Ellen Datlow: Black Heart, Ivory Bones

However, what to do now?

“I’ve grasped from the beginning I’d never leave you, Flarva. But — I have to confess to you about myself.”

She looked up into his eyes. She had learned she had two children in her womb. Perhaps she had fathomed him, too.

“Have you? I mean, do you know I am — a king’s son?

She smiled. “What does it matter?”

“Because—”

“If you must leave me, Urlenn, I’ve always left open the door. I’d be sorry. Oh, so very sorry. But perhaps you might come back, now and then. Whatever, love isn’t a cage, or if it is, a pretty one, with the door undone, and the birds out and sitting on the roof. I can manage here.”

“You don’t see, Flarva. Maybe you might manage very well without me. But I’d be lost without you. And those two — greedily, I want to know them as well.”

“I’m glad. But I thought you would.”

“So I must find a way to bring you home.”

“Simple. I shall give this cottage to our neighbor. The goat will like that. The neighbor’s good with fruit trees and chickens, too. As for the cat, she must come with us, being flexible and quite portable.”

“No, my love, you know quite well what I mean. A way to bring you into my father’s castle, and keep you there. And selfishly let you make it home for me at last.”

They sat by the fire — the evenings now were cooler than they had been. Side by side, he and she, they plotted out what must be done. The answer was there to hand, if they had the face, the cheek, for it.

It had been a harsh, white winter. Then a soft spring. Now flame-green early summer lighted the land.

Amazed, the castle men-at-arms, about to throw Urlenn in the moat, recognized him.

“I’m here without any state.”

“ In a state,” they agreed.

But then some of the men he had led in the war ran up, cheering him, shaking his hand.

“Where on God’s earth have you been? We searched for you—”

“A wild weird tale. Take me to the king. He must hear first.”

Urlenn had been driving a wagon, pulled by two mules, and his war-horse tied at the back. One or two heard a baby cry, and looked at one or two others.

Prince Urlenn went into the king’s presence just as he was, in workaday colorful peasant clothes, and with two white scars glaring above his shining eyes.

The king (who did not know he was the Dad) had been on a broad terrace that commanded a view of the valleys and the distant mountains that marked his kingdom’s end. The two elder sons were also there, and their wives, and most of the court, servants, soldiers, various pets, some hunting dogs, and Princess Madzia, who, for motives of sheer rage, had not gone away all this while.

Urlenn bowed. The king, white as the paper of Urlenn’s last — and only second — letter, sprang up.

They embraced and the court clapped (all but Madzia). Urlenn thought, I’ve been monstrous to put him through this. But surely I never knew he liked me at all — but he does, look, he’s crying. Oh, God. I could hang myself .

But that would not have assisted the Dad, nor himself, so instead Urlenn said, “Will you forgive me, my lord and sire? I was so long gone on the strangest adventure, the most fearsome and bizarre event of my life. I never thought such things were possible. Will you give me leave to tell you the story of it?”

There followed some fluster, during which Princess Madzia scowled, her eyes inky thunder. But these eyes dulled as Urlenn spoke. In the end they were opaque, and all of her gone to nothing but a smell of civet and a dark red dress. Years after, when she was riotously married elsewhere, and cheerful again, she would always say, broodingly (falsely), “My heart broke.” But even she had never said that Urlenn had been wrong.

Urlenn told them this: Journeying home through the forests, he had come to an eerie place, in a green silence. And there, suddenly, he heard the most beautiful voice, singing. Drawn by the song, he found a high stone tower. Eagerly, yet uneasily — quite why he was not sure — he waited nearby, to see if the singer might appear. Instead, presently, a terrible figure came prowling through the trees. She was an old hag, and ugly, but veiled in an immediately apparent and quite awesome power which he had no words to describe. Reaching the tower’s foot, this being wasted no time, but called out thus: Let down your hair! Let down your hair! And then, wonder of wonders, from a window high up in the side of the tower, a golden banner began unfolding and falling down. Urlenn said he did not for one minute think it was hair at all. It shone and gleamed — he took it for some weaving of metal threads. But the hag placed her hands on it, and climbed up it, and vanished in at the window.

Urlenn prudently hid himself then more deeply in the trees. After an hour the hag descended as she had gone up. Urlenn observed in bewilderment as this unholy creature now pounced away into the wood.

“Then I did a foolish thing — very foolish. But I was consumed, you see, by burning curiosity.”

Imitating the cracked tones of the hag, he called out, just as she had done: “Let down your hair!”

And in answer, sure enough, the golden woven banner silked once more from the window, and fell, and fell.

He said, when he put his hands to it, he shuddered. For he knew at once, and without doubt, it had all the scent and texture of a young girl’s hair. But to climb up a rope of hair was surely improbable? Nevertheless, he climbed .

The shadows now were gathering. As he got in through the window’s slot, he was not certain of what he saw.

Then a pure voice said to him, “Who are you? You are never that witch!”

There in a room of stone, with her golden tresses piled everywhere about them, softer than silken yarn, gleaming, glorious, and — he had to say — rather untidy — the young girl told him her story.

Heavy with child, the girl’s mother had chanced to see, in the gardens of a dreaded, dreadful witch, a certain salad. For this she developed, as sometimes happens with women at such times, a fierce craving. Unable to satisfy it, she grew ill. At last, risking the witch’s wrath, the salad was stolen for the woman. But the witch, powerful as she was, soon knew, and manifested before the woman suddenly. “In return for your theft from my garden, I will thieve from yours. You must give me your child when it is born, for my food has fed it. Otherwise, both can die now.” So the woman had to agree, and when she had borne the child, a daughter, weeping bitterly she gave it to the witch. Who, for her perverse pleasure, named the girl after the salad (here he told the name) and kept her imprisoned in a tower of stone.

“But her hair,” said Urlenn, “oh, her hair — it grew golden and so long — finer than silk, stronger than steel. Was it for this magic, perhaps imparted by the witch’s salad, that the witch truly wanted her? Some plan she must have had to use the hapless maiden and her flowing locks? I thwarted it. For having met the maid, she and I fell in love.”

Urlenn had intended to rescue his lover from the tower, but before that was accomplished, he visited her every day. And the witch, cunning and absolute, discovered them. “You’ll realize,” said Urlenn, “she had only to look into some sorcerous glass to learn of our meetings. But we, in our headstrong love, forgot she could.”

“Faithless!” screamed the witch, and coming upon the girl alone, cut off all her golden hair. Then the witch, hearing the young man calling, herself let the tresses down for his ladder. And he, in error, climbed them. Once in the tower’s top, the witch confronted him in a form so horrible, he could not later recall it. By her arcane strengths, however, she flung him down all the length of the tower, among great thorns and brambles which had sprung up there.