Torches make circles of orange light in the dark castle passage. The crone has been here before, many times, to give rescue from what behaves savage. She will lead you to safety—but enlightenment is required for suffering to cease. Listen to her tale echoing along the stone walls…listen, with humility.

It’s up to you to find what meaning you will.

 

 

 

A king once fell in love with an unusual maiden in a faraway land. They married right away, for they seemed to recognize each other. The king and his new queen returned to his kingdom with its castle on a cliff by the sea. Every evening they held hands as court poets gave them pearls of wisdom for their reign. The maiden who had become queen lived the life of a bloomed red rose, until—

The king started doing strange and mean things.

He ordered that the castle must have no more than arrow slits for windows, so their home became dank and dark. He never slept and began to imagine the sins of everyone around him. These he announced after trumpets at court. Knights and peasants alike stood shamed by false or needless accusation, with most being deemed monsters.

“I must weed out the evil to secure my kingdom,” said the king to his queen after spending a lovely spring day inside dark chambers with men in hoods and long robes—his advisors.

One morning the king summoned the queen out onto the castle battlements. He asked her to keep watch with him, looking out over the forests, cliffs, cove, and sea for what he said could be witches and beastly invaders.

“His fearful temperament only grows,” said the queen later to her grimalkin. In case you didn’t know, a grimalkin is a cat. This one was enormous. And strangely orange.

One evening, the queen heard an odd clinking noise as her husband paced the battlements. Baffled, she peered down at the graceful branches of the dryad forest, expecting to see beautiful trinkets hung there as a gift to the lovely tree spirits. There were none. Her grimalkin hissed and arched its back beneath the king’s wide-legged stance when his highness stopped to clutch and shake his head. The queen’s gaze snapped to her husband’s narcissistic face. For verily, the clinking came from inside his brain!

“Fetch the healers,” the queen ordered once she had the king in bed. But he refused any treatment. Meanwhile, his advisors hummed and covered their ears, pretending nothing was loose within their king’s head.   

From then on, the king pleased himself declaring his own glory while condemning others as a way to spend his days. Anyone not bowing at his passing were accused of conspiracy against the crown.

You can imagine how the king’s madness was soon renowned.

The queen walked on her knees after him along the battlements. “Your people must be ruled with pearls, not poison,” she entreated.

The king’s face twisted. He reached down over the battlement wall where a dryad leaned her tree close to eavesdrop on their conversation. The spirit cried out when he plucked from her wood body. The king turned with a flourish and offered the dryad’s greenery to the queen, saying, “My dear, think of it as a fig leaf, with which to cover your mouth.”

The queen no longer knew her beloved at all.

When summer arrived, the queen asked for a ship to sail to her homeland for a visit. The king refused. “My queen will not mingle with dirty foreigners,” he said. “Besides, there are witches where you come from. Even your own sister, is it not true? There are rumors!”  

The queen’s only comfort was her orange grimalkin. It purred and slipped infinity circles of protection between her slippered feet.

Unwilling to give up hope, the queen invited poets to the battlements to speak their pearls of wisdom within the king’s hearing. But all the while the king’s hooded advisors assured him that poison worked better than pearls to secure a kingdom.

The queen became so very cold inside. She locked herself and the weirdly orange grimalkin in her private chamber. There, she crawled into the hearth with its red embers, overwhelmed by belief that she had married nothing more than a beast.

The queen’s tears sizzled where they fell. Her gown smoked and caught fire. This is when she heard the voice of the Crone speak from within the flames:

Your despair is borne of monstrous lies

no different than his hate;

Release your faith in thoughts that hurt–

Speak truth and free your fate!

The queen remembered all the pearls ever given her by poets. One by one she recited them in her head as she went up in a toasted blaze. When it was over, the grimalkin leapt into the queen’s arms, and she emerged from the fire the glowing embodiment of a pearl. For her confusion that life had anything to do with hate or despair was burned to ash.

“I would be cruel, too, if I believed as my husband does,” said the queen to the grimalkin. For her mind was open and willing to see. “My heart holds compassion for him, yet not senseless loyalty. It’s clear that I must leave.”

This is how the queen was set free—by love and clarity. It was bound to happen, for this is the way of things. Understanding always comes. Eventually.

Lightning slashed and thunder crashed. The queen peered through arrow slits in her chamber walls to see an offshore tempest brewing. She stepped out on the battlements to see the dryad forest against the castle waving their leafy hands—the tree spirits seemed to beckon her, as if with furtive message.

“Look there!” exclaimed the queen. A ship appeared to wait offshore. In the tossing blue sea, she caught sight of moon faces and long tails flipping over. The queen whispered, “Is this your working, Sister?”

The grimalkin bristled and arched its back beside her. The queen sensed danger, too. She ran back to the chamber to see axes splitting her locked chamber door. Falling at the hearth, she grabbed up embers in her hands. She chanted a spell over them. The embers glowed fierce red, and she scattered them on the floor only to turn and grab up more.

The door crashed open.

The king’s guards screamed and fell back as their boots caught fire from a burning stone floor.

“It will only buy us a little time,” said the queen to the grimalkin. There was nowhere to go but the battlements. There, she found her husband racing toward her. The queen caught up the grimalkin in her arms to hold it tight, climbed to stand upon the top of the battlement with her gown whipped by wind, squeezed her eyes shut—

And fell back.

A dryad caught her with its arms of branches. Cradling the queen just long enough to gaze at her with solemn goodbye, the tree spirit swiftly passed her on. The queen held her breath as she swished through a blur of rustling leaves in face-filled trees, ever faster at downward angle, when suddenly she felt a slip. A dryad had dropped her—

Over the edge of the cliff.

Our queen screamed as she plummeted through misted air. Down the steep slope of earth, another dryad leaned into the salty winds. The spirit reached up and caught the queen in its limber limbs in such a way to slow her fall—into yet another dryad’s branched and waiting arms.

Moments later the queen stood in a daze on the beach of the cove with sticks and leaves in her hair. Amazed at her rescue, she tilted back her head to look up the steep cliff where dryads lashed their limbs at the king and his men giving chase.

The grimalkin leapt from the queen’s arms and transformed back to human before touching sand. This was necessary, for grimalkins despise going into the sea for a swim. Even when mermaids are involved.  

“Sister, you planned our escape!” the queen said, throwing her arms around the grinning woman with orange hair. But there came a curdling scream.

The two sisters turned to see the king tumbling down the cliff.

When he came to a stop, it was upon a large rock to crack open his skull. This was a grace, for hundreds of clinking vials of poison popped right out of his head.

“Leave me alone,” the king sputtered into sheets of rain. He scrambled away from his queen. “You’re a witch!” He squinted, recognizing the brilliant orange hair of the queen’s sister. “Was she…your cat?”

Bellowing in rage, the king made fists in the sand. He blinked. Opening his fingers, he found vials of poison in his hands. Insane, he shoved them back in his mind as fast as he could.

But not all of them.  

“Don’t leave me,” begged the king, reaching out for his wife. Deep In his eyes, the queen recognized the man she once knew. And yet…she knew he had work to do.

The queen’s sister watched the king’s men making their battered way down the cliff toward the cove. In a peculiar voice like a grimalkin’s mew, she said to the queen, “Come into the waves, we must go with the mermaids to the ship—now.”

“No,” said the king. “She will stay by my side, for I am king!”

Buffeted by gales, the queen knelt before the king one last time. “Our marriage is complete,” she said gentle in his ear.

He grabbed her hand and began to weep. “If you go, my wife, I’ll never see you again.”

The queen ignored the insistent clicking of mermaid song behind her, as well as her sister’s plaintive mewing. She pressed her forehead to her husband’s and spoke with her lips touching his. “Believing false things doesn’t make them true. This is why the damage they do cannot be made real, cannot forever capture you. I will see you again. If not in this life, then another. Or this one over again. I will come to you then, for we must meet until our union is the same as when time first began.”   

She walked into the waves before the king’s men could assault her, calling back over her shoulder, “To save your kingdom you must remember that pearl the poets once bequeathed:  

“The unseen truth of you is beauty, for the soul is not a beast.”  

 

This story is the Crone’s version of Beauty and the Beast. It’s inspired in part by that whirling dervish Hafiz, who said in his verse that poets are life boats when you need to jump ship.

 

Featured image of crown by Ruth Archer

Strangely orange cat made so by my youngest, Jared Baker

Ship at sea image by Comfreak–though I added flipping tails of mermaids 🙂

GORGEOUS DRYAD ART BY JOANNA WOLSKA, who generously gave me permission to use her dryad for this story–THANK YOU!!!

 

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