Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(18)

He roamed all night, or at least until the fattening moon set and the sky on the other side turned pale. Effortlessly, he found his way back to the witch’s house. A faint shimmering line in the air led him.

He followed it, aware it was attached to him, and of its significance, without at all understanding, until at last he found it ran in under the shed-house door, and up to the body of the man who sat propped there, so deeply asleep he seemed almost—if very peacefully, in fact, nearly smugly—dead—and slid in at his chest. The cord that binds me, while I live, he thought. And only I, or some very great witch, could see it.

He paused a moment, too, to regard himself from outside. Rather embarrassed, he reassessed his value. Aside from the leg, he was still well-made. And strong. He had—a couthness to him. And if not handsome, well, he was not an ugly fellow. He would do. He was worth quite a lot more than Yannis, since his crippling and invaliding out of the army, had reckoned. Yannis gave himself a friendly pat on the shoulder, before pursuing the cord home into his physical body, and the warm, kind blanket of sleep that waited there.

“You will never forget now,” she said, next morning. “Whenever you must ease the spirit of the leg, you need only release your spirit. Then the leg will never fret you, no matter that its physical self is gone and ? 67 ?

? Below the Sun Beneath ?

it sits in a jail of wood, just as you do in the prison of flesh we all inhabit till death sets us free.”

“Is it my soul you’ve let out, then?” he asked her. Since waking up again he had been less confident. “Isn’t that going to upset God?”

She made a noise of derision and dipped her bread in the honey.

“Do you think God so petty? Come soldier, God is God! How could we get these skills if it weren’t allowed? But no, besides. It’s not the soul. The soul sits deeper. It’s your earthly spirit only you can now release, which is why it has the shape of you and is male and young and strong. And too—as you’ve seen—nothing human, or very few, will ever espy you in that form. You will be invisible. Which, when you reach the city, can render you service.”

“You think I’ll use the knack to do harm.”

“Never,” she said. “Would I unlock it for you, if I thought so?”

Yannis shook his head. “No, Mother.”

“And I am your mother, now?”

He said, quietly, “She was yellow-haired and pretty. I don’t insult you, Missus. And anyway, I meant . . . ”

“There,” she said, and she smiled at him. She had a sunny smile, and all her teeth were amazingly sound and clean, especially for such an old granny as she was. “And now, Yannis, I will give you the second secret. Which is less secret than the first.”

He sat and looked warily at her as she told him. “You’ll gain the city by nightfall. There is a king there, who is a coward, a dunce, and as cruel as those failings can make a man. He has twelve girls by three different wives, all of these queens now dead, and mostly due to him. But the princesses, as we must call them, as we must call him a king—for they’re all the royalty we’ll get in such a land as this—are at a game the king is frightened of. He wants to be sure what they do, for un sure he is, and to spare. And when sure, to curb them. But he dares not take on the task himself.”

“This is the tale I heard elsewhere,” said Yannis, who had sat forward, partly eager to forget for a while about spirits and souls and God.

? 68 ?

? Tanith Lee ?

“You may well have heard it, for rumors have been planted and are growing wild. Already the king has hired mercenary men to spy on the girls and catch them out. These mercenaries were of all types, high, low, and lowest of the lowest, even one, they say, a prince, but doubtless a prince in the same way of this king being a king. All fail, and then the king gladly has them murdered. That is his bargain. The man who spies on and renders up the princesses, him the king will make his princely heir. But fail—and off with his head.”

“If it’s so hard to catch his daughters, then why try?”

“Because it is never hard at all. Those who watch the girls, or would do, the princesses drug asleep, being themselves well-versed in witchcraft. Whoever wants to find out anything must not taste a bite nor swallow a sip in that house, unless it be from the common dish or jug, and sampled by others. Or if he is forced, he must only pretend. And immediately after he must feign slumber or better—slip into a trance so sleeplike, so deathlike, it will convince the sternest critic. Then he may follow those girls as he wishes, and learn all and everything. Providing, of course, none can see him.”