Swan Sister (2 page)

Back in the seventeenth-century France there was a group of writers in Paris who loved those older, complex stories. And so they made it into a game, as they sat together in their elegant salons, to retell traditional fairy tales in clever, interesting new ways. In fact, some of the tales we love best today are versions first told in French salons, such as Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella,” complete with fairy godmother and rats turned into coachmen. Sometimes two writers would choose the same tale, and each would rewrite it in his or her own way—and then the other
salonnières
would decide who’d done it best. Today, three hundred years later, many of us still love playing this game—trying to discover fresh new ways to retell beloved old stories.

The authors in this book are also people who never outgrew their childhood love of fairy tales—as adults, they’re still reading magical stories, and writing them too. For this collection (the sequel to our previous book
A Wolf at the Door
), we asked writers to send us brand-new stories based on older tales—fairy tales, folklore, legends, and even old folk ballads. You’ll find new versions of “Bluebeard,” “Rapunzel,” “The Fisherman’s Wife,” “Tom Thumb,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Seven Swans;” as well as two works based on
The Arabian Nights;
two different versions of “Red Riding Hood;” a story inspired by “Greenman” legends; and one Celtic folk song. Each of these authors has taken traditional material and fashioned it into something of his or her own—just as those French writers did in Paris three hundred years ago.

Who knows? Maybe three hundred years from now groups of writers will
still
be telling these stories. We hope so. Because there will always be readers who don’t outgrow their love of magic.

If you’d like to know more about fairy tales, here are three good collections of them:
Spells of Enchantment
edited by Jack Zipes,
The Classic Fairy Tales
edited by Maria Tatar, and
Favorite Folktales from Around the World
edited by Jane Yolen. If you’re looking for strong female heroes, try
Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls
edited by Jane Yolen,
The Serpent Slayer and Other Stories of Strong Women
adapted by Katrin Tchana and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, and
Strange Things
Sometimes Still Happen
edited by Angela Carter. A fascinating book
about
fairy tales is
Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood
by Jane Yolen. On the Internet, try these Web sites: The SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages (
www.surlalunefairytales.com
) and The Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts (
www.endicott-studio.com
).

We were sitting under a rowan with Dad’s field glasses,
Merendy and me. I was instructing her in the finer points of bird watching, which meant I was trying not to give either of us warbler neck. That’s what comes when you stare up into the trees too long trying to distinguish one kind of fall warbler from another.

The woods had been exceptionally quiet for such a lovely September day. Hardly any movement in the canopy or underbrush, and it wasn’t even noon, when things usually quiet down.

Above us, seen through the overlacing of tree limbs and leaves, was a slate blue sky, with clouds as flat and gray as aircraft carriers racing across.

D-Day
, I thought. Or at least I hoped.
Landings ahead.
I was thinking of Merendy, of course. Not expecting much. To be truthful, not actually knowing what to expect. My heart was hammering, though, which might have been what was scaring away the birds.
Look out, birds, boy falling in love here!
it was calling.

That’s a joke. Really.

“Something moved. Over there.” Merendy pointed one gorgeous pinkie in the direction of a tangle of bramble and witch hazel, because I had warned her about large movements and frightening the birds.

“Where?” I whispered. Whispering was important, and not just to keep from scaring the warblers off. I had just turned fourteen, and my voice—a late bloomer like the rest of me—had started to squeak at irregular intervals. It’s hard enough to impress a girl who’s just moved into the neighborhood if you’re an eighth grader and she’s in ninth, worse with a voice that sounds as if a good dose of 3 in 1 oil is not only necessary but past due. And I had to impress her fast. School started in a week, and after that someone that beautiful was going to be off-limits for the likes of me. She was high school material for sure.

“There,” she whispered.

I didn’t see anything where Merendy was pointing, but in our woods—deep and entwined—that doesn’t mean anything. To see in the woods—to
really
see—takes a “long patience,” which is how my biology teacher says a man named Buffon defined genius.

I’m not a genius in any other way, but in matters of the woods I do have a particular patient flair. To my certain
knowledge we have foxes and raccoons, turkeys and deer, coyotes and an occasional bear.

I didn’t know if Merendy had ever seen any of those before. She’s from some kingdom or other in the east of Scotland, I think. Her father teaches at the university. He always stays in his study when I visit, calling out orders in a strange, strained language I don’t understand. Merendy and her mother speak the same quick, consonant-filled tongue to one another, but a pleasantly accented and very formal English to me.

Since there are only the two houses on our little mountain and school hadn’t yet started, I had Merendy all to myself. I wasn’t going to ruin it with my squeaky voice.

“There,” Merendy said again without a bit of annoyance in her voice.

This time I saw the movement too. I put my finger to my lips.

“Hush,” I whispered.

She giggled, a sound like water over stone. And then she was still.

The forest seemed to breathe around us, a fresh woody odor. A ribbon of mist wound gently through the trees, making the sharper edges melt away.

I glanced at Merendy’s profile, her straight nose, the slight pursing of her untinted lips, that glorious fall of white-gold hair. Then I looked back where the movement had been.

There!
A slight tremble in a branch, but low down, so I didn’t have to worry about bear.

Then the brambles and witch hazel parted, and—to my horror and surprise—a child toddled out onto the grass. A boy child.

Quite definitely a boy child.

I could tell because he was totally naked.

“Do not look!” Merendy cried out. It was not a cry of embarrassment but fear.

I stood. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “We have to get him back to the house. He must be freezing. And lost. And . . .”

She stood too, her back to the toddler. She stared at me with wide lake-blue eyes. “He is a Jack o’ the Green, a trickster and a villain. We must leave this place. Now! While we still have the time.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I told her, my voice cracking badly on the last word. “He’s a baby.”

But I spoke to her back, for she had already run off toward her house, that glorious white-gold hair like a wave across her shoulders.

I turned around to the little boy. “You sure better be worth it,” I said, guessing that was the last I would see of Merendy except, perhaps, at the bus stop or across a crowded school cafeteria, or encircled by an admiring football team. I took five steps over to him and lifted him into my arms.

He stared at me, his eyes the light green of peeled grapes. Then he laughed, his little gums the same grape green.

Jack o’ the Green
Merendy had called him, whatever that meant.

Well, he was certainly a kind of green. Which definitely tipped the odd meter.

“Jack?” I said.

He laughed again and twined his little fingers in my hair.

“Ouch!” I cried, all oddnesses forgotten with the pain.

This time his laughter, high and delighted, filled the woods, and all around the birds suddenly began to sing.

I took him home, and he seemed to get heavier the longer I walked. I suppose all little kids are like that. Great big lumps of meat surrounded by charm.

Overhead warblers were wheeling and diving as if they were swallows. And a lone crow followed us from tree to tree, crying out raucously.

When I got to my house, the crow flew in front of us and landed on the lintel over the door.

If I had a strong imagination, I might have said that it cried out, “Nevermore.” But it did no such thing. It just sat on the lintel and, when I pushed through the door, it decorated me with its own brand of punishment, a white splotch on the shoulder of my dad’s Grateful Dead T-shirt.

The child—Jack—laughed out loud.

“Mom!” I called, and tried to dump the kid on the floor, only he clung to me leechlike and would not let go. “Help!”

The door slammed behind us, and I heard the crow flap away, cawing.

“Mom!”

She came at my call. I must have sounded really panicked. Normally her writing time is sacrosanct. Her word, not mine. It meant I had to be bleeding from an important orifice before she looked up from her keyboard.

“Good grief,” she said. For a writer she had a pretty small vocabulary when it came to swears. “What are you doing with that child, Sandy?”

“Found him,” I said. “Naked. In the woods.”

While she took this in, she also opened her arms, and the kid—Jack I was already calling him in my mind—seemed to leap from my arms to hers.

Along the way he managed to rip my good shirt with one foot, kick over Dad’s favorite Arts and Crafts jar with the other, and slobber in Mom’s hair, turning a streak of it a strange green.

“You sweet thing,” said Mom, oblivious to the havoc Jack had just wreaked with his one small jump through the air. “Who’s your mother?”

“Mama,” said Jack, and twined his arms around her neck.

“Umph!” she looked at me with dazed eyes. “He’s heavier than I expected.”

I wasn’t surprised. He was also as large as a five-year-old.
Definitely time to put pants on that kid,
I thought. I went into my bedroom, found some boxers I used as shorts, and brought them out to the living room.

Mom was on the sofa and little Jack was on her lap. They were playing pat-a-cake, or something, their hands slapping
together in a complicated rhythm that seemed much too sophisticated for such a little guy.

I came between them in the middle of one
pat
and one
cake
and managed to wrestle the pants onto him. He glared at me with his gooseberry green eyes and tugged at the pants, but could not seem to get them off, which was definitely strange since they were miles too big.

“Go away,” he said.

I shrugged and turned, and the phone began to ring, which startled us both.

He screamed and put his hands over his ears.

I answered the phone.

“Do not let the Green Child into your house.” It was Merendy.

“Too late,” I said.

“Do not feed him. Do not tell him your name.”

“Too late,” I said again. “On the name thing. We haven’t fed him yet.”

“Your name or your nickname?”

“Oh.” I thought hard. Mom had called me Sandy. But my real name is Sandor Christopher Vander. “Nick.”

“Good.” She hung up.

I looked over at the sofa. Mom and Jack were no longer there. Hearing giggles from the kitchen, I ran in.

Mom was stuffing Jack’s mouth with Twinkies.

Twinkies?
This was a sugar-free house. This was a Tofu “R” Us house. This was a We Would Be Vegans If We Didn’t Like Eggs So Much house. Where in the world had the Twinkies come from?

“Mom?” I yelled.

She looked up at me with glazed eyes. Jack slipped from her grasp, now the size of at least a seven-year-old with that gappy lost-tooth look. He still was wearing the shorts, and there was a smear of cream across his lips.

“Sandy?” he said.

I felt my knees give. “Yes?” I answered.

“Cookies.”

Well, I ransacked the kitchen for cookies and found a stash of Mrs. Fields. Dad must have fallen off the tofu wagon. At this point there was a sugar jar cracked open on the floor and tracks through the crunchy brown stuff. Mom’s hanging herbs had been trampled through the mess. And seven free-range eggs had somehow been smashed there as well. Plus Dad’s favorite flowered blue platter.

The phone rang again.

I picked it up. This time it was very heavy. I spoke into the mouthpiece. Or maybe I spoke into the earpiece.

“Too late,” I said, my voice sounding like whale song, low and slow.

“No names,” the phone told me.

I whale-songed back. “No.”

“No names.”

It was Merendy’s father.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean no, sir. No names.”

He hung up. I dropped the phone right into the egg and sugar and herbal mess.

Jack laughed at me. He was over ten years old, I bet. Mom was no longer holding him up, though she was still
holding on. I felt the laughter sawing through me, cutting my cords. I collapsed on the floor.