Page 15 of How To Survive This Fairytale
“Give me one good reason why I can’t go,” you say.
“Because you’ll fuck it up,” he says.He claps your shoulder with his meaty palm and offers you a tight smile.“And because the Fair Queen ordered me to go alone.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” you say.“Shouldn’t I go?To learn from you?Whatareyou hunting, anyway?”
He doesn’t answer.
“A dragon?”you suggest.“A monster of some sort?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he says.“Don’t wish your innocence away.”
“Give me a hint, at least.”
You know he won’t.You don’t know why you asked.
Sighing, you strap a saddle onto his mare.Within the hour, he’s ready to leave.
He doesn’t tell you where he’s going.He doesn’t even tell you when he’ll be back.
“Will you at least tell me what happened after you killed the ogres?”
“Eh?”
“You never finished the story.”
He strokes his beard.“Oh, I’d hoped to marry a princess,” he says with half a laugh, “but, ah… It wasn’t to be.Not in this life.I’d already pledged my loyalty to the Fair Queen.Though I did give the princess the gun for safekeeping.”
One day, it will occur to you that he gave her the gun so that she could protect herselffromthe Fair Queen.One day.But in this moment, you simply watch him mount his horse, disappointed with his story’s ending.
“Listen, Hans,” he says because you’re too old forHanselnow, “the queen will be married by the end of the month.She wants everything to go well.Keep that in mind.”
One day, when it is too late for you, you will understandthatwas your hint.It wasn’t a very good one, but it was all he could say.
* * *
The end of the month comes and goes.In an egregious display of finery, the Fair Queen marries a charming, vapid prince who cannot muster a single smile.The Fair Queen wasn’t his first choice, you hear the maids whisper.His True Love died last year; they say she was found with her heart torn out.
At the wedding feast, she raises her cup to you—you, who provided every bite of venison, every pheasant, every duck, and every goose.The brightness of her smile shrinks your heart; you bow your head to avoid looking at her any longer.In the skittering of your heartbeat, in the gooseflesh raising the dark hair along your arms, some inner voice saysrun away, run away, run away.You swallow down the sense that pleasing her this day was an awful, awful thing.
* * *
Three months from the day the huntsman left, guards escort you to the Fair Queen’s private library, located in a hitherto forbidden part of the palace.
“You may enter,” she says, in her voice sweet as wind chimes, and the heavy oaken doors open of their own accord.The moment you step over the threshold, the doors close, and you’re left with the sense of being swallowed by a whale.You’ve never seen the ocean—never seen a whale—but you've heard stories of their massive jaws, how they open their mouths to swallow water and every living thing in that water, too.One moment you were sharpening your hunting knives; the next, you’re here, standing before a queen dressed in mourning black.
“Sweet Hansel,” she says.A grieved smile pinches her mouth.“Ah, but you’re too old for that now, aren’t you?Nineteen, my goodness.Nearly six years since I saved you in the woods.I’ve watched you grow from a runt into a man.”
Weaving her fingers together, she crosses from the burning hearth to stand in front of the wall-length mirror on the opposite side of the room.Through the adjacent window, sunlight streams into the room; where it graces her skin, she gleams like porcelain.Like a thing made, you think,not a thing born.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” you mutter in the silence.The silence stretches on.She works her jaw, swallowing down some great agony.You have never seen her this way, and you can think of no reason she would summon you to see such pain, unless?—
“Have I… disappointed you, in some way, Your Majesty?”
“Oh, Hans,” she breathes, “never.Though I am afraid I am about you disappoint you.Hurtyou, even.Our dear huntsman…”
Her lower lip wobbles.Dewdrop tears glisten in her eyes.She does not look at you.Instead, she looks into the mirror, into the eyes of her own reflection.
Biting the inside of your cheek, you stare into the fire, at the snapping of its orange tongues.You knew before you walked in here today that he was dead.Hearing it shouldn’t shock you, shouldn’t devastate you—hewasn’tlike a father—but hedidcare about you.He cared about you, and he’s never coming home.