Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  Weakly she scolded Jenny for her cruelty, but the girl only laughed. That night, her mother found the urine-soaked flour sack where Jenny had left it, laid atop her pillow.

  The sight of it hardened her heart. Next time, she swore, she would not be so easy on the girl.

  As the weeks went on, she taught herself to deny Jenny. No more milk in her bathwater and cake when she cried. No new shoes because she stamped off a heel in a fury, no new dolls because she cracked the limbs of the ones she no longer loved.

  Jenny didn’t scream over these new restrictions as her mother feared she would. She did not throw herself to the floor in a fever and weep. She looked at her mother with wide blue eyes, considering her in silence.

  She was changing, the woman dared to believe. Her good girl, her apple child. Soon she would be as sweet as the fruit she sprang from.

  * * *

  Each morning Jenny’s mother rose by dawn light weak as tea. She worked by her husband’s side as the light thickened to honey then deepened to bathwater blue. In the evening, purified by sweat and the limpid air, she bathed her face and changed into a clean dress for dinner.

  On one such evening she paused at the threshold of their farmhouse, ill at ease. The house seemed darker than it ought to be, the air tarred with iron and sugar. She stood a moment, breathing it in, as her dusk-dazzled eyes cleared.

  She’d seen pieces of a shipwreck once, thrown up onto the shore of the Hinterland Sea. She thought of that now, taking in the wreckage of Jenny’s revenge.

  Everything in the room that could be smashed was in pieces. All the fine things she’d collected, the whittled figures and the pair of baby boots lovingly kept, a small painting of a mermaid and the blown-glass iris she’d carried on her wedding day. Flour and sugar were sifted over the floor like sand, gathering in dusty hillocks and sparkling drifts. Slicks of egg and their shells mixed with glass dust beneath her heels.

  Jenny’s door was locked, and when her father tired of pounding his fists on it he smashed off the knob with a hatchet. The girl sat on her bed in a pink-and-white dress, her eyes like the empty cups of bluebells. All her belongings were spotless, untouched.

  The sound of her mother slapping her cheek rang out like another thing breaking.

  Never in her life had Jenny been struck. Holding her face, she ran from the house, over her parents’ fertile fields, and into the woods. She fled like an animal, without purpose or plan. At first she was warmed by her fury. Then she grew frightened, as the forest’s familiar edges gave way to something wild and unknown.

  The stars were out when she spied a glimmer of light through the trees, which became the orange glow of a campfire. The sight made her mouth go dry with desire, for food and warmth and someone, perhaps, to lead her back home. Sitting on a fallen log beside the fire was a girl her own age, dark hair hanging in tangles to her waist. She spoke in a voice far older than her face.

  “Go on your way or sit beside me, but make your choice.”

  Jenny came forward on tired feet, one hand tugging at her hair.

  “Please,” she said, tilting her head sweetly. “Won’t you help me? I’m cold and hungry and lost in the woods.”

  “Foolish of you to lose yourself, wasn’t it?”

  Jenny straightened. “It wasn’t my fault,” she snapped.

  And without prompting she told the stranger what her mother had done. The girl listened so intently, Jenny invented a few new sins to make the tale longer. By the end of it, she believed they were true.

  The girl stirred the fire. “Your mother deserves to be taught a lesson. Your father, too, for allowing her to treat you this way.”

  There was an edge to her voice that Jenny recoiled from. There was rot in her, that was true, but she wasn’t yet rotted through. She could sense what lay beneath the stranger’s words: a dark mischief that promised a hard ending.

  But the girl by the fire was clever. When she saw Jenny pull away, she changed tack. “Someone as pretty as you,” she said, “should be treated like a princess.”

  Jenny leaned in.

  “Yes,” the girl said thoughtfully. “You must play a trick on your parents, to teach them. That they mustn’t underestimate you, or learn to say no. Once they start saying it, they’ll never stop. I will tell you, Jenny, what you must do.”

  Her next words took the shape of an incantation that buzzed inside Jenny’s ear. “Take a needle,” she said.

  “Take a stone

  and prick their heels thrice.

  Bloody the stone and bury it low

  and let the Night Women come.”

  Jenny tugged absently at her ear. “Bury the stone?”

  “Beneath their window,” said the girl. “To invite the Night Women in.”

  “Who are the Night Women?”

  The girl smiled, or perhaps she only showed her teeth. One of her incisors was dark with decay. Another overlapped it, as if to hide it from view. “They’re as beautiful as you, though not so good. If you’re brave enough to let them in, they’ll give you just what you deserve.”

  Then she pointed Jenny toward a path she’d missed, a beaten dirt trail between trees. “Now go along home. The quicker you return, the quicker you can punish them.”

  Jenny left her sitting by the fire in her cape of tangled hair, smiling her brown-and-white smile. The walk back was quicker than she thought it would be. Soon she heard her own name, then found her parents wading through the trees, her mother weeping and her father holding a lantern. They fell on their daughter with tears of relief.

  In their arms she forgot the girl in the woods. Frightened at having almost lost her, Jenny’s parents were obedient again. Her father bought her a dozen dolls and a bouquet of red glass roses. Her mother came home with a pair of satin boots with fifteen buttons apiece and a bracelet of soft gold. They gave them to her like offerings, and for a time the girl was satisfied.

  But wickedness was as much a part of her as blue eyes and a heedless heart. They could not deny that she was as she had always been, prone to fits of rash temper and cruel tricks. They indulged her for a while, but the day came when they did not.

  And every time they scolded or denied her, Jenny remembered the girl in the woods. She forgot the old voice and the hard mischief, remembering instead the girl’s praise and the warmth of her fire. The promise of the Night Women, who would give Jenny what she deserved.

  And when she’d had her fill of being thwarted, Jenny did what the girl told her she must.

  Jenny took a needle, and she took a stone. She waited until her parents were asleep and slipped into their room. Their faces were in darkness, so she did not have to see them as she pulled up the coverlet to reveal their feet. With her needle she pricked the hardest parts of their heels, where they wouldn’t feel it. When she smeared their blood over the flat gray stone she’d found in the garden, the very last bit of her that wasn’t yet spoiled gave a shudder.

  As she dug up the earth outside her parents’ window and buried the stone beneath it, that last unspoiled bit at her center blackened and curled. She was rotten clean through.

  * * *

  Jenny lay awake in the dark of her bedroom, waiting to see what might come. Wind rattled the windows, branches tapped on the glass.

  Rattle, rattle. Tap, tap.

  Scratch, scratch.

  She sat up in bed.

  The pitch of the rattle was rising, till it almost sounded like the chatter of voices. The tapping steadied, falling into a rhythm like the drumming of long fingernails. Then came the shatter-thump of breaking glass.

  Jenny fell back, pulling up the covers till they hid all but her eyes. The voices were closer now, musical and sweet. Someone laughed. Then a moan, quick and cut off in the middle. Her mother’s?

  She strained to hear, motionless, not daring to breathe, and—

  The voices died away, turned down, were nothing more than the rattling wind. The fingernails were only branches.

  Jenny turned onto her s
ide and fell asleep.

  * * *

  She woke with cold hands and a hollow head. Before the sun was fully up, her mother opened her bedroom door.

  She was smiling. Her hair was braided back, and in her hands was a breakfast tray.

  “For you, my love. All the things you like best.”

  Jenny’s father waited behind her. There was a thin line of sweat above his lip, and his foot would not stop tapping.

  The breakfast was everything Jenny wanted, all of it hot and sweet. Still she felt uneasy. As she swallowed her final bite, she understood why.

  It was her mother. Usually she smelled of butter and sweat, of heat and hay. But when she leaned in to kiss Jenny, she hadn’t smelled of any of those things. She’d had no scent at all.

  * * *

  Jenny’s father bought her a horse. She’d always wanted her own, but he’d said she was too young. Now she sat proudly atop a piebald mare with a soft brown mane and a saddle of glistening leather. Her father put a hand to the horse’s haunches and the animal startled, skin shuddering beneath his fingers like they were fleas.

  Her parents watched as she learned to ride, their faces vivid with pride. Their eyes were on Jenny all the time now. They watched her ride, watched her eat, watched her play with the new toys they gave her, beautiful things of glass and metal and wood wrapped in rustling blue paper.

  Jenny’s horse was her favorite gift. The animal was gentle and patient, and loving her might’ve healed the rot at Jenny’s core, in time. But a week after her father brought the horse home, after Jenny had swung into the saddle, he moved too close to the creature’s head. The mare jerked away from him, baring her teeth.

  The sun was behind him, so Jenny could not be sure. But it seemed to her that her father showed his teeth back, in a grin that made his head look smaller and his mouth seem terribly large. When he reached for the mare, she reared up, throwing Jenny into the dirt.

  Jenny landed hard on her back. Through her pain she heard the horse hammering over the dirt and the chilling sound of her mother’s scream. She ran to her daughter, but Jenny’s father ran after the horse.

  Jenny was on her knees when a second scream came from the fields, a beast’s cry of fear and pain. When her father returned, his shirt was slick with the mare’s blood.

  * * *

  Jenny wept, and her parents paced outside her door.

  “Jenny, Jenny,” they cried. “What can we do for you? What can we give to you? Please, tell us, what will make you happy?”

  When she finally opened the door, the sight of them was startling. Her father was red-eyed and narrow in his shirt, while her mother seemed to be swelling, her limbs and belly and mouth voluptuous. The way they beamed at her gave Jenny the stuffed-sick feeling of having eaten too much sugared cream.

  “Leave me alone,” she said unsteadily. “I will be happy if you leave me alone.”

  Their faces twisted, but they nodded and went away.

  Her mother came back in the night. She sat by Jenny’s bedside and stroked her hair, worrying all its knots free. Her scentless breath touched her daughter’s cheek, and Jenny tried to make herself still. She lifted one eyelid, just enough to peek.

  Her mother was smiling down at her, always smiling. It was a smile so wide and radiant her face could hardly hold it. It looked like someone had grabbed the sides of her mouth and tugged.

  Jenny squeezed her eyes shut and tried to sleep.

  * * *

  Always at night now she heard the whispering, the fingernails on glass. Her days were an endless parade of gifts and grasping affection. When she came too close, her mother stroked her cheek. She kissed her forehead, held her hands, buried her nose in Jenny’s hair. Jenny twisted away, but her mother’s smile never wavered. Her husband grew thinner and she grew thick. Her body sweetened, it swelled like a tick.

  “I am growing you the loveliest gift,” she told Jenny one day. She rubbed her stomach, nails long and curling. “You’ll be so pleased when I give it to you. Kiss my cheek now, and I will feed you chocolate. I will give you toys. You will have all the good things you deserve.”

  Her belly was round as an apple now. Perhaps a baby was dreaming inside it, in the place where Jenny once roosted. But where was her father? The days melted into each other like sticky candies, and it felt a long time since she’d seen him. If he’d gone to town, he’d be back by now, with an armful of dolls. His fields were empty, and his chair, and his side of her mother’s bed. If he wasn’t there, who was it her mother whispered with when Jenny heard whispering in the night?

  The same ones, perhaps, whose fingernails tapped the glass.

  One morning Jenny rose before breakfast and walked down the hall. Her mother’s door was open just enough that she could see her dressing through the crack. Her feet were bare and the one Jenny had pricked looked like a dead thing, black and purple with bruises. A fizzing cloud of flies lifted and fell over something on the floor that Jenny could not see. The room’s scent reminded her of the smell of the yard on butchering day.

  Her mother looked up from tugging her boots on. She smiled and licked a dark smear from the corner of her mouth. With one hand she reached out to Jenny.

  “My love,” she said.

  All that day Jenny let her mother kiss her cheeks and eyelids and chin. She ate the sugary foods that were fed to her, that melted on her tongue like sweet air. She allowed her mother to comb her yellow hair.

  And when it was night, and her mother asleep at last, Jenny rose from her bed. By moonlight she packed dresses and handkerchiefs and all the coins she’d stolen over the years and hidden beneath her bed. Her dolls and stuffed kittens and glass roses she left behind.

  She thought she’d sneak out by the window. But the rustling had already begun, the tap-tapping on the glass. She crept through the dark house instead, its empty rooms that smelled of sugar and dust and death.

  Her mother waited by the door. Moonlight threw the swollen shadow of her belly across the floor.

  “Were you going away, my Jenny?” Her voice was woeful, but her smile was bright. “Were you going to leave me? If I had lost you, I’d never be happy again.”

  Her tongue ran over her lip. Had it always been so long, so wet and red?

  “But I didn’t lose you, and I never will. You are my child. I want you close, my Jenny. As close as you can come.”

  “I don’t want to,” Jenny whispered.

  Her mother’s fingers on her belly tapped and tapped. “But you always want. Come closer now, so I can whisper of all the things I’m going to give you.”

  She inched forward on long bruised feet. She rubbed her belly and the thing that lay inside it, ready to become something new. Her smile was wide and wider, a grin, then a gash, then an unpeeling.

  Jenny was sweeter than you’d think. It’s always that way with rotten things. When her mother was done, she lay down for the last time. Her body made a curious sound as it fell away from the thing her stomach carried, like a husk from a cherry.

  The thing she’d birthed stretched. It untucked. It was shaped like a shadow that warped and ran and bent in odd places. With a quiver and a sigh, it gathered itself into the form of a woman. Beautiful, with fingernails made to scratch. Jenny’s blood on the floor was red as candy, and her mother’s gathered in black pools, reflecting moonlight like the glass eyes of a doll. The Night Woman was wet with it as she let herself out into the open air, to join her sisters.

  THE SKINNED MAIDEN

  There are as many ways to take a wife as there are maids to marry.

  Find a girl who catches your eye. Ply her father with coins, woo her mother with words. Make a woman yourself, out of petals or birdseed or snow. Blood for the lips, ash for the hair, be careful what you choose to make her heart. Wipe the filthy cheek of a drudge: under the dirt she might be beautiful, fit to be wed.

  Now take a piece of her she can never get back, that she’d follow you to the rim of the world to retrieve. Bear your children,
bake your bread, bide her time, all for a chance at staying close to that thing you’ve stolen away.

  Her heart, perhaps. Or her skin.

  * * *

  An unwed prince is a dangerous thing. One such man was hunting in a summer wood when he came upon three bears standing upright beside a river, conversing. One had fur as white as the stones in a wedding ring. Another had fur as black as the ashes in a beggar’s cup. The third was as golden as the center of a flame. The prince settled himself between two trunks and nocked an arrow to his bow, waiting to see what they might do.

  “Shall we bathe ourselves, sisters?” said the white bear. They reached up and peeled the fur from their necks, from their faces and shoulders and limbs, revealing beneath their bearskins three maidens, one white-haired, one black-haired, and one with hair of gold. All three were beautiful, but it was the golden-haired maiden who pricked the prince’s heart.

  He watched as they bathed then stretched out bare in the sun. When its heat had dried them, they stepped back into their skins, nuzzled each other’s cheeks, and wandered into the woods in three directions.

  Each day the prince returned to the river to watch the beauties remove their bearskins and bathe. Each day his desire for the golden maiden grew, until he knew no other woman could please him. Stepping from the trees, he seized her shining fur.

  The maidens looked up from the river, bodies bare and eyes flashing.

  “I will take your bearskin,” the prince told his yellow-haired girl, “unless you agree to marry me.”

  Swiftly she rose from the water, walking over the bank till she was a hand’s breadth from the prince.

  “I’ll marry you,” she said. “But first we must kiss to seal our agreement.”

  Enchanted by her nearness, he reached greedily for the girl. As he fitted his fingers to her waist, the bearskin fell from his grasp. Fish-quick she slipped inside it, becoming again a great beast, claws and teeth set to rend. The prince saw he had been bested, and retreated before he could be killed.