Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(110)

They are happily married and go back to rule over her kingdom, where all the cats have turned back into her subjects.

I’m not sure how that fairy tale turned into mine: I only know that the Lady of the Forest and Blanchefleur were both inspired by the cat queen, and that I was more interested in writing about a miller’s son than a prince. Of course he had to go through three ordeals and gain a kingdom in the end. The modern—and what I hope are humorous—touches came from E. Nesbit, another one of my favorite fairy-tale tellers, who often included such touches in her versions. We often associate fairy tales with male writers such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm: I’m rather proud, in this story, of having been influenced by two important female writers in the fairy tale tradition.

Theodora Goss

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Blanchefleur


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Theodora Goss


They called him Idiot.

He was the miller’s son, and he had never been good for

much. At least not since his mother’s death, when he was twelve years old. He had found her floating, facedown, in the millpond, and his cries had brought his father’s men. When they turned her over, he

had seen her face, pale and bloated, before someone said, “Not in

front of the child!” and they had hurried him away. He had never

seen her again, just the wooden coffin going into the ground, and

after that, the gray stone in the churchyard where, every Sunday, he and his father left whatever was in season—a bunch of violets, sprays of the wild roses that grew by the forest edge, tall lilies from beside the mill stream. In winter, they left holly branches red with berries.

Before her death, he had been a laughing, affectionate child. After her death, he became solitary. He would no longer play with his friends from school, and eventual y they began to ignore him. He would no longer speak even to his father, and anyway the mil er was a quiet man who, after his wife’s death, grew more silent. He was so broken, so bereft, by the loss of his wife that he could barely look at the son who had her golden hair, her eyes the color of spring leaves. Often they would go a whole day, saying no more than a few sentences to each other.

He went to school, but he never seemed to learn—he would stare

out the window or, if called upon, shake his head and refuse to answer.

Once, the teacher rapped his knuckles for it, but he simply looked

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at her with those eyes, which were so much like his mother’s. The

teacher turned away, ashamed of herself, and after that she left him alone, telling herself that at least he was sitting in the schoolroom rather than loafing about the fields.

He learned nothing, he did nothing. When his father told him to do

the work of the mill, he did it so badly that the water flowing through the sluice gates was either too fast or slow, or the large millstones grinding the grain were too close together or far apart, or he took the wrong amount of grain in payment from the farmers who came

to grind their wheat. Finally, the miller hired another man, and his son wandered about the countryside, sometimes sleeping under the stars, eating berries from the hedges when he could find them. He

would come home dirty, with scratches on his arms and brambles in

his hair. And his father, rather than scolding him, would look away.

If anyone had looked closely, they would have seen that he

was clever at carving pieces of wood into whistles and seemed to

know how to call all the birds. Also, he knew the paths through the countryside and could tell the time by the position of the sun and

moon on each day of the year, his direction by the stars. He knew the track and spoor of every animal, what tree each leaf came from by its shape. He knew which mushrooms were poisonous and how to find water under the ground. But no one did look closely.

It was the other schoolboys, most of whom had once been his

friends, who started calling him Idiot. At first it was Idiot Ivan, but soon it was simply Idiot, and it spread through the village until people forgot he had ever been called Ivan. Farmers would call to

him, cheerfully enough, “Good morning, Idiot!” They meant no

insult by it. In villages, people like knowing who you are. The boy was clearly an idiot, so let him be called that. And so he was.

No one noticed that under the dirt, and despite the rags he wore,

he had grown into a large, handsome boy. He should have had