Hushed giggles threaded into the dark with curls of dead candle smoke and the hissing of drowned lamp wicks. When he was close enough to see a glow of yellow light, he could also hear gossip about a budding relationship between kitchen scullions. Just before he announced himself, one of the girls turned in profile, tucking a curtain of dark hair behind her ear. Justus’s heart leaped.
It was the cheerful laundry girl.
Justus would have given anything at that moment to look like himself: his hair brushing his brow, his face bare of makeup, at least wearing some trousers. He couldn’t bear to speak to her dressed like this.
The laundry girl reached up, turning the wick on a wall-mounted lamp, and Justus held his breath so he wouldn’t curse. Ragged scars snaked up from her bust and over her shoulder, disappearing down her back. Her ruined skin looked like the wood around the doorknob to Monster’s sitting room.
The other girl had only one arm.
Justus lost himself for a few moments, a cyclone of rage spinning in his chest. His hands tightened on his skirts, and he had to talk himself out of stomping into Monster’s room and stabbing him with the cutlass that very instant.
He could at least accompany the girls to their rooms, even if they didn’t know of it. If Monster showed up and attempted to savage them, Justus could draw the attention to himself. Justus was humiliated by how easily Monster had charmed him into forgetting the very atrocities that brought him here in the first place.
The girls, who called one another Pia and Annike, made their way to the northern wing of the castle. When they opened the door into the northern hall, Justus could see a line of candles, so he knew their work wasn’t done. But when he caught up to them, Justus found the door bolted from the inside. His hairpin was useless.
Defeated, feeling cowardly and alone, Justus returned to his rooms.
He no longer felt torn about the murder he must commit. It wasn’t that there was nothing good about Monster; it was that there was also evil.
Justus would be sure his friend didn’t suffer.
“Will you want another week, mistakenly thinking I will eat you when you finish?” Monster asked at breakfast.
“Ha! I’ve seen the lard you call food,” Justus said. “I’m too lean for you.”
In answer, Monster passed Justus a plate of croissants slathered in butter and sweet frosting.
Justus loathed how easily he fell into their banter, how much he enjoyed it.
“Why don’t you laugh aloud?” Monster asked. “You sit there and quiver like an angry porcupine. The first time, I thought you were dying.”
“I don’t want anyone to know what it sounds like,” Justus said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want anyone to know that, either.”
“Can Anyone see their sculpture, now that the lazy artist has had so much time?”
Justus shrugged. “If Anyone has a gift for me.”
Monster motioned to Valfrid, who brought forth a long parcel. They cleared a place on the table, and Justus peeled away the cloth wrapping to reveal what might have been the most marvelous bow ever made. Dark-stained wood in an elegant, swooping curve, smooth and perfect, with a lightly padded grip measured exactly to Justus’s hand. The arrows, fletched in shades of yellow and white, came in a variety of lengths and points, one for any animal Justus stalked.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. Tears burned behind his eyes, and he rolled everything back into the cloth it came in.
“Will you reveal your masterpiece in the library today?” Monster asked.
“First I should show Rigmora,” Justus lied, hoping he didn’t see Rigmora at all.
He needed to prepare himself by walking through the hall with its macabre masks. He must remember Gudrun and the mutilated servant girls.
Justus tore the sleeves from his dress. He didn’t have any men’s clothes, so he was going to have to kill in this. At least he could cut away the parts that might trip him. He’d learned that lesson on the side of a cold mountain. Justus hacked off the skirt with his cutlass, leaving it scandalously high.
The garters holding up his stockings showed, and he allowed himself a grim smile at how foolish he must look.
Next he turned the blade to his hair, sawing painful handfuls off until it no longer trailed down his back, and only a few thin wisps remained in the periphery of his vision.
Justus had forgotten to have Rigmora help him out of his corset, but it might be better this way. It was tight, so it wouldn’t snag while he shot, and he could tuck the other two arrows in the front lacing, like a quiver.
It was time.
Justus stepped into the library doorway, his weight bent to accommodate the bow, a bear-killing arrow nocked and ready to fly. Would an artist render this grand moment some day? If so, Justus knew it would be wrong. The artist would clothe Justus in a hunter’s garb, perhaps even a noble’s. Not a corset and the tattered remnants of a skirt, garters, and stockings. The Justus of the painting would have a beard and no lipstick. And the Monster of the painting, Justus knew, would be the snarling beast he had failed to carve.
The real Monster was already there, crouched on all fours before Justus’s worst sculpture. Justus wasn’t used to working on such a large scale, or with unfamiliar instruments, but Monster was admiring it with a focus that should have been reserved for a master.
“Do you like it?” Justus asked.
“I was wondering when you were going to stop torturing your voice like that,” Monster said, not looking up.
“How long have you known?”
Monster smiled, still studying the lines of the sculpture. “I asked that Rigmora check your body for further wounds, and she was surprised to find you healthy in places she didn’t even know you had.” Monster laughed, then continued. “I love the carving. If you really were going to kill me, I should want it over my grave.”
“I’ll carry it there myself,” Justus said, his voice breaking. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, Monster. I truly call you friend, and despite this betrayal, I’ll never lie: I loved you.”
“If you call me friend, stay your hand but a moment. I promise I’ll not move from this spot,” Monster said.
“Agreed,” Justus said. He blinked rapidly, shepherding tears away to keep his vision sharp. His arm ached with the need for release, and so did his heart, but he would let Monster have his last words.
Monster reached under his neck and in one fluid movement, he pulled his head off. It fell back like the hood of a cloak, revealing a breath-taking young woman with a face the color of spring petals and eyes like the sky. The laundry girl, Pia.
The rest of Monster was now only a cloak, and she casually tossed it over the statue, clad in a plain shift and woolen stockings with holes at the toes.
Justus fell to his knees on the rug, setting the bow aside and staring. Was she a witch? Enchanted?
“As it happens, Karin,” Pia said, “You’re worse at playing assassin than you are at playing girl. I killed the Greve five years ago.”
“He came to me, in the night,” Pia said, blowing the steam away from her gleg. They sat on the sofa in the library, alone but for the crackling fire.
“I sharpened the curtain rod on the stone under my bed, because after the first time I knew I couldn’t stand it again. I poked a hole in the blankets, and when he came near, I harpooned him just beneath his ribs.” When Justus’s eyebrows rose, she nodded. “Yes, those wounds are from me. Just as these are from him,” she said, rubbing a hand over her left shoulder.
“The Greve howled and tore at me, but I was quick. When I ducked through the door, he tried to leap after me, but the curtain rod stuck across the frame, and I ran up into the attic while he tried to maneuver through. I knew he could follow the trail of blood, but perhaps if I found a small enough space, one where he couldn’t reach me, I could hide there until he bled to death.”
She spoke matter-of-factly, as if it was something fifty years ago rather than
five. She was still too young for lines on her face, but he could see where they would appear: creases at the corners of her mouth, in her dimples, and at the edges of her eyes, which half-mooned when she smiled.
“I waited until nightfall, crammed into a dusty nook in the north tower, before I ventured back to my room. He’d died there, unable to pull the rod free—but I didn’t find the beast. I found a man wearing a cloak.
“I knew better than to put it on, but I had an idea. My grandmother once said you could summon a witch if you hold an item of hers and call to the north. That night, I woke to an owl scratching at my window. When I opened the window, I found the witch in the courtyard. She was a strange and beautiful woman, with white hair longer than she was tall and billowing gray robes.
“At first I was afraid of her, but when I explained about the Greve, and told her my plan, she came inside. We had tea. It was supposed to be a curse, she said, for a terrible man that someone should have killed sooner. You know the rest of that story. She modified the cloak so I could take it off and put it back on as often as I liked. Despite what everyone thinks, for the past five years, I assure you I have not been raping and eating young women.”
“What, not even the one who carved that awful wooden eyesore?” Justus gestured to his failure.
“I have other plans for her. But with the first four girls to come to me, I told each of them they were unfit to be eaten, and exiled them to higher education, apprenticeships, or suitable marriages in other countries. None of them know my secret—they cannot, or they might betray me to the common people.”
“The people wouldn’t kill you if they knew,” Justus protested, shaking his head. “You could tell them.”
“It’s not about being killed,” Pia said. There was diamond in her voice, hard and sharp. “It’s about saving their sacrifices. They were so willing to let go of us instead of banding together and killing the Greve. Well, let them, then! If they can do without those women, so they shall, and I will continue to find better use for them elsewhere.”
Justus wanted to argue with Pia; he wanted to defend the people of his village. But he remembered when he asked about hunting the Greve, how people told him to be quiet or he’d get himself killed and the rest of them in trouble.
“Of a girl called Gudrun . . . ” Justus said, trailing off hopefully.
“She’s in China, studying under a master painter.”
Justus’s soul flickered and burned like a lamp coming to life. “She’s my sister.”
“You look alike, though of course she’s prettier. In that dress, I thought I might have a hard time marrying you off.”
“And now?” Justus gestured at his clothes, spares from Valfrid. The shirt and trousers were both drab and black and had to be rolled up, but at least they wouldn’t trip him in snow.
“Despite your sassy mouth and clumsiness, I don’t think it will be so difficult after all. Would you like to see my notes on you?”
Intrigued, Justus nodded, and Pia rose, cupping her gleg in two hands as she strode down the hall. Justus followed her through the chilly corridor, his mug in one hand, the other guarding against his slipping waistband.
They paused at the locked door through which Pia had disappeared the other night. She let Justus through with a set of clanking iron keys.
Brilliant sunlight stabbed through the windows of Pia’s workroom, illuminating a museum of shrines. Each isolated table held collections of scribbled notes, copied pages from books with underlined passages, and even a few rudimentary drawings. The ceiling arched away into darkness but for cathedral-like skylights of stained green glass.
Pia invited Justus to look closer with a swooping gesture of one arm. He skimmed the notes, looking for something he recognized. He hadn’t learned enough to read well yet, but he could tell not all the words were in Swedish. Justus stopped at the fourth shrine and ran his fingers over an ink drawing of a rabbit in some reeds, carelessly scrawled on a scrap of paper. Gudrun’s daisy-shaped signature curled around the rabbit’s visible paw. Some of the letters here were scribbled in strange characters nothing like those he’d learned from Valfrid.
Gudrun was still gone, as much as if she’d been devoured. Justus wasn’t sure where China was, but he knew what lay between: bandits and pirates, desert, sea, and jungle. His fists clenched, and he thought about telling Pia what he thought of her stealing his sister.
Her cool fingers slid over one of his fists, gentle pressure coaxing his hand open. “Her mentor says she most enjoys painting the birds, and that she makes their tails too long and refuses to change it. One is to arrive for my private collection sometime later this year. You may have it.”
Justus swallowed. “I don’t want her to be gone, even if she’s alive.”
Pia nodded. “I also dislike it when my guests leave. Yours is next,” she added, indicating the next table.
Justus glanced at it. His collection was smaller than the others, and had many observations crossed out and re-written. Most of it was incomprehensible, but here and there he spotted words he knew. Karin. Castle. Brave.
Justus met Pia’s gaze. “I can’t read it,” he admitted.
Pia smiled. “It says, ‘I’m thinking of offering Karin a position as guardian of the castle in my absence—she’s brave and skilled.’ What do you think of that?”
“I don’t understand. You’re leaving?” Justus looked down at the paper again to mask his disappointment.
“Never for good, but I can’t simply dispatch these young women off to unknown places,” Pia said. “I must spend time making connections, through letters, gifts, and sometimes visits. While I’m gone, the castle staff is unprotected. I’m willing to stand for what I’ve done, but I don’t expect them to do the same.
“I was about to ask you if you’d stay on as their protector when I found out you weren’t a woman. Then I waited for proof that I could trust you, and I got it: you would even kill someone you loved if it would guard the lives of my rescued women, Justus. We’ll find no better protector.”
“I’m honored,” Justus said. His gaze snagged on one of the notes, weighted by the two halves of his broken arrow. Sudden emotion kicked through Justus’s heart like a silver frog through a murky pond. He pointed. “That paper has a heart drawn on it. What does it say?”
Pia smiled, raising one eyebrow. “When you can read that sentence, perhaps you’ll find it better than you imagined.”
Cory Skerry lives in a spooky old house that he doesn’t like to admit is haunted. When he’s not peddling (or meddling with) art supplies and writing stories, he explores the area with his two sweet, goofy pit bulls. His retirement plan is for science to put his brain into a giant killer octopus body, with which he’ll be very responsible and not even slightly shipwrecky. He promises. You can find sketches, incriminating photos, and more of his stories at coryskerry.net.
I have a strong Norwegian lineage, so I thought it would be interesting to mine Scandinavian folklore for this story. The hard aesthetic of the Northern tales has always appealed to me: the trolls and the goblins, the brutal choices, the way night and winter feature so prominently. In “The Giant Without a Heart in His Body,” found in the story “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” the giant is very much a relic of the pre-Christian story traditions; its harsh fate is emblematic of the way Christianity absorbed the relics of the pagan traditions, and turned them to its own purposes. I thought it would be interesting if the hero of the story had gotten lost in his journey, and found himself settled into a new era. How would he view his old story, if called back to it again? Would it have the same resonance for him? And what happens when it’s time for the story to finally come to an end?
Nathan Ballingrud
The Giant in Repose
Nathan Ballingrud
Ivar looked through the ice-starred window of his kitchen and saw the crow perched on the fencepost near the barn, like a sharp-angled hole against the white expanse of snow. His own beard had itself beco
me snowy since the last time he had seen the crow, his own face as weathered and creviced as earth. He watched the crow, and he felt the old feeling. The water on the range began to bubble and boil, yet he stood there, still as stone.
Olga’s chin settled onto his shoulder from behind; he felt the weight of her body press against him, her breath against his cheek. “Old man,” she said. “The water’s boiling away.”
“Is it? I’m sorry.”
“What are you looking at?”
He nodded. “The crow. Do you see it?”
She put her arms around his waist, which was wider now than it once was. “You stare at it like an old enemy. Did it insult you in some way?”
“Just the opposite.” He stepped away from her and walked to the door, where he fell upon the bench, pushing his feet into his boots. He stood and shouldered himself into his coat.
Olga remained by the kitchen sink, the humor in her face giving way to concern. “What’s got into you, Ivar?”
“Finish the bathwater, woman. I’ll be back in a moment.”
It was a long trek from the front door to the barn, and though the year was old and the snow was new, a hard winter was promised, and there would be a time coming when this trek could not be made without a rope tied around your waist, lest a blizzard swallow you whole. The Minnesota plains were flat and long, not like the robust countryside of Norway, where glaciers carved bright watery roadways through the mountains. There were no hidden kingdoms in this fertile land, unless they were the kingdoms of the sown seed and the ready harvest.
The crow appeared as young as he ever was, his feathers glossy black, his beak sharp as a blade. He turned his head to the side and fixed Ivar with a bright, black glare.
“Håkon,” said Ivar, coming to a stop beside the post. “I never thought to see you again.”
“I’ve found the church,” the crow said, as though countless years had not elapsed since last they spoke.
Ivar found it suddenly difficult to breathe. “Forget it,” he said.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 21
