Prologue

In a house that looked more like a cabin in the woods than a cottage in the small town, Gale was about to close the windows of his small pharmacy that overlooked the carriage paved cobbled street. He flipped over the open sign to his “Hulder Herbology.” His neighbors were also closing their shops and market stalls, while people who came from a remoter part of the country side prepared to dump their home-grown produce or other commodities back in their wagon. They would have to cross the Rotun hill before it gets really dark and God knows what fairies or changelings will come out. Gale quietly waited for the mandarine orange sky overlooking the humble town of Fullgreens to be peppered with indigo blue specks of the dark, eyeing the ghost of a moon in the baby blue.

Gale finally shut the windows and turned around to see the back of his assistant who made absolutely no noise as she put back the dry herbs to their own small designated cupboards and cleaned their little rustic laboratory.

In contrast with Gale who was taller then average farmers who lived in the stretch from New Jersey to the south of Virginia, his assistant was a tiny, petite woman who looked no older than twenty. She wore a grey cap over her black hair that was styled into a modest, if seen in negative light–prudish, old fashioned bun that Gale has no idea how she tied into without those lacy nets that are all the rage. When she finally turned around to catch her superior looking at her, her dark eyes stared back with their characteristic alertness.

Ever the observant scholar, Gale was puzzled. They’ve lived and worked in his pharmacy that was also his home for about a week now, but he could never fathom any kind of meaning in her translucent eyes.

He can never gauge his alien-looking assistant’s intentions when she stares at him with such a pure of an expression, her glassy stare. She was not a hostile creature ever, as she is a bunny rabbit who he turned human in exchange for her services, but her bold pinning stare hardly won her a reputation as a proper lady. But Gale mused,

‘But the truth is that rabbits’ faces never ever change. So Michaela’s demeanor must have simply transferred to her human state.’

It was only after Gale stopped musing over Michaela’s deep chasms of ink that he began to see her round, smooth contour of her face, pink pert mouth, and honey-beige skin the townspeople called “mustard dyed” or “spun oat meal”.

Unbeknowst to her superior, the expressionless Michaela was actually struck with a strong sense of dread as Gale’s heavily fringed amber eyes looked down at her. Although she was grateful to her employer who with his genius in medicine and tonics helped her young bunny son Theodore to recover from his lifetime illness, she could never dispel her uneasiness around him.

After all he was a hulder or huldra, a night creature native to Scandinavia, even though he said he sworn off of eating meat in order to soothe her and her baby. It didn’t help either that Gale looked very much like a red fox even in his human form. He was extremely tall, with a slender built, as his main diet was like any average farmer’s, with some occasional wild dandelion salad. His waist trimmed of fat could have lowered Michaela’s guard but his height, broad shoulders were too intimidating for her and his endless legs resembled the sharp hind legs of a feared beast that races through the glades. His mussed up curly hair that the young female humans yearned to run their milk white fingers over was roughly speaking golden brown, but by the brass candlelight on his round table in his private study and under the summer rays, his hair revealed its true color–a rare and beautiful resemblance to the notorious color of a red fox. His brown eyes with an undertone of rich red would sometimes narrow into a secretive glance or eye squarely at her like how he was doing right now. Like foxes, his face alternates between a pet dog’s innocence and predatory slyness.

She remembered Gale telling her son lazily about the origins of the Hulder or Huldra, a night creature that populate the region he called “Europe” which is across a large body of water where giant fishes splash all over. Theodore, a small bunny that is always curious, would tilt his head as he measures Gale’s fantastical tales he spun out from memory of his mother’s tales.

“So your great grandmother made a charcoal burner rich…even though he saw her tail.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it. Why?”

“Because he had the sense to be polite about it instead of incensing her. He bowed and said “madame, I do believe you accidentally forgot to tuck in your petticoat.'”

“Was it a donkey tail or a fox tail?”

“A fox tail. My family branch has red fox tails. Others in Norway have donkey tails I believe.”

“Last time you told me, hulders can have tree barks on their backs.”

“Yes, you’re right, dear Theodore.”

“Why are they so different? They are all supposed to be hulders…or huldras. Or skogsas, whatever you call them.”

“Why settle on one when you can have it all?”

Michaela reflected on the conversation between Theodore and Gale she eavesdropped on just yesterday evening.

Hulders bewitch people with their beauty and invite them for a rendezvous in the shades of the forest. If the hulder is left unsatisfied, he or she leaves bloodshed on what used to be a loving nuptial nest. If the hulder’s expectation is met, the human is gifted with a wish come true, a prophecy foretold, or fortune bestowed. The hulders either have backs in the shape of tree barks, donkey tails, or fox tails, but they all are exquisitely beautiful in human eyes. So beautiful that many mortals fall willingly into their traps despite serious  portentous warnings or old midwives’ tales.

It didn’t seem Gale was too keen on continuing such tradition though. He would shed a tear at Theodore’s pain and he was all over his books and crystalline resins, hardly the image of the hulder conjured in the Nordic folklores. After what felt like a long time, Gale tilted his face slightly to the left and his lips drew into a smile that Michaela overheard the male humans call “bewitching,” or his personal favorite, “like a devil’s hound.” That in a bigger, more proper town like the Salem, Gale would get tried for making that kind of smile.

And Gale knew the disarming power of his smile. But he couldn’t help shuffling his feet a bit nervously, as he couldn’t get used to his apprentice who is small but strangely charismatic with her vigilant dark eyes. He wiped his calloused hands off his long olive green apron.

“Michaela, thank you for your service today.”

‘If Michaela absorbed any traits of the female human species, she ought to know that I am trying to make her at ease. Or if she is still more of a rabbit, she should be even flattered to see me deign to smile. I mean, what kind of rabbit isn’t happy to survive being with a beast, let alone being smiled at? To think that I would stoop to such a level because I don’t know what to do…I could just sense Octavia’s glee all the way from London.’

But Michaela without even flexing a single facial muscle, kept staring at her tall benefactor who despite his smooth smile was internally feeling cool sweats forming at the back of his neck.

And when she finally dismissed herself to go to her son who was hopping in the upstairs, Gale let out a sigh of relief. He just had to remind himself that he has to accept the fact that he, a hulder, a so-called creature of the night, son of Tallemaja, the holy Pine Tree Mary, was in a widow rabbit’s fuzzy paws.