They fall over, eyes wide with shock; they are now very, very pale.
“Well?”
One of the small ones who is perpetually on the bottom says, “There is never enough for everyone.”
“Then I’ll make more.”
“There is never ever enough for everyone.”
“If you keep pushing and shoving like that, there’ll be precisely the same amount for everyone: none. Is that clear?”
Guilty, anxious glances are exchanged.
“I mean it. Pretend I have eyes in the back of my head: I hear any more squabbling and you can all go hungry. If you can work together—”
“Doing what?”
“Getting along. If you can do that, I’ll make sure that every single one of you in the kitchen right now has something to eat. Deal?”
He says, “They are not a democracy. They are not empowered—”
“Oh, hush, you. I’m perfectly happy to send them all to bed hungry.”
“They are not children—”
“They are exactly children; they just happen to have no parents. Deal?”
Nodding and shuffling abounds, and he notes—as she must—that there are now six more of the small ones who have magically appeared in the kitchen. She makes no comment, but returns to the chair and sits. “Honestly, how long have you let them live like that?”
He is, again, nonplussed. When he finds words—and they are never far away—he says, “How long have you been able to see them?”
But she shakes her head and lifts her glass. “How long have you had this particular vintage in your possession?”
“Centuries.”
“My answer′s similar.”
He stares at her. He has watched her for months, and all he has seen is a cheerful but sometimes weary woman of middling weight and middling years. She has no great wealth and no great beauty; she fends off no suitors, except the very drunk and garrulous, and she has not particular outstanding talent. When she sings her voice is not unpleasant, but it lacks power; when she paints, she cannot capture the whole of what she sees. Her hair has some grey in it; she disdains—in a quiet and comfortable way—artifice.
She cannot have seen the passage of centuries.
He drinks, as she has done. “Do you know who I am?” he finally asks.
“No.”
“Yet you recognize them?”
“I recognize what they are. I recognized what you are, but not who; that’s always harder. Time has passed, even for the timeless. Everything has to change, if it’s alive.” So saying, she glances at the back of her hands, and a brief, rueful smile shadows the corners of her lips. “Do you recognize me?”
His brows ripple in confusion.
“There’s no reason you should, but you’ve watched me for a while now.”
“I thought you were mortal.”
“Yes, well. I’ve never lied to you. You never asked.”
He is now, finally, suspicious. “Why did you agree to visit tonight?”
“To bake for you,” is her prompt reply.
“To bake what?”
“Apple and cinnamon muffins. I didn’t expect you to have a small host guarding your kitchen floors. I didn’t take you for the type.”
“No more did I,” he replies more severely. “Why did you wish to bake?”
“I told you. That’s the whole of it. You seem like a person who might appreciate it, maybe. Some day. Probably not today, though.”
“Did you—were you—”
“Did I know your mother?”
He lifts a brow. “One could not help but know my mother.”
She chuckles. “That’s a truth even I can’t argue with. Yes, I remember her. Queen of the Dark Court.”
It has been so long since he has heard the words, it takes him a moment to realize that she has not spoken in the English he assumed was her mother tongue. He rises stiffly. “Do not—”
“Call her?” She unfolds her legs, straightens her back; on her it looks almost wrong. “My dear boy, how long has it been since you’ve been home?” There is almost pity in her voice, and he cannot help his reaction; his jaws clench, as do his fists. He is not, has never been, an object of pity, except at his own choosing, for his own ends.
How dare she?
She lifts a hand. “I meant no insult. If I had, you’d know.”
If she had, he would not be so angry. Or perhaps it is not her pity that angers him; her question disturbs. “Why do you ask?” is his formal, stiff reply.
“Because I have visited recently. It’s not what it was in your youth.”
“And what do you know of my youth?”
“It was dark and joyless, but very, very beautiful when seen from the outside.” She lifts her glass, drinks, closes her eyes. Her lashes have always been remarkably long, and they are edged in gold, as if dusted. It is the one thing about her face that is striking. “Wait a minute,” she adds, opening those eyes. She rises and heads to the kitchen to shoo the small ones away from the oven’s door. If they wanted, they could drag her down to their level, like an angry human mob in miniature, but they don’t—yet—dare.
She is his guest, if unexpected, after all. He would be forced to kill them, an act which would, at this point, bring him some comfort.
She won’t let them touch a thing until she has served him, and she does; it is not appropriate food for the wine he is serving, but nothing about this woman is appropriate. When he accepts her offering—although he does not eat it—she returns to the kitchen and supervises the small horde; she is quick and sharp with her words, but they’re not listening to anything but tone.
And her tone is strange; it is both hard and soft, cool and warm. Her expression softens into something very like a smile, and it is an idiot’s smile; she is feeding the vultures, and does not understand this. The small ones would fall on her corpse if they thought they could gain by it.
She looks up at him at that moment, her face still softened by smile. “It’s what they are,” she says, as if this explains her stupidity. “But it’s not all they can be.” She shakes her head. “Next time, I’ll make more.”
There will be no next time. He could hardly call her a fool and at the same time invite her into his domain again, knowing what he now knows. “How can you play this game?” He asks, more sharply than he intended. There is no caution now; he is no longer hunter here, and if he is not to be hunted, he must be canny, wary.
“Which game?”
“This one. This feeding, this—this. How can you speak of trust? If you are not mortal, you must understand—”
“What must I understand?” Her voice is still soft, but there is now gravity to the words, weight, something that suggests a hidden majesty. “We want what we want—but surely, even that changes? The women you dine with, the women who visit you—they leave. They return to the world, and their lives, and they are largely unchanged. In your youth, that would have been nigh impossible.”
That stings, but he accepts it. “I have had to be careful.”
“Why?”
“If they were to disappear, it would attract unwanted attention, and that attention would inevitably destroy the life I have built.”
“Why live in this world at all?”
“I could no longer live in hers.”
“Ah.” She lifts her glass. “Then you should understand me better than you think or know. I could no longer live there, either.”
He surrenders, then. “You were not one of my moth-er′s courtiers.” It is not a question.
“No.”
“Then what? You might have been one of the mortals she adopted as pets—but they aged and died as we watched; you are aged, but you are demonstrably not dead, and more significant, you are here. You are free.”
“She did not own me.”
He laughs at that. It is wild, unfettered; the small ones scatter at the sound, leaving crumbs across his perfect floors in their haste to be gone. “Did not own? She owned us all, from
the least to the greatest. We existed to do her bidding or we did not live for long—and even those that attempted to carry out her will were not spared if their attempts came to naught.”
“If she owned you, how did you escape? Why are you here, in this city? Why do you live without her mirrors and her tokens?”
He falls silent. Silence was one of his mother′s weapons.
It is clearly a weapon to which she is impervious. “Trust is folly,” she tells him, her voice almost a whisper. “So much of our lives are the stories we tell ourselves, the truth buried somewhere in the words, if it can be found at all. There is never enough for everyone, so everyone must guard what they have, take what they can; we live behind walls, and arm ourselves for invasion. We cannot give; if we give, people will know how weak, how foolish we are.
“We will die, if we are weak.”
He nods. “You understand.”
“No. I recite. I heard so much, so often. I was not a member of your mother′s court, it is true; I would have seemed too feckless, too soft, a child for her liking in my youth. But even in my mother′s court, these were the truths we held. We did not disdain humans, as you did, but we didn’t fear them. We laughed at them, always. Their folly and their foolishness. They would come to us like thieves or beggars, with their small, tiny stories, their ephemeral pain. They would ask us for things: power or wealth or beauty. Sometimes they would ask for children.
“They weren’t foolish enough to trust us, just desperate. But they were never so desperate as to approach your mother′s court, your mother′s throne.”
“Yet mortals came.”
“Yet they came. Beguiled, because beguilement was the only road they would travel. She lied to them—but so did we. She entrapped them in the web of their own desire—but so did we.”
“Your desires were not hers, then.”
“No, none so grand.”
“And your court?”
She shook her head. “It is gone, I think. I could not return home after I left your mother′s court; she would have destroyed my people and everything that I might have touched, anyone who might have offered me aid. That was her way,” she added quickly.
“When? When was this?”
“A long, long time ago.”
He stares at her again, and this time he understands what he saw in her eyes the first time; nothing about her face or her hair, nothing about her form, looks the same. Did she bake in his mother’s court? No. No, she couldn’t have. He says, “Your hair—was it gold?”
She laughs the way middle-aged women laugh. “Yes, gold and long and fine. Not a hair out of place in your mother′s court.” She hesitates, and then says, “I lied.”
“It’s what we do.”
“Not me, not any more—but I lied.” She reaches across the table and gently cups his cheek; her hands are callused. “I remember you. What you were. I remember.”
She leaves shortly afterward, the words hanging in the air between them. He closes—and wards—his door, although the gesture is empty. He knows that should she desire it, he will open the door again.
Only once in his long life did his mother shed tears. They were not for, or because, of him, and they caused the deaths of many, for his mother could not abide weakness, could not acknowledge it. But she did not kill him, and he witnessed. Surely that must have meant something?
Surely that must have meant something.
In the days that follow he works, he reads, and he writes. He supervises his graduate students with the same dispassionate air that has always characterized his supervision. Living in a land of mortals has granted him some confidence; they are merely mortal; no matter what they might achieve, they will be dust in time; he will endure.
But he has endured, and at times, in the empty perfection of his home, he feels that that is all he has done; it is a pyrrhic victory. When did it become that? When he first arrived, he found mortal laughter amusing, in a condescending way; he found their delight in their own cleverness very much like the delight of the small ones: laughable, if he was feeling generous. He is not known for his kindness, but has cultivated an aura of fairness, and he knows how to compel them when it is necessary.
He does not do it now; he watches them at work. Their work is often mingled with play, but he does not see much of the joy she so prizes in their daily activities. He watches them, much more discreetly, at play, and even there, there are equal parts pain and happiness, so much so they cannot be separated. He does not see what she sees and it vexes him.
He does not see the woman for whom his mother shed tears, and that is harder. He remembers her in her youth: she was as tall as his mother, gold to her ebony, but just as fair; her eyes were a shade of blue that verged on emerald in the right light. Her hands were long and fine, and she wore black to please his mother, but when his mother rode with her host, she oft slipped into white and gold and wandered through the gardens.
She was always there to greet his mother upon her return, and she would listen to his mother’s stories, terse and perfect as they were; she would play music, a harp or a lute, and she would accept whatever small token of affection his mother brought back for her: emeralds or sapphires, gold; never diamonds.
But it is true: she was not of his mother’s kin. It was generally agreed that her prominence in his mother’s court was in part due to this: she had no ties to anyone that she might manipulate; her own people were in distant lands, their borders contested by both his mother and the mortals who grew bolder and bolder with the passage of time and their own petty wars. They burned and they destroyed with an abandon that the Dark Court did not show; there was no artistry to their destruction; they were like the locusts their farmers cursed and wept over.
Why had she any place in his mother′s court at all?
Why is she so small now, so round, so utterly lacking in grace? Why is her hair so frazzled, her voice so rough, her hands so callused? Why does she seek to command no respect, even the piddling respect of the mortals around her?
He does not understand.
She looks up when he enters the bar, and she smiles. She is sweating. Sweating! Where once this was just a fact of life, it is now almost an abomination. She is jostled by patrons, touched by bartenders—just a tap of the shoulder, a nudge where words would take longer, but it is the principle of the thing.
Her smile is the smile that he first saw. It drew him; he accepts that now. He examines his past for some hint of her power—for she must have some—and finds nothing at all. It is just a smile, like any other mortal smile. But it fits the whole of her face. Yes, her eyes are lined with dark circles, and there are creases in their corners, but even those frame the smile, adding to it.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” she says. “Will you have your usual red?”
Has it been that long? No, months at most, if that. He frowns. “Yes.”
Someone further along the bar shouts her name, and she whips around, “Just a second!” There is music in her voice; it is rough, mortal music. Yet she is here, she is now. Did his mother curse her? Is that why she has become so diminished? Yet she is alive. He was so certain that she was dead and gone, entrapped and encased in permanence in the ice of the queen’s vast, private chambers.
He does not like change. The immortal never do. And this is a change unlooked for, unnoticed; the world has shifted beneath his feet, becoming strange and incomprehensible—and the incomprehensible is death. But he came here for a reason.
He says, “The small ones miss you.”
She raises one brow.
“They remind me that you said you would bake more, the next time.”
“I can see why it took a few months; that must’ve taken some courage.” She doesn’t believe him, but she accepts his lie at face value—and this, at least, is a comfort; it’s a court trick, a verbal dance, as familiar as breath. “You never touched what I baked the last time.”
“I was—”
“Paranoid.”
“Well, I suppose someone was grateful, even if it wasn’t you. You’re sure it’s okay?” She speaks as if nothing has changed, and for a moment, he almost feels nothing has. But then she adds, “You don’t really seem to want them underfoot, and they’ll come. They’ll probably be screeching the whole time, too.”
“Do they not visit you in your own abode?”
She glances down at the table-top. “No.” She does not meet his eyes again until he changes the subject. He does; he understands when she has closed a door. He understood that the first time he saw her, and learned the nuances of it in the months and years that followed. What he does not understand is what his mother saw in her.
He arranges a date for her visit, and as he leaves—and he does, because tonight, she requires it—he finds himself adding, “You’ll come?”
She smiles at him, as if he were a child. “Of course I’ll come.”
His apartment is still perfect. He considers making it less perfect, and begins to do so, arranging newspapers on the living room table, but surrenders when he realizes that they are placed in an artful, almost symmetric mess. Why he does this, he does not understand ; this is his domain, small and humble though it is; the rules of hospitality that bind him and his kin, subtle and dangerous as they are, do not demand her comfort.
Yet he wants her comfort here; he wants her to drop her guard, to be herself.
He pauses, newspapers once again folded and in his hand. What does that mean, to be herself? She is not what he thought she was; she is not what anyone who traverses the loud and crowded floors of her bar thinks she is either, if they think of it at all. What has she shown him of herself, in the end? He has watched, and he has seen only what any mortal fool might see.
No, he thinks. He has seen more than that.
The moment she enters his home, the small ones gather. They do not limit their invasion to the kitchen, either, and he is certain—as she said they would be—they are more numerous. They chatter and whisper like squirrels, stopping only when the door creaks, as if they are collectively holding their breath.
Courts of the Fey Page 21