by Jane Yolen
Precious fluids. The smell of my beloved’s sweat and lust. The way I marked my territory in the garden. And now my great-aunt’s blood. These three have helped me walk away from my father’s world, from his whistles and commands. I will not go back.
65
Meteora Moves to Vinnie’s House
We needed too many things: food, bandages, and most importantly news. As Jack was the only one of us who might have safely ventured outside without drawing the attention of the UnSeelie hordes watching the house, I anointed his left eye with a bit of my spit that he might have partial sight into Faerie. Perhaps it was a rash act, but I had only the right intent that he should protect himself from the UnSeelie in the streets below and at the same time gather news of their whereabouts. But then I forgot the old tales, and the dangers to mortals who can see into our world.
He returned a shade lighter than he had left. Even sick as I was with the bananachs’ poison, I noticed immediately the somber expression on his blanched face, noted the way his hands trembled slightly when he placed the bags on the table.
“What happened?”
He turned to me, the skin across his jaw rippling with agitation. “As I was walking out of the grocery store, a man in a red baseball cap nearly slammed into me. I thought it was just a guy so I sidestepped to avoid him. He hissed and when I looked at him a second time, he whipped off the red cap and I saw him more clearly. Pointed teeth, long ears, green cast to his pale skin. I didn’t look away quick enough. My face showed that I recognized what he really was.”
“We gotta run,” Robin said bluntly.
Jack disagreed. “Sophia’s too sick.”
“They’ve marked you,” Robin argued. “Look out the window. See for yourself.”
Jack peeked around the edge of the curtain and we all heard the sharp intake of his breath. “Damn!”
“If we do not get out of here now, there will only be more of them. And not much we will be able to do to stop them on our own.” Robin moved toward Sparrow, his instinct to protect her making him agitated.
“I know a place,” Jack said, stepping away from the window. “It’s not too far from here, but just the sort of place to throw them off the scent. Lots of iron.”
“But my sister is already on her way.”
“Can you get word to her?” Jack had started gathering up things and tossing them into a huge cloth bag. I noticed that he slipped in his carving tools, but whether for defense or because he was sentimental about them I could not tell.
“I will leave her a message. One the UnSeelie will not find.”
“Then make it quick.” Robin’s eyes were trained out the window. “There are two more monsters sniffing around the garden. And if they are here, then Red Cap won’t be far behind.”
Jack told me where we were going, and I whispered the words to a mourning dove who was napping on the sill of his kitchen window. She was a simple creature, incapable of anything but one or two thoughts at a time. However, it was all I needed. I pulled a hair from my head, and tied it around her leg—for though we were different, my hair, like the feather, would serve to identify her as my nest mate. The dove would not speak to anyone but my sister—indeed she could not, for none but my sister would be able to jog the message from her memory. I bid her fly through Sparrow’s shattered windows, then up to my door that I knew still stood ajar, and wait inside until my sister should arrive.
My legs were shaking, my head light from the fever. It was becoming harder to breathe. “How will we get there?” I asked, unable to imagine running or even walking a short distance to safety.
“We’ll take the Charger. It’s in the garage. We can avoid being seen by anyone hanging around the alley or the garden.” Jack stuffed extra bandages and a sweater into his big bag.
“Charger?” I envisioned one of those great warhorses.
He laughed. “You really are out of this world, sweet Sophia. It’s my car, a Dodge.”
“A muscle car,” added Sparrow.
Now I was thoroughly confused. His words dodge and muscle and charger all had different meanings for me, so I focused on the one word I understood. “I cannot travel in one of those machines of iron and noise. That will kill me faster than the poison. Please,” I begged, my mouth dry with panic, “there must be some other way!”
“She’s right,” Robin said, coming to put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned against him, weak and frightened. “Sparrow and I are human enough that we can stand it for a short while. But Sophia won’t be able to manage.”
And that’s when I saw the shocked look on Jack’s face. I knew he thought me unusual, and even possessed of some magical skills, at least by the standards of this world. But I saw now that he had never considered that I might not be fully human. Or that Robin and Sparrow might be only partially so. Shadow chased the light from his eyes as he absorbed the news.
“So if not human, what are you?” he asked at last.
“Fey,” I answered, hoping that was enough.
The light returned and he smiled his lopsided grin. “I always thought you were supposed to be—”
“Young?” I interrupted, irritably. “Well, consider it a first,” I wheezed. “I’m old and fat, and even though I’ve no more power than a thimbleful of sand, I am still proud of what I am.” It was stupid really. We had other far more important things to consider and there I was muckle-mad about my wounded pride.
Jack put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. “I was going to say I thought the fey were shades of green. Silly joke. I think you are quite perfect, Sophia. Wouldn’t change a thing about you.” He looked out, over my head at Robin and Sparrow, standing by the door. “What if we cover her? Will that be enough to protect her from the iron in the car?”
“Possibly.” Robin grabbed a sheepskin rug off the floor and draped it around my shoulders. Jack added two quilts, and before I knew it, I was swaddled from head to toe.
We took the back stairs that led directly to the garage, Jack in the lead, followed by Sparrow clutching rowan branches pulled from the chairs for protection. I came lumbering after them like a bear just out of her den, and last was Robin cradling his fiddle.
They bundled me into the front seat next to Jack, while Sparrow sat behind me and patted my shoulder. Jack revved the engine and I thought my heart would burst from the whirring iron all around me, every turning cog and piston casting poisonous dust into the air. Robin opened the garage door, jumped into the backseat with Sparrow and we sped away leaving behind a shocked and outraged Boggle and Bloody Bones that had been left to watch. But Jack was right, for even they could not follow the iron trail of the machine.
The journey was worse than I had imagined. Once Jack pulled over that I might hang my head out of the window to vomit. What a sight I made. I could not hold my mind together, raddled between my misery and fear of the machine, the thought of Red Cap’s host desecrating the garden, my grief at mayhap never seeing my sister’s face again, anguish at looking so ravaged in front of the children and Jack. Although I had managed till now to find some small measure of dignity in this disgraceful middle age, the dodging, charging muscle car had turned me into nothing more than a wretched and retching hag.
* * *
WE DROVE FOR WHAT FELT like days, weeks, an eternity, though they assured me it was less than an hour’s tick on the clock till we arrived at a small, shabby house in a desolate neighborhood of the city. Not far away were the massive girders of a huge bridge spanning a river, separating this ill-tide collection of houses from the brighter lights of the city on the other side.
As Jack carried me from the car to a redbrick house, I noticed wild shapes and lines painted in riotous colors on the home’s walls and fences. Swirls and whirls, whorls and wobbles. Even the street signs were marked with black and red letters. Most were meaningless, but here and there amid the outsized letters and curled symbols I saw the wriggles of warding spells that might protect this house and others from malicious infl
uences.
Good, I thought, hope rising. Fighting without hope, as my dam used to say, is the road to ruin.
Once inside the house—its walls covered in fox grape vines, which offered even more protection—Jack set me down and led me into a small sitting room. There he had me sit down like an invalid—which I nearly was. I perched on a huge lumpy couch along whose spine rested four very large sleeping cats. Each opened one eye in my direction and then closed it again, unperturbed by my presence. The house smelled of dried lavender, sweet incense, and the faint whiff of cat pee. It also smelled of power. Not a lot but—another hope—perhaps enough.
Jack had gone off somewhere though I could still hear him, speaking quickly to someone. And then I heard a woman’s voice, low, tremulous, breathy, urging Sparrow and Robin to hurry in with their bundles.
“I need to close the door from the prying eyes of my neighbors,” she said. “Snoopy, gossipy . . .” I did not catch the last of it because of the sound of their running footsteps.
Then I heard the key in the lock and a scratching sound, which I took to be her sketching another warding sign on the door’s wood.
I closed my eyes and sighed. Safe at last.
“Sophia, this is my Aunt Vinnie.”
Had I dozed off? Certainly I had not heard them come close. I opened my eyes. “Hello, Aunt Vinnie,” I began, then goggled.
Time away from the Greenwood had changed her, though I could not say for certain how long ago it had been since our court had seen her. She was old now, humpbacked and with a mouth full of buckteeth through which her speech whistled. But still I recognized those gray-blue eyes, the long silver braid wrapped around the crown of her head, and the soft gentleness of her hands as she laid them on my forehead. I knew her smell.
“Lavinia,” I whispered. “Milk-mother to all.” I remembered her when she was young and buxom, milk flowing in her breasts but no child of her own to nurse for death had taken that babe early. A servant sent into the world to find a wet nurse for a Highborn lady had found a distraught Lavinia, standing on a bridge overlooking a rushing river. The servant had coaxed her with music and Lavinia had followed, through the veil and into the Greenwood. For seven years she served as wet nurse to those few precious children that had been born to Highborn mothers whose own milk was too thin to nourish. Lavinia had remained young in the Greenwood, and beautiful, glamoured by her grateful lords. And then, when there were no more births, she was returned—I had heard—to the very bridge where she had been found.
She chuckled in a low voice. “It’s Vinnie now,” she said, “but I don’t remember you,” she added, squinting at my face.
In spite of my illness, I blushed. “I am not as I was then.”
“Like me,” she replied. “Glad to know I am not forgotten Under the Hill. I hope to return one day.” Her blue eyes sparkled.
“So do I,” I croaked, throat tight with emotion. “So do I.”
* * *
WE HUNKERED DOWN AT VINNIE’S for the next two days as Vinnie brought me teas and tinctures of the very herbs I would have selected for myself, including a few I might have overlooked. She was the only healer I could have imagined with the skills in this world to rid me of the bananachs’ poison. For the first time I wondered: was it only chance that had brought Jack into my life, and his Vinnie, or had someone else had a hand in my destiny?
Jack hovered and I saw similar questions dancing like fireflies in his eyes but I was not ready to share answers with him. And neither, it seemed, was Vinnie.
But not all of my questions were about me. As Vinnie bustled around me, checking my bandages, brewing tea, occasionally throwing back her head to laugh at one of Jack’s teasing remarks, I wondered how she felt about her exile in the Greenwood? About her return home to this world? I could not answer those questions for myself, let alone an almost stranger. I was only aware that I had been changed—outside and in—and I was like a stone in the middle of the stream that longs for the solid feel of the shore but can no longer decide which one.
* * *
ON THE NEXT EVENING WHEN I felt the poison ebb and leave my body for good, I rose from the couch, gave the cats a brisk rub behind the ears, and went in search of the others. I paused at the kitchen door to delight in my returning health and the sight of my friends there.
Jack was cooking, swooping back and forth between table and a collection of bubbling pots like an alchemist intent on the transformation of lead into gold. At the table, chin resting on her palms, Vinnie listened to Sparrow sing a song penned by that fairy-touched poet Yeats, while Robin played his fiddle. And I saw clearly in Sparrow’s face the reflection of the Queen—beauty like a flame—something that she could no longer hide beneath the black hair and smudged eyes.
I entered the room, found my own chair, gently pushed a calico cat off the seat, and joined them, glad to be in their company. And gladder still that we seemed so safe and unharmed in this warded house made of sturdy bricks. Ah—seeming. You would think a fairy—even an aged fairy—would beware of such a transitory state.
The song ended, and supper was served. We grabbed our forks and plates and amid noisy conversation, tucked into the platters filled with the Jack’s offerings: brown bread and butter, savory vegetables with dried apricots and prunes, rice for me, and lamb stew flavored with mint for the others.
Midway through the meal, the calico cat settled into my lap and gently kneaded my thighs. Whistling between her teeth, Vinnie poured neat glasses of Scotch, that very human drink. We held up our glasses, the Scotch bright as amber, and drank to our health.
Is this how it should be? I thought. Halfling and Highborn, young and old, man and maid, fairy and mortal sitting together thus at a single table in friendship and in peace?
It must be so, for I felt a great warming rush of happiness that had nothing to do with the drink. Yes, I longed in my heart to see my sister’s face and know her safe. Yes, I longed to touch the sweet fields of the Greenwood again. And yes, I feared what was coming. But for the first time since my banishment, I did not feel alone.
66
Serana in Flight
The sisters flew wingtips apart. They understood how to catch the coasting parts of the air, the eddies of wind. They knew from long experience how to rest upon a breeze. While I, new come to flying in my cumbersome body, pumped my wings more than I needed to. My arms grew tired. My thighs, stretched out behind me, grew tired. My eyes straining against the blowing winds grew tired as well.
And still we flew, until I began to spiral down and the crones came on either side of me, to help with a soft landing.
What might a watcher have seen? Crows mobbing a hawk, I expect. But that was not what was going on. They guided me to a meadow, leaving me to catch my breath, there beneath the safety of a towering pine. Then they flew off, coming back with food and water, entering the meadow in their human shapes. And I, with barely enough energy to eat, though they made me, sitting on either side and putting the food in my hands.
“You ain’t aerio-dynamite yet,” said Blanche.
“Aerodynamic,” corrected Shawnique.
“That, too.”
They both laughed while I sipped at the water, munched the berries, and ate the small, hard apples they gave me.
Then Shawnique drew a flask from her skirts. My, that dress had pockets!
“Just a small sip, Mabel,” she said. “We got a long road ahead.”
“A sky road,” added Blanche, who seemed to have a talent for the obvious.
“We can’t count on your sister or her Jack having a bottle of the good stuff.” Shawnique licked her lips.
“She means a single malt,” explained Blanche, though that explained nothing. “An Islay. Peatier the better.”
“I like my whiskey neat and my men the same way.”
I nodded as if I understood a word of what they were saying, then took the proffered sip. The drink was body temperature and mellow-tasting, until it hit my throat and then it bu
rned down to my belly where it sat, like a little furnace, warming me up.
“Look at the color in this girl’s cheeks,” said Blanche. “She’s on fire! She’s a hot one! Mabel—are you able?”
Shawnique took the flask from me. “She’s about as able as she’s gonna get. Now you take a sip, sister, and so will I, and then it’s liftoff time.”
“How much farther?” I asked. “Are we almost there?”
“Not for a while yet,” said Shawnique.
“Plenty more miles to go,” added Blanche.
“So we gotta keep movin’. We gotta get there before the shit really hits the fan,” Shawnique said. She began crooning the Hi-de-ho again.
Blanche chimed in.
And then me.
They stood, Shawnique depositing the flask back in her pocket with nary an extra movement, and then before I quite understood it, they were in the air.
Suddenly, my arms and legs felt renewed. Though I wondered silently about that shit and that fan. Sounded awkward at best, messy at worst. Would I ever understand humans?
I leaped into the air, arms windmilling till I was caught by a gust and lifted farther up.
“Coming, sisters!” I cried. Even to my own ears, it sounded like the hawk’s scream, “Kreee-aaah.”
“Listen to her now!” cawed Blanche. “She’s got it!” And she raced ahead of me into the dark.
* * *
IT TOOK US ANOTHER DAY, with frequent stops, plus sips of the energizing brew, to get within one state and two counties away. I did not even ask what a state or county was. They sounded vast.
But my flying had improved until I was almost as good as the crones. They even took to complimenting me, though in an offhanded way.
Shawnique said, “We’re making you an honorary crone, Mabel.”
And Blanche said, “Pretty good for a white chick.”
“Peep! Peep! Peep!” I made the sounds of a chick at her.
That made them howl with laughter, and they called me “chicken hawk,” which was the first really funny thing either of them had said. Or at least that I understood.