Except the Queen

by Jane Yolen

  3

  Red Cap’s Dark Lord

  Listen! She knows winter comes, knows we come. When shadows be longest, we UnSeelie rise. So She gathers light into Herself to hold Her weakling people through the cold.

  Ha! How I love it then: gnashing of teeth, trembling of limbs, tooth red in the gum, stone in the eye, heart beating in the hand. How I love to hear the weak puling of those milklings, whose blood be like whey. The struggle, dark/light, death/life. Ho!

  Already, we prepare the way. Listen! The scream of an old woman brought down by a Ravener. Smell! A man in Founder’s park strangled with twine and mistletoe. Taste! A village well poisoned, a crop blighted, dung in the porridge. Touch! A child stolen from his cradle, a wooden log sprinkled with blood left in his stead.

  This be my duty.

  This be my delight.

  I write sonnets in my enemy’s blood. I dip my red cap in a thousand years of war. Ho!

  Strength be needed now: fist, spear, blood. Now I cry vengeance, argue it in our own court, the UnSeelie. I stand here, cap newly red with blood. The old woman’s blood. The man in the park’s blood. The boy child’s blood. My muscled legs spread apart. Let them see my maleness. Let them desire me. Let their jealous natures feed me. All help me reach my ends.

  “We be under threat,” I tell them. I speak first in that hushed voice that draws all ears. Even my dark lord listens.

  Then loudly I say: “Humans and their iron destroy our world. Let us hunt them as once we did. Not one by one by one. But all of them. Let us make tithes of blood sacrifice. Let the winter be long. Let the dark be king.”

  Jackdaws caw my name. Wolves howl. Jackal-headed men caper on the red carpet. Overexcited, one squats and lets loose a series of black pebbles. The King blows him into ashes, along with his shit.

  My voice rises even louder. “Now be the time to cull their weakest. Pull down their strongest. Take back their power. No more this easy pax. We must war on the Seelie court. Take the Highborn and we take the Game.”

  And then the hall bursts into flames of laughter, shouts of my name. Only my King sits silent on his throne. No smile creases that dark face. But I know he agrees with me.

  After all, he has not blown me into ashes. Hah!

  4

  Queen’s Plaint

  Beneath the blazing torch light, you hold your head high, your slender hands resting at your sides. Betray nothing, you counsel yourself. Let them see only the glamour regardless of what it costs you. There will be time later to rest. But not now. The clans of the Seelie and UnSeelie court have gathered Under the Hill to celebrate the Solstice, the slow turning of day into night, green fields into the black muck of winter. They come to consume the light and unleash the darkness. As it has always been.

  The predatory eyes of the UnSeelie devour your flesh. They pace the hall and their claws strike sparks from the flagons. Hobs and sprites scurry in terror behind your dress, while the Highborn study your movements, your face, looking for signs of weakness. You must reassure them. You walk to the bright center of the hall, then cross into the shadows, until you are mingling among the UnSeelie, who growl and hiss in flecked tongues that threaten but do not touch your pure white skin.

  The Highborn follow in your wake, forced by convention to stand beside you, but you can feel their reluctance. They do not know if they can trust their lives to you, though you have given them no reason—other than that you are female—to doubt your power. You tremble with the effort of maintaining the glamour of youth. But none must know the truth.

  Heat licks the nape of your neck and you turn to see Red Cap standing close, his nostrils fanned to catch your scent. In spite of your resolve, you shiver and he smiles smugly, the row of sharpened teeth like a rusted saw. You inhale the metallic reek of human blood on him and notice that his cap, vest, hands are freshly stained mulberry. And while once you might not have noticed or cared, now you care very much.

  Standing this close you must push back the brutal hand that culls the sweetness from life. You must show there is another way. You draw your hands together, palm to palm before the pale skin of your breasts. You float your pressed hands to your forehead and rest the tips of fingers on your brow. You bow to him, offering the unexpected: a gesture of peace.

  He snarls in answer and shifts his body away from you. You smile, triumphant.

  And then you hear the undertow of whispered words you have long anticipated. And for the first time you learn the names of those who have betrayed you. Fear takes you. But you know the words cannot be stopped. They drift around the room, and you see the startled looks as the story scatters like feathers from a torn pillow. Red Cap’s ears have twitched forward, a leer spreading slowly across his brutal face.

  You see it, but all you can think of is will they believe it? You struggle to banish the heat of shame from your face.

  Red Cap grabs his groin and laughs, and a furious color stains your cheeks. Even now he has caught your true scent and has guessed what lies beneath your glamour. He will have no trouble believing the tale. No trouble twisting it like a knife against you, against your court. You turn away, so that he cannot see your expression for too much has already been given away. You must act quickly now.

  When you turn to your own clans, there is contempt on the faces of the few Highborn Lords you once took to a barren bed. Their dams regard you with envy and bitterness. If they believe the boogans’ tale, they must accept that what was denied to them has been given to you. Lips pressed with scorn, your court draws back to let you pass.

  Only quickness now can serve your plan. Only rage can save you. And this time it will not be hard to find the meddling pair on whom to pour out your fire.

  5

  Serana’s Expulsion

  Green. So many shades of it filtering through the canopy of trees. The gray-green fingers of late summer maple. The stubby dark green lobes of oak. Heart-shaped silver-green of the birch trees. The matched light green droplets of the rowan, dark green rounds of alder and beech, the lighter green spray of ash, the hazel’s double-toothed hairy green leaf.

  And me, lying on my back, in my nest, under the trees, the green light covering my legs and belly and the aureoles of my nipples, all green.

  I was dallying with a favorite lover, a hob with soft hands and a slow manner. We sought one another out once a decade or so when neither of us wanted hard sport or a fleeting wild plundering. His love-name was Will Under the Feather and he had just gotten under my feathers indeed. And with a will.

  We were speaking together of the green light, of the night’s party to come, and laughing. I remember most the laughing. It made little motes of light spark around the nest. Not enough to set the nest on fire, of course, but enough to remind us of the danger. We were hazy in the afterglow of lovemaking, and hazy with the glowworm evening. His fur-covered foot touched mine, and his hand trailed down my throat.

  “Berry-eyes,” he murmured. “So delicious. I could eat you up forever.”

  I responded with a kind of throaty purr that made him laugh, but in that satisfying way that turned me warm all over. My left hand played with Will, while my right stroked the bits of feathers and silk, colored yarns and shiny stones that were stuffed into the crooks and crevices of my nest. My precious things taken down from the branches of trees where humans had tied them, offerings to the fey.

  Without warning, the Queen appeared, looming over me, her golden hair blazing around her shoulders. “Out! Out! Out!” she cried, her face a harridan’s mask. “Gossip’s cup and sneak thief, spreading lies and calumny. Out! Out! Out! I command.”

  I gaped at her, rising before me in a column of flame and I knew with a terrifying coldness that Meteora had spoken aloud the words that were meant to disappear. And she must have included my name, which the Queen now screeched into the boiling air.

  I had no chance to be angry at Meteora. Putting my hands to my ears, I prepared for the worst. Blood rushed around inside my head, hot rivers of it threate
ning to overrun the sides. I could feel my right hand wet with something as the eardrum burst. But I was not dead.

  Not yet.

  Then courage and instinct took me by the left hand and threw me over the side of the nest. I heeded neither the scratching of the dried grasses on my legs nor the thwack I received from Will’s heels as he bailed out the other side.

  As I fell away from the nest, I glanced over my shoulder. The Queen was holding up a rosewood wand, the bumps that would one day be thorns as red and pulsing as pustules. Not her oaken staff. Not her silver mace. Not her rowan switch. So it was to be a punishment, and not death this day. I can live with that, I thought.

  I ran full out with scarcely a strip of cloth covering me, remembering only too late that one does not turn one’s back to the Queen, whatever the hurry.

  The rosewood wand hit me high up on the right shoulder, breaking the skin, and my arm was all at once red, looking more like a sleeve made of holly berries than a naked arm covered with blood.

  There must have been a spell. The wand should not have extended that far. But if there had been a spell, I never heard it spoken; or if I did, it did not register. All that registered was pain. Pain, fear, and darkness. And then the Queen’s voice calling after me:

  Should Sister meet Sister in Light again,

  Then falls the iron rain.

  I tumbled in the air and was somehow transported over the hill and away from home. Away from the body I knew, away from the world I was fond of, away from the sister I loved. I did not know if Meteora, too, had run, leaping over the side of her nest, leaving her lover as fast as I had left mine. And to be truthful—which is not always a mark of fairy—I did not at that moment care. All I cared about was my own pain, my own fear, and the darkness around me that was every color intermixed but green.

  As I fell through the cold, unknown air, I fell out of magic, too, felt it being stripped away from me as if I’d been skinned. As if a hunter had taken a piece of cold iron and slipped it around me with such precision that I was now naked to the elements. And so I entered the new world raw, unprotected, veins open to the earth, sky, and all about, and that was the worst pain of all.

  * * *

  I AWOKE ON A GRAY table in a gray hall, covered by a gray sheet. There were low lights and a buzz of voices.

  And the smell. Oh, sweet Mab, the smell.

  It was as if all the meat of the world had spoiled, and I along with it.

  I turned over on my side and did something I had never done before in my long life. I let what was in my stomach empty out onto the gray floor.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I heard a voice say. “These street people. Look what the cat’s thrown up now. Jenny—get the mop.”

  * * *

  WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, I was starving. My stomach felt scraped and my throat was raw. My shoulder, where the Queen’s wand had struck, ached down to the bone. I was wrapped in some sort of winding sheet that smelled ever so slightly of flaxseed. It was as gray as the room.

  I tried to call out, but my voice sounded scratchy, and as ancient as the great holm oak that sits atop our green hill. But someone must have heard me, for an unhandsome woman ran in. She had a shock of black hair that had strange white roots, as if she had put a glamour on that had worn off raggedly.

  She glanced at me, pulled a long silver needle from a pocket in her gray coverall, and then attempted to shove the needle into my upper arm.

  I screamed and sat up—who wouldn’t? Any fey knows that poison loves the needle. In the same movement, I unwound the top part of the sheet and tore my arm from her grasp. Then I slapped her. My fingerprints blossomed on her cheek. I stood, despite the best attempt of the bottom part of the sheet to keep me down, spoke a curse, and waved my hand to turn her into a toad. She looked at me with a mouth slightly awry, not at all toadlike. I stood there like a gob, staring at her unchanged shape as she grabbed up my arm again and this time shoved the needle straight in.

  It stung, but far less than I had expected. There was a sudden sweet flavor in my mouth, not quite nectar, but not far off from it, which was odd because I had had no drink at all.

  As I fell back hazily onto the bed, I noticed my arm and hand for the first time. Or at least what should have been my arm and hand. Where was my alabaster skin, the agile wrist, the tapering pink nails? What was this long, plump protuberance covered with fine, dark, curling hairs? These fingers as thick as cow dugs? What lines were these across the back of my hand, like folds? And why was the fat, horrible hand clutching a piece of silk the color of a summer rose?

  Whose arm is this, I thought, for surely it was not mine, no matter that it seemed firmly attached to my shoulder.

  A dream, I thought.

  A nightmare, I corrected.

  And then I thought: The Queen’s spell.

  Knowing I was right at last, I let the nectar take me into sleep where I stayed through day and night and into the following morning.

  6

  Meteora Runs Away

  Word was spreading fast from court as I searched the Greenwood for Serana. But there was no sign of her. All I found was Will the hob, shaking with fear, tucked in between two rocks.

  “Where is she?” I whispered.

  “Gone,” he answered, his eyes rimmed white.

  “Gone where?” I demanded.

  “Wherever the Queen has sent her. Quick-like in a shout.” He squeezed out from between the rocks and bolted into the dense bracken.

  Those words, how they stabbed me to the heart. Serana gone! I knew she had no time, no chance to reason with the Queen. With naught on her back, she had disappeared and only the Queen knew where.

  And I was next. I was sure of it. Fleeing to our quarters, I arrived at my room unseen through the mouse holes we had built as a secret passageway to the little springs where we liked to bathe. Frantically, I gathered up beloved things: a silver dove, milky crystals, a lozenge of copper, a pouch of amber beads. I hid these treasures in a band hastily made from my dam’s torn silk petticoat and tied it around my waist. I thought in all foolishness that these things might be of use when I found Serana wherever the Queen had sent her. I held that thought hard and close to my guilty heart.

  Just as I was tying a blue cape around my shoulders, I heard someone enter. Heart pounding, I turned. Of course it was the Queen. Who else dared enter without permission? Perhaps if I begged she might let me share my sister’s place of punishment. At least we would be together. But I quaked before her, my resolve unraveling in fear. She stared at me with an odd mixture of fury and desperation. But there was no mistaking the danger that smoldered in her narrowed eyes.

  I threw myself on the floor, reaching out a tentative hand to touch the doe-white skin of her foot.

  “Oh Gracious Queen, our Queen, your worthless servant begs you—”

  It was useless of course. Even as I had begun pleading, the Queen spit forth a banishing spell that pierced my flesh the way summer hail shreds the tender leaves. Groveling in pain, I wept quicksilver tears, unable to speak further.

  A murderous clap of thunder hurled me from light into dark, from mist into mire. I groaned, my cape soaked through, my face pressed into the soggy earth. I turned on my back, and gasped as rain pelted my cheeks, and pooled in my eyes. I reached out a hand for protection from its stinging cold, seeing only the thrashing branches of storm-tossed trees.

  “C’mon, Grandma!” a shrill voice shouted. “Get up, damn it! I can’t carry you.” A small hand tugged at mine, now grown swollen and useless.

  Dazed, I struggled to my feet, only distantly wondering where the Queen had exiled me.

  “C’mon!” the voice insisted and I looked down through the sheeting rain barely able to make out a girl-child, feral from the look of her matted hair and ragged clothing. “Hey, somebody give me a hand with this one!” she whined.

  From the rain-soaked bushes came an explosion of small bodies, some human children by their clothes, some spriggets and hobs, their na
ked pelts slick with rain. I balked like a nag refusing to plow but they shoved, cursed, and finally kicked me into motion.

  I lumbered down a steep embankment, the girl-child tugging frantically at my hand as though we were being chased by unseen demons. Infected by her fear, I stumbled over root and mud to catch up to her.

  “Get down,” the girl ordered.

  Aided by other hands tugging on my cape, I was pulled to my knees and then forced to lie prostrate in the drenched grass. Twin ribbons of light swooped over us and when the night returned to darkness and rain, the children helped me to my feet again.

  “Who are you?” I asked, finding the sound of my voice strange—thick and husky, as if I had caught a human chill.

  “Later, when there’s time. We have to get you over first.”

  “Let’s go! Or we’ll miss the train!” shouted a lanky boy, his hair shaved into spiral patterns over his skull.

  “You gotta run,” commanded the girl who was still holding my hand.

  I started to trot with a clumsy gait, when I saw again the twin lights approaching. “Wait! Wait!” I shouted, trying to drag my companions to a halt.

  “Aw, shit. We got no time for this,” the boy yelled and slapped me on my flanks. “Run, now! Or we’re all dead!”

  I ran nearly insensate with terror, as the children dragged me by the hand over a gravel path and across a hard road to the other side. Midway, blazing lights captured us in a net of silver rain, a horn blared an alarm, and the monster screeched and swerved, but still we ran, our bare feet pounding the unyielding roadway, until we had crossed over.

  Crossed over . . .

  I was panting, the breath knocked from my chest, my feet burning from the hard slab of the road. But the children continued to push and pull, curse and cajole, dragging me farther into the woods on that other side until again we were on the crest of a hill. Below us on the edge of an open field, I could just make out the rails of iron gouging the earth. Even on the hill, I tasted the bitterness of rust.