Grandmother’s eyebrows knitted, as if she were trying to work out a strange set of hoofprints. “I don’t know. I think I could, I… I suspect there’s a way it could be done. But I wouldn’t like to be the one to try it.”
“Do it now, then!” I cried, grabbing at her skinny hands. “Turn into a mouse and crawl out through the lock, or a bird and fly out through the window grate. Bring back a key and let me free, and we’ll go into the steppe together, and eat deer, and never think about this place again.”
“Poor little Knife, you can be dull and blunt as a rock, sometimes,” she said kindly. “If I became a mouse, I would scurry out and think of nothing more pressing than getting cheese into my little gray belly. I would forget you, and we would never eat deer together again. Besides, I have a killing to do before I can think on mice or birds. And you have a birthing.”
THE WITCH STOPPED SPEAKING. NIGHT STREAMED through the Witch’s windows like bolts of silk. Thick and black, it coiled around them both. The Prince was uncomfortable and cold, his hands covered in bread flour, but he did not dare complain.
The Prince no longer heard her at all, and his hand had begun, again, to bleed. Blood trickled into the bread, but he did not see it. The crackling fire leapt like trout, scenting the hut with green branched sage and sweetgrass smoke. The Prince’s eyes watered, though he did not know whether it was the stinging air that wrenched the tears from him or the buried memory pierced by her casual mention of his mother. The memory had paced back and forth in him for hours, a flash of yellow hair and a flutter of wings beating at the back of his brain.
And it all was becoming so strange and hard to follow, the path he had taken to this house through the forest, the braided words spilling like ink from this gnarled woman’s mouth, the throbbing fear waiting in him, that at the end of all this storytelling, he would still have to suffer her punishment for his killing of the goose—and the memory, the memory, brushing his heart with its awful gray wings.
In truth, lost in her tale, he had nearly forgotten that there ever was s
uch a pearl-feathered creature as that dead bird, that he had ever snapped its neck in the morning light. But he looked down at his flour-speckled hands, washed in the flicker of fire and shadow, and glimpsed drops of blacker blood among the white dust and within his own wet wound, and remembered. It was only a moment ago, wasn’t it, that he had left his father’s Castle like a fugitive, determined never to return? And now he was a prisoner only a few miles beyond the borders of the kingdom, his adventure cut off before it had begun. He was lost as a trapped hare, lost in the mire of this hissing voice, of the hut shadows and the fire and the corpse of the goose-girl, crumpled against the wall, near the hearth to keep her flesh warm.
And now she had uttered his mother’s name, and those old, forbidden syllables layered her tale, which had nothing at all to do with him, of course, but somehow his mother’s memory was a rough lever, and with it the Witch slowly broke him open, inch by bone. He had hardly heard the last sliver of the long tale, so sunk in sorrow, its waters swirled around his chin.
The Witch cocked her head to one side, watching her guest with mild curiosity. Quietly, she took his hand in hers and pressed her palm against the bloodied fingers, stilling the blood. She rubbed some sweet-smelling root against the stubs of his fingers—it prickled cold against his raw flesh.
“Grass and leaves,” she snorted. He tried a wan smile, but it refused to come. The Witch narrowed her feral eyes at him.
“What is it, boy? My servant, yet you cannot even listen to me for an evening? Instead you wrap yourself up in your own troubles like a bolt of wool, and moon after me to take them off your shoulders.”
“My mother,” the Prince mumbled, “you said you knew my mother.”
“And you told me not to speak of her,” she grunted. “Very well, then, shall we stop and listen to the murderer beat his breast and spit out his woe onto my floor? Your mother is dead and your father has all but erased her from the memory of the world. Is it necessary to know more than that of the poor woman?”
Her voice had cracked dangerously at the end, and the Prince started at it, marveled at the things which must have passed in the kingdom without his knowledge, to find exiled deep in the forest a woman who had known the dead Queen. Oh, the name of his mother was written neatly on the genealogical rolls and trilled in country songs which mostly praised her long and yellow hair—but that same name was forbidden within the rooms of government, and within any room his father might hazard to step. Yet the Witch knew her.
She rubbed her long bony fingers, a sound like branches rasping together in the wind, and grinned up at him again, under the gray and greasy curtain of her hair.
“You think I am so wicked, don’t you? A monster. Unnatural. How cruel of me to keep you here and rattle on about my dead grandmother whom you care nothing about. To hold back the doom I keep in store for you and tease you about your mother. I am telling you all this for a reason, you curdle-brained child. Didn’t you ever have a tutor? I am teaching dead, dull history—so that you will understand why your feet carried you here instead of towards some other broken old woman’s hut, and what you ended when you snapped my daughter’s neck. Don’t keep looking at me with that same idiot stare. Listen, or you will comprehend nothing, not even your mother. Shall I just kill you now and have my revenge? It would certainly save breath, and at my age every breath is named and numbered. I entertain you at the expense of not a few figures in that scroll of sighs, boy; do not test me.” She paused, grimacing as if she truly were tallying the accounts of her lungs. “And never assume that a woman is wicked simply because she is ugly and behaves unfavorably towards you. It is unbecoming behavior for a Prince.”
She slurped her tea noisily. When she spoke again, her voice had softened from a dagger point to a smooth, hand-warmed pommel.
“But I can see that you are in pain, and that is the province of monsters. You drag your mother’s corpse with you—it leaves a great furrow in the earth. If it is important enough to very rudely interrupt a woman who already owns two fingers she did not have this morning just to exhume those old bones, I will listen to you instead. It matters nothing to me. Believe me, it will not go easier for you if you come to feel warmly towards me because you have unburdened your soul. We have all the nights the world has ever made ahead of us. Speak of the dead in the dark, boy, and I will take her body from you, if you want to be rid of it.”
The Prince looked up at her, hunched as though whipped, his ribs creaking within him, as though chipped by thousands of tiny blades. He could not breathe, his heart slammed against his chest, his throat flamed. He wanted to tell her what he knew, his soul scorched itself black in the effort, but he could not speak.
And the Witch was laughing at him.
But it was not a vicious laugh; rather, the old hag’s chuckle had gone sad and soft and sorry.
She leaned in, her movement like a door closing. “You tell him her name. You tell him, when you see him again.”
She placed her leathery hand on his forehead, and the other over his lips, cradling his head between her hands like a beloved doll. He wanted to loathe her touch, to spit at her, but as soon as her dry flesh touched his, peace flowed over him like a rippling river, his muscles unlocked and his breath returned. Her hands on him were like the paws of a bear on her cub, strong and cool. When she let him go, he was wide-eyed and straight-backed, his forehead cool.
“Grass and leaves?” he whispered.
“Quite so,” said the Witch.
And with a smooth throat he let fall the words that had long since rusted in him:
“My father killed her.” He shook his head. “It seems like an easy thing to admit, now, but no one speaks of it. No one. I was only a baby when she died, but my nurse told me the way of it, over and over like a lullaby. She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart—something irremovable and constant. She would hold me to her, and whisper the same story, endlessly repeated. I remember her hair, like a forest of straight, white birches all around me, and her dark eyes above…”
YOUR MOTHER WAS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE summer sun, little one. They’ll tell you she weren’t, that she were ugly as a frog’s gullet, but it’s a lie. Yaya tells the truth to her boys, always and always.
All of gold she was, her hair, her skin, even her eyes, like a lion’s. She was called Helia, and that’s as good a name as any I’ve heard.