The king did not wait for them in the throne room but came to the top of the palace steps in all his glittering finery and, with the queen and the beautiful young prince beside him, looked down at Ayama and the monster.
“Why do you bring this beast to my door?” the king demanded to know. “I told you to return with his heart.”
“And so I have,” said Ayama in her loud, clear voice that echoed like a horn of war over the listening crowd. “His heart is mine and mine is his.”
“You think to love a monster?” the king asked, and now there were murmurs and snickers all around her. “Even a wretch like you might hope for better.”
But Ayama was used to insults and paid the king’s words no mind.
“I will love an honest monster before I swear loyalty to a treacherous king.” She raised the thorn knife and pointed it at the king’s chest. “When your wars were failing and the valley was in disquiet, it was you who slaughtered our herds and mowed down our fields just so that we would fear a false villain, instead of seeing that a fool sat the throne.”
“You speak treason!” roared the king.
“I speak truth.”
“And can this ugly beast not speak for himself?”
The beast looked upon his father and said, “A man like you is owed no words. I trust Ayama to tell my story.”
“That creature murdered my soldiers and hunters,” blustered the king. “He built a tower of their bones!”
“He did,” said Ayama. “For you sent them to kill him when it was you who freed your son from the labyrinth in the first place. You set him loose so that you might play the hero, and we would forget our sons and brothers who die in your wars, and the taxes that gild your rooftop in gold.”
“Will you allow this girl to speak such lies?” the king shouted, and though his guards did not want to obey the king’s orders, they drew their daggers and fell upon Ayama.
But no matter how many blows the soldiers struck, Ayama stood unharmed.
Then she took the hat from her head, and all the people saw that she was a girl no longer. Her tongue was forked; her eyes glowed like opals, and her hair twined in serpents of flame that licked at the air around her in ribbons of orange and gold. She was a monster, and no blade could pierce her skin. With her thorn knife she slashed the brambles that bound the beast’s wrists.
The townspeople shouted and stamped their feet, and some turned away in terror. But Ayama stood solid and flat-footed on the ground, and her clarion voice rang out hard as a clap of thunder.
“Speak truth,” she commanded the king.
The king had no shame and would have opened his mouth to let the lies swarm out like locusts, but the queen spoke instead.
“Yes,” she cried. “He was the one who did these things, the one who locked my son beneath the earth with none to comfort him, the one who freed him just to make himself a hero to his people and make his son a monster once more.”
The people looked at the queen’s tearstained face, and they knew the words she spoke were true. They raised their voices once more, braying for the king’s head now, and even the handsome human prince gazed upon his father with disgust.
But Ayama knew mercy and taught them as well. She allowed no harm to come to the king. Instead she had him placed in the labyrinth, and to this day, if you pass through that particular town in that particular valley on a particularly quiet night, you can still hear him shouting his rage, his howls ringing off the stones as he stumbles through the prison he paid to build, swearing vengeance on the girl who trapped him there, and seeking the turn that will finally set him free.
Once the king was gone, it fell to the beast to forgive his mother for not protecting him at his birth or in the long years after. In time, because Ayama had given him something to feel besides anger, he did forgive her, and she lived out her days tending to the quince trees in her garden.
After a courtship of many stories, Ayama and the beast married beneath a blood moon, and pride of place was given to Ma Zil, who had sent Ayama again and again into the thorn wood. She had not been much to look at in her youth, and she knew well that only courage is required for an adventure. As for Kima, she married the beautiful human prince, and since neither had a taste for politics, they left the throne and all its hassles to Ayama and the beast. So it was that the valley to the west came to be ruled by a monstrous king and his monstrous queen, who were loved by their people and feared by their enemies.
Now in the valley, the people care less for pretty faces. Mothers pat their pregnant bellies and whisper prayers for the future. They pray for rain in the long summer. They pray that their children will be brave and clever and strong, that they will tell the true stories instead of the easy ones. They pray for sons with red eyes and daughters with horns.
THE FIRST TRAP THE FOX ESCAPED was his mother’s jaws.
When she had recovered from the trial of birthing her litter, the mother fox looked around at her kits and sighed. It would be hard to feed so many children, and truth be told, she was hungry after her ordeal. So she snatched up two of her smallest young and made a quick meal of them. But beneath those pups, she found a tiny, squirming runt of a fox with a patchy coat and yellow eyes.
“I should have eaten you first,” she said. “You are doomed to a miserable life.”
To her surprise, the runt answered. “Do not eat me, Mother. Better to be hungry now than to be sorry later.”
“Better to swallow you than to have to look upon you. What will everyone say when they see such a face?”
A lesser creature might have despaired at such cruelty, but the fox saw vanity in his mother’s carefully tended coat and snowy paws.
“I will tell you,” he replied. “When we walk in the wood, the animals will say, ‘Look at that ugly kit with his handsome mother!’ And even when you are old and gray, they will not talk of how you’ve aged, but of how such a beautiful mother gave birth to such an ugly, scrawny son.”
She thought on this and discovered she was not so hungry after all.
Because the fox’s mother believed the runt would die before the year was out, she didn’t bother to name him. But when her little son survived one winter and then the next, the animals needed something to call him. They dubbed him Koja—handsome—as a joke, and soon he gained a reputation.
When he was barely grown, a group of hounds cornered him in a blind of branches outside his den. Crouching in the damp earth, listening to their terrible snarls, a lesser creature might have panicked, chased himself in circles, and simply waited for the hounds’ master to come take his hide.
Instead Koja cried, “I am a magic fox!”
The biggest of the hounds barked his laughter. “We may sleep by the master’s fire and feed on his scraps, but we have not gone so soft as that. You think that we will let you live on foolish promises?”
“No,” said Koja in his meekest, most downtrodden voice. “You have bested me. That much is clear. But I am cursed to grant one wish before I die. You only need name it.”
“Wealth!” yapped one.
“Health!” barked another.