I saw from her behaviour that she had courage enough and poise as well as beauty, but was there any gentleness in her, or self-control? When she asked to speak to the young man of the house, I told her that he would not come until daybreak and she responded with a request to sleep the night under my roof. She asked prettily enough, but there was no thought in her that I would refuse. When I said she might remain if she was willing to do a service for me, she acquiesced grudgingly. I set her a room full of straw to spin in a chamber suffused with a scented oil that rendered all magic useless, a gift from the queens, then I sent a twisted little man to offer aid. As I had guessed from her reaction to Cloud-Marie, the young woman’s beauty made her unforgiving of ugliness, but I had not guessed that ugliness would make her actively cruel. Rather than begging his aid or merely refusing it, the girl had jeered and thrown her shoe at the dwarf. Enraged, he had become invisible, pinched her black and blue, and then sliced off the end of her nose.
I had been sickened to see all the blood and mess, but the faerie queen who had lent the dwarf refused to command him to set the matter right. She was fond of the little fellow, she said sternly, and he was shaped to meet like with like. I could not argue. There was no denying the beauty my son had chosen had a short temper and a cruel streak and the outcome was her own fault, for had she been kinder and more polite, the dwarf would willingly have helped her. Even so, I could not help feeling sorry for her as she limped away holding a bloody kerchief to her ruined nose.
My son, restored to his true form, came snorting and bellowing to my chamber in fury. I saw that he had been roused to passion by two hunts and longed to slake it, so I let his anger pour itself over me without responding to it until the torrent ran dry. When at last he stood dumb and panting, my heart bled to see him so reduced, but I dared not let him see any softness in me. Instinct told me to be adamantine.
‘Did you really think a plump little mooncalf or a strutting strumpet fit to rule this realm?’ I asked sharply. ‘Or was it that you were not thinking? You were merely following the base and bullish urges of your loins, like any woodchopper or pig butcher? Perhaps in future you might think beyond bed sports when you hunt, since you will be king and will need a princess who can become a queen to help you rule this kingdom of Faerie.’
‘I do not want a queen,’ he snarled. It was only an unthinking riposte, and yet I thought that there was a bitter general truth in it, for was not I queen, and seemingly tormenter and obstacle to his every desire?
‘Do you want a princess bride who will save you, then?’ I asked, letting my tone become weary and disdainful. ‘For the qualities required by a queen are one and the same as those required for a maid to become a princess bride. Hunt again, my son, and this time choose a maid who will make a good queen, for only such a one will be able to save you.’
Despite his outrage, I saw in his next choice that he had listened, though he said not a word to me about our confrontation following the previous hunt. This time I sent my son out as a cat, hoping some of the subtlety and sly grace of the form would seep into him. I waited for his new chosen to come knocking at my door, and once more cooked and prayed that he had hunted wisely this time. I had forbidden myself to spy, but when the food was done, I went again to my chamber and used the last smear of the seeking salve on my mirror.
The maid my son had hunted this time was a faerie noble’s daughter with a goodly dollop of mortal blood from her mortal father, and this made my heart leap, for it meant she would be better tested in the Wolfsgate Valley and so bring more substance to the chamber than any of the others. She was not living with her parents, having run away from their strictness to live with a household of dwarfs. She did well enough in the Wolfsgate Valley, for she had some magic to aid her, but it was weak enough that she needed her wits and courage as well, and those she seemed to have aplenty. My heart soared and I was glad I had given my son the power to turn into a lion in order to protect her. He still resented the fact that I had made him a donkey in a previous hunt, feeling it made mock of him, though in truth he had made a fine, handsome beast and that form had tenacity and patience.
At dusk on the third day, his chosen came safe through the Endgate and soon was at the door telling me an eager tale of having received a battered gold ring from the mouth of a fish caught by a beautiful orange cat. This had happened, she told me loftily, while she sat watching fish flit back and forth in the depths of a well and thinking deep, pure thoughts.
Accepting the ring and the tale with some scepticism, I invited her in. She lifted her lacy hem fastidiously as she mounted the steps in her dainty shoon. Of course she had used magic to restore her appearance before knocking at the door, and I ran my eyes over her. She was a pretty creature with small, very white teeth, blue eyes, and a long swan’s neck, tiny shell-like ears and hair like a river of pale golden fire. But as we ate, I saw that her mouth was small and she seldom used it to smile and only did so sincerely at a mirror hanging on the wall. All of her attention was turned inward and she spoke of her life with the dwarves, explaining with relish how they had worshipped her beauty and lavished jewels and admiration on her. Indeed, her ears and wrists glittered with the gaudy weight of the gold and jewels she wore, and I was sure it had been these she had been admiring in the well rather than fish and philosophy.
She asked about my son, and I told her he would come the next day. She feigned a delicate yawn and asked if she might lie down and sleep awhile. It was cleverer than a request to spend the night, but still I told her that she could lie down under my roof only after locating a golden ball I had lost in a muddy field inhabited by magical frogs.
She agreed impatiently, certain her magic would enable her to find it, but she soon discovered her magic had no power in that field, which had been sowed with a certain herb I had been gifted, and so she must truly search. The unmelodious croaking of the frogs near drove her mad, so I used a magic shawl one of the queens had given me to transform myself into a poor old woman in rags and offered to sing a song that would make the frogs help her find what she sought. She answered pettishly that she did not need the croaking of a useless old woman any more than she needed the croaking of frogs to find the gold ball, which the sour crone of the house required before she could sleep there. She would summon her seven protectors, who would find the golden ball soon enough for her. She had already sent the pet dove they had given her to fetch them. Then she went back to trying to admire her reflection in the water.
Of course I did not allow the dove to deliver its message, having released from its jewelled box a simple confusion spell that would prevent it leaving, so my son’s hapless chosen passed the night in the field before stalking away at dawn in a filthy temper, forfeiting her chance to become a princess.
‘You are choosing the stupidest tests,’ my son snarled. ‘What does it matter if she cannot find a gold ball in a field, or turns her back on a beggar woman, if she has passed through the Wolfsgate Valley?’
‘You know perfectly well by now that the Wolfsgate Valley does not truly test any but a full mortal,’ I snapped. ‘That is the reason the queen sets tests, so that the lack may be answered. As to the girl you hunted this time, she was vain and ruthlessly self-centred. I would be surprised if she could tell me the colour of your eyes, for given her nature, the only thing she would have looked for in them was her reflection. There was nothing to her but a crafty cleverness, shallow wit and hollow beauty!’
I bade him hunt again, for time was running out for all of us.
The fourth maid he chose was a mortal who had come to Faerie when she was but a child. She had been adopted by a sweet merchant. She was plump and kind and had a soft full mouth and a gentle heart, which made her promise at once to help the unicorn that dropped the battered golden ring into her lap, but she was also exceedingly simple. She had no magic, being fully mortal, and survived the Wolfsgate Valley only because a faerie godmother had blessed her with luck and because of my son’s vigilance and vicious
unicorn strength. I had given him that form in the hope that he would be inspired by it.
When she came to the palace to give me the ring, I assayed a test to see if she had even a modicum of common sense. I warned her specifically not to accept food from strangers, though she was hungry, but to walk in the garden, and I would send Cloud-Marie when a meal was ready. Within ten minutes, she took a poisoned apple from me in my old-woman’s disguise, and ate it. Loosening her stays and dribbling the antidote for the poison she had eaten into her lovely mouth, I thought it a pity she had not wit enough to temper her sweetness, for a queen cannot rely on luck and sweetness alone.
Still, she had pretty manners, and when I sent her off, saying my son had not really needed rescuing, she went trustfully, woebegone but wearing a bracelet of undying violets, and an instruction from me to her father to bid him wed her to his clerk. She had confessed to me that they had pledged their troth in secret as children, for her father would never permit her to marry so low.
‘You sent her away! You can’t do that!’ my son shouted. ‘I wanted her!’
‘I told her that your disguise was a trick and that you had no need of rescuing, so she ought to go home, and she went. If she had been wiser, she might have guessed I was lying.’
‘You are ruining my life,’ shouted my son, but there was fear in his eyes for the first time, and it broke my heart, for I realised that, with this girl, he had truly been trying to find a candidate who would please me.
It had struck me then that part of the problem faced by my son was that the curse had nullified all the grace and cunning of his faerie blood, leaving only the mortal part, and at his age, many mortal men are little more than lumpish boys without subtlety or finesse. How should such a boy be capable of choosing a girl who could become a good woman and a good queen? The next morning over breakfast I tried to talk to the boy about women and their qualities, and about wiving, but he listened with obvious boredom and resentment, tossing the ring up and down in his hand and occasionally letting it fall and roll away to scour my nerves.
Cloud-Marie ceases brushing to bring me honeyed tea, and I sip at it, grateful for its sweetness, its warmth coiling down into me. I close my eyes, but the thought comes nagging and plucking at me that, although I did not bid my son hunt again after the last dreadful hunt years past, I never did officially command him to leave off hunting. And the night before, pity for his diminished state had persuaded me to remove his chain and release him into the Wolfsgate Valley to run there for the night. I had used a bespelled chain my mother-in-law had given me to stop him roaming out of the valley in case he wandered into a village and devoured some hapless peasant with too little magic to stave him off. But it would not have prevented him travelling to the human realm.
What if he had gone there to choose another girl before returning to be chained up again in his yard at dawn? What if the howl I heard earlier was truly a howl signalling the arrival in the Wolfsgate Valley of his chosen, the beginning of a new testing?
Was it possible?
His father had found me there, and perhaps my son retained some dim memory of it, or it might be that my angry words about the worth of mortals tested by the valley had remained even when his human form was lost, to work their way to the surface of his wolf brain. But how could he hunt in the real world where wolves do not routinely run about the streets, and in that city of all cities, where there is no wilderness except the wildness of degeneration? At night he might conceivably pass as a dog, but even if he had managed to find the will to go there and to hunt, what sort of girl would dare accept a battered ring from the neck of a great white wolf? For him to come close enough to bestow it on her, she could not fail to see the savagery in his eyes and know him for a beast. And what of the ring? Certainly I had not taken it from him after what happened to the last candidate, but surely the ribbon had rotted long since, and the ring fallen into a bog or crack. But supposing he still had the ring, and had hunted a girl brave enough to take it from his neck? Would she imagine it could reveal the name of the owner of what she might suppose to be a tame wolf? But what human woman would then obey an eldritch voice issuing from the ring, commanding her to go thence and do this and that in order to free a nobleman’s son from a spell?
In the mirror I see that Cloud-Marie’s errant eye is turning sideways. My breath catches in my throat as she turns her head so that, for a moment, both eyes regard curtains I have not drawn in two years. I had not thought to ever open them again, for the window behind them looks out on the same mist garden as can be espied from the balcony of the Princess Chamber where, when a hunt begins, white roses bloom in profusion.
I know I must look out, have known it since the howl waked hope in me, yet if no roses have bloomed, my son is lost. But in this moment it is horror that deters me more than the fear of having to abandon hope, for, with all my heart, I do not want to be reminded of what I beheld the last time I entered the mist garden.
Cloud-Marie’s good eye turns back and holds my gaze, and I realise that I am not breathing. I release it in a hissing moan as I remember the scarlet beads of blood caught on my son’s muzzle. And though my mind shies from it, I remember following the trail of blood to the body of the young woman in the mist garden. She was dead because she had made the mistake of going outside, rather than staying in the Princess Chamber and sleeping as I had bidden her. I suppose my son thought she had failed, or that she meant to leave. Maybe she had intended to leave. Whatever the reason, he had torn her throat out.
I shivered, remembering the desolation and anguish and rage of his howls that night and for many terrible long nights to follow. I had wept into my pillow for hours, sick with grief for the girl and despair for my son, who had lost his last chance to save himself. That was when I had given up, for I knew the beast must have gained the ascendant for him to have slain the girl he had hunted for his bride.
Cloud-Marie and I buried her on a grassy knoll just beyond the mist garden, where the sun would fall, and although I told no one but my husband and my mother-in-law what had happened, word of the grisly tragedy got out, and thereafter no one came willingly to the King’s Palace. When anyone did come, I would often see them make the sign of horns with their little finger and forefinger, to ward off ill-fortune.
Steadying myself, I drive back horror and gather my courage before signing for Cloud-Marie to take the shawl from my lap. I am chilled to the bone by what I must do and it is not a chill from which any shawl or fire can shield me. She folds it with an oddly graceful and almost ceremonial air, and I feel her uneven eyes on my back as I rise and cross to the curtains. I have to make myself lift my arms, grasp one curtain in each hand and throw them open.
I draw in a breath of chilly wonder, for the garden below glows white with roses that are blooming more thickly than I have ever seen them do before. It might have snowed save for the intoxicating scent the roses give off, even in the clammy air. I draw in a breath and hear the light rasp of the sea in my lungs.
‘It is a miracle,’ I say, aloud, to the misty night or maybe to the stars. I feel how strange it is to use such a word here. Turning, I see that Cloud-Marie still stands by my empty chair, the rug cradled in her arms as if it were a babe. Instead of looking frightened or relieved or even happy, there is a listening expression on her loose features, and then I hear it.
A wolf, howling.
It is not my son. I know the timbre of his call, and besides, he is chained up. Nor is it the distinctive call of the leader of the wild pack whose demesne is the Wolfsgate Valley. It must be another wolf from the pack, and a picture forms inexorably in my mind of the black wolf.
Then my blood runs cold and I draw in a horrified breath, for I have forgotten the most important thing! If the candidate is a mortal maid, she has entered the Wolfsgate Valley without any magic to protect her or her prince to watch over her.
I turn and run to my son’s yard, heart pounding so hard that my ribs hurt. He is straining at the end of his chain
to get as close as he can to the side gate, which opens to the short passage leading to the Endgate. His whole body is trembling with electric tension.
I hurry over and release the catch upon his chain. His fur is white and his eyes have the same gold flecks as his father’s, but over the paler grey of my own eyes. I cross to the gate and he watches me, pricking his ears. He knows this is the way to the Wolfsgate Valley, but it is only dusk and I have never let him out save at darkest night before. Nor have I made any attempt to fasten about his neck the magic chain that will limit his roaming. Does he understand what these things mean? Does he understand what he must do now? I pray so, else the blood of another maid will stain his muzzle and my hands. For a moment I hesitate, but love for my son and crippled hope make me unlatch the gate. I do not attempt to give him any instruction. There is only wildness in his eyes now, and the valley will do all the testing that is needed. My son’s task is to protect the girl and guide her at the last to the Endgate. Remembering the other howl, I tell myself that though my son might lack a rational mind, he knows in his essence what is unfolding, and I pray that his chosen has not already come to harm.
I open the gate and walk along the short passage to the Endgate, hearing him padding along behind me, panting. When I open the gate in the wall that separates the palace from the Wolfsgate Valley, my son passes through it. For a moment he stops in the clearing and looks back at me, standing in the gateway. I want to see a glimmer of human intelligence in his eyes, of love for me and knowledge of mine for him, but there is only an unfathomable wildness there, and then he turns away from me and looks out into the valley.