"Imbecile!" a voice shouted. Thursey froze, then looked up to see Delilah, her broad shadow cast across the water trough. "Can't you even come out to curry the horses without playing like a child! You look like you fell in the hay. Get that mess out of your hair."
Thursey began to pull out the straws.
"Why you've put them in on purpose!" Delilah peered closer. "You put them in on purpose," she repeated and began to laugh. She guffawed, roared with laughter, slapped her side and brayed. "You've woven your hair with straw — with straw! What'd you think it was, precious stones and gold?"
Thursey blanched, then turned red.
Delilah stared at her. "Oh, wait 'til I tell Ma! Oh, oh," and she fell into further paroxysms of laughter. She could have been heard clear to the castle if there had been anyone there to hear her.
Thursey glared. The sisters had never dared act so cruel before her father went away. He would have set Delilah straight. But now if she mentioned him, Delilah would only scoff and say, "That coward! Your father died a coward running from the Balkskakian hordes." She'd heard that more times than she could count. Would her father come home one day? Things hadn't been right since he left. She turned away from Delilah now with angry tears.
I could go away, she thought. But if I did, and he is alive, he wouldn't find me here. And the inn is rightfully his; it's not their inn at all.
"I should turn the likes of you out," Augusta would threaten often. But that wasn't likely. Who would scrub and cook and mind the stable? No one, not for free anyway. "Your father's dead. We could turn you out."
I don't know that he's dead, Thursey thought. No one knows what happened to him in the battles with Balkskak.
Chapter Two
HURSEY'S bed was a cupboard in the kitchen wall. Under it were shelves where the pots and pans were kept, and flanking it were the great fireplace on one side and the broom closet on the other. The bed itself had doors that could be shut and locked, though it had been a long time since Augusta had locked Thursey into it—when she was a good deal smaller. At the back of the cupboard were narrow shelves for Thursey's other dress, her night dress, and her few meager possessions.
Late at night, with the noises of the inn stilled and the sisters upstairs in their beds, with the hoot of an owl coming through the open window and the smoldering fire throwing shadows on the walls, Thursey could imagine any exciting thing. This night the moon was full, sending its light into the kitchen. Thursey drew her quilt around her and watched moonlight and firelight mingle to cast strange shapes across the room, as if a shadowy play were being enacted there. She thought of the story the merchant had told, and how the dear father had said, "What shall I bring you from the fair?" One stepdaughter had replied, "Bring me a cloak of pearls and jewels and bring me a fan of silver," and the other had cried, "Bring me a mirror that I can see my beauty; bring me an emerald comb for my raven hair." Thursey watched the light play across the black stewpot and skillets, and they seemed to be figures moving. "And what will I bring you?" The father asked Aschenputtel. "Bring me, O Father, the first twig that strikes your hat as you leave the fair."
Thursey wriggled her cold feet and pictured Aschenputtel planting the hazel twig her father brought her, placing it in the earth upon her mother's grave. Each day Aschenputtel wept upon it, and soon the twig sprouted leaves and grew into a hazel tree. Each day that Aschenputtel wept over it, it grew larger. And each time she prayed over it, a white bird came to sit on a branch and speak to her.
When Aschenputtel was forbidden by her stepmother to go to the king's festival, the white bird said, "You must go." Aschenputtel replied, "But I have no dress to wear." And the bird said, "Do as I say, and you shall have." Thursey pictured Aschenputtel kneeling before the hazel tree and repeating the words as the bird instructed, "Little tree, little tree, shake over me, that silver and gold may come down and cover me." And at once she was wearing a dress of silver and slippers made of gold. And the next night the dress and slippers were finer, and the night after, finer still; and the mounts that stood before her of a beauty beyond belief. Thursey could see it plainly. She lit a candle and reached under her straw mattress.
She pulled away a bit of wood and drew from the hole a bit of sacking. From this she took paints and precious paper. Then she closed the cupboard doors, wishing she could latch them from inside.
She painted long into the night, page after page that would become a book telling Aschenputtel's tale. She made the pictures around the edges of each page and wrote the story in the middle. She painted the two ugly sisters, the twig, the tree, the white bird, the gold and silver dresses.
It had been an old monk passing on the high road who had taught her to write and to paint. A monk dressed in a dusty brown habit and riding a donkey so small Thursey wondered it could carry the rotund old man, an old monk with paper and colors and quills. He had stayed at the inn healing from an ailment, paying for his board with prayers (which the sisters had little use for) and handiwork (which they used in plenty). He took Thursey into the wood and taught her the herbs to pick so she could have color: saffron and blueberry and madder, indigo and sumac and oak. He gave her paper and made her a brush from the soft hair that she pulled from the old mare's currycomb. Then he taught her letters, a secret she must surely keep to herself, for in those days few could read, and those of a low caste who could do so might be suspected of enchantments.
They had done it all on the sly, the monk saying that he begged Thursey's help in gathering herbs for his fever, and for his good works. The sisters, afraid of some higher wrath if they refused, gave her over reluctantly. Augusta had scowled, remarking that her duties were in the kitchen, not the fields. Anwin had paid them no attention. "Keep your secrets, child. Those three biddies would have your head if they didn't need you in the kitchen. Someday, you'll see, a great enchantment will come to you just as in the stories. Don't laugh, it will surely happen." He had winked at Thursey and at the old mare. The mare had snorted back at him, and Thursey had grinned at them both.
She drew a border of hazel leaves for the cover of "Aschenputtel" and painted the white bird in the center. Tomorrow she would sew the pages together.
The books satisfied something in Thursey, and she guarded her secret fiercely; though once, late at night, Druscilla had slipped in unheard and seen the candlelight beneath the closed doors of Thursey's bed. Thursey, hearing a rustle, had pushed the pages and paints beneath her quilt and sat trembling, her hands pressed together as if she were praying, as Druscilla jerked the doors open and stood glaring in at her.
"Praying! Praying in the night! What would you pray for? And who would hear if you did! And why would you need a candle to pray!" But she had gone away at last, leaving Thursey furious but the truth undiscovered.
Anwin had taught Thursey to cure and grind the colors, and she continued to do it in secret. Dear fat Anwin, where was he wandering now? It must be hard, a monk's life of wandering and begging. Thursey never could believe that he was begging, for truly Anwin worked for his keep, mending the pots as well as a tinker, cobbling the sister's shoes and laying new thatch on the roof. "I must have been up and down this country a hundred times or more, but always and ever there are new souls and new faces. And new joys and new sadnesses." Winter and summer he traveled, just Anwin and his donkey. "One need not be ashamed of dreaming, child. So many are sad because they have ceased to dream. The wonders you know as a child are not meant to die just because you are growing up."