“Alright then, Ana. Show me what you can do. Make me proud.” He pushes out his chest. “Go on, I’ll give you the first shot for free.”
Even before his words are out, Liyana is reaching into the air, seeming to beseech the sky. Huge clouds gather above our heads, emptying cascades of rain so suddenly that tremendous pools of water flood the glade. Cupping her hands, Liyana scoops up the lakes, channelling them into a great wall of water. She pulls back her arms, fists clenched, then pushes forward as if to punch the wall—the water rushes, building into a tsunami that crashes over our father, dragging him under, holding him down, filling his lungs so he’s choking. I watch him, pinned to the ground under a flood, drowning.
At last, Liyana drops her hands and the water subsides, sinking into the soil. Our father lies across moss and stone, open eyes staring up at nothing. We stare at his body, watching for movement, but there’s none.
Then a cough.
Wilhelm Grimm sneezes and stands, brushing raindrops from his cuffs as if he’d just stepped out of a light drizzle. I look on, hope extinguished. What’s the point in fighting? He is invulnerable, invincible. I glance at my sisters and see that they are thinking the same. I’m sorry, Teddy. A heavy rain starts to fall. I drop to my knees, hands over my eyes, when I hear her.
Bea’s voice tumbles through the rain.
Even the strongest sister cannot defeat him alone. You must do it together.
I steady myself, listening.
Channel the leaves, the spirits of all your sisters, your mothers, your aunts. Conduct the power of all the women he’s ever killed. Together you have the strength—
“Stop!” My father’s command ricochets through the glade, obliterating every other sound. He glares at me, golden eyes flashing and furious again.
I feel my sisters look to me, questioning. They heard her too. But we don’t know how. For a moment, I’m paralysed. Then I think: Together. Each of our powers brought together as one. I recall the first time I saw Leo, the first time I spoke to him in my mind. Now I do the same with my sisters.
Watch me, you’ll know what to do.
I take one quick, deep breath to ready myself. I draw on my dreams. I focus every synapse, every cell. I feel strength, power, coursing through my body once more. I look up to the falling leaves. I twitch my fingers, I tug at them. I whisper, I call. An invitation, a request, a direction. Follow me.
Rise.
Stronger, louder.
Rise, my sisters. Rise!
One by one, the falling leaves of Everwhere still, suspended in the air. Then they begin pulling together until they are circling, in flurries and funnels, siphoned by the quickening rain, every falling drop drawing together tornadoes of leaves, until an aerial tower forms, a whirlpool of bright white.
My father, shocked into stillness, stares up. Within the roar of water I hear a single scream, the pitched scream of a woman in the throes of birth and death, a piercing, primitive, primal scream. Then it’s a battle cry, a clarion call. A hundred thousand cracks of thunder, a hundred thousand sisters howling for destruction, annihilation, obliteration . . .
The roar penetrates everything, everyone. It fills me so that I shake with the sound of my sisters and their mothers, my chest a cathedral of screams. And I see that my father is shaking too, shuddering from deep within, as if he’s being torn apart, unstitched at the seams.
I turn to Liyana. She is drenched, rivers running from her fingers as she conducts the rain. I see that she is screaming too, though I cannot hear her.
Now.
Liyana springs forward, fuelled by the roar, funnelling the great torrent of water and leaves towards our father. The force is like a sword plunged into a stone. Liyana drags the liquid blade down, splitting the seams, wrenching him open. I join the roar, the battle cry of our sisters, our mothers, all the women he’s killed, all the Sisters Grimm. I’m certain I hear Ma’s cry among them, and Bea’s too.
For a second everything is still, suspended, petrified. Liyana lifts her hands and the whirlpool of rain, the tornado of leaves, is twisting through the air, borne on the screams, funnelling down, driving a river of white blood into our father and cleaving him apart.
I turn to Scarlet.
Now!
Scarlet presses her hands together. Sparks ignite. Electricity catches. Flashes of lightning shoot from her fingertips, curling in huge arcs through the air. She sets him alight.
And we all watch him burn.
Legacy
Inheritance
We each feel the darkness at our fingertips. We feel the twitch. The flares. We’ve shared it, as all sisters should, so none of us has too much. But then none of us has a little either. It’s there. We don’t use it. Well, only on occasion, when necessary. Or when we can’t control it. But we are moderate. And nothing terrible happens. At least, it hasn’t yet.
Commemoration
After Leo died, I went to Everwhere every night for a year, though I never told my sisters. They were too afraid to go back, thinking they might meet our father’s spirit. I was afraid of that too, but I didn’t care. I’d brave anything, any depths of darkness, to feel close to Leo again.
I visit still.
Sometimes I’ll see a stray soldier skulking in the woods and think for a moment that it’s him. Then I’ll remember, and my spirits will fall before they’ve barely had a chance to lift. The remaining soldiers have disbanded, I believe, since I hardly see them anymore.
I go to the glade where he died, where the air is infused with his spirit and the soil with his soul, and sit on the trunk of the fallen oak tree. I hoist myself up by one of the long, thick tendrils of ivy that’s encroaching on every inert thing, every tree and shrub and stone. I sit; I close my eyes.
I think about spirits. I remember what Leo said about Aether and I wonder on the possibility of resurrection. I feel his breath on the wind, his touch in the falling leaves, his voice in the rush of the river. I imagine he sits beside me. I talk to him, I ask him to tell me secrets. And sometimes, when the rain falls hard, when the clouds part and the sliver of moon illuminates the silver birch trees, he will.
Communication
Where Bea’s soul has seeped into the soil, a single rose grows: blood red, velvet soft. A splash of colour on a white canvas. Her spirit, though, is in the air. She falls with the cascading leaves, floats on the mists, and drifts in with the rolling fog. She glides with the winds, flying through the forests, brushing the tips of birds’ wings. She soars above it all, among the stars, pure moonlight and air.
Bea watches her sisters. Sometimes she sends them messages: a blackbird feather dropped in Ana’s path, an image in Goldie’s dreams, a shadow at the edge of Scarlet’s eye line. Now that Bea has access to humanity in its every shade and hue, she marvels at the extraordinary capacity humans have for good and evil, for love and hate, the contradictory nature within them all. It’s a source of astonishment, even now.
She still misses Vali, still regrets that night, still thinks of him every day. She wonders where his spirit is and wishes he were here with her. Occasionally, Bea feels a twinge of jealousy that her sisters are together. Not that they are alive but that they have one another. Then Bea shifts from being the air beneath the birds’ wings, transforming into a raven herself to soar above Everwhere, black feathers glistening in the moonlight, swooping under the stars.
Solitary, strong, free.
Future
We visit Everwhere together. We find our remaining sisters under the first-quarter moon. We show them who they are and what they can do. We teach our young apprentices how powerful they can be. We show them that here they are bound by nothing, not even the laws of gravity, only the limits of their own imagination. We watch them ignite sticks and create waves and make tendrils of ivy dance.
We remind them, over and again, of their limitless potential, so they won’t forget. For, even though they’ll no longer have to fight the Devil when they turn eighteen, the potential danger of t
he stray soldiers remains, and there’ll be many battles in their lives that’ll require great strength.
We warn them of what’s to come in their teenage years, that they will be tethered to Earth, their ankles tied by ropes of doubt and fear. We tell them to write letters and take photographs (stored in fireproof boxes), and the night before their thirteenth birthdays, we offer to tattoo their wrists. Most get a symbol of their particular power: a flame, a drop of water, a feather, a leaf. Underneath we inscribe these words:
Validior es quam videris, fortior quam sentis, sapientior quam credis.
You are stronger than you seem, braver than you feel,
wiser than you believe.
We tell them to seek the other Grimms, their sisters scattered throughout the world. There’ll be no more born now, so we must find the family we have left. And they do. They spread the word. They talk of hidden magic, of whispers that speak of unknown things, of signs that point in unseen directions to unimagined possibilities.
I hope they’ll find you soon, so you won’t have to live any longer without realizing who you truly are.
Goldilocks
Once upon a time there was a little girl as good as she was pretty. She had big blue eyes, long golden hair, and a smile so lovely that it brought joy to everyone she met. The girl reared baby birds fallen from their nests, rescued worms that’d veered onto paths, enticed wilting flowers back into bloom. She gave food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and her most treasured possessions to the poor.
The girl was so good that she soon became famed throughout the lands. Parents, hoping to redeem their children, told bedtime stories of her deeds, and those lucky enough to meet her swore that she was so saintly her hair glowed golden as a halo.
The girl’s father was so proud of his daughter that he gave her the name Goldilocks. Every night he sat Goldilocks on his knee and asked her to tell him of all the good deeds she’d done that day.
“Today I sold my silver necklace,” she said, “and bought a cow for a farmer who’d just lost his to a sickness.”
“Very good,” her father would say. “You’re a blessing and example to us all.”
Every day Goldilocks alleviated suffering and brought joy. And every night, she fell asleep imagining all the things she might do tomorrow to make the world a little happier than it had been today. And when she saw the smiles on people’s faces, and the approval in her father’s eyes, she was content.
Yet, as she grew, Goldilocks noticed that she no longer always felt the desire to be good, nor always felt joy when she was. She found that people often asked for more than she wanted to give and, sometimes, she gave away not only her precious possessions but herself as well. Gradually, Goldilocks fell into a deep sadness. Still, she did her best to keep smiling and being kind, since she didn’t know what else to do or how else to be.
One day, her baby brother was born.
At first, Goldilocks loved and doted upon him as tenderly as she did every other living thing. But, despite her best efforts, she watched him grow into a boy as wickedly wild as he was handsome. Urso, named for the fact that he liked to roam the village roaring like a bear and scaring dairy maids into spilling their pails of milk, spent his days behaving brutishly.
Shocked as she was by her brother’s behaviour, what shocked Goldilocks most of all was that Urso didn’t mind when their father shouted or the villagers hurled stones and curses at him. He simply continued on in his wild ways regardless, laughing into the long shadows of their scorn.
Seeing how much fun her brother was having, free from coveting the good opinion of others, Goldilocks started secretly following his example. She stopped simply being good and started being a little bit bad. Sometimes she stole and sometimes she lied and sometimes she wasn’t very nice at all. On moonless nights Goldilocks wore Urso’s bearskin and they enacted shamanic rituals, evoking their ancestral spirits who emboldened her further still. Goldilocks chopped off her halo of golden curls and stopped rouging her lips and cast off her frilly dresses, so people no longer thought her pretty. She laughed too loudly and spoke too soon and no longer did what she didn’t want to do.
“You won’t be famed for your goodness anymore,” her father warned. “People won’t love you as they once did.”
Goldilocks discovered that this was true. Villagers who’d previously deified her now shunned her, whispering harsh words behind her back. Saddened by this, Goldilocks tried to return to her old ways, to always smile and be kind. But she found that she could not. Now that she was free she could not willingly step back into a cage.
So, instead of spending her days seeking loving smiles and approving looks, she sought other satisfactions. She dressed exotically and sang badly and danced wildly. She pleased herself in every way and, for the first time in her life, knew pure happiness and true joy.
One day, discovering she had a talent for growing things, Goldilocks began creating gardens so beautiful that visitors came from all around to see how she charmed reluctant shoots from the soil and coaxed the brightest flowers into bloom. Soon Goldilocks was travelling far and wide to every kingdom, sculpting public gardens into spectacles of unparalleled wonderment. Until, one day, Goldilocks was famed throughout the lands not for goodness but greatness.
And she learned that, while she still laughed too loudly and spoke too soon and did exactly as she wished, some people, most of all Urso, loved her no matter what. As for the rest, Goldie found that she no longer cared.
Acknowledgements
With great thanks to . . .
My peerless agent, Ed Wilson, for your insights and your growls. Your superlative feedback transformed this story into something spectacular. And to Ginger Clark for being such a tireless advocate of the book in America. David Pomerico for generously taking the book under his wing and being open to my ideas—even when they were silly—you’re a very good egg.
All at Harper Voyager who did The Sisters Grimm proud. Especially Mireya Chiriboga, for always having the answers. Owen Corrigan and Galen Dara, for creating such a striking cover. Gena Lanzi and Angela Craft, for the most excellent publicity and marketing skills respectively. Nancy Tan, for copyediting par excellence—thank you for catching all my mistakes.
Bridget Collins, for being the first to say yes and so beautifully—she says she wasn’t being kind, yet she was.
Abigail Larson for illustrating the characters exactly as I imagined them. I’ve long been a great admirer of your work and it’s a dream come true to have you illustrate mine.
Alex Buxton-Moore for imparting his tarot wisdom, and for all the life-changing readings.
Ash, keeper of the flame and writer of the most magical letters. Anita, for celebrating the ups and making me laugh during the downs. Al, always my first editor, for telling me that I needed to rewrite the final act when I didn’t want to. Laurence, for his brilliant feedback, especially on the script. Natasha, for being my first educator in fantasy fiction—thank you for the fairies and the magical worlds. Sarah, for the books and brilliant book-chat—Heffers is my favourite bookshop because of you and Richard. Virginie, for knowing how much it matters. Steve, for offering to teach me all those years ago in the coffee shop and for all the cake since. Alice, for being excited whenever I talked about this book and for being the best gift giver. Ova, for believing before she’d even read a single sentence.
Idilia, for being my soul sister and always echoing my enthusiasm. Jack, for his gelato, his generosity, and our movie nights. Dad, for telling us bedtime stories and giving me my earliest education in storytelling. Oscar, for inspiring me with his own beautiful writing and his enormous heart. Raffy, the reason I was writing fairy tales at four a.m., without whom this book would never have come into being. Fatima and Manuel, for being the loudest and most loving cheerleaders. Artur de sá Barreto, the most generous man I’ve ever met, who led me through the darkness and into the light. Vicky van Praag, for absolutely everything—despite being a writer, I have no words.
And for all the friends and readers who brighten the bookish and non-bookish parts of my life, I can’t fit you all on these pages but you’re in my heart.
About the Author
MENNA VAN PRAAG lives in Cambridge with her husband and two kids—the elder of whom loves to read every book he can get his hands on; the younger of whom loves to rip the final pages from every book she can get her hands on. Her family more or less tolerates the fact that Menna spends far too much of her time in fantasy worlds.
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Also by Menna van Praag
Men, Money, and Chocolate
The House at the End of Hope Street
The Dress Shop of Dreams
The Witches of Cambridge
The Lost Art of Letter Writing
The Patron Saint of Lost Souls
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the sisters grimm. Copyright © 2020 by Menna van Praag. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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