In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Slowly, Aerie changed. Her feet warped with moon-colored light and seemed to melt, her arms flattened like sheets of paper without ink. Feathers grew like silken hair on her body, first the curling down and then the strong gray feathers of flight, tipped black at the edges, the color of silver thread spinning on a crystal wheel. Her mouth, silent, as if in wonder herself, bent into a graceful beak, which snapped in a kind of awe at the empty air.

  Only her eyes were the same, the watchful gaze colored like stones at the bottom of a lake.

  She hopped up, my girl, now a pretty gosling, and nuzzled my palm with her soft head. She was still so small. I bent and kissed her feathers, feeling my heart wither like a dead hawthorn within.

  We carried Aerie to the barred window and, balancing on a pile of bones to reach it, squeezed her little body through the gaps.

  “There are hundreds of flocks of geese in this country, Knife. One will care for her until she is grown. It is for the best. We will not manage nearly so well. Go, little bird.”

  Aerie looked at me for a long moment, her black eyes glittering in the frosted wind. Then she turned and hopped from the half-buried window into the deep grass. It was dark and the stars were burning their holes in the black. I watched her go, out of one darkness and into another.

  Three days after we watched Aerie stumble away over the fields, the great iron doors which separated the damp dungeon from the court glistening in candlelight were flung open with such force that they cracked the stone foundations. Grandmother and I were seized by rough hands that bruised and tore at us as we were carried up and up the spiral staircases on which I had been borne downward into hell—so long ago it seemed another woman. Our eyes could not adjust, everything was washed in white and yellow.

  And so, when we came before the King, we could not look directly at him at first, so bright was the sun glinting off his golden crown and jeweled jacket. This, of course, was what he wanted. Later I would learn that he rarely wore the regalia for audiences. A tall man announced the King, a tall man whose hair was twisted, knotted, falling slate-gray to his hips. He wore a wide, bolted iron collar that brushed the fabric of his blue and brown robes.

  “You have been brought for judgment before His Royal Highness, King of the Eight Kingdoms and Steward of the Eastlands, Autokrator of the Unified Tribes, Lord of the Thousand Caves, the Sacred Vessel who owns all above and below earth. This is your Arbiter.”

  By then I could see in the glare the coldness of the King’s eyes, like ice beneath ice. The herald had a cruel mouth, and he turned it on me, pursing his thick lips as he surveyed my emaciated form. Grandmother was stiff as a bristling hound beside me; she recognized him as her would-be master—Omir, the court Wizard who stood ever at the King’s ear. Before I ever came down the stone stair, he had tried, and failed, to bend her into the shape he wished, as though a woman were a stubborn plank of ash wood.

  “You have”—and his voice, his voice was like oil sliding on silk, sinuous and sickening—“You have committed treason, my clever, clever girls. Not a minor feat when locked in a room underground, but you’ve managed it. You have engineered the loss of the King’s rightful property. What’s more, the property in question was not a prize won in war, but born right here within His Highness’s borders—within his very walls!—and clearly his legal chattel.”

  The Wizard rubbed his long fingers as if they hid some secret ache. Grandmother looked at him levelly, her voice empty of fear as a hollow egg.

  “Why do you not come near to me, Omir Doulios, and tell me how my great-granddaughter is the property of this wallowing pig?”

  The Wizard seemed to flinch, but he quickly smoothed his face over. “How close, old woman? Close enough for you to slip a knife under my ribs? I think not. I need not even offer evidence—your admission of a great-granddaughter is enough.” He looked at me with a hot stare that clung to my skin and held me limp in its grip. “The dam has foaled—where is the colt?” I tried to speak, to protest, but Grandmother silenced me with a squeeze of her hand on mine.

  “You will not get what you desire this way, either. It is not for you,” she hissed. And at this the Wizard did step closer.

  “I will not get it, you dried up old soup-bone. I will take it.”

  But his one step had been enough. With a cry like a bear run through with a spear, Grandmother laughed at him, drawing a silver knife with a hilt of bone from her tattered dress. The knife cut true, and slid redly across the Wizard’s neck.

  THE FIRE HAD GUTTERED TO NOTHING AND THE Prince sat in darkness, staring at palms he could not see. The Witch touched lightly the knotted scar on her fore head, the line that twisted and looped like a sea serpent. She smiled grimly, her mouth knotting upward in just the same line.

  The accusation lay between them on the table, fat and hideous, black-spined and full of smoke. The Witch said nothing, and he tried not to look at the corpse which lay covered in soot and dew, leaning against the fireplace like new-cut wood.

  “I didn’t know,” the Prince whispered. “I couldn’t have known. How could I? She was just a bird. I didn’t mean…” He had ruined the only thing his precious quest had touched.

  The Witch covered his shaking hand with hers. Her voice was soft and kind, as soft and kind as a Witch can manage.

  “If you had meant it, my beautiful boy, I would have eaten your liver and smiled through the meal.”

  Prince Leander looked up at Knife with a sudden passion. “But there has to be a way to bring her back! There has to. You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way.” He seized the edges of the table and leaned close to the crone. “Tell me how to do it and I will save her. It is what a Prince ought to do, to save maidens. I beg you, send me to the farthest ice cap, or the widest swamp, but I will go if it means her life.”

  The Witch smiled, a real and tender smile, as from a grown wolf to a whelp.

  “Maybe. As you say, it is the main thing Princes are good for.”

  The Witch was silent. She collected the dough from the table, flour and blood and tears and all, and slid it into a hulking oven.

  “How did you escape from the Castle?” the Prince asked suddenly, wary as a cat.

  “I was banished,” she replied shortly, pushing the misshapen loaf farther onto its iron grille.

  Leander could see the rest of the tale piling up like fat parchment scrolls behind Knife’s eyes. But just as plainly he saw that she had told him all she wished to tell.

  “All you must know is the evil your family has done to mine. She was the last of us, the last child of that poor girl who crouched in her tent while men butchered stars. Now that she is dead there will never be any more of us. That is a truth you can hold like a sun-baked brick in your hand. It has weight, it has heft. To save my daughter you need no more.”

  “So there is a way. What must I do?” The Prince fixed her with that sincere gaze which all Princes possess.

  The Witch grunted, squinting at him through the low light. “She must be wrapped in the skin of the Leucrotta under the new moon. Then it is possible, though not likely, that she will be restored.” The Witch waited for a response, but none came. “Really, boy. Have you never seen the outside of the Castle walls? The Leucrotta is a terrible beast who lives in the Dismal Marshes. He is the color of clotted blood, part stag and part horse, of a size that dwarfs both, a mouth that stretches ear to ear, and instead of teeth it has twin rows of solid bone. It is very fearsome, I assure you.”

  “I am not afraid!” cried the Prince, nearly tripping over himself to show his willingness to brave any challenge to rescue the beautiful bird-maiden and redeem his family name.

  “Wait, boy. You do not understand. Let me tell you a tale of another Prince who went to face the Leucrotta…”

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A HANDSOME PRINCE who went to rescue his innocent sister from the fell beast.

  The Leucrotta snapped his spine with one crack of its jaws,
and wore his head and hands on its antlers for a fort night in celebration.

  The Witch sat back with satisfaction.

  In the Garden

  THE BOY GIGGLED. HE SAT PRIMLY ACROSS FROM THE GIRL NOW, NOT nearly brave enough to attempt to touch her again. She laughed, too, a low, quiet sound in the dark. Her eyes drifted up through the cedar boughs, black hawks darting towards him and away again. They were nervous now, skittish and afraid of Dinarzad’s thunderous steps which surely were not far off. There was no supper to distract them, only the two, eager to tell and eager to hear, awkward and unsure, terrified of discovery.

  In the night, which cantered towards morning like an eager mare, he inched closer to her, and urged her not to stop.

  The girl drew her breath inward and began again, with her voice of waving willows bordering a dark lake.

  WHEN LEANDER LEFT THE HUT IN THE MORNING half-light, the Witch gave him a knowing grimace and kissed his cheek with her leathery lips. It was an awkward gesture, and he did not look her in the eye. But her hand fell to his, and unwrapped the leaves from his stumps. He was not very surprised to see that they had healed over entirely, new skin pink and warm, the fingers severed neatly at the knuckle, with no blood or scar to be seen.

  “Grass and leaves,” he said, smiling.

  The Witch winked.

  And so, the Prince left her, having found a Quest after all. He chased its tail into the high mountains tipped with snow like wise men’s beards, and down to the sea, laid before him smooth as a dress. He did not mind the difficulty of the terrain, being, after all, a soldier, though it was more tedious than he had thought a Quest would be.

  For instance, he had not guessed how much of the body of a Quest was simply walking. He walked until three pairs of shoes were ruined, cursing his lack of a horse. He stomped over every imaginable landscape from dank fen to pleasant farm to alpine ice. And yet, no one greeted him in the villages through which he passed. No one shouted with great joy that the Prince had blessed their village with his presence—what an honor to have you, Sire!—no one insisted he feast at their table—only the best of the harvest for you, Sire!—no one begged to be regaled with a song of his adventures—oh, do tell us of the terrible Witch, Sire!

  In fact, no one took much notice of him at all—innkeepers were surly, tavern-women taciturn and rather getting on in years, milkmaids were unfriendly, wide-calved, and attached firmly to the flanks of their cows. After a time he looked not very different from the lowest peasants—covered in grime, face sour as a priest on Tuesday, and entirely without well-made shoes. All in all, it was nothing like what he had been led to expect.

  One evening as the sun was counting up the day’s gold in the west, Leander ducked into a seaside tavern in the north part of the country with a peculiar sign above the door—a great fist strangling a fish. He laid a few coins on the bar and rested his burning feet against the damp floor. He sucked down a bitter, watered-down ale that tasted of leather and warm bile. It was a filthy place, with dozens of dark, cowled faces peering out from what seemed like far more than four corners. At least in this, he had found, the tales were accurate: Disreputable strangers abounded, as numerous as whitecaps on the sea.

  The bartender was a great hulk of a man who looked as though some giant had simply dropped an armful of limbs into a heap. He brandished a thick rag like a sword, and the rusted iron of his eyes dared anyone to order a drink. His hair was the color of sandy shoals that trapped the hulls of ships; his hands were the size of well-wrought drums. He smelt of lamp oil and brine.

  He glanced at Leander under his heavy eyelids and said nothing as the young Prince grimaced at his mug. He didn’t mean to turn up his nose at the house brew, but the stuff was so foul his face contorted without consulting him. The bartender scowled and spat. But Leander had gotten quite tired of his brusque reception in these wretched little towns. He glared at the barkeep.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The slab of skin behind the counter studied the wood grain of his bar. “Yes,” he grunted, “but you’ll not get a better ale on account of it.” The Prince rolled his eyes.

  “That is not why I asked, good sir. It is,” he struggled for the right word, “fine as the water of the wells at my own house. But all I have met have been rough with me since I set out for the Dismal Marshes, and I have very little time to find what I seek. If only the townsfolk would be kind to me, would smile and bow and point out the way like the markers on the dusty road. But they will not. I guessed you knew me, yet you said nothing of it, nor offered yourself as helpmeet. Why?”

  The man shrugged, and his body seemed to quake like the shifting of continents. “I know some things. Some things the common folk don’t. They likely don’t know you from the King’s cows. And if they did—” The tavern-keeper’s eyes glinted like the hull of a ship in morning light. “Your father is less than loved here. They’d like to take their taxes out of your hide, if they could manage it. They’d like to take back the babies that disappear into the tower of that sorcerer. Barring that, they’d like to kill you as payment for them. I’d not stop them, myself. Best if you don’t make yourself known. You’re awfully far from home. What does your name mean here besides a foreign tyrant? Not to mention, it isn’t the habit of us peasants to be helping strange travelers. I’d rather have a dog with your pedigree, catch my meaning? And that’s more words than I’ve said to a customer in a month, so take them well and get on your way.”

  The abashed Prince picked at his mug. He was becoming used to humility, to being shown that he was a fool. This alarmed him, of course, but this was hardly the place to show his courage and breeding.

  “Will you tell me, at least, how to find the Dismal Marshes? I fear I have become quite lost. And,” Leander gulped like a caught trout, “is it possible you know of a cobbler with a good pair of boots to sell?” The barman glanced over the ale-stained bar to peek at the princely toes poking out of the Prince’s ruined shoes like worms out of a bait-sack. He grunted again.

  “Once, when I was a young man, I went to the Marshes. I’ll tell you the tale, if it’ll clear you from my chairs.”

  The great-shouldered man straightened like a child reciting lessons, and when he spoke his tale, his voice became deep as the sounding of the sea on stone, and his words lost their slur. The Prince was transfixed, for by now he had become an excellent listener.

  “My name is Eyvind. No reason for you to have heard it…”

  IN MY YOUNGER DAYS I WAS A BEAR. This is nothing to gawk at. Bears are quite common in my country, which lies as far to the North as the deserts lie to the South. All my land was covered in snow, and peopled with a proud tribe of pale-furred bears, who governed it well and wisely. When we moved over the ice we were like a wave that is gone before the foam touches the shore.

  I was one of the white bears, and I was very happy. I loved a she-bear, and she was the finest of all our fishers. She could dip a silky paw into the rushing glacier melt and seize twenty salmon at once, holding them up like a bouquet of wildflowers. Her eyes were large and dark and they danced like the lights that often painted the night sky. She was a novice astrologer, but she could already read the Stars as easily as letters. When she stood on her haunches she was taller, even, than I.

  In the Land Where the Snow Does Not Melt, the hours of our days were simply filled, with fishing and hunting, with the rearing of cubs, with watching the Stars. My people were always very great astrologers, though rarely consulted by you folk. Once in a very great while a Versammlung was held—a Congress of the Bears.

  And so a Versammlung was called the day I and several other young bears were to announce our chosen mates. Such things are dependent on the Star-motion, and the Congress must be consulted. Seal fat was laid out like a glistening carpet with great slabs of salmon, pinker than a cub’s paw in the first hour of his life. Hundreds of white foxes had been killed in honor of the Star-gods, and I had made a cloak of their fur for the offering.

&
nbsp; A Versammlung is something to see. The bears come across the glaciers like blocks of living ice, and their eyes flash brighter than a glimpse of seal flesh in the cold water. By the time they had all arrived, the Stars had already begun to shine in through the curtain of sky. I bowed before them. It always pays to be polite when one is asking for a favor. Besides, I was sure that they would approve my choice—she was after all the pride of the Land Where the Snow Does Not Melt.

  “The Stars whisper on their sky-floe,” one bear began.

  “Bless them in their cloud-hunt,” I answered. All these things are ritual—no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.

  At this the rest settled in, ripping into the seal flesh with great relish.

  After all had eaten and were rolling back on the snow, a great, woolly bear came forward. I knew him; he was called Gunde, quite the fiercest of us.

  “The Stars whisper, brother. A great horror has occurred far away to the South. The red summer fire which is called the Harpoon-Star told me. One of his sisters—murdered. A Snake-Star, beautiful and green, and she is dead.” The bears sent up a terrible howl of mourning, piercing as a bone-needle. I shivered.

  “We weep for our sky-aunt; we mourn for the flesh that vanishes. It is a wicked omen. The shape of the Stars is confused—the signs of the Black Seal and the Caribou-Beset-by-Wolves are conjunct. The Great Paw is in retrograde. We have taken the augurs. You may not take a mate in this dark time, which must be a time of grief for all who still love the Stars. We are sorry, brothers.”

  I howled, long and low as a buried horn. How was it right that a death in the forest could deny me my heart on the ice? I dredged the frost with my claws.