Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (40 page)

from you. Not a call, not a question about how I was doing, and then the next thing I know Mr. Spinner is crying and telling me you’re in the hospital. I called the hospital and they told me you wouldn’t be going home. They told me I’d better get here as soon as I could.

I know, finish the story already. Okay. The girl hears that her

mother is in the hospital, right, and her first reaction is
good, let her
rot
. Then she thought, the house is empty, here’s my chance.

I went to the house yesterday, Mother, to collect a few things. Do

• 330 •

• Erzebet YellowBoy •

you know what I found? I could hardly believe it. You picked that

apple up after I left, didn’t you? You picked it up and put it on your dressing table. It’s still there, all rotten, right beside the tarnished comb. I saw that apple and how you’d moved it, and I finally figured out what I could do.

Here. I brought you something. This is the story you wouldn’t let

me tell, and this is how it ends. I smashed your mirror, Mother. I

brought one of Mr. Spinner’s hammers with me to the house, was

going to break open the door of the shed and get some stuff out of

there. Instead, I used it to break your mirror. Don’t be mad, there was no way I could have carried the whole thing.

Here, mom. Uncurl your fingers, let me put this in your hand. Be

careful, I taped the edges but they might still be sharp.

Look. It’s a piece of your mirror. I brought it for you. That’s right, take it. Can you hold it up? Okay, good, now you can see yourself.

Surprised, aren’t you. Well, I told you, Mother. This is a story about love.

••

Erzebet YellowBoy
was born in America, but now lives in a

tumbledown cottage in rural France with her husband and a posse of

wild cats. She is the co-founder and long-time editor of
Cabinet des
Fées
, an online journal of fairy tales, and the founder of Papaveria Press, a micro-press specializing in hand bound, limited editions

of mythic prose and poetry. Her work has appeared in
Fantasy

Magazine, Not One Of Us, Electric Velocipede
, and
Clarkesworld
Magazine
, and in the anthologies
Japanese Dreams, Running with the
Pack
, and
Haunted Legends
. Her novel
Sleeping Helena
was released by Prime Books in 2010, and she has several novellas forthcoming

from Masque Books. Erzebet is also an artist and a bookbinder. Her

work can be found at www.erzebet.com.

••

• 331 •

•

“Blanchefleur” was inspired by one of my favorite fairy tales,

Madame D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat.” In D’Aulnoy’s version,

or the translation of it that I read as a child, a king wishing to pass his kingdom to his sons asks each of them to find the smallest dog,

the finest linen, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Each of the princes goes on this quest, but of course it is the youngest who succeeds, with the help of a mysterious white cat who rules a cat-kingdom. She gives him the small dog and the fine linen in walnut

shells, and in the end, she herself becomes the most beautiful woman.

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

•

• 335 •

•

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

• 337 •

• Blanchefleur •

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

sweethearts, but the village girls assumed he was slow and had no

prospects, even though he was the miller’s son. So he was always

alone, and the truth was, he seemed to prefer it.

• 338 •

• Theodora Goss •

The miller was the only one who still called him Ivan, although he

had given his son up as hopeless, and even he secretly believed the

boy was slow and stupid.

This was how things stood when the miller rode to market to buy a

new horse. The market was held in the nearest town, on a fine summer day that was also the feast-day of Saint Ivan, so the town was filled with stalls selling livestock, vegetables from the local farms, leather and rope harnesses, embroidered linen, woven baskets. Men and women in

smocks lined up to hire themselves for the coming harvest. There were strolling players with fiddles or pipes, dancers on a wooden platform, and a great deal of beer—which the miller drank from a tankard.

The market went well for him. He found a horse for less money

than he thought he would have to spend, and while he was paying

for his beer, one of the maids from the tavern winked at him. She was plump, with sunburnt cheeks, and she poured his beer neatly, leaving a head of foam that just reached the top of the tankard. He had not

thought of women, not in that way, since his wife had drowned.

She had been one of those magical women, beautiful as the dawn,

slight as a willow-bough and with a voice like birds singing, that are perhaps too delicate for this world. That kind of woman gets into

a man’s blood. But lately he had started to notice once again that

other women existed, and that there were other things in the world

than running a mill. Like his son, who was a great worry to him.

What would the idiot—Ivan, he reminded himself—what would he

do when his father was gone, as we must all go someday? Would he

be able to take care of himself?

He had saddled his horse and was fastening a rope to his saddle

so the new horse could be led, when he heard a voice he recognized

from many years ago. “Hello, Stephen Miller,” it said.

He turned around and bowed. “Hello, Lady.”

She was tall and pale, with long gray hair that hung to the backs

of her knees, although she did not look older than when he had last

seen her, at his wedding. She wore a gray linen dress that, although it was midsummer, reminded him of winter.

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• Blanchefleur •

“How is my nephew? This is his name day, is it not?”

“It is, Lady. As to how he is—” The miller told her. He might not

have, if the beer had not loosened his tongue, for he was a proud man and he did not want his sister-in-law to think his son was doing badly.

But with the beer and his worries, it all came out—the days Ivan

spent staring out of windows or walking through the countryside,

how the local farmers thought of him, even that name—Idiot.

“I warned you that no good comes of a mortal marrying a fairy

woman,” said the Lady. “But those in love never listen. Send my

nephew to me. I will make him my apprentice for three years, and at

the end of that time we shall see. For his wages, you may take this.”

She handed him a purse. He bowed in acknowledgment, saying,

“I thank you for your generosity—” but when he straightened again,

she was already walking away from him. Just before leaving the inn

yard, she turned back for a moment and said, “The Castle in the

Forest, remember. I will expect him in three days’ time.”

The miller nodded, although she had already turned away again.

As he rode home, he looked into the purse she had given him—in it

was a handful of leaves.

He wondered how he was going to tell his son about the bargain

he had made. But when he reached home, the boy was sitting at the

kitchen table whittling something out of wood, and he simply said,

“I have apprenticed you for three years to your aunt, the Lady of the Forest. She expects you in three days’ time.”

The boy did not say a word. But the next morning, he put all of his

possessions—they were few enough—into a satchel, which he slung

over his shoulder. And he set out.

In three days’ time, Ivan walked through the forest, blowing on the

whistle he had carved. He could hear birds calling to each other in

the forest. He whistled to them, and they whistled back. He did not

know how long his journey would take—if you set out for the Castle

in the Forest, it can take you a day, or a week, or the rest of your life.

But the Lady had said she expected him in three days, so he thought

he would reach the Castle by the end of the day at the latest.

• 340 •

• Theodora Goss •

Before he left, his father had looked again in the purse that the

Lady had given him. In it was a pile of gold coins—as the miller