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“I know the dark well; it and I have become fast friends. If the old man seeks to frighten me this way, he is a great fool,” she whispered.
We ascended quickly, the liquid stone of a murky staircase sliding beneath us. I followed her scent in the black, the trail of her body heat lighting my way. For a long while there was no sound but our breathing, and the pattern of our feet on the rock like rain in a forest. It was not unpleasant.
As suddenly as we had entered the womblike shadows, we left them behind—stepping into a round room at the top of the tower which held the maiden in its center like a jewel in an iron ring.
“Welcome,” she intoned. “My name is Magadin.”
Her voice echoed in the chamber like an arrow glancing off its target. We could say nothing at first, so stunned were we at the girl’s appearance. Her head, which we had seen from below, was the picture of pearl-edged royalty, gilded and cool-skinned, repulsive to me but beautiful by mortal standards. Yet the rest of her body was terrifying and marvelous—her hands were covered in thick russet fur, tapering to jaundiced claws; her hips twisted into a deer’s delicate haunches; and turquoise wings jutted painfully from her shoulder blades, splitting the skin and drawing blood in great swathes. Her feet sparkled green as underwater opals, webbed and slime-filmed like a frog, yet her legs beneath the gauzy dress were silver as a fish, smoothly coated in translucent scales. Feather-fine fins sprouted from her heels. Her breasts, which below had seemed milky and unblemished, were actually furred in the patterns of a white tiger, dark and feral stripes beginning to show across her delicate collarbone. A wolfish tail thumped unhappily behind her, having torn through the beaded fabric. The ends of her braids appeared to be slowly flapping, the veined surface of dragonfly wings shining through her curls.
Worse, all around her were severed heads mounted on the walls, what once were maidens, each in various stages of metamorphosis: One was half covered in serpent-hide, her hair hissing violently; another had lost her mouth, a beak twisting out of her face in its place; another’s eyes had shrunk terribly, and dark hair covered her batlike features. The menagerie of beast-princesses ringed the chamber, watching us with eyes that seemed not entirely dead.
“You see,” the maiden admitted quietly, “why I have not been rescued yet. Why nothing guards the door. They come by the dozens, pretty knights all in a row, and run like frightened squirrels when they see what I am.”
I saw pity coalesce on the Witch’s face, and she took the maiden into her arms tenderly, as the girl wept great red tears, which fell on her dress like some unspeakable wine. “Tell me what he has done to you,” she said softly, stroking her veined hair.
“He is trying to change me,” Magadin squeaked, her voice cracking like a wounded hawk, “as he tried to change them. He took me from my father’s house…”
I WAS BORN FAR, FAR FROM HERE ON MIDWINTER’S Night, in the middle of a storm that tore the tiles from the roof and flooded the sky with clouds blacker than chimneys. I drew first breath in a tall tower wrapped with ivy and lilies like waxing moons, all of gray stone shot through with quartz. Wind battered at the windows; the sky boiled with thunder. The midwife placed me in my mother’s arms, wide-eyed and wondering. She smiled at me, her face tired and white, full of sorrow, and died with her finger clutched in my tiny hand.
When the wild milkwoods and chestnuts had bloomed twelve times and withered, my father married again, a woman of radiant face and hair like a river of fire, her body like the living sun entering our hall. Her name was Iolanthe. She was a young widow with vast lands, and had two daughters of her own, Isaura and Imogen, somewhat older than I, each more proud and beautiful than the other.
I see you smile, Witch. You think you know how these stories go.
But they were not like their exotic mother; they were exceedingly dull and stupid, their only worth lying in the golden shades of their practiced curls. They were little golden birds, chirping and empty-headed, always together, clutching each other’s little pink hands. I quickly became my stepmother’s favorite, quick and clever as I was. She was an imperious woman, and my father obeyed her every whisper as eagerly as a colt its master.
I adored her.
Obviously, my new sisters hated me.
My only notions of my own mother were stories my father had told me of that last smile, soft and sad. These melted like tea steam in the face of Iolanthe who blazed so brightly, whose laughter lit the chandeliers, whose great dark gowns swept majestically along our halls, filling the house as my mother’s ghost could not.
After a time it became clear that she favored me even over her own children, who grew purple-faced with hate and envy. For my part, I cared nothing for the simpering fools. My stepmother was my world; she had enchanted me completely. I took on her mannerisms, became haughty and fierce, but captivating to all. I was the wonder of the Palace, my father’s pride. I grew up and grew older, more beautiful and wiser, devouring our libraries with delight. I was dark where my stepmother was light, pale as a winter wind where she was rosy as summer dusk.
On my sixteenth birthday, when such things usually occur, a herald announced at every door in the land that the royal Wizard sought some worthy young girl as his apprentice, and that all families of suitable blood were to present their daughters at some appointed day and some appointed time. Of course, we were all thrilled as lambs with a mouthful of alfalfa—each of us certain we would be chosen, and our days filled with riches and power.
Iolanthe heard the summons, and her face darkened. She was heavily pregnant then; her black gown rippled loose behind her. She closed the door after the well-meaning herald, and forbade all three of us to try for the apprenticeship. Instead, she took me up the stone stairs to a high tower, all wrapped with ivy and lilies like waxing moons. She leaned into the heavy door and it ground open, showing a room now filled with decrepit books and ancient scrolls. Nevertheless, it remained, my birth-bed and my mother’s deathbed, facing the long, tapered window, smooth and cleanly white, as though it had never tasted our blood.
“My daughter,” she began, her voice like water over river stones, “for so I hope I may call you, my own girl, as though I had given you life in this room where your true mother died. I wish that I had, and saved you those years of loneliness. My own blood, as you know, did not fare so well.” She shrugged, raising her eyes to the ceiling with exasperation. “They are lovely girls, and I raised them as best I could. Perhaps I indulged them. They will make good marriages to enrich our lands, but though they will be your father’s heirs, they can never be mine. That does not mean, however, that I will stand to see them shipped off to a filthy Wizard with a collar of iron.”
Her eyes glinted with fury like campfires on a winter’s night. Without tensing or moving from her chair, she made a quick gesture at one of the shelv
es, and a heavy, scarlet-bound volume flew obediently into her long, white hand. I gasped, goggle-eyed, and her dark, musical laughter filled the air.
“Didn’t you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman’s house. That, daughter mine, is an estate lonely beyond description. Even this,” she touched her belly warmly, “will not earn me peace. It is a son to till the fields and battle infidels, and yet still your mother will be the Lady of the House, and I only a tenant. Everywhere, your mother’s shade outranks me. I call you my daughter and it freezes in the air, it angers her beyond endurance. But what can she do, the poor wretch? She is long dead, and I live. Daughter, daughter, daughter,” she chanted throatily, as if challenging the dusty breeze. “In this, at least, you can be my true and devoted child. If you want to know magic, I will teach it, and I will teach it without a collar. You can learn the secret things that lie in these volumes and in my own breast. When you are captive in a husband’s house, it may pass the time.”
“But why do you object to the Wizard? Isn’t the magic he would teach as good as yours?”
Iolanthe ground her teeth. “I thought you were a wiser child, Magadin. Did it never seem odd to you that he wants a girl, when most will take only students of their own kind, girls to women and boys to men? Or that he wants an apprentice at all, when he is a slave, doulios, marked by his collar as one whose power has been sold, son back to father back to father, as long as there has been any strength in his blood? He can do nothing without the leave of the King; they are bound together. And I will not barter away any of my girls to that place.”
“And you are not a slave? A doulios?”
“No, my girl, that I am not.”
And so, over the weeks before the appointed day, as the apple groves yielded their musky ciders, I learned from her—small, halting things. Mostly I read her books. I rarely saw my father or my stepsisters, cloistered as I was in my birth-tower, my fingers acquiring the ink stains of a clerk and my clothes growing plainer and less colorful as I tired quickly of the brocades and ribbons that enchanted my sisters. When my brother was born, I stayed in the tower, my hair all dusty and uncombed. They called him Ismail; I took no interest. When she recovered, my stepmother and I spent our hours with heads bent together over concoctions and pleasant, trifling charms, and I was happy. I was sure true knowledge would come later.
Deep in the blue-tongued winter, the Wizard’s day came, and I was to meet the payment for that happiness.
I hid in the stairwell as Iolanthe told me, while Imogen and Isaura were secreted away in a tall armoire. My sisters held each other in terror, huddled side by side like tender fawns left in the bower by their doe. They did not extend their arms to me, but shut the doors abruptly. I folded myself up under the stairs. We were not to squeak, we were not to sneeze, and she would tell the messenger that her daughters had caught chill and died in the frost. I peered through the cracks in the wood to watch my stepmother lie for us.
