For This is My Place

I watched her go, my heart breaking into a thousand tiny pieces as she raised her white hand in a last adieu. Though through the years there had been little love lost between us, she was my sister, and this was our final farewell. It stung like a knife-wound.

Her raven hair whipped in the wind as she sat straight and tall upon the swaybacked mare that was all we could give to her at parting. She wore a jade cloak, exactly the color of her sea-green eyes, and it flapped gently as she rode off into the forest. She was the perfect image of a fairy-tale damosel, riding off to greet her doom to save another.

Father stood by, turned away as she rode off into the sunset. His head was bowed in grief and shame. Though Bryony had taken it upon herself to save Father from the monster’s curse, he felt that it was upon his head that his favorite daughter was now riding off into the lair of a beast, likely never to return. Anger rose in me as I saw his sorrow, and for one tiny moment I glared spitefully at Bryony’s back and thought I would not miss her.

But it was not true. For as much as I hated her at times, Bryony was my sister, and the epitome of everything to be desired. She seemed almost to belong in a world of castles and handsome princes instead of our dusty, tired village and its dusty, tired inhabitants. She worked longer and harder than any of us, yet never complained, but took it all with a gentle smile. Though Alyra and I often yearned for the bustling, beautiful merchant city that had once been our home, Bryony, who had been most suited to that life, said never a word about it.

I turned to go into the house, my eyes dry. The small bare rooms seemed smaller and barer than ever before, and I realized with a pang how much we had all counted upon Bryony’s sparkling laugh, her gentle vivacity, to light up our dreary life. In the city, she had been called Beauty by her friends and her many love-struck admirers, and the name fit her well. I knew of none more beautiful, inside or out, than my youngest sister.

The ensuing days passed uneventfully, relentlessly dull and unremarkable. Alyra cried often – but then, she had always shared a bond with our sister stronger than any I had forged. As often as I had loved Bryony, I had hated her for her beauty, her grace, her insufferably kind nature. She was small, agile as a cat, and gentle as a mouse. I was tall, bony, clumsy, and possessed a fiery temper that was a hazard to all. Her hair was raven-black and her eyes sea-green, while my locks were neither golden nor brown and my eyes a muddy shade of grey. She attracted suitors by the dozen, while I was convinced my fate was to die a spinster.

Yet I missed her desperately. I had not realized until she left how much I loved my sister, how destitute my life would be without her luminous gaze and lavish – if untrue – compliments. Now, as life progressed without Bryony, it seemed unutterably dim compared to what had been.

But I grew – we all grew – to accept her disappearance, and our lives returned to some semblance of normality. Years passed, with no word from Bryony who was called Beauty, and we feared the worst. Yet we worked as always, and not four years after Bryony’s departure Alyra – who shared more of Bryony’s looks and temperament than I – became betrothed to a prosperous merchant’s son from the city, who had passed through our little town on the way to the sea and fallen in love with my auburn-haired second sister. Then Alyra, too, bade goodbye and left our home. There remained now only Father and I.

Five years after Bryony had ridden into the woods to the castle of a Beast, Father fell ill. He worsened rapidly, and I despaired for his life. It was then, in that desperate hour, that my youngest sister returned.

She was older, and more of a woman than she had been when she left us. Her ebony hair had grown past her waist, and was bound up like a lady’s. Her raiment was rich, richer even than anything we had known in the city – sea-green velvet embroidered with tiny seed pearls. She wore a forest-green cloak trimmed with fur, white as the pure snow after its first fall, and around her throat hung a delicate string of pearls that must have cost more than the entirety of our village property. Her eyes were darker, the color of a stormy sea now and not a calm, but in them still danced the same light.

She appeared at the door in the middle of the day, after I had taken my solitary lunch to the music of Father’s anguished coughs. She stood there, looking more worried than I had ever seen her in the past.

"Where is Father?" she whispered. I led her into the sickroom, dark and damp, and Father on the bed coughing as if his life were ebbing with each cough. Which it was. She knelt beside his bedside and grasped his cold hand and whispered words of comfort.

His strength had begun to return within the hour.

Bryony lingered with us for a week’s time, before leaving once more. "He needs me," she murmured to me as we sat together one evening before her departure. She spoke not of Father, but of the monstrous creature that had imprisoned her. I argued fiercely, saying that Father needed her more desperately, but she would not be swayed.

She left the next morning.

Yet even though she had gone, Father recovered his health once more. Not very long afterwards, I was asked to wed by a village lad. Though I harbored no love for him, I saw nothing that I might do. So I gave my consented. We were married the next month.

Not a week after my own marriage, Father showed up at the door of my husband’s home, claiming with wild-eyed happiness that Bryony had returned. She had married, he said. Her Beast had been no Beast at all, but a Prince as in the fairy-tales, and her ending was to be happily ever after. I turned away from my father then, and I did not visit my sister when she came to visit him.

I heard little of my sister after that, but what I heard were the rumors of a shining castle in the heart of the wood where she dwelt with her Prince-of-Disguise. She came to be regarded as a legend in our village, and some forgot that Bryony had existed at all outside of myth. All this, while I slaved away at an ordinary life, raising children and keeping house and watching as my hair whitened. Over time, I grew to respect the man with whom I was joined in marriage, and – much later – love grew between us. Ours was no fairy-tale existence. Instead it was riddled with quarrel, strife, the grief of losing a child, and the pain of everyday existence.

Yet now, as I think back to the days in which my sister dwelt at home, I feel no remorse for what she or I did. It was her lot to become the fairy-tale princess. I never held any claim to such a position. I must consider myself lucky now to be wedded at all, whether or not it is as a dazzling mythological princess.

At night, as I sleep off the cares of the day, I will dream often of a sparkling white castle at the heart of a dense woodland. The princess who lives inside it beckons to me, as does her Prince, and I start to go toward them. But as I do, my hands are grasped and held by those of my children, and I look down and can go no further.

For I have made this life with the work of my hands, and I cannot leave it.

This is my place.