Prologue
Once Upon a Time...
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Once upon a time, a country shepherd boy married a baker's daughter, from the city. The shepherd boy did this, even though his father had arranged a marriage to the woodcutter's daughter two miles away. He fell in love. It couldn't be helped.
Once upon a time, a woodcutter's daughter married a man the devil himself feared, and murdered him. She had a child before she slew her husband - a girl child who drowned in a well, whose name I never learned. To replace her, the woodcutter's daughter stole another child, a boy named Wulf.
Once upon a time, a shepherd's wife carried her youngest child - a plump baby girl in a sling on her mother's back - into the meadow in the forests near their home to harvest wild sage, rosemary, parsley, and thyme. And an unknown man's son walked with his murderous mother and saw the woman cutting the plants on the damp river bank. The evil mother knew at once the shepherd's wife, and rage poisoned her soul when she saw the sleeping infant on her back.
Once upon a time, when I was very young - scarcely able to toddle around without falling on my bottom - my twelve-year-old brother Matthew disappeared in the middle of the night.
Somewhere in that tangle of half-begun tales is where everything started, all the craziness. All the magic. I was only two when Matthew - the oldest of my nine brothers - vanished, so I don't remember it. But one day he just wasn't there anymore. Our father went to wake him up and found his bed empty, his bedroom window wide open. No clothes were missing, no toys, nothing. We were certain he'd been kidnapped, though we had no idea why. After all, we were just a poor sheep-herder's family, with barely any coin to spare for winter clothing, much less a ransom. My family had no enemies that my parents knew of. They could make nothing of it.
And it wasn't even a year later that two more of my brothers disappeared. The twins Henry and Jonathan disappeared in the night, and my parents decided to start keeping a few of the sheep dogs in the yard instead of in the pens to guard the house.
A year later, our dogs were found dead and the other twins, Christopher and Marcus, were gone. My father asked our neighbor's son - the blacksmith's apprentice, a humongous youth with arms bigger around than my head - to guard our home. A year and some months after that, the blacksmith's apprentice broke his leg when a saddle mysteriously fell out of one our windows, and my sixth brother, Jacob, disappeared. My father, desperate to hold onto my three remaining brothers, begged my mother to move into the city. We went to stay with my mother's father, the old baker, and my brother Armand vanished into the darkness.
On a whim, my father decided to visit my aunt, my mother's sister, who worked in the kitchens of the castle - we would stay in the town outside the stronghold itself - and so we left our sheep in the care of our neighbors and journeyed the fifteen miles to the castle township.
My brother David went missing.
I had only one brother left.
Returning home, we were safe for almost two full years before my youngest brother Andrew, now twelve, vanished without a trace.
By this time, I was nearly ten years old. My parents guarded me jealously, for I was their only daughter, and now their only child. And until I was twelve, everything was quiet, peaceful. Still, my parents locked the doors and windows, kept a pack of guard dogs near our home, and refused to let me out after dusk.
It did no good, for when tragedy struck, for the first time it didn't descend on my parents' children.
It came down on my mother, who fell into the well near our small stone house and drowned on my twelfth birthday.
Then, the witch and her son came to our home.
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Author's Note: this is a book that incorporates several fairytale motifs in it, and I am trying to get it published. I want to know how people feel about the story. Is it interesting? Do you like it? Would you read it? Would you buy it? Etc. Any tips or critiques you guys have would be greatly appreciated.