Fairly Wicked Tales (2 page)

I could not quantify the slimy, snakelike ropes knotted in piles where the stomach should have been. The reek of bowels spilled of their digestive juices so foreign as to not register as an odor in my mind. That wasn’t what Pieter had wanted me to see, though. In his palm, he clutched what looked to be an arrowhead made of stone, markings upon it reminding me of swirling loops more than words. That little prize had been what he wanted me to view, not the death of the dog he loved so much.

And most certainly not the gnarled old man stooping down before the dog, red-bathed blade in one hand and the other using a stick to stir through its spilled innards. He glanced up at us, as if finally noticing our presence.

“Children,” He murmured, his words laced with a flavor I had never experienced. “Why do young children come to stare at Old Teufel? Mayhap I find the answer here.”

He stirred the guts again, his breath wheezing in and out of his open mouth.

“How can a dead dog tell you anything?” Pieter spoke up, his fear melting away into the curiosity of all young boys. “The dog is in heaven now. He can’t speak anymore.”

“Oh, but he can,” Old Teufel replied with a hissing chuckle. “He can tell you a great many things if you have the eye to watch and the ear to listen.”

“What does he tell you?”

Old Teufel tipped his head this way and that, reminding me of a vulture seeking the best, most choice mouthful to consume first. “He tells me the future. He says … he says …” His head lifted sharply, staring at me with eyes that burned. “He says you will be queen one day. Old Teufel would like to meet a queen. Come to me, little queenling, and I will show you the way. I will give you a potion to make you the most beautiful, the wisest. Everyone will love the queen Old Teufel creates. And you will love Old Teufel in return. You will give birth to the Old Ways and Old Teufel will guide you.”

I did not realize I had been walking forward, my mouth hanging open. His tone had become so soft, so soothing like my mother’s had been, and I wanted to be comforted by him. I wanted to touch his weathered old skin, ashamed I had thought such bad things about this kindly old man. Until I heard the sound of an arrow whisking by, slamming into the nearest tree and sinking in so deep only half the shaft was visible.

Pieter cried out and I turned quickly, seeing Uncle Kristoph tucking him under one arm, his hunting knife bared in his other hand. My father stood a meter or so back, his bow held and an arrow ready.

Old Teufel laughed, a hissing sound that made my skin crawl. “The King of Life and the King of Death. Tell me, brothers, which of you will stand as such? Old Teufel knows the magic, and Old Teufel will tell you your destiny. The cost Old Teufel asks is the young girl. Give me the little queenling that I may make her the most beautiful, the wisest—”

My father’s arrow took him in his leftmost eye, smashing his crooked body backwards into the tree behind him, the fletching of the arrow the only thing visible in the socket. Trees around us shook in a sudden wind, shedding their leaves like tears, covering us in their mourning of the old man. Hissing sounds wove through the branches, a mooching echo of a dead man’s laughter.

My father grabbed my shoulder, tucking me under his arm much like Uncle Kristoph had done to Pieter. We ran from the dead dog with its spilled entrails and the crying trees and the laughter of a man who should not be able to laugh any longer.

***

Summer brought on the greatest drought in our village’s history. Crops planted and tended with meticulous care yielded up a pittance come harvest time, not nearly enough to sustain us through the winter. My father and Uncle had retrieved their weapons of war from the hidden chests in the cellar, taking to the forests to hunt for meat. They needed such armaments, not for the deer or other small game they sought, but for the newly arrived monstrous beast roaming the Black Forest.

A gargantuan monstrosity of a boar, such was the beast according to the village council. Easily the size of four men put together, with gnarled leathery skin and burning eyes. The creature didn’t grunt like a natural beast should, instead making this hissing-growling sound, as if the rusted gates of Hell, itself, parted to welcome any crossing its path. So fearsome was this beast, and so harsh the winter, the King had offered the greatest reward for anyone who slayed this demon.

He who felled the beast would be wed to the King’s only daughter, becoming the next King of our lands.

Many knights of the realm fought the creature, their mangled bodies found on the outskirts of the forest proper. Placed as if the beast had the sentient mind of a man and did this thing to taunt the King and his daughter. Months had gone by and still none succeeded in felling the mighty boar, villages emptying themselves of their menfolk in an effort to capture a crown for their own.

Upon the evening of a particularly nasty snowstorm, Pieter and I huddled in the darkened stairwell of the Inn, watching in fear and curiosity as the elder men decided the fate of our village.

“We ought to accept the charity of the church,” Adolpho Gottlieb, Pieter’s father, said. “Isn’t enough grain in the storehouses to feed the children! Let us go to the city and make what lives can be made within its walls.”

Several of the elders nodded, murmuring agreement.

“No,” Uncle Kristoph said immediately after. “We cannot abandon the village. This is our home. My brother, Lukas, and I fought for His Majesty in the last war to ensure these lands remain ours. We cannot walk away from them.”

Some muttered in agreement, but few.

“I agree with your heart, Kristoph,” my father put in gently, placing a hand on his younger brother’s shoulder. “My wife rests in eternal slumber in the fields behind our home. I would not leave her nor have her resting place lost to anonymity. Yet I have my daughter to think on, just as Elder Gottlieb has his son. I would just as soon not abandon her to sickness and death brought on by hunger.”

My uncle shrugged off his hand, a look of frustrated rage contorting his features. “You forget the other option.”

“What other option?”

“The beast.”

A chill swept the room, the meager fire in the hearth nearly guttering to embers in the unseen wind. And I swore to all holy saints, a hissing mocking laughter skulked upon a perverted air. Silence filled the room, each man present reaching for the holy cross upon their necks, many not realizing they prayed the Our Father in an undertone. Pieter and I crossed ourselves and silently added Hail Marys in counterpoint to the baritone whispers of the elders.

“Out of the question,” my father snapped when the prayers finished.

“I agree with Koenig, the elder,” answered another. “Out of the question. A bad omen occurs when word of the beast is spoken aloud.”

My uncle shook his head. “Do you not recognize this for what it is? No one has managed to slay the beast to this day. My brother and I can do this together. Out of all the men in this village, we two have fought in wars and survived. We understand these woods better than those Knights from the city in their clanking armor. We are huntsmen. Do you understand what fortunes awaits our village if we succeed, if one of us becomes king?”

Silence served as reply until my father sighed.

“My brother speaks wisdom in part. I suggest the village prepare to head for the city in a week’s time. If Kristoph and I do not return, take the others and go. Our survival rests upon this chance.”

My father spent the night staring at me while I pretended to sleep, muttering prayers for my future. Elder Gottlieb came for him at first light, lending to him and Uncle Kristoph the village’s single surviving beast of burden to make their quick trip to the city and the church therein. When they returned, it was with mixed blessings. They reported the King, himself, had been in attendance at the church, and he had spoken with them in loving kindness. The Princess offered a kiss upon the brow to each of them, praying for their success in this noble task.

My Uncle spoke of nothing more than the beauty of the Princess, the memory of her lips upon his forehead, the softness of her unblemished hands as they held his. My father spoke of the King’s promise of a place within the city walls for our scant number. By royal decree, he would do his utmost to ensure our fields returned to us after winter’s passing. And then he spent the last of the daylight kneeling before my mother’s grave in deep prayer, his sword thrust into the earth at her feet.

Surprisingly enough, Pieter joined him, fascinated not by the coat of mail my father wore, but by the earnest words dropped from his lips. Later in life, when he took his vows to the Cloth, he would tell me the exact moment when God’s hand rested upon him. Never before had a prayer so beautiful, so heartfelt as the one my father said to the Virgin Mary for my sake, touched his soul.

And I? I had set to making a crown of snow blossoms for my father, to show him he would always be a king in my eyes. I grasped the final flower, smiling …. Wind rattled the bare branches around me, spectral eddies hissing up from the depths of memory. I swallowed a scream, dipping through the trees, trying to escape the thing that haunted my dreams. Uncle appeared a short distance away, walking down the frozen road, diverging at the exact spot in which Pieter and I had discovered Old Teufel nearly a year ago. For reasons I would never speak aloud I followed him, my cloak of white ermine and rabbit camouflaging me against the snowy landscape.

Once I crossed the tree line, their branches empty of snow and of the leaves they’d shed at Old Teufel’s death, the same chill as the last time overrode all other sensation. As if something supernatural walked these forested paths. I saw the arrowhead that Pieter had dropped when Uncle had hefted him to safety. I found the skeleton of the old yellow dog, the shafts of my father’s arrows protruding from the tree trunk, the remains of Old Teufel stuck to tree, rotting and full of puss. Maggots spawned in the empty pit where his undamaged eye should have been.

I found the impossible, the reason why the wind hung so cold here, why my father had loosed his arrows instead of bringing the man forward for the King’s justice on the charge of witchcraft.

I witnessed Old Teufel himself standing before my uncle, red-bathed blade in one hand and the entrails of some animal in the other. Whole and healed as if my father had never fired upon him.

“The King of Death returns,” Old Teufel laughed, the hissing sound making me grit my teeth and clasp my hands over my ears. “Are you ready to pay my price, Death King?”

“Name it,” my Uncle pronounced. “Anything you want, so long as I can marry the princess. I love her.”

“Love,” the creature spoke, tilting its head side to side. “What know you of love, King of Death? You have met the Princess only once, spoken not twenty words to her. How can you know love?”

“I know what is in my heart!” he screamed. “I have never suffered such things until I laid eyes upon her beauty. I will die if I do not have her as my bride. By your own mouth, you know the Old Ways. Incline my ear to hear what you hear and my eye to see what you see, that I may slay the beast.”

“Anything I want … ” Old Teufel said again … and stared right into my eyes. “I want the queenling. Give her to me and I shall give you your heart’s desire.”

I do not know what went through my Uncle’s mind. Everything inside of me quaked in stunned silence as he nodded. The arrowhead Pieter had found floated up from the forest floor, landing in Old Teufel’s hand. He sliced open my Uncle’s shirt, carving something unseen into the tender flesh just above his heart. The arrowhead seemed to grow in size, swallowing the lifeblood pouring from the wound until it was the size of a spearhead. Dark in color, blood forged into steel.

“Take this and attach it to your spear, King of Death. Let our bargain be sealed in blood as in the days of Old.”

I ran.

My Uncle did not return in the night, nor was he present in the morning to receive communion and blessing from the priest. Despite my protests, my explanations of what I had seen in the Black Forest, my father hugged me tightly and left to hunt the beast. I stood on the road and watched my father’s form become a puppet on the road, until he shrank into a tiny speck in the far distance. I stood long after he vanished into the trees, long after the snows began to fall once more. I stood until my legs gave out and cold brought me to the ground.

Until Pieter’s father and mother picked me up in loving arms and took me to the warmth of their hearth.

Neither Father nor Uncle came home to me in the first hours of morning. Nor the day after, or the day after that. News of my family did not reach us until the day the village prepared to march for the city. News of triumph and of hope for the future arrived in the form of a royal caravan galloping down our plain little road, the coach of the King heading the procession. The King and his daughter alighted from the coach with its golden scrollwork, approaching Elder Gottlieb and his wife, and Pieter … and me.

My father had prevailed, proclaimed the King. The beast lived no more! He would marry the Princess Ilsa upon the spring when his wounds fully healed, and I would be a high lady. Not a queen as Old Teufel had predicted. For even at such a young age, I understood the Princess was not my mother. Only a child between Ilsa and my father would take the throne. Yet all that hardly mattered to me. My father lived. He had slain the beast and our village was saved.

***

Spring came swiftly on the heels of such a harsh winter, bringing life in abundance. It was almost as if the ground attempted to make amends for the weak harvest of last season, yielding up a bounty of food and flowers, filling our storehouses to overflow. Prosperity returned to the kingdom in ways unseen since before the Black Plague. My father married Princess Ilsa in a grand celebration lasting a fortnight.

Life settled into something of a beautiful peace in the years following the marriage. My father, though now royal, never forgot the village we came from. His first decree as royal husband fed money into our former home, funding a church and a proper town hall. Our old family farm was chosen as the building location, the grave of my mother marking the first to be buried in this newly consecrated ground. And beside her was placed a headstone over an empty grave to honor Uncle Kristoph, who had given his life as so many others had in trying to slay the beast.