Blood, Glass and Sugar

by Lyndsay E Gilbert

  “Bran came to see that she was of ugly character, a woman plotting the death of her husband, and worse. He worked on, anxious to complete the frame. She brought precious gems and jewels to adorn it, and Bran used all his skill, all his creativity, so that she would be satisfied.

  “He thought every day of his fiancé, her sweet lips and pleading eyes. He wished he had not had so much pride. He swore to himself that when he returned to her, he would never leave her side again.

  “Fate would not have it this way. When the frame was complete, and the mirror installed, Bran witnessed the Queen’s first act of sorcery. She did not murder her husband, instead she bound him inside the mirror, so that when Bran looked at certain times he would see a man of startling beauty gazing out from a room, looking at him with piercing eyes, accusing him.

  “Bran requested his freedom to the Queen, wishing to escape back to his own land, his waiting fiancé, but the Queen denied him. While all her people searched for their missing King at her command, she acted distressed and incapable of ruling alone. But in her private chambers she spoke harsh words to her husband in the mirror, taunting him that he would never rule over his people again.

  “She had grown attracted to Bran, and though she made advances, he refused, insisting that he be released. Her great beauty could not persuade him, and so she tried sorcery, but he thought on his love back home, and it was like a shield to all her charms. Frustrated, the Queen flew into a great rage. Pulling the stolen crown from her head, she threw it with great force at her precious mirror.

  “Bran was standing in the mirrors view as it was smashed. It cracked, splitting into seven pieces. As Bran looked at his shattered reflection he saw the prisoner King grasping his moment of freedom. Pain surged through Bran, as though he was being torn into pieces.

  “The King cursed him, saying, ‘Pride is what brought you here, and it is your undoing. Seven fragments, seven souls, seven faces, seven sins.’

  “The pain was unbearable. His true face, the face of pride, was shackled, chained in the corner of his soul as each other sin came to be a part of him, to control his body, his thoughts, his emotions. He was infested. Six pieces of the mirror fell out of the frame, each holding the power of one sin, and each transforming to reflect its nature.

  “The Queen did not go unpunished, and could see herself clearly in the one fragment of the mirror still clinging to its frame. Her beauty was gone, leaving in its place unrecognisable ugliness. Repulsed by herself, the Queen fled Unseelie, taking only her broken mirror, its frame and single shard of glass. Her minions followed her out into the world above, never to return to Unseelie. “

  Auran downed the rest of his mead, and slammed the empty mug back on the table, as if signifying the end of the story.

  “That can’t be all,” Evie pressed. “It doesn’t explain anything. What happened to Bran?”

  “He was unable to leave Unseelie, trapped until a kind Seelie faerie, a slave in Unseelie, took pity on him, and explained that he would never age. Explained that if he took one step out of the faerie realm he would turn to dust, as so many unfortunate mortals before him. He could however leave Unseelie and live among other faeries in a neutral place. A place where the worlds meet, where one may slip from one into another.

  “He took this advice, agonising that he could not return home even once to visit his love, and tell her what had become of him. He did eventually discover that he was able to venture into the mortal world on esbat nights and sabbats, full moons and the holidays of the seasons. The first time he took advantage of this was on a cold Winter Solstice. He travelled home, only to discover that fifteen years had passed and his dear beloved was married to another man and had four beautiful children.

  “Destroyed now, with nothing and no one to live for he attempted many times to die, but the faces inside would take control locking him into a tiny useless place inside his head, where he could only watch as they lived his life, committed foul deeds and crimes in his name. Eventually wherever he went among the faeries he was known, both for his artistic talent and his dangerous changing temperament.”

  Evie thought a dangerous changing temperament didn’t quite sum up what she had witnessed, and sad as Bran’s story certainly was, her role still did not make any sense. “Auran, what happened out in the street? How did I piece the mirror together?”

  “Over the years, his fiancé has come back for him. I know this will be hard for you to believe. You don’t have to think on it, but it is the truth. She is you, and you have attempted many times to save him. The key is in your blood, that you love him, and you can piece him back together.”

  Evie pushed her chair back and stood up, rocking the table so that her mead splashed over Auran. He didn’t pay it any heed, reaching over and grabbing Evie’s wrist, forcing her to sit back down. “If you cannot handle that, do not think on it. It is, after all, irrelevant. What matters is that you can free him. You can gather the pieces of the mirror, and you can place them back together. When that is done, he will finally be free, and the mirror restored.”

  A pulse pounded violently in Evie’s temple. Auran’s dark grey eyes were wide, earnest, pleading. Suspicion broke over her like a cold wave. “What would it matter to you? You’re the Prince of Unseelie.”

  His eyes narrowed, and the angular line of his jaw tightened. “I was there when he was cursed, recently fostered into the Unseelie Royal Court. I was swapped with their true son, he was given to my own parents to foster in the hopes that the feuding would stop for at least a while.

  “To me it happened only two years ago, when I was but seventeen summers old. Yet here the world has moved on six hundred years. I have to restore the mirror; it is my duty to undo the curse on my foster father. I must free him from his prison. If I do not, Unseelie is without a ruler. I am merely a stand in. To gain all the powers of the King I must stab him through the heart. That is the custom.”

  She swallowed, slumping in her seat. He wanted to be King. If she restored the mirror, Auran intended to stab someone through the heart. If she didn’t, Bran remained cursed forever.

  “Evie, you don’t have a choice. I am ready to be kind, if you will let me be. Unseelie is not my nature, but I have no choice either. It is better that we work together. “

  She didn’t speak, looking away from his face and staring down at the spilled mead on the table. She was going to do it. She knew she would have done it, forced to or not.

  “Not every girl gets to play the hero.” Auran offered, reaching over and patting her hand. “Also, though I do not know how it is possible, it is obvious you see something in him.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was freezing outside. Trix’s breath misted in the air before her as she walked to the tube station, clutching the plastic bag with Evie’s finished gown inside. A man was busking outside the station entrance, strumming a guitar with raw pink fingers. She jangled in her coat pocket and threw him a pound coin. He winked at her.

  The station was packed full of people. The Christmas panic was starting in earnest, and kids darted about, chasing each other in front of the turnstiles. Trix manoeuvred around them and swiped her card.

  The train was worse than the station. She only just managed to squeeze into the carriage and spent the journey pressed up against a gross old man. He grinned at her the whole way, and half his teeth were missing.

  She was more than happy to switch lines, though she had to skip several of the trains that came. They couldn’t take any more passengers. When the doors hissed open at the stop people almost toppled out onto the platform. It felt like half the day had passed by the time she reached Camden. Passengers poured out of the train and Trix got shoved in the back more times than she could count before she made it out into the crisp open air.

  She walked quickly to Evie’s street. When she turned in, as luck would have it, Evie was just a few metres ahead of her, going very slowly to her own house.

  “Evie!”

  Evie turned
, looking like she had been caught in the middle of a crime. She stopped walking, and Trix jogged to cover the space between them. “I was calling all morning. What time did you get home at last night? You never phoned.”

  Evie looked like Trix was the last person she wanted to see, and shrugged, saying nothing.

  “That’s it? You don’t have anything to say to me? Evie I’ve been worried about you. And Lou was acting weird. She said you went missing the other day. You didn’t tell me that.”

  Again, a shrug. Though there was a definite blush creeping up her neck and onto her face, staining her pale cheeks pink.

  “Evie, where were you? Are you just coming home now?” Trix heard a pleading tone seeping into her voice. She couldn’t help it. Evie was scaring her.

  “Trix I… I’ve met a guy okay?”

  Trix couldn’t believe her. This was exactly what girlfriends were supposed to tell each other. “So what, within two days you are sneaking about the town, and not telling anyone where you are? God Evie, you can’t tell your best-friend about a boy, but you can go stay at his house already?”

  Evie’s blush deepened to a fiery red. “It’s not what you think-”

  “Staying in the house of some mysterious man? There are lots of things I’m trying not to think!” Maybe she’d overstepped, but she didn’t care.

  “How dare you?” Evie said. “How dare you!”

  Trix shoved the dress at her. “I do dare. I was worrying my ass off about you, and now you act like this?”

  Evie took the bag, her eyes wide, almost like she was panicking. But she still didn’t try to explain anything.

  “I’m serious Evie, what the hell is going on? Are you doing drugs or something? Is this guy a drug dealer?”

  “Does that sound like me?” Evie snapped.

  “Sound like you? You aren’t acting like you! I’m beginning to wonder if it’s you in there at all.“ She swallowed a lump in her throat. She had never fought with Evie before, they were constant. Evie wasn’t like this. Evie cared about her.

  Trix sighed, feeling an actual ache in her chest as she did. Evie didn’t say anything, so Trix continued. “You can go on your own tonight.” She motioned at the gown in the bag. “I don’t think I’m coming.”

  She turned back in the direction of the tube station, expecting Evie to call her back, but she didn’t. When she glanced back over her shoulder, Evie was hurrying up her front steps.

  Trix continued walking, a sick, heavy knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

  * * *

  Lou wasn’t home. Evie took the spare key from underneath the plant pot and let herself into the house. She didn’t look back at Trix. She couldn’t. The guilt was a physical pain in her chest, adding to a thousand others all over he body. Her muscles ached from the night before, and her mouth was sore and dry. Her body wanted apples, mead, any other faerie food. She didn’t think she could face ordinary food. She needed something that would lift her up and out of the world. Everything around her was fake, seemed to belong to another Evie.

  Her coats hung on the stand in the hall, and some of her shoes were scattered about below. She gazed at the shoes she was wearing. They weren’t real. Auran had picked up two rocks and stared at them until they had formed into shoes, old fashioned heels albeit, but still shoes that she could wear home. Glamour. He said it would wear off in a few hours and the shoes would be rocks again. She slid them off and walked into the living room. She sat down on the sofa and pulled off her slightly damp, very dirty socks.

  The remote control lay on the arm of the sofa beside her, and she pressed it so that the TV flickered on. She didn’t want to think about the fight with Trix. As soon as everything was over with Auran and Bran she would call and apologise and hope it wouldn’t be too late.

  For a moment she entertained the idea that she could die, that Wrath could succeed in killing her, that Auran was a liar, that he would hurt her in the end. If those things happened, then maybe she would leave Trix behind with only memories of how they had fought.

  She turned the volume on the TV up, flicking to the music channels. As she watched the people on screen, who she had always thought were beautiful, she couldn’t help but think on the crazy, angular beauty of Auran, of the grace in his movements, the otherness that shone out of him like every molecule that made him was burning in some invisible, ethereal fire. Maybe six hundred years of living in faerie had given Bran a similar edge.

  She wanted to paint it, somehow capture it all on a page, but now that she was not near them their faces blurred, so that just a fuzzy memory remained. The harder she tried to hold on to every detail the quicker they all slipped out of her grasp. She wanted to be near them, she ached for them just as she did for the apples.

  Her world was hollow. She felt like if she turned the TV off she would see herself reflected in the silver screen with a black hole though her stomach, spreading to her chest. Some invisible force was spooning out her insides and eating them.

  She stood up and went into the kitchen, opening the biscuit tin and pulling out a Rocky bar. Maybe the depression settling over her was just hunger and exhaustion. She’d have a snack and go to bed, maybe when she woke Lou would be home, and she could try and make up some excuse.

  The fact that Lou was gone should have bothered her. Maybe Lou was out looking for her. Maybe her father was home. He would flip his final switch if he was, and they came home and found Evie eating biscuits in the kitchen.

  She peeled the wrapper back and took a bite of the biscuit. It was disgusting, sucking all the moisture from her mouth, as if she had poured flour down her throat. It crumbled like chalk, turning to dust on her tongue. She spat it into the sink, pouring herself a glass of water. She drank it down, wincing at the chemical taste.

  Food was a bad idea.

  She heard a commotion in the hallway and walked out into the living room. Lou was coming in the front door, carting a load of plastic bags. Evie couldn’t help but be a little hurt that Lou had been grocery shopping instead of looking for her. She had no idea what excuse she was going to give, and was nervous that maybe she had hurt her stepmother, and that things couldn’t recover.

  Lou tripped over two rocks sitting in the hallway, and cursed, kicking them towards the stairs. She looked up and saw Evie standing in the living room. “What the hell are these rocks, Evie?” she snapped.

  Evie shrugged, dumbfounded.

  Lou bundled past her and into the kitchen. She started putting away the groceries, and Evie followed to give her a hand. They worked in silence, Evie finding all the frozen foods to put in the freezer. Lou was being rather violent, and almost tore open a box of rice krispies, stuffing it into the breakfast cupboard.

  “Lou…about last night-”

  “Save it, Evie. This is the most immature, late coming rebellion I’ve ever had to witness. I don’t care what happened.”

  Evie shrugged, feeling a sudden sense of panic swell in her chest. If Lou didn’t give a damn, and she was fighting with Trix, then she was on her own, and nobody cared. Her dad certainly didn’t. She could cease to exist and he wouldn’t notice just as long as he didn’t have to come home from work.

  “And Evie, if this is some sort of stunt to get your dad’s attention I’d give up now. If I can’t get it, you can’t, trust me.”

  She’d had moments like this with countless of her dad’s old girlfriends as she was growing up. Thankfully none of them had married her dad in order to be promoted to wicked stepmother status. Just a few days ago she could never have imagined Lou turning out like all the others.

  The twisted look on her face didn’t suit. Evie wished she looked even a little exhausted or worn out, like this flip-out was born out of worry rather than malicious anger, but Lou looked exhilarated. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sharp and cruel, she looked like a faerie Queen, like the being Evie had pictured while Auran told Bran’s story.

  Evie set the pack of frozen burgers she was holding on the kitchen table
and walked out. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and started stuffing a change of clothing into a rucksack. She grabbed her sketchbook too and her pencils. She hardly thought doing A Level coursework was on the agenda anymore, but she took them anyway.

  Lou must have heard her thumping down the stairs, but she didn’t come out of the kitchen. Evie pulled her long woollen coat off the stand and left the house. She didn’t have Trix to run to, and no idea where Auran was. Maybe it was dangerous to go back to Bran’s place, but she wanted to see him. If she didn’t see him she couldn’t break the curse. It was daylight anyway; the Sins hadn’t shown themselves until the middle of the night.

  She threw her coat over her shoulders and ran down the front steps, heading towards the town centre.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Trix didn’t go home. She trudged about town, wondering if people could see an actual cloud of gloom hovering over her head when they looked at her. She spent two hours in a cafe eating a veggie fry, and almost sent an angry text before she remembered that Evie’s phone was broken. It was hard to stay mad at her friend, especially when curiosity was nearly giving her a fever.

  She couldn’t push the strange expression in Evie’s eyes out of her head. She hadn’t looked normal since the last day of school term. Maybe it had been bad to yell when Evie had appeared on the verge of some sort of breakdown.

  Trix paid for her fry, trying to ignore the spectre of her mother hanging over her shoulder in disapproval. She earned her money working most of her evenings in ‘The Spindle’, measuring out reams and reams of material for clothes and curtains. She was getting quite popular there, giving people dressmaking tips, especially coming up to school formal season.