The girl stood in place, legs locked and rigid, not knowing what to do. If she tried to flee, the rage she might induce would be terrible; if she stayed, well, somehow that was even worse.
“No,” the girl hissed, finding her voice again. “Leave me alone!”
But as she tried to push her stepmother away, the older woman grabbed the girl’s hair and yanked it hard, tearing at her scalp.
“Shut your mouth,” her stepmother said, dragging the girl back to the bed by her hair and shoving her onto the mattress so hard the girl cried out. With rigid fingers, her stepmother tore at the thin material of the girl’s nightdress so it ripped apart, revealing the girl’s naked torso.
The girl sobbed as she was forced back into her bloody bed and held there against her will. She squeezed her eyes shut as if that would stop the quick, searching fingers from driving themselves into the smooth softness of her flesh until she cried out in agony and guilt––and then she was alone again, tossed aside like a used rag, as salty tears of fear obscured her vision and she fell into a chasm so dark and deep it seemed endless.
The girl shivered, remembering the many times her stepmother had touched her during the intervening months––until her father had suddenly reclaimed his second wife, making her so heavy with child that she no longer possessed the strength to overpower the girl.
The pregnancy had been the girl’s saving grace and she’d rejoiced at the benevolence of fate––but then, without warning, a terrible thought had entered unbidden into her mind and she’d been unable to shut it out, no matter how hard she tried. It was the knowledge that when she left the household, there would be no one to protect her baby sister from the cruel whim of the mother they both shared––one by marriage and the other by birth. This eventuality was what had driven the girl to such a state of frenzied fear that she’d stolen the infant from its crib and made the journey to the fairies’ lair in the dark of night with only a thin summer cloak to keep her bones warm.
It was why she now stood among the roots of a monstrous oak tree, a tiny acorn charm numbing a hole inside the padded palm of her hand.
Her blood thrumming like a melody inside her skin, the girl let loose a scream, the sound echoing through the darkness like wildfire. Compelled to let the charm loose, she grasped the baby tightly under her arm and raised her free hand over her shoulder, letting the charm sail into the plumage of leaves above her head in a graceful, sweeping arc.
Immediately there was a fierce rumbling beneath her feet and the girl stepped away from the network of tree roots, working hard to keep her balance. Above her the oaken overhang of branch and leaf burst into crystalline blue flames and the rain, which had deluged the girl during her journey, suddenly ceased.
“Ah, a wanderer from the human world,” a disembodied voice hummed behind her, precise and masculine.
The girl looked around uncertainly until she spotted its owner––a tall, reedy man in a green suit and matching neckerchief––leaning against the trunk of a nearby tree. The blue flames that had lit the sky only moments before began to dissipate and the girl used this last bit of illumination to commit the man’s features to memory: pale blond hair, a straight nose, and two of the greenest eyes she’d ever encountered. As she squinted against the dying light, she thought she glimpsed a shock of wavy green hair as coarse as strands of trailing vine atop his head, but as the darkness grew and blotted out the light, everything took on a muted, gray tinge and the girl could not be sure.
“Who are you?” the girl asked, wary of the man.
The man grinned at her and bowed his head.
“I’m a distant relation––on your mother’s side,” he added. “But you may call me the Green Man.”
To her amazement, she saw that he was holding her acorn charm, casually throwing it up in the air and catching it again with a fluid ease that impressed her.
“My mother said were I ever to have need of your help––”
“Not necessary,” the Green Man interrupted. “I know what you seek.”
This gave the girl pause. Whether or not the Green Man knew what she wanted, she had come this far and she was going to ask for what she needed with her own tongue. She deserved that––if only that.
“Then you know I want you to take the baby and give me a changeling child in its place,” the girl replied. “One that will suck the very life from the human babe’s mother until she withers away to dust.”
The Green Man raised an eyebrow, but nodded.
“It can be done . . . for a price.”
The girl’s smile faltered then fell away entirely.
“You become my bride,” the Green Man said lightly, knowing this bargain would please the queen of the Seelie Court to no end.
He waited patiently as the girl thought over his offer. He watched her as she considered the bargain, wondering if her stepmother′s death was worth this sacrifice, but, in truth, what the girl did not know was that the decision had been made long before she’d grabbed the baby from its woven birch crib and set out into the darkness.
It had been made the moment the girl’s mother had left the Sídhe to follow her human lover into the human world––six long years without a queen, the Green Man mused. Now it seemed only right that the half-human child would return to the land from which its mother had come; like returning a missing piece back to its lawful owner.
“If I say yes then the babe will remain with me, unharmed?”
The Green Man nodded, willing to sweeten the bargain.
“As you wish.”
The girl cradled the baby in her arms, love for the tiny thing blooming inside of her like a rose. She didn’t need to think any more.
“Then I accept.”
The Green Man extended his hand and they shook upon the deal.
He would send one of his hobgoblins over to her father′s mansion house that very hour, where it would place a vengeful changeling child into the white birch crib and then quietly slip away into the night, with no one in the house ever the wiser.
As for the girl, well, the Green Man had been ded-icatedly listening to her prayers for many, many years and as he stared at her gloriously beatific face, he believed it would be very easy to give her exactly what she had always prayed for.
True kindness.
ANNE
Michelle Sagara
He has come, as he often comes these days, to one of four bars around the corner from the large educational institution in which he spends most of his waking time. He comes not to drink—although for the sake of his table and the attitude of the various bartenders and barmaids, he does; alcohol has never held much sway over him, one way or the other. He’s aware, because he drinks so conservatively, that the same can’t be said for most of the bars’ many patrons, but given his early childhood, he’s always known this. It’s not to socialize that he visits; he comes to watch her.
She has never been a beautiful girl. She is too round, too short, too uncontrolled; her voice, when she speaks, is rougher, lower. She’s also a little on the old side, and the lines around the corners of her eyes and lips—lips the color of her skin—are etched there, now. But he watches nonetheless, fascinated, and willing to be so.
She is nothing like his mother. His mother was slender, tall, her hair long and utterly straight in its fall, no single strand out of place, a curtain of perfect night. Her cheekbones were high, pronounced, her skin the pale of porcelain, and unblemished. No wrinkle graced her eyes, her lips, her brow; even in her rage, she was flawless. Not for his mother something as simple as sweat; not for his mother this noise, this convivial chaos—although even in the chaos, she had an eye for pain and the ugly secrets that sometimes spill out alongside the alcohol.
Surrounded by the pale lights of a bar, the scent of sweat mingling with perfume, aftershave, and alcohol, he remembers his mother; the memories are fragmented, the way the memories of the young often are; they afford him no joy. He lifts his glass—wine, red. Behind the bar, a sweatb
and across her forehead—and necessary—she is working. She will work for three hours, maybe four, serving drinks, her smile tired and worn around the edges, her hands blocky and strong. Tonight, he thinks. Tonight she will join him. He wants that. He knows how to dial up charm; he knows how to push buttons, invoke responses: he spent years in his mother′s shadow—how could he do otherwise?
But he has done none of that here, as if the process is at least as important as the result. He drinks, he watches—carefully—and he waits. It’s mildly surprising, how hard it is to wait. He was never patient in his youth, but had thought, until now, that patience had developed, slowly and inevitably, with the passage of time and the accretion of bitter experience.
Tonight, she works the early shift. It is a definition of early that he feels does injustice to the word, but injustice is a fact of life, large and small. She disappears, relieved of her station behind the bar, and reappears without headband or wristbands. But she’s clearly been sweating; fine strands of her hair are plastered to her forehead.
She is carrying a large plastic bag, which she almost trips over as she winds her way through the crowd. He rises to offer her help; she waves him away with a tired smile, as if his help in her place of employ is unnecessary. Or unwanted. She is so unusual in that way, in this day: she wants very little and feels entitled to less.
When she gestures—with her head—toward the door, he pays his bill and follows her; she’s waiting in the cold night air, her breath suspended in clouds between them. She is also cursing the cold. The cold has never bothered him, although he does find it expedient to wear a coat and gloves. It’s a dress coat; hers is puffy down, in a size too large, the edge of her sleeves beginning to fray, the detachable hood long since misplaced.
“Do you need to stop off at your place?” he asks, eyeing the plastic bag.
“No, I’m taking this with me. I’m baking, remember?”
He does. Or rather, he remembers that she declared her intent; he is only slightly surprised that she meant it.
“Why are you smiling?”
“My mother seldom cooked; she disliked the mess.”
She raises a dark, thick brow. “So you ate out a lot?”
“No. We had cooks, some of them very fine indeed.”
“It’s not the same,” is her resolute declaration.
“No, indeed.” What he doesn’t tell her is that it could never be the same: cooking was for servants, for menials, for those whose choices in life had left them little option.
He doesn’t offer to carry her bags; he’s made that mistake once before, and besides, the way she holds them implies their contents are precious. Of the many things he learned in his youth, the cost of touching something precious to someone else was perhaps the most severe.
His home is perfect. In this city, with its brownstone and townhouses and harbor, he has chosen to live in the sky—and his condo is as close to sky as it is possible to be. Even in his youth, no buildings reached heights this impressive, and the buildings that came close did so by the dint of architecture, engineering, and centuries of labor.
Or by artifice, but artifice creates places of cunning and guile, not homes.
This, then, is not an act of artifice—but when he opens the door and stares into the perfectly designed and sparsely decorated interior, he feels that he has not been entirely honest. Nothing is ever out of place here. No doubt his mother would find fault with it, if she knew where he lived and chose to visit, but he cannot think what that fault would be.
Her bags, wrinkled and stretched, don’t belong in his apartment, but they come attached to her, and he lets them in. She looks smaller and more tired as she enters the hall, and she hesitates, seeing where he lives, but seeing it in her own peculiar way. “Do you ever come home?” she finally asks, and walks into the kitchen, where she places her bags on the counter, beneath the slate cupboards. She doesn’t wait for an answer, or rather, she works while she waits, removing things from the bags and setting them aside in no particular order: flour, sugar, a small carton of eggs, apples, butter. Even milk.
“I come home,” he replies, “at the end of every day.”
She looks up, and then glances beyond him. “What do you do? Just sit in a chair? Or do you go straight to bed?”
“Pardon?”
“You have no books here.”
“Ah. I have some; they are not in the exterior rooms. I have a television. It’s on the wall; you can’t see it from where you’re standing.”
“Do you have a housekeeper?”
“I have.”
“But not a cook.”
He smiles. “No. I seldom use the kitchen.”
She snorts. “All this money on appliances—that Bosch costs the earth—to not cook. It’s a waste.”
“Ah. You are cooking.”
“Yes. You’re not helping,” she adds, but this time she smiles. “Go—loiter in the living room. I’d tell you to put your feet up, but—”
“I understand the colloquialism. I shall endeavor to relax while you work.”
He lies, of course; he watches her. In as much as watching anything is relaxing, she is: she sinks into the center of her activity, and she reaches a place that his entire home can’t touch, although she’s standing in it. She spills flour; she leaves small, red flecks of apple peel and its sticky juice; she curses as she breaks an egg with a little too much enthusiasm. But she works and as she does, she relaxes.
She has a moment of concern when she realizes how little he uses his kitchen, but she manages to find what he himself can’t remember: measuring spoons, cups, baking pans. She mutters about the waste again, asks him if someone else used to live here with him.
“No. I have always lived alone.”
This catches whatever part of her attention she’s willing to spare. “Always?”
He nods.
“What about when you were a child?”
It’s a question he’s been asked many times and he has many different answers to give; the same answer, over and over, bores him. Some women want an easy avenue to pity and sympathy, and to these, he speaks of a cold and isolated childhood; some women want to admire his wit and his ambition, and to these, he speaks of the drive for control of his own life, his rise to power, his frequent clashes with the domineering household into which he was born. Some women want to hear stories of wealth and power, and these, too, he supplies; there is no woman—and no man, if it comes to that—who could hold a candle to his mother′s power, not even at her nadir.
But she asks the question so casually, he has no avenue of approach; there is just his childhood and the facts of it, multiple and distant.
“I lived in a large household,” he finally replies. “In a much larger space than this. You?”
“I lived in a space about this size with a lot of people. We were always getting in each other’s way—you couldn’t take a step without almost tripping over someone.” She laughs. “Someone crawling on the floor, or chewing the table legs; there was a lot of swearing, but not too much cursing.”
“Did the table legs ever bite back?”
She laughs. It’s the sound of her laughter he wants, and this laugh is laced with genuine surprise. “To listen to the kids, yes—but you know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say something deliberately humorous.”
It isn’t. He could tell her—with complete accuracy—every other time he’s made the attempt; he doesn’t. She has never appreciated what passes for a sense of humor among his kin. Whereas he? He finds her laughter inexplicable, unpredictable; the oddest things make her almost squeal in delight. They are mostly common things, unremarkable things; even having observed her for so long, he cannot predict with any accuracy what might delight her.
He knows that gifts, on the other hand, cause her to fall silent and withdraw. At best, she is flattered, but flattery pales quickly under the pressure of refusal.
No man would have dared to refuse his mother′s gifts
, infrequently offered as they were; no man and only one woman in history. Some men were unwise, and accepted her gifts as their due; he was not one of those. When she came with a gift, he looked for barbs; her gifts were often more painful than her punishments, differing only in their subtlety.
Why does this woman make him think so much of his mother?
She is washing her hands in the sink; the soap is one of the few things she doesn’t comment on. He knows she is nervous here, and wonders what her own home must be like; she has never invited him in, although he knows where she lives. He’s seen her, shadowed by the lights in the second floor room above the street; she doesn’t like any height she can’t reach by stairs—and any height that might kill her if she’s forced to jump is also not acceptable. She told him this the second time they spoke.
He looked at her blankly, wondering if perhaps she, too, was a refugee from distant, very different lands, but she said, quickly, “Fire. If there’s a fire. I’m pretty careful, so I won’t set it—but when you live in a building like this, your life is partly dependent on the habits of strangers.”
“No part of my life is dependent on the habits of strangers,” he told her.
She snorted; it is one of her most common—and least attractive—habits. “Everyone’s life is dependent on the habits of strangers; some people just don’t accept it, that’s all. You get in a car, and you’re dependent on other drivers obeying the laws of the road. You’re dependent on people you’ve never seen for your food—unless you happen to grow and hunt all your own?”
He has done both, but does not feel the need to share.
Yet after she’d closed the bar down, her words had clung to him, like cobwebs, fine yet persistent. Where there were webs, there were often spiders, and harmless spiders were a modern invention, or an invention of cars, cities, and cold, cold winters. Yet there seemed no venom in her words, no intent to harm or weaken him; she was frustrated, yes, but she was often frustrated.
Courts of the Fey Page 19
