Ellen Datlow: Black Heart, Ivory Bones

The other paying out had been simple, too.

“In God’s name—” he said, holding her arm’s length, shocked and angry, even though he knew it happened frequently enough.

“I don’t mind it,” she said. He could see, even by the fire and candlelight, she did not. How forgiving she is — no, how understanding of human things .

For the girl’s mother had sold her, at the age of twelve, to an old woman in the forests.

“I was lucky. She was a wise-woman. And she wanted an apprentice not a slave.”

In a few weeks, it seemed, the girl was calling the old woman “Gran,” while Gran called her Goldy. “She was better than any mother to me,” said the girl. “I loved her dearly. She left me everything when she died. All this. And her craft, that she’d taught me. But we only had two years together, I’d have liked more. Never mind. As she used to say, ‘Some’s more than none.’ It was like that with my hair.”

“She called you Goldy for your hair.”

“No. Because she said I was ‘good as gold and bad as butter.’”

“What?”

“She was always saying daft funny things. She’d make you smile or think, even if your heart was broken. She had the healing touch, too. I don’t have it.”

“You did, for me.”

“Ah, but I loved you.”

After an interval, during which the bed became, again, unmade, the girl told Urlenn that her fine hair, which would never grow and which, therefore, she cut so short, was better than none, according to Gran.

“It wasn’t unkind, you see. But pragmatic.”

She often startled him with phrases, words — she could read. (Needless to say, Gran had taught her.)

“Why bad as butter?”

“Because butter makes you want too much of it.”

“I can’t get too much of you. Shall I call you Goldy — or the other name?”

“Whatever you like. Why don’t you find a name for me yourself? Then I’ll be that just for you.”

“I can’t name you — like my dog!”

“That’s how parents name their children. Why not lovers?”

He thought about the name, as he went about the male chores of the cottage, splitting logs, hunting the forest, mending a scythe. Finally he said, diffidently, “I’d like to call you Flarva.”

“That’s elegant. I’d enjoy that.”

He thought she would have enjoyed almost anything. Not just because she loved him, but because she was so easy with the world. He therefore called her Flarva, not explaining yet it had been his mother’s name. His mother who had died when Urlenn was only six.

Urlenn had sometimes considered if his father’s flights of fantasy would have been less if Flarva had lived. The Dad ( Yes, I shall call you that in my head ) had not been king then. Kingship came with loss, after, and also power and wealth, and all the obligations of these latter things.

Other men would have turned to other women. The Dad had turned to epics, ballads, myths and legends. He filled his new-sprung court with song-makers, actors and storytellers. He began a library, most of the contents of which — unlike this young girl — he could not himself read. He inaugurated a fashion for the marvelous and magical. If someone wanted to impress the Dad, they had only to “prove,” by means of an illuminated scroll, that they took their partial descent from one of the great heroes or heroines — dragon-slayers, spinners of gold, tamers of unicorns. Indeed, only four years ago the king had held a unicorn hunt. (It was well attended.) One of the beasts had been seen, reportedly, drinking from a fountain on the lands of the Dad. Astonishingly, they never found it. Rumors of it still circulated from time to time. And those who claimed to have seen it, if they told their tale just in that way, were rewarded.

Was the king mad? Was it his brain — or only some avoiding grief at the reality of the brutal world?

“Or is it his genius?” said the girl — Flarva — when he informed her of his father’s nature. “When the dark comes, do we sit in the dark, or light candles?”

How , he thought, I love you .

And strangely, she said then, “There, you love him.”

“I suppose I do. But he irks me. I wish I could go off. Look at me here. I should have got home by now.”

He had not, despite all this, yet revealed to her that the Dad was also the king. Did she still assume his father was only some run-down baron or knight? Urlenn was not sure. Flarva saw through to things.

“Well, when you leave, then you must,” was all she said in the end.

He had been up by now to the town, a wandering little village with a church and a tavern and not much else. Here he found a man with a mule who could take a letter to the next post of civilization. From there it would travel to the king. The letter explained Urlenn had been detained in the forests. He had only one piece of paper, and could not use it up on details — he begged his lordly sire to pardon him, and await his excuses when he could come home to give them.

Afterward, Urlenn had realized, this had all the aura of some Dad-delighting sacred quest, even a spell.

Would he have to go to the king eventually and say, “A witch enchanted me?”

He did not think he could say that. It would be a betrayal of her. Although he knew she would not mind.

There was no clock in the cottage, or in the village-town. Day and night followed each other. The green thickened in clusters on the trees, and the stars were thinner and more bright on the boughs of darkness. Then a golden border stitched itself into the trees. The stars waxed thicker again, and the moon more red.

Urlenn liked going to the village market with Flarva, bartering the herbs and apples and vegetables from her garden plot, and strange patchwork and knitted coats she made, one of which he now gallantly wore.

He liked the coat. He liked the food she cooked. He liked milking the adventurous goat, which sometimes went calling on a neighbor’s he-goat two miles off and had to be brought back. He liked the pale cat, which came to sleep with them in the hour before dawn. He liked woodcutting. The song of birds and their summer stillness. The stream that sparkled down the slope. The gaunt old tower. Morning and evening.

Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was to find in her always the best — of herself, himself, and all the world.

One evening, when the lamp had just been lit, she straightened up from the pot over the fire, and he saw her as if he never had.

He sat there, dumbfounded, as if not once, in the history of any land, had such a thing ever before happened.

Sensing this, she turned and looked at him with her amused, kindly, feral eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Flarva?”

“I was waiting to see how long you’d take to notice.”

“How far gone is it?”

“Oh, four months or so. Not so far. You haven’t been too slow.”

“Slow? I’ve been blind. But you — you’re never ill.”

“The herbs are good for this, too.”

“But — it must weigh on you.”

“It— It —”

“He, then — or she, then.”

“They, then.”

“They?”

“Twins I am carrying, love of my heart.”

“How do you know? Your herbs again?”

“A dowsing craft Gran taught me. Boy and girl, Urlenn, my dear.”

He got up and held her close. Now he felt the swell of her body pressing to him. They were there.

She was not fretful. Neither was he. It was as if he knew no harm could come to her. She was so clear and wholesome and yet so — yes, so sorcerous . No one could know her and think her only a peasant girl in a woods cottage. Perhaps it was for this reason, too, he had had no misgivings that he abused, when first he lay down with her. He a prince. She a princess. Equals, although they were of different social countries.