Bare Your Teeth
by Savannah Brooks
“The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.” —C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Once upon a time, there was a princess who was promised to a prince. He was a boy from a neighboring kingdom, and as his family visited hers over the years, the two formed a real friendship. They both loved counting the leaves of sun-dappled trees, catching frogs in the fog of morning, mimicking a menagerie of bird calls. He loved squirreling away small trinkets, bestowing them upon her with all the gravitas of the holy grail. She loved penning ballads and seeing him play-act them to life.
As they frolicked throughout the grounds, their parents would half-scold, “Just stay out of the woods. That’s where the wolves live, and they can’t be trusted.”
The princess always thought that was a strange thing to say. As far as she knew, wolves could be trusted to act exactly like wolves. But her mom was always saying strange things about animals: how they caught wishes on their wings, how they spirited sorrow down into the loving arms of the earth, how they spoke for the gods.
As they grew older, the prince named fewer and fewer trees for the princess, noticed fewer and fewer constellations, offered her fewer and fewer stories. He also received fewer and fewer warnings about the woods. In fact, when he was old enough, he was encouraged, more and more, to cross the boundary he’d respected for his whole life. Encouraged to invade.
“Bring us back the monster’s pelt!” the men told the boy. “Show us your worth as our future king!”
The princess didn’t see how the wolves were monsters, but everyone said that they were, told tales of eyes gleaming in the night, teeth bared bloody and white, so she supposed it must be true. And as the prince’s intended, her mother reminded her, she was expected to support him. That’s what royal women did. They supported their men.
So that’s what the princess did. When the prince asked her to join him at the edge of the woods, to cheer him on in his valiant quest, she was nervous, but he was insistent. He would keep her safe, he promised. That’s what royal men did. They kept their women safe.
As the two strolled the tree line one spring morning, the limbs above them grasping, they came across a wolf pup lolloping in a clearing. The prince held his finger up to his lips. He stalked among the verdant brush, silent as a fox, unsheathing his sword as he went. For a moment, the princess didn’t understand what he was doing. Surely, this tangle of fluff tripping over too-big paws didn’t count as a monster?
But as the prince crept closer, there was no denying his intent.
“No!” the princess called out, oblivious to the impending danger: where there was a pup, there was a bitch.
A snarling explosion of fur and teeth blasted through the trees. The prince fell back, scrambling to the safety of the lush tree line, but the princess froze as the wolf mother lunged.
The prince shouted for her to run, dammit, run! But the princess felt strangely calm. It made perfect sense, this mother coming to her child’s aid. In fact, she would’ve been disappointed if the monster hadn’t made such a scene. Wouldn’t her own mother rage to protect her?
“I see you,” the princess murmured as the wolf bit down, as she felt her radius, her ulna, creak beneath the force of lupine jaws. Time dammed to a trickle, and the princess studied the ragged tear in the mother-beast’s ear, the taupe scar on the side of her grey snout, the star-burst patch of white on her chest. “I, too, will protect your child.”
Maybe the wolf mother understood; maybe she didn’t. Either way, she slowly released the princess, a growl low in her throat and sparks bright in her eyes. A maternal inferno. She snapped at the surrounding bramble as she corralled her pup between the mob of trees. Her ghost: shallow pawprints in the soil and deep puncture wounds in the princess’s forearm.
“Come on,” the prince said, once he’d scrambled back to the princess’s side. “Let’s get that looked at.” He wouldn’t meet her eye, only straightened out his doublet with trembling hands. “And when my parents ask, tell them I fought it off. The monster.”
“Of course,” the princess said, blood dripping from her fingertips.
He inclined his head, a small acknowledgment. Then he gently took hold of her injured hand, examining it.
“And you should have run,” he said.
After that, the prince no longer asked the princess to join him as he obsessively prowled the woods. He didn’t ask her to do much of anything at all. Not like when they were children, when they would play pretend down by the misty pond, or race through the echoing castle halls, or snatch cakes from under the cook’s watchful nose. He told her she sat so prettily, but he never asked her questions anymore. Never wanted to know what she thought, unless it was fawning admiration of him. Never stopped trying to prove his worth as a king. She had failed him that day, she knew, when she hadn’t run. She had shown something he could not.
When she came of age, she and the prince were married. The very next day, the two left for his kingdom, where there were no wolves at all.
Her life there wasn’t exactly happy, but it was bearable. The two would walk around the resplendent grounds, and he would speak on and on about his family history. They would share opulent meals and groan with pleasure at the stewed meat. But as the months passed, she kept failing more tests. Time and time again, her husband found her wanting. Then he found everyone else around her wanting, as if she’d poisoned the whole flock. When the chef undercooked dinner, the prince left bruises around the princess’s ribs. When the horse master chose the wrong saddle, the prince ripped out strands from the bottom of the princess’s scalp. When she woke to blood on her bedsheets once again, he’d slap her worthless womb.
“I don’t want to do this,” he’d croon, his jaws tight around her throat. “But I need a wife who can prove her worth as future queen. Don’t you want to prove your worth as future queen?”
She did. So, she sat in storm-cloud silence, her chambermaid layering her marbled face in powder and then rouge and then powder and then rouge again, and she realized why royal women always looked so beautiful.
The summer after they wed, the couple returned to the princess’s family castle to visit. She was a shade of her former self, but no one asked if she was okay. What would she have said if they had? Their silence prevented her lies.
She hoped her husband would find less of her to criticize away from the pressure of his princely duties, but she was starting to fear that she would never make a good queen-in-training. That she would never earn an exemption from his violence. Her husband might have been good as a boy, but he wasn’t good as a man. Just good at pretending.
He was done pretending. He’d grown so careless that he hit the princess across the face while they were visiting her family. While the bedchamber door yawned open. While the princess’s mother was walking by. She reflexively turned toward the sound of her daughter’s pained gasp, and for one glorious moment, the princess thought she’d been saved. But when they made eye contact, her mother only pulled her mouth into a sad, straight line. The line a queen couldn’t cross.
She kept walking.
In the weeks following their visit, the princess faded into purples and greens. The night before she and her husband were supposed to return to their kingdom, the princess walked to the edge of the woods. She wore only a light chemise; her arms bare in the velvety dark. A constellation of scars marked her forearm, bright in the moonlight. She’d half-convinced herself that this stroll was innocent, that she was courting memory, not danger. But when she heard a rustle from the silver-black tree line beside her, she smiled.
Here, at least, she could trust a wolf to act like a wolf.
The beast didn’t attack, though. When it stepped out of the trees, the princess noted the ragged tear in its ear, the taupe scar on the side of its grey snout, the star-burst patch of white on its chest.
“Princess,” the wolf mother said, her voice a gruff, eerie echo. “You’ve been seeking me.”
Awed, the princess knelt, eyes to the dark soil. She knew it was the animals who spoke for the gods.
“Humble,” the wolf mother praised. When the princess glanced up, the beast inclined her great head, her gaze steady and knowing. “It is not often that humans—and royal humans, no less—remember who first formed these lands.”
“I have no claim on these lands,” the princess said, her voice soft as the fur on the beast’s underbelly. “Not anymore. I only wish I did.”
The wolf mother considered her, eyes ghost-green in the night. “Why don’t you return to them?”
“I wouldn’t know how,” the princess admitted. “I would need to leave my husband, run away. And my family wouldn’t take me back after such a disgrace. I would be forced to live off this land. To live on my own.”
The princess tucked into herself, curling around her shame. Surely, this great creature would find her just as wanting as her husband did. She was worthless.
“Who says you would be on your own?” the wolf mother finally asked. “The forest is full of life. You will always belong to the earth. To your mother.”
“But—” the princess began, chest aching with memory even while her heart unfurled like a flag. “My actual mother.”
The beast lifted a black lip.
“Child,” she said. “Who do you think prayed for your salvation?”
The wolf mother nudged the princess’s arm, and she lifted it, obedient. The wolf mother fit her teeth gently, tenderly, around the scars she had made so many years prior. Then she led the princess along the tree line, back to the place they’d met so many years ago.
When the wolf mother began snarling, growling, howling, candles flickered to life in the windows, one by one. The wolf mother raged: a snare drum here, a violin shriek there, a staccato note everywhere. Later, the cooks and chambermaids and stable hands would tell valiant tales of how they tried to save the princess from the jaws of such a mighty beast.
But, of course, they did no such thing.
The princess scanned the expansive castle wall. There—her husband’s lamp, gasping to life. With a sickening wrench, she considered that he might try to come and save her.
He blew the lamp out.
When the wolf mother snapped hold of the princess’s chemise, tugging violently, the princess allowed herself to be swept into the darkness. But not before she found her mother’s face at the entrance of the castle. Not before the older woman set her mouth in a small, satisfied smile. The only real smile a queen could form.
“Open your throat, child,” the wolf mother said. “So, they’ll believe I’ve done it for you.”
The princess did. She squared her chest to the sky and roared and roared, her storm-cloud silence broken by a thunderous howl. The branches above her stretched their feathers into the night.
The wolf mother laughed, throaty and powerful, ghost eyes glinting.
“Do it again,” she said. “Just for fun.”
After the princess’s scream faded, after the crickets and owls took up their symphony once more, the wolf mother stepped further into the trees. The inky black lapped at her like a pup.
“Follow,” she said, leading the princess away from jaws that clamp tight and don’t let go.
Follow, the night symphony said.
The princess followed, straight on until happily ever after.
Savannah Brooks earned her MFA from Hamline University and worked the first decade of her career in publishing. After contracting Long COVID and becoming disabled, she left the field to focus on teaching and writing. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Calyx, and Hobart, among more than a dozen other publications. You can find out more at savannahbrooks.com.