The Stepmother leaves the bed she shares with her husband to start the fire. The sun has barely crept over the forested mountains when she finishes feeding the animals, collecting the eggs, and cooking breakfast. Yet though the routine is the same every weary day, this is the time when she is happiest. The Husband’s grief swallows their house as soon as he rises. He is ten years older than her; that is ten more years for his grief to sharpen his voice, deaden his smile, and shorten his temper. As such, his young and gentle wife is always the one that the stepchildren run to with scraped knees after spending the day playing in the forest. They know that her hands will be soothing ones. But parenting is an impossible business, and she savored those quiet mornings while the rest of the house slept. So it is a surprise when she leans away from the cinder coated hearth a year after joining the family, ragged red shawl around her shoulders, to see the Stepdaughter standing in the open doorway. “Małgosia, you’re letting the cold in,” the Stepmother says, tweaking a blond pigtail and shutting out the wind. The Stepdaughter giggles and curls up against her stepmother as the bread finishes toasting. And when the sun rises, she doesn’t follow her older brother into the forest. He is bitter, since it is not half as fun to play at being the son of a powerful king and beautiful queen without someone else to make it real. At first, the Stepmother is happy to have the little girl trail after her all day like a duckling. It’s shocking to realize how lonely she’s been. But it does concern the Stepmother how the Stepdaughter is always standing in the open doorway, no matter how early it is when she wakes. Not staring out at the darkness, no, but looking into the half-timbered hut with hazy blue eyes. As though the Stepdaughter has just returned from wandering in the woods. Within a few weeks, it no longer brings the Stepmother joy to see the Stepdaughter in the pre-dawn light. However, the Stepmother has more pressing concerns than the oddities of a child. At least until she is woken by the sound of their door opening. She pulls her shawl around her shoulders and follows the Stepson to the church’s graveyard. He pulls chicken eggs out of his coat pockets not to eat, but to hurl against the wooden cross that his mother is buried beneath. Her young stepson is so small against the looming church. The belltower still seems to tilt back, as though it too is afraid. “Quick Jaś, inside,” she hisses, dragging the Stepson down the street as her eyes dart between the neighboring houses. The Stepmother does not relish what would follow the discovery of the Stepson’s midnight wandering. Her fears only grow when, night after night, she is woken by the sounds of him making mischief under the cloud-hidden moon. Trampling their garden one evening. Tearing clothes to shreds the next. One night, she finds him strangling a chicken with his bare hands. When the rest of the village asks the Husband, he blames their animals’ deaths on the woodland creatures, both natural and fey. And perhaps it is the fey creatures that are doing this. She has heard of them stealing away babies in the night, but can they do the same for children already as high as her waist? The Stepmother wishes that her childhood friend still lived in the house next to hers. She had been in awe of the dark haired girl, so daring in her knowledge despite the village’s contempt. The young Healer had continued in that proud refusal even when the church took her own stepmother, a midwife accused of something more. “Evil woman,” they still say today, many years after the Healer’s stepmother had been hanged. “Always carrying herself like a queen, when she was nothing more than a godless shrew.” The children’s stepmother had been the last person to see the Healer before the now thrice-orphaned girl had vanished into the moonlit woods. The Healer had cupped her face with cold hands, but the breath that steamed from those rose red lips promised of a different life, a magical and free one. If only the Stepmother dared to follow her into the falling snow. But by the time she realized that she wanted nothing more than to be by her friend’s side forever, the night’s storm had left no footprints in the snow. The Stepmother spent the hours before the next day’s dawn searching hopelessly for the other girl, tears freezing into crystals on her cheeks. Of course, she had not been the Stepmother then. She had been Meinilde. But those times are gone, for now she is “Stepmother” to the children and “Mouse” to her husband. Her duty is not to love as she once had, but to ensure the health and safety of her family. After all, that is why the Husband married her; not for love, not for loneliness. Just the words of the Husband’s father, his pointing and saying, “Why not her? She may not be pretty, but she’s strong, and dutiful, and obedient. Your children need a mother.” For the Stepmother, however, it had been loneliness. It has always been loneliness. But not the kind of loneliness to write ballads about or weep in a white dress for, no, just the kind that you can’t escape in the quiet moments. That special breed of loneliness that always sits with you, like a woodpecker slowly hollowing out your heart. The Stepmother tried to fill the empty space with a husband and a stepdaughter and a stepson and nothing changed. Sometimes, she wonders if it is too late for the hollowness to leave–if the chance left when a young woman with skin as white as snow, lips as red as roses, and hair as dark as ebony fled for a forest as magical as the fey that haunted it. “Berlwin,” she says one night. “We need to do something about the children.” Just last night, she had gone to put out the fire and saw the Stepdaughter sitting beside it. The child had stuffed a mouse between the growling logs. The Stepdaughter laughed as it squealed. “Honey, stop that!” the Stepmother had said, grabbing at the poker to pull the poor creature out. But the Stepdaughter waved her away and stuck her own hands into the fire. The Stepmother screamed. “It’s okay,” the little girl had said, pressing the mouse further into the crackling logs. Her pink skin stayed unmarred. “This kind of fire doesn’t hurt her.” After the Stepmother finishes telling him what his daughter has done, the Husband strokes his greying beard thoughtfully. He is a poor woodcutter, they cannot afford the church’s fees for an exorcism. So they must turn to different methods. “It’s the fey in the woods,” he says. The Stepmother nods, face turning grim. “We must send the children to the root of this evil.” The Husband scowls, but he does not argue. He knows how the tales go; no victim of a curse has ever survived by hiding in their home. No, instead the curse follows them. Only those who risk the journey to find the fey have even a chance of surviving and coming home. It is the next day when the Husband takes the children into the forest. They can’t afford to wait any longer. After all, when the Stepmother goes to collect eggs that morning, there are none. The last of their chickens has been killed. “Make sure you have enough food,” the Stepmother says, stuffing a loaf of bread into the Stepson’s jacket. “Honey, button your coat,” she tells the Stepdaughter. “Meinilde,” the Stepson says. It is the first time he has spoken in weeks. Meanwhile, the Stepdaughter hadn’t stopped talking, even in her sleep, for the past month. But she has been silent all morning. “Why are we going into the woods?” Even though the Stepson’s voice is eerily monotone, he looks up at the Stepmother like a chick that’s fallen out of its nest. She ruffles the Stepson’s blond curls. “Your Papa wants to spend a day with his children,” she coos. It is just before sunset when the Husband returns alone. He acts suitably distraught, and the village agrees to help search for the children. In the morning, though. No one is foolish enough to venture into the forest at night. The next morning, the Stepmother is hunched over her washbin when she sees an odd pebble on the ground. A few horse lengths away, there is another, equally bright pebble. A third glints on the fallen leaves at the forest’s edge. Heart turning frigid, she walks over to the first white stone. The Stepmother crouches, her overworked joints clicking. It is not a pebble. It is a tooth. A child’s tooth. The Stepmother looks up. The Stepson and the Stepdaughter are at the edge of the forest. He is holding her hand, and she is sucking on her thumb. When the little Stepdaughter pulls her thumb out it trails a bloody thread of spit. Every tooth is jagged and wrong, molars beside canines in the front of her mouth. The Stepdaughter’s knobby knees bend and she scoops up the third-to-last tooth. With the horrific scrape of bone on bone, the Stepdaughter pushes the tooth into her gums. The Stepson grins at the horror in the Stepmother’s expression. He bares the teeth of a deer. “Crows took the trail we made of Jaś’s teeth,” he explains. Blood trickles slowly from his mouth to the frosted ground but he doesn’t move to wipe it away. “But they forgot Małgosia’s, so we just followed her trail.” “Berlwin!” she screams, running towards the market and the Husband’s stall. The children follow her. They are only steps behind. Even when she breaks into a jog, then a sprint, hoisting her grey skirts above her knees, they are relaxed. The other peasants look over briefly from the wheat fields before shaking their heads and turning back to their work. Children laugh at the sight of their playmates chasing an adult. The Stepmother screams for help but the town elders only smile; what a good stepmother, to play such silly games with another woman’s children. When the Stepmother finally finds the Husband he turns pale. He calls the children’s names, going down on one knee. “My dears, what have they done to you?” The two children are on him in seconds. They are coming for his throat. It takes the Stepmother, the village priest, and two blacksmiths to pull them off. Every last twisted tooth is embedded in the adults’ arms and legs, leaving bite scars that will never heal. The entire village gathers behind the lord’s soldiers to chase the children back into the forest. The Stepmother and the Husband are treated to wary stares as they stagger back to the hut, the Husband shaking with the sorrow of his lost children. This time, when dawn comes, the Stepmother looks for whatever clues the children left behind during the previous night’s escape into the woods. She follows the trail of breadcrumbs as far into the forest as she dares, scooping each piece up and holding them aloft for the birds. A crow lands on her shoulder, cawing in her ear. The bird sounds just like the Healer’s poor dead stepmother with its ‘I know something you don’t’ cackling. The Stepmother laughs, stroking its feathers, but she chases it off before leaving the forest. She can’t risk the same accusations following her that did the Healer’s stepmother. The Husband has yet to leave their bed when she returns. “My children, Mouse, my children,” he whispers, voice cracking. “My dear boy, my clever Jaś, he would never hurt an innocent creature.” But he has. Or whatever has taken him has. “And my little girl, she is so sweet…” Sweet? Was that how he would describe the way she left broken teeth in her stepmother’s arms? The Stepmother hates how bitter her thoughts are, but she is tired of being hurt. “Don’t worry,” the Stepmother says. “They aren’t coming back to our home.” He stares up at her with fear stricken eyes. “What did you do?” The Stepmother looks away. “What I had to.” Moments later, she flees their home, hands pressed against her ears and against the screaming. Her clothes and her mother’s rosary and a mouse that the Husband carved as a wedding gift are flung out the door after her. All of her worldly possessions lie on top of the evening frost. The Husband’s words bleed together in his rage but the message is clear; if his children have no way back, possessed or not, then neither does she. The Stepmother squeezes her eyes tight to keep out the tears and trips. Her hands find the base of a small wooden cross, surrounded by the headstones of the church graveyard. “What happened?” the Stepmother whispers to the Mother’s buried corpse. Had they been set on this course at the moment of the children’s birth, the Mother’s death, the Stepmother’s arrival? What had they done to deserve this? A twig snaps behind the Stepmother and she whips around. No, just a snow white bird hopping on the ground. She turns back to the cross, but she doesn’t think of the village priest’s droning or the Bible she cannot read. The little dove flies to the top of the cross and waits. “Schneeweißchen,” she begs. “Please. If you’re out there.” The tiny bird spreads its wings and flies away. The Stepmother has nowhere to go except the forest already smothered in twilight, so she sits on their hut’s stoop. She wonders how long it will take, how cold she will have to get, until she gives up and begs on her hands and knees for the Husband to let her into what she had thought was her home. The moon has come out when she realizes that her possessions are no longer lying on the ground. She thinks that they are stolen until the door opens behind her and a familiar shawl is dropped over her shoulders. The Husband doesn’t say anything, only leaves the door open. The Stepmother stays outside a little longer, letting the cold wind bite at the scrapes on her hands while she stares up at the pale moon and pretends it’s a familiar face. Then she goes inside to sleep in their bed, closing the door behind her. The children don’t come back. Even so, the Stepmother and the Husband are still avoided by the villagers. When she enters one of the lord’s fields to tend to it the other serfs move to the orchards. The butcher refuses to sell her even the most fly infested of scraps. One night, the Husband comes home to see that their tiny garden has been dug up and the vegetables burned. They spend the next week hungry. “It will die down,” the Husband says. “It has to.” The Stepmother takes his hand. “We need to leave,” she says. “Even if they forgive, they’ll never forget.” He shakes his head vigorously. “We are bound to this land,” he says. “My wife is buried here, my parents are buried here, everyone we know and love is buried here.” “And so will we be, all too soon, if we don’t leave,” she says, squeezing his hand. “We’re going to starve.” He doesn’t answer. Throwing his hand down, the Stepmother stalks to their bed. He doesn’t join her. The next morning, she finds him asleep in the bed the children used to share. The Stepmother’s only reprise is in her dreams. Some are memories of growing up surrounded by wildflowers, running freely through the forest, and watching the Healer and her stepmother toil over a cauldron. The others are with a woman who is more familiar than she should be. It is almost as if, contrary to what the Stepmother always assumed, the Healer had not frozen to death in the storm that followed her escape, but instead grown into the powerful woman she’d always wanted to become. They sit under a gingerbread roof with mugs of hot chocolate, and the woman’s smile melts the Stepmother’s heart. It is snowing outside. “The children are sleeping,” the woman tells her. “We have time.” “How long will it be? Until they’re healed?” The woman dips a cookie into her hot chocolate. The Healer used to eat her food the same way, as though she was a princess instead of a peasant. “The fire is taking longer than expected,” she admits. “But when it is ready, all the magic will be burnt out of them.” “Burnt!?” the Stepmother cries. “Have no fear, as long as my assistants and I remove Jaś and Małgosia from the fire as soon as the fey magic leaves their bodies, they won’t feel a thing. And then I can bring them home.” “Thank you,” the Stepmother says. Tears are in her eyes. She had lost hope that she would hold her children in her arms again. The Stepmother hesitates. “Thank you, Schneeweißchen.” The woman lights up, but before she can open her mouth the toffee door swings open. A short man, no, a mountain dwarf, bursts in and shakes powdered sugar off his boots. “We have the dragon’s coal,” he tells the woman. She claps her hands together, and the Stepmother is once again a young girl watching the Healer successfully mend the pair’s bruises for the first time. “Perfect! Now quick, bring it in.” The dwarf waves in his six brothers, each carrying a smoking sack. The Stepmother watches, wide eyed, as they disappear into a hallway lined with sugar glass windows and walls made of the latticed crust of an apple pie. Her stomach growls, mouth watering at the sight of the golden crust. The Healer’s stepmother used to make apple pies when the village still held festivals. The woman passes her the plate of cookies. Cold fingers brush the crumbs off of the Stepmother’s lips, laughter dancing from lips framed by ebony dark hair. It is the first time someone has touched her so sweetly in years, and the last time she will eat for another week. When the children come home, the Husband runs out into the wretched garden to meet them. He goes to peck the tops of their heads but they step back, holding out their hands for him to shake. The Stepmother stays in the doorway. Both of the children are quiet, but then again, is that not to be expected after such an ordeal? The grey clouds begin to sprinkle their cold kisses, and the children shiver as they talk to their father. Both of their coats are in rags. “Come inside,” she calls out to them. “We don’t have any food, but there is some firewood left.” “Jaś and Małgosia have food,” the Stepdaughter says through a half-closed mouth. She opens the sack her brother drops to the ground, letting out a cloud of steam. “They brought it from the witch’s house.” Of course. The woman might not have been able to come, but she had made sure that the children and their family would be fed. The way the children speak is still a little strange, but considering how long the fae had control of them, that’s no surprise. The Husband is drooling when his son passes him a chunk of fire charred meat. His teeth tear into it with a vengeance. The Stepmother can’t help but come closer, summoned by the thought of a full belly. “Oh, Meinilde,” the Stepson says, his smile sharpening his face. “This should fill you right up.” He lifts a head from the bag. A human head. The skin has melted away and the flesh is weeping ash, but even so the Stepmother knows who it is. She used to stroke those cheekbones, kiss that forehead. She bats the head out of the Stepson’s hands, screaming. “What’s wrong–” the Husband starts to ask before he’s interrupted by her shoving her hand in his open mouth. He gags, teeth digging into her skin, but still her fingers search until they land on the fire-hot flesh. It’s tender and juicy and covered in crackling, bubbling skin like the finest oven-roasted boar. The Stepmother rips the half chewed meat out of the Husband’s mouth and hurls it onto the ground. A pair of birds, one large and dark, the other small and pale, land besides it. They don’t peck at any of it, any of her, they just stand guard against the falling snow. Curious villagers step out of their homes. They don’t know who to look at, the children that the forest returned, or the woman falling to her knees, wailing incoherently. Neither does the Husband. “Berlwin,” the Stepdaughter says. He looks down, and her small hand is enclosed in his. “Please, may Jaś and Małgosia go inside? Are they allowed into the house?” He doesn’t move when she tugs at him, the cat’s claws embedded in her fingernails digging into his skin. “What is that?” he asks, wide eyes meeting the dead gaze of the severed head. “Who is that?” He seems terrified of the very question. “Jaś and Małgosia killed the witch,” the Stepson says calmly. He heaves the bag back over his shoulder before turning to face the crowd. The story flows easily from his tongue, a simple child’s tale of a stepmother so evil that she’d chase two playing children into the forest, a house full of temptation, and a villainous witch hungry for the flesh of innocents. But the village need not fear, no. The horror that the witch had intended for the children had become her own undoing. Whispers circle around the crowd, in awe of the children’s bravery and wit. There are no more sympathetic looks for the Stepmother, still wailing as she rocks back and forth over the head and its crown of snowflakes. The Husband lets himself be tugged towards the door. “No,” the Stepmother chokes out. “They’re still in there.” The Stepdaughter shows him her new dog’s teeth and her father actually smiles at the silly sight. “Those aren’t your children anymore.” The Stepson licks his lips with a cat’s tail before the door shuts on his leer. “Berlwin!” The Stepmother pounds on the door. She screams. They won’t let her in, and the snow is falling harder. The crowd leaves one by one. They all lock her out just like they locked the woman in the oven, letting the magic, and then the life, burn out of her. She keeps knocking, even when her knuckles are bloodied. Firelight creeps out from under the crack in the door. So does laughter, growing louder and louder until the anger leaves her and all she can do is sob. The crow lands on her shoulder, cawing in her ear. “Get up,” it says. “I can’t leave him,” she whispers. “I can’t leave them.” The white bird lands on her other shoulder. “Get up.” “I don’t have anyone else.” “Get up,” the birds say together. The Stepmother wipes the tears from her face. They freeze before they hit the ground. “Get up,” she whispers to herself. She draws the red shawl tighter across her shoulders, fingers tipped with a dark, freezing rot. “Get up.” She looks towards the forest. “Get up.” Her teeth chatter. The Stepmother passes the church and its graveyard. The headstones are half buried in snow, and the wooden cross is nowhere to be seen. She looks behind her, once, at the warm huts. At the fields. The castle above it all. And then Meinilde turns, two pairs of claws digging into her shoulders. Her blood freezes in her veins. It is hard to keep walking. To keep living. But cold hands close around her arms. Meinilde leans into the small figure, only visible out of the corner of her eye. The figure is as haunting as a ghost with a pale face, blood red lips, and wispy, dark hair floating in the wind. But she knows that the woman is more than a ghost–she is all the burnt away magic. Tears turn to frozen crystals as Meinilde smiles, only the moon seeing their embrace. The two women and the two birds continue their journey into the forest. They leave no footprints in the snow.
Kai Moore is a college freshman born and raised in Colorado, and long fantasy novels are their poison of choice both to read and write. This is Kai's first published piece. You can find Kai Moore on Twitter at @Kai_Moore_ .
Ruthenium (she/they) is an artist and writer currently living in the state of uncertainty. They believe creativity is real-life magic, and are obsessed with texture, context, light, and the question “what if?...” Their work has been published in Sandpiper, Rabble Review, Celestite Poetry, Lavender Lime Literary, Vulnerary Magazine, and Warning Lines Literary. Their various presences, publications, and collections can be found at https://linktr.ee/Ruthenium.