stevieqgray

Following on from the previous blog, here is the next part of my messed-up little fairy story:

Part II - The Path

Nimmersdorf was roughly half a day's journey by foot across windswept snowplains and through dense, dark forests. The principality sat precariously on the edge of a deep ravine, a modest settlement of dwellings scattered about Nimmersdorf Castle, a fantastical creation of towers, battlements and crenulations, which perched on the very lip of the precipice. Below it, the land fell away in an array of cruel, jutting spikes of rock and sheer vertical drops, the bottom of the ravine obscured by the white mist of raging water.

I had visited the town before, though never on my own. Each summer, my elderly guardians would make at least one journey, to attend the market, trading knowledge for goods, reading palms, selling strange-smelling potions in little coloured glass bottles. On such visits, I would go with them, helping to carry their wares to the market and to bring back their spoils. We would set out for Nimmersdorf with charms and unguents and tonics, and return with clothes, food, livestock, pots and pans, the things we would need to sustain our isolated existence for another year.

I looked forward to these expeditions with great anticipation: everything was so exciting in its newness! And there were people, real people, not just the old, bickering women with whom I had lived my whole life. Last summer, a boy a few years older than myself had asked me my name. He had pretty blue eyes, the colour of cornflowers, and skin bronzed by the sun. He'd smiled at me, as though seeing some great and wonderful joke, and gave me a necklace of milky white stones strung on a piece of leather. Then Anicula had glared at him until he went away. I had been grudgingly permitted to keep the necklace, and wore it all that summer, in spite of Anicula's blatant disapproval, until one day I reached up to touch the smooth white stones and found the necklace gone.

Even after the necklace had vanished, I found myself from time to time remembering that boy, recalling his carefree smile and pretty blue eyes. As months became seasons and a strange new restlessness grew within me, I would find myself wondering where he was now, whether he still remembered me at all, or on shameful, sleepless nights, alone in the dark, wondering where the copper of his skin gave way to pristine, ivory flesh.

Dawn was barely breaking when I left the greystone cottage. Silvery half-light glinted off the snow outside, barely illuminating the room as Genetrixa gently shook me to wakefulness. Huddled under their sackcloths and blankets, in the shadowy recesses, the other two women slept on. From Virgina came the occasional quiet snore or mumble, while Anicula's sleeping form barely even seemed to be breathing. Genetrixa kept her voice low to avoid waking them.

'So,' she said, as she ran a toothless wooden comb through my hair, 'our little girl, an envoy to the castle, eh?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe,' I said. 'We don't know that he'll see me yet. We don't know that he'll help.'

She carried on regardless. 'They say he's devil-handsome, this prince,' she said, as the comb's few remaining teeth conspired to find the tangles in my hair, snagging painfully. 'Devil-handsome, and all alone in that castle. They say something terrible happened in his past, something tragic that just ripped him in pieces.' She had stopped combing now, and had separated my hair into three sections which she proceeded to plait. 'Can't say as I know anything for sure of course. Only ever seen him the once myself: a big procession one spring. Too far away to see, really...' She rambled gradually into silence.

'Ow!' I exclaimed as something sharp and hooked lacerated my scalp. 'What was that?'

'Just the bramble I've plaited into your hair, pet. Didn't mean to catch you then. All done now, anyways.'

'Bramble...?' Bemused, I reached up and sure enough, twisted through my hair I could feel thin, supple twine, barbed with vicious thorns. 'Why?'

'You know, she said awkwardly, 'for the journey, for safety.' She lapsed into an odd, uncomfortable silence.

'Will it help?' I asked.

'Well,' she said, sounding doubtful and uneasy, 'it won't do any harm.'

I wasn't scared, as I left the cottage. I didn't believe that Genetrixa's bramble would offer me protection in the journey ahead, but I was not afraid. Looking back, I was rarely afraid back then. Anicula made me nervous, with her sharp tongue and short temper, and I sometimes felt uneasy in the cottage, when the women were at work and the very air was thick with things I did not understand, but I wasn't frightened.

I can only remember two occasions from that time, when I had been truly afraid.

The first had been the time when I stole Anicula's mirror.

I'd waited until the women were asleep. I thought I knew what I was doing - I'd heard Genetrixa talking about the ritual at the summer markets, instructing young, flushed women as to how it should be performed: look into a mirror in the moonlight - has to be a full moon, mind - stare deep down, past your reflection, and you'll see the man you'll marry. The mirror was old: dulled, black-flecked glass, its edges crazed with razor-sharp chips that could slice unwary fingers. It felt cold in my hands, and very heavy, as I carried it outside, careful not to trip on sleeping bodies.

I faltered, on the threshold, as the door opened under my touch with an inordinately loud groan. I was sure the sound must have woken someone, waited long, drawn-out minutes in the doorway, until I was satisfied it had not, and stepped outside.

The summer was nearing its end. The days were still long and warm and bright, and the first leaf of autumn was still months from falling, but there was a chill in the night air, a certain serrated edge to the breeze that promised colder, darker times. A full moon hung low and heavy in a dark sky. I knelt on dew-damp grass, the mirror in front of me. By moonlight, my reflection in the glass was transformed: alien and ghostly, but still my own. I concentrated harder, thinking back to Genetrixa's words, past your reflection, and I searched long and hard, as the slow, creeping coldness of the earth beneath me seeped into my flesh and bones. I looked for something hidden beyond my own distorted image. The surface of the mirror looked like water, swam before my eyes. Deep, deep down.

Underneath the glass, brief as summer lightning, something flickered. Snapping, snarling, utterly inhuman; just for a moment, something dark and ancient and savage stared back.

The mirror exploded. The air came alive in a blaze of flying shards. The sound of my screams woke the women in the cottage, who found me, incoherent and inconsolable, sobbing and shrieking on the ground outside, surrounded by hundreds of glittering fragments.

Genetrixa took me in her meaty arms and held me against her as she muttered soothing words, until, exhausted by my own fear, I cried myself dry.

Then Anicula beat me until I cried again.

The second time I can remember being frightened was my first bleeding. I didn't understand, and the sight of so much blood issuing from my own body, slicking my thighs with its dark, violent red, terrified me.

Genetrixa explained gently that my body was changing. The blood was a mark of my passage to womanhood.

Even when I understood the reason for my monthly bleed, knew that from it new life could be born, it still unnerved me. I couldn't reconcile myself with the idea that the essence of life could have the same rank smell as slaughter.

Those were the only two occasions when I remember being scared. Strange that they fell exactly a month apart.

I made good time travelling to Nimmersdorf. I was young, unencumbered this time by slow-trudging crones. I covered the ground between the cottage and the woods in less than an hour. I was travelling light. On previous journeys I had been loaded down with the tools of what passed as my guardians' trade. This time, I carried only a small bag of provisions: a meagre supply of whatever could be spared.

The forest, which had loomed stark and black against the distant horizon what seemed like only moments earlier, was now around me. I walked between leafless trees which cast dark shadows across the snow. Although the sun was high in the sky - not strong enough to melt the snow, but warm and bright - here, amidst the trees, the light could barely penetrate.

There was a path through the forest, rust red clay, winding like a ribbon discarded on the black earth. I had been told, by Virgina, Genetrixa and Anicula in turn, of the importance of sticking to the path. The forest was old and vast and sprawling, home to bears and wolves, to other things about which my guardians only ever darkly hinted.

But the path was safe.

The path, by my reckoning, would also lead me more than three hours' travel further west than I needed to go.

I cut instead, through dense, deeply shadowed woodland, where the tracks of various animals criss-crossed in the snow and dirt. A spiders web was suspended between the boughs of a tree, jewelled with frost, gleaming in the little light that fell here. Moss, the silver-white of Anicula's hair, clung to trunks, and scarlet berries shone on otherwise bare branches, crimson spatters against the snow.

Fallen leaves and twigs, rigid with rime, cracked under my feet. Occasionally, from the forest around me, I thought I heard answering snaps and rustling. From time to time, I would halt and wait, motionless and silent as possible, straining to hear, but I could never be sure.

I stopped at a clearing and ate from the bag of provisions Virgina had packed for my journey. At the centre of the clearing, was a pond, spikes of reeds protruding from it frozen surface, ice-brittle and withered by the cold. The sun had reached the zenith of its arc and its light reflected off the frozen water, blinding and hypnotic, and painted the glade in its magical golden glow.

A few hours later, after picking my way between trees and around bramble, crossing ground strewn with pebbles, crusted in compacted snow that hadn't melted since it first fell at the start of the season, I emerged from the forest.

Daylight had all but left the sky. The shadow of Nimmersdorf castle poured long and dark before it, as the last crimson traces of sunset ignited the horizon.

I walked along the main street that ran through the small principality, a straight-ish line connecting the castle and the red dirt track that meandered through the forest. Smoke poured from chimneys of the houses on either side. From the doorway of an inn, came the smell of cooking meat, the sounds of laughter, a blast of heat as I passed by.

A few people crossed my path: a huntsman returning triumphant with a brace of plump birds tied together and thrown over his shoulder; a woman fetching kindling; two young children, their genders utterly indeterminate under the mismatch of layers they wore against the cold, leading a goat down the road. They acknowledged my presence with polite, friendly nods and I nodded in return.

I only realised, when Nimmersdorf castle loomed huge and dreamlike in front of me, that I had been looking out for the fair-haired boy who had given me the necklace last summer, and I felt an odd little wrench of disappointment.

The gate to the castle was before me, set into the wall that surrounded it, hung on hinges larger than my head. I raised my hand to knock. This was it: it was time. I was tired and a little uncertain, but unsurprisingly, I was not afraid.

The sound of my fist against the wood of the massive gate was louder than I expected. It sounded like thunder in the gathering gloom.

A narrow hatch opened in the gate. A panel I hadn't noticed slid aside to reveal a gap, just big enough for a person to see through, or fire a crossbow. Through the gap, two eyes looked me up and down and a voice asked me to state my business.

'I seek an audience with the prince. I come on behalf of the Grey Women who live on the other side of the forest. I carry important tidings, of which the prince must be told.' My voice was steady. I knew I sounded older than my years.

The eyes looked doubtful for a moment.

'Oh...' The panel slammed back into place.

I heard muttered words being exchanged on the other side of the gate: 'I dunno... some young girl in a red cloak... says she's got important news for the prince.'

The hatch opened again. 'One moment, miss.'

Slow, quiet moments passed like that, standing outside the castle gate. I don't know how many. A fine, dry, powder-like snow began to fall, settled on the stones of the walls, on my clothes, in my hair, and a wind began to rise, blowing in from the forests. The flakes swirled and undulated in the newly awoken breeze, as the last glowing licks of daylight faded from the sky.

A groaning of ancient timber: slowly, the gate rose.

I squinted to see past the flurry of snow that danced in front of my eyes, to make out anything in the near-dark of the winter evening.

A courtyard; a fountain (no water arcing from its spouts); someone walking towards me.

He seemed to be lit from within. His face looked as though it had been chiselled from some perfect white stone, or formed perhaps from moonlight itself. His hair was fair - not the straw-coloured fairness of the boy who had given me a necklace one summer that now seemed a very long time ago, but the silver of snow plains on cloudless nights - and it framed his impossibly beautiful face like a halo. His eyes were very green and very kind.

He stood in the gateway: the prince of Nimmersdorf. And he smiled.

I felt that smile embrace me, shutting out the cold and the wind, making me forget the distance I had covered that day. For a moment, I couldn't even remember why I was there.

'You are welcome here, child,' he said, in a voice which, though quiet, was oddly resonant. 'Please, follow me.'

He turned on heel and walked away from me.

And not sure I could do anything else, even if I wanted to, I followed him.

More to come...