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They sucked them down happily, Hind greedily chewing and Hadil making small kissing gestures with her pink lips as the anise puckered her cheeks. It was some time before the effect would be seen, and we were invited to stay and enjoy the food we pretended to have prepared. I was sitting between my parents with an antler fork in one hand, poised to mouth a sliver of sheep’s fat, when Hind turned to her father and said:
“When you are dead and I am Doge, I shall invite all the woodcutters and poets to this place, and they will write odes to the beauty of Amberabad and her two daughters!”
Hadil blushed. “When you have gone and I am Doge in your place, I shall cover my face in mourning white, and no images shall be made of anything at all for a full year, so that we may remember only your kindness, and your face.”
Hind looked at Hadil with disgust. “When did you lie down under the surgeon’s knife and let your heart be cut away? Can you not even once smile with me and be my sister? Stuff your pinched face with your damned bitter roots and choke on them! May you—”
She did not finish her curses. Out of her mouth came a single pearl, large and white and shimmering. Hadil cried out in surprise, and from her rose-scented lips came a slim green frog, hopping unconcernedly onto the table. Another followed, and another pearl from her sister, and another frog. The table leapt with green and clattered with white, the Doge’s beautiful daughters holding back their curled and perfumed hair with both hands as they vomited up jewels and amphibians.
The Doge scowled. “I told you to teach them. Teach the one that goodness is not enough, and the other that cold cruelty is too much. What is this?
Precious jewels from the corrupt daughter, slimy creatures from the virtuous? You will get no payment from me.”
My mother, always the orator, bowed low. “Your Grace, forgive me, but you do not see as we see. From the mouth of the child you judged wicked comes nothing but cold stones, lifeless, shellfish waste. In a seaside kingdom such as yours, they are too common to be called valuable. Beautiful, yes, and they have their worth, but they are just pretty rocks. Out of the other comes frogs, which you may consider ugly, but are food and clothing and curatives and poisons. They are eminently useful creatures in any clime, and she will never be hungry, nor anyone who comes near. Yet those who come near will as often as not cry out in disgust and speak not to her sweetness. Tell me I have not taught a lesson they will remember!”
The Doge laughed, and so did I. Hind hiccupped, and a pearl formed at the corner of her mouth. She stifled tears as one of her sister’s frogs caught the jewel with his tongue and swallowed it.
I have heard that, swollen with pride in her frogs, Hadil became an inefficient Doge, caring only for her amphibian subjects, ordering every frog to be escorted across the road and hoisted on silk cushions, lest the poor beasts suffer. She kept up her singing until no one could stand to step out of their homes, as she added songs for her father’s shade and songs for the betterment of frogs and songs for the salvation of her lost sister. Finally, there was no hour left in the day when the Bell of Amberabad did not endlessly drone from its high balcony.
Hind, I have heard it said, went into the world, dropping pearls behind her and thinking no more on politics.
Perhaps we had too great a love of preaching. But we were clever and delighted each other and practiced our arts with a precision nearly unknown in these degenerate times. And I will take their place when they have gone. I will be greater even than they, for I need no wild wood to give up its savages to me. I am the wild wood, and to produce both pearls and frogs from maidens I need but to extend my hand.
A TALE
OF HARM,
CONTINUED
BRYONY PUT HIS HAND NEAR MY NOSE, PALM UP, and from it twisted up a thorny rose, cloying in its scent, which interfered with his own.
“You understand why I could not give the girls their candies. I did not, not then. But when I was older my mother and father showed me their books, and I read about you, about the unicorn, about the song that the wind plays on your horn. They told me that my graduation from their little academy would come when I had caught you and made my poisoner’s cup, for no poisoner can afford to be felled by his own leafy thralls, and it is known that your horn makes all poison as harmless as water. ‘There is a unicorn in this part of the world, and her name is Nevinnost, and we have saved you for her,’ they said. ‘Go and become a man.’ This is why I have knelt by you, and held your head, and let you smell me all you like, the last wafting fragrances of my innocence, for I am eager to do harm in the name of the world distilled, eager to join my parents again in their stilt-house.”
“I should have expected it.”
“Yes, you should have. I hope I have been a soft bed for you, Nevinnost. I hope the scent of my skin is all you hoped for.”
With this he drew a long silver chain from beneath him, and wrapped it round my neck. I recoiled—his smell had changed, slanted into acrid and burning, charcoal and soot and rinds of sour lemon roasted on white embers. He smiled and the stench worsened; my nose clogged with clanging, warring drifts of him, smoke and ashen logs, vinegar and limestone and his stinking, cloying rose. As I struggled, they came. And surely you have heard this part of the story before: how the huntsmen came with their green hose and their brown arrows, and held me to the earth while Bryony sawed my horn from my head with a blacksmith’s blade.
The wind made a sound like shrieking when the red whorls snapped and shattered. I bled—the black whorls bled and the ground was wet and slippery; I scrabbled against them but the blood-mud held me fast. Our horn is flesh, no less than your nose, and the blood spurted from me like a string of black pearls onto the velvet lap of the poisoners’ son.
THE
HULDRA’S TALE,
CONTINUED
THE UNICORN GLARED AT ME, DEFYING ME TO tell her how foolish she had been to go near him, or that she was no kind of beast to have lost her horn. Perhaps a grown woman would have done this, but I could not.
“Nevinnost, I am sorry for what he has done. A boy once took a thing from me, and in its place I was given a golden ball, and now you see what has become of me. I am like you.”
Her gaze softened. “I am not a unicorn if I have not my horn. I am only a mule with a beard and a very odd tail. You are still a girl. Though I am sorry for you. A golden ball is no thing to give a child.”
“Please help me. I can help you, if you will release me. I will not call a huntsman. I will not call the awful hedgehog who bound me here. If I am innocent, you are safe.”
“All things are innocent until they are not,” she snorted, but bent her dark leg and pawed at the quills which bristled from my pinioned hair in untold numbers. She dug at the soft soil, bit at the slick metallic quills, but her teeth could not catch on their surfaces, and they were driven too many and too deep for her to reach. Finally she just stood before me, her brown flank glistening with sweat. The night sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a long, jagged strip of cold blue against the cold black, and I knew Ciriaco would be coming soon.
“My hair,” I whispered. “Chew it off, and I will be loosed. If I am innocent then all parts of me are innocent, and you may taste of it, in my hair, in my curls, a thing which your treacherous boy would never give. Take my innocence, and set me free.”
