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Your father guarded her, jealous as a jackal, and kept her in a tower room. But her reputation as a beauty for the books filled the countryside. He weren’t married to her too long before you were born—that’s usually the way of it when the wife looks like a lion or a sun—and when you came out of her, easy as nothing, she loved you terribly. You were as dark as she was light, the tiny little moon to her sun. I was her maid then, and she was full of light. I tell you, darling-duck, it hurt to look at her sometimes, when she stood at her tower window with you at her breast, and her hair all filled up with fire. I used to wonder if she gave you milk, or if the sun just emptied into your mouth through her teat.
But one night she was not in her tower. You were almost a boy and the fat was still on your cheeks, then. You waddled about her empty room—your father didn’t even give her a chair, I swear it. She stood all day, and lay on the stones to sleep, and I never heard the woman complain. And I can’t say, since I’d have no way of knowing, what she did that strange night (the rich don’t tell us but how they like their ribbons tied and their tea brewed, and Yaya doesn’t mind, it’s their way), but in the yellow morning your father’s anger clouded up heaven and shook the thatch from the ceiling.
He and his old fortune-teller blustered about the Castle, full of their own huffing wind, blaming me for letting her free, as though a Queen ought not to do as she pleases. He seized me by the arm hard as an iron cuff and we raced up the rickety staircase to the tower where your mother stood, as calm as can be, and you a-sleeping in her arms with not a care in your head. She looked at your father with the glance of a tiger with a full belly, her golden eyes all bright with hate and happiness.
I won’t forget that look, not for all the apples I could eat. Helia hated the King, and that’s the truth; you ask him when you’re grown and see if he calls your old Yaya a liar. You woke up with a cry when your father ripped you from her and shoved you into my arms, just before he hit your mother so strong that she spat a tooth onto the floor—how do you like that? But she didn’t hardly blink, and that awful look never left her eyes. He hissed at her, and it was a strange, black, dark thing he said:
“Woman, you will not make me a fool again. I should have cut your throat when I first saw you.”
“Probably true,” purred your mother. And then the King smiled, and I began to be afraid that there was something secret and rotten in my master—but I said nothing. A servant never says nothing unless she’s asked, and who ever asked Yaya a thing but when the supper was coming?
“Do you remember?” he spat. “With your death I instruct your son.”
She grinned horribly at his purple face and whispered just as sweet as cream, “And he will learn, oh husband mine. He will learn.”
She died the next morning. I couldn’t guess why or for what crime, but she was executed like a thief caught with a slab of butter. I was there, in the courtyard, and I held you close, and like a good nurse I turned your face away at the last moment.
It was before dawn, in the sleepy gray, and your father pulled poor Helia out of the Castle, in a plain white shift with her hair streaming like fire in the fog. The batty old conjurer was there, in his fine blue robes, but he never spoke a word—a servant never says nothing unless he’s asked—just smiled softly all the while. The King tied your poor dam onto a pile of fresh-cut logs and tied her to it with rough-hewn ropes. She didn’t struggle, not even when the ropes were so tight her wrists bled. But when she saw you, well, no mother is so strong she doesn’t care if her babe sees her burn. She wept, then, and screamed, trying to reach out to you, her little chick a-
peeping away in the morning, though she never begged to live, no, not once.
I wanted to help her, Yaya did, but I would have burned beside her, and you would be all alone with no one to love you and stand up between you and the rotten thing in your father.
The King drew a long knife and hacked off her magnificent hair, handing the length to his addle-brained Wizard. They stood over her for a moment, and your sire’s face was dark as dirt. Then, he lit the branches of ash and oak with a great crackling torch, and she was still screaming, but it had a terrible, terrible keening sound, like a song, a frightful death-song that came out of her bones, and you cried even harder, so scared you were by that screeching, singing noise. The fire licked at her feet and caught her dress; it lit up her head like an angel’s.
Now, your Yaya wouldn’t lie, no matter what they tell you at dinner, so listen when I say what I saw. When the fire had wrapped her all up in red, through the wriggling flames I saw your mother change. Her hair went from gold to black and the shape of her body wobbled in the scald, looking now like the Helia I knew, and now like someone else, someone ugly and horrible and dark as anything.
They’ll tell you Yaya is off her head and drinks too much bad red beer, but I think the Wizard saw it, too, and his eyes went angry. He rushed us all out of the cold, saying that someone would come clean up her bones, but that the baby shouldn’t see—I told him right out if he didn’t want you to see he ought not to have dragged you out of bed to watch, but he ignored me like that ragged old stork always does.
But, dear-as-dumplings, her crying followed me, clawing at my back, and behind the cries, behind them I could swear I heard rustling, and flapping, and fluttering, and it only got louder, louder and louder until I had to hold my hands over my ears as we ran from her, from your mother, burning like meat.
“IS THAT ALL?” THE WITCH ASKED, HER TONE BORED.
The Prince nodded dumbly, though something small and calculating had entered his heart, as though he had caught the scent of a stag in the brush, a stag he was sure to catch, if he could creep silently enough. Knife arranged herself on her fur-covered stool and began again.
TIME RAN ALONG LIKE A LEOPARD WITH EIGHT LEGS in those cells—we could not see it, could not hear its passing, but it crept by on those spotted paws and ate us whole just the same. I grew round as a harvest moon, though my limbs were like birch twigs and my cheeks sunk in my face. Hunger and darkness watched over us like worried nurses.
And one night I lay down among the mildewed straw and the scurrying, squeaking rats to give birth to my child. My grandmother held me in a nest of her limbs, bracing me against the stone walls, her face pressed against mine, whispering while I whimpered and wiping away my dirt-blackened tears. She rubbed my swollen belly with her wrinkled brown hands in a swirling motion like the patterns of birds migrating.
The pain was its own world, its own landscape drawn in red and black and flashes of sobbing white. I screamed—but everyone screamed in the prisons. I cursed everything I could think of—but curses are common in jails as gangrene. My hair was matted to my skull with sweat and my bare feet slipped on the floor as I kicked and thrashed like a sick bullfrog. My body ate itself, tearing its own bones apart. I cried and cried. I clutched at Grandmother and she clutched at me, trying to calm me down, nuzzling me like a wolf cub in the snow.
I couldn’t feel her, I could only feel myself coming apart.
But my daughter was born, perfect and whole, with a shock of black hair and calm black eyes. I held her in my arms, her wet, shaking little body, born in the darkness far from our home. Smiling into her face I rocked back and forth, beyond words, beyond despair.
And then my grandmother’s voice slid into me like a needle drawn through linen.
“But we cannot keep her, Knife, you must know we cannot keep her.”
I shrank away and drew my daughter tightly to me. Grandmother hushed me and began to move her hands over me again, to make it better, as if I were a child with a stubbed toe.
“She would never survive. The King would have such a tiny thing killed, even if she did not starve to death in this place. She cannot stay with us. You know it, you just don’t want to know it—no mother would.”
I am so ashamed of my tears that night, hot and thick, dripping like candle wax from a thousand temples, but they would not stop.
“No, no, she’s mine, I love her already. If you loved her, you wouldn’t ask me to give her up. I won’t give her up, I won’t.” I looked up helplessly. “She doesn’t even have a name! How can I?”
Grandmother’s eyes creased with pain, a book read too often, and by rough hands. She shrugged, knowing how stubborn I could be, and for the first time went away from me in the dark, and huddled in a far corner of the cell, hugging her knees to her chest on a pile of mold-greened bones. After a while, I heard her snoring.
