Tender Morsels

  ‘A sampler, you say, Urdda, yet you have near broke my heart with it.’ Still vibrating from all the strong feelings, she took her sister’s hands. ‘It frightens me what else you might do, with the main part of your magic.’

  ‘Oh, no such damage as naughty Annie did, in her time.’

  Annie let go of her and cackled through her tears. ‘Oh, I never made anything like that beauteous beast! And how’d you transmoggerfy the room so? Greshus, my skin is still all a-creeping with the amazement!’

  ‘Do you like it?’ said Urdda to Branza.

  ‘I love it. I shall treasure him.’ Branza held the locket through her bodice-cloth. ‘What a gift! What a power!’

  ‘That is two extraordinary women you have reared there, Liga,’ said Davit.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Annie. ‘You can take all the credit for that.’

  They all looked to Liga, seated by the window with her face to the light, to the faint midsummer air, which moved the tendrils of hair at her temples. She turned and slightly smiled at them all, and tilted her head most graciously, accepting the witch’s and the woolman’s compliments, and her daughters’ pleasure in them, as no more than she deserved.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m very grateful to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts for the two-year fellowship that bought me the time to write Tender Morsels.

  The wRiters On the Rise workshop held in Tasmania in 2007 gave the first draft a good kick along: thank you to Tansy Rayner Roberts for organising the weekend, and to Marianne de Pierres, Rowena Cory Lindquist, Maxine McArthur, Richard Harland, Launz Birch and again Tansy for the useful critiques and the support.

  Jan Cornall’s monthly Draftbuster workshops also provided essential support. Thanks to Jennifer Moore for the beautiful setting, and to Jan, Jennifer, Sunny Grace, Tom Thompson, Lyn Berggren, Helen Chambers, Cecile Bower, Lee Lamming, Belinda Bourke, Wendy Fitzgerald, Narelle Scotford, Jinks Dulhunty and Barbara Pheloung, and everyone else who came by, creating the climate in which this impossible thing became not only possible but inevitable.

  For sustained and valuable editorial input, I’m deeply indebted to Rosalind Price at Allen & Unwin, Nancy Siscoe at Knopf and Bella Pearson at David Fickling Books. For making the whole four-way arrangement happen, many thanks to Jill Grinberg of Jill Grinberg Literary Management.

  For the title, I thank Jack Zipes for his translation of the Grimm brothers’ ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York, Norton, 2001) and the anonymous translator of the same story in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales (Routledge Classics, London and New York, 2002).

  The basis of the St Olafred’s bear ritual is the journée de l’ours held every February in the Catalonian town of Prats de Mollo la Preste, which I first saw on SBS’s documentary program ‘Global Village’. A good description and background can be found online at http://www.anglophone-direct.com/Fete-de-l-Ours-Prats-de-Mollo.

  MARGO LANAGAN is an acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Her three collections of short stories have been rapturously reviewed around the world and have garnered many awards, nominations and shortlistings. Her second collection, Black Juice, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and won two World Fantasy Awards, as well as the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Red Spikes was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Horn Book Fanfare title, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Margo lives in Sydney.