The Twelve Dancing Princesses: A Fairy Tale Sleep Story

Full transcript

At first light, the old king sets his key to the lock, and the door of his daughter's bedroom swings inward upon the same quiet wreckage. Twelve pairs of silk slippers stand in their tidy rows beneath twelve beds, and he lifts the nearest one and turns it toward the gray window, and the sole of it is gone, worn away until the flagstone shows through in a pale coin of daylight where a young woman's weight ought to rest. It was whole at dusk. He watched it set down. This is the German tale the Brothers Grimm wrote out as Die zer tanzen Schuhe, The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces, a room bolted from without each night by the king's own hand, every key to it carried on his own belt, and every morning, the same soft ruin waiting for him on the floor. If these old tales help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you beside the fire. He has learned to read this room the way a shepherd reads weather, and every morning it tells him the same impossible thing. The wardrobes stand shut, and the little key stands in its plate the way it stands at any hour of any ordinary day, turned to no purpose at all. And when he draws the doors open, the gowns hang in their ordered rows, each on its own peg, shaken out and smoothed and hanging even, none missing from the count he has kept in his head since the trouble began.

More than once he has taken a skirt up in both hands and found the ghost of a crease in it, a soft line where silk has been gathered and let go. But a crease is a poor witness, and it tells nothing of where, and he has stood there with the stuff in his fists and been no nearer an answer than before. He has taken lately to laying a sleeve across his palm to feel whether the silk holds any warmth in it, and it never does. It is always as cool as the wall behind it. The water in the washing basin is cold and clear and has not been touched since the maids filled it at dusk. The hearth holds a gray heap of ash with no track through it. The candles beside the beds have burned down to the same finger's breadth on all twelve sticks as candles do in a room where nobody rises and nobody carries a light about. Only twice in all these months has he found anything at all out of its place. Once, a satin ribbon lying coiled upon the flagstone like a thing shed in the night. And once, on a still morning in March, the faint smell of crushed flowers and warm candle smoke hanging in the air, the smell of a hall after a feast, in a room where there had been no feast. Everything else is straight and even and put away, and that neatness troubles him more than any disorder could. It is the neatness of people who have something to hide and the calm to hide it well. And this room will be opened, though not for a long while yet, and not by the key on his belt, nor by the ax that will one day stand behind his proclamation, but by a gray man limping home from a war who will do nothing in this chamber at all but lie still and breathe as though asleep. The way out of it, when it is found, will be no window and no door and no crack in the mortar he has bruised his knuckles against. It will be a square of floor no wider than a doorstep, three paces from where he stands each night with the light in his hand, and it has lain there quietly waiting the whole of this long winter. And there lie his daughters, all twelve of them, cheeks warm and flushed against the white pillows, breathing the long, even breath of the deeply asleep. Their eyes are closed.

Their hands are folded. A loose strand of hair stirs at the youngest's temple with each slow breath, and the gray morning light lies along the row of coverlets without waking a single sleeper. Not one of them shifts when the great door groans on its hinges, though the sound could wake a watchman two rooms distant. The eldest lies nearest the wall, composed as a carved figure on a tomb. The youngest lies closest to the door, and if the king looks very carefully, he might think he sees, beneath her lashes, the faintest tremor of a lid that has only just been shut. He does not trust the sight. He has looked before on so many mornings and found nothing he could name. The chamber itself seems built to make the thing impossible.

It is one long room, and down its stand the twelve beds side by side, each with its coverlet and its carved post and its waiting pair of slippers. Two ways lead into it, and no more. There is the great door onto the gallery, and the king draws its bolt each night with his own hand, refusing the task to any servant, trusting no lock but the one he has turned himself. And there is a low connecting doorway at the near end, opening into the small chamber alongside where a watchman may lie, and that little room has its own door onto the same gallery, and the king turns his key upon that one also before he carries the light away. The single window is set high and narrow above a sheer drop to the rocks, and no ladder leans there, no rope, no scratch upon the sill. He walks the length of the room before he goes, as a careful man walks the deck of a ship before a storm, walks behind the hangings. He presses the flagstones with his heel. He finds nothing loose and nothing hollow and nothing that answers his suspicion.

On the stair afterwards he tells over the keys on his ring the way another man tells beads, and there are as many as there have ever been, and in all the years he has carried them there has never been a second set. It did not begin with twelve. It began with one pair, the youngest's, carried to him by a chambermaid who thought only that the silk had been badly sewn, and he agreed with her, and the cobbler was called and mildly scolded and sent away to do better. Then it was two pairs, and then five, and before the month was out, it was all twelve every morning without fail, through the whole of a long winter and into the spring.

The palace changed its habits around the thing as a household changes them around a sickness. A page was set to keep the tally in a ledger, and the ledger grew fat, and riders went out to the merchants for silk and thin kidskin and came back saying that the price had risen because the whole road now knew who was buying. The treasury felt it. The servants stopped remarking on it because there was nothing left to remark, and a thing that happens every day stops being news and becomes the weather of the house. But what worked at the king was not the cost of it. It was that he had come to expect it, that he woke now before the bell and lay listening to a silence he no longer believed, and rose, and went along the gallery already knowing what waited beyond the door, and could not have said what morning it was that the strangeness had quietly turned into custom. He had not always stood at that door in dread. In a certain kingdom, in the time this story keeps, there lived a king who had twelve daughters, each of them more graceful than the last, and for many years they were only his delight.

They filled the long galleries with the sound of their voices. They sat with him at the high table and walked with him in the garden. Twelve sisters who slept together in one guarded chamber because it pleased them to be near one another and pleased him to know exactly where they were. He would come to them at nightfall, and there would be candles and low talk and the rustle of twelve gowns being folded away, and he would bid each of them good night by name, from the eldest to the youngest. Then he would draw the door to and turn the key, and the sound of the bolt was, for a long while, only the sound of a house made safe for sleep. He did not lock them in to keep a secret. He locked them in because the night is wide and full of accident, and a man cannot hold twelve lives at once except behind a good door. So he asked them plainly, at first, seated among them with the morning light on his gray head, where it was they went when the door was shut, and what it could be that wore their shoes so. And they lifted clear and untroubled eyes to him and said that they went nowhere, that they slept the whole night through, that surely the cobbler had sold him poor thread and thin leather. They said it gently, and they said it together, and not one of them ever contradicted another by so much as a word out of place. He could find no crack in the smooth face they turned to him, and that smoothness, more than the ruined silk, told him that something was being kept from him by twelve people who loved him. Then he stopped asking and began to hunt.

He had new slippers made of the stoutest leather, double-stitched, soled thick as a soldier's boot, and they fared no better than the silk. He set servants to listen at the door through the small hours, and they heard nothing at all. No music, no footfall, only the deep silence of women asleep. He went along the walls by daylight, tapping, prying at the mortar with a knife until his knuckles were raw and the walls gave back only stone. Once, in the depth of that winter, he proposed to move them to a dry chamber in the eastern wing, and for the only time in their lives, the twelve wept and pleaded as one voice until he gave way and let them keep their own room. He remembered that afterwards. He remembered it a long while afterwards and understood it too late. One evening, near the end of that same winter, he sent for the cobbler and shut the door behind the man and put a ruined slipper into his hands and told him to read it as a scholar reads a page. The cobbler turned it about to the candle and was a long time over it.

"This is not walking," he said at last. "Walking wears the heel and the outer edge and leaves the middle sound. Here the ball is gone, and the great toe with it. And see, the inner edge is gone too, where a foot rolls over when it turns upon itself. And it was done on stone. Grass would have greened the seams, and earth would have worked up into the stitching, and there is neither, only a fine gray polish such as a floor gives. Whoever wore this was turning on hard, smooth ground and turning for hours together." The king took the slipper back and thanked him and paid him and asked him to speak of it to nobody and stood alone a long while afterwards with the thing in his hand.

It was not the leather then, and it was not the thread, and it was not any fault he could scold out of a workshop. It was an answer that lay somewhere outside his own walls, and it would have to be sent for. At last, worn down past patience and past pride, the king did what a troubled king does. He made his trouble the whole kingdom's business. He sent heralds out along every road with a proclamation, and it was cried in the market squares and nailed to the church doors and carried by travelers into the neighboring lands.

Any man, it declared, of any birth, who could discover where the twelve princesses went to dance each night and lay the secret bare before the throne should have his pick among them for a wife and should be named heir to the crown and rule the kingdom after the old king was gone. It was a prize to turn any head, a bride of royal blood and a throne besides, offered freely to whoever could answer a single question. But the proclamation carried a second clause, and the heralds read it in the same level voice as the first, so that the reward and the danger stood side by side like two figures in a doorway. Each man who came forward would be given three days and three nights to find the answer.

If by the end of the third night he had not laid the truth before the king, he would forfeit his life, and his head would answer for his failure. There was no softening of it and no appeal. The king had grown hard in his bafflement, and he meant the threat to keep away the merely curious and the merely greedy and to bring him only men in earnest. He did not seem to consider, or would not let himself consider, how many earnest men a hopeless riddle might swallow. And they came. Of course they came, for the prize was dazzling, and young men do not easily believe that they will be the ones to fail. Princes came first, sons of neighboring houses, riding in with fine horses and finer confidence, certain that a night or two of watchfulness would win them a bride and a kingdom. Each was welcomed courteously. Each was given good food and good wine and lodged in the small chamber that opened close beside the princess's room so that he might keep his watch through the connecting door and see for himself whether they stirred. Each settled in at dusk, fully meaning to stay awake till morning, propped against the doorframe with his eyes fixed on the twelve quiet beds. And each, without fail, was asleep before the midnight bell. He could never afterwards say how it happened.

One moment he was watching, alert, counting the slow breaths of the sleepers. The next, a heaviness came down over him, soft as a fall of snow, and his eyes closed against his will, and the whole dark middle of the night was simply gone from him. He would wake with a start in the gray of dawn, stiff and ashamed, and look through the door and see the twelve princesses lying just as they had lain, serene and rosy and fast asleep, and beneath their beds the ruin of another night's silk. The night had passed him by and taken its secret with it, and he had nothing to show the king but empty hands. The first prince let one night go, then another, then the third, sure each evening that this time he would master his own eyes, and each morning finding himself none the wiser. When the third night was spent, the king summoned him and asked him what he had learned, and the prince could say only that the princesses had never left their beds, which the ruined shoes plainly denied. So the sentence fell as the proclamation had promised.

He was led away, and he did not ride home. And when word of it traveled out along the roads, it did not stop the others. It only sharpened the challenge and drew the next man on. So it went, suitor after suitor, through a long and dreadful season. Bold men and clever men, men who boasted they needed no sleep, and men who came with quiet plans they would tell to no one. And every plan dissolved the same way into that soft, irresistible heaviness before midnight and that bitter waking at dawn. The wine, some of them wondered, as their heads sank. The wine the eldest princess brought them with her own hands, so sweet and so kindly pressed upon them. But the thought never held. It slid away into sleep with everything else, and by morning, there was no one left to remember it. The tale gathered its dead quietly, without triumph, the way a hard winter gathers the old and the unlucky, and a shadow settled over the court that no daylight seemed to lift. The king grew grayer and more silent.

He had set the terms himself, and he could not unsay them without confessing that his own daughters had made a fool of him. And still the silk wore through, night after bolted night, and still he did not know. His daughters passed him in the galleries and greeted him fondly and asked after his health, and he answered them and could not meet their eyes for long, and he no longer dared put the question to them at all. And somewhere out along the roads of the kingdom, though no one at the court yet knew it, an old soldier was walking home from a war that had used him hard and left him with nothing, coming slowly nearer with each day's march to a proclamation nailed on a distant door. The old woman met him at a bend in the road where the hedges leaned close and the dust lay pale in the ruts.

She was small and bent, with a bundle on her back and a face folded soft as an old glove, and she looked up at him with eyes that seemed to have watched a great many travelers go by. He gave her a soldier's greeting, for he had learned long ago that the old and the poor often know the roads better than the mighty, and she asked him plainly where he was bound and what business drew a wounded man so far from any war. He did not think to lie to her. He told her that his fighting days were behind him, that his leg would carry him no more into any battle line, and that he had heard, at an inn some days back, of a king whose twelve daughters wore their shoes to pieces every locked and bolted night, and of the reward laid out for any man who could learn where they went. He had a mind, he said, to try the thing himself. He had nothing left to lose but a life that had already been spent hard and a curiosity in him that would not lie down. The old woman nodded slowly, as though she had expected the answer before he gave it. Then she came a step closer and spoke to him low and level, the way one gives directions that must not be misheard. He must not drink the wine the princesses would bring him at night, she said, no matter how sweetly it was pressed upon him, no matter how rude it might seem to refuse a king's daughter. Every man before him had drunk it, and every man before him had slept, and none of them had ever woken in time to see anything at all.

Let him only seem to drink, and then let him seem to sleep, and lie still, and snore, and keep his eyes near shut, and wait, and follow where the sisters led. Then she loosed her bundle and drew from it a cloak, plain and gray and light as a breath across his arm, and she folded it into his hands. When he wore this, she told him, and drew it well about his shoulders, no eye would find him. He might walk among the twelve and stand at their very elbows and be no more visible than the air between them. With that, and with his own patience, he could go wherever they went and come back to tell of it. She asked nothing from him in return, only that he use his wits and remember her words, and before he had finished thanking her, she had gone on around the bend, small and bent, under her bundle, and the road was empty again, but for the dust and the leaning hedges. He turned the cloak over in his hands a long while as he walked. It weighed almost nothing, and yet it seemed to shape of the journey before him. He thought, too, of what such a thing would have been worth to him in the years behind him: a picket line crossed without a challenge, a ford looked over in broad day with the far bank full of men, a wounded friend carried out from under a wall in the middle of the afternoon. It had come to him thirty years late and for nothing out of a bundle on a stranger’s back.

He folded it small and carried it inside his coat, next to his heart, and he went on toward the distant city with a steadier step than he had known in months, and the old woman’s two warnings turned over quietly in his mind, wine and sleep, wine and sleep, until they were as fixed in him as an old marching song. When at last he came to the palace gate and made his errand known, he was received just as all the others had been received. No one turned him away for his gray hairs or his limping leg. The proclamation had promised the trial to any man who asked it, and the court kept its word, though the servants who led him in wore the careful faces of people who had seen many hopeful men come through that same door and had watched what became of them. He was given water to wash and good clothes to put on, fine soft things such as he had not felt against his skin in all his years of camps and marches, and he stood in them a little awkwardly, an old campaigner dressed like a courtier, and let himself be led to his supper. They fed him well and spoke to him kindly, and the king himself looked on him with something that was not quite hope and not quite pity. And as the evening drew down and the lamps were lit along the galleries, he was shown to his chamber, and he saw that it was the same room that had been given to every suitor before him, a small quiet room set close beside the great bedchamber of the princesses, with a door standing open between the two.

Through that doorway he could see the twelve beds ranged in their long row, neat and white in the failing light, and he understood that he was meant to keep his watch from here, with the very door of the mystery left open before his eyes. He sat down on the edge of his bed and did not let his face show anything. He took the measure of the place instead, the way he had learned to take the measure of ground he might have to cross in the dark. Eleven paces from his pillow to the open doorway, a board floor that would hold its tongue if a man kept close to the wall, a lamp set where its light stopped short of his face and left him in shadow. He took the sponge he had made ready and tied it in place beneath his chin, hidden in the loose collar of his fine new shirt, so that it sat close under his jaw where a lowered head would bring a cup to meet it.

Then he lay back against the pillows with his boots still on and his eyes half closed, and he waited for the night to come to him, listening to the small sounds of the palace settling and the soft movements of the twelve sisters getting ready for their rest in the room beyond. The wine came just as the old woman had said it would. When the house had grown quiet and the last of the servants had withdrawn, the eldest princess rose and slipped into his chamber, carrying a cup in both her hands. She was gracious and lovely in the lamplight, and she smiled down at the old soldier with every appearance of warmth, and she told him that a little wine would help an old traveler to a sound night's sleep after so long a road. There was nothing in her face a man could have called false. She held the cup out to him as a kindness, and had he been any of the men before him, he would have drunk and thanked her and been lost. But the soldier only bowed his head to her as though he were grateful and weary and already half gone into sleep, and he brought the cup up under his chin and let the wine run out of it in a slow and silent stream into the waiting sponge.

Not a drop passed his lips. The sponge drank it all, swelling soft and heavy against his throat, and he made the little sounds a man makes when he drinks, and set the empty cup aside with a hand that he let fall as though it were too tired to hold anything longer. Then he sank down upon the bed and let his breath go slow and deep, and after a moment he began to snore. He snored long and loud and with great conviction, the honest rattling snore of a soldier who has slept in ditches and barns and never minded the noise of his own sleeping. He let it rise and fall and catch and rumble, and he lay slack and heavy with his mouth a little open, and he did not stir when the eldest princess bent close to look at him. She listened, and she watched, and she was satisfied. Here was another one gone the way of all the rest, snoring like a felled ox before the midnight bell, no threat to anyone's secret. She laughed a little under her breath, a light, careless laugh, and went back to her sisters to tell them the old fellow was fast asleep and the night was theirs. At that word, the whole quiet room came alive.

The princesses sprang up from their beds, glad as girls before a feast, and there was a soft rustle and murmur of delight running from bed to bed as they threw off their plain night things and swung open the presses, which were never locked and never had been. Out of the dark wardrobes came gowns such as the soldier, watching through his lashes, had never seen in any hall or on any great lady in all his wandering, gowns that caught the lamplight and threw it back in glints of silver and pale gold, stiff with fine stitching, light as they moved. The sisters helped one another with laces and clasps and pinned up one another's hair and turned this way and that and laughed low so as not to wake the sleeper, and their bare feet whispered on the floor as they made ready. And through the room with them moved the very scent their father had caught once on a still morning in March and never been able to account for, crushed flowers and warm candle smoke, the smell of a house dressing for a festival it would never own by day. Whatever waited for them below, they went toward it, not as prisoners, but as dancers who could hardly bear to wait another moment. Only when they were all arrayed and shining did the eldest cross to her own bed at the head of the row. She stood beside it a moment, then leaned down and knocked upon it, three light taps against the frame as one might knock at a familiar door. At once, the bed sank down into the floor with a slow and silent motion, sliding away as though it rode on some hidden weight, and where it had stood, there opened a dark square mouth in the ground, and a flight of steps leading down into it, worn smooth and disappearing into a blackness the lamplight could not reach. A breath of cooler air came up out of the opening, and with it the faint far scent of something green and strange, and the sisters gathered about the to go down. The eldest went first, as was her right, stepping down into the dark with the ease of long custom, and the others fell in behind her one by one in their glittering gowns, their slippered feet finding the worn steps without a stumble. But as the youngest came to the edge of the opening, she hung back, and a shadow crossed her face that had nothing to do with the darkness below.

She caught her eldest sister by the sleeve and spoke to her softly and said that she could not shake a strange foreboding, that something felt wrong to her this night, that all was not as safe as it had always been. She could not say what troubled her. It was only a coldness in her, a sense of some eye upon them, a feeling that the room behind them was not so empty as it seemed. The eldest turned and looked at her, half fond and half impatient, and told her she was a foolish worrier, as she had always been, forever fretting at shadows that came to nothing. Had she not seen the old soldier for herself, laid out flat and snoring like every man before him, drowned in his wine before the bell struck twelve?

There was no one to fear. There was never anyone to fear. Let her leave off her fretting and come down, for the night was short and the way was long, and the music would not wait. And the youngest, soothed a little by the scolding, yet not quite easy in her heart, drew her bright gown close about her and stepped down after her sisters into the dark. The soldier lay still until the last hem had passed from view. Then he rose from his bed without a sound, quick and quiet for all his years, and drew the gray cloak from where he had hidden it, and swung it about his shoulders, and felt it settle over him light as a shadow. He crossed to the open square in the floor and stood at the head of the worn steps, listening to the soft descent of twelve pairs of dancing shoes going down and down into the earth. Then, unseen as the air itself, he set his foot upon the first stair and went down after them into the dark beneath the sealed and silent room. The stair went down farther than any cellar he had ever known, turning and turning upon itself, the walls close and cool and faintly damp beneath his trailing hand. Now and again his fingers found the groove of an old chisel mark in the stone, proof that hands he would never know had cut this hidden way long before any of these sisters were born. The soft patter of dancing shoes went on ahead of him, and he matched his own tread to theirs, setting each old boot down where the sound of their steps would cover his.

Down and down until the darkness thinned by some gray and sourceless light, and the stair leveled at last onto flat ground, and the walls fell away on either side, and the soldier came out from under the earth into a place that stopped the breath in his chest. Before him ran a long, straight avenue of trees, and every tree upon it was made of silver. Not painted, not dusted over, but wrought whole of the pale bright metal, trunk and bough, and the least and smallest leaf, so that the grove stood still and shining in that gray underground light like a wood caught and frozen in a hard frost of moonlight. The leaves did not stir, for there was no wind down here, and yet they gave back the light in a thousand small cold points, and the branches arched together overhead into a roof of silver through which no sky showed. The air beneath them was cool and very still, and it carried a faint metal tang like the taste of a coin held long in the mouth. The princesses walked beneath it without a glance, for they had passed this way a hundred nights, and the marvel had long gone dull to them. To the soldier, it was a wonder such as no field of war and no far country had ever laid before his eyes. He remembered then why he had come and what the old woman had told him, that seeing was not enough, that he must carry away some proof no tongue could argue against. So he reached up as he walked, close behind the last of the sisters, and took hold of one slender silver twig where it branched from the bough, and he bent it and broke it off. The metal gave with a sharp, bright crack that ran down the whole avenue and came ringing back from the silver trees on every side. The youngest princess stopped where she stood, and her hand flew to her breast, and she cried out to her sisters that she had heard it again, that strange sound behind them, as of something breaking in the dark. The others turned, and the eldest among them only laughed, low and easy, and told her it was the princes across the water firing off a salute of joy at their coming, as they always did when the boats were run out. The youngest looked back once into the silver shadows and saw nothing there, for the soldier stood as still as one of the trees with his cloak about him and the twig hidden in his hand. Then she gathered her skirts and hurried on to catch her sisters. And the soldier, well pleased, slipped the silver twig beneath his cloak and followed. The avenue of silver came to its end, and beyond it opened a second, and the trees of this one were all of gold. If the silver wood had been a frost, this was a slow, warm fire, for the golden leaves seemed almost to burn in the underground light, glowing soft and deep, throwing a honeyed glimmer down upon the path and upon the bright gowns of the sisters as they passed. Boughs heavy with golden fruit hung low over the way, and golden flowers stood open along the ground, and the whole grove was so still and so rich that a man might have thought himself walking through the treasure hoard of some old buried king, laid out for no eye but his own. The very light here seemed to lie warm against the skin of his hands, though there was no fire anywhere to give it.

The soldier would not pass through such a place with only one token to his name. He reached up again as he went, and this time the bough was heavier and the metal stiffer, and he had to bend it twice before it yielded, and when it broke, the crack rang out sharper than the first, a hard snapping report that startled the silence and set the golden leaves faintly trembling. Again, the youngest cried out, and this time there was fear plain in her voice. She caught at the sleeve of the sister nearest her and said she was certain now that twice she had heard that breaking sound, that someone or something came behind them in the dark. But the eldest would have none of it. She came back two steps and took the little one's chin in her hand, more nurse now than sister, and said that gold is a heavy metal, and these boughs carry a heavy crop, and that any bough will settle and tick in its own weight if a girl is quiet enough to listen for it, and that she herself had heard the gold grove speak so on more nights than she could than she could number. Let her come along and not go making a haunting out of an orchard. And the youngest, chidden and unhappy, went on, and the soldier hid the golden twig beside the silver one and kept his careful pace behind. Beyond the gold, there lay a third grove, and it was stranger than the two before it, and more beautiful than either. Here every tree was fashioned all of diamond, clear and hard and blazing, so that the gray underground light broke against them and shattered into every color at once and threw it back a hundredfold. To walk down that avenue was to walk through a hall of frost struck through with cold fire, the leaves glittering like frozen tears, the branches flashing white and blue, and sudden green as one moved beneath them, the whole wood ringing with a brilliance that dazzled the eye and left the soldier half blind with the splendor of it. The light seemed to move upon his face as he passed, cool and quick, like the play of sun on water thrown up onto a low ceiling. He had heard tell in barracks of the wealth of kings, and had seen a little of it plundered and passed from hand to hand, but nothing he had ever dreamed came near this silent grove of diamond standing deep under the sleeping earth.

He took his third token here, and it cost him some trouble, for the diamond twig was hard as true stone and would not bend. He worked it back and forth until it parted with a crack that rang out clearest and coldest of all, a high, bright sound like ice breaking on a winter pond that seemed to hang shivering in the air long after. A third time the youngest started, and this time she did not run to catch anyone. She stopped in the middle of the flashing path and would not move, and said very quietly that she had counted it now three times, one in each wood, always behind them, always where no one was. The eldest came back for her and took her by both wrists and spoke close to her face, low and quick, saying that diamond splits with the cold as stone splits on a hillside in February, that she had cried out just so in each of these three groves since the very first night they ever went down, and that not one dreadful thing had ever come of it yet. They were nearly at the water. The others were already down. Would she stand here in the dark and let the whole night be spent for the sake of a noise? And the youngest, seeing nothing behind her, however hard she looked, believed her sister against her own heart and went on. So the soldier came to the end of the three groves with three twigs hidden under his cloak, one of silver, one of gold, and one of diamond, and not one of the twelve sisters knew that he was there.

The path sloped downward past the last of the diamond trees, and the glittering fell away behind them, and there opened before the sisters a wide, dark, shining stretch of water. It was a great clear lake, still as poured glass, reaching away farther than the eye could follow into the shadow, and its surface held the faint light so smoothly that the shore seemed to have no edge at all, only a slow melting of stone into water. No ripple marked it and no sound came off it, and the cool, damp breath of it rose into the soldier's face and smelled of deep stone and old rain. And upon that water, drawn up close against the bank and waiting, there floated twelve little boats, and in each boat there sat a prince, upright at the oars, ready to row, each one gazing toward the shore where the sisters came down. The princesses went down to the water gladly, and each stepped into her own boat where her own prince waited to hand her in, settling her bright skirts about her upon the narrow seat. The soldier came down close behind the youngest, and when she stepped into the last of the boats, he stepped in after her, silent under his cloak, and sat himself down beside her on the small seat, so near that he might have touched her hand.

The little boat took his weight and settled lower in the black water and rocked and steadied. Her prince bent to the oars and pulled and pulled again, and a puzzled look came over his face. He said to the princess that the boat sat strangely low this night and rowed heavy against him, heavier by far than it had ever been, as though it carried some weight he could not see. The youngest looked down at the dark water lapping so near the rim and wondered aloud that it should be so, for she was no heavier than on any other night. But the eldest, from her own boat gliding on ahead across the still lake, called back to them not to dawdle and puzzle over nothing, but to row on and make haste, for the others were already halfway over, and the music was surely beginning. So the prince set his shoulders and bent again to his laboring oars, and the low boat crept out across the wide, dark water with its unseen passenger, last of all the little fleet.

Slowly the far shore came up out of the shadow, and upon it, bright above the black water, there rose a castle all lit from within, its many windows spilling warm gold down onto the lake so that the light lay across the water in long, trembling lanes. From it, faint at first and then clearer as the boats drew in, came the sound of music, sweet and quick and unwearying, and the shore below the castle was smooth and firm for landing. One by one the little boats touched the bank, and the princes handed the sisters out, and the soldier climbed from the youngest's boat unseen and set his feet on solid ground again and followed the whole shining company up toward the open doors and the light and the music pouring out.

Within, the castle opened into a great bright hall, and there the dancing began. The twelve princesses went into it with their twelve princes, and they whirled away over the smooth floor beneath the blaze of many lights, turning and turning, parting and meeting again, their bright gowns flaring and their slippers flashing, their faces lifted and glad. There was no weariness in any of them. The music did not slacken, and neither did they, but danced on and on with a joy that seemed as if it could never be spent, as though down here below the earth there was no morning ever to answer to and no reason under heaven that the night should ever end. The soldier, still wrapped in his cloak and seen by none, moved quietly along the edges of the hall and watched it all.

He watched the sisters he had thought so meek and so guarded sweep past him, laughing in the arms of these unknown princes, and he marked how the eldest led and the youngest followed, and he noticed two things besides that he did not like to think on. The first was that in all those hours of music, not one of the twelve princes said anything whatever to his partner, though out on the black water one of about a boat that rode heavy, so that it was not dumbness in them, but some rule of the hall that shut their mouths the moment they came in under the lights. The second was that in all that great bright room, there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink. No board stood along the wall, no jug went round, no servant came out from any door with anything in his hands. Whatever the twelve came down here to have, it was not supper, and the princes who rode the lake and danced the whole night through never once put anything to their lips. Which was the very reason the cup caught his eye. Near the wall, where the youngest paused to catch her breath between the dances, there stood a cup, a plain thing of chaste silver with a bent lip, the sort a man might find in any hall above the ground, standing by itself on a ledge with nothing beside it, and no use in that room that he could name. His hand went halfway toward it before his judgment caught him.

Take it tonight, he thought, and by tomorrow's dusk there will be a cup missing from this castle, and twelve sisters asking one another who could have carried it off, and perhaps no going down at all while that question stands unanswered. He had three nights, and he had used only one. And there was another reason to leave it standing, and he turned that one over as well while the music went round him. He was a gray man with a limp and no name any herald knew, and when he came at last before the throne he would be answering two things at once, the riddle itself and the plain doubt of a hall full of people who would rather believe an old campaigner had dreamed a wood of silver than believe twelve well-loved daughters had lied every morning for a year. Twigs might be argued at. A twig is small, and a determined man will call it a trinket bought off a peddler, but a cup is a made thing, hammered by some hand, dented at the lip by some ordinary mishap, and if it belonged to no cupboard above ground, then it had come from somewhere, and that somewhere would have to be accounted for. So he marked its place instead, the third ledge from the door, beneath a sconce with a cracked bowl, and left it standing where it stood, and went back to his watching. And still the dancing went on. Hour after hour it went on, and the soldier lost the count of them, standing patient in his corner while the sisters spun the night away and never tired.

Only when the hidden hour of three drew near did the first weariness come, and it came not to their limbs but to their feet, for by then every one of the twelve pairs of fine dancing shoes was worn clean through, the soles gone to holes and the thin uppers split, danced quite to pieces upon that tireless floor. Then, and only then, with their slippers in ruin and the soles dropping from their feet, were the princesses at last forced to leave off, and the music sank, and the dancers came to rest, and the sisters gathered themselves flushed and glowing to be rowed back the way they had come. The princes bent to their oars again, and now the weariness that had spared the sisters all through the dancing came down upon them like a soft weight so that they leaned into the pull with their eyes half closed and their ruined slippers loose upon their feet. The low boats slid out onto the black water for the long crossing home, and the castle lights began to shrink behind them. The soldier, wrapped still in his cloak, saw his chance and took it wisely.

On the way out, he had ridden with the youngest, and her partner had felt the boat run heavy and had said so aloud, and the youngest herself had leaned over the rim to look at the water. He would not set that same small riddle before them twice. So on the homeward crossing, he stepped instead into the boat of the eldest, where nothing had been noticed and nothing was, and sat quiet in the stern behind her while the prince pulled for the near shore. The eldest suspected nothing. She was flushed and content, half dreaming of the music still, and if her boat rode a little low, she laid it to her own tiredness and thought no more of it. Across the wide lake, the little fleet went, the castle lights dwindling behind them into a single warm smudge and then into nothing at all, and the dark closed over the water as smoothly as it had opened. The prince brought the boat gently against the bank and handed the eldest out, and the soldier climbed after her onto the firm ground, unseen, unheard, his three twigs safe beneath the cloak.

Now came the part that asked the most of him. The sisters, drowsy and slow, gathered themselves upon the shore and turned toward the long underground stair that would carry them up through the three glimmering groves to the trapdoor and their beds. They did not hurry. There was no need, for the danger, as they believed, lay snoring soundly above them. But the soldier could not afford to climb at their weary pace. He slipped past them in the dark, quick and quiet, and went up the stair ahead of the whole company, taking the steps two at a time where he dared, through the diamond trees and the golden trees and the silver trees, up and up until he came at last to the open trapdoor beneath the eldest princess's bed. He put his head through it first, listened, and heard nothing but the empty room, and drew himself up onto the flagstones where the 12 beds stood dark and vacant in a row.

He left the square mouth of it standing open behind him exactly as the sisters had left it, for a door shut where an open one belonged would have told them more in one glance than any noise could have told them, and he wanted them to come up into a room that had not changed by so much as a hair. Then he pulled off the cloak and folded it small and hid it away and lay down upon his own bed just as he had lain before. He drew the coverlet up, closed his eyes, and set himself to breathe long and slow and to snore loud and steady and untroubled as a man sleeps who has drunk deep and suspects nothing of the world. He had scarcely settled to it when he heard them coming. Up through the trapdoor, the sisters climbed, one after another, tired and yawning, their beautiful gowns crushed and their slippers gone to ruin in their hands. They lowered the trap behind the last of them and set the bed to rights above it.

Then, before they lay down, they looked across the room to where their strange old guest was sleeping, half fearing what they might find. But there he lay, flat on his back with his mouth open, snoring as honestly as a woodcutter, exactly where they had left him, seeming not to have stirred a finger the whole night through. The eldest smiled a little at the sight, sure now that this one was no cleverer than the rest, and the sisters put away their torn shoes and slipped out of their fine gowns. And then, weary as they were, they did the work they never left undone, shaking each gown out length and drawing their palms slowly down the crushed silk until the night was smoothed out of it and hanging every one on its own peg in the dark press. The eldest went along the row behind them as she did at the close of every such night, straightening a sleeve here and a fold there, feeling with her fingers for any ridge her father's hand might find.

And then she drew the wardrobe doors to upon the whole shining evidence and left the little key standing idle in its plate exactly as it stood at noon. That was a lesson she had learned in the first week of all. Her father would open those doors in the morning as he opened them every morning and a press found locked in a room where nothing ever happened would have been a question in itself and she meant to leave him nothing he could frame a question about. Only then did the twelve lie down in their beds and they were soon asleep.

And the soldier, listening to their breathing settle one by one, kept his own counsel and said not a word. When the morning came and the king unlocked the door, he found the soldier risen and calm and twelve pairs of slippers standing beneath the beds with the silk hanging off them in shreds. And he looked at the old man a long moment and waited to hear whether he would speak. But the soldier held his peace. He was not yet ready. He had seen a wonder that no one would credit on his word alone and he meant to be certain and more than certain before he stood before the king to tell it. So when he was asked how he had passed the night, he answered only that he had slept soundly and let the day go by and said nothing of groves or lakes or castles across the water. For he had been granted three nights and he meant to use them all.

On the second night, the eldest princess came to him again with a cup of wine, gracious and smiling. And again, he only seemed to drink, for the sponge tied beneath his chin took the wine as before and his lips stayed dry. He lay down and snored and the sisters rose in their joy and dressed and went down through the trap and he followed under his cloak. This time he broke nothing. He went softly through the silver leaves and the golden leaves and the leaves of diamond with his hands at his sides and the three groves let him pass without a sound. And the youngest, hearing nothing at all behind her that night, walked easy and glad among her sisters and laughed at her own fright of the evening before. He counted as he went the number of the steps from the trapdoor to the level ground so that he could tell it to the king afterwards and be believed in the small things as well as the great.

At the water, he did not take his place beside the youngest again. He had promised himself that much the night before, and he went instead to the eldest's boat as he had come home in it, and rowed over in the stern behind her while her prince pulled and noticed nothing. In the bright hall, he stood at the edge of the dancing a second time and marked it all more closely than before: the two doors and where each of them gave, the count of the lights along the walls, the silent princes who never once spoke nor ate nor drank nor rested, the tireless floor that took no mark from all that turning, and the chased silver cup standing untouched upon its ledge exactly where he had left it.

He did not touch it yet. He came up the stair ahead of them again and lay snoring in his bed, and again they found him sleeping and were glad. On the third night, he did the same and let them lead him down for the last time into their secret, and it seemed to him as he went that the groves had already begun to feel like a country he was leaving. But this night, he had come down to take something, and he knew already what it was and where it stood. He let the first hour go by and then the second, keeping the third ledge from the door in the tail of his eye the way a sentry keeps a gate he has been set to watch. And only when the dance had drawn the whole shining company down to the far end of the hall did he cross behind their turning backs and lift the chased silver cup from beneath its cracked sconce and slip it under his cloak with the three twigs. It was heavier than it looked and cold, and there was a thin old scratch about its foot where somebody sometime had set it down carelessly on stone. No one saw it go. No eye in that hall turned, and the music never faltered, and there would be no tomorrow night in which its loss could warn them. When the sisters gathered at last with their slippers in ruin to be rowed home, the soldier bore away four tokens in all: three twigs from the three enchanted groves and one cup from the castle across the lake. And he crossed once more in the eldest's untroubled boat and climbed the long stair ahead of them a final time and lay down to his snoring, and they believed for one more dawn that their secret was still their own. But the three nights were spent, and the morning that followed was the morning of reckoning. When the king unlocked the door, he summoned the old soldier before him and asked him the question he had asked so many others who had not lived to answer it a second time: Where did his daughters wear out their shoes in the night, and how, behind locked doors, did they dance 12 pairs to pieces before the dawn?

And this time, the man to whom he put it did not stammer or guess or fall silent. The soldier bowed and said that he could tell the king the whole of it and that he had brought proof enough to stand behind every word. Then, one by one, he laid his tokens down before the king, and he did not hurry over it, for he had learned in a long life that the truth does not carry itself and that a man of no rank had better bring something a king can pick up and turn over in his own hands. He set out the twig of silver cut from the first grove where the leaves ring faintly when a bough is broken. He set beside it the twig of gold, heavier and warmer in the light, taken from the second. He laid down the twig of diamond, sharp and glittering, from the third grove that had blazed like frost about the sisters as they passed. And last of all, he set the cup, plain chased silver with a bent lip, and it stood among the glinting twigs as strange and out of place in that morning room as a stone fallen from the sky. The king took the gold twig up and weighed it in his palm and looked at the small clean break where it had left the bough and set it down again very carefully as a man sets down something he has just understood. Then the soldier told everything he had seen.

He told of the sponge and the wine poured away and the trapdoor beneath the eldest one's bed and the count of the steps and the long stair down through the three groves and the great clear lake and the 12 boats and the 12 princes who rowed them and the bright castle and the dancing that did not cease until every shoe was worn through at the coming of three in the morning. The king listened, and his face grew grave, and he sent for his 12 daughters and stand before him. He showed them the twig of silver and the twig of gold and the twig of diamond, and he showed them the cup, and he asked them whether the old soldier had spoken the truth. And the sisters looked upon the proof of the enchanted groves and the lake laid out plain in the daylight, and they saw that there was no use in it any longer, no denial that could stand against the evidence of their own vanished world carried up into their father's hall. So they gave it up. They confessed the whole of it to their father, the trapdoor and the stair and the lake and the tireless dancing, everything, and hid nothing back, for the secret they had guarded so long was a secret no more. Then the king remembered the promise he had made, that whoever should discover where his daughters danced by night might choose one of them to wife and have the kingdom after him. He was a man who kept his word, and he bade the soldier choose. The old man looked along the row of the twelve, from the youngest, quick and bright, and startled so often in the dark, to the eldest, who had led them all and had turned back three times with a reason ready in her mouth. And because he was no longer young himself and had no wish for a girl half a lifetime his junior, he chose the eldest for his bride, she who had carried him the wine with her own hands and had never once doubted her own cleverness.

And so it was settled. The soldier who had come home from the wars with nothing was named the king's heir and would have the kingdom in his time. There remained the twelve princes across the lake, who had waited in their boats and worn the sisters through so many pairs of shoes. The tale never tells who they were, nor how they came to be beneath the earth, nor whether they were young men enchanted long ago, or something that had never been young at all. Not one of them is given a name, or a house, or a country above ground that anyone could ride to, and they speak but once in the whole telling, and only to remark that a boat is riding heavy. For them the enchantment turned. They were laid under a curse that would bind them for as many nights as they had danced with the princesses, night for night, dance for dance, the whole long tally of the secret revels counted back against them, which is a long reckoning for twelve silent rowers. And the tale sets it down and passes on without another word about them. And with that the lake and the castle and the three bright groves passed out of the sisters' nights forever.

The trapdoor stayed shut beneath the eldest one's bed, and the slippers set out at evening were the slippers found at morning, whole to the last stitch. And the ledger the page had kept was closed and put away on a high shelf with the accounts of a bad year. Such is the tale as it has come down to us, and it has traveled far to reach this hour. This telling is the one the Brothers Grimm set down, Jacob and Wilhelm, who gathered the old household stories of the German lands and gave them at last to the page.

They printed it in the year 1815 in the second volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen, their book of children's tales and household tales. They had it from a young woman named Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff, and it reached her by way of their friends, the Haxthausens, who had heard it told near the town of Münster. The Grimms judged it no older than the 17th century or thereabouts, which is old enough, and no one can now say who first dreamed up the trapdoor and the lake. Its kin are scattered wide across many countries, for a good tale seldom stays in one place. In France, the writer Charles Deulin took it up and retold it in his own fashion in a book he called the Contes du Roi Cambrinus, the Tales of King Cambrinus, and he freely owned that he had the bones of it from the Grimms. In Russia, the great collector Afanasyev, who gathered the folk stories of his people much as the Grimms had gathered theirs, wrote down two versions of it, and both he called The Night Dances. And in Scotland, there lives a near cousin of it named Kate Crackernuts, in which it is not princesses, but a prince who is led away to be danced ragged night after night inside a green fairy hill until a brave and watchful girl follows to break the spell. The bones are the same in all of them, the secret dancing and the watcher who uncovers it, though the flesh upon those bones is cut to a different pattern in each land. Even within the German lands, the tale did not hold to one shape. In the telling remembered about Hesse, it is not 12 dancers, but one lone princess who is blamed morning after morning for a whole dozen pairs of shoes worn through until a young shoemaker's apprentice watches in secret and discovers 11 other sisters slipping out to join her at the revels. And when the truth is out, the spell breaks, and the apprentice weds her. In the telling from Paderborn, the daughters are but three, and they are led each night to a palace by three giants for their escorts.

And it is there, so the old tellers say, that the clever ruse first enters the story, the wine quietly poured away and the heavy sleep feigned. So the count of the dancing daughters shifts from teller to teller, and the shape of the trick shifts with it, and each village kept the story it liked best. But every telling comes round at last to the shoes, and the shoes are the whole of it. They are not merely the sign of the secret. They are the one part of it that could never be managed. Everything else in that chamber could be put right before dawn. The gowns could be shaken out and smoothed and hung even upon their pegs, and the press doors drawn quietly too, and the little key left standing in its plate as idle and innocent as it stood at noon. The trapdoor could be lowered and the bed set down over it so softly that a man lying 11 paces off heard nothing at all. The basin could be left untouched, the ash left unmarked, the candles left standing at their even height. And 12 clever women, tired to the bone at 3:00 in the morning, did that quiet work faithfully night after night, and did it so well that their father came to read good order as innocence. But no one has ever mended a soul with her bare hands in the dark. Leather keeps whatever has happened to it. A shoe cannot be smoothed or hung up or turned to face the wall. It lies where it is set down and goes on saying in the only language it has that a foot has been turning for hours on hard, bright ground. So a secret kept beautifully in every particular was betrayed each morning by the humblest thing in the room. And for a year, a year, that betrayal was answered with iron and answered nothing. A key turned at dusk, a knife worked into the mortar, an axe standing ready behind the proclamation, one failure stacked upon the next while the mornings went on repeating themselves.

It was never for want of diligence. It was that a searching man looks only at what he has already agreed to call the room, the hangings and the mortar, and the open middle of the floor, and never thinks to have the bedsteads dragged out and the ground beneath them lifted because a bed is furniture, and furniture is neither wall nor floor to a man hunting for a door. What the strong could not wrest open, the patient man walked into simply by lying down and being thought a fool, and letting his snoring roll out across the dark room until the sisters were sure of him, and then following them into their own country on their own stairs.

His whole victory was made of a poured cup of wine, a sponge tied beneath his chin, a cloak given him for nothing by a bent old woman at a bend in the road that a hundred mounted men had ridden past without slowing, feet that fell softly, and a tongue kept behind his teeth. Whether the twelve who went down were hard women who carried the wine with steady hands and knew what waited for the men who drank it, or daughters locked in one counted room who had found the single door their father could not bolt and went through it into a joy that was theirs alone, the tale does not say, does not seem to want to. It leaves that, as it leaves the twelve nameless rowers waiting in the dark water, standing open like a room just off the corridor of what we are told, and it is one of the reasons old stories go on holding us.

There is no need to settle any of it before sleep. As for the house above the trap door, it learned quiet slowly. The cobbler who had sat up late all that winter and half the spring cutting soles thin as a leaf and had come to dread the sound of a royal messenger at his shutter, was told his services were wanted no more than any other man's, and he went back to boots and harness and slept the better for it. There was a wedding before the leaves turned, and the old king, on the first night after, came up to the long chamber out of habit with the ring in his hand, and stood a while with the key half turned, and then drew the bolt back instead, and left the door standing unlocked, and went down to his own bed, and slept until the sun was well up, which he had not done in more nights than he cared to count. Now let all of that settle and grow still.

Somewhere far below the floor, the lake lies without a ripple on it, the twelve little boats drawn up along the bank and empty, their oars shipped and dry. The windows of the castle across the water have gone dark one by one, the way windows do in a house where the last guest has finally gone home. The great hall stands with its floor unmarked and the sconces cold, and the doors that stood open on the light are shut. There is nothing left down there that asks for your watching. And before the light goes, let the people of it come back once, quietly, each in turn, and then let each of them go. The old king, asleep at last, the ring of keys lying on the chest beside him, and the iron of it going cold. The old woman with the bundle, on some other road by now, in some other county, stopping to ask another tired man where he is bound.

The youngest princess, who heard the silver crack and the gold crack and the diamond crack, and was right all three times, and who has nothing behind her in the dark tonight at all. The eldest, a bride this season, who had an answer ready for every sound and has learned at last to hear a flaw as only a flaw. The old soldier, who has stood a hundred watches and has none to stand tonight, asleep in a fine, strange bed with his boots set neatly against the wall from long habit. And the twelve at their oars, rowing home over water that no one will cross again, silent going as they were silent coming. In your mind, reach out and close the trapdoor beneath the eldest princess's bed and feel it settle on silent hinges, sealing the three groves away in calm and order. Let the pale silver leaves fold into the dark, and the heavy gold boughs after them, and last of all, the cold, bright branches of diamond, their flashing quieted, their long avenue going gray and then black and then simply gone. Above them, the room is warm, and on a table in the morning light, three bright twigs and a plain cup are gathering the first dust of an ordinary house with no one left who needs to look at them again. Then picture a single candle steady in the dark, its small flame upright and unwavering, the one warm point left in a room where everything else has grown soft and dim. Let your breath slow to meet it, and with one slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out, and let the last curl of light fade into the night.

Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the old tales carry you into the night.