Once upon a time there was a prince about whom, as a child, a prophecy was told: that though he was his father’s only son and heir, he would never be king. He was handsome, tall, skilled with a sword and on horseback and in the ways of learned men, yet because of the prophecy his father the king’s mind was troubled against him. But you do not want to hear about the prince, though he is a part of this story. You want to hear about the girl who was also a house.
The girl who was also a house came to the king’s town one day, unknown as happenstance. Her name was Orra, and she began making her living selling fruit. The king’s son saw her on a ride through town and was taken with her. He stopped by her fruit stall often. It wasn’t that he was in love with her, exactly, which both he and Orra knew. Rather there was something in her that drew him.
One day she showed him what it was. They were in a quiet alley sharing whispers and touches and other such nothings, and she pulled his hand to touch her mouth. Just that fast he found himself standing in a strange hall, the world a dim roar behind him, nothing ahead but motionless dark. He walked and came upon a door, standing old and wooden in the gloom. He opened it a crack, and behind it was the light from a merry fire dancing in a hearth, and the gleam of a well-polished floor, and the savory smell of a meal that has been stewing in a pot for a good long time. “Come back!” said Orra, and the prince turned and walked back the way he came and found himself standing once again in the alley with her, holding her hands.
“What was that?” he said, and she said, “It’s my house. I’m building it. It’s not done yet, but I’ll show you some more next time.”
“But how did you make it all appear?”
She looked at him as though he’d asked how she breathed, or slept, or ate. “I just let you into myself,” she said, and the prince saw that if he questioned her any further, he would make himself strange to her. Where she came from, he thought—she did speak with an accent—such things might be common, such abilities, and he shuddered from top to toe, and hurried away thinking of foreigners and witchcraft and sorcery. But that night when his head had cooled, he remembered how clean and shining the floor had been, how bright and joyous the fire, and especially how good the cooking food had smelled. “Surely,” he said to himself, “it was nothing but an illusion—a pretty one! Really, it was a fine trick! I must get her to show me how it works.”
Next time the prince visited her, Orra let him come all the way into the house. The time after she let him taste the stew that bubbled in a silver cauldron over the fire, the leaping flickering fire set in a red sand-stone hearth on the mantel of which little figurines of cats curled and yawned, their black-glazed forms gleaming in the firelight and seeming almost to breathe. Sea-colored curtains embroidered with flowers fell gently over the windows, and a grand piano stood majestic in the corner with sheaves of music left half-written on the stand. The prince plunked a few keys, but could not play worth a lick, and though the house stood quiet and empty a soft laughter seemed to run through it, humming under the carpets and making the golden lamps in every corner glow brighter.
Soon the prince was causing consternation through the castle with the frequency of his trips into town. To avoid being caught, he arranged a job for Orra working in the castle kitchens. This made it easier for him to visit her at night, but soon enough new rumors formed of the crown prince’s affair with a common scullery maid. His father called him to the throne room.
“Son, if you’re going to dally with women,” he said, “better not sneak around behind my back, but do it openly. If there’s a girl you like, take her and make her your concubine! She can’t say no, it’s a fine life for her, and you won’t hurt your reputation the way you’re doing now.”
So the prince went to Orra and took her hands in his. “I love you!” he said. “Come live with me and be my girl, Father allows it. I’ll give you rubies and satin and the best of everything.”
“I don’t need those things,” said Orra, “I only need you.” She was brought into the concubine quarters and given her own small room. Her life had become much more comfortable than before. The concubines lounged all day gossiping with each other and braiding their hair, painting their eyes, perfuming their bodies and otherwise making themselves beautiful for the prince. Orra didn’t braid, paint, or perfume, but she spent day after day by the window gazing out at the garden, building her house. Each day she added something new to delight the prince: a gabled portico, a marble birdbath, a huge oaken dining table that could seat ten beloved guests. The other girls muttered behind her back, but they also saw that out of them all, Orra was called most frequently to the prince’s bedroom.
Many times the prince begged her to explain the magic of the house. “I can’t explain it,” she would always say. “I am the house, and the house is me. I’m only letting you go inside me. It’s as easy as sex, or talking.” When he was inside the house, inside her, he did not see her as she was on the outside, as a girl he could walk and talk beside. When he pulled back the blue flowered curtains, sometimes he imagined he might glimpse her out the window walking the hills, talking to the birds, tending the flourishing garden which rolled all round the house like the waves of a green ocean. But he never did.
He would have liked to spend every day in Orra’s house, admiring beautiful things, eating home-cooked meals, sleeping in the sweet quilted bed that was always made up just right. His father was growing old. Soon he, the prince, was to rule. He often lay awake at night in a cold sweat, imagining himself making awful mistakes that sacrificed lands and lives to his enemies. When that happened he would ring the cord beside his bed, Orra would come creeping to him in her bare feet and nightgown, and armored guards would watch through the cracked door as she lay down and put her arms around his head. He would become still, and the guards would murmur to each other, saying the prince had surely given his heart away to the girl; for look how she could soothe him with hardly a touch.
Once, because the prince asked, Orra added a room to the house, a sunroom that gave a lovely wide view of the summer roses, which grew in a thriving tangle all around the windows. But after that she refused to build any more, saying she couldn’t make a thing bigger than it was meant to be. The prince began more and more to sit gazing out the windows, wondering what lay beyond those green rolling hills.
“It’s my world,” Orra said when he asked her, and when further pressed came up with some vague bits and things like, “There’s a forest just over the ridge…” and “Yes, there are towns, in places…” but seemed unable to say any more. But surely she had walked those lands!—those places he could not see, and surely she alone could while wandering come upon that deep dark forest, or those charming towns, or whatever else lived out there in the great faraway green. If he could only get into that world somehow, and escape! Escape his life and responsibilities, and be a different person, there in another person’s world. But the windows did not open in Orra’s house, and the only door he had ever seen was the door he came in by, which led him back into his own reality.
“Yes, there is another door,” Orra said when he asked her, but she seemed afraid to say more. “If you ever find it, don’t open it! Something terrible will happen if you do.”
“What is the terrible thing?” the prince asked her, but she couldn’t answer. “Please don’t,” she just kept saying, “please, I’m asking you not to.” He promised, and truly intended to keep his promise, but sometimes found himself wandering—eyes scouring the walls, the floor—searching for hidden lines, disguised doorknobs, anything that seemed like it didn’t belong. And she could feel him pacing back and forth inside, pacing, pacing instead of sitting in his comfortable chair by the fire, and she shuddered, and the floorboards creaked loudly under his feet in protest.
One day the prince found the second door. It was behind a curtain he was sure he’d passed a hundred times before, but something about it drew his eye just then, much like Orra herself on that day long ago in the street, selling peaches with a kerchief round her head and the sun making her white blouse glow in stripes under the awning of the fruit stall. He drew the curtain aside and there it was: a small wood square, rough and splintery, tucked away like some artist’s mistake meant for painting over later. It was barely tall enough for a child to fit through stooping. There was no keyhole, only a crude bronze knob. The prince knelt and tested it. It turned without catching.
For a moment he remembered Orra’s pleading voice, the tears in her eyes and the promise he’d made. But pride welled up in him—“It’s my house too,” he said, “and there should be no secrets from me in it!” and he turned the knob all the way and the door swung out.
Grass, fresh and green and full of dew. Dark earth at its roots, and a triangular corner of cloud-studded sky behind. But the prince only saw grass and sky for a split second.
The house shuddered and groaned. Bits flew from its walls out the tiny door, as if drawn by a great invisible gasp. Paintings ripped from frames and furniture splintered apart. The walls dissolved into stones that pelted one by one through the hole in the wall which seemed to grow wider and wider as the house became smaller and smaller, piece by piece by broken piece. The prince tried to hold the pieces together, but they tore themselves out of his hands til a maelstrom of wood and fabric and metal and stone bewildered him, and then the last stone crumbled and all the pieces fell and he was left in the midst of a shattered waste, rattling in the wind.
Orra threw him out and he landed on the floor at her feet. “What have you done,” she screamed at him, and he tried to answer but could only gasp for breath. “Promise-breaker, liar and traitor, what you’ve done can never be repaired! You have killed me, killed me, destroyed everything I am!”
“I’m sorry,” he cried, and she ran from him, and though he rang the bell and called for her over and over, for a day and a night she did not return to his quarters. His courtiers offered to have her punished and forced, but he forbade them. Finally, on the morning of the third day, she agreed to see him.
She refused his embraces and apologies. “I want rubies,” she said, “and satin dresses, and the best of everything. I want everything you promised when I first came here, when you lured me under false pretenses and took everything I have. I want you to repay everything you took until I am whole again!”
“I’ll help you rebuild your house,” he said, but she spit at him and screamed that she wanted jewels and dresses, and he had the finest of those things ordered and brought to her. She put on the rubies and the silken things and dined on the food he had ordered, roast exotic birds and black plum wine and rare sugar-tidbits imported from far away. When she had finished, he asked her if she was pleased.
“No,” she said. “What you’ve given me doesn’t even begin to compare to the value of what I’ve lost. Try harder!”
Word spread through the castle that the prince was smitten with one of his concubines, and lavished her with expensive gifts to such excess that even the king raised an eyebrow. Then Orra declared that she would not be satisfied until she was made a noblewoman, fit to eat at the king’s table and dance at his balls in her jewels and silk, and the prince arranged everything the way she demanded. Finally, she said that she would not be repaid in full until she was Queen, and this the prince could not do, but he said that if he married her himself she would be Queen when he was King, and rule the kingdom by his side. “Fine,” said Orra, and to the horror of the King and all his court, they were engaged.
But Orra still wanted more, and one day when her betrothed was sleeping, she crept into his chamber with a dagger and slit his throat so the blood ran rich and red across the pillow.
“Witch!” cried the guard who had seen it, and rushed into the room; but the prince was beyond saving, and Orra ran to the window and flung herself out. Guards searched every inch of the castle for seven days and seven nights, but could not find the murderess. The prince was buried in the cemetery of his forefathers as the King wept heavy tears, and the seer who had foretold it grew great in renown, though also feared. The King, who had been Queenless all these years, knew now he would have to seek a suitable woman to bear another heir… But here the other story goes off into the woods.
Orra knew she had to leave the kingdom. Her heart was heavy and hollow and broken, and her hands and clothes were stained with blood. She traveled at night, lying low and keeping to the woodlands. She sold her rubies one at a time to pay her way, and the satin gowns grew tattered and dirty, and the soles of her fine slippers wore down til she walked along the road barefoot. Most often she was mistaken for a street whore fallen on hard times. She was less likely to be followed Northward as winter came on, so she went that way; and there came a time the last of her pursuers turned back and were gone, and she went on.
One day she came to a little Northern village buried deep in snow. The people there lived a hard life, even harder than her own. They never had enough to eat, and their clothes were thin and bare, for they were not able to keep animals for their pelts. The wind kept knocking down their houses and freezing people to death overnight. As Orra arrived, a woman in one of the huts had just died of starvation and cold, leaving behind a young child. The father opened the door when Orra knocked.
“Food? Shelter?” he snarled. “We have none of that here. Come inside if you must, but don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for in this godforsaken place!”
The little girl was huddled in the corner. The mother lay outside in the snow beside the hut, for the storm had howled seven days and seven nights with no way to bury the body, and the girl was pressed to the closest spot on the other side of the wall. Orra looked around the dank, dark room. She sat down in the middle of the floor and spoke gently to the girl. Her voice was hoarse, rough, tuneless as a neglected violin. “Come here, girl. Come here now. It’s warmer when you’re out of the wind.”
The little girl’s name was Alma. The father soon disappeared from their lives, not by death but by abscondence, as soon as the snow let up enough for him to take half their food and go stomping off into the night. “Fickle men, who needs them,” said Orra, and took Alma up in the crook of one arm as she darned the little threadbare socks with the other. “Foolish men, we’re better off without them. Aren’t we, my small one, my little princess?”
“Yes Auntie Orra,” said the child, and stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake drifting slowly through the rafters before it touched the ground.
Years passed, and Orra’s face grew lined and weathered as a map, giving her the look of a woman far older than her years. The villagers forgot she had not always been there, braving each ferocious winter by their sides, tanning in her witch’s pot the hides of the scrawny rabbits the men hunted to make pathetic little fur scarves for the village children. Alma’s father was found frozen solid far down the pine wood, and the villagers muttered to each other that that was what you got for trying to leave this place, that the journey through the forest would kill you faster and surer than staying would. Alma herself, though skinny and frost-bitten like the rest of them, had a quick bright eye and pretty brown hair, like the shining coat of an otter in water. When she came of age there was more than one boy stuttering his words around her; but Orra rapped her fingers with a wooden spoon and spoke sternly:
“Men are nothing but trouble, my princess, my dear. Forget them!—at least til you’re a bit older, and preferably forever. Men are liars and traitors and promise-breakers, they take and take and never give back. We have so little here, my turtle-dove, my only one—we can’t afford to lose what little we have!”
Alma was a dreamy girl, who liked to sit at the window and watch the snow fall. She was a good girl, but sometimes fell still in the middle of chores—not out of laziness—but as if seeing something far, far away in the distance and straining her eyes and ears and entire self towards it, trying to make it out. Orra fretted long over those dreaming looks, praying to gods she had once sworn to forget, rocking back and forth over her knitting as Alma lugged firewood over the snow outside. “Do I tell her, do I ask? …My sweet one, my jewel! Could it be you are the same as me?”
And one day Alma told her quite simply, as they were washing pots in the river, stopping every few minutes to blow on their frozen hands, that often she went away into her mind and she was building a house there. “It’s just something I feel I must do, that comes naturally to me. I like having it inside me, being two things at once, it’s a great deal more fun than being only just a girl. You don’t think it’s wrong, do you?”
“Of course not,” said Orra, but she wept into the water, which bore away her tears. Then a while after that Alma came to her and said for the first time a boy in the village had touched her, kissed her, and that she was frightened and did not know what to do.
“Kissed you! Well, kiss him back, if you must,” said Orra, for she could see which way the wind was blowing in Alma’s pink cheeks, and the stars burning brightly in her fearful wondering eyes. “But I forbid you one thing—I give you this advice only—do not ever let him go inside your house!”
“My house!” said Alma, “that’s the last thing on my mind, auntie. Why would I show him my house, which is only for myself?”
“Then maybe this is for the good,” said Orra. But she was uneasy, and slept badly whenever Alma went out into the snowy evening to hold hands with the boy, bat eyelashes and kiss, all those little lovers’ delights—such things Orra once knew well, and now viewed as if from a great distance, through badly smeared glass. The two made a pretty couple, for Alma was pretty when in love and the boy was a handsome enough lad, and soon enough everyone in the village spoke of an engagement. Several times Orra started to weave up a bridal wreath of dried herbs and branches, but each time found she lacked what she needed to complete the circle. She cursed herself and beat her fists against her head. “Why am I not happy for her?” she cried softly, “my darling, my most deserving? I must be wicked to the core! My house is in ruins, little bird, little dove, and I cannot sleep at night.”
Orra went to gather herbs, and when she came back in the evening she heard sounds coming from inside the hut. She crept to the door and peered inside. Alma and her lover sat on the floor facing each other. He gripped both her hands tightly in his, and she was leaning away from him. “No, no, I don’t want to,” she was crying, and he was saying, “If we are to be betrothed, there must be no secrets between us!” in a high, strong, insistent voice. “I’m not ready,” she cried, and, “Auntie told me not to!” “What does that old woman know about love?” he said harshly, and grasped her by the shoulders. “You said you had a house—you little witch! Show it to me, or I’ll leave you for a liar and a teller of tales!”
Alma sobbed some more, but he held her fast, and she quieted. Slowly onto his face came awe, as if the sun had spread across it, or he had come upon a cliff around which the trees broke to show the sky. He reached out a hand, as if to turn the knob of a door. Orra entered the room and seized him. He came to his feet, shaking his head like a dog, as Alma fell to the floor weeping. “I saw it—I saw the house!”
“Get away from her, you bastard,” said Orra, but he shoved her away.
“How dare you hide this from the rest of the village,” he said. “We’ve been living in poverty and filth while you witches cook up luxuries to serve only to yourselves! Well I won’t have it,” and he grabbed Alma by the elbow and tried to make her rise.
“I don’t want to,” said Alma, and the youth turned on her, hungry face gone hard and a dagger in his hand.
“You’ll do as told or I’ll make you!”
“Run!” shouted Orra, and thrust her hard withered body between the man and her daughter. Alma jumped up and ran crying for the door. The knife the man was holding out so rigidly had gone through Orra’s ribs. She fell to the ground, and her last thought was of the blood that flowed, rich and red and thick through her fingers as she tried to make it stop. I tried—I tried! she thought, and felt her ribs rattle in response around the wound, like fallen timbers in a cold wind blowing over the ground on which they lie.
The villagers discovered the young man in the hut, ranting over the body in a pool of blood. They stranded him and he died of exposure, always the sentence for murderers in that little village, which had no other way of punishing criminals. That spring Alma set off with a knapsack on her shoulder, like her father all those years ago, though the look on her face was much different; and folks did not mutter after her as they had done her father, but watched her go with hidden wistful longing in their eyes, and spoke to one another of how grand it would be if one of their number could someday walk under the sun. No one ever found her body frozen to a pine, and she left no footprints behind her.
A long, long time later, when that village was nothing but buried bones, and snowstorms no longer raged year-round through that forest, and small green life had begun to creep beneath the weather-beaten pines, a man and a woman came walking there. The woman’s name was Elu, and the man’s was Tam. She was sturdy and brown from the sun, with a perceptive star in her eye; he carried a thick walking stick and his hair was gray. They stopped to rest in a clearing, and Elu bent to pick up a worn piece of stone.
“I think this would be a good place to stay awhile,” she said to her husband.
He looked around. “Here? The winters in this region are cold. The trees provide little cover from the wind. I haven’t seen much game, and fewer herbs.”
“But look,” she said, and pointed to the ground. “This land is in the shape of a home. Don’t you see it? That fallen pine, sloping in the shape of a roof. And that great stone, to sit in the garden and have plants all around. There is a space here where a house should be. I see it clear as I see you standing here beside me.”
Tam had his doubts, but he trusted his wife, for Elu sometimes had such intuitions, which would save them from danger or bring them to blessing; she had the ear for listening to the world, speaking with plants and animals, seeing the best in people and understanding the tune of time. They set up camp, and in a few days Elu asked Tam to gather some wood, and a few days later to bring some stones from the river bank, and slowly but surely the house grew up around them, as summer plodded on and turned to the brisk embrace of fall. While building Elu often remarked that it felt as though the stones were telling her where to place them; the logs were rolling into the right places on their own; that the table Tam had built from sturdy pine had told her, when she touched it with her hand, in which corner of the kitchen it wanted to stand. Tam didn’t know one way or the other about such things; but he had to admit, when all the work was finished, that it was a fine-looking house.
They lived in it for many years. Although the snow winds beat hard about it in the winter, the roof never cracked; though the rain poured hard in the spring, the plaster between the stone bricks never crumbled; and often in the evenings as they sat around the crackling fire, Tam was the one to say how glad he was they had settled there. Elu only smiled, and went back to her wood-carving as she sat in her favorite old chair, making little animals to sit atop the mantel with her silver knife. Tam would have been happy to live that way for a hundred years, but Elu’s hair was thinning faster than his, her back was stooping lower, and a time came when they both knew she would not be there with him for much longer.
He sat by her bed, holding her hand. Their two hands clasped were like a wrinkled wood-knot on the blanket. “How will I ever get on without you, Elu? You are my beloved, my only one. If I could trade my life for yours, I would.”
“Don’t worry about getting along without me, dear, I’m not leaving you. If you miss me, just look for me in the world. I’ll be waiting for you there, and so long as you love me and know me still, you’ll see we can’t be parted.”
When Elu died, Tam buried her in the garden, because she’d wanted to be close to the roses. But his grief tortured his heart, and he did not feel close to her when he walked near her grave, but was only reminded of the cold hard work of digging the hole, and the coldness of her body when he laid her in it. He walked in the woods long and often, for she had loved to walk among the trees, and he found some solace there. One day he saw an old tree growing tall and straight, its leaves burnished golden by the sun, its roots forming a strong and stable place to sit beneath the beautiful canopy, which made a figure of the sky beyond it. Tam walked over to the tree and laid his walking stick against it, into a divot in the bark which seemed to fit the head of the stick perfectly.
He sat down and rested his back against the tree. “Ah,” he said, and nothing more, but after a time closed his eyes, enjoying the warm touch of the sun on his face through the leaves.
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Evelyn Pae is an aspiring naturalist and speculative fiction writer currently based in Syracuse, New York.
© 2024, Evelyn Pae
Halfway Down the Stairs 