Alba made herself one more promise. The house will take nothing from me that I do not consent to give. The trick, she knew, was to be ready to give everything.
Hair sweeping behind her, dress rucked up to her thighs, Alba rode.
* * *
She heard the house before she saw it. It did whisper, as the stories said. Or maybe it was the sea at its back that hissed and sighed. There were voices in the whispering that rose and fell, like the murmuring of a crowd gathered before a gallows. The house was a glow through the trees, then a shape rising between them, night birds wheeling over it like falling stars.
Mine, she thought. The ferocity of the feeling surprised her. But it was true, wasn’t it? Even if she were to die tonight, she was married to the master or mistress or monster of this place. Right now, as she rode up to its gates, the house and all its mysteries were hers.
Her house was a grand place, white and silent. She admired its clean edges and the great golden eyes of its windows. Then she straightened her neck and rode on, fast through its open gates, pulling her horse to a halt in the empty yard.
She slid from the animal’s back and led him to the stables beside the house, where a stall stood ready. When the horse had been tended to, Alba walked toward the inland sea.
It’s breathing, she thought. Its waters moved up and down like the flank of a sleeping animal. It would swallow me.
Alba walked through the house’s unlocked doors, into a vaulted hall. The whispering tugged at her ears, pieces of laughter caught in it like leaves in a river. A chair sat in front of a blazing fire, food and wine beside it on a silver tray. There was a card, too, marked with thin writing: Please eat. Please drink.
She tried to imagine her gentle sister reading these words, standing in this place, and having the courage to feed herself. Her sister had rarely gone farther than their yard if she could help it. But Alba had traveled a long way to trade her safety for a secret.
She sat. The food was hot, the wine was good, the fire stoked high. She drowsed in her chair, her head going hazy and the spitting of the fire rising up, becoming brighter, sweeter, until something woke her. She thought she’d heard singing through the floor.
The house’s lights were turned down, blown out. Her tray had been taken away, the fire banked, and a lantern set on the table. Before she could reach for it, the lantern lifted into the air and bobbed off through the dark. Alba followed it up a long staircase, then another, and down a blue-carpeted hallway. The chamber the lantern led her to was lit by one hundred candles, vases of purple-throated flowers wobbling in their light. Before her lay the wide white stretch of her wedding bed.
Alba was brave. She was determined and she was sure and she had taken pains to make herself into someone who would not break like her mother, a woman of glass, or bend like her sister, a girl of wax. But she was sixteen years old, wed to a stranger who might have been a monster. When she lay down, she kept her boots on.
She waited. The candles burned low and the flowers withered in their heat. When the last flame had extinguished itself, the chamber door opened.
The tread across the floor was soft, so quiet she couldn’t be certain anyone was there until their breath was in her ear: cool, smelling of salt and stone. It moved over her face and down to the neck of her nightdress. Then up again, breathing in her ear, breathing her in.
So this was the whim of the one she had married. Alba lay rigid, heart leaping, as a body lay down beside her. She felt the shifting of the bed and waited with crawling skin for the touch that must follow. Nothing happened, and nothing, and nothing. Her body ached from being held so still.
Then, a voice.
“What is your name?” it said.
She sat up, heart pounding with sudden fury. “Do you do not even know the names of the girls you wed? How many, now, have you taken into your bed? Do you eat them alive, or do you kill them first? What did you do with my sister?”
The pause that followed was so long she thought the voice wouldn’t answer. Her heart was almost quiet again when it did.
“That’s four questions,” it said. “I will allow you just one each night. And for every question I answer, I’ll take something in return.”
“What will you—tell me what you will take.”
“That depends on the question.”
Alba thought a long while before she spoke again. “If I were to ask you, What has become of my sister?—what must I give you in return?”
“For that answer, I will take from you your shadow.”
Alba tried and failed to imagine what it might mean to lose your shadow. “I agree to the trade,” she said. “And ask you again: What has become of my sister?”
The voice replied without hesitation. “She came to me as so many of them do. Bewildered and weeping, expecting cruelty and finding none. I took from her what I take from all my brides: the things they do not need. With what was left I made something better.”
Before she could protest this riddling response, Alba was struck dumb by a peeling, sliding sensation, a feeling like a carving knife being taken to all her edges. Not painful, but terrible all the same.
When it stopped she felt lighter, so awfully light, as if her body might lift from the bed and dissipate into steam. Sleep swallowed her like the mouth of a fish.
When she woke there was a tray beside the bed with breakfast on it, and a ring of gold and silver keys. The keys were as long as her forearm and as small as her nail and every size in between. The house is yours to explore, said the note propped beside them. But every room must be opened before you unlock the door that answers to the coral key.
Among the hoard of metal keys was one the length of her thumb, made of bony orange coral. She looked at it closely before burying it among its kin. Then she set out to search for traces of her sister.
First she had to learn how to walk without her shadow. The air felt thin; she slid through it like an oiled blade. If she wasn’t careful her body moved too fast, turned too sharp, stumbled. She was breathlessly, perilously light.
She opened the house’s many doors. A key shaped like a musical note unlocked a room where the instruments played themselves. A key whose teeth had the smoothness of seeds led to a conservatory filled with trees in pots, bearing every kind of fruit. The tiniest keys opened minuscule doors, secret ones hidden in the walls, behind bookshelves, under vases. Behind them were rooms too small to crawl inside, every detail perfect, from the pages of books to the petals of flowers. Through the window of a room no wider than her palm, an unfamiliar moon poured its light over a sleeping city.
Behind a door whose key was as delicate as a fern frond was a room full of marble statuary. Saints with fishtails, goddesses with serrated teeth, kings wearing whalebone crowns. In the room’s center was a circular pool. Weightless as a wraith she stepped into it, shattering the statues’ solemn reflected eyes. Water sluiced over her body like hands. When she put her head beneath its surface the whispering that filled the house’s rooms sharpened into a wordless song. She listened to it, looking at a ceiling painted with the aftermath of a shipwreck: a vessel broken on rocks, men littering the water, women with fishtails taking them into their arms to kiss or kill.
As she opened each door, she pulled its key off the ring and left it in the keyhole. She looked at books she’d never heard of and ate from plates that never emptied, but found no trace of her sister or of the one who spoke to her in the night. When it was dark the bobbing lantern reappeared to lead her to a long dining table inlaid with abalone. Alba drank the wine, ate the bread, and returned to her chamber, wobbling with the heat of a hundred fresh candles.
She kicked off her boots and lay on the bed. When the last candle flame had drowned itself, the door opened. Again came the velvet tread across the floor. Again the briny breath running over her skin, no sound, no touch, and when it became too much to bear she lifted her own hand to feel for the one hovering over her. At once they drew back.
“Please,” sh
e said, desperate suddenly to see another living face. “May I look at you?”
The body settled beside her on the bed. “Is that your question?”
“No! I have another. If first you tell me what I’ll lose if it’s answered.”
The speaker’s pause was thoughtful. “Tonight I will take … your reflection.”
Alba was silent. There was a time when she believed herself to be fearless, but there were trapdoors inside her, it seemed, beneath which fear could hide.
“Yes,” she said, faintly. “You may have it.”
The questions that had circled her mind all day seemed, in the voice’s presence, like the bright thoughts of a sillier girl. “Tell me this,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I am mother and murderer,” the voice whispered. “I am womb and crypt. I am a road and I am the end of it.”
No, Alba wanted to say. No more riddles. But the speaker took her reflection. It pulled free like a plant dangling roots, dragging little grief trails through her chest. With it went her memories of her own face, what she looked like smiling, sorrowing, what parts of it were like her sister’s face, or her mother’s. She had to run her hands over herself, her chest and belly and hips, to know she existed at all. The panic that came with the trade swept her under, and she slept.
In the morning she searched for her face in the breakfast tray and could not find it. She wondered what use the house could have for her shadow, her reflection. Perhaps there was a room where stolen pieces of the brides were kept.
All day she wandered. Through tiled rooms and conservatories and a long, mirrored arcade. She could hear the singing clearly now. The song was everywhere, in every room, settling into her ears like foam. Words bobbed in it like boats; they were speaking to her, if only she could learn how to listen.
She had fewer keys left now than fingers. The last key, but for the one of coral, opened onto a kind of clue: a gallery whose walls were covered in painted women. Eyes light or dark, mouths sweet or cunning, faces full of mirth or sorrow or a secret. She might have seen her sister there, in a portrait whose eyes were dark and its lips unsmiling, but she couldn’t be sure. In losing her reflection, she’d lost her sister’s face, too.
In bed that night she waited impatiently. The candles burned down, they burned out. The tread came across the floor.
“Before you move any closer,” she said, “tell me what I will trade away tonight.”
The speaker in the dark took their time settling beside her. “Your voice.”
“But—” Alba’s heart struggled like a bird with honeyed wings. “How will I ask you anything after that?”
“You won’t. Our game must come to an end tonight. Choose your final question with care.”
And Alba asked a question she would soon answer for herself.
“What,” she said, “is behind the door that opens with the coral key?”
The body beside her sighed in satisfaction. “Behind that door is your true wedding bed. Behind it lies answers to all the questions you’ll have no voice to ask.”
Having answered, they took the thing they had claimed.
Alba did not know her voice nestled in her chest like a ripe peach until it was taken from her. She did not understand the joy of taking bites from that endless peach every time she uttered a sound. But when it was gone she felt its absence, perfectly round and aching like an empty stomach.
This time, the plundered bride did not allow sleep to take her. She stood, picking up the ring from which the coral key hung, and went in search of its master. She passed ironbound doors and doors of soft wood, doors with keyholes where they ought to be and ones that were hidden, disguised as the leering eye of a satyr or the open mouth of a witch. She followed the sound of singing downward, to a slanting cellar door in the house’s very depths. Behind it the singing rose higher, keening and victorious. She could hear the words now.
The bride slid the final key into its lock.
When she opened the door the light that poured through was blue and silver and green and white. It was black and red and every color she could put a name to. Her bridegroom stretched before her, its breath on every part of her. She would call it by its name if she could speak it: the Sea. All the brides were waiting, eyes brimming, hands outstretched, legs fused into shining fishtails. One had a face very like her own. She was as light as them now, her heart as eager. Without reflection or shadow or voice, she moved toward their reaching arms, their braided siren song. She knew another voice would be fashioned for her soon, some absolute piece of her flayed into a thing that crackled and keened. That lured and crawled.
The door shut fast behind her.
THE MOTHER AND THE DAGGER
Wherever you live, there are rules you must go by.
Tales are told of a village so plagued by ghosts that bells are hung over the doors, to keep them from slipping in at night. In certain houses the cooks bake three loaves of bread, two to eat and one to bury. In some towns you would as soon slit your own throat as wear red in winter or yellow on a wedding day. And even kings must bow low when they see a dead man walking, lest the departed take offense, and take hold of their hand.
In this place, a village so small a child could stand at one end and toss a stone to the other, there is one rule: you must never sleep beside an open window.
But it’s hot. Torturously so. Hotter than your own breath, the air so ripe and still you could prick it with a pin. And such rules are faded things, softened by time.
Rise from your bed now, and walk to the window. Put your hand to the glass and push it, just enough to let the night air in. Listen to the sounds of the woods after sundown. Sliding leaves and courting crickets and all the guileless creeping of the creatures who make their homes in the dark.
There’s something else out there, too. Open the window wider to hear it. From beneath the whispering trees comes a singing, not of one voice but many, lifting in a silvery lament.
Look back toward the safety of your bed, just once. Then lift yourself up and out the window.
Walk down a path picked out for you by the helpful moon, then leave it. Let the voices sing you all the way to a little house hung with wind chimes, painted gray by the shadows of the overhanging trees. The chimes, you realize, are what you’ve been listening for. From each rings a voice.
Step closer and see what they’re made of. Bones, curving and fine, drifting in a breeze you can’t feel.
Step closer still. Hear the singing refine itself, becoming a single voice that speaks to you alone. Walk nearer once more and tilt your head close. These bones wish to tell you a tale.
You are far from your bed, they begin. The night is young now, but getting older. Listen while you can, to the story of how we came to be what we are. It begins with the tale of a princess, and the longing that undid her. Of how she became the Mother, and turned her dagger toward terrible things.
* * *
First there was a king (so whisper the bones), and the princess who bewitched him. Their kingdoms adjoined each other, but a great wall of thorns and roses grew up between them. The wall had been raised by a sorceress of the princess’s kingdom, where magic was commonplace, to divide it from the king’s, where magic was reviled.
By rights the two should never have met. But the summer the princess was eighteen, the heat grew so fearsome the roses fell like lopped heads, and the thorns and all their vines withered to dust, and for the first time in a dozen ages the way between kingdoms was clear. As a gesture of peace the unmagical king visited the princess’s father. When he and the princess saw each other, they fell deeply in love.
Though her parents and his advisors tried to put them off the match, they would not listen. The night before their marriage the king extracted a promise from his bride: that, from the moment they were wed, she would forsake magic completely. The princess vowed to obey him in this, and their hands were joined.
For many months the king and his new queen were happy. But one thing stood in
the way of perfect contentment: a year passed, and then another, and the pair remained childless.
Softly, the queen’s thoughts turned to the uses of magic. Harmless things at first. Herbs, swallowed beneath the swollen moon. Incantations, burnt buds, small offerings. Nothing worth troubling the king. But when the hearth magic of which she was capable did nothing, the queen grew desperate.
In her father’s kingdom, friendly to enchantments, deeper magic could be worked. And the queen made her plans.
“I dreamed last night that my father lay ill,” she told her husband. “I must go to him at once.”
The king was uneasy. Prophetic dreams shifted too close to the tricky terrain of magic. But he trusted his wife, so he kissed her and let her go. After a few days’ travel, she and her retinue reached the borders of her father’s kingdom. Though they could have made the palace by nightfall, the queen ordered her people to make camp, fed them the wine she had drugged for this purpose, and rode out alone once the last of them was sleeping.
She rode not to the palace but to the cottage at the edge of it, where the royal sorceress lived. The woman had foreseen her coming, and knew the wish that lay in her heart. The sorceress’s own heart was hardened toward the queen, who, having forsaken the magic she was born to, now crept back to it in the dark.
Nevertheless she received her royal guest with deep genuflections and crocodile tears. “I am honored,” she said, “and I know what you wish of me. But I beg you to think again. The cost will be too much.”
“Save your weeping,” the queen said, knowing the woman despised her. “I care no more than you what your magic may cost me. I must have a child.”
Dry-eyed, the witch sat up and studied the queen. There were things she could do for her. And though it was true the cost of any action would be great, some costs were greater than others. She chose her next words as carefully as an executioner selecting her blade.
Tales from the Hinterland Page 12
