The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(16)

The king’s wife was thereafter served all her meals in her room, under the king’s jolly supervision. “Eat up, my love,” he said, hands folded behind his head. “Check her pockets,” he instructed the steward. “Check her napkin and under the table. We’ll make sure she fills out yet. My daughter”—Not yours yet, nor yet a daughter neither, thought the king’s wife—“my daughter must have plenty to eat. She is a king’s daughter, and must be afforded the care a king’s daughter merits.” The king’s wife had never been a king’s daughter. She was outranked by her belly.

One day, as the king’s wife sat outside the locked door on a little stool, her youngest son said to her, “What is in this room?”

“Your father is making new beds for you and your brothers,” his mother said brightly. “Lovely new beds for grown-up boys.”

“Then why are you crying?” he asked.

“That,” his mother said, “I cannot tell you.”

But he would give her no peace until she told him. At last she took the key from her pocket and unlocked the door, showing him the six coffins in a row, well glossed and warm to the touch, already filled with sweet-smelling pine shavings.

First she had to explain death to him. Then she explained the rest. “If this child is a girl, you will all be killed and buried together in here.”

“Could you try not to have a girl?” Elyas asked.

“I cannot help it,” she said.

“Could you try not to have it at all?”

“I have tried,” she said. “It is a hard thing to stop, once it has started.”

“Could I help you stop it?” he asked, and she fell about his neck and wept for the sweetness of him.

Then he begged her to lay off crying. “We will take care of ourselves,” he promised her. “If the child comes, we will run away, and find something less dangerous to be than king’s sons.”

So his mother gave her son this advice: “Go to the woods with your brothers and find the highest tree you can. Climb it, and keep a watch on this tower every day. When the child comes, I’ll contrive to raise a flag out the window—white if it is another boy and safe for you to return. Red if it is a girl. And if you see a white flag, I pray you will all come home to me and let me see you again. But if you see a red flag, run as fast as you can and stop for nothing, and I will pray for you.

“And—I hope,” she said, “that you would never be too hot in summer, nor too cold in winter, that the sun would not burn your faces, nor the wind tear at your clothes—that if I could not see you again, that you would not be lost from one another, that harm would not find you, and that death would not learn your names.”

So her sons left with her blessing and fled into the woods. Each day, another of them would climb the highest tree and keep watch on the tower, but no flag appeared. On the eighteenth day, Elyas climbed the tree and saw a hand thrust a trembling flag through the topmost window of the castle.

“I see a flag,” he shouted down to his brothers.

“The color,” they called back. “Name the color of it, brother.”

“I see red,” he said. He knew it meant death, and he knew what death was, for his mother had told him. One of his elder brothers spat in the dirt by his feet. “Then we are to be turned out into the woods, and even die, for the sake of a girl?”

“The next girl I see,” said another, “I’ll kill it.”

The hand and the flag vanished back inside the window, and Elyas came down the tree. “We’ll move deeper into the woods,” he said, “where none of us can be found, and none of us will be killed. We’ll go so deep into the woods, we’ll never have to see a girl, nor kill one neither.” The rest of the brothers agreed with his plan, and set off in the direction where the oldest and tallest trees grew thickly together, where the only sunlight was filtered green and vanished early in the afternoon.

Here they built a house, a crudely hewn boys’ house. The first winter they did not know to chink up the cracks with mud and straw and were bitterly cold. They did not know how to tell bad water from sweet and were sick for days. They did not know how to build a fire so that the smoke did not roil and blacken the ceiling, coating the whole house with soot. They did not know to follow deer to find salt for their meat. In short, they suffered. “All this for a girl,” they said to one another in those days, and they swore again to kill the first girl they met. The next winter, they daubed the corners of their house to keep the wind out, and dug a well where clear water gushed up from the earth. And in this manner twelve years passed.

*

The king’s wife had given birth to a king’s daughter, and he named the girl himself. Her hair and her eyes were black, her voice was as clear as the waves breaking on the shore, and she was as lovely a king’s daughter as anyone could wish. She ate from a little golden dish and drank from a little golden cup that he had made especially for her and placed right next to his own seat at the table. The king’s wife again turned her plate out for the king’s dogs, but now that she was not growing a daughter, nobody minded.

The king loved his daughter with all the ease and joy with which he had once loved his sons, and then some—he simply transferred the love he had felt before to her and added that which she merited through her own goodness to it. The king’s wife loved the girl in spite of herself, and her love carried with it six times its weight in grief.