Aimee Ogden - [BCS307 S01]

by Buttercream

  “Warmth.” With the moon in her hair, Willowbright couldn’t read the girl’s face. “Take it. Take what warmth you can wring from my life. If you can do this thing for me.”

  It was agreed, then. Willowbright fluttered off the girl’s lap and looked about. A gown that shone like the sun—that she couldn’t contrive. But one that shimmered like the moon? She tore a moonbeam free of its moorings and shook it out to test its drape. Two more slender shafts that slipped between the clouds made slippers, and a few threads of starlight bound the thing together. Finally, a fistful of snow cast into the girl’s hair melted into a pearl-studded net.

  The girl’s expression didn’t change, but the fire in her eyes kindled anew. The goatskin fell into the snow as she shed her cheap homespun. As she slipped into Willowbright’s creations, Willowbright focused on the matter of transportation. A mount, the girl had said, as if a maiden alone could simply ride sidesaddle up to the estate house in the dead of winter! She dug in the snow until she produced an acorn cap and two pebbles. They vibrated in her palm, listening to the new names she whispered.

  When they understood, she flung them into the air. Instead of an acorn cap, a carriage and team struck the ground, great wheels creaking, and in place of pebbles, a driver and footman caught themselves in the ankle-deep snow. She’d left too much gray in their complexions, but no one would look at a servant too closely tonight.

  “Oh,” the girl gasped, spinning in a luminescent swirl. “Thank you. It’s wonderful. It will last all night?”

  Adequate, yes, though Willowbright for one wouldn’t have sold her life’s warmth for it. She pointed to the moon again, traced its path toward the horizon, then indicated the treetops to the east, where the sun would crest in ten hours’ time. Under the sun’s unforgiving eye, night’s magic would quickly burn away.

  She shot up in front of the girl’s face, though, when the girl lifted her hem and stepped toward the carriage. Wait, Willowbright signaled, palms out. When the girl nodded, Willowbright mimed scooping a double handful of snow. The girl obeyed, and Willowbright flew beneath her hands and pressed them over her eyes. When the girl lowered them, a silver mask clung to her fine features. Almost. Willowbright snapped a pair of icicles from an overhanging branch and affixed them at the girl’s temples. There, they curled into a goat’s stubborn little horns, and her masquerade was complete.

  The girl touched her face, where the white brocade lay flush. “I wish I had my mother’s ring,” she whispered.

  But there could be no turning back now. Willowbright ushered her forward, and the girl stepped into the carriage with the footman’s assistance. Before the door closed, Willowbright glimpsed her hard bright face, with lips clamped together so tightly that Willowbright couldn’t tell whether the girl was smiling or crying.

  After that, Willowbright didn’t see the girl again. Because the margrave’s middle son had swept her off into the velvet-cushioned rooms of the estate house? Or because she’d failed to win her coveted morganatic marriage and had gotten cast out of her stepmother’s house for her ambition? The offerings of cake and cream had ceased, so the cause mattered little. Willowbright eked out her days on acorn paste, but sweet stolen warmth blunted the season’s hungry edge. For a while, she managed to tempt a plump boy into trade. But his slippery little brain forgot often as not that he had bargained bread crusts for Willowbright’s proffered sweets. His attention endured a few weeks before his gifts lapsed altogether. The broken agreement wrung Willowbright magic-dry. But the food held long enough for her to scrape survival out from beneath frost and ice.

  The frozen forest melted grudgingly into spring, bringing sunshine and sweet nectar, and Willowbright wept for joy when summer offered up its fruits. When the first wild strawberries crawled out from their tangle of vines, she gorged herself silly. After a day curled around her stretched belly, she spent a more prudent afternoon lining her new home in a sycamore hollow with fresh leaves.

  Once strawberry days gave way to summer heat, Willowbright flew farther afield, where the blackberry brambles clawed skyward. Her cape, stained pollen-yellow now, held three blackberries. In a few trips Willowbright could carry enough food to last the week.

  If she wore the cape at Court, she would be laughed out of the sett, out of the very forest. Not even human patronage could save her from that. So she didn’t wear the cape to Court. She did not, in fact, attend Court at all, except when it was required for the moon’s turn and the Midsummer Hunt. When she did go, she learned not to shiver in the unfriendly shadows at the margins of the Queen’s glow.

  Little fruit remained at the bushes’ tops, where sun-brushed berries ripened first,. but unripe berries gleamed ruby-red where sunlight sliced through the thorns. Willowbright crept beneath the brambles, wings tucked close. Sour fruit wasn’t worth the trouble to carry, not if it would empty her belly as soon as fill it. She squinted into the deeper darkness.

  A murmur of fairy voices wafted from the shadows.

  Surprise twitched her wings. She shimmied deeper into the bush. Closer to the ground, the sickly sweetness of rotting berries filled her mouth. She landed and slipped in the fruit-muck that littered the soil. The voices had faded, but a dull animal moan reached out to grip her heart. Some unfortunate creature might’ve crawled into the brush to hide or nurse its wounds. Willowbright might able to aid it, if it would serve her for a spell.

  A dark shuddering shape solidified from the restive shadows. Willowbright could nearly make out the long limbs of a fox—or a squirrel’s hunched back? Then the twisting lines and curves resolved into not one body but three.

  One wild fairy sprawled on her back in the fallen fruits. Stains and dripping juice mottled the hard planes of her body. Another rocked back and forth upon the first one’s face, patchwork wings tilting drunkenly for balance. The third rutted against her, pelvis to pelvis, one hand bracing herself and the other working wetly between their tangled legs.

  The moan rolled to a shrill peak and crashed into raucous laughter on the other side. The fairy in the middle arched her back, levered upward by the spasms of her wings. The one astride her mouth slipped and tumbled over backward. Without getting up, she lifted a liquor-limp berry to her lips and sucked its soft pulp.

  Willowbright’s foot crushed more fallen fruit when she took a tottering step forward. Her hand squeezed her own breastbone; her mouth had gone salt-dry.

  The wild fairy on her back was watching her, the same wild fairy she’d met before. “Well?” she said. “Have you decided yet, tameling?”

  The fairy held out a hand and beckoned.

  Willowbright’s wings refused to work. A fat drop of black juice rolled off the wild fairy’s fingers, and the soil drank it up where it struck. The fairy between her legs groaned like a storm-shaken tree and bent to suck the juice that ran down her lover’s jaw.

  The pink flash of her tongue shattered Willowbright’s frozen limbs. She fled the blackberry bramble, heedless of the thorns that nipped her arms, and her wings didn’t stop beating until she dropped into her leaf-lined home. For a long while after, her heart kept the same frantic rhythm. When she closed her eyes, the wild fairy’s lips were against her ear, whispering of sinew and stolen light.

  On a cloudy late-summer day, Willowbright clutched a dandelion-stem bridle and crept closer to the butterfly she’d marked as her desired mount. It lapped at a woundwort, heedless of Willowbright where she wove between dancing wildflowers. Two flicks of her wings lifted her to the level of the flower, and she readied the slippery bridle to throw.

  “There you are.”

  The butterfly twitched away into the air. Willowbright watched in dismay as it shriveled into the distance: it had been a fine blue argus, too, not some ill-tempered copper. An impatient flick of her wings spun her around, and she looked up to find the goatskin girl.

  The girl’s face was still moon-pale despite the summer heat. Weight had fallen away from her, like the snow that melted to leave behind hollows carved
into the soil. Dark stains, not of berry juice, ringed her eyes, and her ragged-cropped hair hung nearly as stringy as when she’d sheltered beneath the goatskin. “I went home for my things,” she said. “My mother’s ring and my father’s cup. Do you know what she did, when she found out the margrave’s son wanted me?”

  No need to ask who she was. Willowbright’s wings scraped the air, as if begging her to flee. She shook her head at them, anchored by a dread sense of debt. The harness slithered from her hand and the grass devoured it whole.

  “The margrave’s son came through the villages, looking for the girl who’d won his heart.” The goatskin girl drew her hair back from her face. A stub shone florid red against behind her cheek, where her ear should have been. “She cut off my ears, so that the mask I’d left wouldn’t fit and mark me true. She rubbed ash on my face and told him I was a madwoman, when I raved and screamed and begged him to know me.”

  Willowbright spread her hands wide: half apology, half plea for explanation. Did the girl blame Willowbright for her stepmother’s monstrosity or her lover’s fickle eyes? There was nothing Willowbright could do about either of those.

  The girl took a step closer, so that her shadow swallowed up Willowbright. “Make it so that every time he touches a coin, from now to the day he dies, it burns his fingers. Make it so that each time he dances, it’s as if he does so on burning coals.” Veins rolled blue in her wrists when her fingers curled into claws. “Make it so her bones go as brittle as ice, so that she can’t bend a knee or stretch a hand without it shattering. Make her skin thin as lace, so that she can see every crack. So that they slice clean through.”

  All this would be too much to ask, even if she’d showed the proper deference. Magic so dark would leave marks on more than just its intended victims. Willowbright slashed downward with one hand, an unmistakable gesture of abnegation.

  “Yes.” The goatskin girl’s shout shook the air, and Willowbright’s wings jerked to keep her aloft. “You promised me safety. You promised me a margrave’s son. You owe me this and more besides!”

  The imputation against Willowbright’s sworn word was too much. She shook out her wings to leave this presumptuous mortal behind.

  A great weight struck her and bore her groundward. When she crashed into the dirt, air fled her lungs. She kicked frantically, held fast by a terrible weight..

  The press solidified: not only weight but grip. Willowbright shrieked for breath and blinked her streaming eyes. The goatskin girl’s dark shape loomed. “You’ll not deny me as easily as that,” she said.

  Willowbright folded around herself and dug her teeth into the girl’s knuckles. Blood ran hot over her chin, but the girl didn’t let go, didn’t even flinch. She spread her palm to force Willowbright flatter into the struggle-torn grass and reached into her pocket with her free hand.

  Through tear-spangled eyes, Willowbright saw the flash of the iron nail. She screamed when it tore through her wing and pinned her to the ground. She strained against it with all her might, but that was only enough to pinch her vision with jagged bursts of light. Lymph and broken scales made sparkling mud of the dirt.

  “Take his sight,” said the goatskin girl. Though she sat back on her heels, taking the weight off Willowbright’s body, her voice stayed close and harsh and her sour-milk breath spilled into Willowbright’s face. Willowbright pulled weakly against her own pain. “Make it so everything she eats tastes of ash and burnt hair.”

  Willowbright turned her head to retch. Her fingers brushed the sap-sticky surface of the dandelion harness.

  The goatskin girl was still deep in her litany. “Let ravens peck out his eyes. Let worms and maggots chew her flesh while she sleeps.”

  The dandelion stem pulled taut in Willowbright’s hand—it had fallen about a slender sapling. She twisted it around her hand and closed her eyes, and tears washed hot down her cheeks.

  She pulled.

  Her wing split with a scream of splintered veins and ruined scales. It hardly pushed air, but Willowbright wrung a frantic lopsided flight from it anyway. Leaves and grass whipped her face until the screams of the goatskin girl fell away behind her, until she was alone with the thunder of her breath and the lightning of her pain.

  This time, when she fell, there was no weight but her own to bring her down. She breathed dirt as much as air, and gagged. A cough cleared her mouth but her vision stayed filmy with sweat and filth and tears.

  One breath, two. Her dizzy world steadied, with pain and grief holding her down in gravity’s place. A passing breeze pulled a shudder from her. She thought of getting up and could not muster the will. At least the Court could not see her now.

  Then hands fell on her once more.

  Small hands this time, fairy hands, but strong and insistent. A moment’s struggle, and they pulled Willowbright flat, slammed her shoulders to the ground. None other than the wild fairy, her wild fairy, straddled her waist. “Hold her,” she said, and pulled spidersilk from a skein to thread a thorn-needle.

  “No,” Willowbright wailed. Three more wildlings pressed her down, one gripping each leg, another pulling both arms overhead. Black wings, bat wings, wings patched with pitch and rags, filled her vision and cut sharp shapes out of the sky above. “Oh, no—”

  “Be still,” the wild fairy said. “It will be over soon. You’ll fly again, tameling.” The needle kissed Willowbright’s tattered wing, and her vision split into empty darkness.

  Daylight returned in dappled patches. By old instinct, she lurched to her feet with a flicker of her wings and sobbed at the bright pain the movement woke. A blanket of leaves had fallen by her feet. No other sign of the wild fairies marked the meadow.

  She bent her neck and spread her reluctant wing wide, to see the damage, to see how they had marked her as one of their own—

  Spidersilk gray hemmed a spread of molten-gold feathers. When she turned, sunlight poured through the fine silken vane. She reached behind herself to stroke the barbs and choked wetly on a laugh.

  She found a pile of wet leaves at the top of the hill and crouched to wipe the mud from her face and arms and the pink petals of her dress. From here, she heard the cattle lowing, smelled bread browning in clever iron ovens. Human voices, too, so far away that their words melted into more animal bleating. Willowbright caught herself straining to hear them, and she let go the breath she’d held too long and tight.

  Then she turned and stumbled deeper into the forest, where the trees grew too thick for sunlight to spill in between, where the fruit fell sweet and rich and rotten. Where the Queen’s Court did not deign to venture, and where humans did not tread for fear of what the shadows hid. When she asked it of them, her wings answered with flight. There was pain—there might never be another such trip without it—but there was the sky, and it was still hers.

  © Copyright 2020 Aimee Ogden