Midwinter at the Ogre's Castle

by Lawrence Barker

Grimswarth the ogre-mage drummed his sallow, gnarled fingers on the polished oak table and stared out the castle's nearest window. The courtyard's mighty ash tree, carved four centuries ago with his name and that of the then-enchanting young ogress Hollowbone by his own youthful hand, groaned beneath the snow. Grimswarth would have to cast a protective spell on his favorite tree. Later, though. He had bigger problems now.

Last autumn, a rusalka had moved into the River Vodla. The rusalka had drowned five of Grimswarth's hardest working serfs, making them ghostly servants to her instead of flesh servants to him. The rusalka was not his biggest worry. Nor was the wyvern that had taken up residence in the southernmost part of his domain, ready to resume burning his fields come winter's end.

Grimswarth's eyes swept from the window to Amanda, his raven-haired human bride of the two years. Grimswarth's biggest worry was her.

Amanda basked in the glow of the enchanted fireplace, the hearth producing heat and an apple wood smell without ashes or stinging smoke. Her left hand held a bowl, turned from the wood of a towering tree magicked from an unimaginably distant winterless land. Fresh cherries, brought from an even more unimaginably distant land where summer and winter reversed, filled that bowl. With a regular rhythm, Amanda's right hand removed those cherries' pits and then stuffed their red, rich flesh in her mouth.

Amanda still had eyes as onyx-perfect, lips as bow-flawless, as she had the day he had lured her from her native village of Viborg. And, unlike most of her one hundred and nine predecessor brides, Amanda never disturbed his personal property (he had especially enjoyed biting off the head of Ilta, number one hundred and three, after she had thrown out his favorite musk-ox hide cloak). Amanda was as dutiful and as loving as a human could be toward an ogre, half again her height and with tusks to rival any boar in the Forest of Ingrian. She knitted caps for his pointed head, embroidered bright flying birds and grazing elk on his tunics, and repaired his shoes when his claws ripped through. But two years with one human female was enough! And, unless her behavior changed, the Covenant that bound him forbade him to move on to bride one hundred and eleven.

"We must talk," Grimswarth rumbled.

Amanda sat down the bowl. "Yes, husband?" She crossed the room, pulled up a chair, and sat down across the table from him.

Grimswarth glanced at the Door, set in the opposite wall. Its handle, sized for a human hand, glistened with golden inlay. The glinting rubies that surrounded the mysterious runes carved in it declared that it was a Door, and not just a door. "The day I brought you here, I warned you to never open the Door."

Amanda nodded meekly. "You did."

"And, though I have often traveled, leaving you in charge, you never came near the Door." Grimswarth's pointed ears twitched.

"I have not."

"Why not?" he demanded.

Amanda looked confused. "You said not to."

Grimswarth's yellow eyes flared. "Has curiosity not compelled you to open it?"

Amanda's fingers rattled the pearls woven into her hair. Her fur-shod feet tapped the elaborate carpet which covered the cut-stone floor. "I have everything I ever wanted and more." She gestured toward the Door that had proven so inviting to wives one through one hundred and nine. "What in there could improve my lot?"

Grimswarth ground his jagged teeth. Could she possibly know of the Covenant, the unbreakable oath that prevented an ogre-mage from devouring, or even harming, his human bride unless she broke his command to never investigate the Door? "I am an ogre," he roared, rising from his chair to make himself look more frightening. "Do you not fear that I hide some terrible secret?"

"You have never beaten me, as the husbands of Viborg did their wives." Amanda smiled with all the innocence of a butterfly, newly emerged from its cocoon. "What could a husband as wonderful as you conceal that was so terrible?"

Grimswarth sank back into his seat, feeling defeated. "But … but …," he stammered.

"Do you want me to open it?" she asked, eyes wide.

Grimswarth shook his head. If he granted permission, the Covenant negated all his magic. Could he have underestimated her? Could she really be clever enough to have planned this trap for him?

"Then what do you want me to do?" she asked.

Her eyes, devoid of any devious intent, revealed the awful truth: desire to know what lay behind the door was as foreign to her as the customs of Cathay. A chill, unrelated to the snow beyond his castle walls, ran through him. "Return to your cherries," Grimswarth sighed.

Amanda obediently rose and resumed her place by the hearth.

Grimswarth again drummed his fingers on the table. He had never imagined a bride resisting the Door's siren song. What could he do?

He laughed as gently as an ogre might. The answer was obvious. Amanda was an ephemeral human. She would last another sixty years tops. He had only to wait.

Grimswarth muttered an incantation. A mug of cloudberry wine materialized. He drained it, savoring its cloying flavor. Luckily, conjuring wine was easy. The next sixty years might require much wine.

END