These Wicked Revels

by Lidiya Foxglove

  I’ve never seen a man in my life. Well, once in a while, in the winter, when the trees are bare, I can see them on the King’s Highway far in the distance on horses. I assume they’re men. They’re actually too far away to tell, the size of ants from my vantage point.

  They are too far away to hear me, I know that. Once when I was fourteen I got very bold and decided to yell “Halloooooo!” at the top of my lungs and those horses didn’t even slow down. Luckily the Witch never found out.

  Oh yes, the schedule. I’m quite proud of it. I dust on Mondays, scrub floors on Tuesdays, mend on Wednesdays, polish on Thursdays, bake on Friday, and on Saturdays I wash my hair and rinse it in rose water. It smells so beautiful afterward. I don’t have to do the washing because the Witch takes that out to somewhere or other, so on Sundays I rest.

  Once everything is clean, I am free to read books from the library or play my lute or do embroidery. Once I asked the Witch if I could learn to be a witch myself and she was very alarmed and said if I ever asked again she would have to take a switch to me. I suppose it’s all right. There isn’t much reason to do witchcraft in my tower, but I dream about it anyway.

  It would be some little power of my own, that’s all.

  Most of the books I have to read are stories telling children how to be good. I’m a grown woman now, but the Witch doesn’t bring me new books very often, and when she does they are manuals on managing a household, so I’m stuck with the same old ones. It’s astonishing how much fun you can have with a story if you get creative. I like to rewrite them so the villains win. Not that I think villains should win in real life, but it’s fun to figure out how they could, because the odds are really stacked against villains, when you think about it. Heroes and heroines always end up having the perfect magical power or friend to defeat them.

  I know I shouldn’t imagine things like that. The world is full of wicked people, and that’s why I have to stay locked up in this tower. Here, I am safe and protected from all the horrors of the world. Even my own mother was a horrid thief. That’s why the Witch took me away from her.

  Sometimes you have to wonder about a story like that, though, don’t you? I mean, none of the girls in my books are locked up in towers. But the Witch says there are lots of other girls locked up in towers, all over the world. The most perfect, beautiful girls. A girl like me could be kidnapped by demons or stolen away by faeries or taken advantage of by rogues in the woods.

  So here I am, safe and sound in my tower, talking to myself, and the birds, and a stuffed raven.

  Maybe the tower was built for another girl before me. I don’t know where it came from or how long it’s been here. It has very thick stone walls and must be very old. The top floor, which is my bedroom and living space, has windows circling all around that I can open to the breezes and the scent of the forest.

  There are two floors below me. One is the Witch’s work room and storage for food and herbs, and the bottom floor is the kitchen, which has a great big stove, and a water pump connected to a cistern. These rooms have no windows except a few tiny ones for ventilation near the top of the wall. Even in the middle of the day, I sometimes light a candle to work down there. One day, I found little scratches near the bottom of the kitchen wall, behind the work table. It looked like someone had been marking days, or weeks. I never asked the Witch about it. The sight gave me a chill.

  The tower has no doors. So no one can get to me except the Witch.

  I’m safe up here.

  I’m not sure I am being entirely honest with myself, about being happy in the tower.

  It’s not dull, not exactly, but it is very very lonely, and sometimes in the middle of the night I lay in my bed, with my room lit by moon shadows, and I think I might die of yearning to have some other soul with me. Other times I feel like I might go mad. The Witch is usually gone for alternating weeks, and for the first day or two after she leaves, I’m happy to be alone again, and then it becomes so awful that sometimes I stomp around the room whacking the furniture with my broomstick.

  I don’t think I am actually going mad, though. As long as I cook and clean and plait my hair, surely I must be a pretty normal young woman.

  Anyway, there are worse things than being locked up alone in a tower.

  I woke to the familiar whistle of the Witch down below my window, early in the morning. Hoo-weet-weet!

  She was back three days early. How odd! But maybe it meant she had a present for me. Usually when she came back early it meant she had come into some extra money and had brought me something.

  “Just a minute!” I sang.

  I unbraided my hair as quickly as I could and dragged it to the window. I shoved it out and let it cascade down past the brambles growing there. There was a tiny clearing in the thorns just below the window so my hair didn’t snag. The Witch stood just out of the way but as soon as my hair was down, I felt the tug of her hands travel up to my scalp.

  I hate to be vain, but I have always enjoyed the sight of that sea of golden hair flowing down the side of the tower. Maybe I liked it because I could imagine it as a passage to the wide world beyond, even though it was only a passage for the Witch and not myself. Or maybe I was just proud of all the work it was to keep it so clean and unsnarled.

  The witch was a little old woman with a stooped back. She had always been so, but in recent years it seemed to me she had gotten even littler and older and more stooped. She definitely didn’t climb my hair as quickly as she used to, although she was still nimble enough. She didn’t weigh all that much. She always wore the same black cloak and the same print dress, and she had a sack with the laundry and other supplies. The sack didn’t look any larger than usual, so if she had brought me a present, it must be a little thing like candy.

  I really, really wanted that present. Even when she brought me bad presents, like stuffed crows or household manuals or aprons, every present was still a thing I had never seen before. I lived for things I had never seen before.

  Hand over hand, she made it up, her sturdy shoes gripping the stones as she went. When she reached the top, I held out my hands and helped her up the rest of the way. She brushed her hands over her clothes, straightening them out, and put down the laundry, and looked at me.

  “My sweet Rapunzel,” she said. “You really have grown up.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.” Somehow in the past couple of years I had gotten very busty. My dresses didn’t fit that well. I had always made my own and I didn’t know how to fit them around my body these days. Once I tried to make pockets to fit my breasts in. It was the most awful thing anyone could imagine. I had to burn it and pretend the fabric had caught fire in an accident, and the Witch slapped me for being careless.

  She unfolded her pack and handed me a small pink box.

  I squealed. “Candy! I was hoping!” I lifted the lid. Inside were pieces of marzipan, shaped like a family of pigs. I gasped. “They’re too cute to eat! But I will eat them, don’t worry. Oh, thank you, thank you!” I gave her a hug.

  “Shh, shh.” She waved me off with a grumble and headed for her favorite chair, slipping off her shoes. It was a very long walk from town to this place. “Don’t get too excited.”

  “You know me. I always get too excited.” I took out the little candy pigs and arranged them on the table in a circle so they could talk to each other.

  “We must talk.”

  “Oh, good.” I sat down. I liked it when we had talks.

  “This is not an easy talk. You see, I’m getting older. I’m getting very old indeed. And there may come a time when I won’t be well enough to take care of you anymore. Which is why, in some ways, this will be for the best, even though I’ve dreaded it for a long time.”

  “What will be for the best?”

  “I must give you away.”

  “What? Like a marriage?” No, I had not forgotten her comment about being a wife.

  “Yes,” she said, with a frown. “It is time I told you about how you came to be
with me. You see, a long time ago, when I was a younger witch, I traveled to the northern woods to get a particular rampion plant that only grows in the wood of the King of the Northlands during the very short northern spring. It is a potent ingredient in spells, and I wanted to grow it in my own garden. It meant trespassing on the king’s land, but I didn’t think he would notice one small woman creeping around his forest.”

  “Oh, no! Did he find you? Did you get in trouble?”

  She gave me a sharp look. She always got upset with me for asking too many questions, but I could hardly help it. “I had only just dug up one of the rampion plants and put it in my sack when a horrible monster came tearing up the hill. He must have been seven feet tall, with white fur on his back, and dripping fangs. A troll, towering over me, shouting at me in a booming voice, ‘Let go of my rampion!’”

  I gasped. The Witch was a very good storyteller when she had a story to tell. “Was it one of the king’s guards?”

  “It was the very king himself!”

  “The King of the Northlands is a troll?”

  “Something like, I suppose.”

  “How did you know it was really him?”

  “Well, dear, he told me so, and one does not question the authority of such a beast. Why shouldn’t he be? They have trolls up north. And I was scared completely out of my wits.” She shook her head, exasperated with me. “The point of the story is that this great Troll-King was a breadth away from striking me down, and I cried for him to wait. He lowered his paw and asked me what I would give him in exchange. I was so frightened that I didn’t know what to say except to ask him what he would like. And then he said, ‘You may take my rampion, but you must only use it in your spells. No one must ever taste it but you. If anyone else has a taste of the rampion, then you must take the thing that is most precious to them and give it to me.’ And of course, I said yes. I knew no one else would ever taste the rampion, because I would take it to my walled garden and only use it in my spells.”

  The Witch said this, and she took out a handkerchief like she was close to tears. “Your mother—,” she began.

  I had never seen her come close to crying before. It scared me a little. “Should I make you some tea?” I asked.

  “No. Listen.” She tried again, composing herself. “I grew the rampion in my garden and for years it remained safe. But your mother and father moved into the house beside mine, a newly married couple, and soon your mother was pregnant. One night, I heard a loud rustle in my garden, and when I came outside, I saw it was your father. He was cutting leaves from my rampion. I told him he must stop and never touch my rampion or I would have to take the thing most precious to him, and he went completely white and said he had already taken some the night before. His pregnant wife was craving rampion something fierce. And that variety of rampion was called…Rapunzel.”

  “What is rampion, anyway?” I asked.

  She sighed. “It is a plant with leaves a bit like watercress and a tasty root. But do you understand? I had to take you away.”

  “But that’s not a real story, is it? Then you would have had to give me to the King of the Northlands.”

  “Silly girl, that’s what I’ve been getting at this whole time. I do have to give you to the King of the Northlands. You are the trade for my own theft. That’s why I’ve kept you hidden in this tower. To protect you from him. But now you are twenty years old and he has sent me a message, saying that he knows I have you and he would like to take you as his wife. And I don’t see that I have much choice. I am getting old, anyway, just as I said. One day I might die and then you would be trapped here.”

  “Oh.”

  All at once, I felt incredibly silly. Silly? More like stupid. Shouldn’t I have known all along? But how could I? I knew nothing of anything.

  It was such an awful, impossible story that I couldn’t connect it to my own safe little world. But if it was true…

  The Witch got up and stood behind me, and gently she began to plait my hair for me, as she liked to do when I was younger. Her hands were so frail and stiff now.

  “I have my hopes that he might be kind to you,” she said. “That is why I have always insisted that you keep your hair pretty, and the house clean. He will be pleased if you are a good wife.”

  I would like to say I was very brave, and lifted my head stoically to face my fate. Or, at least, that I flung myself on the bed and wept beautiful tears.

  But, no. My lip sort of folded up and my nose wrinkled and I made a noise kind of like, “Ewaaaaaahhh!” before blubbering out, “I don’t want to marry a troll!”

  “Sometimes ugly men make very good husbands,” the Witch said.

  “But he’s not even a man! You said he had dripping fangs! Why did you tell me that?” And then I started thinking about one household manual she had brought home that had a chapter on babies, and it got even worse.

  The Witch kept quietly braiding my hair, and I managed to pull myself together a little. “You said my mother was a thief,” I said. “But you were the true thief, all along.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Just that, and nothing else. She didn’t scold me; she didn’t make excuses.

  That was when the tears really began to dry, because I knew it must be real.

  “How long do I have?” I asked.

  “He will send for you on the full moon.”

  That was only a week away.

  Now available!

  About the Author

  Lidiya Foxglove has always loved a good fairy tale, whether it’s sweet or steamy, and she likes to throw in a little of both. Sometimes she thinks she ought to do something other than reading and writing, but that would require doing more laundry. So…never mind.

  lidiyafoxglove@lidiyafoxglove.com