Swan Sister (16 page)

Golden eyes like the wolf’s, gray hair like the wolf too. “I do,” I said; how did she know my name? The cat wound around my legs, sniffed my sandals again. “I come here every day.”

“Come back and visit me,” she said. There was no mistaking her smile now. She ran one hand across my face lightly, like a breeze, like a brushing leaf, like the tickle of fur; gray fur. “I’ll show you some things you’ll like to see. . . . But hurry home now,” in the first, hard, dry-stick voice. “Your papa is very worried.”

“
Gracias,
” I said again, and I did hurry, fast and sure though the woods were pitch-dark, I could barely see my hand before my face—but that didn’t seem to matter, I knew where I was going, I never lost my way or stumbled once.

On the path to my house I saw all the lamps were burning. ’Nando was waiting at the door and “Where were you!” he shouted, as if I’d been away a year. “What took so long, what did she say? Is she really a witch?”

I felt in my pocket for the smiling wooden people.

“Where’s Mamma?” but here came Papa to swoop me up, hug me so hard my breath whistled out, and “Thanks be,” he said. “Your mamma is sleeping. . . . What happened out there, Lupe?”

How could I tell him? What should I say? So instead I showed him the smiling mamma-and-baby. He looked at it for a long time, his face still and solemn in the lamplight. Then “It’s late,” he said. “Time for bed. ’Nando, you too.”

Wait for the moon
. I never did find out what that meant, but Mamma slept all that night and long into the morning, and when she woke up she was the old Mamma again, talking, eating, no more tears. Her red cloak was dirty-brown at the hem, and black on the back where I’d fallen, but she didn’t scold me, or even seem to care. She just added it to her basket of washing and went down to the well.

The wooden people were set up on the table, a little bunch of flowers tucked beside them. Papa started carving lots of smiling mammas-and-babies; people liked them, and bought them, as many as he could carve.

And then one morning Mamma came crying to breakfast, and we all got worried, but she was smiling through her tears and “What do you think?” she said, one hand reaching for Papa’s. “We’re going to have another baby soon!”

Papa’s eyes filled up too, and he kissed Mamma’s hand; ’Nando started hollering about another brother but
“The baby’s a girl,” I said. “Call her Blanca.” Everyone looked at me, and I felt my cheeks get pink. Where had the words come from? I didn’t know, they just popped out. But I knew I was right.

When I asked
Abuela
Blanca about it later, she smiled and nodded, but didn’t explain, just gave me the pestle and mortar and set me to grinding: wild thyme and peppergrass, bright yellow lupine, while she sat on the stool beside me and braided her long gray hair.

“‘Lupe,’” says
K
ATHE
K
OJA
, “is my second retelling of the Red Riding Hood story—the first was in a book of fairy tales for adults—and I find her even more compelling this time around. There’s something very brave and cool and mysterious about that girl walking into the dark woods all alone. I wonder if I could do it? Maybe that’s why I wrote this story: to take another walk, to test myself again in that dark wood.”

K
ATHE
K
OJA
is the author of
Straydog
and
Buddha Boy,
as well as several novels for adults. She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and her son, Aaron.

That first night she woke up, which was the night after it had
just
happened,
Roisa had been surprised. She’d been upset. She knew something had previously gone terribly wrong—exactly like when you have a bad dream, and you wake and can’t remember what it was, only that it was awful, and the
feeling
is still there.

Now, of course, she was used to waking like this. She looked forward to it every night near morning, when she lay down to sleep again.

She sat up, threw back the light embroidered cover, and slipped from the bed. She slept clothed always, in the rose silk dress she had been wearing the evening
It
happened. Yet the silk was always fresh, as if just laundered and pressed smooth by hot stones. She herself was also always
fresh, as if just bathed and scented, and her hair washed in the essences of flowers. She had long ago ceased to puzzle over that, though before That Night keeping herself so perfect had been a time-consuming daily task.

Roisa was sixteen. It had been her sixteenth birthday, the day it happened. Now she was still sixteen, but she had done and learned such a lot. She knew that the cleanness, and everything like that, was simply because of Great Magic.

By the bed was a little (magically) new-baked loaf, apples and strawberries (magically) just picked, and a china pot of mint tea, (magically) brewed and poured.

Roisa made her nightly breakfast.

Then she left the attic room.

Outside, the narrow stairway was as it always was, dirty and cobwebbed, thick in dusts. But when the skirt of the silk dress brushed through the muck, nothing stuck to it.

She was used to that also.

As she was to the people standing about lower down, absolutely stone-still, as if playing statues in some game. There were the ladies-in-waiting first, the three who must have meant to follow her up to the attics that evening. Unlike on Roisa, webs and dust
had
gathered on them, spoiling their gorgeous party clothes and jewelry and carefully arranged hair. It was a shame. Roisa still felt sorry for them, if in a rather remote way.

The first time, it had really shocked her. She had shouted at them, pulled at them, tried to make them
move. Then, worse than these, the other things—for example, the cat that had become a furry
toy
cat on the lowest landing, the bird that stood on the still with its wings fanned out, never lowering them, never using them to fly off. And the young guardsman she had always liked, standing motionless, already dusty in his splendid uniform, his blue eyes wide open, not seeing her at all.

Worst of everything, however, had been to find her parents—her funny, pretty mother, her important, grand father—sitting there like two waxworks in the carven chairs from which they’d been watching the dancing in the Hall. The dancing from which Roisa had escaped, actually, to meet secretly with the guardsman—but somehow she had missed him—and then—then instead she had, also somehow, gone up into the attics of the palace . . .

Roisa had cried when she woke that first night. She had felt no longer sixteen, but about six. She had put her head into the lap of her mother’s dress, clutching her mother’s body, which felt like a cold rock. Sobbing.

That was when
They
came.

They—the ones who told her. The ones with the magic.

When she got down to the palace Hall tonight, Roisa did pause, only for a minute or so, to dust her mother.

She always did that. It seemed essential. Because of Roisa’s attention to her mother, the Queen still looked glamorous—her hair and necklaces still shone.

The King, Roisa didn’t try to dust. She would never
have dared because in the past he had seldom touched her, and then only with the firmest of hands, the coolest of kisses.

Beyond the Hall lay the royal gardens, into which, her dusting done, Roisa ran.

Oh—it was full moon tonight.

Once, wonderful scents had drifted here from lilies and from arbors overgrown by jasmine. A gentle breeze blew this evening, and not one of the now-scentless flowers, not one of the tall, graceful trees stirred. Not a single leaf moved, nor even the wind chimes hung in the branches.

By the fountain—whose jetting water had stopped in a long, faintly luminous arch, like rippled glass—the two white doves sat, as they had done now for years. The doves didn’t move. Nothing did. Not even the moon, which lived in the sky—at least, it never did when she saw it. Only the night wind, the breeze, only that ever moved.

Roisa glanced about her, by this time no longer worried over the time-frozen gardens. Not even the fish in the pool, still as golden coins, concerned her anymore. There was nothing she could do about any of this.

Just then something seemed to ride straight out of the moon.

They had come back. As they always did.

With the brilliant flutter of sea spray, thirteen white horses landed on the lawn. On the back of every one sat a slim, clever-faced lady with flowing hair, each of a different color—and these tints ranged between apricot and copper, between jet and mahogany, from flame to pewter
to violet. Everything sparkled—horses, ladies—with gems, beads,
fireflies
—Then the thirteenth horse came trotting forward, and the thirteenth rider swung from her gilded saddle, light as air. Even though by now she knew this person so well—better, probably, than she’d known her own mother—Roisa never quite stopped being surprised by her.

She was a Fey, of course. One of the Faery Faer, the Elder Ones.

“Awake, I see,” said the Thirteenth Fey, whose name was Carabeau (which meant something like
My-friend-who-is-good-looking-and-has-her-own-household
). “Up with the owl, my Roisa. Come on, let’s be off.”

So Roisa mounted the horse behind Carabeau, as she always did.

After which the thirteenth horse and all the other twelve horses lifted up again into the sky. They weren’t winged, these faery steeds—it was just that they could, when they or their riders wanted, run as easily through the air as over the earth.

In seconds the great palace and its grounds became small, far off and far down. It was possible to see, all round them, the high wall of black thorns that kept out all the world. And beyond the thorn-wall, the deserted town, the deserted weedy fields, and ruined cottages from which everyone had, over the years, dejectedly gone away. For the palace was under a curse that would last a century, and everybody knew it.

Roisa laughed as the horses dived up and up. The moon was like a huge white melon, hung on a vine of milky clouds. The shadows of the horses ran below them over moonlit forests, over looking-glass lakes and gleaming, snake-winding rivers, over sleeping villages and marble cities that had also intended to stay wide awake.