I
Iwas born from my mother en caul, swaddled in my unbroken amniotic sac like an insect encased in amber, and entirely apart from the world.
I have, in all meaningful ways, been alone ever since.
The doctor grimaced and slit open my cocoon with a knife, spilling fluid and meconium, and like a selkie, I slipped off my first skin to reveal another human one beneath.
My mother was gone in an instant, fainting in shock at this living, squirming thing emerging from inside her.
My father took longer to leave.
I was presented to him, minutes old, in the antechamber to my mother’s room, cleaned off and wrapped in lace. I am told he politely enquired after my birth, and had the good grace not to be visibly disappointed that he had no son. A daughter was perfectly adequate, and I had sensibly arrived healthy and whole. My only crime was arriving at all, into the lives of two people who weren’t quite sure what to do with a child now it was here. I never doubted they loved me in their own way, but I understood clearly and quickly what I was to them: a problem to be solved.
Who should look after me? Where should I be put? How could things be arranged so neither of them had to change their lives in any real way?
I soon learned my job. A series of nannies and governesses shepherded me from nursery to school room and I saw my parents in slivers like the windows of a zoetrope: Mother dandling me on her knee before a dinner party, my father presenting me to guests as I recited Goethe. Every child is beholden to the gods of their parents, and I augured their meanings from careless words and gestures, made rituals to fit around their whims, and inscribed into my heart the rules they unwittingly handed down. I learned who I was through them.
Mina is a good girl. Mina is a sensible girl. Mina is not demanding.
I was well fed, clean, sheltered by all the protections money and status afforded.
I lacked for nothing, except real love.
My mother would visit me occasionally, when her spirits were on the way up. This interest in me – riding together, a trip to Paris, a painting course – flared up rapidly like a match being struck, and then would be dropped as the flame reached her fingertips, the shrivelled, blackened stick tossed aside before any of the heat could touch her. My mother was delicate, and a child was one burden too many for her to bear – not that she was capable of bearing many burdens at all. She struggled with life as though it wasn’t her natural home. The air too thick and syrupy for her to breathe, moving through it like a poor swimmer thrashing amongst the waves.
My mother died the autumn I was twelve.
I didn’t understand what it was to need someone, until she was gone.
My father, left with a daughter on the cusp of womanhood, panicked. He did what any prudent man would do and promptly married a respectable widow replete with daughters near enough my age so that someone else could handlefemale issues.As ruler of the small Duchy of Schwartzstein, his time was all accounted for and raising children was not on his schedule.
My mother was tidied away into her grave and my stepmother unpacked her things into her place. I found myself far from home without having travelled a metre. I was living on the outskirts of someone else’s family and no matter how many mollifying words my father offered, I knew I was not a necessary star in this new constellation.
My stepmother was not a cruel woman, merely a disinterested one. She had three daughters of her own and no desire to take on another. Johanna, the eldest, Else in the middle, and the youngest, Klara, needed education and good matches to be found, and that was a far greater draw on her attention than a grieving girl child confused by monthly courses and a shape-shifting body.
Still, she didn’t throw me into a cellar or make me their servant.
No, she simply turned me into a ghost.
When she and her daughters arrived into our house, in all meaningful ways I ceased to exist. I slipped into my adult woman body in the same way I had been born into the world: cloistered apart from the rest of humanity, shuddering from one skin into a new one, my beating heart a problem to be dealt with.
Already well versed in entertaining myself, in womanhood I never thought to do anything but continue along the same path. If the palace that had been my home was now the domain of my stepmother, I would look beyond for something of my own – and found it in the trees outside each window, the mountains that ringed our capital city of Blumwald, in the pebbly river that churned wild in spring with snowmelt and froze solid enough to skate on in winter. I found home in the crags and branches, in birdsong and my own ragged breath as I walked and walked. I felt power in my independence: far, far safer to be alone than to want and be unwanted.
So I walked, and I walked and walked until my boots were bloody and my face was sunburned, until I became a creature like the foxes and egrets, until I was only motion and pumping heart and nothing human at all. Holding entropy at bay, I heard my father call it once, the constant output of energy to remain in one place. Life was in movement; only dead things were still.
I was a dead thing, in my heart. I knew it like a poison I drank each night and purged each morning. I knew that I was isolated, but I didn’tunderstandmy loneliness until I knew what I would give to escape it. What I would be willing to do.
Until I knew what it was to love, and be loved.
It was the Witch who taught me that.
II
The news of Bismark came the day summer died.
The season had stretched long this year, workers sweating in the fields as they brought in the harvest, the last of the radishes, fennel and beetroot flourishing in the shimmering heat until it burst like a blister and a thunderstorm rolled up the valley, bouncing between the mountains to thrash Blumwald with rain and lightning.
I had gone walking early, as I often did. Finally I had woken to a clear sky so I went to my trees to assess the progress of the seasons. I wrapped apples, butterkäse, a piece of smoked sausage, some dark rye bread and a slice of poppy seed cake in a cloth in my knapsack, and put on a stout pair of boots. Dawn cast long shadows across the cobbles. As I wound through the dense knot of forest at the base of the mountain, past logging stations and huntsmen’s cottages, I came across a deer carcass, torn open by scavengers. From the bullet wound to its haunch I knew it was a hunter’s mistake: a doe targeted then lost. She had come to a quiet hollow to die. Maggots had eaten out the jelly of her eyes and the meat of her swollen tongue. This was the nature of my forest home.
