Courts of the Fey

by Martin H. Greenberg

  But she comes with bags—and bags—and when he takes two of them from her fingers, she allows it—her fingers are white from their weight.

  “Hey! You two, get your feet off the counter!” This starts the chatter again, the excitement. It spreads from them to her; her smile is open, infectious; she laughs—and he finds himself smiling, as if he were as insignificant as they.

  He thought carefully about altering the kitchen before she arrived, but in the end, chose to leave it as she first found it. She enters it with less hesitation than she did the first time, as if the act of baking in it—of being the first to bake in it—has somehow made it hers.

  He knows that the only space that is ever a safe space is the space one personally owns; so does she. But she is willing to own this small space—and they know it; it is around her they congregate. He thinks of what she says of her youth, and silently agrees; it would be almost impossible to take a step without tripping on something.

  There is, of course, some struggle for dominance and position among the small ones; honestly, with such a large crowd, how could there not be? But she breaks it as calmly—and sharply—as she did the first time; she even sends two of the largest to the corners of the kitchen. What is shocking is that they obey.

  And he watches, as he did the first time. There is so much he wants to ask, to know, but he is not certain what price he will be asked to pay, and he knows that nothing is given for free. Nothing.

  This time, she doesn’t just bake; she cooks. She makes a meal. It is long, and it is late by the time she is finished, but she does finish, her face red and slightly glistening with sweat. When she joins him at the table, he offers her wine. She flinches, and then shakes her head.

  “No, thank you—I find my tolerance is much, much lower than it was. I can’t—” Her lips thin a moment, as if she feels pain, although her eyes are clear. “It made me remember too much.”

  “We do not forget,” he tells her, in the tone of voice reserved for wayward students.

  “No, we don’t—but sometimes the memories are memories, and I can pick and choose among them; sometimes they’re a little too much like life.”

  “But your life is now given to joy, is it not?” There is an edge to the words.

  “Do you think joy is easy? It’s simple, but it’s not easy. It’s partly a dance, partly a story we tell ourselves ; it’s partly a place we can reach—but only with effort, and we can never stay there. We visit; we’re grateful that the door is open.” The corners of her lips and eyes crease as she smiles. “But thank you.”

  He is silent. “For what?” He finally asks. He is surprised that he’s asked.

  “For them. I miss them sometimes, even if I spend half the time wanting to strangle them all. They remind me of—” she stops. “Is the food to your liking?”

  He does smile then. He lifts fork and he eats, because he knows that’s the price of her visit. If she has enchanted or ensorcelled the food, so be it. But as he chews, as the texture and the salt and the sweetness mix on his tongue, he wonders. Such a risk to take. Such a risk and for so little.

  While he thinks this, she speaks about work, about her regular customers, about the bus driver who stopped to wait for her while she struggled with her bags. She does not speak of his mother, and he finds that acceptable. This is not a meal he could have had in his mother′s court; it is, all of it, mortal.

  After he has finished, she rises and returns to the kitchen to supervise, and after, she returns to him. There is a marked change in her, now, but he cannot quite place what it is.

  “I was sent to your mother′s court as a hostage,” she says. “I was called an ambassador, but that has a different meaning now than it once did.”

  “You did not want to go.”

  “No. I knew of your mother and her kin, and I knew of the damage they could do when roused; many of mine were lost. I hated her,” she adds, in her soft, clear voice, hatred absent from every syllable. She walks away from the dining table and toward the living room. “There really is a TV here. Do you watch it?”

  “Yes.” His tone must alert her, for she glances at it more sharply. But she sits on the couch, and after a moment, she slides her feet beneath her and leans into the corner cushions. He joins her, taking the chair, putting a physical distance between them greater than the table provides.

  “Do not make me get up and come in there!” she shouts, when the small ones begin to shriek. They are laughing, and their laughter, like the laughter of all of their kind, is sharp and pointed. Or it can be; it sounds . . . odd, tonight.

  He waits, now.

  “I hated her,” she repeats. “I had seen her three times in my childhood, in her armor, at the head of her host; I had never seen her in her own domain, and I fervently wished never to do so. But I was chosen. For years, I was taught the arts of her court. I was taught how to play and sing in a manner that might—might—please her. I was taught the art of language and words. I—” she shook her head.

  “I was taught the same,” he replied.

  “Yes, you were. But you lived in that court; it was your home. It was not mine.”

  “It was—”

  “It was not mine. Nothing in the domains she rules can belong to anyone else. Nothing,” she added, her voice dropping, “can even belong to itself.” She lifts her hands and examines them. “I didn’t understand why I was chosen until I was brought to the foot of her throne. Then I saw her, and I saw—” She lowers her hands. “She was beautiful.”

  “You expected otherwise?”

  “We have different standards of beauty, you and I. I wasn’t raised in your court, remember. Beauty just is. The small ones can be beautiful. Oh, don’t give me that look. The pixies in the flowerbeds can be as beautiful as the flowers they tease; the small, warty gnomes that live in branches, and resemble their trees, as if they’ve grown together over time, are astonishing in their season.

  “Yes, they’re small, and often very single-minded—but theirs is a malice of minutes and hours, not of centuries, and they exist to make homes for themselves.”

  “So, too, did my mother.”

  “It’s not the same, and you know it.” She closes her eyes and sinks backward. “She was beautiful to me. Not because I must fear her—fear was a given, and not because of her power, also a given—she was just . . . what she was. Night and Winter and endless fury. But winter is beautiful in its time. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected that anyone could grow to love the cold.”

  “You speak of love?”

  “It’s a turn of phrase,” is her quick reply. She stops, shakes her head, eyes still shuttered. “. . . Yes. I speak of love.”

  “You—you loved my mother?”

  “Is it so hard to understand? She was loved—”

  “She was feared.”

  “Not by everyone.”

  “By everyone.”

  “You didn’t fear her.”

  “I? I feared her most of all.”

  She says, “Your fear and their fear were not the same.” Her eyes are open, and they are emerald, they are almost incandescent. He realizes that she is crying, and he turns his face away, aware of the cost of witnessing something so profound.

  “I stayed by your mother′s side.”

  “I remember you now.”

  She nods. “But when she waged her bitter wars against the mortals, when she raided my mother’s kin, I was left alone. I could not return to my own home, of course. I could not walk our roads, for she would know. I walked, instead, on mortal roads, and it amused me to do so. I granted small wishes, placed small curses, watched births and deaths and war and famine. You understand these things?”

  He nodded.

  “Have you only watched people?”

  “Pardon?” He doesn’t understand the question. She has seen him leave the bar with women of various ages and descriptions innumerable times.

  She repeats the question, waiting, her eyes now dry. “It’s what I di
d for centuries. I watched. I only watched. I watched the changes. I watched their gods rise and fall. I listened to their stories, and sometimes when their stories bored me, I made certain they would tell different tales. I grew, I thought, to understand them. Like you, like your mother, I understood their follies and their weaknesses well. But not all actions can be explained as folly or weakness, although perhaps in the end that’s what they amount to.”

  “There is very little that mortals attempt that cannot be ascribed to folly. Look at how their choices oft end: in humiliation and despair.”

  “If they ended in joy and wonder,” she replies, “would it signify anything, to you? They’re all dust in the end. Not a single thing they make or do will outlast them.”

  “Exactly.”

  She shifts in place, rises, and retrieves a blanket—from where, he is not certain. It is not particularly fine; it is a common quilt, and by the looks of it, made in a period in which quilts were a necessity of mortal economy and not an artistic cloth tapestry. “By that measure, we’re all creatures of folly.”

  She wraps the blanket around herself, on his couch; he almost objects, it is so dingy. But he has survived these long years by being sensitive—or powerful enough that sensitivity is not required; he is not certain that the latter applies here. Her words also rob him of outrage at something so minor.

  “What did we seek, in the long, long centuries of our lives? What, that they do not, in their scant years, also seek? You’ve studied them; you consider yourself a scholar of humanity. For what did you study? To manipulate them? To find better ways to amuse yourself?” She watches him steadily, like a cat might.

  “Tell me you have done otherwise.”

  “It is not an accusation; it’s a statement. We’re not mortal. Their folly and our folly are different. We have the luxury of time. We don’t face age and growing fragility; our bodies do not fail us except by design or the curses of the more powerful.”

  “And you were so cursed?”

  She blinks. Looks at her blocky, callused hands, and surprises him: she laughs. It is rueful, this laughter, but without edge. She does not answer the question ; instead she says, “Ah yes; even mortals have their fixed notion of beauty, and they cling. Have you adopted only hers?”

  “Hers?”

  “Your mother′s.”

  Has he? Beauty is not subjective; it is a fact, a force, like his mother.

  “Did you not watch the mortals age? Did you not find it fascinating?”

  “No. Not when I realized that age is their weakness.”

  She shook her head. “Weakness is our entrance. If they had no weaknesses, they would just be . . . us. I walked mortal roads,” she added, and this time she lifts the patchwork blanket. “And I came to understand one truth of mortality well.”

  “And that?”

  “They are changed by ownership.”

  His lift of brow is derisive. “Did you not visit the mortals in my mother′s court?”

  “In her lovely, lovely cages? Ah, yes. You mistake me, or rather, I haven’t been clear. They are changed in either direction. What they are owned by changes them, yes; how could it do otherwise. But what they own also changes them.

  “And for a time, toward the end of my tenure at your mother′s court, I had grown less cautious. I did not live as you live now, because I had other options, other choices—but I held the mortals in no great respect, and I did not value their base cunning; I thought I understood the whole of what might motivate them. I made, in short, a mistake.”

  The import of her words sink slow roots; they flower in epiphany. “You were trapped.”

  She nods. “Indeed, I was trapped.”

  After a long, long pause, he says, “Did you tell my mother?”

  “I could not, in my captivity.”

  “And after?”

  Her gaze falters for the first time. She smiles, yes, but it is bitter, devoid of the warmth that characterizes so many of her easy, impulsive smiles. “What do you think? What do you honestly think?”

  He nods; in a similar situation, he would have said nothing; not to his mother, nor to the rest of her court. But he would not say anything now, either, in the heart of another′s domain—not unless compelled by a power far greater than his own. He wants to ask her how, or by what, but senses that it is superfluous. The fact she has shared, and she is not the only one of her kind to be trapped by the merely mortal.

  “You must want something from me,” she says, as if she can hear the whole of his thought, “and at that, very badly; you ask me no questions.”

  He nods; both statements are true.

  “My captor was not an old woman, not wise in lore; she was a slight, pretty girl, too pretty for her village. She had only a brother, for kin, and he was a bull of man, unkind and very much enamored of his drinking and his standing in the town. I did not think she would survive for long; she was the type of young woman that men covet, often openly, and she had no wealth with which to buy her own safety.

  “Your mother was, at that time, in the north, near the Isles,” she added.

  “Where your own people dwell.”

  She nods. “I understood the necessity of her wars, but I could not easily stand by and watch and wait, so I was reluctant to return to her court. I could not raise hand against her,” she added. “I had tried, once, and I had failed.” She speaks calmly. “And so I felt some kinship with this girl, and I watched her from afar, and one day, when she was washing clothing by the brook side, a man came from the village to catch her unaware.

  “She was not strong, and he was not kind. She wept in silence after his departure, and I chose that moment to appear before her. I could see the whole of that man’s fate and hers. It is an old story,” she added quietly. “The man went directly to the young woman’s brother. Her name,” she added, “was Anne. He told the brother what he had done, and made an offer for her hand in marriage; her brother accepted on her behalf, for he felt he had no other choice; what other man would have her?

  “But Anne? She came to me. She did not ask anything of me then; she wept and she raged, but as the days passed, she quieted. She made this quilt, but not then; she made it years later, and she made it for another, not me.”

  “It is yours now.”

  “Yes. The one she made it for is long dust; I could preserve the quilt, but not the mortal. Anne quieted, and when she was quiet, she sang. She spoke of her mother—long dead—and her father; she spoke seldom of the brother she feared. And she grew round with child, the unfortunate girl, for she very much wished to reject her suitor and remain unmarried; with a child, she could not do that; her brother would not have her in his house for fear of what others would say of him.

  “I pitied her. Perhaps that was the start of it. But how could I not? I was a cage bird as well.”

  “She married the man?”

  “She did. You wonder, now, why this is relevant, but be patient, and you will understand the answer to your many questions. She married him, she bore a child; she did not die of it, although it was close. The child was not a son, but a daughter, a girl very much like the child I imagine Anne herself might have been. Mortal children are wrinkled and ugly at birth,” she added, “but also strangely beautiful in their utter helplessness, their complete fragility; she thought to hate the child, but she could not.

  “I neither hated nor loved her then; she was merely a mortal child, and I had no need of one at that point. I was content to leave the babe where she was, with her mother. But her father was difficult. He had all the foibles and follies of mortality, but none of the unexpected grace; he was proud in the way of the fearful, very like the brother. He was not good with words; his persuasion took the form of fists, and he was not always careful to make certain his bruises would pass undetected.

  “So Anne was pitied, and she was shunned. She had her home to keep, and the child; she had a husband who she feared and hated as humans fear and hate. It was a life like any other mortal�
��s life. But I watched it blossom. I watched it grow both thorns and flowers. In my fashion, I gardened there, although I did not know it at the time.

  “The child grew,” she added, after a long pause. “I found her difficult; she was very like the small ones who’ve taken over your kitchen, but far, far more fragile; no punishments suitable for the small ones could be visited on her; she would not survive them. Her mother found her frustrating, but—joyful. It was to be my first experience of that strange state of joy, for much of Anne’s misery was also directly due to the child.

  “When the child was five, her father nearly beat her to death. It was then that I intervened; I lead him away in the dead of the night, enticing him onto the wild, old roads. The moon was at its height then.”

  “She asked this?”

  “Of me? No, never. I do not know if she understood who or what I was; she did not ask, and I did not offer.”

  “You chose this?”

  “Yes.”

  “To save the child.”

  “And to save Anne.”

  “But—”

  “Yes. It was an act of folly and anger. But I could no longer stand by and bear witness; I could curse him, and had, but the effects made Anne’s life more difficult, not less. I did not tell her what I would do; I merely acted, and left him wandering in the wild, where any stray creature might come upon him. But then, they were alone. They were grateful to be alone, for a while, but it was not an easy life. It was then that I began to teach Anne some of the ways of plants; how to bespeak them, how to cajole them. She needed food, and while I was not above the theft of food for her sake, I was by then aware that the cost was high.”

  “You taught her.”

  “I did.”

  “And she repaid you by trapping you in her world.”

  “She did.”

  “Were you not angry? Were you not enraged?”

  “I was. But I also knew your mother′s campaign would be long, and I would be free ere her return; Anne was mortal, and the mortals of that time lived a scant few decades. She did not think she could live without me. I concurred. But her death, when it came, a scant handful of mortal years later, her daughter but ten years of age. Anne knew she was dying; I did not deny it. But she called her daughter into her room, and while her daughter wept openly, she told her—”