Except the Queen

by Jane Yolen

  Jack had already set the little table, the bone-handled cutlery laid out just so, framing the porcelain plates. A new taper was in the candlestick and it burned with a cheering flame. All my precious things had been carefully placed on the window ledge. I was astonished into speechlessness—would not Serana be amused at that! Wet, cold, my fingers chaffed, and stained with dirt, I sank into the chair and watched Jack take command of the little kitchen.

  He moved with grace, long, dexterous fingers cracking eggs, beating them in the blue bowl, turning the pan so that the mixture might cook quickly and evenly. He said nothing, but cast his glance my way, questions lying there between us, but good manners holding them in check. Never speak first when dealing with the fey—that old interdiction. Well, it seemed he learned a thing or two from someone with common sense. Perhaps even his neighbor, Baba Yaga. How well does he know her?

  I let him put the food in front of me. When I took a bite, it was delicious. We ate in silence. After the meal was done, I asked but one thing of him: “Will you help me hide Sparrow and Robin? Others will come.”

  “Yes. You can stay with me. Just across the garden.” He pointed out the window to an old five-story building across from mine. “I have the loft on the top floor.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “If you’re asking do I know what I’m in for, the answer is yes. Sort of.” Then he smiled, brushing back the thick gray hair, those eyes too bright a blue.

  “How do you know this?”

  “When I was ten years old my mother left us and my father, bitter about it, deposited me into the reluctant arms of my mother’s sister, a woman strange and fascinating. She was neither gruff nor kind, but drank small glasses of whiskey, read tarot cards, tea leaves, and told stories.”

  “Stories?” I asked, sipping my tea.

  “Yeah, the kind that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and send you either running for the shrink’s couch or into art.”

  “And since you are of normal size, I am assuming you went into art,” I replied, trying to conceal my ignorance. I have no idea what conjurer he imagined would turn him small. Or why.

  He laughed and it was a pleasant sound in my kitchen that drove away the dampness of my joints. I must have guessed correctly.

  After we finished eating, he went to wrap the sleeping Sparrow in a blanket. Robin growled at him, a throaty sound I have never heard a human make before.

  “Then you’ll have to carry her, son,” Jack said. “We have to leave here now.”

  I added, “The truce will end at the moon’s height and we still have to make Jack’s loft a fortress.”

  Robin swaddled Sparrow in a blanket while Jack grabbed what extra food remained in my cold storage. I gathered up my treasures and placed them in my pocket and we left, locking the door to Baba Yaga’s house behind us. Or what remained of it. It seemed I was being forced into exile again.

  Walking close together, we crossed the courtyard, past the garden to Jack’s building. An old rickety lift pulled us to the roof and I have not been so frightened of a cage since the time Serana and I tried to trap a Roc and nearly got our fingers nipped off. Besides, being surrounded by so much iron made me wheeze.

  But finally we entered Jack’s abode and even my cautious sister would have been wild with happiness.

  It was a garden of sculptures: wood and leather, twigs and fur, and green plants growing in abundance. There were stones with natural holes, shells with coiled secrets, a tortoise carapace, and dried fronds of bracken. The air was fragrant with the scents of linseed, cedar shavings, and charcoal. Slender stalks of rowan and blackthorn had been woven into the frames around the windows. Safeguards against the UnSeelie court. I wondered if he knew that.

  Jack directed Robin toward a large bedroom with a window on the ceiling that looked up at the stars. The wooden bed was covered with a huge quilt of velvet patches stitched together with colored silks. Here the children slept, like chicks storm-fallen from their nest and now returned.

  Jack led me to a smaller room at the back of the studio where he stored books and paintings. There was a simple bed covered in a woven cloth of midnight blue and it was as narrow as the cot where once my sister and I shared our youthful secrets. Not with ardor, but with great tenderness he held me in his arms, and in that embrace, I let the terror and grief of our long day recede.

  * * *

  NONE OF US SLEPT PAST the dawn, but it was rest enough. Besides, we had work to do. Jack and Robin had to make the loft safe in case a new battle should break out. I never doubted there would be one soon.

  Since the poisonous ink had given Sparrow a fever, my healing skills were sorely tested. I melted beeswax into a paste with some fresh ginger I found in Jack’s pantry. I added a bit of my own blood drawn from the crook of my left arm and the sweat of a city mouse caught behind the wall. I added a cobweb from the corner of Jack’s bookshelf and the squeezings of rowan berries. It worked albeit slowly. But after a day, most of the frightful tattoos began to disappear—though the one for trouble, no doubt the first, seemed deeply etched.

  Jack made a vegetable soup thickened with eggs, but Robin would suffer no one but himself to feed Sparrow. He raised her head to the spoon, though he managed to get her to take but one sip, or two. She was no more than a ribbon of white flesh now, but I knew how resilient she was—sturdy like her namesake.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT I HEARD ROBIN whispering in the dark, heard Sparrow’s feathered answers while Jack and I took turns standing watch. But either we had hurt Lankin more than we knew, or he was plotting with others for a next move. I wondered about that. He did not seem the type to share. On the other hand, he might have been selling information and still looking for the highest bidder. I could guess who the bidder might be. Had I not seen him on the street? Lankin was bad, Red Cap unthinkable. Though I didn’t say anything to the others, Jack’s loft no longer seemed much of a fortress at all.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, I BUMPED into Robin in front of the water room.

  “How is she?”

  He shrugged.

  “I will make another ointment,” I said. “And I will be in to rub her down shortly.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said abruptly, going back into their room and closing the door.

  I suddenly realized that he meant to protect her even from me. They were a pair, the two of them. Touched by fey hands and then abandoned to some awful life between the worlds. It made no sense, even as my own exile made no sense. But I felt reassured knowing that at least they had each other, as I had my sister, though she was far away.

  Only then did I realize I had to write to her. I had to try to put words to paper, to tell of our recent encounter. But the story was too new, too raw. I grieved for the crows, those little girls who were lost. I grieved for Lily and her bark. I worried for the two spilling secrets to each other in the bedroom. And worried for my Jack who had unwittingly become a part of it all. So first I made the ointment for Robin to put on Sparrow, and after, came back to the table where paper and pen awaited me.

  I got as far as “Dearest Serana,” and burst into tears, unable to write another word.

  61

  Serana and the Crones

  I stood still, all atremble with the sounds of the night: the bridle bells, the horses’ hooves pacing beneath my window, the uncanny silence of the streets. The Queen had never looked up and seen me, white as bone, as milk in the pail, staring down at her. She did not have to. She certainly knew I was there.

  With the first false dawn, she left, going through the curtain of time that separates the Greenwood from the human world. I ran downstairs, to walk widdershins around the block, for all the good that might do me. I passed alleyways where bits of old newspapers and magazines whirled in silent eddies. Where old men slept on the pavement in cardboard boxes. Where feral cats prowled around garbage cans looking for food. And then I came home again just as the city stretched, stirred
, came back to life.

  I had just sat down, still atwitter, when a knock came at the downstairs door. It was a loud hammering and could have awakened the dead.

  One part of me did not want to go down there. But one does not ignore a summons. There are some spriggans and sprites who can stand the light. And of course the Highborn can. Someone from the Greenwood could be coming with a message for me from the Queen. It could even have been the Queen herself, turned round again to confront me. I did not dare keep the knocker waiting.

  Gathering my skirts about me, I walked slowly down the stairs as if going to my own execution. My unprotected hand turned the iron knob. I did not mind the scorching. What did that small burn matter when surely the Queen could melt me like candle wax whenever she felt like it?

  On the doorstep stood a young woman with white-gold curls and a strange, dark center part, and a man the color of crow feathers. Suddenly, I remembered them as if they were part of an old, odd dream. They had been my scare-bird’s companions in the park. But how had they found me? And who had sent them?

  “What is it with you old people?” the girl said, the moment I opened the door. “No landline, no cell? Robin called and told us to get our butts over here. Now.”

  Surely I looked fuddled, for the crow-colored man said, “Slow down, May. She’s just out of bed.”

  “She looks like a rumpled bed, Chim, if that’s what you mean,” she countered. “And don’t forget who else just tumbled out of bed. And just when things were getting . . . interesting.”

  “He’ll wait.”

  “He’d better.”

  May. Chim. Now the whole scene in the park tumbled back into my brain. And what had come after.

  The girl held out a small, pink object. “Call him,” she ordered.

  “Call who?” I said. “Call how?” I wasn’t just fuddled, I was entirely confused.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” she said, and pushed some numbers on the pink object, held it to her ear. Said, “Rob. Yeah. Me. She’s here.” Then held it out to me again. “Just talk.”

  I held it as she had, to my ear, and began to talk. “Hello? Hello? Is this a summons? I am ready. I yield.”

  And then a disembodied voice that sounded like and not like the scare-bird, said, “Hi, Auntie Em. Had some trouble here.”

  I dropped the pink thing and then, as if all the strings connecting my body parts had been cut at once, collapsed hard onto the stone steps. Stone, which had never harmed me in the Greenwood, bruised me in unmentionable places.

  Chim propped me up against the wall, spoke briefly into the pink thing, saying “Hold on a minute, bro,” and then explained that the pink object was called a cell, though all the cells I knew were deep and dark and inescapable. “You can talk to people across the air, all the way to . . .” He stopped talking to me, and said into the cell, “Where the hell you at, Rob?” Then back to me, “Milwaukee.”

  I remembered the woman shouting to the air, the one almost hit by the yellow car. I had thought her crazed. Perhaps she had been talking to a cell, too.

  And then I realized what Chim had said, pronouncing it far differently than I ever had. Milwaukee. Where Meteora lived. “May I speak to my sister?”

  “Can she speak to her sister?” Chim asked the cell.

  I grabbed it before he received an answer. “Meteora. METEORA!” I shouted into the cell, into the air.

  The answer, thin, bodiless, came back to me, “Not so loud, sister. And not with that name. It is Sophia, remember?”

  And then we wept. Any other time we might have laughed to hear our voices trilling like birds through the cell. Quickly she told me what had happened, and I was relieved to know she was all right.

  All right? With the Queen on her solitary Rade, with Red Cap on the loose, with mandrakes screaming in Meteora’s garden, the Highborn Lankin breaking into her house, the arum calling all to wake. With the Queen’s child, hiding her golden beauty with black dyes, poisoned by Lankin’s foul spells.

  There was nothing all right with any of it.

  “I will send aloe cream for your burns,” I told Meteora, my words flying through the air, “though it does not smell like aloe, but more like machinery.”

  She assured me that she had aloe aplenty. “From where I work,” she added.

  “Had you not set wards?” But even as I asked, I knew that if she had, they would not have done any good. Oh, we could keep out unwitting humans with locks, and pigeons with a scattering of herbs, but not a Highborn like Lankin. Or a Lowborn like Red Cap. Even in the Greenwood we had had no strong magic. Here in the cities, stripped of the little we once had, we were naked to even mediocre spellcasters.

  “I will try and find you,” I said. “Good-bye. Good-bye. My lovely sister. I will come.” Iron rain be damned. If my sister was hurting, I would be there, whatever the cost. I waved my hand toward the west, where I knew she had to be. Then I handed back the pink cell to Chim, thinking: How can I get there? I have no more money to ride the horseless carts. Or to buy protection from the iron rain.

  Suddenly I had no idea what to do next.

  I began to weep again. “I must. I must . . .” The words could not push through the tears or the closing of my throat with sorrow. Finally I managed. “I must go to her. To them. They are in terrible danger. In . . . in Milwaukee.” I pronounced it as Chim had. “But how . . .” And then my throat closed down again.

  May’s hands fluttered. “Okay, no more tears. You’ll have me bawling next.” She turned to Chim. “Your aunts, the crones. Could they . . . ?”

  “Dunno.” He shook his head, closed his eyes. Opened them again. “Maybe. They can be fierce.”

  I managed to stand. Everything in my body ached. I doubted I had enough aloe for these pains. “Fierce is good.”

  “It’s on your head then, lady,” he said.

  I patted my hair. We all laughed at that, but the laughter was heavy and dark. “Let me use the water room first.”

  “Don’t be long,” Chim said. “The aunts go to bed around noon. They’re night owls.”

  “Owls are good,” I said.

  They laughed again, though this time I did not know why.

  * * *

  I WAS NOT LONG AT all. I brought along my dam’s shawl for warmth. I also brought an offering of salt and bread in a paper sack for the aunts. In case that mattered.

  “Bus or subway?” May said to Chim.

  He shook his head. “Neither. If she’s anything like my aunts, they’ll make her sick.” He looked sideways at me. “We hoof it.”

  And despite May’s complaint, we walked.

  After a while I stopped counting the blocks. One place looked so like the other. When I asked where we were going, I got a one-word answer.

  “Uptown,” Chim said.

  Walking on the stone walkways is so much harder than striding along any carpeting of pine or grass. I was fairly winded and my feet hurt, but I would not let it show.

  The tall buildings became smaller buildings, and many had flat, tan-colored boards blocking both windows and doorways, as if the people who had lived in those places had moved far away. There were fewer of the yellow cars here, more buses, and people all shades of brown chatting on the streets. A friendlier place than where we had come from, perhaps because many of the people here seemed to be Chim’s brothers and sisters. What a huge family he must have, I thought. And that would mean many aunts. No wonder May had suggested it.

  Finally, we got to a place where shadows lay heavy on the ground, even with the early morning light streaming down. We turned into an alleyway. There was nothing that distinguished this alley from any other; it was simply a dark space between brick buildings. The walls were covered with signs, old and weathered, telling of things like milk and cigarettes and beer.

  “If the aunts are still up,” Chim said, “they’ll be here.”

  “How many aunts have you?” I asked.

  “Two,” said May.

  We went deep into th
e alley, turned a sharp corner, and there in the semidarkness of the shadows stood two ancient crones hovering over a fire contained in a steel drum. Tall, agonizingly thin, their skin stretched like black paper over fine bones. They each wore a voluminous black ankle-length dress, which only emphasized their height, their thinness. The sleeves of the dresses were rolled all the way up so that their arms were bare. As we neared, they were spreading some sort of ointment along the inside of those scrawny arms.

  They must have heard our approach. We weren’t quiet. But they took a long time before looking over at us. May they dismissed quickly, Chim they nodded at in recognition, but me they stared at with eyes hard as walnuts.

  The taller one signaled me to them with cupped hands.

  I was suddenly afraid. There was something royal about them. They may have been Chim’s aunts—but were they queens? Well, if a queen beckons, one obeys. I handed them the paper sack with the bread and salt. The shorter crone opened it up, nodded, smiled as I stood warming my hands over the fire, which snapped and snarled at me from behind its grate. Close up, I could see they were not queens, but something else. Something older perhaps.

  “It took you long enough to get here, girl,” said the taller aunt.

  “I had not known I was coming,” I said, stuttering between words.

  “Lucky we did, then,” said the shorter. At which point they both laughed. It was the same as Chim’s laughter, a short, staccato cascade.

  Then the two put a cape around my shoulders made of some strange yarn, and lucky it was that I was wearing Mother’s shawl or the iron strands in the thing would have burned me clear to the bone.

  “Sister,” said the taller one, “we offer you protection, for we can see that you need it.”

  I said nothing. Could these two really give me the help I needed? Against the Queen. Against Lankin. Against Red Cap and his Dark Lord. But I nodded. Anytime someone offers protection, whether it works or not, the laws of hospitality take hold.