Fairy Tales For Sale

by Rosamunde Lee

  “I can’t believe you!” she howled and hit him.

  “What? I’m a guy,” he said, unapologetically.

  “But you’re a fairy. . . I thought you didn’t like human girls.” Ariadne blinked at him confused. Then he kissed her.

  “I loved you from the moment I saw you,” he whispered. Suddenly, his glitter disappeared and he was just Steve again in great clothes. “Well, my job here is done. You’ve found your true love, and I can quit being a fairy-godfather. I’m not going to miss the heels or the tights.”

  “Wait. What? Why didn’t you just tell me how you felt years ago?” she cried.

  “Couldn’t,” he said, picking her up and walking off with her. “I was your fairy-godfather. It would be a breach of confidence. While I wore the uniform, I had to do my job and act my part. If the powers-that-be knew how many of us were really here just trying to find love, they would shut down the pilot program like that. There are severe penalties for guys who use their position to get a Princess. And I couldn’t quit because then I wouldn’t be allowed to see you anymore. Fairy rules are very specific. Still, I wasn’t going to let you marry some stupid prince either. There is nothing in the rule books about thwarting a meeting with a stupid prince. I was just waiting for you to fall in love with me too.”

  “Thanks for the no help,” she told him. As he carried her toward her window, she asked, “Where are you taking me?”

  “To fairy land. We aren’t staying in this earth dump.”

  “I can go? I thought no mortal could go.”

  “Well, just like telling me you hated me changed things and banished me from your presence...and I can’t believe you said that to me after all I’ve done for you...” he said, frowning handsomely until she kissed him. “Well. . . telling me you love me changes things too. Now we can live happily ever after.”

  “Sure took long enough,” Ariadne said, watching him step on to a rainbow that led out of her window. “Was that always there?”

  Steve laughed. “How else could I you watch you getting undressed every day?”

  “Boy, if I had only known that a while ago, it would have made me feel a lot less guilty about those dreams I kept having about you.”

  Steve and Ariadne had a triple wedding with his two brothers and their princesses. A week later, the fairy-godfather pilot program was shut down for good.

  The Hideous Hero

  A terribly scarred Prince learns the true meaning of Heroism.

  “It was just starting to get better,” Duncan said to the fairy godmother, “and then you had to show up.”

  He stared with hatred at the mound of wrinkles swathed in glitter and sparkles that had taken his Rose away. The Fairy sat at his kitchen table, her back to him, eating like a pig. She shoveled mouthful after mouthful of a pink confection she had magicked into her maw, oblivious to what she had done. Rose would be at the ball soon dancing with his younger brother, the handsome prince. They would fall in love and marry, leaving him with nothing but the burning ash of his life.

  Duncan’s breath came hot out of his mouth with more than the flame of the dragon’s curse. All he had to do was reach out and grab the old woman, just touch her with his smoldering hands, and she would be dead. He would get his Rose back then. Whatever enchantment she had cast would fade with her death and Rose would have to come back to him. Duncan got up and took a step toward the sparkling fairy. As he moved, he looked around his dark, small room, at the little life he lived behind his smithy. The fairy godmother’s brightness made everything look even darker. Only magic could make everything in your life ugly.

  He had suffered so much because of magic, since his encounter with the dragon five years ago. With its dying breath it had cursed him to burn his whole life. Even now, as he moved toward the fairy, he could see it, writhing and white, cut in half, spitting blood and cursing him. Its words took on fiery form all around him.

  “Heartless man, what have I done to you? Neither your jewels nor your gold have I taken. Your city I have left in peace, and yet you come here to kill me. There is no living with men. Everything they touch they destroy. If you had come to me gently, I might have given you a wish, or a talisman to ward off evil, but since you came to destroy, I will give you what you came for. Everything that you touch you will ruin. Your whole being will be a flame that destroys. You will never know comfort. You will forever yearn like fire for the life you cannot have.”

  And then she breathed on him, and her breath had smelled so sweet like roses. Duncan had never known such pain before and hoped never to know it again. His skin broke from within with fire. It smoked and blackened like lava. He ran screaming from the cave. Maddened with pain, he crawled toward his home for many days, for even if his horse had not bolted in terror at the sight of him it could not have borne him. He had dragged himself onward, dreaming of succor, of healing, but his family took one look at him and disowned him.

  It was his father, the king, who had sent him out to win his manhood, to win fame, a name, and the hand of a princess by killing that beast. And when Duncan returned burned and burning, they did not know him. His mother screamed at his hideousness. The guards who had tried to turn him away burst into flames. Duncan had only wanted to go home, but his life did not want him back.

  As a prince, he begged for the first time in his life for pity, for help. His parents had the palace guards drive him away with water that seared him like fire. Screaming, he fled, torching the family fields as he went. Later his parents erected a handsome bronze statue of him in the town square to commemorate his death. Duncan melted it to slag three times, until his parents made his monument out of stone to thwart him, but that was not the end of his revenge. He burned their gardens just by walking through them, just for spite. He burned his father’s favorite forest to the ground. He burned everything they loved because even when the pain in his skin ebbed, the one in his heart never did.

  Soon there was a hefty bounty on his head. He was hunted, but they could not kill him. He fled his tormentors, destroying everything in his path. He laid waste to so much property, the assassins were ordered to stop chasing him and leave him alone. Duncan was shunned and ignored. He soon realized that revenge had not gotten him what he wanted and that nothing would. He could never return home. He wandered off with his heart, mind and spirit broken. He ended up scavenging on the outskirts of a small town for food. In his sadness, he became a target for abuse.

  One day when he was being tormented by the village children with buckets of water, an old, half-blind blacksmith, seeing his odd talent, rescued him.

  “With you I won’t be needing to pay for the kindling,” the old man laughed, his leathery skin accustomed to feeling heat like that radiating from Duncan’s emaciated body.

  Grayl brought Duncan home and made him his apprentice. He fed him good bits of raw meat that cooked nicely on his tongue. He gave Duncan clothes and gloves out of fire cloth, a fabric made by wizards and used by smiths for their aprons. Duncan’s skill with metal soon gained him great fame. Metal did things for him it would not do for other men. Duncan had no use for hammer or anvil. He used his hands. He bent hard metal into delicate roses, into the finest filigree and filaments. He made beautiful things out the ugliness of his life. And for a time he felt satisfaction. And when the old smith died, Duncan inherited his business.

  The old man’s last words were, “You know we should hire a maid. This place is a mess.”

  Duncan’s pockets began to overflow with money then. But because fate is a bitter thing, he discovered he had no use for the comforts money could buy. What do monsters need with pillows? Every lovely thing he made he sold. His pile of gold grew and got dustier year after year. He lived with bare clay walls. He owned only what the old man had left him. A wretched stone table to take his meals on and an oven to sleep in.

  Then one day, one of Duncan’s rich clients raised a brow at the dust caking the place and leaving a smudge on his sleeve cuff a
s he paid, and Duncan remembered the old man’s last words. The next week Rose came like a cool wind into his hellish life. Her parents had died years before in a plague. She had left her home with her thirty-year-old horse, Fallada, to find work after a drought had destroyed her village.

  It took Duncan nearly a year to find out her story. He just had not asked. She was very pretty, beautiful even, with long dark hair and bright dark eyes and little cherry-red lips that smiled easily. And she was intelligent. He kept expecting her to leave one day, to get married and go. His male clients all made eyes at her, all tried to talk to her, but she was so reserved, so sincere and quiet. They all fell madly in love with her, but she never seemed to notice.

  The farther she drove the others from her, the closer Duncan came to her, not physically of course, but soon his heart was burning for her. The flames that were barely encased by his skin no longer smoldered with hate, bitterness, and resentment but with love. He spent his money to build her her own room and furnish it with the best things, to buy her dresses and jewelry when she let him. She was very frugal and sweet and made him give his money away to the poor and those she said who were less fortunate than he. He did as she told him even though he did not agree that there was anyone more unfortunate, until he heard her story.

  One winter’s night after she had finished cleaning up and was sitting by him to keep warm, she laughed a little to herself. Since Duncan was not used to anyone laughing in his presence, he asked her what she found amusing.

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting here,” she said wide-eyed. “It’s a year to the day I found this place.”

  Duncan looked around at the bare bones of his abode and thought that there was nothing to be thankful about. His mind had just gone back to his palace days when she continued.

  “It’s a year since he died. I had to leave him there,” she said sadly, her dark eyes suddenly distant and disturbed. “I just put Fallada’s head down on the dirt. He deserved better than that after thirty years of service, better than to be left on the side the road for crows and wolves, but what could I do?” she asked. Duncan felt the sun dying with her lost smile. “I just stood there looking up and down that white, dusty road, from horizon to horizon and saw nothing, no one to help me. Then I looked down again at what remained of my old faithful horse.

  “I had such dreams when I left home, of green pastures for him, a place in the sun to warm his old bones and maybe even a little stall when it rained. I would have worked night and day to get him that, but it was too late.” Rose wiped her eyes, and Duncan stared at her, for the first time realizing that he was not the only one in this world who knew about pain. “I couldn’t even bury him. I knelt down to pat his thin neck to feel the softness of his hair one last time. I told him I was sorry.

  “I should never have left home. It was too much to ask of him. He hadn’t even been ridden for ten years. I thought then that if we were going to die we should have died at home, where my parents had been buried. But I just thought that there had to be someplace, somewhere in the world where there was food enough to eat for one girl and one old, tired horse, but there wasn’t. So, I just left him there and started walking down the road.

  “A part of me said I should stay with Falada, lie down next to him and give up, but then he would have died for nothing. He had carried me so patiently for days down roads neither us had known, past empty villages choked with dust, with only a blighted mouth of grass here and there to keep him going. When he began to stumble, we had walked side by side, my hand on his neck, his bony cheek against my hip. And when he fell, he had pushed me with his nose to tell me to keep going. He gave his life to see me so far. I thought I had no right to stop then. I was alone for so long except for the dry wind, and the sound it made as it killed everything in its path.”

  Duncan remembered that kind of aloneness. When he had left the dragon’s lair alive but mad with pain, stumbling down the barren slopes with nothing in sight but the vision of his home in his head and the comfort and help he would get there. That dream was the only thing that kept him going, but it turned out to be empty.

  “I walked the sun down, walked the sun up,” Rose told him, “until my limbs hung from their sockets, until I couldn’t feel my legs. My eyes were nearly caked shut, my skin was covered with white dust, but I kept moving. I followed the road into your village. I remember how the people looked at me, avoided me as if I were a ghost. They cleared the street; nobody would even help me. I just stumbled along calling for Falada.

  “I swear I saw him trotting in front of me all the way, his black mane flowing, his flanks glowing like water. I followed him and tripped against a trough and fell inside. I almost drowned. I felt the bottom and pushed myself up. Then I dove into the water again and drank and drank until I thought I was going to burst.

  “Fallada saved me that day. And when I got up I saw all the men and woman and children staring at me. Some of the children were laughing and pointing. The adults only frowned and shook their heads. I wiped my mouth, pulled back my hair and walked away from the horse trough with as much dignity as I could muster. The people looked at me as if hunger and thirst were a disease or crime. I slunk away down an alley to get away from them.”

  That was the way of people. When Duncan had been a prince they bowed and scraped, but when he needed them, they scattered. He could not believe that Rose had ever suffered in such a way. She had always seemed so happy, so gentle. She was never cruel or angry with anyone even those who deserved it.

  “When I was alone I looked down at my tattered and drenched clothes, at my dirty hands,” she said quietly. “I guess I looked like a beggar. My parents were decent folk,” she said, meeting his gaze earnestly. “My father was a scholar, and my mother was a mid-wife. They were respected. They helped everyone they could. And when they died I was so alone, and the world got terrible. I was so hungry that day, so I begged.” Rose looked down at her feet. “I began knocking on doors, looking through garbage, anything, anything to put in my mouth. People cursed and chased me.”

  Duncan lowered his head then and remembered how it had felt to need something that no one would give you. He wanted to touch her hand to share with her, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the words or the voice then to tell her he knew how she felt. So, Rose went on alone.

  “I knocked at another door and the woman yelled at me to go to work. “Where is there work?” I asked her. “I’ll do work, any work.

  “But she just slammed the door. I turned away in time to watch a cat slink into a house for a welcoming bowl of milk and the sight nearly killed me. I sunk down on my knees in despair, and then I heard a door open near me.

  “The blacksmith wants for a maid,” a toothless old woman told me. “It is hard work, in the soot, in the black, and ye have such white hands.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll do anything.”

  “Anything?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, then you’ll do for him. Leave this alley and go down the street a ways and you’ll find him. You can’t miss him. Like Vulcan he is, like the Devil for burning. Remember not to scream, or there’ll be no work for you there,” she laughed and slammed her door shut.

  “I ran all the way, until I saw black smoke coming from a building. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I remember there were two well-dressed men there. I felt so ashamed of my appearance, but hunger made me speak up. I told them I was there for the job.

  “Try not to run us down when you leave,” one of them had said, laughing at me. I didn’t know what they meant, and I didn’t care. I just thought they were making fun of me like everyone else.”

  Rose fell silent then and Duncan couldn’t help but remember the day she had come into his life. She had been a mess, filthy with road dirt and skinny as a new bean, her hair dripping like that of a wet dog. But he still saw how beautiful she was, like a doe who had been through a bad winter. People were so blind sometimes.

 
“You said, ‘I’m a good worker and a good cook,’” he murmured.

  Rose’s eyes brightened with humor. “I didn’t even know if what I was saying was true. I had only cooked and cleaned for my parents,” she laughed.

  Duncan laughed too because she was not such a good cook and her skills at cleaning were moderate at best, but even if he had known this back then he still would have hired her.

  “Then you started to say, ‘I’m not afraid of hard work,’ but I turned around from my forge,” Duncan said, remembering out loud. “I thought you were going to run like everyone else, but you didn’t.” Then he turned to her, knowing his eyes must be burning as hotly as his skin. “Why didn’t you?”

  He looked into her gentle gaze. He asked the question even though he knew it was a very dangerous one to have answered, but they were at stage in their relationship where he had to know the reason behind it.

  “I was afraid. I had never seen anyone like. . .” Rose hesitated.

  “As terrible as me before.”

  “Not terrible... as hurt as you,” she said, her hands moving in her lap as if she wanted to comfort him but could not. “You looked like a candle that had been brought too close to the fire. Everything I was going to say tied itself into a knot in my throat. I felt like crying. Then you moved close to me, and I saw your eyes. They were kind like Falada’s, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. I felt like I had come home. Then you asked me, ‘What aren’t you afraid of?’ Remember?”

  Duncan nodded and smiled because she had tried to imitate his gruff growl with her sweet voice. He could not speak because for the first time in years he did not think of himself as a monster. She had seen his pain. Someone had seen his pain and understood it.

  “And I said,” she went on, a little triumph in the tilt of her head, “‘I am not afraid of hard work.’ and you gave me the job! I couldn’t believe it! You were my hero. You saved my life. You fed me, and gave me a place to sleep, a way to live. And here I am. I’m so happy. Thank you. Thank you so much.”