Strangeness and Charm

by Mike Shevdon

  "That's what we're trying to find out." He squeezed my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

  Once again I thought that there was more that he was avoiding telling me. It would do no good to ask, though. He would tell me when he thought I needed to know.

  I sat cross-legged opposite Angela, about a hand-width apart. She smiled reassuringly, but I could see she was nervous. She kept glancing at the Warders around the room, assessing distance, looking back at me, seeking reassurance herself.

  "Do you still want to do this?" I asked her.

  "I don't have any choice."

  "There's always a choice." I found myself echoing Blackbird's words and smiled at the irony.

  Angela smiled back, taking it as a positive sign. She reached out to touch my cheek, but I shook my head. I held out my hands, palms upward and open, forearms resting on my knees. "Trust me, this is how it's done."

  She looked at my hands and then positioned hers above them. "Ready?"

  "No one ever is," I told her.

  Her hands clasped mine.

  Cold rushes down my arms – I thought I remembered the cold from last time, but my memory was blunted. It sears and burns through my veins, running like rivers of quicksilver, killing sensation. My eyes blur with tears and my teeth grind together until my jaw aches. Humming vibrates through me, a note so low I can feel it in my bones.

  There is Angela behind the glass screen, reinforced with iron wire, her face illuminated in the pale nimbus-glow surrounding me. Blood slashes across the glass, running down in black rivulets, and the door is open. Her hand touches my cheek and her eyes fill with light.

  "The sun will rise and they shall fall." This is not the future, it's the past.

  The world spins and I fall, plummeting into a funnel which narrows so that I am rushing down a tunnel, twisting and buffeting, this way and that, until I stop, suddenly and immediately, standing in the room below Covent Garden Underground Station in the dim orange glow from the lamps with the smell of new turned earth and recent rain. Kareesh sits in her nest of cushions, reaching for me, grinning with pointed teeth.

  I looked around for Blackbird, but she isn't here. Gramawl looms in the background at the edge of the lights from the filigree lanterns hung from the ceiling. Blackbird was here when this happened and Gramawl wasn't, why isn't she here now?

  Kareesh speaks in her crackly voice, "Here you are at last, gauntlet runner, witness and suspect, evader of traps, bringer of hope. Rabbit will be your name, but not for always. Another name will be yours, Dogstar, when you have earned it." She reaches forward and touches my face. "The sun will rise and they shall fall. So say I."

  "So say I." My eyes are glazed as I hear my voice acknowledge hers, but that's not what happened. She never called me Dogstar – that happened later when Raffmir named me at the anvil under the Strand. Are we changing the past?

  There's a cawing sound behind me and I turn to look. I am outside, a path leads up through a graveyard to an ornate archway with a wooden door of grey bleached wood. The arch over the door is carved with impossible creatures, serpents, griffins and manticores, the carved face of a man with ivy growing from his mouth stares down at me. The door swings open and two men stand before the door speaking in low tones.

  "The work is completed?" The first is tall, dressed as a priest.

  "It is done, though why you need such protection on God's house is beyond me, Father." The second looks worried. He has the tan of a man who works outside. His hands are rough and criss-crossed with old scars.

  The priest clasps the man's wrist. "Never speak of it. Understand?"

  "I still say, it ain't right," says the man.

  "He moves in mysterious ways, and we are His servants. This will stand well for you in the life to come," says the priest.

  "I hope so, vicar. I surely hope so."

  As the door closes, everything is inside out and I am in a tall room lined with books. Shelves vanish into the dimness on all sides. A dark-haired man sits at a desk, a lamp at either side. Open in front of him is a book, its pages brown at the edges, the paper as thin as tissue. Each facing page has three intricate symbols aligned down each page and between them is a central design which spans the join. The symbols shiver and squirm on the page but the central design is clear, a circle containing four symmetrical shields arranged in a cross. The symbols have text beside them in the tiniest writing. I squint to see what they say, but my eyes blur and the text runs into grey.

  The grey resolved into mist. I begin to see that there are people around me. There is a noise I recognise, the distant squeal of brakes and hum of an electric train. The mist pulls back revealing a London Underground platform crowded with people.

  I have been here before.

  The train is getting close, I can hear the clack and rumble as it approaches. I am standing in the same spot as on the morning I first learned about my fey heritage, on the same platform with the same people. On that morning, the man beside me fell deliberately onto the tracks as the train reached the platform. He committed suicide by tube train.

  I look at the person next to me, but it's not the same man. It's a skinny boy with spiky hair. He glances at me with knowing eyes and then at the approaching train. He looks calm, relaxed. I look back to where the train is clattering onto the platform. Aware of what is going to happen I turned back to the figure next to me to find him wreathed in fire. Long curling yellow flames ripple up his arms, his clothes smoke, his face shimmers in the haze. No one else notices, no one steps back from the heat that radiates from him.

  He steps around and stands on the edge with his back to the track, looking at me, his eyes filled with orange fire. He extended his burning hand to me. I lift my hand to take his, but the heat from his hand is incredible.

  "It's too hot!" I tell him. My hand blisters as it nears his. I can't take his hand.

  "How can you save me," he asks calmly, falling slowly backwards into the path of the train, "when you can't even save yourself?"

  FOUR

  Angela's hands release me and I topple sideways. Cramp sends shooting pains up my leg and I kick out trying to release the pain.

  "Nnnngh." My tongue is welded dry to the roof of my mouth.

  "I think he's having some sort of fit," said Fellstamp, grinning down at me.

  "Give him a moment," said Garvin. "Well, Angela? Did you see anything?"

  She pushed out her legs, stretching her calves and rotating her feet. "It's not for me to say." She rubbed her hands together, encouraging the circulation. The afternoon sunlight had disappeared, leaving the room in twilight, but having done this before it was not such a shock that so much time had passed.

  I managed to unstick my tongue. "Water," I croaked. Fellstamp knelt down beside me and offered me water from a glass. The glass felt oddly warm in my hands and my teeth chattered against the edge as I sipped from it. I swished the liquid around my mouth to ease the dryness.

  "Did you get what you needed? Did you find out what it means?" Garvin asked Angela.

  She looked up at him, suspicion in her eyes. "You know enough about me, I think, to know that your Warder will know the meaning when the time is right. It's not for me to interpret for him, or to explain what he's seen. I did see one thing, though."

  "And what was that?" asked Garvin.

  "This isn't about me, is it? It's about him." She gestured to where I was sitting half-upright on the floor. "This started long ago and I am only the latest link in the chain of events. I'm not the first to speak of a rising sun, am I?"

  "Nor the last, probably. How about you Dogstar, what did you see?"

  I looked up at Garvin and wondered what he wasn't telling me. "To me it seemed to be more about the past than the future. Maybe whatever it is has already happened and we're just not seeing it?"

  "Seeing what?" asked Garvin.

  "Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it," I said.

  "If we knew what we were looking for
, I'd be able to find it myself," said Garvin. "Fellstamp, give Dogstar a hand, will you? He'll need to sleep it off. I'll ask Mullbrook to find room for Angela."

  "I'm not staying," she said.

  "On the contrary," Garvin said. "I insist."

  "You did what?" Blackbird was incredulous.

  "It was a calculated risk."

  My head was thumping and my vision had acquired a strange heat-haze effect. Maybe that was causing the nausea.

  "After our conversation this morning, when I specifically mentioned the dangers of letting her touch you, you let her do it again? What were you thinking of Niall?"

  "We need to know what this is about."

  "Who is this 'we', that needs to know?" she demanded. "Why don't you let Garvin dirty his own hands?"

  "It wasn't Garvin's idea, it was mine."

  "Then why, Niall? For goodness sake why?"

  I sighed. "You didn't see her room. It's covered in images and clippings and scraps of paper, and as far as I can tell they all link back to me. It's like she's been following my progress without even knowing who I am. How can she do that?"

  "She's fey, and a seer to boot. Who knows what her motives are?"

  "You took me to see Kareesh. She's a seer."

  "Yes, and I had doubts about that. Kareesh has cared for me since I was a girl but I don't just let her lay her hands on me any time she likes!"

  "I had Garvin there to help. He could have stopped it if it was needed."

  "What's he going to do, chop her head off? You had no idea what she was capable of – she was imprisoned the same as Alex. Do you think they were treating her any more gently than they did your daughter? She could be insane for all you know."

  "She didn't seem insane."

  "Your daughter didn't seem insane until she… no, sorry Niall, I didn't mean that. Alex isn't insane, she's just…"

  "What?" My expression had darkened at the mention of my daughter's mental state.

  There was a sound like a mewling cat from the next room which quickly changed to a more persistent cry.

  "Now you've woken the baby," said Blackbird, an edge of irritation creeping into her tone.

  "Me? I wasn't the one making all the noise."

  Blackbird bustled into the nursery, and in a moment the curtains were drawn back and she reappeared carrying a flushed and rather cross baby.

  "Don't you worry, Daddy's going to stop yelling at you now." She rocked him in her arms, though he continued screaming.

  "I wasn't yelling…" but it was useless to argue since he didn't understand the discussion anyway and Blackbird was just making a point.

  "Here," she said, handing me the screaming bundle. It never failed to amaze me how someone so small could make so much noise.

  "There, there," I said, trying to make my voice soothing and still be heard over the din, "there's no need for all that, now, is there?"

  I held him, being careful to support his neck which had a tendency to flop over to one side, and transferred him onto my shoulder, putting his mouth next to my ear, but making it easier to stroke his back and comfort him. I rocked from side to side and gradually the yelling subsided to a low-level grizzle.

  Blackbird opened drawers and pulled towels from the rack, settling onto the bed. She held her hands out. "Pass him over."

  "I've just calmed him down. Give him a moment.

  "He's hungry, that's all. Pass him to me."

  I gave in and lowered him into Blackbird's arms, whereupon he started crying again, just as I had predicted. Blackbird ignored the yelling and lifted her top, exposing a pale breast before lifting the baby's open mouth to a brown nipple. The crying was muffled for a moment and then subsided into a noisy suckling.

  "See," she said. "Hungry."

  I humphed and looked away. For some reason the sight of my son locked onto his mother's breast made me uncomfortable. Alex had been bottle fed as Katherine had problems with breastfeeding, not the least of which were several bouts of painful mastitis. Consequently I'd got used to seeing babies bottle fed, taking my turn as it came, but while the sight of my son gulping from Blackbird's swollen breasts was perfectly natural, I didn't feel that it was a spectator sport. Perhaps it was too many years of looking at women's breasts for entirely different reasons.

  "Why don't you get some sleep," Blackbird suggested. "You look done in. I won't be long. As soon as he's finished his feed I'll put him back down – he should sleep for a couple of hours at least.

  I took her advice, taking a brief shower while she fed the baby and then climbing into bed as she settled him back down. After a few minutes she climbed into bed beside me, sighing with exhaustion as her head hit the pillow.

  "Hard work?" I asked.

  "No, he's fine. Just a long day."

  I rolled over onto my side, watching her stare at the ceiling. "I've been thinking about names," I told her.

  "Not again, Niall. Not now," she protested, squeezing her eyes shut.

  "A family name might be nice, do you think?"

  "The Feyre don't name their babies until after the first halfyear. We've been over this a hundred times. He won't get his name for ages yet."

  "It doesn't stop us choosing a name for him," I said.

  "It's bad luck to name him early, and if you choose a name you'll start to use it, you know you will."

  "I thought the Feyre didn't believe in luck."

  "Tradition, then."

  "Traditions can change? Neither of us is fully fey. Maybe he should have a name after three months, as a compromise."

  "It's just not the way it's done Niall, you must try and understand."

  "It seems a strange sort of tradition that won't give a child a name. Katherine had chosen Alex's name almost before she was born and it didn't do her any harm."

  "Your son isn't Alex and I'm not Katherine, now turn the light off and go to sleep. He'll be awake in four hours and he'll want feeding again whether he has a name or not."

  "It doesn't stop me thinking about it," I said.

  "As long as you don't say it out loud." She deliberately made her voice sound more sleepy to discourage further conversation. I rolled onto my back and clicked the light off, staring up into the dark.

  James was nice, and it could be shortened to Jim, though I didn't like Jimmy. Perhaps Paul – you couldn't really shorten Paul to anything.

  With that thought, sleep claimed me.

  The moonlight bled all the colour from the night. The grass looked grey as Alex hurried across the open space. When she reached the shelter of the oak tree she stopped, breathless, looking back where she'd come.

  There were no lights on behind her, no alarms rang. She let the glamour concealing her fall away. Then she noticed the outlines of her footsteps were printed across the lawn where the dew had been disturbed. She stared at the prints, and one by one they smudged and vanished, leaving the grass pristine. She turned her back on the house.

  Beyond the row of trees it was no longer lawn, but meadow. The grass would be longer but she'd leave less of a trail. Some cows had been allowed to graze the far field. She looked at her trainers and the bottoms of her sweat-pants which were already wet with dew. She frowned again and they were dry.

  "Lovely night, isn't it?"

  "Fuck!"

  When Alex peered beneath the tree she could see a shadowy figure was leant against the tree trunk.

  "Does your father know you use language like that, Miss?" Tate's voice was low and clear in the stillness of the summer night.

  "You near enough frightened me to freaking death. What are you doing creeping around like that? You could give someone a heart attack."

  "I'm not creeping. I've been here all the time. You, on the other hand…"

  She placed her hands on her hips. "I couldn't sleep. I needed a walk." Alex's expression dared him to contradict her.

  "A walk that required you to erase your footsteps?" said Tate, glancing back at the lawn.

  She followed his gaze. "It l
ooked so smooth. I didn't want to spoil it."

  "What I can't figure out, Miss, is why you bother lying to me when you know I can hear the difference," said Tate.

  She looked at her feet and then up at the shadowy outline under the tree. Even now she knew he was there he was still difficult to see. It was hard to tell where Tate stopped and the tree carried on. "Yeah, well. It's easier than telling the truth, ennit."

  "Ennit?"

  "Isn't it? Is it not?" She laughed in the dark. "I can't believe you're correcting my grammar."