Three Vials of Fish Blood and the Sorceress at the Window

The net came up heavy, and inside it a fish opened its mouth and spoke. "Cut me open," it said, "and catch my blood in three bottles. Keep them where no light reaches them. You will take a wife, and she will bear you three sons in a single hour, and whenever one of those sons stands in danger, the blood in his bottle will go black." The fisherman stood on the wet stones with the creature thrashing against his arm, and he did exactly as the mouth in the water told him.

He bottled the blood. He stoppered the three vials and set them on a shelf in the dark of his hut. And within the year his wife lay down and rose with three boys, born so close together and so alike that the midwife could not say which had come first. Their mother washed them and could not mark them apart. Their father held all three and felt only that he was holding the same child three times. They grew that way, one face wearing three bodies, and the vials waited on the shelf, red as the day they were filled.

The Eldest Rides Out and Kills a Lion

When they were grown the eldest took the road. He came to a town wrung dry by fear, because a lion had been carrying off its young women, and the king had sworn his daughter to whoever could kill the beast. The young man knew nothing of the king or the promise. He only met the lion in the woods, and he fought it there among the trees, and he left it dead in the leaves, and he walked on whistling.

An old man had crouched in the brush and watched the whole fight. When the road was empty he crept out, sawed the head from the carcass, carried it to the palace, and laid it before the throne. "I am the one who killed it," he said. The king believed him. The wedding was prepared. But the true hero, in the next town over, heard the proclamation read aloud in the square, turned his horse around, and came back to call the liar what he was. He showed the body in the woods, headless and clawed where his own blade had gone in. The old man had no answer. The young man married the princess, and for a while the shelf in his father's hut stayed red.

The House No One Walks Out Of

One morning he stood at the palace window and saw a building far off across the fields, and he asked what it was. "That is the house of a sorceress," they told him. "Whoever goes in does not come out." He should have heard a warning. He heard an invitation. He saddled up and rode to the gate.

An old woman sat inside beside a great fire, hugging herself and complaining of the cold though the flames were roaring. A black dog lay at her feet. "Be kind to an old woman," she said. "Pluck one hair from that dog and throw it on the fire for me." He reached down. The instant his fingers closed on the dog's hair, ropes came alive out of the floor and the walls and bound him hand and foot. A wizard stepped out of the shadow, the kind of master who keeps his power in hairs and names and the burning of small things, and he carried the young man into a locked chamber and turned the key.

That night the first vial on the shelf went black. The fisherman took it down and held it and knew his son was somewhere past saving by ordinary means.

The Second Brother Walks Into the Same Snare

He sent the second son to find the first. The boy rode to the palace, and the princess, who could no more tell the brothers apart than the midwife had, met him as her husband and led him to her table. She told him everything, the far house, the warning, the morning her husband rode out and did not return. He listened, and then he did what blood and likeness pushed him to do. He rode the same road to the same gate.

The old woman shivered by the same fire. "Pluck me a hair from the dog," she said, and he leaned down, and the ropes took him, and the wizard came, and the second chamber closed. On the shelf the second vial darkened. Two reds remained, and only one of them belonged to a son still free.

What Was Truly His Own

The fisherman sent the third. This one did not ride empty-handed. He brought a dog of his own and a horse of his own, and at the sorceress's gate he tied them outside and went in alone. The old woman sat by her fire and shivered her old shiver. "Pluck a hair from my dog," she said, "and feed the flame."

He bent toward the black dog as if to obey. But his hand went past it, out the door, to his own animal waiting at the post, and it was a hair from his own dog that he carried back and dropped into the fire. The flame took it. And the spell, which fed only on what belonged to the house, found nothing of the house in the offering and broke apart in the woman's hands. The ropes did not rise. She stared at him. He drew his sword and killed her where she sat, then put his shoulder to the locked doors and broke them open one after another. Behind them he found his two brothers, and behind the next his brothers' shapes multiplied into a crowd, dozens of men the house had swallowed and never released. He cut them all loose.

The three returned together to the palace, three faces that were one face, and the princess looked at them and at last the eldest stepped forward and she knew her husband among his brothers. And in the dark hut by the sea the fisherman climbed onto a stool and watched all three vials flood back to red, bright as new blood, and he set out to find his sons and bring them home.