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  Wolves and Witches

  Witches have stories too. So do mermaids, millers’ daughters, princes (charming or otherwise), even big bad wolves. They may be a bit darker—fewer enchanted ball gowns, more iron shoes. Happily-ever-after? Depends on who you ask. In Wolves and Witches, sisters Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt weave sixteen stories and poems out of familiar fairy tales, letting them show their teeth.

  Praise for Wolves and Witches

  “Wolves and Witches is a fabulous collection of re-imagined fairy tales. I made the mistake of starting it late one evening and couldn’t go to sleep until I had read it all. With their dark prose and evocative poetry these sisters have done the Brothers Grimm proud.”

  —Rhonda Parrish, Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine

  “It’s in the details that Davis and Engelhardt get you. I don’t know if it’s love or obsession or maybe just succumbing to the spell, but what stays with me is the tenor and texture of these tales retold—whether the fabric of a dancing shoe, the hollowness of bones in the wind, or the sharp critique of stereotyped social norms. Let yourself be enchanted and enjoy.”

  —Dan Campbell, Bull Spec

  “Sisters Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt are the female Brothers Grimm.”

  — K. Allen Wood, Shock Totem

  “Davis and Engelhardt’s Wolves and Witches: A Fairy Tale Collection is a joy, start to finish. At times eloquent, at times written in a bare-bones style, this collection of verse and prose takes familiar fairy tales and turns them into something darker, deeper, and delicious. My very heart was stolen by a cobbler with a bad leg. That’s good storytelling.”

  — Mercedes M. Yardley, Author of Beautiful Sorrows

  “Dark and delicious revenge-filled tales! I Highly Recommend this fun and small collection of short stories.”

  — Fangs, Wands & Fairy Dust.

  “In their collection of re-envisioned fairy tales, Wolves and Witches, Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt deliver an assortment of poetry and short fiction that entertains the ear and tickles the mind. The prose is assured, clever, and insightful, and the stories, which often experiment with perspective, dance from the page.”

  — Stephen Ramey, author of Glass Animals, and editor for the Triangulation anthology series from Parsec Ink

  “Once I began to read this collection, I couldn’t stop. Just as with those secretive princesses with their silken slippers gone to shreds, I danced among these pages until dawn!”

  — Terrie Leigh Relf, Illumen

  “Strong writing touched with sly humor.”

  — Lissa Sloan, Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine

  Wolves and Witches

  a Fairy Tale Collection by

  Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt

  World Weaver Press

  Copyright Notice

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of World Weaver Press.

  WOLVES AND WITCHES

  Copyright © 2013 Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt

  Published by World Weaver Press, LLC

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  www.WorldWeaverPress.com

  Editor: Eileen Wiedbrauk

  Cover design and interior layout by World Weaver Press

  First edition: February 2013

  Author Spotlight & Interview: July 2015

  Also available in paperback - ISBN: 978-0615763231

  ASIN (mobi): B00BGR4H96

  B&N (ePub): 2940016284798

  Kobo (ePub): 1230000107305

  Please respect the rights of the authors and the hard work they’ve put into writing and editing this collection: Do not copy. Do not distribute. Do not post or share this content online. If you like this book and want to share it with a friend, please consider purchasing them an additional copy.

  To the family, friends, and fables who brought us here

  Contents

  Flytrap

  The Instructions

  The Gold in the Straw

  The Long Con

  The Peril of Stories

  The Witch of the Wolfwoods

  Untruths About the Desirability of Wolves

  Bones in the Branches

  A Letter Concerning Shoes

  Her Dark Materials

  A Mouth to Speak the Coming Home

  A Shining Spindle Can Still Be Poisoned

  The Best Boy, the Brightest Boy

  Lure

  Diamond and Toad

  For Taylor, On the Occasion of Her Fourteenth Birthday with Love

  Questing for Princesses

  Review this Book

  Book Club Questions

  Author Spotlight & Interview

  About the Authors

  Other Fairy Tale Titles from World Weaver Press

  Copyright Extension

  Flytrap

  Amanda C. Davis

  Well, I tell you,

  The hunting’s been bad lately

  And an old woman doesn’t move like she used to.

  Limbs seize.

  Quick little things get away.

  So you start getting tricky.

  Isn’t that the boon of age,

  Ripening mind while the body rots away?

  My mind has grown ripe,

  Taut,

  A noose that does not give.

  Small compensation for slower hands.

  The little things dart through the fields like flies.

  They like to dance,

  Like to eat.

  Doesn’t everything young?

  So I’ll withdraw to the dark wood,

  Build a house of cakes,

  Draw them close.

  I’ll nest like a spider with my seizing limbs

  And ripe taut mind.

  Let them dance to my doorstep.

  Let them come.

  An old woman’s got to eat.

  The Instructions

  Amanda C. Davis

  Say you’ve got a problem. Might be big, might be small. Almost always to do with money. Maybe you can’t afford to feed your kid. Maybe you can’t make the rent. Maybe you’ve thought about all the different ways to get yourself out of this hole, and they’ve gotten bigger and crazier—theft and fraud and suicide and murder—and you’re just about ready to start trying the worst of them.

  Here’s what you do.

  Get your favorite pair of shoes. Doesn’t matter what kind, as long as you love them, even a little bit. Then you put them side by side just outside your front door. You’ll have to get creative if you don’t have a porch. Or if you don’t have shoes.

  This next part is important: go inside and go to sleep. Everyone. The whole house. Don’t get up. Sleep until dawn.

  If you did it right, elves will come.

  There are lots of kinds of elves, and they all agree: a pair of shoes means, “Come on in.” You never know what will show up. Elves from high above or elves from deep below. Tall elves or tiny elves. Ugly elves or elves so beautiful they make you sob. Maybe nobody but your kid can see them. Maybe nobody but the dog. But one way or another, you’ll get elves.

  They will start to work. Things will start to happen.

  People say you can’t pay elves or they’ll leave. That’s not true. You have to pay them every day. Leave them barley, milk, honey. Pick them strawberries and rosemary and roses. When their work nets you ten dollars—and it will—give them a bright new penny. When you get a hundred—and you will—give them a whole roll. Ma
ke sure the pennies shine like fire, shine like the moon. They don’t care for money. That’s where the confusion lies. They care for the shine.

  You’ll do this faithfully for a while. But then something will start to slip. It always does. You don’t put out enough roses for everyone or you accidentally buy the honey that’s really just corn syrup. You let the milk go bad. You let the pennies get dull. Things will keep going well for you, though. Elves hate to do a shoddy job.

  But they watch. And they count.

  They’re like bankers, the elves. They tabulate what they’re owed silently in their strange little heads, and they wait until your debt is too great. Until the balance is too high. Then they leave. They take something with them. You won’t have a chance to argue or bargain: pffft, it will be gone, and pffft, they’ll be gone. After that, you can pile all the shoes you own outside your door. None of them are ever coming back.

  But it’s okay.

  You couldn’t afford to feed that kid anyhow.

  The Gold in the Straw

  Amanda C. Davis

  The first time it happens you wake up with your head on a stack of spun gold, your fingertips bleeding from clawing through bales of straw, and your mother’s ring is gone. So is the straw. The spinning wheel is still there, though. Gold thread weeps from the spindle.

  The prince comes in and you stand up and dust straw from your apron and hold out your arms: Ta-da! Maybe your father wasn’t just boasting after all.

  But it wasn’t you who turned this stable into a treasury. How could it be? The dwarf did it. The dwarf that you saw only dimly: the evil little thing, the ugly twisted monster that saved your life.

  The second time you wait until nearly sunrise, sick with worry that the dwarf won’t come—but it does, and you sleep in straw and wake in gold, and that morning your grandmother’s necklace is gone from your neck.

  You show off a little when the prince shows up. You are giddy with relief. See how fine the strands! How pure the gold! Who would ever guess that all this used to be a pile of straw?

  You spend a stomach-churning day being shown the castle because the prince thinks he’s really got something here, and if you can do it again he’ll marry you, but if you can’t, oh boy: the noose, the axe, the firing squad. You can’t eat because you’re about to die. Even if the dwarf comes again you’re out of things to bargain with.

  Just before bed the prince pays you a gold coin for an hour of your company, and you sell gladly because it’ll be his either way. Besides, he’s a very charming prince.

  So dizzy with hunger and fear and fresh womanhood you go into the last of the king’s storehouses—filled to the ceiling with straw—and you wonder what the king is planning to feed his horses this winter, and then they lock you in and there you are.

  And the dwarf comes right away.

  “This is it,” you say, “I’m out of heirloom jewelry and I just sold my crown, if you know what I mean.”

  It’s like always: fuzzy and weird, and you can’t tell whether or not you’re in a dream.

  “Relax,” says the dwarf. “We’ll work something out.”

  So you fade into black sleep, into soft dark, to the clack of a spinning wheel that will never ever stop.

  You wake as the sun creeps in through the highest windows.

  It’s all gold.

  The prince is happy. You’re happy. He marries you and you make him buy up enough straw to fill the storerooms again, because now they’re your horses too. The queen mother hates you. You put on a lot of jewelry and kiss the prince in front of her. You get a title and a wardrobe and a maid named Marie who is terrified of you until you belch in her presence and then you laugh and she sees your peasant teeth and suddenly you’re both the same. And you go to the prince’s bed every night loving everything about him.

  And before long you’re growing a baby.

  Something starts to nag at you. Something’s not right. You remember something, not clearly, some kind of deal you struck, something to do with the not-quite child. You ignore it. All that fear is a thing of the past. You’re great. You’re going to be a queen. You’re carrying a king. At least you are until she comes out into the midwife’s hands crowned with a caul and all girl. But she’s healthy. She’s rich. She’ll be a queen. That’s good too.

  And the dwarf comes back.

  You’re feeding the baby halfway between midnight and dawn. Marie is asleep. The twisted little thing pops up just like before. The world spins. “Didn’t you promise me?” the dwarf shrieks, in what sounds like your voice. “Your firstborn child. Hand it over, Toots.”

  There’s got to be a way out of this. “Give me a riddle,” you say, clutching the baby tight. “Give me a quest.”

  “Okay,” says the dwarf. “You don’t have to give me the baby if you tell me who I am.”

  “Sold,” you say.

  “Three days.”

  The dwarf disappears. Your head clears. The baby cries. Marie wakes from her slump in her chair and asks whether you need her.

  “No,” you say, shifting the baby to the other shoulder to pat out its burps.

  But you do.

  “Hey Marie,” you say. “Ever heard of a magical dwarf around here? Just wondering.”

  She hasn’t.

  “What would you call a dwarf? Rhetorically speaking.”

  “Shorty,” she says, and laughs and leaves, and you rock the baby and think harder.

  Nobody in the palace library knows of a local dwarven sorcerer. The castle records have skimped on dwarf sightings.

  You stay up all night waiting for the dwarf. The baby’s asleep, and Marie’s asleep, and there’s the dwarf in front of you, arms crossed, waiting.

  You say, “Hello, Shorty.”

  It doesn’t laugh.

  You say every name you know, every name you ever heard in a fairy story, until they whirr together in your head. You don’t remember when you stopped speaking and you don’t remember when you fell asleep, and in the morning the baby’s still here and the dwarf is gone, but that’s one of three nights lost.

  The castle’s no help. You take a day trip home to show the baby your old village and ask questions.

  “She’s beautiful,” say the old women.

  “I think she looks weird,” you say. “Just like that magical dwarf. What was it called again?”

  You better believe they’ll be gossiping about that comment after you leave. And nobody offers a name. The village can’t help you either. You canter home feeling spectacularly alone.

  That night you start reading aloud from the census in the treasury. The dwarf shakes its head and shakes its head. It doesn’t speak. At last you throw the book down. “That’s every name in the kingdom,” you say. “Am I supposed to learn a second language or something?”

  “I didn’t ask for a name,” says the dwarf. “Maybe you already said it. I asked you to tell me who I am.”

  It goes away.

  You and the baby sleep until dawn.

  One day left, one night left. You’re so mad at the dwarf you could spit. What kind of a lousy cheater gives out riddles like that anyway? You get a knife from the armory even though you don’t think it will help.

  And instead of talking to people or reading books, you think.

  You think about how the world spins when the dwarf is near. You think about your night with the prince, that honeymoon before the wedding, and how in the morning the gold coin was gone. You think about stories you’ve heard about magicians: how magic comes differently to everyone, how sometimes the most powerful don’t even know it. You think about your bleeding fingers. You think about straw on your skirt.

  You take the baby and a gold coin—lots of those lying around the castle—and you go out to the stables.

  There’s an empty stall with a bed of straw. You take the coin in one hand and put your other hand on the ground.

  The dwarf comes. It’s watery as a reflection in a rushing river.

  You say your own nam
e.

  It says, “Not bad, kid.”

  You look down at your hands. The stall is full of gold. The coin is worn away to a cratered lump. You think about words like transference, sorcery, alchemy, transition. Didn’t your father used to brag that his mother, too, could spin straw into gold?

  The dwarf winks with your eye, smiles with your lips. It slips into the air and is gone.

  That is the last time you see the dwarf. But the magic—the magic, delicious magic—the magic has just begun.

  The Long Con

  Megan Engelhardt

  I knew the girl would never give up her child.

  I knew before I asked. That is the sort of deal you only make if you’re young and naïve and facing execution and the idea of a child is so very far away that it is an easy thing to give up.

  But I asked her anyway, knowing that she would say yes then and say no later.

  How she wept when I came to collect! Oh, the tears that fell over that poor sweet babe! How she begged and pleaded that I spare him, that I release him from her promise!

  I thought the guessing game was a nice touch. It kept her busy for a few days, and gave her hope.

  And all the while, I was working. I baked and cleaned and made sure the queen’s messenger overheard me sing the naming song in the dark woods.

  She was so proud when she guessed that name! The triumph in her voice! The relief in her eyes! I put on a show for her and she ate it like it was porridge that was just the right temperature.

  “How?” I screamed. “How did you guess that name?”

  I stomped and ripped and shouted. I believe there was spittle, and I am certain my face turned red.

  And then I left.

  I went to my clean cottage that smelled of fresh bread and I waited.

  The child was not yet walking by the time the whole kingdom knew of the twisted man in the deep woods and the clever queen who outsmarted him. The young princeling heard the story at his mother’s knee and saw daily the huge rent in the floor where I had stomped my foot in rage. Servants and peasants would watch him pass and whisper about the boy who had been saved.