by Olga Grushin
The brilliant light is extinguished at my feet.
I am halfway down the stairs when the chiming from the clocktower overtakes me. At the first stroke, a swarm of memories dive after me like shrill, sharp-toothed bats. I cannot let them catch me, so I walk fast, faster still, then break into a run. I skip over steps, slip on stones, slide on leaves, trip over roots, until the palace is only a pale haze of lights shimmering behind me, until the rain-splashed park with its cupids and fountains falls behind as well, and, at last, I am through the gates.
The rutted road stretches before me, black fields on both sides.
I run. My lantern beats against my thigh, my pouch beats against my hip, my heart beats against my chest. Winds pick themselves off the ground in my panting wake, shake themselves off like enormous gray wolves, and lope after me howling. Their ferocity makes me feel brave. Side by side with the winds, I run all the way to the crossroads.
The witch is waiting for me, her cauldron already smoking.
The Cauldron: Closer Still to the Beginning of the End
The world is black and red—black of the night, red of the fire, black of the cauldron, red of the potion. The witch, all warts and hook nose, her eyes gleaming from within the sinister cave of her cowl, her fingers dark and agile like spiders, lurches around the cauldron in a jagged jig, flinging pellets and powders into the bubbling brew, muttering under her nose: “One horn of a poisonous toad. A pair of wings from an unhatched death’s-head moth. Eyeballs of a blind three-eyed newt. Four ground claws of a lame baby dragon. Five scales of a wish-granting pike . . .”
At midnight, the crossroads is a place where the skin of the world has worn thin, and great underground powers are pressing against it: a place of disorder and flux, an in-between place at an in-between hour. Untamed shadows crowd upon it from all sides, low clouds threaten rain, and the prowling pack of winds that have followed me here stalk it on heavy gray paws. Whenever one of the winds throws back its grizzly head and howls, dead grasses rustle in abandoned fields, and flames under the cauldron waver wildly. I wind the cloak tighter about myself. My courage, such as it was, has seeped away, little by little, until I feel trapped in an ugly dream from which I ache to wake up in my blue-and-white bedroom overlooking the park, with my collection of porcelain poodles lining the mantelpiece and the night kept at bay behind the lace of the curtains—yet I stay where I am, and the winds keep on howling and the frightful old woman goes on reciting her lists of strange poisons that fill me with dread.
“Nine tails of rats that met lonely and violent ends. Ten coals from the hearth of a freshly hanged strangler. Eleven drops of the essence of insomnia. Twelve words of venom that broke a woman’s heart. Thirteen lies that tore apart a kingdom. And, for the crowning touch . . .”
Her mumbling grows too low to hear as she drops the final ingredient into the potion. When she looks up, her cowl has fallen back, and the pupils in her deep-set eyes are two slits of molten fire.
“Your turn now, girlie.” Her voice is a cackle. “First order of business, a treasured piece of your childhood.”
My hands unsteady, I loosen the pouch, reach for the dried nosegay of forget-me-nots from my mother’s garden, tied with her hair ribbon, and hand it to the witch without speaking. She flicks it into the cauldron. As I watch the faded petals become consumed by the boiling turmoil, a dull old sorrow cuts my heart.
“And a smidgen of your blood. No need to get all pale and wide-eyed, duckie, it’ll be but a little prick, I’m sure you know all about those, most princes sport them . . . There, all over now.”
My ring finger stings where she has pierced it with a rusty pin, but her touch is surprisingly gentle. She squeezes one drop into the cauldron, and it falls with slow gravity, much heavier than a single drop of blood has any right to be.
“And the nails of your husband’s killing hand? Good, good. And now, his portrait. You did remember, dearie, it must be the most recent one you’ve got?”
I nod, my mouth too parched to speak. The witch does not know who I am. I came to her cave an anonymous petitioner, a wronged woman without a name, common as tears, plain as despair—and I myself am common indeed, but my lot is far from it. I fumble in the folds of my gold-tasseled pouch, pull out the locket. The initial R on the lid is inlaid with rubies, and as the light of the greedy flames falls upon the stones, it looks as if I have trapped a rivulet of fire in the palm of my trembling hand. The witch’s breath rasps in her throat, and when I see the hungry curve of her mouth, I am seized by the cowardly urge to close my fingers tight over the locket’s secret and cry that it was all a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, that I meant none of it—then run, run with my husband’s fate, with my old life, safe in the plush velvet nest at my hip, run all the way back to the palace.
It comes to me then that I always think “palace”—I never think “home.”
“Here,” I say, and click the locket open.
We look at him together.
The night is black and the fire unsteady, but even in the vacillating of shadows there is no denying how handsome, how incredibly handsome, he is. The strong lines of these cheekbones, the chiseled jaw, the easy set of his not-quite-smiling, not-quite-serious lips, the flight of the proud eyebrows, dark and glossy like strips of luxurious fur, over these narrowed blue eyes—so radiant is he with beauty, in fact, that the glinting circlet of gold in his chestnut curls seems merely an afterthought. The witch lets out a whistle, and her eyes jerk away from the locket and swoop onto my face.
My husband’s most recent portrait was done at his coronation.
“Well, now,” says the witch, “this is quite unexpected.” Her tone is dry and businesslike, all traces of cackling gone, her words stiffly formal, no more “girlies” or “dearies.” “It appears that someone was withholding vital information. Had I known who your husband was, madam, my terms would have been different. Queens do not pay in trifles like sapphire brooches. Queens pay in things of true value—their firstborn child or their youth or their voice. Surely you know the rules?”
And I do, indeed I do. We live by rules in our land, and the rules are exacting and many. Trials and wishes come in threes, glossy fruit should be avoided, frogs must never be kissed unless you are ready for a commitment, and princesses, at least the warbling kind, should be ever so mindful of their mood swings—it is sunny when we are cheerful, dreary when we are sad, and stormy when we are driven to consult heinous hags in furtive matters of maleficent magic. And stern justice binds us all, high and low, young and old, good and evil, as some invisible but ever-reliant presence keeps strict tallies of trades and exchanges, rewarding bashful boys’ kindnesses to small animals with beautiful brides, punishing laziness with slugs dropping out of shamed slatterns’ mouths. All magic indeed must be paid for—yet the payments do not always come as violent wrenches, as scourging stabs. There are gentler ways, there are kinder stories. My own life was transformed by magic once before, but nothing was torn from me in exchange for my sweet reward: I earned it instead, scrubbed floor by scrubbed floor, washed plate by washed plate, unvoiced grievance by unvoiced grievance, through many slow, industrious years of patience and misery. I have been hoping that my past stock of exemplary behavior would stretch to pay for this as well.
I see now I was wrong. This is not the same story.
My porcelain poodles, my palace, my park, my predictable past—all of it belongs to a life well thumbed with familiarity and repetition, and no longer mine; and in any case, my once-happy ending has proved to be only another beginning, a prelude to a tale dimmer, grittier, far more ambiguous, and far less suitable for children than the story I believed mine when I was young.
Silent, I stand at the crossroads, twisting and untwisting the hem of my nondescript cloak.
The old hag’s eyes are shrewd and flinty, but when she speaks, her tone is a study in indifference. “Madam, I am a busy woman, and th
ere are few things more odious to me than my time being wasted.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve, glances at it. “As a matter of fact, I have another client, a spurned miller’s wife, coming shortly, so I must proceed to my office without delay if we are all finished here. I suggest you make haste to return to your husband before your absence is noticed and he grows incensed. Wives must be obedient. Good night to you, madam.”
The first drops of rain splash on my shoe, on my cheek. Turning her back upon me, the witch starts to gather her pungent satchels and gruesome bundles, sort them with fastidious efficiency, and pack them away in the crevices and furrows of her robe. In mere minutes, I see, the crossroads will cease to be the hallowed place howling with four-cornered winds and pregnant with the workings of destinies, and revert once again to a barren stretch of stunted land where a few gray brambles struggle in the desolate dust and one potholed dirt road runs across another, both leading from nowhere to nowhere.
I hear someone ask: “What do you want?”
And it is my voice, it is I who have spoken.
Instantly, the witch swings back upon me, her eyes alive with glee, her rags swirling, her knees popping, her mad hair snaking, the crossroads crackling with restored magic.
“What do I want, what do I want,” she croons as she dances around me. I wait, imprisoned by the chilly drizzle that falls harder and harder. “The spell you’ve asked for, it’s ancient, it’s dark, and it doesn’t come cheap, not for the likes of you. What I want is a royal-sized payment. Let me see, let me see here. Your youth is gone, your voice won’t be missed by anyone, and your firstborn is only months away from a woman’s curse, more bother than it’s worth . . .” She stops and laughs, a sharp, baleful laugh like the crack of a whip. “Ah, I know just the thing.”
“My soul,” I whisper, with doomed certainty.
“Not your soul, silly girl, of what earthly use would your soul be to me? Brimstone and damnation are ever men’s unsubtle threats and crude bargains, and they’re welcome to them. What I want is your life’s spark.”
I stare at her through the rain that has become a thousand daggers of cold stabbing me over and over.
“Your spark,” she repeats with impatience. “Your warmth. Your passion. You know. You’ll get your wish, you’ll go back to your life, and you’ll go on, sure as rain, but from now on, everything around you will seem deadly dull. Flat, like. The cheer of singing, the taste of good food, the touch of a lover—you can have them all you want, but they’ll be like pages from a book in a tongue you don’t speak, like a tedious aunt droning on and on about her dressmaker’s cousin’s ailments. Like that children’s counting rhyme: A garden with no flowers, a summer with no sun, a forest with no birdies . . . Well, you know how it goes. I want your joy. Ah, I see by the look on your pretty doll face that you understand. So, what say you, my pet chicken? Yes or no?”
No, I want to scream back. No, no, no! But I never scream at anyone, I do what people tell me, I bend to everyone’s will, an obliging sort of woman, am I not—and just as I think that, the hate in my heart unfurls its great burning wings, and smashes and smashes anew against my rib cage until I cannot breathe, until I cannot think, and the wolf winds are howling, and the storm is raging around us, and the world is black and red, black of my fear, red of my anger—and “Yes,” I say. “Yes. Take it all, take it now.”
I close my eyes.
“That’s right, keep them closed, my precious, it’ll all be over in a moment,” the witch sings out. “And it won’t hurt a bit, or perhaps it will, but only a little, only a stab, one teensy-weensy little stab, a little pinch in exchange for a lifetime of no pain at all, not such a bad bargain—”
I have never had much physical courage. I brace for the violation, my eyes screwed shut, my face dissolving, the water and the tears all running together. But the moment stretches, and stretches, and stretches, and nothing is happening. The rain has become a deluge; all is dark, wet misery. The witch is hemming and mumbling, fussing about me. I am suddenly conscious of my satin slippers swiftly growing soaked through; my toes are quite frozen, and a sneeze is creeping upon me.
“Well, now,” the witch mutters, and she is close, so close I can smell the stench of her breath. “This is peculiar. Very peculiar.”
I sneeze and, gingerly, open my eyes. Her nose almost pressed against mine, she is squinting at me through the downpour, which is starting to abate, ever so slightly. I wait, hardly daring to breathe.
She makes a noise in her throat and moves her face away.
“How big is that sapphire of yours, anyway?” she asks gruffly.
Without a word, I plunge my hand into the glacial water flooding the pouch, and fish for the brooch, and show it to her; and the stone is quite big indeed, the size of a phoenix’s egg. She considers it briefly before her spider fingers pounce upon it, and it vanishes somewhere in the soggy crannies of her robe.
“And that locket with rubies. One fine-looking man, your husband.”
She explains nothing, and I know better than to ask questions, for it is unwise to pry into the caprices and causalities of magic, the give-and-take of fate. I will never know what has just happened, why I have been spared. Feeling limp with relief, I hand her the locket. She scratches at its inside with a crusty nail to dislodge the enameled oval of the portrait, drops the picture absently into the potion, and pockets the locket itself.
The rain has dwindled to a trickle.
“And the trinket on your finger,” she says now.
I gasp. The diamond has been in my husband’s family for many a generation, has served as a boon in many a royal quest. Shell-encrusted sea monsters have swallowed it, only for its dazzle to be revealed beneath a curlicue of parsley in the mouth of a garnished bream on some king’s dinner platter; prophetic golden-eyed eagles have flown off with it, so that some bewildered maiden with bleeding feet could climb a glass pinnacle to retrieve it from a hungry fledgling’s beak and later, limping still, exchange its hard brilliance for her pocket-sized happy ending; sorcerers with indecipherable accents have sworn dreadful oaths on its flawless facets. He will surely notice its absence, and he will be furious, I think in an agony of indecision—and then remember that, once I am done here, he will never be furious with anyone, not ever again.
I twist the ring off—and it requires much effort, for it has been on my finger for thirteen years (thirteen and a half, to be precise). I am not sorry to see it go.
“Well,” the witch says with a shrug, “this isn’t much, but it will have to suffice. One must always make the best of a sorry deal. And now, for the spell.”
She turns to the cauldron. Dead coals smoke, splutter, and burst into vigorous flames. The rain has stopped. My feet are miraculously dry again.
The Spell: At Last, the Beginning of the End Proper
“Magic’s not strictly a science, it’s more of an art,” the witch says as she stirs the cauldron. “There are laws, to be sure, but every case is unique and, with a potion this powerful, we can go in any number of directions. First off, there is the trusty old eye-for-an-eye approach. He’s caused you pain, and you can repay him in kind—say, make him break out in boils and hives, or go lame, or develop a bad case of hemorrhoids, well, you get the idea. No doubt satisfying in its own barbaric way, but I can’t recommend it, because, let’s be honest here, if you’re having trouble with him now, just wait till he is hurting good and proper. Ever had your husband stub his toe? Those princes are all manful bluster, of course, when it comes to skewering ogres or hunting down maidens—or is it the other way around?—but they’re such insufferable babies when faced with the least physical discomfort.” I can tell that she has given this speech countless times before, for her words have grown fluid and remote, like pebbles worn smooth by the ceaseless attrition of the sea. “So, then, moving on, you can make him fall back in love with you, relive the romance of your honeymoon, flowers, ki
sses, all that maudlin sop. And it works, and some of my clients do opt for it, but I always tell them, ‘Dearies, there is a catch.’ No potion can change his nature, so whatever lousy thing he did to you in the past, he will do it again in the future, as soon as he tires of your kisses, which he certainly will if he has once already, and in double time now, because let’s face it, you are no spring chicken. No, not a long-term solution, a year won’t pass before you’ll be dropping by my cave, begging me to curse him all over again.”
The more she talks, the smaller I feel, as if my story is just like every other story, a commonplace, and I a lifeless cardboard cutout, in control of nothing, made to go through motions to illustrate some preordained, banal conclusion. A grain of resistance starts to form deep, deep inside me, tiny yet stubborn, insidious like a pea under a suffocating pile of mattresses to which a fellow princess was once subjected in an insulting parochial trial. Oblivious of my mood, the witch carries on. “A better way, by far, is to target the root of the actual problem. Does he treat you with cruelty? We can make you invisible. Does he gamble? We can turn all the coins in his pockets into cobwebs and leaves—a cheap fairy trick, that, but quite effective. Does he drink? Any wine he puts in his mouth from now on will taste like troll piss. Are there other ladies involved? We will cause him great difficulties in this department, if you get my drift, heh-heh-heh, just say the word—”
