by Cat Hellisen
“Does it?”
“Time, and space.” Alan finished the last of his brandy tea. His eyelids had half closed, as if he were about to fall asleep at any moment. “But you’re a smart girl; you’ll have worked that out already.”
Sarah raised her chin and said nothing. She’d only worked it out when she tried to leave. “So the whole forest is cursed?”
“The whole forest is magic. That’s hardly the same thing.” Alan got up. “Sit tight, and I’ll tell you the story, and then you decide what you want to decide.”
“Fine.” Sarah pulled the blanket around her, and tucked her feet under her knees. Stay focused, she told herself. Listen to him, but assume nothing is true. A little flare of excitement shot through her heart. The raven had already told her one story—its version of the truth—and now she was going to hear Alan’s. Maybe somewhere in the middle of the two tales, she’d find out what had really happened.
“You know what happened to your grandmother and grandfather?” Alan began.
“Yes.” In a way, although it was hard to really believe. She made herself say it out loud, just so she could hear how utterly ridiculous it all was. “They were cursed by a witch because she thought they were vain and silly and cruel and they deserved each other.”
“Jealousy,” said Alan. “It always comes down to jealousy.” He sighed and put the brandy bottle to his mouth, but didn’t drink, just stared thoughtfully as though he were waiting for Sarah to sort all the truth out for herself.
“You think—oh.” She pursed her lips. It made more sense that way. Here were the bits of the story the raven wasn’t telling her. The handsome prince should have loved the witch instead of the empty-headed but beautiful princess, and all would have been well. “He probably never even saw her,” she whispered to herself.
For the first time she wondered about how that might feel. She’d never considered it before. It must have hurt, to know that someone ignored you because your hair wasn’t the right shade, or your nose was too long or too short, or your eyes were ditch-water brown instead of hydrangea blue or vice versa. That all the clever or funny things you knew meant nothing if the mouth that said them had lips that were too thin or not thin enough. And so the prince had married, the witch had placed the curse, and now look where it had gotten them. No one was happy. Sarah glanced up. “She keeps him in a cage, did you know that?”
“So?” Alan blew a soft note over the bottle neck. “All cages have keys.”
“Yeah, and this one’s around my grandmother’s neck.”
“And when have you ever known someone to not keep a spare key to something important?” he countered. “Never, that’s when.” Alan grinned slyly for a second, then grew serious again. “So, you know one version of the story. I’ll tell you another. You think it’s as simple as punishing two wicked, vain people with eyes for nobody but each other, and mayhap that much is true, but there are always other parts to a story. And in this one, there are two witches.”
Sarah leaned forward, her fingers clinging tighter to the armrests. “What do you mean, two?”
“Don’t play the fool, Sarah. Your grandmother is not a powerless old woman.”
The truth was there. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed the small magics her grandmother had performed. “She’s a proper witch, same as the witch of the Within?”
“Yes. Freya and Inga both grew like willows at the same stream.”
“Whatever that means.”
“It means that they were raised the same, that they both had magic and learned it from the same man. Their father.”
“The raven said they were sisters, but they turned on each other anyway.” Sarah stood, her skin shivery with goose bumps.
“Freya was the birth child, and Inga the foster, but they grew up together, close as two girls can be.” Alan paused to watch her through the murky glass of his bottle, as if deciding what to tell her next. “And Inga was the prettier of the two, that much is also a truth, but it wasn’t her beauty that grew that wicked sore spot between them,” he said.
“So what was?”
“Inga turned her attentions to the wrong person.”
Sarah frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head. “Okay, fine. But then Inga was still a witch, she knew magic, you said. So why didn’t she just break the curse herself?” Sarah sat back down, pressing her spine against the couch until the springs squealed in protest.
“Because you can’t go around breaking curses willy-nilly. It doesn’t work like that. Curses are strict. There are rules to follow and conditions to meet. That’s the beauty of them. And why they cannot be broken.” Alan set the bottle down next to his empty cup. “Besides, even if it were possible, your grandmother didn’t have enough power to do something that big.” He steepled his fingers and pressed them against his mouth, watching her. “It’s still a love story, you know.”
“What is?”
“Your grandfather would never have turned into a beast if he hadn’t truly loved Inga.” He shrugged one shoulder. “And your father wouldn’t have fallen in love with your mother if he had known the truth. Or mayhap he would have. Love is a strange master.”
The brandy had loosened all his words.
“When I came to work for Freya, it was all long over, of course. I didn’t even know about it. This was when she still lived in the Within, and we hardly stepped into the rest of the forest.” He stopped the gentle rocking of his chair and leaned forward across the table, his owl eyes blinking in the murk.
“This doesn’t tell me anything new,” Sarah said mournfully. “I was hoping you’d explain a way for me to break the curse, and instead you tell me it’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s ever impossible,” Alan said. “Just—”
“Improbable, I know.” Sarah flapped one hand like she was shooing away a bug. “But that doesn’t help me. If I can’t break it, I need to make sure it never happens to me.” She frowned. “And you’re sure my dad didn’t understand how the curse worked? I mean, if he did, he was an idiot to go and fall in love.”
Or he thought that it wouldn’t run to him, that the power of the magic had ended with his mother and father. It hadn’t, as it turned out.
Alan laughed. “Let me tell you a story of love,” he said. “And maybe you’ll understand.”
“Go on, then.”
“There was once a witch’s daughter who hated magic. She hated being alone in the middle of a forest, with no friends for company, with only a measly servant to talk to besides her mother. The witch’s daughter grew up and slipped away from witchery as soon as she was an adult. She told the servant to teach her how to walk out of the forest, and because he didn’t know any better, he did as she asked.
“She escaped magic and lived in a normal apartment, and went to a normal college. She didn’t come back to her mother. The servant, seeing how the mother grieved and grew old and small, went to speak to the daughter, begging her to return. He asked her why she wouldn’t come back.
“She told him she didn’t like the smell of the forest. The cold and the pines reminded her of her life with her mother in the Within. She was scared that if she went back, she’d never again be free.
“Her mother grew older and meaner and colder inside. Love died, in the slow way that it can. The servant still tried to convince the daughter to return, and to be fair to her, she still loved her mother, but only when she remembered to. Her mind was made up, and she never came back to the forest.”
The silence filled up again, not with words but with the squeak of the rocking chair.
“That’s pretty sad.” Sarah’s tea had cooled, and an oily smear swam on the dark caramel surface. Even if it wasn’t poisoned, Sarah decided that she really didn’t want it now. “But what’s it got to do with my grandparents?”
“Well, that’s just the thing. You see, curses are wicked. And curses always go in circles. Think of your own story—once Freya had her revenge, she withdrew to the cold and t
he dark, and paid no more attention to your grandmother Inga and her vain prince than they did to her. And so she’d no idea that they’d had a son and that he’d grown up spoiled and happy, until the day his father turned to a beast and the terms of the curse called Freya back to Inga’s side.
“They’d sent their precious son far from magic. From forests and castles and stones as old as the bones of the earth. They sent him past the borderlands, to where magic is kitten-weak.
“The spoiled prince learned a trade and went to classes at night in a cold brick building, instead of sleeping on rich beds. He left his history behind him and built a life under the smoke and stink of human cities. And there he met a girl who reminded him of the forest, and though it seemed like something out of the fancies of children, they looked at each other and fell in love.”
“Oh no,” said Sarah. “The girl—she was Freya’s daughter.” She closed her hands and studied the hills of her knuckles. “They didn’t—?” she asked, even though she knew they did. Of course she knew they did. She’d always loved the story of how her parents had met—how they had seen each other across a crowded quad, their eyes had met, and something had exploded between them, like an invisible firework. Before, Sarah had thought it was love, but now she was beginning to wonder if curses felt like that when they struck. Maybe it was impossible to tell the difference.
Alan nodded. “They knew nothing of each other’s cursed pasts, or how it might trap them in the same circle. It’s hardly the sort of thing people think to ask about, though perhaps they should.”
She marveled sadly. Her mother, running from witchcraft, and her father, running from curses, and somehow they’d crashed into each other, they’d fallen in love. And eventually, she supposed, they’d found out the truth about each other. “But they seemed so normal.”
“It was what they wanted. They kept moving, running. When Freya heard what had happened, she wanted to bring your mother back to the Within, to keep her daughter from the curse that snapped at its own tail. She combed the human cities for her daughter, bringing the cold of the Within right out into the world in her hunts.”
“The cold…” Sarah ached. Her mother had always run from winter, a fawn racing away from a pack of snowy wolves.
“But Inga was also a witch, and though she couldn’t break the curse she was caught in, she had enough power to set her own curse on Freya. Freya was doomed, just as Inga’s marriage was doomed.”
“Doomed? She killed her?”
Alan shook his head. “She might as well have, I suppose. She bound Freya into the form of a raven until the day she lost what she loved most.” He sighed softly, and it took a while for this to sink in.
“That’s cruel.”
“Each as cruel as the other, curses like circles, each begetting another.”
Sarah didn’t exactly know what begetting meant, but the concept of it, that the curses all led to more curses, like a spiral of madness, was clear enough.
“And then Inga finally got the truth out of her son, that he’d married none other than Freya’s daughter, and the curse closed like a trap.”
Sarah kept quiet, frowning. “A raven,” she repeated softly. “A white raven.” She looked at her knees. “Oh. Oh, how awful.” Her hands curled into fists. “That’s—then she’s also my grandmother. How could they do that to each other?” She raised her head.
Alan shrugged and rocked back in the chair. “The terms were set before you were born. And there was only one thing that Freya still loved, in all the worlds. Your mother’s death was the only thing that would make Freya human again.” He frowned slightly, and the shadows seemed to dance across his skin, making him look suddenly impossibly unreal and beautiful. “It was an ugly thing, ill-done, but it was done.”
Sarah shifted. She was emptied out inside, and all the hope she’d had of begging the witches to lift the curse from her family had been replaced instead with a thick, dead nothing. Her family’s curses were all twisted up in each other, like strangling vines.
“The raven. F-Freya—” Sarah stumbled over the name. My grandmother. My other grandmother. “She said that the price of leaving their beasts was that the wives would turn into something, but she wouldn’t say what.” Sarah pulled her knees up against her face and tried to make the words come out right. “My mother—what has she become?”
The chair’s slow creak faded as Alan stopped rocking. He watched her, still frowning. The afternoon had passed almost to twilight, and whatever warmth had filtered in though the two small windows at the front of the house was fast fading.
Sarah found herself shivering again, although this time it was not from the near-constant chill of the forest, but from a nameless fear deep inside her.
“Do you remember when we met?” Alan’s voice floated through the spreading grayness.
Sarah nodded. “You said you were hunting. A bird—”
“About so big, yes.” Alan spread his thumb and forefinger apart. “A little wren.”
There was a thick, salty lump in Sarah’s throat, and she had to swallow again and again before she could get her next words past it. “A wren. The ones who leave the beasts become birds?”
“Yes.”
Sarah pressed her palm over her mouth and breathed in sharply. It felt like she was storing up air so that she’d be able to dive into a deep lake, so that she’d have time to kick her way down to the mysteries that lay on the lake bed. The birds and the beasts—wild and free, and never able to be together. The beasts would hunt in the woods, and the wrens would sing their hearts out, and the two would never understand each other.
And the louder the wrens sang, the more chance there was that the hunting beasts would find them.
She pictured again the beast in the forest, worrying at the rabbit corpse like a terrier with a rat.
A wren would stand no chance. The beast had been huge—one snap of its jaws, and it would crush the tiny bird, piercing heart and lungs and liver with needles made from its own thin bones.
Just.
Like.
That.
“Oh,” Sarah said, and the sound puffed into her palm, was trapped there. That was what would happen if her father and mother ever found each other again. She would die, killed by the one who loved her, by the one she once loved. And dead beasts stay dead. It was unbearable. “So cruel.”
Alan leaned forward and stretched out one hand to tug at her wrist, to pull her fingers away from her face. His skin was warm and dry, and he touched her arm with a gentle patience, like he was petting a kitten. “Yes,” he said, his forest voice filled with the welcoming rustle of leaves.
Sarah stared into his eyes—all she could see now in the deep gloom of the cabin—and they were small amber flames, golden pools deep enough to drown in, the glass-yellow of topaz.
They reminded her a little of her grandfather’s beast-eyes. She had to go back to see him, to tell him that she understood everything now and that she was going to find a way to stop it all. To set everything right again.
There had to be a way, no matter what Alan or the raven said.
“I have to go,” Sarah said, and pulled her wrist from Alan’s fingers and ran out the door.
11
THE KEY OF HORN
SARAH CREPT BACK into the castle, but it seemed that no one had even missed her. She helped her grandmother feed the beast, all the while staring from one to the other and trying to imagine the young girl Nanna used to be. The handsome boy that the chained and stinking beast must have been, to drive a wedge between the sisters so easily.
I haven’t got the whole story, Sarah reminded herself as she slopped the bucket of bones and stewed meat over to her grandmother so she could put it in the cage. There had to be more to it. More to Inga and Freya’s tale. She didn’t even know her grandfather’s name.
“What was he called?” she said after her grandmother had locked the cage again and closed the door on the sorry beast. “When he was still human.”
&n
bsp; “What does it matter?” Nanna snapped. “He’s not now.”
“But…” Sarah paused, the empty bucket swinging against her knees as they walked, the rust from the handle biting into her palms. “He can still talk and—”
“How do you know that?” Nanna whirled on Sarah, her hard, sharp face like an ax in the moonlight. “Been poking your nose where you shouldn’t?”
“No.” Which wasn’t strictly true, of course, but Sarah thought that since Nanna was one big ball of lies, it really didn’t matter. “I thought I heard him say something last time.”
Her grandmother sniffed and stood up straight, still keeping one eye on Sarah like a hawk watching a little grass mouse. “Talking doesn’t make things human.”
Sarah pulled up her courage inside her and managed to say, very quickly, “Well, I think it goes at least some of the way.”
“Parrots talk,” her grandmother said, after a moment. She looked as surprised as Sarah felt about Sarah standing up to her.
“Nope. Parrots repeat, that’s different. You don’t have a conversation with a parrot.” Sarah looked around, though of course it was night, and the raven was nowhere to be seen. “If someone was once a human and magic turned him into a beast, but he can still feel and think and talk like a person, then what is he?”
Her grandmother’s eyes went waxy and cold, as if they’d filmed over with ice, and Sarah took a small halting step backward. “He. Is. A beast,” her grandmother hissed. “And nothing else.”
Sarah knew better than to carry on arguing, but a flame lit up inside her. Her grandmother was wrong—and she knew it. Sarah knew it too. The man in the cage might be beast-shaped, but he was still a man, like her father was still her father, and the little wren that Alan was hunting was still her mother. Like the raven was her other grandmother.
There had to be a way to set it all right again.
Her grandmother turned around on the path ahead, and gave Sarah a hooded stare. Then, rather unexpectedly, she said, “It’s better this way, Sarah.” She didn’t sound like the crotchety, malicious woman who made her go dig out flowerbeds all day. She sounded like a woman who was tired of carrying bags of groceries down a long road all by herself. Or who was sick of one more load of dirty laundry—as if she was about to cry but knew that if she started, she would never stop. “It’s easier if he is a beast, and that’s the truth of it.”
