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  After the soldier cut off my head it rolled away under a holly tree and thereafter sun wind snow rain petals dripped down upon the earth through the gaping eye sockets of my skull.

  Teach a callow man to be a soldier and he will learn to use violence to solve his problems. It was for that reason I had appeared to him as an old hag and allowed him to fill his pockets with coin from my secret treasure. He was a vain and trifling fellow, and it is never so very difficult for men of that temperament to dispose of women who they see as ugly.

  Losing my head was a small price to pay for my ultimate object, the overthrow of the king and the uncommonly clever queen. Their regime was thoroughly regimented. Those who rule with an iron grip and attention to detail know how to crush each least spark of rebellion, how to behead any small cry for freedom. No carefully crafted revolution, however righteous and passionate, stood a chance against their cunning secret police, prosperous merchants and landlords, and well-fed and well-paid military.

  But what would a common soldier be to them? Merely a man without ambition except the gratification of material desires like rich food, expensive clothing, and a forbidden kiss from their daughter, the beautifully passive princess. My hope was that the king and queen would not take such a soldier seriously until it was too late, when he had finally understood the power of the humble tinder box he’d stolen off my corpse.

  As for him, he thought cutting off my head would end my part in the matter. He couldn’t know he was only the first part of my plan.

  My skull lay for years I could not tally as I waited for the right heart to pass by my slumbering roots.

  * * *

  There came a soldier marching down the road: One, two! One, two!

  I spun myself as a springtime bloom into a gown with the languid purple of a crocus and a checked apron of white and blue. My hair fell as fine and pale as dandelion filaments. I stumbled to the road, pretending to fall.

  A strong hand caught me. “There now, what’s a delicate flower like you doing out alone in the forest?”

  I clung to him as to a stout tree in a wild storm, so he would believe me helpless. “What news of the army, soldier? My brother marched out. I wonder if he will ever return.”

  “You should not be outside the walls where any criminal might chance upon you.” He set me at arm’s length with the frown of a man who finds a woman desirable and is ashamed of his thoughts. “Let me escort you to the city gates before I continue on my way.”

  “You are not a city man?” I asked.

  “Village born. Just passing through, though there’s not much waiting for me at home. When the war started the king paid our parents to sign up their extra sons. They’ll not welcome another mouth to feed when I return.”

  “I can’t help but notice you have a very sharp sword but an empty knapsack.”

  “True enough. For all our victories, we soldiers haven’t been paid. There are a lot of growling stomachs coming back to our villages and towns in the next weeks.”

  I smiled. “Perhaps we can help each other. Before she died my grandmother told me about a tree.” I pointed to a massive old oak with its gnarled trunk. “It’s hollow to the roots and underneath there’s a hole. I can’t get into it by myself. But if I tie a rope around your middle, then I can lower you down and pull you up again.”

  “What would I do in a hole under a tree?” he asked.

  I gazed at him with my primrose eyes. “Do you love the king?”

  “I love the king as much as he loves me.” He glanced at his boots, so worn they were held together with string, and shrugged to jostle the knapsack which was as light as if it was filled with air, for that is exactly what was inside it: air and hunger.

  The old regime would never have let its soldiers lack food, the better to use them to keep their subjects cowed and compliant. But he had not been born in those times. Hunger made him ripe for persuasion.

  “Under the tree beyond the hole lies a bright hall burning with lamps. The hall has three doors, and each door has a key in it. In the first room you’ll find a big chest in the middle of the floor. On that chest sits a dog whose eyes are as big as teacups. But don’t fear! Spread out my apron and set the dog on it, and he’ll be quiet. Open the chest and take out as many copper coins as you wish!”

  “Just like that?”

  “Be sure to use the apron exactly as I’ve told you.”

  “What if I forget?”

  “Then the dogs will kill you, and that would be a shame, would it not?”

  He smiled to hear me speak of his death as a shame. Then he registered the words I’d said. “Dogs? There is more than one dog?”

  “Indeed there is. Through the next door is another room, and another chest, and a bigger dog. This one has eyes as big as mill wheels that spin as water flows. Don’t fear him either! Put him on my apron and he’ll sit obediently. In this chest you’ll find silver. And even that isn’t all of it! In the third room sits another chest and another dog, this one with eyes as huge as the royal tower and a growl to match. But pay him no mind. Put him on the apron, and you can take all the gold you could ever need.”

  “Nothing wrong with that!” he said. “But what shall I give to you, my flower? I can suppose you must want something from the arrangement.”

  His eyes grew bright with longing. But he was a man of restraint, and therefore just what I needed.

  “I do worry about my brother, and how he’ll fare if he ever makes it home. Our parents are gone and we lost our tiny home because we couldn’t pay the tax. I want you to buy an inn in the city where you welcome soldiers returning from the war. Serve them drink and food, at a price they can afford. Give beds to the indigent ones until they’re on their feet again. As for me, all I ask is a little room in the back where I may sleep until I can find out whether my brother is among the living or the dead.”

  He agreed at once.

  The deed was easily done, and this time I suffered no harm from it. He was not the sort to lop off the head even of an ugly old witch. Certainly he was not going to murder a pretty young woman he was well on his way to falling in love with.

  As we walked toward the city I asked him innocent questions to help me discover how much time had passed and how exactly things stood in the kingdom, all without him realizing I did not know. He was a younger son with no prospects, and had joined the army during a famine for the promise of getting two meals a day while his starving parents had gotten a coin and a bag of seed. A man like him knew farming and the routine of army life. The city and the doings of the royal family might as well be the moon.

  A rifle’s shot from the walls there stood beside the main road a pair of stone monuments inscribed with the words: Memorial to the Gallows Revolution.

  “Let us go see,” I said, for I knew I would find answers here.

  A marble-paved path led to a tall gallows with a viewing stand surrounded by an honor guard. The wooden structures were weathered from years of sun wind snow rain. Fresh wreaths had been heaped upon the raised floor with its hanging frame. Beside the gallows a small brass and steel shelter cleverly built to resemble an oversized tinder box sheltered three lamps, one small, one medium, one large. Beneath each lamp was affixed a coin-shaped medal with an inscription. The copper coin read STRENGTH, the silver TRADITION, and the gold BOLD ACTION.

  At the viewing stand, a polished brass plaque recorded how a wicked conspiracy of evil witches and villainous malcontents had murdered the gracious king and queen and all their councilors and judges in broad daylight. Only the dogged resistance of a brave soldier coming three times to the aid of the beleaguered princess had saved the kingdom from utter ruin. Thus she married him and together they became the new king and queen and restored the peace and harmony her parents had so prized.

  “How could a single man defeat a multitude of conspirators?” He studied the account with the skeptical eye of a man who has been told once too often of an evening to expect rations in the morning that never come. He could not connect the lamps to the dogs, or know that each strike from the flint of the tinder box would magically bring a dog to serve the one who held the humble-seeming implement. “When I first joined the army there were people who claimed the king as he is now used a terrible magic and three enchanted dogs to murder the king and queen who came before. Thus he gained the princess’s hand and the throne.”

  “Is there more to the story than is written here?” I asked with all the innocence of

pretended youth, as if I had not handed the means to the first soldier for this very purpose.

  His smile had a nervous energy. “Now that I think about it, anyone who made such claims vanished or died until there were none left to speak of it. I pray you, pretend I said nothing of such a rumor.”

  I rested a gentling hand upon his arm. “I would be the last person to mention it or to put you at any risk. In truth I have long wondered the same thing. But it all happened before you or I was born.”

  “Before you were born, my fresh flower. I was born the year the new king and queen came to the thrones. Thirty-three years.”

  So. Thirty-three years my bones had lain on the earth. Now I would discover if it was time enough for grievances to simmer and suffering ferment beneath the rule of a violent king and a gormless queen, so different from their disciplined predecessors.

  In the city I became his guide. I showed him along the elaborate city walls with their cunning interior staircases and concealed tunnels. I conducted him to each of the city’s thirteen bridges that carved the city into defensible neighborhoods, and taught him their fanciful names like Hidden Pearl Bridge for lovers and Scattered Petals Bridge where foreign sailors congregated by the docks and Iron Claw Bridge that controlled the approach to the part of the town where factory smoke churned day and night.

  We strolled the grand avenues where those with money ate the best food at the best inns wearing the most fashionable clothing. My own garb was thirty-three years out of date. As we walked I shifted its colors and cut bit by bit and piece by piece in the subtle manner a plant produces a flower. The plain leather belt became a cloth sash embroidered with keys. The cut of my bodice sloped a little lower to display more bosom. The length of my skirt moved a little higher to give a glimpse of ankle. My long straight hair by slow degrees curled upward into an artfully styled cascade adorned with a chain of red poppies.

  In the evening he purchased a run-down inn in the poorest neighborhood of the city. I chose a humble little room with a narrow little bed for my own, and he respected that. But he gave me a curious once-over before we each went to our rest.

  “Weren’t you wearing an apron before? Or no, that’s not it.” He smiled triumphantly, pleased with his discernment. “You’ve changed something about your hair!”

  “Wind has blown it awry all the afternoon,” I said, knowing he would soon forget about the checked apron. “Fortunate for us that tomorrow is a new day.”

  He smiled, thinking my words the cleverest aphorism any person had ever spoken. I heard him repeating the phrase as he walked down the passage to the innkeeper’s office where his lamp burned late into the night. He was a diligent worker. So was I.

  By the end of the first week the common room was spick and span and already busy with soldiers home from the war. They liked to sit beside others who had endured the same indignities they had. They liked me as I served their tables because I asked each man his story as if it were the most important story ever told, and these were men unaccustomed to thinking themselves the center of any tale. Nights when comrades froze to death on the hard ground for want of a tent while noble officers luxuriated with braziers and furs. Days with only a dry crust of bread and congealed porridge while visiting ministers devoured cattle commandeered from unprotected villages. Coats so worn they could not keep out the rain while brightly clad courtesans sang and danced inside houses and inns requisitioned for the use of the highborn.

  What young village lad who has joined the army for adventure, or for a meal, and who has been cashed out without pay can resist a pretty smile he believes is meant for him alone? They called me Sweetpea or Rosie, Violetta or Daisy, Fleur or Zahara or Yasmin. Camellia if they fancied themselves poets. They needed a name to put to the words I spoke at their tables, as if I were the first person ever to question the unfairness of the hand they’d been dealt, as if they were the first person I had ever breathed my rebellious thoughts to.

  As for the soldier who was now the innkeeper, he called me only and always “my flower.” Because he was a good man, he left me alone even though his smiles revealed his heart.

  After a month the common room was so crowded and lively with talk of the war that the prince got word of it. He was a great hero to them for his reckless bravery, the sort that got those fighting around him killed while he never suffered more than glancing wounds.

  He appeared late one night like fireworks bursting out of a gloomy sky. They all exploded into song, a splendid shouting fusillade of a melody which he joined in. He was as handsome as the day is long, winter or summer depending on the taste of the observer.

  The glowering expression of the innkeeper told its own story.

  “Do you know him?” I asked with a look as dewy as the petals of a just opened bloom.

  “As if a common soldier like me would know a prince. My unit fought under his command a time or two.”

  “Weren’t those all great victories?”

  “For those strewn like gravel on mud to stabilize the path for others, I would not say so. Of the thousand men in my unit, I don’t think more than two hundred returned home.”

  “And even then with empty knapsacks and no back pay?”

  The anger in his furrowed brows and the flash of defiance in his eyes was the answer he gave.

  The prince shouted, “Drinks on the house!” and we had no more time to talk. But I had a reason to glide up to the handsome prince bearing a fulsome cup and an abundant smile. He was the sort of man who could not be satisfied unless he consumed both, once he perceived they were on offer.

  The evening passed with songs, with tales of this battle and that siege, with ale flowing freely as if at the prince’s bequest although of course he had carefully said “on the house.” He was a man who never had to pay for what he used up.

  I spun in and out of his grasp until the night grew late and the songs faded. Exhausted, war-weary men fell asleep slumped over tables. Just in time, since the innkeeper had twice had to send out to other establishments to bring in more ale at his own expense. Because of me he had coin enough to cover it, but if he had not, who could say no to a prince?

  At last the prince noticed his circle of admirers had thinned down to those hangers-on who had arrived with him in the first place, and to me. I aimed my arrow carefully, hidden within my artless chatter.

  “They say the treaty signing ceremony with Brevikin was held in a palace whose tapestries are woven of gold thread. But I suppose such a place would be nothing special compared to our own copper castle.”

  “Have you not danced in the great ballroom, Camellia?” He laughed in his hearty way, and his friends laughed with him although they were not sure why it amused him since why would a common-born serving lass have any means or cause to dance beneath the glittering chandeliers as violins played a spritely melody?

  “Why, I am sure my eyes would be too dazzled and my heart overcome, and I would swoon to see it.”

  “Would you swoon into my arms?” He leaned closer with the smell of liquor on his breath.

  “Your Highness!” I cried, pressing a hand to my comely bosom, not that he hadn’t already studied the contours of my breasts many times over.

  “We shall go now!” he proclaimed as only a prince can proclaim, sure he will not be gainsaid in the moment. “My good friend whom we call Lord Embellishment here can play a wicked fiddle, and not that kind of fiddle haha! He shall accompany us with a tune. You my fair and sumptuous blossom shall dance in the ballroom of the palace as if you were a great lady of the realm.”

  “As you please, Your Highness,” I said demurely.

  When I went to get my cloak, the innkeeper stayed me with a hand. “My flower, you mustn’t go. He’s a dangerous one.”

  “So am I,” I said as I met his gaze. For the first time he took a step away from the heat of me. “Do you suppose I have forgotten my brother? Or our purpose here? Don’t you forget it.”

  “You know my heart,” he whispered roughly.

  “I rely on you to have a heart that desires justice.”

  I left him there.

  Clinging to the prince’s arm and laughing all the while at his polished and mean-spirited witticisms, I arrived at the castle gates.

 

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