—Thomas Grimsby, introduction to “Rose-Red and the Basilisk,” Collected Fey Tales
* * *
Dorie was hot and tired by the time she had found her precarious way down the mountain. She was bone-sore, dying of hunger, and her finger was throbbing like fire. There was no help for it. She had to sleep, and eat something more substantial than dandelions, and that meant she had to go home. The rented bike was still there, and she headed down the muddy hill and farther out into the country.
Night was falling as she reached the dilapidated old manor that was Silver Birch Hall. She had not done a four-hour bike ride since she was a teenager, roaming around the country, and her legs ached and her rear was sore.
Dorie banged the hoop doorknocker with her good hand until the door creaked open and a small liveried figure with a cane and long grey braid opened. “Hi, Poule,” said Dorie. She waved the same dirty hand at the old butler. Woglet mewed.
Poule looked at the slight boy standing on the doorstep with first one sharp eye, then the other. “Come on in, Dorie,” she said.
* * *
There was dinner, a bath for her and Woglet—Woglet took to it surprisingly well, splashing mightily with his silver wings—and then at length Dorie found herself in girlshape in one of her old dresses, in the faded old piano room, explaining herself to two dubious parents.
“Believe me, I’m thrilled about the ironskin business,” said Jane. “But why do you have to do it as a boy?”
“Well,” said Dorie. All her clever reasons seemed to have deserted her along with Tam. “I wasn’t getting anywhere as a girl. And now I am.” Poule had put some sort of cool gel on the hand with the damaged finger, and bound it up to keep the gel from getting on anything. She wondered what was in the medicine—feywort? It did seem to help. She rested that hand carefully on her lap.
Jane shook her head. “I understand, of course,” she said, in a voice that clearly meant she didn’t really understand, not at all. “I just wish you could fight the battle as who you are. Not disguise yourself. That just lets them keep thinking they’re winning.”
“But they were winning,” said Dorie. She was hot and tired and the road dust was making her eyes itch and water. No, she had washed her face, hadn’t she? It must be something in the air.
Her father came and held her close. “I think it’s very brave,” he said to Jane. “And very clever.” But her father always said those things. Dorie was not naïve enough to think it meant that only her father could possibly understand her, that she was special and unique. No, she understood all too well that he simply loved her too dearly to ever think ill of her. She could probably tell him the whole truth about Tam and have him not say one word of reproach.
Jane also loved her, but Jane had standards.
And if she didn’t live up to Jane’s standards, then she had to think seriously about who was right and who was wrong and what she truly believed.
It would be so much easier to believe she was always right. That’s what her father thought.
Dorie rubbed her eyes with the back of her good hand. “Did you know Aunt Helen and Uncle Rook left town?” she said. Her parents just looked at each other. “Why didn’t you go, too? Are things really that bad? You should have gone with them.”
“You can stay or you can run,” Jane said, but Edward put a hand on her knee, and her face softened.
“In war, everyone has to make the best choice for their family,” her father said. “Helen and Rook have two little girls. There isn’t much I wouldn’t have done for you.”
She felt like she would dissolve at that, but what she said was, “Do you think this is … war?”
“It’s a different kind of war,” her father said soberly. “This war isn’t fought hand to hand. This war isn’t equitable.”
“Does war have to be equitable?” said Dorie flippantly.
But her father answered her seriously. “People in the city are trapping the fey en masse. Led by that blacksmith—”
“Niklas,” Jane said quietly.
“I couldn’t stop your stepmother from investigating, once you tipped her off to what you’d been hearing.” Edward looked at Jane proudly, and Dorie’s heart clutched at the sight.
“You were right,” said Jane to Dorie. “He’s been working on a new machine the last five years.” Anger suffused her thin frame. “And I found out where the feywort is going, to boot. Denying it to those with crimson fever—using it for this! For this, Dorie! They’re splitting the fey just as the Fey Queen did when she was supplying us with bluepacks long ago. Clean energy for all—only this time it isn’t voluntary. It’s slavery. And it doesn’t have an end date, which bluepacks had back in the old days. Bluepacks lasted a few years until their servitude was up, and then the bits of fey wriggled free and went home to be whole again. But this? Splitting them forever? This is—”
“Genocide,” supplied Edward.
Jane nodded, her fingers unconsciously going up to touch the old red lines of her face. “I have always hated the fey. I never thought your father should have taken you into the woods. But this … I can’t condone this.”
“We’re practically alone in the fight,” Edward said. “Those of us who speak out are hauled in under Subversive Activities. And out here in the country the wounds are still too fresh, even twenty years later. We get turned away from shops. They see me as a sympathizer.” He spread his crippled hands. “But genocide?”
“It is strange to find myself on the other side of the fight,” admitted Jane. “And yet not so strange, for we have always loved you.”
“Morals aside,” said Dorie, “shouldn’t you run? If you’re in danger from the country, danger from the city? Wouldn’t it be safest to go abroad for a few months?”
Her parents looked at each other, then shook their heads.
“We’ve worried you,” said her father. “We want you to understand what’s going on, but don’t worry about us. We’re safe out here. We’re forgotten.”
Jane shook her head. “We’re not forgotten, not really. But I won’t run, either.”
Dorie could tell this was an old argument between the two of them. She thought how odd it was to have been on her own for so long that they could have an old argument she didn’t recognize. For a moment she looked at them with fresh eyes—the wrinkles beginning to weigh down her father’s face, the grey streaks and white lock in Jane’s hair. “Good night,” she said gently, and kissed the two of them, and headed up to her old room at the top of the stairs.
She meant to sleep just a few hours, then head back into the city. But her body betrayed her; she slept until almost dinner. There would be no trains from here this late on Sunday. She bowed to the inevitable and followed the real sleep with a real dinner: great heaps of potatoes and cheese and whole milk and half of a chicken Poule had insisted on killing for her. (Poule was also very pleased with Woglet’s mousing skills, and said he was welcome anytime.) Dorie had hoped a night’s sleep would make her parents more tractable on the subject of leaving the country, but it did not, and when she finally went up to her bedroom on Sunday night it was with a sense of foreboding.
Sleep was slow in coming. At last she got back out of bed and opened the window, looking out into the pitch-black forest that came up to the back of her house. It was quite cool, now that the heat wave had broken, and she breathed the air with relish. She was seized with the sudden whim to go outside. Martha, the maid, had washed her boy clothes, and Dorie put them on, thinking through where she would go. Perhaps she would go tramp through the forest as she had as a child; perhaps she should leave right now and hitch back into town. She stared into the night, pondering, remembering everything that had happened there, remembering everything she had messed up with Tam.
She stayed awake for so long she heard the men burst through the front door.
Dorie was alert in an instant, shoving her feet into her boots and tying them with her mind as she ran into the hallway. Yes. Silvermen, their
glowing palms readily visible in the moonlight. She cast about, searching for something to throw at the intruders. Three shabby old curtains hung around the foyer below her; she ripped them off and tangled them around the men’s ankles. That slowed them down—for a second. Her parents came stumbling out behind her, slow humans running into the hall. “Go,” she shouted at them. “Run!”
But they didn’t. She knew they wouldn’t, and she was proud of them even as she was frustrated—what could they do? Her father was a painter with crippled hands—he didn’t even hunt.
The men were untangling themselves now, heading for the stairs, silver palms extended and glowing in the presence of Dorie. With a presence of mind that suggested she had thought through this scenario, Jane upended an entire bag of Dorie’s childhood marbles on the stairs, momentarily stunning the men again. In the chaos, Dorie mentally pulled an oil painting of her father’s off the wall and smashed one of them over the head. “Sorry,” she called to her father. “I liked that one.” She looked around for something else to throw, but all she saw was the old chandelier. It was well bolted to the ceiling with iron—she couldn’t budge that. But it had once run on fey power, and so the lower links were copper. Perhaps she could loosen those.…
“Martha is taking the auto and heading for town,” her father shouted in her ear under the clatter. “Run to the back and meet her.”
Dorie gripped his arms and said, “No, listen to me. You run. They can’t catch me.”
He shook his head ruefully and said, “I won’t leave Jane, she won’t leave me, and neither of us will leave this house. You see how it is.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” she said, uselessly. Surely sometimes discretion was the better part of valor—surely sometimes it was better to lie, and hide, and work within the system. He smiled at her, as if divining her thoughts, and Jane grinned savagely and threw an armful of books, one by one, at the attackers.
They were foiled by the age of the house—the foyer had long since stopped being perfectly level, and the marbles had all run through the missing curtain into the back hallway. The men were approaching cautiously, but they were on the stairs again. The one in front seized Jane—and then Woglet flew into his face, biting and scratching, until the man let go, trying to protect his eyes. Jane kneed the man in the distraction.
Dorie got back to working on that copper ring of the chandelier just as Poule came hurrying down to the foyer, rolling some enormous cylindrical contraption. The old part-dwarvven woman moved slowly these days, but she hobbled as fast as she could. The men ignored her, which was their mistake. Poule flicked a switch, and soap foam began to spray out of the nozzle. An invented carpet cleaner, perhaps, repurposed. With frothy accuracy it sprayed into eyes and mouths and noses.
One of the silvermen realized that Poule was more dangerous than she looked. Shielding his face, he crossed the foyer and landed a blow to the gut that knocked the wind from her, toppled her to the floor, unmoving. “Poule!” shrieked Dorie. She redoubled her mental efforts with the copper ring, until she twisted the last bit away, and with a push in the right direction, managed to drop the chandelier squarely on the head of the man who had hit Poule. He crumpled to the floor with a satisfying crash.
It was good but it wasn’t good enough. The other men had seized Jane and Edward now. Edward went gracefully and with an air of hauteur; Jane kicked and bit for all she was worth. The last two men were now approaching Dorie with ropes; they obviously thought the little blond girl would be an easy catch. She smirked, planning what damage she was about to cause. But the man holding Edward seemed to be the one in charge, and he said, “You idiots; didn’t you see her drop the chandelier? She must be fey-ridden.” He tossed a pair of iron handcuffs to the man advancing on her. The eye on their palms glowed silver.
“Go,” shouted Jane, and her father smiled sadly at her.
Dorie backed up through the door to her room, Woglet returning to her side. The men grinned as they came close.
And then there was nothing for it but to leap through the open window and fall, fall, turning half-fey and rolling as she went.
* * *
She did not know where to go, and in her despair found herself fleeing into the cold forest behind her house, looking for fey to help her fade out to blue and help all her human worries vanish. But the fey were not there, and as if in a bad dream, she ran wild and half-fey through the woods, searching for her old companions. Woglet flew behind her, cooing in concern.
They were not in the fey ring, where she had once met her mother. They were not in the stand of silver birches that ran along the creek, where she had first gone with her father to meet her other kin. She ran until she reached the place she had never wanted to go back to at all: the old copse of pines where she had taken Tam that summer.
They were not there, either, and she sank to the ground, panting and exhausted. The ground was cold and dark and wet and there is nothing, nothing left of the fey.
She spreads her fingers in the needles and as if that fey loophole has taken her through time, she is back there, and it is sunny and golden where the light slants through the trees. She sees another Dorie, she sees another Tam, but this time she recognizes them all too well. Dorie has blond curls, Tam has a crisp clean explorer hat, and they are both fifteen.
Tam is excited, for he has tried to talk to the fey, but they laugh at those who want to find them. Today Dorie has promised an introduction. He turns to her, eyes shining, and takes her hands.
Dorie has butterflies in her stomach that twist and turn into giant basilisks. She has never been truly accepted by the fey. They say she is too human, that she cannot understand their games, their caprices, bright against the backdrop of the lazy drift of time. Impatient, fifteen-year-old Dorie perhaps cannot. But at the same time, she is not fully human, not accepted there, and she thinks again and again when she is teased: fine, I didn’t want to be an ordinary girl anyway.
She spent all last school year plotting her escape and now, here at the start of summer, she has come with a special request. She has asked the fey: How can I be more like you? What can I trade you? I want to be all fey, as much as I can.
Older Dorie knows what they answered, but does not want to face it, not just yet. She looks at her younger self and wonders if seven years has made any difference in her understanding of time. Perhaps being here, right now, is the strongest suggestion that it has. Fey senses are different than human. They spread over centuries, and perhaps a slow dip into past memories is commonplace.
She would pull back from this memory, but it drags inexorably on, and sick fascination compels her to stay.
For what the fey answered was, <
That Dorie, young Dorie, tells herself that she is only giving Tam what he wants. He has begged her to talk to them. He has his notebooks, he has his pencils. He wants to know the stories they tell. He wants to be with them, to drift with them, to know.
He does not know what he is asking, not really. He does not know what it is to be a human, taken by them. To go into the forest, where they will entwine him with blue and time will pass more slowly than it does outside, one day for every three. Where the blue fey will start to solidify, in contact with him, and they will amuse themselves with games with him, entertain themselves with his gifts. Where everything around him will be strange and full of illusion.
And she does not really know what she is giving him. She does not really know if it is for him or for her that she holds his hands in response and leads him backward, a step at a time, deeper into the circle of pines.
He stops her before they are quite in the middle, and she thinks perhaps that is the sign to turn back. She can sense the fey hovering, so very near, and she thinks that is why he stopped. That he, like she, has regrets.
Instead he cups her cheek and kisses her, and she dissolves and breaks apart as if she is all fey, t
urning blue.
But no, when she pulls back she finds she is all too human, looking into those dear brown eyes.
That’s when the fey she has summoned finally come.
That’s when they hand her the blue cup that looks like water, and she looks at him and gives it to him, and he drinks down the fey substance that will let the fey take him and keep him.
He thinks this is just an afternoon of talking.
She never has to see the betrayal on his face when he finds out it’s for a year.
This Dorie pulls back from the past, into the night, and she is crumpled on the ground, broken. There is one fey above her now, two, three. No more, but that is something, and they take her gently and help her fade into nothing.
<
Then it all stops, and she goes tumbling into the ravine where she and Tam fought only yesterday morning, Woglet tumbling down next to her.
It stops.
Dorie sat up, looking around. The fey that brought her here had vanished. She climbed up the ravine on the wyvern side, looking for the blue. There was an awful smell of petrol and she felt as though she were climbing through memories again, but this time not her own. They were impressions of ripping, of burning, limb from limb. And another smell, a stench far worse than fuel. Her eyes were stinging by the time she got to the top.
The silver cliffs of the wyverns had been desecrated.
Adult bodies were strewn everywhere—mangled and torn in the vicious fight to protect their eggs. She ran to the nests to see—empty. Systematically emptied one by one, and the remnants casually strewn down the cliff. Only the eggs had been considered of value, although here and there she saw wyverns shorn of their head or wings—grisly trophies taken back. Not even the babies she and Tam had brought back had been spared. She recognized Buster’s bent tail and knelt beside him, petting the cooling body.
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