From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  It was important to remember that magic always came at a price, and in this case, it was a steep one. But the witch continued to chop and stir, because there would always be someone desperate enough to pay it.

  Arachne

  Magriet supposed that one always knew when one was a changeling, even if one didn’t really know it. One knew it when remarkable things happened, inexplicable things and terrible things, and also strange, lucky things.

  The world had a slightly otherworldly tint to it, if you should ever look it in the face. But she also knew that it was not at all the sort of thing one actually mentioned at home or in polite society, and so she didn’t breathe a word.

  If she tried really hard, Magriet could do things, like turn her embroidery thread to silver or make a grey day melt into sunlight like butter, or even, once when she was very young, spin a bit of undyed wool into fine gold.

  But that definitely wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about – not least because spinning was not a suitable occupation for a lady. She knew with a burning certainty that nothing good ever came of exhibiting such strange talents, and so she pretended that she did not see the world any differently than other young ladies of her acquaintance.

  Magriet sewed samplers, practiced the lute and infuriated her dance master with her terribly clumsy feet. Then she married a mad king, because it was a terrible idea to refuse mad kings, she knew. Especially this one, who had a taste for the executioner’s blade and a close connection to his cousin, the brutal count of Holland, and the council of regenten who ruled the republic. This king, in between boasting of his many achievements, played off his meagre courtiers one against another and showed not the least remorse over the resultant bloodshed.

  Magriet had never cared for the king, not even before she had found out his particular passion for vengeance and poison. He was to her like any of the other minor kings one met at court. He had little to say for himself, for one, and his golden beauty and good bones were of little appeal when all he cared for were hounds, hunts and the sound of his own voice. And heirs, of course: kings also cared about heirs. Probably as much as her mother, a minor margavine, cared for titles.

  “It is all well and good for you, my girl, to turn your nose up at such things, but our family is little better than the millers or the farmers on your father’s land and that will not do,” she would say, adjusting a rope of pearls around her neck and mourning a wealth lost many generations ago in an unlucky game of hazard.

  Margiet had often wondered if it would have been better to be a miller’s daughter. Certainly, there was a freedom in not having to care about fortunes or titles. But then she would think of cold winters at the mill and of her own home, where there was always hot stew and a blazing fire to warm the bones.

  And to marry a king, no matter his fondness for hunts and hounds, no matter even his madness, would mean that she should be warm and fed forever. She would command courtiers, and drape herself in beautiful gowns and bright jewels that rivalled the stars. She would have good wine and a dozen portraits rendered by the finest masters.

  While she did not much care for jewels, Magriet liked portraits. She liked to watch the paint take shape, capture time on canvas: the pretty and the frightful, side by side forever.

  Still, she would have been very happy to stay well clear of this particular king and his calculating eyes, but she had been pulled down into the undertow before she’d even stood a chance of making it to shore.

  The whole sorry mess began at the Comtesse de Vitry’s autumn ball, when Magriet’s mother, who had had far too many glasses of negus, announced to half the room that her daughter’s greatest achievement was no less than that she could spin straw into gold, such a clever and capable girl was she. Many notables, including no less celebrated a personage than the visiting Prince de Condé, had been struck silent at such a bold statement.

  It had been a very foolish thing to say. Especially given that Magriet had never been near a spinning wheel. Well, except for that one time her nursemaid had drifted off to sleep at her own wheel and Magriet had decided to have a go at spinning wool. Her nursemaid had been shocked at the evenly-spun gold thread, but she said not a word to anyone because she came from the villages and thought poorly of any such skills.

  That gold thread had been used to trim mama’s headdress, and had faded considerably over the years. Magriet had not touched the spinning wheel since and her nursemaid had long moved on to another appointment.

  Now, well out of the schoolroom, Magriet could, at best, embroider with the mediocre skill of every other young woman of good family. Though it took some focus to keep from accidentally changing her plain practice thread into more interesting things. She worked in wool and silk, making pretty samplers and, bits and pieces for her trousseau, under the supervision of a strict English seamstress who came twice a week to teach her stitchery.

  Magriet certainly did not dabble in any more weaving, and her mama could not possibly have known what had happened the one time that she had. Having exhausted the topic of her magical daughter, the margravine proceeded to describe the richness of a new gown she had ordered, with a volume and detail that was anything but in good taste.

  Papa had long since retreated into the card room and there would be no convincing him to do a thing about the margravine, Magriet knew from experience. She had no way of correcting her parent herself without appearing severely uncivil, and so she was forced to excuse herself to the refreshment table, hoping fervently that nothing more came of all that weaving nonsense.

  Grandmother, had she been alive to witness such a travesty of breeding in her braggart daughter-in-law, would have been thoroughly mortified at this newest faux pas levelled by the Margravine of Veere. She would have wasted no time quietly informing Magriet’s father that that was exactly what came of marrying the local merchant’s daughter, though her eyes were the prettiest in all the town.

  Mama’s father had started out as a miller before he made his fortune with the Dutch East India Company and survived the tulip disaster that had impoverished many of his fellows. Margriet’s grandmother, the dowager margravine, had been adamant that a merchant in the family would be even more embarrassing than a highwayman, but her protests had fallen on deaf ears.

  At the refreshment tables, which were located in a little side room, Magriet had breathed a sigh of relief, enjoying the raspberry tarts with her dearest friend Alida, and wondering vaguely where she might have left her pretty silk fan, which had been painted to look like the splendour of spring. She would have been very sorry to lose it, she’d thought idly, for it had come all the way from France.

  Possibly, her mother’s shocking exaggeration was Magriet’s fault a little, too. She had never been particularly good at any traditional accomplishments, after all. She spent too much time trying to hide the fact that she excelled at the strange ones. She was a passable horsewoman, an unremarkable harpist and a perfectly mundane painter, though she loved to admire the works of others.

  She played the lute quite well, and she wrote poetry and ditties when inspiration struck, but that would hardly win her a wealthy husband and a title of her own, and therefore, in the eyes of the margravine, it wasn’t of the least use.

  Yet she could not imagine what had possessed even her lady mother to exaggerate as she had done. Straw into gold, indeed! Who would ever credit such fanciful nonsense? Magriet thought faintly. The very notion…

  And yet her mother’s audience had been a captive one – the margravine had no equal when it came to spinning a tale. The king, Lodewjik Henri, who ruled a little inland territory on the border with Holland, had stood transfixed by it, no doubt picturing gilded tapestries and cloth-of-gold livery.

  His eyes had instantly fixed on Magriet, who had previously been nothing more than a blur of rustling silks and a flash of jewels: his contemplative gaze had followed her as she quit the room.

  Lodewjik was not a very important king, less so even in the eyes of the grim reg
enten, and he was often impulsive to the point of aggression, as by all accounts he had been during the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. But he was still a king and the cousin of kings, so that his mediocrity and madness had not mattered in the least to a mother whose daughter did not play the spinnet or even keep a decent seat on a horse.

  Yet spinning had been such a peculiar achievement to name – Magriet’s lessons had only ever been in music, penmanship, embroidery, dance and whatever of the sciences her tutors had managed to impart upon an absent-minded child prone to daydreams.

  It was the sort of absurdity one might see performed in a French Comedy at court. Had had it not been many years since her mama had ventured to the Hague to earn some much-needed preferment, Magriet would have wondered if that was where she’d got the absurd notion.

  The king seemed utterly besotted: if not with Magriet’s brown eyes, long nose and dark curls, then with a future filled with twinkling gold thread: a guaranteed turn-about of the sorry state into which his fortunes had fallen.

  When Magriet emerged from the refreshments room, he instantly commandeered her hand for the two last minuets, where Magriet had had the dubious honour of leading the line of dance.

  The king spoke to her of his grand home and his ancient lineage, his military triumphs, and her unparalleled beauty with such carefully worded diplomacy that she knew him to be a much better manipulator than he appeared. She did her best to be decorous but distant, though it made no difference for he did not heed a word she said.

  King Lodewjik made an offer for her the following day. He arrived at the Veer household promptly after midday and demanded an audience with the margrave, though the lady of the house appeared also, looking eager and flustered.

  “It pleases me that your daughter knows such art as you say,” he told the margravine. “It happens that there is much straw to be had at my castle. I shall take her for my queen and put her to the test myself.”

  It did not seem to occur to the king that he could be refused, and indeed he was not, though his aggressive air made the margrave uneasy. He had not heard the tale of the spinning and so had no notion what art it was that had so captivated the man, but he was informed of it by his triumphant wife once the king had taken his leave. Though he was duly horrified to learn of what had brought about all the nonsense about spinning, it was much too late to refuse.

  While Magriet had spent many years busily ignoring the strange world that hid just around the corner of what was real and proper, she had still learned some of its perplexing rules. These rules could be just as brutal as those of the respectable world behind which hid the true unforgiving nature of polite society. First and foremost, there was always a steep price to be paid for any sort of grand marital coup, whatever world you happened to live in, and hers was to be steeper than usual.

  The marriage contracts arrived just as the margravine buried herself in preparations for her only daughter’s wedding banquet. She spent many happy hours picturing Magriet crowned queen. The margrave had been entirely too taken-aback by the proceedings to say much at all, until he was faced with the contracts.

  Before Magriet could become a rightful queen and be crowned in gold and ermine as tradition dictated, the king’s minister declared in sweeping writing, she would have to prove her worth. She would not be crowned until she had earned out twenty times her weight in gold thread, spun with her own pale hands.

  One month she would have in which to do so, from the day of her wedding. One month to spin a mound of straw into a gilded fortune, else the contract would be null and void, the margravine punished most severely for falsehood, and Magriet’s life forfeit.

  To sign was madness, but to reject the contract now that the mad King Lodewjik had made plain his marital intention was surely even worse.

  “It cannot be done,” Magriet insisted desperately as her mother critically inspected her finest gown, which had been ordered especially for the wedding. “It is impossible!”

  The margravine had engaged the finest dress-maker in town, but there had still been a great deal of fuss over the gown, a heavy green velvet like spring, sewn with pearls and embroidered in silver because Magriet had refused to have gold.

  “Nonsense, darling,” her mama dismissed. “Of course it is possible – I have seen you accomplish stranger things. But even so, do you really think the man to be so fanciful as that? You mark my words, once he has a lady about the house, a wife of his very own, he will forget all about his silly straw. I always thought you were meant for a spectacular match!”

  That wasn’t strictly true, of course: Magriet had been told many times that she would be lucky to land a baron, with her acerbic speech and frightful lack of skill on the harp. And certainly the margravine, who was good and Protestant, would not hear of a Catholic husband for Magriet, which had instantly dismissed half the court.

  “And what a fine, handsome husband the king will make,” the lady sighed, sinking into a chair, Magriet’s dress temporarily forgotten. “You will be the foundation of a royal line! You will be mother to princes.”

  The margrave, entirely at sixes and sevens over the whole thing and hating to be tricked into surrendering his only daughter to almost certain death, wished Magriet luck and fortune, and went hunting. He had studied at the university in Paris: he did not believe in magic, any more than he did in the quality of Magriet’s spinning.

  Alida came to visit Magriet a week before the wedding, wide-eyed and uncertain of how she ought to behave, and Magriet was so glad to see her that she was temporarily overwhelmed by tears that burned her eyes like coals. She forced herself to pretend she did not see the way Alida’s grey eyes filled with empathy and concern. Her friend left much too soon after that, and Magriet wished with all her heart that she could have gone with her.

  It seemed, she thought, that all her strange accomplishments and the glimpses of a world barely-seen were no use at all in saving her this time. Days fluttered out of her grasp like birds. The trousseau was prepared, and farewells were taken, and then she was on her way to her new home and her new husband.

  Alone in the carriage, dressed in her ridiculous gown, Magriet once more contemplated escape. They passed fairs and markets, villages and mansions, all filled with music and the ringing voices of her future subjects, until they came at last to the wooded mansion that was the king’s winter retreat.

  The first thing Magriet noticed was the fact that she could no longer hear the sea. The castle was much further north and inland than her father’s holding, and the sudden silence was more unsettling than anything else she had encountered up till then.

  Before she could look at the castle, which stood stark and proud, surrounded by verdant parkland on all sides, she was whisked away by an army of attendants, the doors shut firmly behind her. Her only impression was of grey stone and high towers stretching far into the sky. Some birds circled high above, but they were too far away for her to guess what they might be.

  She was married quickly, at the castle church, introduced to a handful of gaunt wolfish courtiers as King Lodewjik’s new lady wife, fed a quick supper in the company of more gaunt courtiers and then led up and up a steep circular stair. She tried not to trip over her skirts as she ascended what had to be the highest tower in the castle.

  As is turned out, the king had not for a moment forgotten about his straw. The room was generously furnished, endlessly circular and boasting of a wardrobe full of queenly gowns. There was a bed, two chairs and a spinning wheel. A pile of straw as tall as Magriet had been left in the very centre of the room, bizarre next to the pretty, soft carpet and the lovely furnishings. A round, mullioned window looked out at the lawns and treetops far below. It was a very long way down.

  Handmaids fluttered around her like silky butterflies, their wide eyes and excited chatter making her quite hopelessly dizzy so that she had almost to ask for her smelling salts. They did not give her their names, almost as though they expected her to know them already.

&nbs
p; “How nice it will be, to have a lady in the castle again,” a wispy girl said as she unfastened Magriet’s green bodice and unpinned her hair. They left her in a voluminous nightgown, a dove grey robe and the diamond necklet that had belonged to her grandmother.

  The king came up shortly after to wish his bride a good night. He watched her like a magpie would a silver spoon.

  “You looked a commendable beauty today, my dear. And this is to be your chamber,” he said, indicating the tower. “Only a temporary arrangement, of course.” A tilt of a golden head towards the straw.

  Magriet wondered if she was meant to feel grateful that he had come to drop muted threats in person. “You have a month to weave your gilded future. We shall use the first of the gold to commission you a new crown.”

  His smile was friendly: utterly affable, which seemed a travesty.

  “Well, wife. I will leave you now, for you have a night of work ahead of you. But tomorrow we shall feast and dance, and perhaps I will show you the parklands.”

  Magriet could only stare in astonishment at this bizarre turn of events. Was she a guest or a prisoner, or was there simply no difference between the two in his mind?

  “Remember, my love,” he said, before shutting the door and locking it. “I expect this done by morning one month hence, or your life is forfeit – I shall give you a queenly death, of course, and cut off your head.”

  There was something behind that warm smile: the pleasant bonhomie with which he said his piece assured her that he meant every word. It sent a chill down her spine.

  Alone at last, in her very own tower, the full scope of her situation hit Magriet. An impossible task lay before her and a strange house all around. There was not a single friend to turn to, and no way to escape her predicament. Magriet had always thought herself to have enough character to keep her head in a crisis, yet she felt acutely nauseous as she realised how hopeless her situation truly was.

  Slowly, as is in a trance, she walked over to the spinning wheel. It was a clumsy-looking wooden thing, though handsome, despite its ungainliness. It was made of dark ash and finely polished. Nothing like the plain one her nursemaid had had.