The Last Changeling

by Jane Yolen

  For the first time, the words struck her, as hard as the force of a troll’s cudgel. If Odds was to be believed, and humans were the storytellers and poets, then a human had written the play about Princess Eal.

  “Skarm drema!” she whispered. “‘For I’ve been stolen for to slave inside a dragon’s dark, jeweled cave . . .’”

  By her left side, a woman with orange hair and a turned-up nose looked at her, not at all startled, and whispered back, “Drema skarm. Time to leave the cave, sister.”

  Without questioning it further, Snail handed her one of the cards.

  ASPEN PLAYS HIS PART

  The sun went down, the stage lights went up, and Maggie Light pushed Aspen onto the stage. Where he immediately forgot his first line.

  Instead, he was mesmerized by the multitude of faces in the audience: elven soldiers, lower-caste fey, mud-folk peasants, the odd middle-class merchant or laird come to the fair for a bit of low entertainment. They all shared a certain expectant look, as if they believed they might actually be about to see a magical world where brave princes fought mighty dragons to rescue beautiful princesses, though of course everyone knew that dragons no longer existed. Except in stories. Or plays. Or the occasional song.

  He supposed that once upon a time, he’d looked at the stage like that: mouth agape, expecting magic.

  But there will be no magic tonight, folks, he thought bitterly. It is all colored lights, ropes, and a whole lot of bad acting. A prince in a dress, a dwarf dressed as a prince.

  He looked out at the faces of the shopkeepers, farmers, day laborers, and other menials who did the actual work of his father’s kingdom and thought about the tiny magicks they wielded. He even saw Snail making her way through the crowd, a magicless, lower-class girl.

  But braver than any prince I have ever known.

  He included himself in that number.

  Suddenly, a trapdoor cleverly concealed in the grains of the wooden floor popped open in front of him. It was only a crack, but as if to prove how much braver Snail was than he, he nearly startled right out of his massive costume.

  First a nose and then a beard poked out of the trapdoor and Annar hissed, “I am and am not the Princess Eal.”

  “Oh, yes. Right.” He cleared his throat, looked over at the audience, and began.

  I am and am not the Princess Eal.

  And none of you knows how I feel.

  For I’ve been stolen for to slave

  Inside a dragon’s dark, jeweled cave . . .

  That was not half bad, he thought, before looking back at the onlookers. They stared aghast and he suddenly realized that he hadn’t spoken in a falsetto, as Maggie had reminded him to, but instead had used his normal—and quite male—voice.

  Oh. No.

  He tried to redo the lines in a girl’s voice, but squeaked the first line and coughed on the second and, to his eternal horror, the crowd started laughing. He stopped before repeating the third line, and tried on a smile.

  Maybe we can play this thing for laughs.

  Then he turned to see Dagmarra making her entrance. She looked every inch the brave and martial prince, though those inches were rather few.

  And she was staring daggers right at Aspen.

  So, he thought miserably, we shall not be playing this for humor.

  With a great deal of emotion—and, Aspen had to admit, a fair amount of thespian skill—Dagmarra began to deliver her lines:

  I am Ollm and Ollm I am,

  Prince of fey and beast and man.

  With sword and shield and magicks, too,

  I have come to rescue . . .

  But neither Aspen nor the crowd got to hear what Dagmarra was going to do with her sword and shield and magicks, because just then one of the soldiers in the crowd let out a howling scream.

  There was a black arrow sticking out from under his arm, the one place the breastplate did not protect. He pawed at it ineffectually for a moment and then fell. There was the briefest bit of silence, as the crowd tried to figure out whether this was part of the play or not. But when more arrows flew into the crowd, hitting soldier and peasant alike, everyone began screaming.

  Snail! Aspen thought.

  He looked over to where he had seen her last, but the crowd was stampeding now, the night closing in, and it was impossible to make out one small redheaded girl in the bubbling ocean of frightened folk.

  What he did see were fell creatures wading into the crowd now, black and green, with too many teeth and not enough limbs. But what limbs they did have were clawed or taloned or holding black knives. More creatures followed behind them, warty and short, and tall and hairy, and dark and smoky, as if they were only halfway here in this world. He knew them of course. They were drows and boggarts and bogles and bogies. They were leshies and lycants, kelpies, and members of the Wild Hunt.

  “Unseelie!” someone shouted. Aspen thought it might have been him.

  And I’m standing onstage in a dress.

  Arrows thunked into the stage now, and Aspen drew his dagger from the folds of the dress. He thought about cutting the costume off with it, rubbing his face free of the woman’s makeup, but realized there was no time. He would have to fight as he was.

  “But not in these shoes!” He realized belatedly that he had shouted the lines as he kicked off the silly things and dove off the stage.

  Seelie folk were desperately running this way and that, not sure of where the attacks were coming from or which way to go to get away. Some of them had fallen and were being trampled by friend and foe alike.

  Aspen thought he might be trampled as well, but he began a swimming motion that pushed people away from him while moving him through the crowd. He felt hobbled by the dress and hated it, but he kept going, glad the shoes at least were gone.

  Once, he had to stop his swimming motion to avoid stabbing a brownie child, and while that was the noble thing to do, he was immediately buffeted, then knocked sideways.

  A black-clawed hand swung at his face and he cut at it wildly with his dagger. He must have scored a hit because he heard a squeal and the hand disappeared.

  Catching a brief glimpse of a redhead that he thought might be Snail, he tried to push toward her, but the sheer press of people was carrying him along now. He was a piece of driftwood with its hair standing on end.

  With its hair standing on end?

  CRAAAAACK!

  Aspen was blinded by a blue light as the smell of lightning and burnt flesh filled the air. He and the crowd members nearest him filled the air, too, unaccountably lifted up and flung back toward the stage. They landed in a heap of broken limbs and bleeding skulls. Aspen hit the ground and then desperately kept rolling because his dress had caught fire from the lightning spell.

  I guess we will see magic tonight.

  Standing up at last in the burned rags of his costume, head ringing, half-blind in one eye, he found he’d lost his dagger, but at least he was back by the stage, which meant he was out of the crowd a bit.

  The lower-castes were still running about mindlessly. They had no idea how to fight a battle.

  If someone does not lead them soon, he thought, it will be a complete slaughter.

  He turned to look up at the stage, all the while thinking, War should be fought soldier to soldier, not like this. This is the cutting down of cattle; this is simply fish pulled up in nets.

  There were children lying bleeding against the stage, women with red wounds blossoming on their breasts. Farmers and shopkeepers torn in two. The area in front of the stage was running red with a river of blood.

  The stories he had loved as a boy, the minstrel songs, the great ballads of both Seelie and Unseelie kings, all celebrated heroism and heroic deaths in battle. Even the Border Lords came back from raids joking about their scars.

  But this, Aspen thought, no one ever sings
about this. No tales talk of such destruction on the large scale or the small.

  Meanwhile, the Seelie soldiers were trying to recover, but they were badly outnumbered. As they called out to one another to regroup, to find their leaders, the black and green Unseelie monsters were being reinforced by Border Lords in their plaids, swinging huge swords that cut down anything near them: men, women, brownies, selchies, hobs, children. The children, he thought, were the hardest to bear. Why had he never thought of children in war?

  He looked at the Border Lords, in their orderly lines. Like bloody farmers scything the crops, he thought. They may be berserkers, but they are disciplined ones. No one will escape this harvesting. He shuddered.

  One of the Seelie officers, of obvious noble blood, was trying desperately to rally his troops by flinging spells wildly, hitting friend and foe alike.

  Aspen could feel the magic calling to his own, and he felt a rage rising inside him. He tried to suppress it, hold it in. Using his princely magic would alert every wizard in two kingdoms where he was. But here, whatever he thought of it, was true battle. The magic would not be denied.

  Blood calls to blood, as the old Seelie saying went. His blood, his noble blood, was being called out.

  “I am the Bright Celestial!” he shouted, barely able to keep from naming himself. “I am Ruire of the Tir na nOg!” He raised his empty hands and saw that they were ringed with fire. “And you shall regret interrupting my performance!”

  The magic exploded from him, shooting flames from his fingertips. It washed into a row of kelpies and they screamed and withered to ash and crumbling seaweed.

  A dozen Border Lord archers notched arrows and turned to face this new threat. The remaining kelpies nickered and neighed as they swung away from the fleeing crowd to surround Aspen.

  They have, he thought wildly, very sharp teeth for horses.

  Boggarts howled, drows made a jubilant ululating sound. The lycants growled so loudly, it sounded like thunder. Aspen managed—but only just—to keep from putting his fingers in his ears.

  Not far from the stage came the sound of goblins in the bushes. Probably mixing something explosive, Aspen thought. Perhaps that war cry was not my best idea ever. But even as he thought that, he knew it was not something he had chosen to do: Blood called to blood.

  Gathering flames around him, a shield and a weapon as one, he prepared to charge to his certain—though quite princely—doom.

  But at that very moment, the back of the wagon split open and Huldra—baby Og now strapped to her back—roared out of it, immediately stomping two bogles into the ground. Blood and bones and loosened bowels were ground into the churned-up dirt. She stopped to swallow a third bogle whole, then roared out a belch that shook the ground around her. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so frightening.

  A sword was pressed into Aspen’s hand and he looked down at three very angry dwarfs holding axes and looking grim.

  “Beware!” Dagmarra growled at him, then glanced over her shoulder.

  Aspen peered over her shoulder as well.

  From behind the wagon came the giant metal spider that had set up the stage. Only this time it was plucking up Border Lords and kelpies, leshies and lycants and tossing them impossibly high into the air. Its legs must have been cold iron because every Unseelie who tried to rush it was burned at the touch. Arrows plinked off the spider’s sides as its enemies fell broken onto the ground.

  Looking more closely, Aspen saw that the spider carried a strange addition to its iron carapace. Someone was riding the spider as if it were a gigantic steed.

  “But that’s . . .” Aspen said.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Annar pointed out.

  Aspen couldn’t even smile at the wordplay; there were still enemies before him. And though they were shaken by the sudden appearance of so formidable a foe, they did not look ready to run.

  Yet.

  Giving a thin grimace to his companions that someone might mistake for a smile, Aspen turned and fired a gout of flame from his fingers into the ranks of his enemies. Then he followed the flames in, sword at the ready, with Professor Odds’s players swooping in from behind to lend him their support.

  SNAIL MANAGES SOMEHOW

  Snail didn’t see the first arrow or the second, and the first sign she had that the whole evening had changed irrevocably was when she stumbled over a dead Seelie soldier. He was not much older than Aspen, for he hadn’t a hint of a beard or the faintest bit of hair on his upper lip. She still didn’t understand what was happening until moments later when another soldier fell dead at her feet. Then the screaming began.

  Her first thought was of Aspen, then of baby Og, and she turned to run for the wagon. The crowd swept her up and she knew immediately that she wouldn’t make it.

  The woods! she thought, but they looked impossibly far away. Well, if I can’t run . . . She drew her knife and looked for someone to fight.

  There was no one, just panic and screaming and arrows appearing from the darkness. A girl no older than she stumbled and hit the ground with the sound of a sack of grain being slammed into the dirt. An arrow stuck out of her calf like a serving fork in a solstice hen. Suddenly, Snail felt all doubt fall away.

  She threw herself next to the fallen girl, guarding her from the fleeing crowd with her body. The girl was screaming in pain, but the sound was lost among the panicked shouts of the crowd.

  However, dealing with screaming women was the first thing you learned as a midwife’s apprentice.

  Snail turned the girl over onto her back, grabbing her leg, and in almost the same motion, knelt on the leg, holding it firm. Unable to sit up, the girl slapped at Snail ineffectually till Snail hissed at her, “Hold still!”

  The arrow had gone through the meat of the calf; the bone looked untouched. She slit the girl’s leggings, then tore the fabric off in strips.

  I’ll need those in a moment.

  The tip of the arrow was poking out the other side of the girl’s leg, but hadn’t broken the skin yet. Snail thought briefly about warning the girl what was going to happen next, but didn’t think that would help anything.

  Grabbing the feathered end of the arrow, she shoved it harshly further into the calf so that the barbed tip sliced through the skin on the far side, and new blood gushed from the wound. She felt the girl struggle, but Snail had her leg secured.

  And the leg is all that matters right now.

  Snail gave little thought to what she must do, and just did it. Gone was the midwife’s creed: Anticipate, alleviate, and then await. She’d no time for any of that. Do and do and do was her creed now, and worry later about what she’d done or if she’d done enough.

  She grabbed the arrow below the tip, careful not to cut herself—hoping it hadn’t been dipped in poison—and snapped the tip off. Then she pulled the whole thing back out the way it had gone in, swiftly and smoothly, ignoring the foul names the girl was calling her.

  “I’m a trained doctor,” she fibbed, but it was like a rag in the girl’s mouth, stoppering her insults for the moment.

  Grabbing the strips of cloth she’d cut from the leggings, Snail wadded each into the wide punctures in the girl’s leg, then tied them tight in place with the rest. Only then did she release her.

  The girl glared at her, but her leg was too swollen and bruised for her to move.

  “Someone will help you up after a bit,” Snail told her. “But at least you are losing no more blood. That’s what could have killed you.”

  And still might, she thought. When women died giving birth it was often due simply to the blood loss. It was one of the first lessons Mistress Softhands had taught. But infection was just as deadly. And she had no herbs to help the girl with that.

  A big man in a farmer’s tunic was stumbling through the crowd, his nose askew and a brutal gash across the top of his thigh. Blood was waterf
alling down his leg. She wasn’t sure how he was able to walk with that wound but knew he wouldn’t be doing it for much longer—or ever again—if it didn’t get tended to soon.

  She held up her arms to stop him, but he shook his head and pointed toward the trees. She nodded and followed behind him as he bulled his way through the hordes of people.

  The amount of blood seemed to work as a charm, parting the crowd. The farmer collapsed just before the treeline, but there were suddenly hands there to drag him into cover.

  Snail cut his pants away from the wound and went to work. At least the farmer didn’t curse her, only grunted once or twice. Though like the girl, he gave Snail no thanks for her help. But Snail had been enough times in a birth chamber to know that thanks came only after fear and exhaustion had time to walk out of the room, after the patient was assured of life.

  More wounded arrived, some stumbling on their own, some carried. They all came to Snail as if pulled there magically. She examined their wounds, treated those that she could. The others she left to the compassion of the fey gods.

  The fey gods, as she knew well, were not always kind.

  At one point a woman pressed a needle and thread into her hand, and someone else dried the sweat from her forehead. She realized she had helpers—men who found supplies at her asking, women who dealt with the smaller hurts. She sewed and cut and sweated and at some point she noticed that her own fingers bled from a hundred pin-sticks.

  Her shoulders felt like boulders; her back had a permanent ache that ran from one side to the other. But she ignored her own pain as she ignored those wounded who weren’t going to die without help, and went back to work. The time seemed to concentrate down to each wound.

  After she’d worked on a dozen, two dozen, five dozen . . . maybe even a hundred patients—she’d lost count long ago—the sound of clashing blades and crashing magicks grew dangerously close to her wooded spot. But she had a vein pinched between her fingers, and if she looked away before she closed it, the mother of four lying before her would die in front of her children.