Brother One Wing

At night, when he and his swan brothers lift into the air like six white ghosts, he opens his beak against the sky and pretends to eat the stars. When they skitter into landing on the moonlit lake, he sinks his elegant neck beneath the water and thinks, I am swallowing the moon whole. He cannot say whether his five brothers ever take to the air with liberated joy, or if they ever feel embraced by a splash, but he does. Every time.

He does not yet know that one day he will awake to a single useless wing, and that all the world will know him for it and call him Brother One Wing. Beside him will lay a lover he has yet to meet, a huntsman with broad shoulders and a beard like lamb’s wool. The freedom he knows now isn’t a freedom that will last. In a story like this, it can’t.

†

One day, his sister will be a queen.

Today, she’s a girl who lives in a hovel in the woods.

She tosses kernels of corn and unshelled peas into the grass for her brothers then leaves them to squabble over who will win the biggest share. Threading thorns through the eye of a needle, she continues the wretched work of breaking a curse. Six shirts for six swan brothers in six silent years, or they’ll never be human again.

Of his brothers, he’s the one who tugs at the ragged hem of her dress for her attention. As she stains his feathers with her blistered hand, he thinks about biting her and making her scream. One sound out of her and they’ll be swans forever.

But he can’t do that to his brothers, or to her. Look at them: love traps them both in silence. He wishes he had a voice to tell her what he wants.

His isn’t the wish the story cares about.

†

Long before she sees the king, she hears his dogs howling on the hunt. Knee-deep in filth and magic, he’ll see her as either a witch or a princess—and though neither is wholly untrue, she doesn’t have time for the consequences of her nature. There’s work to do.

So she takes her work high into the nearest tree, and perches atop a branch to keep sewing. The story is already written.  Before she even meets the king, she’s his wife. Before she even sees him, she has his children. Before she even makes her choice, she’s on the pyre, accused of murder.

Some stories have endings before they begin.

†

As for the huntsman, he’s always had choices, but this takes years to understand .  As he aims his arrow at her heart, he sees the wicked queen’s stepdaughter for the first time, younger and more beautiful—and he knows this story is hers. The huntsman realizes he can walk away at any moment, and this is the moment he chooses.

He lets the poor girl go. Let whatever happens happen. He doesn’t stay to see how this story ends.

†

One morning, awaking in bed together, Brother One Wing smooths his fingers through the thick curls of the huntsman’s hair. “What did you dream of?” he asks.

“I can’t speak of it,” the huntsman says.

Despite all the years they’ve spent together, the huntsman never confesses to the horrible things he’s done. Brother One Wing can’t imagine what it’s like to bury one’s past as if it were dead. His own past still lives, still has a heartbeat, in the remaining wing that never regressed to armhood.

†

When he flies toward her pyre, he knows that this is the end of him. Last in the swooping line, he watches each of his brothers receive shirts and become men again. That’s all they want: to become men again, even if she burns. The shirt falls over him, stinging with its nettles, and sinks deeper than bone, and the first words he speaks are in her defense.

†

Some winter, walking with her through the village square, Brother One Wing offers his sister his wing to hold. She refuses. She never believes him when he promises he is happy.

At the tailor, she observes the work required to create a coat that can accommodate a wing. Children gather around him and hound him for stories and, raising his wing high and spreading his feathers, he promises to regale them another time. The baker gives him a loaf of daily bread, which he cradles with his wing. With his true hand, he holds the box given to him by the cobbler, containing a surprise for his huntsman.

Through all this, the queen sees her shortcomings, and a promise she could not keep.

At the edge of the village, beyond all roads, they discover a pond. Even in winter, with a thin veil of ice masking the surface, a pair of swans sit together. The queen lowers her head and keeps walking. Brother One Wing pauses to watch the swans in their act of living.

“I’ve realized something,” Brother One Wing says. “The best years of my life were the worst years of yours.”

He smiles, and takes his sister’s hand to place it on his wing.

“Our brothers forget,” he says, “but I never wanted to.”

†

The day Brother One Wing and the huntsman meet, they have no idea what they will become. Seeing that white wing, the huntsman asks: “What was it like, then?”

Brother One Wing always wants to tell the story, but no one ever asks. Like his sister, most people presume his shame, rather than his joy.

“It taught me humility,” Brother One Wing says. “It taught me there is more to this world worth caring about than money and glory. I never thought the plants that grow in the lakebed could taste more delicious than a feast served to me on golden platters, but they did. And to move through the water with the ease of belonging, to feel it roll off your back… I didn’t know I could be that happy.”

The next day, the huntsman decides: no more geese, no more ducks. No bird will know his arrow again.

†

In the quiet defenselessness that borders sleep, the huntsman drags his calloused fingertips down the cascade of white feathers and asks: “Do you miss it? Would you go back?”

Brother One Wing nestles his head closer into the crook of the huntsman’s shoulder and drapes wing over chest. “How can I go back,” he asks, “if I can’t leave it behind?”

That isn’t the answer to the question he was asked, but it is the closest answer he can give. The huntsman cards his fingers through the feathers, deepening his touch until he feels skin and the curve of bone. When they kiss, Brother One Wing feels the huntsman everywhere, like air, like wind.

© 2021 S. M. Hallow

About the Author

S. M. Hallow is a comic artist and writer obsessed with fairytales. To learn more, follow Hallow on Twitter @smhallow.