“I expect you may get that,” said the titmouse. “At least the bit with your own garden. Providing dresses like that—well, you’re practically her fairy godmother. I should expect a reward will find its way here eventually. Particularly if a small enchanted bird were to show up and sing about the benefits of gratitude.”
Hannah grinned.
“Perhaps Anabel and I can set up together. She can sew dresses and I’ll keep bees. There are worse fates.”
“The dryad won’t be happy,” warned the bird.
“Sod the dryad.” She thought for a minute. “What about you, though? Aren’t you supposed to go back to being a regular bird?”
The bird shrugged. “Didn’t get you married. I may be stuck like this for awhile, or until the dryad gets distracted.”
“You don’t sound too bothered.”
“Once you get in the habit of thinking, it’s hard to stop. Perhaps you could throw me a worm now and again.”
“I’d be glad to,” said Hannah, and the titmouse rubbed its small white cheek against her round pink one.
“That’s all right, then,” said the bird, and it was.
LET PASS THE HORSES BLACK
My friend Tamnonlinear passed away last year. She curated Tam-Lin stories. I wish I’d written this sooner, so she could have added it to her collection.
I wish a lot of things.
“The horses will be black,” she’d said. “The Queen will ride on those, with her greatest nobles around her.”
Janet rubbed her hands down the sides of her jeans, wiping sweat from her palms, and watched the animals prance through the crossroads.
They were seven feet tall at the shoulder and their hocks were feathered with stormclouds. Their eyes blazed silver and their reins were made of braided briars. When the Queen tugged on their reins, blood flowed from their skin and from their riders’ hands and neither seemed to notice.
One of them, passing close to Janet’s hiding place, turned its head and snapped a passing bat out of the air. Janet could hear the crunch of tiny bones. The rider laughed and patted his steed’s bloody neck.
When it walked on, she could see the hoofprints burned into the road, smoking in the twilight.
Sure, thought Janet. Sure, yeah, the first thing you’d notice about those horses is the color.
“You have to stay hidden,” the little mouse-eared elf had said. She was smaller than Janet and her skin was gray, with a thousand lines running through them like the channels of tree bark. Janet touched the back of the elf’s hand, very delicately, and the skin was smooth like polished wood, not like human skin.
The elf gazed at the shape their hands made, barely touching. Her eyes were the green of madrone leaves, newly emerged in spring.
“You have to stay hidden. If the Queen sees you, she’ll catch you. And that will be very, very bad. It’ll be a little safer when the brown horses pass, but don’t come out.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Janet.
The brown horses passed with the rest of the Fae Court among them. There were more of them than there had been black horses, by a great number, but at least they were not bleeding. Janet shifted in her hiding place. It was cold and damp, but that was only to be expected.
She’d dressed in clothes she was willing to die in. It seemed like there was a good chance of that happening. But then she had stepped out the door and it was already getting cold so she’d grabbed the first warm thing she found on top of the clean laundry and now she was going to her death in a sweatshirt that read: OREGON—TEN MILLION BANANA SLUGS CAN’T BE WRONG.
Typical.
The elf turned her hand over and closed her oddly-jointed fingers over Janet’s. Her wrist lay against Janet’s ringless finger.
“Because we’re leaving. And I love this place.”
Janet studied the odd, narrow face across from hers. She could feel a pulse through her fingers, though it did not feel like a heartbeat. It sank and thrummed and swirled like fiddle music in the elf-woman’s veins. “Why leave, then?”
The elf made a restless gesture with her free hand. Her small mouse ears flicked to catch sounds that Janet could not hear. “The Queen has called the rade. The last rade of the fairies in this land. Some of us could stay behind the last time, because they would return.”
She gave a small, unhappy smile. Her teeth were delicately pointed behind her lips. “We said we were preparing for the Queen’s return, so that there would be a place for the court to stay when they returned. But this time, she won’t take that excuse…”
The brown horses were made of wood. They came in a hundred shades of brown, from cypress gray-green to golden yellow poplar. Bark clung to some of them, where the manes and forelocks would be, and their tails were great swinging root clumps, still clotted with earth.
Are they alive? Does the Queen just call them up and then root them whenever they’re done traveling?
Janet had a brief, dizzying vision of a fairy stable that was half forest, of horse-trees rooted in the ground by the feet and tails, waiting to be brought to life.
She craned her neck, looking at the palest of the horses. Was one of the riders Lyn?
No. They were fairies, elves, some of them almost human but most of them not even close. They had antlers or hooves or heads like birds. One rider was a cloud of amber moths, swirling more or less above the saddle. One rode side-saddle to accommodate a massive serpent’s tail.
None of them had the face of her brother.
“He’ll be with the white horses,” said the elf-woman. “Your brother, I mean.”
“I still can’t believe the fairies took him,” said Janet.
The elf-woman shook her head sadly. “The Queen fancies mortals sometimes. She takes them. The King does too, sometimes, but he mostly lets them go afterwards. The Queen keeps hers for decades.”
“It’s not that,” said Janet wearily. “It’s…it’s any of this.” God help her, until the elf-woman had come out of the madrone tree to talk to her, she thought Lyn had gotten arrested or robbed a convenience store or something.
I should have been so lucky…
Janet saw the mouse-eared elf at last. She rode a horse the slick red of madrone bark, with shaggy, peeling strips around the hooves. Her ears moved endlessly, as if listening for someone in the shadows, but she was staring down at her hands on the madrone-horse’s reins.
I’m here, thought Janet, as hard as she could. I made it.
She didn’t think elves could read thoughts, but she hoped somehow that the other woman knew.
“I’ll tell him,” said the elf-woman. “To ride on the outside if he can. There’s a few of them, you know, the ones on the white horses. The humans that the Queen is taking with her.” She grimaced. “She keeps them like pets. It’s cruel.”
“She seems cruel,” said Janet.
The pulse, still against her fingers, swirled to a frightened crescendo. “Yes,” said the elf, pulling her hand away. She tucked it against her body. “Yes. More than you know. She’ll kill us if we don’t come with her. The ones tied to a human family are the only ones with an excuse, and they’ll lie low anyway, in case she forgets.”
“Can’t you lie low, too?”
The elf-woman shook her head. “She’d come for my trees.”
There were eight white horses the color of milk. Janet half expected them to be unicorns, but they were only horses. They wore bridles and saddles like normal horses and their riders were the first humans that Janet had seen that night, since she looked in her mirror.
She saw Lyn among them at last. His skin was very pale, almost as white as the horse’s hide, and he had the set lips of a boy at a funeral who is determined not to cry.
He had not been able to ride on the outside after all, but he was only one horse deep at last. Good enough. She’d manage.
She took a deep breath and jumped out of the shadow of the trees.
“You have to pull him off the horse,” said the elf-wo
man. “You have to do it quickly. The Queen can’t control mortal horses very well, but she can send them mad. If you get him off the horse before she knows what’s happening, though, she won’t bother.”
She sat back. “After that…after that, it will be hard.”
Janet ducked under the first white horse, grabbed the second one’s bridle, and Lyn stared down at her with his mouth hanging open.
“Janet?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to help,” snapped Janet. She grabbed his ankle and yanked. The horse shied and Lyn (had he ever even been on a horse before?) slipped and squawked.
“Give me your hand!” she growled.
He got the message or else he was grabbing for something to hold onto. Either one worked. She caught his hand and half-dragged him out of the saddle.
The other white riders set up a cheer.
“Do it!” cried the one on the first horse. “Lady, hold him!”
They turned their horses and suddenly there was a ring of white around them, with Janet holding Lyn in the center.
“Stay strong!” cried another rider, an old man in ancient armor.
And then, in a voice like shattering bells, the Queen cried “What is happening here?”
“She’ll turn him into beasts,” said the mouse-eared elf. “A lion or a wolf or a bear. A few of them. You have to hold onto him through it all. If you let go, she wins.”
“I have to hold onto a bear?” said Janet, horrified.
“Or a snake,” said the elf-woman. “She’s fond of snakes…”
It was a lion first. Janet saw her brother’s face melt like candlewax, and his open mouth grew fangs as long as her thumb. She ducked her head down into its mane and wrapped her legs around the beast’s belly thinking this is it, this is where I die, no one is going to believe it…
The lion roared in her ear and left her head ringing. He could not get at her with his teeth, but he sank his claws into her back and she felt the sweatshirt shred away in rags and her skin with it, and then he brought up a hind leg and scratched like a dog scratching and itch and his claws tore her leg open and she was going to bleed to death and they would find her body and think—what? A mountain lion? An escaped zoo animal?
“If you will not relinquish your grip, then try another!” shouted the Queen and the world changed.
Her sweatshirt was whole again. Her leg was no longer torn open. The circle of white riders was still there, and the old man in armor said “Well done!” and then Lyn turned into a bear.
It was so massive that her arms ached spanning its body. She grabbed handfuls of fur, trying to hold on. This time, the bear hugged her back.
Things snapped in her chest like tree branches. She knew that sensation, knew that her ribs were broken and if she breathed, the ends would jam into her lungs but that didn’t matter because she couldn’t breathe anyway, the bear was crushing the breath out of her and it smelled rank and terrible and wild.
It doesn’t matter. Hold on. Just hold on.
Her hands were locked in the bear’s fur. She focused every ounce of will on her fingers, feeling the strands slide loose one by one. Hold on. Hold on.
“Or this!” cried the Queen, and the bear dwindled away into a slick, muscular surface as thick around as her thigh.
Janet drew in a breath that didn’t hurt and her ribs were no longer broken. Her breath came out in a huff of laughter, because what was this? This was only pain, and Janet knew too much already about pain.
The white riders heard her laugh and they shouted like spectators at a football game. Were they on her side? They sounded as if they were on her side.
Some of them have been her pets for decades, the elf-woman said. Perhaps there was no one to come for them.
The serpent hissed and tried to slither out of the circle of her arms. It was too slick to hold like she had the bear.
She grabbed for its head instead and it opened its mouth to strike.
Unimaginative, she thought grimly. If the Queen had any wits, she’d turn him into a porcupine. Or a cactus. But Janet had grown up moving snakes off the road before a car could hit them, and this part, at least, was easy.
She jammed her forearm into the snake’s mouth and it clamped down.
The pain of the fangs was like daggers, but that didn’t matter. That was only pain. She flung her other arm over the top of the snake’s head and now it was trapped against her, unable to release its mouth. The long body lashed and the tail spasmed.
“I—will—not—let—go!” snarled Janet into the snake’s forehead.
“Enough,” said the Queen.
The pain in Janet’s forearm ebbed away and she was sitting on the path with her brother Lyn clutched in her arms.
The circle of riders opened.
It seemed to Janet that they moved aside reluctantly, but move they did. The Queen, on her great black horse with silver eyes, came walking into the center of the circle.
She leaned forward over the horse’s neck and looked down at Janet.
“Very well,” she said. “Very well. You have pulled him down and held him. This I acknowledge.”
Janet looked up into the face of the Queen of Fairies.
She was beautiful. She was beautiful like stars were beautiful or moons or photos of distant galaxies. There was nothing human in her face, nothing that Janet’s eyes could catch onto. She had no idea, even after gazing for a long time, what the Queen looked like.
“What is he to you, then?” asked the Queen. “Your husband? Your lover?”
“My brother,” said Janet. In her arms, Lyn was breathing in wet, heavy gasps, his eyes closed.
“You have earned your kinsman back, then,” said the Queen. “I did not know he had a champion.”
Slowly, slowly, Janet stood up. She had him by the hair, still, in case the Queen had a trick left to play.
She looked the Queen of Fairies full in her impossible face and said “He doesn’t.”
A moan went through the white riders, a sound like the wind through pine trees.
She had moaned like that when Lyn had broken her ribs when she was ten. That was when she had learned what it felt like to have branches break inside your chest.
She flexed the fingers of her free hand, the one that had lay across the elf-woman’s palm. The last two fingers on that side would always be crooked, from the time where her brother had ground his heel into her hand.
That was when her mother had thrown Lyn out of the house. The first time.
Perhaps it would do him good to learn what it was like to be at the mercy of a greater power.
Janet looked past the ring of shaken white riders. Her eyes picked out a slender figure on a slick red horse, with mouse ears and eyes the color of new madrone leaves.
She set her foot on her tormenter’s shoulder.
And she smiled a very human smile at the Queen of Fairies, and said “I’ll trade you.”
THIS VOTE IS LEGALLY BINDING
There was a stretch in 2016 where everybody and their brother had a hot take article on trying to talk to women wearing headphones. After about the third such thinkpiece, I was moved to poetry.
Someone always says it, whenever it comes up:
"I guess I'm just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!"
Well.
Yes.
It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote
all us women
and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone
ever again.
This vote is legally binding.
Yes, of course, all women know each other,
the way you always suspected.
(Incidentally, so do Canadians. I'm just throwing that out there.)
We went into the women's room at the Applebee's on the corner of 54
and all the others streamed in through the doors
into that endless liminal space,
a chain of humans stretching backward
; heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites,
Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child.
We sat around in the couches in the women's room
(I know you've always been suspicious of those couches)
and chatted with each other in the secret female language
that you always knew existed.
Somebody set up a console--
the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart
and Cleopatra never learned to lose
and a woman who ruled an empire that fell
when the Sea People came
and left no trace
can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument.
Eventually we took the vote.
You had three defenders:
your grandmother and your first-grade teacher
and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody.
Your mom abstained.
It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks
that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee's
since the beginning of recorded time.
And then we went back to playing Mario Kart
and Hoelun took off her bra
and we didn't think about you again
except that I had to carry this message.
So anyway
good luck with that
it's just as you always said it was.
Hush now,
no talking,
hush.
TELLING THE BEES
I grew up reading Cricket Magazine, with the little bug comics along the bottoms of the pages. This story was eventually reprinted in Cicada, their young adult magazine, and I danced around yelling, because it was Cricket and I hadn’t known how much that would mean to me until it happened.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 13
