Toad Words(12)

When the lawyers found her at last, and made their report, she learned that she had a great deal of money. A murderer’s estate was automatically forfeit to the Crown, but apparently her husband had, in the last few months of his life, put everything into a trust in her name—except for the manor house.

Very well. Let it be someone else’s problem now.

She also learned that around the neck of each of his dead wives had been a necklace, and on each necklace hung a brilliant golden key.

“How frustrating that must have been for him,” she said, and laughed a little to herself. Her laughter sounded rusty and disused, but it was a laugh all the same.

She really hadn’t known.

She’d just thought that the world was a complicated place, and everyone in it deserved a little bit of privacy, and perhaps a room of one’s own.





LOATHLY





Author’s Note: This is a Loathly Lady story, which were more common in medieval literature than they are now. The only popular version that I know from recent times is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry” on the album Below the Salt.

It is a hard, sometimes ugly story, and hard, ugly things happen in it, including sexual assault. The reader is advised to proceed at their own risk.





My husband never forgave me for the hounds.

Everyone knows the song by now, I suppose—how the king was hunting, and stayed the night in a haunted hall, and a monster came in the night and trapped him inside. He killed his animals—“his hawk and his horse and good greyhounds”—to feed her, and then she demanded that he lie down beside her as man and wife.

When he woke in the morning, the monster was gone, and he held a beautiful woman in his arms, with the whiff of elder days about her.

The song is true, more or less. He wasn’t the king, but a younger prince, and no one ever comes up with a suitable rhyme for “goshawks.” And I would deny categorically that I was “the fairest lady that ever was seen,” then or ever. But most of the other details are right.

I did not want him to kill the hounds or the horse or even the mad-eyed goshawks, which made such pitifully small mouthfuls of feathers. But I was given no choice in the matter. These things were, you might say, the conditions of my parole.

I was enchanted two or three hundred years ago, as near as I can determine. The reasons don’t matter now. Everyone involved is dead, except for me. I have not been able to find records of my father’s house, or of the sorcerer that enchanted him, and my sense of time passing was blunted by the years. Acorns turned into worm-ridden oaks and came crashing down, tearing holes in the forest canopy around my hall, and I endured.

I should have started marking the seasons, I suppose, but I was not thinking clearly. Being turned into a monster will do that to you. I was sunk into despair, curled up in the back of the ruined hall. Hunger was the only thing that drove me outside. It may have been several seasons before I travelled more than a hundred yards from the hall, and ate more than lichen clawed from the stones.

I was—well, I suppose I was a sort of bear-like creature, but a bear crossed with something else, and larger than any mortal bear had ever been. I had shaggy fur and horns like a cow, and enormous claws. My eyes were very large, and the edges of my tongue turned up against my fangs.

It was a long time before I could look at myself in a still bit of water without screaming. Screaming only made it worse, because they weren’t proper screams at all, but the bellows of a monster. It was too exhausting. I stopped looking.

My claws bothered me the most, because they were always in front of me, and I couldn’t ignore them. But they were useful for tearing into rotten logs to turn up grubs, sometimes even honey, and I learned to flip fish up onto the banks with them. The magic would not have let me die of starvation, but it did not much care if I felt hungry, so I learned to fish and eat grubs and mushrooms and anything else I could find.

The first knight came to the hole a year or two after the enchantment took hold. I tried to hide from him. I was ashamed. I had been beautiful, and now I was a great shaggy monster reduced to eating insects and gnawing strips of lichen off the stones with my teeth. I did not want to see him. I was afraid that he would try to kill me, or worse, that he would recognize me.

It was the magic that dragged me out of the ditch where I was cowering. It walked me up the pathway like a marionette and forced me through the open doorway. The knight started up, looking shocked, and I dug my claws into the floor until the nails split and tried to beg for mercy.

The magic pried my jaws open, and in a voice like stones grinding together, I demanded meat.

He attacked me. The magic used my claws to kill him.