by Anthology
***
Auntie Rosa’s place was a cottage like ours, but bigger and more luxurious, all soft furs and bright fabrics. She cured all her own pelts, and I would curl in the decadence of her bearskin rug while she knitted and told me stories, or sit cross-legged by the fire and clean her guns while she quizzed me on the habits of the grundwirgen and the ways a hunter must recognize and spare them. Auntie Rosa had been hunting longer even than my mother, ever since her own grandmother had taken her out on the trails from before she could walk.
“Tell me again,” she’d say to me, night after night, her voice starting to creak with age even though her spine was as straight, her eyes as bright as ever. “Tell me again, how you know one.”
“Aw, Auntie,” I would groan as I got older, snuggling down by the fire. “I’m never going to see a grundwirgen. They’re too rare. What are the chances—”
“The chances you’ll be tried for murder? Child, have some sense. You must know. There are no excuses.”
“I think if one starts up a conversation I might suspect.”
“And if you’re stalking your quarry, if you go for a clean kill, you think a grundwirgen would ever have a chance to beg for its life? Don’t be stupid.”
So I would rattle off the signs: the habits a creature would have if it was trying to be the human it once was, or if its wild nature hid a witch in disguise, or if it chanced to be an honest animal but one born with the capacity for reason. All types of thinking creatures were lumped in as grundwirgen, not only the cursed but also those who chose to roam in animal form or those who were beasts in truth but with intelligence equal to our own. Mistaking a grundwirgen for a game animal was not an excuse, not under the law; it was the same as firing upon a human.
“I’m glad they aren’t more common,” I said once. “We’d starve to death. Everyone would be too afraid of accidentally offing some spoiled rich kid who went and got himself hexed.”
Auntie Rosa sniffed. “Child, it’s a big world out there. The grundwirgen are not all alike—some are innocent, and some are brutal. Just like people.”
“Have you ever met one?” I demanded.
“Yes,” said Auntie Rosa.
“What? When?” I cried, sitting up straight as if I were a dog with a scent. But she refused to say anything more.
***
Auntie Rosa gave me another, larger rifle for my twelfth birthday, and a third for my fifteenth. Three days after my fifteenth birthday, the King’s Men burst into our cottage and arrested my mother for murder.
The cottage erupted into a tumult of curt shouts and tromping boots and someone screaming—I was screaming. My new rifle was in my hands, my knuckles white where I gripped the wood, but even then my mother and Auntie Rosa’s teaching kicked in, the years of safety lectures dragging me back, making me hesitate, because I’d never raised my rifle against a human form and that felt wrong—and the pause was enough time for my mother to snap, “Get her out of here” and for Auntie Rosa to bear hug me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides and dragging me into my mother’s bedroom.
I cried for so many hours after they left—heaving, messy sobs that wouldn’t stop. Auntie Rosa stayed with me through the night. I refused to let go of her, my fists clenched in the scarlet wool of her sweater so tightly they cramped that way.
***
Auntie Rosa offered to come stay in our cottage, but I looked around at the empty rooms and the overturned chairs and the too-enormous lack of my mother and insisted we go back to hers instead. We packed me a bag, gathered the hunting gear and perishable food, and hiked over the hill together, not speaking.
I’d asked Auntie Rosa once why she didn’t live with us, when I was old enough to understand her and my mother’s relationship. She’d smiled and said that it was better for all of us if we had our own spaces. I hadn’t agreed—still didn’t—but now I was glad for the refuge, for a sanctuary that didn’t have the memory of swarthy, booted King’s Men stomped upon it.
She gave me her room, with its bright patterned quilt and draped crimson fabric—Auntie Rosa loved red; she blanketed her house with it and wore it in brilliant scarves and hats and shawls throughout the season—while she herself insisted on sleeping under a deep red blanket by the fire, snugged on a pile of furs. I wondered again about her other room then, the locked one. It had been locked for as long as I could remember, and when I’d been nosy about it as a child, she’d told me that it was her private storage space for things too naughty for a young one to see. My imagination had run wild as I got older, but I’d never seen her enter the locked room once, not even to clean.
But this day I had neither the courage nor the energy to press her. I put my things away in her room as she directed and then lay down and buried my face in her bed, breathing in the lingering scents of pine and hickory smoke on her pillow.
***
Auntie Rosa went into the city the next day to petition at the courts. She refused to allow me to come. When she reappeared at sunset, hiking up the slope with her walking stick, my heart somersaulted and then plummeted. Such was my faith in Auntie Rosa that I had somehow expected to see my mother walking at her side, for Auntie Rosa to have enacted a miracle.
I ran to meet her. “Where is she? Did you see her? What’s happening?”
“Let me get inside, child.” Her voice was tired, and she looked older than she ever had before.
Inside the cottage, my hands shook as I made us some tea. Auntie Rosa’s fingers wrapped around her mug as if she hoped it could warm her soul.
I waited.
“Your mother…” Her eyes were fastened somewhere on the floor by the fire. “Your mother is on trial for killing a grundwirgen.”
“That’s impossible,” I said instantly.
Auntie Rosa didn’t answer.
“No, Auntie, that’s not possible,” I said. “She would never mix up—youknow! They should just talk to her; they’ll see!” Tears of fury prickled my eyes. To accuse my mother of murder was one thing; to malign her skill at the hunt—it was ludicrous. Insulting.
“They say she knew,” said Auntie Rosa, her eyes still on that same spot near the fire.
The air vibrated. My hand dug into the back of a chair where it was keeping me upright. “They say she knew…and she still took the shot?” The words made no sense.
Auntie Rosa finally took a sip of her tea. “Sit next to me, child. It’s time you knew about your mother’s past, before you hear it from the rest of the kingdom.”
***
“Your grandfather was a merchant,” Auntie Rosa began. “A wealthy one for a time, from what I understand. He traveled from the East regularly with his ships, making deals with the kingdoms here. On one such journey he was shipwrecked and lost all his goods. He’d taken payment for the cargo already, and faced debtor’s prison in a strange land, where he thought himself like as not to die in chains.”
She paused, lost in the past, her hands tight on her mug of tea, before she said softly, “He made a deal to sell your mother to a grundwirgen prince. She was ten years old.”
My breath felt too thick. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
Images collided in my mind: my mother, a young child, forced to sail to a far-off country, sold into marriage to pay her father’s debts…sold to a man who was not a man at all. I didn’t want to understand.
Auntie Rosa sipped her tea, and continued. “The grundwirgen prince had been cursed for refusing aid to an injured traveler. That traveler was a witch, as it happened.” Her lips curved in a bitter half-smile. “She did not know enough of his nature. She should have done far worse than transform him into a beast.”
“And my mother?” I forced myself to ask, when Auntie Rosa had not spoken for a few long moments. “What happened?”
“The grundwirgen needed a woman to break the spell,” she said. “If I ever find that witch, I will kill her for making that the condition. The prince needed a woman to break the spel
l, one nobody would care to rescue from a monster. So he bought himself a foreign bride.”
I’d sat down at some point. I couldn’t remember when. My hand clenched the edge of the chair so hard my fingers ached. “Did my mother kill him?” I asked.
“She escaped,” said Auntie Rosa. She stared into the fire, and her voice dropped to barely a whisper. “She escaped. Isn’t that the important part?”
***
Auntie Rosa went into the city every day, and came back ever grimmer as more details of my mother’s case came to light. The remains of the grundwirgen prince had been found more than a generation ago, my mother the assumed perpetrator. For many years her life of quiet anonymity had kept her safe, until a chance remark about a woman from the East of about the right age had fallen upon the ears of a distant relation to the long-dead prince. My mother’s foreignness was proof enough of her identity, and no one had any doubts as to her guilt.
After a week of pleading at the courts, bullying and prodding and lobbying as I am sure only she was capable of, Auntie Rosa returned to say she had finally been granted one request: they would allow me to visit my mother in prison.
“Just me?” I said, my heart thumping faster.
She turned her face away. “They say I’m not family.”
So the next day I journeyed with her into the city. Auntie Rosa came with me as far as the King’s Men would let her, before they crossed their spears in front of her and kept her from passing on. I picked my way down the stone stairs to the dungeon without her, flanked by unspeaking guards, my booted steps echoing off the dank stone walls.
We hiked to the far end of the dungeons before the lantern light fell across one more barred cell and I saw my mother.
She sat huddled on a pallet of filthy straw, her clothing disheveled and her black hair coming loose from its neat braid. Seeing her so alone in so much darkness, so untethered from the world she owned—my world—the air wrung out of my chest, my heart turning in on itself until it hurt. I broke from the guards and ran up to the bars, gripping the cold metal as if I could melt it by force of will.
My mother flew up to meet me, her fingers closing on my arms so hard I was certain I would bruise. I didn’t care. “Mama. Mama. Are you all right?”
“You mustn’t believe what they say about me,” she said, tight and desperate, the intensity more alien on her than even the prison cell. “You mustn’t, you hear? Whatever happens, promise you believe me, at least. Promise me.”
“Mama, Auntie Rosa told me…” I didn’t know how to finish. The story of her past seemed so personal, my knowing it almost a violation. “If you were defending yourself—Mama, they have to say that’s okay. They have to.”
“They don’t have to do anything.” My mother’s forehead creased; her fingers loosened on me and she stepped back, her sharp eyes searching my face. “Rosa thinks I—?”
I didn’t know what to say.
My mother took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Tell her I didn’t do it,” she said softly. “Please. I need both of you to know—I didn’t do it.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
***
The King’s Men permitted me to visit my mother once a week. We had no word of when she might be called before the court, and the unknown pressed down on us, heavy and smothering. But I think we were all secretly glad of the wait—we all knew trials in this kingdom were swift and executions swifter.
I didn’t know whether my mother would be better off saying she’d killed the grundwirgen prince to escape, or whether she should continue to claim her innocence. I didn’t know that either would save her. Everyone who mattered had decided her guilt before she was arrested, and by law the grundwirgen prince had been her husband—you don’t escape from a husband.
***
I had a sudden horrible thought, in the middle of the week when I couldn’t ask my mother about it. I was determined to keep it to myself, but Auntie Rosa caught on within minutes and ordered me to spit out whatever new worry plagued me.
I fingered the rich crimson afghan draped over the armchair. “My mother never told me…” I couldn’t finish. “My father. Was he…?”
Auntie Rosa’s face went slack with surprise for a moment, and then she laughed. “Child, is that what’s eating at you? Did we never teach you sums?”
My cheeks flamed at her reaction. My mother and Auntie Rosa were not young, and Auntie Rosa had told me my mother had escaped when barely older than I was now. My father could not be the grundwirgen prince. “Who was he, then? My father?”
“Ha! Another prince, if you would believe it. But a human one. A charming cad.”
“I’m the daughter of a prince?”
“I suppose so, though don’t let that give you airs. Your father was off in the wilderness with his men, traveling to seek his fortune as young men do. He met your mother. It turned out he had a weakness for black hair and white skin, and didn’t mind kissing first and learning names later. Your mother was fine with that at the time, the saucy wench.”
I thought of my mother’s moon-pale skin that made her look so odd to the people of this country, and the curtain of jet-black hair she always braided away from her face into a long queue. The prince must have thought all his dreams realized, to find her. “But wait,” I said. “You and my mother—you’ve been—for decades, I thought.” My face burned hotter. Auntie Rosa was right that I was bad at sums; I’d never put the fact of my birth together with that before.
“Yes, we were, but I wasn’t going to get in the way of your mother having a bit of fun with a man when it came her way.” She reached over and tucked my hair away from my face affectionately. Sadly. “The world’s a large and complicated place, child. You’ll learn.” Too fast, she didn’t say, but I knew both of us were thinking it. Fifteen was too young for me to see the world judge my mother and take her away from me.
***
I didn’t make the connection until the following day, but when I did, I started packing immediately. I would wait to see my mother one more time, and then I would leave to find my father.
When I tried to broach the idea to Auntie Rosa, she flew into a rage.
“How can you be so senseless, child? Of all the times for insipid flights of fancy!” She tore my clothes out of my bag and flung them to the floor. “Your mother may be facing execution, do you understand that? And you would leave her? Alone?” Her voice cracked. The King’s Men still had not permitted her to see my mother.
“I’m going to save her,” I insisted.
“How? This is what the world is. They tell us what we can and can’t do, and they don’t listen, they don’t care. There is nothing you can do!” She yanked at the whole quilt, upending everything I had piled on the bed with a violence I’d never seen in her. “The one thing you can do, the only thing, isbe here.”
I started picking up my things, carefully, one by one, as if I would break if I moved too quickly. “You’re the one who told me my father was a prince,” I said. “Maybe by now he’s a king. Kings have power.” So much of my world had collapsed into confusion, but the power of a king was one thing I was still certain of. “He’ll help, I know it. We’ll save my mother.”
“He’d as like have you killed,” Auntie Rosa spat. “If not him, then whatever wife he ended up taking, worried about her children’s inheritance. Or any one of his enemies. Royal bastards stay anonymous or they die.”
I took out my three rifles in their cases from under the bed. I could sell two of them to give myself some money to travel on. I unbuckled the case my first rifle was in, the one Auntie Rosa had given me when I turned seven; it looked so small now, but was still smooth and shiny, gleaming and well-cared for. Parting with it would wrench me.
“I won’t tell you where to go,” Auntie Rosa said. “I won’t tell you where he is.”
“I’ll ask my mother,” I answered.
***
My mother wouldn’t tell me, either.
“Your auntie’s right,�
�� she said. “Your father—I wish she hadn’t told you. He was a pleasant dream, and we both kept it that way.”
“He won’t want you to die,” I insisted.
She reached through the bars and grasped my hand, entwining her fingers with mine. “He didn’t want complications,” she said. “He’ll want them even less now. And that’s what you would be to him. A complication.”
“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe he’d want to meet me. Maybe he’d want to know.”
Her eyes softened. “Maybe. It’s not worth risking your life over.”
“But this is your life,” I tried to argue. “It is worth it. I want to take the risk.”
Her fingers squeezed mine. “I’m sorry.”
No matter how I tried to cajole or persuade her, it was useless. She would not tell me which kingdom my father hailed from—if she even knew herself. Short of traveling the world and asking which king had an eye for pale-skinned women, I had no way to find him.
***
I’d leave anyway, I decided. I’d start in the city—ask questions, stick my nose in everywhere I could. I’d find out which kingdom had the snowiest queen with the inkiest hair, and sell my rifles to find the money for passage there, and shame my father into demanding my mother’s freedom from our king.
I burst back through Auntie Rosa’s door filled with determination, only to find my bag and rifles gone from my room. “Where are they?” I railed at Auntie Rosa, who sat knitting in the armchair by the fire. “Where are my things?”
“I’ll give them back to you when you give up this foolishness,” she said.
“I’m trying to save my mother’s life!”
“You’re trying to do the one thing that would kill her. You do not understand the folly of your plans. Your mother needs to know you are safe.”
“My mother being executed will not make me safe!” I was shaking with rage. “You can’t do this. You’re doing just what that grundwirgen prince did—not letting me leave until you get your way!”