by LK Rigel
“Mr. Thresher, what are you about?” The alarmed woman at the doorway wore an apron and held a kitchen towel, but she was not Meduyl. “Who has you there?”
“Tunic,” Elyse said. She was instantly covered with a dress. Quite nice, in fact, made of soft and colorful cloth.
“A fairy’s got me, Mrs. Thresher!” The man ran behind a chair near the fireplace. Where did that chair come from? He wasn’t afraid, Elyse was sure of that; he wanted to hide his aroused state from Mrs. Thresher. “Bring the salt!”
Mrs. Thresher ran back to the kitchen and Elyse ran out the front door, calling for Hector’s harness.
“Sun and moon!” She didn’t recognize the rig that appeared in her hand.
Too late! Too late! The crow again scolded her. She muttered cursed crow, and the bird fell to the ground dead.
Oh, Mother! Elyse burst into tears. Her power had finally come in—stronger than she ever dreamed of. You can’t begin to know your power, Elyse. This is what Mother had tried to protect her from. “Hector!” But with dawning terror, she knew he wouldn’t appear.
Mr. and Mrs. Thresher did appear. They ran toward her, throwing handfuls of salt and yelling at her to go away.
Elyse shouted, “A horse—to ride!” A serviceable bay, saddled and bridled, trotted to her from the barn. She mounted quickly as the farmer and his wife filled the air with screams. Thief! Fairy! Woe! Woe! Help us!
Elyse thought invisible and urged the horse on, leaving the farmer and his wife absolutely convinced that a fairy had stolen their horse.
And maybe one had. She rode toward Tintagos Castle, but well before she got there she knew she’d been gone longer than a few days. Inside the castle keep, she dismounted and made herself visible again.
“Fairy!” She’d appeared beside the smithy, a new forge but in the same place. An apprentice close to Elyse’s age pulled a handful of salt from a bag on his workbench and threw it at her.
“Ow!” She grabbed his hand. “That just makes me mad, boy.”
His eyes grew wide. “I thought you were a fairy. You were—you were invisible.”
“What year is this? Tell me, boy!” He wasn’t really a boy, and both of them were suddenly aware of that fact. She had to get away from people before Galen came out again. “What year?”
“One thousand ninety-seven, my lady.”
She dropped his hand, and he backed off as she mounted the horse again. A hundred years!
“If you’re not a fairy,” the apprentice asked as she turned away, “what are you?”
Good question. She called out over her shoulder, “I’m the wyrding woman of Glimmer Cottage.” And she rode home to make it so.
She’d been gone a hundred years. There was no one to explain things to. No one to accuse her of what she’d done, to hate her for it.
It didn’t help.
Guilt and regret lasted as long as Idris had predicted, and Elyse’s half human—“faeling”—body lasted nearly as long, but the fairy king had been wrong about one thing. She didn’t go insane. Over eight hundred more years passed. She set a boundary around Glimmer Cottage and lived apart from the world, avoiding the war between fae and wyrd that ravaged Dumnos. She didn’t know what it was about, and she didn’t want to know.
She had other problems, in constant awareness of Galen bound in the gold band and Diantha bound in the silver, entwined around each other and forever separated from each other.
Elyse couldn’t visit Igdrasil. It was too painful to think of Lourdes trapped inside—whether in stasis or with full consciousness, Elyse couldn’t know. Couldn’t stand to know.
She would have lasted longer if it hadn’t all been so draining. She had to wyrd the entire village and surrounds every time it occurred to someone that the wyrding woman of Glimmer Cottage had been there longer than humanly possible.
For five hundred years, the hardest part was to keep Galen and Diantha in check. Every so often the boundary around Glimmer Cottage failed and someone slipped through.
One day, a woodcutter came to the door looking for work. He had kind brown eyes, just like Galen’s. He caressed Elyse’s cheek, and she remembered how good it had felt to be kissed. Why not indulge herself, just this once? She lifted her lips to the woodcutter and said, “Galen.”
Diantha streamed out of her silver band into Elyse’s mind and said it again, “Galen!”
“Diantha, I found you!” The woodcutter’s arms were so strong, his need so desperate. Elyse regained control just before Diantha could spread her legs.
In all the time of her life, Elyse had never made love. She should have slept with Idris when she had the chance. More than once, she’d been tempted to remove the ring and end it all. But if she died, Galen and Diantha—and Lourdes—would be trapped in their hells for eternity. Or she could bring another woodcutter to her door and let Galen and Diantha have their way. But then she’d have to add a woodcutter’s soul to her guilt list—and if all she had wanted was physical pleasure, she would have stayed in fae.
In the end, time won. In 1933, her resilient faeling body wore out. The teeth were long gone, the hair a few wispy colorless strands. Skin amassed with age spots. Odd lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. Hair in her nose. Sun and moon, the indignities.
But her magics had not weakened. She would do what had to be done. She got the idea from Galen and Diantha, actually. She’d find another body.
It was easy. She let down the boundary, and soon enough someone came to the door, a seventeen-year-old girl—seventeen!—who was starving. Mary. Perfect name for a martyr. Too skinny, but that could be remedied.
Like a wicked witch in a fairytale, Elyse invited Mary in and fed her tea and biscuits.
She’d been walking the countryside for weeks, begging a meal where it looked safe, sleeping under hedgerows.
“The country is in a bad way these days,” Elyse sympathized. “Much good it’s done Dumnos to join whatever Sarumos is calling itself now. The British Empire.” Mary frowned, and Elyse wondered if she’d said something amiss. She hadn’t been keeping up, that was true. “Have you no family, Mary, nowhere to go?”
“No family.” She blushed and looked a bit miserable. Perhaps she’d gotten into some trouble and been disowned by her family.
“How would you like…well, this may sound strange, Mary, but would you like to stay here at Glimmer Cottage for a time?”
“Oh, ma’am. I…I don’t know.”
What was there to wonder about? The little fool was starving. She’d have food and a safe roof over her head.
“I’m getting old, you see, and I could use a…” what were they calling it these days? “A companion.” Elyse put a wyrd on the biscuits to sweeten the deal, make Mary think it was the best food she’d ever eaten.
“I suppose I could stay for just a little while.”
“Of course, dear. Only as long as you like. And I’ll give you a small gift to seal the bargain.”
Elyse slipped the ring onto Mary’s hand, the skin fresh, elastic, and smooth.
“Silver and gold find you.
Silver and gold bind you.
Serve not desire, but enhance delight.
All will be well, all will be right.”
After so much time, Elyse knew something about possession. There was barely a struggle. Alert faeling beats unaware human every day of the week. The first thing Elyse did in her new body was inhale, deep and long. Heaven to have healthy lungs again!
Then she let loose a scream, shrill and piercing.
No wonder Mary had been…reluctant. The lumpen mass of wrinkles lying on the ground looked grotesque and smelled worse. With a flick of her wrist, Elyse wyrded the body out of sight, out to sea. Let what creatures who dared to make a meal of it.
She spent the first twenty-four hours in blissful sensual submersion. Everything tasted better. An apple—an apple! What wonderful teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear, crunch, crunch. Coffee. Beans and onions. All delicious.
The next day, she gave Mary a bit of rein. Let her see the world, taste some food, smell the jasmine on the roof. She was docile—grateful to have a full belly. But soon it went bad. Once the novelty of daily food and a secure bed wore off, Mary resented the occupation. Elyse’s noble cause didn’t impress her.
Your sister is dead, she said. She’s not inside some tree waiting for liberation. You killed her.
Mary had to go. Too bad, so sad. Elyse pushed the host personality into a dark cubby in the brain and sealed the space over. Mary was weak and uninteresting, and it was easy to forget her, but the human body wore out after forty-three years, the blink of an eye.
In 1976, the world was sophisticated and prosperous and far too wary of strangers. No one was going to come in for tea and let Elyse slip a ring onto her finger. One day she found a young woman in the garden smelling the roses and didn’t bother with small talk. She jumped inside and put the ring on herself, once again wyrding the discarded carcass out to sea.
She’d taken the body of a countess. Beverly, a drug-addled flower child, but a countess nonetheless. Someone would miss her.
Elyse went up to the roof deck to gather a sense of the village. The countess’s husband was worried about her. She’d been missing for months. Perfect. Elyse wyrded him to believe that he’d received a telegram. It informed him of Beverly’s tragic death from a drug overdose. She’d been on a cruise and fallen overboard. Lost at sea.
No remains.
This time, Elyse prepared ahead for the day she’d need a new body. She created the legend of the Handover and wyrded the story into every human memory in the county.
Lady Dumnos was fine—a bit muddled from so much pot and acid, and too weak to fight. Still, Elyse never would have taken her if she’d known her history. Sun and moon! From Beverly’s time in Piccadilly, the memories of sex were astounding. Men, women—men and women! The poor thing had run into a band of fairies on mischief night. Elyse could tell they were fairies because she recognized one—Aubrey!
Elyse stopped the memory right there and wiped it from both their minds.
And then the boy. That was awful. Beverly had a child. Her despair over missing little Cade was so intense that Elyse had to wyrd the boy with an aversion to Glimmer Cottage to keep the two of them apart. She didn’t need that drama added to her collection.
Beverly was docile, but she had a clever streak. Passive-aggressive, they called it these days, but Elyse just called her sneaky. Sometimes when Elyse’s focus was off, Beverly would get out. She couldn’t get away or break her binding to Elyse, but she’d assert her independence in little ways. Drink peppermint tea, which Elyse loathed. Eat avocados, sun and moon save us. Marion brought them in.
The sister. Marion, the cheerful innkeeper who came by one day with scones and strawberry jam and clotted cream and screamed when her sister opened the door. That problem was easily addressed with a forgetting wyrd. She came again with gossip of the world and more good things to eat and eventually made herself wholly necessary to one’s happiness.
“Did you like the avocados?” Marion asked one day. “I found your note in my bag after I left last time.”
“They were perfect,” Elyse lied. Sneaky Beverly, finding a way to smuggle in contraband foods.
Beverly didn’t stop at food. She assimilated a pinch of wyrding skill, not enough to do harm, but one day Elyse found herself staring into the glimmer glass without remembering having picked it up.
“Beverly, what did you do?” Cade was in the glass, at an awkward age, talking to a girl.
I don’t know. I picked it up, and he was there.
Elyse was about to set a boundary on the glimmer glass to keep it away from Beverly when the girl in the glass laughed. A cruel laugh, not with the boy, but at him. Elyse felt the pain sear Beverly’s heart.
“Don’t look too often,” Elyse relented. “It will make you sad.”
After a few years it seemed Beverly had given up the glimmer glass until one afternoon when Elyse awoke from napping on the roof. The glass was in her lap, showing the boy—a young man now. He held a cat in his lap and scratched behind its ears, his face animated as if he was watching a play. It’s a telly, Beverly told her. You should get one.
Ten years later, Elyse woke with the glass on her bed, focused on Cade accepting a cup of tea from Marion.
Elyse didn’t stop Beverly from watching her child. There was no harm in it once every ten years. Anyway, the bond between Beverly and Cade reminded Elyse of her bond with Frona. She renewed her resolve to atone for what she’d done to Galen and Diantha and to Lourdes.
Marion became the only friend Elyse had ever had. She visited, made tea, and told fantastical lies about the world. Airplanes, Elyse could believe—and she’d seen Spitfires fly over Dumnos during one of the wars. She confirmed the existence of television. But men on the moon? Utter hogwash. Still, the stories were entertaining.
Until Marion betrayed her.
14
Lily
Elyse was frozen on the outside, but her mind raced. While Marion pulled on the oracle’s ring, grunting and panting, Elyse ticked through the possibilities. How had Marion, neither wyrder nor fae, done this to her?
Beverly snickered from some corner of the brain. That was it. Drugs! Marion had drugged the tea. Stupid woman.
Elyse wyrded off the drug’s effects just as Marion pulled golden Galen away from silver Diantha. The lovers screamed in agony in Elyse’s brain, and rage boiled through her veins and exploded. Elyse thought she might nearly have another soul to atone for, but Marion wasn’t hurt.
“I’d do anything to see my sister again.” She retreated and ran to the door, the gold band still in her clenched hand. “Just one more time.”
“Silly woman. You’d do anything to get your sister back? Well, so would I!” Elyse wyrded the door shut and threw a boundary around Marion. “Stupid, stupid human beings!”
That was it! Human beings. That’s where she’d made the mistake, inhabiting human bodies. She needed a body with fae blood. So obvious. The wheels clicked and whirred in her mind. Mother wasn’t the only human ever to lie with fae. Elyse knew that much from her brief exposure to Beverly’s life. There must be someone else like Elyse in the world.
“I’m going to let you go,” she said. “Give me the ring.”
“No.” Marion shook her head.
“Give me the ring, Marion. I’m not going to die. You only got half of it.” She held up her hand with the silver band still there. Marion’s face fell. So forlorn, Elyse felt sorry for her.
“I want to make a deal with you.”
Elyse put a wyrd on the Galen half of the ring so it would attract a faeling, a human with fae blood. “Send this half of the ring out into the world. If it brings the person I need, I’ll let you see the Beverly again.”
Of course Marion agreed. What choice did she have? She took the Galen half to an antique dealer in London. Antique, ha. They had no idea. Then they waited. A month passed with no response, and they were all miserable, Elyse, Marion, Beverly, and Diantha.
The strategy failed utterly. Galen was gone, and Diantha’s constant wailing gave Elyse a headache even she couldn’t cure. For the first time in a millennium, she sympathized with Aeolios.
Then one morning Beverly made her presence felt above Diantha’s sobs. Wake up! Wake up! Look! The glimmer glass lay beside Elyse on the bed. She’s the one. The glass showed a young woman lying on a bed, crying.
“How do you know that, Beverly?” Elyse said. “Who is she?” Beside the woman was a paper that contained pictures of Tintagos. There was Igdrasil. And could that pile of rocks be Tintagos Castle? Oh, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, no!
Look. She has a tether. That’s how the glass found her.
She was right. The woman in the glass held a necklace in her hand very much like the one Idris had tried to give Elyse all those years ago. “Beverly, you clever girl. There’s more to you than I’ve realized.”
Ely
se touched the glass, and it told her the woman’s name. She was on the other side of the world. Thank sun and moon for airplanes. Elyse sent a wyrd through the glass to call the woman to Tintagos. “You deserve a reward, Beverly. Tomorrow when Marion comes, you can listen when I tell her to prepare a place at the inn for Lily Evergreen.
15
Give Me
Lilith sat across from Marion in the carriage next to Bella. Cammy got in last. Instead of sitting by Marion, she plopped down between Lilith and Bella and handed Marion her phone. “Our last ride in the Bausineymobile,” she said. “Would you take our picky, Moo?”
Cammy saying “Moo” was just wrong, like nails being dragged across a blackboard. She had been cloyingly sweet since this morning when she discovered Lilith in the lobby, having been stood up for her breakfast date.
When Marion had returned from taking the earl’s breakfast, she said Cade wasn’t feeling well and she’d replace him at the Handover ceremony. She was nervous, and Lilith had been sure she was lying. For one thing, Cade had already told her last night that he wasn’t going to the Handover. Marion was probably covering for him.
Cammy retrieved her camera and moved over beside Marion. “I’d have thought his lordship would never miss the big day.”
Cade had abandoned them all. Likely, he’d come to his senses and realized he wanted nothing to do with Lilith. If only she could remember clearly what had happened last night. One minute they were on the verge of making mad passionate love, and then the prince and princess from her dreams had shown up. Then she was in Cade’s car, and he was taking her back to the Tragic Fall.
Cade must have decided that she was too nutso for him after all.
He’d given such mixed signals. On the roof he’d pulled away as if she was repulsive to him. At the inn he’d begged her not to go to the Handover, as if he sensed some danger and was truly worried about her. And then he didn’t show up this morning. Men! She should take a break from them for awhile. As she had meant to the first place.
