Elixir

by Ruth Vincent

  I stared at her.

  “Please, forgive me,” she whispered.

  I was too shocked for words. The Queen didn’t apologize. She didn’t ask for forgiveness. What the hell was going on?

  “Don’t you want to eat or to drink? You must be famished. You’ve been away from home for so long.” She pointed in the direction of the table.

  Since when did the Queen have any concern for my well-­being? Anger was rising from deep inside me. How dare she act like she cared about me now, when she’d abandoned me, severed my magic, left me to die as a human?

  I couldn’t hold it back anymore. The words spewed out of me before I could think better of it.

  “Why the hell did you do it??” I shouted. “Why the hell did you trick me and leave me stuck in the human world?”

  The Queen started. Her mouth quivered, as if she was going to cry. Then, turning around to her shocked servants who were still standing stock-­still, awkward and open-­mouthed around the corners of the room, she said in the most imperious voice she could muster:

  “Leave us alone!”

  Obediently, they all filed out—­quickly, like they were grateful to be out of this room, away from this awkward scene and the strange behavior of the Queen. Even the little pixie fluttered away.

  The only one left was Korvus Korax, who hesitated.

  “Arania,” he started to plead, like as her closest advisor he should remain. I was shocked that he’d dared to use her first name. But when she glared at him, he reluctantly shuffled out of the room.

  The door shut behind him and she let out a ragged sigh.

  Obviously the Queen knew they’d all be talking about her, because she scowled. But clearly whatever she was about to tell me would be worse for them to hear than whatever stories her court would make up on their own.

  I shifted on and off the balls of my heels, nervously waiting.

  Her manner had changed. The facade of imperiousness was gone. She leaned up against one of the stalagmites as if she needed its support. In all her feathers and finery she looked so small and frail that for an instant I almost felt bad for her.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she whispered.

  But I wasn’t appeased.

  “Of course you had a choice!” I countered. “You’re the Fairy Queen—­you have absolute power! No one makes you do anything. You chose to betray me.”

  There was a searching desperation in her eyes. “I don’t have absolute power,” she said quietly. “I know you don’t believe me. But, please, listen before you judge me. There are many who would see me dead.”

  I didn’t know where she was going with this. It was true—­I could think of quite a few who wouldn’t cry if the Fairy Queen died, starting with Obadiah. And even during my time in the Vale, I’d heard whispers of revolution, packs of Wolfmen or Sanguinari who wanted to overthrow the Queen. But if what Obadiah had said about her—­what she’d done to the human children—­was true, then she deserved all of it.

  “I learned some things, Your Majesty,” I said, my voice cold, “that might have made you some well-­deserved enemies.”

  Her cheeks flushed, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Someone has to do what’s best for the realm,” she said. “Someone has to make the difficult decisions.”

  “Like killing kidnapped human children? There is no justification for that!” I was shouting now. There was a time when I wouldn’t have dared to shout at the Queen—­but I couldn’t help myself. Somehow, as a human with no magic, I felt more equal to her than I had as a Fey.

  “So that human boy, Obadiah, gave you his side of the story, did he?”

  I faltered. Had she seen him enter into the Vale with me? If she’d seen him, did that mean he was already in danger?

  “I found out what you did,” was all I said.

  The Queen turned to me, and there was a softness in her voice, a gentleness that I had never heard before.

  “Come,” she said to me. “I want you to see something.”

  The Queen led me out of the Great Hall to a small antechamber swathed in a heavy spider-­weave curtain. Drawing it back, I could see the room was full of tiny, translucent squiggles—­dozens of floaters gliding through the air—­but then I looked closer and saw that they were in fact a bunch of pixies. I’d heard that the Queen hired pixies—­“The Queen’s Eyes,” they were called. The Queen’s Spies, more like it. There was a reason they were the Vale’s most popular messengers. Tiny, unobtrusive and almost impossible to see—­just a small visual disturbance in the corner of the eye.

  The small room was full of maps and drawings scattered upon a table, and the pixies hovered around them. My hand went to my mouth in shock. The sketches were of my apartment and Reggie’s office building—­and even the modest split-­level house where my parents lived.

  “You’ve been spying on me?” I gasped.

  “I’ve been watching over you,” said the Queen.

  “I’ll call that ‘spying’! The floater in my eye . . . that was one of your spies?”

  The Queen regarded me sadly.

  “So you’ve noticed it,” the Queen said quietly, “following you around most of your waking hours, appearing even in your dreams?”

  I nodded, my heart beating faster.

  “That was me watching over you, Mab,” said the Queen.

  My breath was coming in short, sharp heaves as I tried to process what she was saying.

  Why would she waste so much time and energy spying on me? I’d always thought—­or hoped I guess—­that the pixie messenger had been sent by Ursaline. But by the Queen? I didn’t understand it.

  “But why?” I gasped. “You abandoned me as a human. If it hadn’t been for . . .” I caught myself before I said out loud how Obadiah had helped me travel back to the Vale—­I didn’t want to say anything that would get him in trouble. “If I hadn’t been able to find a way back, I would have been stuck in the human world all my life. And that’s what you wanted—­wasn’t it? To get rid of me!”

  “No, Mab . . .”

  “But that’s what you did,” I continued. “You exiled me! So why watch over me like this?”

  The Queen gazed down at me. I saw pain in her eyes.

  “I know you were told you were an orphan . . .” she began.

  I stared at her, unable to move.

  “That wasn’t entirely true.”

  “What are you saying?” I whispered, my heart pounding in my chest. “Tell me the truth.”

  The Queen took a deep breath.

  “The truth is, Mab,” she said, “I’m your mother.”

  Chapter 16

  “Mab, I’ve wanted for so many years to tell you the truth. Please believe me—­it killed me to watch you grow up and not be able to see you, to hold you—­to let you think I was some cold, distant monarch, and not the mother who loved you.”

  Her opal eyes were brimming with tears. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t be.

  And yet here she was, the Queen of Mannahatta, standing before me, sobbing.

  Surely, she wouldn’t have done this just for a trick.

  Could it be true?

  I felt like I was going to faint.

  “Why did you do it?” I blurted out. “Why did you lie to me? And why . . .” I was stammering, feeling like my whole world was crashing down around my ears. “If it’s true, if it’s really true—­then why did you send me away?”

  “Mab, I did it for your own protection.” The Queen looked imploringly into my eyes. “You’re my daughter—­that means you’re next in line for the throne. All my enemies—­everyone who wants to assassinate me . . .”

  I felt dizzy and nauseous. I grabbed at one of the stalagmites to steady myself, then winced as my human skin made an oily mark on the pristine whiteness of the stone.

  The
Queen reached out to touch me, but I shrank back.

  She gazed at me with tears in her eyes.

  “They were trying to kill you,” the Queen said. “The assassins who were after me, they made an attempt on you, when you were still inside my womb. I knew they wouldn’t stop. They would find you and they would kill you when you were young and vulnerable and unable to defend yourself. There was only one choice.” She gulped, closing her eyes, as if reliving the pain of the memory again. “To say that you’d died within my womb, and then deliver you in secret, make sure you were raised without the knowledge of who you really were.”

  Her voice was almost a whisper.

  “There were so many fairy orphans, no one was the wiser. I paid that bear woman to take you in, and some other orphans as well, so it wouldn’t look suspicious.”

  “You paid . . . ?” I didn’t want to finish the thought. Surely that wasn’t the reason Ursaline had taken in us fairy orphans? We were her cubs. That’s what she always told us. But I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  I stared into her fiery opal eyes. Was she really my mother?

  “Then why did you trick me into going to the human world?” I shouted. “Why did you sever my magic powers? Why did you force me to become human?”

  The Queen sighed.

  “My enemies suspected who you were. You weren’t safe anymore. There was only one way to make you truly safe, and that was to hide you in the human world. The Vale assassins wouldn’t be able to detect you if you were human. I’m so sorry—­it broke my heart to do it.”

  I couldn’t take it all in—­it was too much. Everything that I thought I knew about myself, my history . . . had none of it been true?

  “But why did you lie to me?” I said at last. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth about all this?”

  “Because would you have really agreed to it, if you’d known? Would you have agreed to go live in the human world, to have all your magic powers severed voluntarily?” Her voice was rising, and I could see that this choice she’d made still killed her inside after all these years.

  My mind was spinning.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I would have. But you never gave me the chance.”

  There was an awkward beat of silence between us.

  “Well, everything is good now,” she said at last. “You’re back. I’ve killed almost everyone who was after you. And now you’re an adult—­strong enough to defend yourself against whatever assassins are left.”

  “No! It’s not good. You kidnapped my friend. I don’t even know what you did with the poor human girl you swapped me with—­I’m afraid to know. And you severed my magic. Even drinking Elixir can’t make me switch back to fairy form. I can never go back to being Fey!”

  “That’s not true,” said the Queen. She was twisting her white hands in front of herself. “The spell isn’t permanent, Mab. When you become Queen, it will undo the effects of the spell—­you’ll regain your power.”

  When I become Queen . . . The words felt surreal. That wasn’t going to happen. I was human. My Fey life was over.

  But what if it wasn’t? What if she was telling the truth?

  The Queen was staring at me with hollow eyes. I could see the dark circles under them, breaking through the mask of her beauty, the fear that had etched itself into the architecture of her face. It occurred to me as I studied her that she was the most miserable person I had ever seen. Everyone in Mannahatta always joked that they wished they were the Queen. But they wouldn’t have, if they could see what I was seeing right now.

  “I don’t know if I want to be the next Fairy Queen.”

  I didn’t know where the words had come from. They had exited my lips before I’d even had the chance to think about them.

  “But, Mab.” She smiled at me as if I were still a child. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  I just felt angry.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t even have Fairy Queens anymore!” I said, the words tumbling out of me. “Maybe we should go back to being a democracy.”

  “You would really entrust a society, with magic on the wane, with the streams of Elixir going dry, to the popular whims of fools?” she asked. “Mab, someone has to make the hard choices. Someone has to do what’s best for the realm. That’s what I swore to do. And someday”—­she reached out towards me—­“and someday you will too.”

  Her hand alighted on my shoulder.

  I wanted to shrug it off, I wanted to run away—­and yet, I couldn’t move. The Queen had never touched me before—­the Queen didn’t touch anyone. Her hand felt comforting. Could it truly be because she was my . . . ? No.

  “What did you do with the little girl I switched places with?” I asked her, breaking the tender silence that had fallen between us.

  The Queen withdrew her hand.

  “You told me when I signed up for my mission that you would take care of her. But that’s not what I heard. I’ve heard stories about what you do to human children.”

  The Queen was very quiet for a moment, biting her lip. At last she spoke, so softly I could barely hear her.

  “They killed our children,” she whispered bitterly. “It was only fair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you volunteered for the changeling mission, and I told you I suspected humans were behind the Elixir drought, I wasn’t lying. Ever since their Industrial Revolution, our power has been waning. The more they cut down their trees and pollute their waters, the drier our streams of Elixir become. Our worlds are linked in perilous ways. For years we’ve taken Shadows—­the abused, neglected children who we adopted as our own. I realized that if I harnessed the children’s life energy, they could restore the draining supply of Elixir. They could power our world.”

  “You’ve been killing children—­and using their life energy to make Elixir?”

  The Queen turned away from me.

  “What could I do? The fairies were dying.”

  “But you killed kids!”

  In that moment, whatever tenderness I’d felt before was gone. I hated her.

  “It was a fairy life or a human life, Mab,” the Queen said. “Someone was going to die—­and I wasn’t going to let it be us.”

  “I can’t believe you would do this!” I said, my fists clenched beneath my shirtsleeves. “Innocent children! It isn’t their fault.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “No,” she said at last, “it isn’t their fault. They’re not the ones who destroyed their world. It’s not fair—­I agree with you on that. But listen to me. We are dying. The fairies are dying. The Vale itself is collapsing. I’m sure you saw it on your way here—­the destruction, the fallen House Trees, the gaping holes in the Vale itself . . .”

  I was silent, biting my lip, because I knew she was right. I had seen it—­those yawning chasms of blackness that seemed to stretch down into terrifying infinity. Our world was failing.

  “The children’s energy is the only thing that is propping up what little magic we have left. If anything, we need to take more children, not less.”

  I shook my head. “There has to be another way.”

  “There isn’t. The only other way is this: let every one of us die—­you, me, Ursaline, the friends you grew up with, everyone you passed today in the square. And let the Vale collapse. Then there will be no more magic in the world. That’s the alternative.”

  I turned away from her. I couldn’t bear to look in her eyes. I was too afraid what she was saying was true.

  We couldn’t keep going on like this, stealing children. It was wrong. But if we didn’t, would we die? And were our lives—­our magic—­worth this terrible price? The price of children’s lives? Maybe we deserved to die.

  I had no answers. The question was too big. I stood staring at the agate floor for a long time. I could think
of nothing to say, nothing that matched the enormity of it.

  And then at last, I asked the only question I thought I might actually be able to get an answer to:

  “What happened to my Shadow, the baby I switched places with? Did you kill her too?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you . . .”

  “Mab, I swear it. She’s alive. For your Shadow, it was different than it was for the other children.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I kept my promise. When you became a changeling, I grieved so much for you—­I adopted the human girl, Mabily Jones. I raised her as if she was my own. No one at court knew why—­but it was because she reminded me of you. I took good care of her.”

  I folded my arms tightly across my chest. I wasn’t sure if I believed this.

  “But she grew up. She grew cold to me. She resented the fact that she couldn’t do magic. And then some unscrupulous courtier told her about you—­that you two had been switched—­and she flew into a rage. She stormed out. She took up with one of the revolutionary groups in the woods. Together with them, she plotted to kill me. Kill me, her own mother!

  “When she tried to assassinate me, I had no choice,” said the Queen. “I had to make an example of her—­for the others.”

  “But why? What could she do to you? She’s human—­you’re the Queen. She couldn’t kill you if she wanted to.”

  “But she was going to come after you next, Mab. She was going to find a way back to the human world, and kill you. She kept saying you stole her rightful place, that she had to go and kill you to get it back. I had no choice—­I had to lock her up.”

  “Where is she? I want to see her,” I demanded.

  “Please, Mab, don’t do this,” the Queen whispered. The tone in her voice shocked me. She was pleading. “I really don’t think you should go see her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to like what you see,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t care. I need to see her. I need to apologize. I need the real Mabily Jones to know the truth. You lied to both of us!”