Caged: A Twisted Fairytale Retelling

by Lena Mae Hill

  “I’m not a cow,” William growled from under Daniel, groping for his glasses, which had fallen off in the scuffle.

  “What else are we going to do?” I asked. “Even if we can eat grass, you can’t.”

  Ma dropped her head into her hands, resting her elbows on the battered table. She was a human, but for obvious reasons, she knew about shifters. Most humans in the valleys knew we weren’t like regular people, though they didn’t all know how. But it was kinda hard to get knocked up by a shifter and not figure it out, even if he left pretty soon after bestowing the name of his favorite drink on your sons.

  “We’ll go further,” I said. “We’ll go out of the valley. Someone in town might pay for a bull.”

  “How are you going to get to town?” Ma asked, rubbing her forehead.

  “We’ll walk.”

  The car had broken down months ago, and even though our mad scientist William could have fixed it, we couldn’t seem to save enough money to buy the parts he needed.

  “Fine,” Ma said to the table. “You could use the fresh air. Don’t cross through the First Valley, and don’t come home until you’re sober.”

  “We won’t,” I said. “We know better than to cross the witches.”

  “Or you,” Daniel said, dismounting William and offering him a hand up.

  “We’ll bring you back some money,” I promised.

  Evan leaned down to kiss the top of her head, and I followed suit. She might not have given birth to me, but she was my mother, and I was going to make her proud. One day, I was going to do something so good she’d never be ashamed of me again.

  Chapter Three

  Astrid

  I stood at the window, watching the red circle of shadow creep over the full moon’s face. Now I knew it wasn’t blood that made the moon turn red. I’d read all about eclipses in my encyclopedia.

  “Where are you?” I whispered, as if the moon had the answer. I turned and paced back to the bed. Mother Dear’s body lay silent and still as always. She wasn’t in it. But where was she? Why hadn’t she come back for me?

  I paced to the window again and watched the moon hide its face. A shiver went through me, and not only because the air was damp and chilly outside my window. Something about watching this alone made me feel even more lonely, as if emphasizing that Mother Dear was not beside me. She never spent a lot of time with me, so it wasn’t just that she’d been gone for a few days. She’d promised to come back before the eclipse, and she hadn’t.

  I pulled the basket to my side, examining the knot holding the handle, the tight weave of the hair. Maybe I could lower myself down. I pondered through how I would go about that. I’d need a lot more rope. I’d need double the rope, so I could lower myself on one and control the descent with the second rope. It was no good. I didn’t have two ropes. I sighed and slid down the wall, pressing my back to the cold stone.

  “Where are you?” I whispered again. The empty room had no reply.

  When I woke the next morning, my shoulder was aching, and my neck cramped from sleeping on the hard floor. I sat up, blinking away sleep. “Astrid,” called an impatient voice.

  “Mother Dear,” I cried, leaping to my feet and grabbing the basket. I tossed it down, letting the rope unwind all at once. Hand over hand, I yanked the basket up as fast as I could. As soon as the old lady disguise appeared, I tugged the basket through the window. “What happened? Why didn’t you come back? I was so afraid you’d been hurt or killed or kidnapped or—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Mother Dear said, brushing past me and going to the bed.

  “But what happened?” I asked, running to her side. “I’ve been waiting here all night, Mother Dear. At least tell me where you’ve been.”

  “I’ve been with your father,” she said, lying down on the bed next to her abandoned body.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, darling,” she said, her voice softening. She reached up a gnarled hand and caressed my cheek. “Now let me get back into my real body before I have to spend one more minute in this rotting flesh bag.”

  “Okay,” I said, tears pooling in my eyes as I nodded and smiled and cried with relief all at once. Mother Dear left one body to enter her usual one, and a minute later, she sat up.

  “Much better,” she said, standing and running her hands down her body as if making sure all her curves and slender places were still where they ought to be.

  “So?” I asked, grasping her hand. “Tell me the story. Where is Father Dear?”

  “He’s in the Third Valley where he belongs,” she said. “Everything didn’t go according to plan, but all is not lost. Not yet. I sent a man up to get you, but he found someone else outside and mixed you up. Why is everyone such a complete and utter idiot, Astrid?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, trying to comprehend her words. She had sent a man to get me. “Was it the wolf prince?”

  “No, just a shifter,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “The prince was injured, that’s all I know. I’m going to visit them, but I needed a better body. I can hardly move around in that old lard-bag.”

  I glanced back at the strange, silent beauty of the old woman, feeling an odd urge to defend her.

  “Anyhow, I’ll be back, my dear,” my mother said, taking my face in her hands and pinching both my cheeks at once. “Don’t worry your silly little head. Wait for Mother Dear to take care of everything. You just stay here and look pretty, maybe add to your treasure.”

  Where else would I go? I’d never been out of this tower in my life. Until a few years ago, I’d never been out of this room. But for my thirteenth birthday, Father and Mother Dear had given me access to the trap door and the room below, where they kept my treasure so that no one would ever find it. Mother Dear always told me how much men liked treasure. It was my job to make sure they never got mine.

  When she was gone, I stood at the window looking at the folds of land that formed the mountains and valleys below. I thought about painting, as I often sat there in summer and painted the view from my window, but I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, I stared down at a path I could just make out through the trees. Mother Dear had said that she’d sent a man to get me.

  Just a shifter. What shifter would she trust with her most precious treasure of all? She made it sound like it was just someone she’d passed on the trail, a random shifter she didn’t even know. Shouldn’t my father have come to get me? And what had happened to the prince I was to marry?

  I knew I should be worried about him. I should sit in my tower and pine for him and hope to be rescued like a maiden in a story. But I had no idea what the prince would be like, so it was hard to know what to worry about. So, I just sat in my tower and worried about my mother for the next two days. On the third day, I was sitting at my window waiting for a familiar figure on the path when a horse came tearing along into the field below my tower.

  Stifling a shriek, I dropped down below the window, my heart hammering. After a minute, I slowly rose to peek over the sill. My eyes widened when I saw two people in the clearing. The horse had run away, and a naked man had appeared. My eyes widened. I had never seen a naked man, but his back looked wide and gloriously strong. I hadn’t looked at my back in the mirror for a long time. I wondered if it looked that strong.

  The people were fighting. Maybe the girl was mad that the man had chased her horse away. Pretty soon they pushed each other down and rolled around in the grass together. I gripped the sill, leaning forward, my heart pounding. The man was so big, he must be killing the girl! I wanted to scream, but I knew I wouldn’t get there in time to save her. He held her down for a long time, until tears pooled in my eyes. I hadn’t helped her. I hadn’t even tried.

  But then they got up, and they didn’t even seem as angry anymore. My fingers had cramped around the sill, but I sagged in relief. She was okay. I didn’t want to blink and miss a single moment. I hardly ever got to see people. When anyone came up onto the mountain from one of the valleys,
I was supposed to go downstairs and hide. After all, they might try to find me and kill me.

  But these people were busy focusing on each other…until they weren’t. Suddenly, they were pointing and looking up at the tower—my tower. I fell backwards, scrambling on hands and feet away from the window, my heart flooding my chest until I thought I’d faint. After a minute, I convinced myself I’d been dreaming. Creeping back to the window, I listened hard. I could hear their voices, but not their words. I flattened myself against the wall and stepped toward the window, peeking out from one side this time. What I saw stopped my heart dead in my chest.

  The man had shifted into a bird, and now he flew straight toward my window.

  Chapter Four

  Daniel

  “Do you guys hear that?” I asked, cocking my head. Even though we were in human form, my sense of hearing was superior to all my herbivore brothers.

  “What is it?” Jack asked. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “It’s a party,” I said, a smile forming on my face. I liked to party.

  “How do you know?” asked William, ever the pragmatist.

  “I can hear it. Just through that gully, and down into the next valley.”

  Evan cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Weren’t you listening to Ma?” William said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Bro, that’s the witch valley,” Jack said.

  Evan just shook his head, looking disgusted.

  “Your point is?” I asked, ignoring Evan and turning to Jack.

  “We can’t sell a cow to a witch,” he said. “Not if the cow is going to turn back into William and disappear on them. They’ll be pissed.”

  “And what if they won’t let me go?” William said. “What if they trap me there and eat me?”

  “Witches don’t eat people,” I said. “That’s giants.”

  “And how did the witches get here?” Jack said.

  Evan crossed his arms and planted his feet wide, frowning down at me.

  “That’s just a story,” I said. “There’s no other world full of giants and witches.”

  “Not a story,” William said, pushing up his glasses. “We’re living proof. Shapeshifting animals don’t belong here, where everything makes logical human sense.”

  I appealed to Jack, the most adventurous of my brothers. “Come on, let’s at least check it out. Whatever we descended from, we still need to eat.”

  “You’re right,” Jack said. “There’s no reason we need to starve while the other two valleys are using diamonds as doorstoppers. Who cares what Ma said? She’ll never know.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Her stories are as old as the ones about witches coming from other worlds. No witch has cursed anyone in our lifetime.”

  We turned to Evan for the final verdict. He scratched the back of his head and scrunched up his face, studying the gulley before us.

  “Maybe there’s a reason Ma told us not to go here,” William said.

  “Or maybe she doesn’t understand witches, or maybe she just didn’t want us to find more fun people to party with,” I said. “Maybe they’re not even witches at all. I mean, have you actually met a witch?”

  “And I don’t really want to walk all the way to town,” Jack said.

  Again, we turned to Evan, waiting for his wisdom. He shrugged and started forward, and the rest of us followed, our voices lowered in excitement.

  “I’ve never been in the witch valley,” Jack said. “This is going to be awesome.”

  “You think they really use diamonds as doorstoppers?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t we be in animal form?” William asked.

  “It’s going to look weird to see a bunch of random animals running around in the woods together,” Jack said. “Especially when one of them is a cow.”

  “Shut up,” William said.

  I slugged him in the shoulder. “Moooo.”

  He leaped at me, but Evan grabbed us both and held us apart, giving us a little shake to remind us that this was serious business, and if we were fighting and making a racket, they’d hear. We snuck down the rest of the mountain in silence. Just like I’d thought, there was a party going on. To be more precise, it looked like a wedding. Of course, I didn’t know shit about witches, or weddings for that matter, but that’s how it looked. Two people were standing at a stone altar holding hands while everyone else gathered around. For all I knew, they were about to do a human sacrifice.

  And then the weirdest thing happened. A horse ran straight past us and down into the valley, right up to the wedding.

  “Shit,” Jack said. “Where did that thing come from?”

  “Is that…?” William asked.

  Before we could answer, the horse shifted into a man. Apparently, not all shifters were obeying the rule to stay out of the First Valley. I wasn’t a bit surprised to see Efrain, one of the worse shifters in the valley, emerge from the horse form. There was a commotion among the witches, and I wished we’d gone charging in there instead of waiting up here. I couldn’t even hear what they were saying with all of them talking at once. But we weren’t as ballsy as Efrain. Most people weren’t, though I knew Jack looked up to Efrain and his bad boy ways. He was a good eight or ten years older than us, and he was always fighting, or playing cards and drinking hard, or getting girls just to make them cry.

  A few minutes later, the bride rode off on Efrain—in horse form—up the other side of the valley. The witches followed in a long procession.

  “I don’t know much about weddings, but I don’t think that’s supposed to happen,” I said.

  “But look,” Jack said, pointing at two long picnic tables laden with packages wrapped in burlap, cardboard, pretty fabric, and paper. “We might not have to sell William today after all.”

  “Are we really going to steal from witches?” William asked.

  “Do you want us to sell you to them instead?” Jack asked.

  Even Evan shook his head in disbelief.

  We waited until the witches had gone before emerging from behind the trees and running down the remaining hillside. The wedding had been taking place in a clearing surrounded by forest. The altar was at the far end, and on one side was a small, plain house with the gift tables set up in front of it.

  “What is all this stuff?” William asked, picking up a box.

  Evan ripped the wrapping off another package, which turned out to be a fancy stone pot.

  “Man, this stuff is lame,” Jack said.

  Just then, the door to the little house opened. We all looked up, our mouths falling open as a man stepped out. He looked like giant. He was tall and broad, with dark brown skin and an eye patch that didn’t quite cover all the scars on his cheek. Even in February, he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and his arms were covered in scars, too. The guy looked like he’d eat all four of us for breakfast, whether we were in animal form or not.

  Without a word, Evan shifted into a horse and took off. The rest of us followed, running toward the forest while stripping off our shirts. I prayed the giant wouldn’t shoot me with a gun, or a spear, or a magical lightning bolt, or whatever witches had.

  “Hey,” he yelled after us, his voice a deep, resounding bark that followed me up the mountain. At the top, we stopped to regroup.

  I shifted back into human form, though it was cold, and shrinkage was real. “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  Evan shifted into his human form, too. William arrived in his bull form, huffing and puffing as he hobbled to a stop.

  Jack, still in the form of a buck, scented the air.

  “Nice rack,” I said to him. He shifted back into human form then, as if he’d forgotten he was still an animal.

  “Guess it’s too late to sneak out without anyone seeing us,” he said.

  “Maybe it won’t be too bad,” I said. “We can tell them we came with Efrain.”

  “And face him?” William squeaked, still out of breath even though he’d shifted like the rest of us.
“I’d rather face a witch.”

  “Hey, they didn’t catch us,” Jack said, spitting something into his palm.

  “And it’s not like we took anything,” I said, looking around at the others.

  Evan shook his head no, holding up his empty palms. Relief melted over me as I began to believe my own words. It would be okay.

  “I might have taken something,” Jack said.

  “What?” I asked, rounding on him.

  “It was in my hand,” he protested. “It was just a tiny package. I thought it might be diamonds. Do you know how much we could sell those for? Ma would be set for life. We could get her a real house. And the witches would never miss them.”

  “Is it diamonds?” William asked, crowding closer to see what Jack had spit into his hand when he shifted back.

  “No,” he said, his shoulders slumping as he opened his palm. “It was a seed packet.”

  “So, you risked our lives for some pretty flowers,” I said, disgusted.

  “They’re not flowers,” Jack said. “They’re beans.”

  Chapter Five

  Astrid

  I stifled a scream and shrank away from the window. The man was coming. He was flying up here. Into my tower. Where no one had ever been before.

  I dove for the bed, hitting the floor and sliding on my belly across the polished hardwood. I slid straight under the bed, inhaling a mouthful of dust. I really needed to sweep under here. I blinked cobwebs from my eyelashes as I heard the loud beat of wings. My heart hammered so hard I couldn’t hear anything else for a minute. And then I heard a voice. Two voices, actually.

  A deep voice like my father’s, and a softer, plainer voice that belonged to a girl. They had flown up here. They must be shifters. Real shifters! Would I be their queen someday? Their hidden weapon?

  I could hardly believe my ears. They were here, in the tower, with me. The girl was fawning over the woman in the bed above me. They sat right on top of the bed, right over me. I thought my heart would stop, but it kept right on beating as they discussed whether to leave or stay. The man left, and another man replaced him. And all the while, I laid there as quiet as a dead bug, just like Mother Dear had told me to do. Hide. I was good at hiding. I didn’t even want to crawl out and meet them. Not even a little. I mean, what would I say?