Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman

confessed.
    In the Halls of the Mountain King, the women had birdcages woven of spun gold wire and inside them kept all manner of pretty things: a toad with a muddy stone set into its forehead, a white rat with a man’s wet eyes. Song birds fashioned ofgold gears and silver wires with diamond-chip hearts twinkling in the machine-work of their chests. Their houses were carved directly into the living rock. Some were simple—a hearth, a low shelf for a bed, the woman sitting cross-legged on it whistling to her little bird who perched on her finger and whirred and tinkled back. Some were as elaborate as mansions with seemingly endless rooms opening back into the rock. Salt caverns and caverns of ice. Rooms hung all about with luxurious furs and a room whose walls were as thin as fascia stretched over a pulsing, purple organ. A room whose walls, when pierced with a knife, yielded a thick well of honey dripping amber to the floor, and in one crowded hall all manner of statuary: fawns and serpents, satyrs and goddesses with struck lapis eyes.
    Once there was a young woman who married a man who was blind. This sparked all manner of cruel jokes in the village about the young woman’s looks, which were poor, and her prospects, which were few. What the villagers did not know, and wouldn’t truly have cared if they did, was that the woman, who had had all her life to live with her weak chin and hooked nose, her small eyes and fat, sagging cheeks, had married for love, not security. Her bridegroom, whose fingers were long and white and sensitive, knew exactly what she looked like and didn’t care.
    For one year, they were very happy together. They lived in a cottage the young woman’s father had left her when he died and ate the vegetables from her garden, the animals she snared in the woods, and the bread her husband turned and oiled with his patient hands. In fall she chopped down trees and split them into firewood, and in the winter she built the fire up until it roared and they sat before it, her hand on her husband’s knee while she described to him the ordinary sights of her day andhe carved figures from spare stove-lengths, the knife a wicked extension of his thumb. Then, one day in early spring when the lower slopes of the mountains were hazed magenta with blooming redbud trees, she returned home from the forest to find the cottage empty.
    “Husband,” she called, slinging onto the table a rabbit she had snared and bled, its throat open in a second, wetter mouth, “wait until I tell you what I saw today.”
    She meant to tell him about the bear she had stumbled across, still drowsy and weak from hibernation. She watched it from behind the safe tangle of a deadfall as it foraged on the forest floor, pried apart a rotten log with great delight and plumped back on its rear like a child as it scooped pawfuls of termites into its mouth. She imagined how her husband would carve the bear as she described it, capture exactly its clownish simplicity and even her little hidden fear, her voyeur’s thrill. She sifted through the woodbin for a suitable knot as she called again, “Husband?” into the empty house.
    It was no use; her husband was gone.
    Though she searched for him for many months, calling over the hills and valleys as they darkened into summer and then blazed with fall fires, calling, her voice thin and cracked, through the still blue winter, she never again saw him or heard his voice and lived her life alone in the cottage they had shared so briefly in what seemed to her another time.
    She never remarried and took little notice as over the passing years her body hardened and curled. Her back bent under the weight of her solitary labors until, as she scramble up the rock falls and hopped nimbly over the mountain’s streams, she often resembled a beetle, round and hard. Though she never forgot her lost husband, and never passed a day in which shedid not take one of his figures down from the mantle and turn it over in