by Hal Bodner
Silence served as reply until my father sighed.
“My brother speaks wisdom in part. I suggest the village prepare to head for the city in a week’s time. If Kristoph and I do not return, take the others and go. Our survival rests upon this chance.”
My father spent the night staring at me while I pretended to sleep, muttering prayers for my future. Elder Gottlieb came for him at first light, lending to him and Uncle Kristoph the village’s single surviving beast of burden to make their quick trip to the city and the church therein. When they returned, it was with mixed blessings. They reported the King, himself, had been in attendance at the church, and he had spoken with them in loving kindness. The Princess offered a kiss upon the brow to each of them, praying for their success in this noble task.
My Uncle spoke of nothing more than the beauty of the Princess, the memory of her lips upon his forehead, the softness of her unblemished hands as they held his. My father spoke of the King’s promise of a place within the city walls for our scant number. By royal decree, he would do his utmost to ensure our fields returned to us after winter’s passing. And then he spent the last of the daylight kneeling before my mother’s grave in deep prayer, his sword thrust into the earth at her feet.
Surprisingly enough, Pieter joined him, fascinated not by the coat of mail my father wore, but by the earnest words dropped from his lips. Later in life, when he took his vows to the Cloth, he would tell me the exact moment when God’s hand rested upon him. Never before had a prayer so beautiful, so heartfelt as the one my father said to the Virgin Mary for my sake, touched his soul.
And I? I had set to making a crown of snow blossoms for my father, to show him he would always be a king in my eyes. I grasped the final flower, smiling …. Wind rattled the bare branches around me, spectral eddies hissing up from the depths of memory. I swallowed a scream, dipping through the trees, trying to escape the thing that haunted my dreams. Uncle appeared a short distance away, walking down the frozen road, diverging at the exact spot in which Pieter and I had discovered Old Teufel nearly a year ago. For reasons I would never speak aloud I followed him, my cloak of white ermine and rabbit camouflaging me against the snowy landscape.
Once I crossed the tree line, their branches empty of snow and of the leaves they’d shed at Old Teufel’s death, the same chill as the last time overrode all other sensation. As if something supernatural walked these forested paths. I saw the arrowhead that Pieter had dropped when Uncle had hefted him to safety. I found the skeleton of the old yellow dog, the shafts of my father’s arrows protruding from the tree trunk, the remains of Old Teufel stuck to tree, rotting and full of puss. Maggots spawned in the empty pit where his undamaged eye should have been.
I found the impossible, the reason why the wind hung so cold here, why my father had loosed his arrows instead of bringing the man forward for the King’s justice on the charge of witchcraft.
I witnessed Old Teufel himself standing before my uncle, red-bathed blade in one hand and the entrails of some animal in the other. Whole and healed as if my father had never fired upon him.
“The King of Death returns,” Old Teufel laughed, the hissing sound making me grit my teeth and clasp my hands over my ears. “Are you ready to pay my price, Death King?”
“Name it,” my Uncle pronounced. “Anything you want, so long as I can marry the princess. I love her.”
“Love,” the creature spoke, tilting its head side to side. “What know you of love, King of Death? You have met the Princess only once, spoken not twenty words to her. How can you know love?”
“I know what is in my heart!” he screamed. “I have never suffered such things until I laid eyes upon her beauty. I will die if I do not have her as my bride. By your own mouth, you know the Old Ways. Incline my ear to hear what you hear and my eye to see what you see, that I may slay the beast.”
“Anything I want … ” Old Teufel said again … and stared right into my eyes. “I want the queenling. Give her to me and I shall give you your heart’s desire.”
I do not know what went through my Uncle’s mind. Everything inside of me quaked in stunned silence as he nodded. The arrowhead Pieter had found floated up from the forest floor, landing in Old Teufel’s hand. He sliced open my Uncle’s shirt, carving something unseen into the tender flesh just above his heart. The arrowhead seemed to grow in size, swallowing the lifeblood pouring from the wound until it was the size of a spearhead. Dark in color, blood forged into steel.
“Take this and attach it to your spear, King of Death. Let our bargain be sealed in blood as in the days of Old.”
I ran.
My Uncle did not return in the night, nor was he present in the morning to receive communion and blessing from the priest. Despite my protests, my explanations of what I had seen in the Black Forest, my father hugged me tightly and left to hunt the beast. I stood on the road and watched my father’s form become a puppet on the road, until he shrank into a tiny speck in the far distance. I stood long after he vanished into the trees, long after the snows began to fall once more. I stood until my legs gave out and cold brought me to the ground.
Until Pieter’s father and mother picked me up in loving arms and took me to the warmth of their hearth.
Neither Father nor Uncle came home to me in the first hours of morning. Nor the day after, or the day after that. News of my family did not reach us until the day the village prepared to march for the city. News of triumph and of hope for the future arrived in the form of a royal caravan galloping down our plain little road, the coach of the King heading the procession. The King and his daughter alighted from the coach with its golden scrollwork, approaching Elder Gottlieb and his wife, and Pieter … and me.
My father had prevailed, proclaimed the King. The beast lived no more! He would marry the Princess Ilsa upon the spring when his wounds fully healed, and I would be a high lady. Not a queen as Old Teufel had predicted. For even at such a young age, I understood the Princess was not my mother. Only a child between Ilsa and my father would take the throne. Yet all that hardly mattered to me. My father lived. He had slain the beast and our village was saved.
***
Spring came swiftly on the heels of such a harsh winter, bringing life in abundance. It was almost as if the ground attempted to make amends for the weak harvest of last season, yielding up a bounty of food and flowers, filling our storehouses to overflow. Prosperity returned to the kingdom in ways unseen since before the Black Plague. My father married Princess Ilsa in a grand celebration lasting a fortnight.
Life settled into something of a beautiful peace in the years following the marriage. My father, though now royal, never forgot the village we came from. His first decree as royal husband fed money into our former home, funding a church and a proper town hall. Our old family farm was chosen as the building location, the grave of my mother marking the first to be buried in this newly consecrated ground. And beside her was placed a headstone over an empty grave to honor Uncle Kristoph, who had given his life as so many others had in trying to slay the beast.
Yet as is the course and folly of mortal men, happiness was not to last in our kingdom.
In the summer of my sixteenth year, the old Sheppard brought his wagon into the castle courtyard. So much joy had come to our family, I hardly remembered the dark prophecy of Old Teufel. Instead I glowed with womanhood, with the knowledge that finally, at long last, my father had gotten the Princess with child. The baby would be born within the month, further evidence I would not be queen and the vile prophecy would never come to pass.
My father took it upon himself to arrange a dual celebration in honor of the babe and also Pieter’s ordainment as a priest. After many troublesome years of study, my heart’s friend would achieve his dream to take over stewardship of the newly constructed church back in the village we both still called home. I had never been so proud of him, watching as the Holy Father laid the vestiges upon him for the first time.
And still the smile remained o
n my lips as I stared down at this Sheppard, watching him offer the choicest of his flock to my father for the celebration. Cold wind had returned to me, bringing traces of decay and other odors I had long since forgotten. It seemed to me the axels of the Sheppard’s wagon hissed instead of creaked, waking nightmares of the boar and the darker things tiptoeing across my thoughts. My hands trembled, and I dropped the jeweled crown my stepmother was trying to show me. It sparkled as it fell, the gems refracting the sunlight, spilling it around us like the falling leaves at the moment of Teufel’s death.
Its tumbling caught the Sheppard’s eye, and his face lit up with excitement. “Your Highnesses, Princess Ilsa and Lady Magdaline, I bring a special gift to you. Behold the horn that sings!”
He brought the instrument to his lips and blew upon the mouthpiece. Hissing, grating laughter exited the tube rather than the melodious notes to call the flock home. Shortly after came a voice, one I had known since childhood. The sound of Uncle’s tone.
“Ah friend, thou blowest upon my bone!
Long have I lain beside the water;
My brother slew me for the boar,
And took for his wife the King’s young daughter.”
No sooner had the words died from the thrice damned horn my father fell to his knees and wept, clinging to the hem of Pieter’s newly sewn priestly raiment. He sought confession instantly, declaring before the whole world the weight of his sin. All true, what this wicked horn had blurted forth. Uncle Kristoph had slain the boar, but he had done so with witchcraft and trickery. My father had fought with his brother upon the bridge in the Black Forest, refusing to let him sully the land with a kingship born of curses and black magic. He offered my uncle a choice: toss the head of the boar and the wicked spear into the water, and take compassion from the church with the rest of the village, or die.
In the end, my father had slain his brother. In his pride, his desire to protect the village he loved, he cast the cursed spear and Uncle’s body into the river, claiming the boar’s head as his own. The King in his wisdom, for he had come to love my father and I as his own, pardoned my father and named him a true hero. For my father had not used his title for personal gain, but had provided well for the people of the kingdom. Princess Ilsa had truly fallen in love with him, and the King proclaimed no greater man to rule in his stead.
The celebration continued as planned, the Sheppard confessing he found a bone along the river on his way to the castle. It had been the perfect size to make a mouthpiece for his horn and so he helped himself, thinking the piece from an animal’s remains. He was asked to stay as a guest of honor for bearing the truth to the King’s ear.
And no one noticed how Princess Ilsa cut her hand when I dropped the crown. When she asked later that night to examine the miraculous horn that had revealed the depth of her husband’s piety and courage, the wound opened as if of its own accord, deepened greatly. The bone the Sheppard carved for the mouthpiece, the bone bearing my Uncle’s sins, from the very hand which slay the beast with a demonic spearhead, drank deeply of her royal life.
No one noticed, save for Pieter and me.
***
We ghosted like shadows between the narrow alleyways of the castle grounds, two cloaked figures silently running for the servant’s gate. The feasting had continued, the minstrels playing loudly, and the guards on duty dozed, thick-witted and slow from too much wine. The King proclaimed a great holy day in honor of my father’s confessed bravery, challenging any in the kingdom to claim they would have acted differently in such a situation. As such, every man and woman in the castle was afforded drink and food.
We slipped out unnoticed.
The parish in which Pieter studied rested half a mile from the city gates, allowing its practitioners and students an easier time of ministering to the poor and uneducated. Horses were stabled nearby, older beasts better suited to pulling the plow than carrying passengers. However, they were the best we could acquire at the late hour, and their feet were sure on the road back towards our village. We promised to return before too long.
A promise we would not be able to keep.
We had to find the place in the woods, the location where my father had killed the body of Old Teufel. Under his cloak, Pieter carried a container of salt, a flask of oil, and a tender box for which to create a flame. In his ministry he had traveled the length and breadth of the kingdom, encountering superstition after superstition. So many of them had collected in his thoughts he’d taken to penning them in a ledger for later study, determined to find the one gem of truth within their depths he may use to turn the populace away from such thoughts.
I was ever so glad he had taken this life path in this moment. He was most likely the only one that knew how to save us all from the growing evil. For he knew what to do to settle Old Teufel to his grave once and for all. All we needed was to find the body, the thing nailed to the tree by my father’s arrows. Then we would salt and burn the bones, tossing their ash into the nearest stream.
My feet seemed to find the entrance to the woods all on their own, something within me drawn to the darkened branches, the moist cold of the grave. I could not still the beating of my heart, the way my breath raced in and out of my lungs anymore than I could deny the pull of destiny along my limbs. I had to reach this place, this wicked den of corruption, and … I knew not what else. I knew only I had to get there. I was called.
The chill enveloped us the moment we crossed into the familiar tree line, though sweat slicked my skin from the balmy summer night. The woods were unusually quiet, the absence of night birds and forest critters echoing louder in our ears than any scream. The full moon provided the light we needed, propelling us deeper towards our target, our feet making barely a whisper upon the forest ground.
Until we found the clearing. Until we realized our mistake.
They were waiting for us, these superstitious peasants pretending to find Grace in Pieter’s words. Too many of them to count, all nude and covered with the same symbols that had decorated the arrowhead Pieter had found. In the center of them roared a soundless bonfire, the heat of the summer night masking its warmth from our detection. Hands seized our persons, ripping at clothing and binding my wrists. Our screams were rewarded with mouthfuls of a coppery-tasting liquid until we choked to silence or became forced to drink it again.
The world tilted dramatically around me, my ears filling with a rushing sound, like the winter melt engorging the river. Something … not right tainted the wine, something that transformed my body into air. Not a hint of sensation tickled my body as they forced me to my knees, buckling some sort of mask across my face. And hands, gnarled leathery hands, grabbed the bonds holding my own, keeping my nearly naked form kneeling at his feet.
“The Queenling has tasted the nectar,” he crowed, answered in kind by his followers. “And now she will give us the Old Ways again. Let the celebration come. Let the Queenling take the guise of the hart and run free. And let the Green Man bring her down and fill her belly with life.”
The eyeholes in the mask were too narrow, my head heavy as if full of rocks. But I glimpsed Pieter stripped nude in the firelight, the people taking handfuls of green paint to his body. He struggled in vain, his limbs as heavy as mine thanks to herbs in the wine. Too many hands assaulted his flesh, too many people pouring more liquid into his mouth. I tried to reach him, to twist my hands free. Old Teufel’s grip was like iron and I simply lacked the strength.
“Please,” I begged, my voice slurred. “Please let us go. Please don’t do this.”
His gnarled face leaned down into my own, fingers caressing my throat with a gentleness belied by my previous treatment. “You were promised to me, queenling. Your Uncle gave his word and sealed you to me in blood. You felt the pull, did you not, the need to be here? You listened to the words of my messenger upon the horn. Even now, the sacrifice is made, the life-force of the princess and her child collect in the potion you and your Green Man drank.”
“The S
heppard and the bone,” I sobbed, head lolling upon my neck like a broken puppet. “I saw it drink her blood. It’s killing her and my unborn brother. Why?”
“Fate did not have to turn this way, my precious. If you had stayed with me I would have prepared you for this moment. The Green Man would have learned my ways instead of the insipid cloth of the false god. Yet all is coming to pass as it should. Now rise, my lovely hart, and run. Let your crown come forth in your virgin’s blood upon the thirsty ground. RUN!”
He shoved me away, and obediently I ran. Not knowing where I was going, unable to maintain my footing for long. Shreds of my once fine gown tangled in bushes and tree branches and roots, much like the horns of a wounded deer. I fell so often, twisted about as I rose, unable to keep my bearings. It became impossible to tell if I was heading for the road or deeper into the Black Forest. But I could hear him, perceive this horrible creature and his hissing laughter pursuing me through the darkness.
Pieter ran behind me, chasing me down just as Old Teufel wanted. And heaven help us both, he caught me. We went down in a tangle of limbs, his body overpowering mine. Every muscle on him gleamed emerald in the moonlight, his tall rangy frame pinning mine to the earth, my bound hands forced high above my head. His hands, those gentle pious fingers used to soothe the tears of widows and children alike, tore at the tatters of my gown until I was as nude as he.
He pushed my thighs apart, the hard length of him pressing into my center until, with one solid thrust he broke my maidenhood. I screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed. And he cried, his tears watering my face as his body pumped into mine. His mind fully aware of what he could not control, of what his body was doing to mine, of the newly sworn vows he was breaking. Until his back stiffened and a new kind of cry broke the night, one of pleasure instead of pain.
It took me a moment to realize the cry had come from me, that somewhere along the way, my screams had changed their flavor from pain to ecstasy. Just as somehow I knew my stepmother cried out as well, the blood trickling from between my thighs gushed from hers. She was losing the baby, the waves of pleasure I felt mirrored in her with agony. Each pump of my heart was another lost to hers and my unborn brother. And still coherent thought eluded me, clouded through the herbs forced down my throat and Pieter’s, to try and stop this all from happening.
