“Odile,” he called. “Come here!”
The black swan swam to shore and slowly waddled over to stand before von Rothbart. Her neck, as sinuous as any serpent’s, bent low until she touched her head to his boots.
The Black Swan
Odile felt more defeated than annoyed at being discovered. Despite the principle that, while also a swan, she should be able to tell one of the bevy from the other, Odile had been floating much of the afternoon without finding Elster. Or, if she had, the maiden—Odile refused to think of them as pens, despite Papa insisting that was the proper terminology—had remained mute.
“What toad would want this swan’s flesh?” her papa muttered. “I want to look upon the face of my daughter.”
In her head, she spoke a phrase of rara lingua that shed the albumen granting her form. The transformation left her weak and famished; while she had seen her papa as a pother owl devour a hare in one swallow, Odile as a swan could not stomach moat grass and cloying water roots. No longer the tips of great wings, her fingers dug at the moss between flagstones.
“There’s my plain girl.” Smiling, he gently lifted her by the arms. “So plain, so sweet.” He stroked her cheek with a thumb.
She could hear the love in his voice, but his familiar cooing over her rough-as-vinegar face and gangly limbs still hurt. A tear escaped along the edge of her nose.
“Why you persist in playing amongst the bevy. . . . ” He stroked her cheek with a thumb. “Come inside.” He guided her towards the door. “There won’t only be lessons today. I’ll bring a Vorspiel of songbirds to the window to make you smile.”
Odile nodded and walked with him back into the tower. But she would rather Papa teach her more of rara lingua. Ever since her sixteenth birthday, he had grown reluctant to share invocations. At first, Odile thought she had done something wrong and was being punished, but she now she suspected that Papa felt magic, like color, belonged to males. The books he let her read dealt with nesting rather than sorcery.
From his stories, Odile knew he had been only a few years older when he left his village, adopted a more impressive name, and traveled the world. He had stepped where the ancient augers had read entrails. He had spoken with a cartouche of ibises along the Nile and fended off the copper claws of the gagana on a lost island in the Caspian Sea.
But he never would reveal the true mark of a great sorcerer: how he captured a the wappantier. His secrets both annoyed Odile and made her proud.
The Wappentier
As the sole-surviving offspring of the fabled ziz of the Hebrews, the wappentier is the rarest of raptors. Having never known another of its ilk, the wappentier cannot speak out of loneliness and rarely preens its dark feathers. Some say the beast’s wings can stretch from one horizon to the other, but then it could not find room in the sky to fly. Instead, this lusus naturae perches atop desolate crags and ruins.
The Rashi claimed that the wappentier possesses the attributes of both the male and female. It has the desire to nest and yet the urge to kill. As soon as gore is taken to its gullet, the wappentier lays an egg that will never hatch. Instead, these rudiments are prized by theurgists for their arcane properties. Once cracked, the egg, its gilded shell inscribed with the Tetragrammaton, reveals not a yolk but a quintessence of mutable form, reflected in the disparate nature of the beast. A man may change his physique. A woman may change her fate. But buried, the eggs become foul and blacken like abandoned iron.
This Swan May
When Elster was nine, her grandmother brought her to the fairgrounds. The little girl clutched a ten-pfenning tight in her palm. A gift from her papa, a sour-smelling man who brewed gose beer all day long. “To buy candy. Or a flower,” said her grandmother.
The mayhem called to Elster, who tugged at her grandmother’s grip wanting to fly free. She broke loose and ran into the midst of the first crowd she came upon. Pushing her way to the center, she found there a gaunt man dressed in shades of red. He moved tarnished thimbles about a table covered in a faded swatch of silk.
The man’s hands, with thick yellowed warts at every bend and crease, moved with a nimble grace. He lifted up one thimble to reveal a florin. A flip and a swirl and the thimble at his right offered a corroded haller. The coins were presented long enough to draw sighs and gasps from the crowd before disappearing under tin shells.
“I can taste that ten-bit you’re palming,” said the gaunt man. Thick lips hid his teeth. How Elster heard him over the shouts of the crowd—“Die linke Hand”—she could not guess. “Wager for a new life? Iron to gold?” His right hand tipped over a thimble to show a shining mark, bit of minted sunlight stamped with a young woman’s face. Little Elster stood on her toes, nearly tipping over the table, to see the coin’s features. Not her mother or her grandmother. Not anyone she knew yet. But the coin itself was the most beautiful of sights; the gold glittered and promised her anything. Everything. Her mouth watered and she wanted the odd man in red’s coin so badly that spittle leaked past her lips.
When she let go of the table, the iron pfenning rolled from her sweaty fingers. The gaunt man captured it with a dropped thimble.
“Now which one, magpie? You want the shiny one, true? Left or right or middle or none at all?”
Elster watched his hands. She could not be sure and so closed her eyes and reached out. She clamped her hand over the gaunt man’s grip. His skin felt slick and hard like polished horn. “This one,” she said. When she looked, his palm held an empty thimble.
“Maybe later you’ll find the prize.” When he smiled she saw that his front teeth were metal: the left a dull iron, the right gleamed gold.
A strong arm pulled her away from the table. “Stupid child.” Her grandmother cuffed her face. “From now on, a thimble will be your keep.”
The Message
Down in the cellar, the stones seeped with moisture. Odile sneezed from the stink of mould. She could see how her papa trembled at the chill. The floor was fresh-turned earth. Crates filled niches in the walls. In the tower’s other cage, a weeping man sat on a stool. The king’s livery, stained, bunched about his shoulders.
“The prince’s latest messenger.” Papa gestured at a bejeweled necklace glittering at the man’s feet. “Bearing a bribe to end the engagement.”
Papa followed this with a grunt as he stooped down and began digging in the dirt with his fingers. Odile helped him brush away what covered a dull, gray egg. “Papa, he’s innocent.”
He gently pulled the egg loose of the earth. “Dear, there’s a tradition of blame. Sophocles wrote that ‘No man loves the messenger of ill.’ ”
He took a pin from his cloak and punched a hole into the ends of the egg while intoning rara lingua. Then he approached the captive man, who collapsed, shaking, to his knees. Papa blew into one hole and a vapor reeking of sulfur drifted out to surround the messenger. Screams turned into the frantic call of a songbird.
“We’ll send him back to the prince in a gilded cage with a message. ‘We delightfully accept your offer of an engagement ball.’ Perhaps I should have turned him into a parrot and he could have spoken that.”
“Papa,” Odile chided.
“I’ll return his form after the wedding. I promise.” He carried the egg to one shelf and pulled out the crate of curse eggs nestled in soil. “What king more wisely cares for his subjects?”
The Prince
The prince would have rather mucked out every filthy stall in every stable of the kingdom than announce his engagement to the sorcerer’s daughter at the ball. His father must have schemed his downfall; why else condemn him to marry a harpy?
“Father, be reasonable. Why not the Duke of Bremen’s daughter?” The prince glanced up at the fake sky the guildsmen were painting on the ballroom’s ceiling. A cloud appeared with a brushstroke.
“The one so lovely that her parents keep her at a cloister?” asked the king. “Boy, your wife should be faithful only to you. Should she look higher to God, she’ll never pay you an
y respect.”
“Then that Countess from Schaumberg—”
The king sighed. “Son, there are many fine lands with many fine daughters but none of them have magic.”
“Parlor tricks!”
“Being turned into a turkey is not a trick. Besides, von Rothbart is the most learned man I have ever met. If his daughter has half the mind, half the talent . . . ”
“Speaking dead languages and reciting dusty verse won’t keep a kingdom.”
The king laughed. “Don’t tell that to Cardinal Passerine.”
The Fledgling
In the silence, Odile looked up from yellowed pages that told how a pelican’s brood are stillborn until the mother pecks its chest and resurrects them with her own blood. Odile had no memory of her own mother. Papa would never answer any question she asked about her.
She pinched the flame out in the sconce’s candle and opened the shutters. The outside night had so many intriguing sounds. Even if she only listened to the breeze it would be enough to entice her from her room.
She went to her dresser, opened the last drawer, and found underneath old mohair sweaters the last of the golden wappentier eggs she had taken. She could break it now, turn herself into a night bird and fly free. The thought tempted her as she stared at her own weak reflection on the shell. She polished it for a moment against her dressing gown.
But the need to see Elster’s face overpowered her.
So, as she had done so many nights, Odile gathered and tied bed sheets and old clothes together as a makeshift rope to climb down the outer walls of her papa’s tower.
As she descended, guided only by moonlight, something large flew near her head. Odile became still, with the egg safe in a makeshift sling around her chest, her toes squeezing past crumbling mortar. A fledermaus? Her papa called them vermin; he hunted them as the pother owl. If he should spot her. . . . But no, she did not hear his voice demand she return to her room. Perhaps it was the wappentier. Still clinging to the wall, she waited for the world to end, as her papa had said would happen if the great bird ever escaped from its cage. But her heartbeat slowly calmed and she became embarrassed by all her fears. The elder von Rothbart would have fallen asleep at his desk, cheek smearing ink on the page. The sad wappentier would be huddled behind strong bars. Perhaps it also dreamed of freedom.
Once on the ground, Odile walked towards the moat. Sleeping swans rested on the bank. Their long necks twisted back and their bills tucked into pristine feathers.
She held up the wappentier egg. Words of rara lingua altered her fingernail, making it sharp as a knife. She punctured the two holes, and as she blew into the first, her thoughts were full of incantations and her love’s name. She had trouble holding the words in her head; as if alive and caged, they wanted release on the tongue. Maybe Papa could not stop from turning men into birds, though Odile suspected he truly enjoyed doing so.
She never tired of watching the albumen sputter out of the shell and drift over the quiet swans like marsh fire before falling like gold rain onto one in their midst.
Elster stretched pale limbs. Odile thought the maid looked like some unearthly flower slipping through the damp bank, unfurling slender arms and long blonde hair. Then she stumbled until Odile took her by the hand and offered calm words while the shock of the transformation diminished.
They fled into the woods. Elster laughed to run again. She stopped to reach for fallen leaves, touch bark, then pull at a loose thread of Odile’s dressing gown and smile.
Elster had been brought to the tower to fashion Odile a dress for court. Odile could remember that first afternoon, when she had been standing on a chair while the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen stretched and knelt below her measuring. Odile had never felt so awkward, sure that she’d topple at any moment, yet so ethereal, confidant that had she slipped, she would glide to the floor.
Papa instructed Elster that Odile’s gown was to be fashioned from sticks and string, like a proper bird’s nest. But, alone together, Elster showed Odile bolts of silk and linen, guiding her hand along the cloth to feel its softness. She would reveal strands of chocolate-colored ribbon and thread them through Odile’s hair while whispering how pretty she could be. Her lips had lightly brushed Odile’s ears.
When Papa barged into Odile’s room and found the rushes and leaves abandoned at their feet and a luxurious gown in Elster’s lap, he dragged Elster down to the cellar. A tearful Odile followed, but she could not find the voice to beg him not to use a rotten wappentier egg.
In the woods, they stopped, breathless, against a tree trunk. “I brought you a present,” Odile said.
“A coach that will carry us far away from your father?”
Odile shook her head. She unlaced the high top of her dressing gown and allowed the neckline to slip down inches. She wore the prince’s bribe but now lifted it off her neck. The thick gold links, the amethysts like frozen drops of wine, seemed to catch the moon’s fancy as much as their own.
“This must be worth a fortune.” Elster stroked the necklace Odile draped over her long, smooth neck.
“Perhaps. Come morning, I would like to know which swan is you by this.”
Elster took a step away from Odile. Then another until the tree was between them. “Another day trapped. And another. And when you marry the prince, what of me? No one will come for me then.”
“Papa says he will release all of you. Besides, I don’t want to marry the prince.”
“No. I see every morning as a swan. You can’t—won’t—refuse your father.”
Odile sighed. Lately, she found herself daydreaming that Papa had found her as a chick, fallen from the nest, and turned her into a child. “I’ve never seen the prince,” Odile said as she began climbing the tree.
“He’ll be handsome. An expensive uniform with shining medals and epaulets. That will make him handsome.”
“I heard his father and mother are siblings. He probably has six fingers on a hand.” Odile reached down from the fat branch she sat upon to pull Elster up beside her.
“Better to hold you with.”
“The ball is tomorrow night.”
“What did he do with the gown I made you?”
“He told me to burn it. I showed him the ashes of an apron. It’s hidden beneath my bed.”
“Let me wear it. Let me come along to the ball with you.”
“You would want to see me dance with him?”
Elster threaded her fingers through Odile’s hair, sweeping a twig from the ends. “Wouldn’t you rather I be there than your father?”
Odile leaned close to Elster and marveled at how soft her skin felt. Her pale cheeks. Her arms, her thighs. Odile wanted music then, for them to dance together dangerously on the branches. Balls and courts and gowns seemed destined for other girls.
The Coach
On the night of the ball, von Rothbart surprised Odile with a coach and driver. “I returned some lost sons and daughters we had around the tower for the reward.” He patted the rosewood sides of the coach. “I imagine you’ll be traveling to and from the palace in the days to come. A princess shouldn’t be flying.”
Odile opened the door and looked inside. The seats were plush and satin.
“You wear the same expression as the last man I put in the cellar cage.” He kissed her cheek. “Would a life of means and comfort be so horrible?”
The words in her head failed Odile. They wouldn’t arrange themselves in an explanation, in the right order to convey to Papa her worries about leaving the tower, her disgust at having to marry a man she didn’t know and could never care for. Instead she pressed herself against him. The bound twigs at her bosom stabbed her chest. The only thing that kept her from crying was the golden egg she secreted in the nest gown she wore.
When the coach reached the woods, Odile shouted for the driver to stop. He looked nervous when she opened the door and stepped out on to the road.
“Fraulein, your father insisted you arrive tonight. He s
aid I’d be eatin’ worms for the rest of my days.”
“A moment.” She had difficulty running, because of the rigid gown. She knew her knees would be scratched raw by the time she reached the swans. Odile guided a transformed Elster to the road. The sight of the magnificent coach roused her from the change’s fugue.
“Finally I ride with style.” Elster waited for the driver to help her climb the small steps into the coach. “But I have no dress to wear tonight.”
Odile sat down beside her and stroked the curtains and the cushions. “There is fabric wasted here to make ten gowns.”
When Odile transformed her fingernails to sharp points to rip free satin and gauze, she noticed Elster inch away. The magic frightened her. Odile offered a smile and her hand to use as needles. Elster took hold of her wrist with an almost cautious touch.
The bodice took shape in Elster’s lap. “We could stay on the road. Not even go to the ball. You could turn the driver into a red-breasted robin and we could go wherever we want.”
“I’ve never been this far away from home.” Odile wondered why she hadn’t considered such an escape. But all her thoughts had been filled with the dreaded ball, as if she had no choice but to accept the prince’s hand. She glanced out the tiny window at the world rushing past. But Papa would be waiting for her tonight. There would be studies tomorrow and feeding the wappentier, and she couldn’t abandon Papa.
It was a relief that she had no black egg with her, that she had no means to turn a man into fowl. She had never done so, could not imagine the need. So she shook her head.
Elster frowned. “Always your father’s girl.” She reached down and bit free the thread linking Odile’s fingers and her gown. “Remember that I offered you a choice.”
The Ball
The palace ballroom had been transformed into an enchanting wood. The rugs from distant Persia rolled up to allow space for hundreds of fallen leaves fashioned from silk. The noble attendees slipped on the leaves often. A white-bearded ambassador from Lombardy fell and broke his hip; when carried off he claimed it was no accident but an atto di guerra.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 49
