The Godmother's Bargain

"Requiescat cum diabolo et dona sua referat pro sanguine tui sanguinis," I chanted over my mother's corpse. Rest with the devil, and bring back his gifts for the blood of your blood. My voice was quiet, so not to wake the household, and red fell from my palms to the ground. My mother's spell had been broken with her death and I had to rekindle the enchantment the only way I knew. Blood called to blood.

Unfortunately, my mother had died trying to make the magic work. She accidentally killed herself, cutting too deeply into her pulse points and sprinkling too much of her own blood throughout the garden as she tried to summon the spirit. I found her underneath the weeping willows, white as bone, with the blade fallen from her slack hand and standing sentinel over her body.

Although I didn't know what she had planned, last night I dreamed about the spirit she summoned. I woke and went out to the garden to find her lying there, then did as the dream told me. I buried my mother's blade deep in the gardens underneath the willow trees. I dragged her body up to her chamber and disguised her self-inflicted wounds with paste and blood, creating suppurating sores, before running through the house, crying plague. No one was brave enough to come close and see if I told the truth. Even my father wouldn't check on his "beloved" wife, stopped by fear of the deadly disease.

And I? I was daubed with the same brush as she, cast temporarily down into the servants' quarters in case I disturbed the household with my exposure to my mother's phantom illness. My costly furs and velvets stayed in my rooms, and I dressed in brown homespun clothes and slept next to the coals in the fireplace. The servants would not come near me other than when summoned, so the warm hearth was mine alone.

The night of my mother's death, I closed my eyes in exhaustion and fell instantly asleep. I saw my mother dancing underneath the willow trees. Her arms and face were frozen in the rictus of death I had found her, but her legs limber and leaping like a deer. As she spun away, I saw she'd been dancing with a shadow under the weeping trees. The shadow moved toward me in a rush and I held out my hands--whether to stop it or welcome it, I did not know. I opened my mouth to speak, to scream, to stop it--

--and woke on the hearth, my face smudged by the ashes of the fire.

Weeks passed and no one in the household fell ill. I was allowed to return to my old rooms. It wasn't long afterward my father introduced me to my new "mother."

Her face was round and plump, like a dairy maid's. I had seen her before with my father at odd moments, receiving a stolen kiss in the marketplace, greeting him in a doorway across the square. She moved into the house, along with her two daughters, one of which had my father's eyes, the other his short beak of a nose. It was not long before they were sheltered under my father's name.

"When it happens, do not hesitate," my mother told me the night before she unwittingly took her own life.

And I didn't hesitate. When the time was right, I struck, and the old man died.

It was that shrew mistress who suspected me. She was never so easy with my father's sudden death. She tried to keep me as far from her daughters as possible, but it was hard to isolate me without exposing her suspicions. She did her best, keeping me away from the lessons her daughters took, engaging a separate tutor for me. From the outside, one would think she cared.

"How you must mourn your father's death," she said, and had my meals sent to my room instead of allowing me at the table. "You need space to grieve in your own way."

In my bedchamber, I ate the food she sent and laughed softly to myself.

It wasn't until after my father's passing that everything began to unravel. But by then, it was too late to save anyone.

#

In my sleep, I danced as my mother had danced. When I woke abruptly, the household was silent. Outside the window, the gardens were lit as bright as daylight, it seemed. It was midnight, and when I stood, my limbs felt as languorous as if I were still sleeping. I moved in a dream down the stairs and through the kitchen, my bare feet making no sound. I stepped over the sleeping servants, the whisper of my fine lawn gown brushing over twitching faces that did not wake.

Out in the garden, the cold ground on the soles of my feet seemed to pierce through the mood. The cold traveled up my calves, and into my thighs and seemed to lodge in my heart. With the chill, I remembered from my dream what I had to do.

Under the midnight moon, I danced in the gardens where my mother had died. From the outside, I was a pale slip of a girl, barely a threat to the deep shadows of the night. Inside, I had my purpose drilled into me from the moment I could walk and talk, the culmination of my mother's life. Underneath my feet, the earth that had drunk my mother's and my blood, that had witnessed her final summoning, shifted and groaned as if from great pressure.

The magic did not work for her, but then again, she was the first sacrifice.

It worked for me.

When I turned in the final circle, I saw a figure resting on a bench beneath the willow trees. The moon didn't penetrate the stark shadows of the drooping branches, so the figure was simply a darker hue against the black. There was something wrong about its outline, something that sucked at what little light might have exposed it, that trapped the moon's gentle glow in a miser's fist and released only more darkness.

"Godmother," I said in jest, and the figure threw back its head and laughed in great and violent joy. I shivered at the sound but didn't dare retreat. "I have a boon to ask you."

"You ask for a gift? But who will pay the price?"

Startled, I replied, "I have already paid."

Laughter again, but gentler, like a mother's indulgent chuckle. "Oh, child, you understand nothing. You have paid nothing."

"Fine." I raised my chin. "What is the price? I will pay it."

The shadow studied me, but I saw it finally nod. "You will." Fingers chopped through the air, cutting the light into pieces. "Give me your hand."

I took a deep breath. Although I had come this far, I did not trust what might happen next. But there did not seem to be many options open to me with such a direct order. I walked forward, keeping my eyes centered on the darker shadows of the willow trees. I held out my hand, palm forward.

A touch, so gentle I might have imagined it and for a second, nothing.

Then a flood poured through me. Behind my closed eyelids, I saw images flickering in quick succession, so bright and fast they made little sense at first. Magic roared through my veins, battered my senses. My mouth was open, an endless scream escaping into the night, but the scream was as soundless as if I had been muzzled.

I found myself flat on my back, staring up at the cold moon. My body felt bruised but filled with a power both dark and thrilling.

"That's the payment? Destroy the king?" I managed to croak in a voice that sounded ancient with knowledge.

A voice rustled from the shadows. "I have given you what you asked. Find my payment, then return to me. You have a month until I come looking for you."

#

A lifetime marked out in the space of a month. The next morning, my stepmother came across me in the kitchens. She glanced around.

"What are you doing here? Where are the servants?"

"I dismissed them." At her shocked, rounded "o" of a mouth, I said, "I told them it was you who ordered it, and withheld their final wages. No one will take a position with us now. Well, what are you going to do?"

She stared at me for one long moment. Her eyes were dark, her brow furrowed. Without a word, she turned and stormed away.

I stayed in the kitchen. When midday came, I brought up to their rooms a tray of food for my half-sisters, a meal I had lovingly prepared with my own hands. Just as they sat down to eat, my stepmother came rushing into the room and knocked the food to the floor.

In a low voice, she hissed at me, "Try as you might, I will not allow you to do what your wicked heart desires. It is over. You have won."

"Won?" I asked with a smile. "Whatever do you mean?"

"I found what you wanted me to find--the newly turned earth in the garden. Five rows for the five servants you 'dismissed.' We will take ourselves from here. Immediately. Girls, pack only the bare essentials. We are going."

"Where will we go?"

"Why?" cried my half-sisters at the same time.

"It doesn't matter where we go, but go we must. For our lives. For our souls." The adulteress hustled the girls past me, making the sign of the cross as she did so.

#

The following day, a knock boomed at the door of my empty house. Dressed in castoff rags left behind by one of the servants, I answered the summons. Smothered in gold braid, a man bowed stiffly to me and unrolled a scroll without pausing to raise his eyes to my unworthy demeanor.

"His Royal Highness, King George, requests the attendance of all the noble ladies of the kingdom for their celebration of Prince Frederick's natal day this evening." The messenger bowed once more, spun on his heel, and strutted off.

I had to wait until the sun disappeared, until the last light left the sky. Whereas poison worked at any time of day, magic--my magic--did not. Once darkness covered the earth like a smothering blanket, I pulled the magic into my service, creating from the cursed garden a veritable wealth of accoutrements. From the branches of the weeping willow, I spun a dress that draped around me like sorrow. From the tears cried in the garden by my stepsisters for our father, I fashioned two glass-clear slippers. From a death cap mushroom, I created a gleaming white carriage. Bats descended from the sky and I transformed them into midnight-black horses that moved in odd, jerking movements, as if trying to take flight.

My arrival at the castle gates did not go unnoticed. Whispers followed me into the palace, followed me as the prince came across the ballroom floor as if entranced and took my hand, while his father, the king, beamed at us from the dais. The prince and I danced all night, long past the setting of the moon. It was not until the air grew moist before dawn, not until I noticed the sky had not quite lightened, that I felt my magic begin to drain away. The sun would kill it completely, but before that happened, there was one more thing to accomplish.

I cast a spell over the crowd like a net. They closed their eyes and turned away for a moment as I walked up to the dais and took the long blade from beneath my skirts--the same blade that had killed my mother I had just dug up from the gardens that night--and I sunk it deep within the breast of the king.

By the time the crowd blinked and turned back to the dais, I was back across the room with the prince. Like the rest, I feigned shock and grief.

After the tedium of the king's funeral and a brief period of mourning, the prince and I were married. But by then, of course, he was king, crowned in a dazzling ceremony that anticipated only our wedding for its splendor.

After my husband fell asleep on our wedding night, I took the blade back and buried it in my father's gardens under the cold light of the moon.

"The price has been paid!" I danced as I had before, following in my mother's footsteps, and the shadows gathered under the willow.

Laughter rang through the gardens like a midnight bell, overwhelming me with the coldness of a thousand hating hearts.

"Oh, my little queen, you are wrong. You have failed."

My mouth dropped open in shock. "Failed? But… the king! I killed him. You told me must destroy the king."

"And yet the king still lives."

"What? That is not the same king! You cannot really expect me to kill everyone with royal blood. Why, even I am distantly related..."

I saw the task stretching out before me, an impossible and unsolvable problem.

"The king is dead," said the voice, mocking me, fading back into the shadows. "Long live the king."