by Neil Gaiman
"I always thought so, certainly," the Lady agreed. "I don't know why your father was so surprised when you killed him. I told him he shouldn't have removed it."
The Witch clutched the bed gown, the fur rough against her icy skin. She was beyond shivering. "You removed it," she said. "That was the bargain."
"It was his bargain. He paid me for it, anyway. Which reminds me. We haven't discussed payment."
"Payment? But there's no bargain between us."
"Yes, there is. I remember it clearly. We discussed it just before you killed your father. You wanted to be free of him and you wanted your heart back. You said you'd give me anything I asked for."
"My heart is still in the Mountain," said the Witch.
"The were-girl can get it for you, if you're afraid to go yourself," the Lady said. "And you've been free of your father for eons. You owe me."
The Witch got out of bed and knelt by the fire. She didn't like being so close to the Lady, but the flames whispered comfort, and she was cold, so cold. "What do you want?" she asked.
"That would be telling, wouldn't it? You just have to be willing to give it to me. Are you willing?"
"I am not your creature," said the Witch.
"Aren't you?" The Lady widened her eyes. "You're mad as a hatter, mad with fear."
"I cannot feel fear," said the Witch.
"You are fear," said the Lady. "Bone to skin, hair to nail, you are made up of fear. Just like your father."
She laughed then, her eyes black and leering and full of stars, her mouth gaping wide on her merriment. The Witch seized the fire irons in icy fingers and slashed them across the Lady's face. The force of the blow sent bright blood spattering over her hand, her face, her gown, and hissing into the fire. The Lady gave a thin, high scream like a dying rabbit's. Her eyes were bright and mocking.
"How many times will you try that?" she said around the fire irons wedged in among teeth and red-stained bone. "It doesn't work. It doesn't work with me. It didn't work with your father. Not that I care; but it does make a mess."
The Witch covered her face with sticky hands. "Go away," she mumbled. "Take anything you want. Anything. Just go away."
"Very well," the Lady said. "I will."
When the Witch unblinded herself, the chair was empty and the blood was gone. So were the fire irons and the fire. The Witch dressed, braided her hair around her head, and called Fida.
Fida had clothed herself in a gown the Witch had imagined for her, loose leaf brown wool made high to the neck and tight to the wrists. She came in shyly and knelt at the Witch's feet, head low, shoulders hunched. The Witch took her by the chin, forced her head up, and looked long into her moonstone eyes.
"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Like hot blood," said Fida, unblinking. "Like the fresh marrow of bones."
"Good. Will you prove it?"
Fida looked puzzled. "I hunt for you. I sleep with you. What more do you want of me?"
The Witch caressed her hairless cheek. "There's a cave at the top of the Mountain," she said. "I want you to go there and bring me back something that I lost a long time ago."
"No," said Fida.
The Witch's hands dropped numbly. "You must."
"I will not. The Mountain is dangerous."
The Witch shivered, little tremors like ripples in still water. "You must, Fida. It's why I made you--to find my heart and bring it back to me, my heart that lies frozen in a cave at the Mountain's peak."
Fida ducked her head stubbornly. "The Mountain belongs to the White Wolves," she said. "They let no living thing pass."
"The Lady set them there to guard my heart from any who would harm me," said the Witch. "You love me. Surely they'll let you by."
"No."
"They're shadows, I tell you. They're for humans to fear, not for a wolf. Not for you."
"I am not afraid. I am not stupid." Fida touched the Witch's knee. "You have power and beauty and endless life. What do you need with a heart?"
"I need a heart," the Witch whispered. "I need my heart. I need it to love. I need it to hate. I can feel pain, nothing else. Oh, and cold. I can feel cold."
She began to weep, huddled in her wolf pelt, shuddering with dry, soundless sobs. Fida, reaching up to the blue-white hand, found it cold as snow or death. "You cannot love?" she asked sadly. "You don't love me?"
The Witch stilled. "You warm me," she said at last, and put her fingers to Fida's mouth.
The girl licked them until they were supple and ivory white and held them against her cheek. "I must think," she said.
"You will do it, then?"
"I don't know," said Fida. "I must think."
Sitting still by the open window, the Witch shuddered and wrapped an end of her black shawl around her throat. A year. Four hundred days, or a little less, since she'd first seen Fida; two days since she'd asked her to retrieve her heart from the Mountain. And before that, how long? Ten years? Fifty years? A hundred? What meaning does time have when there is nothing by which to measure it?
Fida had brought time into the Witch's life, marking the hours and days by her presence, by her absence. The Witch felt she had lived a lifetime in that year, two lifetimes in the two days Fida had oscillated restlessly between manor and wood. Now she was gone and the Witch did not know what to think. One moment, she knew, as she knew there would be wine at her hand, that Fida would not return, that the cold centuries would unfold year by year with the Witch at the heart of them, frozen and unchanging. The next moment she knew that Fida would bring her heart to her, awaken her like the Sleeping Beauty, to joy and warmth and peace.
Long after Fida had disappeared into the wood, the Witch sat staring out over the chiaroscuro of snow and forest, watching the shadow of the Mountain nibble at the manor and growing colder and colder until, had she had a heart, it would have stopped beating forever.
In that cold and in that silence, she remembered how lovely she had once found the moon's silver spell cast over Mountain and wood. She remembered loving the stars, and begging her father to teach her the patterns of their celestial dance. Those had been her first lessons in magic, conducted in the observatory her father had built in the manor's attics. They'd had human servants then, and people had come to visit from time to time--men in long black robes and ruffs and woolen caps tied under their spade-shaped beards, men whose skin was like unbleached linen, who smelled like old books. They had talked with her father of the stars, of the Philosopher's Stone that could turn lead into gold and confer eternal life. She'd had a little maid to wait on her, and a little dog to sleep at her feet, and her father had called her his heart's delight. The maid's name was Gretchen. The dog had been Sweetheart. Had she had a name? She must have. But she could not remember it.
The moon was full. Fida trotted up silent, silver glades toward the Mountain, her paws crunching on the frozen snow. She'd been as far as this the night before, to challenge the White Wolves, whose territory began where the trees thinned and the rocks grew thickly together. They'd answered her with growls and bared fangs. She'd fled downhill before them, but she'd learned that they had neither smell nor shadow. Perhaps they were like her mistress's bread, which filled the mouth and left the belly grumbling--shadows of wolves, with only the power that shadows have, to raise the ruff at nothing.
The trees began to dwindle in number and size, bowed by the wind, stunted by the cold, their roots twisted under boulders and down cracks in search of soil and water. Suddenly a wolf appeared, bright as mist in her path, his pack drifting near behind him like snow. Fida bristled and rumbled and cocked her ears forward. The White Wolf stretched his jaws and howled.
Had Fida worn her human form, she would have laughed aloud. No wolf howls at the edge of battle. She shook down her ruff and walked forward to meet him, wary but unafraid. The shadow-wolf howled louder, and his pack echoed him, scattering froth from their jaws like a snowstorm. As Fida approached, their howling grew more frantic, and the
y themselves more insubstantial, until she walked blindly through a cacophonous mist, following the slope of the ground upward step by step, while around her the White Wolves yammered like terrified puppies.
When the mist stilled, she was almost at the top of the Mountain, her nose against a slit in the rock barely wider than her shoulders. She sniffed deeply, smelled rock and water and something else, something that made her think of a white face and black eyes and sweetly curved red lips. Head warily low, she pushed into the slit and entered the Mountain.
The cave was very cold, colder than a frozen river, and so damp that Fida's bones ached with it. The moonlight crept in behind her, silvering the icy rocks, picking out odd gleams and sparks from the cave's shadowy throat. Slowly the wolf-girl paced into the darkness, her fur bristling.
Ice-rimed rock gave way to a tunnel carved out of blue ice, crazed and clouded like old crystal. At the end of the tunnel, a diamond spark glittered unnaturally, beckoning her forward. The walls breathed an arctic chill that froze her fur into an icy armor and her thoughts into silence, and still she advanced, her pads slipping on the glazy floor toward the ice cave, where the Witch's heart was hidden.
The cave itself was as bright as the tunnel was dark, carved facets of ice reflecting light back and forth to adamantine brilliance. The wolf narrowed her eyes against the glare and padded forward to the center and source of the light.
It was a casket of ice, set with moony jewels and bound with silver bands, fantastically carved and faceted to set off the scarlet heart that rested in its clear depths like an uncut ruby. The air around it shivered with waves of painful cold. The wolf bowed her head and whimpered.
In her blood-hot room, the Witch paced. She knew she must be patient, and yet she could not be still, but strode from hearth to window, from window to hearth, in a fever of restlessness. She wiped irritably at her hairline and her upper lip; her hand came away damp.
The wolf circled the casket, eyeing it as if it were a stag at bay. Her paws and tongue were bleeding and torn from her attack. Her brain was numb with magic and cold. Yet she was hopeful. It seemed a little warmer in the cave than it had been, and the surface of the casket was no longer perfectly flawless. It seemed to her, pacing and watching, that the heart had begun to beat a little, feebly, in time to her stiff-legged strides. Her own heart beat faster.
The Witch stood at the undraped window. Wood and Mountain were mantled in ermine, their image subtly distorted by the rippled window glass. She laid her hands flat against the icy pane. Heat caught in her chest and throat, dragging at each breath. She unbuttoned her woolen bodice and undid her boned lace collar, stroked her chilled hands down her face and neck. It felt nice; not as nice as Fida's coarse fur, damp after a run in the snow or the mist, but nice. She had a sudden image of Fida's head tucked into her shoulder, the brindled hair rough against her skin, the moony eyes hidden. She shivered, but not with cold.
"Well? Are you warm yet?" The Lady's voice was teasing. It was a lovely voice, the Witch thought, resonant as an oboe. Odd she'd never noticed. She turned to it as to a fire.
"I am warmer than I was," she said.
"Good. I hope you like it. Heat's expensive." The Lady was examining herself in the mantel mirror. The Witch saw both reflections, the Lady's and her own, near and distant, side by side. Feature by feature, they were identical: mahogany hair coiled like sleeping snakes around shapely heads, long, slanting eyes, high cheeks, crimson mouths, white throats.
The Witch stepped closer. "Who are you?"
The Lady settled a jeweled pin at her nape. "You," she said.
"No," said the Witch. "You are beautiful and I am not." She took another step. "Your lips are fire and your neck is snow. There are mysteries in the folds of your hair and the curve of your mouth." She was very near now. The two faces, one intent, one detached, watched her hand rise and hover toward the Lady's shoulder.
The Lady stepped aside and turned in one smooth movement. "Do you want to kiss me? There's a price on my kisses."
"Who are you?" asked the Witch again.
"Your father kissed me. He gave all he had for the privilege."
"I will give you everything I have."
"I have that already. You have nothing left to give me. Except everything you might have had. You could give me that."
Fida put off her wolf's pelt as the Witch had taught her, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Gently, she touched one torn finger to the casket, leaving a smear of blood on its clear surface, which slicked and shone for a moment, as if the blood had melted it to liquid. She lifted her finger to her mouth and ripped at the nail with her teeth until blood welled from the wound and dripped onto the casket. A fat crimson drop trembled a moment, cabochon, then collapsed and ran off the casket's side. Where it had been was a tiny pit.
Fida tore at her wrist then, sharp wolf teeth shearing through thin human skin as easily as knives. The resulting stream of blood was strong, pulsing over the icy casket in thick waves that thinned as they sheeted down the sides, melting the facets and the fantastic carving to rose-tinted smoothness, releasing the silver bands and the moony jewels to lie among rocks and pools of ice melt. Her arm grew heavy; she rested her hand on the ice, which burned her fingers, clung to them and to her wrist, freezing her to itself. Still the wound bled sluggishly as Fida knelt by the casket, her pelt slipping from her shoulders, watching her blood soak through the ice toward the Witch's glowing heart.
"Well?" said the Lady. "Is it a deal or isn't it? Your father knew what he wanted, and the last deal we made, you did too." A paper appeared in her hand, one line of small black type printed neatly across the middle and, beneath it, a blotched signature scrawled in brown ink.
"Here it is, in living color," she said. "I help get rid of your father and give you a chance to get your heart back, and you give me your name, your life, and your mind. Signed with your heart's blood, which is a neat trick for someone who doesn't have one."
The Witch reached for the paper; the Lady snatched it away. "Uh-uh," she said. "You'll just have to trust me. Come on, have I ever lied to you?"
"I don't know."
"So you don't," said the Lady cheerfully. "That's the beauty of it. But I always keep my bargains. Just ask your father."
"My father! My father! Why must you always be talking of my father? He's gone."
The Lady looked apologetic. "Well, that's the problem, you see. He isn't. When you cut out his heart, you simply covered him up with a rug and left him in the corner of the ritual chamber." The Witch's eyes shifted away, blank as stones. The Lady smiled and said, "I promised him you'd always be together."
"But what of your promise to me?" the Witch wailed.
"It hasn't been easy, I can tell you. Now. What about that kiss?"
The Witch felt her hair clinging stickily to her cheeks and brow, and lifted her hand to push it back. The movement brushed her loosened gown against her nipples, which hardened. There was sweat trickling down between her breasts, and, beneath the layers of her petticoats, she felt a moist heat between her thighs. The room pulsed around her, quick and hard. She stepped forward, close enough to see the thread of a healing cut on the Lady's lower lip.
Had Fida bitten the Lady, too? She fingered her own mouth, felt the faint ridge Fida's tooth had left there. It hadn't been a bite at all; it had been a kiss. And it had burned her. She recognized the heat now. It was desire for Fida. Fida of the wild smell and the bristly, brindled hair, Fida who never taunted her, Fida who was willing to brave the White Wolves for her. Fida who loved her.
"Yes," said the Lady, "she loves you. She's yours, by her own free gift. As you are mine."
"I am not yours," said the Witch.
"Very well, then; you're not. Save your chilly charms for your little pet, if she returns. She could meet a young dog-wolf on her way back through the wood--winter is mating season for wolves, did you know? And she-wolves are notoriously horny. Or she could run off with y
our heart, or eat it. You haven't been very kind to her, and she's still a wolf. Everyone knows that wolves are by nature cruel and crafty and mean."
"No," said the Witch. "She'd never do that. Would she?"
"Of course she wouldn't. She'd bring it back, or die trying. Wolves are notoriously faithful. And then you'd be whole again, mistress of your name, your life, and your mind. You'd feel warmth again, and love and fear and desire, and all sorts of other things you've forgotten about. Grief. Remorse. Loneliness. Oh, and you'll grow older. White hairs, some of them growing from your chin, and lines around your eyes and mouth. Loose teeth, droopy breasts. I can't guarantee you'll be able to imagine food and drink and fuel from thin air anymore, either. There are certain kinds of magic only I can give you."
The Witch made a little whimpering noise. Her reflection in the mirror flushed and paled as waves of heat and cold chased one another up her throat and licked her cheeks.
"Ah," said the Lady. "You don't like that, do you?"
"I want my heart," said the Witch. "That was the bargain."
"You can't have both your heart and me," said the Lady.
Fida lay white and unmoving in a puddle of pinkish ice melt, her hand cupped protectively around a quivering human heart. The cave was like a cloudy night, dark and close and featureless. In one comer, a shadow flickered black against black and drifted toward the wolf-girl. Shaking long sleeves from its star white hands, it touched her head. Fida's head stirred on her pillowing arm; she opened one eye and sighed. All was well. Her mistress had come to her.
"Good cub?" she whispered.
Her mistress giggled. Fida squinted up at the long face set in the depths of the cowl. No, not her mistress. Like, as a deadly mushroom is like an edible one, but not the same. Her eyes had no white, but were black from lid to lid; and where her mistress smelled of wool and woodsmoke and fear, this woman smelled faintly of peaches. Fida growled.
"Ah, you know me," said the Lady. "Well, never mind. It will be our little secret. You have something that belongs to me, I believe."
Fida closed her hand around the heart. It throbbed and burned in the hollow of her palm like a wound or a living coal.
"Don't be silly," said the Lady. "You can't fight me." Her white face filled the cave, round and unbearably white. "I am everything. I am wiser than heaven and more powerful than a pack leader in his prime. Truth itself is my creature and my slave."
Fida contracted on her sodden pelt, clutching the Witch's heart to rest against her belly, shielding it from the Lady's pitiless eyes with her wide hands and her bony knees.
The Lady's face waned, dwindled to a pale curve of cheek veiled by a drifting wrack of hair. "You can't fight me," she whimpered. "I am nothing. I am more ignorant than dirt and more powerless than a day-old cub. Truth passes through me as though I didn't exist."