Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition Read Online Free PDF

away. She whispered to her father, “The thorns will tear me. She means me to be hurt.”
    When Bianca was twelve years old, the Witch Queen said to the King, “Bianca should be confirmed so that she may take Communion with us.”
    “This may not be,” said the King. “I will tell you, she has not been Christened, for the dying word of my first wife was against it. She begged me, for her religion was different from ours. The wishes of the dying must be respected.”
    “Should you not like to be blessed by the Church,” said the Witch Queen to Bianca. “To kneel at the golden rail before the marble altar. To sing to God, to taste the ritual Bread and sip the ritual Wine.”
    “She means me to betray my true mother,” said Bianca to the King. “When will she cease tormenting me?”
    The day she was thirteen, Bianca rose from her bed, and there was a red stain there, like a red, red flower.
    “Now you are a woman,” said her nurse.
    “Yes,” said Bianca. And she went to her true mother’s jewel box, and out of it she took her mother’s crown and set it on her head.
    When she walked under the old black trees in the dusk, the crown shone like a star.
    The wasting sickness, which had left the land in peace for thirteen years, suddenly began again, and there was no cure.
    * * * *
    The Witch Queen sat in a tall chair before a window of pale green and dark white glass, and in her hands she held a Bible bound in rosy silk.
    “Majesty,” said the huntsman, bowing very low.
    He was a man, forty years old, strong and handsome, and wise in the hidden lore of the forests, the occult lore of the earth. He could kill too, for it was his trade, without faltering. The slender fragile deer he could kill, and the moon-winged birds, and the velvet hares with their sad, foreknowing eyes. He pitied them, but pitying, he killed them. Pity could not stop him. It was his trade.
    “Look in the garden,” said the Witch Queen.
    The hunter looked through a dark white pane. The sun had sunk, and a maiden walked under a tree.
    “The Princess Bianca,” said the huntsman.
    “What else?” asked the Witch Queen.
    The huntsman crossed himself.
    “By Our Lord, Madam, I will not say.”
    “But you know.”
    “Who does not?”
    “The King does not.”
    “Nor he does.”
    “Are you a brave man?” asked the Witch Queen.
    “In the summer, I have hunted and slain boar. I have slaughtered wolves in winter.”
    “But are you brave enough?”
    “If you command it, Lady,” said the huntsman, “I will try my best.”
    The Witch Queen opened the Bible at a certain place, and out of it she drew a flat silver crucifix, which had been resting against the words: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.… Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.
    The huntsman kissed the crucifix and put it about his neck beneath his shirt.
    “Approach,” said the Witch Queen, “and I will instruct you in what to say.”
    Presently, the huntsman entered the garden, as the stars were burning up in the sky. He strode to where Bianca stood under a stunted dwarf tree, and he kneeled down.
    “Princess,” he said, “pardon me, but I must give you ill tidings.”
    “Give them then,” said the girl, toying with the long stem of a wan, night-growing flower which she had plucked.
    “Your stepmother, the accursed jealous witch, means to have you slain. There is no help for it but you must fly the palace this very night. If you permit, I will guide you to the forest. There are those who will care for you until it may be safe for you to return.”
    Bianca watched him, but gently, trustingly.
    “I will go with you, then,” she said.
    They went by a secret way out of the garden, through a passage under the ground, through a tangled orchard, by a broken road between great overgrown hedges.
    Night was a pulse of deep, flickering blue when they came to the forest. The branches of the forest overlapped and intertwined, like leading in a window, and the