by Cat Hellisen
“Touch me, and know the truth,” said her grandfather. His deep growl was hypnotic, smoothing away her fear.
Her hand lifted, and she snaked her wrist between the bars to settle her fingers above the cold black nose. The beast—her grandfather—was warm, the fur rough under the pads of her fingers.
He huffed and pushed his nose against her hand, and Sarah stood, stroking the vast muzzle of the thing in the cage. Beast. Grandparent. She couldn’t be sure, but that didn’t matter.
There was no denying the reality of the creature’s existence. And the reality of his circumstances. He was hunched into a cage too small for him to walk in, his fur was matted with filth and his own droppings, spoiled food covered the floor of his prison.
The beast sighed and closed his eyes, shifting his head so that Sarah could reach up and scratch behind his ears, her nails pulling away the tangles from the base of the nearest horn. Metal clanked, and when Sarah crouched down a little, she could see the manacles that had worn away the fur above his massive paws, had chewed the bare skin raw.
“Oh, Grandfather,” she whispered.
“What are you doing here?” A woman’s voice shrieked from behind her, and Sarah whipped around to see a small white shape in the doorway.
The raven hopped inside. “You may not be here without your grandmother. Step back!”
Sarah hesitated, and the raven cried again, panic making its beautiful high voice sharp and angry. “Back! Back!” It flapped its wings. “There is no trusting the beast!”
This brought a pained growl from the beast, and Sarah pulled her hand back out of the bars and stumbled away. The beast was looking at her again, golden eyes so bright that it made the rest of his shape nothing more than a dark shadow in darker shadows.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” she said, not knowing what she was apologizing for, and ran out into the sunlight.
The mist had lifted and the forest was a shimmering peridot wall around the castle clearing. The bright sky was washed blue. Everything was clear, almost glowing in the sunlight. The little nets of spiderwebs had dried away, and the clumps of grass stood high and green, their ribbon-twisted blades dancing in the breeze.
The door to the shack swung closed of its own accord, the bolts screeching back into place.
Sarah shuddered. There was no denying now what she had seen. She swung around to where the raven was standing on the roof of the ruined car, much to the dismay of the hens inside, who were clucking furiously. Sarah lunged forward and caught the raven by surprise, closing her hands around its feathery body. The bird struggled, cawing in indignation, but Sarah held fast, pinning its wings flat to its sides.
“What,” Sarah said, very slowly, “is going on? Tell me now and tell me everything.” She slid one hand higher, tightening her grip, as she felt the bird’s heart thrumming under the joint of her thumb. “Or I will wring this scrawny neck of yours, you see if I don’t.”
8
YOU CAN’T LIFT CURSES WITH KISSES
AN ARCTIC WIND shivered through the trees, causing their great shaggy heads to bow closer as if they wanted to hear what the raven would say. The bird went limp and unresisting. “You wouldn’t really?”
“I don’t think I would,” Sarah said, then decided that didn’t quite sound menacing enough. “But I’ve never really been in a situation where I’ve wanted to.” She paused and glared at the raven. “I may be getting there.”
“Let me go, and I swear I’ll tell you all you need to know.”
“And who decides what that is—you? No.” Sarah shook her head. “Everything.”
“On my honor,” the raven said. “Everything.”
“Okay.” Sarah lifted one hand away, and the raven hopped free, to land some distance from her on the far side of the car. It stared at her from its perch on the roof. “I’m waiting,” said Sarah. “Or do birds not have honor?”
“We’re not safe here,” said the raven. It looked up at the bulk of the castle, which was throwing a misshapen shadow across the clearing. “Follow.” It threw itself up into the air and flapped toward the forest.
The trees were crowded together, their trunks too close, knitting a solid fence around the castle and hemming her in. Sarah gritted her teeth. What is it about the forest that’s so terrifying, anyway? It’s not like the trees are any creepier than the castle.
Maybe because it was not a little piece of forest, but a great one. Sarah wondered what this kind of primordial forest would remember.
A tall figure flickered in the arboreal dark, a shape flitting between the trunks. Sarah opened her mouth, certain she’d seen a face staring out at her under a cap of russet hair, but then the thing in the forest moved again, and whether it was the stretching shadows or the close-packed trunks that had confused her, the shape looked now more like an antlered buck, pausing to watch the human who stood at the forest’s border.
It was just a deer. She didn’t linger too long on how for one moment she’d thought the deer was a lanky stripling named Alan, and she’d been about to call his name out in greeting. Instead, she set off in the direction the raven had flown.
The edge of the forest was cool, the trunks mossy and green, some of them completely choked with ivy. Faint beams of light filtered through the canopy, dappling the leaf litter. Small mouselike birds fluttered among the upper branches, and a squirrel chittered at her from one high branch, then ran up into the canopy. Sarah took a few more hesitant steps into the gloom and almost walked into a low-strung spiderweb.
She ducked, and the webs shivered as her hair caught on the thick strands. There wasn’t just one. Several vast webs stretched between the branches, each holding a yellow and black spider like a bright sweet at its center. The spiders were thumb-sized, their webs catching the weak light and glinting golden. They lined the narrow little animal paths like the walls of an ethereal labyrinth.
“Raven?” Sarah called nervously.
“This way.” A moon-white shape sailed overhead and landed with a thump on a branch wreathed with greenish old-man’s beard. The raven edged along the tapering walkway and leapt to another, always staying ahead, leading Sarah through the maze of trees and golden webs, deeper into the forest.
“Where are we going?” The trees grew far enough apart from each other to allow easy walking, but some of the branches were low, and Sarah had to hold them aside so she could follow. The leaves were prickle-edged and bit into her freezing hands. She’d never seen trees like this before, but that didn’t mean much—she’d never really been botanically inclined. Some of the thinner twigs snapped as she passed, and a spicy, bitter scent followed her.
It was getting colder; her breath puffed up in little clouds of smoke.
“To the center,” said the raven. “Or as close to the Within as we can get.”
“What’s the Within?” A branch slapped Sarah across the cheek, the spiky leaves catching at her eye. “Ow, wait.” She wiped the sting away and rubbed her cheek. It was definitely getting colder. There was frost trimming diamond skins on the leaves and twigs.
“Where the witches used to live.” The raven stopped. From a distance came a cold burble of running water. “Your grandmother cannot go into the Within, so the land around it is safe from her.”
“Witches.” Sarah hugged herself and rubbed her arms with her palms, trying to warm up. She stamped her feet and the ice on the ground crushed softly beneath her shoes. “I don’t want to go anywhere near witches.” If there were cursed beasts who crushed skulls between their teeth just below the castle, then she didn’t want to consider what witches deep in a forest were like. Like they were in the old stories, probably—child-eaters and poisoners.
“You’ve nothing to fear from the witches now,” the raven said. “There aren’t any left, just beast-boys and creatures that used to belong to the Within.”
“I don’t like this,” Sarah whispered. They were now so deep into the forest that not even the faintest sunbeam could squeeze its way down. There
were patches of ice crisping the ground, and icicles dripped from the shadowy spokes of the trees.
“Here we are,” said the raven, and Sarah followed the flash of its white feathers to an open spot. The sun was cold and far away, but at least there was sun. It sparked off patches of fallen snow, and off the steel-gray waters of a turbulent river. That was where the sound of water had been coming from. It looked fast. The edges were cloudy with ice, but the middle was a deep black-green that made Sarah shiver right down to her soles. Under the surface the stones rolled, crashing against one another.
“You may speak with safety. Your grandmother will hear nothing said here, even to me. Her reign extends only so far.”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. “How can I believe that?”
“You can’t.” The raven shuddered, half-opening its wings. “You have only faith.”
“Um, yeah. I don’t think I have faith in anything here, especially you.” Sarah rubbed her nose. It was reassuring to find it still there, as it had now gone completely numb from the cold. And her cheeks were starting to burn. “But if it’s a choice between you and Nanna, I guess…” Sarah dropped her hand and sighed. “Okay, the truth then—what’s going on? And what’s the curse everyone’s talking about?”
The raven dipped the front of its body in a little bow, and began. “Your grandfather was once a beautiful prince, and like many beautiful people, vain and selfish. He had the pick of women of the woods and the castle—all kinds, ones with power and ones without, the pretty and the plain and the in-between. And like all foolish, vain people, instead of choosing a woman he loved, he chose a prize to look pretty on his arm.
“I would like to say that the bride he picked was as foolish and vain as he was, but perhaps she was just young. At any rate, she was not rich in magic, and even poorer in wisdom, but she had looks and charm and she saw the prince and wanted him. Many beautiful people are interested only in mirrors.”
“They both sound … wonderful.” But then again, who knew if the raven was really telling the truth. “So what happened?”
The raven puffed up. “The bride was an orphan who had been taken in by foster parents, and their true daughter was a powerful witch. And this witch-maiden could see that the prince and his chosen were not truly in love with each other, but were so captured by each other’s beauty that they could not see those who did love them, and treated those people with blind cruelty. So on the evening of their wedding, she set a curse on her foster sister and her prince.”
“Nice.” Sarah rolled her eyes.
“It was only fair, to show them both the depths of their vanity. The witch-maiden cursed the prince to change into a beast the moment he truly fell in love with his bride.”
“That seems odd. And not exactly fair.”
“You would be surprised how often people fall in love with their own reflections,” the raven snapped. “And he would be doomed to stay a beast until she loved him equally in return.”
Sarah was quiet for a while. “Is she that hateful—Nanna? Did she realize that he’d fallen in love with her, and then instead of feeling anything, she just kept him in a cage forever?”
“No.” The raven almost looked like it was smiling. “By the terms of the curse, she must stay with him or die.”
“Nanna will die if she leaves my grandfather, even though he’s a beast? Why would anyone be so cruel?” Sarah hugged herself. Things were looking darker, and she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear how the curses all twisted together.
The raven cawed, a sound of malicious triumph. “Maybe she deserved it. The witch-maiden was smart, she knew how these things go. The girl—the beautiful, empty-headed girl—would never leave her beast no matter how loathsome she found him, because she couldn’t. She was cursed to stay by his side until death.”
“I don’t get it. So if Nanna has to stay with him, where do you come in?”
The raven puffed up its feathers, so it resembled a rather startled snowball. “That has nothing to do with this story,” it said. “And I don’t have to tell you.”
Sarah rubbed her freezing hands against her face, and blew into them. She was starting to suspect the raven was mad—well, madder than previously thought. “I still don’t see why he can’t just make her fall in love with him so he stops being a beast and everything ends happily ever after.” Sarah shrugged. “Isn’t that how these things usually go?”
The sound of the river grew louder as it clawed at its banks. Snow slid from a weighted branch and dropped with a thump that shook ice-sharp rain from the trees. The raven regarded Sarah with solemn patience.
“You can’t make someone fall in love with you,” the raven said when it finally spoke. “I should know. And that is where the storytellers write their own sugary versions of the truth. A pack of lies until they reach ‘The End.’ But no story ever comes to an end, at least not one so neat. There are voices silenced, characters erased at the storyteller’s whim.” The bird clacked its beak. “They do not tell you what happens when the children have eaten their way through the witch’s treasures and face another starveling winter, when the glass slipper no longer fits the crone’s swollen foot, when the beauty doesn’t fall in love with her beastly prince.”
Sarah felt deeply uncomfortable. “I hate this story,” she said. The raven was lying to Sarah, she knew it—taunting her for amusement. Nothing it said could be trusted.
The raven cawed in laughter. “I told you the witch-maiden was clever. She knew that even if Inga did ever fall in love and the curse turned the monster back into a man, she would always know that her prince might go back to being a beast if she fell out of love again. It made it harder for her to fall in love in the first place. No love is endless.”
“That’s not true!”
“Oho! Is that what you think? Why did your mother fly?” The raven stared, head cocked. “People fall out of love slower than they fall in, to be sure, but there’s the story no one wants to tell. It’s dull. Boring. The good ones don’t always win. Nothing lasts forever.”
A ragged wind had picked up and was winding its way through the branches, rolling a blanket of clouds over the distant sun.
“I don’t believe you.” Sarah shook her head. “I won’t believe you.”
It became colder—impossibly colder—and Sarah, who had already pulled her sleeves over her aching fingers, crossed her arms and tucked her curled-up hands into her armpits. The warmth there wasn’t enough, her fingers chilled right through her sweater to the tender skin of her underarms. She was shivering now so hard that her teeth were rattling in her jaw like dice in a cup. “So,” she said, through the ivory chatter of her teeth, “my grandmother never loved my grandfather, and he had to stay a beast? Is that what you’re saying? The curse could never really be broken?”
“There are curses layered on curses in your family, secrets so deep and dark that your parents and grandparents refused to face them,” said the raven. “Your grandfather became beast and burden, for your grandmother had bound herself to him as tight as any bride could. She made him promises on that wedding day, promises she could not keep—that she would love him always, that they would only ever be happy.”
Sarah swallowed hard. The things that the raven was telling her couldn’t be true. They were too ugly. “So she keeps him in a cage and feeds him leftovers—why not set him free and go? Surely they’d both be happier.”
“I told you, she cannot. She is as cursed as he is. She gave her word, and the witch-maiden made sure that it was a marriage bond she could never break.” The raven watched Sarah with one pale blue eye, its head twisted so that it could stare balefully at her. “It is a curse that binds your family; it wraps them up tighter than rope and chains, for it is a curse of their own making. The witch-maiden cast it not only on those two foolish, vapid people, but on all their line, for all eternity.”
“Oh,” Sarah said, and sniffed. The cold was making her nose run. “Is my father cursed then, too?”
The raven
’s eyes gleamed. “What do you think?”
Yes, Sarah thought, before she could try to convince herself otherwise. Her mother had left him, not bound by any curses to stay when her own love failed, and now her father was turning. How long before he too was an animal, like his father? Was that why he’d sent her away, so she wouldn’t have to see his fall? “That’s not fair,” she whispered. “He’s only half a beast.”
“And you only a quarter,” snapped the raven. “Curses have no care for the thinness of your blood.”
“I’m—I’m not cursed, they said.”
“And you believe them.” Sarah could hear the laughter in its voice, cold and brutal. A talking raven, another beast.
Sarah hugged herself tighter. “I don’t care if you say you’re not part of this story. You are, or you wouldn’t be here. Tell me the truth.”
“Oh, me,” said the raven, and bobbed its head as if it were curtsying before a queen. “We’re all cursed here.” And it would say no more. Eventually, Sarah supposed it couldn’t, and that was that.
The darkening sky was pressing down, the river running faster beneath its icy shards, churning the snow at its edges to slush. “We’d best be back,” the raven said. “You may come here again if you need a moment away from her, but on no account try to cross the river. Its price is too high, and the Within is not a place for you.”
“Why’s that?” Sarah asked as she scrambled back to the little track that ran between the black trunks. Rain had begun to hiss against the uppermost leaves, and a few drops were plopping down through the thick canopy.
“The Within is the heart of all curses. There the witch wove the spells that turned your family, that bound them in their strange skins. It is a place thick with ancient power, where the witch-maiden made her home, the root of her magic—why would you go there and tempt the curse to wake inside you?”
Another branch slapped forward into Sarah’s face, grazing her chin, cutting a thin line across her lower lip. She licked, tasted the blood. Sarah was beginning to think that the forest had a mind of its own, that it wanted her to stay. The going back was harder than the leaving had been. But perhaps there was a good reason for that. Perhaps the forest was trying to tell her something. “Things that make curses, they can unmake them too,” she said harshly. “If the Within is where the witch’s power comes from, and the witch is gone, maybe it just needs someone else to use that power.”
