The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(20)

She began to see how dangerous it was to be unhappy when he did not want her to be and smiled at him. He smiled back at her and ran his hands through her hair, and she stayed very still, so as not to upset him by shuddering. She wished now for the pain she had known in the woods, and would gladly have taken another seven years of blisters and stings and aching joints over these interminable caresses, but she had promised to suffer without distinction as to the cause.

“Open your eyes when I address you,” the king told her, and pinched her sharply about the neck until she looked at him. “You return my generosity with such sullenness, such as befits a kitchen maid, rather than a king’s daughter and a king’s wife. Would you take all the joy out of my gift?”

She opened her eyes very wide and shook her head very hard.

“Good,” he said. “Do not make me regret my generosity to you again.”

*

After a year of this, the king’s wife knew she was going to have a child. How she wished for her mother then! Here was a wholly new kind of pain. Surely she would be acquainted with every variety of suffering before this could end, but she could at last say she had earned the right to be born. She had completed four of the shirts now and kept them hidden in a small compartment underneath her bed, for the king had taken away the spinning room he had given her and snatched at her hands when he thought she had been working, to check for blisters.

“You have no right to ruin these hands,” he told her, and tweaked her wrist until she sank to her knees. “Why do you wish to insult me, by marring what I love so dearly?” And then he would kiss her hands until he was on his knees beside her, and gather her into his arms, and whisper tender words to her. After that she did her work with gloves, although the wearing of them hindered her progress exceedingly.

One of her servingwomen, who was named Laila, was dearer to her than all the rest and knew her mind better than anyone. One evening, as the two of them walked arm in arm in the king’s gardens, Laila asked her, “How long have you carried the king’s child?”

The queen fanned out two fingers across her stomach.

“You will not be surprised, I think, to learn that you are not the first woman at court to do it,” Laila said. “I can help you, if you wish it. Would you like to keep the king’s child, and raise it, and be a mother to his son?”

And the queen shook her head. Behind her, a flock of swans landed noiselessly on the surface of one of the king’s pools.

“Would you like to be rid of it now?”

The queen nodded. The swans drifted idly along the water.

That night Laila brought an evil-smelling cup to the queen’s bedside and bade her drink it. The next day, Laila said to the king, “Your wife is unwell, and must not see anybody if you value her health.” Three days later, the king had no child. It had only been an ordinary, common kind of suffering, and the queen was grateful for it.

The next year, after the completion of another shirt, the queen found herself in the same predicament as before. This time, the king’s mother whispered to him that the woman he married was unlucky or worse, but he would not believe it.

“Have I not taught her to treat her hands as if they were my own? She has come to see that we are as one body, and that any crime she committed against herself would be a crime against my own person.”

But the king could not make up his mind to dismiss these charges quite, and when the queen failed to keep his child a third time, he had her drawn up in front of the whole court and accused her. She was unable to speak in her own defense, and, unwilling that her servingwoman should suffer alongside her, she was condemned under the law.

It so happened that the day of her sentence was the last day of her seven years’ silence. All but a single sleeve on the sixth shirt was done. As she was led away to the stake, she draped the shirts over her right arm. The king saw them and cried out at the sight: “Those accursed shirts! The witch was always secreting herself away, spinning and toiling at God knows what, and wishes to take her tokens with her—take them away! Strip her before she burns!”

She closed her eyes and heard the sound of wings. Before one of his men could reach her, the six swans landed in a circle at her feet, and her heart sang for joy. She threw a shirt over each of their heads, and the crowd drew back.

All her brothers stood before her, tall and clear-eyed and beautiful. One of them grabbed the king by the scruff of the neck and held him near the fire intended for her.

“Sister,” he said, “is it your wish that this man should live? Only say the word, and we will spare him.”

And she said nothing.

“You need not fear to speak now,” Elyas told her, putting his arm around her. His shirt had lacked only one sleeve, and in place of the other arm, he retained a swan’s wing, which he kept folded at his side. “The time is over, and you have suffered beautifully. There is no reason to hold your silence any longer.”

The king struggled in her brother’s grip. “Woman—woman—use the tongue in your head!” He hurled every invective imaginable at her—accusing her of spite, of obstinacy, of wretched ingratitude, of heartlessness, of a lack of womanly affection, of coldness—and she heard them all.

“Perhaps she would rather save her first words for something more deserving,” Elyas said.

“Sister,” her brother said, “I begin to weary of the tender embraces of this kicking jackass, and I think I know how to address our situation. Say the word if you wish to spare him. Say nothing and I shall consign him to the flames and wish him the very best of luck with them.”