“My husband died,” I say firmly, leaning back against the door. My voice is as unsteady as my hands. I shake all over. I count my breaths as the door shakes against my back.
“There was an accident,” I say a moment later. “My poor Jakob never returned home.”
“No!”
“He went on a trip, but he didn’t return,” I continue to explain through the door. “He left me here alone, and I’m waiting still for him to return.”
I push off the door and shove a heavy wardrobe in front of the door.
“Wife!” Jakob calls again. “You cannot trap me in my own home.”
“This is my home, now. I live here with my twelve sisters.”
“You may not do this.”
“It is already done,” I remind him. “I was searching for you, too, Jakob. The others did nothing. They let you steal us away. They let you hurt us.”
He says nothing.
“It is done,” I repeat. The Maiden Thief is done, and so too is his capture.
I wish briefly that I could be strong enough to simply kill the man who has tormented my town, who has hurt my sisters, who has trapped and made so many girls bleed. I am not heartless enough. Even now, I cannot help feel sorrow for him.
“You’ll die before the next new moon passes, Jakob. There is only so long you can live without food or drink.” I put my hand to the door and add, “If you prefer, there are glass shard aplenty that are sharp enough to let you make a choice.”
“Set me free,” Jakob speaks in the same tone he’s used when he’s disciplined me.
This time, however, I am the one with the key.
“I am setting all of us free,” I promise him. “You’ll be free of this world before the next new moon.”
Then I walk away, leaving my husband-no-more to his death and returning to my sisters who have found life again. Some cannot yet speak, and others barely wake. I don’t know that they’ll all live, but I have hopes for them—for all of us.
One by one, I visit each of the bedrooms where they are recovering from their years of imprisonment. They’ve been fed through tubes, kept calm with herbs so that they were all shocked to learn how long had passed. Slowly, they would grow stronger, and then, we would set our house to rights.
I tell each one, “It is done. We are free.”
I’d figured out the Maiden Thief’s test, and I’d trapped him. Together with the others, I will figure out how to disable the traps he’s set on the grounds. For now, the larder is well stocked, and my sisters need time to heal.
There will be no Maiden Thief when the leaves turn next Autumn. In his place, there will be only invitations to women seeking solace and peace. He’s left behind a home and gold aplenty.
His many wives will turn it into something better now that there are no more glass coffins to imprison us.
A Note on The Maiden Thief
I wrote this in one fell swoop. I had a night terror, woke in tears, and had to write. Over the next three months, I revised and then I sent it to Ellen Datlow, an editor I admire who had invited me to anthologies in the past. She bought it. It's never been in print or in a collection/anthology.
In retrospect, I can say it is most directly inspired by Bluebeard, with touches of Beauty and the Beast and Snow White. The question I had was what it means to be married to a serial killer—because that's what Bluebeard is. He's a killer, and what I wondered was how a woman ends up married to a killer. Are you a monster if you sleep next to one?
The other question I had is one that drives a lot of my stories: how can a woman save herself? Can she save her sisters? From Wicked Lovely clear through to the novel I'm currently revising, that is a concern. Sometimes I'm not so very different from the girl in rural Pennsylvania asking why I needed to "catch a husband" when I could simply get a job and pay my own damn bills. I have no objection to a partner in life, but I think that a woman ought to try to save herself rather than waiting for father/brother/boyfriend/townsfolk to come to her rescue as they did in the fairy tale.
***
Awakened
Tonight, unlike every other night I have walked on the shore, a man stands on the beach near my hiding place. I can’t pass him. He lifts his hands, palm open, and holds them out to his sides to show me that he is harmless. If he weren’t looking at me so fixedly, I might believe him, but I don’t think I should trust this one.
He is young, maybe nineteen, and fit. In the water, I could escape him, but we are standing on the sand. He has dark trousers and a dark shirt; the only lightness is his pale blond hair. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen him, until I was almost upon the crevice. Until this moment, until him, I’d been singing along with the steady rising and falling of the waves as they stretched toward the sand and fell short. Now, I stand bare under moon and sky on a beach, and this stranger stares at me with a look of hunger.
No, I do not believe he is harmless at all.
“I won’t hurt you,” he lies.
Something in his voice feels like it wants to be truth, but I shiver all the same. I hadn’t expected anyone to be on the beach at this hour, and I’m not sure what to do about the man who stands watching me with such intensity that I want to flee. Men do not look at you like that without wanting something, and in the wanting, they often hurt us. My mother told me that long before I ever set foot on the shore. It is why I am careful when I come here.
Waves lap around my ankles as I try to think of a solution. I wish I could jump into the water and escape, but I am bound by rules as old as the ebb and flow of the water at my feet. I cannot leave without the very thing that he is preventing me from reaching. The best I can do is to avoid looking at the dark shadows of the crevice and hope he has no idea what I am.
“Are you alone?” he asks. His gaze leaves me then, sliding away. The moon is only half full, but it is enough to cast the light he needs. The beach has few barriers, nothing to hide others. It takes only a moment for him to determine that I am isolated, that I am trapped.
As his gaze returns, traveling over the whole of me as if to weigh and measure my flesh, words feel too complicated. Everything feels complicated. He is waiting for my answer, so I nod to indicate that I am alone, confirming what he already has discerned, showing him that I am truthful and good. Maybe that will spare me. Maybe goodness will make him turn away. Still, I tug my hair forward, hiding myself as best I can. Dreadlocks don’t cover me as truly as untangled hair might, but I am in the waters too much to have any other sort of hair. The thick tendrils drape over my shoulders like so many ropes hiding my bareness.
“I’m Leo,” he says, and then he walks over to the shadows and eliminates any chance I had of escape. He pulls the carefully folded skin from the crevice where I had hidden it. He is careful, knowingly handling it as if it were a living thing. It is, of course, but I do not expect land-dwellers to know that. Not now. Not in this country.
Then he walks away, his arms laden with the part of me that I’d hoped he wouldn’t see, and I have no choice but to follow. He who holds it, holds me. It is as an anchor, and I am tethered. The sea would swallow me whole if I tried to return with my other-self still here on land. I’m trapped more truly than if I were in a cage. This man, Leo, has my soul in his hands.
“That’s mine,” I say. “Please give it back.”
“No.” He stops then, turns, and looks at me. “Since I have it, you are mine.” He strokes the skin in his arms as he stares at me. “Tell me your name.”
“Eden,” I say. “I’m called Eden.”
“Let’s go home, Eden.”
I cannot go home. I have to obey him. It’s the order of things, and so I walk away from my home. “Yes, Leo.”
He smiles, trying to appear kind, pretending he means me no harm. Hate ripples through me like the waves during a storm. As he leads me further onto land, I fill with hatred that I cannot exorcise. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. I hate many of the humans who spill their refuse into my sea, who leave their rubbi
sh on the sands, who desecrate my world with their noise and filth.
I whimper at the weight of loss, at the freedom that might never be mine again.
His gaze falls to my bare feet. “Would you like me to carry you?”
“No,” I manage to say. I cannot say that it is not my feet, that he is carrying part of me and that is the reason I am trying not to weep. I cannot say anything to change this: while he keeps my skin in his possession, I, too, am a possession. I am bound to obey the words he speaks, trapped under his whim and will.
Leo is quiet as we walk. I study him and find that he is strangely beautiful in that way that the very assured often are. He’s taller than me, but he looks to be only a bit older. He’s young and handsome. In times long gone, he would’ve been the sort of man a selchie felt lucky to have as a captor, but I never expected to be a captive. I believed they had forgotten how to ensnare us. When a selchie woman’s skin is found, she has no choice. So many husbands could be unsightly or brutish, but a selchie must follow, must stay, where her skin is kept. Once one of them takes your other-skin, your soul, into his arms, you are his.
I want to weep; I want to run from him. I can’t do either. All I can do is wait and hope that he will slip, that he will do one of the two things that will set me free. If he strikes me three times in anger or if he allows me to have possession of my other-skin, I can return to the sea. I hope that he does not know the truths, that his ignorance will lead to my escape, that I will be whole again one day, that I will not lose myself in captivity. I know my history, but most of the land-dwellers have forgotten that we are here. Their ignorance is our safety.
But I am following a boy who owns me now, and I think that he was watching for me tonight. Those of us who live in the waters look much like the land-dwelling—at least when we are wearing only this skin. He glances at me, and I know that he sees only the part of me that looks like I belong on land. Other men have looked at me that way. I’ve walked on shore, and I’ve known men. None of them knew that there was another shape to me. They saw only this skin.
Leo knows more, and so I am trapped. The sea calls out, beckoning as waves do, but Leo leads me away. There is nothing more I can do.
Yet.
He says nothing more as he takes me to his home, a house that sits on an otherwise empty stretch of beach. It’s a large squatting thing, a building of so many rooms that I become lost and sit weeping in the darkness until Leo finds me. After he chides me for foolishness, he leads me back to the room that he’s assigned me. He does not want me to share his room. This, I think, is for his own reasons, not as a kindness to me.
As he stands just inside the doorway, he kisses me. It’s a soft peck upon the top of my salt-heavy hair. “Silly girl,” he says, but there is affection in his words.
Perhaps all will be well. Perhaps I will be able to convince him to free me.
***
Over the next few days, I realize that Leo can be kind. I am grateful for this. There are moments when I don’t feel as if the world around me is too bright, too harsh, too alien. They are few, but they are present. He tries to make me smile, and sometimes I do.
Leo’s home is comfortable in a way that invites silence: the carpets are thick; the counters are polished; the furniture is heavy with age and importance; and the staff is ever-present with mute efficiency. I am lonely here, but before I am allowed to be out among Leo’s friends, I must learn the right words—as well as the right forks.
Time passes as I learn all I must in order to be what Leo wants. He’d already told me that the two most important qualities—beauty and obedience—are well met. He tells me that he’d watched for me, selected me especially because of my looks. I understand from the way he stares at me so intently that I am expected to be pleased by his words, and because of what he’s stolen, I cannot disobey him. I murmur, “Thank you.”
“You’ll be perfect, Eden.” He beams at me. “Once you learn, you’ll be the wife I should have, and you’ll never leave me. Everything will be perfect. We’ll be happy, you’ll see.”
I dip my head meekly as he likes. I have already learned quickly that he is happiest when I show him modesty and obedience. “I will try.”
“My father never uses this house,” Leo says. “He’s away in Europe all the time. No one will know about you until we’re ready. You can stay here and keep up your lessons when I go back to university, and then in a couple of years we’ll be married. I’ll come to you on every break.”
I keep my gaze down to hide my fear of such a life. I want passion, true love with a man some day in the distant future who is so overcome with love that he’ll accept me for who and what I am. I want a man who did not trap me, who will not keep me in a cage. There is no happiness inside a cage, no matter how gilded.
The man in front of me breaks my heart as he stares happily at me. When he grows tired of smiling at me, Leo motions to the table. “Which one would you use for the salad?”
I select a fork. I know this answer, have learned these useless things because it is his desire that I do so. His desire is all that matters now.
“For lobster?” he prompts.
I stare at the utensils arranged in front of me. Nothing seems right, and this question hadn’t been in the last drill. It is a trick. I look at him, hoping my anger is better hidden than it feels. “The staff will bring that . . . utensil.”
Leo nods, and at first, I think that he hasn’t heard the pause in my words or the fury in my mouth. Then he frowns, and I see that even if he doesn’t know what it was, he has heard something. He gives me a tight smile that already I am coming to understand means that I will be punished, and he asks, “Did you practice the phrases in the folder?”
“Yes, Leo.”
He watches me for a moment, and then he sighs and tells me, “I don’t think there will be enough time to walk tonight, Eden. You’ll need to practice more. We can try again when I get back from my swim.”
“Yes, Leo,” I say quietly, careful not to let him see my envy that he still swims in the sea every day while I am trapped on the shore. Even when we walk on the beach, I am not allowed to swim. I am permitted to watch him, but I am not allowed to touch the sea without his hand holding me fast.
And so the days pass. We practice all the things I am to learn. Leo explains my new life, what I should and—more importantly—should not do. I learn how to appear as if I belong in his world, how to eat at his table and sit at his side. I dress in the clothes he’s brought for me (because I am not yet allowed to go to stores with him), and I try very hard not to cry as he cuts off all of my hair. The thick twisted locks fall to the floor with soft thumps, and I am left with close shorn hair.
“It’ll grow longer,” Leo assures me. “You’ll brush it every morning and night, so you don’t have nasty dreadlocks. Nice girls have long, shiny hair.”
As I have done from the first moment he lifted my soul in his hands, I again keep my anger in silence. I know that my silences and downcast gazes please him, so too do the words “What do you think?” I have learned already to use these as I have learned to use the right utensils and phrases.
And he rewards me with smiles and soft kisses on my cheek or forehead. He tells me that he loves me, and I smile at him. He wants me to say the words, but he does not demand it. I will say them one day. I will lie to him, and he will trust me then. He is a child in this, wanting love so desperately that he has caged me here and trains me like a pet. I will bide my time.
Already I can find the magic combination of words and gazes that result in walks at the edge of the water. It’s a bittersweet temptation to be so close to the waves, but Leo holds tightly to my hands. I wonder if he knows, too, that there is a third choice for my freedom. I am not yet so desperate that I will ask the sea to consume me, but even if I were, I’d have to escape his grasp to do so, and as the weeks pass, my strength fades. The tight muscles I had from diving and swimming are softer now. I worry that even if I had my other-skin, I
wouldn’t have the strength to reach deep enough waters for the current to pull me under.
Leo kisses my eyes when they start to fill with tears and promises, “You’ll be happy with me, Eden. I’ll make you happy.”
And I smile at him and lie, “Yes, Leo.”
***
Weeks passed in that way, but I can’t tell how many. I know only that the summer is ending, and that Leo will soon leave me. He seems nervous, repeating the orders to the staff as if he hasn’t told them the self-same words every day of late. They know that I am not to cross the threshold without supervision, that the doors must be kept locked, and that—although I am allowed to spend hours on the wide deck overlooking the sea—I must not be allowed to be there alone.
It is the last night before Leo leaves. We are both barefoot on the sand tonight, and Leo allows me to walk in the water. It is only as deep as my ankles, but it is my home and he is allowing me to be caressed by the waves. For that, I am grateful.
“I will only be gone a few weeks,” he repeats yet again. “I’ll call you every night.”
We have practiced using the telephone, so I know how to take his calls when he is gone. I will answer and listen; I will tell him of what I read while he is away.
“Maybe in the spring, you could visit me,” he offers.
He seems to think this will please me so I smile and say, “Thank you.”
Leo likes that. He seems happy, and as we stand on the beach, he leans closer and kisses me. His lips don’t part, and I am not sure if I’m grateful for that or not. I know well what happens between a man and a woman. One cannot avoid such knowledge in the sea, and I think I would take comfort in that here on the beach. I don’t want Leo, but I want to be happier.
I open my lips and wrap my arms around him. He is my jailer, but he is often kind . . . and I am lonely.
The way he looks as he leans in to kiss me is new, and I know that I could make him love me enough to escape him. He is desperate, afraid of what will happen when he returns to his university, and I suspect that he means only to kiss me chastely. In all of these weeks, he’s never been anything other than distantly affectionate. He is not a passionate man with me, and it is passion that I need in order to escape him.