Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  The queen would’ve been glad to hide the baby away, but the king liked to bring the little thing along for hunts and feasts and festivals. Their marriage was ever a warring of two kinds of power, and he enjoyed the queen’s shame at this display of her infidelity. Though the court indulged the king and made sport of the queen, no one looked too closely at the child, at her drowning, bead-black eyes. Even the servant who was her nursemaid kept away from her as much as she could.

  It was some months before anyone noticed the child was growing no bigger. She drank her milk and slept in her cradle and watched her nursemaid quite alertly, but even her nails refused to grow. Two years bloomed and faded, and she remained a wizened, new-fledged thing, who never cried or cooed or even sighed.

  Until the frozen day when the nursemaid shuffled in with her usual bottle of sheep’s milk, and saw something amiss in the shapes of the shadows. Hunched in the crib where a baby should be was a little girl, hair to her shoulders, limbs frail as a frog’s. She was naked, the little shift her baby self slept in discarded on the floor. The room smelled of iron and burning hair.

  The child fixed her char-colored gaze on the nursemaid and spoke the first words anyone had ever had of her.

  “I require new clothes.”

  * * *

  For a time the queen’s fast-growing bastard was a novelty. A wardrobe was made for her, miniatures of the queen’s own clothes, and the nursemaid learned to dress her yellow hair. Courtiers asked her questions and laughed at the precision of her replies, her perfectly formed sentences and the coolness with which she considered the world. Would you like a lovely doll? No, I would not. What would you have instead? That jewel just there, on your hand. Give it to me. They laughed, but they shivered, too. To have the princess look at you too long was a feeling akin to dipping your hand in cold oil. It was hard, afterward, to remove the feel of it.

  Since the girl’s birth the marriage of the king and queen had passed through many seasons—cool, warm, frigid, blistering. During their periods of good understanding, the queen conceived again twice. One child she carried in her arms, the other in her belly. When she looked at her black-eyed brat, she knew by instinct to hold the baby closer, to curl an arm over her stomach. The king pressed her to finally give a name to the bastard girl, and the queen considered it. How the thing you’re called could shape your road.

  She chose a small, ill-starred name, not fit for royalty. A name with a wish inside it: that the little girl would not outlive her childhood. The queen called her Alice.

  * * *

  Soon the court’s changeable attentions turned away from Alice and toward the next bright thing. She was no longer coddled or delighted in, and drifted away from the life of the castle.

  She preferred being left to her own devices. Her nursemaid was negligent at best, and as the months passed the princess’s new clothes grew ragged. When summer came she shunned the sun, hiding in the castle’s coolest chambers. When it grew cold again, she slid through the shadows, over the lawns, frightening the maids and making her siblings cry just by looking at them. She never outgrew her dresses, never grew at all, and in time the castle forgot her feat of leaving babyhood behind overnight.

  Then, on a breath-freezing morning many months after the princess cast off her infant self, she performed the trick once more. Overnight she became a black-eyed girl of twelve, a coltish creature of angles and points who could barely walk on her new legs. When the queen heard what had happened, she had her daughter brought before her.

  The queen by then had borne six children, three before Alice and two after. She’d been a bride at sixteen and was nearly thirty, and still she was small as a girl, her yellow hair falling past her hips.

  She looked at Alice from atop her throne. Descending, she circled the child, pinching bruises onto her skin, squeezing her chin in her nails, staring as long as she could stand it into her eyes. She tugged sharply on her daughter’s hair, so like her own. Alice’s nursemaid stood in the doorway, unsure what she should do if the queen decided to kill her charge.

  I mustn’t help her do it, the nursemaid thought. But nor would I stop her.

  The queen didn’t kill her daughter, though later she had cause to regret it. When she spoke, it wasn’t to Alice.

  “Hire another servant to watch her,” she told the nursemaid. “Hire two. And be sure my children are never left alone with her. Be sure they’re never left alone at all.”

  As she wished it, so it was done. But still Alice found her way to the queen’s other children. The younger ones bore odd-shaped bruises in hidden places, while the elder grew thin on a diet of strange dreams, violent in their beauty: of ice that glistened like gemstones and frozen dancing halls carved deep beneath the earth, where men with jet-colored eyes offered their calloused hands. Without knowing it, the castle held its breath, everyone listening with one ear for Alice’s approach—her sliding step, the bounce of her silver ball. Servants left in the night, and members of the court spoke of finding marks on their skin any place the princess’s eye had touched. A lord might see her in the gallery, and a lady in the music room, and later discover they’d seen her at the same moment. She was never seen moving anything but slowly, yet seemed to travel too quick.

  When the queen threw herself on her husband’s mercy, begging for Alice’s exile, he was receptive to her pleas. He would, he told her, send the girl out into the world the very next day. With her would go her nursemaid, a carriage, two horses, and a purse of gold. What became of her after that was nobody’s concern but her own.

  When the nursemaid heard of the king’s plans, she grew bitter. Years of her life she’d spent in the keeping of a loveless child; would she spend the rest of it in exile?

  She would not. She would use poison to ensure it. Her only consideration was whether to kill the princess now, before they left the castle, or to take her chances on the road, where she could claim the king’s carriage and purse of gold as her own. By the morning’s earliest hour she’d made her decision. She would kill the girl now. Even if she were caught, she reasoned, the queen would intercede on her behalf. No one would be punished for bringing about the death of this Alice.

  The nursemaid carried a tray that held the princess’s breakfast: a bowl of chipped, honey-sweetened ice and a carafe of watered wine, both sprinkled liberally with a flavorless poison.

  But from the hallway she caught again the awful odor that marked the girl’s previous changes—the sickroom scent of spilled blood, of bones broken and reset. Her feet faltered, the tray rattled in her hands.

  Waiting for her in Alice’s bed was a girl of seventeen. Her hair was as long as the queen’s, her black eyes set like two faceted stones. The princess, now three times grown, blinked at the woman on whose indifference she had been raised. It was the slow, cold blink of a slow, cold heart.

  “You may leave my service at once,” the princess said. “Or you may sit beside me and eat my breakfast yourself.”

  The nursemaid was not seen in the castle after that day.

  * * *

  The queen woke the morning of Alice’s exile with a light heart and a heavy head, foggy with the tincture she drank each night to stop her from dreaming. She was a long time in preparing herself to sit beside the king as he banished the wicked girl. Her hair was dressed in opals and thin-hammered coins. Her gown was cloth of gold. Her livid lips were painted over in white and her lashes blackened. She smiled to see herself looking as she did when she was a merchant’s daughter standing in the snow, catching the eye of a king. She was pregnant again, though only she knew it. She let her dress drape itself over the first swelling of her stomach.

  In the throne room the king was already in his seat, the court lined up before him. The air was laced with the scent of smelted iron, singed hair. The courtiers cast covert glances toward the queen as she entered, and whispered behind their hands.

  A girl stood before the king. Her skin shone like nacre around a ragged dress, too small, and her hair
fell over her back in dense yellow waves. The queen had forgotten over their many married years how the king had looked at her when she was a girl and he newly crowned and their marriage date just set. He was looking in just that way at this girl, this blond-and-pearl stranger.

  The stranger turned as the queen approached. Her eyes held and swallowed the light, so that over her face there hovered a darkness. They were black from end to end.

  * * *

  Even the king’s closest confidants, even his most rapacious companions, attempted to dissuade him from courting the queen’s bastard.

  “She is not my own child,” he told his counselors. “I will not be moved. And since when does a king explain himself?”

  Alice’s exile was forgotten. As the queen thickened with her seventh pregnancy, the king held feasts and dances in Alice’s honor. He gave her gifts not meant for a daughter: a dragonfly catch for her cloak, made of red metal. A blown-glass flower that looked like a scorpion striking. Sculptures carved of ice, before which she stood enchanted. Though she gave no other sign of softening toward her mother’s husband, her indifference only inflamed his passion. The court said that the girl had bewitched him.

  As for Alice, no one could say how her thoughts might run. But as the king’s courtship stretched on, the castle fell under a spell of bad luck. The queen blamed all of it on the girl: the dark dreams that stalked the court, the unexplained deaths of the stable’s best horses, the hysteria that overtook the servants like a plague, coming and going in a fortnight. Spoiled milk, bad weather. The obsession of the king.

  It struck the queen that the girl could be working out of desperation, seeking escape from royal courtship. The idea came and went. She could not learn this late to pity Alice.

  One night the queen fell asleep before she could give her children the drafts that sent them to a place deeper than dreaming, protecting them from the visions she feared Alice might plant in their heads. She woke in the dark with a pounding heart.

  The queen took up a candle. Barefoot and trembling, she moved through her children’s rooms, holding the candle aloft to see each beloved face, softened by sleep. One, two, three, four, all of them breathing quietly. But the fifth bed, where her second son slept, was empty, its coverlet folded back. Alice, too, was missing from her chamber.

  * * *

  Alice returned by morning. The queen’s son did not. The servants meant to protect the one from the other were hanged, but Alice remained under the king’s protection.

  “You cannot prove it,” he said, “and he may yet come home. This grudge has made you foolish.”

  The queen could not have the girl killed. She could not exile her. She could not hold her head underwater until her black eyes closed. Forced to find a more palatable means of getting rid of her, and heedless of the king’s desires, she decreed the girl’s eligibility for marriage.

  The rules she set were this: Alice would be given to the first man who would have her. If he were poor or cruel or both together, all the better.

  Though the king raged when he learned of it, the declaration had been made. The suitors came, among them both princes and paupers. But Alice would not look at them. She who dealt her words as carefully as cards now made her own decree.

  “Ice,” she said. “I will marry the first man to bring me a silk purse filled to the brim with it. Not just any ice, but that which is found in the caverns at the top of the world. Those who try and fail must lose their lives.”

  The girl was a bastard and a monstrosity, but she was also a princess, and her words had weight. While no royal maiden could refuse to marry, any could set the terms by which her hand was won.

  Now the suitors came armed against her request, and proved themselves foolish. Some brought ice that melted to water along the way. Some carried great harvested slabs of it from the king’s own stream. Some presented diamonds to frost the princess’s fingers and throat, and learned too late her request was not a metaphor. The days went by, the suitors failed and fell, and the queen despaired of the girl ever marrying.

  Until, on a raw spring day, two brothers arrived on foot. Their clothing was threadbare, their ruddy hair dark with sweat. Each carried a crate in his arms.

  The jostling pack of courtiers and other suitors laughed at the ill-dressed men. The brothers ignored them, walking with laden arms to where Alice sat between the king and the queen. Behind her stood her father’s headswoman, who struggled to keep her ax clean between executions. The brothers dropped their crates at Alice’s feet and pried them open.

  First came the lights. Cast from the open crates, they played like moving constellations over the walls and the distant ceiling, the crowd of suddenly solemn faces. The queen’s heart lightened and lifted, the king’s darkened and dropped. Alice’s fingers squeezed bloodless around her skirts.

  From each crate the brothers hefted a block of ice, brushing away the sawdust it was packed in. Every eye was drawn to it, everyone who saw it remembered a dream they’d had once, for good or for ill. The ice was glass-clear in places and silvered with bubbles in others. In it swam lights of green and violet and palest pink, always moving, tugging the hearts of those who saw it upward, toward the caverns from whence it had come. Many a suitor sighed as the brothers took out carving knives and cut a block into pieces.

  Alice stood silent as the older brother counted chunks of ice into a velvet purse. There was a singing in her head: the high, thin whine ice makes when it softens. She’d never heard it before, but was born knowing its sound. The men who had won her stood at her feet, but she had eyes only for the ice.

  “Which one of you will she marry?” the king asked, his voice churlish.

  “I don’t want a wife,” said the older brother. “I want to bring a princess low. She’ll bake our bread and clean our house and bear the children who will serve us after she’s dead.”

  The queen’s white-painted lips parted in an unseemly smile. Even the king seemed disconcerted by it. But Alice didn’t look at her mother, or the men. She held the purse of ice to her lips and tipped it down her throat.

  Those nearest to her could hear the princess’s sigh of contentment before the frost overtook her. It crawled over her lips, it bloomed over her limbs. Her skin went blue, her eyes iced over, and she dropped softly to the ground, a frozen maiden wrapped in her own yellow hair.

  The gathered court sprang back in case the cold was catching. The queen cried out, one high, fierce note of triumph, and the elder brother shouted with dismay over his fallen prize. He quarreled for a time with the king, till it was decided he would take the princess as she was, and decide her fate on the road.

  The brothers set off that night, Alice tied to the back of a horse the king gave as her dowry. The queen watched her go, waiting for the sliver of ice that lodged beside her heart to melt away.

  The brothers rode until the stars faded, then stopped to make camp. They laid their bedrolls on the ground and their princess beneath a tree. The elder brother fell easily into a heavy sleep, but the younger twisted in the grip of terrible dreams, of a white-furred fox with holes for eyes and a child who laughed while drowning in an icy pond. Of the things they’d seen while harvesting Alice’s ice.

  As the sun bled over the horizon, he woke to find his brother unmoving beside him. The dead man’s skin bristled with frost, his eyes were frozen wide. The younger brother sprang to his feet, looking toward the princess.

  She lay where they’d left her. When he kicked her with his boot, she did not move.

  The man thought fast. He tied Alice’s hands and feet with strong rope and quickly packed up camp. Leaving the princess behind with his dead brother, he rode away like Death was after him.

  It was not winter, but he heard wintry sounds as he went: the wind through frozen branches, gouts of wet snow thumping to the ground. He spurred his horse faster. When the animal was covered in froth and the brother too exhausted to continue, he made camp. All night he held a knife at the ready, keeping a fire alive
and a lookout over the road. When nothing had come for him by dawn, he began to feel foolish.

  Until the rising sun illuminated his horse. The dead animal’s eyes were covered with a membrane of frost and its mane was hung with ice crystals. There were tracks leading to it in the snow. Not footprints, but the trail of something that slid.

  The younger brother fled. In his terror he found his way into the deepest part of the forest, where the air froze his throat and chilled his eyes until they ached. It was twilight when he collapsed, so tired he couldn’t summon the strength to feel afraid.

  When he was asleep, the princess crept out from behind a tree hung with vines. She knelt over the brother and cupped her hands to his face. She placed her mouth on his.

  When he was dead, Alice stood up tall. The ice was moving in her, swirling in her eyes like cirrus clouds. On the wind she caught the breath of cold lilacs, a late freeze on an early bloom. It was the scent of her mother’s perfume. When she closed her eyes she could feel the faraway queen, the pulse of her triumphant heart.

  * * *

  The queen’s victory did not sate her.

  Her son was still gone. The king still longed for the departed princess, even more beautiful in memory than in his halls. There were still the dead to be seen to, a battlefield’s worth of fallen suitors, and her own injured pride.

  And, she thought that night, lying sleepless in her chambers, there was the remaining block of ice. The brothers who took Alice had carved only one.

  She walked on bare feet to the throne room. The whole place shifted with the ice’s delicate lights, so it felt as if she walked underwater. The queen circled the block, closer and closer, the chill breathing from its sides dusting goose bumps over her skin.

  What had her daughter felt when she swallowed the ice?

  She shook the word away—daughter—but the feeling of it stayed.