Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

all begins with a witch.
    Let us call her Malara. Or Maleficient. Or Maladroit. It is all the
    same. She was jealous, of course, of her twelve sisters, of her position
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    • The Spinning Wheel’s Tale •
    in the middle of their pack. Not the prettiest, not the fairest, not the smartest, not the sweetest, not the eldest, not the youngest. All those get special mention in any recounting. She was, so she liked to say, the median, the middle, the muddle, and the mess.
    Well at least in this she was honest, if in nothing else.
    Everything Malara put her hand to was a failure. A wish for a woman’s fecundity produced a litter of babes too small and too early to live, and a blasted womb thereafter. A wish for a garden to produce led straight to a proliferation of weeds the likes of which had never been known in the land. A wish for the early marriage of a prince turned into an early funeral as well. She did not have a good head for wishing.
    But oh, how Malara could curse.
    She could cause the dead to rise, pennies on their eyes, and a death rattle in their mouths that went zero to the bone.
    She could curse a man to impotence, a cuckold to impudence.
    She could curse a purse to poverty, a poet to prosody, a singer to a sore throat, and a hangman to his own noose. She could curse a king
    to catastrophe, a princess to catatonia. She was herself the queen of curses.
    No wonder she ceased to be invited to royal births, royal
    christenings, royal engagements, royal weddings. Even funerals were
    forbidden to her.
    She was left with nothing—nothing to do, nothing to favor—and
    that led to her to having everything to do with what happened ever
    after.
    Her sisters tried an intervention, tried to teach her the lighter side of magic: how to cause the lame to dance, milk to spring from a
    maiden’s breast. Tried to insert her as the muse in amusing histories.
    But as with everything Malara did, things always turned to the worst.
    And there it could have stood, with her sisters loving her and wishing to help. With them worrying over her, thinking she’d been damaged
    somehow, that none of this was her fault.
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    • Jane Yolen •
    But when at last they understood how much she reveled in her
    talent for cursing, even her sisters left her alone.
    And that is when she found me and made the last of her curses.
    O acorn, that you never had known spring. O oak, that you never had
    grown limbs. O limbs, that you never were sawn, planed, bended, and
    bowed. O wheel, that you were never made.
    Malara found me in a byre, set aside after a lifetime of use. Her
    fingers started me awhirl again and I was pleased to be found useful.
    She tested the spindle, and I was delighted to feel magic. She wound wool through all my parts, and I was thrilled to be spinning anew.
    I thought her no more then a solitary crone, for so she presented
    herself, as if touched by age, humped with it. We limped up to the
    forbidden tower.
    There was such a sense of wonder in her touch I ignored the
    darkness in it. Stupid old oak.
    There was warning in her songs. I thought them full of beauty.
    Foolish acorn child.
    I dreamed that I might be the one to spin straw into gold. Silly old wheel.
    Instead of slowing my rotation, instead of tangling the yarn, I held my spindle upright. My wheel made many smooth turnings. I was
    addled with work, in love with production.
    I did not see the world coming to an end.
    There was a knock on the door.
    A girl fair as morning entered, the sun-gold in her hair all the
    riches I was ever to see.
    “Grandmother,” she said to the witch. “I am here for my lesson.”
    Malara smiled and handed her the spindle.
    It pierced her finger and all the world spun down.
    So why is it I, not the witch, being put to the flame?
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    • The Spinning Wheel’s Tale •
    Jane Yolen , author of over eighty-five original fairy tales, and over 335 books, is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America—
    though