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That particular hunt was by far the most interesting to occur in the King’s brief lifetime. He was not ashamed to admit that a good part of this was because his prowess at the chase was passing at best; but also, he found very little to interest him in riding through brush and bramble after a quarry that didn’t particularly want to be caught. The mud clung to one’s hose in the most unpleasant way possible, and the stench of rot lingered in the nose.
When his foreriders found the girl in the tree, his principal hope was that the question of what to do with her would take up most of the time before sunset; so that he might return home all the sooner without having to endure the sight of a carcass being dressed. But he looked at the eyes of the men around him, the gleam as she desperately cast down girdle and garters and gown, and he knew what would come next without needing to hear the ribald jests and jibes they exchanged.
He nudged his horse ahead and held out his hand.
The King could not be certain if her obedience to his silent command came from discernment or desperation, but she dropped down to rest on the saddle before him. He slung off his fine woolen cloak and set it about her shoulders, hoping rather that she would have the decency to return it, and found himself recoiling from the stinging nettles she clutched defensively.
“It’s all right,” he said, mostly because he was fairly certain she would start aiming for his eyes next. “I won’t hurt you. It’s only–you do know you could do with a good bath?”
She glowered, but did not argue, which was just as well. She didn’t say a word all the way back to the royal encampment, which also suited the King perfectly well. He had little stomach for making half-hearted, uncertain conversation. But she jumped and looked about when the horses startled, and stared above when a flock of magpies flew overhead; she scratched her fingers into the King’s arm when he looked likely to steer them directly into the path of a low-hanging branch but did not so much as whisper a warning; and the King watched and considered.
When they arrived at the King’s tent, despite his earlier words, he did not lead her to the bathtub waiting warm behind its screen, or even the shallow washbasin resting upon his desk. Instead he cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to another, and made altogether a hash of things until the nettles seemed fair to make an appearance again.
“Well, then,” he said at last, finding no real way around it, “I have a proposition for you.”
It had been a childhood fever, or so he had been told; coming upon him only after speech had come upon him. In fact, those noises that were inordinately loud were still noticeable, if not quite as onerous as other people seemed to find them. If anything, his condition was a dreadful encumbrance: angling himself where he might pay attention to the way a minister’s lips moved, learning to laugh along with a courtier and hoping he hadn’t consigned himself to infamy, growing to adjust the volume or tone of his speech with every odd look he received.
His mother, privy though she was to his secret, was little help; her repentance for having appointed the nanny she accused of rendering him utterly invalid (as she put it, tearfully and often) was to cosset him away from any danger she detected. This was an expansive list, including such entities as sundry wildlife (another reason why he’d never cared for the hunt), council meetings that lasted too long, and fashion too many seasons out of date. It was far easier, most of the time, to kiss her solemnly on a cheek and set her safely among her favored hobby of dog-breeding and witch-hunting.
Hence the solution he had found.
To the girl from the woods, he said, “Naturally I couldn’t help but notice your situation.”
She raised an eyebrow. The King began to develop the impression that this was not the most tractable of women.
“It’s quite unexceptionable,” he made haste to add. “You see I have one, too.” No improvement on that scowl. Ah well. “Not quite the same. The opposite, even, you might say. Only–only–”
Only she was a woman whose sanity seemed rather in question, with an inability to speak and a concerning compulsion to twist those star-nettles about her poor fingers over and over again; and he was a man too easily scorned by his court, one misinterpretation away from losing whatever wobbly hold he had upon them.
“Only we need each other,” he finished, and her eyes softened at last.
On the face of it, it made for an honest bargain: he would provide her with a place to stay where she might conduct whatever bizarre experiments with plant-based clothing possessed her, and she in turn would stay by his side at meetings and diplomatic balls, etching out warnings into her iron grip around his palm. A tap of the thumb meant yes; an urgent press of his smallest fingernail no; and between the two of them they infused a hundred other simple mannerisms with meaning.
It took time, of course, and hours spent together arguing back and forth about the best method to favor. Naturally his first question was to ask why she couldn’t simply use the bloody alphabet to spell out what she intended, and crossly she signaled back, Only the wicked read.
The King’s own realm was refreshingly free of magic, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother and her proteges. Still he did know of countries to the south, knee-deep in magic, that crafted elaborate knots and baubles to keep their records rather than humdrum alphabets. There, only sorceresses and warlocks had any cause to crack open magic tomes. The King was half-inclined to ask what she thought herself, if not a sorceress; he couldn’t think of anyone else who might make such a fuss over curing nettle-stalks by moonlight.
But even then he knew she was possessed of a vicious pinch, and the conviction to cling to every last one of her outlandish beliefs, and he turned the conversation away before he need consider why it was so important not to distress her.
She did not laugh, but he laughed for her, reveling in her sharp sour humor; he did not dare offer his court anything but cautious smiles, but she gave him courage. Hesitantly at first, and then perpetually, she offered up her own thoughts and opinions on what she heard.
His mother assumed he had taken a mistress; and other than favor him with a dozen pamphlets warning against fornication, made little complaint. His advisors raised eyebrows at first, all outweighed by their relief that their monarch was making sensible observations to their reports at last.
It was no different, really, from the interpreter the visiting Emperor of the North Sea employed when grunting out words from behind his gleaming sealskin; or the scribe that followed the Duchess of Records like a shadow, scribbling down every word said in her presence. No different save for the way the King found himself ever turning to study his companion’s face, the changing cast of her eyes so different from her motionless mouth; no different save for the way her touch burned against his skin like a scream.
He didn’t even know her name.
“Do you miss your home?” he wondered aloud once.
It would be almost a season before she would kiss him for the first time, fierce and fearless; and nearly half a year before he persuaded her to his bed; but the King’s thoughts had turned to her, and it seemed suddenly imperative to know.
She paused her handiwork, and looked out the window–not north or south or towards any land he knew of, but rather up at the open sky that was no man’s own.
Always, she said, eyes wide and wild.
“Even so–” he cleared his throat “--will you stay?”
She watched him for so long, he half-hoped she might not have heard him at all; but he knew the tilt of her head, the way the sunlight caught the swan-feathers braided into her dark hair, and knew she was deep in thought.
He held his tongue, and stilled his mouth, and allowed himself nothing more than to hope.
Slowly she smiled; slowly she put away her nettle shirts, and came away from the casement. He found it suddenly very difficult to breathe, even before she carefully framed his face with her own two hands.
Yes, she promised. Yes.
She didn't marry him.
The stories claimed otherwise, of course, but the stories were rather more concerned with legitimizing their children after all the scandal that had already happened.
This was rather more important than it seemed; his mother, however much she disliked her son's lover, would never have acted against legitimate grandchildren, just as a court would not have found it so easy to convict her had she been an anointed queen. And besides it was much easier to imagine that a soiled dove destroy the proofs of her transgressions than a wife do away with her one god-given responsibility of providing heirs.
It was not for lack of trying on his part. Her reluctance was due to her inability to say her vows in church, or so he gathered from her insistent sign of oath to all his arguments. Even pointing out that he wouldn't have been able to hear her anyway did no good; her mind was made up, and in this as in all things, he would let her have her way.
She did not press her lips together, or open her mouth in a sigh, not even when he thought he was doing a particularly fine job of pleasing her. She left their bed at odd times, and she came back with hands newly scarred and hem dyed green with algae. She grew by turns more pinched and tired and intractable than ever.
But sometimes she ran her hands through his hair, traced the fine bones of his wrist with particular care, and he imagined she meant, I love you, I love you, I love you.
It was enough.
When the witch-hunters came to take her away, he did not follow. Why should he? By now he had suffered three long years of his mother's speculations, three years of the sour turn of his advisors' mouths, three years of courtiers whispering things he had no desire to hear before they turned away. She never translated those for him; he would have given much to stop her ears to it as well.
Instead he sat before the council that had terrified him so with perfect calm. He smiled and told them he was not a whole man, that their worst suppositions were true, that everything his mother had worked so hard to conceal was in vain. He told them he had done his best to serve them as king nevertheless, and judged he had done as well as any man might. He told them that if any harm should come to the innocent woman tied to the pyre outside, he would leave his throne behind and never return. Let the kingdom fall into civil war and bloodshed; a lifetime of vagrancy would be preferable to staying another day in the country that had let the woman he loved burn.
He emerged at the head of the procession come to set her free only in time to see the first of the swans circling overhead transform.
Ah, he thought. That was something of a surprise.
After the dust had settled, and the eldest of his new not-quite-brothers-in-law carefully explained his history so that his lips could be read, and his newly recovered children been restored into the care of their nurses, the king turned to the woman he had brought home from the woods.
"Well," he saw her mouth, and make a face. That will need some getting used to. Her face shifted into unease. Are you troubled, for yourself?
"Should I be?" He considered a moment. "That is--unless there are other transformed family members you have lying about. The huntsman is already piqued at being forbidden to capture waterfowl, but I might wring a few more concessions out of him yet."
There may be other spells, she told him, this girl who so despised sorcery while practicing it herself, and I doubt it would take so long for one man as opposed to six--
He was very quiet for a time. "Do you think it necessary?" He knew the answer of his own heart; he had the council behind him now, whole or not. He had dared them to act against him, knowing what could undo his reign; he had seen them defy his mother and the very laws of the land at his word. Whatever she or anyone else might believe, he lacked nothing.
Perhaps she saw some of that in his face, for she smiled, free and open as never before, and draped her arms around his neck. Not so much as I must deign to marry you at last, for I see how my oldest brother glowers.
He laughed at that, and swung her about and about, and beside them, the last of the pyre-smoke met the cold air of the castle lake and faded.