by Tay LaRoi
“Yes,” he said, nodding his head as though hearing her elevated heart rate and correctly guessing the reason behind it. He waved one long bony hand at Dancer. “Dancer cannot find you a way out. I can’t find you a way out. No one can. Except you. If you want to walk out of here, you have to learn how to crawl. Do you think you can do that?”
Chess became more panicked as he spoke.
The tall man didn’t look away from her but, after a few moments, he repeated, “Do you think you can do that?”
And deep inside her chest, Chess felt the budding core of strength starting at the base of her backbone. She’d been called obstinate from her youth but had somehow forgotten the strength she’d once gained from it. Looking into the tall man’s eyes, she could see him awaiting her answer, could feel that presence of steel strengthening within her, turning into something like calm pride
She looked to Dancer. Their hand was holding hers tighter now.
Chess didn’t want to be seen as weak. Certainly not when Dancer, by demonstration, had shown her repeatedly what it looked like to be strong. Dancer had been strong enough for both of them since Chess had arrived.
She didn’t know if everything the tall man said was true, but suddenly it didn’t matter.
He had helped her to remember and to locate the strength that used to run the whole length of her spine. He had returned clarity to her in a world that seemed to border the very limits of insanity. Ultimately what she did next wasn’t for him, but for herself.
Four
In the coming days, Chess learned how to crawl within the world of the Fae. She stopped trying to push back everything that was different and started appreciating the mind-made scapes that made the Below world beautiful. Ivy that ran through brick buildings. Rooftop gardens that never saw the dark side of the sky, the sun always shining down on them, no matter that there were stars and clouds above the surrounding buildings.
But none of it was home, and it couldn’t replace her home.
Dancer must have known, even though they never spoke of it. By nights—nights, or just days that looked like nights?—Chess rested her head on Dancer’s shoulder and wondered how long any of this could really last.
When the day came that the tall man returned, Chess wasn’t ready.
“You’ve done well,” he said in that deep resonating and sombre voice. “You think you’re not ready, but you are.”
Was this world always going to try to make her believe the opposite of what she thought was true? Was it always going to be able to succeed?
She went with him, the tall man, despite her misgivings. Dancer followed close behind, but Chess didn’t look over her shoulder at them until the tall man’s long strides started to slow down. They had reached their place.
“Here the veil between the worlds is thinnest. If it is truly your wish, you will go home,” he told her. Chess realised only belatedly that she had never even asked his name.
Then the thought of never seeing Dancer again struck her. The thought of being alone again in a world that didn’t have them in it gave her pause to blink away unexpected tears. She didn’t know if she’d ever been in love before now, and the circumstances that brought the two of them together had hardly been conducive to making her think about that. But they had been there for her. Every single minute Chess had allowed them to be there, there Dancer had been. It didn’t matter to Chess what gender Dancer was. She realised she’d automatically stopped trying to clump the feminine but androgynous faerie in as a female a while ago. Did that mean she was bisexual now? Pansexual? Or just…Dancer-sexual?
It didn’t matter. It couldn’t. Chess was leaving them. She had to. She’d been wrong to wish to leave her pain behind. The pain had been there in the land of Fae, waiting for her. And it would be there when she went back home. But Chess thought she could deal with that now. Or, at least, she could stop hiding from it.
All of these thoughts crashed through her, choking and closing her throat around the words she still sought to say. It wasn’t a panic attack this time, though. Chess had another word for the feelings that rose in her, looking up at Dancer in surprise. She knew now that she’d never been in love before this moment because she’d never felt like this before.
“I love you.”
Dancer shook their head. “Don’t look back at me,” they told her. But their face twisted in pain, and Chess realised that even though they didn’t say the words back to her, there was a sense of returned feeling for her in those iridescent eyes.
“Thank you,” Chess whispered, reaching up to touch the soft cheekbone of the faerie she’d grown to love, closing her eyes for a second to try to memorise the feeling of their skin to bring it back to mind later.
Then, taking a deep breath, Chess turned and muttered the words she knew she needed to focus her thoughts.
“I want to go home.
“I want to go home.
“I
want to
go…
home.”
The release she felt as her body no longer tethered itself to this place of unrealities and unrelenting twilight was slow, like an outward breath at the end of long, languid sex between lovers. She felt her head shifting from side to side through gentle and pulsing currents that might have been air or might have been more fluid. She couldn’t remember the journey that had got her here, but she knew this was different.
Coming home again.
Five
“Hey. You. Are you all right?”
The sounds around her when she next opened her eyes were more abrasive to her ears than the early morning sun. She had so quickly gotten unused to bright sunlight during her time away.
A bus shot past, honking at some vehicle in front of it, and Chess flinched before reminding herself that all of this was normal. This was home. Above. No. Earth. The smell of petrol fumes trailing in the bus’s wake made for an exceedingly unpleasant welcome home, causing her to cough into her sleeve.
She picked herself up off the side of the road, pressing palms against the brick of the building there. She looked at it, and her hand with the sunlight bouncing off it, making the skin look bright and yellow.
Finally, she came back to the man who had asked if she was okay. He didn’t look in much better condition than she felt, currently standing deferentially to the side and poised for flight, as though he expected her to pull a shiv out of her pocket at any moment.
He probably thought Chess was homeless or desperate or both.
The thought slowly deposited itself in amongst the others as she squinted up at him against the early morning sunlight. Sunlight. How long had it been since she last saw the sun?
“What day is it?” she asked, only just pitching her voice above the cars and trucks that trundled down a busy street. She probably wasn’t helping the opinion he’d made of her, passed out on the side of the street.
“Aww…” The man shook his head. “You’re even more fucked-up than I thought you were.”
“No…” Chess scavenged in her head for a reason for her to be found lying here. “I bumped my head. I just don’t want to lose time.”
The man shifted from foot to foot, ran his hand across his face and then finally uttered, “It’s Tuesday. And just before 9:00 a.m. from the traffic. There’s good busking if you go a little farther down Johnston Street…” He peered at her as though waiting for her to pull some joke at his expense.
She didn’t. Maybe that disappointed him, but she understood he wasn’t the kind of person she could ask the date of. Had she been gone a week? A month? Months?
Or was she back the morning she’d left? All the popular Irish folk tales said time travelled differently in the land of the Fae.
“Thank you,” she said, distracted as she pushed away from the brick building, the only comforting detail in the world she’d so struggled to get back to.
“You could drop a coin in my cup,” he called after her. Chess had no doubt that, had she looked back, he would have been
shaking a cup in his fist behind her. “You could drop a coin in my cup!”
Chess walked along the concrete street until she could no longer hear him behind her. Thankfully, he didn’t run after her with his demand.
Six
“You want to follow after her.”
It was the Tall Man’s voice coming out of the darkness, and Dancer felt themselves nodding before they spoke. “Yes.”
“You know there’ll be a price to pay. There’s always a price to pay when our kind walk in the Above.”
“I understand,” Dancer replied.
“Do you?” Dancer had a sense of the Tall Man raising an eyebrow in their direction before his voice came once more. “When you go to that world, you will be half of what you currently are.”
Dancer paused. They knew faerie bargains well. Even if they asked, they would get no more of an answer than had already been said. It didn’t matter. What they wanted was more important. “Very well.”
“Do you need a moment?”
The words were delivered with the perfect impartiality of the Tall Man who had no name other than that, and Dancer shook their head and indicated he should move on. Every minute they waited here kept them away from Chess.
“Then go.”
And so, over the hill, where the trees that didn’t sing grew, past buildings that seemed to suck in light, and amidst pedestrians who felt no connection with the ground they walked on, Dancer beheld the fact that they were in the human world.
They were still half a head taller than many of the people they walked past, but Dancer caught sight of their own reflection in the window as they passed one. Their lips parted at what they beheld.
Although they still looked ostensibly like themselves, there were subtle changes Dancer noticed after over a century of looking at themselves in reflected surfaces. Their lips were fuller, they noticed, as they pursed them together. Their jaw was pointed where it hadn’t been before, and the curve of their cheekbones was softer now. Dark eyelashes surrounded eyes that were no longer shimmering different colours, but just blue. Why blue?
It was a strange detail for them to fixate on, but the overall changes were so pronounced to Dancer they couldn’t help but fixate on something small. The Tall Man had said there would be a price to pay for walking into their world. Was this that price?
Dancer blinked and looked down at the rest of themselves. They were wearing an off-the-shoulder top and a long skirt that went to their ankles. Hardly anything that could be convenient to move in if they needed to run or hunt. Dancer forced themselves to relax. There was no need to think of hunting. They were in the human world now.
Still, standing by the window that reflected them, they almost wished they’d taken that moment by the trees to gather themselves before the Tall Man departed back into their world. They’d chosen this, they reminded themselves. Knowing full well what Chess had gone through, knowing their nearly immortal life would shrink down to that of mere mortal longevity.
Dancer’s focus shifted. On the other side of the window, they could see Chess standing behind a counter, handing food to someone in front of her. She was the reason. They had asked for her to enter their life. Now that the universe had brought them together after nearly a century of waiting, Dancer wasn’t willing to let her go unless Chess told them she didn’t want them.
Seven
When Chess first laid eyes on them again, she thought she’d actually gone insane, just like the tall man had threatened. Was that still possible, now that she’d returned home, no longer in the land of the Fae, or was her time there enough to taint her and cause her grip on sanity to completely let go?
Quickly, she lowered her gaze back down to the coffee counter in front of her. If it was just a stranger who sort of looked like Dancer, they certainly wouldn’t thank her for staring at them.
Chess busied herself with cleaning the coffee maker. It was just a casual position she’d picked up that paid her enough to pay her rent and make bills while she found her feet and figured out what she wanted to do with her life now that she’d gotten it back again. She’d talked to a couple of her friends about how she had been struggling and was pleasantly surprised with how much support she’d gotten from them. She’d considered seeing a psychologist too, but that was scarier than talking to people she already knew, and more expensive, so she’d been putting it off.
Glancing back at the person who had come into the café, Chess realised with a burst of disappointment that it couldn’t be Dancer. The person she’d mistaken for them was obviously female. Maybe it was just the strange height for a woman that had made Chess think…
But then the person looked back at Chess, and there was recognition in those eyes. Blue eyes, Chess told herself. They weren’t multicoloured; they certainly weren’t shimmering. It wasn’t Dancer.
“Can I help you?” Chess asked, determined to be polite, to not show her yearning for the faerie she’d lost in front of this customer she’d never met.
“Yes.” The voice was light, familiar, and Chess caught her breath just hearing it. “I was hoping you could.”
For a moment, Chess couldn’t say anything. The response had been far more intimate than expected. Despite them standing in a coffee shop with other customers around them, it seemed like it was just the two of them. Chess opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
Then, out of nowhere, a giggle made its way out of her mouth. Looking at Dancer again—for she knew it was them now, no matter the colour of their eyes or the new shape of their face—she burst into further peals of laughter. In response, the corner of Dancer’s mouth lifted with their own amusement, probably at Chess’s own expense.
Chess didn’t care! She couldn’t quite articulate what she was laughing at, but she must have looked a little bit mad, for one her co-workers came out from the back and offered to serve the person behind Dancer in her place.
Taking the unexpected moment given to them, Chess reached out to grab Dancer’s arm and tugged them away from the front of the counter.
“Is it really you?” she asked, before holding her breath. She didn’t know what would happen if this person didn’t know what she was talking about.
But Dancer, eyes still smiling with the mirth they had shared, inclined their head. “I came after you,” they said.
“You did.” Tears threatened at the edges of Chess’s vision.
Immediately, Dancer looked concerned. Chess was quick to shake her head, quick to wipe the wetness from her eyes.
“These are happy tears!” she promised.
“Ah. Well then,” Dancer replied, seeming nonplussed but accepting of them.
Her next words came from her unbidden, unable to keep looking at Dancer without acknowledging their altered appearance.
“I’ll still regard you as they.” Chess meant the words to come across as reassuring, but they sounded pushy even to her ears. “If that’s what you’d want?” she added, a question lifting up the word at the end.
Dancer nodded. “Yes,” they answered. “That is what I want.”
The next day, Chess wouldn’t come in to work, and that night, she’d shoot off a text to say why. But, right then, she soaked up the sight of her beloved, the surprising faerie creature who came for her.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she whispered, pressing close to them, unable to let them go, even though she wasn’t due for a break, and the time they had to be alone together had to be counting down.
She glanced at the clock on the wall.
“I’m only working a half day,” she said, speaking quickly, as if they were running out of time. “Would you…like to stay and wait for me?”
“Nothing would please me more.”
About Nicole Field
Nicole writes across the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity. She lives in Melbourne with one of her partners, two cats, a whole lot of books and a bottomless cup of tea.
Co-creator of Queer Writers Chat and reviewer for
Just Love: Queer Book Reviews. Also likes tea, crochet and Gilmore Girls.
Website: https://nicolefieldwrites.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/faerywhimsy
Tumblr: http://polynbooks.tumblr.com/
A Tended Garden
J.P. Jackson
Fall
Catastrophe at Mabon
“So mote it be.” Alyssa repeated the mantra with the other women as the chorus rang out, signaling the end of the ritual. A gentle breeze wove its way through the near-barren trees. A shower of ochre and rust reds cascaded down upon the coven, the desiccated leaves remnants of what had been an overly hot summer.
Alyssa sighed with relief. The Mabon ceremony was over, and it played out just as Rachel had choreographed. Rachel was their High Priestess and could be a raging harpy if things didn’t go as she’d planned.
It was sad, actually, because the holiday should have been a time to relax. In the old days, the festival was a celebration marking the midway point of the harvest. The majority of the fields would have been cleared off, as the hard days of working in the scorching summer sun came to an end. Autumnal temperatures settled in, and nights had a crisp bite as the trees slowly morphed into their magnificent glory of reds and yellows—a final show before the long rest of winter. For Alyssa—this being her favorite time of the year—it was the season for big fluffy sweaters and light drizzly rain. Weekends were spent on long walks through deer paths in the forest or curling up at night by the fire with a blanket, a good book, and a hot cup of cocoa. Preferably an oversized mug with extra chocolate swirled on the inside rim and little marshmallows floating on the top of the rich steaming liquid. But it was also the time of year when Alyssa spent hours writing new spells in her Shadow Book. And that had to be done the old way, with parchment and ink, otherwise the spells never seemed to work right.
