(She was beautiful, beautiful as she had been the first time she came to his window, and if she’d only loved him he’d have left the shards in his heart, stayed clever and cruel until he rotted around them.)
He was frightened of her, and of the place she led him to. When she was gone, he screamed at the ice, and dreamed of her, and lost all sense of cold, and decided that to die wasn’t such a sacrifice. Maybe, long after this, the Queen would cut the shard from his heart, place it on her tongue until it bled white.
It isn’t that he wanted to stay in the palace.
It’s just that he had no hopes of coming home. You forget what you have no hope of.
He recognized Gerda as soon as he saw her.
(She was in a bright jacket; he remembered, all at once, a trellis of red roses.)
He pretended not to, as long he could.
Once, she was quiet for five full breaths, and he waited to see what it meant.
He’d hoped she would leave him behind.
She didn’t let go of his hand, all the long trip home.
(They walked along the reindeer trails for days, Gerda looking at every profile for Meret. Gerda never saw her, but at the village, Meret’s mother, the Laplander woman, had two ponies waiting.)
As they went south, it turned slowly back to summer.
Kay said little, and whenever she took his hand he looked down, as if surprised her skin was warm.
His eyes had lost their color, in the winter palace; now they were pale as glacier ice, and he hardly brought them up to look around the plains where the reindeer had crossed it, to mark the turning season.
The silence grew, and grew, and soon they were under the shadow of the trees, and it was too late.
For those five breaths, deep in the cave with Kay pleading not to go, she had closed her eyes, thought about the plants that make a poison.
The night they reached home, after Kay was sleeping, Gerda crawled out the garret window to cut the roses out at the root.
But though the vines that wrapped the terrace were the same, the red roses were gone.
They had bled all their color. They were white as hellebore, now; white as a palace of ice.
He never asked her what she had done. Maybe he had forgotten the roses. It was just as well.
Red makes you remember things.
When he looks out the kitchen window in the mornings he seems a decade older, but even with a face made of edges, his profile is kinder than it was.
(The Laplander woman had promised; as he wept, the shards of mirror had washed away.)
Gerda had thought his heart would close again, and be whole, but that was her own foolishness. Some things leave hollows behind them no plant in the world will heal, the center burned black.
They let it be.
This is home, and autumn is already going; nothing can be done about it now.
Gerda never saw the Snow Queen. When she reached him, Kay had been a long time alone in the cave of ice.
(She had hoped; she had wanted to see the Queen. It would be worse if he had only dreamed her.)
She’d had to take her sturdy Lapland knife and smash the ice that had wrapped his ankles, before she could even speak to him, before she could ask him to stand, before she could take his hand and lead him home.
He doesn’t remember it, she thinks. She doesn’t know. It would mean asking him.
What’s one more lie, in a gardenful?
They had passed the greenhouse garden, too, as they came home—bursting in its late-summer dress of bright golds and purples and reds.
The Lady of Spring had been working behind the glass, up to her elbows in dirt, picking flowers for a poison.
She was happy. She never raised her eyes from the ground.
Gerda took her hands off the pony’s bridle, clenched them in her lap as if around a little book, until they were well clear.
Kay looked at her, said nothing.
Soon the river turned, and she saw the bridge, and the wisps of smoke from the town, and soon, soon, soon, they were home.
He waits on the main road, off the square.
(He met her at the shop, once; too many mirrors.)
When she appears he leans in and kisses her, lips cold as winter brushing her cheek.
They walk, a little apart, over the bridge.
He looks at the faces the frost makes in the trees; she looks at the bend in the river, like an outstretched arm reaching north.
Ahead of them is the little house; white roses; the rest of a year.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was a Nebula nominee. Her second novel is forthcoming from Atria/Simon & Schuster. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth, and more. Valentine’s nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, The AV Club, Strange Horizons, io9.com, and Weird Tales, and she’s a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk). Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on genevievevalentine.com.
Why fairy tales? She was bitten by that bug early, having devoured the Andrew Lang color fairy books as an impressionable girl. It is why, when asked to give the Andrew Lang lecture in 2012, (past lecturers had included J. R. R. Tolkien, who gave the “On Fairie-Stories” lecture, as well as John Buchan!) she hesitated until told that—as the twenty-second lecturer since 1927, she would be the first woman to do so. At that point she signed on. They had to bring in about a hundred more seats as the hall filled up.
One of the things Jane Yolen enjoys doing is retelling a familiar story from the point of view of an unfamiliar narrator, and “The Spindle’s Tale” is no exception. Here an innocent is coerced into doing an evil deed, and pays the price instead of the powerful enchanter. One might wish to ask if this is meant as a political fable, but Yolen always says, “I tell the story. I leave commentary and exegesis to academics and critics. And if you think I am being disingenuous, then you don’t know me very well! As I wrote at the end of a recent poem: ‘After the soldiers leave the field/Truth stays on, under its own banner.’ ”
The Spinning Wheel’s Tale
Jane Yolen
I worked all my life. Indeed, I worked for every hand that touched me: spinning a thread, spinning a tale, spinning a life. Yet all I am remembered for in this kingdom is the one death that was spun of a witch’s lies.
Blame her, not me, for the hundred years of devastation, the castle waiting while sleep stole breath after breath. Blame her for hedges run riot while gardeners dozed. Blame her for the loss of revenues, avenues, a major highway becoming a byway, a byway a path.
But do not blame me. I only spun what I was held to, did what I was told.
I was always a poor woman’s right hand, the small business base, not something fit for palaces. Yet here I was brought, set into curse and tale. We who are the workers have no say in the production. It is an old story, but a true one.
I remember the acorn, the sprout, the single green leaf. But that never features in this tale. The story begins with spinning, spinning the wheel, spinning the curse, spinning the lies that lie at the heart of a mouth, a castle, a hedge.
And of course it all begins with a witch.
Let us call her Malara. Or Maleficient. Or Maladroit. It is all the same. She was jealous, of course, of her twelve sisters, of her position in the middle of their pack. Not the prettiest, not the fairest, not the smartest, not the sweetest, not the eldest, not the youngest. All those get special mention in any recounting. She was, so she liked to say, the median, the middle, the muddle, and the mess.
Well at least in this she was honest, if in nothing else.
Everything Malara put her hand to was a failure. A wish for a woman’s fecundity produced a litter of babes too small and too early to live, and a blasted womb thereafter. A wish for a garden to produce led straight to a proliferation of weeds the likes of which had never been known in the land. A wish for the early marri
age of a prince turned into an early funeral as well. She did not have a good head for wishing.
But oh, how Malara could curse.
She could cause the dead to rise, pennies on their eyes, and a death rattle in their mouths that went zero to the bone.
She could curse a man to impotence, a cuckold to impudence. She could curse a purse to poverty, a poet to prosody, a singer to a sore throat, and a hangman to his own noose. She could curse a king to catastrophe, a princess to catatonia. She was herself the queen of curses.
No wonder she ceased to be invited to royal births, royal christenings, royal engagements, royal weddings. Even funerals were forbidden to her.
She was left with nothing—nothing to do, nothing to favor—and that led to her to having everything to do with what happened ever after.
Her sisters tried an intervention, tried to teach her the lighter side of magic: how to cause the lame to dance, milk to spring from a maiden’s breast. Tried to insert her as the muse in amusing histories. But as with everything Malara did, things always turned to the worst.
And there it could have stood, with her sisters loving her and wishing to help. With them worrying over her, thinking she’d been damaged somehow, that none of this was her fault.
But when at last they understood how much she reveled in her talent for cursing, even her sisters left her alone.
And that is when she found me and made the last of her curses.
O acorn, that you never had known spring. O oak, that you never had grown limbs. O limbs, that you never were sawn, planed, bended, and bowed. O wheel, that you were never made.
Malara found me in a byre, set aside after a lifetime of use. Her fingers started me awhirl again and I was pleased to be found useful. She tested the spindle, and I was delighted to feel magic. She wound wool through all my parts, and I was thrilled to be spinning anew.
I thought her no more then a solitary crone, for so she presented herself, as if touched by age, humped with it. We limped up to the forbidden tower.
There was such a sense of wonder in her touch I ignored the darkness in it. Stupid old oak.
There was warning in her songs. I thought them full of beauty. Foolish acorn child.
I dreamed that I might be the one to spin straw into gold. Silly old wheel.
Instead of slowing my rotation, instead of tangling the yarn, I held my spindle upright. My wheel made many smooth turnings. I was addled with work, in love with production.
I did not see the world coming to an end.
There was a knock on the door.
A girl fair as morning entered, the sun-gold in her hair all the riches I was ever to see.
“Grandmother,” she said to the witch. “I am here for my lesson.”
Malara smiled and handed her the spindle.
It pierced her finger and all the world spun down.
So why is it I, not the witch, being put to the flame?
Jane Yolen, author of over eighty-five original fairy tales, and over 335 books, is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America—though she wonders (not entirely idly) whether she should really be called the “Hans Jewish Andersen of America.” She has written a lot of fairy tale poetry as well, and has been named both Grand Master of the World Fantasy Convention and Grand Master of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has won two Nebulas for her short stories, and a bunch of other awards, including six honorary doctorates. One of her awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set her good coat on fire, a warning about faunching after shiny things that she has not forgotten.
My lovely green-eyed Mother told me many traditional fairy tales when I was an infant, following these up with her own wily retellings.
The influence of these can be seen in my children’s collection (Princess Hynchatti) published in the 1970s but written by me in the 1960s. In these stories are such things as a prince who falls in love with the witch helping him to win the difficult, task-setting princess, and the prince who drives a swan nearly crazy by repeatedly kissing it—wrongly—sure it is a princess under a spell . . .
Evidently such magical twists still obsess me.
Tanith Lee
Below the Sun Beneath
Tanith Lee
I
Life drove him into death, so it had seemed. It was the choice between dying—or living and causing death, to be corpse or corpse-maker. Perhaps Death’s own dilemma.
He had joined the army of the king because he was starving. Three days without eating had sent him there; little other work that winter. And the war-camp was bursting with food; you could see it from the road: oxen roasting over the big fire and loaves piled high and barrels of ale lined up, all a lush tapestry of red and brown and golden plenty, down in the trampled, white-snowed valley. He had fought his first battle with a full belly, and survived to fill it again and again.
Five years after that. And then another five. Roughly every sixth year, the urge came in him to do something else. But he had mislaid family, and even love. Had given up himself and found this other man that now he had become: Yannis the soldier.
And five years more. And nearly five . . .
The horse kicked and fell on him just as the nineteenth year was turning towards the twentieth. Poor creature, shot with an arrow it was dying, going down, the kick one last instinctive protest, maybe.
But the blow, and the collapsing weight smashed the lower bones in his right leg, and he lost it up to the knee. All but its spirit, which still ached him inside the wooden stump. Yet what more could he expect? He had put himself in the way of violences, and so finally received them.
The army paid him off.
The coins, red and brown, but not golden, lasted two months.
By the maturing of a new winter he was alone again, unemployed and wandering, and for three days he had not eaten anything but grass.
Yannis heard the strange rumour at the inn by the forest’s edge. The innwife had taken pity on him. “My brother lost a leg like you. Proper old cripple he is now,” she had cheerily announced. Yet she gave Yannis a meal and a tin cup of beer. There was a fire as well, and not much custom that evening. “Sleep on a bench, if you want. But best get off before sun-up. My husband’s back tomorrow and if he catches you, we’ll both get the side of his fist.”
As the cold moon rose and the frosts dropped from it like chains to bind the earth, Yannis heard wolves howling along the black avenues of the pine trees.
He dozed later, but then a group of men came in, travellers, he thought. He listened perforce to their talk, making out he could not hear, in case.
“It would seem he’s scared sick of them, afraid to ask. Even to pry.”
“That’s crazy talk. How can he be? He’s a king. And what are they? A bunch of girls. No. There’s more to it than that.”
“Well, Clever Cap, it’s what they say in the town market. And not even that open with it either. He wants to know, but won’t take it on himself. Wants some daft clod to do it for him.”
Yannis, as they fell silent again, willed himself asleep. In the morning, he had to get off fast.
A track ran to the town. On foot and disabled, it took him until noon.
The place was as he had expected, huts and hovel-houses and the only stone buildings crowded round the square with the well, as if they had been herded there for safety. Even so, at his third attempt he got a day’s work hauling stacks of kindling. He slept that night in a barn behind the priest’s house. At sunrise he heard the priest’s servants gossiping.
“It’s Women’s Magic. That’s why he’s afeared.”
“But he’s a king.”
“Won’t matter. Our Master’ll tell you. Some women still keep to the bad old ways. Worse in the city. They’re clever there. Too clever to be Godly.”
Beyond the town was another track. At last an ill-made and raddled road.
He knew by then the city was many more miles of walking-limping. And all the wolfwood round
him and, after sundown, as he crouched by his makeshift fire, the wolves sang their moon-drunk songs to the freezing sky.
On the third day, a magical number he had once or twice been told, he met the old woman. She was out gathering twigs that she threw in a sack over her shoulder, and various plants and wildfruits that she put carefully in a basket in her left hand. Sometimes he noted, as he walked towards her along the path, she changed the basket to her right hand and picked with the left. She was a witch, then, perhaps even knew something about healing. There had been a woman he encountered like that, before, who brewed a drink that stopped his leg aching so much. The medicine was long gone and the full ache had come back.
“Good day, Missus,” he therefore politely said, as he drew level.
She had not glanced up at his approach—that confident then, even with some ragged, burly stranger hobbling up—nor did she now. But she answered.
“Yes, then. I’ve been expecting you, young man. Just give me a moment and I’ll have this done.”
He was well over thirty in years, and no longer reckoned young at all. But she, of course, looked near one hundred: to her the average granddad would be a stripling. And she was expecting him, was she? Oh, that was an old trick. Naturally, nothing could surprise her, given her vast supernatural gifts.
Yannis waited anyway, patiently, only shifting a little now and then to unkink the leg.
Finally she was through, and looked straight up at him.
Her eyes were bright and clear as a girl’s, russet in color like those of a fox.
“This is the bargain,” she said. “Some wood needs chopping, and the hens like a regular feed. You can milk a goat? Yes, I believed you could. These domestic chores you can take off my hands for two or three days. During which time I will teach you two great secrets.”
He stared down at her, quite tickled by her effrontery and her style. She spoke like someone educated, and her voice, like her eyes, was young, younger far than he was. Though her hair was gray and white, there were strands of another color still in it, a faded yellow. Eighty years ago, when she was a woman of twenty, she might well have been a silken, lovely thing. But time, like life and death, was harsh.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 4