cursed girl in the book grew russet fur and pointed ears on the nights when the moon was full, but my mother doesn’t change, physically at least. As the moon waxes and rounds, she starts to become restless, her gaze darting around the room, hands suddenly reaching out with unnatural, jerking movements. Then the whites of her eyes turn pink, then red, paling again when the full moon passes. On those nights I can’t go near her after sundown; though her own skin doesn’t split and her bones and teeth don’t lengthen, whatever is human in her is swallowed by the need to bite and tear, both with fingers and words.
The first time the beast was on her, I went in too soon after sunrise and she lunged, locking a hand around my ankle and pulling me to the floor. I’d chipped one of my teeth as my face had smashed into the filthy rushes coating the old wood. If it had happened a few seconds before, if the sun hadn’t been as high over the horizon, if I hadn’t been wearing two pairs of woollen stockings, so many ifs and so much luck… Maybe I’d be like her now too.
In the beginning, before I knew what I was dealing with, I’d tried to find a cure, scouring my old books for any mention of her symptoms. I thought it was a matter of finding the right page, finding the right recipe. I truly thought that this time I wouldn’t fail. But the only thing that matched was in a story inside the book I was too afraid to open until I was desperate and terrified, and when I finally did, I already knew that there was no cure.
Then I hoped to quell the beast, to put it to sleep: camomile, hops, lavender, lemon balm. But she burned through even my most powerful sedatives – even when the doses were dangerously high, she’d be banging at the door again within an hour or two.
Finally I became desperate and turned to the nastier plants: poppy, wormwood, even small, diluted tinctures of aconite. I broke the law time and again gathering dark weeds and berries: half terrified I’d kill her, half terrified she’d kill me first. You have to treat those plants the way you’d treat a beast. You shouldn’t seek them out, and if you do you must never take them for granted, or trust them; you have to respect them, fear them. I feared her more.
None of them worked anyway. Her eyes followed me hungrily around the room as the full moon approached, her fingers curled like claws, and she sniffed me when I tucked her into bed. After realizing I’d failed, I stopped trying to help her any further than buying myself a few hours of respite. If my apothecary master, Master Pendie, could see me now, he’d be sickened.
She still looks mostly like my mother when she tries to hurt me. She doesn’t howl; she whispers my name, begging me to open the door and hold her, imploring me to be with her, to comfort her.
It’s the only time she speaks to me any more.
I turn the page over and come face to face with the Sleeping Prince. I stare down at the illustration of him, his silver hair whipping out behind him and across the page. In his arms is a beautiful dark-skinned woman. He looks out of the page, his face proud and protective, and she gazes up at him. One of his hands rests on her face and she seems to lean into it, eyes half-closed in pleasure.
Until I started my apprenticeship, I didn’t know the Bringer was part of the Sleeping Prince’s story. I’d heard of him, of course: Be a good girl or the Bringer will come – it was a thing parents said. I never knew his origins were tied with the Sleeping Prince’s, until one day I was flicking through Master Pendie’s copy of the stories while I waited for a potion to brew. It was the first time I’d ever read the story myself – when I was a child, Mama, Papa or Lief had read it to me – and as I grew up I stopped being so interested in the old tales, making up my own stories instead. But that day, I picked the book up and I read it all. Including the part where the Sleeping Prince became a father and never knew it. I understand why