That’s what we don’t tell people when they ask how we got together, on the rare occasion that they do. Owen likes to tell stories, so he makes it a good one—one about how I was going to run away, so I hid in an apple crate and he found me and instantly fell in love. I don’t correct him. Sometimes, the lie is better than the truth.
Fall, 1994
1
We hold the First Annual First Frost Banquet a week after the frost, in October, a month after Owen takes over as leader of the shifters. I tell Owen it sounds silly, even more silly than it will ten years down the road, when we’ll have the Tenth Annual First Frost Banquet. But he just laughs and says, “I’m a man who knows when a little silliness is required, my dear.”
Last month, the shifters in the valley had finally had enough. They came together in secret and voted unanimously to exile Owen’s parents and instate Owen as our new leader. Suddenly, he wasn’t the Shifter Prince. He was the Shifter King. A whole new set of burdens and expectations was heaped on his shoulders.
The golden-haired son of our ruler, a prince among commoners, Owen has always drawn attention with his quick smile and quick temper, his fickleness and favoritism. The community must have thought anyone could do better than his father. I expected him to take the job a little more seriously, considering he’s lived in the community all his life, the same as the rest of us. He’s been through the lean years under his father’s rule, which was most of them. But maybe what he promised me is true—as leaders, we will never know hunger. Maybe, because he’s always been a prince, he’s never known hunger in his twenty-one years.
I’ve known hunger. Sometimes, it still hits me, even after three years of marriage. I’m no one, just another shifter girl, raven hair for the raven girl who hungered for everything—food, friends, a loving family, status in the community, and most of all, for Owen. Though we’re married, I haven’t known that favoritism for long, and part of me is still waiting for it to end.
Owen stands up on a picnic table and tells the short story of our meeting, his eyes shining with merriment as he watches me squirm.
I don’t stop him, though. As if by some miracle, I am his wife. The queen of the beasts. I look around at the tables laden with food, guilt weighing huge in my belly, like I’m already swollen with nine months of child. As queen, it isn’t just my duty to throw parties and demand the other shapeshifters give me their food when I’m hungry. It’s our job to take care of these people, from the largest grizzly to the smallest mouse. It’s our job to feed them, not the other way around.
In recent years, through a series of bad decisions, our hunting ground has shrunken too far to sustain us. Owen’s father let loggers take more than half our valley, sure that the money would be worth losing a little forested acreage. In the ensuing years, what remains has been hunted until the predators have little left to hunt. When one of our young girls, a half-grown fawn, was attacked in the woods by another shifter, something had to be done. But the surrounding land is owned by weres and witches, so we can’t purchase land, even if we had money left from the logging. We don’t.
The only thing the community could think to do was to overthrow the king and install his son in his place. Let him figure it out. And so, here we are, gorging for one night. I can’t help but think we will regret this next spring. But there is no going back now. Owen is too young to be overthrown by an heir. Leadership must only pass from one generation to the next.
His son, I think, pressing a palm to my flat belly. I smile to myself, imagining the delight with which he will receive this news later. I didn’t want to spoil his fun. This night is just for him. There will be many, many nights of diapering and feeding and wiping tears. Those nights can be about his son. This one is about Owen.
I watch him dancing in the firelight, spinning and jigging with a child, and I think he will make the best father. Unlike his own father, he will not be overly serious and preoccupied. Unlike mine, he won’t be gone half the time and drunk the other. Owen will be an engaged father, carrying his sons on his shoulders, letting his daughters braid his beard.
Now he takes the hand of Ericia, the slim teenager who was attacked in fawn form, and spins her around and around and around until she is dizzy and squealing with laughter, her tawny brown hair flying out like a fan around her shoulders. I can practically see her falling in love with my husband, the same way I did when I was her age. Though now his beard is full and his shoulders wider, he’s still the rambunctious boy who splashed all the girls at the river and put mud down their shirts back then.
I can tell he feeds off her adoration, the adoration of the crowd. Our people are grateful for the food and the chance to have a good time, even if it’s only for a night, even if they’ll pay for it later. Owen is right. They need this. My little boy of a husband is happy and laughing, and that’s what they need to see. He’ll be a good leader. He already is. And I will be a good wife, let him bask in the glory of a king—the crush of every girl, the idol of every boy. Soon enough, I will have his attention again. I will give him something none of these girls can. I will give him an heir.
Summer, 1995
1
Something is wrong. Owen went out hunting this evening, and he never came home. Now I lay in bed, wide awake, my hand on my belly. Something terrible has happened. I can feel it building inside, like an abscess. Where is he?
I cooked a pot of beans for dinner, throwing in some bones and herbs for flavor, and a lot of vegetables to make them go further. We only have a few handfuls of dried beans left from last fall, and I don’t want to ask the other families for food.
Owen says they’ll give it happily, but I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to take food from anyone who has as little as we do. And I don’t want them to know we’re as hard off as they are. Owen is good at faking it, at convincing everyone they are happy to eat tomato and squash soup all summer long. I’m not as good.
What will I do if he never comes home?
I was proud of my thin bean soup, and I set the table nice, sure that he’d come in at any minute and see dinner all set out and waiting for him. He’d be happy, even if he hadn’t had any luck hunting. That always puts him in a bad temper, but I can usually fix it. But my own temper soured as I waited. I worked hard on that dinner, and he didn’t even show up for it. He didn’t send someone over to tell me he was eating at Ira and Galon’s, as he sometimes does. Or that he’d drunk a little too much blueberry wine and was going to be playing cards until late into the night.
But as the night wore on, the anger turned to worry. And now I’m here, my hands pressing in on the mountain of my belly, alone. The baby hasn’t moved all day.
It’s a funny thing, that feeling you get so used to that you only notice when he jams a foot up under your ribs or throws an elbow at your bladder. You no longer notice the little flutters as you go about your day, hoeing the garden, weeding, digging grass roots and rocks. You know it’s there, but you pay more attention to the restricted motion as you stoop to pick potato beetles and bean beetles and flea beetles and blister beetles and cucumber beetles. There are so many pests, so many small, insidious things that can destroy you.
And you don’t notice when it goes to sleep. You only notice later that it never woke up. How long has it been? I can’t remember the last time I felt him move inside me. Last night? Yesterday? This morning? I was too busy worrying about Owen all evening and up until midnight, when I was too exhausted to stay up any longer. Even as I crawled into bed, I knew I would only manage a half sleep, with worry holding court in half my brain, refusing to let it rest. My ears still listen for his footsteps even when I manage to slip halfway into oblivion.
I don’t know when I noticed the baby wasn’t moving. Now I lie worrying about that. Pressing down on one side of my stomach and the other, feeling the bulges of his body inside mine. A head, a rump, a pair of knees. Sometimes, I move him inside me, changing his position from the outside. Sometimes, he does somersaults in there. Mostly
, he sleeps.
He’s just sleeping, I tell myself. He’s asleep, but he’ll wake up soon.
And that’s what happened to Owen, too. He ran into a few other men on his way out, and they joined him on the hunt. They got something good—a buck, maybe even an elk that wandered up from the valley, or a bear. To celebrate, they drank a little too much persimmon brandy, and he fell asleep. That’s all. I didn’t lose the two most precious things in my life in one day. They’re just sleeping.
2
I wake slowly the next morning, groggy and exhausted. My thoughts fly to Owen, and my hand stretches across the bed for him. But the bed is cold.
I remember the baby, and my hand searches for that life now. He’s always active in the morning. Except this morning, when my belly is as still and quiet as the other side of the bed. I poke at it, kneading my thumbs into my flesh, trying to rouse him.
In a haze of dread and weariness, I get up and eat a few spoonfuls of cold bean soup from the pot, tasting nothing. Outside, I hear children shrieking and singing. I plod to the door and outside, where I squint into the bright yellow sunshine of a summer morning. Two kids with sticks are chasing a plump goat along the dirt road in front of our house. They wave and smile, yelling hello on their way. I don’t know if their goat is always their goat, or if it is their mother, getting fat on grass to provide them milk and cheese and butter at the expense of her own life.
When a shifter takes another form, there is a cost. If a cat lives twenty years, and a human lives eighty, then one human year is four to a cat. If I spent a year as a cat, I’d shift back four years older than I am now. Which isn’t so very much, but what if I spent a year as a mouse? What if I spent an hour every day as a raven, which only lives ten years? In short, most of our people grow old before our time, and do not live to see those eighty human years.
I think of my own mother, how she must have changed in these years. I wonder if she ever put her hand on her belly and felt me moving inside her, if she loved me the way I love this child. An ache builds behind my eyes, but I won’t call her. Owen told her never to call us again, and I haven’t contacted her since our wedding. Maybe now he’ll let me. Maybe he’ll let our child see his grandmother, if she’s even still alive.
And the child in my belly, will he even live to see a day? Inside me, he sleeps, as still as a stone, as heavy, as cold. I know it’s my imagination, but I feel the coldness seeping from him, filling my womb with ice. The crystals spread like frost, consuming me from the inside out, blooming across the inside of my skin in wicked crystalline patterns. And though I imagine the beautiful, stark world inside me, the frost blue of his unseeing eyes, the snowflakes gathering on his eyelashes, freezing to his sightless eyes, the beauty holds only horror for me.
I miss the turn to the midwife’s house and have to back the truck up for a hundred feet along the dirt road. The yard is empty, and no one answers the door. I sink onto her old grey porch swing and stare sightlessly at the assortment of old junk piled along the border of her yard. After a time, I rise and return to the truck, making my way further down the valley to the doctor’s house.
When I pull in, I spot her rusted out hatchback in the yard without relief. She calls to me from the fenced garden beside the house, where she is spreading a wheelbarrow full of old rotting leaves on a bed of tomatoes. I don’t know the doctor, though I know who she is. I’ve seen her more intimately than most people, although she doesn’t know it. I’ve seen her trading goods at the weekly swaps, and around the valley since she moved back. But I’ve never spoken to her. There are whispers among the women that she is a witch as well as a shifter, that she made some unholy bargain with them to come here.
“Dr. Golden?” I ask, as if I don’t know her name. She’s older than me by only a few years, with two long, yellow braids hanging down her back to her waist.
“Here I am,” she says, her voice higher and sweeter than I remember. She has feathers braided into her hair, and a flower tucked into it above one ear. But she’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the same as anyone else. “Are you here about your health? Or the baby’s?” she asks, gesturing towards my belly, where my hand rests protectively.
“The baby.” The catch in my voice surprises me.
“Come in,” she says, smiling with such reassurance that she doesn’t have to tell me the baby is fine. That’s how powerful her calming effect is. As I follow her to a small, clean bedroom, I wonder if she has a calming spell on her house or an enchantment on herself. If she learned these tricks from witches.
“What is your natural form?” she asks as I shed my pants and lie down on the floral quilt tucked tightly around the bed. “It’s probably nothing to do with that. But you do know the dangers of shifting while pregnant?”
“Yes, I know,” I assure her. “I usually go to the midwife, but she’s not home today. And I’m a raven, so I can’t shift at all.” Not without losing the baby. Raven’s do not have wombs.
She quirks an eyebrow at me as she tugs on a pair of examination gloves. It strikes me as funny, suddenly, that she takes this precaution, and that I’ve never noticed that the midwife doesn’t. It seems so sterile, like something that happens at the big hospitals, the nearest one over an hour’s drive away. But it gives me hope, too, that she thinks there is still a life to protect.
“I need this baby to live,” I say as she pushes her fingers inside me. I adjust my shoulders on the bed and fix my gaze on the ceiling. “It will be my first. Our first. To carry on the royal line.”
Her fingers cease their probing for just a beat, but I feel it. “You’re Owen’s wife?” she asks.
Not, You’re Doralice, or You’re the Queen of the Beasts, or even, You’re the king’s wife.
But that’s silly. Of course she doesn’t have to ask that. Everyone knows Owen by name. He’s universally known, gregarious, a good leader who speaks to everyone, not only his own friends. And no one knows me as anything but the lucky girl who made it good.
Her fingers press at my stomach, knead it, but suddenly, I don’t want her hands on me. I remember then that my dislike of her didn’t just stem from the whispers of witches, but from the knowledge of her and Owen. I remember her legs around him on that streambank, when he was hardly more than a gorgeous boy I had a crushing crush on.
She’s going to kill the baby inside me. She wants to get rid of him, so I can’t give Owen what he needs from a wife. Because she wants Owen for herself. I can see it on her face, in the determined set of her mouth as she digs the baby loose from his moorings inside me, as she strangles the life from him with her witch-trained fingers.
“No,” I gasp, squirming away from her digging fingers that do their magic within me, where Owen has been so many times, even when he was hers. Where his baby will travel to reach the world he will rule just as Owen does, with kindness and humor and empathy.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her fingers sliding from me. “Did that hurt?”
“What did you do to him?” I hiss, snatching up my pants. I knew better than to come to her, this witch doctor set on revenge. “If you killed him, you’re going to be sorry.”
“I am sorry,” she says softly. “But I don’t think there is life inside you.”
“It’s you,” I scream. “You did this!”
With that, I flee. I leap into my truck and spit gravel all over her driveway as I rev the engine, spinning out onto the road. I crush the gas pedal and weave through the valley, back up to my house. I know I just acted like an insane person, but I’m too hollow to care.
When the truck’s engine dies in our driveway, I sit behind the wheel for a time, the truck growing warmer and warmer under the punishing sun. I roll down the window, but I don’t get out of the truck. If I get out, I’ll have to go inside. If I go inside, I’ll know if Owen’s home. And if he’s not, there is nothing left for me. I will turn into a fruit fly and expire in a day.
3
That night, the house feels cold, although it’s th
e middle of summer. The rain has cooled everything, but this time, I miss the heat. I sit on the porch, waiting for the midwife, while the world sheds its tears around me.
If Owen doesn’t return, I will have to tell the others in the community. I don’t know who will become our leader. One of Owen’s cousins, probably. And I will become nothing, just a poor raven girl who, for a moment, was a queen. If I’m lucky, I’ll marry a time or two—we aren’t known for the longevity of our relationships—and live out the rest of my life as a destitute wife. But I’ll never love anyone the way I love Owen.
I’ll never forget the chance I had for a moment, a chance that was ripped away. Without a child, I’ll never be anything other than I am now. Broken. Defective. Barren.
If this child had lived, even without Owen, I’d be the mother of the future king or queen. I’d be taken care of by the community until he was old enough to claim the throne. Now, I’ll go back to being alone, like I was growing up. No one will want to befriend me, the disgraced, fallen queen. They’ll say I’m putting on airs, the way they do now. Except then, I won’t have a husband or a title in my favor.
I’ll have nothing. Maybe I’ll never get married at all. Because what man is going to marry someone who was once the queen of the beasts? What man’s ego can handle the fact that I was once married to the king?
The midwife arrives, interrupting my thoughts, and I rise to greet her. By the look on her face, I’m sure she thinks that I put the future king in danger, that I killed my baby. They would believe anything that let them hate the upstart queen, a nobody who caught the eye of the king. The king, who could have done better. Who do I think I am, to consider myself worthy of his proposal?
“Yesterday, there was warmth and roundness and life,” I explain as I undress for the examination minutes later. “Today there is only stones.”
The Raven Queen: Fairy Tales of Horror (Villain Stories Book 1) Page 4
