by Irene Gallo
But I did resist. The Matronit lent me strength and I directed it, meeting Herr Geiger’s magic with my own, stopping his will in its tracks.
I stood up. “Alas, Herr Geiger. I regret that I cannot give you cause to hope. But my loyalty to one who is now gone prevents it. I will care for Eva faithfully, but to you I must never be any more than your daughter’s nurse.”
He gazed at me in wonder. I spared a thought for the late Konstanze, and wondered if she had been tricked into marriage by such a request, if she had mistaken his desires and magical compulsions for her own inclinations.
“Good night, Herr Geiger.” I walked out of the room and left him staring after me, eyes wide.
* * *
The following morning I took time during Eva’s morning nap to bake cakes for the Matronit. I stayed in the kitchen as much as possible, trying to avoid Herr Geiger’s eyes. I suppose it had been many years since anybody had been able to refuse him a direct request. I did not care to encounter his scrutiny.
But I could not avoid it forever. I became aware of … how shall I put this … his eyes upon me. And he took to accosting me without warning and asking me to do things. I acceded, but when he would ask for a kiss, I would not, and then his curiosity would redouble.
“When?” I pled with the Matronit. “When? I cannot stay near this man much longer, Mother. When will you be strong enough?”
Soon, she replied. But every time you must refuse a request of his, my power is depleted. Are you so sure you will not—
“I am sure,” I told her. “I will not endure the touch of his lips. Not now. Not ever.”
* * *
One morning, a month later, she said tonight.
* * *
I devoted myself to Eva that day as if I would never see her again, for I did not believe I would. I could not take a Christian baby, not after all the lies told about us. This is not a thing we do, stealing children.
But did Eva not belong to me? By love if not by right? Her face lit up when I picked her up from her cradle in the morning, and when she was fretful, only I could calm her. She laughed at my games and clung to me with both her fists whenever someone else tried to hold her. Even her father.
I did not like to think of what would become of her with the rest of Dornburg dead. For I could not kill an infant, not an infant. I am not a monster.
But how could I take her?
* * *
Eva became drowsy at dusk, and I cuddled her and sang her to sleep as gently as I could. After she fell asleep in my arms, I curled myself around her and napped, drifting in and out of sleep. I felt at peace; I felt that all the world had fallen away, and only Eva and I remained, coiled together in love.
The clock at the center of town tolled midnight. I shifted, but did not rouse myself. I did not want to leave Eva. I wanted only to have her in my arms forever.
Rise! The Matronit’s voice was mighty, implacable, and I was instantly fully awake. The time is now.
I sat up and reluctantly pulled away from Eva’s small body. She stretched out an arm, looking for me in her sleep, but was otherwise undisturbed.
I had been ready, I think, for a decade.
* * *
First I went to Herr Geiger’s study and collected his fiddle and his blowpipe. Then I silently left the house. The judge who had ordered my father’s death had been an old man then, I had learned over the months. He had died not long after. But the mayor and the hangman, they were still in the prime of life. The hangman had several children and a lovely house, some distance from the other homes, it’s true, for nobody loves a scharfrichter, but nonetheless, he had a good life, and was respected if not celebrated. I walked to his home by moonlight, my cloak wrapped tightly around me. Standing outside his house, the Matronit told me to shut my eyes, and when I did, she granted me a vision.
The scharfrichter, Franz Schmidt, and his wife, Adelheide, were sleeping in their shared bed. All was peaceful.
What is your desire? asked the Matronit.
“Give him a dream,” I told her. “Can you do that?”
But of course.
“Give him a dream. He is in chains, being led to the scaffold. He is innocent of any crime, but nonetheless, the faces of the crowd are filled with hatred. He thinks of his wife, his children, and how they will long for him, grow old without him. The noose is fitted around his neck and he finds his tongue, pleads for mercy, but the judge and the crowd only laugh. The platform drops out from under him, but the rope is not weighted correctly, and instead of his neck breaking instantly, he is slowly strangling, dancing in air. Oh, how he dances!”
The vision the Matronit granted me changed—Schmidt is twisting and turning in bed, unable to wake, unable to breathe. His face is pained and panicked.
I waited, wondering if I would feel pity, or remorse, or forgiveness. I felt none.
“Stop his heart,” I said.
Schmidt convulses once, and then is still. His wife has never moved.
I then went to the house of the Bürgermeister.
* * *
Strangely calm, I returned home; I returned to the house of Herr Geiger.
Herr Geiger awoke to find me seated on a chair at the foot of his bed. “Jutta?” he yawned, all confusion. “What are you doing here?”
I did not answer. Instead, I brought the blowpipe out of my pocket and snapped it in two.
“Jutta! What are you doing?”
I then smashed the fiddle against his bedpost. It was nothing, then, but shattered splinters and catgut. I threw it to the ground.
“Jutta!” Herr Geiger was on his feet, looming in front of me, grabbing my shoulders. “Do you know what you have done?”
Still I did not answer. My braids undid themselves and my hair, my true black hair, stretched out toward the fiddler, becoming thorn-covered vines. He shrieked and tried to back away, but my vines caught his arms and legs, lifted him into the air, and there was nobody to hear his shrieks except Eva, who awoke and began crying in the other room. The maid and the cook came in daily, but lived with their own families.
I stood.
My vines twined ever tighter around his arms and legs, and blood ran down his body freely as the thorns dug through his skin. He twisted in pain, trying to wrench himself free, but succeeded only in digging the thorns in more deeply. My vines suspended him in the air in front of me, and I watched his struggles dispassionately. They did not bring me pleasure, but neither did they move me to pity or compassion.
“Why, Jutta?” he gasped.
“My name is Itte,” I told him. Then I spoke to the Matronit. “Let him see my true face.” I watched his eyes as my disguise melted away and my own features showed forth.
“You killed my father,” I told him. “Ten years ago, you killed him. For ten years, I have missed his embrace and smile. And never will I see them again.”
“Jewess!” he spat.
“Yes,” I agreed.
The vines grew further, wrapping themselves along his trunk, and they began burrowing into his flesh. He screamed.
“Did my father scream like that?” I asked him. “Did he scream when you made him dance in thorns?”
Eva continued to cry.
“Please, Jutta, spare me!”
Again, I could feel the force of his request marching through my body. The Matronit was channeling all her strength into the vines of my hair. I had only my own resolve with which to meet his power, but that power had been weakened by my breaking the blowpipe and the fiddle, for all things are more powerful in threes. I met his will with my own.
“For Eva’s sake, spare me!”
I stared into his eyes. “You know nothing of Eva! Do you know which solid foods she can stomach, and which she cannot? Do you know on which day she began to crawl? Does she even babble your name?”
I thought of my father, swinging me through the air, patching my dolly, cuddling me to sleep, and I thought of him exhausted, breathless, limbs burning like fire, skin torn, conf
essing to crimes he had never committed, knowing he would never see me nor my brothers nor my mother again, and my resolve strengthened.
“I will not spare you, Herr Geiger,” I said. A new vine formed from another lock of my hair, and even as he gibbered in terror, it wrapped itself around his throat.
“Eva—” he began.
“Eva is mine,” I told him. “You destroyed my family. I will take her and make a new one.”
At my nod, the vine gave one jerk, and snapped his neck.
The vines let him fall, and they began shrinking and turning back into my plain black hair, which replaited itself. I took one final look down at what had been Herr Geiger. Then I nodded again, and turned and ran to Eva.
As soon as she caught sight of my face, she stopped crying, and she beamed at me through her tears and held out her arms. I picked her up and began to soothe her. I changed her cloth, for she had wet herself, and nursed her back to sleep.
“I am taking her with me,” I told the Matronit as I threw my belongings into my sack. “I do not care what is said about us. I will not leave her here to be raised by strangers, to be taught to hate Jews.”
It would be a terrible thing to do to a Jewish infant, said the Matronit.
I paused. “She is not Jewish.”
She is the child of a Jewish mother.
“Konstanze was Jewish?” I asked.
No. Konstanze is not her only mother.
“She is not my daughter.”
She is. Your milk gave her life. She knows she is your daughter.
“Why did she not cry when I picked her up?” I asked. “She has not seen my true face before, only my disguise.”
She has never seen any face but your true one, the Matronit said. She knows you. She knows your face. She knows you are her mother.
I had finished packing. I picked up Eva and she opened her eyes to peer drowsily at me. She smiled, nestled her head against my chest, and fell back asleep. I tied her to me, picked up my sack, and left Herr Geiger’s home with my daughter.
* * *
Outside the town walls, I stood and watched as bushes and vines of thorns grew. They blocked the gate and rose to enclose Dornburg.
“What will happen to the townspeople?” I asked the Matronit.
They will wake tomorrow to find the sun blotted out, the sky replaced by a ceiling of thorns, and no way out of the eternal night their town has become. The sun will not shine. The crops will fail. No traders will be able to penetrate the thorns. They will starve.
I watched for a while longer, and found myself troubled. I could not shake from my mind the memory of the grin the little boy had given me on my first day in Dornburg. Apparently I had some pity, some compassion after all.
“Is this just?” I asked. “To destroy the lives of children for what their elders have done before they were born?”
The vines paused in their growth.
Do you question me?
“I do,” I said. “Children are powerless. Is this divine retribution, to murder the helpless? I do not wish it. Matronit, you should not do this.”
The Matronit was silent. And then—Very well. I will spare the children. You may take them away to safety.
I remembered an old story, of a man in a many-colored suit leading away the children of Hamelin. But is this what I wanted? To take charge of a town’s worth of children who by the age of six were already playing at killing my people?
“No,” I said. “What you suggest is impossible. How should I do such a thing? And is it mercy to take children from the only love they have ever known, to make them wander the earth without family? Without home? Is this kindness?”
What do you suggest? The Matronit did not seem pleased with me.
I thought again, looking at the thorn-vines. “I know another story,” I said. “Of a princess asleep in a tower, and a forest of thorns sprung up around her.”
And this is your vengeance? asked the Matronit. Sleep for a hundred years? They will sleep and wake and your people will still be suffering.
“No,” I agreed. “A hundred years will not suffice. But … let them sleep … let them sleep…” I thought of what the Matronit had shown me of the future. “Let them sleep until their loathing for my people, Matronit, for your children, is only a curiosity, an absurdity, a poor joke. Let them sleep until they are only antiquities, laughingstocks. Let them sleep until Hesse—and all the lands that surround it—are safe for the Jews.”
The Matronit was silent once more.
“Will that suffice?” I prodded her.
That will be a long time, my daughter.
“Yes,” I agreed.
That … will suffice. They will sleep until realms of this land—all this land, all Europe—are safe for the Jews. And you are satisfied? This is different enough from death?
I struggled to explain. “If they do not wake … if they cannot wake … it will be only their fellows in hatred who are to blame. Not I.”
I stroked Eva’s head, noticing the darkness growing in at the roots of her hair. “Will you guide us, Matronit? Will you guide my footsteps?”
I will guide you. I will guide you to Worms, where you will see and speak with your Uncle Leyb and Elias, and then you shall take them with you to London.
“London?” I asked, surprised.
London is open to my children once again. And there will be no pogroms there, not in your lifetime. Nor your daughter’s. Nor your daughter’s children’s, and their children’s after them. I will guide you to London, and then I must depart. But you will keep my rites, daughter. Keep my rites.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I will keep your rites.”
* * *
I stood outside those walls with Eva bound to my chest, my old dolly tucked in next to her, and I carried my pack, which contained only those things I brought with me—I no more steal than my father did—and some of Eva’s necessary items. She is sleeping peacefully, and I can feel the damp warmth of her breath against my neck. No feeling has ever given me greater pleasure.
The vines of thorns had almost reached the top of the town walls when I turned and did what my father had not been allowed to do. I walked away from Dornburg.
VERONICA SCHANOES is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Queens College—CUNY. Her fiction has appeared in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons. Her novella, Burning Girls, published on Tor.com, was a finalist for the Nebula Award. She lives in New York City.
These Deathless Bones
Cassandra Khaw
They call her the Witch Bride, the king’s wild second wife, and there’s only discord between her and the spoiled young prince. Edited by Ellen Datlow.
“You’re not supposed to say that,” the young prince whimpers, looking up from his dinner of sausages and truffle-infused mash, savaged and pearled with the bites he’d drooled out half-chewed. It’s hard to believe he’s eleven. There’s gravy everywhere; practically a gallon of flavorsome beef extract, seasoned with allspice and caramelized onions, a rub of thyme, a bay leaf cooked to gossamer. The new cook spent ages on it. I know. I was there.
“You’re mean! I’m going to tell my daddy that you said all those things! You’re not supposed to say that.” He howls.
I laugh, a little bitterly. There were many things I wasn’t supposed to do, or be. I wasn’t supposed to be someone’s second chance, someone’s happily ever alternate. I wasn’t supposed to be the malevolent stepmother—heartless, soulless, devoid of the natural compassion expected of childbearing women, the instinct to drop everything and coddle needy, whiny little whelps like him.
Actually, I suppose I was meant to be all of those things, but I was also expected to rise above the unflattering stereotypes.
Well, fuck them.
I gesture, a slant of the palm. His attendants, bruise-cheeked and flinching, retreat as one, silent as they pour back through the servant doors. A few hesitate, questions in the bends
of their mouths. All these years and I’ve never once asked to be alone with the little prince, have done everything I could to avoid his company.
Even if some of them might have been suspicious of my intentions, not one gives voice to their misgivings.
At last, the servants are all gone.
“I do hate you, though,” I murmur, striding deeper into the room, my gown rustling across the marble floor. Underneath, I have my riding leathers and my boots, the chestpiece I’d sewn under the watch of the tanner’s sweet son. My first and truest love. His bones are with me still. When he died, I carved his femurs into the handles of my skinning knives, his tibias into ice picks. A knucklebone, I loaded with iron bearings and then sanded into a gleaming die. We became legends, he and I, but that is a separate story.
“I hate you,” I continue. “With everything that I am. I hate your screaming. I loathe your lying, screeching ways. I abhor your crocodile tears, your sly little smiles—oh, don’t think that the adults don’t know. We can tell when you’re putting on a show.”
The little prince lets out a lunatic shriek, slapping his spoon against his palm. Pureed potato, beautifully infused with truffle oil and a lick of mustard, goes everywhere.
“I hate you.” I crouch in front of him. “You have no understanding as to how much. You charmed little prick.”
“I’m going to tell Daddy,” he announces, venomous. The pupils of his eyes are so wide that they almost eclipse his irises, leaving only the barest halo of gold to encircle the dark. In them, I can see myself: fearsome, fearless, furious. “I’m going to let him know that you said mean things to me. I’ll tell him that I hate you. I’ll tell him to get another mommy for me. Then he’ll throw you out and the dogs will eat your bones!”
Another giddy scream of laughter. “New mommy! New mommy! Someone tell Daddy! I want a new mommy!”
“You waste of meat,” I hiss, savoring the sibilance. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
The little prince giggles.
“You’re uglier than my real mommy.”
“And you’re a piece of shit.”
I don’t know why his father chose me. It couldn’t have been for beauty. My sister, ebony-tressed and sublimely sleek-limbed, would have been the superior choice. It couldn’t have been that he was looking for someone tractable. There are storms more accommodating than I, wildfires less inclined towards defiance. For a while, I suspected it was because he was wise to my genealogy, that he could hear my bones whispering to his.