by Livi Michael
‘But now I’ve got nothing,’ I say, ‘and no one.’
The look on her face. Shocked, hurt, reproachful. ‘You have me,’ she says. ‘You can stay here.’ But I only groan and bury my face in my hands.
Then she crouches in front of me. ‘Stay with me,’ she murmurs. ‘You have a life here, with me. People come and go, they forget things, they change their minds and their hearts, time wastes them away and they grow old and die. But here you will never grow old.’
She leans forward and grasps my closed fists. ‘Stay with me, Keri,’ she urges. ‘You have lost everything, you have no one – I have no one too. All my people have fled. We could be everything to one another. Don’t you understand what I’m offering you? You could leave behind your mortal life and live with me forever!’
And in a flash then, I see how it could be – me and Mabb playing in our enchanted forest, stringing spiders’ webs from branches, drinking nectar from flowers, teaching the baby birds to fly. No more sickness and pain, no more loneliness, no more growing old and dying. We would live forever, learning the language of stones and trees, and all the brightness and magic and fire of the faerie world would be ours.
‘You cannot want to return to your mortal world,’ she says, ‘to old age and sickness and death. Those people you call yours do not even know you, Keri, they don’t know how much you have to give. They will forget you, Keri. So much time has passed that they have already forgotten you. But I have nothing to do with time,’ she says, still holding on to me. ‘Years come and go. What have they to do with me?’
I pull back from her, wrenching my fists away. ‘But they’ve got everything to do with me!’ I tell her. ‘I’m human, and I need to be with humans. I want my home back and my family, and I want them back now!’
She looks at me with a peculiar expression on her face, a queer, half-smile of triumph. ‘You were human,’ she says gently, and all my breath catches in my throat. Then it’s my turn to grab her by the arm.
‘Listen to me, you evil witch,’ I hiss. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but you can undo it. I want my old life back – just the way it was before I met you. I wish I never had met you. So spin your webs and cast your magic spells, and send me back now!’
She rises then and stands up, tall – taller than she has ever been. Not a little girl any longer, but the Faerie Queen, tall as a young tree, older than time.
‘You do not tell me what to do,’ she says. Her voice is like lightning, flashing inside my skull, and her heart beats rapidly in my hand. I stand up too, and hold it up so that she can see it.
‘What’s this then?’ I say.
For the first time I see an expression like fear flit across her face. She lifts her hand to where her heart should be, in her chest. For a moment neither of us says anything, then her head droops.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You have come to kill me.’
‘I will kill you,’ I say, ‘if you don’t send me back. Back to the way things were before.’
Her heart is soft and palpitating between my fingers. I could crush it so easily. I can hear my own heart beating fast and strong. I squeeze her heart, and she clutches her chest with a moan and starts to sink to the floor. But she looks up at me, and her tender, rain-coloured eyes are full of tears.
‘Kill me then, if you must,’ she says.
Crush it, crush it, a voice says in my head. Yet still I hesitate. For one thing I can see, suddenly, clearly, that if I kill her, I have no idea what will happen next – which world I’ll go back to, or even if I can get back at all.
And I can see also that if I kill her, all the enchantment and magic of this world will fade – all its mystery and cruelty. She does what she does for no reason at all – just because it’s in her nature – because she can. And what she does is beautiful in its own way. Simply, eerily, beautiful.
I can’t kill her, I see that now. I can’t kill her just for being herself. Whatever is left of me that’s still human can’t do it.
That’s when I know I’m not all faerie, whatever she says. Part of me is human, and that part can’t save me now.
I release the pressure on her heart and let my hand fall uselessly by my side.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ I say. ‘I just want to go home.’
She doesn’t look at me. She is crouching, still holding her chest where I hurt her.
‘But what if I can’t send you home?’ she says.
There it is. The words I’ve most dreaded to hear. She might be able to change things, but can she change them back?
‘You must be able to,’ I say, and she gives a slight, very small, shake of her head.
Don’t know if I believe her or not. I do know, now, that I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. My legs start to tremble and my stomach feels sick. I make my way over to her bed, almost stumbling, and sink down on it. All I can see in my mind are the images she showed me in the mirror, of Lu grown old and dying, then me growing old and mad and a stranger in my own world. I shake my head but I can’t shake them out of it. Seems like I’ve got two choices, only neither of them’s what I want. But I can’t stay here. That’s not even a choice any more. I shake my head again, as if I can make it clearer. Then I say, ‘I’ll go back anyway.’
She looks at me incredulously. I can see that she’s shaken. ‘Go back – to that?’
I nod once, heavily. I will go back, no matter what. To whichever world is waiting for me.
‘You want to grow old?’
I don’t say anything.
‘And watch everyone you love grow old – and die?’
I still say nothing. But I can see from her face that she doesn’t believe me, that she simply doesn’t understand. And I don’t know why, but I have to try to make her understand. Maybe it’s just that I have to understand it myself.
‘At least I’ll be able to love them,’ I say, and I realize, even as I’m saying it, that it’s true. You need the time in things to be able to love. You need the change in them, you even need the death. Because that’s what makes them precious.
‘You don’t love anything,’ I say, and I realize that’s true as well. Whatever she wants, she takes. And changes it into something else.
Mabb’s face flickers for a moment, but she doesn’t speak. I speak to her instead. ‘You want me to stay with you,’ I say, ‘as your plaything – for your amusement. You call that love – but it isn’t love – you don’t know how to love – it isn’t anything – it’s nothing at all.’
Mabb is glimmering white and shaken by my words. I can see the anger in her, but more than that, for the first time, I see how thin and white and spidery she looks. But still she’s determined to pretend that nothing’s wrong.
‘Keri,’ she says, ‘if you stay with me, you will forget…’
I look at her then, and into that look I put everything I’ve lost, everything she’s taken from me, and how the last thing in the world that I would want to do is to forget, but all I say is, ‘You’ve made me lonely.’
It doesn’t seem enough, anywhere near enough, after everything I’ve been through, and everything I’m going through right now, but the funny thing is, it seems to hit home.
Her face changes. An expression like horror flits across it. I can see, in that moment, what I’ve never seen before in all the time of knowing her. All the time I’ve been with her, she’s made me see the world through her eyes, but now I’ve made her see it through mine. And she doesn’t like it at all. I can see her struggling with it, as though she’s had a thought she’s never been capable of thinking before. She presses her fingers to her forehead. Her lips are working as she tries to see herself in her world, but no sound comes, and the moment seems to go on forever. She seems even thinner and shinier, more spidery. I turn away from her.
‘I’m going back now,’ I tell her.
‘Stop!’ she says in a strangled voice, and I do stop, but I don’t turn round.
‘Aren’t you going to
ask me which world you can go back to?’ she says in a thin, spindly, wheedling voice. ‘Aren’t you even going to ask me for three wishes?’
I hesitate then. Three wishes. What could I not wish for? That I had my old life back? That Lu would be well again? And even, that my father had not died. I could wish that no one I loved would ever die. My thoughts race, and my heart races with them. But then I remember, suddenly, clearly, that that’s how I got into this mess in the first place. Wishing for a life I didn’t have. Wishing for things to be different from what they were. Wishing that I could enter the faerie world. And all my wishes came true, and it’s just like a nightmare. I’ve lost everything I ever loved. I’ve wished myself lonely.
If I had more wishes now, wouldn’t that make me just like Mabb? Cruel and cold, wanting everything my own way, changing everything to suit me? And wouldn’t part of me always belong to her?
So I turn, finally, and her heart in my fingers gives a single great throb. I walk over to her and she has a hungry, fierce expression on her face.
‘You can keep your three wishes, Mabb,’ I say, and I lift up her heart, then press it into her chest. She gives a little gasp and a shudder as it enters into her.
‘You choose,’ I tell her, and I walk away.
Then behind me I hear Mabb’s cry. High and shrill and lonely it sounds, then higher, and shriller. The walls of her room rock and judder, the doorway splits in two as I reach it. I leap through it, and there’s another room like the one I’ve just left, only dusty, and old and dim. There’s the chair of sighs and the basin of tears, and the little dressing table with its mirror. There’s a crumbling noise, and the ceiling starts to fall in. I dash through the splitting doorway just in time.
And I’m in the same room once more. The chair of sighs is broken and the basin of tears cracked and mouldy. Everything’s strung with cobwebs or crumbling into ash. Desperately, I run towards the door again. I turn the handle.
I’m in the same room again but it’s crumbling all around me. Small stones shower down on me and cracks appear beneath my feet. Don’t seem to have wings any more, I’m not flying, just stumbling on, – a small scared figure pursued by flying stones. I’m clinging to one wall and going as fast as I can because now all the walls are shaking with Mabb’s cry. And still the cry gets higher, louder and more unbearable. It has all the agony and sadness in the world.
Faster and faster I go as the floor trembles and threatens to shake me off my feet. No matter how fast I go, I hardly seem to be moving.
I’ll never make it, I think. I’ll be buried here in a pile of rubble between the worlds, and Mabb and all that goes with her will be buried with me.
It’s then that I see my shadow, running frantically ahead of me, along the wall. I’m skidding on sharp rock and thrown from side to side by great quakes, and there’s a sudden grinding, rumbling noise as the roof itself begins to split. I try to catch up with my shadow, but she’s always a little way ahead.
The distance between us is widening. Soon we’ll be separated forever. She’s waving at me wildly, and then I see it. The mirror above the dressing table, on the far wall.
The table’s just a heap of broken wood, but the mirror’s still there, hovering like a still pool in the air. It’s not gleaming any more, it’s a blank darkness and I can’t see anything in it. But my shadow’s standing next to it, waving frantically.
The room is collapsing behind me as I run. And I’m running for all I’m worth, but still it seems to me that I’ll never reach that mirror. I’ll be buried in rocks, and nothing will matter any more. The floor splits, and I leap right across it. Then the mirror starts to crack.
On the wall next to me, my shadow makes a jumping motion, and disappears then reappears again.
She wants me to jump into the mirror.
I shake my head vigorously.
‘I can’t!’ I cry, but my words are lost in all the rumbling, crashing noises. It’s no use. I can’t leap into that glassy surface. Don’t know where I’ll land. A shower of small stones strikes my shoulders, but still I don’t move. No way forwards, no way back. I stare hopelessly at my shadow, and my shadow stares at me. Then slowly, as if saying goodbye, she holds up her hand.
Even though I know there’s no point, I hold my hand out to touch her for the last time.
And that’s when I feel her shadowy fingers holding mine, like feathers in my palm. I close my fingers round them, and she steps away from the wall. The ground beneath us falls away to an immense abyss, all livid lights and jagged edges. Behind us, the chamber collapses in an avalanche of rubble. The mirror splits slowly, opening on to more darkness. Don’t suppose I’ll see anyone I love ever again. But at least I’m not alone now. The two of us, girl and shadow, leap into the dark surface of the mirror.
All the air whooshes out of me. I’m plummeting so fast I can’t think. Just as well, when you’re about to be dashed to bits. All I can think is, this is it, now, as the darkness rushes up to meet me.
Then I see it, a kind of wrinkle in the darkness. No time to wonder what it is; no time to shout. I hang on to my shadow and together we plunge into it. Feels like the world’s folding up around me.
And that’s it. I leap into the air, over a valley of stones, but I land on my back in the forest, legs and arms flung wide, both eyes open, staring.
Everything around me is in motion. It’s dark, but there’s a pattern of branches above me. Trees, shifting and blowing about. I can hear the rustle of grass in my ears. There’s breath in my body, and I know I’m alive.
Cautiously, I move one foot, then the fingers of one hand, then the other. Nothing broken. Slowly, I sit up. The forest murmurs and stirs all around me. Can’t see my shadow, it’s too dark. I try to work out where I am. Leaves have fallen and I’m lying on a thick bed of them. My ears are filled with strange noises, rustling and creaking and moaning, like the forest is alive. Well, I knew that, of course. I get up on my knees, then slowly, unsteadily, stand.
Heavy. Everything seems heavy. My arms and legs feel like they’re made out of stone. Except they’re bruised, and aching. Didn’t know a body could be this heavy.
Maybe it’s my heart, weighing it down. Because I know I’m back, but I don’t know what I’ll find. My stomach is hollow with fear. I take one stumbling step, then another. This is what it feels like, to be mortal.
Trees, and more trees, shifting and blowing about. Don’t know if I’m going in the right direction, because all I can see is trees.
Then I see something else. A light, flickering in the branches like a fallen star. I move towards it, as fast as my heavy body will let me. I try to call out, but my tongue feels like it’s made out of wood, and all my breath catches in my side. The trees start to clear, and I glimpse the roof of one hut, then another. Then someone calls out my name.
My heart beats thick and strong as I see them – Bryn and Griff and Gwern, carrying lanterns up the hill. They look up and Bryn calls out again, and I realize that it’s me they’re looking at, they can see me! A little ragged urchin coming from the trees as fast as she can. Bryn and Gwern move apart and I can see her, finally – my mother, coming up the hill with her face all puckered up with worry.
Now I’m running and tumbling so fast I can’t stop. My mother’s face changes to startled hope. ‘Keri!’ she cries, and suddenly everyone’s shouting, calling to one another, but I can’t even hear. I stumble into my mother’s arms and bury my face in her, and she’s warm, so warm, and I can smell her, the smell of cooking and herbs and sweat, and I can hear her real, her human, heart.
And that’s it. That’s how I go back to my ordinary life. Shelling peas, weaving baskets, scaling fish. And looking after my little brother, Lu.
Lu’s all right.
When I looked up finally from my mother’s arms, the first thing I said was ‘Lu?’
‘Lu’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s sleeping in his cradle.’ And I felt such a rush of relief I could hardly walk. I stumbled back with he
r to the hut. And there he was, my little brother, his face round and rosy again, with no trace of the rash. My eyes filled with tears, real human tears, and I brushed them away. Then I touched the amulet round his neck.
‘Don’t wake him,’ my mother said quickly. ‘He’s been in a terrible mood all day, with his teething.’
‘But – he was ill,’ I said, and my mother looked at me strangely.
‘He had a bit of a fever,’ she said, ‘but it was only his teeth coming.’
I stared at her then. ‘But he was really ill,’ I wanted to say. Only it was as though I could no longer remember what had happened and what hadn’t. I struggled to get my thoughts together, but all I could do was yawn.
‘Time for bed,’ my mother said briskly. ‘You can tell us all about it in the morning.’ And she led me through to my bed, my own lovely bed, which was just the way I remembered it, and I lay down on it and she tucked me up. And she kissed me, which was something she hardly ever did.
‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ she said, in a trembling voice. And she stayed with me, stroking my hair, until I fell asleep.
In the morning I wake up from the deepest sleep I’ve ever known, in my own bed, in my own hut, and the first thing I do is run into the main room to check that they’re all still there. My mother’s stirring the porridge and Lu is sitting on the floor, splashing his hands in his bowl. I run to him and gather him up, and he squawks and pushes me away. Then he pats porridge on to my face and my mother laughs.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ she says. ‘That tooth’s still bothering him.’
And that’s it. No mention of him being near death. No mention of me running away into the forest. No one asks me what I did there. It’s as though they’re all just glad to have me back home. So I don’t mention it either. And I don’t ask how long I was gone. I’m here now.
Myrna comes with a herbal brew she’s made, and looks at me keenly as I drink it.