Little Red Cinderella and the Three Beanstalks

Previously...

“Good luck on the rest of your quest. I've been gone from the farm too long anyways.” He squeezed the horse's sides with his knees and started her trotting off, back in the direction we had come from, towards the forest.

“Jack, please! How are you even going to get all the way back on your own?” I called after him, desperately, but he only ignored me, and urged his horse into a gallop. I stared after him helplessly, completely at a loss as how it could have turned out this way. I turned around, looking to Ezu for help, but I saw him throwing his own stuff over his horse's back.

“Ezu?” I asked, my voice cracking ever so slightly. He wouldn't look at me, his face was a grim mask. “Ezu, what are you doing?” I made to walk over to him, reaching my hand out to grab his arm, but he flinched and shied away from me which made me freeze in place.

Still without looking at me, he said, “I told you, I'm not going to love anyone. Ever.” He pulled himself onto the horse, never, not once, even glancing at my face. “You make friends easily, you'll be able to find two new knights. Finish the quest, and go home to your family, and your world.”

“You can't just leave!” I cried, but that didn't stop him from doing just that. He didn't follow the path Jack had taken, but he too headed towards the dark forest, in the opposite direction my quest for the remaining Princesses would take me. I watched him go, and he never looked back.

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Ezu didn’t look back. He didn’t look back when he Rikki called out to him. He didn’t look back when he reached the opposite tree line, urging his skittish mare deeper into the dark woods. He didn’t look back when the thought crossed his mind that maybe, if he just would, he could turn around and pretend like he’d never started to leave, he could go back to rescuing vapid princesses with a stubborn girl.

But he didn’t.

He slept that night, but not well. He spent most of the night staring into the flames of the small fire he had made, his ears pricked for the sounds of the forest, but could hear little over the nervous nickering of his horse, who was unhappy at having to camp overnight in the forest. He wondered where Jack was, and where Jack was going. He didn’t think about Rikki. He didn’t let himself think about Rikki. His stomach growled, but his pack and provisions we far enough away that he would have to get up from where he sat, leaning against a mossy boulder, and he didn’t have the energy for that. So he just sat there for half the night, his arms folded across his chest, staring into the flickering firelight, listening to the growling of his stomach and the breathing of his horse and all the small sounds of the woods at night. Eventually he did fall asleep, sitting there against the boulder, his head drooping forwards onto his chest, but it was a fitful and uneasy sleep, plagued by dreams. Dreams he had been having a lot recently, good dreams that made him feel miserable when he awoke. It was a cold night, and he shivered in his sleep.

The next morning dawned bright and chill, and Ezu was awake before the sun had fully risen. He didn’t feel rested in the slightest. If anything, he was more tired than he had ever been in his life. He heaved himself to his feet, and his limbs felt as though they were made of lead, hanging heavy and useless. His chest hurt, his throat felt raw, and he knew his eyes were red rimmed without having to look in a mirror. The chestnut mare was staring at him with big, soft brown eyes.

“What are you looking at?” he growled at her. She shook her head, and gave a snort. A wad of horse snot catapulted from her nostril and hit Ezu in the neck. He wiped it off with an expression of disgust, and then trudged over to his pack. Slinging it over his shoulder, he took the mare’s reigns in one hand and started to lead her back to the trader’s dirt road that cut through the forest.

He walked for the better part of the next two days, sleeping on the side of the road, almost wishing a thief would dare try to rob him in the night to give him an excuse to lash out, and trying not to think. It wasn’t hard. He just focused on the shifting light that filtered through the gaps in the trees, on the steady progression of his feet over the deeply rutted road, on the weight of the pack on his back and the feeling of the soft leather of the mare’s reigns. He didn’t think about another pair of soft brown eyes, or a tangle of dark, wild curls framing a freckled face. He didn’t think about a bad attitude and a sharp mouth, or an unstoppable sense of duty and a bleeding heart. He didn’t think about an open smile, or the occasional glance cast his way.

He made it clear through the other side of the forest without thinking about Rikki once, apart from her eyes, her hair, her freckles, her attitude, her mouthy remarks, her honor and compassion, her smile, the looks she saved only for him. Apart from that, he didn’t think about her at all.

There was a halfway house about four miles from the edge of the forest, indicated by a weathered sign that had been hammered into the ground on the side of the road. At he pace he was trudging along, it would take him an hour and a half to reach it at best, and the sun was beginning to sink low in the sky, the end of the third day since he and Jack and Rikki had parted company drawing nearer. His horse was tired and hungry, sick of spending nights unsheltered in woods full of wolves and worse, and practically dragged him along after her once they broke through the last line of trees and even she knew that there must be a dry stable with fresh hay and sweet apples somewhere ahead of them, sooner or later.

They reached the inn just as the sun was starting to dip in earnest below the hills to the west, the horizon glowing gentle orange, which turn to pale blue, then deepened gradually into velvet navy darkness on the opposite horizon. It was getting cold, and Ezu started to wonder if Jack and Rikki had somewhere to sleep that night, before he quickly shut down those thoughts.

He knocked on the door of the inn while the mare ate some of the petunias growing in a window box within reach. Almost a minute passed before a tall, plump woman opened the door and looked down as Ezu with a drawn, serious face.

“Yes?” she said.

“Do you have a room I can have for the night? And a stable for my horse?”

“If you’ve got money to pay for it, I do.”

“I’ve got enough money.”

“Then come in. I’ll stable the horse. My husband is inside, he can get you a drink or a meal, if you’ve got money for that too.”

Ezu handed her the reigns and went inside, where a thin, balding man was leaning back in a chair, balancing it on the two back legs, and smoking a pipe. He got up when he saw Ezu.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’d like a room for the night, and dinner. I’ve got a mare that the lady of the house is stabling right now, and I’d be grateful if she could get some feed as well.”

“Aye,” he nodded. “We’ve had a stew and pease porridge on the fire all day. I won’t lie and tell you it’s the best you’ll ever have, but its hot and ready. And an ale?”

“If you would. Pease porridge, please,” Ezu replied gratefully. He sank into a chair at an empty table, and closed his eyes tiredly. He could have sworn he only shut them for a second, more like a blink, really, but the next thing he knew the man was back, placing a bowl of steaming pease porridge in front of him, and a plate with a soft heel of bread and a healthy portion of thick bacon, marbled richly with fat. It was a better meal than Ezu had had in a long while, and for the next few minutes his weariness was all but forgotten as he devoured the food with renewed vigor.

The man didn’t leave after serving Ezu. He pushed a tankard of ale towards the young man, then pulled out a chair and sat across from him at the small table, staring intently at Ezu with watery blue eyes. Before Ezu finished eating, the woman had returned, and she came over and leaned against the chair her husband sat in, her arms folded over her chest, watching Ezu eat just as seriously.

When Ezu finally leaned back, stopping himself just short of licking the bowl clean, the man gave a grunt.

“You alright, boy?” he asked. “You seem stretched mighty thin.”

“I’ve been busy recently,” Ezu replied, without looking the couple in the eyes. Their interest in him was making his feel awkward, but he was wary of seeming ungrateful. The bacon would have been a bit of a luxury this far from farming country, and they didn’t have to share it with him.

“You out here all alone? These parts can be dangerous, so close to the woods,” said the woman.

Ezu shrugged. “I’m alone now. I’d had… I’d had traveling companions, but we went our separate ways a few days ago.”

“Well, you best be being careful out there, young man,” said the man gruffly. “Times are strange, and I advise against traveling alone if you can help it.”

Ezu made a noncommittal sound in his throat, and made an effort to steer the conversation in a different direction. “Have you lived here a long time then?”

“This was my parent’s house,” said the woman, who now pulled out a chair of her own and sat beside her husband. “I inherited it when they died. That was, what, twenty five years ago now?” she said, looking at her husband.

“More ‘n that by now,” he replied. “Not quite thirty years though, I think. How long have we been married?”

The woman smiled. It wasn’t a lovely smile, but it was warm and gentle. “Twenty seven years,” she said.

“Then this place has been yours for twenty eight. I married you the year after you took it over. To help take the work load off such a young girl.”

“To mooch off of my family’s money, you mean,” she shot back, but without rancor.

“It helped that you were rich and beautiful.”

She snorted, but seemed pleased by the compliment. Ezu took a better look at her. Her face was hard and weathered, the lines of her mouth and jaw stern with year and hardships alike, but he could tell that she must have been handsome enough in her youth. Perhaps never a beauty, but you’d think she was if you judged only by the way her husband smiled at the memory. It make Ezu shift uncomfortably in his seat, as if he were intruding on something intimate.

“It was hard making ends meet those first few years,” the woman went on. “I knew how to keep the inn running, how to clean the stables and care for horses; I could cook well enough to keep people fed without too much complaints; I knew how to tend the fires and empty the chamber pots regularly and prepare the bed warmers. Sheets were clean, the repairs were kept up with. I’d learnt all that while working for my parents. But I was young and inexperienced with people, and I was often cheated out of fair payment for rooms and meals, or intimidated into giving them for free. I almost lost the land that had been in my family for generations completely, before Karl here helped me save it.”

“I was just looking for an excuse to get you to talk to me,” Karl said. “I’d lived about ten acres west of here my whole life, and had known Erma my whole life. And she never wanted anything to do with me.” He shook his head sadly at young Erma’s folly. “I’d been trying to court her since we were sixteen, but she’d have none of it.”

“You were a right tosser back then,” Erma scoffed.

“Well, not so much so that you refused my help when I offered to work the inn with you for in return for room and board.”

“I was desperate,” said Erma, determined not to give an inch. “And if you’ll remember, it took you nearly a full year to convince me that you weren’t the same nasty little boy who used to pull my pig tails when we played together. He helped keep most travelers from cheating me out of pay,” she said to Ezu. “It was harder to cheat two of us, as opposed to one young girl on her own. We pulled through, and were married in a years time. Facing that challenge together brought us closer together than anything else could have.”

“And we’ve been keeping the inn up and running ever since, though some years are leaner than others. We do alright, mostly.”

Ezu frowned at the couple, then leaned back in the chair and crossed him arms over his chest.

“That’s all very touching, but love isn’t for every one. We don’t all get happily ever afters.”

Karl raised his busy eyebrows at Ezu, but shrugged. “Well, you’re right about love not being for every one. My own brother never got married. Never wanted to, and he’s as happy with his life as I’ve ever been. And I guess you’re right about not everyone getting a happily ever after too. But personally, I think that you can, if you’re willing to fight for it.”

Ezu narrowed his eyes. “Some people just can’t be happy. They aren’t allowed to be.”

“Am I right in guessing you mean yourself, lad?” Erma asked. Ezu flushed.

“I mean plenty of people.” He paused, averted his gaze, and cleared his throat. “I mean, you could use me as an example, but I mean anyone. Some people just don’t have happily ever afters in store for them. Some people just don’t have futures. Some stories are short and unhappy, and there’s no point in trying to fight it. It will only end in more hurt.”

“What’s your story, then, boy?” asked Karl.

Ezu looked around the small room, his gaze lingering on the flickering lamp light; on the empty bowl before him; on the pits and whorls in the wooden table top. Anywhere but directly at the couple sitting across from him. He had decided he wasn’t going to answer, but then suddenly the words began pouring out of him, as if a dam inside him had suddenly broke.



I had left my family home to seek my fortune. It was going well for me. I’d met a fairy in disguise, to whom I’d done some kindness, and she’d given me wonderful gifts in reward. But while I was off, away from home and so caught up in my own life, a terrible fate was befalling upon my family.

My mother had always been a beautiful woman, and age did not take that from her. Every man in our small village envied my father. In her youth, she’d been courted by nearly every man in town, but she’d rejected them all. She had eyes only for my father, who was not particularly handsome or wealthy, but came from a hardworking farming family. I can’t pretend to know why they exactly they fell in love, but they did. Even after they were married, even after I was born, many men could not let the desire to have my mother for their own go. She was pursued often, even by married men, but she and my father didn’t let that get in the way of their love for each other, and for me and my younger sister. Sometimes trouble would arise, and someone would have to be physically dissuaded from harassing my mother, but for the most part life was happy. Our farm did well and we lived comfortably, though not richly, for most of my childhood.

There was one man, though who simply would not leave my family alone.

He was from a prosperous farming family, and had been one of the most persistent pursuers of my mother. He didn’t let a little thing like her marriage to my father get in the way either, and he continued to accost her whenever he saw her in town, even coming over to our farm when he knew my father was away, despite being told in no uncertain terms that his affections were not wanted. He was always there, my whole life, waiting in the shadows for any chance to catch my mother alone to try to convince her to leave her husband, her children, and be his instead.

My father was a quiet man, and gentle, and even threats of violence did not come naturally to him, but he was driven to warn the man to keep away from my mother on more than one occasion. My mother herself made it clear that she was not interested in him, that she loved my father and her family and wouldn’t trade her life for anything he could offer her, but the dog just would not give her peace. When she went to town, there he would be, as if his bragging about his lands and wealth could woo her. When my father left town, there he would be, driving his carriage up the path to our farm, bearing fine dresses and other gifts, as if he could bribe her to abandon her family.

I wasn’t as hesitant as my parents, who were wary to make too much of a scene given his wealth and social standing. My mother tried to avoid him whenever possible, and my father held his head high and did his best to ignore his comments and insinuations. I had my own way of dealing with things. I wasn’t afraid to make enemies, and I wasn’t afraid of him. When I was old enough to understand what was going on, I took it upon myself to keep him away from my mother, from my family, in ways that my parents didn’t dare attempt themselves.

I must have been about fifteen when I first physically threw him off our farm, warning him that I’d kill him if he ever stepped foot on our land again. I blacked his eye after I heard that he had been making disgusting comments about my mother while he was getting too drunk to stand in the village pub.

He was a pig, and accustomed to using his wealth and status to get what he wanted—but eventually he got the message that as long as I was around, all he’d get for his trouble was a fight whenever he came sniffing around my mother. He appeared to finally give up, to lose interest. It wasn’t worth the trouble I gave him. I figured he’d finally learned his place, and I wasn’t worried for my parents by the time I left home to seek my fortune.

But I was young and stupid, and I didn’t realize the lengths that lust could drive a person to.

I’d been gone less than a year when my sister started writing to me, Her letters were full of worry; she told me that in my absence, the man had begun to harass our mother again, and that he was finding pretenses to come to our farm and make lewd comments to her, or trying to to convince her to take up with him. It was always when my father was away, of course, and my sister said my mother wouldn’t tell him about the harassment, insisting that she could handle it herself.

But he became more insistent and aggressive as time passed. I had no money to travel at that time, and could only read my sister’s letters with growing anger and worry.

And then my sister wrote that the man had assaulted our mother, in her own house, after he had showed up blind drunk and demanded that she leave my father for him. She told him he could go to hell. She tried to throw him out, but he overpowered her and tried to force himself on her. My sister, who had been hiding in the kitchen because our mother was determined to keep her away from the man in case he turned his attentions on her, grabbed a pan and ran to help, beating him on the head and back until he released her and fled from our property.

I realized then that I had been foolish to leave home, and that I needed to get back, by any means necessary before something worse happened. I thought maybe that I could convince my parents to leave the farm, that I could bring them back to the cottage in the woods the fairy had gifted me. I thought that we could be safe and happy there, and make new lives for ourselves as far away from that ogre as we could get.

I scrounged together what little money I had and started out, spending most nights sneaking into barns to sleep, or just collapsing on the side of the road for a few hours fitful rest when I couldn’t walk any longer. It took me weeks to get back home, and I’d run out of money and food on the way. I didn’t care though, my only thoughts were for my family.

I didn’t bother to pass through town on my way to the farm, I knew it was quicker to cut through the wheat fields to the south than it was to follow the winding road that lead through the village and from there to our land. The short cut brought me up around the back of our house, but I knew something was wrong before I ever saw it.

There was black smoke rising into the sky, and it was too close to where I knew the house was to be a burn pile. I remember running then, and the way my blood started pounding in my head, filling my ears like the sound of rushing water. I remember feeling every beat of my heart, as if it were slowing down, while my feet continued to run faster and faster.

The entire house was just a smoldering black ruin. Half of it had caved in on itself, the beams and floorboards reduced to blackened charcoal. And ash. So much ash and smoke in the air, it choked me as I gasped for breath, filling my lungs and coating the inside of my mouth and throat. I stumbled over the threshold, terrified of what I might find but unable to look away, unable to leave without knowing.

I saw one body there in the burned heap of the house I was born in. I didn’t even recognize it as human at first, it was just this twisted charred thing, a lump curled up on the floor in the middle of what used to be the kitchen. I can’t quite remember what happened right after that, but the next thing I knew I was running from the house, out onto the road, until I stumbled and fell to my knees, and vomited all over myself. I must have been crying too, because I couldn’t see anything clearly. So I didn’t realize what the shapes were in front of me, laying sprawled in the middle of the path. I could only see the colors, crimson on cream and blue, and the pale white of dead flesh.

I crawled over to them, on my hands and knees. I couldn’t stop staring at all the blood. There was so much blood. I didn’t know a person had that much blood in their body, let alone two such small women like my mother and sister.

They were laying spread out, their hair and dresses fanned out around them. My mother was laying face down, but my sister was staring with dead eyes up at the sky. Most of her face was gone. I’d startled away the crows, who had been finishing the work the wolves had started. It was obvious it had been wolves. I’d spent the last several months hunting wolves for petty payment, I knew what one of their kills looked like. Though it had always been sheep before.

That was how they found me. The townsfolk, I mean. Finally, someone had noticed the smoke coming from the still smoldering house and realized it wasn’t an ordinary burn. They found me over my mother and my sister, covered in their blood and my own sick, completely incomprehensible. Someone took me away, I don’t remember who. Someone went to the house, and found my father’s burned body. I stayed in town for several days, feeling like I was sleep walking as I tried to plan funeral arrangement's, as I tried to explain again and again how I’d found them like that, how I didn’t know what had happened.

It didn’t take very long before the rumors started.

I’d been gone for months, I’d never visited or come back. And then suddenly I’m found kneeling over the bodies of my slaughtered family. Some people defended me, saying that it was obviously the work of wild wolves from the woods who had been forced into farmland by a harsh winter. Others said that wolves couldn’t have set fire to the house, that it was too much of a coincidence that the house would have just so happened to have burned down with my father inside just as wolves attacked my mother and sister. Some speculated that it was my father who killed them, or had them killed, and then he killed himself, purged his sins through fire. Others said he was too good a man for that, that he must have found their bodies and then burned down the house with himself inside it because he was so distraught.

But everyone agreed that it was suspicious that I was found at the scene while the blood was still wet and the ash still warm after having been gone for months.

No one dared actually say anything to my face. I think they all were just hoping I would leave again after the funeral and never return, and they’d be rid of me and of any responsibility to determine what had actually happened there that day. I was hoping the same thing myself. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to my family. My mind just… shut down whenever I tried to think about it. All I knew was that they were all dead, and there was something wrong, but I wasn’t in any state to try to put two and two together.

Then I was at the funeral, watching the pallbearers lower the three caskets into the ground while the man who had christened me talked about the ineffable will of God and looked at me as if I’d been the one to put them there.

And then I looked up, for the first time, and saw him standing there, at the back of the crowd, looking somber and serious. And he must have felt my eyes on him, because he looked up and met my stare. And he smiled.

I understood, then. It all fell into place and I realized what happened. But I had to be sure.

I left town immediately after the funeral, feeling awake again for the first time since I’d arrived back home. I took my axe, my bow and arrow, and I went into the woods to hunt some wolves.

I laid traps and snares, and shot them down from above in trees, and killed every foul animal I could find. Most were just ordinary wolves, but some I knew could speak. And when I found them, I caught them, and I forced the truth out of them. I made them tell me about the man who had promised them an entire herd of fat sheep—my family’s sheep—as payment for them doing what wolves do to any human they found on that farm. Then I killed them, and I waited until night fall, and I went back into town.

I waited for him to come stumbling out of the pub, where he always was every night. I hid in the shadows and waited for him to stagger behind the building to relieve himself, and I took him. He was too drunk and stupid to fight me, or even to manage a proper shout to bring anyone running. I dragged him off into the woods, and I told him I’d already made his furry friends pay for their part in the deaths of my family. I made him confess there in the woods, in the middle of the night while he sobbed and pleaded on his knees at my feet. I made him describe everything to me, I made him tell me how he had come up with the plan to make my mother, my father, my little sister suffer for his humiliation and rejection. How he had finally had enough, and decided that if he couldn’t have my mother, then no one could, and that he couldn’t stand to let her live her life happy and in mockery of him. So he decided to punish her, and he went to the wolves. How my father had been out in the fields at the time, how the wolves didn’t realize he was there and dragged the sheep off thinking their job was done. How the man, who had led the animals there, was left alone standing over the bodies of my mother and sister when my father back from the fields. How they struggled, how the man overpowered my father. How he hit him with a stone until my father stopped moving, dragged him into the house, and set the house alight to finish the job, because he was too cowardly to strike the fatal blow with his own hands.

I let the man beg and plead for his life, I let him sob until he was sick, until he pissed himself and knelt there covered in piss and vomit, stinking and weeping and terrified for his life.

And I killed him.

I killed him, and my parents were still dead. My sister was still dead. It didn’t bring them back. It didn’t make their deaths any less unfair, any less horrible. It didn’t undo anything that had been done, which is what I wanted more than revenge. And that’s what I live with, every day. That’s my story. There is no happy ending. There is no way to make anything good come out of that. There is no love or happiness in my world, not when love and life and everything good was taken from my family. I don’t deserve it after I failed them, I don’t deserve it if they, who deserved it more than anyone I ever knew, weren’t allowed to have it.

Ezu sat back in the chair, staring down at his hands which rested palms flat against the cool wood of the table. No one spoke for a long while.

“That is an unhappy tale,” Erma finally said, very slowly and very gently. “It sounds like one of the most terrible things that could happen to a person.” She went quiet again, as if thinking. “My parents were taken by plague. I was seventeen, I think. There abouts. The plague was taking many folks in those days. My father fell sick first. My mother wouldn’t let me near him, but then she started getting to boils too. Big, horrible things, they were. Red and ugly, in their armpits and groins and throats. It was the most horrible when they seized, when I tried to shove bits of leather between their teeth to keep them from biting their tongues, when I tried to hold them down to keep them from falling out of their beds. They choked as I poured water down their throats, they sobbed in the night until the fevers became so high that they lost their senses. I was all alone, and both my parents were dying. I had to nurse them, I couldn’t just leave them, but I wanted to. I hated myself for it. They were so sick, and I knew they weren’t going to get better. I knew they were going to die. There was no point in trying to nurse them, it would only end in death. It would have been so much easier, so much less painful to just walk away and sleep in the stables for a few days, a week, until I was sure they had already died. But what kind of daughter would I be if I did that? So I stayed, and tried to help them even though I knew I might as well have been spitting on a beached fish. And it broke my heart. It almost killed me to watch them die, so slowly and so horribly. I never caught the plague, but I almost died of a broken heart.”

Erma looked hard at Ezu then. Karl reached out, took her hand, and gave it a squeeze. “But broken things can be repaired, usually. They might not be quite perfect again, not exactly like they were, but they can be repaired. They might be a little beat up, but that doesn’t mean they won’t work just as well as they did when they were whole. And that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a happy future. A heart that’s been broken can love just as hard as an untarnished one. Even harder, I think. A broken heart knows what it’s like to lose love, and can better value it when they find it again.”

Ezu shook his head. “I don’t deserve-”

“Do I not deserve the love that I was able to find?” Erma interrupted him. “Do I not deserve my husband here, and the good life I have now?”

“That’s different,” Ezu said, flushing with anger and embarrassment alike.

“Is it really though?” Erma sighed, and shrugged. “I can’t tell you how to live your life, though. I can only tell you how I lived mine. Maybe you can take something from that, I don’t know. It’s getting late now though, and I think it would be best if we all went to bed. Karl can show you to your room.”

Ezu followed Karl silently through the dark halls of the halfway house, glancing out the windows to see only the darkness that had swallowed the landscape beyond. A blanket of clouds must have rolled in, because he could see neither stars nor moon in the black sky.

Karl led Ezu to a room whose door was slightly ajar. Ezu dropped his pack on the ground beside the bed while Karl lighted enough candles to give the room a warm glow to see by.

“Breakfast is ready about an hour after sunrise. It’s only curds and whey, but there are fresh berries that Erma gathered this morning to go along with it,” Karl said gruffly. He made to leave, but stopped in the doorway and turned back to Ezu one last time. “Is it someone in particular that you think you don’t deserve to be happy with?”

Ezu didn’t reply. Karl nodded slowly.

“Well, I’m not one to try to tell someone how to live their life. But I have to wonder, do you think that that someone doesn’t deserve to be happy with you, then?” And with that he left, closing the door on Ezu’s surprised face behind him.