The Book of Gothel, page 17
The downstairs room was gloomy enough that I could spend that day shadowing Kunegunde, helping her experiment with a remedy from an ancient tome that she hadn’t tried before. I tried to avoid meeting her gaze directly as much as I could. Fire leapt in the hearth, and her ravens roosted on the upper shelves, startling me each time they croaked. I pretended to be interested in wortcunnery, watching carefully whenever Kunegunde opened a drawer in the apothecary cabinet or one of the earthenware jugs near the door. Wherever she had stashed the alrūne, it wasn’t in the drawers or jugs she used that day.
By evening, I was exhausted from all the deception and frustrated that I hadn’t figured out where she kept it. I did not put the powder in my evening drink. When the ravens started swooping at the shutters to get outside, like they often did when there was someone in the forest, I let them out and volunteered to follow them to see what was there.
“Don’t leave the circle,” Kunegunde reminded me.
Outside, the sun was sinking over the horizon. The last tendrils of daylight were turning pink. The ravens soared away from the tower, sounding their awful deep-throated cry again and again. I followed them into the forest. The wind bit my face. I fingered the bird-woman in my pouch as I walked into the trees, praying that whatever ill omen their calls predicted would not apply to me.
As I neared the brook, I paused, realizing that I could feel a faint tension, a possibility in the air again. Relief coursed through me. It was as I thought. My gift hadn’t vanished. Kunegunde’s gooseberry powder had stolen it from me.
As I neared the edge of the stone circle, I slowed, trying to decide whether to break Kunegunde’s rule. Then something came over me. At first I didn’t recognize the source of the shiver. I thought I was just cold. Then I felt the tension in the air, the pull. My soul lifting from my skin.
I woke on my back in the snow, a dull ache in my head. A fainting spell? Now that I had stopped taking the powder, things were back to the way they had been before. I could sense the next world, but without the alrūne, I couldn’t hear the voice. I had to find out where Kunegunde had hidden it so my mother could speak to me again. Was she trying to tell me something now? Did she want me to go see what was out there, like she wanted me to visit the next mountain?
Ice snapped beneath my boots as I rushed to the edge of the circle, my frustration spurring me on. It was a relief to be out from under Kunegunde’s watchful eye, though this part of the forest was unnaturally dark. When I passed through the stone circle, my whole body tingled. A wild laugh bubbled from my throat. It was wonderful to feel like myself again, to have these sensations. I hurried into the forest after the birds, boots crunching the snow. Again I felt the trace of a shiver prickling the back of my neck, but when I turned to look over my shoulder, I could see only shadows.
“Who’s there?” a feminine voice asked behind me.
I whirled around, surprised, despite the fact that I had suspected someone was out here. A girl about my age, maybe a little younger, stood a few paces away, leading a white horse with a large basket around its neck. She had wild dark curls that refused, like mine, to be tamed by her braids; she was dressed in a faded woman’s shift and skirt and wimple under dirty furs. Her face was eerily similar to mine. Her pale skin was covered in dust, but she held her head high, as if she had noble blood. In the twilight, her eyes glinted a pretty hazel with bright golden flecks. There was only one other person I’d seen with eyes that color: back home, years ago, beside her mother on a white horse. Princess Frederika. But the princess was years younger than I was, and this girl seemed about my age. Then I remembered how old, how brave, the princess had seemed all those years ago on her mother’s white horse, and I knew. It was her. “Your highness.”
The princess looked over her shoulder uneasily, lowering her voice. “Surely you mistake me for someone else. Who are you?”
“Haelewise, daughter-of-Hedda-the-Midwife.”
She looked skeptical. “You sure are finely dressed for a peasant.”
“You sure are humbly dressed for a princess.”
She frowned.
I could tell she didn’t want to give up the pretense, but I was so certain. “I saw you with your mother at a parade. On this horse!”
She laughed, despite herself, searching my face. “By the breath of the gods. You resemble me so much, it’s like staring into a mirror.”
I gazed at her. She was right. We were about the same height—I was short, and she was a little tall for her age. The resemblance would’ve been even more pronounced if I were still eating the alrūne, which would’ve made my eyes gold. “We could be sisters.”
“You wouldn’t happen to want to marry Prince Ulrich for me, would you?”
My eyes widened. I shook my head, holding up my hands.
She laughed again—loud and wild—and I realized she was kidding. I had spent so long in Kunegunde’s tower, I didn’t know how not to be suspicious. The princess’s horse was near enough now for me to see her big brown eyes. I approached the horse in an attempt to change the subject. “Your horse is beautiful.”
“Her name is Nëbel.”
The horse sniffed my hand and opened my fist with her muzzle, as if to see whether it held a treat. Her nose was cold against my palm. Her huge pupils glistened, inky black, in the dark. When she discovered that my hand was empty, she let out a nicker of protest. “She’s friendly.”
“She’s known nothing but kindness since she was a foal. I saw to that. She’s the finest horse in the kingdom, aside from her fearfulness.”
I looked at the horse’s broad white chest, her rippling muscles. It was hard to imagine her afraid of anything. The creature snorted, meeting my eyes. I turned to Frederika. “What are you doing in this part of the forest?”
She drew back, her expression instantly mistrustful. “Who sent you to spy on me?”
“No one. I—”
“My father? Ulrich?”
I held up my hands. “I’m an apprentice to a local wise woman. I swear it. Our animals were acting strangely, so I came to see who was out here.”
“Do you mean Mother Gothel?”
I nodded.
“I’ve been searching for her tower for ages.” She lowered her voice, looking over her shoulder again into the trees. “It’s been two moons since I bled. May I follow you back?”
I hesitated. Frederika was a noble, the daughter of the king who had issued a writ for Kunegunde’s death. She was the betrothed of a man my grandmother hated more than anyone else. But the tower was supposed to be a haven for women in Frederika’s condition. Kunegunde was such a recluse. What were the chances that she would be able to recognize Frederika in these clothes? And why in the world, with all the secrets Kunegunde was keeping from me, should I worry about being honest with her? The idea of lying to my grandmother filled me with pleasure.
Explaining that we would have to hide her identity, I led Frederika back toward the tower. We could use our likeness to our advantage and introduce her as my cousin. We would call her Ree.
At the edge of the stone circle, Nëbel whinnied, pulling on her reins, eyes wild. “The stone circle,” Frederika said. “I’d heard of it, but—” She whispered in the horse’s ear, then pulled her inside the circle. “By the devil,” she swore. “This place is so thin, it’s making her nervous.”
Can she feel the thinness herself, I wondered, or is she only commenting on the horse’s behavior?
Nëbel pranced anxiously, whinnying and blowing air through her nose. By the time we reached the tower, the horse was calmer. The spell, I thought, the one that zapped between the stones. That was what was making her nervous. I helped Frederika tie the horse outside, then led her into my grandmother’s home with her basket.
Kunegunde was so absorbed in her writing, she didn’t notice that anyone had come in with me. Only Erste looked in my direction when I opened the door, dark eyes glittering from his perch.
“What was out there? A wolf? A fox?” Kunegunde said without looking up.
Frederika stepped forward, clearing her throat. “Mother Gothel?”
Kunegunde looked up. “Do you know this girl?”
I avoided her eyes, grateful the tower was so dim at night. “This is Ree, my cousin on my father’s side. She was wandering the forest, looking for the tower.”
Kunegunde looked from Frederika to me and back. “Cousins. You look like sisters. You say she’s your father’s kin?”
I nodded, perhaps a bit too eagerly.
She shook her head. “Well, girl? Out with it. What do you want?”
“It’s been two moons since I bled,” Frederika said quietly.
“Ah. What did you bring as payment?”
Frederika peeled back the linen that was covering the basket. Inside were several blocks of goat cheese, a large sack of flour, a walnut bread wrapped in cheesecloth, some quinces, and several pounds of dried blaeberries. “Is it a difficult spell?”
“Everything that is done can be undone,” Kunegunde said, her voice matter-of-fact.
She nodded at the basket Frederika offered—it was enough—and gestured for her to set it on the table. Then she retrieved the manuscript she was always working on from its place on the shelf and turned to a page that had yet to be illuminated. She lingered over it for a moment, reading, then excused herself to go downstairs to the cellar.
While she was gone, I inspected the indecipherable symbols on the page, awed, realizing the manuscript Kunegunde had been working on all this time was a spellbook. Frederika settled into the chair by the fire ring, her expression melancholy.
In a moment Kunegunde came back upstairs with a lockbox. She fished out a key from a drawer in the apothecary cabinet, which she used to unlock it.
Inside were about three dozen alrūne fruit, the ones I’d brought to Gothel and more, dried like the one I had found in her pouch so they wouldn’t rot. Also within were several misshapen bulbs that looked like the plant’s root in the drawing she had shown me.
My heart stopped. There they were. Finally, I knew where she was keeping them. I had to work to keep my breath regular.
Kunegunde took out one of the roots with a rag, closed the box, and locked it. I watched her closely as she put everything back, memorizing the locations—the key in the drawer, the lockbox in the cellar—though I was anxious about the prospect of stealing the fruit back. I would have to be careful how much I took.
Kunegunde caught me watching and raised an eyebrow. “Make yourself useful. We need pennyroyal, lavender, thyme. A cup of snow and some rope.”
From her chair, Frederika watched me move around the tower, collecting the items Kunegunde named. When I’d collected all of them, Kunegunde suspended the cup in the ropes above the fire ring. She stoked the flames so the snow would melt. After a while, she called Frederika over. She had her knot the rope around the alrūne root, then drop it into the cup, whispering strange words. “This chant binds the root to the child in your belly,” she explained. “You’re certain you want this?”
Frederika stared into the cup, measuring her words. “I want the child, but I can’t foresee a life where I will be able to care for it.”
“Isn’t that always the way?”
Frederika looked grim, her expression uncertain.
“The potion has to steep overnight. What if we start the spell now, and you can decide tomorrow whether to finish it? It will cost you either way, mind you. The ingredients—”
Frederika thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Sprinkle in the herbs.”
She did as told.
Kunegunde turned to me. “Do you want her to sleep in your room?”
I nodded. The prospect of putting off the spell set Frederika at ease. We talked with Kunegunde awhile, spinning stories about my father’s family. We play-acted brilliantly, making up anecdotes about all the times we had played together as youths. Our appearances weren’t our only likeness; our minds worked similarly. We had never met before this day, and yet somehow we were able to improvise these stories seamlessly, finishing each other’s sentences. It was exhilarating.
As soon as we went upstairs, we shut my bedroom door and stared at each other in awe. It almost felt, by then, that the stories we’d made up were true. I pulled the shattered hand-mirror from the trunk so we could indulge in a moonlight comparison of our faces. She touched the symbols with her fingers, looking at me wordlessly, before she turned her focus to our reflections. It was difficult to see with all the cracks in the glass, but we had the same round face and curly black hair, the same high cheekbones. Our noses were a bit different, as were our eyes—mine were almost fully black now, and hers were that gold-flecked hazel—but apart from that, the resemblance was undeniable. We giggled and called each other cousin for long after we heard Kunegunde go to her room. Eventually, when we settled down in bed, I asked Frederika why she ran away from the castle, and she told me the story. As I suspected, it had all begun when her father promised her to Ulrich.
“Why would he promise you to such a man?”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t believe the stories. Hardly anyone noble does. Father says they’re wives’ tales, peasant talk. Ulrich can be so charming at court. He strutted like a peacock into our castle and convinced my father—my father, the king and Holy Roman Emperor—to give him my hand. Ulrich boasted about the safety of his castle, swearing he would protect me with his life. My stepmother tried to tell my father what he’s really like, but my father didn’t believe her. He swore it was a good match, since my mother”—Frederika blinked, her voice catching—“since the annulment made me a bastard. He thanked Ulrich and promised him Scafhusun for his fealty.” She shivered again. “I wish I could stay with Daniel.”
“Daniel is the father of your child?”
She nodded, telling me about the boy with whom she had fallen in love, a young Jewish man who lived in a nearby settlement. They had been handfasted in secret months ago.
I was so shocked at her description of Daniel that I had trouble paying attention to what she said next. Nobles sometimes married merchants, as Phoebe had married Matthäus, but a high princess carrying the child of a Jewish peasant was beyond belief. When I was little, the synagogue in the next town had burned down in the middle of the night. Father said God set the fire, but Mother said it was set by wicked men who wanted to drive the Jews out of the city.
“He would make such a good father,” Frederika was saying.
“How did you end up in his settlement?”
Her voice was tired. “When the nights grew too cold, I couldn’t sleep in the forest anymore. I had to find a place to stay. A place that didn’t have any connections to my father. I was following the trade route west, when I met a trader on his way to the Jewish settlement. It seemed perfect. Small. No priests, no princes, and the kingsguard wouldn’t think to look for me there.”
I looked at Frederika anew, realizing for the first time how clever she was. She would have to be to escape her father. People said he was the same way.
“I didn’t mean to fall in love with Daniel.” She sighed. “It just happened.”
Empathizing, I told her about the woman Matthäus had married, how he wished he could marry me instead, how I’d refused to be his mistress. “I couldn’t do it,” I said, surprised at the bitterness, the anger in my voice. I sounded like Kunegunde when she spoke of the Church. “I couldn’t bear the shame.”
She was watching me closely. “You cared for him a great deal.”
I went silent for a long time, staring into the dark, all the feelings I had tried to suppress threatening to bubble out. “I did,” I admitted, finally, my voice carefully controlled. “But it wasn’t enough. I need to be respectable to work as a midwife. I want children, a real family of my own.”
Frederika fell silent. I thought on what I’d said, realizing it might be unkind to speak of my longing to be a mother when she was trying to decide whether to end her pregnancy. When I apologized, she went sullen, despairing at the plans her father had made for her. Eventually, she changed the subject to the spell Kunegunde would cast in the morning, which seemed to fascinate her in theory if not in effect. When she confessed that her stepmother had taught her a few incantations, I remembered the rumor about the queen whispering into a hand-mirror, and my breath caught. “You’ve been learning the old ways?”
Frederika nodded slowly, startled by my eagerness.
I tried to rein it in. “Does your father know?”
“Absolutely not. It was all in secret.”
Her boldness inspired me. She had learned the old ways in secret, run from her arranged marriage, hidden from her father in these woods, and here I was afraid to sneak into an old woman’s lockbox. “I’ve got to do something,” I said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.”
“All right.” Frederika wrapped herself in the blanket.
Down the stairs I crept, listening for movement above, enjoying the fact that I was defying Kunegunde. The ground floor of the tower was silent apart from my footsteps. Embers glowed in the fire ring below the draught that was steeping in the cup. I went to the apothecary cabinet and opened the drawer where Kunegunde had put the key. Lighting a small candle, I tiptoed downstairs into the cellar. The candlelight flickered and hissed as I passed through the archway into the dark. I surveyed the room. Where would she put the lockbox? I checked behind the barrels in the buttery but found nothing. I checked the crates in the corner with no success. As I was searching the shelves, I stumbled slightly on an uneven stone. Kneeling down to remove it, I found the lockbox buried beneath the floor. I could hear the dried fruit rolling around noisily inside it and swore an oath of joy.
Unlocking it, I took out three dried fruit—hopefully not enough for her to notice—closed the box, and locked it, holding my breath as I put everything back. It was only after I had returned the lockbox to its hiding place in the cellar and the key to its drawer upstairs that I could breathe again. I broke off a piece of the dried alrūne, ate it, and wrapped the rest in a cloth, feeling defiant. Blowing out the candle, I was conscious of the need to wash my hands. I did so as silently as I could, then tiptoed back upstairs, feeling more than a little self-righteous about my theft of what had been mine in the first place.
