Toad Words

by T. Kingfisher

  Thank god for Bluebeard. Otherwise she’d still be at home, dealing with those…those prying harpies. Not a shred of privacy to her name.

  Her husband understood. When she said that she was sick of both of them, that they were appalling, that she would have nothing more to do with either of them, he did not argue. When she burst into furious tears at the end of it, he said “Oh, my dear—” and opened his arms, and she cried into the blue curls of his beard until her nose was red and she looked a fright.

  He had apparently been a very evil man, but not actually a bad one. Althea had spent the last few months trying to get her mind around how such a thing was possible.

  At the end, he’d tried to spare her. She remembered that, when everyone turned on him, when they’d dug up the bones and thrown them into the river.

  Years had passed. Any blue in his beard had long since been replaced by gray. He no longer travelled for business or rode to hounds. Althea herself moved more slowly, and felt the weather in her bones.

  They had not shared a bed for many years, but they were friends. Probably there had been other women, but he was always discreet, and Althea never faulted him. There had certainly not been other women for a number of years, nor other men either.

  They spent evenings in the library. She would read funny passages aloud to him and he would laugh. They played chess. He usually won, but he was a patient teacher and occasionally she surprised him.

  On that last night, he moved restlessly away from the chessboard, rubbing his left arm and gazing out the window.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He turned toward her and grasped her hands, his eyes fierce. “Althea—my love—promise me something.”

  “Anything,” she said. She did not like the pallor of his face, or the way he kept rubbing his arm. “What can I do?”

  “When I die—when I am dead—”

  “Don’t talk like that!”

  “It will happen soon. I was already well-aged when we were wed. I have lasted much longer than I expected, probably because of you, my dear. But it will happen. I can hear Death tapping at the walls. I know him—very well. I owe him this.”

  Althea put a hand to her mouth.

  “Promise me,” he said, “that when I am dead, you will burn the house down.”

  “What?”

  “The manor,” he said impatiently. He clasped his wrist to his chest, looking really angry, angrier than she had ever seen him look. “Take the furniture out if you must, take your clothes, whatever you want to keep—but burn it to the ground. Leave the doors opened. It must burn.”

  “You’re mad,” she said unsteadily. “This is my home! I live here too! I can’t just—why?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. He sank to his knees in front of her. “Please. If you have ever loved me—if we have been friends these last few years—”

  “You aren’t well,” she said, standing up. “You’re delirious, that’s all. I’m going to send for the doctor. It will be all right, my love, it’s probably just a touch of the influenza—”

  She put a hand on his forehead, and he groaned. He was ice cold, not hot.

  “Please,” he said. He fell over on his side, curled in a ball, and she stood helplessly in front of him, not knowing what to do. “Please.”

  When the servants found them the next morning, she was staring dry-eyed out the window, and Bluebeard’s body was already cold.

  She wished now that she had listened to him.

  If the house had been burned—oh, if only! Then she might be a respectable widow. They might whisper that she had gone mad, to burn such a marvelous house as a funeral pyre, but they would not stare at her with such mingled pity and disgust.

  But she had not burned it. Instead she had been swept into the usual business of widowhood—papers to sort through and allotments to settle. He had left most of his affairs in good order, but there were a few things missing, and she had to turn the house over looking for them, while the lawyers tapped their feet and sent politely worded notes about how vital it all was that they receive this by such-and-such a time to avoid some unspecified unpleasantness.

  At last, with one of the lawyers actually in the house, she had remembered the room at the top of the tower.

  “There’s one other place I suppose it could be,” she said dubiously. “My husband’s study—I never went in there. But I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Were there papers in there?” asked the lawyer.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Althea. “I still haven’t gone in there. Let me find the key.”

  She had to get a chair into the library, and then check three or four bookends—was it the elephant with the saddle, or the woman with the urn, or the dragon clutching the treasure chest?—until she found the key. There were cobwebs in the urn, but nothing more. The key was as brilliantly gold as it had been the day that Bluebeard had handed it to her.

  They went up the stairs to the top of the tower—stupid having a tower in a manor house, but the previous earl had been fond of eccentric architecture—and Althea fitted the key to the door.

  “The dust is probably appalling,” she said. “Nobody’s been in here in six months, and I doubt my husband kept it up very well. He was a dear thing, but not much of a housekeep—”

  She pushed the door open, with the lawyer at her back.

  No overstuffed chairs. No etchings. Bare floors, bare walls—and them. The previous wives of Bluebeard.

  The irony was that there was bad taxidermy after all. He hadn’t been good at it. Those poor women. Bad enough that he had killed them at all, but their bodies were preserved so badly that they barely looked human. At first she had thought they were festival costumes with poorly-constructed masks, draped over dress-maker’s dummies. Something. Not people.

  Cobwebs draped each of the figures. There were seven in all.

  “What on earth…” she said, peering more closely. “What are—oh god—”

  When Althea realized what they were, she sat down in the middle of the floor and put her hands over her face. The lawyer caught her shoulder. “Miss—miss—” and then, bless him, he picked her up bodily and carried her out of that terrible room.

  She didn’t go back. They had men out—constables and investigators and who knew what. They went into the room and took the pitiful contents out. Althea lay in bed for three days, her mind a great roaring silence, and then her sisters arrived and she rose off her bed long enough to throw them out again.

  Once she was up, she figured that she might as well stay up. She packed the entire household up in a week, left most of the furniture to the lawyers to auction off, and went to the hunting lodge in the country. Before the horses were even unloaded, she went into every room, throwing the doors and windows open, letting light shine into every crack of the house.

  There were no dead women there. She moved in at once.

  It was not a bad place. It was rougher than the manor house, and the cook complained endlessly about the stove, but be damned if she was moving to the townhouse to be the butt of pity and accusation. She walked through the woods every day, wearing mourning black, not entirely sure who she was mourning for.

  She still missed her husband sometimes. Every time it felt like a betrayal of those women—those other wives—and yet it was what she felt. Twenty-seven years of living with someone, sharing their bed and crying on their shoulder, were not so easily erased. There was a great deal of guilt and fury as well—enough to fill an ocean, enough to make her pound her fists on the walls and howl—but there was no one she could talk to. No one else had ever been in this situation. The one person she could always talk to, the one who would have listened, was dead. And a murderer. But mostly dead.

  When the lawyers found her at last, and made their report, she learned that she had a great deal of money. A murderer’s estate was automatically forfeit to the Crown, but apparently her husband had, in the last few months of his life, put everything int
o a trust in her name—except for the manor house.

  Very well. Let it be someone else’s problem now.

  She also learned that around the neck of each of his dead wives had been a necklace, and on each necklace hung a brilliant golden key.

  “How frustrating that must have been for him,” she said, and laughed a little to herself. Her laughter sounded rusty and disused, but it was a laugh all the same.

  She really hadn’t known.

  She’d just thought that the world was a complicated place, and everyone in it deserved a little bit of privacy, and perhaps a room of one’s own.

  LOATHLY

  Author’s Note: This is a Loathly Lady story, which were more common in medieval literature than they are now. The only popular version that I know from recent times is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry” on the album Below the Salt.

  It is a hard, sometimes ugly story, and hard, ugly things happen in it, including sexual assault. The reader is advised to proceed at their own risk.

  My husband never forgave me for the hounds.

  Everyone knows the song by now, I suppose—how the king was hunting, and stayed the night in a haunted hall, and a monster came in the night and trapped him inside. He killed his animals—“his hawk and his horse and good greyhounds”—to feed her, and then she demanded that he lie down beside her as man and wife.

  When he woke in the morning, the monster was gone, and he held a beautiful woman in his arms, with the whiff of elder days about her.

  The song is true, more or less. He wasn’t the king, but a younger prince, and no one ever comes up with a suitable rhyme for “goshawks.” And I would deny categorically that I was “the fairest lady that ever was seen,” then or ever. But most of the other details are right.

  I did not want him to kill the hounds or the horse or even the mad-eyed goshawks, which made such pitifully small mouthfuls of feathers. But I was given no choice in the matter. These things were, you might say, the conditions of my parole.

  I was enchanted two or three hundred years ago, as near as I can determine. The reasons don’t matter now. Everyone involved is dead, except for me. I have not been able to find records of my father’s house, or of the sorcerer that enchanted him, and my sense of time passing was blunted by the years. Acorns turned into worm-ridden oaks and came crashing down, tearing holes in the forest canopy around my hall, and I endured.

  I should have started marking the seasons, I suppose, but I was not thinking clearly. Being turned into a monster will do that to you. I was sunk into despair, curled up in the back of the ruined hall. Hunger was the only thing that drove me outside. It may have been several seasons before I travelled more than a hundred yards from the hall, and ate more than lichen clawed from the stones.

  I was—well, I suppose I was a sort of bear-like creature, but a bear crossed with something else, and larger than any mortal bear had ever been. I had shaggy fur and horns like a cow, and enormous claws. My eyes were very large, and the edges of my tongue turned up against my fangs.

  It was a long time before I could look at myself in a still bit of water without screaming. Screaming only made it worse, because they weren’t proper screams at all, but the bellows of a monster. It was too exhausting. I stopped looking.

  My claws bothered me the most, because they were always in front of me, and I couldn’t ignore them. But they were useful for tearing into rotten logs to turn up grubs, sometimes even honey, and I learned to flip fish up onto the banks with them. The magic would not have let me die of starvation, but it did not much care if I felt hungry, so I learned to fish and eat grubs and mushrooms and anything else I could find.

  The first knight came to the hole a year or two after the enchantment took hold. I tried to hide from him. I was ashamed. I had been beautiful, and now I was a great shaggy monster reduced to eating insects and gnawing strips of lichen off the stones with my teeth. I did not want to see him. I was afraid that he would try to kill me, or worse, that he would recognize me.

  It was the magic that dragged me out of the ditch where I was cowering. It walked me up the pathway like a marionette and forced me through the open doorway. The knight started up, looking shocked, and I dug my claws into the floor until the nails split and tried to beg for mercy.

  The magic pried my jaws open, and in a voice like stones grinding together, I demanded meat.

  He attacked me. The magic used my claws to kill him.

  I think I went a little mad after that.

  I did not eat him. I want to be very clear on that. Sometimes the songs say that I did, but the bodies vanished into the magic without any help from me. But I went blundering out of the hall, bellowing. I rolled in mud and wiped my claws endlessly in the grass, trying to get the blood off. I tore at tree trunks, trying to scrape it off in the clean heartwood, tearing down great swaths of ivy that fell across my face and back until I could hardly move.

  Eventually my claws came clean again, but I could smell his blood for days afterwards, a coppery stink that clung to my fur and stuck in the back of my throat.

  It was a long time before I could go back to the hall. I don’t know that I would have, but the magic poked and pinched at me, the murderer returning to the scene of the crime.

  And yet, when I did return, I was glad. The twin saplings growing on either side of the door, one a little closer to the wall than the other, were like friends. The tumbledown wing with the shattered beams and the nests of wood-doves were familiar. It was an unexpected sweetness, like tearing open a ruined tree and finding wild honey inside.

  The body was gone. The bloodstains seemed old and faded. I allowed myself to hope that it would not happen again.

  The second knight came in winter, and he had such frightened eyes. I would have let him go—I swear I would have—but when the magic took me by the throat and I growled “Give me meat!” he fell down and begged for mercy.

  Mercy is not the same as meat. I killed him, still on his knees.

  I tried to commit suicide several times after that, but the magic would not let me. Monsters do not drown easily, and I tore the hide around my throat to shreds without ever getting near the vein. When I ate poisonous mushrooms, I shook and sweated and lay in a puddle of my own vomit for three days, but I did not die. It was a cruel immortality.

  There were more knights after that. Some of them attacked me at once. One or two listened to my demands, but they balked at killing their horses to feed me. I appreciated that. It was an unkind thing for the magic to ask. I bore their horses no ill-will, and when their masters were dead, I cut the traces and sent them wild-eyed back to their stables.

  The magic was very particular about knights. I suppose the sorcerer had some grudge against them. I saw a woodcutter several times and while I did not show myself, the magic had no interest in him. A band of gypsies moved into the hall for three nights while it hailed outside, and I slept in a den beside the river and offered none of them violence. It was only ever knights.

  One knight brought a priest who threw holy water in my face. “Begone, fiend!” he cried. I laughed like an earthquake because it was all so stupid and hopeless. I killed the knight—I had to—but the magic did not care about the priest, so I let him go.

  You would think that the priest would have warned others away, but instead more knights came in a flood, ten or twenty of them, sometimes as many as three in a week. It is terrible how rapidly killing becomes banal. The murders became a horrible play that we acted out together, and I began to hate the knights for forcing me into my role. I hated their bravado and their foolish metal weapons that barely marked me. I hated their stupidity. I hated the magic that drove me, but the magic did not needle me if they stayed out of my hall, so it became easier and easier to kill them.

  A philosopher would probably say something wise about becoming a monster in heart as well as form, but we did not get many philosophers in the woods.

  I don’t know which knight it was that finally killed his horse. The mag
ic drove me stomping and snarling into the hall and I uttered my lines—“Give me meat!” and instead of attacking me or begging for mercy or looking at me with total noncomprehension, he said “Very well,” and cut his horse’s throat in front of me.

  I hated him more than any of the rest put together. The horse was entirely blameless, which was more than you could say of the knights. It was a gray horse, and it made a horrible choking noise as it died.

  He brought the meat into the hall, and the magic lowered my head. It was still warm, and I thought with every bite that I would be violently ill, but the magic had hold of my teeth and tongue, and I swallowed and chewed and swallowed and chewed and thought that the nightmare would never end.

  The only virtue of being a monster is that we take very large bites.

  When the horse was nothing but bloody bones and hide, the magic took my voice again, and I demanded something to drink. “Very well,” said the knight, and threw me an entire skin of wine that had been draped across his saddlebow. I drank it. It was probably drugged, but if the mushrooms hadn’t killed me, I had little hope of this doing the job.

  Both the knight and I were listening closely to see what I would say next. I licked the last drop from the wineskin—mercifully, it blotted out the taste of the gray horse—and opened my mouth and said “Lie with me tonight.”

  Oh, you may think that being a monster renders one immune to shame, but you would be wrong. If I could have blushed under my fur, I would have. To say such a thing—to say such a thing to a stranger—and I in the form of some disgusting horned beast with claws like daggers—dear god! I wanted to tear a hole in the stone floor and hide myself in it. I had been a virgin girl, you know, before the spell, and certainly there were no males of my kind in the wood.

  Revulsion showed plain on his face. I was glad to kill him then, as he choked out his refusal. Horse-killer. Did he think that I wanted him? Once he was dead, no one would know that I said such a thing.