Carolyn Turgeon - The Fairest of Them All

“Can you see anything about my son?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I think he will be born in Cancer,” she said. “Do you see it up there, the crab?”

I followed her finger to the faint spots in the northern sky, the line of stars splitting into thin claws. “Yes! Hercules kicked the crab into the sky, right, after Hera sent it to him? While he was battling the Hydra?”

She smiled. “You remember. It’s been years since I told you those stories.”

“I remember all of them,” I said.

“He will be strong and gifted,” she said. “Like his mother.”

We lay back, side by side, watching the stories in the sky. I imagined my own body being placed in the heavens, outlined by diamonds.

I felt a rumbling through the earth before I heard it. I sat up, instinctively placing my palms over my belly. It sounded as if a whole army were heading toward us, with hundreds of horses storming over the ground, their massive hooves shod with iron.

Mathena sat up and put her hand on my shoulder, keeping me seated. “It’s all right,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

The hooves got louder. Leaves shook on the trees around us, rattling together, and then I saw several figures—five, I counted—men with sacks raised up in their arms, knives and crossbows strapped to their sides, approaching through the woods. In the dark, their bodies were hulking shadows and it was impossible to tell where man and horse divided, so that it seemed as if great mythic beasts were bearing down on us.

Bandits.

My heart hammered in my chest. They came right toward us. I ignored Mathena and scraped at the ground, trying to move out of their way, but I felt as if my own feet were covered in iron. The sound deafened me, the earth shook beneath me. All the while, Mathena sat calmly watching.

And then they were upon us, we were right in their path and there was no way to move. I bunched myself into a ball, tears streaming down my face, waiting to be run down.

The sound, the smell of horse and man passed over me. The horses ran right through me as if I were not even there. I twisted my neck and watched their shadows disappearing into the woods on the other side of us.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what had just happened. If it weren’t for the taste of dirt in my mouth, the overturned earth all around us, I might have thought I’d imagined it.

I looked over at Mathena, who was steadily watching me.

“What . . . ?” I began, not sure what to say.

“You’re safe,” she said.

“Those were bandits, weren’t they?” I’d heard stories about them for as long as I could remember—how they lived in a house by the river, outside the kingdom’s rule, preying on those who entered the forest.

She nodded. “Yes, but they cannot hurt us. Not here.”

I looked at her, amazed, this woman who’d read the stars for a queen.

It was the first time I had seen one of Mathena’s protection spells at work.

That night I slept in the tower and was plagued by strange dreams, in which my son was alive and whole, come to see me. His blue eyes stared up at me, his fists unfolded and became massive. Antlers rose from his skull, twisting like branches into the air, puncturing the clouds.

I woke up with my palms under my belly, cradling him, on my side on the stone floor, clutching my stomach. I was so ravenous I couldn’t make it to the house and the cupboards there. I wrapped myself in furs and flew down the winding stairs and out into the winter frost and I dropped onto the ground, shoving leaves and dirt into my mouth. My child wailed inside me. I could hear him, blending in with the wind that whipped my hair into a storm around and above me. I wished I had two mouths, three mouths, to take it all in, to eat the earth, the leaves and grass, the acorns that tasted as marvelous as cream.

After, I hauled myself back up the stairs, shaking from the cold, crawling on my hands and knees up the stone.

I dropped the fur from my shoulders and looked in the mirror, and what I saw seared itself into my memory: I was reflected in the mad light of the roaring fire, half in shadows and smeared in dirt. My slight, rounded belly. My hair like a wild robe hanging to the floor and swirling on the stone, scattered through with leaves and bark and frost. My breasts, too, were becoming rounder, and my nipples were black with dirt. Earth pushing through my body, tangling around my stomach, entering my womb.

Outside the wind howled. The moon cast its eye on everything. The fire crackled, devouring the wood. Inside me, he was screaming, and the world turned feral.

The mirror seemed to ripple, like water, as I peered into it.

This is who I am, I thought.

The woman in the glass. Wild and broken.

I thought of the stories Mathena had told me of my real mother, who craved rapunzel and wasted away without it, because she could not stand to eat anything else. She could not grow it in her own garden, apparently, which was as barren as Mathena’s was lush and full. I imagined my mother standing at the window, growing thin from hunger, longing, that inexpressible need for something just beyond her reach to fill the dark space inside, even after she’d birthed me. And me, wailing beside her until she was forced to make me stop.

Something blasted up inside me, a memory or not-memory, a banshee cry, a feeling that there was a dark force nearby wanting to harm me and that I would fight and die to protect myself, my child, from it. And then it seemed that this darkness was inside of me. Passed down from my mother to me.

Winter came quickly and buried us in snow, and we sewed, mended, embroidered, ate the food and burned the wood we had gathered during the vibrant summer months and the bountiful fall. Mathena made me teas to keep me strong and healthy. The occasional woman came and went, the more desperate ones willing to march through drifts that came up to their thighs to see us—sometimes they complained of love, sometimes of hunger and bare pantries, not enough food to last through the winter. I knew these women’s desperation now, and became a better practitioner for it.

Occasionally, we heard word from court, usually half rumors and gossip that came to us third- or fourth-hand. I was always eager to hear of it. Of him, his wife, the palace.

One day a young woman came to our door, an already small girl thinning from disease. I was stirring a stew over the stove. Mathena was spreading salve on the girl’s back when the girl told us the news.

“The new princess is pregnant,” she said. “People say it’s a good sign, that things will be better for us now.”

I dropped the spoon I was holding. “The wife of Prince Josef is with child?”

“What wonderful news,” Mathena said quickly. “That we will have an heir.”

“Yes,” the girl said, her feverish face shining with hope. “They say the princess has already taken to her bed. She doesn’t want to take any chances.”

“It is a good sign indeed,” Mathena said, placing her hand on the girl’s shoulder. When the girl bent over in pain a moment later, Mathena looked over at me worriedly. Worried more for me than the girl, I realized.

I stood there in stunned silence. I don’t know why I was so surprised by the news, but I was. Teresa was his wife, her main purpose was to bear him heirs. Yet somehow it had felt like what had happened in that tower was special, mine alone. Maybe she could have him, but only I could have his child.

Mathena focused back on the girl. “Breathe this in,” she said, holding a packet of lemon balm and lavender to the girl’s face, “until it passes.”