#visible crip

Our new guest cries. There are groans in it. Grunts and tearing noises, frustrated-strange. The sound makes my teeth ache, but I remember by brother crying about devils, the fear on Linden’s face and my stepmother’s disgust, and I lift my chin.

I open the door.

The shutters are down. No, not that. The windows are blacked out, the room thick with dark.

Kriegnuerose, my stepmother said. Something shameful, best kept out of the way.  

If I squint, there is a shape on the bed. I hear creaks and rustling from the other side of the door, and I imagine this room swallowing her up, with a whole house moving blithely around her.

I scowl. Ziska will see to her, my stepmother said. Well. As she wishes. I’ll see to light, and common courtesy.

I trace my hand along the wall, searching for the gaslight. I twist. Strike the match. Blue and orange light flares.  

The girl on the bed groans.       

“Hello,” I manage, “What’s your name?” 

She sits, after a fashion. Pillows bolster her, and one hand is tied to the bed. My stepmother’s work? She looks younger than me, but not by much, her face pinched and ashen where it isn’t flushed from tears. Her head lolls.    

It’s an easy cruelty to undo, my fingers working the knots and chafing her wrist as it slides free. Her hand shakes, a constant mess of twitches that travel up her arms, over her face. Her hair is snarled tighter than the rope.

“Do you have a name?” Nothing. “What do I call you?”

A skinny leg jerks beneath the coverlet. Her throat works, tongue flicking over chapped lips. Sounds. Not words.

“My name is Ziska,” I say at last. The gaslight stains everything a warm, rose yellow. The gossips said there were roses in her hair. 

“Rose,” I say, shaking my head as I let the strangeness in all of this ease under my skin. The English word sits oddly in my mouth. “I think I should call you that.” 

She pulls her hand away. One sharp, solid, determined movement that pushes me back, nerves spilling up and out of my throat in laughter.

As I watch, the princess stares at her own, palsied hand, and then she meets my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” I say. “I’ll try to help you here.”

The next few days are a blur of headaches and overturned soup. I pry the blackout boards from the windows, splinters and flecks of paint sticking fast under my nails.   

Rose fights. She fights to sit. She fights to speak, sounds coming thicker and stronger until I can imagine words locked up in her throat, stuck there fully formed.

I brush her hair and help her eat. After a week, she lets me take her hands in mine.

“What happened to you?” I ask, though I know she can’t answer. It’s the same question my brother has for me every night.

“How did you end up in an air raid shelter? You can’t have slept. No one could.”

Rose looks at me. She is getting better at that. The struggle to hold her head can be seen in every straining muscle in her neck and jaw, but her eyes are clear.

I smile. “Everyone says my brother woke you with a kiss.”

Rose’s expression darkens. Her head drops forward.

“Rose?”

She groans. It makes me wince. The sound and my stupidity mixing together as I imagine what it might be like, waking up in the dark to the pressure of lips on mine, and someone like my brother staring avidly while splinters press into—no.

No, I cannot. My mind skitters away from the images. Rose’s hands fist inside my own.

 “I’m sorry,” I say, “I talk too much. Especially when you can’t answer back.”

“…Words!”

Rose’s voice is hoarse and slurred, dark eyes clenched shut with the effort of turning sound into shape, but I hear her. I wait.

“All—your words—are wrong.”

She falls back onto the bed, hands sliding from mine, drenched in sweat.

“You just used some of them well enough,” I manage. “Our words, I mean.”

She opens her eyes, and I catch a tiny smile.

“Fairy gift,” she whispers. “Tell you—m-more, if you know the year.”

“1921,” I say, “The year. It’s 1921.”

Her face crumples, and she is crying again. There are words in it. 

I sit at the foot of her bed, on the covers I stitched myself, and listen as she weeps over a mother, cat, and a world. She curses, long and loud. By storms and poisons, blood and spite.

 “...Never even saw a spindle,” she says.

I stand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, “But I have things to—”

“—Do you want to?”

I pause. “Excuse me?” 

“Do you want to know the story?” she asks. Each word is heavily spaced. Distinct. “Someone — probably should.”      

“Is she well, Ziska?” My brother snatches at my hands as I set his wine glass down at dinner. His eyes are wide and rain-wash grey, and his grip presses splinters deeper into my skin. “Is my lady well?” 

My fingers feel like they've been jointed with hot wire. I gasp, spilled wine sharp at the back of my throat. 

She spoke today. That is what he wants to hear.

The words don't come out.

“She’s not—” I swallow. “Some things take a long time, I think.” 

The prince scowls. “I want to see her,” he says. “I found her, remember.  I want—”

“—She’s been ill!” 

My breath comes fast as I remember the fear on Rose’s unsteady face.

“Very, very ill,” I say, “So I really don’t—”

“—You’re hurting Ziska, Liebling.”

My stepmother rises from her place at table. She is smiling, but my brother drops my hands immediately, mumbling apologies. 

When I turn to thank her, she is staring at my hands. 

 “I asked you to keep her quiet, Ziska,” she says. 

“Well?” My voice is a harsh surprise. “You expect her to live in the dark?”

Silence. 

“I expect,” my stepmother says, “That you will do as I say.”  

My brother flinches when she glares at him.  “There are too many strays in this house,” she says. “Your father’s indulgence was bad enough, and now you bring home a cripple.” 

“She was asleep,” he says, as if that explains everything. “Asleep, and waiting for me.”

 “Your stepmother,” Rose says as she manages a slow, dragging circuit around the room, “She is a witch, no?”

“No!” 

I am perched on the end of her bed, household accounts in hand, and smudge my way through a month’s worth of reckoning as I stare at her.  

The room is littered with the prince’s gifts. Rose runs an obstacle course of lace and pearls as she re-learns how to walk. She treats each present with amused disdain, though she does wear an old yellow muslin of mine that I let out to fit. 

I don’t know why this makes me happy, but many odd things do now, as if my old dread transformed into something bright and fine while Rose shares more of her magic, nonsensical self. 

“We don’t have witches,” I say.  

Rose often comes out with things like this. Stories of witches and a world one century dead. Her words come clearer as the weeks pass. She still shakes, new bruises growing with every fall, but her smile is a wicked flash of crooked teeth, warming the whole room.  

 “All the witches in the world died in the last century, then?” she demands, sitting next to me and wincing as I brace her.

 “I think not,” she mutters. “Why else does she keep me locked up in here? Your stepmother is a witch. Your brother is a beast.”

 I blush. “I…I don’t know,” I say, “But it’s probably manners. Not witchcraft.”

“A manner of witchcraft?”

“No, just manners.” I shake my head. “You were hysterical, and you’re still—”

“—Altered?” She drawls the word, lip curling, splaying her hands wide and holding them up, watching them twitch until she cannot hold the posture.

I swallow. “People…talk. About princes carrying home pretty girls.”

Rose tilts her head, letting her hands curl into quiet fists in her lap. “You think I’m pretty.” 

“Well,” I say, laughing. “Yes. You are.”  

Rose smirks. “And if I said that eleven fairies each gave a year of their lives to make me so?”  

“I’d say you were full of rubbish,” I say, prompt. “And… also very pretty.” 

She is still smirking. I let my hands cover my face. They are nearly healed, only a little swollen around the nails.  

“Look here,” I say through my fingers, “If my stepmother was a witch, what does that make me? Aschenputtel?”

“Who?” 

“You don’t know the story?” 

The smirk settles into a smile, and she leans her head on my shoulder. Two strays together. 

“Well, then,” I say, letting story cadences lift my voice into something serious and strong, and marvelling at the soft, contented look on Rose’s face. 

“There was once a man who died. He had a daughter. And a second wife.”

“I hear you, you know.” 

My brother likes to wait for me outside Rose’s door. Now, he grips my shoulders.  

“I hear you talking,” he says. “Talking and laughing. Don’t tell me she’s sick, Ziska.”

I swallow. There is a lost look on his face that I do not understand, but his hold is too tight, and Rose is terrified of him. “Your mother wants me to—”

“—My mother,” he says, “Does not get everything she wants. If she did, you’d have been on the streets before I was born.” 

I stare at him. We are not close, but he has never been cruel.   

He shakes his head.  “Have you told her anything about me?” he asks,

“Have you given her my gifts?” 

A pause. Another shake. “Or,” he whispers,

“Are you keeping them for yourself?” 

“No! No, she has them.” I’m babbling. He doesn’t seem to notice, his eyes locked on the door behind me instead of my face.

“She’s mine, you understand,” he says, and it comes out oddly distracted. “I found her.” 

Found her. I twist, managing to break his hold, though all I do with this new freedom is press myself flat against the door. 

“What, Ziska?” He’s looking at me now, lower lip caught between his teeth.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” 

“She’s not a doll,” I whisper. “She’s scared. And she’s hurt. And—”

And my brother slaps me so hard my lip splits on my teeth.

“There is something wrong with you,” I mumble. Madness. But my mouth is full of blood, and all I can hear is Rose’s angry mutter that my stepmother is a witch and my brother, faced with something he wants and locked door between them, is a beast. 

He slaps me again. And there is a new voice, loud and slurred and angry.

“My name,” says the princess on the other side of the door, “Is Rose. Leave my friend alone.”

The prince pushes me aside, and presses against the door. “My lady,” he says, breathing hard. “What a lovely voice you have.” 

 “Liar.” Rose is laughing. A hard, raucous thing that distorts her speech even more than usual. “You locked me up, prince. And then you ran from me.” 

“I…” he blushes. “I was overcome.” 

“Should I be flattered?” 

I look away from him, and swallow a scream that tastes of blood and spit.

“Come down for dinner,” my brother says.

“Never.” 

The prince sighs. “What if,” he asks, one hand now pressed to Rose’s door, “I lock Ziska up in her rooms until you do? It feels only fair.”  

The prince and his princess had their dinner. I’ve heard that much, from gossip by my doorway. There is a gap by the floor. The noise of the house curls in like steam. I strain for it. The clock in the hallway strikes midnight. 

I’m crying. Hot, small sobs that I wish were loud enough to scare anyone who heard them. 

Bastards, even royal ones, grow up expecting hurt. But it was always an inchoate thing, before. A mix of small pinches and slights, the feeling that my place was not solid, my future unset. 

Now, I keep seeing my brother pressed against Rose’s door, the changes in her face at the thought of an unwanted kiss. I feel the bruises left on my upper arms; the pulsing ache of my missing tooth every time I breathe or swallow.

A key turns in the lock. As I swallow, tears turning cold on my face.  

“Well,” says Rose, breathing heavily, “This makes a change.”  

The dull, brass key to my room falls from her fingers. She is leaning on one of my brother’s large hunting rifles, her stance lopsided under the weight of a pack. 

“Don’t worry,” she adds, shifting the gun. “This isn’t loaded. I didn’t know how.” 

“I…” I have to blink. Hard. “What are you doing?” 

Rose sighs. “Rescuing you,” she says. “I thought that was obvious.” 

“It’s—”

 “—Your stepmother,” Rose says, moving into the room and dropping the pack at my feet with a relieved groan, “Really does not like you. Nor me. This is, she told me, the perfect time to get rid of us both. And she is a witch, so we must do as she says.” 

“Rose, stop.” 

She pauses, scowling at me. 

“My stepmother is not a witch,” I manage. “And my brother—”

“—A witch, or a very clever woman. It hardly matters,” Rose says, reaching out to touch my bruised jaw. “She drugged her son. Your servants are all...elsewhere. She wants me gone, and we have his gifts to sell. When he wakes, she will tell him a story.” 

She grins. “I’m rescuing you now, sweet,” she says, “But I need some help. And we would miss each other.”

 “You seem very confident of that,” I say, surprised at the laughter in my own voice.

Rose takes my hands in hers. She turns the left one over, and presses a kiss to my palm, her hair falling forward over her face. It is hard to breathe.

“An uncanny ability to read people,” she says, words thick. “Along with a gift for languages. And…prettiness.” 

 I can feel her smirk against my wrist, and I shudder. 

“More fairy gifts?”

 “Of course.”

“I still don’t believe you,” I say. “But I want—”

“—What do you want, Ziska?”

The question feels bigger than the two of us. I feel caught and cradled by Rose’s words and the idea of a world outside my brother’s house. 

“This was my place,” I say, and I’m crying again, sore and small. “It wasn’t much, but it was mine. Years of work, and now you and stepmother expect—”

“—She expects,” Rose says, “I…ask.” 

I close my eyes. 

“I’ll go with you,” I say. “Just let me find my coat.”

 Many years and borders later, Rose’s rifle sold for a proper walking stick and our keys kept safely by our wrought iron door, I imagine the story my stepmother told the prince when he woke.

I do not think it ended as happily as us.