by Ransom Riggs
The prince ran to a window and tried to force it open, leaving the princess to face the assassins by herself. As they came toward her with their bloody daggers drawn, she felt a strange pressure building behind her tongue.
One after another they lunged at her. One after another, the princess launched streams of venomous poison into their faces, and all but one fell writhing to the ground and died. The fifth assassin fled from the room, terrified, and escaped.
The princess was as surprised as anyone. It was something she’d never known she could do; then again, she had never been threatened with death before. The prince, who was already halfway out the window, pulled himself back into the room and regarded both the dead assassins and the princess with amazement.
“Now will you marry me?” the princess said.
“Absolutely not,” he replied, “but as a token of my gratitude, I won’t tell your father why.”
He grabbed a discarded dagger and rushed from assassin to assassin, stabbing their dead bodies.
“What are you doing?” said the bewildered princess.
The king emerged from his wardrobe. “Are they dead?” he said, his voice trembling.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said the prince, holding up the dagger. “I killed them all!”
The princess was shocked by his lie, but held her tongue.
“Magnificent!” cried the king. “You’re the hero of Frankenbourg, my boy—and on your wedding day, no less!”
“Ah—about that,” the prince said. “Regretfully, there will be no wedding.”
“What!” shouted the king. “Why not?”
“I’ve just received word that the princess and I are cousins,” said the prince. “Such a shame!”
And without so much as a backward glance, the prince slipped out of the room, gathered his entourage, and took off in his carriage.
“This is preposterous!” the king fumed. “That boy is no more my daughter’s cousin than I’m this chair’s uncle. I won’t allow my family to be treated this way!”
The king was so enraged that he threatened to go to war with Galatia. The princess knew she couldn’t allow this to happen, and so one evening she requested an audience with her father alone and revealed the secret she’d been hiding so long. He called off his war plans, but he was so angry with his daughter, and so humiliated, that he locked her in the dankest cell of his dungeon.
“Not only are you a liar and a beast,” he said, spitting through the bars of her cell, “you’re not marriageable!”
He said it as if that were the greatest sin of all.
“But, Father,” said the princess, “I’m still your daughter, aren’t I?”
“Not anymore,” the king replied, and turned his back on her.
The princess knew she could use her acidic venom to burn through the lock of her cell door and escape, but instead she waited, hoping her father might come to his senses and forgive her.5 For months she subsisted on gruel and shivered through the nights on a stone slab, but her father did not come. The princess’s only visitor was her handmaiden.
One day, the handmaiden arrived with news.
“Has my father forgiven me?” the princess asked eagerly.
“I’m afraid not,” the handmaiden replied. “He’s told the kingdom you’re dead. Your funeral is tomorrow.”
The princess was heartbroken. She broke out of the dungeon that very night, escaped the palace, and with her handmaiden she left the kingdom and her old life behind. They traveled incognito for months, wandering the land, taking domestic work where they could find it. The princess smeared her face with dirt so she would not be recognized and never opened her mouth to anyone but the handmaiden, who told people that the dirty-faced girl she traveled with was mute.
Then one day they heard a story about a prince in the faraway kingdom of Thrace whose body sometimes assumed a form so peculiar that it had become a national scandal.
“Could it possibly be true?” said the princess. “Could he be like me?”
“I say it’s worth finding out,” the handmaiden replied.
So they set out on a long journey. It took two weeks to cross the Pitiless Waste on horseback, and two weeks more to cross the Great Cataract by ship. When they finally arrived in the kingdom of Thrace they were sunburned, windburned, and nearly broke.
“I couldn’t possibly meet the prince looking like this!” the princess said, so they spent the last of the money they’d earned and went to a bathhouse, where they were washed and perfumed and anointed with oils. When they emerged, the princess looked so beautiful that she turned the heads of everyone who saw her, male or female.
“I’ll show my father I’m marriageable!” the princess said. “Let’s go meet this peculiar prince.”
So they went to the palace and asked for him, but the answer they got was disappointing indeed.
“I’m sorry,” a palace guard told them, “but the prince is dead.”
“What happened?” asked the handmaiden.
“He fell ill with a mysterious disease and died in the night,” said the guard. “It was all very sudden.”
“That’s exactly what the king said happened to you,” the handmaiden whispered to the princess.
That night they snuck into the palace dungeon, and in the darkest, dankest cell, they found a giant garden slug with the head of a rather handsome young man.
“Are you the prince?” the handmaiden asked him.
“I am,” the repulsive thing answered. “When I’m feeling dejected, my body turns into a gelatinous, quivering mass. My mother finally found out and locked me down here, and now, as you can see, I’ve become a slug almost head to toe.” The prince wriggled toward the bars of his cell, his body leaving a dark stain on the floor behind him. “I’m sure she’ll come to her senses any day now, though, and let me out.”
The princess and the handmaiden exchanged an awkward glance.
“Well, I have good news and bad news,” said the handmaiden. “The bad news is your mother’s told everyone you’re dead.”
The prince began to wail and moan, and immediately a pair of gelatinous antennae began to grow from his forehead. Now even his head was turning slug.
“Wait!” the handmaiden said. “There’s still the good news!”
“Oh yes, I forgot,” the prince sniffled, and the antennae stopped growing. “What is it?”
“This is the princess of Frankenbourg,” said the handmaiden.
The princess stepped forward into a pool of light, and for the first time the prince saw her fantastic beauty.
“You’re a princess?” the prince stuttered, his eyes going wide.
“That’s right,” said the handmaiden. “And she’s here to rescue you.”
The prince was thrilled. “I don’t believe it!” he said. “How?”
His antennae were shrinking back into his head and the tubelike mass of his upper body was already beginning to separate into arms and a torso. Just like that, he was turning human again.
“Like this!” said the princess, and she spat a stream of venomous acid into the lock of the prince’s cell door. It began to hiss and smoke as the lock melted.
The prince recoiled in alarm. “What are you?” he said.
“I’m peculiar, like you!” the princess replied. “When my father found out my secret, he disowned me and locked me up, too. I know just how you’re feeling!”
As she spoke, her forked tongue flicked from her mouth.
“And your tongue,” the prince said. “That’s part of what’s . . . wrong with you?”
“And this,” the princess said, and she slipped an arm from her dress and showed him the scales across her back.
“I see,” said the prince, his voice sorrowful again. “I should’ve known this was too good to be true.”
As a tear rolled down his ch
eek, his arms began to disappear, joining again with his torso in a wobbly mass of slug flesh.
“Why are you sad?” the princess said. “We’re a perfect match! Together we could show our parents that we’re not unmarriageable, and we’re not trash. We can unite our kingdoms, and one day, perhaps, take our rightful place on the throne!”
“You must be mad!” the prince shouted. “How could I ever love you? You’re a disgusting freak!”
The princess was speechless. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“Oh, this is so humiliating!” the slug prince bawled, and then antennae sprung from his forehead, his face disappeared, and he became a slug from head to toe, quivering and moaning as he struggled to cry without a mouth.
The princess and the handmaiden turned away, stomachs heaving, and left the ungrateful prince to rot in his dungeon.
“I believe I’m done with princes forever,” the princess said, “peculiar or otherwise.”
They crossed the Great Cataract and the Pitiless Waste once again, and returned to Frankenbourg to find it at war with both Galatia and Frisia, which had united against it. The king had been overthrown and jailed, and the Frisians had installed a duke to govern Frankenbourg. The duke was a bachelor, and once his rule had been established and the country pacified, he began searching for a bride. The duke’s emissary discovered the princess working in an inn.
“You there!” he shouted, calling her away from a table she was cleaning. “The duke is looking for a bride.”
“Good luck to him,” she replied. “I’m not interested.”
“Your opinion doesn’t matter,” the emissary replied. “Come with me at once.”
“But I’m not royal!” she lied.
“That doesn’t matter, either. The duke merely wants to find the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, and that may well be you.”
The princess was beginning to regard her beauty as something of a curse.
She was given a nice dress to wear and brought before the duke. When she saw his face, a cold chill spread through her. This Frisian duke had been one of the assassins who had come to kill her; he was the lone assassin who had fled.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” the duke said. “You look familiar.”
The princess was tired of hiding and tired of lying, so she told the truth. “You tried to kill me once, and my father. I was once the princess of Frankenbourg.”
“I thought you were dead!” said the duke.
“No,” she replied, “that was a lie my father made up.”
“Then I’m not the only one who tried to kill you,” he said, and smiled.
“I suppose not.”
“I like your honesty,” said the duke, “as well as your fortitude. You’re made of strong stuff, and we Frisians admire that. I can’t make you my wife because you might murder me in my sleep, but if you’ll accept the position, I’d like to appoint you as my adviser. Your unique perspective would be valuable indeed.”
The princess happily accepted. She moved back into the palace with her handmaiden, took a position of prominence in the duke’s government, and never again covered her mouth when she spoke, as she no longer had to hide who she was.
After some time had passed, she paid her father a visit in the dungeons. He was wearing grimy sackcloth and not looking very kingly at all.
“Get out of here,” he growled at her. “You’re a traitor and I have nothing to say to you.”
“Well, I have something to say to you,” the princess replied. “Though I’m still angry at you, I want you to know you are forgiven. I understand now that what you did to me wasn’t the action of an evil man, but a common one.”
“Fine, thank you for the wonderful speech,” said the king. “Now go away.”
“As you wish,” said the princess. She started to go, then stopped at the doorway. “By the way, they’re planning to hang you in the morning.”
At this news the king curled into a ball and began to snivel and cry. It was such a pathetic sight that the princess was moved to pity. Despite all her father had done, she felt her bitterness toward him melting away. She used her venom to melt the lock from his cell, secreted him out of the jailhouse, disguised him as a beggar, and sent him running in the same direction she had once fled the kingdom. He did not thank her, nor even look back at her. And then he was gone, and she was gripped by a sudden, wild happiness—for her act of kindness had freed them both.
The First Ymbryne
Editor’s note:
While we can be certain that many of the Tales’ characters really lived and walked the earth, it can be difficult to confirm much of their factualness beyond that. In the centuries before our stories were written down, they were disseminated as oral tradition, and thus highly subject to change, each teller embellishing the tales as she saw fit. The result is that today they are more legend than history, and their value—beyond simply being compelling stories—is primarily as moral lessons. The story of Britain’s first ymbryne, however, is a notable exception. It is one of the few tales whose historical authenticity can be thoroughly accounted for, the events it describes having been verified not only by many contemporaneous sources, but by the ymbryne herself (in her famous book of encyclical addresses, A Gathering of Tail Feathers). That is why I consider it the most significant of the Tales, it being equally a moral parable, a ripping good yarn, and an important chronicle of peculiar history.
—MN
The first ymbryne wasn’t a woman who could turn herself into a bird, but a bird who could turn herself into a woman. She was born into a family of goshawks, fierce hunters who didn’t appreciate their sister’s habit of becoming a fleshy, earthbound creature at unpredictable times, her sudden changes in size toppling them out of their nest, and her odd, babbling speech spoiling their hunts. Her father gave her the name Ymeene, which in the shrill language of goshawks meant “strange one,” and she felt the lonely burden of that strangeness from the time she was old enough to hold up her head.
Goshawks are territorial and proud, and love nothing more than a good, bloody fight. Ymeene was no different, and when a turf war erupted between their family and a band of harriers, she fought bravely, determined to prove she was every bit the goshawk her brothers were. They were outnumbered by the larger, stronger birds, but even when his children began to die in the skirmishes, Ymeene’s father would not admit defeat. In the end they repelled the harriers, but Ymeene was wounded and all her siblings but one were killed. Wondering what it had all been for, she asked her father why they had not simply run away and found another nest to live in.
“We had to defend the honor of our family,” he told her.
“But now our family is gone,” Ymeene replied. “Where’s the honor in that?”
“I don’t suppose a creature like you would understand,” he said, and straightening his feathers he leaped into the air and flew away to go hunting.
Ymeene did not join him. She had lost her taste for the hunt, and for blood and fighting, too, which for a goshawk was even stranger than turning into a human now and then. Perhaps she was never meant to be a hawk, she thought, as she winged down to the forest floor and landed on human legs. Perhaps she was born in the wrong body.
Ymeene wandered for a long time. She lingered around human settlements, studying them from the safety of treetops. Because she had stopped hunting, it was hunger that gave her the nerve to finally walk into a village and sneak bites of their food—roasted corn put out for chickens, pies left to cool on windowsills, unwatched pots of soup—and she found she had a taste for it. She learned some human language so that she could talk to them, and discovered that she enjoyed their company even more than their food. She liked the way they laughed and sang and showed one another love. So she chose a village at random and went to live there.
A kindly old man let her stay in his barn, and his wife taught Ymeen
e to sew so she would have a trade. Everything was going swimmingly until, a few days after she’d arrived, the village baker saw her turn into a bird. She hadn’t yet grown accustomed to sleeping in human form, so every night she changed into a goshawk, flew up into the trees, and fell asleep with her head tucked under her wing. The shocked villagers accused her of witchcraft and chased her away with torches.
Disappointed but undeterred, Ymeene went wandering again and found another village in which to settle. This time she was careful not to let anyone see her change into a bird, but the villagers seemed to distrust her regardless. To most people Ymeene had a strange way about her—she had been raised by hawks, after all—and it wasn’t long before she was chased from this new village, too. She grew sad, and wondered if there was any place in the world she truly belonged.
One morning, on the verge of despair, she lay watching the sun rise in a forest glade. It was a spectacle of such transcendent beauty that it made her forget her troubles for a moment, and when it was over, she wished desperately to see it once more. In an instant the sky went dark and the dawn broke all over again, and she suddenly realized she had a talent other than her ability to change form: she could make small moments repeat themselves. She amused herself with this trick for days, repeating the leap of a graceful deer or a fleeting slant of afternoon sun just so she could better appreciate their beauty, and it cheered her up immensely. She was repeating the first fall of virgin snow when a voice startled her.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but are you making that happen?”
She spun around to see a young man wearing a short green tunic and shoes made from fish skin. It was an odd outfit, but stranger still was that he carried his head under the crook of his arm, disconnected entirely from his neck.
“Excuse me,” she replied, “but what’s happened to your head?”
“Frightfully sorry!” he said, reacting as if he’d just realized his pants were unbuttoned, and, with great embarrassment, he popped his head back onto his neck. “How rude of me.”
