Tellings
Issue six: short fiction by S. E. Clark
Written in the wake of the repeal of Roe versus Wade in the United States, SE Clark examines the way fairy tales are transmitted in this animal bridegroom story. According to Clark, ‘The act of women telling stories—to shape the world they live in, to pass along information, to form relationships—sits at the heart of this tale of tales’.
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One
When they are caught by the king’s patrol on the road to the cottage, they know what story to tell. It started harmlessly enough—a red blister that would not heal, a lump like a tree knot on the bridge of the nose—and then their bodies were a mass of sores, disappearing as if eaten by hungry ghosts. ‘Pity us!’ the two women cry, and let slip the wrappings on their arms to show blooming lesions.
The patrolmen on their horses back away. ‘What are you doing here, then, if you’re in such a sorry state?’
‘We journey to the leprosaria on the other side of the mountain,’ says the first woman, ‘and there are many days ahead.’
‘Have you seen a maiden traveling alone? She is a shepherdess with the mark of a rose on her cheek, and the king wishes desperately to find her.’
‘No travellers but us,’ replies the first woman as the second lowers her bandaged face. One of the patrolmen flicks a coin off his thumb, and it lands in the mud. ‘For your trouble,’ he says, and they gallop away.
The first woman picks up the coin and rubs it clean on her tattered cloak. ‘A single copper. What a fortune.’
‘That was close,’ says the second woman.
‘My mistress taught me the difference between lesions and a rash from stinging borage. Most people panic before they can get a good look,’ replies the first woman, the midwife’s apprentice. ‘I suppose we are lucky the king’s patrol is as observant as they are generous.’
When they reach the crossroads, a small shrine greets them at the juncture of the mountain road and the sloping path down to the forest. The women leave the coin at the foot of a little plaster god frozen in its dance. When they are enrobed in the cool shadow of the trees in the lowlands, they cast off their filthy disguises and scrub their faces and arms clean of the stinging sap in the brook.
‘If we follow the stream,’ the apprentice says, ‘we’ll be at the cottage by nightfall. If you are still sure?’
The second woman gazes at her reflection on the water. A port-wine stain marks her cheek, pinker now from rubbing. Looks more like a splotch of madder on a bedsheet than a rose, the apprentice thinks, but why let truth get in the way of a good story?
‘I am sure,’ the shepherdess replies, and they go into the deep dark green.
Two
Here is the bark to chew when pained.
Here is an herb to aid a newborn ewe in dispelling water.
This resin will clean your teeth; this flower, boiled, will chase away sadness. Eat this berry but only when it is ripe, round and black as a deer’s eye. Eat that plant but only when it is new and unfurling or your tongue will prickle for days. Drink this if you want to see Death. Drink that if you want to meet her.
‘So many of these grow in the pastures,’ the shepherdess says, as she points to a line of small white anemones growing beside a fallen tree. ‘I never knew they could live this far in the forest.’
‘You’d be surprised what else lives here,’ the midwife’s apprentice says and seats herself on the log. She sighs as she touches her belly, still small but firmer than the week before. ‘I’m ravenous. There’s a bit of cheese and bread in my pack. You can have some if you like.’
The shepherdess winces at the smell of food, odorous through its cloth wrapping, and hands the package over with a sharp shake of her head. As nausea roils through her, she leans against the trunk of a spruce and watches as squirrels chase one another through its branches.
‘So the tales are true, then?’ she asks, as she holds her hand in front of her lips.
‘What tales?’
‘About the monster.’
‘Is it even a forest in this country without a monster?’ says the apprentice, and the shepherdess laughs.
‘Still. I have heard of its appetites.’
‘Devourer of goats,’ the apprentice says, as she cuts a slice of cheese with her knife, ‘and sheep, and woodsmen.’
‘And women,’ replies the shepherdess.
‘Wives,’ the apprentice corrects.
‘So you have heard the stories.’
The apprentice waves her hand. ‘A monster lived in the woods, eating anything it could catch. It was as strong as a bear, as mean as an ox, and—’
‘—as hungry as a wolf,’ the shepherdess says.
‘So he was. One day the monster appeared in the village square demanding a wife in exchange for his departure. None of the villagers wanted to send their daughters, so they chose the tanner’s oldest instead. She’s plain and unmarried, so no one would miss her. But the tanner’s daughter was clever, and she crafted herself three magic costumes: one of boar skin, one of goshawk feathers, and one of tortoise shell. Are you sure you don’t want any?’ She holds out the last slice of bread topped with cheddar.
‘No, no. I can’t keep much down. Please, go on.’
‘I understand. So the tanner’s daughter went to her bridegroom in his rotting castle in the woods and faced him cloaked as a boar. They battled, tusks and claws, until the boarskin was tattered and the monster’s fur peeled away.’
As she listens to the tale, the shepherdess watches a dray of squirrels scrabbling through the trees. One pauses on the branch just above her head, its nose wriggling as it sniffs the air. It stills, and so does the shepherdess.
‘Infuriated,’ the apprentice continues, ‘the monster gave chase. But under the boar skin, the tanner’s daughter wore her feathered cloak, and flew easily between branches and briars as she led the monster through the thicket circling his castle. The monster took no care in his rage as he ran through the underbrush, until his horns caught on a tree limb. He tried to pull himself free, and in doing so, ripped them out.’
In the spruce, the squirrel arches and flicks its tail as it barks. Others join in, a chorus of rasping squeals in the trees. The shepherdess follows the point of the squirrel’s nose to the undergrowth, trying to see through the layers of green.
‘Finally, the monster cornered the tanner’s daughter, and sprang upon her with voraciousness. Gleeful, he tore apart her feathers, starved for his next meal. Then he bit down onto hardness and cracked his fangs upon the tortoise shell.’ The apprentice brushes crumbs off her dress. ‘Monster defeated, the tanner’s daughter loomed over him in her nakedness and discovered him in much the same state: a prince released from his curse. So they lived, happily ever after.’
‘That’s not how it ends in my village,’ the shepherdess says.
‘Oh? What’s your ending?’
‘He eats her. And he roams the forest, never satisfied.’ She pushes herself up from the tree, shoulders tense. ‘Did you see that?’
‘What?’
‘Something’s moving. There.’
The apprentice pulls the shepherdess down to the log as she presses a finger to her lips. They listen for the clank of armor or the crunch of hooves; the wind rustles the leaves of the canopy and patterns shiver across the tree trunks, disorienting, fairy-like. The shepherdess tries to make out the shape lingering in the shadows, but it melts into the shimmering light.
The apprentice touches her shoulder and whispers. ‘That’s enough tales, for now—there are worse things hunting us than some storybook monster. Shall we go?’
The shepherdess hesitates. Perhaps that’s all it was, a frenzy of lights and illusions playing tricks on a restless mind, and not a pair of eyes peering through the boscage.
‘Yes,’ she says, and they go, deeper still.
Three
The cottage is a patchwork house, built in the footprint of a ruined manor, borrowing stone walls and grand windows and a front door that opens to a kitchen with a pot of perpetual stew bubbling over the embers in the fireplace. The midwife’s apprentice selects her bottles of dried herbs and measures them on a scale. She pauses to rub her lower back with one hand, as the other cups her stomach. The shepherdess watches from a wooden chair that seems too fine to belong in such a house.
‘Have you felt it?’ she asks. ‘The quickening?’
‘No,’ the midwife’s apprentice replies. ‘It can take a while for the first baby. Fetch me some water from the river, won’t you? The bucket’s there, by the door.’ When the shepherdess hesitates, the apprentice grins. ‘Take the bow, too, if you’re so worried, though there’s nothing but rabbits to shoot.’
‘It isn’t far, and I shouldn’t be long,’ the shepherdess replies.
Outside, the golden afternoon mellows into a pink sky as the sun dips behind the trees. Water gurgles around enormous stones; if they once were bricks, the marks of the stonecutter’s axe have long since been smoothed away. The shepherdess fills the bucket, and her foot sticks in the silt. Grumbling, she reaches down to free it. Near her own footprints, an older set is cast in mud: cloven hooves, larger than any she’s ever seen. She spreads out her fingers—the middle reaches the start of the tapering curves of the toes, and her thumb fits into the hole made by the dew claw. They are only a few hours old, and everywhere: along the riverbank, through the underbrush, back and forth between the house. She wishes she had brought the bow, and runs, water sloshing over the lip of the bucket. It is a miracle there is any left when she reaches the cottage and throws open the door.
‘What is it?’ the apprentice asks. Before the shepherdess can say monster, she purses her lips and sets the water down.
The apprentice peers into it. ‘There should be enough,’ she says, and pours some into a kettle to boil. As the shepherdess settles into her chair, the apprentice brushes her measured piles of herbs onto a sheaf of paper and pours them into the belly of a stone mortar.
‘I’ve told you a tale. Tell me another, to pass the time? One I’ve never heard before.’
‘Never heard before?’ The shepherdess brings her thumb to her mouth to bite the nail. She stares into the fire, eyes far away.
‘There’s one,’ she says, ‘about a girl who watched over her family’s flock. And every spring she took the flock to the fields to graze. She knew those fields better than herself. When things were quiet, she picked honeyberries and slept in the sun.’
‘Pastoral,’ the apprentice says, as she grinds down herbs with the pestle.
‘One day, a young man came riding across the field on his horse. And the girl knew he was a prince, even though he wore rags, because his horse was well fed and his boots were well made and he was beautiful.’ The shepherdess watches the tongues of flame lick at the bottom of the pot. ‘Dark hair. Brown eyes like damp earth. A birthmark on his cheek that looked—’
‘Like a rose?’
The shepherdess nods.
‘A mark of royalty. They all have them, supposedly. Even their mothers, for the time they are carried,’ the apprentice says.
‘He was on some kind of quest. Kill a golden bird, bring back its heart, lift the king’s sickness. I don’t remember much. He was lost, thirsty, and hungry, so the girl gave him water and berries and company. He sang her songs. Called her beautiful. They lay together under the stars. And in the morning she showed him the best way out of the fields, and he was off.’
The scent of mint drifts from the mortar as the apprentice finishes her grinding. She lifts a spoonful and places it in a red clay cup. When the apprentice pours water into the cup, the scent blooms, so strong the shepherdess can feel the backs of her cheeks tense. Underneath the sweetness is something faintly acerbic; a hidden, shadowy thing.
‘And once his quest was fulfilled he returned to marry her, I suppose?’ asks the apprentice.
The shepherdess sucks at her teeth. ‘He limps home to die after getting shot through the neck, and the girl realizes too late that she’s missed her bleeding.’
‘Ah. And the ailing king is without an heir. Or so he believes. But then how does he find—’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the prince told him about the girl on his deathbed. Maybe he’s got a magic mirror. Either way—he’s looking, and no one will help her.’ She pauses. ‘Almost no one.’
The midwife’s apprentice swirls the liquid in the cup, peering down at it. ‘Why not be caught, then? There are worse things in the world than being the mother of a prince. For a girl like that.’
The shepherdess looks her in the eyes. ‘She doesn’t want to,’ she says.
A few seconds pass between them. The shepherdess’s gaze does not falter. The apprentice places the cup next to her hand and in it, the copper-colored tea waits.
‘Drink deeply,’ she says, ‘if you are sure.’
The cup is warm in the shepherdess’s hands. She can see herself in the tea’s reflection, marked by a rose as if branded: a face she does not recognize.
‘I am,’ she replies and drinks it down.
Four
There’s blood as the night turns to velvet blackness. The shepherdess shivers under thin sheets as the midwife’s apprentice dabs sweat from her brow. Outside, the wind blows through the trees, and it sounds as if great beasts lumber through the forest.
‘Easy,’ the apprentice says, ‘you’re doing very well.’
‘I saw hoof prints.’ The shepherdess speaks through clattering teeth. ‘It’s real; it’ll hurt us.’
‘He won’t. Here, let me help you sit up.’ The apprentice warms an herbal-smelling salve on her hands and rubs it along the shepherdess’s lower back. ‘This should take the sharpness away.’
‘How do you know the beast won’t come?’
‘I’ll tell you a story,’ the apprentice replies. ‘A girl in my village was born cursed and had to be cut out of her dead mother. Some shrunken thing that the town witch took pity on and raised to be useful. Always sent her out to the woods to gather supplies; she was strange and ugly, so not even a beast would eat her. Breathe in and out, that’s good.’
The shepherdess lets out her breath with a moan and lies back on the pillows. The rose on her cheek burns vermilion.
‘Is that better?’ the apprentice asks.
‘Yes. And then?’
At the basin by the window, the apprentice washes her hands. She gazes out at the forest awash in soft blue moonlight. ‘One day, the river flooded her bloodroot field, so she had to travel to the heart of the forest, where she’d never been. The shadows turned her around. The light played tricks. Finally, she found a patch of bloodroot at the mouth of a cave she’d never seen. It’s only when she leaned down to pick the flowers that she noticed the pile of bones in the corner. It’s only then she heard something breathing.’
‘I suppose it’s not a bear,’ the shepherdess says.
‘It’s never just a bear. Whatever it was, it sent her running. Soon she lost—well, everything. Her way. Her shoes. They’re probably still stuck in the mud. Have you ever seen redbrier?’
‘No.’
‘Nasty thing. Grows inside the groundcover.’ The apprentice sticks out her thumb. ‘Thorns as long and fat as this. The girl stepped in a patch and one stuck in her heel, far too deep to pull out. No escape now. It’s easy for the monster to catch her.’ The midwife’s apprentice dips one of the sweat-soaked cloths in a bowl of clean water. ‘She expected him to rip her head off, as the stories said. Instead, he took her ankle in his hand and plucked the barb from her foot. Let her go. She returned, a month later. They became friends. Then more.’
She wrings out the cloth. By the river, the frogs sing to one another in their chorus. Pinpricks of light appear through the tree trunks. Lightning bugs? the apprentice thinks, but it is far too early, too cold.
The shepherdess gnaws at her bottom lip. ‘What happened to them?’
The apprentice hesitates. She remembers the look on her mistress’s face when she moved aside her cloak, the way it creased in fear like a shrivelled apple, how her mistress pushed a cup of copper-colored tea towards her and said, there’s still time. The tea had been freshly brewed for a marked woman whom her mistress refused to serve—why wasn’t important. Drink it, pet; be rid of it.
She rests her hand on her stomach. ‘They lived happily ever after.’
The lights grow, flickering orange and red, and the apprentice realizes too late they are torches. Four figures cross the lawn, and she flinches away from the window as if the sill were made of hot iron.
‘Stay quiet,’ she commands and sprints down the stairs. The front door rocks on its hinges as the figures batter it, the tip of an axe splintering wood, glass spraying across the kitchen as a rock soars through a window. As the king’s patrolman climbs in, the apprentice flings the kettle, and he shrieks at the scalding water. The axe breaks through, a hand reaches for the latch before it jerks back. Beyond the wrecked door there’s howling men and something else howling, too, a gout of blood splashing across the threshold. Through the gap, bodies whirl—a patrolman lies still on the ground and another struggles in the grasp of a beast until something snaps and his head falls limp. The sword of the final patrolman glints in the moonlight before it plunges into the beast’s hunched back, and the apprentice flies out of the house, wild, her fingers reaching for the patrolman’s eyes. It is easy to knock her down, to wrap hands around her neck—and then a whistling, a sharp pain in the patrolman’s shoulder. As he turns, he sees the shepherdess in the doorway, flanked by the light of the house, in a gown soaked with sweat and blood. She releases another arrow; it catches him in the temple and he falls dead.
In the moonlight, everything sinks into royal blue. Water glimmers; blood turns black. It covers the apprentice’s hands as she presses them against the wound on the creature’s back. The shepherdess draws her bow as she inspects the creature: enormous cloven hooves, haunches covered in coarse fur, a man-like chest. Tusks curling over a thin top lip, gnarled lupine face. Monstrous.
The beast cradles the apprentice’s hand in its clawed grasp. The apprentice looks up into the shepherdess’s face, clean and inscrutable as a sheet of new parchment.
‘Please,’ she says.
The shepherdess lowers her bow.
The child stirs.
SE Clark is a writer and artist living in a small town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has previously appeared in publications such as Lady Churchill’s rosebud wristlet, Weird horror, and Nixes mate review. When she is not writing, you may find her warring with rabbits in her garden (they’re winning) and posting photographs of mushrooms on her Bluesky account @seclarkwriter.
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I absolutely loved this story.
What a gorgeous, beautifully written story. ❤️