by F. M. Isaacs
“Have fun, you two. Take it easy on her, Hannah,” Andrew said genially. “Don't talk her ear off.”
Hannah swatted at him playfully, “Go, you crazy guy!”
“Daddy, I want a horse!” their daughter shrieked.
Both Hannah and Andrew froze for a moment. “What?” Hannah squeaked.
“I told you Gina got one! Why can't I?”
Andrew took the innocent wish of an eight-year-old in stride. “I thought you wanted a panda, Shaina.”
“Daddy, you can't ride a panda!”
Hannah rolled her eyes and adjusted the flowers in a nearby vase.
“No horses, Shaina. Just...no.” Andrew swept her and the other children away with a quick nasty wink at his wife.
When the door closed behind them, Hannah turned to me, her face flushed. “Shaina doesn't realize how close to home her words hit,” she grinned. She fished up her own copy of The Sad Little Peahen from a side table.
I was glad that she could smile about it now, because her situation had seemed so pitiful – at least the version that came down through the ages as a fairy tale.
“So you know who we are, but you want to hear the actual story,” Hannah began, easing herself into an armchair. “Well, as you know, I was the title character, The Sad Little Peahen.” She pointed to the colorful book cover, then looked pensively out the window.
I thought about how different Allen had been from the Aldous in the book – at first. “Your father was so nice to me until he needed to save himself,” I commented, settling into the chair beside her.
“Yes, it was jarring to encounter him. He was transformed, so at first I didn't recognize him, but I quickly sensed him. His signature was always so strong.” She swallowed, her eyes watering. “When I first heard that Daniel had rescued him, I was happy. I felt like a child who hasn't seen her parent for years, which I was. But my memories and my anger came rushing back, and I knew he couldn't stay. Especially because then I wouldn't have been born.”
“Why didn't you tell me to stay away from him?”
“The first time I actually came in contact with him was at your party. I was so traumatized, I couldn’t think straight. And what could I possibly do other than warn you to be careful?”
I kicked at the chair leg, knowing she was right. “How did he turn so evil that he did such awful things to you?”
She sat up straight, gripping the armrests tightly. “Corinne, my father was such a good man. He really was. But living back then and being constantly in fear of your life, you learned to take care of yourself.” She bit her nail nervously. “As he saw it, he was trying to help you, but when he learned your family wanted to take him back to our century...well, you can't blame him for wanting to stop you.”
I shuffled my foot. It was self-preservation, pure and simple, and again I forgave Allen a little bit. Just a little.
“Father was always working with us. He and Mother made sure my brother and I were both educated, even though I was female. He was always busy, yet he still made time to teach us the ways of nature. We flew with the birds, we swam with the fish...
“But my brother married and moved away, and one day, Mother...” She paused, wiping at her eyes, and I felt a pang. Even so many years removed from it, this part of the story obviously pained her.
“What happened to your mother?” I gently prodded.
“Sometimes, to get food for the family, Father would change one of us into a large predator, and we'd go hunt. Well, he changed Mother into a bear, and she went out. There was a blizzard, and she never returned. We went out to find her – I was an owl, and Father was a horse. We searched for so long, I fell out of the sky from exhaustion. ”
“I'm so sorry, Hannah.” I said, drawing nearer to her.
“What's funny is that the king, Andrew's father, was a great fan of hunting wild boar and bear,” she gazed off, her eyes full of sorrow. “Time and again Andrew and I wonder whether Andrew’s father might have killed my mother, however inadvertently.”
“That's...horrible.” I really didn't know what else to say.
“Anyway,” she continued grimly, “my father blamed himself for Mother's death, and he became very bitter. He kept insisting that our hunting really hadn't been necessary, because he could transform anything into food, so Mother had died for no reason.” She let out a deep sigh. “He arranged a marriage for me with the son of the richest man in town. He forbade me to see Andrew, and when I did anyway, that was the last straw. I, his only remaining family member, had deceived him. Despite my impending marriage, I had secretly continued to see the son of the man who might have killed Mother. I shamed him.”
“So he transformed you into a peahen?”
“Just like in the book, Andrew and I used to love to sit and watch his mother's flock of peacocks. We'd spend hours there, dreaming of a future that was forbidden to us – and not just because of Father. A prince marrying a commoner, and a Jewish one at that...well, it was unthinkable.” She opened the book to a two-page illustration of glorious fields, a flock of peacocks, and a castle in the distance. In the foreground sat a young girl and boy.
Placing her finger on the page, Hannah murmured, “Doesn't look much like me, but they got the hair color right.” She flipped to the next page, where the picture of an enraged dark-haired man dominated the text. “I remember my father's words exactly: ‘You have disobeyed my wishes, and you’ve brought shame on this family. If you like watching the Queen’s peacocks so much, you may join them!’ And I did.” She sniffled. “Father shooed me away like a common pigeon...”
“So you stayed with the other peacocks?”
“I tried, but they sensed I was different. They drove me away, so I went off on my own and I lived in a meadow. The book says I was killed by hunters. Actually, Julian and Patricia rescued me and brought me here.”
“What happened with Andrew?”
“I always told him if I 'disappeared', I'd come to him as an animal. He knew the stories about my father, but he never believed Father could transform people. Yet the villagers called Father 'The Fox' for a reason, and that was in the back of Andrew's mind.”
“It's so weird that Mom's family got their last name from that,” I said.
Hannah nodded. “When I came to Andrew as a peahen, he was determined to get my father to change me back. Andrew begged and pleaded, but Father refused. When Father was publicly accused of sorcery, Andrew disappeared soon after. Father had changed him into a horse and substituted him for one of the king's own animals, and the king's men unknowingly used my poor husband to till the fields and pull their carriages.
“Before he was transformed, however, Andrew had told everything to his brother, Louis, who believed the stories about Father's abilities. After all, the king consulted with him for a reason – and it was more than Father’s just being the village doctor.”
“Allen...your father was a doctor?”
“An excellent one, considering his ability.” She shifted position, and continued on. “So after Andrew's disappearance, Louis came to my father one night. To be safe, Father had been transforming himself at bedtime into inanimate objects – usually rocks – so he wouldn’t be murdered in his sleep. But Louis guessed correctly what he was, smashed him to bits, and scattered him through the countryside. I guess there’s no coming back from that.”
Both of us let out a long breath. Hannah was beginning to cry, and I embraced her tightly in consolation. “I'm sorry, Hannah.” I tried to hold back my own tears.
“He was a good man,” Hannah wept. “Really. But he was so proud and stubborn...” She wiped at her eyes.
I attempted to think of something positive to say. “So...I guess I'm related to a princess?”
She chewed her lower lip, pondering this. “I'm hardly a princess. I'd say Andrew kind of lost his title once he was turned into a horse.” She almost smiled. “Our kids carry royal blood, though.”
“Do you miss it?”
“What, my time?
”
“Everything. Your life back then, changing with your dad?”
A faraway expression came over her face. “Life is much better here. I wish we could have helped my father, but I'd never have been born if he stayed here. If you stemmed from him directly, perhaps through my brother, you wouldn't be alive either. Your whole line would simply never have existed. Then your mother wouldn't have been around to save me, and my children would never be born. You understand how drastically time would be affected?”
I hadn't thought this through to the extreme that Hannah had mentioned. If we hadn’t brought Allen back, would I have blinked out of existence? When would that have happened? The possibilities only flooded my head with more questions.
“I wonder how Father would react if we reunited after what he’d done to me. Could he get over his bitterness? Would he strive to be a better person?”
My parents saved people right before they died. Couldn't we save Allen right before Louis murdered him? Maybe, being older, he might be very different.
“I didn't mean I wanted you to try that,” Hannah added hastily. “If you're thinking that you can save him at the very end and bring him back here, don't go down that path,” she warned, practically reading my mind.
“But–”
"He's dangerous, Corinne. He shouldn't be in our time, no matter how old he is, and he wouldn’t be the same person you knew. Let it go. You see what he did to his own daughter," she cautioned me again.
I wasn't quite ready to dismiss the idea, but I wasn't foolhardy enough to embark on it either.
But another issue gnawed at me. If Hannah and Andrew had been brought to the future, who had passed the peahen tale through the generations? “Who wrote the stories, Hannah? The book always says 'from the Hungarian folk tale'.”
“At first we thought it was Louis, but he didn’t know that Andrew became a horse.”
I gazed at her expectantly, but she remained silent.
“So who was it?” I finally prompted.
She swallowed. “Father. Before Louis killed him.”
“Allen? Why?”
She twiddled her thumbs. “One time, soon after he changed me, he sought me out. That was the only time after he transformed me that we came in contact.
“I saw him trudging through the grass, appearing like he’d aged overnight. When he looked up at me, I saw the guilt etched in every line of his face. 'My shame is too great to return you to your proper form, daughter,' he said to me. 'But you will not perish. You will have a better life someday in a future time.' Then he flew off as a dove.
"Until Julian and Patricia saved me, that one interaction with him kept my hopes up. My father had often spoken of dreams of a different time, and he had mentioned that he had seen a woman who looked like me in them."
I gasped. “So maybe he remembered!”
“He was always talking about dreams and telling tales. When he went into town to see patients, the neighborhood children would beg him to tell stories. I suspect a great favorite was The Sad Little Peahen, without Aldous dying in the end, of course.”
I inhaled deeply. “He told his own story?”
“I'm sure he originally didn't say it was about himself. But Louis was also a storyteller, and I’m sure he figured it out.”
“How do you know?” I exclaimed.
Hannah led me over to her computer and spoke to it. An article entitled, “History of Fairy Tales” lit up the screen.
“You researched it? It's in there?”
“Indeed it is.” She pointed out a paragraph to me, and I read:
Louis of Hungary recorded several folk tales handed down from his grandfather King Louis the First. A manuscript remains in the possession of the Budapest archives. The last and most well-known tale included is “A Szomorú Kis Pávatyúk”, or “The Sad Little Peahen”. Louis the First insisted it was a true story, and that he himself killed the evil wizard Aldous after discovering he had turned Andrew, Louis' brother, into a horse.
“Well, that last part's not quite accurate. Louis originally didn't know what happened to Andrew or he would have come to help him. At a later point, he must have heard Father's version of the story and tacked on the horse part from that.”
“And he added how he killed Aldous, too. Wow.” I took a moment to digest what I had just read. Allen's telling his story probably helped make him feel better. Had he only changed Hannah back, the tale would have had a far less grim ending.
Hannah confirmed my thoughts. “Father shared his guilt with the world. It just didn't help me.”
“But he did help you,” I exclaimed.
“How?”
“He gave you hope.” Allen had come to her. Despite my mother's measures, he somehow had dredged up the memories of his time here enough to realize that his daughter would be rescued. And he hadn't done anything to prevent it.
“No, Corinne, you gave us hope.”
“Me? How?”
Hannah touched my hair lovingly. “He spoke of a 'dream girl' with such love and guilt. She was always with him when he was particularly depressed or lonely.”
“With him?”
“He talked to her in a strange language. Apologizing, asking for forgiveness...”
“Apologizing?” I had no proof that he was looking specifically for my forgiveness, however. “Maybe he was talking to your mother. How do you know the dreams were about me?”
“Oh, they were. He talked to the girl even when Mother was around, which probably disturbed her, but she never let on.” She nibbled at her thumbnail. “And the language, I learned later, was English. Twenty-first century American English.”
A strange feeling welled up inside of me. Maybe I was glad that Allen had maintained some shadowy, ethereal memories of our adventures. Perhaps I was sad but proud that he had loved me and missed me after all, even if he retained me as but a vague image in his head.
Hannah saw my wistful contemplation, and she paused a minute to let me gather my thoughts. Then she continued, “Before I was born, Father remembered something about the dream girl that was very dear to him. Mother said he was so happy when he did; it was like a gift. He named me in hope of cherishing that memory forever.”
I gulped. "He did?"
"Yes, he did,” Hannah answered, looking me straight in the eye. “You see, my full name is Hannah Corinne."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
F. M. ISAACS LIVES in New York with her husband, two sons, and five cats. One of those cats is a female unfortunately named Jonas.
A great fan of fantasy and science fiction, F. M. started writing in these genres at age eight, and has never tired of them yet. She has several novels in the works, including Books Two and Three of the Family of the Fox Series. In addition, a trilogy about Patricia and Julian’s adventures is nearing publication, and shortly after that, Grandpa Brian’s past will be uncovered in a spin-off book.
She also would like to thank her family and husband for their help and infinite patience with her writing endeavors.
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