Alone we conjure companye

To stay with us the waning hour;

Is not God highest figment

of Man’s first solitude?

The hunter inspected the parting of the grass. The wind blew through it a song of betrayal that turned his head toward the juniper thicket and would end in a wail and a thump.

Sup well, thought the hunter, nocking his bow. For I will.

He hadn’t the name of the wolf. Most noble sons did and believed themselves blessed with the spirit of the black forest. They stalked the banquet hall and preyed as their namesake did upon the unsuspecting fawn. But they did not share the wolf’s freewalking spirit, his lordship over the wilderwood.

Sascha kept with the woodsmen and traders, those unafraid to feel their own smallness under the black sky. He preferred hunting to women, and he longed after the thunder and stone of the mountains that girdled the Queen’s lands. He wanted to leave behind the vainglorious court and cling like an ant to the shoulder of the world.

Though blood and obligation kept him tethered to the citadel and its neatly kempt groves, he learned their tumbles and veins, became strapping and knowledgeable over decades of gamekeeping, and without conscious imitation of the wolf became one.

He took dinner at the low table. The nobles waved him to their mahogany round but he pretended not to mark them. They would pinch his beard and call him a funny man, but in truth he unnerved them as they did him, with their clutching courtesies and contradictions. They smelled of tulips and piss pot and reconciled etiquette with fabulous lusts for coin, flesh, wine and influence, all immaterial to the hunter.

Their ribbing was fondly meant, at least. He had their gratitude for stocking the forests for the Hunt, a holiday of merriment and pretending conquest. Their favor did not flatter him. Not while they sneered like petty children over the Queen. They waved their fingers when she passed, aping her faelike grace. They ridiculed her dignity, her ibis gate, and above all her rulership after the death of her husband.

The Queen thwarted their japes with her icy inimitability. She made them feel the weight of their idiocy, and they redoubled of spite.

Sascha did not like the Queen. Her fashion and eloquence, her invulnerable pallor as she bore the nobles and their devilment unblinking, struck him as not altogether human. She was a glazed idol, as mortal clay made jagged.

Sascha would not have pledged fealty to any other after the late king. Only she had the stomach to heel his slithering acolytes. For, complacent in his later years, the king let decadence darken the court, leaving his wife an assembly of drunks, rakes and blackguards, all deluded to royal pretensions. Men of irresolution and sloth. The king had left her an inheritance of hyenas who fancied themselves wolves.

Even in the king’s day, despite their love for him, they challenged his authority and jerked him like a scarecrow between their squabbles. He allowed it, that he might be loved and well remembered. He held their leashes without reining them.

The Queen did not bother with leashes. She controlled their finances, forgoing the scrabble of capitulation and simply dispensing as much or as little as ensured some semblance of order. They could yap and whine all they liked; she was their master, and she would have them remember it. But the Queen’s tightfistedness turned their hearts. It burned the nobles to be hand-fed by this slight woman whom they thought should have tremulously deferred. They plotted to heel her in turn.

They would have to be quick about it, for the late king’s daughter had begun to sprout. If they disliked the Queen’s control over their pleasures, they despised the prospect of a sixteen-year-old sapling on the throne.

The child had no idea of their prejudice. Until she lengthened and flowered into an eloquent young thing with the legitimate power—and the consciousness of that power—to threaten their courtly standing, they doted on her. As she grew, however, they treated her with erratic and strange attentions: flattery, ridicule, flirtation. She took to the groves to escape their games, granting them perfect privacy in the banquet hall to conspire.

The hunter divorced himself from that nastiness. He saw nothing in the child but the vivacity of the late king and the innocence of his own youth. He wished her happiness and, in all practicality, resigned her to either harden as the Queen had or fall to the hyenas’ jaws.

While the child played with caterpillars and the Queen shored up the coffers, the nobles sent agents far and wide. They rode out to other kingdoms and curried favor with eligible bachelors who would know only what they were told, that the Queen was a powerful woman with youth, beauty and loneliness; that she yearned for a lover to warm her bed and seat the throne with which her dead husband had burdened her.

Those who ventured to court her found a hard surprise.

She was beautiful, as promised, but twisted. She did not use her charms to gratify their advances as courtly women were supposed to do. Instead she hosted her suitors without care or thanks, frustrating them by her haughty air.

For her part, the Queen had caught on to the noblemen’s scheme. She knew they meant to cripple her through marriage. But she let them have on in the undisclosed hope that they might drum up a match in wit and heart, with money to relieve her of the nobles’ debts and good humor to lighten the gloom of rulership. She too was frustrated with her suitors, all of them brats. They called her wicked, manly and disdainful.

Their hatred was validation.

The Queen took sport in embarrassing them. One suitor dared to ride into her audience chamber and, astride his horse and visored still, make an offer with the token of a girdle. His lackey presented it on a pillow so that she might admire the goldspun silk bordered in mother-of-pearl. She regarded the girdle, readily tied to the size of a stein, and replied,

“And what shall I wear to the wedding?”

The suitors should have stopped coming. Word of the Queen’s contemptuousness would have poisoned her prospects. But the nobles defended the fair widow’s image, disposing of each homegoing suitor before he made the border. They fabricated accidents—highwaymen, riding spills, wolves—to prevent the spread of slander. Unwittingly they occasioned a new reputation, one of ill fate and chaos over the Queen’s lands, which more effectively deterred new suitors than a difficult woman would have.

Two years had gone since the last visit. The young prince had traveled far, and when he arrived the queen was reviewing cases. Rather than interrupt, he slipped among the audience to listen. She heard nobles and peasants alike, and she arbitrated with compassion and full wisdom of the law. He did not find her the innocent as reported and for it she captured his heart.

When she refused the prince, he left crestfallen but determined to prove himself worthiest. He figured that she had dozens of suitors and could only hope to distinguish himself from them. To the Queen alone, he could never compare. With this secret ambition, fired by love and naivety, he rode from the castle and reaching the border was shot off his horse.

The nobles grew mad to replace the Queen. It seemed she would run every worthy man from the kingdom. In the meantime the child was blooming into a woman of blood claim, which would cement her cunny on the throne. She was eleven already. Sixteen in a blink, in the wheel of kings and dynasties. It would not do.

They had a solution.

The nobles proposed a festival, to mark the harvest and rekindle trade relations with the neighboring kingdoms. They invited every kingdom to revel and tourney. These courtiers who excelled in strength, cunning and skill—and coin, for the buy-in—would have to turn the Queen’s eye, if not the people’s. They would pick a favorite and ring the streets with his name, and the bitch would have to please them, if not her own court, in marriage. The nobles threw themselves into preparations and drummed up a roster of fine competitors, including the foreign duke.

Kasimir, the sure victor, would heel her. He was a true wolf, standing tall on a pile of wives whose sudden deaths and mottleneck corpses showed that he of all suitors had the right way with women. He wore the rings of their marriages—one ruby, one sapphire, one silver, one gold—soldered in place by his ever swollen knuckles.

The Queen did not care for an excellent lancer or boxer or rider for a husband, but she had resigned to make a selection at the tournament. When else might she have her pick? Her coffers were empty, and without money she had no leverage, no assurance of survival, against the court. She needed a moneyed co-regent to sustain her kingdom and appease its court of ingrates who her drank her late husband’s cellar dry and pretended to her chambers. She was tired of fighting them. Out of all the competitors who arrived with boasting banners and retinue, one of them had to be tolerable. At the least, controllable.

She spent the last of her gold decking the kingdom for the fateful occasion, figuring she might as well have a hand in the arrangement of her marriage. She meditated on the late king’s virtues and deficiencies and decided she wanted a sharp man with a sense of the world. He must have strategy, courage and experience. With those interests in mind, she designed a Hunt that would weed out the idle pretenders and faint of heart. The gamekeeper, known plainly as the hunter, would carry it out.

The hunter knew the victor would be king. He knew that the succession of talent, popularity, and deep pockets would force the Queen’s hand for the advantage of the people. He did not assume, however, that the victor must be a scoundrel or a simpleton. The hunter understood the gravity of his role in the wheel of kings and made the woods a course of trials to ensure a canny victor.

The hunter regretted he could not do more for the Queen. Not many husbandly virtues mattered in the woods. He steeled himself against such worries. The Queen would stand upright and proud, ever the ivory tower no matter her counterpart.

The preparations occupied much of his time. He tended to the game, the weapons, the trails and the dogs. The nobles harassed him with their ideas, which he patiently handled.

He did not anticipate the Queen’s proposal.

His dinner was interrupted by a letter of summons. The hunter knew the Queen’s page, and her seal, and figured she too had suggestions for the Hunt. He recalled she was a formidable shot herself.

He left his meat and goblet and followed the page to the king’s suite. Hat in hand, he went in.

The hunter had never been inside the royal suite and was surprised to find the child on the floor. She was crouched on her haunches in the dim antechamber, absorbed by the contents of her hands. The hunter glimpsed the wriggling shell of a roach and kept walking. The Queen awaited in the parlor.

The walnut furniture gleamed darkly in the firelight, and the Queen sat behind the writing desk like an egret in wasteland. The moonlight through the window lit her on one side while the diamond lattice cut her face and shoulder. Her eyes were the green of spring climbing for summer, hard as emerald rounds upon the hunter’s entry.

“Tell me,” she said by way of greeting, “how goes my Hunt?”

The hunter bowed and told her of the course. She listened and moved her neck in signs of acknowledgment, pleasure or question. When the hunter fell silent, the Queen spoke.

“I trust you know the importance of your task. And yet I have one more to ask of you.” Her eyes flickered to the antechamber and back. “You best of anyone know the woods and its dangers. Is it true we must fear the woods at night?”

He bowed his head. It was, but he did not want to answer her. A sense of dread had knotted his insides. He felt he was the object of some private joke.

“What is it about the night?” she went on. “Everything under it is the same, regardless of the turn of the Earth.”

The hunter swam for an answer that might satisfy her. “I suppose that would be the invisible—that is, the unknown that we realize too late.”

 The Queen smiled. “Delusion. Self-treachery. I feel their humiliation more keenly than regret. Don’t you?”

The hunter turned his hat in hand. “Yes, my Queen.”

“Then you agree. The unknown is a danger.”

She looked him full in the face. It was a cutting look that forced his eyes low. “I think,” he said slowly, “that the unknown had better be found out.”

She rose from the desk. The Queen had begun to fear as the nobles did the coronation of the child, who was the true unknown with her bugs and wanderings. She sometimes fixed the Queen a look of peculiar darkness, an accusation she was too young to make consciously. It froze the Queen’s blood, and it would not go away with money or capitulation.

The child had to die. But her innocence, and the king’s memory, forbade it. She would bloom in beauty and power, and she would grow blighted as the Queen did with their hatred, except the child would not be able to stand it. If she could, it was because she hadn’t the companion pressure of one younger, one incognizant, edging her out.

She must be kept in her innocence, and she must answer for it. The Queen decided.

“She must die, or I.”

In fairness and mercy the Queen commanded the hunter.

She knelt in the scrub under the apple trees. Dirt and grass had turned her hem dark, but she did not notice. She chatted into her hands, which were cupped around something fragile and crawling. A grasshopper, perhaps.

Sascha pitied the child. He could not know the workings of a young girl’s mind, but he recalled his own wants and faults at her age. He imagined her love for life and her hunger for it, the world an open rose.

And yet the Queen was right. The child was not faultless. She carried the blood of kings and had grown out of harmlessness. The queen was ridiculous for fearing the child and yet, in this court of hyenas, deadly prudent. He pitied the Queen and wished mercy on her and the child she might have loved, were the child not a reflection of her own age and obsolescence.

He nocked an arrow and drew his elbow back. The bowstring tickled his cheek.

As if perceiving a flutter of her own finality, the child looked up and smiled.

Sascha froze.

He should have let go before she looked up.

She was not an animal to be shot and bagged. She was not an unknown, to the hunter at least. She was a kindred spirit, who seemed to peer into his soul and question without judging. 

Sascha dropped his stance and slung the bow over his shoulder. He knew he would regret it, but he would not run from a child.

He approached her, crackling the fallen leaves in the way.

She flinched and broke into a precious grin. “Sascha!”

Her gaze shifted ever so slightly, hitting his true, and he realized with a heavy heart that she had not seen him before. She had looked up for some other reason. In effect she might not have looked up at all. He might have killed her without difficulty, without treason.

Oblivious to his prior intentions, she flew happily into his arms.

The hunter looked upon her sun-stinging hair. He felt the intensity of her small, beating frame. She was such an easy favor. He might follow through without even knowing it. Divorced of his will, his arms might constrict and in the way of true patriots happen to snap her like a stalk.

He let her go.

“I’d like you to meet my friend,” she said, opening her fist. Inside was a spider, shapely and striped like a violin. It twitched in the pink of her palm, two of its legs splayed.  She must have disjointed them in her happiness. The hunter thought on what he could say.

“Most children dislike spiders.”

She shrugged, putting the critter in her pocket. “It’s better to make friends than be afraid.”

The hunter started, recognizing the words of the late king. She looked like him. She had his blood, legitimate blood, and though the Queen had ruled long and well as she could in his absence, was it possible she, in the wheel of kings, was the pretender?

“I think you’ll need this one,” he said, licking his lips. “He’ll serve you on your journey.”

The child squinted at the sky. “But it’s not sundown yet.”

He followed her sulking gaze toward the castle. “No, child. You must leave these lands.” He nodded to the North, where the sunstruck mountain budded gold over the trees. “There you will be safe.”

“From what?”

He thought a moment. “From the gargoyles.”

She did not know the word.

“You know,” he pressed, lowering his voice so she might lean into the lie. “The noblemen. You didn’t think they were human, did you? Not like you or I.”

She stared hard into the hunter’s eyes, the cogs of conjecture working in her own. “They’re loud. And silly. And they give me strange looks.”

The hunter’s heart broke for her, but he went on. “Yes, the evil eye. They mean to curse you—tonight! If you do not leave this moment, they will turn you to stone.”

He watched her grow into the lie, latching onto the importance of it.

“Go, then.” He pointed her toward the mountain. “Be safe.”

She sniffed. “The worms.” She pointed to her spot in the leaves. “I’m the one who waves off the robins and tucks them back in the mud.”

“There will be worms on the mountain.” The hunter glanced over his shoulder, at the sun touching battlements. “Wherever you go there will be little things to save.” He shook off his coat and started lifting her arms into it. She pouted and tugged against him until he promised to tend the worms in her stead.

Satisfied, she snuggled into the fox fur. “When will I see you?”

He did up the buttons and turned the collar to protect her from the nightfall chill. “If you’re a good child, you’ll tuck yourself deep in the mountain where no one can find you. Forget the castle. Never reveal yourself. And never return.”

The child turned red, her chin set and dimpled.  “Won’t she bid me farewell?”

The hunter stopped fussing over the coat. The poor thing did not understand the danger she faced—or the danger she posed. How could she? Her world was mud and spiders. How simply he could stoop to kiss her goodbye and pop her head off its cord. He would be spared the Queen’s displeasure. The Queen would be spared her own demise. And the child would be spared a life of exile.

Her neck, pale and insignificant between his hands, might happen to twist…

The hunter started. He did not have to kill the child. The mountain would do it for him. If the cold did not take her, some animal would. He need only jolt her toward her fate.

“Go, Princess,” he said, towering over her. “Or stay in stone.”

With that, the hunter changed his face. His brow rolled like a bag of snakes and his lip curled in a bestial grin. With a snap of his jaws, he frightened her into motion.

He chased the child as fast as her legs would go. He chased her into the deep woods and over the hills, out of the orchard and into the true wilderness beyond. She scrabbled over rocks and tree roots, her dress snapping like the tail of a hen. He gave her no quarter, chasing her until she collapsed just shy of the kingdom’s edge.

He regarded her, twisted and steaming on the forest floor, and did not know what to pray—that she survive the night or die at once. Undecided, he gathered her in his arms and laid her down on the other side of the border.

She had made it farther than most. He could help her no more.

The child woke in a darkness spit with stars. She wore a man’s coat, and the soles of her feet were rubbed raw in their shoes. She recalled a man chasing her—a gargoyle, it was, with a wolfish face and evil eye—and the safety of the mountain. Given the slant of the earth, she must be upon it.

Burrowing into the lap of an oak, she reserved her strength for the morning.

The Queen was pleased, if a little revolted, by the hunter’s zeal. He had swiftly handled with the child and cut out her heart for proof. It lay hardening in a glass box on the nightstand.

In the quiet of the night and her own peace of mind, she dreamed of the Hunt.

At the spit of the canon, the hunters bounded into the woods and killed everything. Their lackeys slouched under biers of foxes, badgers, bears and fowl, piling the banquet hall until the tables caved. The Queen stood at the parapet, watching the last man return. At his side walked a white roe. Its neck was marked where he had trapped it, but it did not wear a leash. It walked of its own accord and together the roe and the man entered the castle.

The dream heartened the Queen. She allowed herself a sprig of hope in the outcome of the festival and treated herself to a morning of leisure before the mirror, twisting her hair into a crown.

The wolves had gotten to her.

That was the story the Queen had ordered. The child wandered herself lost one afternoon and, come the night, was devoured.

The nobles threw a merry wake in the child’s honor. They drank in her name and had whores in her memory. When they recalled the child afterward, they remembered their fun and almost regretted that she had died.

The hunter absented himself. He could not watch their travesty of mourning. He threw himself into the Hunt but was too scattered to properly attend to the preparations. He began to look as helpless as he felt, and, with this erosion of composure, suspicious. He had to jolt himself to decisive action. But that was the problem. The child had fled, and along with her had gone his judgment.

He wondered if she had even woken after he ran her out, or if her little lungs had burst through her teeth. She had been feverish when he left her in the leaves. He thought of her ducking from gargoyles in the wilderwood, on the cusp of winter. He had not wanted to kill her and had done it anyway, drawing it out for demented mercy. She would die and be scavenger food, whereas he could have wrung her neck and left her in her beloved orchard. People would think she had choked on an apple, and she would be buried a princess between the marble coffins of her parents.

He had fooled the Queen with the heart of a boar, and she had scowled at the visceral, veined stone. Is this what we’re made of? she seemed to say, before shutting the glass lid. He did not know what she had done with it, kept it for a trophy or a momento mori, but he hoped it haunted her. In the days following he thought he could smell pig’s innards on her pearl-netted hair.

At dawn the child set out to climb the mountain. She had only to keep walking uphill to reach the summit, safely enwrapped in the blue cirrus of dusk. There she found an old cottage, overlooking the cadmium rolls of the kingdom. Finally safe, she took out her only friend, as of yet, to show him the view.

The spider had curled into a briar, and it refused to move. When she blew on it, it fell open. That was all. She tipped her palm and watched it float back toward the castle, where she hoped it would perk up and be lively again.

She could not comprehend the history of the cottage, that someone had cobbled it of sticks, mud and stone. She thought it a fixture of the mountain, a project of fairies trying for paradise.

Inside the cottage was a pantry, a cache of hunting weapons, an old shirt with too much ruff, and a wooden table and chairs. The child stared into the oak slab tabletop and its honey and cinnamon veins. She rubbed its stubbled face until her palms tickled with splinters. She felt it was magic, and disposed to help her.

She clambered onto the table and rested her cheek on the surface. It smelled of wood, dust, and rat piss, and it warmed to her. The chairs, too, took a liking to her. Their backs peeked over the table, the slats knotted with eyes, striped eyes that watched her.

She hopped off to examine these curious chairs. They were short and crude, made of sticks that bent different ways, suggesting different personalities. She pulled them into the last slant of sunlight to get a better look. They returned her judgment like mischievous children, daring her to pick one. She did not. She leaned against the table and waited for them to give up their names.

Hungry. Weary. Bilious. Bleary. Tearful. Hopeless. Penitent.

It was her job to cheer and instruct them, to beat her skirt over the dust of their seats and remind them of civility. She would be their guardian, favoring some above others, but privately; dividing herself fairly with all in perfect telepathy and perfect friendship.

The child thrived in her new company. They did not chase her or tweak her or linger eyes. They tested her in other ways. They raked her stomach and parched her mouth, sapped her limbs and slouched her back. It was meant in good fun, so she forgave them and cultivated a rare, feral beauty as sovereign of her cottage, her mountain, her reality. She would not last long, for bodily wants, but she would enjoy the splendor.

She foraged in knotholes and slips of rock, finding parcels of potatoes, turnips, cheese, candles and flit. Sometimes sweet meats, but these were rare treats. The mountain did not trust perishables.

She did not know it was the hunter who provided. He hid the parcels low, where she might think to look, and hoped with each one that it was in fact the princess who found them. He worried for wolves. And he worried for her. Should he encourage her survival? Should he risk her dependence and, were he caught and punished, her disappointment? What if someone caught her?

Regret and uncertainty ravaged him. He no longer cared to keep up appearances. He looked like any woodsman, haggard and bent. His beard grew free and patchy where the wilderwood scratched him.

He hoped to track her through the empty parcels and bring her back to people—discreet people—who would marry her into a new name and keep her fed and lodged the rest of her days. But the festival drained his time and prevented the anonymity to go where he liked. For now the parcels would have to do. They were almost enough to convince him of his own goodness.

The festival came and the nobles had their champion, the strapping Kasimir. He had bribed the other kingdoms not to trade with the Queen. Lacking the partnerships that would have repaid her extravagance, she would have to marry him.

He delivered his catch at the Queen’s feet. She looked upon the white roe and its unseeing eye, punched like a berry by the killing shot, and accepted his victory with a gracious nod and bile in her throat. The people rejoiced to be saved by the dashing huntsman.

 The Queen awarded him the victor’s ring, an emerald set in gold. He pushed it over his thumb, completing the glister of jewels on his swollen hand.

  — Three Years Later —

He saw her.

He was gathering leaves for burning, when he sensed another presence and turned.

The child had grown into a mouse on stilts. Her feet and hands were black from foraging, and her legs showed to the shin under her dress, since torn up the back to accommodate her growth, though hunger and scavenging had slouched her. She chattered to herself in her own language.

He staggered in disbelief, crunching the leaves.

She looked at him. Time’s pendulum halted between her eyes and Sascha saw nothing but wilderness reflected in them. He called her name.

She bolted.

He could not keep up with her. She was hardly the child he had frightened off years before—and he was no longer that hunter. He tripped over his feet and fell like a plank, biting his lip open.

He left the leaves and shut himself in the castle.

The nobles knocked. The horses stamped and the dogs whined for food. Only the Queen could stir him.

His misery intrigued her. She did not understand the sudden, sickly onslaught of conscience that kept him indoors. He held a new glamor, the fact that so loyal a subject could be so unhappy in her court, when there was no cause for misery other than her own—or was that not enough for him?

Kasimir had made his status unquestionable. He fixed himself in the banquet hall and outshined even the lustiest of nobles. The Queen watched him drink and whore and loose his temper in excess of even their standards. She prolonged her engagement by any means possible. She did not want to share her kingdom, or her bed, with that brute. Such a one would have everything, what power she granted him and what little remained.

He harassed her with threats and affronts, bashing her servants and tossing her into walls. She slit her skirts and carried a dagger at her thigh, which he laughed at when she wielded but for the time being minded. She only had so long to use it against him, her betrothed, for she could not point a dagger at a king.

The more Kasimir terrorized, the more the hunter enticed her.

She made him aware of her attentions. She sent presents to ensure it. A bow carved of whalebone. A new spaniel. A garter of silk.

The gifts did not remind Sascha of the Queen’s generosity. He thought of the child in exile. He realized what he must do to salvage his peace, and the child, and agonized.

She intercepted him in the kitchen.

He took his meals there, in the privacy of the bustle. Clearly he had underestimated the Queen. She was a bloodhound, not to be evaded or tricked.

His stomach flipped as she approached, her crown brushing the pots hung on the ceiling.

“You cannot avoid my notice, hunter. I’ve grown used to male attention, such that I feel a chill when I am deserted. Especially by one who so interest me.”

The hunter apologized with a bow.

“I knew where to find you,” she said. “I was simply detained.”

He saw the blue spots on her forearm, and for a moment she was any other woman to him: flesh, possibility, warmth.

She rolled her wrist so that all he saw was snowy white again. “I’d like you to visit the royal chambers.”

She said it sweetly. But a word from a Queen was an order. They both knew it.

At nightfall he appeared, unchanged and unshaven. The page was scandalized, but the Queen would not have him killed for slovenliness. Such consequences, however, were not unwelcome to the hunter.

When the Queen let him in, a faint smile touched her eyes. “These chambers have not seen a real man for some time.” She stepped aside in wordless beckoning and shut the door as he entered. His eye fell to the spot on the carpet where he had seen the child playing all those years ago. The Queen offered him her elbow.

“I have a request, Sascha. And I can only entrust it to you. You are the one friend I am given in this life, and I wish I could give more than I have robbed of you.”

She sounded sincere as she pulled him along. They reached the bedchamber.

“You want me to kill the future king,” he said.

“Is that what he is to you?”

The Queen thumbed the scab on his lip. He winced.

“I believe you a good man, Sascha. Your agony proves it. Murder is not kind to the pure of heart. Now I beg you, as your friend and queen: be good again for me.”

She led him to a walnut bed with sheets of blue silk.

He saw the box on the nightstand and hardened his mind. He allowed the Queen’s affection as she slipped him from his doublet and boots, stripped him bare and vulnerable and told him to undress her. He obeyed, reciprocating her fierce, sucking kisses and making love to his sovereign until she wept like a dog, starved so long of warmth and company. He felt sorry for her as he brushed her hair off her sleeping chest. He almost regretted taking the knife, which he knew she would keep under her pillow, and punching it through her heart.

She felt only a distant rush, a severance.

He dressed himself and rode out, taking the glass box with him. He pitched it into the woods and did not hear it break, so well and rightfully was it lost.

The hunter searched for years. In that time Kasimir took the throne and reveled himself fat and ulcerous. Some of the nobles learned shame to obey such a king and skulked to their country manors. The hunter might have retired as well, but he wanted to remain close to the child, wherever she was. He felt her close, shadowing him, curious but afraid.

He did not mean to trap her.

He found her bent over the snare, her ankle caught between the steel jaws. Hearing his approach, she snapped upright—too fast—and sank to one knee. Semisensate, she struggled and tore against the trap. The blood flowed fresh and steaming, more than the earth could take.

“Princess!” Sascha cried, rushing to stop her.

She recognized through the tired folds of his face the gargoyle that had run her near dead. She screamed to the mountaintop to be saved.

Her friends did not hear her. She screamed and screamed.

The hunter carried her back to the castle. She thrashed and kicked in bouts of consciousness, and he ended up tying her to a wheelbarrow to get her inside. He would not abandon her again. He owed it to the child who lived somewhere in this feral creature. He owed her civility and comfort.

Kasimir would help. He saw the maiden, bleeding out in her wheelbarrow, and pledged to marry her. So taken was he by her peculiar, grunting, innocence.

The hunter resigned her to the king, who would dote on her as she deserved. It would not be like his last betrothed, who grudged him everything. So the hunter told himself.

As predicted the king fattened and hammered her into womanly shape, and she forgot the mountaintop. She learned to speak again and had a pretty voice when she was bid to use it. She was charming and healthy and perfectly civilized.

She felt indifference for it all. She beamed at the king’s arm and felt scraped inside. Empty and immovable. Hard.

In the fog of her dreams, when her naked legs touched and the lame ankle twinged, she saw seven shapes on a mountaintop. She understood that they watched her and that without her care they would gather dust and petrify. The blue cirrus would sweep them into its sanctuary and she would warp beyond recognition should they meet again.