Once
Six Historically Inspired Fairytales
by
Elisabeth Grace Foley, Rachel Heffington, J. Grace Pennington, Emily Ann Putzke, Suzannah Rowntree, and Hayden Wand.
The Mountain of the Wolf © 2016 Elisabeth Grace Foley
She But Sleepeth © 2016 Rachel Heffington
Rumpled © 2016 J. Grace Pennington
Sweet Remembrance © 2016 Emily Ann Putzke
Death Be Not Proud © 2016 Suzannah Rowntree
With Blossoms Gold © 2016 Hayden Wand
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
This volume contains works of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the each author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Book design by Suzannah Rowntree
Cover design by Suzannah Rowntree
Copy editing by J. Grace Pennington
Preface
Humanity was born craving a story. We were born with a desire to assimilate facts, emotion, and experience into a tangible understanding of what is happening. What has happened to us, to them, to humanity at large. Story is our answer to the question of why we are here and from whence we came and where we will go. In fact, this pursuit of our thirst is the reason we cannot be content with the old ways of telling things.
All the authors who have contributed stories to this collection have come from varied backgrounds, locations, and lives. Elisabeth Grace Foley, an accomplished writer of Westerns, also writes fairytale retellings set in historical periods. The Mountain of The Wolf, with its deliciously moody setting and slow-burning romance, is a bit more intense than her previous two. J. Grace Pennington predominantly writes science fiction and dystopia, and her steampunk novella, Rumpled, is a unique mesh of science fiction with the historical and fairytale genres. Emily Ann Putzke, author of Sweet Remembrance, is a budding expert on the subject of WWII, having written a novel based on the life of Hans Scholl. The setting of the Warsaw ghetto for her story bears the rich stamp of her intimacy with this time period. Suzannah Rowntree primarily focuses on historical fantasy, writing an an ongoing series of fairytale retelling novellas in wildly different genres, cultures, and time periods, of which Death Be Not Proud is the fourth and set in a dazzling portion of New Zealand. Hayden Wand’s stories tend to meld her love of history with a sense of fun and humor, and these aspects shine in her contribution, With Blossoms Gold. My own story, She But Sleepeth, is rooted in highly personal, sensory memories of my several trips to the beautiful country of Romania and the uncanny hold Peles Castle and its royals have on my imagination and my heart.
We six write in vastly different genres. We live different lives and pursue different careers, but this quest for Story is our unifying factor and the thing which, we hope, reaches you and binds we story-cravers – authors and readers – together.
It is a new age we live in. A confusing, pain-filled, rich and thrashing age. If life was, at one period, lived on the bucolic edge of Once Upon A Time, we now live under the nose of the dragon who, while not yet slain, is certainly aware of a roving knight on his way thither. It makes the dragon petulant, understandably, and we under that rule are pressed harder than ever to see past the smoke and scales to our rescue. The fairytale must speak differently to us now. So we reassemble. We change the story just enough to help us understand our own way through the larger narrative. Perhaps Rapunzel in her tower can no longer help us; we need a Rapunzel who has broken free. Red-Riding Hood no longer a child afraid of wolves, but a strong woman who seeks them. Sleeping Beauty must sleep no longer but awaken to her rightful inheritance with a will to protect. And while caught in our Age like a princess bound promise-wise to Rumpelstiltskin, we can strike these fairytales like matches at midnight, lighting the way for the still-noble huntsman who will break fealty with the Evil Queen.
And while we make the changes our hearts glow, pumping warm blood into numb fingertips. Here is Story again, in a way we can understand it, in a way we can attain it. Here is courage and high honor. Daring and the truest love.
Here are fairytales. Beware the dragons, and enter in.
Rachel Heffington
Contributing Author She But Sleepeth
The Mountain of the Wolf
Elisabeth Grace Foley
I.
The fences had fallen into disrepair in a year and a half. Down below the level shelf of land where the buildings stood the clay-colored cliffs, the thread of dark green in the bottom of the canyon, and the long, silent expanse of blue sky over it were all unchanged. But it seemed quieter, and not only because there were no horses in the corrals.
In the dusty, sun-baked yard in front of the house, Charlie Conlan, who had never met a silence he did not break, lounged against the fence and gave tongue. “Hey, Rosa Jean!” he called. “Ain’t you gonna tell what’s for supper tonight? I got a sneaking predisposition that it’s pie.”
There was no answer, and he slid his elbows off the fence and came closer—edging round outside a certain radius from the door, however, for he had met a pan of dishwater in the face before, and could not be entirely sure it had been by accident. “Hey!” he hollered. “Rosa Je-e-an! What’s on the bill-a-fare?”
Rosa Jean appeared in the doorway and shook the dust from a faded rag-rug mat with a snap. “Salt pork,” she said. “I haven’t seen a red cent out of you or Wirt yet. You’re not getting anything better till you pay up.”
Charlie began complainingly, “Aw, say, listen—” but she cut him off: “And don’t tell me you haven’t got any money, because I know Wirt went down to the Gulch to lay in supplies. I’m not running any free lunch counter, for you or anybody else.”
“Shooee!” said Charlie. “You got a bite today. Any special reason?”
“I wouldn’t call you a special reason,” said Rosa Jean Kennedy tartly. She disappeared into the house and came back with a broom, and began to sweep the dry, splintered wooden steps.
Charlie grinned only half sourly. His customary expression wavered between joking bravado and a rather sneaky, guilty look, as if he had just been caught in something or expected to be caught at any minute. He put his foot up on the lower step, and Rosa Jean pushed it off with the broom. “All right, all right. Reckon maybe I ought to marry into the business if I expect not to starve. You are gonna marry me one day, aren’t you, Rosa Jean?”
“If it ever snows on the Fourth of July I might consider it.”
Charlie let the well-worn joke fall with a flop. “Well,” he said, “I reckon it’s too much trouble to take for pie. Maybe I’d a’ had a better chance with you if Bruce was around—he used to say he could sweet-talk you into most anything so long as he caught you before your mind was all the way made up.”
The words were barely out of his mouth before he perceived he had made a mistake. Rosa Jean’s face changed—all expression wiped from it, stiffened in hard reserve. Charlie, made as uneasy as it was possible for him to be, looked away and hitched his shoulders awkwardly. “I’m—I’m sorry, Rosa Jean. I didn’t mean to remind you.”
“You’re not fit to remind me.”
Charlie either could not or did not want to attempt protest of this. He looked away down the trail sloping from the ranch toward the canyon, twisting his face into a squint that did nothing to improve his appearance. Rosa Jean turned on her heel and went inside.
She re-emerged in a moment carrying a basket, came down the steps and
started for the chicken coop. Charlie started to follow her for a few steps but thought better of it and stopped.
“Going to be three of us for supper,” he said, with a half-hearted effort at sounding defiantly normal. “We’re taking a third fella in with us this trip. Guess I’ll go and meet Wirt and him now.”
“I’m not stopping you,” said Rosa Jean without turning her head.
Charlie, once it had penetrated his mind that this was a hint, glanced vaguely around the yard, shrugged, and walked to his horse, which stood saddled and resting a hind hoof by the fence. He mounted and started down the trail, a soft, choking plume of dust-like smoke ascending from his horse’s hooves and blowing up and over the empty, run-down little mountain ranch to dissipate in the endless skies above.
Rosa Jean paused at the enclosure of the chicken coop with her hand on the latch, and stood looking back until the dust thinned and faded, leaving a clear view of the canyon below. The long, diamond-shaped shelf of land was a halfway point tucked against the side of the rough red mountain range—a few acres of pasturage and a small cluster of buildings that stood in the shallow inner point of the diamond against the mountainside. To the left of the house, the trail dropped toward the canyon; away at the far end of the pasture began another that wound up into the mountains. Most of the prospectors who hunted silver and the mustangers who hunted wild horses there passed this way on their journey upwards—yet even these visitors were few and scattered enough.
Rosa Jean fed the chickens, then put her empty basket on top of a fence post and crossed to the barn. Inside the barn was dark, and a phosphorescent haze hung in front of her eyes for a moment as they adjusted from the suddenly-shut-off afternoon glare. The one horse inside moved white in the gloom—a finely speckled flea-bitten gray which turned its well-shaped face toward her inquiringly. Rosa Jean moved close to the horse, put her hands on either side of its neck, and pressed her face against the firmness of its smooth, wiry coat. She was conscious of an intense desire to feel some living thing close to her, to direct toward it some other feeling besides the indifference and dislike bestowed on most of the human beings who crossed her path. She was weary of feeling those things, and only those things.
Perhaps it was because Pheasant was the only other living creature, besides Wirt and Charlie, who had been there when Bruce was. She had sold his two horses that were left, but Pheasant was her own. The only other creature who would remember, if horses could remember. All the others had forgotten, or else they did not care.
Meanwhile, Charlie Conlan rode at a lope along the trail that skirted the edge of the canyon. Further on, the trail curved down and descended into it, and away below the canyon and a succession of pine-clad slopes lay the mining town of Gorham Gulch. The Gulch had been brought into existence, like a mushroom forced in a greenhouse, by a silver boom ten years before and was now kept alive in a somewhat reduced state by a small but steady trickle of ore from the few mines that remained open.
Half a mile above the place where the trail climbed out of the canyon, Charlie met two riders with a pack-horse coming up—Wirt Timmins and another man. They drew rein facing each other at the crest of the long ledge of sun-baked rock, and made salutations after their own fashion.
“Hey,” said Charlie. “Got everythin’?”
Wirt Timmins had a thin, pointed nose, a wide mouth, and a complexion the color and texture of a gunnysack. His head was balanced on his scrawny neck in such a way that it seemed every heavy nod would bobble it off. He made one of these nods now in answer to Charlie, and then gestured toward his companion. “This here’s Quincy Burnett. Told you about him.”
“Yep,” said Charlie with a squint and tilt of his hat in the direction of the newcomer.
Quincy Burnett returned the acknowledgement with a nod, for he felt that after this exchange “Pleased to meet you” would have seemed an extravagance. He was young, with a suntanned face and tousled light hair, and the studious expression he preserved while in Charlie and Wirt’s presence hinted at his intelligence.
Charlie turned his horse around and they proceeded up the trail, Wirt and the pack-horse falling to the rear. The sun, almost directly ahead of them, was taking on its evening tint, and the rocks, the canyonsides below, and the huge bulk of the mountain range looming above all emitted a red-gold glow, as if the whole was baking in some gigantic kiln. Quincy Burnett turned in the saddle to look back at the trail, then pushed his hat back and tilted his head to look up at the peaks, as though gathering a sense of how this majestic mass of creation related to the small gulch of civilization he had left behind.
He glanced at the sinking sun and brought his horse up alongside Charlie’s, the trail having widened to permit two abreast. “Going far tonight? Looks like it’ll be dark before we make those hills.”
“Naw, not far,” said Charlie. “It’s only half an hour from here to Rosa Jean’s place. We’ll lay over there for the night. Start up in the morning.”
Quincy, who had been studying the looming mountains again, glanced at Charlie with a mildly curious flicker of an eyebrow. “Who’s Rosa Jean?”
This question seemed to give Charlie considerable mental exercise. “Well,” he said after a minute, “she’s Rosa Jean—Kennedy. Lives up ahead—alongside of the mountains.”
“Alone?” said Quincy, a little more surprised.
“Yeah. She cooks meals for the prospectors and such that come up this way into the hills.”
“Seems like a strange place for a woman alone—this far up from the Gulch, even,” said Quincy, his gaze straying into the darkening reaches of the canyon.
“Well, it was her brother’s place. She used to live there with him.”
“What happened to him?” said Quincy.
Again there was a small, uncomfortable pause before Charlie spoke. “He’s dead.”
Quincy asked no further questions. He sensed that there was some unpleasant story woven around the Kennedys, and somehow it seemed to make it more sordid to pry it in pieces from the likes of Charlie Conlan.
It was dusk when they arrived at the Kennedy place. A light in the window of the house shone out like a single eye through the gloom. They unsaddled and turned their horses into the corral, and Quincy followed the other two to the bunkhouse, a long narrow shed that looked settled and crooked even in the uncertain lighting. Inside, Wirt lit a small lamp with a smoky chimney, revealing a couple of narrow bunks against the walls at one end and some old Army cots crowded around a tin stove at the other. They stowed their saddles and packs under the bunks, put out the light, and went across to the house for supper.
After the bare, musty-smelling bunkhouse, the front room of the little three-room house surprised Quincy somewhat. It was bare enough, but the plank walls and floor were scrupulously clean, and there were turkey-red calico curtains at the windows and a couple of braided rag rugs on the floorboards. A cot with some Navajo blankets on it simulated a sofa, some pegs on the wall near the door held a man’s old sourdough coat and some kerchiefs or aprons, and there was a little thing of needlework in a wooden frame on another wall. Quincy looked at it more closely; it was a little girl’s sampler with the precise letters of the alphabet in colored worsteds and a motto stitched a bit crookedly but proudly beneath it:
Heaven is our Guard, and Innocence its Care
Nor need the Just the worst of Dangers fear.
He felt an unexpected little stab of pity—it was so far removed from the night and the inhospitable place and the crude little house. A pitiful remembrance of innocence long gone, perhaps.
He turned away from the frame, not wanting to be caught looking at it, and joined his two companions at the table. There were some noises in the kitchen of dishes being moved and pans scraped across a stove, and as Quincy pulled his chair up to the table a girl came through the door into the front room with a platter of food in her hands. Quincy gave her a sidelong glance—and then another that stayed on her, with slow surprise.
A ch
ild—that was his first impression, but on the second look he revised it. She was older than that, though probably not much more than seventeen or eighteen. She was tall and slender and angular, her straight dark hair drawn back from her face into a long braid that fell halfway to her waist; her brown calico dress was worn but clean like everything else in the house. Nothing about her matched the idea he had formed in his head of the lone woman belonging to a place like this.
Charlie made introductions with a jerk of his tow-colored head and his mouth already full. “This’s Quincy Burnett—he’s goin’ back in the hills with us after horses.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Quincy, looking up at her from the act of filling his own plate. From across the table Rosa Jean looked directly at him for the first time, studied him for a second as if taking his measure, and then turned away toward the kitchen without having betrayed a flicker of interest.
Quincy fell to the business of eating along with the other two, all of them with considerable appetites and their elbows on the table, but he could not resist glancing toward the kitchen door now and then. The girl puzzled him. She was not what he would have called attractive, with her thin, dark, high-cheekboned young face, but there was a strange tired, far-away look in her eyes that stirred a questioning instinct in him. What was a kid like that doing alone in a place like this?
He did not see whether she had her supper in the kitchen, or if she had eaten before they came, but when they were finished she came back into the front room and began to collect their empty tin plates and cups. She came around Wirt’s chair and leaned past Quincy Burnett to pick up his empty cup, and Quincy looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said. “It was real good.”
Rosa Jean stared down at him almost as if surprised, and he thought her expression softened uncertainly—perhaps the would-be equivalent of a smile. Then she turned away.
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