The Modern Faerie Tales

by Holly Black

  “Nicnevin?” Ruth asked. “Who is that supposed to be?”

  “I think she’s the old Unseelie Queen,” Val said. She dragged her fingers across several cords at once. A cacophony of voices rose up, each one telling its bitter tale, each one mentioning Mabry. “They’re all hair. The hair of Mabry’s victims.”

  “This is some spooky-ass shit,” Ruth said.

  “Shhh,” Val said. One of the voices sounded familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d heard it before. She plucked a golden string.

  “Once I was a courtier in the service of the Queen Silarial,” a male voice said. “I lived for sport, for riddles, and dueling and dance. Then I fell in love and all those things ceased to matter. My only joy was in Mabry. I desired a thing only if it delighted her. I basked in her gladness. Then, one lazy afternoon, as we gathered flowers to weave into garlands, I saw that she’d wandered off. I followed and overheard her speaking with a creature from the Unseelie Court. They seemed well acquainted and her voice was soft as she told him the information she had gathered for the Unseelie Queen. I should have been angry, but I was too afraid for her. If Silarial had found out, the consequences would have been terrible. I told Mabry that I would tell no one, but that she must leave directly. She told me she would and wept bitterly over deceiving me. Two days later I was to duel in a tournament with a friend. When I donned my armor, it felt strange, lighter, but I paid it no mind. Mabry told me she’d stitched her own hair into it as a token. When my friend struck, the armor crumbled and the sword cut me right through. I felt the silk of her hair against my face and knew I was betrayed. Now I must tell my tale forevermore.”

  Val sat down hard, staring at the harp. Mabry was a spy for the Unseelie Court. She had killed Tamson herself. Ravus had only been her instrument.

  “Who was that?” Ruth asked. “Did you know him?”

  Val shook her head. “Ravus did, though. He was the one swinging the sword in that story.”

  Ruth bit her lower lip. “This is so complicated. How are we going to figure out anything?”

  “We already figured out something,” Val said.

  She stood up and walked into the next room. It was the kitchen. There was no stove, however; no refrigerator, only a sink in a long expanse of polished slate. Val opened up one of the cabinets, but it was filled only with empty jars.

  Val thought about Ravus’s glamoured form, his golden eyes the flaw in his disguise. There was something disquieting about these perfect rooms, dustless and echoing only with footsteps and the splash of water. But if there was a glamour, she had no idea what was beneath it.

  Ruth walked into the room and Val noticed the white powder drizzling from her backpack.

  “What’s that?” Val asked.

  “What?” Ruth looked behind her, on the floor, and shouldered off the bag. She laughed. “Looks like I ripped the canvas and popped a hole in our baby.”

  “Shit. This is worse than a bread-crumb trail. Mabry’s going to know we were in here.”

  Ruth squatted down and started sweeping the powder together with her hands. Instead of forming a pile, it gusted up in white clouds.

  As Val looked at the flour, she got an idea. “Wait. Hey, I think I might have to commit infanticide.”

  Ruth shrugged and pulled out the sack. “I guess we can always have another one.”

  Val ripped open the paper packaging and started sprinkling flour on the floor. “There has to be something here, something we can’t see.”

  Ruth grabbed a handful of white powder and threw it at the door. Val tossed another fistful. Soon the air was thick with it. Their hair was covered and when they breathed, flour coated their tongues.

  It settled all over the apartment, showing the fish pond as a broken pipe spilling water into buckets and pooling on the floor, revealing the sagging sheetrock of the ceiling, the chipped tiles along the walls and tracks of mouse droppings on the floor.

  “Look.” Ruth walked over to one of the walls, powder making her ghostly. Flour was stuck to most of the wall, but there was a large bare patch.

  Val tossed more powder at the gap, but instead of hitting the wall, it seemed to go through the space.

  “We got it.” Val grinned and lifted her fist. “Wonder twin powers activate!”

  Ruth grinned back, knocking her fist into Val’s. “Shape of two fucking lunatics.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Val said, and ducked through the gap.

  There, in a shadowed room hung with velvet drapes, was Luis. He lay on a carpet patterned with pomegranates and was wrapped in a woolen blanket, but despite that, he was shivering. There was blood on his scalp and several of his braids had been cut off.

  At first Val just gaped at him. “Luis?” she finally managed.

  He looked up, squinting, as though against a bright light. “Val?” He scrambled to a sitting position. “Where’s Dave? Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she said absently. Her mind was racing. “What are you doing here?”

  “Can’t you see that I’m chained to the floor?” Luis said. He turned his wrists and she saw that his own braids were wrapped around them, pulled taut.

  “The floor?” Val repeated stupidly. “But what about the carpet?”

  Luis laughed. “I suppose this place looks beautiful to you.”

  Val looked at the low couches, the bookshelves overflowing with cloth-covered fairy stories, the faded grandeur of the carpet and painted molding on the walls. “It’s one of the most gorgeous rooms I’ve ever been in.”

  “The plaster walls are cracked and there’s a leak in the ceiling that pretty much means that whole corner is black with mold. There’s no furniture here, either, and certainly no rug—just floorboards with some old nails sticking up out of them.”

  Val looked around at the soft light coming from a pewter lamp with a fringed shade. “Then what is it that I’m seeing?”

  “Glamour, what else?”

  Ruth ducked her head into the room. “What’s goi—Luis?”

  “Hold on. How can we be sure it’s really you, Luis?” Val asked.

  “Who else would I be?”

  Ruth came most of the way in, her foot still in the glamoured opening, as though she thought it might close at any moment without a wedge. “We just left you in the park and you were sleeping.”

  Luis let his head fall back. “Yeah, well, the last time I saw Ruth, I was with Lolli and Dave in the park. We’d picked out a place to sleep near the weather castle. Lolli was leaned up against me, dozing off when Dave just got up and walked off. I knew he was upset. Shit, I was freaking out, too. I thought maybe he wanted to be alone.

  “But then he didn’t come back and I didn’t know what to think. I went out looking. I saw him walking back through the Ramble. He wasn’t alone, either. At first I thought it was some guy—I don’t know, hitting on him—but then I saw the guy had feathers instead of hair. I started toward them and that’s when tiny fingers covered my mouth and my good eye, grabbed hold of my arms and my legs. I could hear them snickering as they lifted me up into the air and my brother saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just for a little while.’ I didn’t know what to think. I sure didn’t think I’d wind up here.”

  “Did you see Mabry?” Val asked. “Did she say anything to you?”

  “Not much. She was distracted by something that was going down. Someone visited her and she was pissed about it.”

  “There’s something we have to tell you,” Val said.

  Luis went quiet, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “What?” he asked, and his voice was so quiet that it made Val’s heart ache.

  “It was Dave that we thought was missing. He’s gone. Someone’s pretending to be you.”

  “So you came here looking for Dave?”

  “We came here looking for evidence. I think Mabry’s behind all the faerie deaths.”

  Luis scowled. “Wait, so where’s my brother? Is he in trouble?”

  Val shook her he
ad. “I don’t think so. Whatever’s pretending to be you seems to be spending all its time screwing Lolli. I don’t think that’s exactly on the supernatural agenda, but it’s definitely on Dave’s.”

  Luis winced, but he said nothing.

  “We should hurry,” Ruth said, patting Val’s head, her fingers threading through the stubble. “Just because this bitch can’t tie you up with your own hair doesn’t mean we should hang around.”

  “Right.” Val leaned over Luis, looking at the braids that bound him to the floor. She tried to snap them or pull them loose, but they were as hard as if they were made of steel.

  “Mabry cut them with scissors,” Luis said. “And cut me, too.”

  “Do you think scissors would slice through the braids?” Ruth asked.

  Val nodded. “She has to have a way to sever her own spells. Where do you think they would be?”

  “I don’t know,” Luis said. “They might not even look like scissors.”

  Val stood up and walked out into the parlor, stopping at the fountain where the flour had dissolved, then walked over to the display cabinet.

  “Do you see anything?” Val called.

  Ruth pulled out a drawer and dumped the contents onto the floor. “Nothing.”

  Val looked in the cabinet, noticing the ballerina again, noticing the loops her arms made and the bloody color of the toe shoes. Reaching in, Val picked her up, sticking her fingers through the arm gaps and pushing. The figurine’s legs closed and opened, just like scissors.

  “Get the harp,” Val said. “I’ll get Luis.”

  It wasn’t quite dawn when they picked their way back through the Ramble, up through the branching trails to where they’d left Lolli and what had appeared to be Luis. The chords of the harp jangled as they moved, but Ruth muffled it by hugging it tighter to her chest. As Val, Ruth, and Luis approached, they saw that the other Luis was awake.

  Lolli’s voice was high and trembling. “It’s so cold and you’re burning up with fever.”

  The disguised Luis looked at them. His eyes were blackened around the edges and his mouth was dark. His skin was pale as paper and had a sheen of sweat over it that made it appear like plastic. With trembling fingers, he brought a cigarette to his lips. The smoke didn’t leave his body.

  “Dave,” the real Luis said. His voice was even, calm, just like Val’s had been after she’d seen her mother with Tom. It was a voice so full of emotion that it sounded like no emotion at all.

  Lolli looked at Luis, and then at his twin. “Wha—what’s happening?”

  “You couldn’t tell the difference, could you?” the disguised Luis said to Lolli. His face changed, features subtly shifting to become Dave’s. The blackened mouth and eyes remained, as did the sheen on his skin.

  Lolli gasped.

  He laughed like a maniac, his voice raspy. “You couldn’t even tell the difference, but you would never give me a chance.”

  “You fucking shit.” Lolli slapped Dave. She hit him again, blows raining against the hands he threw up to ward her off.

  Luis grabbed her arms, but Dave laughed again. “You think you know me? I’m Sketchy Dave? Dave the Coward? Dave the Idiot? Dave who needs his brother’s protection? I don’t need nothing.” He looked Luis in the face. “You’re so smart, right? So smart you didn’t see any of this coming. Who’s the moron, huh? You got some fancy fucking word for how stupid you are?”

  “What have you done?” Luis asked.

  “He made a deal with Mabry,” Val said. “Didn’t you?”

  Dave smiled, but it looked like a rictus grin, the skin of his mouth too tight. When he spoke, Val saw only blackness beyond his teeth, as though she were looking into a dark tunnel. “Yeah, I did a deal. I don’t need the Sight to know when I have something somebody wants.” He wiped his forehead, eyes increasingly wide. “I wanted—”

  He collapsed, his body shaking. Luis sank to his knees next to Dave and reached out to smooth his locs back from his face, then abruptly pulled his hand back. “He’s way too hot. It’s like his skin is on fire.”

  “Never,” Val said. “He’s been using Never much more than once a day. He had to take it this whole time to keep that shape.”

  “In the movies they put people with crazy fevers in a bathtub with ice,” Ruth said.

  “What, when they OD on faerie drugs?” Lolli snapped.

  “Grab him,” Val said. “The lake should be cold enough.”

  Luis slid his hands under his brother’s shoulders. “Be careful. His body is really warm.”

  “Take my gloves.” Ruth pulled a pair out of her coat pocket and handed them to Val.

  Pulling them on quickly, she grabbed Dave’s ankles. Touching his skin was like grabbing the handle of a pot of boiling water. She lifted. He was so light, he might have been hollow.

  Together she and Luis hurried down the steps, down the paths of the Ramble to the edge of the water. The heat of Dave’s body scorched her skin through the gloves and he twitched and writhed as if he were fighting some unseen force. Val gritted her teeth and held on.

  Luis waded into the water and Val followed, the frigid cold at her calves a terrible contrast to the burn of her hands.

  “Okay, down,” Luis said.

  They lowered Dave into the water, his body steaming as it touched the lake. Val let go and started back to the shore, but Luis held on, keeping his brother’s head above water, like a preacher performing a terrible baptism.

  “Is it helping?” Ruth called.

  Luis nodded, rubbing his brother’s floating face. Val could see that Luis’s hand was bright pink, but whether he was burned or just cold she wasn’t sure. “Better, but we have to get him to a hospital.”

  Lolli waded in, staring down at Dave. “You fucking moron,” she shouted. “How could you be so stupid?” She looked suddenly lost. “Why would he do this for me?”

  “You can’t feel responsible,” Val said. “If I were you, I think I’d want to kill him.”

  “I don’t know what to feel,” Lolli said.

  “Val,” said Luis. “We have to go ask Ravus for help.”

  “Ravus?” Ruth demanded.

  “He saved his life before,” Luis said.

  Val thought of Ravus’s face, closed, his eyes dark with fury. She thought of the things she knew about Mabry and the things she just guessed about the currency Dave had used to pay for her help. “I don’t know if he’ll be willing to now.”

  “I’ll take Dave to the hospital,” Lolli said.

  “Go with her, okay?” Val asked Ruth. “Please.”

  “Me?” Ruth looked disbelieving. “I don’t even know him.”

  Val leaned close to her. “But I know you.”

  Ruth rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you owe me. You owe me like a month of mute servitude.”

  “I owe you like a year of mute servitude,” Val said and waded into the water to help Luis lift his brother’s body once more. Slowly they made their way to the street. The first cab they hailed pulled up and then, seeing Dave’s body, drove off before Lolli could grab hold of the door. The next one stopped, seemingly indifferent as the two girls got in and Luis draped his writhing brother across their laps.

  “Here,” Ruth said, handing over the harp.

  “We’ll take care of him,” Lolli said.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Luis hesitated shutting the door.

  The taxi started to move and Val saw Ruth’s pale face staring from the back window, her lips mouthing something Val couldn’t make out as the car got farther and farther away.

  12

  And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine

  Burned like the ruby fire set

  In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,

  Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,

  Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet

  With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.

  —OSCAR WILDE, “IN THE GOLD ROOM: A HARMONY”

  A horse-d
rawn carriage had stopped beneath the arch of the bridge support. It was a long way from the park or anywhere else that a carriage should be and the dun horse looked restless in the pale, dawn light. There was no driver.

  “Do you think someone took a ride to the supermarket?” Val asked.

  “That’s no horse,” Luis said, pulling Val wide of it. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips cracked with cold. “Be glad you can’t see what it really is.”

  It looked like any other city horse, with its big sagging back and fat hooves. Val squinted at it until the image blurred, but she still didn’t know what Luis saw and she decided not to ask. “Come on.”

  Sticking near the opposite wall, she crept beneath the overpass, Luis right behind her. She knocked on the stump, but as they slipped through the doorway, Val heard someone banging down the bridge stairs.

  It was too late for them to do anything but gape at Greyan. His hands were covered in blood, blood that dripped off the tips of his fingers and clotted on the dusty steps, too bright to seem real. He held his bronze knives together in one hand. They, too, glistened with gore.

  “It is done,” the ogre said. He looked tired. “Little humans, let me lesson you to intrude no more in the dealings of the fey.”

  “Where’s Ravus?” Val demanded. “What happened?”

  “Would you fight me again, mortal? Your loyalty is commendable, if misplaced. Save your courage for a more worthy foe.” He pushed past her and walked down the remaining steps. “I have no lust for dealing more death today.”