by Tanith Lee
Until he came to the youngest princess, Gold-as-Gold Evira.
“How strongly you step,” said she.
“How lightly you lead,” said he.
And he looked into her eyes and saw there, even on that curious dancing floor, a color and a depth he had met seldom. And Yannis thought, This after all, the very youngest, soul-wise is the eldest—
And she said, “By a ribbon of air.”
And he said, “But I must follow you.”
“You,” she said, “and no other.”
“Are you so sure?” he said. He thought, What am I saying? But he knew.
And she smiled, as his soul-sister had, and he knew also her smile. And then his inner woman returned, and coming up to him she kissed his cheek, and vanished, and he, if he had grown visible, vanished also.
From high up he watched the princesses and the princes fly toward the doorway and hurry down to the boats. As they ran he saw the naked soles of their feet, and they were worn and bruised and in some parts bloody from so much dancing, and streaked with shines and spangles.
Yannis ran before them over the lake. He ran before them up the land beyond, missing the tender farewells. He bolted across the orchards of the Otherwhere, and behind him he heard them say, “Look, is that a hare that runs so fast it moves the grasses?” One thought it must be a wolf, or wildcat.
Then he fled to the mystic entry to the world, and unmistakenly rushed in like a west wind, and found instantly the silver spirit-cord flowing away through the mausoleum, and on. So out over the graveyard hill, and in at the secret corridor, and up inside the palace walls. Straight through the stone he dived. And stood sentry behind his body, sleeping tranced as death in the chair, until they came in.
“Look at him!”
Eleven sisters scorned and pinched him and made out he snored, the fool.
By then the Earth’s own dawn was rising like a scarlet sea along the windows. It showed their dresses were plain again, and how weary they were, having danced in their physical bodies all night. But the body of Yannis the soldier had slept with profound relaxation. So in he stepped to wake it up at once.
• • •
“Never a hare, nor a cat, running. I ran before you, exactly as I followed you all night, my twelve dancing ladies.” Just this said Yannis, standing lion-strong on his legs of flesh and wood, eyes bright and expression fierce. And he showed them leaves of silver, and of gold, and a diamond, taken now from his physical pocket. He told them all he had seen, and all they had done, every step and smile and sip and sigh. And he added he had not needed three nights to do this, only one. “Meanwhile, I will remind your highnesses, also, of mockery, pinches, blows—and a twisted pin.”
Their faces whitened, or reddened.
But Evira Gold-as-Gold only stood back in the shadows, her cat and dogs and most of her birds about her.
“What will you do?” Eleven voices cried.
“Why, tell the king. And he will make me his heir, and you he will curb. Whatever that word means, to him.”
Then some of them began to weep. And he said, “Hush now. Listen. What you do harms nobody. More, I believe you do good by it, keeping the gates oiled between here—and there. And he is a poor king, a coward and tyrant, is he not? His people sullen and afraid, his guards afraid, too, or arrogant and drunken. He’s not how a king should be, his people’s shepherd, who will die for them if needs must. Few kings are any good. Few men, few human things.”
But still they sobbed.
Then Yannis said, “I tell you now what I’ll do, then.”
And he told them. And the crying ceased.
Down into the king’s hall went Yannis, with the twelve princesses walking behind him on their bare and bruised and lovely feet.
And as he had suspected, the instant the court and soldiers saw the daughters walked meekly with him, everyone grew silent.
The king with his grayed black-iron beard and hair looked up from his gold dish of bloody meat. “Well?” he said.
“Their secret is this, sire,” said Yannis, “they stay wakeful on full moon nights and do penance, treading on sharp stones, and praying for your health and long life, there in their locked room. Such things are best hidden, but now it’s not, and the luck of it is broken. But so you would have it.” And then he leaned to the king’s ear and murmured with a terrible gentleness this, which only the king heard: “But they are, as you suspect, powerful witches, which is why you fear them; but the old gods love them, and you’d best beware. Yes, even despite all those other men you have allowed these girls to dupe, and so yourself had the fellows shorn of their heads: blood sacrifices, no less, to the old powers of Darkness you believe inhabit the lands below the Sun Beneath. This too shall I say aloud? Or will you give me what I’m owed?”
Then the king shuddered from head to foot. Top to toe, that was fair. And he told everyone present that the soldier had triumphed, and would now become a prince, the king’s heir, and might marry too whichever of the daughters he liked.
“That’s easy, then,” said Yannis. “I’m not a young man; I’ll take the oldest head and wisest mind among them. Your youngest girl, Evira.” And because, he thought, she is the golden cup that holds my heart.
And gladly enough she came to him, and took his hand.
• • •
Less than half a year the iron king survived; maybe he destroyed himself by his own plotting. But by then Yannis was well-loved by the city, its soldiers loyal to him, for he had learned how to be a favorite with them, having seen other leaders do it.
Yannis, therefore, ruled as king, and his gold-haired queen at his side. Some say they had three children, some that they had none, needing none.
But it was not until after the burial of the cruel first king that Yannis said to his wife, “But did your white cat, at least, not protest?”
“At what, dear husband?”
“At your changing her, for however short a space, into a goat.”
“Ah,” Evira said. “Of course, you have known.”
“And the dogs to wolves, and the birds—to chickens . . .”
“They were glad,” said Evira, coolly, “privately to meet with you. For I had sensed you were coming toward us all, and foresaw it was the only way that you would let me tell you and warn you and teach you—and so help me to save my sisters, who trust no man easily, from our fearsome and maddened father. The way matters stand in this world, it is men who rule. So here too it must be a man. But a man who is cunning, brave, kind—and with the skills of magic woken in him, needing only the key of one lesson.”
And from this they admitted to each other that Evira had disguised herself as the elderly witch in the woods, and since she was far cleverer than her sisters, none had discovered her. Though at the last, as they danced, because of the russet radiance of her eyes, Yannis did.
To the end of their lives he and she loved each other, and Evira and her sisters went on dancing in the other country below the sun, even with Yannis sometimes. But he never betrayed them. Never.
It took storytellers, alas, to do that.
NOTE
Tanith Lee categorized the stories in this volume by the tales that inspired them. A list of the source tales with their stories follows:
Snow White
Redder Than Blood. Snow Drop.
Pied Piper
Magpied
The Sleeping Beauty
She Sleeps in a Tower. Awake. Love in Waiting.
Cinderella
The Reason for Not Going to the Ball. Midnight. Empire of Glass.
Rapunzel
Rapunzel. Open Your Window, Golden Hair.
The Frog Prince
Kiss, Kiss.
Rumpelstiltskin
Into Gold.
Little Red Riding Hood
Bloodmantle
. Wolfed.
Swan Lake
My Life as a Swan.
Beauty and the Beast
The Beast. The Beast and Beauty.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Below the Sun Beneath.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Redder Than Blood” © 2017 by Tanith Lee.
“Snow Drop” © 1993 by Tanith Lee, first published in Snow White, Blood Red, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, William Morrow & Co.
“Magpied” © 2013 by Tanith Lee, first published in Weird Tales issue 361, edited by Marvin Kaye, Wildside Press.
“She Sleeps in a Tower” © 1995 by Tanith Lee, first published in The Armless Maiden, edited by Terri Windling, Tor Books.
“Awake” © 2003 by Tanith Lee, first published in Swan Sister, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.
“Love in Waiting” © 2017 by Tanith Lee.
“The Reason For Not Going to the Ball” © 1996 by Tanith Lee, first published in this version in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mercury Press.
“Midnight” © 2004 by Tanith Lee, first published in Weird Tales issue 335, Terminus Publishing.
“Empire of Glass” © 2011 by Tanith Lee, first published in The Immersion Book of Steampunk, edited by Gareth D. Jones & Carmelo Rafala, Immersion Press.
“Rapunzel” © 2000 by Tanith Lee, first published in Black Hair, Ivory Bones, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Eos.
“Open Your Window, Golden Hair” © 2013 by Tanith Lee, first published in Fearie Tales edited by Stephen Jones, Jo Fletcher Books.
“Kiss, Kiss” © 1999 by Tanith Lee, first published in Silver Hair, Blood Moons, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Eos.
“Into Gold” © 1986 by Tanith Lee, first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois, Dell Magazines.
“Bloodmantle” © 1989 by Tanith Lee, first published in Forests of the Night, HarperCollins.
“Wolfed” © 1998 by Tanith Lee, first published in Sirens and Other Demon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Eos.
“My Life as a Swan” © 2008 by Tanith Lee, first published in A Book of Wizards, edited by Marvin Kaye, Science Fiction Book Club.
“The Beast” © 1995 by Tanith Lee, first published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, William Morrow & Co.
“The Beast and Beauty” © 2017 by Tanith Lee.
“Below the Sun Beneath” © 2013 by Tanith Lee, first published in Once Upon a Time, edited by Paula Guran, Prime Books.
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