Chapter 6
Six
For the next week, Friend sets the pace.
Slow. Leisurely. Curious. She stops to sniff each flower, each mound of dirt.
A rabbit crosses her path, and she growls, showing all her teeth.
She growls at rabbits the way she used to growl at girls, you remember with a wave of nausea.
The way the Fair Queen’s maidens would try to run from you, only for Friend to stop them—because she loved you, and you’d given her instruction.
You can’t change what her quarry used to be. You would, if it were possible, but that would require so much undoing—and how much undoing can be done before you’ve undone everything you’d want to leave intact?
No, you can’t change the past. But you can let her chase gophers until she doesn’t want to anymore. You can let her dig at the entrance to a warren. You can let her boof at raccoons and foxes. You can let her feel brave, and strong, and needed. Because she is.
* * *
In the next town, you sell a few grouses to the butcher. Friend wags her tail at your feet, tongue hanging out of her mouth, all pride and tender glee. I’ve still got it, she seems to say. I’m still great at what I do.
“This old lady helped you, eh?” The butcher peers over the counter at her. “Coin won’t mean anything to her. I got something else she’ll like.”
A bone.
A bone that fits perfectly in Friend’s mouth, that she wrestles with her teeth and paws.
Would the butcher be so kind if she knew what you’d done, what you’d trained your sweet old lady to hunt with you?
No—you know this—of course not. Her kindness wedges inside your chest like a splinter you can’t take out: it’ll sit there, and become a part of you, and never quite feel like it belongs.
Leaving the butcher, you walk deeper into town, Friend carrying that bone like a medal of honor.
The marketplace buzzes with its usual crowd, but a small audience has gathered around a raised platform.
You’re quite happy to walk on by, but when a rooster crows, Friend’s ears prick up, and she squeezes between strangers’ skirts and capes to watch the show.
Which is the strangest show you’ve ever seen.
A red rooster perches on the back of an orange cat, which perches on the back of a tawny donkey. The rooster keeps on crowing; then the cat joins in with a mournful yowl; then the donkey brays, and brays, and brays.
“Let’s get out of here, Friend,” you say. “The inn’s this way.”
But she doesn’t turn to you. She doesn’t even hear your voice. You whistle, and she glares at you like you’re a mannerless peasant who has interrupted the opera.
Well, all right.
For her sake, you’ll endure… whatever this is. A racket. A sign of the end times.
It goes on, and on, and on. The crowing and the yowling and the braying change rhythm, occasionally, but you’re doing your best not to listen.
You’re doing your best not to watch, either—the rhythmic motions of their heads and limbs, like a dance, send shivers up your spine. You’d rather look anywhere else.
So, you watch the marketplace. The parents holding the hands of their young children.
The crying toddlers unleashing volcanoes of misery, refusing to be soothed.
The couples walking arm in arm; the couples standing so close they might as well be sewn together at the hip.
The man holding out his wide, white wing for a group of children who stare in awe.
The man holding out his—
The world goes syrup-slow around you. Molasses plugs your ears.
He’s a tall, lithe fellow, with a wing like a swan’s where his left arm should be.
His legs are a man’s, his torso is a man’s, and he has lips, not a beak, and his eyes are human eyes, not the black beads of a swan’s.
It’s just the one, singular wing. How do you know him?
You don’t. You’ve never seen him before.
And yet you trust him. You’d trust him with your life.
You’d trust him with your heart. With your entire rotten, broken, beaten—
A little girl barrels into your hip. The syrup drains from your world. The cacophony of the animal trio returns; the marketplace is the marketplace again, and not a place where star-crossed strangers meet. The little girl squeals, then keeps running, right up to the one-winged man.
“Swan Prince, Swan Prince!” The little girl’s voice is so loud it carries through the square.
She runs into him too, and grasps his feathers in fistfuls to make sure she has his whole attention.
“Is it true you’re cursed? Is it true a witch put a spell on you? Is it true you’ll be this way forever?”
The girl’s harried, far less sprightly mother limps after her.
“I’m so sorry,” the mother says to you. She claps a hand on your shoulder. “She didn’t hurt you, did she?”
“What about True Love’s kiss, surely True Love’s kiss will make you a man again,” says the girl, in high-pitched desperation.
“My sister did make me a man again,” says the one-winged man. The Swan Prince. “And she worked very hard to make that happen.”
“But she didn’t do it right!”
“For heaven’s sake, child!” snaps the mother, before you can respond. When she lets you go, the warm squeeze of her palm lingers behind. “That’s the queen you’re talking about, have some respect!”
Your throat goes dry.
“It’s no worry, ma’am,” says the Swan Prince.
He holds up his human hand and smiles down at the little girl, whose expression is caught between excitement and shame.
“She did everything she could to make me and my brothers human again. She didn’t talk for six years.
She sewed shirts out of thorns. That’s True Love, isn’t it? ”
“I guess so,” says the little girl, “but then why isn’t your wing an arm again?”
“That’s enough, child,” says the mother. “Forgive us both, Your Grace.”
The mother takes her daughter’s hand and yanks her away. The Swan Prince begins to walk in the opposite direction, away from you. He never saw you at all.
“Wait,” you say, the word scraping quietly out of your throat on a wisp of air.
There’s barely any breath in your lungs. It’s as if he took that massive wing, slammed it into your diaphragm, and knocked the wind out of you.
“Wait—Favorite—wait.”
The crowd swallows him. You try to follow, but your knees wobble.
The thing you’ve wanted most—the thing you haven’t let yourself want—the thing you’ve dreaded, because what would you do if you got it?
—has happened, and you can’t move toward it, can’t move away from it, can’t move at all.
How long do you stand there, heart thrashing against your ribs, before Friend licks your palm?
You stare down at her. Her eyes are full of yearning.
“Ready to leave?” you ask.
She whines.
The performance is ongoing. The noise rattles your teeth. If you could get past it, you might see how much this means to her. You might even start to see her story’s inception.
Friend takes you by the shirtsleeve and makes you stand at the very front with her. And it’s too much. This crowd, these people, this endless caterwauling—You did it, Gertrude, you realize, tears brimming in your eyes, You did it, you did it, you did it.
* * *
At the inn, while Friend devours the steak you promised, you ask the serving girl if she knows anything about this Swan Prince.
“Oh, everyone knows him,” she says. She places a bowl of stew on the table in front of you, a bowl your potion ensures you can’t taste. Supply’s waning, though. I have to find a new apothecary. “The queen’s youngest brother. He’s the only one who didn’t run off the minute he was human again.”
“The others ran off?” you ask.
“You don’t know this story? Everyone here knows this story.”
“Ah, well,” you say, shrugging one shoulder, trying to seem friendly—aware you seem grizzled, sharp-edged—“I’m not from here.”
The serving girl eyes you, head to toe. “You really don’t know what happened?”
“I couldn’t begin to guess,” you say.
Another moment passes. Then, she tells the story:
“Once, many years ago now, our king was riding through the woods of another land and came upon a lake where he hoped to rest. His guards found a peasant girl hiding in a hovel, and she was so beautiful he fell instantly, madly in love with her. No other girl would do, not for him, so he decided to take her as his bride. Well, she put up a hell of a fight, but she wouldn’t tell him what was wrong.
She couldn’t speak, but somehow she got him to understand she couldn’t leave without the six swans that swam in the water.
They weren’t merely swans, you see—they were her brothers. ”
“No kidding,” you whisper, as if surprised.
“Her brothers had been cursed,” the serving girl says. “And their sister had to be silent for six years, and sew each brother a shirt of thorns, to make them human again.”
“That’s quite an ordeal.”
“That’s just the beginning. So our king brought her whole family home with him and made her his queen.
His mother, though—she was furious, and did everything she could to make him hate our Silent Queen.
Even tried to tell him the queen was a cannibal who planned to eat her own children.
Everyone knows only witches are cannibals, and the king knew he hadn’t married a witch.
Nothing she did could move his heart, so she spread rumors in the country that the queen was a witch, and made us all believe it, and well… ”
“… Well?”
“Someone kidnapped her, and planned to burn her at the stake,” says the serving girl. “It nearly got that far. At the last moment, though, she threw those thorn-shirts over each swan, and each swan became a man, and each man insisted our queen wasn’t a witch. She was just trying to break a spell.”
“What happened to the king’s mother?”
“Burned her instead.”
You exhale a long breath. “Quite a story,” you say.
“Oh, it doesn’t end there,” says the serving girl. “The king was so horrified by what his own mother had done to his bride, he fell down dead of a broken heart, right on the spot.”
Oh, Gertrude, no, you think. Damn it all, can any of us be happy?
“I see,” you mutter. “And the Swan Prince… why does he still have a wing?”
“Oh, that part,” the serving girl laughs.
“At the time the queen was kidnapped, she only had one sleeve left to sew on one shirt… But she had no way of finishing it. So she threw an unfinished shirt on him. No sleeve, no arm. He seems happy enough, though. Lives in the woods and visits town pretty often.”
With a shrug, she walks away to serve other customers.
Your mind buzzes.
Friend presses her face into your thigh, but you barely feel her.
You’re so tangled in the tapestry of Favorite’s story (and who wouldn’t be?) that you do not realize her own story is just about to begin.