HOW THE ROSE PRINCES CAME TO LIFE

HOW THE ROSE PRINCES CAME TO LIFE, by Elizabeth R. McClellan, artwork by Andrea Alamona

 

 

 

Witching is about knowing.

Though we keep cats, a mouse

with a message has amnesty

unquestioned by familiars,

 

for mice get in everywhere

and gossip like ravens,

with less crude sniggers.

They do not trust us, but we

 

speak their language, are generous

in trade of food for news. So it was

a mouse with a mangled paw who came,

all quiver and nerves, to the new moon

 

and my sisters, to tell tale

of foul doings, two brothers tied up

in roses, locked in towers,

children who held each other to sleep

 

with much prayer but no certainty of morning.

How we mislike meddling in politics!

It is undignified, and not our role.

But children locked away bring them

 

under our jurisdiction; we steal babies

when they are not safe at home. A princely

cage is a prelude, to the coffin and the grave.

Better to be taken by witches, and live.

 

They think iron foxes a witch, which is

convenient, as if we have no nails in

our boots, as if you can make a cauldron

out of gold. They think iron stops us

 

because a hot iron will make any lips confess

and a cold one can hold a weeping old crone

who never did more than brew a tincture

against the cold. Witches sing to iron locks

 

and they click in appreciation until they spring

loose and open. No soldier remembers

what laundresses look like, if they are not

young and beautiful. A mandrake can look

 

like a starved child, and they bleed red.

New moon next we lay ready, bundling out

the wan little boys who knew not to ask questions,

leaving behind a false trail of murder already

 

intended. In their castles nobles assumed

another had beaten them to the prize,

made their next moves, continued their

chess game of princes and principalities.

 

In the deep forest where the old growth

sucks up the sun, they glowed with pallor

and cried, clinging to each other, thinking

we would eat them, as if we could do them

 

worse than their own relations had. We

fed them, when they got hungry enough to

risk witch-food, found it not poison,

gobbled more. We moved them, slowly,

 

by nights, darkening their hair with herbs,

trusting the rough weave of their clothes

to make them forgettable, until they reached

the coast, were signed up as ship’s boys

 

for a pirate witch with a laugh like forgetting

who would not beat them for holding hands

whenever they could. There they passed

to the sea, where your story is your own

 

starting from first port to the farthest shore.

Better to be a deck rat than a prince with

no army, no defenders. And I? I was called

to a sickbed, some years hence, for

 

the pretender I knew had planned two murders.

In his unrepentant dying, I asked if he

remembered, and smothered the lie rising

to his lips, and said I had done all I could

 

to ease his passing. In the alchemy of potions,

the brews calling for the hair of a king

do not falter if the claim to the throne is

weak. The strands made their way

 

into many hands that had passed two

striplings along silent paths. The roses

bloom, as ever, better for the pruning;

the witches listen to the mice, and thrive.

________________________________________

Elizabeth R. McClellan is a disabled gender/queer demisexual demigirl poet writing on unceded
Quapaw and Chickasha Yaki land in what settlers call the Mid-South. In their other life, they are
a domestic and sexual violence attorney working with Latinx immigrant survivors to provide
holistic civil legal services. They are a previous winner of the Naked Girls Reading Literary
Honors Award, multiple time and current Rhysling Award nominee, and have a poem submitted
by the publisher for Best of the Net 2021. Their work has appeared in Apex Magazine,
Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, Chrome Baby, Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling, Utopia
Science Fiction, Apparition Lit, Illumen Magazine, Mirror Dance and many others, as well as two
of the Rhonda Parrish Elemental Anthologies, Girls Who Love Monsters, and other anthologies
including The Moment of Change. They can be found on Twitter and elsewhere as @popelizbet
and on Patreon at patreon.com/ermcclellan.

 

Andrea Alemanno  is a compulsive illustrator  who fills the line spacing, preferably at 300 dpi.
She’s  from Italy and loves to move into a new city searching for inspiration. In every city,  she constantly keeps drawing.
Now, 3 decades later (and a little bit more), she is  still drawing and learning something new everyday.
She loves the traditional touch into a digital tools world so uses pencil, ink and digital colors to give life to her artwork.
Sometimes she shares her knowledge with wannabe illustrators.
 Her work has been selected for several awards and she’s currently working for Italian and international publishers.