Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  But they don’t have to be mine, she thought an instant later. I found them in the street. Someone must have dropped them, someone too much in a hurry to stop. She tangled the pen into the tangle of silver on her head, let the green plume dangle over her shoulder, and tucked the book under her arm. He hadn’t noticed the closed book, probably, only the open book before she began to run.

  Her skin prickled as she thought of him, part fear, part anticipation. How can I persuade him? she asked the book. Maybe I should give him something. If I ever find him again. If he even lets me talk before he calls the ferrets. Anyway, I don’t have anything he would want. I don’t even have anything he would want to look at.

  Or is he expecting me?

  She let the city pull her into itself, drifted with it deeper into its unknown heart.

  Gradually she realized that people were staring at her, avoiding her, parting to let her pass, even those who wore fine, scrolled blades like pendants around their necks and masked their eyes with darkness. She was used to hastily averted eyes, even to the sudden silence that she seemed to inspire, at least among humans, before she passed and they thought she couldn’t hear their jokes behind her back. But these were the ferrets, wild, magical creatures who had chased her, barking, through the streets; now they were stepping out of her way, their faces carefully expressionless. Can’t they tell? she wondered. Can’t they see? It’s only me behind a mask of dying leaves and a T-shirt from Yosemite. They couldn’t, apparently. She walked taller, took a longer, sweeping stride through them, refusing to think about what would happen when they did find out that it was only her.

  She saw him finally, coming toward her down the sidewalk, and she stopped. He saw her at the same time; his face hardened. But it had masked itself against fear, she saw in wonder, not against her. He stepped around her carefully, hoping, it seemed, that she had not stopped for him. But she turned, looking up at him as he passed, holding his eyes, until he took a futile half-step, trapped in her gaze, and finally stood still.

  He whispered, “Who are you?”

  She swallowed sudden dryness, decided simply to answer his question. “Maris.”

  “Who do you want?”

  “You.”

  He drew breath slowly. His skin was so pale it could not grow any whiter, but she saw the tension along his jaw. “What do you want from me?”

  She swallowed again, feeling the closed book under her elbow pushing hard against her ribs, wondering how much power the mask she wore held over him, wondering if she had the courage to say what she wanted to say. But how else would she know who she was, in that moment, in his eyes? She answered finally, carefully, “I want you to say yes. To anything I ask.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She lifted her hand, pushed the mask up so that he could see her marred, sweaty human face. “Teach me magic.”

  He stared at her silently a moment longer. Then a shudder rippled through him, pushed words out. “Who are you?”

  She opened her mouth, then stared back at him, suddenly perplexed. Maris, she had started to say, but she did not recognize this Maris, who had stopped a Trueblood in his tracks and made him ask her for her name. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, still astonished that he was not summoning his ferrets furiously out of gutter drains and broken windows. “Who are you afraid of?”

  She heard his breath again; his face lost some of its rigidity. “I could not see your eyes,” he said softly. “Or your face. Only leaves. You looked at me out of leaves as old as our world, and said you had come for me. Until now, I thought I was afraid of nothing.” He paused again. “I seem to be afraid of you. Where did you get the leaves?”

  “In a dream.”

  He nodded, unsurprised. “And you came back here to look for me. You aren’t afraid of me, even after I drove you out of here.”

  Oh, yes, I am, she thought. Oh, yes. I would be just as afraid of the lightning bolt I caught in my hand. But I am the Maris who can catch a lightning bolt and still be alive and talking to it. “Why did the forest let me dream about it? Why did it give me leaves?”

  He shook his head. “I have dreamed of it. But it has never let me take anything away with me.” He touched the leaves above her eyes gently, tentatively. Then he asked, unexpectedly, “What happened to your hair?”

  “It went white.”

  Again he nodded; such things happened, she guessed, in the old forest. “You look more like one of us.”

  “I was trying to disguise myself, so you wouldn’t recognize me and chase me away again.”

  He shrugged slightly. “It wouldn’t have mattered; all humans look alike to me. I would never have recognized you without the leaves.”

  “But you didn’t know—”

  “I recognized the magic in you,” he said simply.

  She felt her clenched hold on the book, on herself, loosen a little. Standing on the crowded, burning street with him, human in a place where borders merged, worlds touched and might explode or sing at any moment, she suddenly felt safe. “Then you will teach me.”

  His brows lifted slightly, ruefully; he looked for a moment almost human. “I said yes.”

  “Dear Book,” she wrote in fear and triumph that night, on her stained mattress, while the old building stirred noisily around her. Sounds of hurrying boots and arguments cluttered the air; someone played a raucous ballad on a guitar; someone else played, very faintly, an older ballad on a pipe. “Today I did my first magic. I made one of the Trueblood see my human face and say my name. Maybe that’s why we all have come here, with our scars and our secret faces. We want the ancient magic to recognize us. To welcome us home.” She paused. Her pen descended, hesitated at a word, wrote again finally. “I’ll write to my mother tomorrow. This is hardest for me to say. She was right.”

  The Fortune-Teller

  Merle saw the silk trailing out from under the toothless pile of rags snoring in a muddy alley. She glanced around. Most in the busy marketplace were buried under hoods and shawls, eyes squinched against the drizzling rain. They paid her no attention. She knelt swiftly, tugged at the silk. Cards came with it; she felt them as she stuffed the plunder under her shawl and strode away. Oversize, they were, like her mother’s cards, and knotted in threads spun by little worms on the far side of the world. The sleeping lump had probably stolen them herself, and there was no reason why Merle shouldn’t have them instead. She, after all, wasn’t wasting the day facedown in the mud. Fortune favored those who recognized her, and Merle had watched her mother read the cards often enough to know what to do with them.

  She worked quickly and efficiently through the crowd, a tall, thin, unremarkable figure swathed against the rain like everyone, with only her eyes visible and wide open. Her long fingers caught the change rattling into a capacious coat pocket as its distracted owner bit into the sausage roll he had just purchased. Farther down among the stalls, she slid a lovely square of linen and lace, perfumed against the smells of the street, out of a lady’s gloved fingers. The lady had stopped to laugh at a parrot inviting her to “Have a dance, luv, have a dance.” Opening her bag to find the one-armed sailor a coin, she gave a sudden exclamation. Merle left her searching the cobbles for her lace, and disappeared back into the crush.

  Another carelessly unguarded pocket in a great coat caught her eye, its shiny brass button dangling free of its loop and winking at her. She drew up close, dipped a hand in. Faster than thought another hand followed, closed around her fingers.

  She drew a startled breath, gathered her wits and more breath in the next instant to raise an indignant and noisy complaint against the ruffian who had grabbed a poor, honest young girl going about her business.

  Then she saw the face between the upraised coat collar and the hat. Her tirade whooshed into a laugh.

  “Ansel! You gave me a moment, there.”

  He didn’t look amused; his lean, comely face, his jade eyes were hard. “Someone will give you more than a moment,” he warned, “if you don’t
stop this.”

  She shrugged that away, more interested in his clothes. “Where did you steal the coat?”

  “I didn’t. I’m a working man. I drive a carriage now. You—”

  “I’m a working girl,” she interrupted before he could get started.

  “You’re a thief.”

  “I’m a fortune-teller. Look. I even have cards now.” She opened her cloak, gave him a glimpse of the cards in their silk tucked into her waistband. “I found them this morning.”

  He gave a sour laugh. “You stole them.”

  “Nobody else was using them.”

  “You said you were going to—”

  “You know I can earn my way, telling fortunes. I’ve done it before. I told yours. Remember?” She shifted the shawl wrapped up under her almond-shaped eyes to remind him of the full lips and sweet, stark jawline beneath, a trifle wolfish, maybe, but then she was ravenous half the time. His own lips parted; his eyes grew vague with memory. “Remember? The day we met. You saw me and followed me to my tent; I told your fortune with tea leaves and coins made of candle wax. You stole bread and sausages and cheese for our supper. Now that I have cards, I can build a reputation like my mother had—at least when my father stayed in one place long enough.”

  “You told me,” he reminded her softly, “that I’d meet a stranger with storm-gray eyes I’d follow forever. I thought, that night, I had.”

  She shrugged slightly. “You liked me well enough then. But you didn’t stay forever.”

  “You promised me you’d stop this magpie life. I stopped, but you didn’t.”

  “Now I can,” she said, tightening her cloak around the cards again. But he only made a sound between a sigh and a groan, and stepped back impatiently.

  “You’ll never change.”

  “Come and see. You know where to find me.”

  “Wherever they lock you away, most likely, one of these days. You can’t play your tricks on the world forever.”

  “I’ll stop, I promise,” she told him, half-laughing again. He shook his head wordlessly, turning away, and so did she, with another shrug. She had coins for a meal, lace to sell; she could spend some time studying the cards now. She made her way back to her tent, pocketing a stray meat pie from a baker’s busy stall along the way. Why should she pay for what the world put in her way for free?

  Her fortune-teller’s tent was makeshift: an abandoned shell of a wagon on the edge of the marketplace. It had a broken axle and two barrels propping up the corners where the wheels were missing. A discarded sail nailed over the ribs kept it dry. Merle had brightened the inside with dyed muslin and sprigged lawn skirts she’d separated from their drying lines. Fine shawls with gold threads, ribbons, beads of crystal and jet, left unattended in carriages or dangling too far over a lady’s arm, she’d appropriated from their careless owners. She picked apart the seams and wound the swaths around the wagon ribs to make a colorful cave of embroidery, lace, ribbons, flowing cloth. She collected candle ends wherever she found them, to scatter around her while she worked. The tent was guarded by an old raven she’d found protecting a blind beggar who had fallen dead in the street. She’d coaxed it to eat; it came home with her. It had a malevolent eye, a sharp beak, and a vocabulary of two words—“Help! Murder!”—which it loosed with an earsplitting squall when it was alone and faced with a stranger.

  It greeted Merle with a rustle of wind and a faint, throaty chuckle. She lit candles and shared bits of the meat pie with the bird. Then she reached outside to hang her painted sign above the wagon steps, and draped a long, dark, beaded veil over her hair and shoulders. She unwrapped the cards.

  The silk was snagged and frayed, with a spill of wine along one edge. The cards themselves were creased, flecked with candle wax, and so thumbed with use that some of the images were blurring. She began to lay them out.

  Scarecrow. Old Woman. Sea. Gypsy Wagon.

  She paused, studying them. It was an odd deck, not at all like her mother’s with its bright paintings of cups and swords, kings and queens. Those had once belonged to Merle’s great-grandmother; her mother cherished them, wrapped them in spotless silk and tucked them into a cedar and rosewood box between readings. These, well-drawn and colored despite their age, said nothing at all familiar. She laid out a few more and gazed at them, perplexed. There seemed to be a lot of crows. And what would a snake curled into a hoop and rolling itself down a road possibly signify?

  The curtains trembled. Merle glimpsed fingers, pale and slender, heard whisperings outside on the steps. She drew the veil across her face. No sense in getting herself into unnecessary trouble if someone happened to recognize her. When the whispering didn’t go away, she lit more candles around her and waited.

  The curtains opened finally. Three young women, as neatly and fashionably dressed as they could afford, stared at her anxiously.

  “Come in.”

  Something—the exotic veil, her deep voice, which made her sound older and possibly wiser than she was, the flames weaving a mystery of light and glittering dark around her—reassured them. They ducked under the canopy, seated themselves on pilfered carriage cushions, the golden-haired one in front, the other two behind. They spent a moment eyeing the fortune-teller, the cards she had gathered up again, the motionless raven, the drifts of silk and muslin above their heads.

  The one in front spoke. “I need to know my fortune.”

  Merle, shuffling the deck, supposed that anyone with that pretty, tired, worried face probably needed all the good news she could get.

  She named her price, and when the coin lay between them, she began to turn the cards, laying them into a pattern: the rainbow arc of life and fortune.

  “Wolf. Sun. Old Woman. Well.” Again, nothing was familiar; she had to guess at what they should be called, keeping her voice calm and certain, no matter what showed its face. “Spider. The Blind Man. The Masked Lovers.” She hesitated briefly. Who on earth was this? A blue-eyed grinning skeleton with a full head of red-gold hair, cloaked in blue and crowned, rode a pitchfork with three blackbirds clinging to the tines. “Lady Death,” she guessed wildly, and the young women made various distraught noises.

  One suggested timidly, “Three of crows?” which made sense when Merle remembered the other crows in the deck.

  But she answered smoothly, “When a card falls into the arc of life, it no longer belongs to a suit. Don’t be afraid. She doesn’t always signify death. Let’s see what falls after her...” She turned another card, hoping it wasn’t more crows. Pockmarked puddles came up; that was plain enough. “Rain.” She turned the next and decided it would be the last: best to end with a cheerful face. “Fool.” She put the deck down. “This is good. Very good.”

  “It is?” the young woman who had paid said incredulously. “But it says so little about love.”

  Love. Of course.

  “Oh, but it says a great deal.” Improvising rapidly, she led the rapt watchers through it, card by card. “Wolf, at the beginning of the arc, signifies a messenger. Sun is, of course, a fortuitous message. The Old Woman in conjunction with the Well is someone you will meet who will give you strength and power—that’s the well water—to achieve your heart’s desire. Spider may be good or bad. When it appears in the arc, it’s the web that signifies, and here it means something well planned, successful.”

  And so on. She could chart a fortune through twigs and broken eggshells, if she had to. Where she saw a pattern, she could find a fortune. She’d learned that much from her mother before she’d escaped from her eternally traveling family to the city. Even she couldn’t see a fortune in a tinker’s wagon.

  “But what about Lady Death?” the young woman whispered, mesmerized by the card. “Who will die?”

  “In this arc,” Merle explained glibly, “Lady Death signifies protection. She guards against misfortune, malice, bad influences. Rain follows her. A little stormy weather will hamper the lovers, but that is natural in the course of true love. In the end the Fool, who
signifies the wisdom of innocence, will guide your heart to achieve its innermost dreams.”

  The young woman, whose mouth was hanging by now, closed it with a click of teeth. She sighed and began to smile; the faces behind her brightened. “So he will love me in spite of everything.”

  “So the cards have shown,” Merle answered solemnly, sweeping them together and palming the coin at the same time. She wondered briefly what obstacles the cards had missed. The rival lover? The deluded husband? The betrayed wife? Lack of money to wed? Mismatched circumstances: she a seamstress, he a noble who had admired too closely the shape of her lips? Merle had a hunch that, under other eyes, the cards would have suggested a darker, more ambiguous future. But the young woman had paid for hope, and Merle had earned her pay.

  You see? she told Ansel silently as the women went back into the rain. I have a profession, too. Soon, with these strange cards, I’ll even have a reputation. Then I can afford to be honest.

  Ansel came to her that night as she knew he would. In spite of himself, she guessed wryly, taking note of his dour, reluctant expression. But she knew tricks to make him smile, others to make him laugh, which he did at last, though he sobered up too soon after that.

  “You’ve learned a few things on the street since I saw you last,” he commented, rolling onto his back in her meager bed, and stroking her hair as she laid her cheek on his chest.

  “Knowledge is free,” she said contentedly.

  “Is it?”

  “At least I don’t have to steal it. Don’t—” she pleaded as he opened his mouth. “Don’t go back to glowering at me. You like what I learned.”

  She felt him draw breath, but he didn’t lecture. He didn’t say anything, just smoothed her hair, drew it out across his chest to watch it gleam in the candlelight, onyx dark, raven dark, true black without a trace of color in it. He laughed a little, gently, as at a memory.

  “You’re growing so beautiful... All I could see of that the few months ago I met you was in your eyes. You were such a scrawny girl, all bones and sharp edges, and those huge eyes, the color of a mist that I wanted to walk through to see what I would find.”