The Forest Queen Read online

  Clearing my eyes of tears, I stared my stepmother down. She looked back at me. Though I had only seen coldness and distance in her face before, I saw something else then. I saw challenge. We both knew what she was doing: she was making me a servant. But I began to think she might be testing me, preparing me for some sacred rite of entrance into her true family. Making sure I was a good daughter.

  So I nodded, and I looked down, and I retreated to the kitchen. When your heart is broken, it’s easier to follow rules.

  I kept waiting, too, hoping I might pass her test. I carried that hope with me like a rosary, counting the worn beads each time she assigned me some yet more menial chore.

  If it was ever a test, I must have failed.

  Despite what she had reduced me to since Father’s death, though, I still could not believe Stepmother was entirely evil. Do not mistake me: she was cruel and sharp, and she spoiled her own children to a fault while denying me any scrap of affection. She took a hypocrite’s great pleasure in her own abstinence. She enjoyed denying herself more than she ever relished an indulgence. I could list her flaws for days.

  But she gave me my mother’s letter. I didn’t know why she did, or why she didn’t read it first. Perhaps, I thought, it was because she loved her own daughters too much to disrespect another mother’s wishes; perhaps I would never know the reason.

  It must have been Stepmother, I thought when I found the envelope slipped under my door one autumn morning.

  for Nicolette

  on her sixteenth birthday

  She even gave it to me on the correct day.

  Late that night, I crept through the hall to the portrait of Grandmother. She cut an imposing figure atop her huge black stallion, Jules. Mother’s family had long been famous for their hunt horses, and Jules was the greatest stallion they ever produced. There were even rumors that the blood of Fey horses ran in Jules’s veins—but if that was true, any records of it would have been destroyed after King Corsin’s quarantine on Faerie. No one would admit to the least association with the Fey anymore, not after a Fey assassin had killed the previous Heir.

  Our country had to learn how to live without magic after that. We were still learning.

  Still, with his long, powerful legs, streaming mane, and brightly gleaming coat, Jules looked as beautiful as Fey horses were said to be. Mother used to tell me that together, he and Grandmother could put the men to shame at the fox hunt—I always loved hearing that story.

  No key hung on the wall when I took down the picture. Annoyed, I squinted at the letter again.

  Take the key from behind your grandmother’s portrait.

  I puzzled for a moment—then had to laugh at my own stupidity.

  I dug a ragged fingernail into the paper at the back of the frame. It exploded in tiny brown fibers that blanketed my hand to the wrist and suffused the air with feathery antique dust. I grinned, feeling rough metal against my finger. I hooked my fingertip around the key and pulled it from the frame.

  It was a skeleton key, quite large. The prongs on its shaft were many and complex.

  I pocketed it quickly and rehung the portrait, feeling like the heroine in a twopenny storybook. Grandmother watched me from her gilded frame.

  I kept near the wall as I walked to the cellar door. I could hear Piety’s snores and Chastity gibbering in her sleep. Stepmother slept even more deeply than they did. Still, I stayed silent as a huntress, creeping toward the secret I could sense just ahead of me. Any false move might wake the Steps and pull it out of my reach.

  I double-checked the lock on the door and crept down the stairs. I held my candle high. I had chosen a plain kitchen candlestick—Stepmother would miss the scented beeswax. So it was by a crude and greasy light that I found my mother’s gift.

  It was easy enough to push the desk aside; finding the door was harder. The flickering candlelight revealed nothing until I practically had my nose to the seam. I was covered in spider silk before I saw it.

  But there it was, obscured behind seven years of grime . . . and something else. Something not quite a shadow—something I might have thought, before the quarantine, was magic. Dark, with a darker shine. But it vanished as I put out my finger to touch it, and I thought I must not have seen it at all.

  I stepped back, relishing this last moment of mystery. I put a fair amount of force behind the key, expecting rust to have diminished its fit.

  But it slipped in like a foot into a slipper, and I stumbled against the opening door.

  A rattling overhead drew my attention. There were round, spiked shadows in the darkness of the ceiling, rotating at the same rate that the door was pulling open—being pulled. Inside the room, a hissing sound stopped and started in a heartbeat pattern.

  I picked up my candle and entered.

  The door swung shut behind me, as smoothly and quickly as it had opened. I didn’t feel trapped; I felt welcomed, wrapped in my mother’s love. I surveyed my inheritance with awe.

  There were charts on the walls, mapping the inner mechanisms of a thousand wonders. There was a coal-powered loom, a sewing machine—thank goodness, I thought, my finger still stinging from the last time my needle had slipped—and an automated rocking chair and cradle. This last made my heart ache with loneliness for her and for my own childhood, but I could not stop to examine it further; I was too curious about her other designs. I was particularly drawn to an acidic rainbow of dyes painted into a line of circles, next to long notations of their formulas. I could smell the oil lubricating the gears that had swung open the door.

  A bookshelf on the far side of the room completely covered the wall. It sagged into a smile under the weight of its leather-bound occupants. Stuck in amid the books, a desk sat draped with haphazard stacks of paper and half-finished diagrams. A pair of glass and leather goggles rested on top of one blank sheet, still dusted in soot. I recalled the pale rings around Mother’s eyes.

  I jumped when the room’s thick silence broke. A small chest on a low shelf thunked once, and again, in a determined beat.

  I sighed, relieved that no one had discovered me. But what lay in that dark box?

  Years of unhappiness had made me fearless. I expected a family of rats, and when the thing in the chest scurried into shadows as I opened the lid, I assumed I was correct.

  Then I heard the soft whirring of gears, and my nervousness dissolved into delight. I had found another of Mother’s creations.

  I lowered my palm gently into the box. I found myself cooing and nickering to the thing inside, as if it were a shy cat.

  “Come on, now,” I said quietly. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.” I turned my gaze politely away.

  I felt a delicate nipping at my little finger and had to laugh at the sensation. Something rounded pressed against my palm, and I looked down.

  A metal horse nuzzled my finger. No taller than my hand at the shoulder, he was the most delicate little toy I had ever seen . . . and yet more than a toy: he moved of his own volition, and the way he regarded me was more than lifelike—it was life itself.

  He was made with too much care, too much precision, to be intended only as a plaything. His head and neck were copper gone a bit green, and his flanks were blown glass. Through them, I could see his clockwork musculature turning back and forth as he pranced beneath my fingers; there was even a tiny clock face that looked as if it had been taken from a small pocket watch. He had no mane, but a tail of silver chains that he flicked back and forth and lifted for balance when he moved. Etched into his right flank was the name Jules II. Subtle puffs of steam blew from his nostrils. When I stroked his belly, I felt the heat of some inner furnace.

  The chest that held little Jules was, in fact, a sort of stable in miniature. There was a bottle of oil and a rag in one corner. A crinkle of green patina, his outline, blossomed in another; he had clearly lain dormant for years. How had he known to awaken? And what else could my entrance have aroused in my mother’s world of mechanical wonders?

  I
lifted Jules from his confinement and set him gently on the floor. He reared up on his steel haunches and looked at me pointedly. We regarded each other.

  Then he set off at a canter toward the far corner of the room. I followed—though I paced him easily, of course, even when he broke into a jingling gallop. I felt as if I’d stumbled into Faerie.

  Jules halted in front of yet another door, just as subtly set into the wall as the first had been. This one was wider, and streaked in places with dried grease.

  I saw a smudged black handprint among the streaks. When I placed my own hand there, it matched exactly. I knew even before I pushed the door open that here was where Mother kept her workshop and the first room was simply a designer’s studio, a repository.

  I opened the door, and more gears sprang to my aid. The hissing was louder in here, and the air was humid with steam.

  Jules pranced eagerly at my feet, his metal hooves clacking against the stone floor. Before me lay a world of possibilities.

  ✷

  It was hard to breathe, at first, in the steam-thickened air, and harder still to see. I stumbled a few steps farther inside as that door closed itself behind me too, and reached down to stroke Jules. Somehow the touch of his hard, warm back made me stand a little surer on my feet.

  The rumbling quieted, and the air began to clear. I caught sight of an orange glow at the far side of the room, growing slowly brighter.

  Jules saw it too. He let out a pleased whinny—an odd, scraped-glass sound that made my spine tense—and cantered toward the glow.

  A furnace. Heat radiated from it and pressed against my face as I approached.

  Squinting, I could see where the fire continued to grow and grow at its center, colors changing from deep orange to yellow to white, and something whiter than white in a spot at its very middle, almost blue. The warmth felt good on my skin, seeping through my thin linen dress, as if it were opening me up somehow, readying me to be molded and reworked, like metal.

  I saw gloves hanging on an iron hook to one side of the furnace, and I put them on. Of course they fit, just as Mother’s sooty handprint on the door had.

  Next to the gloves, a series of iron wheels sat built in among the furnace’s bricks. I touched one and found I could rotate it easily. It clicked as I spun it down. The furnace rumbled again, its heat lessening slightly. The rough warmth left my cheeks and forehead, and I immediately missed it. I was in love with the furnace already.

  I knew, though, that there were other things left to discover, so I turned away and tried not to long for its almost-burn on my face.

  I let the fire heat my back as I surveyed the rest of the room. There was a huge leather bellows attached to pulleys that ran up into the low ceiling. I was sure I could control the bellows with one of the iron wheels on the furnace’s other side.

  Steel and copper sheets lined one wall, somehow mostly unoxidized, even after all the years since Mother’s death. Beyond them were shelves stacked with boxes labeled in Mother’s spidery handwriting or slotted with glass windows so I could glimpse their contents. I saw more gears, screws, nails, hinges and joints and pistons, bottles of oil and grease and paints: everything that a mechanic of Mother’s caliber might need.

  Between the shelves and the far wall were dozens—no, probably hundreds—of cubbyholes and drawers, tiny and tinier. I opened them, of course. I wanted to see everything Mother had left me, absolutely everything.

  But they contained only drifts of ash, pale gray and so fine, it flowed like liquid when I pulled the drawers open. Metal label holders under each held drawings, rather than the neatly scripted labels on the larger boxes and shelves.

  They were pictures, sketched in worn black ink, of animals. The first were of insects and other crawlers—spiders, beetles, butterflies—then came lizards, fish, canaries, bats. Larger animals, too: cats and hounds and birds of prey. Horses.

  And the ash in the drawers I’d opened . . . it moved.

  I thought I’d imagined it at first, but as I looked closer, it rippled and swirled, then rose into ghostly shapes too vague for me to recognize. It trembled upward, toward me. I put out a hand to meet it, but it cringed suddenly backwards and settled again.

  Warm as I was, I shivered.

  I looked down toward my feet, but Jules hadn’t followed me to this side of the room. He was backed against the furnace wall, his bright ears flat against his head. His slender clockwork legs stood straight and unmoving, and if he’d had muscles, I would have sworn they were tense. I hadn’t been much around horses in years, but anyone could have seen he was frightened.

  “All right, boy.” I hadn’t been much around horses, true, but I still knew how to speak soothingly to one. “We don’t have to stay here; don’t worry.” I crossed to the furnace and picked him up, wincing as the fire-heated glass of his flanks met the thin skin on my palm. I hoped I wouldn’t blister.

  I could feel him . . . relax . . . in my hand, as if he had muscles after all. The whirring ticks of his mechanisms, what I would almost have called his heartbeat, slowed down.

  He calmed further when I brought him back to the studio. I reluctantly laid him in his stable-box, and he settled down in his corner.

  He glanced up at me through those intelligent eyes just for a moment. I caught myself thinking he was sad to see me go.

  Then he closed them, and I watched his clockwork wind down. Framed there in his little stable, he was so much like the ink-drawn horse on that drawer in the other room. Both of them, I thought, looked almost lonely.

  I was being foolish, of course. Mother’s most lucrative trade had been in mechanical creatures like this: automated beetles and butterflies that fashionable ladies wore in their hair or pinned to their dresses. Her best insects could be trained to do simple things like light candles and draw curtains. She always insisted that the insects were simply machinery, though—she said only her most gas-headed customers treated them as pets. I, too, had grown fond of the little ratcheting creatures Mother showed me when I was young, but I’d always believed she was right. Even the trainable ones were no more responsive or affectionate than any real beetles or dragonflies I’d seen.

  But I’d only known she made insects, not larger, more intelligent animals. Not horses.

  And the look in Jules’s glass eyes . . . but I turned away.

  It was verging on daybreak, judging by the thin, gray streaks of light starting to leak through the workshop’s one narrow window. I retreated to the door and turned the handle, letting the gears overhead take most of its weight.

  Leaving the workshop was like pulling away from my mother’s embrace. My skin prickled, and my clothes seemed to hang looser on my frame now that I’d left the warmth of the furnace behind. But I had no time for dallying. It was silliness to start missing Mother again, when I felt closer to her than I had since her death.

  I climbed the stairs slowly, so they wouldn’t creak. Before I closed the door, I took a last moment to peer down into the shadowed well of the cellar.

  I took a breath, and blew out my candle.

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  About the Author

  Author photograph by Harper Malloy

  BETSY CORNWELL is the New York Times best-selling author of Tides, Mechanica, and Venturess. She graduated from Smith College and was a columnist and editor at Teen Ink before receiving an MFA in creative writing from Notre Dame, where she also taught fiction. She now lives in Ireland with her family.

  Learn more at www.betsycornwell.com

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