by Allyse Near
Isola looked up to see the flash of the glass cross in Florence’s trembling grip.
‘But you have to let me kill –’
Isola rolled to the side as Florence brought the mirror shard down like a stake towards a vampire’s chest. The glass plunged and stuck in the earth; Florence struggled with it for a moment before ducking to miss the blade swinging towards her. Isola kicked her savagely and then their positions were switched: Florence empty-handed on the forest floor, and Isola standing over her, clutching Ruslana’s dagger. Chests heaving, both girls glared at each other, unmoving for a long minute.
‘Go on, then!’ spat Florence. ‘Try it! What can you do?’
Isola lowered the dagger. ‘Mama Sinclair’s right,’ she said simply. ‘You’re not my enemy.’ She turned her back on the ghost girl, going back to the bone-weapons she’d dropped. She stooped and lit the second arrow tip, then drew back the bow.
‘What are you doing? Don’t you dare –’
Before Florence could finish, the second arrow hit the Vigour Mortis tree, and it burst into instant, screaming flames.
‘NO! MOTHER!’ Florence howled. She leapt up, her fingernails scrabbling at Isola’s back. Her skeleton fingers caught hold of the steel-bar ribs through Isola’s dress, jerking her backwards.
A flash, a scream, a spurt of blood.
Blood edged the mirror shard in Florence’s dirty fist.
The Bright Eyes of Annabel Lee
‘ISOLA!’
She clutched at her face. Blood bubbled under her hand, running from her right eye. The shout had come from somewhere in front of her, and automatically, Isola stumbled forwards into familiar arms.
It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be –
‘It is,’ said that voice, tight and tense with worry, and she hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud, and yes, she felt secure with Bunny and with Edgar and with Mother but not safe, not completely protected, not like this.
She parted her fingers, squinted up through her left eye, blinking the world back into focus.
‘You are all right,’ said Alejandro quickly. ‘It will all be all right, princess, I promise.’
Where have I heard that before? Isola wondered, feeling somewhat dazed. She peered around the clearing, blinking rapidly to flush the stars from her vision.
Her princes. They weren’t slain. The storybook brother-princes hadn’t reached their own sister in time, but Isola’s protectors had come for her, and for the first time in so long – far too long – she was glad that she wasn’t written down, that she hadn’t been dreamed up like some sad French fairytale, and the dragons hadn’t won yet.
The clearing felt so full, and her chest seemed to swell, a lovely pain and pressure against the bands of her rib-birdcage, and she didn’t mind the hot bolt of pain in her eye, or the indistinguishable screeches of her haunting behind her, or the pinched, terrified faces each brother-prince wore – they had come for her, and she was happy.
‘Stop!’ Isola heard Florence shriek in her wrecked voice. ‘Let go!’
In her peripheral vision, she spotted Florence struggling against Ruslana’s iron grip. The Fury released her, only to shove her backwards into the Wish-You-Well. With a great splash and a glitter of gold scales, Christobelle knocked Florence off her feet with her powerful tail, and together the mermaid and the Fury pinned the ghost at the water’s edge.
‘The dust!’ said a squeaky voice above Isola’s ear.
A pink blur – Rosekin! – danced fretfully around Isola’s head, and Alejandro plunged his hand into Isola’s pocket, cradling her face with the other. Isola felt her hand prised gently away from her right eye and heard a sharp intake of breath before something grainy was dribbled into the socket. She flinched, but already the hot flow of blood down her cheek had slowed to a trickle, and she watched Alejandro untie the silk cravat from her wrist, looping it tightly around her eye, clotting up the wound.
The rush in her head was passing; she felt steadier, more solid, and Isola passed her one good eye over the princes again. All but Jamie had returned to her side – they were slightly smoky, a magician’s illusions, more unreal than ever. A diamond shone on Alejandro’s starched cuff, another in his eyes, which crinkled with concern as they gazed upon her.
‘Isola,’ said Grandpa Furlong in his gentle cadence, and she closed her uninjured eye for a moment, letting the sound of her name on a prince’s lips wash over her.
‘LET ME GO!’
Isola snapped her eye open – Florence was shouting, her struggles against Christobelle and Ruslana violently renewed, and before another word was said, Isola had torn herself from Alejandro’s grasp, landing on her knees at the reedy bank. She lifted her hand and hit Florence as hard as she could. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she bellowed, even as Florence screamed back in hysterical rage. ‘What have you done to us?’
‘Isola –’ said Grandpa Furlong again, the reprimand against violence clearly climbing his old throat.
But Isola raised a hand. ‘What?’ she growled at the girl.
‘I – just – wanted – your – attention!’ wailed Florence, struggling uselessly against the iron grips of the Fury and the mermaid.
‘Well, you’ve got it now, Florence – whoever you are.’ Isola loomed closer to the captive spirit, trying to penetrate that stringy dark hair with her glare. ‘What is it you’ve been trying to tell me?’
‘Isola,’ said Alejandro suddenly. ‘Wait, I think I –’
‘No – no, I don’t wanna!’ Florence cried out, and writhed in the mud.
Isola paid heed to neither. She grabbed Florence by her hair and pulled the shrieking girl up and into the firelight from the crackling tree.
And at last that loathsome hair tumbled off her ruined face, which was lit orange in the night, and Isola gasped, stumbling back as the face of her tormentor was revealed.
Death Masks
‘She looks like me,’ breathed Isola. ‘Why – why does she look just like me?’
The princes flinched in collective shock. Florence wailed anew and tossed her hair forward, crouching to the ground and screaming into her knees. Ruslana, unable to stop herself reacting to a girl in obvious pain, reached out to touch the screeching ghost, then pulled away again.
‘Oh, querida,’ moaned Alejandro quietly.
‘Alejandro! Why does she look like me?’
‘I –’ The Spaniard swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed down into his collar. All of the princes were eyeing him, rage beginning to colour their frozen expressions. ‘I only just realised – she – it is a –’
‘My darling,’ said a sweet voice behind them, ‘haven’t you figured it out yet?’
Isola and the princes turned around. There, leaning against the flaming tree, was the lanky figure of a woman. She stepped away unharmed from the blackening trunk, smiling angelically at Isola. Her wild hair was scrubbed around her head, and she wore a black halo of berry twigs and leaves. She had a loop of dead faeries as a necklace, floral wrist cuffs. She had wild hair like the Lady of the Unicorns, her glass feet spiderwebbed with cracks like the waking Beauty’s. She was dressed in a long gossamer skirt, her waist-cinch woven from pond reeds and sparrow bones.
Isola stumbled backwards. ‘I know you.’
‘And I know you,’ acknowledged the wood witch with a graceful curtsey, slipping fluidly free of the devouring flames and standing silhouetted in red.
‘You’re my heroine,’ breathed Isola. ‘You’re Lileo Pardieu.’
Daughter of the Séance
‘What is this?’ cried Isola. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’ She pointed an accusing finger at Lileo.
‘It will be all right.’ Lileo the wood witch smiled. ‘I promise.’
That phrase again.
‘Mother!’ howled Florence, and Isola flinched away – what? – Christobelle tightened her grasp on the dirty doppelganger girl, sloshing up the muddy pondwater.
Lileo took a step towards Is
ola, a curious wonder in her eyes. She didn’t seem to have heard Florence’s cry. ‘I’m here because you summoned me, remember?’ she said gently, in a voice like bells on red ribbon. ‘The séance last summer? You wanted me here, Isola – especially after you saw that boy jump to his death on the television.’
Isola felt the choked breath of the trees, the quiet terror in the animals watching in the dark. She tilted her head back, to the stars amongst the tangled canopy of a dying wood. ‘But, I–I didn’t want this!’
Lileo eyed her curiously. ‘Then what did you want from me?’
The princes hadn’t moved, and Isola wondered what they were waiting for. Moreover, what was she waiting for them to do? This wasn’t the showdown she’d expected; her weapons so far had been futile against the witch, who wore the face of someone Isola idolised, like a porcelain death mask. She looked around at Florence, who, under the muck and the great red handprint she’d left, suddenly seemed something to pity and not be frightened of at all. ‘I never knew you had a daughter,’ she murmured.
‘Of course you knew,’ corrected Lileo. ‘Darling, you are my daughter.’
The crackling of the burning oak tree filled the silence.
‘You’re not my mother!’ Isola snarled, suddenly defensive of the woman being eaten alive by illness at home. ‘You’re a dead storyteller! I have a mum, and yeah, maybe I used to wish she was you, and maybe she’s not the parent of the year, but she’s still mine and I love her!’
‘You do?’ said Lileo, who appeared honestly touched at the sentiment. ‘Truly? Oh, Isola. Even after everything I put you through?’
‘YOU’RE – NOT – MY – MOTHER!’ Isola bellowed, and she threw Ruslana’s dagger as hard as she could at her. The wood witch caught it easily, dropping it to the forest floor without even examining it.
‘But I am,’ said Lileo sweetly. ‘Darling, you must remember –’
‘Do you?’ Florence interjected.
They all looked down at the girl in the mud with her dark hair and striped stockings and torn black dress. A girl so unlike Isola in every way but her face.
‘Do you remember?’ Florence said hoarsely, left eye fixed wide on Isola. ‘What happened when you were ten?’
‘When I was ten?’ Isola repeated blankly. Hadn’t Bunny asked her the same question – what had she told him then?
‘REMEMBER!’ Florence shrieked, her static voice exploding like a star, a great rush of wind.
Isola’s hair and dress whipped around her and she felt an electric current flood through her brain. And through her own bloodied right eye she saw it – a film playing in her head, taking her away from herself.
The Girl Who Was a Fairytale
Born under the sun in Lille, northern France, Lileo wasn’t always a Pardieu. She began life with her father’s surname – a man who gave Lileo sermons in a thunderous manner, as if he were the one nailed through his wrists and ankles. He preached a furious love, a divine suffering, and throughout her childhood, Lileo suffered in silence.
Despite her best efforts to suppress it, the strangeness began slipping out. The other schoolchildren called her fille étrange, and said she kept ravens and black rabbits in her thick dark hair, and their parents denounced her as an unlucky omen, for wherever she went the wildlife followed, foxes and rabbits swarming the farmlands they tended.
Lileo’s mother, who had always seemed so understanding, would strike the girl across the face whenever she brought up the Nimue-world, whenever her curious eyes followed faeries as they drifted up the chimney.
‘Tu es trop vieille pour les amis imaginaires! Lileo, you are too old for imaginary friends!’ the no-longer-Nimue woman roared, and Lileo grew up thinking books brought only trouble and the world would be better off if those damned covers stayed shut, their words left to fester inside.
They moved to London when Lileo was five, occasionally travelling back to France to bury their extended family in grand churches while Latin hymns rang out and Jesus watched from the coloured glass windows.
It was in a cemetery in Paris that she first met the ghost of Oscar Wilde, who was the first person to show her true kindness. Through him she discovered a cosmos of books unread, words unlearned.
Lileo’s parents hated the books she buried her nose in, even the studious classics Oscar Wilde recommended to her. She daren’t even tell them about the leather book under her bed in which she was recording all her fanciful tales, hoping to have someone to read them aloud to someday.
They despised the loose way she wore her hair, how she openly preferred cathedrals of sunlight and altars of wildflowers to the worship dictated between the pages of that book. When she entered adolescence, during their summers back in rural France, the boys she refused to kiss would label her a sorcière, and she ran away to stalk the graveyards, and stole cigarettes and lipglosses and sticks of bubblegum from the local supermarchés. The Pardieus finally sent her away, to a famously strict boarding school in Avalon, where a cruel nun struck her hands and the only class she comfortably passed was French.
The forest that frothed along the valley lip, she soon discovered, was a Nimue hub, and she’d tear her uniform climbing through the brambles to be amongst the bustle, to speak to these beings in a language no-one else around her seemed to know.
She stroked the nose of a beautiful unicorn foal she’d taken to calling Dusk. She avoided the swan creatures and threw silver coins into the shallow pond. She met a Scotswoman who was Nim-born too, and she met a boy with a caramel kiss just waiting there on his mouth, daring her to steal it.
Lileo swapped his kiss for a golden ring and a home as close as possible to the woods she loved. But it was still difficult to be happy.
Lileo had been using her mother’s surname since her time at St Dymphna’s. The Pardieus were a long line of women all bearing single daughters, all cursed with unhappiness if they tried to deny their roots – roots that sprouted where the Lake met the Tree – or cursed with men who denounced them as whores or witches or hysterical madwomen if they couldn’t suppress their true natures.
Lileo’s mother had chosen the first curse. She stayed married, and the more she fixed her eyes to the Word of God, the less she could see, until her memory clouded, and she’d forgotten all about the sons and daughters of Nimue.
Could Lileo have both? She wanted her forest and she wanted her husband – maybe she’d break the curse, or maybe it never really existed, or maybe she only had to try harder.
Her husband tried so valiantly. Lileo was difficult to live with. He didn’t know it, but he was trying to share the burden. Trying to carry the curse for her.
She wandered the woodland and rubbed her blooming belly. She came home with the star-rise and he shouted at her – What was she thinking? She was going to be a mother; she couldn’t play at being the wandering nymph any longer!
That night, for the first time, Lileo Pardieu wished she wasn’t a daughter of that wretched Merlin-murderer. Why couldn’t she be normal? What had possessed her to have a child? For it was certain to be a girl, certain to be Nimue-cursed, and it would suffer through life as she had.
Mr Wilde was losing his patience. She hadn’t made a choice yet. Him or Nim.
Lileo Pardieu lay in a half-dream, thick in the lavender field on Avalon’s outskirts. A breeze ruffled her hair, the slipstream of an angel flying low, and her small daughter crept amongst the floaty violet stalks, speaking in a baby babble-tongue. Little Isola would often sing in this language, mimicking the strange words the flowers sang to her.
‘Isola,’ called Lileo, and the toddler came wandering back, petals crushed in her fists and crammed in her mouth.
Isola stooped to pick up every strange insect and plant in Vivien’s Wood as mother and daughter walked hand in hand back to the house. Lileo watched her, ready to stop her putting more things in her mouth – a little Lady, raised as if by unicorns to fear nothing natural.
An oasis. A small daughter, a stack of books on her bedsi
de table, a head full of fantastical tales she’d learned from the Children she’d encountered.
Lileo felt as though her noisy heart might burst with happiness.
But happiness was not an amulet, and slowly the illness crept back.
She took whatever Dr Aziz prescribed, and in between doses she would sit in her bedroom and look out the window, the princess in her tower. Sometimes she practised her death.
She kissed a wild swan-boy with moons in place of pupils and she felt seven years drain out through her teeth, but that wasn’t enough. In her worst moments she’d cry and beg her husband to leave her, to take their daughter before it infected her, too, but he’d point-blank refuse and she would tear off her wedding ring and throw fits, raging at him and the world that wouldn’t let her be content, even though she had a beautiful husband and house and a woodland next door and a blue-eyed daughter who had been made out of faeriedust, who could shoot down the moon and no-one would miss it because she was night-beauty enough for the world.
She made compromises with herself, striking Faustian deals. Whenever she felt like running away from her family, she’d look in on her sleeping daughter. Count the breaths she took. Touch her translucent eyelids and try to see through to her dreams.
When Lileo felt like hurting herself, she’d get in the bath. The thoughts hardened, poking her skull with their sharp edges, and so she soaked them, softening the suicidal impulses to jelly, to reset another day.
She told stories to her daughter – some she’d heard told as legends amongst the other Children of Nimue, many she’d invented herself – and Isola laughed and gasped and shrieked and clapped, such a big audience in such a small body. Lileo Pardieu promised herself she wouldn’t die until she’d seen her daughter outlive the first Isola Wilde.
Isola was sprouting up as fast as the plum tree in the front yard, and soon she was nine, and the day was approaching. Isola’s tenth birthday. The final milestone.
