Fairly Wicked Tales Read Free Page A

sealed in blood as in the days of Old.”
    I ran.
    My Uncle did not return in the night, nor was he present in the morning to receive communion and blessing from the priest. Despite my protests, my explanations of what I had seen in the Black Forest, my father hugged me tightly and left to hunt the beast. I stood on the road and watched my father’s form become a puppet on the road, until he shrank into a tiny speck in the far distance. I stood long after he vanished into the trees, long after the snows began to fall once more. I stood until my legs gave out and cold brought me to the ground.
    Until Pieter’s father and mother picked me up in loving arms and took me to the warmth of their hearth.
    Neither Father nor Uncle came home to me in the first hours of morning. Nor the day after, or the day after that. News of my family did not reach us until the day the village prepared to march for the city. News of triumph and of hope for the future arrived in the form of a royal caravan galloping down our plain little road, the coach of the King heading the procession. The King and his daughter alighted from the coach with its golden scrollwork, approaching Elder Gottlieb and his wife, and Pieter … and me.
    My father had prevailed, proclaimed the King. The beast lived no more! He would marry the Princess Ilsa upon the spring when his wounds fully healed, and I would be a high lady. Not a queen as Old Teufel had predicted. For even at such a young age, I understood the Princess was not my mother. Only a child between Ilsa and my father would take the throne. Yet all that hardly mattered to me. My father lived. He had slain the beast and our village was saved.
     
    ***
     
    Spring came swiftly on the heels of such a harsh winter, bringing life in abundance. It was almost as if the ground attempted to make amends for the weak harvest of last season, yielding up a bounty of food and flowers, filling our storehouses to overflow. Prosperity returned to the kingdom in ways unseen since before the Black Plague. My father married Princess Ilsa in a grand celebration lasting a fortnight.
    Life settled into something of a beautiful peace in the years following the marriage. My father, though now royal, never forgot the village we came from. His first decree as royal husband fed money into our former home, funding a church and a proper town hall. Our old family farm was chosen as the building location, the grave of my mother marking the first to be buried in this newly consecrated ground. And beside her was placed a headstone over an empty grave to honor Uncle Kristoph, who had given his life as so many others had in trying to slay the beast.
    Yet as is the course and folly of mortal men, happiness was not to last in our kingdom.
    In the summer of my sixteenth year, the old Sheppard brought his wagon into the castle courtyard. So much joy had come to our family, I hardly remembered the dark prophecy of Old Teufel. Instead I glowed with womanhood, with the knowledge that finally, at long last, my father had gotten the Princess with child. The baby would be born within the month, further evidence I would not be queen and the vile prophecy would never come to pass.
    My father took it upon himself to arrange a dual celebration in honor of the babe and also Pieter’s ordainment as a priest. After many troublesome years of study, my heart’s friend would achieve his dream to take over stewardship of the newly constructed church back in the village we both still called home. I had never been so proud of him, watching as the Holy Father laid the vestiges upon him for the first time.
    And still the smile remained on my lips as I stared down at this Sheppard, watching him offer the choicest of his flock to my father for the celebration. Cold wind had returned to me, bringing traces of decay and other odors I had long since forgotten. It seemed to me the axels of the Sheppard’s wagon hissed instead of creaked, waking nightmares of the boar and the