The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(17)
The girl knew she grieved her mother and tried to be less than she was so as to lighten her mother’s burden. Once she chanced down a small corridor and saw six small rooms, with six small beds, and six small pairs of shoes arranged neatly in them. She asked her mother, “Whose are these rooms?”
And her mother told her the story of her birth, and took her up to the locked room, and showed her the six coffins with the goose-down pillows. Then the girl said, “Then I should never have been born.”
“I love you, dear child,” her mother said, which was not quite a contradiction.
The girl said, “My father the king loves me without goodness. You love me without joy. I will go and find my brothers, and it may be we will be happy together.” And so it was that the king lost all his children, and whether he got any more from this wife or any other woman, I cannot say.
The king’s daughter, who should not have been born, took what belongings she could carry and went out into the forest, not knowing that her brothers hated her with all their hearts. The woods were green and gray, and filled with currents of cold air that carried no scent with them. She walked all of six days and into the seventh night, and her shoes were flimsy and full of stones. (But she had suffered as yet only a week; she could not yet match her brothers’ twelve years.) When night was drawing to a close, she came to the little house. She went inside and found a young man, who looked frightened to see her. Being a king’s daughter, she was used to the look of fear and was not surprised by it. “Where do you come from?” the young man asked her. “Who are you, and where are you going?”
“I am looking for my brothers, the king’s sons,” she said, “to apologize for being born.”
“And you have found them,” he said, for it was Elyas, her youngest brother, and they embraced each other with glad hearts.
“But, sister,” Elyas said, pulling back from her, “my brothers hold a murderous grudge against all women and have sworn to put an end to any girl we meet.”
“Oh,” his sister said, as she had not expected that. “I had not expected that.”
“They will not do it, I think,” he said, “if they saw you, for then they would love you and wish to make you happy, as I do. You are lucky they left before dawn this morning to go hunting. But hide yourself under this washtub, and I will endeavor to set things right between us.”
“Someday, I think,” she said, her voice muffled under the tub, “I would like to meet someone I have not caused any pain.”
“Be quiet,” Elyas said. “I hear someone coming.”
The door of the house swung open and in poured the brothers, now men, carrying with them all manner of game: red grouse tied together in fat clutches by the feet, bundled packs of snow cock, field-dressed barking deer and ibex. They threw their boots, crusted with game-blood and dirt, into the corner, and turned their catches over onto the table, so you could hardly see the wood beneath it.
“Little brother,” one of them said, clapping Elyas on the shoulder, “this is a cold welcome! Where is the kettle? Where is the fire? What have you been doing with yourself while we were out hunting?”
Elyas asked, “Know you nothing?”
And his brother answered, “Nothing more than to find game, and to track it, and to hunt it.”
“You have gone hunting, and I have stayed at home, but I know more than you,” Elyas said. And his brothers smiled, for they loved a good riddle. One of them started a fire on the stove himself, not begrudging Elyas the making of it.
“We made a promise to each other once,” Elyas said to them, “that the first girl we saw, we would kill. Will you break that promise, if I ask you to do it?”
“Hungry men will break any promise!” his eldest brother shouted. “Tell us, Elyas, but for God’s sake, feed us after the telling.”
It had been many years since any of them had thought about the red flag or the promise they had made when they spat in the dirt and ceased to be king’s sons.
“We’ll harm no one you’ve put under your protection, little brother,” one of them said.
“As for me, I am too weak from hunger to harm anything but dinner,” said another. “Tell us, and have done, and pass me a crust of bread so that I may live to hear Elyas’s news.”
Then Elyas lifted up the washtub and out of it crawled their sister, with her black hair and her sorry eyes. “Here is the sister for whose sake we took to these woods,” he said. “She is here to love us and be loved by us, if we will have her.”
Her brothers stared in amazement, until at last the tallest among them, red-haired, brown-cheeked, and merry-eyed, clasped her by the waist and lifted her bodily above him. “What a plague you’ve been to us, little murderer,” he said, but his voice was full of joy.
“What a mess you are,” said another, smiling at her dark and curling hair. “Did you crawl through the woods on your hands and knees to find us, or are you just an unusually slovenly girl?”
“A waste, entirely,” said a third, taking her in his arms and embracing her. “Shall we send her back to the king, brothers?”
“Surely,” said another brother, leaning still against the doorway. “She’ll be nothing but a burden to us.”
“A terrible burden,” the last said. “She shall have my bed, until I can build her one of her own. Though I’ve no doubt I’ll catch my death of cold, sleeping on the floor.”