P. K. Graves, page 2
The word left her in spangled orange butterflies that circled Marta’s head like a bride’s veil. And Marta smiled at them and lifted her hands to them, giving them her fingers to play around and alight on.
A noise behind her shook the butterflies away. Marta turned to see Bettina watching her, weeping a little: happiness and sorrow. Bettina, like everything else Marta saw, was made of light, but a darkness clawed in Bettina’s side.
“You are dying of that.” She pointed. Bettina put her hand over it and nodded.
“Your prince’s love of money,” Marta said to herself. Bettina looked away, out the window to the fen.
“I’m so unhappy,” Bettina whispered in death-lilies. She folded up to fall; Marta scrambled to her in time to help her down.
“You tell it so well,” Bettina said, looking blindly at her. “Our story. Why did you stop?”
“I don’t know what happens next,” Marta said. “I didn’t die in a corner of the forest. You didn’t live happily ever after. The rest of that story didn’t happen.”
Shooing the last of the worms and toads and waterfleas out of her cottage, she put Bettina to bed in her own cot and lay on the rug on the floor beside her.
Through the night Bettina muttered, in her sleep, of heartbreak and betrayal.
Marta gathered up the bitter purple blossoms and burnt them.
Some summer mornings Marta found Bettina wandering through the marsh, studying the plants and insects. Others, Bettina barely woke. Then Marta would tell her again of the fairy woman and how she’d tried to capture Marta’s heart.
Some days it made Tina laugh, and on others she only nodded, her eyes dark with remembering. One day she asked, “Why didn’t she keep you?”
Marta grinned. “She tried. I was more than she was. I was more than she reckoned I was. I left her standing with only herself, and that will never be enough.” Bettina nodded, her blue eyes dark with trying to understand something just beyond her.
“He cannot keep you, you know.” Bettina’s brow furrowed. That was the truth for which she sought, but it was yet unreal. She had not found it for herself.
On an autumn morning Tina found Marta in the tall grasses, speaking toads. She knelt beside her, holding a baby spotted toad between her thumb and forefinger and tickling its round yellow belly.
“What was I like? Before?” she asked Marta. Marta looked away, guilty that she thought she understood Tina’s question.
“Before the prince. Before the old woman — the Lady — at the well. What was I like?”
Marta opened her mouth to answer, but Tina went on. “Was I kind and gentle?
Was I happy? Did I love you and Mother, and was I grateful? Or did I deserve to be silly and frivolous and valued only for what comes out of my mouth?”
Marta watched the fall of amethysts and ambers, then lay back among the grasses to answer her in gnats. “You were all of that and more. You were happy, and you loved us, and we knew it. The Lady is evil. You never realized it was you who was cursed, did you?” Tina shook her head and let the toad go. “I have always been so sorry for you,” Marta whispered.
Tina gave a big white poppy sigh. “Thank you. I’m glad you didn’t hate me.”
Marta laughed at her silliness — spotted bugs — but Tina just stared across the marsh. “What do I do now?”
“What do you want to do?” Marta asked. Bettina took a while to answer, her smooth, pretty face made beautiful by lines of concentration.
“I want to be something. I want to be what I might have been, what I could have been, if I’d chosen differently that day. I want to be what I really am.”
The light within Bettina flared before Marta’s eyes and didn’t diminish even after she’d stopped speaking daisies. Only a little of the darkness remained in her side, and that mellowed the light and made it more beautiful. Marta sat up and took Tina’s hand.
“You can. You can be all of that,” she said. The sisters smiled at each other.
“Will you help me?” Tina asked.
Marta looked away, humbled. Of course I will, she wanted to answer. But a vision flashed: the Lady reclining in her throne of bones, laughing, happy to teach Marta everything she wanted to learn, for the small price of herself.
“I’ll help if I can, but it’s your road to walk,” she said slowly. Bettina nodded.
Marta hoped they both understood.
“Please come.” Yet another spring day melted into the cottage. Another small diamond fell from Bettina’s mouth.
“I’m far happier here,” Marta smiled. Two frogs and a lotus plant left her. Her talents had grown over the years, but she coughed over the last of the roots.
“But I miss you,” the Princess whispered in moonstones and aquamarines the color of tears. Marta wiped them off her fragile, wrinkled cheeks, then put the lotus in a jug of water.
“Your prince’s love of money again?” Marta asked. The royal head nodded.
Marta had no empathy, but a sigh of anger left her in wasps. Princess Bettina held out a silk envelope.
“If you change your mind,” she said without gilding. Marta opened the envelope and took out the gilded invitation. Smiling at it, she picked up a branch of dried heath off the table and pressed it inside the invitation, and resealed the envelope with a kiss scented with rain and grass.
“If you change yours,” she said, handing the envelope back with a hand that shook only a little. Bettina blinked back tears and smiled, gazing at the cottage where she’d grown up a little. Where she’d been happy.
“Maybe I will,” she said in bright topazes. “Maybe someday I can learn to speak marshflowers instead of jewels, and spring breezes instead of gold.”
The sisters embraced. “You can,” Marta whispered, shooing the new green dragonfly away from her sister’s hoard of silver hair.
Marta waited until Bettina was safely down the lane before scooping the gems and the beetles up. The beetles especially, of all her children, stayed the closest by her. She dumped them all gently outside; the beetles and frogs so enjoyed playing with Bettina’s gems.
Standing in the sunlight eased the ache in her old bones a little. More, it let her feel a little of what she was: a part of the light that made up everything that was alive. Marta yawned: moss draped the trees that had long grown on the edges of her fen. She rubbed her nose a little, then sneezed. Bees puffed out and set off to dance in the first spring flowers. Fetching a bucket for fresh forest-well water, Marta followed the bees a while.
At the well she saw two girls: one lithe and simple, one tall and strong: laughing as sisters do together. She wondered if the girls had heard her story, if they believed the story that the world of men told them. If, in the gypsies’ or peddlers’ stories, Marta was still quarrelsome and prideful and ended badly in the corner of a forest, she didn’t care. It was a tiny thing against the much larger thing of speaking the world of a fen into being.
Marta waited until the girls had gone, then fetched her own water.
Copyright © 1999 P. K. Graves
The Fen-Queen's Bride, P. K. Graves
