Fae

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  Ahead, the animal path she has been following runs into a tangle of trailing leaves that hang, like a curtain, across her way. Curious, and unwilling to return to the hunt, the Lady reaches forward and draws them aside.

  At first, all she sees is gold. She blinks into it for a moment, before she realises it is sunlight, and she has stumbled upon a clearing, hidden away at the heart of the forest. Untamed, knee-length grass is embroidered with pink-tipped wild roses and clusters of bluebells, while the warm air seems to spark as light is caught by busy insect wings and floating clumps of thistledown. The Lady laughs with delight and runs forward, eager to feel the sun on her face.

  Too late, she sees she is not alone: a creature is moving out of the shadows on the other side of the glade, far bigger than a wolf—bigger even than a bear. The Lady backs against a tree, only too aware of how helpless she is without man or weapon, too frightened to move or make a sound. The creature steps into the sunlight and her heart is thudding so painfully, her breathing has grown so shallow, it is almost in the middle of the clearing before she sees: it is a stag.

  It is the most magnificent beast the Lady has ever beheld, and also the strangest. Its coat has a greenish hue, and is threaded through with lichen and moss, while its antlers are as twisted and gnarled as branches. It looks old, far older than she can even imagine, yet somehow fresh and strong as well. Without her realising, the Lady’s grip on the tree at her back has loosened, and her feet have begun to take her towards the stag. Once she meets its dark green gaze, she is unable to look away. In his eyes, she can see the whole of the forest; as it was, as it is, as it one day will be.

  She draws close, and the stag inclines its great head to her in greeting. The Lady reaches out a hand and, very gently, runs it across its brow.

  At her touch, the creature cries out and sinks to its knees so heavily that the ground shudders. The Lady gasps, frightened she has hurt it, but then she sees the arrow in its side, and when she turns back to the edge of the clearing, her brother is there, his bow aloft.

  “No!” She stands between the King and the wounded stag. “Leave him!”

  But the King is already pushing her aside and advancing upon on the animal, which is puffing and pawing at the ground where it lies.

  “Please!” begs the Lady, now restrained by two of the King’s men. “Have mercy! He is no ordinary beast!”

  The King does not listen. He stands above the creature, draws his longsword and slices down, again and again. It takes a dozen strokes, to hack off the stag’s head.

  At once there is a swell of noise in the glade: the King’s men cheer, the Lady screams, and birds take frightened flight from all around. Then everything is suddenly quiet, as the King, the men and the Lady see that the blood dribbling from the stag’s severed head is not red, but bright green, like liquid emerald.

  “Oh, Brother,” whispers the King’s sister, “what have you done?”

  ~*~

  Dusk: the court is feasting in the dining hall, the stag’s head propped up in pride of place at the centre of the long table. The King is gorging himself on venison, and relating a story in which he gave chase to the stag for several hours, finally killing it with a single blow. He does not notice that the meat has a bitter taste, or that many of his guests are dropping it under the table, for the dogs.

  The King’s sister does not eat. She ignores the chatter of the courtiers and sees only the stag’s head, its dark green eyes watching them all.

  ~*~

  The next day, messengers arrive from the North, East, South and West corners of the kingdom. Each man bears the same tidings: the crops have failed. In the fields, in the earth, in the orchards; overnight, everything has withered and died.

  The King’s advisors speak of the weather, the season, the plague that must have swept through the land. There is no cause for worry, they say, and keep saying it, even when they hear that nothing new is growing.

  The King laughs. “We shall all feast on flesh,” he declares, and doubles his effort in the hunt.

  The King’s sister dreams of the stag. She is in the clearing again, and her brother has not come, so she is running her hands through the creature’s coat, and burying her face in its neck, which smells of leaves and trees and the forest as it was. Or else, she is running with the stag, dodging through the densely-packed trees, and she cannot see her body, but she does not think she is human anymore: she is too fast, too strong.

  One night, many months after the death of the stag, the Lady dreams she is looking into his dark green eyes and he begins to weep golden tears that fall to the ground like drops of sunlight. Only, once they hit the forest floor, the grass is scorched. She looks up, tells him to stop, but all of him is weeping now, his whole body is melting away into a golden stream that gushes to the ground, burning away the soil, the Lady, everything.

  Awake, the King’s sister slips out of bed and creeps through the sleeping castle. In the dining hall, she heaves the stag’s head from where it has been mounted on the wall and drags it through the corridors, over the courtyard, and out into the sanctuary of her own little garden. Everything within its walls is as barren as the rest of the kingdom, but the Lady digs through the dry soil until she makes a hole so large that even the stag’s antlers can be buried below the earth.

  When the King discovers the theft of his trophy, he rages through the castle threatening and punishing all who cross his path. He is so angry, so cruel, that his sister takes him to the dead garden, shows him where she has laid the head to rest. Knowing the worms will have begun their work, and there is little use in digging it up, the King turns his wrath upon his sister.

  “If you love the beast so, you may stay with it always,” he tells her.

  After he is finished with his fists and his feet, he locks the great iron gate to the little garden, trapping the Lady inside.

  ~*~

  (Growth)

  The kingdom is a graveyard. Naked trees are breaking apart, the bark peeling off their trunks like dead skin; empty fields are cracking into dust; rivers are clogged and poisoned with the bodies of the starving. More and more people are reaching out to the King, wailing that they have had to eat their dogs and horses and worse, but he can do nothing. “Eat flesh,” he tells them, over and over, “eat flesh until the next crop.”

  The Lady too is close to death. The King holds the only key to the garden gate and has forbidden anyone from scaling the high walls. She has a summer house for shelter, a pond for water, but no food, and so she sits in the skeleton of her garden, and waits for the end.

  Instead, something begins: from the freshly-dug mound of earth in which the stag’s head is buried, two shoots sprout, side by side. They grow, faster than any normal plant, twisting together into a tree that, in just a few days, is taller than the Lady. The sight of it strengthens her, forces her to her feet, and as she stands, holding onto a branch to check it is truly there, she finds an apple in her hand, red and rosy and ripe enough to eat.

  The garden begins to wake. Grass, shrubs and trees rise from their earthy bed, stretching up and up towards the sun. Buds yawn into leaves and flowers. Branches and stems dress themselves in fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries. The Lady falls upon this feast, and she too blooms again.

  Some of the plants are exotic and strange, with shapes and colours she has never seen before, and there are fruits she must learn to peel and crack and chop as best she can, in order to scoop out their pulp or seeds with her fingers. Each day holds a discovery: a faraway flavour to be sampled, an impossible new pattern upon petals to be believed, and new growth, everywhere.

  Soon, she is no longer alone. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers; birds squabble over branch space, or tug fat, pink worms from the soil; whiskered, four-legged visitors come in the night, creeping out from under bushes or through gaps in the gate, to snatch at food or one another under cover of darkness. The Lady welcomes them, watches them, and sometimes she forgets to be lonely.

 
; ~*~

  (Death)

  Nobody in the castle knows precisely what is happening within the garden and they are too afraid to dwell on the whereabouts of the King’s sister. But vines and the tops of trees are poking above the walls, and people made bold by hunger begin clambering onto one another’s shoulders, or prodding at the branches with brooms, trying to reach the plums or pears or sweet chestnuts they can see above. Sometimes, they even dare one another to peep through the garden gate, but it is so overgrown on the other side the view beyond is blocked.

  The King has avoided the garden since he left his sister there, unwilling to brood over her fate. Yet he cannot ignore the attention it is receiving at court, the whispers of what is happening within its walls and so, without telling a soul, he unlocks the gate.

  Ripping aside the trailing vines that have grown over the entrance, the King steps inside and cries out in alarm: the garden is a living beast, blinding him with colour, choking him with its sweet and cloying perfume, tugging and scratching at his clothes and skin.

  “Brother, you do not look well.”

  His sister stands at the centre of it all, her hands and face smeared with soil, her dress torn and stained, her hair a tangle down her back. He has never seen her more beautiful, more alive.

  Rising from a curtsey, she plucks an apple from the tree above her head and holds it out to him. The King stares at it, at her, his stomach aching. Then he raises his bow, pulls back the string, and fires. The Lady gives a little gasp of surprise as the arrow hits her chest. Her knees buckle, the apple falls from her hand, and by the time her body meets the springy grass, she is dead.

  ~*~

  (Rebirth)

  The crypt, then; growing around the dead lady, enclosing her, embracing her. The King too is being cocooned in the garden, along with his twin, she who pushed herself first from their mother’s womb. He sees how the very earth is moving to mourn her, and is filled with a fury unlike any he has ever known. He begins to fight this garden-beast, kicking, punching, tearing it apart. He throws his whole weight against it, hissing and spitting and screaming. His head pulses with pain, his eyes sting with sweat, his hands and arms are bleeding, and so it takes him a little while to notice: the garden is fighting back.

  It starts with a hum from below, as many roots begin to tremble, and it grows louder as it moves upwards, through stems and trunks. The soil begins to lurch like a storm-tossed sea and the King is thrown off-balance. He tries to grab at a nearby vine to steady himself, but is slapped away. Then there is an almighty crack, as the first tree splits clean in two, and with a bellow, the stag erupts out of the earth.

  The King gapes as the animal reborn before him rises up onto its hind legs; bigger, greener, more ferocious than before. He reaches for his bow, but the beast is already lowering its head, already charging, and the King is thrown backwards, slammed against the garden wall, his flesh punctured by the ends of the sharp antlers.

  Finally, when the King has stopped struggling, the stag grunts, shakes his great head, and lets the lifeless body at the end of his bloody antlers drop to the ground. He then pays the man no further heed, turning instead to the Lady lying in the middle of the garden, an arrow through her heart.

  He is not a stag when he kneels beside her, and maybe he never was. His hair is still threaded with lichen and moss, but now he wears a robe of leaves and cobwebs and evening mist, and he pulls the Lady to him with strong, green arms.

  Easing the arrow from her chest, the Green Man throws it aside, and places a hand over the wound. The blood that dribbles between his long fingers turns dark green like liquid emerald, before ceasing to flow altogether. He looks at the Lady, smoothes back the dark hair that has fallen over her face, and he kisses her.

  The Lady stirs. She opens her eyes, smiles.

  “I knew it was you,” she says.

  Now she kisses him; hungry, greedy kisses, and she lies once more upon the ground, drawing him down into the grass. The hair that fans around her head turns to spiraled leaves, like a weeping willow, and he pulls up not a dress of velvet and silk, but petals and pollen and morning dew. Her body is shifting under him, with him, and she is older, and younger, and everything in between. She can see the whole of the forest; as it was, as it is, as it one day will be.

  Afterwards, they leave the garden. They walk, hand in hand, past the body of the King, through the castle, and out into the land. Those that see them quickly forget: they are distracted by the shoots that are beginning to sprout from the couple’s footprints.

  ~*~

  Amanda Block is a writer and ghostwriter based in Edinburgh, UK. A graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at the University of Edinburgh, she is often inspired by myths and fairy tales, frequently using them as a starting point to tell other stories.

  Amanda’s work has been featured in anthologies such as Modern Grimmoire: Fairy Tales, Fables and Folklore and Stories for Homes, as well as magazines including Vintage Script and Bookanista. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition.

  Amanda is currently working on a collection of short stories, and thinking about getting back to her half-finished novel.

  ~*~

  Only Make-Believe

  Lauren Liebowitz

  Some long-dormant sense between taste and sound woke within me, and I froze with my hand on the library shelf. So much for wondering whether I could still sense someone else’s magic, all these years later.

  I caught a glimpse of her passing me—brown hair, brown eyes, a few freckles around her tanned nose. In almost all ways, she was ordinary, but the magic hung around her like perfume, glimmering ever so slightly. It was nothing like my glamour, but I knew it was fae, as surely as I knew anything. By the time I backpedaled to catch up to her, she had disappeared.

  Frantic, I followed the trail of her magic through the library, past rows of books to the front doors. She waited under the awning while sheets of water drummed off the roof and churned the dirt into mud, filthy rivulets creeping over the cracked sidewalk toward her feet. I pegged her as something of a nerd—she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she’d apparently chosen to spend her after-school time at the library.

  I gasped a breath. “Hi,” I said.

  She was taller than me, though I could have towered over her, if I’d wanted to—I could have been a bodybuilder, or a dashing young man with pretty lips and hair swept over my eyes, or anything, really, if I felt so inclined. But that wasn’t me. And while the short, skinny, messy-haired self I showed to the world wasn’t either, it had some sort of authenticity. It felt right, maybe because I’d been wearing it for years.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “It’s really coming down, isn’t it?”

  Usually I was better at emulating normal people, but a lot was at stake here. Yes, she was cute, but that wasn’t it. I’d never had anyone to talk to about me, about magic, about anything—not since my parents left me.

  She shot me a thoroughly unimpressed look. I wondered why she couldn’t see my glamour, that there was something different about me, the way I could sense it all over her.

  I tried again. “Look, I promise I’m not hitting on you. I just really need to talk to you about something.”

  “What’s that?” Her delicate chin lifted in challenge.

  “Magic.” Speaking the word out loud to someone made me dizzy.

  Her eyes narrowed, crinkling the bridge of her nose. I could like freckles, I thought. “You’re full of it,” she said, but she leaned closer and I knew I had her.

  I held out my hand.

  She stared at it, then at me. I wondered if I’d crossed a line, but then she placed her hand in mine.

  If I blew it, she’d probably avoid me forever and I would go mad knowing I’d been so close and lost my chance. I pursed my lips, exhaled, then pulled her after me into the rain. I could barely bring myself to look at her in case it hadn’t worked.

  But it had.

/>   The rain fell around her, but her hair, her clothes, were perfectly dry. She spun in gleeful circles. From the look on her face, she’d clearly never seen magic before. Maybe she’d been left here even younger than I had.

  “This is crazy,” she said. “There’s no way.”

  “You believe me?”

  “I’ve waited my whole life for magic.” Her voice quavered. “How did you know?”

  “You’ve got magic of your own. I knew it when I saw you. That’s why I had to tell you.”

  From the curb, a car honked. She bobbed in an impatient, frustrated dance. “Aw, crap. I have to go.”

  “Tomorrow?” I asked. “This weekend?”

  “Friday. After school. I’m Nadia, by the way—”

  “Robin.” I waved at her, dropping the glamour on her as I did, and she shrieked as she realized the water had soaked her clothes. It was a good-natured short of shriek, like children jumping through puddles, and she actually stuck her tongue out at me before dashing through the rain toward her car.

  ~*~

  “The first rule of magic,” I told her, “is that you have to believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t believe it, how can you expect other people to?”

  I’d met her at the nearby high school, where I sometimes pretended I was a student. We traipsed down residential streets with mosaic sidewalks. My little display of magic had won her over completely, and she seemed to think nothing of walking with me, a stranger, toward the park where I lived.

  “I’ve never heard that before.”

  “Well, maybe it only applies to glamour.” I honestly couldn’t remember how my parents had explained it, whether this rule was general or just ours.

  “But the rain—”

  “I convinced you that you were dry. It’s the same principle. It’s all about trying to trick you into thinking something is real.” I spread my hands, walking backwards to face her. “I’m sure this makes me sound shady, but I promise I’ve never hurt anybody. I just use it to get by.”