by Dahlia Adler
So I did.
The Raven (Remix)
amanda lovelace
Changeling
Marieke Nijkamp
inspired by “Hop-Frog”
1.
1832
“Girl, stop dawdling. Lend us a hand.” A large, leathery fist pushed me off the high cart, flat onto the cobbled road. The stones dug into my face, my hands, my shoulders. I barely managed to roll out of the way of the tall wheels before they crushed my legs.
And I went to work.
In those days, we were left for the fae and the fair folk, we misformed and broken children. After all, our families decided, we were cursed. We were bad luck. So we were left, small and defenseless against the cold and the elements.
Except, when you leave a child for the fae, the fae don’t always know to come. They are magic, yes, but not omniscient. Some of us waited to no avail. Some of us were taken by strangers first, strangers both kind and not so kind.
I was one of those taken. But I was never wanted.
They called me girl, or changeling, the merchants who found me. A crooked child whose back was bent, whose hands were clawed, whose tread was always too slow, too stumbling, too insecure.
They laughed at me. At my wobbling, my hesitation, my fear.
They used me. They found themselves a servant for free on the road between Lyon and Tarare and they took full advantage of it. I was small enough to hide when needed. Agile enough to climb between carts and horses. And because it was the life I grew up in, I did not know better. I did not think it abnormal to be beaten or starved, and the traders who crossed paths with us, well, who ever takes notice of a crippled child? They considered it a mercy, an act of charity that my merchants even fed me at all.
Still, I was all too aware that I did not belong there and I wished for a place where I did. Every night I dreamed of being taken by the fae. Every morning I woke up disappointed.
We traveled all across the continent. From the gray masses of industrial cities breathing out endless smog to farmlands still scarred and exhausted from the wars and revolutions that swept across Europe before I was born. From Piedmont through Tuscany to the Papal States. From Bavaria to Saxony and Prussia. We traveled by cart, mostly, but occasionally by ship or the steam-powered trains that tore through the landscape.
My masters traded in fine textiles, contraband, and cruelty, all of which were languages spoken universally. I only spoke when I was spoken to, and even then I tried to avoid it. At best, I practiced words in the privacy of night.
I learned to mask my differences as much as possible when we got to new towns. When I didn’t or didn’t succeed, I’d be yelled at. Boys would laugh and jeer at me, throw sticks and stones. Drunk men would spit at me.
I wondered often what they saw when they looked at me, back then. A demon? A danger? As I grew into my teens, my body became even more angled. It became harder to walk the way people expected. I couldn’t mask the hunch of my back or the way my fingers curled around thin air.
“That wretched girl is better off in an institution,” one contact told my master, late one night, not bothering to lower his voice. “Bad luck they are, the defective ones. Criminals and thieves too.”
“Work ’em until they bleed, is what I always say,” my master said.
I looked at the welts on my legs. I wondered sometimes if my skin would become so scarred it wouldn’t bleed anymore. It hadn’t yet. Nor had it stopped scarring. I wore an atlas of cruelty upon my skin.
“Leave your changeling to a workhouse,” another said, when I could barely hold the spirits that the merchants wanted to show off. “They’ll put the fear of God into her.”
“So will I,” the merchant said.
I couldn’t imagine being more afraid than I already was. My fear was always there, like a second shadow, darkening my steps.
“Chain her to a wall just like they do in those asylums,” a third suggested, when I lost my grip on a box of coin and banknotes and spread the contents all over the dirty floor of an abandoned den in the hills between Basel and Zurich. Hunger gnawed at me, causing my hands to tremble, my stomach to cramp. I was too weak. I was too wretched. I was too worn away.
Without pause, my master dragged me close to him and slapped me with the back of his hand. The stones of his rings tore into my cheek like broken glass, flaying me open.
“Leave her. You’ve done your charitable duty.”
He smiled. “She’s grown useless, yes.”
“You’ll find another one.”
With his thumb, he smudged the blood on my cheek to make it into a mocking rouge.
I would’ve run if I could have. I couldn’t. I tried to struggle. They didn’t stop laughing. All those years of free service had not rendered me valuable, they’d rendered me worthless. I was nothing more than entertainment.
He decided it was a waste to use chains, so they used rope instead. Along my feet and arms. Around my throat. The rope cut and burned. It choked me. I would grab at it, tear at it, but my fear had gripped me too.
One of the contacts took his cup of contraband bourbon and emptied it over my head, before they left me to the wintry night, bound to the outside wall of a barn, while they slept in the warm interior. “She’ll sing for us before the night’s end,” they said, as they closed the door and left me to freeze.
I listened to their drunk voices inside, the bawdy songs, the laughter, while I slowly turned to ice.
That was when the fae finally came for me.
2.
1896
We observe, from a distance. We’ve fallen into a routine, the two of us. We are together, for convenience or comfort or complicity. Because vengeance is addictive, and because, no matter how time passes, the world is a too cruel place to leave it be. We do not need to be everywhere, but we need to be in too many places. We are barely magic and still not omniscient, but we try to be both.
There is a girl on a grassland between villages. Somewhere between Ely and Lynn. She reminds me of Jester when we first met. She reminds me of me. She’s as crooked and small as I am, and as fierce as Jester. She has a birthmark that spreads across the side of her face. She wears rags and contempt. She’s surrounded by a group of boys. All look pretty much the same to me—blond hair, pale skin, harsh eyes. They all wear similar clothes, in whites and dark browns. They are farm boys, perhaps. Or scholars. I cannot tell the difference, and I’ve found cruelty knows no class.
“If it isn’t the miller’s crippled daughter. Have we not made it clear? You don’t belong here.” One of the boys grabs the crutch she leans on and flings it off into the distance.
The girl wavers but places her fists on her hips. “Lay off, Francis. It is not for you to say where I do and don’t belong.”
Another boy leans against a strange contraption with two wheels and a handle bar across the front. Another one of those contraptions leans against a raggedy shed. He lets it go and it clatters to the dirt road. He grimaces. “We tolerated you while your father was still alive. Since it’s just you, we should’ve put an end to it months ago. You’re a drain on our community.”
“I’m not a drain on any community. I take care of myself fine. Lay off.”
The first boy—Francis—smiles thinly. “Perhaps not you personally, though I know you accept food from families like ours who need it more. Perhaps you can be of use—or of pleasure. But the world is changing, Harper. There is a new century coming, and the world holds no place for your kind anymore. We’ll stop you from weakening our genes.”
My blood runs cold. The girl takes a step back and stumbles.
One of the other boys catches her, wraps his arms around her in a deadlock. “Doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun first, of course.”
The third boy pulls a bottle of something or other from his coat, and for the briefest of moments, I’m convinced it’s the same bourbon the merchants poured over me, more than a lifetime ago. But when he uncorks the bottle and forces it into
her mouth, it smells of cheap ale instead.
He locks his arms around her, but before he can pour it all down her throat, she lashes out. Her arms are pinned behind her back, in the other boy’s grasp, but her legs are still free. She kicks out at the one holding the bottle first and hits him square between his legs. He drops the bottle, which falls to the grass but doesn’t shatter, and he doubles over.
She brings her heel down on the other boy’s instep with all her force. He yells. He doesn’t let go, instead pulling her closer.
“You degenerate witch,” Francis spits at her.
He reaches out to hit her, and I tear through the air—like luxury textiles or skin—and hop out before Jester can do or say anything to stop me.
Francis reaches back and I grab his fist.
“No.”
He spins around and his mouth curls in disgust when he sees me. “Another one? Get—”
At that precise moment, Jester appears next to me, and to these boys it must seem like she appeared out of nowhere. She’s smiling, the way I smiled when I got my revenge. There’s a red hue to her eyes, and we carry shadow with us. Despite the time of day, the sunlight dissipates when she smiles. “She said no.”
Before they can scream or attack her, she snaps her fingers and they all crumble to the ground. Jester has been part of the unseelie world for so much longer than I, she knows tricks I only tried and failed at.
The girl falls too, unfortunately, but she’s still conscious.
Jester walks over to where the girl’s crutch landed to collect it.
I step on one of the boys to get to the girl. She’s curled up in a ball and she retches. I crouch down—or stumble in a controlled manner—and brush her hair out of her face. She’s clenched her jaw and she’s shaking.
“Hey.” I try not to touch her beyond keeping her locks free of vomit. “We won’t harm you. You’re safe now. What’s your name?”
3.
1832
“What’s your name?”
Jester was my age, though she was taller by half and sharp as the edge of a knife, when she found me, bound, in the middle of the night. She seemed to me like a tree sprite, in her dark green linen clothes, leaning against a twisted wooden staff, with her dark eyes that burned.
She crouched down next to me, loosened the ropes around my arms and neck. She didn’t flinch away from touching me, and I leaned into her, because I didn’t know what kind touch felt like.
“What’s your name?” she repeated.
I coughed and croaked, unsure exactly what the answer was. I only knew what people called me. “Changeling.”
She kept her eyes on my lips. She nodded. She pulled her long coat off and wrapped it around me, rubbing life back into my shoulders and arms.
“Come,” she said. “This place isn’t for us. This world isn’t for us.”
With her help, I scrambled to my feet. Cold fire rained down my spine, as my blood crawled its way through my limbs again. Now that I was standing as tall as I could, Jester was easily head and shoulders taller than me.
“Are you fae?” I so rarely used my voice, it sounded awkward and foreign to me, but she didn’t seem to notice.
She raised her hand and the air shimmered around her, then tore, like paper. The tears showed an even darker night than the one we were in. A moonlit sky. Dim vales and shadowy woods. Phosphorescent trees and a thousand red and purple stars. A less cruel world. “I don’t know what I am. But I know I belong here.”
That was good enough for me. Every night I wished to be taken by the fae. I believed I belonged there too. “Can I come?”
She moved so fast, producing a knife from out of shredded air. She cut her forearm, she cut my forearm, then she pushed them both together. Her blood sizzled on my skin. “From now, always. We’ll go immediately.” She licked her lips. “Unless.”
“Unless what?”
Her smile was all teeth.
“Do you wish to take revenge?”
4.
1896
The world changes every time we tear through the fabric that separates the unseelie realm from the place where I grew up. Time moves differently in each place, so it can easily be that what seemed like mere months ago to me is decades in real time. I met Jester two years ago, but Europe changes every time we cross over. Revolutions. Uprisings. Outbreaks. War. Industrialization. Technological advances. The end of the century crawls nearer and I’m still a teenager.
We change too. I eat properly for the first time in my life. It looks like endless riches to me. Jester teaches me to be comfortable in my body—and comfortable in hers. She teaches me signs—and private touches meant only for us. We are both still in pain. That never changes. But we find solace in each other.
We find other folk like us—girls, boys, others—who don’t belong here. And, oddly, some who do. Some who are both wanted and accepted. We turn away from them, because that, in itself, is pain too.
And we find folk like this girl. Who once, perhaps, belonged here, but who is now on the verge of losing that.
“Harper, isn’t it?” I vaguely remember one of the boys saying that.
She nods.
I wonder what she sees when she looks at me. A demon? A danger? She would be wise to think me both. But likely she sees a glamor instead. Both Jester and I have it, faintly. Enough to make it look like we fit in every era we visit. Not enough to mask the burning hatred I direct at the boys.
“How are you feeling?” Jester asks. She kneels down with a suppleness I both envy and appreciate, and holds out the crutch to the girl.
Harper starts to laugh, but she does so with heaving sobs. “I grew up with them, did you know that? I grew up with them, and they would break me. Use me. Francis … we used to play hide-and-seek together. He was a bully back then, but it was never more than pulling my hair, pushing me around.”
I grit my teeth.
“You are fae, aren’t you?” Harper continues without pause. “My father always told me about you. He told me about your tricks and dangers. He told me to stay away from the valleys and the glens, because once you got lost you could never return. When I was born … they said in the olden days they left children like me for the fae. Have you come to collect me?”
“We have,” I say.
I get to my feet and pull her up as well. I stretch to my full length, which brings me up to about halfway to Jester’s biceps. Our first day together, I cut off all my hair, and it hasn’t returned. One of my hands has turned inward. I would swear my back keeps angling in more absurd directions. Jester rocks to a stand and leans on her cane. Scars from another incident with fire snake around her free arm. And now Harper stands before us, her crutch trembling in her hand. Her pale green eyes are fierce against the light. We’re a motley collection.
“This place isn’t for us. This world isn’t for us. We know of a better one,” I say. I gesture to the tear in the air that we left open.
“You think there’s nothing left here for me?” Harper asks.
“Do you think there is?” Jester counters.
The girl visibly considers it. She stares at the boys, at the road she walked down, at the rags she’s wearing. And little by little, I can see her break.
“You want there to be, don’t you?” Jester asks with tenderness.
Harper clenches her jaw and steels herself, doesn’t answer. “Is this what you do then?” she asks instead. “Appear out of nowhere and find the unwanted ones?”
I shrug. “That’s how Jester found me.”
And mostly, everyone we find is ready to be away. The lost girls in the asylums. The children who are still left for the fair realm. The older ones who face the wrath or the cruel mercy of their families.
“Do you ever happen upon people like us who do belong?” Harper wants to know. She’s not the first to ask, but it happens rarely.
Jester takes a step closer. Her voice lowers. “Yes.”
“Really?”
I kick one of the
boys in the shoulder. They won’t wake up for a while yet, and my eyes burn and my hands itch and I taste the bitterness of blood in my mouth. “Yes. We find folk like us who are accepted, who belong. Brave, poor things. It doesn’t happen often. They find each other too. But it happens.” I refuse to lie about it, not to her, but it makes me feel at once as if those who remain here were stolen from us, as if they belong to our strange, underdark family, and as if I were stolen from them.
“And those of us who don’t?”
I start to smile. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Do you wish to take revenge?” I ask.
5.
1832
“Yes.”
If I had answered that question differently, perhaps things would be different now. But I didn’t. I did wish to take revenge. The moment she asked me that question, I felt the need for it burning inside my bones, a different pain than the pain I carried with me. A hunger to return every cruelty I’d been shown over all the years I traveled.
Jester’s grin broadened. It was as if her teeth grew sharper, as if her eyes shone brighter. And I remembered the stories I’d heard of the fae and the fair folk across all the continent. Hobgoblins and will-o’-the-wisps. The wild hunt and the many lost travelers.
“You’re unseelie,” I whispered. I’d never before been able to speak all my thoughts.
Jester handed me the ropes that had been used to bind me. “Seelie and unseelie depends only on your point of view. To me, they’re all the same.”
“Were you found by the fae?”
A shadow passed by us as Jester took a step back. She shrank in on herself, and without fully understanding, I could see how similar we were. Her angles were softer, her scars were different, but her hurt ran as deep. “I wish.”
