Who Goes There?

We don’t know much about E. Lily Yu. We don’t even know what the “E.” in her name stands for, or at least I can’t find a source on it; her own site doesn’t mention it. We don’t know when she was born either, but given that she graduated from Princeton in 2012 we can make an educated guess. Incidentally she received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer that same year, off the strength of a couple very strong short stories. Since then she has written one novel, a short story collection, plus an essay collection. “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” is a fable, or rather a fairy tale sort of in the style of Hans Christian Andersen, but with a more explicitly feminist bent. This one is a little upsetting to read, truth be told, because of how vividly it depicts an abusive relationship and a woman’s disillusionment; but it’s also written in a style that is (for the most part) in keeping with the tradition.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September-October 2016 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (ed. Jonathan Strahan), The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (ed. Charles Yu), The Best of Uncanny (ed. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas), and the Yu collection Jewel Box. Pretty good for a more recent story.

Enhancing Image

The story is about a witch, “neither very old nor very young,” and as the narrator tells us, “she had not been born a witch.” She went through a few jobs first and took on the role of witch, learning the arts, living a secluded life in a hut on Orion Waste, so named after a fallen star. The setting is for the most part your typical medieval fantasy setting, albeit with a tinge of the post-apocalyptic and couched in a style of narration that makes it clear from the outset we’re reading a story. The witch herself seems close to being aware she’s playing a part in a fable, and there are a couple side characters who are mentioned as taking part in other stories—which of course we hear nothing about, but this is a fantasy world that is decidedly and completely removed from the real world. The style Yu employs here makes sense for both the material and for someone would’ve been very young still when she was writing it, as the fable is a mode that’s easy to learn but hard to master; it’s not as demanding as trying to emulate the Bible, or even Hemingway, but it takes a talented writer to squeeze fresh juice out of this fruit. As such Yu assumes (correctly) that the reader has at least a cursory knowledge of how traditional fairy tales work and proceeds from there while also having some fun with it, such as a light meta touch.

The witch takes on the companionship of a knight, with the former seeing the latter as worthy of admiration and the latter seeing the former as useful. Right away we get the feeling something isn’t right with this relationship, but the witch is blinded both by her feelings for the knight and the fact that she hesitates to use a certain tool that would’ve prevented this whole oncoming trouble. You see, the witch had inherited a magic bell, “forged from cuckoo spit, star iron, and lightning glass, which if warmed in the mouth showed, by signs and symbols, true things.” The problem is that using the bell renders the witch ill to the point of being bedridden, so it’s only something to be used in dire situations. It’s a shame, because the knight is not without his merits; he is brave, and he does try to take on the dragons that his profession calls for, but he proves to be simply not strong enough to take on these beasts alone. The witch goes through great pains to save the knight, but is not rewarded for it; instead the knight berates her, being clearly envious of her talent, and even later in the story threatens to kill her if she “takes the credit” again. The knight does not see the witch as fully human but rather as a utility, to be discarded if deemed too inconvenient or if her usefulness runs out. And yet the witch stands by the knight; she can’t bring herself to hate him, or even to articulate the ways in which he mistreats her.

The witch is a woman, but the knight never treats her as such. Historically, in the real world, witchcraft has been associated with women’s evil ways, and while witchcraft is not an exclusively female practice and women aren’t the only people to suffer from witch hunts (Giles Corey sure died for it), a woman being accused of witchcraft is like a woman under patriarchy being accused of promiscuity. To help make this point, Yu introduces us to the lady (mind you that none of these characters have names), whom the knight rescues after the witch has defeated another dragon. The lady is everything the knight expects out of a “good” woman: conventionally attractive and pure as snow, not given to wickedness. Unfortunately the lady is also a real bitch, and it doesn’t take long for her to whisper sweet nothings in the knight’s ear and convince him to kill the witch while she isn’t looking—something the witch luckily overhears. I will say that things at this point get a bit confusing since there aren’t any breaks between scenes and the third-person narrator seems to jump between characters’ perspectives carelessly by the time the lady is introduced. It doesn’t make the story difficult so much as unnecessarily hard to untangle at times; it gives the impression of unprofessionalism, or at least that one more go through the manuscript would’ve been nice. Ultimately these are quibbles, given the story’s power otherwise; just wanted to point them out since they stuck out to me initially.

There Be Spoilers Here

When I started reading this story I assumed the “boy knight” of the title would be an actual boy and not a man (how stupid of me), and yet I ended up not being that far off. The witch’s bell reveals that a curse had been put on the knight, such that while physically a man he’s still a young boy on the inside, which goes to explain his erratic behavior and lack of capacity to empathize with anyone. The lady, for her part, is also cursed, such that once she has her hands on someone she can’t have them, though it’s unclear at first what this could mean in practical terms. The witch pities both of them, although what’s interesting is that for both Yu and the witch the curses put on these people do not absolve them of their wrongdoings. The twist of the knight’s condition also comments on the immaturity inherent in misogyny, about how a misogynistic tendency always reveals a lack of maturity and capacity to empathize with other people in the misogynist. (Needless to say this also applies to transmisogyny.) I say this with clarity as someone with a long history of misogynistic tendencies that I’ve been trying to atone for in the past couple years. I used to be almost as bad as the knight. It’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s true, and it’s probably a personal factor that has gone to heighten this story’s effectiveness for me.

In a way the story’s climax is a bitter one. The knight is not cured of his curse, nor is he redeemed, but rather becomes another toy for the lady, who herself is said to be deeply unhappy. Things turn out well for the witch, though, who has gotten out of her toxic relationship and can now act only for herself again. Aging and wounded from her travels, she take up working at a shop, not saying much but being content in her work—only she’s met with one last visitor, a peddler “with a profitable knack for roaming between stories” who offers her a pair of red shoes. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher if taken on a literal level, but since this is a fairy tale it’s easy to grasp the allegorical significance of the witch putting on the shoes and taking flight, after having suffered and yet retained a sense of purity. Unlike the mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, who must work in the afterlife to redeem herself, Yu’s witch is more akin to Thomas Hardy’s Tess in that she is a fundamentally good woman who has been done dirty. The very end sees the witch ascend to the heavens, but also out of the story.

A Step Farther Out

There’s a roughness to it, mainly in the lack of scene breaks and shifting in perspectives, that tells me it could’ve been even better had there been another rewrite. At the same time it’s telling that when logging this story for my reads-of-the-year spreadsheet I bolded the title, telling future me this is very much a story work recommending and remembering. “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” is a modern fairy tale that captures, in balanced measures, both the whimsical high fantasy and dark moralism of quite a few classic fairy tales. Yu understood the form well enough to not only emulate it successfully but to give it a little something extra. rest assured we’ll be returning to her eventually.

See you next time.