Curse of the Thirteenth Fey

by Jane Yolen

  My first flight was not a real flight, of course. I merely hopped, skipped, and lifted above the ground for about twelve seconds, covering a distance of no more than seventeen feet, most of it downhill. I screamed all the way, more with delight than fear. As it was a scream and not a Shout, I only distracted the bluebirds and crows without disturbing so much as a feather. Lucky for them.

  Darna was supposed to be looking after me, and she took her duties seriously, so she ran to tell the others. That left me to tumble down the rest of the muddy hill unwatched. It was the beginning of my role as the accident-prone one of the Family. The number thirteen at work, I suppose. I hit my head on a small protruding rock and lay unresponsive for almost a minute before Darna came back with Mother and the Aunts.

  When they found me at the bottom of the hill, a bit mixed up from the head bump, there was confusion and distress. They fluttered their hands (Solange told me this) but were careful not to Shout. Father was summoned from the library, but I woke up before he arrived. For a moment, my eyes crossed and I couldn’t focus properly.

  I touched my mouth with a muddy hand, saying, “Please, some milk, Mistress Bossy.” I was incredibly thirsty and, for some reason, thought my kin were cows, the lovely black-and-white kind.

  This strained things for a few minutes till Mother realized I wasn’t being sassy but merely concussed. At that, they hastily gathered me up, cured my bruises with their healing touches, and argued about whether I had the Sight or not.

  “Certainly she has Flight,” said Great-aunt Gilda.

  “That doesn’t mean she has Sight,” Aunt Glade pointed out.

  “Different first letters means a different spell,” Aunt Granne added, always turning the obvious into the mysterious.

  Me, I fell asleep during their long concatenation that went from Flight to Height to Blight to Sight and back again. According to Father, who was studying about it, the Shouting Fey are the only ones who still hold to rhyme in their spells. At least according to his books.

  “If it was good enough for the ancestors . . .” Great-aunt Gilda intoned as always.

  At this point Father arrived, scooped me up in his arms, and took me back to the library, where I spent a lovely afternoon on the couch, a blanket lapped over me and whatever books I wanted read to me on a table by my side. In between naps, I heard every single one of them twice. Father had a lovely reading voice: lilting, mellow, and convincing.

  • • • • • • • •

  As Solange had said, there were also my vivid dreams that convinced the Aunts I was the One. In those dreams I seemed to see a strange future, where humans flew through the air on iron wings, babies were born in bottles, and food was plucked from boxes filled with winter ice and light.

  It turned out those dreams were sent to me by any ague or earache that I came down with, or by the peculiar swirling patterns of the moldy wallpaper in my bedroom, or from an unidentified allergy to flyspeck not diagnosed until I was a grown-up.

  Besides, the dreams were odd conversions of the things I’d read about in the library. No one truly understood this. Except for Father, none of the Aunts read much, and my siblings didn’t read at all.

  I was, in my Father’s words, “ever a surprise.”

  At each dream, the Aunts gathered again, standing over my cot, my bed, my library chair, my bale of hay, wherever I was couched at the time. They listened to my maunderings, then they wrangled about the meanings, made charts, laid on hands, tried to figure out what my prophesies meant. As they’d done that day at the family picnic.

  The one who almost always sat by me with a cool compress or warm milk, rocking me through the worst of my dreams, was Father and, occasionally, my brother Dusty. Dusty often brought a little gift, usually something sparkly he’d found somewhere. His nickname in the Family was Mr. Magpie, and the shelves of his room were stuffed with bits he found all over the place—glittering globes, silver ribbons, shining buttons or coins, bits of broken glass, and rocks with sparkly stuff in them.

  Hardly anyone else ever sat with me as I battled through a fever. They all seemed to feel that if a thing couldn’t be solved by magickal healing, it wasn’t worth solving.

  Father took a much more practical approach. “You’ll be fine,” he’d say, mixing honey in the milk. “Nothing to worry about,” he’d promise, wringing out another cool cloth for my head. “Close your eyes, and I’ll read to you,” he’d tell me, and he always did.

  I expected his calm, quiet presence at my sickbed, and if he couldn’t be there, and someone else besides Dusty sat with me instead, I’d make myself sicker with my weeping and demands until whoever was caring for me found Father in the library and he came running to my side, storybook in hand.

  • • • • • • • •

  As the years went by, it became clear to the Aunts that none of my childish predictions had come true. So they stopped asking me to look into the future, realizing that I was simply guessing. Or inventing. Or borrowing from the books I’d read. What humans call “storying” when they do it themselves. Or when someone else does it, they call it “telling a lie.”

  “Not that imagination is to be sniffed at,” said Aunt Glade one afternoon, leaning over my sickbed. Her wattle shook as she spoke. Then she sniffed loudly. I didn’t miss the irony of that sniff, but I didn’t move a muscle.

  As Aunt Glade turned away, her voluminous skirt swishing like leaves skittering over a human road, I heard her mutter to Mother, “That’s what comes from mixing with elves. You get weak children.” She sniffed again, though softer this time, and added, “You married him for naught.”

  Mother said nothing in return. Nothing.

  They both believed I was asleep, but truly I wasn’t. As I often did, I was only pretending to sleep. That way I could listen in on the grown-ups’ conversations. By six, I’d become a professional eavesdropper. It was the only way to learn anything in the Family. For all they were great Shouters, the Aunts and Mothers were also great keepers of secrets. Of course the problem with listening in when others think you are sleeping is that sometimes you hear something you wished you hadn’t.

  What I heard that day seemed so awful that I almost sat up and screamed at the two of them. Screaming is not Shouting. There are rules for Shouts, and only lungs and bad temper for screams. At six, I had a child’s version of the Shout and thought I’d dimmed the stars one evening when I was out practicing in my secret meadow, which lay on the other side of a copse of trees from the Wooing Path. Probably I’d simply mistaken a bank of clouds for my own work. As frightened as I was then of what might have been my power, part of me was sure I’d never have enough. After all, I was more elf than fey, and elves have no ability to Shout at all. But instead of sitting up and asking what Aunt Glade meant, or why Mother didn’t just Shout her down, I lay there, tears pooling beneath closed lids, my heart broken. I could feel the jagged pieces in my chest.

  It didn’t matter that Aunt Glade thought me weak. Clearly I was. No one else in the Family was sick in bed at least twice a season, and sometimes more. No one else ran fevers like mine. No one else got sick headaches whenever too much magick was present.

  No, that wasn’t what made me ready to scream myself hoarse. It was the other words—“You married him for naught”—that raced about in my head. Had Mother only married Father to get a man to stay around for the Family? For the first time, I’d overheard a secret I didn’t want to know. I suddenly understood something that should never have been mine to understand. Mother didn’t love Father, had never loved him, had used him for whatever wicked purposes the women of the Shouting Fey use their men. No wonder the human Uncles kept disappearing. Who would want to stay if he was unloved, unwanted, uncared for?

  I convinced myself in the middle of my hysteria that probably now Mother and Father would be separated, what we fey called a “dissolvement,” and Father—lik
e the Uncles—would disappear from our lives forever. Perhaps he’d wander off a high cliff in despair, not having wings like a fey to fly down gracefully. I imagined him dead fifty ways before I fell into a real fever sleep brought about by sadness and fear, where I dreamed even more disasters, earthquakes, conspiracies, and the Great War, all things I’d read about and only half understood.

  A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF THE FEY,

  WHICH FATHER TOLD ME ONE NIGHT

  • • • • • • • •

  In the old country of the Fey, which lay Under the Hill, there were counties larger than any human regions, states, or shires. And that country was divided into two great faerie courts.

  The Seelie Court was where the good faeries congregated, though “good” in the old tongue merely meant blessed, or lucky. There were many—both human and fey—who saw nothing good about the Seelie folk at all. Father said the Seelie folk talked about doing good, wrote ballads about it, yet never actually helped anyone but themselves . . . to their neighbors’ property, jewels, and spells.

  The Unseelie Court was where the reputed bad faeries danced the night away, or at least they danced when they were not off playing tricks on humans like stealing their children or leading them into poison ivy while the humans thought they were in a faerie grotto, or leaving boogers on the Seelie Queen’s crown that looked like precious jewels until dawn. When Father talked about them, he spoke in hushed tones. “No need to alert them,” he said, only naming them in whispers.

  “Why, Father?” I asked. “Will they hurt us?”

  “They will try,” he said, “because they are cold, distant, cruel, and unfeeling.” Then he saw me shudder, so he added quickly, “But Mother and the Aunts will keep us safe.”

  I thought there was little to choose between the two courts, and said so.

  Father had laughed, that water-over-stones laugh of his. Cupping my chin in his right hand, he told me, “You are too wise for your years, but remember this: stealing your jewels and stealing your soul are leagues apart. However, I don’t want you to even think about wandering Under the Hill, child. Better to stay up here in the Light, where the wind puzzles through the trees, fish leap in our streams, and we can follow the running of the deer . . .”” He looked away to the far hills, to the West, where his own people lived. Or where his people once lived. We’re his own people now.

  And then I thought about the third court, our court, the Court of the Shouting Fey. We don’t live Under the Hill but above it. In the soft air. In the green meadows. Father said that according to Great-aunt Gilda, the Under the Hill folk consider us a silly, useless, powerless few. They call us “the Misfits” or “the Losers” and sometimes “the Quirks” because we live above ground. They threw us all out of Faerie, for unknown reasons. And even Great-aunt Gilda, the oldest of all of us, doesn’t remember why. Or at least Great-aunt Gilda doesn’t say. Another secret.

  We, of course, just called ourselves the Family.

  My Great-grandfather Fergus (according to Father) had been the first leader of the Shouting Fey. No one called Fergus a king, though in fact that’s what he was. He had other titles, too: Lord of Misrule, Earl of the Downers, Father Fol-de-rol, and sometimes just plain Puck.

  Great-grandfather Fergus had married Banshee, a woman of the faerie mounds, whom no one else wanted, for she was Cursed to keen loudly at the waterside whenever there was to be a death of kings and their kin. Faerie kings as well as human kings, which may be why Fergus refused the title. He reportedly said, “If I am no king, she will never have to keen me down.”

  Dusty once said that made Fergus a coward and he wanted nothing more to do with him, but at that point he’d never himself had anything to be truly brave about except an iron bar.

  I said back, “Great-grandfather Fergus sounds less like someone afraid and more as if he was just terribly in love with his wife and didn’t want her to suffer.”

  Dusty answered witheringly, “You are a romantic.”

  I went right to my favorite dictionary in the D section of the library and looked that up. We have thirteen dictionaries, enough for each of Father’s children, but I’m the only one who regularly consults them. Romantic—it seems—is not a bad thing to be.

  Great-grandfather Fergus was evidently a romantic, too. He’d fallen in love with Banshee’s long white-gold hair and her black shroud eyes. He nearly wept tears of pearl at her lovely voice. “Like an angel,” said the folks who’d obviously never heard her keening. When Banshee wasn’t keening by a river in a voice that could shatter glass, she spoke softly, even sweetly. In fact, some folk called her a “Fallen Angel,” which is what people say when they can’t think of something nicer.

  However, “keening” is a pretty way of putting what Banshee did. When Great-aunt Gilda told stories about her, she said that Banshee’s voice was somewhere between the wail of a grieving woman and the moan of an owl, appropriate for someone whose chief job is to announce the deaths of kings before they happen.

  It was because of Great-grandmother Banshee, of course, that we got to be known as the Shouting Fey. The use of the voice for magick seemed to be the one trait that bred true in the Family. Banshee’s three daughters didn’t keen, but all could Shout, a variation that was passed down to the rest of us, especially the girls of the Family, of whom I am the youngest.

  • 3 •

  PROPHECY AND INVITATION

  My big adventure really began nine months before the human king’s only child was born. I mean the human king on whose land our pavilion and belvederes and whimsies sit. I was thirteen and thought I knew a thing or three, though what followed after the royal birth proved to me that everything I’d believed before was wrong.

  That birth had been long awaited, really long awaited. As in a dozen years or more. For the fey, that’s an eyeblink. But for humans—especially for the royal kind—it’s an eternity. We fey rarely die except by accident, Oath-breaking, or on purpose, and then mostly out of boredom. On the other hand, humans labor mightily to produce an heir or two before one or both parents expire, which happens early and often.

  The queen of this kingdom was a harridan with a great dowry and even greater lands. Alas, she was thought to be barren, for years of that particular royal marriage had produced nothing but promises, taxes, and wars. The king might have set her aside for someone younger, prettier, quieter, who could bear him children, except then she would have taken her lands and jewels home with her. Because of her personality, even with her lands and jewels, neither her father nor brother wanted her back. But they would have been forced to go to war for the insult anyway.

  Still, worried about being thrown out of the kingdom, the queen took matters into her own hands. She Bid Great-aunt Gilda come to her and bring both a potion and a Wish that would guarantee children. Now, as the queen knew, such potions and such Wishes could sometimes go awry, which is why she hadn’t sent a Bidding for a child before. But she was desperate, fearing the king was already deep into negotiations to send her home. And so she Bid Great-aunt Gilda swear a terrible Oath guaranteeing a child.

  So Great-aunt Gilda had had to swear because of the Bidding. But she knew that there could be no guarantee. Magick simply doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you get exactly the opposite of what you expected, especially if something like a Bidding or an Oath is involved. So when she got home, Great-aunt Gilda called us all to a family meeting in front of her house. She was dressed in her best purple robes, which quieted the trembling of her wings. There was an odd pallor to her face, though normally she was rosy-cheeked and the picture of health.

  “My dears,” she said, her voice low, which was also unusual, “I have had to swear an Oath this day to guarantee the queen will soon be with child.”

  We all gasped. We knew the odds.

  “So I have called you together to tell you my Will.”

  I was all atremble
. In the thirteen fey years I’d been alive, no one in the Family had ever died or even had to tell us their Will because of sickness, accident, or a coming duel. My headaches and agues were simply not thought to be life-threatening enough and besides, as the youngest, I hadn’t very much to give away.

  So it was clear that Great-aunt Gilda thought she might not be successful with the queen’s baby. And, if she wasn’t successful, the Oath would be compromised, and she’d burst into a thousand stars. I tried to hold back my tears, but they were already gathering in the corners of my eyes.

  “Being of sound Fey mind,” she began, “I bequeath all that I have to the Family. Gardenia can have my belvedere, because she’s stuck in the smallest folly which still leaks, despite all we’ve done to fix it, though there’s this proviso: every one of her sisters gets to choose a keepsake, and after them, the grandlings. The girls (by which she meant Mother’s sisters) may have my everyday robes and dresses, except for these purple robes, which go to Galda, who is the eldest, and Banshee’s Cloak of Invisibility, which—if found—shall go to Grete as the seventh, and after her, to her youngest, Gorse, the thirteenth.”

  Beside me, Solange drew in a harsh breath, for surely she, as the seventh child of a seventh child, should have been getting the Cloak and not me.

  Either Great-aunt Gilda hadn’t heard that sharp intake of breath or thought it beneath her to react to it at such a moment, for she simply continued telling her Will. “The boys can have Fergus’s compass, knives, hats, and bows, the arrows they already have. And as for you, elf . . .” She turned to Father, who stood stony-faced in the back of our group. I looked over my shoulder at him. “There are three books in my belvedere from Banshee’s time, and you may have them for your library, where they may do more good than sitting on my shelf.”

  Father looked stunned. I supposed he hadn’t known about the books. I smiled tremulously at him, and only then did the tears slip down my cheeks.