Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  I left you.

  You wanted a baby.

  It didn’t work out.

  And now you want to come back? I’m not like you, Maria.

  Don’t you ever miss the ocean?

  No. I never do.

  But he had too much pride, and I had too much shame. And once I was Judge Delprado, I only saw him in court anymore.

  Esau called me, left a message on my cell, his name, who he was, where he’d be. I didn’t know how he got the number. I met him out of curiosity as much as concern, at the old church downtown, the one from the thirties built of irreplaceable history. They made it of stone, to last, and broke up petroglyphs and stalactites to make the rough rock walls beautiful for God.

  I hated Esau the first time I laid eyes on him. Esau. There was no mistaking him: same bristles and thinning hair, same spectacularly ugly countenance, fishy and prognathic. Same twilight-green aura, too, but Esau’s was stained near his hands and mouth, the color of clotted blood, and no lights flickered near.

  Esau stood by one of the petroglyphs, leaned close to discolored red stone marked with a stick figure, meaning man, and the wavy parallel lines that signified the river. Old as time, the Colorado, wearing the badlands down, warden and warded of the desert West.

  Esau turned and saw me, but I don’t think he saw me. I think he saw the pearl I wore around my neck.

  I gave all the jewels back to Pinky when I left him. Except the pearl. He wouldn’t take that back, and to be honest, I was glad. I’m not sure why I wore it to meet Esau, except I hated to take it off.

  Esau straightened up, all five foot four of him behind the glower he gave me, and reached out peremptorily to touch the necklace, an odd gesture with the fingers pressed together. Without thinking, I slapped his hand away, and he hissed at me, a rubbery tongue flicking over fleshless lips.

  Then he drew back, two steps, and looked me in the eye. His voice had nothing in common with his face: baritone and beautiful, melodious and carrying. I leaned forward, abruptly entranced. “Shipwrack,” he murmured. “Shipwrecks. Dead man’s jewels. It’s all there for the taking if you just know where to look. Our family’s always known.”

  My hand came up to slap him again, halted as if of its own volition. As if it couldn’t push through the sound of his voice. “Were you a treasure hunter once?”

  “I never stopped,” he said, and tucked my hair behind my ear with the brush of his thumb. I shivered. My hand went down, clenched hard at my side. “When Isaac comes back to New England with me, you’re coming too. We can give you children, Maria. Litters of them. Broods. Everything you’ve ever wanted.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Not for . . . Isaac. Not for anyone.”

  “What makes you think you have any choice? You’re part of his price. And we know what you want. We’ve researched you. It’s not too late.”

  I shuddered, hard, sick, cold. “There’s always a choice.” The words hurt my lips. I swallowed. Fingernails cut my palms. His hand on my cheek was cool. “What’s the rest of his price? If I go willing?”

  “Healing. Transformation. Strength. Return to the sea. All the things he should have died for refusing.”

  “He doesn’t miss the sea.”

  Esau smiled, showing teeth like yellow pegs. “You would almost think, wouldn’t you?” There was a long pause, nearly respectful. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Come along.”

  Unable to stop myself, I followed that beautiful voice.

  Most of a moon already hung in the deepening sky, despite the indirect sun still lighting the trail down to Willow Beach. The rocks radiated heat through my sneakers like bricks warmed in an oven. “Pinky said he didn’t have any family.”

  Esau snorted. “He gave it the old college try.”

  “You were the one who crippled him, weren’t you? And left him in the marsh to die.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “He didn’t tell me. I dreamed it.”

  “No,” he answered, extending one hand to help me down a tricky slope. “That was Jacob. He doesn’t travel.”

  “Another brother.”

  “The eldest brother.” He yanked my arm and gave me a withering glance when I stumbled. He walked faster, crimson flashes of obfuscation coloring the swampwater light that surrounded him. I trotted to keep up, cursing my treacherous feet. At least my tongue was still my own, and I used it.

  “Jacob, Esau, and Isaac Gilman? How . . . original.”

  “They’re proud old New England names. Marshes and Gilmans were among the original settlers.” Defensive. “Be silent. You don’t need a tongue to make babies, and in a few more words I’ll be happy to relieve you of it, mammal bitch.”

  I opened my mouth; my voice stopped at the back of my throat. I stumbled, and he hauled me to my feet, his rough, cold palm scraped the skin of my wrist over the bones.

  We came around a corner of the wash that the trail ran through. Esau stopped short, planting his feet hard. I caught my breath at the power of the silent brown river running at the bottom of the gorge, at the sparkles that hung over it, silver and copper and alive, swarming like fireflies.

  And standing on the bank before the current was Pinky—Isaac—braced on his canes, startlingly insouciant for a cripple who’d fought his way down a rocky trail. He craned his head back to get a better look at us and frowned. “Esau. I wish I could say it was a pleasure to see you. I’d hoped you’d joined Jacob at the bottom of the ocean by now.”

  “Soon,” Esau said easily, manhandling me down the last of the slope. He held up the hand that wasn’t knotted around my wrist. I blinked twice before I realized the veined, translucent yellow webs between his fingers were a part of him. He grabbed my arm again, handling me like a bag of groceries.

  Pinky hitched himself forward to meet us, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit Esau across the face with his crutch. I imagined the sound the aluminum would make when it shattered Esau’s cheekbone. Litters of them. Broods. Easy to give in and let it happen, yes. But litters of what?

  “You didn’t have to bring Maria into it.”

  “We can give her what she wants, can’t we? With your help or without it. How’d you get the money for school?”

  Pinky smiled past me, a grin like a wolf. “There was platinum in those chains. Opals. Pearls big as a dead man’s eyeball. Plenty. There’s still plenty left.”

  “So there was. How did you survive?”

  “I was guided,” he said, and the blue lights flickered around him. Blue lights that were kin to the silver lights swarming over the river. I could imagine them buzzing. Angry, invaded. I turned my head to see Esau’s expression, but he only had eyes for Pinky.

  Esau couldn’t see the lights. He looked at Pinky, and Pinky met the stare with a lifted chin. “Come home, Isaac.”

  “And let Jacob try to kill me again?”

  “He only hurt you because you tried to leave us.”

  “He left me for the father of frogs in the salt marsh, Esau. And you were there with him when he did—”

  “We couldn’t just let you walk away.” Esau let go of my arm with a command to be still, and stepped toward Pinky with his hands spread wide. There was still light down here, where the canyon was wider and the shadow of the walls didn’t yet block the sun. It shone on Esau’s balding scalp, on the yolky, veined webs between his fingers, on the aluminum of Pinky’s crutches.

  “I didn’t walk,” Pinky said. He turned away, hitching himself around, the beige rubber feet of the crutches braced wide on the rocky soil. He swung himself forward, headed for the river, for the swarming lights. “I crawled.”

  Esau fell into step beside him. “I don’t understand how you haven’t . . . changed.”

  “It’s the desert.” Pinky paused on a little ledge over the water. Tamed by the dam, the river ran smooth here and still. I could feel its power anyway, old magic that made this land live. “The desert doesn’t like change. It keeps me in between.”


  “That hurts you.” Almost in sympathy, as Esau reached out and laid a webbed hand on Pinky’s shoulder. Pinky flinched but didn’t pull away. I opened my mouth to shout at him, feeling as if my tongue were my own again, and stopped. Litters.

  Whatever they were, they’d be Pinky’s children.

  “It does.” Pinky fidgeted with the crutches, leaning forward over the river, working his forearms free of the cuffs. His shoulders rippled under the white cloth of his shirt. I wanted to run my palms over them.

  “Your legs will heal if you accept the change,” Esau offered, softly, his voice carried away over the water. “You’ll be strong. You’ll regenerate. You’ll have the ocean, and you won’t hurt anymore, and there’s your woman—we’ll take her too.”

  “Esau.”

  I heard the warning in the tone. The anger. Esau did not. He glanced at me. “Speak, woman. Tell Isaac what you want.”

  I felt my tongue come unstuck in my mouth, although I still couldn’t move my hands. I bit my tongue to keep it still.

  Esau sighed, and looked away. “Blood is thicker than water, Isaac. Don’t you want a family of your own?”

  Yes, I thought. Pinky didn’t speak, but I saw the set of his shoulders, and the answer they carried was no. Esau must have seen it too, because he raised one hand, the webs translucent and spoiled-looking, and sunlight glittered on the barbed ivory claws that curved from his fingertips, unsheathed like a cat’s.

  With your help or without it.

  But litters of what?

  I shouted so hard it bent me over. “Pinky, duck!”

  He didn’t. Instead, he threw his crutches backward, turned with the momentum of the motion, and grabbed Esau around the waist. Esau squeaked—shrieked—and threw his hands up, clawing at Pinky’s shoulders and face as the silver and blue and coppery lights flickered and swarmed and swirled around them, but he couldn’t match Pinky’s massive strength. The lights covered them both, and Esau screamed again, and I strained, lunged, leaned at the invisible chains that held me as still as a posed mannequin.

  Pinky just held on and leaned back.

  They barely splashed when the Colorado closed over them.

  Five minutes after they went under, I managed to wiggle my fingers. Up and down the bank, there was no trace of either of them. I couldn’t stand to touch Pinky’s crutches.

  I left them where they’d fallen.

  Esau had left the keys in the car, but when I got there I was shaking too hard to drive. I locked the door and got back out, tightened the laces on my sneakers, and toiled up the ridge until I got to the top. I almost turned my ankle twice when rocks rolled under my foot, but it didn’t take long. Red rock and dusty canyons stretched west, a long, gullied slope behind me, the river down there somewhere, close enough to smell but out of sight. I settled myself on a rock, elbows on knees, and looked out over the scarred, raw desert at the horizon and the setting sun.

  There’s a green flash that’s supposed to happen just when the sun slips under the edge of the world. I’d never seen it. I wasn’t even sure it existed. But if I watched long enough, I figured I might find out.

  There was still a hand span between the sun and the ground, up here. I sat and watched, the hot wind lifting my hair, until the tawny disk of the sun was halfway gone and I heard the rhythmic crunch of someone coming up the path.

  I didn’t turn. There was no point. He leaned over my shoulder, braced his crutches on either side of me, a presence solid and cool as a moss-covered rock. I tilted my head back against Pinky’s chest, his wet shirt dripping on my forehead, eyes, and mouth. Electric blue lights flickered around him, and I couldn’t quite make out his features, shadowed as they were against a twilight sky. He released one crutch and laid his hand on my shoulder. His breath brushed my ear like the susurrus of the sea. “Esau said blood is thicker than water,” I said, when I didn’t mean to say anything.

  “Fish blood isn’t,” Pinky answered, and his hand tightened. I looked away from the reaching shadows of the canyons below and saw his fingers against my skin, pale silhouettes on olive, unwebbed. He slid one under the black strap of my tank top. I didn’t protest, despite the dark red, flaking threads that knotted the green smoke around his hands.

  “Where is he?”

  “Esau? He drowned.”

  “But—” I craned my neck. “You said Gilmans never drown.”

  He shrugged against my back. “I guess the river just took a dislike to him. Happens that way sometimes.”

  A lingering silence, while I framed my next question. “How did you find me?”

  “I’ll always find you, if you want,” he said, his patched beard rough against my neck. “What are you watching?”

  “I’m watching the sun go down.”

  “Come in under this red rock,” he misquoted, as the shadow of the ridge opposite slipped across the valley toward us.

  “The handful of dust thing seems appropriate—”

  Soft laugh, and he kissed my cheek, hesitantly, as if he wasn’t sure I would permit it. “I would have thought it’d be ‘Fear death by water.’”

  The sun went down. I missed the flash again. I turned to him in a twilight indistinguishable from the gloom that hung around his shoulders and brushed the flickering lights away from his face with the back of my hand. “Not that,” I answered. “I have no fear of that, my love.”

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award-winning author of twenty-seven novels (her most recent novels are Karen Memory and—co-authored with Sarah Monette—Apprentice of Elves) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts.

  Yoon Ha Lee’s story draws from childhood images of the Dragon King Under the Sea and his realm from Korean folklore. Unlike malevolent European dragons—usually associated with fire and devastation—dragons in Korean tradition are mostly benevolent and connected to the quality, flow, and control of water as well as the waves of the sea.

  The Coin of Heart’s Desire

  Yoon Ha Lee

  In an empire at the wide sea’s boundaries, where the clouds were the color of alabaster and mother-of-pearl, and the winds bore the smells of salt and faraway fruits, the young and old of every caste gathered for their empress’s funeral. In life she had gone by the name Beryl-Beneath-the-Storm. Now that she was dead, the court historians were already calling her Weave-the-Storm, for she had been a fearsome naval commander.

  The embalmers had anointed Weave-the-Storm in fragrant oils and hidden her face, as was proper, with a mask carved from white jade. In one hand they had placed a small banner sewn with the empire’s sword-and-anchor emblem in dark blue; in the other, a sharp, unsheathed knife whose enameled hilt winked white and gold and blue. She had been dressed in heavy silk robes that had only been worn once before, at the last harvest moon festival. The empire’s people believed in supplying their ruler well for the life in the sea-to-come, so that she would intercede with the dragon spirits for them.

  The empress had left behind a single daughter. She was only thirteen years old, so the old empress’s advisors had named her Early-Tern-Journeying. Tern had a gravity beyond her years. Even at the funeral, dressed in the white-and-gray robes of mourning, she was nearly impassive. If her eyes glistened when the priests chanted their blessings for the road-into-sunset, that was only to be expected.

  Before nightfall, the old empress’s bier was placed upon a funeral boat painted red to guide her sunward. One priest cut the boat loose while the empress’s guard set it ablaze with fire arrows.

  Tern’s oldest advisor, a sage who had visited many foreign shrines in his youth, turned to her and said over the crackling flames and the lapping water, “You must rest well tonight, my liege. Tomorrow you will hold court before the Twenty-Seven Great Famil
ies. They must see in you your mother’s commanding presence, for all your tender years.”

  Tern knew perfectly well, as did he, that no matter how steely her composure, the Great Families would see her as an easy mark. But she merely nodded and retired to the meditation chamber.

  She did not sleep that night, although no one would have blamed her if she had. Instead, she thought long and hard about the problem before her. At times, as she inhaled the sweet incense, she wanted desperately to call her mother back from the funeral ship and ask her advice. But the advice her mother had already passed down to her during the years of her life would have to suffice.

  Two hours before dawn, she rang a silver bell to summon her servants. “Wake up the chancellor of the exchequer,” she said to them. “I need his advice.”

  The chancellor was not pleased to be roused from his sleep, and even less pleased when Tern explained her intent. “Buy off the Families?” he said. “It’s a bad precedent.”

  “We’re not buying them off,” Tern said severely. “We are displaying a bounty they cannot hope to equal. They will ask themselves, if the imperial house can afford to give away such treasures, what greater might is it concealing?”

  The chancellor grumbled and muttered, but accompanied Tern to the first treasury. The treasury’s walls were hung with silk scrolls painted with exquisite landscapes and piled high with illuminated books. The shapes of cranes and playful cats were stamped onto the books’ covers in gold leaf. Tiny ivory figurines no larger than a thumbnail were arrayed like vigilant armies, if not for the curious fact that each one had the head of an extinct bird. Swords rested on polished stands, cabochons of opal and aquamarine gleaming from their gold-washed scabbards, their pale tassels decorated with knots sacred to the compass winds. There were crowns of braided wire cradling fossils inscribed with fractured prophecies, some still tangled with the hair of long-dead sovereigns, and twisted ropes of pearls perfectly graduated in size and color, from shimmering white to violet-gray to lustrous black.