He and his eleven brothers were changed into swans via their vituperative stepmother, who had no aim of raising the twelve sons of her husband’s former spouse (whose pallid, mortified face stared glassily from portrait after portrait; whose unending pregnancies had dispatched her before her fortieth birthday). Twelve brawling, conceited boys; twelve fragile and rapacious egos; twelve adolescences—all provided to the brand new queen as ordinary elements of her activity. can we blame her? can we, absolutely?
She became the lads into swans, and commanded them to fly away.
trouble solved.
She spared the 13th infant, the youngest, because she changed into a woman, although the stepmother’s fantasies approximately shared confidences and daylong buying trips evaporated quick enough. Why, in spite of everything, mighta female be some thing however surly and petulant toward the woman who’d became her brothers into birds? And so—after a certain affected person lenience closer to sulking silences, after a number of ball gowns purchased but by no means worn—the queen gave up. The princess lived in the castle like an impoverished relative, fed and housed, tolerated but now not loved.
The twelve swan-princes lived on a rock a ways out at sea, and have been permitted handiest an annual, daylong return to their country, a visit that became each eagerly anticipated and awkward for the king and his consort. It changed intodifficult to exult in a day spent amongst twelve formerly stalwart and valiant sons who may want to only, at some stage inthat unmarried every year interlude, honk and preen and percent at mites as they flapped around in the castle courtyard. The king did his satisfactory at pretending to be satisfied to peer them. The queen was constantly struck via one in all her migraines.
Years surpassed. and then… At long remaining…
On one of the swan-princes’ every year furloughs, their little sister broke the spell, having learned from a beggar femaleshe met at the same time as picking berries in the woodland that the handiest recognised treatment for the swan transformation curse become coats product of nettles.
but. The lady become compelled to knit the coats in mystery, because they needed (or so the beggar female told her) now not most effective to be product of nettles, however of nettles accumulated from graveyards, after darkish. If the princess became caught amassing nettles from amongst tombstones, past nighttime, her stepmother would genuinely have accused her of witchcraft, and had her burned along with the rest of the garbage. The female, no fool, knew she couldn’t expect her father, who by way of then harbored a secret desire (which he acknowledged no longer even to himself) to be free of all his children.
The princess crept nightly into nearby graveyards to acquire nettles, and spent her days weaving them into coats. It was, as it grew to become out, a blessing that nobody inside the citadel paid a great deal attention to her.
She had nearly finished the twelve coats when the local archbishop (who become now not requested why he himself occurred to be in a graveyard so late at night time) noticed her selecting nettles, and turned her in. The queen felt confirmed in her suspicions (this being the female who shared no longer a single virginal secret, who claimed wholeindifference to shoes super sufficient to be proven in museums). The king, unsurprisingly, acceded, hoping he’d be seen as strong and unsentimental, a real king, a king so dedicated to protecting his people from the darker forces that he’d comply with the execution of his personal daughter, if it saved his topics safe, free of curses, unafraid of demonic differences.
just because the princess became about to be burned on the stake, however, the swan-brothers descended from the smoky sky, and their sister threw the coats onto them. all of sudden, with a noisy crackling sound, amid a flurry of glowingwind, twelve studly younger guys, bare under their nettle coats, stood in the courtyard, with only a few stray white feathers wafting around them.
honestly…
…there had been 11 fully intact princes and one, the 12th, restored keep for a unmarried detail—his right arm remained a swan’s wing, due to the fact his sister, interrupted at her paintings, had needed to go away one coat with a lacking sleeve.
It seemed a small-enough fee to pay.
11 of the younger men soon married, had children, joined agencies, gave events that thrilled absolutely everyone, properdown to the mice in the walls. Their thwarted stepmother, so raucously outnumbered, so unmotherly, retreated to a convent, which stimulated the king to fabricate reminiscences of abiding loyalty to his transfigured sons and helplessness earlier than his harridan of a spouse, a version the lads were more than willing to trust.
quit of story. “thankfully ever after” fell on absolutely everyone like a guillotine’s blade.
almost all and sundry.
It became hard for the twelfth brother, the swan-winged one. His father, his uncles and aunts, the numerous lords and women, have been now not thrilled by the reminder of their brush with such sinister elements, or their unskeptical willingness to execute the princess as she worked to save her siblings.
The king’s consort made jokes about the swan-winged prince, which his 11 flawlessly formed brothers took up with no trouble, insisting they have been best intended in amusing. The younger nieces and nephews, children of the elevenbrothers, concealed on every occasion the 12th son entered a room, and giggled from in the back of the chaises and tapestries. His brothers’ other halves asked time and again that he do his first-rate to stay calm at dinner (he become at risk of gesticulating with the wing at the same time as telling a funny story, and had once flicked a whole haunch of venison in opposition to the opposite wall).
The palace cats tended to snarl and slink away on every occasion he came close to.
sooner or later he packed a few matters and went out into the world. the sector, however, proved no simpler for him than the palace have been. He ought to handiest get the maximum menial of jobs. He had no marketable skills (princes don’t), and just one working hand. on occasion a girl grew fascinated, but it constantly turned out that she turned into in briefdrawn to a few Leda fable or, worse, was hoping her love may want to convey him again his arm. nothing ever lasted. The wing turned into awkward on the subway, not possible in cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And until it become washed each day, feather through feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a linty, dispiriting gray.
He lived with his wing as another man would possibly live with a dog adopted from the pound: candy-tempered, howeverneurotic and untrainable. He cherished his wing, helplessly. He also determined it exasperating, lovable, hectic, wearying, heartbreaking. It embarrassed him, not only due to the fact he didn’t control to preserve it cleanser, or because getting thru doorways and turnstiles by no means got much less awkward, but because he didn't insist on it as an asset. Which wasn’t all that difficult to assume. He ought to see himself selling himself as a compelling metamorphosis, a younger god, proud to the point of horny arrogance of his anatomical deviation: 90 percentage thriving muscled guy-flesh and ten percentage wonderful blindingly white angel wing.
baby, these feathers are going to tickle you midway to heaven, and this man-component goes to take you the rest of the manner.
in which, he asked himself, became that version of him? What dearth of nerve rendered him, as 12 months followed year, an increasing number of paunchy and slack-shouldered, a strolling apology? Why was it beyond his capacities to get returned into shape, to cop an mind-set, to stroll insouciantly into golf equipment in a black lizardskin match with one sleeve reduce off?
Yeah, right, sweetheart, it’s a wing, I’m component angel, however accept as true with me, the relaxation is natural devil.
He couldn’t appear to manage that. He might as nicely have attempted to run a 3-minute mile, or become a virtuoso on the violin.
He’s nevertheless round. He will pay his lease one way or every other. he is taking his love where he can discover it. In late middle age he’s grown ironic, and pleased in a toughened, visible-it-all way. He’s come to be possessed of a world-weary wit. He’s found out he can both descend into bitterness or end up a wised-up holy fool. It’s higher, it’s much lessmortifying, to be the fellow who knows that the joke’s on him, and is the primary to chortle when the punch line lands.
most of his brothers back on the palace are on their second or third better halves. Their kids, having been cosseted and catered to all their lives, may be hard. The princes spend their days knocking golden balls into silver cups, or skewering moths with their swords. At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats carry out.
The twelfth brother may be determined, maximum nights, in one of the bars at the town’s outer edges, those that cater to people who were only partially cured in their curses, or no longer cured at all. There’s the 3-hundred-12 months-antiquefemale who wasn’t unique enough whilst she spoke to the magic fish, and discovered herself crying, “No, wait, I supposedalive and young forever,” right into a empty sea. There’s the crownletted frog who can’t seem to truely love any of the girlswilling to kiss him, and damage the spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the place of the comatose princess he’s meant to revive with a kiss, and has recently been much less devoted to searching mountain and glen, greater vulnerable to bar-crawling, given to long stories approximately the lady who got away.
In such bars, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.
His life, he tells himself, is not the worst of all viable lives. perhaps that’s sufficient. maybe that’s what there's to hope for—that it merely received’t get any worse.
some nights, when he’s stumbled home smashed (there are numerous such nights), negotiated the five flights as much ashis condo, turned on the tv, and passed out on the sofa, he awakes, hours later, as the first mild grays the slats of the venetian blinds, with only his hangover for employer, to find that he’s curled his wing over his chest and belly; or as an alternative (he knows this to be impossible, and yet…) that the wing has curled itself, via its personal volition, over him, both blanket and accomplice, his devoted resident alien, each bit as imploring and ardent and inconvenient as that mutt from the pound would had been. His dreadful acquainted. His burden, his comrade.
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