Modern Faerie Tales

by Holly Black

  “I had a boyfriend like that once. Used to beat the shit out of me.” Fatima sat next to Kaye and patted her back.

  “Maybe he saw you with Kenny,” Janet said without looking at her. She was leaning against a headlight, staring out across the highway at the military base opposite the diner.

  “I’m sorry,” Kaye said miserably.

  “Give her a break,” Fatima said. “It’s not like you didn’t do the same thing to me.”

  Janet turned to look at Kaye then. “You’re not going to get him, you know. He might want to fuck you, but he’d never go out with you.”

  Kaye just nodded, bringing the cigarette to her mouth with trembling hands. It would have been a better idea, she decided, if she had sworn off boys entirely.

  “Is that Robin guy going to come after you?” Fatima asked. Kaye almost wanted to laugh at her concern. If he did, no one could do anything to stop him. He’d moved faster than Kaye could even see. She’d been very stupid not to be afraid of him.

  “I don’t think so,” she said finally.

  Kenny and Doughboy walked out of the diner, swaggering in tandem toward the girls.

  “Everything okay?” Kenny asked.

  “Just a couple of bruises,” Kaye said. “No big deal.”

  “Damn,” Doughboy said. “Between the other night and tonight, you’re going to be too paranoid to hang out with us.”

  Kaye tried to smile, but she couldn’t help wondering how double-edged those words were.

  “Want me to drive you home?” Kenny asked.

  Kaye looked up, about to thank him, when Fatima interrupted. “Why don’t you take Janet home, and I’ll drop off Dough and Kaye.”

  Kenny looked down at the scuffed tops of his Doc Martens and sighed. “Right.”

  Fatima drove Kaye home in relative silence, and she was grateful. The radio was on, and she just sat in the passenger seat and pretended to listen. When Fatima pulled up in front of Kaye’s grandmother’s house, she cut the lights.

  “I don’t know what happened with you and Kenny,” Fatima began.

  “Me neither,” Kaye said with a short laugh.

  The other girl smiled and bit one of her manicured nails. “If you were just looking for some way to piss off your boyfriend, don’t do it. Janet really loves Kenny, y’know? She’s devoted.”

  Kaye opened the door and got out of the car. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “No problem.” Fatima flicked the car lights back on.

  Kaye slammed the door of the blue Honda and went inside.

  In the kitchen, Ellen sat at the table with a spiral notebook in front of her, phone to her ear. When she saw Kaye come in, she gestured toward the stove. There was a pot of cold spaghetti and sausages. Kaye took a fork and picked at some of the spaghetti.

  “So you think you can get Charlotte?” her mother said into the phone as she doodled on the pad.

  “All right, call me when you know. Absolutely. ’Bye, chickadee.”

  Ellen hung up the phone, and Kaye looked over at her expectantly.

  Her mother smiled and took a sip from a mug on the table. “We’re going to New York!”

  Kaye just stared. “What?”

  “Well, it’s not totally definite, but Rhonda wants me to front her new all-girl group, Meow Factory, and she thinks she can get Charlotte Charlie. I said that if they can get her, I’m in. There are so many more clubs in New York.”

  “I don’t want to move,” Kaye said.

  “We can crash with Rhonda until we can find another place to live. You’ll love New York.”

  “I love it here.”

  “We can’t impose on my mother forever,” Ellen said. “Besides, she’s a pain in your ass as much as mine.”

  “I applied for a job today. Grandma will be a lot happier once I’m bringing home money. You could join a band around here.”

  “Nothing’s set in stone,” Ellen said, “but I think you should really get used to the idea of New York, honey. If I’d wanted to stay in Jersey, I would have done it years ago.”

  A hundred matchbooks, from a hundred bars that her mother played one gig in, or from restaurants that they got a meal in, or from men that they lived with. A hundred matchbooks, all on fire.

  She was on fire too, aflame in a way she was not sure she understood. Adrenaline turned her fingers to ice, drawing her heat inward to dance in her head, anger and a strange sense of possibility thrumming through her veins.

  Kaye looked around her dark bedroom, lit only by the flickering orange light. The glassy eyes of the dolls danced with flames. The rats curled up on one another in the far corner of the cage. Kaye breathed in the sharp smell of sulfur as she struck another matchbook, watching the flame catch across the rows of white match heads, the cardboard covering exploding into fire. She turned the paper in her hands, watching it burn.

  5

  I ate the mythology & dreamt.

  —YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, “BLACKBERRIES”

  Kaye awoke to a scratching at the window. The room was dark and the house was silent.

  Something peered in at her. Tiny black eyes blinked beneath heavy eyebrows, and long ears rose up from either side of a bare head.

  “Spike?” Kaye whispered, crawling up off the mattress on the floor where she had been sleeping. The covers tangled with her legs.

  He tapped again, eyebrows furrowing. He was smaller than she remembered and clad only in a thin bark that ran over his waist and down part of his legs. At his elbows, points extended into the shape of thorns.

  Behind him, she could make out Lutie-loo’s thin form, incandescent against the dark tiles of the roof. Her wings were so translucent as to be nearly invisible.

  Kaye pushed on the window, but it took several tries to get it unstuck from the old, swollen sill. Two white moths fluttered in.

  “Spike!” Kaye said. “Lutie! Where have you been? I’ve been back for days and days. I left milk out for you, but I think one of the cats got it.”

  The little man cocked one eye toward her, like a sparrow. “The Thistlewitch is waiting,” Spike said. “Hurry.”

  His tone of voice was odd, urgent and strangely unfriendly. He had never talked to her that way before. Still, she obeyed out of familiarity: same old room, same little friends coming in the middle of the night to take her to catch fireflies or pick sour cherries. She pulled a black sweater on over the white old-lady nightgown her grandmother had loaned her to sleep in and kicked on her boots. Then she scanned the room for her coat, but it was just another black, soft pile in the dark, and she left it. The sweater was warm enough.

  Kaye climbed out onto the roof. “Why does she want to see me?” Kaye had always thought of the Thistlewitch as a crotchety aunt, someone who didn’t like to play and who you could get in trouble with.

  “There’s something she needs to tell you.”

  “Can’t you tell me?” Kaye said. She swung her legs off the edge of the roof while Spike scuttled down over the bark and Lutie glided down on iridescent wings.

  “Come on,” Spike said.

  Kaye pushed herself off the edge and dropped. The dry branches of a rhododendron bush scratched her legs as she landed, spry as a cat, on her two feet.

  They ran toward the street, Lutie-loo dancing half in the air around Kaye whispering, “I missed you, I missed you.”

  “This way,” Spike said impatiently.

  “I missed you too,” Kaye said to Lutie, reaching out her hand to brush the light body. Lutie felt slick as water, smooth as smoke.

  The Glass Swamp, so called because of the abundance of broken bottles choking the little stream, ran beneath the road a half a mile along the street. They climbed down the steep bank, Kaye’s boots slipping in the mud. The thin rivulets of water shimmered with multicolor hues under the street lights, broken glass turned to panes of a church window.

  “What’s happening? What’s the matter?” she called as quietly as she could and still have Spike hear her. Something was definitely wrong�
��he was hurrying along like he couldn’t look her in the face. But then, maybe she was too old to be fun anymore.

  He didn’t answer.

  Lutie darted up to her, hair whipping the air like a banner of cream. “We have to hurry. Don’t worry. It’s good news—good news.”

  “Hush,” Spike said.

  The heavy growth close to the stream forced her to pick her way near the water’s edge. Kaye stepped carefully along the bank, illuminated only by the dim light of Lutie’s glow. They walked in silence. She wasn’t sure whether the next step would plunge her boot into cold water.

  A flash of white caught her eye—cracked eggshells bobbed in the narrow stream. Kaye stopped to watch the armada of shells, some small and spotted, others gleaming supermarket white. In the center of one, a spider scuttled from side to side, an unwilling captain. In another, a black pin anchored the center as the shell spun dizzily.

  Kaye heard a chuckle.

  “Much can be divined from an eggshell,” the Thistlewitch said. Large black eyes peered out from the braided weeds and briars that covered her head like hair. She was sitting on the opposite side of the riverbank, her squat body covered in layers of drab cloth.

  “They have even caught us,” the Thistlewitch went on, “with the brewing of eggshells. Pride makes braggarts of even the wisest of the Folk, so it is said.”

  Kaye had sometimes been a little afraid of her, but this time she felt nothing but relief. The Thistlewitch had kind eyes, and her scratchy voice was sweetly familiar. She was as unlike Roiben and his demon-horse as anything could be.

  “Hullo,” Kaye said, not sure how to address her. When she was a child, most of the times she had spoken to the faerie had involved a splinter or a skinned knee or an apology for dragging one of her friends Ironside for a prank. “Spike said you had something to tell me.”

  The Thistlewitch regarded her for a long moment, as if taking her measure.

  “So much focus on the egg—it is life, it is food, it is answer to a hundred riddles—but look at its shell. Secrets are writ on its walls. Secrets lie in the entrails, in the dregs, at the edges.” The Thistlewitch poked a pin into either side of a tiny blue egg and put it to her lips. Her cheeks puffed out with air, and a trickle of clear, thick snotlike liquid drizzled into a copper bowl in her lap.

  Kaye looked at the eggshells, still bobbing down the stream. She didn’t understand. What secrets did they hold, except a spider and a pin?

  The Thistlewitch tapped the damp earth beside her. “Would you see what I see, Kaye? Sit beside me.”

  Kaye looked for a dry patch and crossed the stream with an easy leap.

  A tiny being wearing a moleskin coat slithered onto the Thistlewitch’s lap and poked its head inquisitively into the bowl.

  “Once, there were two nearby low courts, the bright and the dark, the Seelie and the Unseelie, the Folk of the air and the Folk of the earth. They fought like a serpent devouring its own tail, but we kept from their affairs, kept to our hidden groves and underground streams, and they forgot us. Then they made truce and remembered that rulers must have subjects, especially if they wish to avoid the reach of the High Court of Elfhame. There is such a habit of service among us.” The Thistlewitch stroked the gleaming fur of the little faerie’s coat absently as she spoke. “They brought back the Tithe, the sacrifice of a beautiful and talented mortal. In the Seelie Court they may steal away a poet to join their company, but the Unseelie Court requires blood. In exchange, those who dwell in Unseelie lands must bind themselves into service. Their service is hard, Kaye, and their amusements are cruel. And now you have drawn their notice.”

  “Because of Roiben?”

  “Oh, do speak his name again,” Spike hissed. “Shall we invite the whole Unseelie Court to afternoon tea while we’re being daft?”

  “Hush,” the Thistlewitch soothed. Spike stomped his foot and looked away.

  “You mustn’t even use their speaking names aloud,” the Thistlewitch told Kaye. “The Unseelie Court is terrible, terrible and dangerous. And of the Unseelie Court, no knight is as feared as . . . the one you spoke with. When the truce was made, each of the Queens exchanged their best knights—he was the offering from the Seelie Court. The Queen sends him on the worst of her errands.”

  “He is so unpredictable that even his Queen cannot trust him. He’s as likely to be kind as to kill you,” Spike put in. “He killed Gristle.”

  “I know,” Kaye said. “He told me.”

  Spike looked at the Thistlewitch in surprise. “That’s exactly what I mean! What perverse ovation of friendship is that?”

  “How . . . how did he do it?” Kaye asked, half of her dreading the answer, but needing to know nonetheless. “How did Gristle die?”

  Lutie flitted to hover in front of her, tiny face mournful. “He was with me. We went to the knowe—the faerie hill. There was cowslip wine, and Gristle wanted me to help him filch a bottle. He was going to trade it for a pair of pretty boots from one of his hob friends.

  “It was easy to find the way inside. There’s a patch of grass that’s all brown and that’s the door. We got the bottle, easy-peasy, and were on our way out when we saw the cakes.”

  “Cakes?” Kaye was baffled.

  “Beautiful white honey cakes, heaped on a plate for the taking. Eat ’em and you get wiser, you know.”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” Kaye said.

  “Of course it does,” Lutie-loo scolded. “How else would it work?”

  Continuing, the tiny faerie gripped onto a thin twig and hung from a low bush as she spoke. “He swallowed five before they caught him.”

  Kaye didn’t point out that if these cakes were supposed to make him wiser, it should have occurred to him to stop after one. It didn’t make his death any less horrifying.

  “They probably would have let him go, but she needed a fox for her hunt. Since he stole the cakes, she said he was the perfect fox. Oh, Kaye it was awful. They had these dogs and horses, and they just rode him down. Roiben was the one that got him.”

  “What is it with you fools and saying his name?” Spike growled.

  Kaye shook her head. Roiben had killed Gristle for fun? Because he stole some food? And she’d helped the bastard. It made her skin crawl to think of the easy way she’d spoken with Roiben, the ways she had thought of him. She wondered what exactly could be done with a name, what sort of revenge she could really have.

  The Thistlewitch held out the little egg. “Come, Kaye, blow out the insides and then break it open. There is a secret for you.”

  Kaye took the little blue egg. It was so light that she was afraid it would break from the slight pressure of her fingers.

  She knelt over the Thistlewitch’s bowl and blew lightly into the pinhole of the egg. A viscous stream of albumen and yolk slithered from the other side, dropping into the bowl.

  “Now break it.”

  Kaye pressed her thumb against the egg and the whole side of it collapsed, still held together by a thin membrane.

  Spike and Lutie looked surprised, but the Thistlewitch just nodded.

  “I did it wrong,” Kaye said, and brushed the eggshells into the stream. Unlike the little boats, this egg was a shower of confetti on the water.

  “Let me just speak another secret then, child, since this one eludes you. If you think on it, I’m sure that you’ll admit there’s something passing strange about you. A strangeness, not just of manner, but of something else. The scent of it, the spoor of it, warns Ironsiders off, makes them wary and draws them in all the same.”

  Kaye shook her head, not sure where this was going.

  “Tell her a different secret,” Spike warned. “This one will only make things harder.”

  “You are one of us,” the Thistlewitch said to Kaye, black eyes glittering like jewels.

  “What?” She’d heard what was said, she understood, she was just stalling for time for her brain to start working again. She could not seem to get a breath of air into her
lungs. There were grades to impossible, levels, at least, of unreality. And each time Kaye thought things were at their weirdest, the ground seemed to open up beneath her.

  “Mortal girls are stupid and slow,” Lutie said. “You don’t have to pretend anymore.”

  She was shaking her head, but even as she did it, she knew it was true. It felt true, unbalancing and rebalancing her world so neatly that she wondered how she didn’t think of it before now. After all, why would only she be visited by faeries? Why would only she have magic she couldn’t control?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Kaye demanded.

  “Too chancy,” Spike said.

  “So why are you telling me now?”

  “Because it is you who will be chosen for the Tithe.” The Thistlewitch crossed her lanky arms serenely. “And because it is your right to know.”

  Spike snorted.

  “What? But you said I’m not . . .” She stopped herself. Not one single intelligent comment had come out of her mouth all night, and she doubted that was likely to change.

  “They figure you’re human,” Spike said. “And that’s a good thing.”

  “Some crazy faeries want to kill me and you think it’s a good thing? Hey, I thought we were friends.”

  Spike didn’t even have the grace to smile at the weak joke. He was entirely wrapped up in his planning. “There is a knight from the Seelie Court. He can pull the glamour off you. It will look like the Unseelie Queen wanted to sacrifice one of our own—the sort of jest many would well believe of her. It will cost her the legitimacy of her rule. And since she will have forfeited the bargain, it will mean the Folk like us will remain unsworn.” Spike took a breath. “We need your help.”

  Kaye bit her upper lip, running her teeth over it in deep concentration. “I’m really confused right now—you guys know that, right?”

  “If you help us, we’ll be freeeeee,” Lutie said. “Seven years of free!”

  “So what’s the difference between the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court?”

  “There are many, many courts, Seelie and Unseelie alike. But it is nearly always true that the Unseelie Courts are worse and that the gentry of either court enjoy their rule over the commoners and still more over the solitary fey. We, without ties to any courts, are at the mercy of whoever rules the lands to which we are tied.”