Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  “Yes,” the witch said softly. “I will save my tears, and weep for you once you’ve heard what I ask for.” She took from a chest a little knife, its enameled handle set with red apples, and a glimmering metal bowl.

  “Tomorrow night, when the moon is high, you will take this dagger and cut out your tongue. Collect the organ and all its blood inside this silver basin, then bring it to me. I’ll simmer the thing by moonlight, over a peat fire, and you’ll eat it from root to tip. Once that has been done, the signs of pregnancy will come quickly. By season’s turning, you’ll have your child.”

  The queen looked at the witch awhile in silence, considering her price. The violence of it, of her own hand being set to it. But she could do it, she thought. So long as she did not lose her grip.

  “Yes,” she told the witch. “I will.”

  Under advancing dawn she rode back to her retinue, lay as if sleeping among them, and waited for their drowsy awakening. The party rode on to her parents’ palace, where they were received with celebration. She pretended relief at her father’s being well, and spent the day visiting with her mother and sisters. When the palace was asleep she took the witch’s dagger and basin into her father’s courtyard and made ready to cut out her tongue.

  She tried, and tried again. But her hand and her nerve failed her. Finally, weeping at her own cowardice, she lit on a deception. From an old dress she cut a length of red velvet. The cloth grew lively as she cut, writhing under the bite of the witch’s enchanted dagger. The queen stuffed it with sawdust and sewed it into the shape of a tongue. Then she slashed the inside of her elbow and let her blood fall into the basin until the velvet tongue was soaked through.

  It was only her blood the witch truly needed, she told herself. The old woman meant to make a fool of the queen.

  Mouth shut tight, she delivered to the witch the bloody basin. The old woman did as she had promised, cooking the false organ over a fragrant fire. Quickly the queen swallowed it down, eager for the whole business to be finished.

  At once she felt a thump in her belly, as of something dropped with force. She pressed a hand to the place and smiled with closed lips.

  The witch smiled, too. “Good fortune to you, highness. May you get the child you paid for.”

  * * *

  For a time the queen did not open her mouth but when she was alone. She did not speak or sing or eat in company, or part her lips beneath her husband’s. She dared not risk the witch hearing of her treachery.

  But as her stomach ripened, she forgot to be cautious. She had paid for her baby in blood; why pay a second time in silence? Now she spoke and drank watered wine and spent long hours with the king imagining their child’s bright future. The queen was always happy in those days, though sometimes she thought it unusual the way her baby moved in her. Other women spoke of their children kicking and swimming and turning about. Hers seemed instead to twitch, to wetly slither.

  She did not linger too long over these thoughts. Already she loved her child fiercely.

  Her time came, and the king paced outside the door. All went as it should until the queen began to push.

  The baby’s hands came first, reaching blindly from her womb. Beneath the midwife’s watering eyes, it pulled its body after.

  The queen wore rings on every finger. Jewels winked from her ears and throat. When she saw the nature of the thing she had birthed, she stripped her hands, her neck, her earlobes and wrists. She split the riches between the ashen midwife and her assistant. Knowing that might not be enough, she whispered promises of what would become of them if they spoke a word about what they’d seen. Of the dreadful things she, a queen raised in a kingdom of magic, could do.

  That done, the queen held her baby close. It was long and thin, its sawdust weight lopsided in her hands. Its eyes were wood-knot whorls, oddly alert, and its skin was velvet. She began to nurse it, not at her breast, but on blood from her bitten tongue. As the creature lapped up the stuff, its skin grew fleshlike, its gaze almost indistinguishable from a real child’s.

  The queen knew enough of magic to know the effect would fade. The child must be fed regularly, and in secret. She would gladly give every drop of blood in her body to keep it safe and close. It was her only child.

  She bade the midwife open the door, so the king might meet his son.

  * * *

  The queen was slow to recover. With his own hands her husband fed her bone broths and bloody cuts of meat, candied nuts and the furred halves of peaches. Still she was wan and weak, crooning over her baby, tucked in bed with it at all hours. The king had the sense, half-formed, that the child was to blame for her somnolence: his wife would not hear of separating from it for any length of time.

  But she could not refuse her husband when he begged her to try, at least, to leave her bed. To put the baby in its cradle and lean on his arm. Dizzily she stood. No sooner was she upright than she swayed and stumbled, and fell to the ground.

  When the queen regained her senses, she was tucked in bed. Her child was no longer in the room.

  “It’s for your own good,” the king said soothingly. “Our son is strong, he weakens you. He’ll have a wet nurse until you’re well again.”

  An hour later, the king’s blood still red beneath her nails, the queen lay in a poppy-induced sleep. Her husband walked through the palace unseeing, his wife’s screams echoing in his ears. The red tunnels her fingers had dug glistened freshly over his cheeks.

  She was sunk beyond screaming now, but somewhere, across the palace, another voice cried out. That of a nursemaid who’d peered at the child in its cradle.

  * * *

  Without the queen’s blood, her baby’s eyes lost their living shine. While she slept, the grain of its skin softened back to velvet. The thing the king called son was now just as it had been when it dragged itself from the queen’s womb: a velvet poppet with wooden eyes, stuffed with sawdust. His horror of the thing was more vicious for having curdled from love.

  When the queen woke in a cold room, her husband was beside her. Though he heard the change in her breath, from sleeping to awake to afraid, he did not lift his head.

  “What punishment would you recommend,” he said at last, “for a wife who deceives her husband? Who defies and deceives and defiles. Whose dark arts stain his person and his crown and that which he cherishes most. What punishment has such a woman earned?”

  Her child was dead, or whatever passed for dead when applied to a thing that was never truly living. The queen could feel that it was gone, undone, its small strange place in the world scratched out. In a voice that was pitiless, she answered her husband.

  “You must take a barrel and drive one hundred nails through it. The wife must be stripped naked and placed inside the barrel, and its lid pounded tight. The barrel should then be rolled through the kingdom with the wife inside it, to the place where a bonfire waits to swallow her.”

  The king did not seem to hear her.

  “Banishment,” he said. “That will be her punishment.”

  * * *

  The queen who was no longer a queen was delivered to the end of her husband’s kingdom, where a wall of thorns and roses once grew. There they left her, a single man staying behind to make sure she didn’t reenter the kingdom. He watched as she walked away from the road that led to her parents’ palace, into the wild woods that belonged to no king. He kept his eyes on her back until she was lost among them.

  The queen, whom we must now call the Mother, still had the witch’s apple-handled dagger. She knew from cutting the velvet that made the false tongue, that made the false child, that the dagger had some measure of life-giving properties. She comforted herself through her days of grief and exile by using it to make all manner of things into children: cut flowers that spun their petals at her after she sliced through their stems, wood carved into babyish shapes that wriggled over her hands. As she had done with her child, she could make the life in these objects last longer by feeding them on her blood, but alw
ays their capering turned at last to stillness.

  Some months after her banishment, the Mother sat in solitude in the crude shelter she’d built herself, whittling and weeping and singing a cradle song. She heard something shuffling through the trees and waited to see what might present itself. Death, her heart whispered, a prayer of longing.

  It was two children who broke at last from the woods, their faces filthy and striped with tears. Brothers, abandoned by their own parents, they’d heard the Mother singing and drew too close.

  She dropped her dagger and held out her hands.

  * * *

  Mother took them in. The boys built for her a new shelter, a sturdy, beautiful cottage. They taught her things a queen doesn’t know. Which plants to eat, where to set your traps, how to boil hickory root into salt. She sang to them and told them tales of kings and queens, and at night she kissed their cheeks and locked their door against the dark. The three lived happily for a time, until the night came when her sons discussed their plans.

  “I’d like to have a farm one day,” the older boy said. “As our father did before he lost it.”

  Mother was whittling with her little dagger; now her hands went still. “Would you go so far from the woods?” she said faintly.

  “I wish to go even farther,” said the younger boy, stoutly. “I wish to spend my life at sea.”

  She listened to them, knuckles whitening around the handle of her dagger. The firelight painted their faces with unfamiliar shadows, and they seemed suddenly to be strangers.

  No, she decided. They would not leave her. They would not go away. It wouldn’t do for her to lose her children.

  All the next day she doted on her sons, holding them close and feeding them good things, laying her hands on them whenever they were near. Despite the sweetness of her attentions the boys were uneasy. They shifted and slunk like animals before a storm, and couldn’t put a name to their fears.

  When the sun went down she bade them lie with their heads in her lap. They looked swiftly at each other, but still they did it, their hair tangling over her knees as she sang the lullaby that once lured them from the woods. When their eyes fell shut she kissed them on their temples and mouths. They could taste her intentions in the salt of her tears, but it was too late. With her dagger, made of magic and sharper than most, she severed their heads from their necks.

  As quickly as their own life left them, their bodies were animated by the borrowed life of the magic dagger. It made their viscera unpack itself, it made their bones lament and sing. And the Mother’s heart sang with them, because she saw she had been right. Her children would not leave her now, they would always be with her. She strung their bones into windchimes that filled her little clearing with the music of their wistful voices.

  So it went. There are always lost children, and woods to hide them, and the Mother waiting in her cottage with a smile on her lips. And if rumors of her reach the villages that grow beyond the trees, they are told in twisted whispers.

  There’s a woman in the woods who longs for children. There’s a house hung with singing bones. Do not sleep with your window open at night, lest they sing you away from home.

  * * *

  The bones fall silent. You stand alone in the darkest part of the night. Far behind you is your room, your bed, your life, all so distant they might as well be dreams.

  The door to the cottage is opening now, letting out sweet smells and firelight and a woman so beautiful you forget the bones’ tale. Her white dress, her black hair. Her smile so soft and inviting. A mother’s smile.

  She runs a hand over her bone chimes to make them sing, and reaches the other out to you.

  “Won’t you come closer?” says the Mother. “Won’t you come in?”

  TWICE-KILLED KATHERINE

  An enchanter lived in a house with rooms beyond counting, in the shadow of an ancient oak. He had a string of wives behind him and as many children as his house had doors, because when he was young he’d learned the secret of long life. Using sweet smoke and words stolen from a witch, he’d coaxed his own death from his body, hidden it in an acorn, and buried the acorn below his window. The branches of the oak that rose from the acorn still tapped against the glass, but the wise old face in the tree’s trunk that once spoke to him had long ago gone quiet.

  The enchanter, rich and as handsome as he’d been when he seduced the witch who gave up the words, had no shortage of wives when he wanted them. His latest was beautiful and young and prouder than he’d given her credit for, with a will nearly as strong as his own. She was determined he would end his dalliances with the servants and in town, and fixed her heart on making his life a misery if he didn’t. And so, when the stable master’s wife told the enchanter she was carrying his child, he was set on keeping it a secret.

  After receiving word that the midwife had come to the stable master’s cottage, the enchanter dispatched the raven that was his familiar to stand watch at the window. The laboring woman saw the black bird peering in and was afraid, for herself and the child she carried. When the baby came it was red-haired and blue-eyed, with a hard chin and blade-cut mouth, every inch the enchanter’s child. But the stable master’s hair was ruddy enough, and a purse of gold convinced him to accept the girl as his own.

  She was called Katherine, and she grew up in solitude. Her mother resented being closeted with a baby in their crude quarters, and the stable master didn’t care for children. Katherine would have been lonely had she not learned, early on, that she had a powerful affinity for growing things. She gave flowers new ambitions, convincing them to creep free of their beds and up around her windowsill. She coaxed a bounty from her mother’s mean kitchen garden and made the grass around their door grow thick and high, never suspecting she was drawing from the slipstream of magic that ran in her blood.

  But she was always fascinated by the enchanter’s oak tree. His servants knew without being told that the oak was not to be disturbed, never pruned nor otherwise tended. Even its shade was shunned, having an unsettling texture to it, that of something you could peel back and fold or step into and be lost completely.

  Katherine did not share their fears. When she was old enough to crawl, she crawled toward the tree. When she learned to run, she ran to it. Her miserable mother always caught her, until Katherine grew old enough to care for herself and her mother gave up trying.

  “Go,” she said, “and curse yourself if you wish. Let the old tree swallow you, or the ground, for all I care. Let the enchanter himself find you and beat you, if it teaches you at last to be still.”

  Katherine took her mother’s abuse in silence, as she always did, waited till the woman wasn’t looking, and fled to the tree. Over the creek, past the stables, through the enchanter’s gardens, to where its shadow spread over the grass like a pool of black water. It was cool and dark and slightly binding, clinging to her skin. She laid a hand on its bark and felt it grow keen beneath her fingers. It was the same feeling she had when making a tomato plant grow out of season, or convincing a bush that bore only leaves to bud with flowers.

  She put a foot on the trunk and settled her fingers in its furrows. She began to climb.

  * * *

  Though the enchanter’s body was young, his mind was old beyond reckoning. He looked sometimes at the age-twisted oak and marveled that he’d known it when it was a dream inside an acorn. His mind still ran like quicksilver, still sparked like water over rocks in sun, still wondered and lusted and questioned and raged, but sometimes when he looked at the tree’s scarred trunk he felt very old indeed.

  It was one such time when, gazing into the oak’s shifting leaves, the enchanter saw another face peeping out at him. It was sharp and fearless and a cunning kind of quiet. It looked just like his own. Having long forgotten about the stable master’s wife and his little red-haired by-blow, the enchanter was startled, a thing he very rarely was.

  “Who are you?” he asked, in a voice that sounded less than commanding. “Are you my death
returned?”

  The creature in the tree said nothing.

  “Do you come to remind me of my own mortality?” he said. “Go back, feed the oak, and be patient. I have much work to do before I have need of you.”

  Katherine watched him in startled silence, and he might have turned away still believing her to be his long-deferred death, having crept up out of the acorn to glare at him. But just then she lost her footing. As she clung to the branches, her face colored with surprise, and he realized she was no uncanny thing, but a child. And he remembered the baby who had looked at him with such composure more than a decade ago, when he went to strike a deal with the cuckolded stable master. In one motion, he lunged over the windowsill—his body stretching unnaturally, arms long as branches—and pulled the girl into his house.

  * * *

  Katherine knew when to be quiet. She knew how to stand very still, so she no more caught the eye than a footstool did, and if she were to be kicked or slapped, it would be with the impersonal violence enacted upon an inanimate thing.

  She stood before the enchanter, in his rough brown robe with its sleeves pushed up and the raven on his shoulder. His face was so exactly like her own that it answered a question she’d never thought to ask.

  “Are you not afraid of my tree?”

  His voice was stern, but she sensed he was pleased by the notion. She shook her head.

  “They say the touch of its shade will flatten you like a flower and deliver you straight to Death. They say the nod of my head could flay you where you stand, that my voice alone is deadlier than a goblin’s kiss. Are you unafraid, or just foolish? Do you not believe what they say about me?”