The Fairy's Tale

by F. D. Lee

  Bea’s chest felt tight. She couldn’t breathe. The earth was spinning beneath her feet. There was a fire in her lungs, causing her throat to dry to a crisp. She watched as Sindy looked up at the boy, her arms wrapped around his thick middle.

  Bea’s hands gripped Seven’s powder blue arm so tightly her knuckles whitened.

  The girl, her heroine, her character, stood on her tiptoes, bringing her perfect face up to this dirty, stocky country boy…

  Bea shut her eyes tight and brought her head back against Seven’s face as hard as she could, gratified when he cried out in shock and pain. His arms dropped, and she ran on shaking legs from the sight of the two humans kissing in the dappled sunlight.

  As soon as she was under the cool shade of the trees Bea came to a faltering stop. She was feeling giddy and sick and, just underneath that, waiting for its moment, was a great chasm. She could feel it under her skin, waiting to pull her in.

  She dropped to her knees, gasping for breath.

  “Was not that informative?” Seven asked, appearing next to her. There was a smear of black blood on the underside of his nose, such as might have been missed by a quickly wiped hand.

  She turned away from him, too angry to be upset, too upset to be angry.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder.

  She shrugged it off.

  “It is understandable for you to-”

  “Will you just shut up!” Bea cried. “Every beautiful girl dreams of marrying a King! It’s what they’re there for!”

  “Still you persist in this ridiculous fallacy? What is it you believe will happen – that your girl will kiss John and instantly fall in love with him?”

  “True Love – yes,” Bea said. “That’s what happens. That’s why the Plots use it. Everyone knows that.”

  Seven snorted.

  “Oh, and what do you know about it?” Bea said. “You’re not a character. They like these stories. True Love and Happy Ever After.”

  “Love is not happy,” Seven answered, his kohl smudged eyes darkening to a deep, midnight blue. “Love is painful. Love is sufferance and sacrifice and passion. It is the blood and the soul of life.”

  “You sound ridiculous,” Bea answered back. “Love doesn’t have to be so over the top. Love like that is just as bad, it’s just as unthinking.”

  “Have not you gained insight from the scene before you? Can you not see what real passion is?”

  “What do you know about anything? What can you possibly know?” If Bea had been a volcano, the locals would have started dashing around the house, gathering up their possessions.

  “You show me things like… like… that,” she continued, waving her arms in the direction of Sindy’s cottage, “but you’re just pushing this to get what you want! You’re too good looking, and you’ve got all these clever little arguments and you’re so bloody pleased with yourself, aren’t you? You’re might has well have ‘villain’ tattooed on your forehead.”

  A part of her, outvoted and ignored, was screaming at her to look at the way the Anti’s hands had balled into fists, the way he was now facing her, his body rigid. But she was angry and, underneath her anger, was the fear that everything he said about Sindy was right.

  “You’re nothing, nothing, nothing,” Bea yelled at him. “You sleep with her sister and you steal my Book and you make all these wild accusations, and you seem to think you’re somehow better and smarter than anyone else. But you’re not, in fact you’re disgusting and selfish and cheap. It’s no wonder the GenAm hates you so much. I understand now why they Redact creatures like you. No, Redaction’s too good for you. It wouldn’t hurt you enough.”

  She glared at him, gasping for breath, daring him to fight back. He stepped forward, his mouth a thin line, his body casting a shadow over her. She steeled herself.

  And then he looked away, saying something in a language Bea didn’t recognise, a soft and rounded tongue that she imagined would be written to look sweeping and beautiful.

  “Pardon?”

  “I do not disagree with your insight,” he said. “I wonder that you are unable to turn such clarity of understanding on your own actions. You have laid many accusations at my door, and yet what have I done that you do not so eagerly strive towards?” He met her eyes with his empty gaze. “I believed you sensed the truth of it, that you were better than the rest of them, that when you saw the reality of Sindy’s feelings you would revise your position. Clearly I was mistaken.”

  “I’m not… What’s wrong with them believing?” Bea asked, a note of pleading creeping, uninvited, into her voice.

  “You do not sell belief, you sell ‘belief-in’. Belief in true love, as if everyone were entitled to it. Belief in a simple solution to a complex problem. Belief in one type of person, one type of future.”

  “No, I don’t. I offer people dreams, and hope, and, and, something to organise their lives with,” Bea said, not sure why she was trying to convince him. “I don’t make them into ‘one person’.”

  “Oh no? Let me recall your doctrine: Kings, Princes and their ilk must marry girls whose only asset is their beauty. Not clever girls, not worthy girls, not girls who could rule. Powerful women, older women – like one day you will become – are nought but wicked creatures, consumed with jealousy and unfit to hold position. No,” he said as Bea began to speak, “I am not finished. Let us turn our attention to the men. As long as the woman is something to be won, it follows only the worthy will prevail. It matters not if they truly love the girl, nor if the man is cruel or arrogant or unfit to tie his own doublet. As long as he has wealth and completes whatever trials are decided fit, he is suitable. For what is stupidity or arrogance when compared against a crown? The good will win, and the wicked perish, and you and your stories decide what makes a person good or wicked. Not life. Not choice. Not even common sense. You.”

  Bea opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “Va,” Seven spat. “How could you possibly understand what it is to be so restricted?”

  Bea shook her head. “No, no, no, I see what’s happening. You’re just trying to confuse me. That’s obviously how you Anties work. You lie, and twist everything up.”

  He reached out and grabbed her by her shoulders, squeezing them hard. “I have shown you only the truth, and you confound it to fit your needs. And if you, Bea, believe yourself to be above censure, you have not half the wit I credit you with. You are a wicked creature, as am I. All those futures, all those lives stolen – do not you ever think on that? A shallow, vapid fantasy I may be, but you are dangerous and selfish and completely indefensible.”

  “Let me go,” she shouted, banging her fists hard against his chest. “You don’t know anything!”

  And then the Anti lost control. “I know more than you could ever begin to understand,” he shouted, his breath cold on her face. “You pretend to offer hope of a better life, but all you do is take! You are selfish and dictatorial, caring only about your quota and your Mirrors and damning your victims to the purgatory of prewritten futures! You know nothing of what it is to suffer!”

  Bea wanted to destroy him then. She wanted to diminish him, erase him, make him small and insignificant. But right now she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to do so.

  Seven dropped his hands from her like she was scalding hot. “This serves no purpose. You are not what I thought. Your Book is in the small carved box by Ana’s bed. Do not say I do not fulfil a bargain.”

  And then he wasn’t there. Bea stared at the patch of space where just seconds ago he had been, and where now there was only empty forest. She looked up in the direction she had come from, where Sindy and the human boy were.

  She stood for a moment, lost. And then she began walking away from the cottage, back towards Ana’s encampment to get her Book.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Bea appeared through the Mirror, her bag and Book safely in her hands.

  She had found the Book exactly where the Anti had said it would b
e. Perversely this annoyed her, as if it would have been better that he’d lied about the Book’s location, keeping it hidden from her. Still, here it was, in her hands, and here she was, back in the Grand.

  The station was once again full to bursting point, and the checkpoints were up. The red GenAm banners fluttered in the breeze of hundreds of breathing mouths. Bea normally didn’t question them – she barely even read them anymore. They were just part of living in Ænathlin, like the dirt and the smell.

  Now it was like she was seeing them as an outsider might; as she must have done once, a long time ago. She looked over the station and saw, like a new soul stepped into an old world, those same banners that had surrounded her for years:

  “The Teller Cares About You”

  “Carelessness Creates Crossed Plots”

  “Anti-Narrativists Operate In Thaiana”

  “The Redaction Department: Protecting Your Safety”

  It was like suddenly there were a thousand tiny little messages hidden in the everyday humdrum of her life.

  She bumped into the checkpoint, distracted.

  “Sorry,” she said, dragging her eyes to the brown-suited dwarf on the gate.

  “I need to stamp your papers,” he said, obviously unimpressed by her apology.

  “Of course, of course.” She handed him her Book and waited while he checked her in. When he handed the Book back she headed quickly for the exit.

  “Bloody fairies,” he muttered as he waved the next fae forward.

  Back in the safety of her home, Bea felt absolutely lost. She drifted around the room, picking things up, moving them to new positions and then changing them back again. She straightened out her bed sheets, organised her cupboards, and set the chairs under her table so they sat neatly. She wiped down her surfaces. She brushed the mud and leaves from her dress, and set about fixing, poorly, a new hole in her skirt.

  An hour and two pin-pricked fingers later she felt no better than when she’d started.

  She flopped down at her rickety table and buried her head in her arms. She couldn’t help going over what the Anti had said to her, even though every time she replayed the morning’s events it made her feel heavy.

  The Anti had said things which could – which should – be easily dismissed as propaganda. Except that he’d also shown her things she simply couldn’t ignore. Things that she felt she should have seen herself. And, like a splinter under a fingernail, she couldn’t easily shift the guilt she felt at the thought of Sindy marrying the King.

  Bea groaned.

  How was this possible? Her first ever character and she wasn’t behaving like a character should. Sindy, who apparently had feelings and wants and desires that simply didn’t fit. She was a beautiful, kind, young girl. She should want to marry a rich, handsome man and, Bea didn’t know, have babies or brush her hair or whatever it was beautiful girls did when they married Kings.

  But Sindy didn’t seem to want any of that. In fact, from what Bea could tell all Sindy wanted was to be with the stocky boy she’d kissed in her garden. It wasn’t a grand dream, certainly not the kind of Dream that should Come True. But then, Bea had the kind of dream that shouldn’t come true as well.

  She’d always believed that the Plots helped people. But now she couldn’t quieten the voice in her head that kept saying ‘but that’s not exactly true is it..?’

  She had certainly thought more than once that things could be better organised – that perhaps it would be wiser to select clients based on a little more than their ability to hold a note or look good in a raggedy dress.

  She recalled one of the first stories she’d been out on. She’d taken on a Plot-watch from one of the other FMEs, an old, drippy-eyed woman who should have been jolly but was in fact merely sad. Bea couldn’t remember her name now, but it had probably been something like Angie or Flo. Like all godmothers, she had been short and bosomy, with the tell-tale purple dress and grey bun. Flo, or maybe it had been Doris, had tried to liven herself up with a bright yellow sash that had disappeared into her rolls of fat like the last hurrah on New Year’s Eve.

  It had been in one of the faraoli in Ota’ari, the First Kingdom. On this occasion, like so many others, Bea’s job had been to watch the story, making sure nothing happened to disrupt it. But as she’d waited, bored and frustrated, the unwanted and disturbing thought had occurred to her that the GenAm had selected this heroine because she had been the only one of age and who lived in a cottage that was remote enough to allow them to finish the task without risk of interruptions.

  Of course, the girl hadn’t particularly minded finding out she was the long-lost daughter of an old and gentle Sefipht, but Bea remembered thinking that that wasn’t the point.

  The Sefipht had died not long after being reunited with his daughter and seeing her married off to the neighbouring Sefipht – a young man who had more of an affinity with a fishing rod than with another human being. Doris/Irene had returned to orchestrate the wedding, collect her Book and scold Bea for being Bea, and that was an end to it, as far as she had been concerned.

  Bea, on the other hand, found herself having to try very hard not to think about what was going to happen to all the citizens who now had as their rulers a girl who had never managed anything more advanced than a sewing kit and a young man whose idea of a sustainable food supply chain was to catch an exceptionally large fish.

  Bea shook her head, dislodging the memory, and stomped over to her little window.

  Her one-room apartment was divided into three sections by the rather ingenious use of imagination. One third of the room was given over to her narrow bed, another was the area she liked to refer to as her sitting room – a battered old sofa and a table with one leg shorter than the others – and finally, a section devoted to the kitchen. There was a shared bathroom down the hall.

  What no amount of imagination, no matter how liberally applied, could give the flat was security. Ivor, brown-toothed and foul, would only really be good at stopping burglars who considered halitosis a serious deterrent – though in particular regards to the gnome, Bea wouldn’t have taken odds on how often this had actually worked.

  Still, in deference to the possibility that the criminal underworld of Ænathlin were capable of securing a peg to their noses, she had taken to hanging her most precious possessions in a little bag out of her window. This was a trick Joan had picked up in one of the many detective books she’d stolen from Thaiana. Bea wasn’t really sure how much help it actually was in keeping her belongings safe, but since she had nothing to trade for a strongbox she took what she could get.

  She leaned out of the small window until she was all but hanging over the ledge and rummaged around in the bag. After a moment she pulled out a small, corked, glass vial and pulled herself back in.

  Placing the vial carefully on her table, she left her room and walked down the musty hallway, as dank and dismal a corridor as ever imagined, into the rusty, shared bathroom. She grabbed a piece of tissue and walked back to her room, pulling the door closed gently behind her.

  Very, very carefully she pulled the cork from the vial and, having placed the scrap of tissue over the rim, upended the bottle, letting the paper soak up a small measure of the clear liquid.

  She put the cork back in the vial, placed it reverently back in the bag outside her window and took her tissue and herself to bed, where she got under the covers and lay sniffing at the doused paper, trying not to cry.

  There was a noise at her door.

  Bea could hear it through the covers. It sounded like someone was trying to open the door without forcing it. Groggily she wondered why any burglar would be so considerate – a good kick would probably bring the whole door in, including the frame. And she then realised it was probably Joan – she’d said she’d go straight to Joan’s house once she’d got her Book back, hadn’t she?

  Bea emerged from her blanket, her eyes screwed shut against the glare of the sun through her window. It didn’t come. Bea let one eye cree
p open. Her room was bathed in the dirty orange of early evening. She must have fallen asleep.

  The noise at the door persisted.

  “Alright! Hang on!” She shouted.

  The noise stopped.

  Bea stumbled across the small space from her bed to her front door and pulled it open. “Oh Joan, I’m sorry. You won’t believe what happened when I went to get- What in the five hells are you doing here?”

  Mistasinon gaped at her from where he was kneeling in her hallway.

  To say each was surprised to see the other was to miss an opportunity to use the word ‘flabbergasted’. Mistasinon recovered first.

  “…Hi,” he said.

  Bea stared at him.

  “Right,” she said.

  “So, um...” she added.

  And then she slammed the door shut, leaning against it like it was the last line of defence between her and the hounds of hell.

  “Are you alright?” Mistasinon asked through the wood.

  “Yes, everything’s fine.”

  “Oh. Only you shut the door in my face.”

  “Yes. Sorry. I was, um…” She looked around for inspiration, but nothing presented itself. “…naked?”

  She heard Mistasinon laughing. She looked down at herself, still in her homemade dress.

  “Am I really so awful to open a door to?” he said through the wood.

  “I wasn’t expected anyone, that’s all. I’ve been working on my Plot.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Let me explain.”

  Bea swore, but pulled the door open and stood in the gap.

  “You’ve got a mouth like a sailor,” Mistasinon said, gifting her with his funny, sad little smile.