The Starlit Wood Read online

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

  IN THE DESERT LIKE A BONE

  by Seanan McGuire

  (Little Red Riding Hood)

  UNDERGROUND

  by Karin Tidbeck

  (East of the Sun, West of the Moon)

  EVEN THE CRUMBS WERE DELICIOUS

  by Daryl Gregory

  (Hansel and Gretel)

  THE SUPER ULTRA DUCHESS OF FEDORA FOREST

  by Charlie Jane Anders

  (The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage)

  FAMILIARIS

  by Genevieve Valentine

  (The Wolves)

  SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON

  by Amal El-Mohtar

  (The Glass Mountain/The Black Bull of Norroway)

  BADGIRL, THE DEADMAN, AND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  by Catherynne M. Valente

  (The Girl with No Hands)

  PENNY FOR A MATCH, MISTER?

  by Garth Nix

  (The Little Match Girl)

  SOME WAIT

  by Stephen Graham Jones

  (The Pied Piper of Hamelin)

  THE THOUSAND EYES

  by Jeffrey Ford

  (The Voice of Death)

  GIANTS IN THE SKY

  by Max Gladstone

  ( Jack and the Beanstalk)

  THE BRIAR AND THE ROSE

  by Marjorie Liu

  (Sleeping Beauty)

  THE OTHER THEA

  by Theodora Goss

  (The Shadow)

  WHEN I LAY FROZEN

  by Margo Lanagan

  (Thumbelina)

  PEARL

  by Aliette de Bodard

  (Dã Tràng and the Pearl)

  THE TALE OF MAHLIYA AND MAUHUB AND THE WHITE-FOOTED GAZELLE

  by Sofia Samatar

  (The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle)

  REFLECTED

  by Kat Howard

  (The Snow Queen)

  SPINNING SILVER

  by Naomi Novik

  (Rumpelstiltskin)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  In memory of my grandmothers:

  Miriam Rosensweig, who shared stories with me,

  and Marcia K. Levine, who made them an integral part of my childhood.

  —N. W.

  For my parents,

  who are not of the fairy tale variety.

  —D. P.

  INTRODUCTION

  When thinking of fairy tales, it can be easy to mistake the forest for the trees. In this case, the literal forest: the woods are almost ubiquitous in fairy tales. But perhaps they shouldn’t be.

  In times when individuals seldom ventured far from home, it made sense to view the unknown—usually the world just outside your little microcosm of a farm or village or city—as suspect. And so, the woods were the place of monsters, of weird happenings, of adventure. That is no longer the case. Over time the world has grown bigger and the woods—both metaphorically and physically— have grown smaller. Now the unknown is to be found in other places. The woods can still be a place of wonder and of danger, and sometimes they even feel more alien to us than ever because of how disconnected we are from them, but the strangers, the mysterious happenings, the fantastical adventures: those take place in other landscapes now. It’s easy to forget that when we think of fairy tales. We tend to go back to what we think of as their original setting, to that old-timey, woodland world we know is home to those weird, sometimes frightening, often violent stories of wonder. But some of the tales never had woods to begin with. Fairy tales originate from all over the world, from widely differing traditions and cultures, and in many cases the woods are never even a factor.

  So what connects them, if not the woods?

  Think of skeletons. Mammalian skeletons, for example, all have similar touchstones. Just by looking at a mammal skeleton, you would know it was a mammal, even if some parts were missing. A mouse is not a whale, is not a tiger, is not an aardvark. You might not be able to see the similarities when they’re covered by things like skin, fur, and hair, but when you strip them down to their bones, their most basic elements, they’re slightly different but unmistakably related. So it is with fairy tales: we know to expect certain themes and subjects, or at least variations on them—terrible parents, wandering children, fantastical animals, enchanted items, moral components, trials and tribulations—to a point where even if we don’t necessarily recognize the source material, a story can still feel like a fairy tale.

  In their original form, fairy tales were always evolving. An oral tradition, they were constantly being told and retold, changing ever so slightly as they were passed from one storyteller to the next. As a definitive catalog of fairy tales emerged, writers borrowed and stole bits and pieces and elements from a vast mythos of stories and revised and reworked them tirelessly. In this way, retellings have always been a part of the fairy tale tradition.

  In keeping with that original model of composite storytelling, we decided to run fairy tales through a prism, to challenge our authors to look at stories from an unusual angle, to bring them back into different genres and traditions, to—if you will—return them to their cross-genre roots. We wanted our authors to move beyond the woods. Sometimes that meant removing a piece traditionally viewed as integral to the story—like music from the Pied Piper—or putting a character as geographically far as possible from his or her original setting, as Little Red Riding Hood in the desert. In some cases it was exploring lesser-known or even newly discovered fairy tales, which helps highlight the interconnectedness of the fairy tale tradition around the world.

  From the woods to the stars, join us on eighteen extraordinary journeys into unexpected territories, uncharted lands, and unforeseen experiences. Welcome to an adventure that’s strangely familiar and startlingly different at the same time. You’re likely to emerge changed, but isn’t that the way it is with all the best stories?

  So come on in.

  Step into The Starlit Wood.

  —Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

  IN THE DESERT LIKE A BONE

  Seanan McGuire

  he sky is the color of bleached bone, neither white nor yellow, but a creamy in-between shade that speaks death from one end of the horizon to the other. Under it, the desert, the sand little darker than that endless sky. Upon that desert, two riders on horseback. Coyote has the lead, has had it since the day he swung a scrap of a girl barely worth the patchwork cotton she was wrapped in onto the back of his horse. She has her own steed now, can choose her own way, but still she follows in his wake, close and quiet and biding her time.

  His shadow rides before the both of them, draw
n bitter-black on the desert that stretches under the bone sky. As always, his face is concealed beneath the brim of his hat, and the gun at his hip glimmers with poisonous menace. He is a thin creature, is Coyote, raw of bone and furrowed of brow. The sun has burnt itself into him an inch at a time, turning his skin leathery and hard. Mosquitoes cannot pierce that skin, and fly away hungry when they come too close.

  Behind him on her swayback mare rides his red fox girl, her eyes bright as bullets and scanning the horizon for signs of death or danger. Her hat is brown leather, but to listen to the people who have seen her, it should be red as blood, red as a harlot’s corset, red as a rare, expensive apple stolen from an eastbound train. Her hair is the color of straw on a barroom floor, and her skin is tanned the color of the desert sand. She disappears, the fox girl does, whenever she slides from her horse and sets her feet to the ground. She is a child of this blasted, unforgiving land, and when she looks upon it, she sees a paradise, and not a waste at all.

  She knows the rock, and the shadow of the rock, and the flowers that bloom there. If there is danger here, it does not frighten her.

  The man in the black hat and the girl with hair the color of straw ride under the bone-colored sky, and no one knows from whence they ride, and no one watches them go.

  “Once upon a time,” say the prairie harpies and the respectable housewives, the snake-oil saleswomen in their jewel-colored gowns and glittering cosmetics, the woodwitches and the wisewomen and the lost, “there was a little girl in a place where no little girl should be. Her mama was long gone to blood on her handkerchief and fire in her lungs, and her daddy was no daddy at all but a man who saw no difference between daughter and dog—and he was a man who’d beat his dog besides. They lived in a little house all the way to the cruel, civilized East, and everyone who knew him for a widower said ‘wasn’t it fine’ when they sighed over the way he was bringing up his little girl, all by himself, without a woman’s hand to give him aid. That little girl had the best clothes and the best bread, and a cloak as red as the blood she’d seen on her mama’s lips before the man in the black wagon came to carry her mama away forever.”

  That’s where the stories diverge. “She would have been a fine lady; she would have grown up draped in diamonds, wrapped in silks. She would have danced in the finest parlors, and if her daddy didn’t love her, she would have found a man who loved her more than the moon and the sun and the stars. But that bad wolf came in the night and gobbled her up, and she never got her dancing shoes, never got her debutante ball. She’s a ghost in the desert now, lost and lonely and brokenhearted as a bobcat in October, and if you see her, child, don’t you meet her eyes; don’t you let her lead you astray.” So say the housewives and the rich women as they tuck their own dear daughters into bed. For them, she is a cautionary tale, a way to keep their children close, and who can blame them? Who can blame them in the least?

  “She would never have been a fine lady, as she had no grace for dancing; all her grace was in stillness and in silence, because those were the things her daddy prized, and so those were the things she learnt to please him. She would never have danced in the finest parlors, and who’s to say the man in the black wagon, the wolf of the west who was never a wolf at all, didn’t love her? What other reason could he have to come like a shadow in the night and sweep her away? Maybe she never got her diamonds, but she got the high desert stars, which shine far brighter. Maybe she never got her fine silks, but who would trade a single midnight breeze for all the silk in China? Her debutante ball was danced with jackrabbits and red-eyed lizards under the harvest moon, and if she never looked back, not even once, who can blame her? She’ll lead you astray as easy as breathing, but that’s no shame on her, or on you, for she never met a path she cared to follow. If you see her, child, don’t meet her eyes; I need you here with me.” So say the snake-oil saleswomen and the frontier wives, and they’re as right, and as wrong, as anyone.

  The girl in the hat that isn’t red anywhere but in stories follows Coyote across the desert, and the stars are diamonds in her hair, and when she speaks—which is rare, for she trusts slow and warms slower—her voice carries the sound of the Atlantic, of deep woods and harsh snows and a climate she was born to but never belonged in. She could tell them another story, if she chose to, if she thought they’d listen. She could tell them about choices; about following because sometimes it was easier to track your prey when someone else blazes the trail. She could tell them all her choices have been her own, and will remain so: that if she had wanted someone else to make her choices for her, she would never have opened the window, never have left the path.

  She says none of these things. She has other matters to concern herself with, and other jobs to do. She builds the fire when they stop for the night, piles the kindling high and coaxes the flames toward the moon. Some nights, Coyote goes hunting, and she sits close to the warmth and listens to the howls in the far distance. Other nights, she fetches the rabbits and the grouse for their supper. Her hunts are silent, unlike his. They are no less effective. Her feet still leave dents in the desert sand, but he assures her that this, too, will pass; one day, she will move as light as the wind that blows between midnight and morning, leaving nothing behind. On that day, she will earn bullets for the guns she wears strapped to her sides. On that day, she will finally be free.

  Until then, she builds the fires when and where he tells her to, and she listens to him howl in the dark, and she tries to forget the house in the green world, where a man who claimed to know her had given bruises where he should have given kindness. She sleeps in the arms of the desert, and the stars keep watch above her.

  This day, the sun is high and harsh in the sky, beating down until even Coyote shields his eyes. The girl huddles under her hat and thinks longingly of caves and mountain springs, of places of safety and succor. All of them are hidden somewhere in the desert. She does not think this a contradiction. The desert is the greatest safety she knows.

  Coyote looks to her. A frown is on his lips, and there is worry in his eyes. “Are you well?” he asks. His voice is gunpowder and grace, as bone-bleached as the sky.

  “Just hot,” she says. Her voice still belongs to a young woman, growing from childhood into womanhood. She might still find her way back to the green world, if she chose to seek it. That door is not yet closed to her. “We almost there?” Questions are small, skittering things, like mice. Answers are the predators that pounce on them. She has learned to unleash her questions cleverly, rather than risk them all being devoured before she can learn what she needs to know.

  “Close enough. You sure this is where we need to go?”

  Her nod is tight. New Woodbury is a small town built around a well that cuts all the way to the bones of the world, down to where the water waits. The people who live there think they’re going to thrive on that water. They don’t understand how fickle the desert is; they don’t know they’re being hunted. “I’m sure. There’s a man there. He says he’s looking for something he lost.”

  Coyote looks at her, expression giving nothing away. “We have money. We could stop somewhere else. Rent a place, maybe get you some schooling before we finish the ride.”

  “I’ve had enough schooling. I don’t want any more.”

  “Bullets are good. Knowledge is better. You want to keep riding with me, you’re going to need both.”

  The girl, who knows better than to cross the man she rides with, says nothing. But her eyes burn beneath the shadow of her hat, and Coyote feels a pang of pride. She’s growing up to be a proper wild thing, his little stolen pup. She’ll learn soon enough why he insists on things she thinks have no value, that to reject something, it must first be understood. They all learn, given time. That’s when they leave him. When they understand, and no longer need looking after; when they decide that it’s time to start looking after themselves.

  Distance has no meaning in the desert—not if the rider knows the way of things, the points of similarity betw
een this and that, the places where the sky can fold. A man with a map, now, he’ll have a hundred miles of hard land to walk, and every inch of it resenting him for what he represents, for the way he pins it down. A lake that was once free to move from here to there, as migratory as a bird, finds itself tethered by the intersection of pen and paper. The predators are heroes to the desert. If the mapmaker is lost, if all his possessions are destroyed, the landscape can be unbound. But if other eyes should see those lines, those laws, then all is lost.

  To the mapmakers, Coyote and his red fox girl started the day a good sixty miles from New Woodbury, separated by long stretches of empty earth. But Coyote is no mapmaker, and his horse has no eye for cartography. He rides into town as the clock on the town hall strikes high noon, the girl still close behind him. The townsfolk stop what they were doing and turn to watch the strangers come, the man on the tall horse, the girl on the swaybacked mare. Their shadows are ink on the ground, etching them in the here and now as cleanly as any map could have dreamt.

  They ride until they reach the boardinghouse, where a trough waits to soothe their horses, and a tying post stands ready to confine them. Coyote swings down as easily as breath, setting his feet to the ground and freeing his horse to drink. He leaves his reins to dangle. The horse would stay or go as it chose, and either way, he wouldn’t try to argue with it.

  The red fox girl doesn’t seem to dismount at all. One moment she is seated on her horse’s back, and the next moment she is standing on the ground, her hat still covering her eyes. Like Coyote, she leaves her reins untied. Unlike Coyote, she stands nervous, worried that her mare would leave her to ride double with the man who led her across the desert—but if he can trust his horse, she can trust hers. It seems the right thing to do.

  Both horses stick their faces in the water and drink greedily, gulping until their bellies fill and their throats are no longer dry. Coyote and the girl dip their hands in the cool wetness and run dripping fingers across their faces, cutting trails in the dust that covers them. When they turn away from the trough, a man stands before them. He is plump, in the way of townspeople, an amiable, enviable softness that speaks to things being done for him, and not by him. His neck is thick, and his arms are heavy with muscle. A boss-man, then, and one for whom enviable plumpness was a new thing. That makes him dangerous. Men who haven’t had a thing for long always know how valuable that thing is, and they more than any will fight to keep it.