Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

“I can taste that ten-bit you’re palming,” said the gaunt man. Thick lips hid his teeth. How Elster heard him over the shouts of the crowd—“ Die linke Hand ”—she could not guess. “Wager for a new life? Iron to gold?” His right hand tipped over a thimble to show a shining mark, a bit of minted sunlight stamped with a young woman’s face. Little Elster stood on her toes, nearly tipping over the table, to see the coin’s features. Not her mother or her grandmother. Not anyone she knew yet. But the coin itself was the most beautiful of sights; the gold glittered and promised her anything. Everything. Her mouth watered, and she wanted the odd man’s coin so badly that spittle leaked past her lips.

When she let go of the table, the iron ten-pfennig piece rolled from her sweaty fingers. The gaunt man captured it with a dropped thimble.

“Now which one, magpie? You want the shiny one, true? Left or right or middle or none at all?”

Elster watched his hands. She could not be sure and so closed her eyes and reached out. She clamped her hand over the gaunt man’s grip. His skin felt slick and hard like polished horn. “This one,” she said. When she looked, his palm held an empty thimble.

“Maybe later you’ll find the prize.” When he smiled she saw that his front teeth were metal: the left a dull iron, the right gleamed gold.

A strong arm pulled her away from the table. “Stupid child.” Her grandmother cuffed her face. “From now on, a thimble will be your keep.”

Down in the cellar, the stones seeped with moisture. Odile sneezed from the stink of mold. She could see how her papa trembled at the chill.

The floor was fresh-turned earth. Crates filled niches in the walls. In the tower’s other cage, a weeping man sat on a stool. The king’s livery, stained, bunched about his shoulders.

“The prince’s latest messenger.” Papa gestured at a bejeweled necklace glittering at the man’s feet. “Bearing a bribe to end the engagement.”

Papa followed this with a grunt as he stooped down and began digging in the dirt with his fingers. Odile helped him brush away what covered a dull, gray egg. “Papa, he’s innocent.”

He gently pulled the egg loose of the earth. “Dear, there’s a tradition of blame. Sophocles wrote that ‘No man loves the messenger of ill.’ ”

He took a pin from his cloak and punched a hole into the ends of the egg while intoning rara lingua . Then he approached the captive man, who collapsed, shaking, to his knees. Papa blew into one hole, and a vapor reeking of sulfur drifted out to surround the messenger. Screams turned into the frantic call of a songbird.

“We’ll send him back to the prince in a gilded cage with a message. ‘We delightedly accept your offer of an engagement ball.’ Perhaps I should have turned him into a parrot, and he could have spoken that.”

“Papa,” Odile chided.

“I’ll return his form after the wedding. I promise.” He carried the egg to one shelf and pulled out the crate of curse eggs nestled in soil. “What king more wisely cares for his subjects?”

The prince would rather muck out every filthy stall in every stable of the kingdom than announce his engagement to the sorcerer’s daughter at the ball. His father must have schemed his downfall; why else condemn him to marry a harpy?

“Father, be reasonable. Why not the Duke of Bremen’s daughter?” The prince glanced up at the fake sky the guilds-men were painting on the ballroom’s ceiling. A cloud appeared with a brushstroke.

“The one so lovely that her parents keep her in a cloister?” asked the king. “Boy, your wife should be faithful only to you. Should she look higher to God, she’ll never pay you any respect.”

“Then that countess from Schaumberg—”

The king sighed. “Son, there are many fine lands with many fine daughters, but none of them have magic.”

“Parlor tricks!”

“Being turned into a turkey is not a trick. Besides, von Rothbart is the most learned man I have ever met. If his daughter has half the mind, half the talent. ”

“Speaking dead languages and reciting dusty verse won’t keep a kingdom.”

The king laughed. “Don’t tell that to Cardinal Passerine.”

In the silence, Odile looked up from yellowed pages that told how a pelican’s brood are stillborn until the mother pecks its chest and resurrects them with her own blood. Odile had no memory of her own mother. Papa would never answer any question she asked about her.

She pinched the flame out in the sconce’s candle and opened the shutters. The outside night had so many intriguing sounds. Even if she only listened to the breeze it would be enough to entice her from her room.

She went to her dresser, opened the last drawer, and found underneath old mohair sweaters the last of the golden wappentier eggs she had taken. She could break it now, turn herself into a night bird and fly free. The thought tempted her as she stared at her own weak reflection on the shell. She polished it for a moment against her dressing gown.

But the need to see Elster’s face overpowered her.

So, as she had done so many nights, Odile gathered and tied bedsheets and old clothes together as a makeshift rope to climb down the outer walls of her papa’s tower.

As she descended, guided only by moonlight, something large flew near her head. Odile became still, with the egg safe in a makeshift sling around her chest, her toes squeezing past crumbling mortar. A fledermaus ? Her papa called them vermin; he hunted them as the pother owl. If he should spot her. But no, she did not hear his voice demand she return to her room. Perhaps it was the wappentier. Still clinging to the wall, she waited for the world to end, as her papa had said would happen if the great bird ever escaped from its cage. But her heartbeat slowly calmed and she became embarrassed by all her fears. The elder von Rothbart would have fallen asleep at his desk, cheek smearing ink on the page. The sad wappentier would be huddled behind strong bars. Perhaps it also dreamed of freedom.

Once on the ground, Odile walked toward the moat. Sleeping swans rested on the bank, their long necks twisted back and their bills tucked into pristine feathers.

She held up the wappentier egg. Words of rara lingua altered her fingernail, making it sharp as a knife. She punctured the two holes, and as she blew into the first, her thoughts were full of incantations and her love’s name. She had trouble holding the words in her head; as if alive and caged, they wanted release on the tongue. Maybe Papa could not stop from turning men into birds, though Odile suspected he truly enjoyed doing so.

She never tired of watching the albumen sputter out of the shell and drift over the quiet swans like marsh fire before falling like gold rain onto one in their midst.

Elster stretched pale limbs. Odile thought the maid looked like some unearthly flower slipping through the damp bank, unfurling slender arms and long blonde hair. Then she stumbled until Odile took her by the hand and offered calm words while the shock of the transformation diminished.

They fled into the woods. Elster laughed to run again. She stopped to reach for fallen leaves, touch bark, then pull at a loose thread of Odile’s dressing gown and smile.

Elster had been brought to the tower to fashion Odile a dress for court. Odile could remember that first afternoon, when she had been standing on a chair while the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen stretched and knelt below her, measuring. Odile had never felt so awkward, sure that she’d topple at any moment, yet so ethereal, confident that had she slipped, she would glide to the floor.