He said quickly, “Frayne sent me.”
She was laughing before he finished, at her sweat, her dirty hands, her long hair sliding loosely out of its clasp. “He picked his moment, didn’t he?” She balanced the ax blade in the chopping block with a blow, and tossed pieces of kindling into her apron. “You are?”
“My name is Reck. Frayne told me to find a lady called Bettony and ask her for a bed.”
“I’m Bettony,” she said. Her eyes were as bright and curious as a bird’s; in the twilight their color was indeterminate. “Reck,” she repeated. “The wizard?”
“Yes.”
“Passing through?”
“No.”
“Ah, then,” she said softly, “you came because of the wood.” She turned. “If you can bear carrying anything else, bring some kindling in with you.”
Reck, wondering, gathered an armload and followed her.
“I’m my own housekeeper,” Bettony said as she piled the kindling on the great, blackened hearth inside the house, and Reck let his pack drop to the flagstones with a noiseless sigh. “Though I have a boy who takes care of the cows.” She flicked him a glance. “That heavy, is it? Shouldn’t such a skilled wizard be able to lighten his load a little?”
“That’s why I came here,” Reck said grimly, and she was silent. She lit a taper from a lamp, and stooped to hold it to the kindling. He watched her coax flame out of the wood. Light washed over her face. It looked more young than old, both strong and sweet, very tranquil. Under the teasing flame, he still couldn’t see the color of her eyes.
She gave him bread seasoned with rosemary, a deep bowl of savory stew, and wine. While he ate, she sat across from him on a hearth bench and talked about the wood. “My family wandered in and out of it for centuries,” she told him. “Their tales became family folklore. Some were written; others just passed from one generation to the next along with the family nose. Even if the tales weren’t true, truth would never stand a chance against them.”
“Have you ever been—”
“To fairyland and back? No. Nor would I swear, not even on a turnip, that any of my ancestors had. But I’ve seen the odd thing here and there; I’ve heard and not quite heard...enough that I believe it’s there, in that ancient wood, if you can find your way.” He nodded, his eyes on the fire, seeing and not quite seeing, and heard her voice again. “You’ve been there and back.”
“Yes,” he said softly.
“That weight in your pack. That’s what brings you here.”
“Yes.”
“What—” Then she smiled, waving away the unspoken question. “It’s none of my business. I’ve just been trying to imagine what it must be that you want so badly to give to them.”
“Return,” he amended.
“Return.” She drew a quick breath, her eyes widening, and he saw their color then: a gooseberry green, somehow pale and warm at the same time. “You stole it?”
“A more tactful innkeeper would have assumed that it was given to me,” he commented.
“Yes. But if you wanted half-truths I could give you family lore by the bushel. I’m perceptive. Frayne thinks it’s a kind of magic. It’s not, really. It simply comes of fending for myself.”
“Oh, there’s some magic in you. I sense it. I think that if we picked apart your family folklore we would unravel many threads of truth in the tangle. That would take time, though. As you so quickly observed, what I carry is becoming unbearably heavy. Even my powers are faltering under it.”
“Take it into the wood,” she suggested. “Set it down and walk away from it. Don’t look back.”
“That doesn’t work,” he sighed. “I’ve lost count of the number of times and all the places I’ve walked away from without looking back. It always finds me. I must return it to the place where it will stay.” She watched him, silent again, her eyes wide and full of questions. Is it terrible? he heard in her reluctant silence. Is it beautiful? Did you take it out of love or hate? Will you miss it, once you give it back?
“I stole it,” he said abruptly, for keeping secrets from her seemed pointless, “from the Queen of Faerie. It was something she loved; her husband had his sorcerer make it for her. I took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.”
“All that,” she said wonderingly.
“I was that young,” he sighed. “Such things are so complex then.”
“Do you still love her?”
“That young man I was will always love her,” he answered, smiling ruefully. “That, I can’t return to her.”
“But how did you escape their world? And how can you be certain that this time you will be able to find your way out of it again?”
“It wasn’t easy,” he murmured, remembering. “The king and his greatest sorcerer came after me....” He shrugged away her second question. “One problem at a time. All I know is that I must return. I can’t live in my world with what I stole from theirs.” He set his plate aside. “If there’s any way you can help me—”
“I’ll tell you what tales came down to me,” she promised. “And I can show you things my ancestors wrote, describing what stream they followed that turned into a path of silver or fairy moonlight, what rose bush they fell asleep under to wake up Elsewhere, what black horse or hare they chased beyond the world they knew. It all sounds like dreams to me, wishes out of a wine cup. But who am I to say? You have been there after all.” She rose, lit a pair of tapers, and handed him one. “Come with me. I keep all those old writings in a chest upstairs, along with other odds and ends. Souvenirs of Faerie they’re said to be, but none so burdensome as yours.”
She told him family folklore, and showed him fragile papers stained with wine, half-coherent descriptions of improbable adventures, and rambling musings about the nature of magic, all infused with a bittersweet longing and loss that Reck felt again in his own heart, as though no time had passed at all in the realm of his memories. The writers had brought tokens back with them, as Reck had. Theirs were dead roses that never crumbled and still retained the faintest smell of summer, dried leaves that in the Otherworld had been buttons and coins of gold, a tarnished ring that once had glowed with silver fire to light the path of Bettony’s great-great-grandfather as he stumbled his way from a tavern into fairyland, a rusty key that unlocked a door that had appeared in the oldest oak tree in the wood....
“Such things,” Bettony said, half-laughing, half-sighing over her eccentric family. “Maybe, maybe not, they all seem to say. But then again, maybe.”
“Yes,” Reck said softly. He glanced out a window, seeing through the black of night the faint, haunting shapes of ancient trees. “I’m very grateful that Frayne sent me to you. This must be the place I have been searching for, a part of their great wood that spills into ours and becomes the path between worlds. Thank you for your help. I’ll gladly repay you with any kind of magic you might need.”
“There’s magic in a tale,” she replied simply “I’d like to hear the whole of yours when you come back out.”
He smiled again, touched. “That’s kind of you. Come to Frayne’s tavern tomorrow evening and I’ll tell you as much as I know so far. That’s the debt I owe to Frayne.”
She closed the chest and stood up, dusting centuries from her hands. “I wouldn’t miss it. Nor will the rest of Byndley,” she added lightly. “So be warned.”
Reck spent the next day roaming through the great wood, hoping that his heart, if not his eye, would recognize the tree that was a door, the stream that was a silver path into the Otherworld. But at the
end of the day the wood was just a wood, and the only place he found his way back to was Byndley. He went to Frayne’s tavern, sat down wearily and asked for supper. The pack on the floor at his feet weighed so heavily in his thoughts he scarcely noticed that the comings and goings behind him as he ate his mutton and drank his ale were all comings: feet entered but did not leave. When he turned finally to ask for more ale, he found what looked like an entire village behind him, gazing at him respectfully and waiting.
Even Bettony was there, sitting in a place of honor on a chair beside the fire. She nodded cheerfully to him. So did the blacksmith Tye behind her. He picked the ale Frayne had already poured off the counter; the mug made its way from hand to hand until it reached the wizard.
“Where did we leave off?” Tye asked briskly.
There were protests all around him from villagers clustered in the shadowy corners, sitting on tables as well as benches and stools, and even on the floor. The wizard must begin again; not everyone had heard; they wanted the entire tale, beginning to end, and they would pay to keep the wizard’s glass full for as long as he needed.
The innkeeper shook his head. “The tale will pay for itself,” he said, and propped himself against the bar to listen.
Reck cleared his throat and began again.
By mid-tale there was not a sound in the place. No one had bothered to replenish the fire; the faces leaning towards Reck were vague, shadowy. As he began to describe what he had stolen, he scarcely heard them breathe. Deep into his tale, he saw very little beyond his own memories, and the rise and fall of ale in his cup that in the frail light seemed the hue of fairy gold.
“I stole what stood on a table beside the queen’s bed. To prove that I had been in that bed, and that once I had been among those she loved. Her husband had given it to her, she told me. It was a lovely thing. It was fashioned by the king’s sorcerer of a magic far more intricate than I had ever seen, which may have been why he pursued me so relentlessly when I fled with it.
“It was like a tiny living world within a glass globe. The oak wood grew within it. Gold light filled it every morning; trees began to fade to lavender and smoke toward the end of the day. At night—their night, ours, who can say? I was never certain while I was there if time passed at all within the fairy wood—the globe was filled with the tiny countless jewels of constellations in a black that was infinitely deep, yet somehow so beautiful that it seemed the only true color for the sky. In the arms of the queen I watched the night brighten into day within that tiny wood, and then deepen once again into the rich, mysterious dark. She loved to watch it, too. And in spite of her tender laughter and her sweet words, I knew that every time she looked at it, she thought of him, her husband, who had given it to her.
“So I stole it, so that she would look for it and think of me. And because I knew that though she had stolen my heart from me, this was as close as I would ever get to stealing hers.”
He heard a small sound, a sigh, in the silent room, a half-coherent word. His vision cleared a little, enough to show him the still, intent faces crowding around him. Even Frayne was motionless behind his bar; no one remembered to ask for ale.
“Show it to us,” someone breathed.
“No, go on,” Tye pleaded. “I want to hear how he escaped.”
“No, show—”
“He can show it later if he chooses. He’s been carrying it around all these years; it’s not going anywhere else until he ends it. Go on,” he appealed to Reck. “How did you get away from them?”
“I don’t think I ever did,” Reck said hollowly, and again the room was soundless. “Oh, I did what any other wizard would do, pursued by the King of Faerie and his sorcerer. I fought with fire, and with thought; I vanished; I changed my shape; I hid myself in the heart of trees, and under stones. I knew that I only had to toss that little globe in their path, and they would stop chasing me. But I refused to give it up. I wanted it more than reason. Maybe more than life. Eventually the king lost sight of me, confused by all the different shapes of bird and animal and wildflower I had taken. But I could not hide the sorcerer’s own magic from him. He never lost sight of the globe, no matter how carefully I disguised it. Once, in hart-shape, I wore it as my own eye; another time I changed it into the mouse dangling from the talons of the falcon I had become. He never failed to see it.... Finally, for no matter which way I ran I could not seem to find my way out of that wood, I performed an act of utter desperation.
“I hid myself within the wood within the globe. And then I caused everything—globe, wood, myself—to vanish.”
He heard an odd, faint sound, as though in the cellar below a cork had blown out of a keg, or somewhere a globe-sized bubble of ale had popped. He ignored it, standing once again in the tiny wood inside the globe, among the peaceful trees, the endless, ancient light, feeling again his total astonishment.
“It was as though I had been in my own world all along, and I had mistaken all the magic in it for Faerie...” He lifted his glass after a moment, drank, set it down again. “But I could not linger in that illusion. It’s not easy to fling yourself across a world when you are both the thrower and the object that is thrown. But I managed. When I stopped the globe’s flight and stepped, with great trepidation, out of it and into my own shape, I found myself in the gray, rainy streets of Chalmercy.”
He paused, remembering the grayness in his own heart at the sight of the grimy, cold, familiar world. He sighed. “But I had the globe, the world I had stolen out of fairyland. For a long time it comforted me...until it began to weigh upon me, and I realized that I had never been forgotten. It was what I had wanted—that the queen should remember me—but she began to grow merciless in her remembering. I had to return this to her or I could never live in any kind of peace again.”
He bent then and untied his pack. The tavern was so still it might have been empty. When he lifted the little globe out of the pack, its stars spangled the shadows everywhere within the room, and he heard a sigh from all the throats of the villagers of Byndley at once, as though a wind had gusted through them.
He gazed into the globe with love and rue, seeing the fairy queen again within that enchanted night, and the foolish young man who had given her his heart. After a moment he blinked. He was holding the globe in his palm as lightly as though it were a hen’s egg. The strange, terrible heaviness had fallen away from it; in his surprise he almost looked into the open pack to see if the sloughed weight lay at the bottom.
Then he blinked again.
It took no small effort for him to shift his eyes from the world within the globe to the silent villagers of Byndley. Their faces, shadows and stars trembling over them, seemed blurred at first, unrecognizable. Slowly, he began to see them clearly. The wild-haired maker with his powerful face and the enigmatic smile in his dark eyes... The tall, silver-haired figure behind the bar, gazing quizzically at Reck out of eyes the color of the tranquil twilight within the globe... The woman beside the fire....
Reck swallowed, haunted again, for not a mention of time had troubled that face. It was as beautiful as when he had first seen it, tinted with the fiery colors of the dying wood as she walked toward him that day long before.
She smiled, her green eyes unexpectedly warm.
“Thank you for that look,” she said. There was Bettony still in her face, he saw: a glint of humor, a wryness in her smile. The faces around her, timeless and alien in their beauty, held no such human expressions. She held out her hand. Reck, incapable of moving, watched the globe float from his palm to hers under the sorcerer’s midnight gaze.
“I always wondered,” he told Reck, when the queen’s fingers had closed around her globe, “how you managed to escape me.”
“And I always wondered,” the queen said softly, “why you took this from me. Now I understand.”
Reck looked at the king among his mugs, still watching Reck mildly; he seemed to need no explanations. He said, “You have told your tale and been judged. This time you m
ay leave freely. There’s the door.”
Reck picked up his pack with shaking hands. He paused before he opened the door, said without looking back, “The first time, I only thought I had escaped. I never truly found my way out of the wood.”
“I know.”
Reck opened the door. He pulled it to behind him, but he did not hear it close or latch. He took a step and then another and then did not stop until he had crossed the bridge.
He stopped then. He did not bother looking back, for he guessed that the bridge and every sign of Byndley on the other side of the stream had vanished. He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn.
The Twelve
Dancing Princesses
One day long ago in a faraway country, a young soldier, walking home from a battle he had fought for the king, found himself lost in a forest. The road he followed dwindled away, leaving him standing among silent trees, with the sun just setting at his back, and the moon just rising ahead of him. Caught alone and astray between night and day, he thought to himself, there are worse things that could be. He had seen many of them on the battlefield. He was alone because he had watched his best friend die; he had given his last few coins to another soldier trying to walk home with only one foot. But he himself, though worn and bloodied with battle, had kept all his bones, and his eyes, and he even had a little bread and cheese in his pack to eat. He settled himself into a tangle of tree roots, where he could watch the moon, and took out his simple meal. He had opened his mouth to take the first bite when a voice at his elbow said, “One bite is a feast to those who have nothing.”
He turned, wondering who had crept up so noiselessly to sit beside him. It was a very old woman. Her bones bumped under the surface of her brown, sagging skin like the tree roots under the earth. Her pale eyes, which now held only a memory of the blue they had been, were fixed on the heel of bread, the rind of cheese in his hand. He sighed, for he was very hungry. But so must she be, scuttling like an animal among the trees, with no one to care for her. There are worse things, he thought, than having a little less of something.
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