by Kim Wilkins
“You’re the only person left who knew me when I was who I really am. Before the accident.”
“And who are you now?”
Christine shrugged. “I’m different. I’ve been beaten up by the world.”
Mayfridh leaned in and kissed her forehead, then rose to leave. “I must go before the sun comes up again. Time is passing too quickly.”
“He asked me to marry him.”
Mayfridh froze. “Jude?”
“We’re getting married as soon as we’re home in New York.”
Mayfridh forced a smile. “I’m so happy for you. Jude is . . . lovely.” The profound inadequacy of the word was clumsy in her mouth.
“Tell him I’ll be home soon.”
“I will.” Mayfridh took a last loving glance at Eisengrimm, and headed out into the twilight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Curse those squeaking stairs! In the dead of night they were as loud as gunshots. Mandy crept slowly, slowly. He didn’t want any of the artists to know he had returned. What had Christine said? Everybody at the hotel knows what a monster you are. He couldn’t risk them interfering with his work. Maybe, in a few days, when he’d spent some time with his Bone Wife, he would call his solicitor and have them all evicted. Not too hastily, though. He still hoped that Mayfridh would return and he could fulfill his plans for her. How it pained him that she had slipped through his grasp.
His own lounge room alarmed him. So bright with color! Hues were bleeding into everything now, not just a bright object here or there. He could see the carpet was the color of grass, the sofa the color of Christine’s blouse, and the rug on it a lighter, warmer shade of her blood. He paused for a moment, gazing. Then he noticed the mess. Empty plates and food scraps and pillows where they shouldn’t be. Who had been here?
Tiptoeing now, he explored the rest of his flat. He was alone. He couldn’t risk being discovered, so he unlocked the door to the dark staircase and headed up to the soundproof boning room. He was a large man, and the bag of bones was heavy and cumbersome. The stairway was so narrow that he had to breathe in tight and yank the sack behind him, but finally he had his booty safely in the attic room. He tipped the bones out on the floor. Gorgeously, a pale blue sheen covered them. He had never seen it before, and spent a few precious moments holding them aloft in the light, tilting each this way and that to enjoy the pale color. Christine’s hand was among his stash. He scooped it up and sniffed it. Faery bones. No doubt at all about it. She was a human with the hands of a faery. One could say he had done her a favor by removing it.
He turned the hand over; what a special prize. He already had a plan for the bones inside. He settled on the floor cross-legged, like a child excited about playing, and pulled off the cheap shining ring on the engagement finger. He cast it aside and it rolled into a corner of the room. The work of art he had planned would prove far more precious a jewel. He reached for a blade and started to work.
The black windows allowed him no access to the night outside. Still, it must be growing dark because it was growing cold. He padded downstairs for warm pajamas and returned to his work. Carving, joining, polishing, under the fluorescent lights, solitary and creative in a dark, sleeping world. The early hours of the morning passed. His hands ached, his eyes stung. A tiny sliver of light from a scratch in the window. Dawn approaching.
He held up the product of his hours of labor. A delicate chain of glistening white, every link carved lovingly out of the fine bones of Christine Starlight’s fingers.
Mandy turned to the Bone Wife, waiting patiently for him. A pity she had no neck to hang it around, but he approached and slung it over her waist. Her fine hips stopped the chain from sliding all the way to her feet. It fell in a soft V between her thighs.
He fingered the chain gently, turning the links over and over. What a fine sculptor he was. What a brave hunter and unique artist. And with a pile of bones waiting for him (not quite the pile he had hoped . . . ) it wouldn’t be long before the Bone Wife could wear her new necklace about her gleaming white throat.
Mandy stood back and admired her. “Come, my love,” he said, “we shall dance.”
With that he stepped in and grasped her about the hips. He stepped back, and she stepped forward; he stepped forward, and she stepped back. Slowly at first, then in a circle. Mandy began to laugh. She was actually getting the hang of it. “Yes, my dear Wife, that’s good.”
Step, step, around in a circle. He hastened his pace; she kept up. Soon they were whirling around the vat as the city woke up far below.
Then she misplaced a dainty foot and came crashing down. Mandy fell down next to her, kissing her pale curves. “Never mind, never mind, my darling. Soon you will be finished, and there will be so much magic in you that you will dance like a ballerina.” He laughed, sitting up and shaking his head. His body cried for sleep, to be horizontal in a warm soft bed, but the bones were just within his reach and his fingers craved them like a sinner craved absolution. He crawled over to the bones and began to sort.
As she walked up Vogelwald-Allee through the blustery November wind, leaves skidding and overtaking her left and right, Mayfridh made a deal with herself. It was up to Jude: if he asked about Christine first, then she would let him go. She would let him continue his deception with Christine (poor Christine, how that guilt swirled in her stomach like bad cream) and say good-bye. But, if his first concern was for Mayfridh, then she would know that his love for her was more than his pity for Christine. And she would do everything to make him hers.
She steeled herself as she opened the front door to the hotel. Mandy could be around here somewhere; she had to be on her guard. She recalled his face in the half-light of the dungeon, full of hate and longing, and it made her shudder with fear.
Inside the hotel, all was quiet. She hurried up the stairs to the sanctuary of Jude’s apartment and knocked on the door. Her heart was hammering fast. He opened the door. His face grew pale. He grabbed her hand and yanked her inside, kicking the door closed and embracing her. “Mayfridh,” he gasped, “thank God you’re all right.”
She knew she had won.
For a few moments there was nothing but the warmth of his arms and the beating of his heart, and then he drew back, took a breath. “Where’s Christine?”
“She’s still in Ewigkreis.”
“Why?”
“To recover.” She looked pointedly at the sculptor’s mallet on the kitchen table, deciding not to tell yet that Christine had lost her hand. That knowledge would confuse his feelings; Mayfridh liked it better when it was obvious he loved her.
“When will she be back?” he asked.
“Perhaps a day or so.”
For nearly a full minute they stood gazing at each other. Mayfridh knew she had so little time for standing and gazing—Hexebart was still loose—but she was frozen. He was frozen.
Then he seized her and kissed her—passionate, violent kisses—and her body was surrendering and surrendering, with hot blood and lips and eyes; and she was consumed by that blissful feeling of emptiness withdrawing, of loneliness vanishing, of happiness being possible. Sometime.
Afterward, they lay in a tangle of clothes and warm limbs, breathing slowly in the afternoon shadows. Sunlight, dappled and dimmed by branches moving outside, shone on the sill and the carpet but didn’t reach the sofa. Mayfridh shivered and pulled her blouse over her shoulders.
“Jude,” she said, “would you be my king?”
He opened his eyes. Alarmed. “What?”
“Would you come back to Ewigkreis with me and be my king? Raise heirs with me, grow old with me . . .” The panic in his eyes finished her sentence. “Jude?”
“I can’t, Mayfridh.”
“You can. You’d become one of us, you’d live four hundred years. It’s a beautiful place. You could paint all day and never have to worry about anything.”
He fell silent and she sat up, looking down at him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Would you do it?” he countered, his voice touched with anger. “Would you give up everything and join me in my world?”
“But I have so much more to lose,” she said. “My magic, my power, hundreds of years of youth and beauty.”
“I belong in the Real World,” he said. “I belong in a place where there are urban spaces and traffic noises and cynicism and alienation. All the things that drive my art. What would I paint in Ewigkreis? Landscapes?”
“Forget I asked.”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “I belong with Christine.”
“You don’t. You belong with me. You know it, you feel it.”
“I don’t know what I feel.”
She climbed to her feet and straightened her clothes. She had expected him to say yes. He loved her, she knew he loved her. If it wasn’t for Christine . . . a surge of anger and resentment swept through her. Christine, with her plain face and her infinite ability to make people pity her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I.” All her hope deflated in her chest.
“Mayfridh,” he said gently, reaching for his clothes, “you didn’t come back here just for me, did you?”
She took a deep breath and shook her head. “No, no. I have to find Hexebart.”
“Gerda needs you to remove the spell that Hexebart put on her.”
“Of course, I . . . oh no.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Spells! I didn’t bring a single one with me. Christine still has them.” How could she have left Ewigkreis without spells? Too many of her thoughts had been spent on fantasies of Jude.
“So you can’t fix Gerda?”
Mayfridh shook her head. “Only after I find Hexebart.”
“We’ve searched for her all around the hotel. I don’t want her to run into Christine. I don’t want her telling about . . . you know.”
Mayfridh felt a flush of impatience. He was so selfish, so preoccupied with himself and his stupid deception. “I’ll find her. Where has she been so far?”
“I saw her in the park at the end of the street when she came to tease me about knowing my secret,” Jude said, “and Gerda saw her in her apartment. And she stayed in Mandy’s flat one or two nights.”
“So she’s been making mischief with my friends.”
“Yeah, so she’s probably still nearby.”
Mayfridh tried to follow the twisted paths of Hexebart’s logic. “Because she’s taking out her hatred of me through hurting you and Gerda—”
“And Christine as soon as she finds her.”
Mayfridh’s heart went cold. “Ohh,” she said, “I think I know where she is.”
Christine woke from the welcome oblivion of sleep to find that she still lay among the rough bedcovers at Klarlied’s cottage, and that her left hand was still missing. She groaned involuntarily and rolled over. Eisengrimm was watching her.
“Eisengrimm.” She swept her hair out of her eyes. “You’re awake.”
“I have been for an hour.” His golden eyes were deep with mea-sureless compassion, his mellow voice warm and gentle. “Christine, what happened to you?”
She held up her wrist. “Immanuel Zweigler happened to me. Mayfridh enchanted my hands so I could magically banish him. He took one as a souvenir.”
He shook his gray head. “You have suffered too much.”
“So have you.”
“I’m her counselor. I’m employed to suffer for her.”
Christine sighed. “I let her go back to the Real World. Alone.”
“You were wise to stay and heal.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve left her alone with Jude. Jude’s in love with her.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yeah. Pretty certain.” She sat up and gazed across at him. “But she’ll be gone soon enough. And Jude and I will get on with our lives and . . .” A sob broke through her words. “Oh, God, who am I kidding? I’m in pain every day. I only have one hand. I’ll be such a burden to him.”
“If he loves you, you won’t be a burden.”
“He doesn’t love me the way he loves her. How could he? She’s so beautiful and rare. I’m so . . . I’m interchangeable with anyone.”
“Christine, that isn’t true.”
“You’re in love with her too. You know the power she has.”
“Then why did you let her go alone?”
She shrugged. “Because there are some things you can’t fight. Because maybe he deserves the thrill of a grand passion before he settles down with me. I don’t know.”
The hessian curtain at the doorway parted and Klarlied peeked in. “Ah, Counselor Eisengrimm. I thought I heard your voice. How do you feel?”
“Very sore, but lucid.”
“Thorsten and Brathr wait for you in the kitchen. They are eager to speak with you.”
Eisengrimm glanced at Christine. “The mayor and the reeve,” he explained.
“Shall I send them in?” Klarlied asked.
“You should rest some more before you take on official business,” Christine said.
“I can’t. Winter is very close and matters are very serious.” He turned to Klarlied. “Send them in.”
Christine stretched and got out of bed. “I’ll leave you alone with them.”
“Thank you, Christine.” He looked so vulnerable lying curled on the bed, bandages around his ribs; a hurt dog rather than a queen’s counselor.
Christine slipped out as two men strode in. She hoped they would be kind to Eisengrimm. It wasn’t his fault his queen was so flighty.
Klarlied stopped her, with a smile, in the kitchen. “Would you like some soup?”
“No, I’m going to get some fresh air.” She felt in her pocket for the remaining spells. She had deliberately withheld them from Mayfridh, and felt a twinge of guilt over that. For some reason, when Mayfridh was leaving, Christine’s desire to own the spells was greater than her concern for Mayfridh’s needs. Perhaps it was simple jealousy, or simple curiosity. Or perhaps there was nothing simple at all about her feelings for Mayfridh.
Christine found herself in Klarlied’s neat square of garden. Hedges were over-spun with spiderwebs that glistened in the morning sunshine, wafting to and fro on the breeze. Christine shivered against the cool, but relished the fresh air. She had been cooped up too long in the cluttered, stuffy cottage. Klarlied’s home stood at the end of a dirt road. Wheat fields spread out behind it, stubbled and golden. The slanted sunshine dazzled on the fields. Christine pulled a spell from her pocket. As far as she knew, her remaining hand was still enchanted. She had no idea what magic she wanted to perform—given that turn back time to before Mandy took my hand was not an option. She gazed at the spell and a cloud moved over the sun.
“Butterfly,” she said, and blew. The spell disappeared and an indigo butterfly flew from her fingers and up into the sky. She laughed. What a curious pleasure it was to make magic happen, like a shiver and a held breath and a liquid tingle. She took another spell and held it out. “Birdsong.” As she blew, the spell dissolved and the air around her was filled with the sweet strange song of a bird she didn’t recognize. It swelled and withdrew, leaving her standing, smiling for the first time in many long hours, in Klarlied’s garden.
She checked her pocket. Only four left now. She had best be prudent and save them, give them to Mayfridh when she got back to the Real World.
Voices from nearby. She turned to see the two men—the mayor and the reeve—leaving the cottage, muttering to each other in serious voices. She hurried inside to find Eisengrimm sitting up on his bed. His eyes were thoughtful.
“Is everything all right?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “No. Not at all.” His shoulders were hunched forward and his fur was dull.
“Lie down,” Christine said. “You look sick and sore.”
“I am sick and sore.” He did as she directed and closed his eyes.
“Tell me what happened,” she said, curling
up next to him and gently stroking his ears.
“The officials in the village, and most of the villagers it seems, are unhappy. Very unhappy. Hexebart has disappeared with the royal magic, six faeries have been murdered, winter is coming, and their queen is nowhere in sight.”
“Did you explain she’s gone to find Hexebart?”
“Yes, but she made no official announcement, took no guards or helpers. It looks suspicious. It looks like she’s run away.”
A brisk wind gusted overhead, moaning softly over the eaves.
“What will they do?” Christine asked.
“They have already done it. They have officially expressed their lack of confidence in the queen. When she returns, she will have to prove herself fit to rule, and she will have to name an heir.”
“Name an heir?”
“They ask it of rulers whose competence is in doubt. She can name anyone she wants, and the villagers vote on whether to agree to it. That’s how Liesebet made Mayfridh her heir, even though she was a human changeling.”
“Would she name you?”
“She has tried in the past. I won’t let her.”
“No?”
“I have no desire to be a king.”
She smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. “You’d make a fine king.”
“She could also prove her intention to produce an heir.”
Christine was confused. “How so?”
“She could marry. Then it would be assumed a child would result.”
Christine opened her mouth to ask, “Who would she marry?” but no sound came out because she knew precisely who Mayfridh would make her first choice.
“Christine?”
“She can’t take him away from me, can she?” she breathed.
Eisengrimm fixed her in his golden gaze. “I don’t know, Christine. Can she?”
Mayfridh thrust money into the taxi driver’s hands as they pulled up outside Diana’s house at Zehlendorf.
“Here, keep the change,” she muttered, hurrying to open the door, and emerging onto the quiet street. The last of the sun’s rays had disappeared, leaving only the cold gray shadows of twilight. The front of the house was dark and silent. She hoped that she was wrong, that Hexebart hadn’t discovered Diana and come to make the same kind of mischief she’d made at Hotel Mandy-Z. She hurried up the front path, stopping when a flash of gold caught her eye.
