “I won’t marry him,” the girl murmured, already halfway to sleep.

  “You will,” the ghost replied. “We always do.”

  She stayed for a time, as Isobel slept.

  Poor girl, she sighed. Poor girl, poor girl.

  Perhaps she was speaking of herself.

  * * *

  In the morning the youngest sister boasted of the rich man she’d met in her dreams. The middle sister spoke more quietly, of her husband-to-be’s handsome face and strong arms. When it was Isobel’s turn, she told her sisters her sleep had been dreamless.

  “I suppose you’ll never marry,” said the youngest, her face soft with pity.

  Isobel curled bloody toes beneath her blankets. Fiercely, she wished it to be true.

  * * *

  Isobel burned the satin slippers. Her battered feet reknit themselves. But she could not forgive herself so easily. She was an eldest sister, and still she’d gotten herself caught in some creature’s net.

  Away from the world beneath the stairwell, she began to calculate. She’d given no promises, she told herself. She’d eaten nothing, kissed no one. All she’d done was dance.

  But all that winter, the grove and the suitor’s threats held her in their grip. Her sleep was unsettled, opaque. She could not descend the stairs without an ache in her feet and a rising dread. She found herself misplacing things: a copper thimble, a bracelet of braided metal. A blue glove embroidered with darker blue forget-me-nots.

  Her distraction lasted until spring. The season’s first green breath brought her back to herself, infected her with an appetite for open air. Perhaps, she ventured to hope, her night beneath the stairwell had never really happened. The Wicked Wife was just a tale, after all.

  Then her youngest sister came home from a dinner party with flushed cheeks. She gathered her sisters close and revealed that she’d met him, the man from her dream. She’d known him at once. He was as rich and handsome as she remembered, and he’d spent the entire evening by her side.

  The next day the man presented himself, speaking to their father before putting a ring on the girl’s hand. Isobel blanched, and smiled, and congratulated her sister.

  Soon after that, the middle sister spied the man she’d seen in dreams at a market day. He wrapped her finger in a flower stem and promised a ring would come.

  Isobel wished her well in a voice frail as paper. And when she could manage it, she slipped away, back to the abandoned garden where briars grew over the grave of the Wicked Wife.

  She paced among them, catching her skirts on their teeth and disturbing the bees. She was in danger, or she was a fool. She was cursed, or she was hunted by nothing but a night of dark dreaming. With one foot she walked a solid path, while the other trod in nightmare. She did not know which to believe in.

  Nothing for it but to take the knife from her boot, let it bite her finger, and watch her blood drop onto the briar.

  What a fool I’ve become, she lamented, to court a phantom twice.

  But her sleep that night was dreamless, as deep and dark as the sea. She rose from it with aching eyes.

  On the pillow beside her lay a wooden mask. It was carved from oak, its painted tiger stripes garish in the sun. Softly she lifted the thing, feeling its clumsy weight. Then she tossed it onto the fire.

  It was better to know, she told herself, as the flames washed it to ash. Better than to waste her time in wondering.

  Her youngest sister’s wedding was set for the very start of summer. When she woke that day, Isobel set her troubles aside. Tomorrow she would worry and scheme. Today she would smile and weep only happy tears. She would dress in green satin and lay a wreath of hellebore in her hair.

  She was watching the wedding party with a pinned-on smile when a young man approached her. He was a cousin of the groom, with the same warm eyes and green-rinsed hair; she’d heard it said that their mothers’ mother had been scooped by her husband from the sea.

  He held out a hand. “Will you dance?”

  Isobel hadn’t danced since the night her broken feet painted roses over the snow. But she let him lead her into the crowd, counting her quickening breaths as they spun. Smiling back when he pulled a blossom from her hair and kissed it. Laughing when he lifted her in tandem with the other dancers, his hands on her waist light as water.

  She danced with him a second time, a third. I could do it, she thought. Letting him brush his lips over her fingers, then her palm, then her mouth. It would be no hardship to let this man win her. He was finely made, he stood solid on the earth. And he could protect her from other entanglements. When the suitor from below the stairwell came to claim her, she would show him another man’s ring on her finger. No one need know she’d nearly been tricked into giving herself away.

  All went as she hoped. The young man visited her the day after the wedding, and every day after that. He was the son of a shipwright, with a quick laugh and gentle manners, easy to like. When he asked for her hand, she gave it to him gladly, feeling her neck slip free of the noose.

  In her father’s hall they toasted the engagement. Late that night, tipsy and triumphant, she ascended the stairs alone.

  Did she imagine the shadows that lay drift-deep beneath each step? Were there more stairs than there ought to be, carrying her up and up until, panting, she reached the landing at last?

  In her room she moved quickly to the mirror, finding in it her hand and its engagement ring. Her breathing settled as she looked at the ring’s reflection, lifting her fingers to admire its light.

  Inside the mirror’s watery oval, the stone wriggled from its setting. It shuddered and stretched damp wings, becoming a pale moth that rose to tangle itself in her hair.

  When her mother rushed in, drawn by Isobel’s screams, she found her daughter doubled over, clawing at her head. There was nothing there that the older woman could see. The engagement ring shone, unchanged, from her daughter’s finger.

  * * *

  Isobel told her betrothed they must be married at once. That very day. He said it was impossible: he and his father must sail down the coast to deliver a ship to a king. He would travel home on horseback, in time for them to be wed before winter.

  “Return to me before the first snow falls,” she told him, “or it will go badly for us.”

  He smiled to soothe her worries, kissed her, and went away. In the quiet left by his absence she discovered he was more than an escape from a tightening knot: she had come to love him.

  But her
love was harried by the suitor below the stairs. Unseen hands left moldering roses on her pillow. The ivory skeleton of a songbird appeared in pieces at the bottom of her soup bowl. One night she woke to the sound of hissing laughter and the phantom feeling of fingers on her skin, and found a necklace of woven metal branches wrapped tightly around her throat.

  She suffered without speaking and her family smiled to see it, calling her lovesick.

  Summer ripened, then rotted. The heat broke and it was autumn. With the new season came a dead weasel at the foot of her bed, its long body wrapped in white satin. A fox’s paw in her left dancing shoe. She disposed of the weasel, threw the paw on the fire. The leaves crackled into sunburn colors and the preparations for her wedding to the shipwright’s son heightened. On the day her bridal dress was delivered, a rat’s gray pelt fell from its folds.

  At last she received word from her betrothed that he was on his way home. Business had gone better than expected, and they could be married without delay.

  It was autumn still. Late autumn but warm, the skies clear and freckled with the falling bodies of leaves. She would marry her love before the snow fell, and be safe.

  Their wedding day dawned pale. The clouds’ bellies hung low and the breezes blew cold. Isobel’s mother lit lamps, chiding her daughter for standing at the window watching the sky.

  The wedding guests arrived and Isobel was dressed in white lace, made to move among them. Whenever she could, she looked out at the yard. It was nearly dark when her fiancé arrived on the back of a steaming horse. She ran to him, her dress dragging behind her.

  Muddy-hemmed and panting, she reached up to seize his hands. Before they could touch, the clouds gave way, letting fall the winter’s first snow.

  Quickly, quickly. Isobel pulled him through the yard, into the house, past their drunken guests. He was laughing at first, then not, as she led him to the judge, who sat with a wineglass in one hand and a cake plate on his knee.

  “Marry us,” she told him.