Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(62)

Emer glided onwards, unaware that her companions had dropped behind. She slowed, and descended, carefully avoiding the shifting mass of what appeared to be large rabbits—no, hares kicking at each in occasional ill-temper. She alighted on the shabby red carpet leading to the dais upon which a cushioned throne was set. Three short steps separated her from black-booted toes.

Lifting her gaze, Emer took in the woman’s face, gypsy-hued, marred with long-healed scars; her hair and eyes like jet, lips like a damson plum.

And the features somehow familiar, yet Emer could not place them. The woman in a long charcoal dress, with carmined nails, smiled down at the raven who was a girl. Emer shuddered deep inside her hol ow-boned body. She wished to fly, to flee, but her limbs would not obey.

The dark one limped down the stairs to gather up the bird. She tucked Emer under her arm as one might a chicken, and stroked her with a hand almost entirely curled in upon itself. Emer recoiled, willing her talons to lash out and tear, her beak to stab and shred, but her body was contrary. All she could do was shiver. Clicking her fingers, the woman produced a chain as fine as thread from thin air.

The thing shone and shimmered as she twisted it twice around the raven’s right foot. Emer watched as the metal fused. The other end was looped through the intricately carved rose-and-briar pattern adorning the top of the throne.

The woman’s voice, when she spoke, was strange, a mix of the sweet and the discordant—only later would the girl realize it came of the scars at the base of her throat.

“Now. Now you are secure, my little one, the game has begun.”

? 198 ?

? Angela Slatter ?

Emer, finding her own voice unaffected by whatever paralyzed her body, gave an answering cry.

“Come, come—you want to help me, don’t you? And if I take my fun at the same time, then what harm?” She laughed. “Would you like a story, my dear one? My sweet sister’s darling child? Shall we begin thus? Once upon a time . . . ”

And Emer listened as her unsuspected aunt told of two sisters, one swan-white, the other raven-dark. All the while the girl wondered how long she would be in this shape. How long before all she began to think of were bugs and beetles, worms and carrion. How long it would take for someone to find her. And Emer despaired because she knew her parents believed the Black Bride defeated and dead.

They would never find their raven-daughter because they would never think to hunt for a ghost.

The girl spent many months feathered and tethered.

Each night she heard the Black Bride’s version of the tale Emer’s governess had told in hushed tones. Her mother had tenderly sworn it was no more than a story, and even though Emer pretended to believe her, she had seen the evidence on the Queen’s very flesh: the blemishes around her neck where the gold band clutched too tightly, the left hand missing its smallest finger where her wings had been clipped so she would not flee the palace pond. By the end of her first month in captivity, Emer was acquainted with every cadence of the new account as surely as she was her own heartbeat.

How the Black Bride’s mother had two perfectly serviceable husbands, one after the other, and produced one lovely daughter with each. How both girls were raised with equal affection, and how, when an exceedingly fine suitor—a king-to-be—came a-courting those very girls, this very same mother refused to choose between her daughters, so the dark girl had no choice but to make her own fate.

How the prince had made his preference for the snowy girl known— and the girl of shadows had determined her will would prevail.

It wasn’t as if she’d harmed her sister so terribly, said the Black ? 199 ?

? Flight ?

Bride with a shrug. Turned her into a swan, certainly, but as she was sure Emer could attest, a few feathers never hurt anyone. And hadn’t the swan-sister’s revenge been a terrible over-reaction?

When she came to this point in the tale, the Black Bride always fingered the scars on her cheeks, neck, breasts, where spikes hammered into the barrel had pierced her as she was rolled up hill and down dale until that barrel had finally hit a tree and burst asunder, leaving her bleeding and dying, the tiny child within her withering as surely as an ice-lily on a summer’s day.

How, when she’d thought her last breath was spent, she was found by a woman, a witch—not kindly—who mended her and taught her greater things than she’d ever imagined. Marvelous magics, legends of objects that might grant every wish, but none of this imparted fast enough for her wanting or wishing. There was still much to learn when the Black Bride held a pillow over the old woman’s face and stifled her last breath, but the girl was simply tired of waiting for her to step aside and let a new order begin.