Seasonings

Max White

“What can you do?”

That isn’t the first thing the men say to her. The first thing is, “What are you doing here?” 

When she wakes up, they’re all standing semicircled around her. She doesn’t remember falling asleep there. Her mind goes frayed around the edges after the business with the guard, after he dropped the knife and told her to run, and she obeyed. 

“I got lost,” she tells them. It isn’t a lie. It’s the closest thing to the truth she can give. 

The men exchange glances. In the strands of moonlight, their pale, flat eyes, seven pairs in all, look nearly translucent. The woods around them are watching her too. Every other thing she saw in there seemed to have fangs. She tries again. “I need a place to stay.” 

“So do we,” one says.

“You’re in it,” adds another.

She doesn’t look at their faces. Something about the puglike twitching of their noses makes the back of her neck tighten. Instead, she stares at their talons. “I can help you. If you need it.” 

“What can you do?” 

She pauses, a little too long. Two of the men’s ears twitch toward her. A sullen-looking one mumbles, “I think we should just eat her.” 

“I can bake,” she offers. This is a lie. She means I can learn to bake, or I have some idea how to light a stove . She tried pestering the cook into teaching her once, but he never used enough spices. 

The leader, or the one with the most rows of teeth, steps forward. “Bake what?” 

Across the kingdom, the heart is under-seasoned. The queen takes another bite and wishes the castle cook would use cayenne. 

“She would have made a terrible general,” she observes, moving a model battalion across a map. The kingdom has been at war for weeks now, even though the men in the cottage won’t know it for another month. 

“That’s true,” says her advisor. “She was a very pretty girl, though.”

“Yes,” says the queen. “Pity, that.”

The curtains to the queen’s room are always drawn tight. She tells everyone it’s to keep her skin youthful, and most of them believe her. The women in her family have always aged gracefully. The real reason the curtains are closed, though, is because the mirror told her to. 

“Good evening,” she tells it when she enters. It doesn’t respond, but the tips of her fingers turn ice-cold. This old spirit, this outsider’s god who answered when her own refused, has never been particularly interested in niceties. She continues: “We’re attacking from the east before first light. The troops are low on supplies, and we might have to raise taxes again.” 

Their militia will see you coming if you start east. It answers, as always, from everywhere and nowhere, inside her body and creeping through the crack under the door. Begin at the north. 

“We can’t—” 

Begin at the north, or fail. 

“And we’ll win?” 

If you pay the price I have offered. 

She looks at her hands so she won’t have to feel its gaze. The inside of her mouth tastes of blood and under-salted meat. “I understand.”

The men are gone before the girl wakes up. In the first few hours, she pulls back her hair and cleans the house from top to bottom, and then again from bottom to top. When even the undersides of the windowsills are gleaming, she takes a fishing pole borrowed from a long-forgotten closet. The stream is full of fish, and she’s fairly sure some of them are trout.

By the time the men return, the trout are sizzling in butter and lemongrass scrounged from the cupboard. One of the men, the oldest, looks at the stove and frowns. 

“You’ve taken out all the bones,” he tells her. “We don’t do that here.”

“You’ll like it,” she assures him, but he still frowns.

“We don’t do that here.”

The next day, when the men come home, she makes herself fried fish. The rest of them are left raw and scaled. The oldest man looks at her, and at the fish, and nods. When the sullen one remarks that they should still eat her, she just smiles. 

It takes a week before one of them asks her name. It’s the youngest one who finds her halfway under the stove with a hodgepodge of tools scattered across the floor. She thinks he’s the youngest, at least, because his philtrum hasn’t closed yet. They stay a while in silence, her fixing, him watching, until he says, “We don’t call you anything.” 

She thinks about this. “No, you don’t.” “Should we?”

“If you like.”

“What?” 

This takes another moment of thought. She could just give him her name. But that name has always had power, and it’s not power she wants. Instead, she gives him the name of an old imaginary friend: “Valerie.” It’s good enough. “What should I call you?” 

“Whatever you want. We don’t really do that. We know when someone’s talking to us.” 

She laughs at that, and he does too, even though she thinks he was serious. When she sits up and blots the soot from her cheek, he asks, “Do you want to play with me?” 

The game, which consists of dice and round tiles and cards with runes that shift away when she looks at them, isn’t easy, but he assures her she’ll understand soon. She doesn’t. He beats her three rounds in a row. As he lays out the tiles in a new formation for the fourth, he tells her, “We’re not going to eat you, you know.” 

“I know.” This is a lie. She hadn’t thought about it much either way. 

“We were never going to. Your bones are too thick.” He grins, displaying rows and rows of perfect pointed teeth, and pushes the dice her way. She looks at the board. Somewhere in the last few minutes, the tiles have turned hexagonal. “Your move.” 

This goes on. They leave before dawn and return after dusk, and while the house is empty she finds things to fix. The furnace vents. The leaking roof. When the war gets too big to keep confined to maps and model ships, and they can’t use oil in the stove anymore, she unblocks the chimney, and two of them bring her wood for a fire.

It’s not bad, she decides. Not perfect, not even close, but then, she supposes you can only ever be so picky about homes. And here and now feels more real than then and there ever was. The men talk to her. They tell stories larger than any she ever heard at home, and they don’t ask her where she’s been when she comes back late or tell her off for tracking mud into the kitchen. The first time she beats the youngest at his game, he smiles so widely she can count his molars before setting the tiles back up. 

“You’ve got something on your mind,” the queen’s advisor observes one night, when the candles have burned too low to see past the table.

The queen spins a tiny model ship in a perfect pirouette. They are losing this war. They have been losing this war for a long time, perhaps since before it began. “I don’t know what you mean.” 

He leans closer. In the shadows, each new line on his face shows up in stark relief. “You’re lying.” 

She looks at the map again. Every model soldier has her stepdaughter’s face. “I have to go.”

The mirror is already waiting for her when she arrives. Its face, vast and unknowable, holds no expression, so she imagines anger. It helps, thinking it can feel. “We’re losing the war.” 

Of course you are. 

“You told me we wouldn’t.” 

If you delivered. The face twists, and for a moment she sees every nightmare she had as a child. And then: The girl lives. 

The queen falls to her knees. Or rather, the floor seems to jerk suddenly from under her. Yes, she thinks, the heart had been a bit too large to be human, and yes, the guard hadn’t completely looked at her when he delivered it, and— 

The kingdom. The kingdom, for her own blind trust. “I’ll do it myself. Show me where she is.” 

When she arrives, the girl doesn’t recognize her. Funny what a sprig of yew, a handful of salt, a whispered incantation can do if you know how to use them, but then, not everyone learns. She gets there at four minutes past five exactly, long before the moon will grant the men safe passage home. Three knocks, evenly spaced, another spell under her breath for protection.

The girl answers, and in the light careening through the forest she is more lovely than she has ever been, and perhaps the loveliest she will ever be. The queen wants to wring her perfect, pale neck. 

“What do you want?” 

“My dear.” She catches herself just before spitting it. They’re strangers, she remembers. The girl won’t know this new face. “My dear, I’m only here to sell fruit. If you’re busy—” 

She buys, in the end, eight apples, mostly because the men have been asking her to bake. Crumble can’t possibly be that difficult. So the apples are peeled and cored, the butter chopped, the spices mixed. She has to fudge the topping because they’re low on oats, and she hopes that chili powder will make up for the lack of cinnamon. It isn’t until the pan is ready to go in that she remembers the only useful thing the castle chef taught her: never finish a dish without tasting it. 

When they return, the men find her body crumpled by the stove, what’s left of the crumble scattered across the floor. 

They don’t talk about it, but secretly, they all think the same thing: she’ll sleep it off. She’ll be fine tomorrow. There’s been something going around, and humans’ bodies are much too fragile anyway. So they leave fish fried in butter by her bed and open every window in the bedroom, even though the light hurt their eyes. Three days pass, and every hour one checks her breathing, the fluttering of her eyelashes. The fish begin to reek. After sunset on the fourth, the leader addresses them all over dinner. “We need a true love. That’s the way these things are done.” 

“True loves,” says the sullen one, “are hard to find.”

“True loves are easy to find,” offers the youngest one. “It’s good ones that are rare.” The leader nods. “So we find the right one.”

For a week, and then two, they audition true loves. They come from leagues away to the cottage in the woods, each one sure he’s the perfect match. The first is too stoic, the men decide, the second too meek, the third too self-aggrandizing. Too tall. Feet too large. Terrible singer. After the forty-third true love turns out to have a terrible allergy to lemongrass, the shortest one turns to the sullen one and mutters, “Well, you’ve got your wish. I guess we have to eat her.” 

The sullen one glares. “That’s not funny.” 

Three weeks, then four. The flow of true loves turns into a trickle. None of them want to say it, but the thought is there, tapping, tapping, tapping on the backs of their necks. In the end, it’s the youngest one who breaks the silence over dinner that none of them have touched. “What happens if she doesn’t wake up?” 

The leader pushes his fish to the side of his plate. He hates the sightless accusation of its stare. “I suppose,” he says finally, “we dig a grave.” 

Across the kingdom, too many soldiers have died for the graveyards to fit. When the queen kneels in front of the mirror that night, she tastes the ashes of the crematorium. 

Funerals, it seems, always come too early or far too late. In another life, perhaps, the men would have argued about which one this was, but they can’t quite bring themselves to do it. 

“At least—” The oldest one swallows hard. It feels, he thinks, like breathing in too suddenly when you first get back above ground. “At least it’s sunny. She would’ve liked that.” 

“We should have a prayer,” whispers the youngest. “To keep her safe.” 

“We don’t know her prayers.” The leader’s voice—all their voices, really, but his most of all—is raspy and underused. He’s buried too many friends to count on his hands. None of them ever looked so breakable. “It wouldn’t be right. To send her off with something she didn’t know.” 

“But it might help.” 

He doesn’t want to pray. He wants to protest, or to lecture, or perhaps just to scream wordlessly until his vocal cords snap and his throat fills with blood. In the silence that follows, the youngest one just says, “Please.” 

The leader clears his throat, and then clears his throat again. He thinks a fishbone from last night’s dinner is still lodged somewhere in it. The prayers he knew have gone somewhere he can’t reach, so he murmurs a nursery rhyme, one his mother used to tell him before he went to sleep. Not a goodbye, he reminds himself. A goodnight. 

He kisses her on the forehead, then, on a whim. It’s silly, childish, but when he looks up, the oldest one half-smiles and steps forward to do the same. One after another, they whisper their last words to her, their regrets, their best wishes for wherever she’s going. 

As the youngest brushes her hair back, he feels something strange. Not movement, nothing so forward as that, but as if a hundred bees a mile away have all begun to buzz. “Do you feel that?” 

“It’s your imagination,” says the sullen one. “We should go home.”

“It’s there,” he insists. “Come here. You’ll know what I mean.”

The sullen one would have protested again, were it not for the sudden interruption: before he can get a word out, the girl sits up. For a long, silent moment, she takes in the scene, all of them lined up and the yawning mouth of her casket. “Hello,” she says. “Where am I?” 

The leader clears his throat, and thinks he feels the fishbone dislodge. “You’ve been asleep. For a long time.” 

“I remember...” Something old and dark flickers across her face. She shakes it away. “A spell? I thought you needed a true love for that sort of thing.”

The look the men exchange carries everything they haven’t been able to say. “So did we.” 

She laughs a little, like the end of a rainstorm, and swings her legs over the edge of the coffin. The leader offers a hand to help her down. “Would you like to go home?” 

Before she takes his hand, she hesitates. “I lied—I can’t actually bake.”

He grins at that, really grins, and guides her carefully out of the casket. “We knew that.” 

The royal advisor finds the queen the next morning, when she doesn’t come down for breakfast. It’s the light under the door that tips him off first, when her room should be pitch-dark, and when she doesn’t answer, he enters. 

Three things greet him, when he arrives. The blood coating the queen’s hands. The dark, clawed ruin of her eye sockets, to match the gash across her throat. And an ancient voice, everywhere and nowhere, asking: 

They’ll send troops by sea tomorrow. Would you like to know how to beat them?