“‘Should any of my people see this ring,’ she said, ‘they will know the wearer to be under my protection and do what they can to aid you.’
“This debt of gratitude repaid, the Veil Queen returned to her people.
“Her curse was on Lorez. She called the Folk from their hollows and hidey-holes, from tree and bog and bedrock. The Will-o’-Wispies, the hobs and hobgoblins, the wolfmen, the crowgirls, the Women Who Wail. She called to her brother the Deep Lord in the Fathom Realms of the sea. Together they roused the Veil against Leressa. They drowned Lorez and demolished Lirhu. They trapped Torvald in the body of a beast—and rightly, for it fit the shape of his soul, and consigned Lissa to the long dark of dreaming, to match the darkness of her scheming. They sent warriors to grapple back mortal-worked lands for the wild, to seed Gentry children in the wombs of mortal women.
“Fiercely did the Gentry fight for their queen, but in one thing they would not yield. They would not put a monster on their throne. A hunchback boy to wear the antler crown? A scarred and crooked thing to be their king? Never. Yet while he lived, no one but he could ascend the throne. A few of the Queen’s bravest and brazenest subjects set upon the child—who was now just three years old. They tortured him almost unto death.
“Again the Veil Queen took her child and fled. She returned to Feisty Wold, hoping to find succor and friendship again. The tailor’s wife, Mava Oakhewn, welcomed her to her house. She whittled wooden toys for the boy in his convalescence. She set him to sleep in the same cradle as her own tiny daughter Gordie. Mava entreated the Veil Queen to stop the battle between their people. The Veil Queen refused.
“‘Your heart is hardened,’ Mava told her in despair.
“‘Then will I give it over to thy keeping,’ did the Veil Queen reply. ‘I have no use for it now.’
“So saying, she cut out her heart and strung it on a ribbon, disguised it as a bauble under Mava Oakhewn’s stewardship. For a third time she took her son and disappeared, to a place where neither Gentry nor mortal could find her. She raised her son in the ruins of that city which had ruined him.”
In the silence that followed, the wind shrieked.
She was his mother. I sat not a hand’s span from his mother. My own mam’s friend. Queen of all the Valwode and cause of the war. Just cause, if her story was to be trusted.
Did I trust anyone anymore?
Yes. One. And she was his mother.
“Now,” said the Witch, “this broken boy is full grown and of an age to rule. He is both wise and good, as puissant with power as ever his mother was. Still the Gentry cannot bear that he must wear their antler crown. The war rages between Gentry and mortalkind; the Valwode withers without its sovereign. But the Folk are stubborn.
“One year ago today did the Gentry Prince come before the queen. He knelt before her—he, to whom all worlds should bow!—and begged to give his life for his people, to make way for another heir. This the Veil Queen could not stomach. She bargained with him instead.
“‘Go you questing to the mortal realm,’ said the Veil Queen. ‘Return only when you have my eye, my heart, and a child of our blood to sit upon the throne.’”
The Witch subsided. My whole face was numb with revelation, but when she said, “The rest you know,” I leapt off our sitting stone.
“No!” I cried. “The rest I don’t! For I don’t know his name. Without his name, there’s no end for me. And no beginning, neither! It’s all just another ghost story.”
The Witch rolled her one eye up to me. The long white oval pulsed with gold. When she spoke again, the subject was so changed I nearly kicked up a foot and popped her in the knee.
“Were children never cruel in your village, Gordie Oakhewn?”
“Aye,” I snapped. “All children can be cruel.”
“Did they never sing songs while clapping hands or jumping rope?”
I jerked my chin and began to pace. “Of course.” I did not say, That’s how I found you, isn’t it?
“Did you never join in their games?”
Turning to scowl at her, I said, “Me? Mam would’ve clouted my backside with her dishrag, she heard me singing some of those naughty rhymes. Which you’d know if you’d really met her, Your Majesty.”
“But you listened,” the Witch continued. “You watched from your window. You stopped at the side of the road to hear their songs.”
“Sometimes!”
“What did they sing?”
“What did they sing?”
“What. Did. They. Sing.”
With a rub of my face and a shrug, I rattled off a few of the old chants. “‘Shark in the Cellar.’ ‘How the Fox Ate the Moon.’ ‘Come and Cut the Cute Cat’s Head.’ ‘The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where?’” I gestured about extravagantly. “Here, apparently. Oh, and the companion song, about the Witch’s—” I stopped.
That gold eye glared.
“About the Witch’s Crooked Son.” My gorge rose too fast. That terrible song. In her last days of life, Mam had lain beside her open window whispering it, frail and sobbing, and I could do nothing to comfort her.
“Sing it.”
“I won’t!”
“Sing it.”
“Never! How could you ask it of me? His own mother?”
The Witch grasped my chin in her hand. I had never felt fingers so strong and fell. I, who had been wife to boorish Jadio. Cold as the claws of the White One, they were, who rides your neck until you run off a cliff to escape her.
“You are not your mother’s daughter. You are craven. You do not deserve him.”
“Listen, you!” I bellowed, knocking her hand aside. “Twenty years the tots of Leressa have been singing that song. Cutting his soul into snippets and wounding him with every unwitting word. How could you—the Queen of the Valwode—you who know better—let his name be wrecked like that? Gentry never tell, he said—not even their own mothers. Is this why? Who let his secret name out? Who gave it like a golden ball into the hands of heedless children, until years of low games so dirtied and dented it you can hardly see the glistening? Twenty years of mockery. It must have been like a knife in his back every time some kiddie jumped rope.”
The Witch’s white shoulders seemed almost as hunched as her son’s. She whispered, “In the early days I trusted Lorez too dearly. I underestimated his knowledge of the Gentry. Too well did he understand our ways. The night he betrayed us, he called Torvald and Lissa into our room. ‘Witness the Witch’s imprisonment,’ he said. ‘The ruins of your baby brother on the floor. Do you see what your father does for you?’
“Perhaps they were repulsed at the sight. Perhaps they were delighted. The faces they showed their father were pitiless as his own. Then Torvald made up that rhyme to sing while Lissa danced around the baby’s body. He had been silent until then. Stunned. That was when he began to scream. How they made him dance, rhyming him back his own name.”
The night air was wet and cool, but my skin baked so with anger that it might have been high summer. Shrugging off my quilted coat, I rummaged in my pack for the length of gold-braided rope I’d planned to sell off in pieces for food if my quest failed, or hang myself with if Jadio’s soldiers captured me.
My hands shook. Nevertheless, I stood, turned my back on the Witch, and began to skip.
Swoop, slap, thud. Swoop, slap, thud. The old rhythms entered me. My breath came faster. My heart began to drum.