Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  “My mother isn’t here yet,” protested her fiancé.

  “I must finish my wine,” the judge said sourly.

  A knocking came at the door.

  “Perhaps that’s my mother now,” her betrothed murmured.

  The judge swallowed the last of his drink.

  “Stop!” Isobel cried, but her father was already opening the door.

  Through it came a crowd of figures in bridesmaids’ gowns, their hands gloved and their slippers trailing yellow ribbons. Their wooden masks were painted with joyful faces and circlets of lilies crowned their pointed ears. One bridesmaid was dressed more lavishly than the rest, in velvet adorned with tiny mirrors that threw sequins of light over the guests. She walked to the room’s center, lifted a fiddle to her chin, and began to play.

  The music wound round the guests like piano wire. Though Isobel tugged at the hands of her betrothed and the arms of her sisters, though she pleaded in her mother’s ear, they would not look at her. They only gazed at the masked girls dancing prettily as marionettes.

  The fiddler’s song spun wilder, till the wedding party’s entrancement turned to toes tapping and the fox girls whirled among the guests, drawing them into the dance. When the fiddler dropped her instrument, the thing played itself, perched against empty air as she took the hands of the bridegroom.

  Isobel stood alone in a room swaying with masked dancers and smiling guests. They were drunk and glad; they laughed with pleasure right up until the moment the bridesmaids pulled off their masks, revealing the pointed faces of foxes, and used their shining teeth to rip out the wedding guests’ throats.

  Off came their heads! They looked happy as they fell but surprised when they landed. Isobel rushed to where her beloved’s head had fallen. She leaned down to kiss its lips, weeping as the fox girls seized her up and carried her away.

  The long staircase was not as she remembered it. Gone were its polished steps, given way to rough wooden boards weeping splinters. The paintings were transformed: now the women in them consorted with long-tailed beasts, and the men carried their own skins over their shoulders. The gold and silver grove had become a thornwood that tore at Isobel’s skin and hair and wedding dress. When they reached the house beyond the woods, her dress was in rags.

  The once beautiful house was a ruin, its hall scattered with the bones of small creatures and its ceilings porous as cheese. The fox girls bore the bride to a dusty room where a wooden altar waited. Its boards were stained, and the brown snail curl of a dried orange blossom clung to its front.

  “Make your preparations,” said the fox girl in the mirrored gown. “Your husband-to-be is on his way.”

  Isobel held up trembling hands still stained with her fiancé’s blood. “If he tries to keep me, I swear by my eyes I will make his life a torment.”

  The fox tsked scornfully. “You’ll only be his bride of an hour. It’s not your company he longs for, it’s your blood. Just as flowers wilt for want of water, this house and its grounds thirst and fade without maidens’ blood. It is my master’s fancy to seduce and marry its meals. After his realm feasts on you it will return, for another year, to its splendor.”

  The fox laughed its coarse laugh, showing the blood caught on its pointed teeth. All the foxes had shed their wedding clothes; now they dropped to the floor and trotted away, locking the door behind them.

  When they were gone, Isobel rattled the door. She stood on her toes to peer out the narrow windows. When she looked back toward the altar, a woman was sitting there. White-dressed and russet-haired, turning her golden lioness mask in filmy fingers.

  “I will wait with you,” said the Wicked Wife. “Until he comes.”

  Isobel could not speak above a whisper. “You are to blame for this. You, the Wicked Wife.”

  “I was a wife, it’s true. His very first. But it’s only in the mouths of tale tellers that I’ve become wicked.”

  “You baited me. You gave me to him.”

  The ghost’s bent neck spoke regret, but her voice was steady. “I was the bait only. Not the hook.”

  “Then help me. Don’t wait with me for death to come, let me escape it.”

  The ghostly bride opened her mouth as if to speak but, flickering, did not. Instead, her misty body drew in on itself. It shrank into the form of a white dagger, which darted toward the door and rattled through the rusty keyhole, shaking the wood in its frame.

  When Isobel tried the door again, she found it unlocked. Alone, she wandered through her suitor’s house.

  It was like the carcass of a dead beast, its rancid rooms picked rib cages or the chambers of a broken heart. As she walked through a ballroom with blackened walls, Isobel spied a column of ghostly light.

  The Wicked Wife hooked a finger at her to follow.

  She trailed the ghost through rooms that bubbled with decay, to a staircase made of cloudy rose quartz. The living bride followed the dead one up the stairs, stepping over the places where they’d crumbled. They ended in a door that opened onto a large chamber.

  Isobel knew by its odor of dirty sheets and vetiver that it belonged to the suitor. Instead of a bed, there was a nest of silken pelts. A mirror hung on a hook, and on a hatstand a wardrobe of wooden masks, each painted with a different face. Against one wall an enormous bound chest was held in place by roots spangling down through the ceiling.

  Isobel trembled to think what might lie inside it. But when she lifted the lid, she saw neither bloody flesh nor cracked bone. The chest was full of trinkets, some so old they were nearly dust, and some quite new. A carding comb, a cloak of gray wool, a needle stuck into a spool of thread. A little clockwork cat with three tails. The withered crown of hellebore made her pause, but it wasn’t until she saw her own braided bracelet and vanished blue glove that she understood.

  They were keepsakes. Trophies, perhaps. Of Isobel and all the brides who’d come before her.

  She closed her weary eyes. The hungry house breathed around her, so certain it had her in its grasp. And she remembered a far-off day, when three sisters let their blood feed a sleeping briar.

  Seeds, she thought. All the stolen oddments planted in this chest, they were seeds. The roots that grew from the chest burrowed through an acre of earth and into a wild garden, where they showed their faces as a thicket of briars. This was the grave of the Wicked Wife, of all the wicked suitor’s blameless wives, planted with the things they’d once held dear.

  The blood that warmed her cheeks seemed to speak to her, or maybe it was the Wicked Wife who whispered in her ear: Let loose your blood. Bleed into this chest as you did on the briars.

  The needle in its spool of thread winked at her. Isobel took it up and stuck it into the tips of her fingers, letting her blood fall onto the contents of the open chest.

  As the blood dripped down, she heard a growling from below.

  As the things in the chest drank it up, there came a heavy footstep on the stair.

  As the stolen trinkets shuddered, a great howling came from outside the door.

  The suitor bounded into the room, crouched like a beast in a torn velvet coat. When he flung aside his mask he had a lion’s face, pupils drawn tight and dried blood on his muzzle. He made to leap at Isobel, but it was too late.

  From each trinket sprang a ghost. With broken bones and blood-silvered throats and chests carved hollow, their eyes glistening like gems in a wedding ring. They smiled at the bristling lion, their teeth, for a moment, sharp as foxes’. Then they descended, their dead hands given form by Isobel’s blood.

  She watched as the brides took their revenge. From below came the howling of the fox girls, as a host of brides darted down the steps to make short work of them, too.

  In the quiet that followed this bloody time, the ghosts gathered around Isobel.

  Take my cloak, said one.

  Take my key, said another.

  Take my needle and thread, whispered a third. It is not too late.

  And they evanesced into the fragrant ai
r. When the last had disappeared, a rumbling shook the room. From the chest Isobel seized the needle and thread, the cloak, and the key, and fled.

  The house went to pieces as she ran. The cloak protected her from all manner of disaster, falling masonry and fast-crawling rot and devouring lines of blue fire. When she reached the house’s front door, the key unlocked it.

  Fast through the thornwood, her cloak blunting its attack, and up the staircase. All the people in the paintings were dead, the steps scorched dark. When Isobel reached her own front hall, the carnage of her wedding party awaited.

  She walked among the broken bodies. Her mother and father. Her sisters in their gowns. Her betrothed with his sea-washed hair. She set aside her grief and picked up the needle and thread.

  It took a long time to fit each head to its proper body. It took longer to sew them back on. Her fingers slipped and the needle pierced her and her blood mixed with the blood of the dead. She worked in awful solitude for a day and a night, shuddering to think she might run out of thread. As the sun rose on the second morning after what should have been her wedding day, she used the last inch of it to sew up the throat of the judge.

  A wedding party of stitch-necked bodies lay about her, limbs slack and mouths silent. She did not know what came next. The dead brides had given her no instructions.

  She thought a while, then kneeled over her betrothed and pressed her cracked lips to his. A moment passed, still as stone. Then he breathed, and sighed, and cried out. From all around them came the shouts of awakening wedding guests, who remembered nothing after the flash of fox eyes, the sudden tearing of flesh.

  Wrapped in bloodied finery, by the light of the season’s first snow, Isobel and her beloved were wed. The stitches over his throat remained forever as a symbol of his wife’s devotion, and her own thornwood scars never quite faded, as a reminder not to trust the touch of a masked man.

  ILSA WAITS

  In a village where a plague called the dream sickness slipped from house to house, a man lay dying.

  But never a man so young, his wife said, watching the sleeper like she could hold him there just by looking. The dreaming sickness only takes old men. Yet the hours passed and still he did not wake.

  The dying man had six sons and a daughter named Ilsa, the youngest child and often overlooked. With curious eyes that saw much and understood little, she watched his decline.

  The sickroom smelled of dried sweat and burning wood and there were always too many people in it—Ilsa’s mother and brothers and the herb-woman who could do nothing but took her coin anyway, just for bathing the dreamer’s face in scented water. At the end, as her mother’s whispering became a keen and the herb-woman shook her head and six sons moved in to say their goodbyes, Ilsa saw a man she did not know.

  There was no such thing as a stranger in the girl’s small world, in her hard, poor village tucked among the trees. But she would have remembered this man, whose shape was cut like paper against the room’s sour shadows. He sat perfectly still, hands resting on his knees. His pale eyes were on her father.

  The dying man’s breath labored and slowed. Someone pushed Ilsa toward him, and she went reluctantly. She didn’t know her father well. He was a deep voice in the dark before dawn. A hand on her hair, too hard to be affectionate. But her mother was watching, so Ilsa put her lips to his damp cheek.

  When she straightened, the stranger was looking at her.

  “Do you see me, child?” His voice was low and slow. His lips were lovely, for a man’s.

  “Yes,” she said, uncertain.

  His head tilted. Even that small movement seemed grand. “And yet it is not your time. I think you see too much, little Ilsa.”

  This was the most anyone had spoken to the girl since her father lay down one night and did not get up again. The gift of this stranger’s focus made her hard seed of a heart soften. She opened her mouth to respond, but her mother was pushing her away, laying her own cheek over the place in her husband’s chest where his breath clotted like spider’s silk. Above the heads of her brothers Ilsa saw the stranger moving toward the bed. To help, she thought, and stood on her toes to see it.

  Then her mother was wailing, her sons gathering around her or drifting from the room, according to their character. The stranger, too, had gone. Whatever he’d done to Ilsa’s father, it hadn’t saved him.

  * * *

  Now Ilsa was the daughter of a widow with six living sons. Her every minute was spent in the care of men, cleaning and feeding them, patching the holes they made in the world. Her eldest brother became master of the house, and power hung on him poorly. His natural indolence turned to outright sloth, his petulance to cruelty. His mother could not check him, and his brothers were badly influenced. Ilsa sought to survive by making herself invisible.

  After a long hard year, the sickness that had taken her father came back. It moved through the village on velvet paws. Softly it padded into her own cottage, curling up one night on her eldest brother’s pillow.

  Ilsa knew she was a wicked, wicked girl. Because even as she sat beside him, wetting his slack tongue and wiping cool cloths over his face, she wished he would not wake. After a string of days and nights that melted together into one long twilight she walked into the sickroom to find the stranger beside her brother’s bed. Two years had passed since her father’s death, but she knew him at once.

  His back was to her as he leaned over the sleeper. He did not turn before speaking.

  “Go away, little girl who sees too much,” he said in his voice like living stone. “Sleep without fear, the dream plague is passing. And I think your load will be lighter now.”

  Ilsa’s mother cried out behind her. In the moment it took Ilsa to turn around and back again, the stranger had gone. Her brother’s eyes were open, but they saw nothing.

  * * *

  Life was easier after he died. Without his cruelties to goad them, Ilsa’s other brothers grew less crookedly. Often she remembered what the stranger had said, and wondered if he’d had some hand in her brother’s dying. Fiercely she told herself she’d thank him if she could.

  Her chance came in summer, on a rare day when the sun shone so hotly even her village was warmed by it. Ilsa was twelve years old, carrying bread in a handkerchief and a skin of fresh milk, sneaking off into the trees. When she saw the far-off figure in a trim black coat, his hatless head and hands at his sides, she hurried toward him. Over the rutted path and into the trees, and no matter how she ran she could get no closer. Then she was in the woods, and could not see him.

  “Ilsa.”

  The stranger spoke from behind her. He stood in the shadows just off the path, his face obscured and the rest of him carved into sunlit pieces.

  “You see me still,” he said. “I thought you might outgrow the habit.”

  She pressed a hand to her hammering heart. “I wish to thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked sharply.

  Ilsa started to speak, but fear of her own wickedness stopped her tongue. Had this man really killed her brother? Could she truly be grateful to him if he had?

  “I’m not accustomed to being thanked.” His voice was gentler now. “Any more than I am to being spoken to.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Though she could not see his face, she was certain he was smiling. The funny kind of smile people made when they thought a child was being foolish. “Do you pretend, still, not to know me? Those who see me once always do, and you have seen me three times now.”

  “Not your face,” she ventured. “I’ve only seen your face once.”

  “And you’ll see it again, in time. Here, come closer. Little daydreamer. Brave girl.”

  His praise poured over her bones like firelight. She moved toward him, straining all the while to see his face. The shadows over it held fast. When he reached out a hand her heart opened wide, but he did not touch her. He took the milk she held and poured it out, flinging away the empty skin.

  “That is not f
or you. Not yet.” And he slipped like a wild creature into the trees.

  Ilsa walked home slowly, turning over the stranger’s words and what he’d done. When she reached her yard, her mother ran to meet her.

  “Did you drink it?” Her fingertips dug into her daughter’s skin. “Did you drink the milk?”

  Ilsa could only shake her head until her mother let go. The woman was weeping now, too hard to tell the tale, so one of Ilsa’s brothers had to do it.

  Their cow had been bitten by an adder with a slow-moving poison, he said, that bled into her milk but took hours to make her sicken. Ilsa’s youngest brother had drunk straight from the bucket. Now beast and boy were dead.

  Ilsa knelt beside his small body before it was buried, touching the peaks of his face beneath the winding sheet. She thought of the stranger in the woods and cursed herself for her foolishness. She knew, now, on what errand he’d come.

  Had he held the boy’s life in his pocket when he spoke to her in the trees? When he dashed the poisoned milk away, was it with the same hand that had closed her brother’s eyes? Too long had she been foolish, but she would not be so now. If her burden was to see Death when he came, she would stop him before he stole from her again.

  From that day forward, Ilsa carried a knife.

  * * *

  Ilsa was fourteen. She’d done her share of grieving, but so had everyone in her village. Death was not the courtly visitor she’d once believed him to be.

  It was winter now, the woods blue and white and howling with a storm that seemed endless. Their stores were perilously low, their bellies churning. After three days of snow Ilsa’s second brother ignored his mother’s pleas and went out with his arrows and bow.

  He did not come back. They slept and woke and slept again, and still he did not come back. His mother stood outside the door and Ilsa stood beside her, both glaring with streaming eyes into the snow. The longer they looked, the flatter it seemed, until Ilsa felt she could tear the world in two. Then she saw something coming, a dark lick against the white.