Tales from the Hinterland

by Melissa Albert

  The journey was longer this time. Her body was damaged, though her life force was strong. She could hear her husband’s heartbeat in her own, feel the ghostly twinges of injury that mimicked the flutter-kicks of the child she’d carried.

  When she reached her father’s land, it was not yet dark. She walked past the river and the stables and the silent oak. She walked through the enchanter’s house, past startled servants, up to her father’s workshop. She threw open his door.

  He was waiting for her, raven on his shoulder.

  “My daughter returns.” His brow seemed untroubled but she knew him well, could read the rage in his tightening jaw.

  “Did you fail to find your fortune?” he said. “Do you expect me to take you back? To continue your teaching? You’ve lost your beauty. You’re dressed like a common fishwife. Your power is out of practice.”

  She didn’t say a word. Lying beneath the corpses of her husband and child, she’d worked out the shape of her curse, and knew who’d given it to her.

  She took a knife and ran it over her throat.

  * * *

  That hungry, life-seeking piece of her rushed at the enchanter. His color was high, his bones unbowed, he crackled with good health. But his life was a thing with no shadow: a hard, bright pebble, edgeless. Without the presence of death to cast it into relief, it could not be peeled away.

  The house and its grounds hummed with people. Servants and children, the new wife the enchanter had taken in Katherine’s absence, the baby he’d put in her belly. But they were too far away. Nearer to Katherine, and so imbued with magic by its master that its life shone with an unnatural light, was the raven.

  Black-feathered, tarry-eyed, its years elongated by its covenant with the enchanter, the bird hopped on one foot. Katherine drank its life down.

  All but the last little sip, which was tied to the bird with magic. Not as powerful as the spell that made Katherine unkillable, but nearly. That tiny piece of life folded itself up to the size of a seed, planting itself in the bird’s smallest claw.

  * * *

  When Katherine woke, her front was heavy with blood and the bird clung to her shoulder. She felt their shared life tilting between them like the liquid in a spirit level. It wasn’t enough.

  Staggering to her feet, ignoring the enchanter, she ran from the room.

  First they found a girl in a neat kerchief. A shriek jerked out of her at the sight of Katherine, bleeding, weak, and wild, her arm weighed down by the raven.

  “Go,” Katherine whispered, and the bird obeyed. In a flash of feathers it stole the girl’s life, its talons flexing and Katherine weeping with relief as their two bodies, hers and the raven’s, were filled with it.

  The enchanter’s deathless daughter made her way through his house. By the end of it she glowed with stolen life, her skin plumped like a pastry and her hair blazing red for the first time since she was a girl. She held the bird against her breast like a baby as she returned to her father’s room.

  He’d heard the music of massacre and done nothing. All his long lifetimes cosseted by magic had made him weaker instead of strong. Katherine looked down at the fearsome enchanter who cowered before her.

  “I spoke with Death when I was below. As my body tried to take your life, I petitioned him to help me, to kill you one way or another. And he told me something I wasn’t wise enough to see.”

  “What—” The old enchanter—for he was, despite his youthful face, very, very old—swallowed dryly. “What did Death tell you?”

  “That there are things worse than dying.”

  Fed on the strength of many, the girl and her raven descended on the enchanter and tore him into living pieces, as many pieces as years he’d had of ill-gotten life.

  Ever after Katherine kept a piece of her father hanging at her belt—his left eye, rolling in its pouch, seeing nothing. Her bird she carried in a cage, loosing it when she felt the life in her faltering, for she had work to do: stealing the lives of arrogant men, and those who would tangle the threads of magic.

  DEATH AND THE WOODWIFE

  Beware the hollow-eyed men who make their living on the road; beware their riddles and the pretty things they sell.

  In a valley kingdom where summer ruled, a good king lived with his wife. In the years of their marriage the queen gave birth to three daughters and four sons. A white rosebush was planted for every girl and a red for each boy, and the queen and her children spent many happy hours in the scented shade of their garden.

  The years passed like turning pages and accrued like golden leaves, the princesses growing lovelier and the princes more handsome, until the day a wolf of the road came to their gates in the guise of a peddler. He stood at the courtyard’s edge and sang up to the windows.

  “Jewels for your daughters

  Satins for your sons

  Toys for your children

  Me, I have none.”

  The seven royal siblings abandoned their lessons when they heard his song, running to the gates to let him in. In exchange for the rings on their fingers, he gave them brooches and scarves, carved cups and filigree thimbles. Soon they were running through the palace with their new trinkets, and the peddler was continuing on his wicked way, seven royal rings flashing from his hands.

  The queen’s youngest daughter died first, strangled by the peddler’s necklace. Her eldest son was next, poisoned by the first swallow from his new willow cup. One by one, the princes and princesses fell, and by the time the king and queen heard of the coming of the peddler, it was too late. Their children were dead, and though they sent their fastest riders, they could not find the evil man.

  The queen’s joy died with her children. The last of her youth, the golden net of her laughter. She grew thinner, till the rings slid from her fingers and made a harsh music on the floor. She might, the king thought, have found solace in her garden. But as each child died, their rosebush died with them.

  After her last child breathed his last breath, the queen took to her bed. She stayed there for seventeen days and nights, eating nothing, deaf to her husband’s pleas. On the eighteenth morning she rose early and alone. On bare feet she walked through her garden, counting the places where her roses had been. At last she reached the place where an eighth rosebush would’ve grown, had she given birth to another child. From its plot rose a black sapling, narrow as a spike and dotted with green flowers. When she moved to pluck one, a hidden thorn pierced her skin. As she carried the bloom back to the palace, seven drops of blood fell to the earth behind her.

  The next morning, seven more saplings had sprung up from the queen’s blood. She moved among them, her grief finally eased. Each day they grew higher, until their branches met overhead and they made a thorn grove. The queen spent her days in the grove, walking beneath its waving green flowers, with a glove always covering the hand the thorn had bitten.

  At first the king was grateful for his wife’s change of heart. But her women whispered that her grief had only taken a darker turn. Her hours beneath the trees were spent conversing with her dead children, laughing with them, singing them lullabies. The day came when she refused to leave them, demanding her bed be set at the grove’s heart.

  The king could take no more. The thorn trees must be chopped down, he said, for the health of the queen. But, whether out of fear or sympathy, none of his men would follow the order. And so the king, older than he’d been, walked to the grove that night with an ax over his shoulder.

  His queen waited for him in the dark, her own ax across her knees.

  “For the love we have shared, for the love of our children, you’ll turn back from here,” she said.

  One hand was on the ax, the other on her belly. And the king saw something that made the spit dry in his mouth. Though she hadn’t shared his bed for many nights, the queen’s body was swollen with pregnancy.

  He wasn’t angry, but afraid. Unshouldering his ax, he left his wife to her trees. He charged her women to keep her cool when they could, a
nd warm when they must, and waited to see what she might birth in time.

  When her labor began, the queen paced and howled among the thorns. Sometimes she shouted and sometimes she whispered, never to anyone the king could see. At the height of her pains she tugged off the glove she wore on her left hand. The midwife drew an astonished breath, but the king could muster no surprise. The fingers the queen had long concealed were not fingers. They were five thorn branches, their nails round green buds.

  She labored long, and in laboring died, after giving birth to a tiny child whose skin was green in the light through the flowers. In her last moments, the queen ran her branching fingers over its head, blessing it in a language no one present knew. When the midwife carried the baby to the king, he saw that the tint of its skin was no effect of the light, but its true color.

  The midwife feared for herself, and she feared, too, for the child. She worried the king might kill it. Sickly, alien thing though it was, she didn’t want to see it dead. But when presented with the small green infant, its head fuzzed with dark hair and its ears whorled tight, the king took it into his arms. He spoke over it his own blessing.

  But the midwife had heard the words the queen spoke to her baby, in that rolling, thorn-tipped tongue, and knew the king was too late. Whatever the child would do or become, it would unfold under the auspices of the queen’s last blessing.

  * * *

  The queen was buried and mourned, her thorn grove chopped down, uprooted, and burned. The wet nurse claimed the child had writhed in her cradle as flame tore through the branches, but no one dared relate the tale to the king.

  The child grew up beautiful and maybe even good, though no one could be certain—she rarely spoke a word. The king adored her and spoiled her in every way she allowed, having claimed her entirely as his own. He could only imagine what a stepmother might make of the silent, green-skinned princess, and he took no second wife. He kept his dead queen’s memory close at hand, leaving her chamber exactly as it was when she was happy, before the peddler and the thorn grove. Her room was entered only by the maid who cleaned it, a flighty girl who didn’t think to tell anyone of the single flower sitting in a glass by the queen’s bed, still exhaling its strange perfume, as fresh as it was on the long ago day when she picked it. The maid only freshened its water and dipped her nose to its cup, looking at the queen’s blood still clinging to the thorn below its petals.

  The princess’s skin never lost its odd hue, nor her fingers their unnerving narrowness. And while she was quiet, it wasn’t because she was foolish, as some imagined. Nor dutiful. Nor good. She was quiet because she was waiting for something worth her attention. She didn’t find it in the king who made her call him father, or the nurse who attended her without love. She found a trace of it, perhaps, in the painted face of the queen, but it was no use pining for the dead.

  She might’ve spent the rest of her life looking for some unfindable thing in the corners of the palace. But when she turned sixteen the king roused himself long enough to command all the eligible men in his kingdom to attend three nights of dancing in his hall. He sensed his daughter was dissatisfied, and knew that finding a husband was her nearest means of trying on another life.

  For three days and nights the palace filled up with princes and mothers and merchants and maidens, eldest brothers and seventh sons and girls who spun so fast on the ballroom floor you could see nothing of them but their hearts, laid out like bait for wolves.

  In the first hours of the first night, the queen’s leaf-skinned daughter watched from her jeweled chair as tales were made and unmade before her. She must’ve looked lovely sitting there, in a defiant white dress that made her skin glow greener. But the hours passed and the men in the room kept their distance. The night had nearly ended when the doors of the ballroom blew open with a crash, letting in a wind that made the candles gutter and the dancers draw close together, shivering.

  In the doorway stood a man with the bearing of a king and the saturated eyes of an animal. His hair was black as an empty sky and his jacket was sewn with stars. They winked their tinny lights at the princess as he approached her, holding out his hand.

  She was a girl who knew silence, who lived in and loved it. But when his fingers folded over hers and he drew her into the dance, she understood what silence really was. This beautiful man with his predator’s gaze was as cold and quiet as a forgotten grave. His presence ate up the voices and the music and the laughter, so she heard only the soft sighing of his breath.

  When he let her go, half of the ballroom watched her with envy, the other half with fear. He bowed, kissed her fingertips, and took his leave.

  The dancers spun on. Chilled through by the stranger’s touch, the princess closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, it was the second night of the ball. The dancing had begun. She was restless in sharp yellow satin, waiting on her chair, but no one dared approach her: word of her mysterious suitor had spread.

  He arrived at last in a coat woven with the moon in all her aspects: infant, maiden, mother, warrior, seer. Again they danced in his miniature realm of quiet and cold. After a time the queen’s daughter spoke into it.

  “Who are you?”

  The man smiled at her, the smile of a wolf.

  “Do you see the way the young look at me?” he said. “With longing. With lust. I’m so far from them, they think I’ll never catch up. Now look at your father, and your old nurse beside him—see how they watch me with fear? Ask them. They’ll tell you who I am.”

  “I asked you,” she said.

  “I am the quiet,” he told her. “I am the cold. I am the thing that comes after the end.”

  Then their dance was over. When he took his hands from her skin, the noise crashed in.

  Before the third ball, the king came to his daughter’s chambers.

  “Have caution,” he told her. “Beware of making a promise before you’ve made a choice.”

  She watched him in her mirror, eyes cool. “Beware of kings who speak in riddles,” she said.

  That night she wore black gossamer. Her skin against the dress was the delicate color of a slit cocoon. The man arrived just before night tipped into day. He’d worn stars and moons, and now the princess thought he might come in stitched suns. Instead he wore a coat that jittered with bones. Finger bones, jawbones, the clattering bones of the feet.

  He pushed away the music and the whispers of those who watched them. Down a corridor of quiet he walked to her, tugging her to him as easily as he might snap a leaf off a branch. They danced again, but it was a formality. She couldn’t hear the music.

  “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “A man who will wear a coat of knives on our wedding day,” he said. “A crown of dreams, shoes of sand, and for our marriage bed a coffin.”

  Then he took her two small hands in his one and sealed his mouth to hers, taking the breath she’d sucked in when he gripped her. She supposed you could call it a kiss. When he slipped a ring onto her hand from his own smallest finger, the air around them shook with applause.

  The queen’s daughter held her head high. She let the stranger take her wrist and dipped her head at the king, cursing herself for not listening to his sage advice. When the ball ended she began planning her escape.

  * * *

  The princess had long felt it her right to visit her dead mother’s bedchamber. Through patient eavesdropping she’d gathered the story of her birth and of the burning grove, but patience wasn’t enough to gain entrance to the queen’s locked rooms.

  Now she devised a plan to steal the key from the maid who kept it. She had need of her mother’s counsel, and though the woman was dead, perhaps she’d left something behind to guide her desperate daughter.

  Taking the key was easy. Three glasses of punch to muddy the maid’s head, and silver scissors to cut the chain the key was linked to. Before the sun had fully risen, the princess was letting herself into her mother’s rooms.

  There was a b
ed there, still lush with coverings. A cold fireplace clean as peeled wood, and a chest full of things the queen had brought from her parents’ own palace, long ago, treasures wrought in glass and metal and wood. On a table lay a nosegay of white and red roses, dried brown and black. There was a looking glass and a trio of dolls with eerie faces and a footstool carved to look like a fat yellow dog.

  The queen’s daughter lingered by none of these. Her eye went to the flower canted carelessly in its cup.

  Its bloom was the color, exactly, of her skin, its stem the very shade of her hair. When she took it in her hand, it lit like a lantern. From its petals rose eight drifting ghosts: four handsome boys, three beautiful girls, and behind them a woman with long eyes and a sad smile. Speechless and shining, they beckoned at her. All moved their lips, but only the woman’s words could be heard.

  You are made of stronger stuff than he, the queen whispered to her daughter. But your suitor has his tricks. If you wait until morning, it will be too late. Wear sturdy shoes and carry this flower. Go quickly now, and find your freedom in the woods.

  The princess left the palace by the kitchen door, setting off for the forest. By day she slept and by night she walked. The green flower lit her way, and if she wandered from the path her mother set her, its light would falter. Always it led her toward secret byways, to places where berries grew and water trickled, where moss made a soft bed. She walked for more nights than she could count, until she reached a clearing with a cottage at its heart. There, her mother’s ghost appeared to her once more.

  Rest in this place and do not leave it, she said. Plant the flower at the clearing’s edge, and it will keep you safe. It is dangerous to be a princess: forget your past. The one who seeks to marry you will forget you in time. Then she kissed her daughter with a touch like a leaf falling over a stone grave marker and faded forever from sight.