Kissing the Witch (4 page)

My stepmother lay on her back and grew so limp I could see the bones below her eyes. When I brought her red-bound books and jewelled earrings she turned her face away. I took to walking in the
orchard on my own again, and once or twice boredom drove me a little way into the forest that lay beyond the castle walls. Fear enlivened those afternoons; I kept my back to the light and turned my
head at every creak of wind. The forest was like a foreign court, with its own unspoken rules. The birches moved to a music only they could hear; the oaks wanted for nothing, needed no touch.

As another year stretched into spring it was not my stepmother who lay swollen and sick, but my father. He curled up on his side like a bear troubled by flies. I stood by his bed, on and off,
but he was past caring. He cursed the doctors, he cursed his enemies, he cursed the two wives who had failed him, and finally with a wet mouth he cursed the son who had never come.

My stepmother had me called to the throne room where she sat, huddled in ermine, fist closed around the sceptre.

Say that I am queen, she said.

You are my father’s wife, I replied.

I will be queen after he is dead, she said.

I made no reply.

Say that I am queen, she repeated, her fingers whitening around the sceptre.

If you really were, I told her, it would need no saying.

She stood on the pedestal above me. The moment I am a widow, she said, I could have you cast out.

Indeed.

If you cross me in this, she said confidingly, I could have a huntsman take you into the forest, chop out your heart, and bring it back on a plate.

Strong meat, I murmured.

I can do it, she howled. I have the power.

I said nothing.

She lashed out with the sceptre, but I stepped back, and it crashed to the floor. I was gone before it rolled to a halt.

That night I heard many feet hammer a track to my father’s room. I flattened my face into my pillow. I waited. No sound cutting through the dark castle; no final word for me. The linen lay
against my eyelids, still dry.

I decided not to stay to see what the day of the funeral would bring, which courtiers’ eyes would shine with flattery, and which glitter with violence. I decided to leave it all to her,
and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold pieces and slipped away.

If it had been winter still, that first night would have finished me; only the mild air was my salvation. Wider than I ever imagined, the forest was home to creatures I couldn’t put names
to, things with silver eyes and audible teeth; for all my furs, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. By sunrise I was more lost than any nestling. All my plans came to nothing: I never found the
family of the maid who had raised me, nor an empty cottage to live in. Everything I put my tongue to tasted like poison.

After wandering half starved and half crazed for more days than I can remember, I had the good fortune to be taken in by a gang of woodsmen.

They put water to my stained lips and asked who I was. The truth was quicker than a lie, so I told it. They nodded. They had heard of the death of the king. One of them asked what was in my
skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.

That first night they fed me, and every other night I fed them. Though squat and surly, with earth in every line of their faces, these were not bad men, and considering how little my condition
entitled me to, they treated me royally.

I guessed how to cook the food they threw on the table, gathering together from the shattered jigsaw of memory everything I must have seen the castle servants do ten thousand times. Gradually I
learned how to keep hunger at bay and disease from the door: all the sorcery of fire and iron and water.

Hard work was no hardship to me; it kept the pictures at bay. Whenever I slackened or stopped to rest by the fire, I was haunted by the image of my stepmother. My father was only a tiny picture
in my mind, shut away like a miniature in a locket. But his young widow stalked behind my eyes, growing tall or wide as I let my mind dwell on her, now smiling, now spitting, ever stretching like a
shadow against a wall. I pictured her life as the queen of the castle, and it was strangely familiar: long days in charge of fire, and iron, and water. Her hands would stay smooth as lilies while
mine were scrubbed raw day by day, but we were living much the same kind of life.

The men never asked what was in my mind, not even when I got lost in a daze and let the broth burn. They let me dream by the fire like a cat.

This was only a lull, a time out of time. You see, I knew my stepmother would find me. The thread between us was stretched thin, wound round trees and snagged in thickets, but never broken.
Somehow I trusted she would track me down and kill me.

But when she came at last she seemed to have changed. I looked out over the half door one summer day and there she stood in the clearing, hitching her horse to a tree. There was nothing of the
wife about her when she smiled. May I come into your house? she asked.

I said no and turned away. But when I had stoked up the fire and boiled the shirts and chopped the turnips, I went back to the door, out of curiosity, and she was still there, with her back to
the tree.

I let her in for a minute. She said how thin I had grown. I said I was well. We said not a word of what was past. She said, I keep breaking mirrors.

Sitting by the fire with her I shut my eyes and it felt like old times. She stood behind me and laced up my stays tightly, the way I could never lace them on my own.

When they came home that night the men found me alone in a sort of stupor. First they were anxious, to hear my breath come so quick and shallow, and then they were angry, to see the turnips
curling on the table and no food in the pot. They said my stepmother had to be a sorceress, to find me so deep in the forest.

Some weeks went by and I was myself again, scrubbing and mashing and earning my keep. The visit began to seem like another one of my daydreams.

One afternoon I was resting on a tree stump outside the cottage, snatching a moment of sun on my back, when I heard the jangle of her harness. This time, she knelt beside me, and there was
nothing of the queen about her. I haven’t had a night’s sleep since you left, she said; it feels like dancing in shoes of red-hot iron. Will you come home now?

I said, No, and turned my head away. She took out her jewelled comb and began to draw it through my hair, patient with all the burrs and knots my new life had put in it. I shut my eyes and let
the points of the comb dig into my scalp, scraping down to the kernel of memory.

When they came home that night the men found me curled around the tree stump on the damp grass. They lifted me up and told me that my stepmother must be a witch to put such poison of idleness in
my head. They warned me to stay inside and shut the door to all comers.

For some weeks I did what I was told, kept house and kept quiet. My hair knotted again, my stays hung loose.

But one afternoon in early autumn I was troubled by a whiff of a scent of overpowering sharpness. I could not remember what it was; all I knew was that I could hardly stand it. I turned, and
there at the half door my stepmother stood, an apple in her upturned hand.

Stepmother, yes, that was the word, but there was nothing of the mother about her.

The apple was half ripe. One side was green, the other red. She bit into the green side and swallowed and smiled. I took the apple from her without a word, bit into the red side, and began to
choke. Fear and excitement locked in struggle in my throat, and blackness seeped across my eyes. I fell to the ground.

It was all white, where I went; like warm snow, packed into the angles and crevices of my body. There was no light, or noise, or colour. I thought I was treasure, stowed away for safe
keeping.

When I came to I was jolting along in an open coffin. Sunlight stabbed my eyelids. The woodsmen were bearing me down the mountain, out of the woods. I gagged, coughed, sat up. How their eyes
rounded; how they laughed to see me breathing. But lie down, one said, you are not well yet. Until you were poisoned we had been forgetting who you are, said a second; now we’re taking you to
another kingdom, where they’ll know how to treat a princess. Lie down and rest, little one, said a third; we have a long way to go.

My head was still swimming; I thought I might faint again. But my mouth was full of apple, slippery, still hard, vinegary at the edges. I could feel the marks of my own teeth on the skin. I bit
down, and juice ran to the corners of my lips. It was not poisoned. It was the first apple of the year from my father’s orchard. I chewed till it was eaten up and I knew what to do.

I made them set me down, and I got out of the box, deaf to their clamour. I stared around me till I could see the castle, tiny against the flame-coloured forest, away up the hill. I turned my
face towards it, and started walking.

In the orchard, I asked,

Who were you

before you married my father?

And she said, Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of a handkerchief.

T
HE REASON
I would have killed you to stay a queen is that I have no right to be a queen. I have been a fraud from the beginning.

I was born a maid, daughter to a maid, in the court of a widow far across the mountains. How could you, a pampered princess, know what it’s like to be a servant, a pair of hands, a
household object? To be no one, to own nothing, to owe every last mouthful to those you serve?

All our queen loved in the world was her horse and her daughter.

The horse was white, a magnificent mare with a neck like an oak. The princess was born in the same month of the same year as I was. But where I was dark, with thick brows that overshadowed my
bright eyes, the princess was fair. Yellowish, I thought her; slightly transparent, as if the sun had never seen her face. All she liked to do was walk in the garden, up and down the shady paths
between the hedges. Once when I was picking nettles for soup, I saw her stumble on the gravel and bruise her knee. The queen ran into the garden at the first cry, lifted her on to her lap and wiped
two jewelled tears away with her white handkerchief. Another time I was scrubbing a hearth and stood up to stretch my back, when laughter floated through the open window. I caught sight of the two
of them cantering past on the queen’s horse, their hands dancing in its snowy mane.

My own mother died young and tired, having made me promise to be a good maid for the rest of my days. I kissed her waxy forehead and knew that I would break my word.

But for the moment I worked hard, kept my head low and my apron clean. At last I was raised to the position of maid to the princess. Telling me of my good fortune, the queen rested her smooth
hand for half a moment on my shoulder. If your mother only knew, she said, how it would gladden her heart.

The young princess was a gentle mistress, never having needed to be anything else. The year she came of age, the queen received ambassadors from all the neighbouring kingdoms. The prince she
chose for her daughter lived a long day’s ride away. He was said to be young enough. The girl said neither yes nor no; it was not her question to answer. She stood very still as I tried the
bridal dresses on her for size. My hands looked like hen’s claws against the shining brocade. The queen told her daughter not to be sad, never to be wilful, and always to remember her royal
blood. I listened, my mouth full of pins.

If I had had such a mother I would never have left her to journey into a strange country. I would have fought and screamed and clung to the folds of her cloak. But then, my blood is not
royal.

Ahead of her daughter the queen sent gold and silver and a box full of crystals. She took the princess into the chamber where I was packing furs, and there she took out a knife and pressed the
point into her own finger. I could hardly believe it; I almost cried out to stop her. The queen let three drops of blood fall on to her lawn handkerchief. She tucked this into the girl’s
bosom, saying that as long as she kept the handkerchief, she could come to no great harm.

And then the queen led her daughter out into the courtyard, and swung her up on to her own great horse. I would come with you myself, she said, if only my kingdom were secure. In these troubled
times, you will be safer where you’re going. In my place, you will have my own horse to carry you, and your own maid to ride behind you.

This was the first I had heard of it. I went to pack my clean linen. The rest of my bits and pieces I left under the mattress for the next maid; I had nothing worth taking into a far country. In
the courtyard, a stableman hoisted me on to a nag weighed down with all the princess’s paraphernalia.

I watched the queen and the princess kiss goodbye in the early-morning sunlight. The horse’s mane shone like a torch, but where the mother’s forehead rested against the
daughter’s, the sun behind them was blotted out.