FAIRY TALES

The Great Goddess or the Great Spinner, as they call her, is no more than the Great Sinner. Do not believe their weak venerations. The Great Sinner spun our secrets into the world and in doing so we were all undone. She brought magic into light and in doing so invited the shadows forth.

The Goddess, The Book of the Binders

Aunt’s hair-brushing that night was not gentle and neither was the look in her eyes. She was seething. Well, I’m angry too, Anna thought bitterly. Angry that Aunt had ruined things with Selene. Again. Angry that her life had to be so different from theirs. Angry at herself for being herself. She found it quietly satisfying to recall the look on Aunt’s face as Effie had exploded the bottle.

‘What did I tell you?’ Aunt’s brushing yanked her head to one side. ‘Witches like them ought to be bound on the spot. That girl should not be allowed to practise magic, so untethered and impulsive, she has no idea of the consequences. She’ll end up like your mother, mark my words.’

Anna had spent her life marking Aunt’s words and it didn’t seem to have got her anywhere. Aunt put the brush down and made a knotting gesture; Anna’s hair wound into a tight plait. ‘And you. Don’t think I couldn’t see how you were looking at them, that look you’ve still got in your eyes now – all dazzled and desperate. Pathetic. Magic is the first sin.’ Aunt twisted her hand in the air and Anna’s plait yanked tighter again, pulling her eyes wide in her skull.

Why let her go to my school then? Anna wanted to scream but she was too afraid to move, the plait was holding her tightly, straining painfully, threatening to rip the hair from the roots.

‘You know the consequences, why the Binders do what we do, why magic must be kept concealed, why we must never forget. You know of the threats we face. The Ones Who Know Our Secrets. The fire never dies; beware smoke on the wind.’

The Binders’ final tenet. ‘The fire never dies; beware smoke on the wind,’ Anna repeated. She knew the words, she knew of the threats, and they’d never seemed to have got her anywhere either.

Aunt pulled the plait a fraction tighter – Anna resisted crying out – and then let her grip go. ‘Drink your milk,’ she said irritably. Anna finished the glass in one gulp. Aunt picked it up. ‘You’ll be cleaning up that broken glass tomorrow,’ she threatened ominously, giving Anna one last cold look before leaving.

Anna sagged in the chair, undoing the plait and running her hands through her hair. Selene was gone and she hadn’t even had the chance to talk properly – the chance to say goodbye. A small part of her lamented the fact Selene had not given her a gift. Selene’s infrequent visits had always been timed around Anna’s birthday and she always brought a gift. An extraordinary gift.

Anna reached into the back of one of her drawers and pulled out a small black drawstring velvet bag, soft and supple. Selene had given it to her just after she turned seven. Anna remembered exclaiming how pretty it was.

‘Oh, its prettiness is just a distraction,’ Selene had said. ‘It’s a nanta bag. It’s not meant for looking at but for storing secrets.’

‘Oh! How?’

‘You whisper them into it and it’ll keep them for you. You must have lots of secrets; any respectable woman should.’ She’d winked.

Anna had not understood. She’d opened the neck of the bag – finding its insides darker than its outsides – and whispered hello into it. She’d felt the words pull from her lips as if a breeze had carried them away. The bag had felt heavier.

‘It heard that?’ she’d said in wonder.

‘Of course. I know how hard secrets can be to bear alone and I think you spend a lot of time alone, my little matchstick …’

On her ninth birthday Selene brought her a pair of golden shoes. ‘They’ll grow with your feet so you’ll have them forever!’ On her third and last visit, when Anna turned thirteen, Selene had given her a golden comb. ‘It’ll bring back all those natural curls that Vivienne has tried to strangle.’ Selene had drawn the comb through Anna’s hair and her over-brushed frizz had bounced back smooth and shining, like straw spun to gold.

Those presents had kept Anna going over the years. After a tough day she’d go upstairs and admire the golden shoes or run her fingers over the comb. She did not use them; but kept them there waiting like a promise. She used the nanta bag though, whispering secrets into it that she ought not to have had – how she hated her life, how she missed Selene, how she longed for magic. The bag had grown as heavy as her heart … nothing but silly, childish secrets.

Anna put the bag away and looked up into the mirror. The eyes that stared back at her were empty.

She imagined exploding the mirror to pieces. How it would feel. She thought of Effie’s eyes, the way they’d seemed to express everything while giving nothing away, the way they’d looked at the world, as if it consumed her and bored her all at once, no match for the storms inside of her. Her disdainful scowl that so quickly became a smile when she looked at him, and that way he’d looked at Anna herself – as if I were no more than a child …

They might be everything wrong with the magical world but they were still part of the magical world and that was more than she would ever have. She crept back to bed and took out a book, determined not to think about Effie or Attis any longer. They made her feel as if she was lacking and now she’d have to face them every day. She was already worried about returning as a member of the sixth form – the top years of the school. They’d be having joint classes with boys from the nearby St Olave’s Boys’ School for the first time. Things would be changing and she’d had very specific plans to stay out of it all: keep her head down, focus on her studies, pass her exams and get into medical school, just as she or, more accurately, Aunt had planned. And now this.

What if they speak to me? What if they taunt me? What if they don’t notice me at all? No scenario was comforting. Anna had been lectured her whole life about never exposing magic to humans – sending Effie into the ordinary, humdrum corridors of St Olave’s was surely like throwing a live firework at a haystack? It made no sense. To have convinced Aunt, Selene must have greater persuasive abilities than Anna had known she possessed. Anna drummed her fingers on the book and attempted to read while devising strategic plans on how to avoid them at school as much as humanly possible.

A tap on the French windows broke the silence.

Anna dropped the book on the floor. It came again. Someone was on the balcony. She went to get up but the doors burst open of their own volition. A yellow coat with golden hair stepped through. Selene. Anna’s tangle of thoughts fell away. Selene smiled and stretched out her arms.Anna ran to her. They hugged, the rain on Selene’s coat soaking into Anna’s pyjamas. It didn’t matter.

‘I can’t believe you came back.’

‘Of course,’ said Selene, throwing her coat off and dropping it on the floor. She kicked off her shoes; there were deep red marks where the straps had dug in. Mascara was smeared under her eyes from the rain. ‘No one kicks me out of a party.’

‘I’m just glad you’re here. Do you want a cardigan or a dressing gown? You look cold.’

‘I’m marvellous. Come sit down, my little matchstick.’

Anna brought over a towel and a small heap of clothing just in case and sat down next to her on the bed.

‘Did you have a good birthday?’

‘Well, it was … it was …’ Anna smiled. ‘Fun.’

‘I’m sorry Effie was so unforgivably rude to you. She gets like that. I’ve spoken about you in the past and she knows how close I was to your mother. She gets jealous easily.’

It took a moment for her words to sink in.

‘Jealous? Of me? No.’ Anna refused to believe it.

Selene waved a hand. ‘Well, you can get to know her when you go to school, can’t you?’

Anna made a face that implied this was highly unlikely.

‘Oh, she’ll come round.’

‘I’m not sure we’re going to be sharing lunches and making friendship bracelets for one another, let’s put it that way.’

Selene smiled at her. ‘I wasn’t sure I liked your mother when I first met her.’

‘Really?’

‘It was the first day of school and I had to sit by her on account of our surnames being next to one another in the alphabet. She had this official-looking pencil case and thick black hair, so straight and shiny, and mine was a frizz of yellow curls.’ Selene ran her hands through her now glossy hair. ‘We had to practise speaking French and she pronounced each word perfectly and I felt so clumsy trying to reply. She wrote notes while I doodled all over the textbook. I decided she was perfectly boring and a goody two shoes. Then she spent ten minutes trying to fit a new cartridge in one of her pens and ended up spilling ink all over herself. I laughed so hard.’

Selene smiled at the memory. ‘She turned to me and I thought she was going to tell me off but she started laughing too, then I laughed harder and she flicked ink all over me. We couldn’t stop then – we’d set each other off. The teacher came over and Marie blamed herself and smiled and apologized in such perfect French that we didn’t get in any trouble. I think I learnt that from her, my propensity for getting out of difficult situations with nothing more than a smile.’

‘Did you always sit together after that?’ Anna asked, eager for more.

‘Always, and she taught me too, until I could keep up with her. She was like that, your mother, always helping people. It was her strength and her weakness … Anyway, enough of this blabber.’

‘I want you to keep telling stories.’ Anna liked it when Selene spoke of her mother’s magic: how easily it had come to her; how powerful it had been.

‘Well, tough. It’s gift time.’

‘A gift?’ said Anna with growing excitement. ‘I didn’t think—’

‘You didn’t think I’d forgotten? It’s your birthday and I shall spoil you.’

‘If you have to.’ Anna nudged her playfully, as Selene handed her a badly wrapped gift, sealed with plasters.

‘I couldn’t find any sellotape.’ Selene laughed. ‘Open it! Open it!’

Anna peeled them away to reveal a book. Its cover was a rough cream cloth, stained with age, cloud-like patches blooming across the front, collecting the rains of passing time. She turned it over and written in gilded gold script was the title: East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Beneath was an engraving of two trees: one upright and one upside-down, their roots locked together, their leafy branches hung with apples. They were perfect mirror images. Seven apples on each.

‘It’s lovely.’ Anna ran her hand over the engraving and wondered what strange magic it did, what tricks it would soon reveal.

‘It’s a book of fairy tales. Your mother’s favourites. I found this copy in an old magical antique shop. Your mother knew them off by heart; most witches do … Oh, there are hundreds of versions of them and a thousand other stories out there besides, but these are the classics. You ought to know them.’

‘Fairy tales?’ Anna repeated, waiting for Selene to announce they read themselves out or would grant wishes, but Selene continued to smile at her. Anna smiled back, not wanting to reveal her disappointment. Selene’s gifts were always so magical but she was turning sixteen – what did she want with a book of children’s fairy tales? What good would they do her? She opened it, feigning interest. The paper was whisper thin. The first tale was called ‘The Eyeless Maiden’.

Anna knew it. She remembered Aunt telling it to her when she was younger. At the end, the curious maiden, having survived her quest through the woods, gets her eyes pecked out. Aunt relished that bit. Her stories had always been laced with such lessons and warnings, but Anna had still loved it when she told them – had still found herself lost in the words, the possibilities they offered, the spaces they opened up, like paths through a forest. She’d liked how Aunt looked when she recalled them too. Softer. Not quite herself. Transferred to some other place. Perhaps she’d read them with her mother when they were young?

Aunt had stopped telling her the stories years ago; she’d decided they excited her emotions too much. Anna closed the book. ‘This one doesn’t have a happy ending,’ she said.

‘Well, true fairy tales are not always kind or pleasant but neither is life and we must live it anyway. Stories must be lived too; only then can they be understood.’

Anna’s eye was drawn again to the mirrored trees on the front cover.

‘Hide it,’ Selene urged. ‘Hide it from the kraken. I have another too …’ Selene seemed unsure, her red lips twisted. ‘It’s not a gift as such, just something I thought you should have.’

She handed Anna what appeared to be a photograph. Anna turned it over and there was a woman and a man sitting together, turned towards each other, a baby folded in the woman’s arms. They were somewhere outside; there was a tree in the background. He had short dark hair, slightly curly. He’d crinkled his nose up and was looking at the woman teasingly. Their smiles were a mirror of one another. The baby was asleep, a little round, contented face.

Anna looked at the photo for several long moments.

‘Is that—?’

‘Your father.’

Anna had never seen a photo of him before.

‘They loved each other,’ Selene said gently.

Love. Aunt had said that too. Aunt had told her the full story when she was ten and the horror of it still didn’t feel real. Her father, an ordinary human, had met her mother and they’d fallen in love. A couple of years later, when Anna was just three months old, he’d strangled her mother in a fit of rage after she’d accused him of having an affair and then stabbed himself in the heart in the same bed. Do you see? Love destroys everything, Anna.

‘He killed her,’ Anna muttered, but it was hard to imagine now she was staring him in the face. He looked so ordinary; the lines around his eyes seemed kind. He was hardly the monster she’d always imagined – or tried not to imagine. She turned the picture over.

‘You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to, but I felt like it belonged to you.’

Anna opened the drawer of her bedside table and placed it at the back between a pile of books. She didn’t know if she ever wanted to see it again.

‘Oh, but you do look like her,’ said Selene, touching Anna’s cheek, ‘and I loved her too.’ She took Anna’s hand. ‘How are things, my little matchstick? You’ve said so little about yourself.’

‘I am—’ Anna started and then realized she couldn’t finish. She wanted to tell Selene everything. About her life. Her pain. Becoming a Binder. Did Selene know it was her future? Selene had always been the one who’d tried to teach her magic, with some success at first, but later – she’d given up. She couldn’t find any in me. The shame cut through Anna like a glass shard. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ She smiled, gripping Selene’s hand. ‘Please don’t leave.’

‘Never. I want to know everything you get up to this year. What rules you break. What magic you create. Who steals your sixteen-year-old heart. Got your eye on anybody?’

There was one boy. Peter Nowell. He went to Olave’s Boys’ and Anna had seen him during shared school socials and events over the years, but he didn’t know her. She knew him though. She knew exactly how blue his eyes were. Will he be joining my classes this year? Anna shook her head at Selene. There was little point in indulging feelings of that sort at all.

‘Well, if you need any help I have a repertoire of spells, some more appropriate than others.’

Anna laughed. ‘I shall try my very hardest to be as utterly fabulous as you.’

Selene cackled. ‘They’ll be dropping like flies.’

‘Shhh, you’ll wake the kraken.’ Anna swatted at her playfully.

‘Oh, sod her.’ Selene glared up to the floor above. ‘By the hour of the moon, it’s time for cake. Proper cake.’

She rummaged around in her bag and pulled out an impossibly large box. Anna peeped inside and sitting in the middle was a cake, plump as a goose, covered in creamy icing and dusted with a red powder.

‘Red velvet with cream cheese. Die right now if you please.’

Anna collapsed onto the bed. ‘Best. Birthday. Ever.’

Selene handed her a fork and they delved into the cake, its centre oozing red as blood.