by F. D. Lee
“What in the worlds are you talking about?”
The hooded man closed the space between them. Every muscle in Bea’s body told her to run, but she couldn’t stop staring up at him. She had often encountered what she would have thought, before this moment, to be disgust. She now realised that the way the other fae treated her was in fact very low on the spectrum of abhorrence.
“You wish for transparency?” he said. “Very well. I neither condone nor tolerate your presence here. You are abhorrent. You are a vile, sour little fairy, living vicariously through those who know no better.”
“Riiiight. I see.” Bea almost felt relieved. At least she knew where she stood with fairy-haters. “Well, you’re not anything special, you know? You all think you’re so great just because the characters believe in you for longer – but you know what, they stop believing in all of us, sooner or later.”
The hooded fae seemed for a second confused. Whatever it was, he shook it off, walked over to the King and began untangling him from his horse. “This is only the beginning,” he said, lifting the King with a grunt.
“What do you mean ‘this is only the beginning’?” Bea said.
He turned to her.
“Let me gift you with some advice. Resign your post. You are not welcome here.”
“What? No! This is my story!”
“We shall see.” He held up his gloved hand and snapped his fingers.
Sindy screamed.
Chapter Nine
“What about the bear?” Joan asked, her seemingly mild words masking the desire for high drama that her tone conveyed.
Bea ran a finger around the rim of her wine glass. She’d arrived home and immediately sent out a tompte with an urgent message for her friends to come around. They were now sat around the small table in what might, by a particularly unscrupulous liar, be called her kitchen.
“He didn’t wake the bear up. He was there with the hero over his shoulder, clicked his fingers and disappeared, and then the heroine was screaming. So I thumped her on the back of the head and carried her home. Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Bea said in the face of her friends’ horrified looks.
It is perhaps worth noting that there are many expressions of horror available to a face blessed with forty-two muscles, and Bea was experiencing two of them. Joan’s horror was skating in the grey area between disbelief and excitement. Melly’s, on the other hand, had more of the classic air about it, with accents of dismay and shock.
“I can’t believe you did that,” tutted Melly, an elf by tribe and a witch by trade, between pulls on her cigarette.
She smoked voraciously, although Bea was pretty certain she didn’t actually enjoy it. She’d told Bea once it was expected of a villain, along with the black dresses and the penchant for red wine and evil laughter. When they’d first met, Melly had worn green face paint, but it had made her skin itch and after a while she’d given up. That was when she’d started smoking.
There was also the crown. For someone who went to such great lengths to look witchy, Bea had never understood why Melly wore it. The crown was small, ornate and antlered, the startling white of the polished bone softened by silver and mother-of-pearl, though not enough to detract from the fact that the ends of the antlers were viciously sharp. She said it was gift, though from whom Bea had no idea.
Witching wasn’t a traditional job for an elf. They were too vain and, often, too feckless for such a demanding position. But Melly had been witching for years – longer than Bea had known her – and she was obviously good at it, since the GenAm didn’t seem to put any demands on her, even with the Mirrors breaking.
“Well, honestly, I can’t believe that’s all you did,” said Joan.
“What should I have done, then?” Bea asked, and immediately regretted it. Joan had a very active imagination, and a love of mysteries. The little tooth fairy tended to see everything in terms of a crime scene.
“Well,” Joan began, taking a deep breath. Bea caught Melly’s eye and tried not to laugh. “Firstly, right, I think you should have tackled this hooded man. Suspicious, wearing a hood. Shows he’s hiding something, doesn’t it?”
“Well… yes. I guess so. But he pretty much admitted that he didn’t want me on the story. Not much hiding there.”
Joan waved the comment away. She was in flow now and wasn’t going to be pegged in by boring little things like what actually happened. “Fine, fine, fine. So, firstly, I’d have tied him to a chair-”
“Were there any chairs in the forest?” Melly asked casually.
“Not many,” Bea admitted, trying hard not to grin.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Joan said, glaring at them. “Alright then. To a tree. Yes. I’d have tied him to a tree and then begun the interrogation. I don’t suppose you had any thumb screws on you? Or some kind of torch? Torches always work well for questioning,” Joan said with all the authority of an overactive imagination. “You can shine the light in their eyes, and they get so nervous they give up on the whole thing. Of course, you need to be careful you don’t singe their hair. Did you really not get a chance to see his face?”
“No,” Bea answered miserably.
“You didn’t get anything out of him at all?”
“Only what I’ve told you,” Bea said. “He said he used magic, which is nonsense. If we had magic like that we wouldn’t need the Mirrors. Oh, and he spoke really strangely.”
Melly frowned. “What do you mean?”
Bea thought about what she meant. Now she had to, it was hard to explain.
“I guess… He sounded like he’d been dead for hundreds of years. The way he spoke, his sentences were all backwards. ‘Have not you descended the staircase’, that kind of thing. And he had this accent, it was lovely. I mean, if you didn’t actually listen to what he was saying, his words sounded wonderful. Like he was talking directly to you.”
“But weren’t you the only one there?” Joan asked, puzzled.
“I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It just seemed like he knew all this... this stuff.”
“Stuff? You’re not being a very good witness, Bea. What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing really. I can’t remember now.”
Joan rolled her eyes, obviously giving up on Bea for any answers. She turned instead to Melly, who was staring up at the ceiling, her expression clouded. “What do you think?”
Melly pulled her attention back to Joan and Bea. “He’s an Anti,” she said simply. “He’ll have to be reported. Better he meets the white suits than you.”
“She’s right there, Bea,” Joan said. “Why haven’t you given the whole thing over to the GenAm? You didn’t mention Mehta- Mitas- your Plotter. You have told him about this, haven’t you?”
“Mistasinon. And it’s complicated,” Bea said in the convincing tone of someone who knew it wasn’t.
“Exactly how is it ‘complicated’?” Melly asked.
Bea glared at Melly across the little table. If looks could kill, Joan would have had her very first, real life crime scene to investigate.
“You said it, not me,” Melly said, drawing on her cigarette for emphasis. The effect was ruined somewhat by her closing her eyes against the smoke.
Bea shuffled in her seat, suddenly the focus of two pairs of accusatory stares. “You’re just assuming he’s an Anti, but he quite clearly said he didn’t want to stop the story. He’s just another fairy-hater. I can deal with one of those by myself, I don’t need the GenAm.”
Melly nearly choked. “You’re seriously considering not reporting all this?”
Bea wanted to say ‘of course I know I should involve the GenAm. But then they’d take the story from me, and maybe I’d get a new one, but probably I wouldn’t. And I’d have to tell Mistasinon I wasn’t able to finish the ‘simple’ Plot he gave me. And all the other FMEs would know I’d failed before I’d even begun’. But instead she said, “I don’t think there’s anything to report.”
The witch stubbed her cigarett
e out. “They don’t mess around anymore. I’ve heard the Beast is out every night.”
“Well, that’s true enough, but the Beast wouldn’t be called out for a simple mix-up,” Joan said. She looked at the expression on her friends’ faces. “Would it?”
“Not if she reports it now,” Melly replied, her eyes fixed on Bea.
“If I report it I’ll lose my story!” Bea shouted, frustration overwhelming her. “Look. It’s a short story,” she continued, aiming for calm but landing in patronising. “Ball, Kiss, Happily Ever After. Easy. Anyway, I’ve got to finish it, no matter what.”
“No matter what?” Melly parroted. “And does ‘no matter what’ include engaging with an Anti? Does ‘no matter what’ include being Redacted?”
Bea ran her hands over her face. “No, of course not. But I’m not giving up my Plot. Not for a little hiccup.”
“But if he is an Anti, it isn’t really a hiccup. We’re just worried about you, that’s all,” Joan said.
“Yes, but he’s not an Anti, is he? He didn’t actually do anything wrong,” Bea answered slowly, testing the idea. “He just said that I was to drop it.”
“Oh, right,” Melly snorted, letting her beautiful face crease. “Because he didn’t suddenly launch into the Anti-Narrativists’ manifesto he’s somehow legitimate?”
“I only mean that you’re assuming he’s on the other side, which, really, is a bit of a jump. Why would an Anti even bother with this Plot? It’s tiny.”
“He used magic,” Melly said.
“He said it was magic,” Bea countered quickly, “but obviously it must have been some kind of drug, like the one I used.”
“So you admit he lied?” Melly announced triumphantly.
“Look, I’m not defending him, I’m just saying there’s no reason to go jumping to conclusions,” Bea said.
“To be fair, Bea, you did say he threatened you,” Joan said, taking a sip of her beer, ignoring the rising tension. When you grew up in a house full of sisters, you learned not to pay attention to disagreements, no matter how serious.
“He…well, I mean, that could be open to interpretation.”
The witch and the tooth fairy shared what only could only be described as a ‘Look’. Bea began a detailed visual study of her table top.
Melly broke the silence.
“Mortal gods. You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re actually not going to report him. The Beast will be the least of your problems. They’ll get the white suits involved, mark my words. Why are you being so stubborn?”
“I’m not being stubborn – it’s just the thought of all those bitter-faced FMEs, whispering about me, about how they’d always said I couldn’t do it. I came all this way, I left everything behind, and now it’s almost going to have been worth it. Can’t you understand? The Beast won’t be called out, not if I get everything back on track. It’s only the introduction. And anyway, Mistasinon said he wanted me to use my initiative.”
“This is madness Bea,” Melly said. “There has to be a moment when you accept that some things just aren’t meant to-”
“Wait! Wait!” Joan cried, “the Plotter! Blue suit! You can talk to him!”
Bea looked at Joan like she’d suddenly taken up shark wrestling. “Haven’t you been listening?”
“I’m not saying you should tell him anything. Only, well, it seems like your main point is that this hooded man could maybe not be an Anti, right?”
Bea nodded, glaring at Melly.
“So, why don’t you try to find out from blue suit exactly what an Anti might look like, or what they might do to stop a story?” Joan said. “You pop over and, you know, just sort of casually ask him about Anties in general. Like a character précis.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Melly said after a pause. “He said you could ask him for help, didn’t he?”
“Exactly,” Joan said. “What harm could it do?”
Bea drummed her fingers on the table. She was pretty certain it could do a lot of harm, but she had to admit that her friends had a point. There was no way she was going to go to the GenAm and tell them that she’d been accosted by a possible Anti, and potentially lost control of her story – not yet, anyway. But it would be good to get some information.
“Fine, fine,” she said, hands held up in defeat. “But I’m still not going to report it.”
Joan beamed. “Why don’t you go there now? It’s still early, I’m sure he’ll be there.”
“And if nothing else,” Melly added, stubbing out her cigarette, “if you speak to this Mistasinon now you could argue later that you told the GenAm.”
Melly and Joan walked away from Bea’s squalid bedsit, winding their way through the honeycomb of narrow streets. There was something heavy in the air. Although it was hours until evening and the streets were busy, there was a sensation that Ænathlin was slow and watchful, like a wounded animal. Joan also noticed that there seemed to be a larger than normal number of brown-suited workers from the Contents Department on the streets. No white suits, though.
“Well, that was a little fraught,” she said.
Melly pulled a cigarette from her onyx case and tapped it against the lid. Joan waited while she lit up, politely ignoring the way the witch spluttered on the first inhalation. When she decided Melly had recovered, she said, “I understand that she doesn’t want to lose the story – not after working so long to get one.”
Joan let the comment hang in the air, but Melly only flicked her cigarette with her thumb, letting the ash answer for her as it dropped to the cobbles.
“That was a bit weird though, wasn’t it, all that stuff about not wanting to go back? Go back where – the Sheltering Forest? Go back to orc and gnarl attacks? That’s obviously not what would happen.”
Melly glared ahead.
“She gets by on Plot-watching. Even if she did lose the Plot, she wouldn’t have to give up her flat,” Joan said.
Glare. Puff. Glare.
“I think she expected it to be easier.”
Puff. Puff. Glare.
“You can’t say this isn’t a good opportunity for her. She couldn’t have waited much longer, I think.”
Glare. Puff. Puff.
“And, you know, fair enough, she should probably report this hooded man, but the chances of him being an Anti must be a million to one.”
“Hah,” Melly said, finally breaking her silence.
Joan looked sidelong at her friend. “Do you really think Bea can’t manage her Plot?”
“She can’t let it go.” Melly sighed. “It’ll hurt her, sooner or later.”
“Oh, I see,” Joan said, though she didn’t.
“She just doesn’t want to risk her ‘career’,” Melly continued. “She should report it and get as far away from the whole thing as possible. This is real life now. It doesn’t have a Happy Ending.”
Joan looked up at her friend. There was a look on the witch’s face that suggested she was not, despite her physical location, actually here at all.
“Her Plotter seems alright at least. Between you and me, from what she said he said, I think he was quite taken with her.”
“That’s hardly any great help. People do stupid things when there are feelings involved.” The end of Melly’s cigarette burned white. “But not nearly as stupid as the things they do when all their choices are taken away from them.”
Chapter Ten
The bronze doors of the Plot Department shone painfully in the autumn sunlight.
The Teller had had the General Administration buildings constructed early in his Chapter, and for reasons only he could answer had chosen to build in a style that was not reminiscent of any of the Five Kingdoms of Thaiana. This was a show of architectural deviance wholly uncommon in Ænathlin, a city founded on an almost schizophrenic plagiarism of the characters’ world.
On the streets of Ænathlin, red stone from Ota’ari jostled for space with Penqioan marble and Ehinen wood. Whatever could be stolen from Thaiana wa
s put to use, one way or another. Ænathlin therefore had no one particular style, and as such the Teller’s deviation from the norm should not have jarred as it did.
And yet the design of the General Administration buildings was wholly indicative of the Teller, a Narrator who had changed everything: the Plots, the city, the rules; the lives, hopes and dreams of all of the fae.
And, as Bea stood on the shallow steps in front of the doors of the Plot Department and looked down at the open space in front of the GenAm, she could see another example of the changes the Teller had wrought.
Once, the fae used executions.
Now they Redacted.
Bea hated watching Redactions. She’d always found it too easy to imagine what it would feel like to sit in front of the screaming crowds, knowing this was the last thing she would ever experience, knowing that in a few moments there would be nothing left of her. But this time she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
The Redaction Block sat in the square outside the GenAm. It was old, the wood almost black and as hard as stone. It sat on the top of a raised dais, big enough to accommodate the criminal and the Redactionist who would carry out the sentence. The square was wide and open, unusual in the overcrowded city, to allow people to watch.
Redactions always drew a crowd, something the Redaction Department encouraged. Food and drink were handed out, and usually a few Raconteurs were paid to retell the tale of the Great Redaction, being sure to highlight how the Teller Cared About Them. Redactions were exciting, and an excuse the fae rarely needed to laugh and dance and celebrate. This time, however, no one was cheering. There was instead a terrible expectancy in the way the crowd stood and whispered, in the recrimination that hung over the square.
Bea joined the crowd, pushing her way forward until she could see the gnome being led up to the platform, her tiny hands tied tightly behind her back, a gag biting into the corners of her mouth. The gnome sat gently on the block, resigned to her fate. A lock of hair brushed against her cheek. Bea realised that was probably the last thing the gnome would ever truly feel again.
