The Seventh Swan: Part Two

By Jaida Jones

After the second day the beach turns too rocky to walk on and we turn left, keeping to flat land and staying clear of the hills that, Nick Peddler told us, breed bandits. My brother and I take turns each telling the other what stories we remember. My favorite of his is Bluebeard.

‘Should she not have looked?’ I ask, kicking up dirt. ‘Perhaps he killed them in his disappointment, that no woman loved him enough to trust him.’

‘Do you believe that, Beauty?’ Courage asks.

I shake my head, wrinkle my nose and reply, ‘Not at all!’

The sky is dark when I exhaust my usual repertoire of tales: The Yellow Dwarf, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, The Terrible Head, Rumpelstiltskin.

‘What now, then?’ I ask.

Courage looks away from me. ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ he says.

My hands feel cold. I shove them into my pockets, uncertain of his motives; I can’t bear my brother this way. ‘Why not The Princess on the Glass Hill?’ I ask. ‘I’ll tell that one. I like it better.’

‘I haven’t heard Beauty and the Beast in years,’ Courage says. ‘Come. I like the way you tell it best.’

I tilt my chin up in defiance. ‘I hate that one,’ I tell him.

‘Why?’

‘The Beast,’ I explain. ‘He’s been a Beast for a hundred years, hasn’t he?’

‘Those were the terms of the curse.’

I swat a mosquito against my cheek. ‘Well, and so,’ I continue, ‘what happens when he finds that he’s a man again? He fell in love with Beauty as a Beast, and she with him—as he was. It’s all well enough to say it wasn’t anything but love, pure and simple, but a man—grows used to being a certain way.’

‘A man never grows used to that,’ says Courage. ‘A man never grows used to being deformed, a monster, not while he can still remember what he was before the change.’

‘Yet he was her Beast,’ I press, stubbornly. ‘I should think it would have been a trouble for both of them.’

‘If Beauty loved him,’ Courage says, voice all fire, ‘then it would not matter which way he was at all—Beast or man.’

‘I wonder,’ I reply. ‘I meant it for him though, most of all. What if he came to remember too much what being a man was? Once that happens, is it really going back at all? Or is it just another change?’

‘Once a Beast, always a Beast,’ Courage whispers.

It seems strange that one man should be cursed for too little kindness while another is cursed for too much of the stuff. I don’t like to bother with it either way. My brother remains in a mood all night long, but I can’t help but think he brought it on himself no matter which way you turn the thing to the light.

It’s evening again when we see the smoke from the gypsy fires. Nervousness clenches in my belly, and gladness too.

‘They’re still there,’ I tell my brother, embracing him happily. He presses his lips against my hair, and doesn’t pull away.

‘How’ll we manage this?’ he asks.

‘With the truth,’ I reply.

‘Ah,’ says Courage. ‘I’ll wait here to learn the verdict.’ I begin to protest, but he shakes his head. ‘It’s better I don’t follow you,’ he explains. ‘Cross my heart, Beauty. Nick Peddler told me it must be done this way.’

Nick Peddler hasn’t once led us astray. I agree, but grudgingly. I’d rather enter the gypsy camp with my brother at my side for a hundred reasons, not the least of which being his bravery.

I comb my hair with my fingers and, kneeling by the stream, wash the grass stains out of my new jacket, polishing the buttons with a corner of the quilt. I can see myself reflected floating and uneven in the water. If only I had a mirror.

‘Stop preening,’ Courage says fondly. ‘You’re beautiful as ever.’

‘I hope the locket will prove payment enough,’ I reply. There’s a midge bite on my throat and I arrange the collar of my jacket to cover it. ‘There. How do I serve?’

Courage goes so far as to laugh at me. ‘You serve well enough,’ he says.

‘Better than most?’ I coax.

‘Better than any other,’ Courage replies, still laughing. ‘Enough to bargain us safe passage with the gypsies, or at least a free look at our tea-leaves.’

Nick Peddler gave me what he called three thimblefuls advice on dealing with the gypsies. One: be as beautiful as you can be. Two: don’t wear a shifty look. Three: tell the truth no matter what it costs you, for lying is always worse.

The first gypsy I see is a child, finger popped in its white-toothed mouth. I can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. It’s naked from the waist up, a bright red scarf wrapped around its middle, and it watches me from under dark lashes. I pull a button from my jacket and hold it out.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘My name is Beauty.’

The child takes the button from me, inspects it, bites it with its back teeth. ‘Good,’ it says at last. ‘Come.’

I feel the eyes on me as I walk through the half-pitched tents, roms and their romas and a scattering of barefoot children appearing from within to follow a few steps behind me. The child with my button walks me proudly to the empty space in the center of all the tents, where the oil drum fires remain unlit until evening. I feel like the Pied Piper leading a gypsy army into battle.

‘You wait here,’ the child tells me, and disappears into the crowd. I try to follow it but the gypsies close up around its path, and as I lift my eyes I discover I’ve been surrounded. Dark eyes, gold teeth, bejeweled ears, black hair, tattoos. It was one thing to watch the gypsies pass by Mark’s window, few by few; it’s another to be at the heart of them, overwhelmed by the smell of oil and firewood.

For a long time, nothing happens. I look at them and they look at me, and though my resolve wavers I don’t let it show.

I want my brother.

At last one brave man with broad shoulders and not a single gold tooth in his mouth steps forward, bridging the space between me and them. He reaches an oil-slick hand out to touch my hair where it curls against my neck. I feel suspiciously like a thoroughbred colt brought to market.

A woman, both her front teeth glinting with metal, follows suit, testing the weight and fabric of my jacket, inspecting the buttons. Her breasts are freckled and her shirt barely covers them. When she notices me looking she smiles a bright smile, and swishes her hips as she leaves me.

A few of the gypsies click their teeth in my direction. Others eye the locket, my fine boots, the tear in my trousers at the left knee. I can see them taking me in, inch by inch, deciding my worth and weighing me by my soft hands, my green eyes, my long lashes.

I try to look as beautiful as I can.

It must be ten minutes at least since the child left me when it returns at last, leading a woman of indeterminate age. Her hair is black save for two shocks of silver, her skin smooth everywhere except for the wrinkling corners of her eyes, and her mouth is a wicked thin twist in her hard face. The other gypsies fall quiet, perhaps out of deference or perhaps out of curiosity, as the woman folds her arms across her chest like a man and stares at me.

‘So,’ she says at last. ‘You come here for help, is it?’

‘I do,’ I say.

‘And who led you?’

‘Nick Peddler,’ I tell her. ‘As far as the sea.’

‘And what’s your purpose?’

‘To lift the curse on my brother.’

‘And what curse is it?’

‘If you want, you can see.’

‘And what do you want from us?’

‘Nick Peddler told me: you’d know better than he.’

The gypsy woman purses her lips. After a moment she throws her head back and laughs, and the others follow suit. ‘True enough, so,’ she says. ‘Come. Let’s see your brother. When we see your brother, we see what we can do.’ She draws close to me, looking hard into my eyes. ‘Your name is Beauty?’

‘Yes.’

‘You think too much of yourself?’ she asks. ‘Too little of other people?’

‘I don’t think much at all,’ I tell her. ‘That’s the truth of it.’

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I see. You tell stories, you do. Come! Show me what you want to show.’

I lead her to Courage outside the camp. By now I’m certain all the gypsies are coming and nervousness kicks and dances in my heart. Should I have come alone, I wonder: could I have come this far on my own, without my brother’s face to remind me of my purpose? I’m not certain. I don’t know.

Courage is waiting for us.

‘Off with it,’ the gypsy woman says. ‘Let’s see you, so.’

I help my brother to undo the buttons and to ease his wings out of his sleeves. When he unfurls them with a sudden, fierce snap, lifting them high, it startles even me. The gypsies are silent, wary. The gypsy woman presses her thumb against her mouth and stares at him, and though I know she wants no more than to get a good long look at him I don’t move away, though my brother has never appreciated it when I act as his shield, and isn’t likely to start now.

‘Hide those wings again,’ the gypsy woman says at last. ‘Then follow you me.’

I do as she tells me, glad to have my brother at my side again. By the time I’ve done up the last button on Courage’s coat the other gypsies have melted away, back to their here-and-there jobs; I hear the sound of metal pounding against metal, of curling melodies plucked on guitars, of boiling water and of laughter from far away.

‘We do this private,’ the gypsy woman says. ‘No good to carry finished curses into a gypsy camp. No good to carry finished curses anywhere at all.’

Her tent is made of many brightly colored carpets all sewn together and propped against heavy beams of some pale wood.

‘Boat, once,’ she tells me, twitching her fingers to bid us inside. ‘Sit. You,’ she tells Courage. ‘And you, Beauty: here.’

She’s separated us, Courage on the ground in one corner, and myself on a squat stool in the other.

‘Now,’ she says. ‘Let’s have the story.’

I tell her everything I told Nick Peddler. If I tell it enough times, I realize, I’ll soon forget the story is my own. As I speak the gypsy woman is never still, smoothing out her skirts or boiling up a kettle of water; she pours three cups of tea in chipped white cups that have no handles. As the tea brews she watches me. Only when my story is finished does she speak again.

‘The tea is ready,’ she says.

It wasn’t what I was expecting.

When she says nothing more I decide against offending her hospitality, and lift the cup closest to me, blowing on it, breathing in the steam. I sip it first to test it, and find it isn’t too hot.

‘Are you thirsty?’ I ask Courage.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Go ahead.’

I frown and bring it to him anyway, holding the lip of the cup to his mouth. He drinks. When he’s done I dry his mouth with the corner of my sleeve, and look up to find the gypsy woman watching us.

‘Beauty is not usually so kind,’ she says, her smile crooked as the moon.

‘I don’t care very much for tea,’ I reply.

She waves me to her. ‘Give me that cup,’ she says. ‘I’ll see what’s to be done with you.’

I hand her the cup and she takes it with her hands, which are surprisingly smooth, and upturns the soggy leaves against the table. I see nothing in the shape at all, but it seems to decide something for her. She looks up at me, eyes older suddenly than I remember them to be.

‘How will you pay your way with us?’ she asks. ‘You plan to eat our food, I’m sure. You didn’t come here to die, to starve.’

‘I have this,’ I say, indicating the locket.

Her laugh is like warm, coarse bread. ‘Is it so, Beauty-boy? That’s but a trinket. We’ve seen the likes before. It’s no small task you ask of us.’

I flush. ‘I had a shirt of nettles,’ I tell her. ‘But I traded it to Nick Peddler for guidance here.’

‘It was a poor trade for you, Beauty-boy,’ says the gypsy woman. She pauses for a moment and I can see her eyes darken with thought, her brow wrinkling. Finally, she continues. ‘What would you be willing to do to pay us for our time, our troubles, our good bread?’

‘Anything,’ I whisper.

I mean it.

The gypsy woman looks slyly at my brother, his knees folded against his chest and his wings hidden in their sleeves. ‘Without that coat,’ she says, ‘he’ll fetch a pretty copper penny.’

My stomach feels like lead. ‘Not that,’ I say.

‘Why not?’ asks Courage. ‘You’ve done enough, Beauty.’

‘Don’t,’ I plead. ‘Courage. Please.’

‘If I had hands,’ Courage says, his tone decided, ‘I’d shake you on it.’

‘Will your brother be your hands?’ the gypsy woman asks him. Courage looks to me. My mouth is dry and all my words stick in my tight, tight throat. I wipe my sweaty palm against my jacket and hold my hand out to her.

‘I’ll be my brother’s hands,’ I say.

The gypsy woman never tells us her name, but the children call her Mama Lin. We’ll move north in the morning, she says, before she takes the hair from the locket: for whatever luck the love of a young maid’s snow-white heart brings.

One of the gypsy men fashions a collar for Courage out of scrap metal. Next, he fits a heavy linked chain to it, pieced together from mismatched links he gathers throughout the camp. He works fast and has me fetch a few extra links before the day is through, seeing as, he points out, I’m not doing anything but standing there so. He sends me three times. Each time, I pass Mama Lin’s tent where Courage is waiting, and the third time I meet the gypsy woman with the freckled breasts, who clicks her teeth at me.

When the work is finished, I bring the collar and chain to Courage to see if everything fits well. I lock the collar round his neck the way that girl slipped her locket round mine, except this is no lover’s token. For a moment I wish that I might be the one of us with wings for arms, but it’s a foolish thought. We both know I’d never bear it so steadfast of heart and mind.

‘How does that feel?’ I ask. I push the hair away from his neck to make sure it doesn’t snag and catch. ‘None too heavy? None too tight?’

‘Neither,’ says Courage. ‘It feels right.’

‘And you’re sure it won’t chafe?’

‘It might,’ Courage admits.

‘Mama Lin says you only have to wear it during the day,’ I say, though he knows better than I what’s expected of him. I run my fingers through his hair next, secretly trying to get used to the feel of the metal around his neck. It makes me a coward, but all I want is to take the thing off, not accustom myself to it. ‘Maybe she’ll have something to soothe the skin.’

Outside the sound of metalwork begins afresh. I know what the gypsies are building now: a cage for my brother. Light and easy to set up in the morning, break down again at night; for show only, and to make the children in the audience, if their parents allow them to come, feel safe.

‘Any case,’ I say, reaching to remove the collar, ‘you don’t need to wear it now.’

Courage pulls away from my touch; if he had hands, he would catch my wrist. ‘It may be best I get used to it first,’ he suggests.

I sit for a while with him, but I can’t stand seeing the metal glinting smooth around his neck, or hearing the chains clink one link against another every time he moves. At last I can weather the injustice no longer.

‘I’ll go see if there’s some dinner for you,’ I tell him. Quick as that, I slip away.

It’s not yet time for dinner, but I follow the smells of cooking until I find a group of gypsy women, both very young and very old, with their ironware cookery assembled round three fire pits. One skins a rabbit while another plucks some bird clean of its feathers, and a third is stirring something sweet by one of the fires. The rest knead a white, sticky dough, covered all over with flour: their arms, their breasts, their necks and faces. I watch them at their work for a long time, afraid to go back and face my brother. The gypsy women prove quite skilled at ignoring me completely, yet for a time it’s almost a relief to feel as though I’m neither here nor there, nor anywhere at all.

After some time they come to an unspoken agreement about me and what’s to be done with my presence in their midst.

‘Fetch me that knife, then.’

‘Bring me here that bundle of thyme.’

‘That’s not the thyme, boy, what else don’t you know?’

‘Come and I’ll show you how to gut the game.’

‘And turn the other way, so, if you’re to lose your lunch about it!’

The orders come fast and fierce and each one directly after the other. A few of the gypsy children—all boys at least seven to at most ten years old—gather in a half-circle round the cooking place to watch the spectacle. Now and then a rom passes by and, seeing me bent over the cooking with the women, works up a mouthful of spit and flings it from him with pursed lips and astounding vehemence, meant no doubt to reassert their masculinity in the face of my demeaning behavior.

The roma, on the other hand, don’t seem to mind.

They don’t thank me, but have me taste their food before the others, holding wooden spoons to my mouth and watching me with their keen eyes. I praise each of them in turn, at which they laugh and slap me on the back in thanks.

It’s late by the time they load me a plate of hot bread and my favorite of their dishes. A few of the children follow me back to Mama Lin’s tent, and I can feel them watching even after I duck inside. It isn’t my presence that fascinates them so. I place myself between the entrance and Courage, who still wears his collar. Mama Lin is nowhere to be found.

‘Are you hungry?’ I ask.

‘You’re flushed,’ he says.

‘I helped the women with their cooking.’

‘And they took no offense?’ Courage is smiling with half his mouth.

‘None,’ I assure him, ‘and I think they gave me the best of the bread for my troubles, too.’

‘The roms will surely resent you,’ Courage says. ‘You should be more circumspect with your attentions, and talk only to women without pierced ears.’

I laugh and tear our bread, feeding him piece by piece. The texture is coarse and the center still hot, and I burn my fingers more than once, so that I have to suck on them before I can go on.

‘Careful,’ says Courage.

‘It’s only bread,’ I scold.

‘Perhaps you should ask the children if they’re hungry, as well,’ Courage says.

I turn to look at them, eyes and grubby mouths and dirty hands all crowded together at the open tent flap. When they see me looking at them they don’t flinch or startle away, just stare at me instead before they fix their attentions once more on my brother.

‘I can chase them off,’ I offer.

‘Invite them in,’ Courage says. ‘Isn’t it best if they get used to me?’

Children are strange creatures, not at all like little people, unfathomable and very small. I beckon them in to us and they congregate just inside the tent, toeing the dirt and banding against us, together.

I lift my chin. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ I ask.

Silence.

‘Well, we have far too much bread,’ I go on. ‘So if you are hungry, you can come and have some of ours. Otherwise, you can do as you like.’ I leave the bread on its plate next to me, and turn back to the task of feeding my brother. The sticky sweet substance, when eaten with the rabbit, is delicious.

Soon, I’m aware of a movement at the corner of my eye. It comes closer, a tousle-headed, cautious child, until he stands at my elbow. ‘Bread,’ he says.

‘Go ahead and take it, then,’ I reply.

The boy rips off the crusty end, holding it in his hands and blowing on it before he takes his first bite. All the while he regards Courage with round, dark eyes.

‘Does that hurt?’ he asks finally, pointing to the collar.

‘Not very much,’ says Courage. ‘Though it is heavy.’

The boy seems startled. ‘You talk?’ he asks.

‘When I have something to say,’ says Courage.

‘Oh.’ The boy thinks it over, eating more of our bread. ‘What about those?’ he asks, pointing this time to Courage’s wings.

Courage shifts them so that the feathers ruffle and a few fall free. It’ll be summer before we know it and he’ll soon start molting. ‘Not very much, either,’ he says.

A few of the boy’s friends have come up behind him, sticking close. He shoves what’s left of the bread at them and wipes his palms on the front of his shirt. ‘Can I touch them?’ he asks.

Courage nods. ‘All right.’

‘Be careful,’ I add. ‘And don’t pull at the feathers.’

The boy gives me a look that says: I’m not stupid like some, gadjo. He reaches out and touches Courage, tentative at first, and then more sure of himself. It seems to give him some position of power amongst his friends, for they all look at him and shift from foot to foot, mouths open with awe.

‘How is it?’ Courage asks him.

The boy considers the question. ‘Soft,’ he replies.

When Mama Lin returns it’s to tell us we have our own tent. It’s small and it’s dark and the mosquitoes can still get at us, but it’s been a while since I last went to sleep without being able to see the stars.

I nestle my hands against the down underside of Courage’s wings.

‘They are soft,’ I say.

‘Goodnight, Beauty,’ says Courage.

The gypsies carry some things on their own backs and strap their heavier possessions to their horses. A rom named Cooper—who admired my locket the first day—tells me our first stop will be that evening, entertaining on private land. As we walk, he explains how the show will be with his hands.

‘A curtain like so,’ he says, drawing it in the air in front of us. ‘The cage behind. You stand there by your brother. I bring the crowd. One by one they come in. You give them half a minute, one minute at most. Then send them back out again. If they want to see more? They pay more. They get rough, they ask too much? My men will manage them.’

‘And what do I do?’ I ask.

‘Tell them anything you like,’ says Cooper. ‘Anything to bring them back, make their friends jealous, spread the word. Tell them he can fly and we keep him chained down so. Tell them he’s been this way for one hundred, two hundred years at least. Tell them you found him washed up on the shore of the ocean, or hidden in a cave surrounded by pirate gold. Tell them—’ Cooper pauses, dark eyes very bright. ‘Tell them he has no name at all.’

I feel as if I’ve missed some important secret. ‘Why’s that?’ I ask.

Cooper gives me a surprised look. ‘Nothing draws a crowd like a man with no name,’ he says. ‘Though you’ll need better clothes for it, so.’

It’s possible Cooper has no idea what this jacket cost my brothers to have made especially for me. I open my mouth to protest his ignorance, but Cooper silences me by taking an earring from his ear and holding it up against my cheek.

‘What do you think?’ he asks.

The metal is cool against my skin. I shiver, and say, ‘Oh.’

‘Something that catches the eye so,’ says Cooper. ‘That’s what you’ll need.’

We stop once to take lunch, and by dusk we reach our destination, a private house with high walls and narrow windows like a snake’s eyes. It’s my job to keep Courage hidden as they set up the tent for him, and one for Mama Lin to tell fortunes, and another for Alin who charms snakes.

I comb Courage’s hair and take off his jacket and his shirt. The gypsies light fires unevenly around the perimeter of our camp, small beacons to bring the landed gentry to our small carnival. I can see the lights go on one by one in the windows of the great house as I set the collar around Courage’s neck.

‘Cooper says I should struggle and flap my powerful wings,’ Courage says, speaking low to fill the unhappy silence.

‘I’m to tell the customers you have no name,’ I reply. ‘For that will bring the crowds. Would you rather have been washed ashore or found in a cave?’

‘Neither. How did you tame me?’ Courage asks.

‘With a special song I learned from the gypsies,’ I reply. ‘Mine is the only voice you answer to.’

‘Do I speak?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Where did I come from?’

‘No one knows.’

My brother’s chest is bare, his shoulders strong, his back smooth and pale. When he moves his wings, the muscles over his shoulder-blades stretch and shift. He tests the force of his wings, spreading them out to their full span, and from tip to tip they run the entire width of our tent.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I tell him. ‘We can run away. We can find another answer.’

‘No,’ says Courage. ‘We can’t.’

Cooper pierces my ear with deft, rough hands. The gypsy woman with the freckled breasts, whose name is Doina, dresses me as Cooper leads Courage to the cage. Doina’s fingers are short and very thin. She wraps a scarf around my waist and another around my neck, pinching the stinging lobe of my ear until it’s numb.

‘Your mother named you very well,’ she says, and twitches her skirts up above the knee as she walks away.

‘They say he fell from heaven,’ I tell the wide-eyed lord’s son. ‘The night before the morning I found him, men and women saw stars shooting through the sky. It’s possible he was one of them.’

‘Is it an angel, then?’ the young man asks.

I let my voice grow soft. ‘None can say,’ I reply. ‘Mayhap he came from above. Mayhap he came from below.’

‘Does it—does it speak?’

‘Not a single word,’ I say.

Women bring their babes in to see him for half the price. Young men push their loud way past the curtains. Children pay three times and only on the third time find bravery enough to shove their hands through the bars. One small girl faints and another threatens to do the same. Cooper’s strong voice carries through the night. Come one, he says. Come all who can, to see the Swan Prince—caught, bound, dangerous and beautiful! For each customer, Courage stretches himself and grows fierce, wings beating against the bars of the cage; one time he almost breaks himself free, and it’s only quick thinking on my part that keeps the flimsy cage together. He’s more careful after that. As I tell his story I grow braver each time, but I no longer look at him as I tell it, pacing the tight confines of the cage and ruffling his feathers.

So many come and go that I’m certain we’ve earned the gypsies a small fortune in one night alone.

It’s late when Cooper draws the curtain and yells loud enough to chase the last of the stragglers off. Coin jingles in his pockets as he comes inside, unlocks the cage door, and offers Courage his own jacket. I drape it over Courage’s shoulders, hiding a yawn against the heel of my palm. Courage turns his face against my hair.

‘Sleep now and deep so,’ Cooper suggests. ‘We travel again before dawn.’

Word spreads fast.

We make the most money in towns, Cooper’s sons picking pockets in the crowd outside the cage tent, and the rest of the coin turned to paying for entrance. I tell the same story each time: They say he fell from heaven, and the night before I found him, men and women saw stars shooting through the sky.

It’s possible the Swan Prince was one of those stars.

When there’s nowhere between stops to put on a show, we eat well and sleep even better. Cooper plays his guitar and Doina dances with her sisters, stamping their bare feet against the earth. Courage watches some nights and is nowhere to be found on others.

To pass the empty time I help the women prepare our dinners. Some days we’re paid in vegetables: corn, potatoes, beets. Ileana One-Tooth bids me slice the beets until my hands are purple all over the fingers and under the nails, and sticky with their juice.

Courage finds me slaving over my task and watches me, silent, for a time.

‘You look a madman,’ he says at last.

With a grin, I lift my stained hands to his face, pressing their shape in purple-red outline against his cheeks. I run my fingers over his jaw, his chin, even his lips. My thumb traces the whole of his mouth. Only then do I find I can’t take my eyes away from his, nor he from mine. My thumb rests, still and stiff, at the corner of his mouth, where he’d smile if only he were smiling now. I’m holding his face in my hands. With my fingerprints smudged and colorful all over his skin, he looks like a monster from some faraway land.

I tilt my mouth towards his, uncertain.

Courage recoils, as if burnt by the sight of me, come so close. ‘There’s a show tonight,’ he says. ‘Wear gloves, or wash your hands.’

‘Courage, wait,’ I say. ‘Your face—’

The air moves warm and empty in his absence.

I hurry to wash the beet juice from my skin before it sinks deep and won’t come off. Though I plunge my hands over and again into the ice cold water, my blood is up.

Doina finds me there, bent over the stream and scrubbing hard. She crouches behind me and takes my hands in hers. I can feel the beating of her heart through her breast, and feel the length of her thighs against my own. I turn wild and helpless to kiss her mouth with mine.

In the cage tent that night, a young boy points and screams and buries his face in his mother’s skirts. I long to lift my hand and strike the tears from his face.

‘The minute’s up,’ I say instead, my cheeks flushing hot with anger and shame.

I’m tired of this game, the chain clanking against the bars, and the hot air stirred every time Courage beats his useless wings.

Mama Lin corners me after the show, when I should be kneading the sore muscles of my brother’s neck and soothing the chafed red skin with the balm she gave us.

‘Drink this,’ she says simply, holding out one of her white teacups with no handle.

It smells of cinnamon and wine. I drink it at once, its spices burning through my throat, whereupon she takes the cup out of my hands and leaves me. No more than a minute later I find myself throwing up in the bushes, dizzy and too hot.

‘She made it from that lock of hair you had with you,’ Cooper tells me, stroking my back and showing an unusual kindness. ‘Drinking it will give her a Dream. She’ll now what to do with you then.’

I feel wretched and overwhelmed, too often on my hands and knees. I didn’t come into the world to learn humility, but rather to protect my brother from so much suffering. I’ve lost my certainty in the face of what the gypsies know.

Cooper smokes a cigarette made of thin paper and cloves. He offers me a puff from it, but I gag and turn away; he chuckles quietly, watching my face regain whatever color it once had under the burn I’ve acquired spending so much time beneath the hot sun. We sit for a spell in silence on the grass, under the swollen moon.

‘What do you hope to gain from this?’ Cooper asks.

What have I already gained? A hole in my ear, Doina behind a tree, a locket. I’ve lost more things than that: a shirt made of nettles, a father and mother, a sister, five brothers, a kingdom and a lock of hair.

‘I want it more than anything,’ I tell him. That much I know.

‘Ah,’ says Cooper. ‘But you still haven’t told me what it is, so.’

It may be it isn’t his place to hear it. It may be I haven’t learned it for myself yet.

That night I dream of Courage’s hands doing simple things, stained in beet juice up to the elbow, plunged into water that shines golden in the sunlight. I dream of the round hole of a wishing well. I want this to be over and done. I want to lay my brother’s arms before him as a gift and be held in them after. I want my stomach to stop aching from the brew Mama Lin bade me drink, and I want to be loved for a job done selflessly.

Mama Lin wakes us too early.

‘Get you gone, Beauty-boy,’ she says. ‘Get you out. Take your brother. Both of you get gone, now. Go.’

Courage groans. I hide my face against his chest, trying to keep things quiet and dark as sleep was bare moments ago. Courage lifts one wing to cover both of us, but I can feel Mama Lin’s fingers pinching my arm. I try to pull away. I should know better by now.

Mama Lin slaps my face. ‘Up!’ she hisses. ‘Up now! The place is close by. If you pay us for our hospitality any longer, so, we’ll be owing you for the kindness: and gypsies owe no man no thing. What you own is packed already, and Doina baked fresh bread for you. The time for your leaving is now.’

Grumbling, I stumble wearily into my boots and help Courage on with his coat, which he’s not worn since we joined up with the gypsies. It may be too hot for him to wear it now. Mama Lin shoves dark, unrecognizable things into a sack for us. I can smell bread, and cinnamon again, and catch the glint of light off a small, round mirror, blinding me where I stand.

Courage bumps my shoulder with his own. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘I’ll carry the sack.’

‘I’ve got it,’ I tell him. It’s not heavy at all, with two strong leather straps, and I swing it over my back.

The rest of the gypsy camp is sleeping: I can hear Cooper snoring in his tent. I feel adrift, without roots; I don’t know if I’ll miss any of them, or what’s to be done about it if I do. I rub at my eyes again while Mama Lin walks us to the edge of the camp and gives us our directions.

‘You follow the path between the two trees,’ she tells us, ‘and you come to the river Usk, where the water runs dirt brown. You follow it for a time and you’ll find the man on the stone. You break bread with him, he’ll tell you what to do. Three things. Repeat them to me.’

‘Path between two trees,’ I say. ‘Follow the river Usk. Break bread with the man on the stone.’

‘Good,’ says Mama Lin. ‘See that you remember this.’

She holds Courage’s face in her hands before we leave, almost the same as when I held it the day before, though the difference is Mama Lin knows her purpose, while I’ve no clues at all about mine.

Something I don’t understand passes between the gypsy and my brother.

‘Thank you,’ says Courage.

‘We’ll miss the money you bring,’ Mama Lin tells him, grinning wide. ‘Nothing else and nothing more.’

‘If you’d give this to Cooper,’ I add, handing her the locket, ‘I’d be grateful.’

She lifts it, inspects it, and then tucks it into a pocket in her skirts. ‘I’ll see he gets it,’ she says. ‘Now go on, I’d rather see the back of both of you.’

The river Usk is a dark, muddy gurgle, none too wide and none too deep, but very long, winding like a great brown serpent and flanked on either side by tall bleached grass.

‘You’ve changed,’ Courage says, not quite looking my way.

I hook my hands in the straps at my shoulders, lifting the weight as much as I can from sitting full on my back. ‘Have I?’ I ask.

No lie has ever crouched, squat and quiet and oppressive, between us this way before. I’m honest with my brother, if no one else, and he’s honest with me. The secret I keep from him lingers and festers, or sinks deep like a wedge of wood: swelling with rain, strong enough to split rock.

‘Yes,’ Courage says. ‘Something’s changed you.’

I remember Doina’s touch: warm, worn hands, and the tangle of her hair. I remember the smell of her. I stare at the poisonous, unclean water. My body liked it well enough, I have to remind myself, and wonder if Courage knows already. Perhaps Cooper or Alin or even Mama Lin told him, or perhaps he guessed matters for himself. I look at him slantwise from the corner of my eye to see if I can divine whether or not he knows—if I’m really so changed from what I’ve done—but his face is mostly turned away from mine, and I can read nothing of it.

‘You could have kept the locket,’ Courage says.

‘Cooper liked it so,’ I reply, adopting the gypsy dialect.

‘No good deed goes without its reward. It was clever of you.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t think we’ll travel with the gypsies again.’

‘Are you sorry to go?’

I tighten my grip on the straps, licking my lips. Doina chafed them something sore with her own. ‘Not if it means finding the man on the stone,’ I say.

‘And the cure for what ails me,’ Courage adds, with the traces of a smile.

‘And that, too.’

It’s some minutes more of silence before Courage speaks again. ‘And what of Doina?’ he asks. His voice is deceptively careless. I can feel his eyes trained on me, making the back of my neck blush. It’s burnt enough that the sudden color won’t show, and for the first time I’m grateful for the spiteful sun.

‘I’m no virgin, but neither was she,’ I reply. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

Courage looks shamed. ‘Yes,’ he says at length. ‘It was.’

‘And there’s nothing of it,’ I add, feeling suddenly stronger.

‘That’s unlike you.’

I reach out across the distance between us, touching the raw skin at his throat. ‘I don’t think we’ll travel with the gypsies again,’ I repeat. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I’ll mind.’

Soon enough, we come across the man on the stone. He’s impossibly small—though he’s a man in proportion, certainly, rather than a misshapen dwarf or inhuman goblin—not more than half the size of most men I know and barely a third of Cooper’s height. His eyes are black and beady as a bird’s in his brown, bald head, and his nose longer than it should be, his wrinkles carved and deep as oak bark. He doesn’t move but watches us, gaze hungrier even than ours.

‘What do you have,’ he asks me, ‘there, in your sack?’

‘Bread and drink from the gypsies,’ I reply. ‘Will you sit a while and take lunch with us?’

‘I will that,’ he concedes, rubbing his belly. ‘My stomach’s never full, and there’s a fact.’

I spread a cloth I find in the sack out on the ground and put the bread and gypsy rose-wine upon it. The little man leaps down from his stone, which is smooth and mounded as a rich man’s stomach when he’s sleeping, and together we tear the bread in half. He fills his mouth all at once, then chases the bread down with most of the rose-wine.

‘Hungry still?’ I ask him. He nods keenly. ‘You can’t have my brother’s lunch,’ I say, ‘but you can have mine.’

‘A deal, then,’ the little man says. He eats the rest of my bread and licks his nimble fingers greedily, until no crumb is left.

In turn, my brother offers him his bread, and we watch the odd man devour every single morsel of our food, looking sharply all around us when he’s finished it to the last, as if expecting more.

‘There’s no bread so fine as the gypsies’,’ he tells us at last, giving a great, satisfied belch.

‘To be sure,’ I agree.

‘Now, travelers,’ he says. ‘For your kindness, a kindness I have of my own to give you.’ He beckons me close to listen to him, and I lean forward eagerly, until his wrinkled lips are against my ear. ‘By the river Usk is a tangled wall of thorns. ‘To be sure,’ you may think, as many have thought before, this is a wall of thorns, and no sane man should try to pass it through. Yet in truth, the thorns are none so sharp, and should you tap it once with this stick—’ He plucks a branch from the ground beside us and hands it to me with a great flourish. ‘—should you tap it once with this, you’ll find a passage opened, and your way through safe as if it were through the clouds.’

‘And what lies beyond the wall of thorns?’ I ask.

‘You’ll soon find out,’ the little man says peevishly, pursing up his lips. ‘I don’t remember it myself. Good day to you both!’

I gather up the cloth and the bottle and return them to the sack, watching him scramble back onto his perch and sit there still as a statue carved from a tree rather than from a rock. His dark eyes flash at me, and I hold tight to the magic stick.

‘Good day to you, Master Stone,’ Courage says.

‘And to you, Master Swan,’ replies the little man.

We leave him as we found him, and travel on.

In no more than an hour we find the wall of thorns. It begins as merely a tangle of bone-dry brush, but grows as it leads away from the river and soon splits in two, forming the high winding wall so thick no sunlight can penetrate it. From beyond I think I hear the sound of a flute—or it may be the wind whistling through the tangle of thorns. It doesn’t matter which. I take the stick Master Stone gave us and draw it over and against the tangled branches, beating out a strange staccato.

Slowly, creakingly, grudgingly, the thorns pull apart from each other, shaking down dirt and the soft downy feathers of little roosting birds. The path is a slim beam of light drawing us forward and inside.

‘I’ll go first,’ I say.

‘No, Beauty,’ Courage says. ‘I’ll go.’

I stick close to my brother’s back, holding the crooked branch in one hand and the fabric of his coat knotted in the other. The thorns whisper all around us, curling away from our skin; but I can see them close up again behind us, and I wonder if Master Stone was a little man to be trusted, or if his magic stick will ever lead the way for us back out again.

I don’t know how thick the wall of thorns is, or how far we’ve traveled already in order to reach the other side. A strange chill comes over me near half-way through. Soon after that, time loses all its sense and meaning, and I realize from the way Courage holds himself that he feels this change the same as I.

At last, the thorns draw away and fresh air breaks against us with sweet, relieving force. We find ourselves in a small copse, at the center of which is a golden, murky well, round and very deep, overhung by willow branches, the surface broken by lily pads and the occasional white bloom of a lily.

‘What now?’ I ask.

There are trees on all sides of us. I struggle to remember what Master Stone said, but the air has become too sweet, perfumed and heavy. I can barely keep my eyes open, but I’m certain I can hear the flute music now, coming to us tenderly over the water.

I stumble towards the edge of the well and kneel beside it, peering down where the water is black as ink beneath. Fat droplets of dew have collected in the center of the moist green lily pads. The sweet smell is rising off the well.

Courage’s breath rasps in my ear. ‘I feel—unwell,’ he whispers, sagging against me. I wrap my arms around his waist and pull him away from the water.

For a moment, I thought I saw golden hands twisting like fish in the sunless depths of the water.

What was it, I try to recall, that Master Stone told us to do?

Minutes pass, or perhaps hours. The sound of the flute grows louder while Courage’s head rests in my lap, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Then, with a wet sucking sound, a golden head crests the surface of the water.

Its hair is gold, and its lips and teeth; even its lashes, its brows, the hairs on its chin. Its eyes are every shade of gold there is, dark and burning in the center and white-gold where the whites should be. Golden pond-life trails like a veil through its golden hair and over its whole golden head. A golden frog sits as a little crown on its forehead and the sound of the flute, I realize, comes from its singing, golden mouth. For a long time the song is wordless, until at last I come to understand the meaning of the tune:

Wash me and comb me and lay me down gently.

I kiss Courage on his warm brow and slide him from my lap. My duty here is clear, and from the gypsy sack I take a gypsy comb, ivory teeth and an ebony backbone. The golden head bites at my fingers as I reach out to do its bidding, but I don’t pull away. I’m gentle with it, and careful, cleaning the bits of pond-weed from its hair and ears, and drawing the comb tenderly through each golden knot. When I’m finished, I gather the heavy head into my arms and set it down on the grass, which curls golden away from its sighing breath.

A second head emerges, and begs the same of me, followed by a third. I do the other two the same kindness as I did the first, until all three sit in an uneven row by the well. The grass around their neckless shapes shivers with the same gold as gilds their skin.

You’ve been so good to us, they say.

We’ve been trapped deep down with no gentle hand to care for us.

Shall we repay you, kind Beauty?

And if so, how?

I dry my hand against my shirt and lay the palm against my brother’s cheek. ‘My brother suffers from a curse improperly lifted,’ I reply. ‘With Nick the Peddler, I came as far as the gypsies. With the gypsies, I came as far as Master Stone. Master Stone gave me this sapling branch and sent me to the wall of thorns, and the wall of thorns has led me to you. I’ve washed you, combed you, then laid you down gently. There’s only one thing I seek.’

That’s a better magic than we know, they say.

Older, too, and stronger still.

We’re three heads under a curse ourselves, you know.

There’s little we can do.

And even less for which we can predict the outcome.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘I’ve come this far. I keep the promises I make. There must be something you can do to help me!’

We think that there might, they say.

But it will be a longer journey still, more land yet to cover, darker nights than you’ve ever seen.

And you haven’t the boots left to make that journey.

I will give you strong boots, and your brother too, says the first head.

And I will give you strength in the icy rain, strength to weather the coldest winter, strength to withstand the hottest of suns, says the second.

The third says, And I will show you the way.

On the other side of the well the grass is whispering to itself. All at once it begins to grow, each blade twisting higher and higher. When it’s calm and still again it parts to reveal two fine pairs of golden boots. Next, the grass by my fingertips also begins to grow, winding like snakes around my fingers and wrists, creeping high over my arms and kissing my skin with cool, silken embraces. When it reaches my mouth and nose, an unusual feeling comes over me. I can’t say yet, one way or the other, what this new feeling is. I guess it must be my gift of fortitude from the second golden head, since when I look at him, I see his fat lips are smiling.

There are your boots that will never wear out, says the first golden head.

And there is your strength, says the second.

The third says, You must find the three wide-eyed dogs, who are under an enchantment by the same witch who ensorcelled us. Yet being animals in something of their original shape, there is more power in them, and more knowledge. They can lead you to your journey’s end, if any can.

‘And how,’ I ask, ‘do I find the three wide-eyed dogs?’

Soon through this forest, you will pass a great lake. It was there that a young soldier killed our witch, says the third golden head. He cleaved her neck in two and left her dead by the roots of a magic tree. Its branches will always point you to find that soldier. Break you one branch from this magic tree, and it will act as compass, leading you to him.

‘And this soldier knows where I can find the three wide-eyed dogs?’

Why, says the third golden head. Do you not know the story? The soldier stole them, not so long ago as all that.

Emboldened by the second head’s gift and eager to move on, I dare to ask one more question. ‘And what’s been done to my brother?’

The cursed share a mind each with one another, the three heads say.

We never dream but for one thing, and even that, only rarely.

So we gave him a good Dreaming.

Once you have placed us back in the well, his eyes will open, says the third head, and you will find him refreshed in body and in spirit. Then you will put on your new boots and, in a few hours’ time, find yourself come to the lake. To find the magic tree you must first bathe in those dark waters.

‘Thank you,’ I say to each, and kiss each on the salty brow, so that my mouth comes away golden-glinting. I place each head back into the water one by one. As I embrace the third, I ask impulsively, ‘What is the name of the lake?’

Ah, says the third head. Swan Lake is its name.

The water swallows him up greedily, and within seconds I can no longer see even the glimmering crown of his head. The golden frog leaps into the well after him, and soon enough all the flutes stop singing. I’m left behind with my brother, two pairs of golden boots, fingertips the color of pure gold, and a quick breeze blowing in from over the treetops. I crouch by my brother’s side and lay a hand against his brow. The instant I touch him, he wakes.

I tell him the story of the golden heads while combing golden grass from his hair. We leave our old boots in the grass in exchange for the new ones, and together we plunge into the forest beyond, in search of Swan Lake.

Feedback? :: Part Three