The Fairies of Sadieville

by Alex Bledsoe

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can. I don’t have that much Tufa in me.”

  “You’ve got it where it counts,” Ginny said, and tapped her friend over her heart. “I’ve heard you play and sing. You’re not just a talented musician, you’re magic.”

  “Maybe,” Janet said.

  “‘Maybe,’ my skinny white ass. Don’t humble-brag at me.” Ginny was a good bassist, but she suspected that any heights of musical ability she reached was just riding on Janet’s coattails. Her friend was a legitimate phenomenon, and everyone knew it. Ginny had no doubt that Janet would likewise dazzle their true community in their homeland.

  She took another long toke on the joint. “I don’t guess we have to worry about it just yet, until they tell us they’ve actually found the way.”

  “They’ll find it,” Janet said. “It’s the kind of thing they always find.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Janet waved her hand at the world around them. “The thing that fucks up everything good with a promise of something even better.”

  “Whoa,” Ginny said. “That is seriously deep.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, seriously. Seriously deep.”

  “I know.”

  They sat in silence, looking out at the stars and the lights on the road, the air around them still and quiet. If they noticed that the night winds were silent, they didn’t comment on it. They were content to let their slowed awareness take in all the details that they were usually too busy to appreciate.

  * * *

  Saggory “Sag” Gowen sat with his grandson Kurt on his knee as his wife refilled his iced tea. His daughter-in-law Renny, the boy’s mother and the widow of his deceased son, stood at the window looking out at the night.

  “I can’t believe it,” Renny said at last. “It must be some kind of elaborate practical joke. I mean, if it was going to happen, wouldn’t it be … I don’t know, announced or something?”

  “It has been,” Sag said. “That’s what that song was about.”

  “I guess.” She took the refill that Sag’s wife Bobbie handed her. Although she’d sworn she’d never darken the Gowen doorway after she’d learned that her late husband Duncan was responsible for her brother Adam’s death, Renny had mellowed over the intervening months. Kurt deserved to know his grandparents, especially since they were just as appalled at their son’s behavior.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Bobbie said. “We’re not purebloods, or even half bloods. We’ve got just enough Tufa in us to cause trouble.”

  “What about Kurt?” Sag said.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Renny said with certainty. “And neither am I.”

  “What if they make us?” Sag asked.

  Renny snorted. “I’d like to see ’em try.”

  “They could. Mandalay, she could do it. She’s strong enough.”

  “Nobody’s strong enough to make me leave my son or my home,” Renny said firmly.

  The Gowens fell silent, each of them mulling their own thoughts. Only Renny had the absolute certainty that she wouldn’t go; Sag and Bobbie wondered first if they would, and then if they’d even get the choice.

  * * *

  Mandalay and Luke drew their lips apart. His hands were under her shirt, and her right hand stroked him between his legs, over his jeans. This was as far as they’d ever gone, and in calmer moments, both agreed it was a good stopping point. They were just kids, after all, and Mandalay especially was aware of the cliché of the knocked-up hillbilly girl. Plus there was the undeniable truth of who she was, and the fact that she was pretty much doomed to die in childbirth.

  And yet the sense of hovering right on the edge, of only a few pieces of cloth keeping them from each other, made them both rethink that agreement. For Luke it was the thrill of new discovery, while for Mandalay it was a reminder of just why her predecessors risked agonizing death.

  They were in her bedroom, alone in the dark, in the trailer she shared with her father and stepmother. The adults were away at the Pair-A-Dice roadhouse, drinking and dancing, and Mandalay was too old (far too old, if you thought about it) for a babysitter. Nothing stopped them but their own wills, and neither felt they could count on that much longer.

  She knew what to do in this situation; having the memory of millennia of women, all of whom had had lovers, meant she would be very capable of guiding the inexperienced Luke to do exactly what she wanted. And she knew what to do to him, to make sure he enjoyed himself as well. But something held her back, and it wasn’t morality; it was the sense that she needed to focus her energy elsewhere. No matter, she thought heatedly, how much other parts of her body felt differently. So she fought the memories of her past selves’ sexual experiences and tried to remain a fifteen-year-old virgin.

  She felt her bra come unsnapped. She said raggedly, “Move your hand up a little.” He did, cupping her breast. “Oh,” she said, her eyes closed.

  He was shirtless, and she ran her left hand over his shoulder and back, feeling the lean muscles under his skin. If he grew up like his father, his shoulders would grow even broader, and his arms would develop whipcord muscles that stood out beneath his skin. His fingers would remain long and nimble, allowing the easy playing of guitars.

  And other things. His long fingers trembled against her, and the sense of power it gave her made her stomach drop.

  “Okay, stop for a minute,” she managed to choke out, and Luke withdrew his hands. He tucked hair behind her ear and let his fingertips brush her cheeks, not ready to entirely quit touching her.

  “Too far?” he asked.

  “I just … I need to keep my head clear.” She stood, pulled her bra free of her tank top, straightened her clothes, and took a long, deep breath.

  He stayed on her bed, watching. They’d begun dating when they were both twelve; she was the leader of her people, and his family had always followed the group led first by Rockhouse Hicks, and now Junior Damo. It was not a true Romeo-and-Juliet situation, since no one tried to keep them apart, but there was tension whenever they appeared in public together. So they tended to keep their encounters private, which had brought its own set of issues. Especially now.

  “Thinking about going back to … home?” he asked.

  “Hard not to,” she said. “I remember it.”

  “That must be strange.”

  “That’s one word for it,” she said with a chuckle too mature for her years.

  “What was it like?”

  She thought that over. How to describe a place that, for her and her people, was as much a part of them as a limb or an organ? “Everything was beautiful. I’m not just saying that, either. The people, the land, the air … it was all perfect. Everywhere you looked, there was something that should take your breath away. Except … nothing did. When all you see is beauty, you have nothing to compare it to. So none of us realized how beautiful it truly was, and how happy we were in it, until we came here, and saw how crude and ugly this world could be.”

  He came up behind her, brushed her hair from her neck and kissed it. “This world has its nice points.”

  She smiled and leaned back against him. “Yeah, it does.”

  “Are you going to look for it, then?”

  “No. I think that’s what those two strangers are here for. To find it for us. To give us time to decide what we’ll do when they do find it.”

  “Is that what the night winds want?”

  “I don’t know. The night winds have done things like this before: brought in outsiders to do things that the Tufa can’t or won’t do.” She turned to face him, astounded anew by the sheer youth of his face, the untested bravery in his eyes. Would his courage prove strong enough if it came down to it? Did she want to know?

  “So the winds haven’t spoken to you about it?”

  “No. One thing I’ve never known is whether the night winds came with us, or were already here and just took us in when we arrived.”

  “So if
they’re native to this world, they may not want us to go back,” he said, thinking aloud. “They may not let us go back.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “It sounds like there’s a lot of things you just don’t know, and that you can’t control.”

  She laughed. “That’s totally true. Does it surprise you?”

  “A little,” he said, and put his hands on her waist. “Maybe you need something to take your mind off it.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “Have you got any ideas?”

  “I do,” he said, suddenly sounding confident and mature. She knew it was an act, since she felt his legs trembling, but she appreciated it more than she could say. The mere fact that he sensed what she needed and was trying to give it to her almost made her cry.

  “You have to promise me something, though,” he added.

  “What?”

  “No thinking about the future. Or the past. You stay in the moment, right now, with me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised.

  “And I’ll do my best to keep you here.”

  * * *

  Later, after Luke left and her parents came home, Mandalay lay awake staring at her ceiling. Everyone expected answers from her, from the one person they were sure knew what the night winds were thinking. Sometimes that was true. But not this time.

  She began to sing, very quietly, the only song that mattered now:

  As a girl I walked your hollers

  Down by the shallow, springtime creek

  But now where I walk, a shadow follows

  And I pray the Lord my soul will keep …

  As she sang, the wind picked up outside. She went to the window and opened it. The breeze was cool against her still-warm skin, and she closed her eyes to it. When she opened them, she jumped. Something now stood in her yard, silhouetted in the orange-pink glow of the sodium security light.

  It was a deer, but almost as big as an elk, with broad antlers having a staggering thirty points between them. Beside the stag stood two coyotes, lean and still.

  She swallowed hard. The King of the Forest. This was serious.

  She dressed and slipped out of the trailer carefully, without waking her parents. She winced as the screen door squeaked shut.

  By then the stag and coyotes were gone, replaced by a man nearly seven feet tall, with a broad chest and wearing only an animal-skin cloth tied around his waist. He still sported the antlers from his temples, though in this light, it could’ve been a headdress. If she didn’t know better.

  As she approached him, two young women with dreadlocks, also dressed with just animal-skin sashes around their waists, came out of the shadows and escorted her, one on each side. They smelled like outdoor dogs, and as they walked, one of them leaned forward and sniffed at the back of Mandalay’s neck.

  Mandalay only came up to the middle of the big man’s broad, hairy chest, so she had to look up into his bearded face. The two coyote women circled them as they gazed at each other.

  “So you’ve heard the news,” she said.

  His immense head nodded.

  “Do you know where to find the passage?”

  This time he shook his head.

  “Will you try to stop us if we go?”

  Again the head shake.

  She had to swallow before asking the next question. “Do you want us to go?”

  The winds were still in the darkness above them. The only sound was the soft padding of the coyote girls’ bare feet. Then he slowly put one enormous hand on her shoulder. A shudder ran through her, overpowering and intimate, a primal response to the most masculine thing any woman might experience in this world. It wasn’t invasive, or an invitation; it simply was, as he simply was.

  Then he spoke. Not many encountered the King of the Forest; usually he was glimpsed, in his stag form, in the distance. There were stories of encounters, but usually those were warnings, and ended badly for those who met him. In no stories did he ever speak; he usually left that up to his escorts, the coyote women. But this time, he spoke as equal to equal.

  “You have been kind to my forest for a very long time,” he said in a voice so deep she felt it in her chest more than her ears. “If you depart, the ones who settle here after you will not be.”

  “And you’ve been kind to us as well,” she said, her voice trembling. She put her hand over his. “I don’t know what we’ll decide. But when we do, I’ll come find you.”

  He nodded and removed his hand. The tips of his enormous fingers lightly stroked her cheek, just as Luke’s had done earlier. Then in two long strides he disappeared back into the darkened woods. His women companions had vanished, and now two coyotes followed him. The shadows between the trees swallowed them at once.

  Mandalay let out a long breath. The encounter had shaken her, just as her only real confrontation with the spirits of the night winds had once done. That time, they had spoken to her directly, in a human voice, but she had lacked the courage to turn and see them. At least with the King of the Forest, she managed to look him in the eye.

  She went back inside and tried futilely to sleep. But too many uncertainties battled for supremacy in her head, all boiling down to one issue: could they, or anyone, find the cave the Conlins once guarded? And if they did, would it still lead them home?

  * * *

  At the Catamount Corner bed-and-breakfast, in the little apartment behind the front desk, Cyrus Crow sat at his kitchen table and smiled at the face on the laptop screen. “Hey,” he said, his heart filling with love in a way he’d never imagined possible.

  “Hey,” Matt Johanssen replied. He was exhausted but wired, as he always was after a performance on the road.

  “How was the show tonight?”

  “Okay. The board Jason was dancing on cracked halfway through the wedding scene. Sounded like a gun had gone off, and since I had a gun, everyone thought it was either part of the plot, or a mistimed sound effect.”

  “At least you got their attention,” C.C. said.

  “They were riveted,” Matt agreed with a laugh. Then he rested his chin on his hand. “So what’s wrong?”

  “What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

  “Well, mainly I just had a feeling about it. But now that I see you, I see you’ve got that little furrow between your eyebrows. You only get that when you’re worried.”

  C.C. smiled again. He understood that Matt had to honor his contract to the show Chapel of Ease, that his career was important to him, but he wanted nothing more than to hold Matt’s hand as they walked through the woods and talked about the future. In his perfect future, Matt retired from the stage and helped him run the Catamount Corner; it may have been a gay couple cliché, but truthfully, it was C.C.’s fondest dream.

  “I learned something new tonight,” C.C. said.

  “So you had a very special episode?”

  “Ha.”

  “Okay, so what did you learn?”

  “Remember how I told you that the Tufa came from … somewhere else?”

  Matt’s tired, relaxed face suddenly tightened, and his eyes flashed with wary alertness. He even sat up straighter. “Yes.”

  “Well, now there’s talk that we might be able to go back. Some college kids who are doing some research project may have found the way.” As he spoke, he looked up at the ceiling, imagining Justin and Veronica asleep in their room, excited to hunt up the ruins of Sadieville and having no idea what they might unleash by doing so.

  Matt swallowed hard. His voice, though, was casual. “Do you want to go back?”

  C.C. sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know, Matt. All I know about that place are the stories I’ve heard. Yes, it sounds wonderful, but so does Florida until you find out about the palmetto bugs and the fire ants.”

  After a pause, Matt said, “I’m guessing I’m not invited?”

  “It’s a dangerous place for people who aren’t Tufa.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

&nbs
p; C.C. knew Matt deserved the truth. “No, you wouldn’t be invited. It’s only for the Tufa, and then only for those of us with enough true Tufa blood.”

  In the silence, the refrigerator compressor kicked on, making C.C. jump.

  “Wow,” Matt said finally. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, we’ve made this long-distance relationship thing work, but that’s really long distance.”

  “Yeah. I guess it sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s not for me to say. They’re your people, not mine.”

  “I’ve always thought so.” He touched the laptop’s screen, caressing Matt’s video cheek. “But you know what I realized the moment I saw your face tonight?”

  “What?”

  “That you are my people now. That nothing over there can possibly beat what I’ve got here.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  C.C. saw the relief in Matt’s eyes, even as his actor’s skill kept it off his face. He realized Matt had been genuinely, truly afraid that C.C. would choose the Tufa over him.

  “I can’t wait to see you, you know,” Matt said.

  “I know,” C.C. agreed. And then they described what they’d do with each other the next time Matt visited.

  * * *

  Upstairs, sated by exhaustion and sex, Justin and Veronica slept in each other’s arms. It was the kind of position long-term couples usually abandoned, but they clung to it, and each other.

  Then Veronica’s eyes suddenly popped open. She lay still, looking around in the darkness, wondering what had awoken her. Had she heard a sound? For an instant she was disoriented, wondering where they were, then she recalled the events of the past day.

  Azure, the professor in the forest, had told them the story of Sadieville. They had only to go out tomorrow into the hills and find it. With the GPS coordinates and topographical maps, it should be possible. Then Justin’s academic career would be back on track.

  But what about her?

  Lying there in the dark, with his steady breathing in one ear, she realized that she really served no purpose here other than being a supportive girlfriend. She often imagined stretches of her life as a movie, and in this one, she realized it wouldn’t even be her story: she’d be the spunky love interest, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, whitewashed of course so she could be played by the latest version of Katie Holmes or Rachel McAdams.