Wicked Stepmother

The witch comes calling

On this particular day, all seven of my gaolers had risen early and gone off to "the diggings", which by the way I had not yet seen and had only a very vague notion of. It was washing day and I stripped all the beds and added the linen to the piles of worn garments and tablecloths; the copper already boiling over the fire. I was throwing in the clothes when a querulous old voice hailed me:

"A cup of water, pretty daughter"

I looked up. A bent old woman was shuffling toward me.

"Where did you spring from?" I wondered aloud. We were in the middle of the forest after all.

"I am a fortune teller" she said to me in her creaky old voice, you must at least let me tell your fortune. That made me giggle as I remembered Kiora the false witch and her horrible fortunes. In hindsight I felt I had been too quarrelsome. Maybe her tone was superior and she made me want to slap her face sometimes but she had been company. I laughed again but I felt like crying.

"Will you tell my fortune?" I asked, "Oh, only I have no money" I added ashamed a moment later.

"For a glass of water I will tell the pretty young thing's fortune" this was a real witch I supposed and a lot creepier than my silly young "stepmother". I went to the jug and poured her a ceramic jar of water.

"Thank thee kindly" she said and sat down and took my hand. She bent over it, looking deep into it as if it was a page of writing that was hard to read. I looked at the lines on my hand too but grew no wiser. To me they looked very much like anyone else's hands.

"Oh a King's daughter!" the witch exclaimed suddenly, "and what's this....heir to the throne!" At this I sat up straighter. She was no charlatan then but had real power.

"What else does it say?" I asked in a tone that was supposed to be skeptical

"That you ran away because you are afraid for your life...an evil mother...no stepmother seeks to usurp your power for her child"

I drew my hand back quickly

"Don't say that about Kiora" I told her.

"Why else would you have run away?" she asked me. I frowned at her caught between anger at how she misrepresented things and puzzlement that she had got so much right but that so very wrong.

"I ran away because I was pregnant of course!" I said angrily, "Didn't the lines even tell you that?" I thought of Kiora's half-joking predictions about some prince and his babies in my belly and I felt the tears in my eyes.

"That bastard huntsman!" the witch said in a completely different voice, "What did he do to you?"

"No he didn't...I mean I wanted him to" I said looking in amazement as the "witch" wiped off something from her face and changed and became Kiora.

"That's a great trick" I said admiringly, "how did you do it?"

"It's called a glamour" she told me, "I can appear different than I am. It takes some effort to maintain though, I am glad I can drop it."

"Glamour?" I asked laughing, "It is not very glamorous"

"Glamorous means false" she said in that snobby know-it-all tone she sometimes had

"Let me get you a tea and a slice of apple pie" I said to her

"You can make apple pie?" she raised an eyebrow

"Oh no, I am hopeless at everything" I confessed, "Lara made it. She is the best cook out of any of us for all that pepper makes her sneeze!"

"Us?" Kiora raised a beautiful, cultivated, palace lady's eyebrow and I suddenly felt how grubby and rough I had become. I felt ashamed of my appearance and life but I bustled away to make tea and cut pie for the queen. When I brought it out Kiora asked,

"Why not come home? Between us we can make your father let you bring up your child alone...or you can marry that..."

"I don't want to marry anyone!" I said quickly

"I am glad to hear it" Kiora said in the snobby voice with the snobbier eyebrow and for a second I wondered if I hated her now. But then she fell into my arms weeping.

"I need you to come home Clovis" she said simply and I kissed her full on the lips as I had tried to do so many times before but this time she did not resist. She hesitatingly kissed me back and her lips were sweeter than apple pie and softer than my palace bed that I so missed and more radiant than the sparkles of water on a sunny Sunday down by the river.

"I need to find a way to cure my pregnancy" I told her, "I will not bear children. I promised you I would disinherit Orion and I don't mean to!"

"Come home Clovis" said Kiora, "and we will raise them as twins, I will say the child is mine. Come home and they can be brothers and rule together" and briefly I considered the idea because it meant I could come home. But in so many ways it was impractical.

"I don't want to bear a child" I told her, "I want you to help me get rid of it"