Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Each horse carries a saddlebag full of the usual supplies: water, money, royal seals. Clothes, canteens. Blankets, bullets. Your gun.
Then there are the more unusual ones:
In Cyrus’s, a magic pot that will cook any food you desire.
In yours, a wolf pelt.
“I know you hate it,” you say. “But I had an inkling we might need it.”
He smiles. “I trust your inklings.”
Also in yours, a pouch of seeds. The pouch of seeds. All this time, and still you haven’t planted them. Your land is still a mess, and your land didn’t feel like quite the right place. Now you know there is somewhere else for these seeds and you intend to take them there.
* * *
Cyrus isn’t used to riding hard, long hours, but he doesn’t complain about the outdoors.
No, he loves the outdoors. Sometimes you catch him with eyes closed, head tilted back, soaking in the autumn sun like a blossom.
Other times you catch him— again, with his eyes closed—and his wing outstretched, catching the wind.
What joy it must be, to be two things, to live in between.
What pain, too—to be rendered neither by sheer virtue of being both in a world that does not allow both.
That night, you camp in a wide open field beneath a singular, statuesque oak. Before dawn, you plant a blueberry seed beneath it.
* * *
Three nights later, you awake with a gasp and dart upright. Moments later, Cyrus’s hand is on your shoulder, his voice is in your ear, shushing and cooing, promising you’re safe.
“What was it?” he asks. “What did you dream of?”
“I can’t,” you choke.
Can’t speak of it. Can’t relive it a second time in the telling. Can’t ever let him know. Can’t calm your heart, can’t catch your breath, can’t clear your mind.
He gets you to lie down with your back against his chest, and he drapes his wing over your waist. Not just over your waist—over your arm, your shoulder, your hip, half your thigh. The breadth of flesh and feathers covers you like a blanket.
“Once upon a time,” he mutters in your ear, and he tells you the safest, sweetest story you’ve ever heard, about a bird who fell in love with a boy.
Before riding out in the morning, you plant a cucumber seed in the ground where you slept.
* * *
A month into your journey, you come upon the tower in the clearing.
Only the most stubborn leaves cling to the trees. Crisp, brown, dried-out leaves blanket the ground in the woods, but here in the meadow, the leaves are few and far between, blown in by the wind.
You water the horses at the trickling stream and kneel down to wash your face.
“Cook, little pot, cook,” mutters Cyrus.
The magic pot has been a blessing. It offers whatever food they each desire without needing to ask for it; it stops as soon as Cyrus bids it. Just as the pot begins bubbling, you cast your husband a sharp look and shake your head.
“Not here,” you say, “it’s not safe.”
“We’re not close to the tower.”
“A witch lives there, love. We can’t rest here.”
“A witch? You’re certain? Stop, little pot.”
The bubbling ceases. Having not had enough time to make much else, it produces only one hunk of bread for each of you. With the canteens filled and the horses refreshed, you help Cyrus back into the saddle, then mount your own.
“We’ll ride for a bit, then rest elsewhere,” you promise. “The witch comes and goes. There’s a girl in the tower who throws down her hair like a ladder.”
“A girl in the tower?” Cyrus frowns. “A prisoner?”
“I don’t know anything more than what I said.”
“… A daughter, do you think?”
A cold shiver runs down your spine. You turn back to look at the tower, with no one in its window, no one at its base, and your stomach turns. A daughter. Where is Snow White? Did the Fair Queen send someone else after her? Or did the witch’s child outsmart the witch?
“If a witch ever raised a child,” you say, speaking carefully, choosing each word to avoid the magic noose, “I’d fear for that child.”
* * *
In the next village, you stop at a tavern for the night. Cyrus writes a letter to Gertrude to ask if anything can be done for the sleeping princess. It seems like a useless question to you. You think he ought to let it go.
But then again—useless and let it go have been said to him, too.
While the village sleeps, you plant blackberry seeds outside the tavern.
* * *
Another month in, you come to the castle of the sleeping princess.
“I’d heard of this,” says Cyrus. “Knew it was nearby, too, but… Never came to see it.”
The horses snort and nose the dying grass while you and Cyrus gaze on.
In the daylight, the broken windows and ruined stone are even more pitiable.
A wall of thorns surrounds the castle, as tall as five men and too thick to see through.
The tangled thorns grasp each other and don’t let go, too dense to break through without magic. Or a very good sword, you think.
Woodpeckers fill the silence, a silence not unlike that of a graveyard—sad and powerless, full of grief and pity.
And yet life here grows on, and what can you do?
This still isn’t your story. You may be a prince now, but you cannot give her True Love’s kiss.
Neither can Cyrus. Cyrus can’t even give that to you.
“Is that blood?” Cyrus asks.
He points and you follow his arm to a section of bramble where someone clearly got stuck trying to crawl through. A shred of ruined fabric knifed to a thorn gutters in the breeze.
“Must have hurt,” you mutter.
You click your tongue and with a snort, your horse begins to walk on.
“Someone should be guarding her, don’t you think?” He looks at you, certain that this is good and right, yet uncertain of its actionability.
“The wall of thorns will keep her safe.”
“From people, yes, but what about animals? The windows are broken. You’ve told me bats roost there.”
“And how do you suppose a guard would get through the bramble to fight off the bats and raccoons?”
Though his horse walks beside yours, he looks back over his shoulder at the castle.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Just feels wrong to do nothing.”
* * *
That night, the little pot gives you an apple, with bright red skin that crunches perfectly under your teeth and juice so deliciously tart it squeezes your eyes shut. You hadn’t thought you wanted an apple, and yet an apple you were given, and an apple was just the thing.
“Do you know, when we first met,” says Cyrus, “or rather—when we met the second time, when you came to the cottage… You looked hollow, Hans. Like someone had opened you up and taken everything out.”
It doesn’t surprise you to hear that. It doesn’t surprise you that he noticed, either.
“I like seeing you… like this. I don’t know how to say it. Little by little, you filled yourself back up. You’ve changed. For the better, I think.”
Six seeds lay waiting in the core of the apple.
Five of them you plant while Cyrus sleeps, but the sixth seed—the sixth seed you wrap in a scrap of cloth and tuck deep into the saddlebag.
The sixth seed, like the sixth swan, is yours.
The sixth seed, unlike the sixth swan, is something you can keep.
* * *
The snow comes early and the snow slows you down.
* * *
You hold him in the night while he shivers. A fire and all of the blankets are barely enough. He asks for the wolf pelt even though he hates it. Its added warmth sears into both your bones as you drape it across your bodies.
“We’ll stay a while in the next village,” you promise. The wind screeches beyond the tent. “I’m sorry. We should have stopped in the last one.”
“My fault,” he says, teeth knocking. “I’m the one who wanted to press on.”
You bury your face against his neck. “Hot tea?”
The little pot cooks hot meals, as many as you ask for. If you can just get through tonight. If you can just make it through this squall. If you can just make it to the next village, and rest until merciful winter relents. If, if, if.
“Cook, little pot,” he says, “cook.”
* * *
“Going to freeze my feathers off,” says Cyrus, dismounting his horse.
You dismount as well and pay the inn’s stablehand to see them cared for overnight.
The snow is waist-high, thick and heavy, walling in the path to the inn’s door.
Inside, heat welcomes you, and next, a bed welcomes you, and next, Cyrus’s body welcomes you, arm around your shoulders, legs around your waist, both of you moving with the rhythmic ease of straw spinning into gold.
“Still frozen?” you ask, snatching his ear between your teeth and sighing.
“A bit,” he says. “Got an idea, though.”
He rolls you over onto your back, his hand on your broad chest, his hips rolling down against your body. With one hand, you encircle his delicate wrist.
With the other, you sink your fingers into his feathers, deepening your touch until you find skin to rub against. You’d be a sky for him if you could.
You’d be a lake. If you could clap your hands and turn your fingers into minnows, your palms into mussels, every strand of hair into eelgrass, you would.
You’d make your body into a broad expanse for him to swim across.
You’d be his home, if he let you. You’d be his True Love if only things weren’t what they are.
* * *
A few weeks later, in another village, he lobs a snowball at the back of your head.
It explodes into powder down the back of your shirt.
Seeing the look on your face, he takes off running, nearly trips on a patch of ice—but you catch him, lift him up, spin him around, and heave him over your shoulder.
He cackles, even as you toss him into a snow bank, where the imprint of his wing would make anyone believe in angels.
* * *
Come spring, you and Cyrus find yourselves once again in the woods, riding down a muddy, well-trod path. Puddles form in the tracks of previous travelers and their horses. Rain drips from the leaves and rolls right off Cyrus’s wing.