The Raven Lady

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

  Though I did at last try, sleep wouldn’t come, and in the small hours I crept down the stairs, intending to begin the task I’d been given by the king and at the same time explore the castle. I moved slowly and silently, keeping to the shadows, testing whether I could mark the sentry below before she marked me. When I rounded the final bend of the staircase I heard laughter, and I sank against the wall, listening.

  “She’s an ugly, scarecrow of a thing, is she not?”

  The speaker’s voice was shrill. I crept down four more stairs, craning my neck to see. Just beyond the erect form of the sentry were several smaller creatures lounging about on the flagstones like fox kits in the sun. They were angular and twiglike, their faces pointed and woody, their hair the dust-green of heath flora, but wild like thistledown.

  “You know they intended her to marry the king!”

  I froze, pressing my fingers into the wall’s rough stones.

  “A goblin princess!” scoffed the first speaker. “Married to Finvara!” The creature made a hissing noise.

  Goblin. It was an unforgiveable slur. My father had made use of those base and vicious creatures in his ancient wars, and his enemies whispered that the blood of goblins and shadow elves had become mingled.

  “What a shame that would have been,” continued the little beast. “Him who’s always courted the most beautiful women in Ireland.”

  The flesh at the back of my neck felt hot, and my breaths shortened.

  “’Twas the queen, his own cousin, who ordered it. And still he’d have none of it! Locked her in the tower instead.”

  The twig people twittered with laughter. I pressed my hands to my chest, feeling like it might split the seams of the confining garment I wore. Then, with a sudden, wrenching tug, knife-shaped shadows swooped out of my chest.

  “There’ll be mischief, mark my—”

  The speaker broke off with a frightened squeal as my furies swept to the bottom of the stairs, flapping madly, giving chase until the twig people scattered and disappeared into crevices in the stone.

  I’ll give you mischief.

  BEARINGS

  Koli

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, heart pounding, I watched my furies dissipate into the shadows of the corridor. Something about their arrival had been different this time—I wouldn’t go so far as to say I deliberately conjured them, yet there had been a moment when my anger seemed to make an opening for them.

  I glanced at the sentry before starting down the corridor—and would have sworn she was trying not to smile.

  “I have business elsewhere in the castle,” I announced stiffly in Irish as I walked on. “The king has authorized it.”

  “Indeed, the king has notified me,” replied the fairy woman, “Lady Scarecrow.”

  I stopped and turned, eyeing her sharply. Her smile had broken free, but I saw that it was not a mocking one. So she’d found the scare I’d given the twig people to be a good joke. These Irish fairies were not, as I had supposed, united in their scorn of me. It boded well for Doro’s scheme, and it also made me feel slightly less alone.

  “Can you tell me where to find the prison tower?” I asked her.

  “Follow the corridor back toward the keep, lady,” continued the guard, “and I will direct you.”

  The corridor torches blazed with spell-born flames. They put out white light with no smoke and very little heat. I trailed my fingers along the cold stones as we walked.

  “What is your name?” I called to the sentry, who followed at a respectful distance.

  “Treig, lady.”

  “Treig,” I repeated. It sounded like an Elvish word—trygg. Loyal.

  We made our way back to the corridor that ran between the great and lesser halls, and then wound around the courtyard.

  “Watch for the stairs to the parapet, on your right,” she directed. “The base of the tower contains a cistern, so the dungeon can only be accessed from above.”

  “Is anyone there?”

  “There are no prisoners, lady, if that is your question. Though in Knock Ma it is never possible to say with certainty whether a chamber will be empty at any given time.”

  It was no wonder the king always appeared, to some degree, bewildered. This court was in a state my father would not have tolerated.

  We found the stairway and climbed out of the keep and into the open air. The night was clear and cold, and Corvus still floated in the moon-bright sky. Had I been alone, I would have stopped to study the ship again—everything had changed since I’d first seen her.

  We continued along the open parapet and then up another set of stairs to the top of the tower. Treig lifted the bar on the door, and we went inside. An empty landing provided access to a stairway that curved down around the inner tower wall, and I started descending into the windowless chamber.

  “Be careful, lady,” Treig advised. The stairway was narrow and had no railing.

  At the bottom was a chamber containing four barred cells. The open area between these cells was littered with colorful objects. It was as if a demented inventor had worked for years, only to quit his workshop in the end, abandoning his creations in a heap. And these creations were alive, or seemed so. A murmur of mechanical noises rose from the clutter—clock ticks, soft hisses, metallic pinging, and chimes both tinny and resonant. Sometimes these noises accompanied physical activity—small movements that could be explained by items shifting as they settled.

  “Odin’s eye,” I swore under my breath, impressed by the size of the collection.

  Kneeling at the edge of the jumbled pile, I reached for a globe formed of badly tarnished silver—gleaming ridges interrupted its smooth surface, connecting the sections like puzzle pieces. I tried for a few moments to open the globe by pressing and pulling at the ridges. When this failed, I whispered a spell for unlocking, but still nothing happened.

  I set the globe aside and picked up a porcelain doll, turning it over in my hands. She was a pale and gleaming thing with black hair and a green gown, and a windup mechanism at her back. The doll’s internal workings clicked loudly as I turned the key. When the key would budge no further I released it, watching to see what would happen, and the doll jerked from my hands. A set of wings had emerged from the satin gown, and they propelled the doll in flight a few yards across the chamber. Then it dropped and once again lay motionless.

  I stood up, sighing. Even working day and night, it could take months to study and catalog everything. This was exactly what I had asked for—an occupation to give me an excuse to leave my chamber and to keep me from going slowly mad. Yet now I found myself most interested in how these little machines had come about. Doro had referred to a “vein of magic” that had opened when the seal between fairy and Ireland had been broken. And the king’s servant, Keane—he’d told me Finvara suggested that time had been confused by the merging of the ancient and modern worlds. These two ideas seemed to fit together into a reasonable enough explanation. Did the things also have some purpose, though, or were they just things?

  “Unsettling, are they not, lady?” said Treig. She had come down the stairs behind me.

  “Indeed,” I murmured. But they didn’t unsettle me at all. The noises they made were soothing, reminding me of the rhythmic, breathy sounds of sleep. Busy as they sounded, were they in fact resting? Could they be woken?

  Moving in among them, I gently lifted a birdcage. I turned another windup key, and the mouse-sized yellow bird on the perch inside began to tweet, its dainty feet and head moving in a jerky fashion. The movement was mesmerizing, and when it stopped, I wound it again. Then again.

  I touched the bars of the cage and whispered a spell: Wake. I started as the bird’s wings stirred momentarily to life, as if it would take flight. Then they lowered again.

  These objects might have been created by fairy magic, but a mortal and more modern magic
was also at work. I wondered whether the king knew enough about mechanical workings to explain them to me. Would I have an opportunity to ask him?

  Doro had said that I was free to spend more time in Finvara’s company or keep to myself. The king did not appear to find my company distasteful—nor I his, to my astonishment. That being the case, I might as well proceed as I’d begun, and maybe he would start to trust me.

  A yawn overtook me as I replaced the birdcage. I did not require much sleep, but the day had been taxing, and suddenly I felt ready to retire. Rising, I picked my way back toward the stairs.

  I noticed another bird shape on the edge of the rubble—a raven formed of a grimy metal, like the grandfather clock. It was perched on a stand, and its parts were segmented in a way that suggested it was capable of motion.

  My furies had first manifested after my mother’s death, but even before that I had been drawn to ravens. Not surprisingly, perhaps. The elves were descended from Loki, a shape-changer who had taken the form of a female raven in his attempt to escape an enraged Odin. For a time, Loki managed to distract the All-Father’s male messenger ravens—though not without consequence. Later, when Odin had captured and imprisoned him in a hidden hall beneath Iceland, Loki himself gave birth to the elves.

  Tucking the mechanical bird under my arm, I continued toward the stairs, and Treig and I returned to my tower.

  I set the raven on a windowsill in my bedchamber. Outside, the new day had dawned with more fog rolling in from the Atlantic. Slowly it consumed the tops of the trees in its march toward the castle and Corvus, which I could see clearly from my chamber. There was a commotion on the parapet below me, and I watched for a few minutes while sentries fired arrows at the hull of the ship. There were lines attached to the arrows, and I wondered whether anyone would be fool enough to test their weight on one. It seemed they wouldn’t get the chance, as one by one the arrows bounced harmlessly off the hull. Could be there was a protective spell at work.

  Weary to my bones, I finally turned from the window and lay down across the bed.

  Finvara

  Toward dawn, I quit my study—and a half-emptied bottle of Bushmills—to sleep for a few hours.

  The dull light of a misty morning had made a weak incursion into the chamber by the time a servant brought my coffee and a two-day-old Irish Times. With it came sheets of proposed menus, decorations, and other arrangements that Doro had sent for my approval. I shuffled through them and handed them back to the servant, muttering, “Fine.”

  Opening the newspaper, my gaze fell on a photograph of my cousin. According to the accompanying article, after the seal between Ireland and Faery had been broken, the magnificent old library at Trinity College had become entangled with the Faery library. Other-worldly creatures scurried through the hallowed university halls, vines twined round its staircases, and trees jutted up like great columns, filling the high spaces with foliage. The venerable gentlemen who had dominion there were apoplectic, demanding that the queen restore order. The Times editor had demonstrated her wit by selecting a portrait of the queen where her countenance suggested frayed patience and forced courtesy, and it made me laugh as nothing had in weeks.

  Yet there was a hollowness to it. A crisis of identity was playing out within me. The queen had a country to rule, as she always had. There was order to be restored—or at least some semblance of it. What was my place in this new Ireland? I had been tasked with watching for enemies and restoring a court that, while important to the citizens of Faery, was largely considered a nuisance by the Irish families who called this region home. My time was mostly occupied by listening to questions for which I didn’t have answers, and wishing I was elsewhere.

  I ran my hand over my cropped head, reminding myself that I’d vowed only hours ago that I would endeavor to make the best of it. But I began to feel that what I was doing amounted to suppressing my own nature, and I’d been doubting my impulses and actions—a thing I never did at sea.

  My thoughts wandered to the chamber at the top of the tower, where there was a woman who must be feeling much of the same. She too had a led a very different life before the obligations of her birth had caught up to her. I decided that my first mission of the day would be a diplomatic one.

  Setting the newspaper aside, I got up and dressed, my mood lifting at the thought of the upcoming visit. I could not deny the Elf King’s daughter was a fascinating woman—something I’d always been drawn to. I found myself looking for reasons to summon her, despite my new pragmatic outlook. I’d not give over all my old diversions, by god.

  My best hope of breaching those stalwart defenses of hers, I reasoned, was to spend more time in her company. When I encountered Keane in the corridor, I asked him to invite her to join me on the drawbridge.

  Outside, the morning fog was clearing. The air was chill and damp, but breaks in the cloud cover suggested we would catch a glimpse of the sun. Today was the first day of spring—my new steward had reminded me of it, as it was an important holiday for the fairies, and Knock Ma had always staged revels. Doro had assured me that the upcoming masquerade would fit the bill.

  The phantom ship remained in the sky above the castle, hull creaking as it shifted in the breeze. I detected no change in its status—no sign of captain or crew. I wondered how long before I had a reply from the queen on how best to manage the situation. The nearest telegraph office was at Tuam, an easy enough distance, and Doro had promised to send a man. The queen had of course been overrun with her own problems, and I was unsure if anything would attract her attention—outside of Fomorians on our doorstep.

  “She is a beautiful ship.”

  I turned at the sound of the low but feminine voice, and for the space of several heartbeats, my breath stuck in my chest. What a difference a night had made. Her raven hair hung like a velvet cloak over her shoulders, and something had raised the pink in her cheeks. Thick as her hair was, it could not completely conceal the tips of her ears, higher and more delicately curved than those of the firglas. I saw now, too, that her eyes were not black, but closer to the iron gray of a winter sky. And the light of day revealed the strong contrast between her fair countenance and the freckles—they were tiny star shapes—that overlaid her nose and cheeks. What had perhaps wrought the greatest change, and called all these attributes to my attention, was the color of her dress—ruby port in place of the mourning black. A shade very close to that of her full lips.

  “Beautiful, indeed,” I agreed, lifting my gaze to hers before it became awkward. “I hope you slept well, lady?”

  “Well enough.” She drew closer, lips now curving downward. I tried like the devil to read anything in that blank—or rather, controlled—expression. “Your Majesty has transformed since our last meeting.”

  I smiled and ran a hand over my scalp. “Oh, aye. What do you think?”

  I watched her study me, and it struck me that rather than offering an automatic compliment, she was seriously considering my question. “Less like a sea raider,” she said at last.

  I laughed. “I’ve not undergone the ordeal for nothing, then.”

  Her eyes settled again on mine, and she asked in a colorless tone, “You sent for me, Your Majesty?”

  This is hopeless. I sighed inwardly, yet I refused to give up—I’d just have to find the proper lever to open this puzzle box.

  “My family will be visiting Knock Ma in less than a week, and a masquerade ball will be given in their honor. I wanted to invite you to attend, if it would please you.”

  Something did then kindle behind her eyes. Surprise?

  “A ball?” she repeated.

  “Aye.”

  She glanced again at the ship and did not immediately reply. I wondered whether such things were outside her experience. “Maybe dancing is not to your liking,” I added, “but there will be a banquet, disguises, and all manner of lively diversions. You would be welcome.” />
  “I have nothing suitable to wear to a masquerade, Your Majesty.” She looked at me. “Though perhaps your courtiers and kin would not feel that I need a disguise.”

  For the space of several moments my mind worked to produce a gallant reply, but though her tone had been arch, I’d observed a light twitching at the corner of her lips. The princess is joking, I realized with astonishment.

  Relaxing into a grin, I replied, “Perhaps they would not, still I would be happy to provide one. I intend to go masked myself, the better to anonymously observe others making fools of themselves, and you, if you choose to attend, may do the same.”

  Still she didn’t answer, and I added, “You may consider it, if you like, and give your answer at a—”

  “I will attend,” she said abruptly. And if I was not mistaken, the pink in her cheeks deepened. Now, this was a physical response that I could interpret. She was not so different from an Irishwoman after all. As to the cause of her sudden discomfiture, I could not hazard a guess.

  “Very good,” I replied, feeling gratified. The chances that this grand occasion would prove in any way diverting were dramatically increased by her attendance, and if she made my family uncomfortable, so much the better. “I will ask my steward to see to your disguise.”

  “I thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “Don’t,” I muttered, shaking my head. “At least not until you’ve passed an evening in the company of my relations and still feel that you can remain on speaking terms with me.”

  She lowered her gaze, clasping her hands in front of her. Rashly, I swore an oath to gods both old and new that I would make her laugh, even if it cost me an arrow through the chest.

  “Now that’s settled, I wondered whether you would care to walk out with me?”

  Her dark eyes lifted.