From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  About From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

  In this collection of short stories, enter a world where a young woman paints the future, for a terrible price, and an automaton comes to life; where wizards roam the night, ice pixies invade every Yuletide, and a vampire meets Death on a rainy night. Here, a musician plays cards with a fairy king in a game that isn’t really about cards at all, and a king’s long-suffering councillor must figure out a way to deal with a very pesky monster.

  Learn the price of immortality and the meaning of loss, and discover the power of love, humour and friendship in these 17 tales of magic and wonder. Explore the evanescent world of the Hinterlands, where words, wishes and music are so much more than you would ever expect…

  From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

  An Anthology

  (Book 1 of the Annwn Cycle)

  Emily de Courcy

  Kindle Edition

  ***

  Copyright © 2013 Emily de Courcy

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  The seller of fortunes

  Impasse

  Something rich and strange

  The bridge

  Of ice pixies and wine casks

  Hliff and Maelstrom

  Nepenthe

  Arachne

  Mrs Winifred

  Etude

  Pumpkins

  Beowulf, a prequel: in which no one could be bothered to speak in verse

  The barely-seen world

  Hildegarde

  The song of Rowland

  Pavane

  Dear Readers

  Author Bio

  Other books by Emily de Courcy

  Historical Romances as Daphne du Bois:

  Acknowledgements

  For Ali and Chants, besties and sisters.

  The seller of fortunes

  Mestral was a seller of fortunes. She lived in an old stone tower on a hill. Fortunes were much better than love charms, potions that warded off death, and horses made of air, because while they could turn around and bite you just as easily, at least you knew what you were getting into. Mestral had a very particular sense of fair play.

  The tower was full of paintings and brushes, inks and dry flowers hanging by the dozen from hooks on the high ceiling. She only lived on the first floor: the rest was left for birds to nest in and Autumn leaves to gather in bright piles, carpeting the upper floors in burgundy and gold. It got cold in the winter and she would light the fire high and bright, so that it crackled furiously against the confines of the grate.

  Mestral had a cat, a large tabby, who had taken to sleeping in the rag basket next to her paints one winter, and never left. She had put off naming the creature because she had not been certain she had any right to it, but in the end had given up and called it Wiglaf, after some warrior from a story someone had once told her for a glimpse of their future love. Wiglaf had never given any indication of being warlike, but then Mestral didn’t know of any heroes who did nothing but lap milk, climb the curtains and doze in the sun.

  Sometimes they would doze in the sun together, while time streamed around them, ruffling hair and fur alike.

  It had been a long while since the tower had teemed with voices, though Mestral had always assumed there had been such a time, because otherwise why would the tower have needed so many floors? But it had been just she for many years, and just her aunt before her. Perhaps this was for the best: Mestral was good with cats and paints, but she was not very good with people.

  It was the paints: they made it hard to focus long enough to have a proper conversation, to read between the lines or share a secret smile. The paint was always there, and it was usually everywhere. Most days there was paint in her brown hair and her clothes were covered in colourful splotches: tunics and gowns hopelessly stained with greens and indigos and scarlets. Sometimes the cat would get splattered too, but he didn’t seem to mind and he never stared like they did when she ventured down into the village.

  They looked at the floor, mostly, when they came up to see her.

  She didn’t mind it so much anymore. Not the way she had done in her younger days, when she had first come to apprentice with a long-lost aunt who’d promptly died and left Mestral the whole. People had a way of slipping away from Painters, or just coming for a visit and vanishing with the dawn, leaving cold tea cups and an empty easel. She’d felt then that the job was an honour she could have done without. If she spent her life painting the future of seamstresses, kings and pining lovers, what chance had she at a future of her own?

  There could only ever be one Painter and, by necessity, when an apprentice came into her brushes, the Painter before her could live no longer. It didn’t seem quite fair, but injustice was a lesson sooner or later learned by all, so it did no good to complain.

  Mestral painted the future and sometimes she wrote it in ink on parchment bought from a wandering wizard. She mixed her own paints and an old distillery in the basement guaranteed a constant supply of inks. She wasn’t sure where the brushes came from, but somehow they had been there from the first moment she was pronounced ready to paint and they would be gone just as quietly on the day the next Painter took over. She used to wonder to herself whether someone came to spirit them away, or if perhaps they simply melted like the last little islands of snow in the sun.

  People came to her for all kinds of reasons. Jealousy, desperation and desire; indecisions and doubts. They would hesitate, shuffling by the peeling blue gate. (There wasn’t a fence but for some reason they always came through the gate anyway.) Some would think better of it and retreat. Others would press on, trying to look undaunted. They were never completely certain if they ought to have come at all, but they hardly ever turned back once the gate had been carefully shut behind them. Mestral took payment in bolts of fabric, honey cakes, and biscuits for the cat. Sometimes she took tears and lost memories, the occasional dream or an escaped chuckle. These went into the paints, and from there, the images on canvas.

  There had been a Painter once, long ago, who’d taken payment in voices and hopes – Mestral had never seen the point of these, though she knew her own prices could be just as steep: Wiglaf was very fond of the biscuits.

  She never tried to discourage her customers – there had never been any reason to. If they did not go to her they would go to some peddler at a fair, with a colourful tent and an unhealthy sense of theatrics, and buy a lie instead. Worse yet, they would be told what they wanted to hear, whatever that may be.

  The way Mestral saw it, at least she showed them a truth. And if they were the sort that had a punishment coming to them, most likely at their own hands, then a truth could be much more potent than a disappointment. Painters never painted themselves. It was not a law, so much as it was common sense.

  She didn’t deal in truths, of course. She just painted, rendering images with a skill and delicacy that ought not to have been possible. She could never quite know how a painting would turn out until it was done, because exerting her will against it would instantly ruin the thing. The glimpses of the future, caught in the shadows and the brush strokes, happened all by themselves.

  They were never set in stone until you looked at them. Mestral painted possibilities, but when the customer set eyes on a finished canvas, they took what they saw for granted and made it into a future. She had always supposed that if o
nly they wouldn’t do that, the future would simply flow on instead of catching in the snare. She had tried explaining that at first, but it was never any use.

  Over the years, Mestral had witnessed every possible hue of joy and despair, with all the fascination of an outside observer. There was no time for either in the little tower and, as the years went by, she thought that she might be better off with the brushes that never failed and the neat bottles of coloured ink. Though it would be nice, a treacherous voice pointed out, to have another cup permanently on the table with hers. A cup with a personality attached, with character, with a someone.

  Mestral did not enjoy the moment of revelation, when the customer set eyes on the canvas they had thought they wanted to see, but she went on painting regardless because that was what she did and what she was. There was no way she could ever be anything else until her brushes disappeared and another Painter took her place.

  Often, she sat in the sun next to her little vegetable garden while Wiglaf made a token attempt to pounce on a butterfly or a pigeon before deciding that the hunt was simply not worth the effort and curling up in the grass instead.

  Sometimes mortals came from their side of the veil, always on impossible quests looking for phoenixes, princesses, and dreams. She would give them aid as best she could, and they would continue on, leaving their paintings behind, to be stored in the back room behind the broom closet.

  These were the most interesting and she was always sorry not to know how their quests turned out in the end, and how the paintings might fit into the stories they were living. Mestral always saw the world in colours and patterns, and stories made for a pleasant change.

  It was on a sunny afternoon, as she sat sleepily on a bench behind the house, half-awake and half not, that a man in rusted, outdated armour came crunching over the leaves. He was a sorry sight to behold. He looked weary, downtrodden and somehow anxious all at once. He didn’t have a charger or a sword or a surcote that might denote his colours. Mestral liked colours, though heraldry meant nothing to her.

  Absently, she retrieved a brush from the pocket of her dress, twirling it in her long fingers, and wondered how she might paint him. (There would be lots of greys and silvery-blues, she decided, and brownish red for the rust.) He looked surprised to see her, as if she were the first person he had set eyes on in centuries.

  “You are not a fairy’s child,” he said, half to himself, and half in a whisper, in a voice that was hoarse with disuse. It was as if he were quoting from memory words he had once known better than his own name.

  Mestral did not think she was of fairy kind. But she did know the signs when she saw them: he was one of the queen’s victims. Queen Asdis and the dark tales whispered about her had never really occupied Mestral’s thoughts for long. What did they matter to her, in her tower on the edge of nowhere?

  Yet, even she had heard about the queen, and her game of luring mortal knights: of her wild eyes and of the fairy song with which she would lull them into sleep or madness, or both.

  Mestral watched curiously and wondered which it was this time – or were madness and sleep as one in his frantic mind? Sometimes, the queen would simply lure her knights into swamps and drown them while they dreamed deliriously of her eyes, but she was rarely so merciful as that.

  “I am the Painter of fortunes,” Mestral said when he stopped to take a second look, as if to make certain she would not fade like a dream conjured by a mind not quite his own. The paint splotches assured him, she noticed, for he visibly relaxed when he saw those, and her bare feet. It was not the sort of thing knights dreamt about.

  He stopped by the blue gate, puzzled, then went around it. “And what do you paint: luck, or the future?” His voice was like pines creaking in the Autumn wind.

  “Sometimes, both.”

  The knight sat wearily down near her and leant against the stone wall of the tower. His armour made a laborious grating sound and Mestral cringed. It was a while before he spoke again, before he returned to the same world in which she sat, watching him patiently. He didn’t ask her to paint his future or write his fate on a scroll. He asked for her to paint his death instead.

  Mestral did not answer for a long time. There were some stories she wasn’t sure she wished to hear. The cat ambled over suspiciously, then extended a paw to a trailing bit of broken chain mail, pushing it experimentally. It made a soft clinking sound.

  “Why?”

  “I have slumbered these hundred years in a fever dream. I saw the shade of my lord, pale and forgotten. And I saw her, with hair like thistledown and eyes like fire, and I heard her voice, like the crackle of lightning, whispering I love thee true. She stole the lives of many who wished to live and she stole death from me. There is nothing now, no lord or keep, and perhaps eternity before me.” He wasn’t looking at her: from what Mestral could see, he wasn’t looking at anything.

  The Painter thought about this, as they sat in the sun. She had painted a thousand futures and there had been death in her paints many times. But she didn’t think she wanted to paint death on request, even if she could, and she thought it was stupid to request it when so many would have given anything to have her blanch the canvas and start again.

  “I see,” Mestral said, when the sun began descending. “But I don’t love thee true. I didn’t steal your life and I don’t wish to paint your death. I am sorry your lord is dead, but perhaps instead of wandering the countryside looking a fright you ought to get on without him.”

  He truly saw her then, his tired eyes flying to hers, bewilderment painted across his wan face, as though she were the mad one.

  Mestral rose to her feet, went into the house and put the heavy cast-iron kettle over the fire. She thought about eternity and death while she waited for the water to heat. Later, when the water had boiled, she poked her head out again. He was still by the wall, looking at the stars now, but seeing none of them either.

  “Perhaps, one day I will oblige you,” she said reluctantly. “But for now I think you had better come in. The wind is picking up. And I do wish you’d leave that armour outside. I won’t have it in my kitchen.”

  She didn’t paint his death that day, though she did give him tea and a bit of walnut cake, a clean shirt that was only slightly less old-fashioned than his armour, and a mattress to put near the fire.

  The nights were getting colder, and just because he couldn’t die it didn’t make a chill any more pleasant to bear. Then she set about trying to explain something she had learned over her many years of painting, and watching as people made their minds up about her canvasses: it wasn’t the past or the future or even the present that truly mattered. It was the colours and the sun and biscuits. And the Autumn was too beautiful a season to die in.

  Impasse

  Sometimes she was a cat. Other times she was a bird or a willow tree, leaves rustling in the breeze. She could be a dozen different things: wishes and secrets and dreams. It was often hard to remember who she was supposed to be, as she sat on a tall branch watching people walk past below, wielding bags and umbrellas. Such strange things, humans, she’d think before remembering that she was meant to be one of them. It gave her headaches to remember that part.

  Other times, she was human, when she forgot not to be. She would change suddenly, flow into a human form, like water. She had a house and a roomful of shoes she never wore. Her pristine collection spanned the ages. She didn’t like shoes – they felt somehow wrong, restraining. But she kept them anyway, because it seemed to unsettle people to learn that she didn’t own any. Bad enough that there were no mirrors in her house: it was impossible to explain that.

  It wasn’t that she disliked them – it was just that there was only one mirror that was right, and she never could find it. When she was human she would go to galleries, look at the portraits and sit in the café with her bare feet tucked under her as she drank black coffee and watched lives drift past. Coffee was the only thing she drank, the only thing to be found in her kitchen most of t
he time, except milk for the cat, which she never touched herself.

  When she was human, she had a name, though it would slip out of her mind, and slip back in quite unexpectedly. Gabrielle, she thought, and tried to hold on to it. She had been a countess once, long ago, in France, and had had a long name, most of which never came back to her at all. She felt old when she thought about it. She still had the manor, inherited by herself from herself down invented generations of family with whimsical names she had made up because they amused her.

  There was a lot of marble and a gallery of paintings of people who had never been her own relations, for the house had originally belonged to the count and the portraits with it. It was always cold inside, but she liked to leave the doors and windows open, and feel the crosswind rattle the portraits like old bones and memories come to life.

  She’d walk barefoot on the cold marble in the portrait gallery, and when it rained she left wet footprints behind. She had a cat who was always a cat, and who reminded her that she was human. It often sat on her windowsill, and she gave it milk. It had been scruffy once, but it was sleek now, and it slept on her pillow when she left her bedroom window open. Gabrielle had a soft spot for sad, broken things.

  Her house was piled with books, hardcovers and paperbacks, fiction, history, and numerous mystery novels: anything that struck her fancy. There were books she found on park benches and on the edges of fountains – she had had a long time to grow her collection. When she read them, she could stay the same shape for days on end.

  The harpsichord, antique and long-since unplayable, stood quietly in one of the rooms – she had never been musical. It reminded her of when the house had been full of high-born guests playing at cards and gossiping. She could almost picture the fluttering fans, heady perfume, and jewellery that sparkled like dreams in the candlelight. The house had been alive then, through dinners, card parties and balls.