A Mother’s Love

You’ve heard the tragic tale of Tantalus, yes? How he tried to feed his own children to the gods, and they punished him with wrathful retribution for his heinous depravity?

He’s still down in the Underworld to this day, thirsting but never drinking; starving but never eating. Serves him right. Any parent that serves up their own children for a meal—or any children for that matter—deserves what’s coming to them. His punishment fit his crime, no question about it. But we’re not talking about old Tantalus. We’re talking about me.

You’ve heard the stories about me, no doubt. The dark tales told in hushed whispers around flickering campfires and in dimly lit taverns. The ghastly rumors spread like wildfire and no one ever stopped to ask if they were even true. They are not. But it is so much easier to believe in the rumored monstrosities of others than to dwell upon the atrocities of one’s own life.

I am not writing about such things. I am writing a different story altogether. It is not the story you grew up hearing. That story contains fragments of truth, but it is not the whole truth. It is skewed and shaded to show another in a more favorable light. After all, history is written by the victors, so they say.

And I was many things in life, but a victor was not one of them. In your storybooks, I was the villain. No matter. I am writing to set the record straight. This is my story.

I wasn’t her mother. I would never be her mother. She was fond of reminding me of that, often with outbursts of emotion and tears. That cold word-knife cut deep and it hurt me. But I suppose I can understand. She was a child who lost her own mother at a young age. The king married me soon after his wife’s death, for the child to have a mother. But she never saw it that way. She didn’t understand why her father would ever choose to remarry—much less marry me.

It didn’t matter to her that I was the one who held her as a squalling infant, I was the one who rocked her at night and told her stories of magic and myth until she finally fell asleep. She really was a beautiful child. Asleep, she seemed perfect, almost doll-like. But awake… she was a nightmare. I tried to raise her as best I could, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I loved a child who wouldn’t love me back. I wasn’t her mother. I would never be her mother.

I wasn’t of noble birth; I didn’t have any political connections. Why would the king seek my hand in courtship and then in marriage? I was beautiful, perhaps that was what initially drew the king’s eye to me. But beauty alone does not make a queen. At least, not a competent one.

My beauty may have caught his attention, but my mind was what captured the king’s heart. I’ve always been good with numbers and keeping records. Ever since I was a child, I helped my parents with bookkeeping for their shop. They passed away a few years before the king married me and I became queen. Perhaps that was for the best. They never had to see the people turn against me. They never had to see me shoulder the weight of a dying country on my back when the king passed away from failing health.

It was his own fault, really. Some have said in hindsight that I poisoned him, but I never did. Years of eating fatty meats and drinking mead without a proper exercise regimen seemed to be what did him in. Regardless, the king was dead, and he left me with the keys to the kingdom. If only the kingdom wasn’t rot gilded with gold. The princess was too young to rule; the duties of leadership now fell solely to me, until the princess turned eighteen and was deemed old enough to become queen.

The kingdom was in a state of financial disrepair and mismanagement that was frankly embarrassing. I turned things around. I brought our country back from the brink of financial ruin and starvation. Perhaps that was when the rumors started. The nobles and the commoners knew the state of affairs in the kingdom. They knew we had been headed toward disaster. So, when I became involved and the situation began to improve, the whispers trickled down from one end of the country to the other. I was a witch.

In their minds, the only way I could have possibly turned the country away from the fate that awaited it was that I practiced witchcraft. Really, that alone should have been enough to warn me of what fate awaited me. I should have quietly handed back the crown and let the nobles use the young princess as a puppet figurehead. I should have left them to their own devices, whether it be to fly or fall.

But I loved the princess and I loved the people who lived in my country. Perhaps that was my fatal flaw. I thought I could save them all. So, I let the rumors persist. What did I care if they thought I practiced witchcraft? Strangely enough, it wasn’t against the law in my queendom to practice witchcraft. Such folk were merely given a wide and cautious berth by polite society. My stepdaughter began to believe the rumors, too, and she stayed as far from me as possible. Just another reason for her to avoid me.

Years passed. I remained the sole leader of a country brought back from certain death and ruin, but it was a thankless position. My leadership went unappreciated and unnoticed by the common people. They only saw me as the cruel witch who raised taxes after a bountiful harvest. They forgot that I only did so to store up a portion of the crop in granaries, preparing for the years of low-crop yield. They did not love me. I wasn’t their queen. I would never be their queen.

They loved the princess. The hearts of the people belonged to her and they always had. As a child, she was fair, but as the years passed, she grew into a beautiful young woman. The people adored her and lavished her with praise and affection, all the while whispering behind my back that I consulted with the occult and worked my strange, arcane magics to stay in power.

And now it sounds like I was bitter because the people loved her and not me. I was not. Despite all of the whispers, I still loved the people, and I still loved the girl who would never see me as her mother. I tried to teach her what it meant to be a good queen and a competent leader. She would need such advice when she became the leader of an entire country full of people with hopes and dreams. But she would not listen.

She was a vain thing. Pretty, but vain. She would stare for hours and hours at her reflection in her looking-glass, telling herself over and over and over again that she was the fairest in all the land. You heard that the mirror was mine and that it was magic? I heard that one, too. It wasn’t. It was just an ordinary looking-glass. A lie told, no doubt, to make her look better than she was, and myself worse than I was. I’d wager that you also heard I was the one wrapped up in delusions of grandeur and beauty as well. Ironic, how the truth is spun together with lies.

She was sixteen, then, and teenagers can be full of themselves. I tried to dismiss her actions as such, even if such conduct was unbecoming of a queen. But I began to see that there was no changing her. She refused to grow, to become learned in finances and education. She thought her beauty was all she needed, and she wore it around her like armor.

What did she care if she couldn’t read a sentence to save her life, or balance an account book with basic, rudimentary math skills? She was beautiful, and people would love her. Even as she brought the country to its knees, they would love her for it.

I saw what would happen. You don’t need to be a practitioner of the arcane arts to see that. She would bring the country to ruin and disaster, just as her father had before her. The country I had worked so hard to get back on its feet would be leveled just as quickly once the princess ascended to her throne. I couldn’t let that happen.

I searched the laws of the land, hoping to find some way to keep her from ascending to the throne on her eighteenth birthday. I had to do it secretly, of course, because the nobles and the common people all believed me to be a cruel-hearted witch, keeping their sweet, precious princess in her clutches. What would they do if they found out I was trying to have her forcibly removed from her position of leadership? I should have considered what would happen if the child found out I was searching for such things.

The storybooks say I tried to have her killed by a huntsman in the forest one day, and I instructed him to cut out her heart so I could eat it and gain immortality and perpetual beauty. Ridiculous. But that sounds a whole lot more compelling and generates much more sympathy for the girl than the truth—which is that she often ran away from the castle and her responsibilities.

She was more inclined to spend her days gallivanting through the forest with the woodland creatures and listening to them tell her how wonderful she was, or something preposterous like that. Unfortunately for her, woodland creatures aren’t able to communicate with people in the real world and are more inclined to see them as a wonderful meal than as simply wonderful.

I don’t know how many times I had to send huntsmen to go out and save her from being eaten by the very woodland creatures she loved. Looking back on it, I probably should have let her pay the price for her own foolishness. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and grief, and the story you grew up hearing would likely have never been told.

I loved my stepdaughter. I couldn’t let her be eaten by wild animals, but I also couldn’t let her ascend to the throne. I sound monstrous for even writing it, and I know that in the eyes of the law, I have just condemned myself, but I wish that I had the strength to do what was necessary.

That’s the cold, hard truth. I wished I had the strength to have the girl killed. The weight of the crown was on my head and the burden of leadership was on my back. What would happen if this vain, foolish, empty-headed child became queen?

But I didn’t have such strength. Or perhaps I had the strength not to do so, but at the time, I didn’t think of such things. I hadn’t found a way to remove her from the line of kings and queens. Short of rewriting the laws of the land, she would become queen on her eighteenth birthday, whether I liked it or not. Since I couldn’t bring myself to have her killed, there was really only one option left to me.

I would stay by her side, no matter what happened throughout the events of her reign. If she would listen to my advice, perhaps she’d be a good and noble queen. Perhaps she wouldn’t bring the land to devastating ruin. Perhaps there’d be a way to help her grow into being worthy of the praise and affection the people lavished on her.

I was hopeful and optimistic. But such thoughts were more foolish and fanciful than the story you grew up hearing. Such thoughts were naïve of me to think. I should have known that could never happen. To be hopeful is to be naïve. And that is a dangerous thing to be.

I suppose you heard that I took an apple and dipped it in a cauldron full of a dark and bitter brew before giving it to the child to eat. With just one bite, she fell into a deep sleep from which she should never have arisen. Again, such a thing would be a more condemning twist, but far less factual.

The truth is far stranger and far darker. On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she baked an apple pie and brought it to my chambers. As I took the apple pie from my stepdaughter, she greeted me with more warmth than she’d shown me in any of the past eighteen years. That alone should have been enough to make me suspicious. I wasn’t her mother. I would never be her mother.

The child said the apple pie was a gesture of goodwill and atonement for all the years that she’d treated me rather horribly. She said she wanted my forgiveness and reconciliation between us. She realized she was not ready to wear the crown and felt the burden of leadership weighing her down. She wanted me to instruct her. She was finally willing to learn. And, being foolishly, naively optimistic, and desperate for the love that the child refused me for so long, I accepted her apology.

It wasn’t an apology. I should have known something was awry. They say poison is a woman’s weapon. Easier and less messy than other instruments of murder. Was it hemlock found in the dark parts of the forest, similar to the poison that old Socrates took? Or was it something else, some sort of venom that the child had bought? To this day, I don’t know the sort of poison with which my stepdaughter laced that apple pie.

All I know is that it brought death with the very first bite. I tasted the dark bitterness on my tongue, the cold tendrils of disease reaching toward my heart. The child watched and smiled as I fell to the floor. That was the last thing I saw on this earth, the last terrible sight before my vision darkened and my spirit fled my body cold: My stepdaughter smiling as she watched me die. I heard her whispering words, laced with cold cruelty, the last things I’d ever hear: You thought you could keep me from my birthright? The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

My spirit crossed the River of Death, led by the Ferryman with hands of bone, into the depths of the Underworld. Time held no meaning for me and I drifted through fields of amber grain forever. I heard the rest of the story later, of course, from other spirits who crossed to the other side sometime after my death. Other souls who had lived in the queendom my stepdaughter inherited by matricide.

They told me of the story she spun, a story similar to the one which you grew up hearing. She told the people that I had tried murdering her, and it was only through her great courage and bravery that she was able to outwit the wicked witch who sought her life. Such a tale condemned me in the eyes of the people and cemented her in their hearts as their dearly loved queen.

Instead of valuing kindness and compassion, she was cold and calculated. Her enemies fell before her and her queendom grew. All the while she wore a mask, hiding behind her beauty. They all fell for it, just as surely as I had.

Perhaps she had been listening to my instruction, all those years. She simply took it differently than I had intended. She was far cleverer than I gave her credit. I thought she was simply a vain, empty-headed child. Was that what she wanted me to see? How often had I told her that beauty alone does not make a queen?

All this time, I’ve waited in the fields of amber grain down in the Underworld. Old Tantalus is somewhere down here, desperately wishing that he could have just one bite of the apple hanging over his head, just out of reach. And me? I’m wishing that I had never taken a bite of that apple pie. Not because I wouldn’t have died, but because I wasn’t able to explain myself to my stepdaughter.

She thought I was a threat to her claim to the throne and so she acted preemptively to remove that threat. That’s why she killed me, I’m sure. She must have been so frightened of me to hide behind her mask. She didn’t know that I had given up such thoughts of forcing her abdication long ago. She didn’t know that I fully intended to stay by her side, to help her become a good queen, beloved by her people. She thought I wanted her crown, but I didn’t. All I really wanted was her love.

For all of it, I could forgive her. All the years of animosity and hateful words thrown in my face, even for poisoning me and murdering me. I could forgive her. I did forgive her. Even if she told me otherwise, I was her mother. I loved her. I will always love her.

What does it matter to me if I am remembered as a villain in your storybooks? It isn’t the truth. I don’t care what anyone else thinks of me. If they remember me as a monster or as a horrible witch, so be it. There’s only one person I want to know the truth.

I haven’t seen my stepdaughter arrive yet, but I know she eventually will. When she does, I’ll finally have a chance to explain myself to her, to tell her that I’ve forgiven her and that I love her. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll finally tell me the same.

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