FABLE

Chapter Thirty Two

I'm lying in my bed beneath the covers.

My grandmother tucks me in. As she leans over me, she blocks out the light from my bedside lamp, and her wild tangle of flame red curls threaded with silver is lit up from behind. A halo fit for an angel. I must be about four years old. By the time I was seven, gran's hair had turned completely white.

The memories that flicker through my dreams are soft and shimmering. Everything glows brighter than its real life counterpart, bursting with radiance, swimming in muted light.

"So, what will it be tonight my bairn?" She asks, tucking a stray hair behind my ear. "Sleeping Beauty? Rapunzel? Or maybe The Little Mermaid? It's been ages since you last heard that one."

Most nights I'm perfectly happy to hear any of the countless fairy tales my gran tells. I've heard the same stories a million times over, and they never get old. But tonight is different.

"Tell me a new one!" I squeak from under the covers.

My grandmother gives me a disapproving look.

"I mean, tell me a new one, please." I say. "I want a story I never heard before."

"One you haven't heard before? That's no easy task." She walks over to my bookshelves;  her fingers trail over Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Happy Prince, Collected works of Hans Christian Andersen. Even at that age, I had a huge appetite for fantasy. For the unreal.

Gran sits back down on the bed. She looks thoughtful for a moment, scrutinizing my face before nodding.

After a long silence, she gives me a strange smile – sort of sad, half-formed. "I was going to wait until you're a bit older to tell you this one," she says. "But I suppose it's time you heard it. No time like the present."

She tucks the covers tighter around me, pulling the quilt up from the bottom of the bed and smoothing it over me like a woolen shield.

"You'll tell me if the story is getting too scary, ok? I only told your mum this one when she was much older than you are now."

"Mommy knows this story?"

"Of course. All the women in our family know this story. And now you will too."

"Is it a scary story?"

"Sort of. It's scary, but you'll like it. And you need to hear it sometime anyway. Might as well be now. " Her expression is solemn. "It's very important."

"Why?"

"Because it's not just a story, my bairn. Not all fairy tales are made up. This one happens to be true."

Before I can get another question in, her voice changes into the special singsong lilt reserved for bedtime stories.

A long, long time ago, back when there were fairies in every forest, and princes and princesses ruled over vast kingdoms while dragons slept beneath the earth, there lived an old witch in a cave by the sea.

Although she was shaped like a woman, in truth she was more sea creature than human, and she was just about the ugliest thing you can imagine. Her hair was long green dripping seaweed, her face was scaly grey and wet to the touch, and her teeth were a row of jagged brown spikes encrusted with fish guts and slime.

Her heart was as cold as the murky sea cave she lived in, and when she wasn't brewing potions and poisons, she was using dark magic to stir up the seas and wreck any ships unfortunate enough to pass by her lair.

But there was one speck of light and warmth in the old sea witch's heart.

She had a daughter; a lovely human girl she'd found half-drowned on the tide as an infant. Some say the girl was shipwrecked royalty, marked as the heir of a kingdom, and that is why the old woman had kept her. Other versions of the tale say that the old woman was merely lonely, and kept the girl by chance as if she were a pet. Either way, the girl was as beautiful as her adoptive mother was ugly, with eyes the deep blue green of the ocean and long tumbling hair as pale and glimmering as moonlight on sea foam. The old woman dressed her in faerie fabrics – a delicate dress of enchanted spider's silk that grew as the girl grew, embroidered with tiny pearls and bits of coral.