Blood, Milk & Chocolate - Part 1 (The Grimm Diaries Book 3) Page 5

The single, delicious Blood Apple that grew on my birthday was even rarer. This one was the first to grow in my homeland, Styria, in seven years.

  A nameless witch—we did not speak her name—had cursed my homeland in Western Europe many years before. Every time a tree gave birth to an apple, it came out grey, rotten, and infested with worms. No amount of magic or prayers managed to lift up the curse. They said the witch was the mother of all witches, that she was darker than the darkest shades of night. For reasons beyond me, she had cursed us with no intention to relieve us from her wicked omen, ever.

  All of this changed the day I blossomed from my mother's womb into this life. No one knew how it was possible, or why it happened. Everyone said I was going to be a special princess who'd prosper and grow and maybe rule Styria one day.

  The servants in our castle drooled at the sight of the single red and ripe apple. They stared at it as if it were the fountain of youth that could quench their thirst and wet their seven-years-long dried souls. Some of the servants sank to their knees and thanked Pomona, the Goddess of Fruits whom no one had ever seen, for her blessings.

  But only fools thanked Pomona, for the rest of our land knew it was me who had saved them. I possessed the power to defy "the witch whose name we don't speak."

  The birth of me, Carmilla Karnstein, daughter of Theodora and Philip II, was a miracle like no other in centuries. I came to this world with a revelation, a sign, and some kind of rapture: the first Blood Apple in seven years.

  Little did I know then that it wasn't a lucky coincidence, that I wasn't just a fairy tale made up by the poor and wishful peasants of Europe. How would I have known that I was part of the universe's plan in an eternal feud between good and evil?

  The arrival of a beautiful child, the blossoming of apples, and the end of a curse were only a prelude to an epic tale of love and sorrow.

  ***

  My mother, the beautiful but stubborn countess Theodora Goldstein, later told me why they called it a Blood Apple. Although no one was exactly sure why, there had been many stories told. One of them suggested the reason was the red and juicy insides of the apples. Some said ancient tribes killed each other and spilled blood to get their hands on it.

  This was the kind of apple that had not only lifted a seven-year-old curse, it had secured a safer economy for the land of Styria, which had been struggling, almost starving, in the previous years of drought and never-ending snowstorms—probably the nameless witch's doing too.

  Before that, Styria's economy had mostly relied on exporting apples.

  There was also this one last folk story that didn't make much sense to me, my mother told me. It was about a boy named Pyramus and a girl named Thisbe who had been in love, opposing their parents, two feuding families who couldn't stand each other. They lived in Ancient Greece when apples were still white fruits—a reality few historians know about. Later, in unusual circumstances, Thisbe killed herself after mistakenly thinking Pyramus had poisoned himself. Thisbe took her own life with a dagger. It was said the blood spattered all over the apples on the trees nearby, and that the gods honored their True Love by turning apples red until Judgment Day. Those first apples were Blood Apples.

  "Many years later," my mother had told me, "a man named Shakespeare stole the story, only he called it Romeo and Juliet. Just like he stole most of his other stories."

  "But the servants say Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time," I had protested.

  "The peasants know very little, Carmilla," she had said. "Always remember that the truth is usually stranger than fiction, and that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make you think he was someone else."

  Although I was too young for my mother's deep warnings, I still loved the Shakespeare story. I loved it even more that I was connected to the Blood Apples in one way or another, thus connected to a great love story—years later, some fortune-teller told me a similar story would repeat itself in my Kingdom of Sorrow, but I haven't witnessed that yet.

  A few days after my birth, Blood Apples began to grow everywhere in Styria—so frequently that trees almost bent over like hunchbacks under the heavy weight.

  Noble families from all over Europe crossed hundreds of miles on their majestic carriages to visit the House of Karnstein, only to lay eyes upon my little figure cradled in a royal crib.

  I had small, chubby arms and feet, and even fat cheeks—I was generously fed. Mostly apples, of course.

  My smile, my golden hair, and my blue eyes were said to glitter like stars. Poets wrote about my reddened cheeks, which they described as "flowery red, like Blood Apples." The servants said I was always surrounded by an unseen aura, that angels were protecting me. Again, angels that smelled of ripe apples.

  They said my presence was my greatest charm, though. Even as a child, it took one's breath away. No queen or countess stood before me without feeling it. I was the presence of a miracle, a child capable of ending a wicked curse with its birth. A child that turned a land, once forgotten, into a paradise of shimmering red bulbs dangling from trees—the apples were so shiny and glowing that travelers used them for guidance through the forest in the murky nights.

  But beneath the linen of happiness lay a sinister secret no one wanted to talk about.

  No one wondered why no other baby was born in Styria the day I crawled into existence. No one questioned why the seven other mothers expecting babies only gave birth to stillborns.

  Instead of investigating the matter in a time in history where the supernatural was always considered, the royal visitors who came to see me wished I'd conjure luck and prosperity for their lands. They thought that wiggling my small toe would equal what you'd expect from a magic wand, that a touch of my hand enchanted them, and that my smile would bless their souls and dry soil.

  I was a holy princess in the cradle, almost as holy as a high priestess or prophet. I was a genuine mystery, even to myself.

  11

  The following years, I was spoiled with the precious love and care of my mother, and especially my father, Philip Karnstein II.

  At age seven I was pampered with all kinds of exotic dresses from all over the world. Those I liked best were the embroidery dresses my father said were exclusively designed by fairies in a faraway place called Neverland. I was always surrounded—also guarded and protected—by too many servants eager to please me. Visitors from other lands still came and kissed my hands for blessing.

  At the times of gathering apples, we always had the Avalon festival, where I was carried on a high chair by peasants and walked through the land to greet the locals. Avalon was said to mean "apples," and of course I had no idea what was going on exactly. But it never hurt to wave back at the people who thought I was an angel or something.

  On every Hallows' Eve, in the time of harvest, they sat me on a chair made of a huge pumpkin—also imported from Neverland—and walked me again through the city, waving at all the peasants.

  My parents never let me out of their sight. They even denied me the right to play with other children at the Pond of Pearls, a beautiful lake that everyone loved to visit and watch their reflections in the water, as mirrors hadn't been invented yet—at least, we hadn't known about them in Styria. Only a few elegant women, like my mother, used copper and obsidian mirrors, which were nothing like the silver mirrors introduced to us many years later. Their reflection was bobby and unclear. They also cost a fortune and had to be imported, not from Neverland but from a factory called Kurmainzische Spiegelmanufakturin in Lohr in Germany. The factory resided near the Spessart forest, which meant "Woodpecker" forest, and was repeatedly visited by Austrians. The Germans and the Italians, on an island called Murano, competed for the best glass and mirror manufacturing in the world at the time.

  Still I never got to play with the children at the Pond of Pearls, and never got to see my reflection in the water like them. I thought it would be enchanting to see my reflection and know what I looked like exactly. I never knew why I wasn't allowed to
play by the Pond of Pearls until later.

  For the time being, I was occupied learning the history of our ancestors. My family turned out to be unusual and greatly important in deciding the fate of the world. The Karnsteins weren't just descendants of a noble Austrian family with blood ties to Mary Antoinette, the Queen of France—a close friend to my mother who never really said "Let them eat cake," which was another fabricated story told by historians.

  We, the Karnsteins, were descendants of the first vampire hunters in history. Our great ancestors had been the ones who supposedly invented the profession. It wasn't an easy task. You have no idea how much misery it bestowed on us.

  My father, who had been away and secretly fighting vampires most of the time, explained to me how it all started. Contrary to common belief, vampires hadn't been there from the beginning of time, and nor were they the descendants of devils. Vampires had been created, and under most unusual circumstances.

  Before I tell you my father's story, you should know there was a Vampire Craze all over Europe in my time. People argued whether vampires really existed, and brutally killed whoever was suspected to carry the disease. The story started with people dying, buried, then returning home from their graves, only to bite the rest of their families a day later, turning them into vampires. Walking around with fangs and red eyes then sleeping in graveyards and coffins at night had been previously thought of as an infection. The kind of infection that had to be stopped from spreading. Europe had been damaged and horrified by the Black Death plague a few centuries earlier. All they could think about, and all they feared, when coming across an unusual phenomenon like vampires, was that it had to be a disease.

  Few people, like the Karnsteins, knew the truth about vampires.

  My father's story was that vampires were created around 600 years ago in the small town of Hamlin, around the year 1300. The town of Hamlin was geographically and culturally very close to Styria. The story was that the founders of the town of Hamlin had recruited a "Man with a Flute" to get rid of an invasion of thousands of rats that threatened to spread a horrible plague. The man, whom my father called the Pied Piper, lured the rats out of Hamlin with the magic melody of his flute. My father said it was rumored, but he wasn't sure, that the tune was called "The Magic Flute," which was orchestrated by a new Austrian musician named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he and my mother were planning to watch playing in Vienna soon. It always boggled me how the Piper played a tune composed by Mozart centuries later, but later I learned how. The Piper managed to lure all rats out of Hamlin, but the elders refused to pay him in return. According to my father, the elders considered themselves religious and thought of music as the voice of the devil.

  "But they were the ones who asked him to play the music," I protested.

  "That's the irony of it," my father said. "The elders accepted music to get rid of the rats but denied paying the Piper because they thought it was the voice of the devil."

  "What happened next?" I asked.

  "The Piper returned a few years later, looking very different to what he had been before," my father said. "The merry jester with the flute who wanted to please everyone turned into a dark man, wore a black cloak, and rarely spoke any words."

  I remember wincing at the description, thinking my father was describing the devil himself.

  "The Piper played the flute again, but this time he lured the children of Hamlin out of town," my father said. "Every single one of them."

  "Why?" I frowned.

  "Revenge for not getting paid," my father explained. "Historians will tell you that he lured the children to a nearby lake and drowned them in it, but that is far from the truth."

  "Just like Shakespeare stole Romeo and Juliet?" I asked.

  My father chuckled then dragged from his pipe. "Rather like it."

  "So where did he take them?"

  "Before I tell you that, you have to know that only seven children escaped the Piper." My father felt the need to educate me. It seemed like he had to teach me our ancestors' history for some future reason he had in mind.

  "Seven children escaped? Where did they go?"

  "No one really knows," my father replied. "But the Piper is still looking for them to this very day."

  I began to fear this Piper more and more.

  "We call them the Lost Seven," my father added.

  "The Lost Seven." I repeated the words on my lips, as if not wanting to forget them. My intuition told me I would be repeating the words for the rest of my life.

  "Other than the Lost Seven, all children were deported by the Piper to a faraway place," my father said.

  "Neverland?" I squeaked, but my father shook his head. I grimaced, as I sensed he was going to tell me something I wasn't ready for.

  "The Piper took the children of Hamlin to Transylvania."

  Instantly, I shrieked and clapped my hands on my mouth. I had been told that Transylvania was part of vampire lore. "But how do you know, Father?" I asked. "This story seems far-fetched."

  My father patted me and stood up. He walked to his huge library and climbed a ladder to get a book from the highest shelf. When he came down I saw it was a book of rare poems, documented and authenticated, although the poets remained unknown. "This is a special book, written by our great ancestor himself," my father explained.

  "The very first Karnstein?"

  My father nodded as he opened the book. "After the children were sent to Transylvania to be turned into an army of vampires by the Piper, who had vowed revenge on the whole world, only one child managed to escape."

  "Our ancestor!" I proudly clicked my fingers.

  "Exactly," my father said. "Our ancestor escaped after he learned all about the vampires. That's why we, the Karnsteins, are the only ones who know how to kill them."

  "So what's in the book of poems?"

  "A poem that explains it all." My father flipped the pages then laid the book on the table, low enough for me to read it. I was reading a poem called "The Pied Piper of Hamlin." An incredibly long poem. Then my father pointed at a part that made it connect. I read with an open mouth, realizing how history was both fabricated and true at the same time. Each person knew part of history's true incidents but then added his own flavor or lie to it.

  The poem I read was later published under a pen name of Robert Browning, and was known of one of the greatest. The part my father pointed at read:

  How their children were stolen away,

  And there it stands to this very day.

  And I must not omit to say

  That in Transylvania there's a tribe

  Of alien people who ascribe

  The outlandish ways and dress

  On which their neighbors lay such stress.

  And that had been my first encounter with how most of the things around us weren't as they seemed, and that historians taught us lies.

  ***

  Three years after my father educated me about my ancestors, I turned fifteen years old. Not only was I right in the middle of my teenage years, and on the threshold of becoming a girl, I was about to learn one of the darker secrets of my childhood.

  I was old enough to be told why I wasn't allowed to see my own reflection in the Pond of Pearls—thinking about it now, I don't have the slightest idea how I lived without seeing my reflection for fifteen years. How did I tolerate not knowing how I looked like? I guess that since I had never seen my face, I wasn't curious about it.

  The truth was that I was mentioned in a prophecy, spread by a blind woman who supposedly lived in a dragonship in the middle of an endless ocean called the Missing Mile, somewhere far away in a land few mortals knew how to reach—I myself thought it was myth until I sailed to it years later.

  The blind woman's name was Justina, the Godmother of Justice, and her predictions were told to my parents by a mysterious messenger who had access to the Missing Mile. My family had always been into superstitious traditions.

  Justina claimed I was the curse-breaker. I was a sp
ecial child, a white soul, a gift to my people. Not just that. She claimed I was the nameless witch's all-time nemesis, and that I was going to give birth to an even more powerful girl than myself in the future.

  But these blessings came with a price—the same way everything came with a price. A price that only I had to pay.

  As it turned out, the universe always demanded balance. For everything it granted us, it took something in return—a basic law in alchemy. The curse that had been lifted when I was born wasn't going to just fade away. It morphed into another shape of a curse somewhere else in the universe.

  Ironically, she who lifted the curse had to pay the price to keep the world balanced.

  In my case, the price I had to pay would seem benign, even shallow, at first. It even seemed that way to me in the beginning, until I realized the atrocity of such sacrifice.

  My curse was simply this: I wasn't allowed to see my reflection in any clear mirror or reflecting surface for the rest of my life. If I ever did, something horrible would happen to me and my family and my land.

  12

  It's hard to describe how an adolescent girl's life without a mirror is like. I can't even bring myself to remember it now. I need to take a deep breath before I write about it.

  Give me a second, please.

  At seventeen, all the talk about my ancestors soon escaped my adolescent memory. I don't know what it was that actually made the idea of not seeing how I looked liked intolerable. I had always thought of it as a great sacrifice. When you're young and naive, you think that sacrificing yourself for others is a good thing.

  Maybe it was knowing that I was "prohibited" to see my reflection. Deny anyone anything and they only want it more. Maybe it was my hormones kicking in. How was I supposed to walk over the threshold of womanhood without seeing and—hopefully—admiring my looks? Sometimes, I wondered if all this was only a camouflage faked by my parents so I never saw how hideous I looked.

  But it didn't make sense. How did all those visitors look at me as if I were the most beautiful of them all?