by Jeannette Ng
I looked confused at his face. He was staring at me intently. The hunger in his eyes was both alien and achingly familiar.
That knot within me tightened and I felt a warmth spread across my skin.
“You–” His jaw clenched and his lips pulled into a tight line. He did not stop staring, though, even as I could tell he was trying to stop. Those dark currents beneath his usual veneer were shifting.
I looked down. The gold and silver dress with its bewildering layers had disappeared; I was clad only in my shift.
I was completely naked underneath the gossamer thin fabric. I could feel my brother’s gaze upon my skin, his study of my shape.
Mortification struck too deep for even blushing.
Foolishly, I thought I could outrun my shame and I bolted. My naked feet thudded against the ice-cold floor.
The thousand, thousand mirrors that lined the castle reflected my shame back to me. I was a white phantom in the glass, and yet I saw myself, every shadowed curve and traitorous pink blush. The breeze of my pace swept up my shift, making it cling to me. I could not help but wonder if this was the true reason Mab had every corridor covered in mirrors.
I could hear the chimes of the clocks, midnight rippling across the castle. It seemed to follow me, that thunderous, echoing count of twelve. It made the seconds stretch as time itself seemed to stalk me.
Breathless, I did not allow myself to stop until I reached my room.
I crumpled to the floor and leaned against the warm wood of the door. I could still feel my brother’s gaze upon me. I folded into myself, knees pressed against my breasts, arms wrapped around myself. Fingers squirmed first into my armpits and then between my thighs in search for warmth. My nipples were hard and ached against the cold.
My breath misted and I cupped my hands around the warm air.
That night, I dreamt again of Laon.
It was the Masquerade again with its silver trees and weeping leaves.
We were surrounded by faceless automatons, by soulless fae, by mindless beasts. He was the last real thing within these borders, under this unreal sun. No eyes could watch us here.
A waltz struck up. The seductive rhythm lulled us into a gentle sway. He did not need to ask if I would dance.
Palm against palm, our hands met and his fingers intertwined with mine. I felt my brother’s intoxicating warmth near me, against me, envelope me. He clasped me closer than was decent and our feet flew across the star-strewn floor.
The dizzying steps of the waltz wheeled us around and around. Our feet flew across the marble floor, across the glass shards of a thousand broken mirrors, across snowflakes suspended in an inky sky.
We were young and we were old, the strange overlap of time. We were at once running through the heather and arguing over his departure to become a missionary. We were bickering over toy soldiers, getting lost in the garden. We were gazing upon our father’s coffin and despairing over our inheritance of debts.
All moments of our intertwined lives tangled before me. I felt that old, familiar knot within my chest tighten.
My fingers traced against his flesh and I found the words that were written there, secrets that were always meant for me. As I read his bound soul, his hands uncovered mine. We followed each unutterable word, each branded red and raw in the book of human skin.
We were bound up in each other, of the same flesh and clay. Skin against warm skin, we tangled, and I found my own name written upon the book of his soul.
For an infinity of moments, our worlds were but the clasping of our hands, the brush of lips against bare skin and the sinking of one into the other.
Chapter 24
The Red Sky at Morning
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I did not want to wake up.
A weak and hazy sunlight filled my room. The morning had resoundingly arrived but I turned over in my bed and refused to rouse.
It was why I did not hear Miss Davenport’s knock as she burst into my room, a breakfast tray in hand.
“So I thought you might want some breakfast,” she said, quite abruptly. “I know I do, and I’m far more comfortable interrupting your morning than your brother’s.”
“Thank you,” I said, staggering awake. My eyes were full of sand and grit. I threw my dressing gown and a shawl over my night things. For all my hope that Mab’s artificial winter may have passed now that her Masquerade was over, there was still an icy bite to the morning air.
“You can’t sleep forever. A hunt always follows a ball.”
“Isn’t it in the evening?” I rubbed my eyes free from the sand crusted in the corners. The lingering traces of dream evaporated as I spoke. Its touch stayed, however, and the warmth of it lingered on my skin even as I cupped icy cold water to my face.
“True, but I still want breakfast.” Miss Davenport put down the large tray. It was piled high with an assortment of leftovers from the night before: The ruby-red grapes were each dusted over with a delicate filigree of pale green ice. Thinly sliced roast beef had been rolled into little rosettes and wrapped in leaves of fresh herbs, mostly mint. Shards of snowflake biscuit, some glazed and some not, were jumbled together with gingerbread owls. Lumpy, imperfect scones sat in a basket next to vol-au-vent pastries, each spilling out their delicious sweet and savoury fillings.
“Your door is unlocked,” she said, glancing over at the door to empty air.
“Oh,” I said. The bolt had indeed come free and I resolutely pushed it back into place. “It’s loose and often slides open when I’m not looking. I must have been too… tired last night. To check.”
In a smaller, nervous voice, she added, “I also heard what happened last night.”
I felt that knot tighten in my chest. Images from my dream intruded; they were meaningless. Desperate to change the subject, I said, “I still haven’t salted the food.”
I found the salt shaker in my desk and sprinkled the salt onto the grapes and the biscuits.
“I heard about the illusion and how you ran–”
“Why do you need salt in your food?” I interjected as I finished salting everything on the tray.
Miss Davenport pressed her lips into a tight scowl. She picked up the plate of snowflake biscuits and sat back. Biting savagely into one, she said, “Changelings aren’t really fae. I thought I said as much before the ball.”
“You did, but it didn’t make sense.” I helped myself to a scone, breaking it in half before spreading butter onto it. “How could you not be?”
Miss Davenport shrugged and continued between mouthfuls of vol-au-vent. “There’s fae who are as you see them, or not, since they are changeable by nature and very varied. But there is them and there’s humans.”
“And changelings are neither?”
She nodded. “Changelings are made to be like humans but not. We have to grow and learn like humans. Otherwise we would be found out. Not all are well made, but successful deception or otherw
ise, we aren’t fae. And we aren’t human.”
I ate my scone in silence, trying to think through the implications of what she said. Humans, of course, were created with souls. They were breathed into humanity’s forefather named mankind. Fae, on the other hand, we simply didn’t know. If changeling were in between, did it imply that fae had to be humanity’s opposite?
Careful to avoid certain thoughts, I mused on the true forms of the Masquerade’s guests. If all the fae are indeed animals, then that had some profoundly disturbing implications for our work in Arcadia. The true nature of Arcadia has been a fertile topic of debate since its discovery, and my time here had been far from elucidating. The pendulum sun and fish moon were but symptoms of a deeper strangeness. But moreover, what of its fae inhabitants? After all, birds and beasts have no souls and do not need converting. They were placed under the dominion of mankind. It was with a sinking feeling that I worried, wondering about the nature of souls and God’s creation.
“So to answer your question,” said Miss Davenport. She did not meet my eyes and her speech was halting, stumbling her phrases over one another as though no sentiment could escape unimpeded by caveat. “Changelings have certain human limitations, but not others. Changelings are like people, a lot like people, but not entirely. But we vary, considerably, if nothing else because, among other reasons, we have different creators. I don’t know everything about being me, but I do know I don’t need food. I don’t starve, I just feel hungry.”
“How do you…” I trailed off, realising the impudence of my question.
“Ariel Davenport’s family died in a workhouse. I watched them starve when I did not. Whatever fae gears were inside of me kept turning.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“But here, I still need human salt. Whatever promise that was made, whatever geas that invokes, it applies to me as well.”
“I think I understand,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
She grinned, less wide than usual with a touch of melancholy in the corners. “I wish you need never know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want… I just want you to know it’s for your good.” She shook her head and the melancholy faded. Her grin stretched wider, tighter and she said, her voice high and bright, “I haven’t had any of the gingerbread yet!”
After Miss Davenport left, I sought distraction in my collection of papers. Anything to not think about my dream from the night before. With sufficient time I knew I could bury those thoughts, I had done so before. I knew they would pass. I just needed to think about something else.
So I leafed through them: the pages in Enochian and my attempts to decipher it; Roche’s journal; and the letters from the chapel. The castle’s preparations for the Pale Queen’s Masquerade had left me so tired each night that I had not managed to read all the letters until now.
Paper crackling, I unfolded the first. The texture of the page drew my attention, the scratch of the nib on its surface and the etched shadow of the words.
After several pages detailing the inconsistencies of the forged castle and how distracting the writer found this, I came to the last page of a letter. So used to mysterious was I that I barely believed it was signed. It was. The writer was:
E R
A postscript then giggled of how unaccustomed the writer was with her new name as a married woman.
Elizabeth Roche. Elizabeth Clay.
And for once, all the pieces seemed to fit together: the shiny new initials on the trunk in the attic; the Miss Clay in Roche’s journal; the name my brother let slip.
The E C who owned the steel scissors must have been Elizabeth Clay.
Yet immediately after such triumphant revelation did I feel the sting of defeat. The information was useless. Knowing to whom the scissors once belonged answered no real questions. That it was Elizabeth Clay’s scissors that the stolen woman had found in her bid to escape and avenge herself on Mab offered no further insight.
I tucked a stray hair from my face and, as my fingers brushed against my own skin, I remembered how Laon used to do the same for me. He would reach across the table and wind my hair behind my ear. Reaching for a pin to secure the distracting hair, I told myself that it was nonsense to miss the softness of his touch or the stroke of his fingers.
My hands were shuffling through the letters with little focus, my eyes skimming across the words without comprehension. Many of the letters were cross-written, with the letter continuing over itself at a right angle. The hand was rigorously curled and meticulously correct. This helped neither their legibility nor my focus. The events were a jumble in my mind. Further, the lack of careful dating only made the construction of a narrative harder.
I trust it not too presumptive to write to you after our most delightful meeting in Oxford. You summarised most eloquently the Tracts that have been published in my absences. Pusey’s work on the doctrine of Eucharistic Sacrifice sounds most intriguing and was of particular interest to me. I will endeavour my utmost to achieve my own copy.
It was only after many, many more letters did I realise they were love letters. Or rather, those of a courtship.
Both Jacob Roche and Elizabeth Clay had been verbose in their affections, though the word itself seemed inaccurate to their state. They wrote extensively on the importance of the missions to far flung places and divisions and indivisibility of the Church, reflecting on its various branches and if those differences would prove them doctrinally incompatible. They wrote of transubstantiation and divine presence, of grandiosity of rituals and the dangerous allure of popery.
Jacob Roche wrote sparingly of the mission in Arcadia, but he did describe to her Gethsemane and a mute housekeeper made of flame. He showed very little of the desperation that I was familiar with from his journals. He seemed full of hope and desperate to share this strange new world with her. When she enquired of the fae and the reputations for sin and duplicity, Roche stated that that was an oversimplification. He called truth their weapon.
Through them all, the sincerity of Elizabeth Clay’s faith shone brightly. Roche could be abstract in his theology, but for Elizabeth Clay it was passion that burned inside her. Even in debate she wrote with an undeniable ferocity.
Roche, at times, seemed more enthused about his future bride’s theological education than any other attribute.
He must have brought the letters with him as a reminder of his waiting wife.
Reluctant to dwell on the thought of Roche’s widow, I turned from the letters to Enochian. I had made some progress in my understanding of the language, but odd words were not the same as true meaning. I had thought when I first encountered it that I would be able to teach myself Enochian much like how Laon and I had studied Latin and Greek in our youth, unable to pronounce any of the words in our long compiled lists. I missed the sound of his voice as he stumbled through our notes, trying to intone the speeches of long-dead heroes.
I sighed again and rose to splash a little water onto my face. There was still some left in the pitcher from the morning’s ablutions.
The water was cold enough to sting.
Given what Kasdaye and Penemue said during the Masquerade, I was more certain than ever of the theory that this was indeed a project undertaken by Roche to assist in his conversion of the fae. The mother tongue was, after all, the greatest missionary. To speak to a people in their own language was foundational and fundamental to the great work.
And yet Arcadia had no tongue of its own.
Oddly, it was something I had never questioned. The fae seemed simply to speak with fluency the language of any and all they encountered, or perhaps that was simply those who spoke with outsiders. For all the pretences of the explorers, there was very little we knew about inner Arcadia. And moreover, most early accounts did not think to distinguish between changeling and true fae. Much like Davenport, many early ambassadors were changelings.
I thought of what my brother said of the sea whales and how they swam for most of
their lives beyond the light of the pendulum sun. Its straight path meant there must be, within Arcadia, vast stretches that rarely knew day. Yet of these dark lands beyond the light and warmth of the pendulum, we knew almost nothing.
I felt again that aching desire, my mind tumbling through my recent vivid dreams of my brother.
I remembered his hand in mine as we ran through the heather and into the depths of Arcadia. The infinite promise of wonder and adventure.
A knock summoned me from my reverie.
It was Mr Benjamin. He was in his best waistcoat and he was wringing his straw hat in agitation. Mab’s visit had been taking its toll on the gnome, but though his weariness was evident, he stood just a little taller, less hunched and crumpled than usual.
“A sister for a brother, is fair trade. A sister for a brother,” said Mr Benjamin under his breath, as though reminding himself of something. He nodded to himself, as though steeling his own resolve. His eyes flickered to my face before returning to his nervous hands. “You will pretend priest again? Please?”
“Why?” Fear splashed across me like a pail of cold water and the knot in my heart tightened. “Has my brother left?”
He shook his head. “He is not in the chapel. He won’t talk to Mr Benjamin.”
“Can it not wait?”
Mr Benjamin shook his head again, his eyes screwed tight as he did so. “The Pale Queen will hunt today.”
“I know.”
“A hunt follows a ball. And it be Benjamin.”
“I’m sorry, what do you mean by that–” I said, thrown by the tears that were rolling from his eyes. Floundering, I offered him my handkerchief, which he took after returning his hat to his head. “Don’t cry. She told my brother she will leave after the hunt.”
“What do you mean by that? There is a hunt, yes?” He dragged an arm over his eyes, smearing the tears. My handkerchief remained unused in his hand. “A hunt follows a ball. Yes, yes?”
“Yes, that I know. It is one of the Pale Queen’s entertainments.”