Faerie Fruit

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Died?’ said Greensleeves sharply.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. She became a statue before my eyes, all turned to white stone like marble—’

  Helewise got no further, for the effect of these words upon the King of Faerie was profound. He stared, his black eyes intense with some emotion she could not name. Then he leapt off the tree and pulled Helewise to her feet without ceremony. ‘Take me to wherever she is,’ he ordered.

  Half relieved and half alarmed by this urgency, Helewise was glad enough to obey. She hastened to Heatherberry Spinney as quickly as she could go, regretting, now, that she had not after all begun by ensuring that the poor woman was still there. What if she had troubled the King for nothing?

  These fears melted away upon rounding the southern corner of the Spinney, for there was the pallid lady, almost exactly as Helewise had last seen her. Spiders had wreathed her hair in cobwebs; morning dew sparkled upon them like diamonds upon a silken hairnet.

  ‘Mallinerla,’ said the King of Faerie, and Helewise realised it was her name. He bent to examine her, all tender concern where Helewise had known only horror and pity. ‘It is not yet too late,’ he decided. ‘But it will be difficult. Will you stay?’

  This last was directed to Helewise, to her surprise, for she could not imagine herself vital to whatever magics might be required to revive Mallinerla. But she agreed at once, more than willing to assist if she could.

  ‘She will be weak, when she wakes,’ he told Helewise. ‘She may require aid.’

  Helewise assured him that she was at his disposal, and positioned herself a safe distance away. She watched, her heart beating quick, as Pippin Greensleeves took up the phial of liquid that hung around his neck and removed its stopper. She thought he would bathe Mallinerla in it, or perhaps incite her to drink it, but he did neither. He let the phial drop again until it hung once more around his neck, and then he took up his silver pipes.

  The melody he played was as nothing Helewise had ever heard before. It was melancholy and lively by turns, first tearing at her heart and then filling her soul with a joyous buoyancy. As he played, the golden liquid poured forth from his pendant in a fine aurulent mist which filled the air around all three of them. It clung to the marble contours of Mallinerla’s inert form; she glittered with it, and Helewise held her breath, watching closely for any sign of revival.

  The marble lips parted, and Mallinerla breathed. The change that came over her was so gradual, and so subtle, Helewise could not have said when precisely it was that she knew she was looking once again at a living woman — pale as marble but flesh once more, breathing, her heart beating.

  Mallinerla’s ice-white eyes fixed upon the King of Faerie, and she took in a great, shuddering breath of air. ‘Pippin,’ said she. ‘Where is my mother?’

  ‘She is gone,’ he replied. ‘Gone this century and more. Is that what has brought you among us?’

  Mallinerla did not immediately reply. She looked searchingly into Pippin Greensleeves’s face and shook her head slowly. When she rose from her kneeling posture, she did so with an enviable grace only slightly marred by a stiffness in her limbs. She walked a circle, paying no heed to the bedraggled state of her clothing nor to anything she saw around her.

  ‘She is gone,’ she said. ‘But not forever, Pippin. Long have I believed her lost, and for always, but something has changed.’ She looked around herself with more attention than before. ‘This place. It is in Faerie?’

  The King said nothing, so Helewise answered. ‘You are in Berrie,’ she said. ‘It is of Faerie now, though it was not so before. Not until recently.’

  At these words, Mallinerla grew inexplicably excited. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘That is what it was! It must be. She has been here, Pippin! Her feet have walked this very road. I thought her gone for always and ever — we all did. We grieved and we sickened and faded. But then I felt… something of her. An echo, a dream, I hardly know what. Down I came at once! But too late. I did not find her, and I was lost.’

  This rambling speech puzzled Helewise considerably, but the questioning looks she directed at both Mallinerla and Pippin Greensleeves went unacknowledged.

  ‘Berrie?’ said the King of Faerie. ‘You think she was lost in Berrie?’

  But Mallinerla was growing visibly confused. ‘But no, that cannot be, for she is nowhere in Faerie. I would swear it. She has been here and gone again, and now I will never find her.’

  Mallinerla appeared to be on the verge of falling into despair, and Helewise reflected that she was of somewhat volatile disposition. ‘This is only half of Berrie,’ she ventured by way of encouragement.

  The pale, woeful visage changed again and at once. Mallinerla stared at Helewise, electrified, and crisply ordered: ‘Explain further!’

  Helewise blinked, but before she could speak, Pippin Greensleeves interjected.

  ‘Berrie was Berrie Wynweald, when it was of Faerie. Do you recall that name?’

  Mallinerla shook her head wordlessly.

  ‘The northern half crossed into the mortal kingdoms, many long years ago, and Southtown much later. It came to be called simply Berrie, or Berrie-on-the-Wyn. And so it has remained for some time: a mortal town.’

  ‘Until recently,’ said Helewise with some asperity. ‘When our long-barren trees bore the strangest apples imaginable and wrought great mischief upon us. And the King of Faerie stole back half of Berrie Wynweald into Faerie.’

  ‘Berrie Wynweald?’ echoed Mallinerla.

  ‘Berrie-on-the-Wyn,’ Helewise explained.

  To her surprise, Mallinerla grabbed at her arm and clutched her with a painful grip. ‘The Wyn!’ she cried. ‘Is it a river?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Helewise in confusion.

  ‘When did the river cross into mortal lands?’

  ‘It crossed with Southtown,’ said Greensleeves. ‘A century or so ago, in mortal years.’

  Mallinerla squeezed Helewise’s arm still harder. ‘Take me to it!’ she cried. ‘Oh, my foolish, unlucky mother!’

  ‘Peace, Mallinerla,’ admonished the King of Faerie. ‘You are hurting the lady.’

  But Mallinerla was not listening. ‘Did you know of her habits, Pippin? Oh, how she loved the rivers of Faerie! Once in each of her cycles, down she came to bathe. No harm did it ever do her, and when she returned she glowed more brightly than ever.

  ‘But perhaps she did not know that the Wyn was lost! Down she came to bathe, and found herself in mortal waters.’

  ‘Iron-tainted,’ said the King of Faerie, his eyes wide. ‘But why did she not return? Why did she send no word for aid, if it is as you say, and she was not killed?’

  Mallinerla did not engage with these questions. ‘Take me to this river,’ she begged of Helewise.

  ‘I cannot, for the way is shut. The river is not in Faerie now, and the bridge that used to span it is broken.’ Helewise glared at Pippin Greensleeves, who received her silent condemnation with a frown.

  ‘It would never do, to leave a door gaping open into Faerie,’ he told her. ‘Nor to reclaim a tainted river.’

  ‘I think you should reconsider,’ said Helewise. She took hold of Mallinerla’s hand and pulled it, gently but firmly, away from her arm. ‘I will take you there,’ she said. ‘Though I do not at all understand who you are, or for whom you seek.’

  ‘I am Moon’s Daughter,’ said Mallinerla, which only puzzled Helewise more.

  ‘A star, as you would think of it,’ said the King of Faerie. ‘Like Faerie itself, they do not thrive without the light of Moon and Sun.’

  Helewise absorbed this in silence. ‘I will take you there,’ she repeated. ‘And the King of Faerie will open the way.’ She looked steadily at Pippin Greensleeves until he bowed.

  ‘Very well, Helewise Dale,’ he said. ‘It shall be as you say.’

  Chapter Three

  In which Dorothea Winthrope goes into Faerie, and Receives an Unpleasant surprise.

  Three bottles of honeywine was more than enou
gh, Dorothea knew. And yet, here she was venturing upon her fourth. She was merry and expansive and distantly aware that she was laughing too much, but had stopped caring about halfway down bottle number three.

  ‘Drowning your sorrows, Dot?’ said Verity Wilkin, who was sitting to her left and sipping far more decorously from a glass. Dorothea had progressed to drinking from the bottle some time ago.

  ‘I am!’ she agreed. ‘Only—’ and here she dissolved into laughter and took some time to recall herself from her mirth. ‘Only I cannot remember what they are.’

  ‘Then you have drowned them successfully,’ said Verity with an indulgent smile.

  Dorothea shook her head several times. ‘I can never remember what they are.’ She took a long drink, and another, wondering vaguely how the bottle had come to empty so fast. ‘But it doesn’t matter so much, when I am looking at the world from the bottom of a bottle.’

  ‘That is trying,’ agreed Verity, looking more sceptical and confused than concerned. ‘Though if all you have forgotten is your sorrows, you have gone the right way about it. We should all be so lucky.’

  The woman did not understand, Dorothea reflected as she looked at her companion through the prism of her sadly empty bottle. The glass distorted Verity’s pleasant round face in intriguing ways, and Dorothea felt well entertained.

  ‘Perhaps you ought to go home,’ Verity suggested. ‘Shall I accompany you?’

  And that was another point the woman did not understand, Dorothea thought with some sourness. None of them did. When had she, Dorothea, ever had a home? If she had, then that, too, was long forgotten.

  That was another odd thing about herself, she decided. The good people of Berrie freely assumed that she had a home, because they all did. It did not appear to occur to any of them that they had never seen it, and did not even know where it was.

  Furthermore, she had the vague and disturbing sense that she had been wandering the streets of Berrie for far longer than ought to have been reasonable or even possible. Her neighbours had aged and died around her and Dorothea lingered still; elderly, somewhat infirm, but undeniably alive. None of them appeared to take note of that, either.

  She had all the drawbacks of immortality without any of the benefits. Other than the simple advantage of not dying, which admittedly had its merits, for nobody much appeared to enjoy that part.

  Home or not, it was certainly time to leave. Dorothea declined Verity’s offer of company, for she had no notion what she would be expected to do with it, and stood up. The room swayed, and she closed her eyes.

  ‘She is here, I know it!’ cried an unfamiliar female voice. A young voice, thought Dorothea with a vague, incomprehensible flicker of interest. But her head drooped and somehow she was face down upon the table and for a while afterwards she knew little and cared significantly less.

  She awakened an unknowable time later to the unwelcome sight of John Quartermane’s face not far from her own. He was being so intolerably rude as to tap repeatedly upon her forehead with his thick, blunt fingers, and when she swam vaguely back to consciousness she was just in time to hear him saying ‘… Winthrope? Mistress Winthrope! If you are going to sleep I must ask you to do it off these premises.’

  Dorothea splendidly ignored this, for her attention was arrested by a scene of total uproar across the taproom. A woman Dorothea had never seen before was actually sitting atop the bar, cross-legged and thoroughly comfortable. She was singing something odd and fey in some fluid, burbling language and it made Dorothea’s head hurt. A woman almost as old as Dorothea stood nearby, clearly importuning the girl to get down off the bar please, to no effect, and on the singing girl’s other side stood a riotously colourful man in mulberry trousers, surveying everybody at the Moss and Mist through narrowed eyes.

  Some question had been asked, perhaps, or maybe it was the music, but the good people of Berrie responded to this incursion with considerably more than the mild interest it might be expected to occasion. Half of them were talking at once; the rest were listening with rapt, spellbound attention to the singer.

  Dorothea refocused her attention on John Quartermane. ‘You may wish to reclaim your bar,’ she told him, slurring her words in a manner that ought to have embarrassed her.

  Quartermane blinked, turned about, and uttered a few curses under his breath. To Dorothea’s satisfaction he went at once after the singing woman, leaving Dorothea in peace.

  Her immediate intention was to withdraw to the street, loath though she was to follow any suggestion of John Quartermane’s. But the tumult in the tavern was doing deplorable violence to her poor head and she really did want to sleep. Verity Wilkin had disappeared sometime during Dorothea’s nap, her neighbourly goodwill not up to the task of hauling a magnificently drunk Mistress Winthrope out into the night. Thus, nobody stood between her and delicious escape.

  Except, perhaps, for the music, for she had ventured but halfway across the tavern when something about the melody arrested her steps. She could not say why, for the words made no sense to her and there could be no reason why an incomprehensible song should interest her in the slightest.

  Nonetheless, it did. The words might not resolve themselves into sentences she could understand, but she felt a nagging sense that they ought to, and might still, if she waited a few moments longer.

  So she halted and waited, but that proved to be a mistake for soon afterwards there came a great rush for the door. Dorothea was almost knocked from her feet as virtually every patron of the Moss and Mist left the building at once, dashing out into the street as though somebody were giving free money away.

  Perhaps somebody was, for all Dorothea knew or cared, except that some of them were shouting something about a bridge. Well, no matter. At least the tavern was quiet again, save for that dratted singing.

  The mulberry man appeared at her side. ‘Mistress Winthrope?’ he said, and reached out a steadying hand to her elbow as she swayed.

  ‘That is what they call me,’ she agreed, grimly fighting down a wave of nausea.

  ‘Have they always called you that?’

  ‘I cannot remember.’ Dorothea closed her eyes. ‘If you will excuse me, I believe I am shortly in danger of embarrassing myself.’

  ‘Allow me.’ Mulberry trousers escorted her outside, where Dorothea was free to empty the contents of her stomach to her heart’s content. Not that it made her feel particularly contented to make a mess of the street like that, but at least the nausea eased.

  She was pleased to note that she managed to avoid making a similar mess of the young man’s colourful clothing.

  The singing had stopped, she noted vaguely. Then the door of the tavern flew open and out came the singer, followed by the older woman. She was in a fine temper, or perhaps it was a fit of dismay. Either way, she was vociferous about it.

  ‘How can it not work?’ she was saying stridently. ‘The self-same song she sung to me a thousand times, as I grew and brightened in her own arms! She must know it! And I ought instantly to know her, no matter what has become of her in this abominable place. I—’

  Dorothea felt an urgent impulse to decorate the street a little more, and did so at that moment with vigorous energy. The woman’s head whipped around and she stared at Dorothea in disgust, followed momentarily by horror and something resembling dawning recognition.

  ‘Mother?’ she whispered.

  Dorothea shook her head. ‘I was never married, dear girl, and should you not prefer a different mother at that?’ Nobody could suppose Dorothea well suited to the condition. The poor woman must be desperate indeed to fix upon so poor a candidate for the post.

  The woman only stared, and shook her head. ‘I cannot believe it,’ she decided.

  That seemed reasonable enough to Dorothea. ‘If you will excuse me,’ she said. ‘I have an appointment with the river.’ And she began, slowly, to shuffle away.

  ‘The river!’ cried the same, pesky female. ‘Pippin! Do you hear that! You must recall it at once.�
��

  ‘I must what?’ said the mulberry man.

  ‘The river! If you can drag the southern half of Berrie Wynweald back into Faerie I do not see why you could not bring the river with it. And then—’

  ‘Mallinerla,’ said mulberry trousers, or Pippin. ‘It is not the simple matter you imagine. It took a vast deal to recall any part of Berrie Wynweald and it is but temporary; soon enough it must go its own way, as it has always done. And the rivers I may not touch at all.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because the wild waters of Faerie answer to no one. Not even me.’

  The woman called Mallinerla made a noise of disgust. By now Dorothea had trudged some distance away and the rest of their conversation faded to a remote babble of sound behind her, and then into silence altogether. Dorothea breathed in the peace like air, a tension in her soul relaxing.

  That song. That dratted song. It echoed in her mind, every word distinct even if she could not remember what any of them meant.

  Somebody came after her. It was not the mulberry man, nor (to her relief) the noisy girl they called Mallinerla. It was the other one, the woman as old as herself. A woman she knew, she dimly realised, for the face was familiar now that it approached up close.

  ‘Dale, isn’t it?’ she said, after a moment’s mental fumblings.

  ‘Helewise Dale. How are you, Mistress Winthrope?’

  ‘You might as well call me Dot,’ said Dorothea. ‘Most of the rest of them do, and it is an easier mouthful to spit out.’

  ‘Very well, Dot. You are away to the river, are you?’

  Dorothea nodded once. ‘A quick swim, before I fade into sleep. It is good for my ancient withers, though you would not think it in this weather.’ It was raining a little, a desultory grey drizzle, cold and miserable and most unwelcome.

  ‘Have you been visiting the river a long time?’ said Helewise. She was nice enough to take Dorothea’s arm and help her along, without being so conspicuous about it as Pippin of Mulberry had been.