The Seventh Swan by Nicholas Stuart Gray

The six fully human brothers (there were seven brothers here) are off living their lives – but the seventh, Alasdair, has not done well adjusting to life as a human – and life with one wing. Gray sets the story in Scotland in perhaps the 18th century, and picks up the thread about two years after the fairy tale ended. The good folk are about to light the kindling when the swan brothers arrive, and she throws the shirts out onto them – but the last one is incomplete, and when her youngest brother is restored he is left with one wing. She keeps weaving, even managing to retain her hold on her work when they boost her onto the pyre.

A neighboring king finds her in the midst of the task, falls in love with her, and marries her, and she keeps on weaving, even when the people decide she must be a witch and go to burn her at the stake.

Their sister can restore them, but the only way is to weave shirts for them out of nettles (or something similar), and cannot speak (or smile, possibly) until they’re complete. The original story is “The Six Swans” (not seven?), in which an evil step-mother turns her husband’s six sons into birds. The book uses one of my favorite devices: it takes a well-known story, in this case a fairy tale, and re-imagines it, pushes it out further. Given some of the events in Susan Dexter’s The True Knight, I thought of Nicholas Stuart Gray’s The Seventh Swan, and pulled it off the shelf. This is such a perfect quote – it’s wonderfully true. From the old standby, Wikipedia: “Neil Gaiman has written that Gray ‘is one of those authors I loved as a boy who holds up even better on rereading as an adult’.”

The Seventh Swan by Nicholas Stuart Gray