by Jane Yolen
I thought I had some measure of courage and yet now I tremble to the very marrow of my bones.
What say you, Serana? Are we two strong enough to push back this darkness? Or is it beyond our strength? I suspect we should run off screaming, but now there are children clinging to us so I know your answer already. We will remain.
Have you any sense, dear sister, of what is afoot?
More precious to me you are than
ever before,
Meteora
39
Serana Recoils
Red Cap? She saw Red Cap? Surely not. Not there in her far-city before the Solstice. Not in a place where iron binds the bones. He would not chance it. Not for long at any rate.
Yet how could she mistake him? Why should she lie?
I read the lines on the page again. I smelt the blood, so like iron, slamming through my nostrils. It burnt my nose hairs. I houghed like a goat trying to get the smell out.
Red Cap! I will not say his name aloud lest it become a summons. I hate that Meteora has seen him but it explains so much. The last Red Cap I saw was in a Lowland peel tower, where he waited for unwary travelers, his cap so stained with their blood it was a deep, pulsating, malignant crimson. His teeth were green and he was bent over with the weight of all his sins. No sin eater could have ever cleansed that hide. I left immediately and reported him to the Queen. As I had to, for she must know everything.
The Queen. Does it all come back to her? But what game does she play with the UnSeelie folk? Can they somehow have her in their thrall?
No more. My poor head reels with questions that have no answers, and soon I will be as useless as my bile-filled boy.
He stayed with me three days, hardly speaking, answering none of my questions, as if I spoke to him in an alien tongue. Then, when the moon became big with herself, as big as a woman in the last stages of birth, I could see he was hungering to leave. And suddenly I did not want him to go. Yes, he was a trouble, a pain under my breastbone, as if I had given him life. Though with the difference in our ages now, I might as well have been his granddam.
He had even—in the depths of one night dream—called me such. “Grandma,” he croaked.
In response, I wrapped three more long strands of my white hair around the blue stone. Then I put the stone in his pants pocket. At this rate, I shall go bald.
The three days he stayed with me, he refused to open his eyes for more than a blink. Refused to open his mouth to answer my questions. Allowed me only to lead him into the water room to pee as if he were the old one, not me.
I watched him most of those three days as a mother her newborn, but by the third day, with nothing left in the cupboard for either of us, I left to get more food from the store.
Before going downstairs, I locked the door securely behind me, sprinkling the last bits of all my binding herbs on the jamb. Knowing it was the only thing I could do that might keep the boy safe. Then walking quickly down the street, I went to the bodega.
The Man of Flowers looked at me askance, and I do not blame him. I was a wrecked ship on the shore, red-eyed with sleeplessness, frantic with worry, like a deer before hunters.
“Are you . . . ?” he began. As if by magic, lines like old runes appeared on his forehead, signaling concern.
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. I could not involve him in this. “Grandson,” I lied, liking the sound of it.
“Ah,” he replied. “The children—they break your heart.”
I nodded, but all the while I was thinking about this buying and selling of things to eat. Once I would have searched out the petals of shade-loving trillium or the sweet sap that drips behind the bark of trees. Once I would have beaten out butterflies for the nectar in red flowers. Is that not the burden of my tune these days? Once . . .
Instead, with nearly the last of Jamie Oldcourse’s money, I purchased eggs and milk, garlic and peppermint; the tiniest carrots stripped of their earthen coats; a cheese veined with blue like marble; three apples, red on one side and golden on the other, because that betokened summer and winter at the same time; and a package of blueberries so impossibly large I thought they must have been made by magic. After much thought, I also added a crisp hollow cracker that longs to be filled with something sweet. And, remembering the magic brownies, chocolate. I think if there is one thing humans have that the fey do not, it is chocolate. If the benighted scare-bird wants to eat, I thought, then I shall feed him. At least until I winkle out why he is here.
I also bought a pair of gardener’s gloves that were hanging over the potted herbs. They were ugly things, a crass green that never grew in a faerie garden, and far too big for my hands, even with the swollen knuckles I now had, but I desired them.
“Are you here?” the wheat-faced man asked.
And indeed, he was right. I was not there. I was back in that funk of a room with the scare-bird. I was in the Greenwood gathering things to eat. “Where else would I be?” I asked.
He nodded and bagged the groceries without speaking further, but there was another star fruit in the bag when I got home that I had not paid for. My debt to the Man of Flowers was mounting, but I did not have the energy to worry about it. All my worry was turned toward my bile-blood boy.
Outside of the store, I passed some boys as tough-looking as the men of the Wild Hunt, their faces pinched with anger, their eyes dark and compressed like nuts that contained only rotten centers. They were talking about creatures I did not know, Sticks they called them. Or perhaps it was Spicks. And laughing angrily at a joke about the neighborhood going, though they did not say where. They reminded me of the young Highborns, so full of their own worth they could grant none to any other. I hunched my shoulders and walked on by. They looked through me—old age being better than a Cloak of Invisibility—and did not see me at all.
When I got near home, I stripped a rowan branch of its leaves. Below the tree an odd thistle grew, and I took that, too. One never knows when such things will be found again.
Upstairs, the boy was still sleeping. I made myself a salad of greens and herbs, some to keep me in health, some to keep me safe, especially from the Wild Hunt boys.
And then I lay down by the scare-bird and slept.
* * *
ON THE FOURTH DAY, OR rather the night, the scare-bird sat up, smiled, and waved his hand at me, not like a grandson to his granddam, but more a princeling to a servant—and an overbearing princeling at that.
I came over to see what he wanted, and realized that I knew him. Knew him from the green park near the fat river. He was the young man with the pipe who had called the birds. Who played the long-necked lute. Who even played a fiddle, or so said the girl with the spring name. Of a sudden, I remembered that he called himself Robin, and as puffed up as a robin he certainly was.
How could I have not recognized him from the first? What magic had disguised him, besides the magic of a dirty face, wet hair, bile blood, and a cover over his head as he slept? How could I not have known before?
And then I remembered the magic brownies, not to think kindly on their chocolate-ness, but to remind myself how they had befuddled my mind—made me laugh and cry and then sleep as though dead. Perhaps he had been even more susceptible to them. Perhaps they had corrupted his very nature and made him unrecognizable—to himself as well as to me.
No wonder, though, that I had taken him in. Not because he had asked for sanctuary, but because of what I owed him. He had given me back my coins, and done it with words that were both Highborn and low. My body knew what my mind did not. Perhaps now the debt is paid. Even overpaid, I thought.
But first the princeling beckoned. “Goddess,” he said, “but I am starved.”
I almost throttled him, but—as if under a summoning—went directly to the kitchen to make him something to eat.
Taking out three of the six eggs I had just purchased, I carefully coddled them in their shells. I did this in case the boy was really a wicked spirit, a changeling who would then
be forced to speak out in wonder and disclose himself. But he just gobbled the eggs down and demanded three more. Three more! They were to have been my own dinner and breakfast as well. I ground my teeth but said nothing. Does he not understand how indebted I am becoming to the Man of Flowers, to Jamie Oldcourse? But what princeling ever cares about the woes of others?
As he ate, I sat down in the big chair by the window, drew a piece of almond-colored paper to me, and leaning on the sill, wrote to my sister of the boy’s sleep and wakening and all of my fears.
Sister, I wrote, if only I had fairy gold, and could spend it prodigally I would, but alas that path is closed to me. I would not even care that in the Greenwood such gold often made my hands swell and hives to break out on my back and under my breast. I would dare more damage to this enfeebled, old body just to have much money at my command.
But of course I gave the scare-bird the last of the eggs and went without supper myself, all so I could question him.
After he finished eating, belching loudly, I put aside my half-written letter and tried to name him.
“Robin!” I said, but he did not recognize the name, or else did not want me to know the dart had struck true. Either way, it was not his True Name. That I would have known at once for had it been, he would have bowed to me, groveled, begged to do me service.
However, he gave another name so freely, I know it was not his True Name either.
“Vanilla Blue,” he said. Yet he neither smelled like the fresh, sharp vanilla nor had any of the longing that the color blue conjures. I suspected he understood the power of Names and was playing with me.
Well, two could play such small games. I told him to call me Auntie Em, borrowing the first initial of my sister’s name. For some reason that made him giggle, though I could not figure out why.
He went to bed soon after, and that was the whole of our conversation.
As soon as he slept, I finished my letter to Meteora.
So I worry about this boy, your girl, the puzzle pieces. But mostly I worry about that Red Cap you saw. Or think you saw, though I do not doubt your word.
You must tell me if you ever see Red Cap again. And I will let you know should I see any such myself. If the UnSeelie folk are truly moving easily into this world, well—there goes the neighborhood. (That is a joke I overheard in front of the Man of Flowers store, though it seemed more frightening than funny at the time. Perhaps it was meant to be both.)
Your loving Serana
40
Hawk Casts a Net
I sit outside at a small table that is covered with a thin sheen of dirt and coffee stains. The girl who waits on me takes no notice of the filth, but merely writes my request for tea on a pad and disappears. She has several tattoos, none of them mine. They are crude designs, stamped into her skin with no sense of how the furrows of ink should nestle against the body’s curves. She will age and they will age, sagging without grace until her skin resembles the mottled hide of a toad. I turn away, bored and irritated. Not much longer, I remind myself. Not much longer.
I stare at the humans passing me on the street. They are young, but already their flesh sings of weariness. Better to free them from their anxieties, their uselessness. I do not feel remorse or shame for the bargain I have struck with the Dark Lord’s loathsome servant. But I swallow a mouthful of the scalding tea the girl has brought in an effort to wash away the rancid taste of our encounter, for Red Cap poisons the air with his graveyard breath.
Red Cap. I whisper the name without fear, for I know him better now. He tried to impress me with signs of his power; the stink of carnage that flies from his mouth, the claws that scratched and fondled his prick, and the eternal well of pain in his stone eyes. He boasted that his hound was on the trail of the child in a far-off city, that I had nothing to offer him. But I did not purchase his tale for he wears the leather collar of his Dark Lord, and though it is decked with onyx, bloodstones, and rubies, it serves a function other than fashion. He has come to me because he has been ordered by his Lord not to fail or his head will rest on a pike. His own servants will feast on his carcass and another will be enjoined to wear the cap o’ blood.
I have no such allegiances to the Queen, nor do I fear her reprisals for she will not venture from the court. And there is no one among the Highborn who would come forth as her champion. She has walled herself away from the bitterness of the clans who have watched their numbers and their world dwindle. They remain at court, mute but filled with anger, clinging to a fading past.
The tea, despite the taste of human pollution, cleanses my palate. I dip my finger into the black brew and begin to trace a wet, circular line on the table. A sending designed to call its brother etched into the neck of the girl who resisted me. I can see her face, a lean oval, the cheekbones rising beneath moss-colored eyes, the kissable truculent mouth, and a small white scar at the corner of her upper lip bearing witness to an old beating. I hesitate, wondering if she might actually be the Queen’s lost whelp, for there is in her features and in the defiant blood traces of the fey. I shrug. It doesn’t matter whether she is or isn’t. I only need Red Cap to believe it and his own hunger makes him an easy dupe.
The pattern forms beneath my finger, and I dip my finger again into the cooling tea to draw more lines across the table’s scummy surface. I do not need the girl to come to me to snare her like a hare in a hunter’s noose. The knot of trouble on her neck will do as I ask. I do not need to collect her blood, only truss her slowly in the spider’s silk of my tattoos: the adder and scorpion to bind her will to mine. When she is weakest, I will claim her, a valuable hostage, in a game of power between the Queen and the Dark Lord.
41
Sparrow at the Crossroads
From her place at the foot of the bed, Lily growled deep within her throat. Sparrow lifted heavy lids and stared at the moon-washed ceiling. She nudged Lily with one foot to quiet her and felt the dog’s tensed body. Turning her head toward the bedroom door, Sparrow became aware of the dull thumping and banging from the floor below punctuated by men’s raised voices. Anger? She closed her eyes again and settled back into the pillow. Maybe just drunken defiance. With Alex and Nick it was hard to tell. Mostly they were just bristle and balls.
“Shhh.” Sparrow hushed the agitated dog. “It’s only the dorks downstairs. Let it go, Lily. They’ll pass out soon.”
Lily’s disapproving growls quieted to a soft rumble, but her head remained lifted, ears erect, snout turned toward the door.
Sparrow scratched her left forearm aimlessly. Lately, it seemed that Alex and Nick had become more outrageous than usual, and their choice in girlfriends had gone from bimbo to beastly. The last pair had been wrong on so many levels, their lips too red, their translucent skin greenish beneath the porch light, eyes too large and wet, peering out beneath a fringe of stringy hair. “Damn tweakers,” Sparrow snorted and wondered when the boys had become so desperate.
The itch on her left arm began to burn the longer she scratched it. Curious, Sparrow raised her arm to the moonlight, wondering if she had unknowingly cut herself, or picked up some sort of allergic reaction to a bug bite. The silvery moonlight fell in a broken pattern on her arm, revealing a curved shadow on her skin that seemed to be the source of her pain. She switched from itching to rubbing, hoping to lessen the fiery irritation on her arm. But she was much too tired to turn on a light and investigate more thoroughly. She’d figure it out in the morning. Reaching down, she stroked Lily’s ears, the velvety touch of fur comforting.
Lily stopped growling and licked Sparrow’s fingers. I am here, the gesture said.
Sparrow smiled, closed her eyes, and curled into a ball, dropping effortlessly back into sleep. And dreams.
In the dream, she lay curled in a fern bed, her back against the warm, rough hide of the deer nestled beside her. She tasted again the wild berries that had stained her lips and felt her hands close around the gathered acorns in her pockets. Surrendering to the sensations, Sparrow insti
nctively understood this to be a healing dream, a dream of the forest that surfaced whenever she felt threatened. Her arm prickled and she frowned. Why do I feel threatened?
Mist angled through the trees, chasing away nesting birds in the branches above. They rose in a clamor of cries and pounding wings. Then the mist reached below the boughs and brushed the shrubs and grasses with icy hands. Delicate ferns bowed, heavy with pearly drops that slowly hardened into frost. Whimpering, Sparrow clenched into a ball, knees to nose. The deer were gone and she shivered as a clammy breeze cupped her face. The scar on her thigh ached. Her lashes were crusted with rime and she could not open her eyes.
Groaning as a wave of tiny stings pierced the skin of her forearm, she was all ice and fire; her face cold as though washed in snow, but her arm throbbing with a scalding burn. Tears brimmed beneath her closed lids as she rubbed her arm, trying to soothe the flaming skin.
Distantly, Sparrow heard Lily’s barking and she struggled to rouse herself. Suddenly, she became aware of a second, more demanding voice.
“Wake up! Sparrow, wake up for godsakes! Lily’s going fucking crazy!” Marti shouted at her. “Sparrow, wake up!”
The dream dissolved like shredding storm clouds, but the pain continued to blaze on her arm. Sparrow blinked rapidly and opened her eyes wide to the muted gray of early dawn.
“Quiet, Lily,” she mumbled. “Quiet, girl. It’s all good.” She ran a hand down Lily’s neck and shoulders, smoothing down the stiffened hackles on the dog’s spine.
“No it’s not,” Marti said, standing at the open door of Sparrow’s room. “I thought you were dead and Lily was scaring the hell out of me. She’s been barking like that for about an hour and wouldn’t let me near you. What’s the matter with you? Couldn’t you hear it? Are you drunk again? Or stoned?”