The tattooed woman ran at him, swinging her axe like a scythe through wheat, and he dropped the girl’s body with a horrible thump onto the grass. When she reached him, she stopped short and breathed hard into his face, stinking of rotted plums and dark, secret mosses. She lifted her axe and cut off two fingers on the Prince’s left hand, licking the spray of blood from her cracked lips. He could not run, the blow was so sudden and complete, but only cry out and clutch his maimed hand. He knew if he bolted from her he would lose much more than a finger. He promised the crone a thousand thousand kingdoms, the treasures of a hundred dragons, babbling oaths like a child. But she would have none of it, and slowly moved her free hand to one of the long knives.
“You have killed my child, my only daughter.”
She laid her ponderous axe on the damp earth and drew, with one long, sinuous sigh, the bright-bladed knife from its sheath—
The girl paused, and looked into her companion’s eyes, which were like deep marshes at sunset.
“Don’t stop!” he choked. “Tell me! Did she kill him then and there?”
“It is night, boy. You must go in to dinner and I must make my bed among the cedar boughs. Each to our own.”
The boy gaped, grasping frantically for a reason to stay and hear the fate of the wounded Prince. Hurriedly, he murmured, “Wait, wait. I will go to dinner, and steal food for us like the brave Prince Leander, and creep out under cover of night like a hawk on the hunt, and stay the night with you, here under the stars, which are bright as crane feathers in the sun. Then you can finish the story.” He looked at her with a hope whose fierceness was brighter than any torch now lit at court.
She was quiet for a moment, head bowed like a temple postulant.
Finally, she nodded, without looking up.
“Very well.”
In the Garden
AS THE LAST HARP STRINGS OF CRIMSON SIGHED INTO THE SILENT westward darkness, the boy returned, clutching a handkerchief filled to bursting. He clambered into the little thicket and proudly laid out their feast. The girl sat as she had when he left her, still as one of the calm profiles of the Garden statues. Her strange quiet unnerved him, frightened him. He could not hold her dark gaze, her wide, almond-shaped eyes ringed about with their strange markings.
Instead, he glanced awkwardly at the steaming food. On the little square of silk lay a glistening roasted dove, fat peaches and cold pears, a half loaf of buttery bread covered in jam, broiled turnips and potatoes, a lump of hard cheese, and several sugared violets whisked away from the table garnish. He drew from his pocket a flask of pale watered wine, the great prize of his kitchen adventures.
The girl made no move, did not reach for the dove or the pears. Her crow-feather hair wafted into her face, borne by the warm breeze, and all at once she began to shudder and weep. The boy did not know where to look, did not wish to shame her by witnessing her tears. He fixed his eyes on the shivering boughs of a distant cypress tree, and waited. By and by, the sniffling ceased, and he turned back to her.
Of course, he understood that she had never eaten so well in her life, as she had never been welcome at the Palace dinners—he imagined that she had lived on the fruits and nuts of the Garden, foraging like a beggar. But he could not understand why plenty would make someone weep. His hands were soft and scented with rose oil, and his hair gleamed. He had known nothing but the court and the peculiar adoration it bestowed on beautiful youths. But he was a child of nobility, and would not embarrass her with displays of compassion.
Wordlessly, she tore a wing off the coppery dove and delicately mouthed the meat. With a small, ornate silver knife hidden in the folds of her plain shift she sliced a pear in two. As she extended one pale green half to the boy, he wondered vaguely how she had come upon such a handsome knife. Certainly he had nothing so fine, and yet her dress, such as it was, was threadbare and her fingernails dirty. A thread of fragrant juice ran down her chin, and for the first time, the girl smiled, and it was like the moonrise over a mountain stream, the light caught in a stag’s pale antlers, clear water running under the night sky. When she spoke again, the boy leaned forward eagerly, shoved his thick, dark hair back from his face, bit into a ripe peach and stuffed a bit of cheese into his mouth, mechanically, without noticing the taste. Her large eyes slid shut as she spoke, so that her eyelids and their mosaic covering seemed to float like black lilies in the paleness of her face.
“The wild woman drew her long knife from her belt and held it for a moment, almost playfully, at the Prince’s smooth neck, a sliver of breath before the fatal cut…”
“LET ME LIVE, LADY,” HE WHISPERED, “I BEG YOU. I shall stay here and be your servant; I will take the place of the bird-maiden and remain loyal to you for all of my days. I will be yours. I am young and strong. Please.”
He did not know what moved him to make such an offer, or if he meant to keep his promise, true as law. But the words ripped from him as though the woman had put her fist into his throat and seized them for her own.
Her eyes blazed like clouds filled with a thousand tiny seeds of lightning. But they held now a calculating gleam, and indeed, in another instant the knife had vanished from the Prince’s throat.
“Even if I agree it will not save you,” she hissed, her voice like a great toad singing at dawn. “But I will tell you the tale of my daughter and how she became winged. Then, perhaps, you will see what it is you offer, and we shall discover whether or not you prefer death.”
But she did not speak. Instead, she tore a long strip of mottled fur from the collar of her tunic and bandaged his hand. Her touch was practiced and much softer than he expected, almost, though not quite, tender. From a pouch at her waist she drew some withered leaves, among which he thought he could recognize bay and juniper. She pressed them into his ruined stumps. Tightening the poultice, she examined her work and judged it fair.
“First, I am not blind. I can see that you are young and strong, and there is no doubt I can use up your youth and vigor like well water. This is not the question. Can you listen? Can you learn? Can you keep silent? I wonder. I believe you are a spoiled brat with no ears at all.”
The Prince bent his head, penitent. Already his hand had stopped its thick throbbing, and he said nothing, judging that nothing was the best shield he could fashion against her. The crone sat against a large stone and rolled a few musky leaves between her gnarled fingers…
I CAME FROM THE NORTHERN TRIBES, THE STEPPE-WOMEN with their shaggy horses and snow-clotted braids. I’m sure you’ve heard stories—we were monsters, we were unnatural, we deserved what we got.
Among the unnatural monsters, I was more monstrous and more unnatural than the rest. They called me Knife. When I was young and my strength was taut as a bow string, I was the best rider of all the young girls. I had many necklaces of jasper and wolf-tooth, three fine hunting knives, a strong bow that I could draw into the shape of the full moon, a quiver full of arrows fletched in hawk feathers, and a wildcat hide from my first kill. All around me were the wild, honey-colored steppes, the fat deer we hunted, and the sleek, brown, fragrant horses I loved. They ran like ripples in a mountain lake. I ran alongside them, and rode astride them, and I slept against their flanks.
I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough.
My sisters were all older than I, my brothers away fighting on the borders of our country, and so I was free, and feral, and my smile was often too like a snarl. One day Grandmother Bent-Bow, whom everyone called Grandmother but who was truly mine, and had the ugliest face I knew, like beaten bark, called me to her under the new moon. She told me that she had found a man for me to marry. I loved my grandmother very much, but I did not care to be married. I was a muscle-knotted mare; I needed no mount to slow me down. But Grandmother’s word was the closest thing to law we had. Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone.
And so, even though I was very young, I stood in her beautiful deerskin breeches, with my proud wil
dcat hide on my shoulders, and wed the man she had chosen. He was dark, with very bright eyes, and we hunted together—at first only cutting meat side by side, but slowly we became one hunter, leaping onto heavy-boned deer with twin knives flashing. We smiled and snarled and smiled again under a sky blazing with stars, like milk spilled across a black hide.
When I was not hunting with him, my sisters Sheath and Quiver—for daughters come always in threes among us—and I raced each other, practiced the songs of our tribe and the twanging songs of our bows, and from Grandmother we learned magic. I braided her silver hair while she taught us secret things—monstrous things, unnatural things. Under the Snake-Star and the Bridle-Star and the Knife-Star, my own namesake, Grandmother prickled my face with delicate tattoos and called me her best girl, called me initiate, and horsewoman true.
We grew, we hunted, we laughed. I was happy. But though I did not know it, the sun was getting lower in the sky.
One day your father’s army—
Stop gaping, boy. Did you think I did not know who you were the second you crossed onto my land?
One day your father’s army came screeching up from the south like a prairie fire. He wanted our fat herds and strong horses. He wanted the heads of monsters on his wall. He wanted to clean his kingdom of unnatural things, things which squalled and crept and darkened the corners of the light.
I had never seen anything like his soldiers. They wore armor like fish scales, with towering smoky plumes, and they shone like a thousand silver clouds on horses black as demons. I shot all my arrows into those clouds, and all of Sheath’s arrows, which were fletched with crow feathers, after a man cut her sword arm off. From a ruin of her blood and dark, wet insides, I pulled her blade and tried to swing it into the gut of one of the clouds, but I was never much use with blades, no matter my name, and he was on top of me before my blow had even begun its arc.
He was a filthy man—and when a scrabbling creature who spends her nights squeezed between horses under no kind of roof calls a body filthy, you can be sure it is no ordinary dirt-stench. Leather-lashed beard bristling with lice and blood, he picked me up by the waist, hauling me up onto his warhorse. To shut my cursing mouth, he smashed my face with an armored fist. The glove floated before me, silvery and oddly beautiful, and then my forehead split and glutted red.
What sort of monster was I? I could not even hold my own against one knight; I could not even get a sword into one hollering pig. I looked up through a sheet of tears and blood and clay-slick dirt to see my new husband racing after us, screaming like a wounded wolf, and your father with his raven plume riding behind him. The black-feathered rider rammed a colossal blade through his poor chest with as little thought or effort as squeezing a fly from the air with two fingers. I saw the bits of bone and gore fly forward; I watched my husband spit blood onto the grass and kneel as if in prayer before he went face-first into the blood-whipped mud.
I tried to stop crying and pressed my face into the comfort of the strange horse’s flank—at least it was a horse, at least its sweat and hide were not so different from my own long-legged friends’—smelling for the goodness of my family in those thick, powerful haunches.
We rode south.
The sun had disappeared.
That first fist of many marked my face, knotted my forehead into scar like a sailor’s rope. The rest, though, is my doing. We rode for a long time. I lost track of the days. The sour smell of the filthy man and his starving horse enclosed me. There was hardly enough to feed the knights and the women, let alone those poor beasts, who should have been oiled and loved and held while they slurped clear water.
After a few days Quiver managed to kill herself by leaping into a river; the current like a breath of night carried her far from me, who should have caught her and held her face to mine. She was the oldest, yet I live and she is dead.
I knew before we arrived at the Palace what would happen to me. Even monsters are not stupid. I would be a slave, meant for the pleasure of your father and his grime-bathed soldiers. I would be dressed prettily, and oiled like a whore. Slavery did not disturb me; escape would be simple enough. But I would do nothing for their pleasure, and I would not be beautiful for them. They found my grandmother’s tattoos, those beautiful dark lines snaking over my face, to be exotic.
My hatred burned black and furious as an iron furnace. And so one night when my friend the filth-monger had fallen into a drunken sleep I took his dagger from the sheath at his side. It was a lovely weapon, with a straight, clean blade that shimmered like the water of Quiver’s grave. I placed it at my cheeks, and drew the knife twice, three times, down across my face, slashing the flesh and obliterating forever whatever beauty a monster owns.
Of course the men were enraged when the morning came and my face was as thickly smeared with blood as if I had covered it in a crimson hide. I was taken from the tent and thrown into the train of true slaves, the miserable lot which were destined for mines and quarries. I truly believed this would be my place, too, cutting rocks and scooping metal from the mountains, and I exulted—what is easier than running off when those mountains are all around and welcoming? I felt as though I was within a fox’s skin, full of tricks and victory. But I was mistaken.
The Palace reared up before us like a stallion, heavy and fierce—and to my shock, I was not sent beyond it, to the gold-riddled hills, or the limestone-swathed valleys, but dragged inside. Down, down, down, down a thousand stairs and through a hundred gates I was led by rough hands, and thrown into a tiny cell dank with sweat and years. Ah, I thought then, this is my punishment for spoiling a soldier’s war prize.
I howled. I screamed and screeched like a flock of frenzied owls, clawing at my hair and the stone floor until my fingers shredded into uselessness. I lay on the floor like a child, curled up and weeping, my escape made impossible, my life to be spent in this place, a hundred nights from my snowy, windblown steppes. It was then that I heard a chuckling voice from the darkness, familiar and roughly sweet, rubbing my cheek like wolf’s fur.
“Are you quite finished, girl?” it asked quietly. I looked into the murky air, into the corners of the room, where I expected to see piles of bones and old hair—instead, my grandmother sat cross-legged, clothed in rags and laughing.
“You needed to storm a bit, I know, but it is just getting indulgent now. Haven’t I taught you anything?” She opened her skinny arms like beaten bark and I fell into her. I do not know how long she held me, how many times I died and was resurrected and died again. But when I looked up into her face, she was stroking my hair and smiling. “It isn’t so bad, dear, they might have killed you.”
“This is worse,” I grunted. With a sound like a hand against a horse’s side, my grandmother slapped me hard across my mangled face.
“No. You are alive. Your sisters are both dead. Why are you feeling sorry for yourself, you rotten child? I think I have spoiled you.” I was stricken, and I stared like a dumb animal.
“They have brought me here because they think they can break me, or use me, or both,” she mused. “After all, I am a very special slave. I belong to their silly court wizard now, with his hat and his rabbit tricks. I have decided to be happy about it—they will leave me here long enough that I know who is in charge and who is not, and then I will be brought before the King to show what a good dog I am. I will be more than close enough to him to cut his throat.” She smiled brilliantly, full of cheer. “So we have little time to talk, for me to tell you what you need to know, so that you can decide to be happy about your fate, too.” She pursed her lips together, examining my savaged cheeks. “It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic.”
I watched her and listened, her words closing over me like a pool of cold water, rocking me and cooling my flushed skin. Her eyes glinted like an owl’s, and her face was calm as the moon.
“Now, you listen. Before they come to separate us, I must tell you the
story of my apprenticeship, so that you can come to know what I know, what you would have learned on your own, and your sisters too, if the King had not landed on us like a rock dropped from a great height. As it is, you must take what you can from these old bones.”
The girl stopped her tale with a press of her gentle lips, looking off into the night with eyes of shadow and woven web.
“You stop and start like a stubborn tortoise,” the boy said flatly, “always pulling your head in just when I want to hear more. It is very frustrating.”
The girl smiled wanly, as though she meant to apologize, but could not quite manage it. She licked her lips delicately, forlornly tasting the last vestiges of the roasted dove.
“But I must rest a little. We can sleep for an hour, then I will continue.” She paused, blushing to the tips of her temples. “You can lie beside me if you want; it gets cold here at night.”
She made a space in the long grass and the boy awkwardly lay against her. For long moments, neither of them slept, stiff and tense against each other as though the one had not slept every night of his life beside a brother or a sister, and the other had not spent every night of hers in blossom bowers and tree hollows. He watched her, the wind rustling her hair like river rushes, until finally, she was asleep, and then, the softening of her limbs a kind of permission, drifted away himself.
But it was not very long until he was shaking her awake, thirsty for her stories as a beggar in an endless desert.
THE TALE OF MY LONG YEARS OF STUDY IS TOO much to impart to you in this small, dark time we have together, my child. What I will tell you is the story of a single night, the last night of my formal apprenticeship, the last night of my girlhood. It is a good story to tell here in the shadowed corners of the earth, in this deep-within-deep place, where the sun falters.