The Changeling
I: The Exchange
In the center of the hearth, a crack shot through the shaft of the largest log. The young woman stoking the flames leapt to her feet when the horrible sound, like that of a bone being snapped in two, emanated from the fire. The rusting poker clattered out of her hands and onto the cobblestone floor at her feet just as the two halves of the log sundered along the jagged seam and tumbled down the meager pile to the smoldering ashes blanketing the bottom of the hearth.
Wynne had always hated fire, ever since she was a little girl. At night, when the moors were silent save for the sibilant gales whispering along the dried grass, each loud pop and splinter of the firewood sounded sinister—like some sorts of infernal beasts feasted in the flames dancing in the hearth. She saw them too—their shadows thrown up on the walls of her family's hovel, lanky and exaggerated and grotesque in the orange light. For years, she never told Mam about how terrified of those beasts she was but was always shamefully relieved when the firewood ran out and left her family huddling together to brave the brutal winters.
As she stared at that fire, at the two halves of the log that darkened and crumbed with every passing second in the flames, Wynne's fingers twitched with the desire to snuff it out. She had survived colder winters than this, could survive dozens more.
But the baby wailing in the bassinet could not.
Where beasts of flame and shadow had once terrorized the girl was now her own child—the wriggling baby boy swaddled in a sodden blanket that one of the old wives in the village had scrounged up from children past. Since he had been born but three months prior, Wynne had heard nothing but his voice: little burbled whines between which shrieking cries were interspersed. Though she craved many things—food, comfort, and companionship—she craved one above them all: silence.
Just one moment of relief, she wished silently as she sank back to her knees before the hearth. Just one moment when I don't have to pretend.
Her eyes fell on the iron pot of stew simmering above the fire. She wasn't sure why she bothered pretending anymore. In the hovel perched on the rolling peak of a tall hill, she was completely isolated from the rest of the village now that the valleys had been choked with snow. Until spring returned, Wynne was trapped only with her cursed child and the withering grasses beyond her door. There was no one to keep her honest now; her husband was gone—taken by the last gasp of the frigid winter the year prior.
And so the wicked thought reigned: When spring returned, would anyone truly be surprised if a newborn living in the hovel at the top of the hill did not survive?
She drew her tattered shawl around her shoulders tighter, clenching her teeth to suppress the shudder that crawled through her. That Wynne was without any maternal affection or instinct had not mattered to whatever old gods had cursed her womb with a child anyway. When she was young, Mam had always told her that the old gods could see the darkness in your heart long before you even knew it was there. Had the death of her husband and the curse of this pale imitation left in his place been penance for the wickedness that seethed in her now?
Her fingertips glistened when she touched the corners of her eyes, the gold light and dirt-crusted interior of the hovel rippling in her vision. A single tear slid down her cheek, cutting through the soot and grime layered on her flesh. For as much as she agonized over the unfairness of her life, she pitied her child—born to a mother who would never love him, fated to live in squalor in the hills. That the old gods had brought them together was fair to neither of them, and she wished, oh she wished that someone would...
A memory of Mam chiding her older brother for invoking the goblins flickered like an ember in her mind.
Wynne wished that someone would take him away.
Months of disuse left her voice croaking and phlegmy when she finally spoke, testing the names of all manner of goblins said to haunt the hills, while tears fell freely from her eyes like spring rain showers. With the back of her arm, she swiped at those that collected on the underside of her chin, heavy with the sorrow and guilt and shame of what she was doing.
A shrieking cry of the child tore through the hovel like that of a banshee; Wynne clamped her hands over her ears and pleaded to the wicked things underground.
"If any of you listen," she gasped as sobs bobbed in her throat. "Take him. Take him, please. I do not wish to be his mother."
As soon as the words tumbled from her lips, everything fell silent. The child stopped crying. The hearth extinguished with a sinister hiss. The winds battering the hovel ceased.
Pale light slanted over Wynne's huddled form as the door creaked open. When her eyes fell upon the proud figure silhouetted by the light, her trembling hands flew from her ears to her mouth to stifle her alarm.
Mam had always said that goblins were squat creatures with scaly skin speckled with warts and puckered scars. They had gnarled claws for hands that could tear through flesh like it was supple butter and gnashing mouths full of needle-teeth and frothing with spittle. And they never spoke words, only cackled deviously before descending upon the foolish humans who summoned them.
Yet the woman entering the hovel was anything but. Envy tightened in Wynne's chest as she took in the shiny, golden blonde hair weaved into a thick braid that circled her head like a crown, revealing a high forehead and emerald green eyes the color of costly jewels the lords of the countryside hoarded in their coffers. The woman's lips were flushed a delicate rose, and her skin milk-white and free of the blemishes and nicks of hard labor.
But perhaps worst of all, was that she held a child—a little girl no older than Wynne's own son who slept soundly like he never had.
"I am here for the child." She declared. Her voice was like a winter breeze, so light and chilling all at once.
"I..." the words caught in Wynne's throat as she scrambled to her feet, scrubbing at her still-wet cheeks and dusting her palms along her tattered skirts though it hardly made a difference.
"You wished him to us, did you not?" The goblin woman frowned, taking Wynne's speechlessness for regret.
Under the piercing gaze of the goblin, Wynne trembled in her slippers, barely able to squeak out, "I did."
She ghosted over to the bassinet, while Wynne could only watch petrified where she stood. Her features were expressionless as she beheld the child squirming within it, staring up at her with mismatched eyes. Under her breath, she said, "Yes, he will do."
Over her shoulder, she caught Wynne's gaze. "Does the child have a name?"
She had not named him, had not even looked at him when the old wives shoved him in her arms, her chest heavy with the fatigue of labor and the crushing sorrow of mourning. Naming him made him real and permanent, things she did not desire him to be, but with the goblin woman looking at her expectantly, Wynne felt compelled to say something.
"Jareth." She forced, digging her nails in her palms to fight back the scream rising in her throat. It felt like betrayal to pass her husband's name onto the child.
"Jareth." The goblin woman tested in that impossible voice of hers. "A suitable name for our future king."
"Our what?" Wynne gaped.
Pivoting on her heel, the goblin woman abandoned the bassinet and came to stand before Wynne. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing what she could have looked like in a different life. In a different world. She pinched the ends of her pale blonde hair, feeling so small before the otherworldly woman across from her.
"Aboveground kin, as promised, I will take the baby. I will raise this child you so despise, and in turn you will raise mine."
She extended her arms, the bundled baby girl, towards Wynne.
"I can't," Wynne stammered. Didn't the woman see that the reason she was wishing her child away was because she could not be a mother?
"You will find her most agreeable and your own capabilities up to the challenge." The goblin woman insisted. Carefully but forceful still, she pressed the baby girl into Wynne's arms. "Sarah will be the envy of all the mothers in your pathetic little village."
The words hardly stung as Wynne's eyes drank in the image of the baby in her arms. Tufts of dark brown hair poked up from beneath the blanket, a striking contrast to her skin that was as pale and smooth as that of the goblin woman. A tenderness like that she had never felt for her own child warmed her stomach like a hearty stew.
"Why are you giving her away?" Wynne wondered aloud. To me?
The goblin woman turned away and strode back to the bassinet, dipping her hands into the nest of sodden blankets and lifting the baby into her arms. With her back still to Wynne, she only said: "The affairs of the Underground needn't concern you, mortal. There is only one task left for you to complete, and then the baby will be nothing more than a fading nightmare in your life."
She wanted to know more about what the woman meant when she called Jareth a future king, wanted to know what affairs of the Underground had catalyzed this switch of children across the boundary of two worlds. But a compulsion, a desperate need to speak words she wasn't sure she had even known before that moment, eclipsed her curiosity.
"I wish that the goblins would take him away."
Outside, the clangor of thunder in the gray clouds throttled the hill. Like bones, the wooden planks of the hovel rattled against one another, and Wynne clutched the baby girl to her breast protectively though the goblin woman stood by the bassinet unfazed. In her arms, Jareth fussed, but the woman merely cooed something to him in an ancient tongue and he fell silent once more.
"It is done." A smile spread on her lips, revealing a mouth of pointed teeth. Her emerald eyes glistened with something not unlike mischief, and a chill bristled along Wynne's spine. "In thirteen hours, he will be one of my kin. If in that time you choose to reclaim him, you will have to face the Goblin Queen and her Labyrinth. Both are as horrible as all of you mortals believe our kind to be."
Her grin was positively feral. Wynne withered beneath her predatory gaze.
If she had been a good mother, perhaps she would have fought for the child, fought to keep both him and the baby girl that the goblin woman had cared so little for to give to a human who was heartless enough to wish her own child away. But she was not courageous or clever or compassionate in the ways that the heroes who face goblins should be.
No, Wynne was not a hero. So she remained silent as the goblin woman stepped out into the frozen afternoon and vanished in a plume of snow with the child that had once been her son.
End
It's been a few years since I last tried my hand at a Labyrinth story, and I'm excited about this new stab at it! Currently, I'm envisioning this story alternating between the past and the present. Since this is a bit of a change of pace for me, I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of it, so please leave me a comment or two on your way out. I'll see you all soon for chapter two!