“I’m not like that!” I said. “And I don’t want to be. And why do fairies get such nice magic? Talking to mushrooms? Surely you’re not all benevolent. Your cousin doesn’t seem to be.”
“No, we’re not,” he agreed. “Nature can be violent and heartless, and humans can be as selfless and good and heroic as anyone else. That’s the kind of sorceress I imagine you would be.”
My cheeks warmed despite the cold. I had never thought of myself as becoming a sorceress, but that was what I was after, wasn’t it?
“Our tutor was always saying how everything has a spirit. Magic just taps into that. So it’s all about how you use the connection, isn’t it?” He grinned. “I really sound like I know what I’m talking about.”
“Don’t you?” I laughed. “Please tell me you’re not making this up so I’ll feel better.”
“No. Though I was just thinking how much I’ve grown up.” He sounded sober at the thought. He gathered a few sticks from the ground, his first concession to the original purpose of our outing. “We all learned some things about magic, politics, other races, propriety… things royal children should know. But it isn’t until just now that I realized how much I know.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“If I’m ever going to be a king, it is.” His brow furrowed, and he said nothing for a moment. We had come to a thin creek that ran through the woods. He wordlessly handed me his basket while he stepped across the frozen water, putting his bad foot forward first with the walking stick for stability, his other arm out for balance. I leaped across after him, and he took the basket back.
“A part of me was hoping my body really was lost forever,” he said. “I’m terrified of ruling the fairy kingdom. I was never meant for something like that. But it’s true what you say. I hated Luka when we were children. And from all I’ve heard of Luka as king, he hasn’t improved much.”
“You’d be a good ruler,” I said.
“Would I?” he cried. “I’ve lived just seventeen years-maybe eighteen by now-but I come from a prior generation. I hardly know what’s been going on. And when I was last alive, I wasn’t interested in anything that wasn’t fun. Is a kind but unwilling king any better than a cruel but competent one? I’m not so sure.”
Once again, we stopped walking. The air was still, just as we were, but the high, thin sunshine of winter was shining on the white world. I touched his sleeve. “But are you unwilling? What do you really want? To die now? To be king? To melt away unnoticed?”
He made a face. “The last option is tempting.” He paused. “I don’t really want to die.”
“I feel sure you would make a better king than someone cruel,” I said. “I think it would be very hard at first, and then get easier.” Part of me wondered why I was encouraging him to be king. I felt I was pushing him farther from my own life, and yet, I could see that future for him. “You’re a brave person. And you take care of other people. Very good qualities for a king.”
“Do you really see that in me?” He looked at me carefully, as if searching for a reflection of himself he had never before seen.
“I do.”
“I think you’re speaking of yourself,” he said softly. “I think it’s you who would make a good queen.”
My chin briefly trembled. I could imagine myself a sorceress more readily than a queen, and neither would be easy. I had been raised into singing and dancing at a royal court, but it was another thing altogether to envision myself on a raised platform where the king and queen sat, garbed in jewel-colored silks, surrounded by gold platters of food and scores of willing servants. Of course, the fairy kingdom would not look the same, but the feel of it must be similar.
“Well, I’m not royalty, I’m afraid,” I said. Not to mention, I was human.
“You can be an optimist about my fate, but not about your own?” Erris said.
“It’s always easier to be optimistic about someone else.”
“If the job was offered, though, would you take it?” he asked, looking at me.
“Can a human be the fairy queen?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, there were times in which it was preferred. Fairies believe that a little diversity is a good thing.”
“Well, then, of course I would take it. Without hesitation,” I said, my heart beating fast. Which was not exactly true-I might hesitate, but the end result would be the same. I had come this far. If Erris asked me to be his queen, I would say yes and manage it somehow.
Chapter 14
It was only later that I had time to consider what the conversation really meant. Erris truly had shifted his focus toward the hope that he might live to become king. It made me tremble a bit. Still, we owed it to both Lorinar and the fairy kingdom to prepare.
A week or so later, I was in the kitchen-we did nearly everything in the kitchen-reading some of Ordorio’s books when Lean Joe came back from town with the mail. “You have a package, miss,” Lean Joe said, gathering everyone’s attention as he dropped a small parcel in front of me.
“Oh! I asked if Karstor would send something to help with the jinn.”
“No, it’s from overseas. Mr. Parry.”
“He’s sending you packages now?” Erris said. “What is it?”
I chewed my lip. I wanted to open it alone, but that would only arouse Erris’s suspicions further, and I didn’t feel like making him jealous now when he was talking to me about being a queen. Celestina handed me a knife and I slit the brown paper open.
A silver bracelet slid out. Each end of the bangle depicted the head of a stylized elephant, and the trunks formed the clasp. It was clever and lovely and I wished for all the world Hollin had not been the one giving it to me.
“Oh, can I see?” Violet said. “That’s wonderful!”
“He probably got it cheaply,” I said, knowing it wasn’t true.
“He does remember that he’s married, doesn’t he?” Erris said.
I let Violet and Celestina admire the bracelet for a moment, and then I slipped it back in the envelope. “Maybe he just wanted to give me a token of friendship,” I said. “He knows I like elephants.”
“Elephants aren’t really romantic,” Violet pointed out.
“I guess he can send you whatever he likes,” Erris said. “But I hope you don’t encourage him.”
“It’s nothing!” I said, perhaps protesting too loudly. “Annalie is my friend, and Hollin and I went through a lot together.”
“Oh, ‘together,’ did you? What exactly did you go through together?”
“We-” I made a face. “He’s one of the only people I have to write to.”
Erris gave a dark look down at the surface of the table. Of course, he had even fewer people to write than I did.
I wasn’t about to open Hollin’s letters in front of everyone, but I felt almost as if I were sneaking off into a liaison when I took them to my bedroom. My heart pounded as if I were, especially recalling what I had written to him last. I could no longer remember the exact words, I just recalled it had made me nervous.
Dear Nimira,
I was so pleased to receive your letter. I suppose the mail travels relatively swiftly in these modern times, but things change so quickly in my life that it seems an age passes between letters.
I hope you enjoy the gift. I remembered us talking of elephants back at Vestenveld, so when I saw this bracelet in the market, I had to get it for you. Many of the women here wear silver bangles of similar design.
I’ve been continuing my work with the schools, but I no longer work under Mr. Quendley. I have a usual round of twelve schools in a fifty-mile radius that I’m supposed to check on each month. I then send a report back to my superiors, about what kind of magic the schools are teaching. I do believe the Lorinarians would rather the natives abandon magic altogether, but they realize magic helps prevent epidemics and famine, and the people would rebel without it, so they only try to suppress martial magic.
I do see, now, why this was considered a s
uitable punishment for my mistakes back home. I’m traveling twenty-seven days out of thirty each month, and the conditions can be grueling. The roads are poorly kept, the weather is unpredictable, and I’m always dirty and exhausted. My lodgings vary greatly in quality. I never thought I would be eating with my hands, crouching on the dirt at an open fire, with a woman offering me fermented milk of some unknown animal. I’ve learned some of the language, but there are so many dialects that half the time it does me no good.
This is not travel as I imagined it. There is no leisurely sightseeing, no servants, no hotels catering to Lorinarian travelers. I don’t know when in the history of the Parry family anyone has worked this hard.
Yet, it is so different from anything I’ve ever known. None of the social mores of home apply. It makes me wonder what is real.
I think you must know how it feels.
He went on for a while, in similar vein to the last letter-musing how I must have felt coming to Lorinar and talking of how different the people were. His tone had changed. It was more subdued and thoughtful. The pages held less romance and more grit.
I had an odd, fleeting yearning to be there with him, to see him change, to see his eyes open in a country where women wore bright colors and bare arms again.
But I had never really been in New Guinnell and quite likely I was romanticizing it myself. I didn’t think I’d care much for fermented milk.
He didn’t precisely acknowledge how I had scolded him in my last letter, but he did speak of Annalie:
Nimira, I know you are a girl of good moral character-better than my own-and I hope my letters don’t make you uncomfortable. I know you are friendly with my wife, and I know I shouldn’t write any other woman but her, especially you, considering how I once offered to run away with you.
I’m not trying to woo you anymore, Nim, I swear to that. It was the biggest mistake of my life to even consider it, and I know I am the villain in this piece. You know the facts of what happened between us: I cursed her in an attempt to save her while she was sick. I left her touched by the dead, trapped in the dark, haunted by spirits.
But do you know how it feels to harm someone you love? To see them changing, to know you caused it, to be helpless to stop it? You do know how it feels, I think. And at first, for Annalie there was only pity and regret and thoughts of trying to lift the curse, to put things back to how they were.
At some point, I was forced to admit that lifting the curse was beyond my power, and at the time I felt like the cursed one. Annalie didn’t want to see me. She wasn’t girlish and playful anymore, but she also wasn’t depressed and miserable. She was turning into that person she has become-strange and wiser than her years….
I admit I am slightly frightened of her. After all that’s happened, a part of me still longs to see that bright young girl who couldn’t dance well, and I have such trouble knowing how to relate to her anymore.
I am not sure, in saying all this, if I am looking for your sympathy or advice, or if I am merely trying to warn you that Erris might be changing with all he’s been through, and I hope you can weather it better than I could.
Strangely, I almost wanted to cry when I read this, and I wasn’t sure why. Was I terrified that Erris was changing into someone I couldn’t understand, or was I merely relieved to know that someone else shared my pain? I took a deep suppressing breath.
Now I picked up the letters from Karstor and Annalie, noticing suddenly the postmarks. They were the same.
Sure enough, Annalie wrote:
Linza and I have moved into Dr. Greinfern’s apartment. Vestenveld is rather isolated and he was concerned for my safety there. Several people have come nosing around since the public learned about me. I’m not worried, but Dr. Greinfern’s concern is reasonable, and the house has always been too large, especially with Hollin away.
Of course I don’t want you to worry. Dr. Greinfern has made things very comfortable for me. Moreover, I must say I’m fascinated to learn more about his work and how matters unfold with the fairies. He’s a very intelligent man. Hollin would never have talked to me about magic and politics, but Dr. Greinfern sits and talks to me and explains things very thoroughly. I think he’s lonely himself, poor man.
Karstor barely referred to the arrangement, merely saying he thought it better if Annalie stayed with him, but he did call her Annalie, not Mrs. Parry. He wrote me a very long explanation of jinn.
It’s hard to get much concrete information about jinn, because they are surrounded by a certain magic that makes people forget them and what they’re capable of. Besides that, their history belongs to antiquity, and surely is as much myth as fact. It’s commonly believed that they are humans with a streak of demon blood. I am never inclined to trust anything that brings up demons. Writers love to bandy about the notion of demons because they’re very sensational. I suspect storytellers have done the same for thousands of years. But whether or not they have demon blood, jinn are certainly powerful-and pitiable, really, it seems to me.
Thousands of years ago, it is said the jinn did something or another to infuriate a king who was, in turn, favored by the angels. The king cursed the race of jinn to serve his kingdom of men forevermore. Even after the king died, even after his descendants died, even after his palace fell into ruins, the jinn would be trapped forever in the king’s collection of vessels-oil lamps and decanters and such. To this day, any man who finds one of the vessels can expect the jinn to serve him.
This matched the myths I had heard. Sometimes my father even used to say, if I wished for something impossible, “Travel west for thirty days and your wishes will be answered”-a reference to that palace in ruins. I was never sure it was actually real. Travelers spoke of it, but no one I knew ever actually found a jinn. Then again, maybe they would forget about it if they had. It made my brain hurt to think of it.
Karstor continued with a list of things jinn were rumored to be capable of and not capable of. Nearly everything one could imagine appeared on the first list. If the myths were true, we were most definitely out of luck.
“I believe the best defense is likely spirit protection,” Karstor concluded. “Unfortunately spirit magic is not so common. I’ll try to find Ordorio and send him home, wherever in God’s name the man might be, and in the meantime, I’ll see what help I can provide. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry? This hardly seemed a time not to worry. I sat for a long time, chin in hand, the other hand tapping the folded letter against my leg, pondering all these troubling letters-Hollin growing tanned and strong somewhere while Karstor and Annalie shared an apartment and a jinn of unknown power looked for Erris.
Of course, I shouldn’t be disturbed by Annalie moving in with Karstor. The logic was sound, the arrangement likely very proper-Karstor was old enough to be Annalie’s father, and while kind, he had always struck me as a private, withdrawn person. But was it really the only safe place she could go?
I suppose I wanted Hollin and Annalie to have a happy ending, just as I wanted a happy ending for Erris and myself. What would Hollin do if he came back? If Annalie was lost to him, and Erris lost to me?
Was I worried Hollin would continue to express interest in me?
Was I even worried I might be tempted to reciprocate?
Hollin was fully alive. Safe. Handsome. I didn’t love him-no, of course I didn’t, but… what if he changed enough that I could?
I almost could. I hated to think I would entertain the idea, even for a moment.
I love Erris, I told myself. Insisted.
But Erris didn’t show me passion. Not like Hollin had. I had a flash of memory-when Hollin and I had fought the dark spirits off together, and he had pulled me close to him and said, “Thank God,” fiercely and earnestly.
Then I would remember all the awful things about Hollin-the uncomfortable moments, the cowardice, the fact that he was married-and hated myself for ever thinking of him fondly.
Sometimes I wished he would never write me again. I
t always left me confused, and the last thing I needed was more confusion.
Chapter 15
The magic that came most easily to humans was fire. I didn’t need spell books to tell me that. Everyone knew it. Some people even suggested that humans were born of the fire element, just as they said fairies were born of the earth, mermaids of the sea, and winged folk of the sky.
Erris had told me everything has a spirit to be tapped into. Therefore, I needed to tap into the spirit of fire.
The sun set early now, so that by five o’clock we were lighting a candle to eat and work by, but on one particular afternoon, I decided to build an outdoor fire. Celestina was still wary of dabbling in magic, especially fire magic, but Erris and Violet agreed to help. Erris insisted on hauling the logs into place. He was the only one of us who had ever built a fire outdoors, and he seemed invigorated by the task, so I kept my fears about his fragility to myself.
Violet was so bundled up she probably could have survived a fall from a cliff. The snow from earlier in the week had melted, and the forest around us was a blue-tinged black in the dusk. We sat together on an old wooden bench and watched Erris get the fire going with a scrap of paper to catch the kindling.
I watched the small red sparks dance. Memories of my childhood stirred, but I couldn’t recall exactly when I’d been around an outdoor fire. It must have been a long time ago.
Erris had on the hat he’d bought in Cernan and leather work gloves, and he walked back and forth with a pitchfork, fussing with the logs. He looked very absorbed, rugged and content, nothing like a prince, but very much alive. The fire popped and the dark logs shifted.
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