by Melanie Rawn
He deliberately chose the exact opposite direction taken by Mieka and Yazz. Nothing more uncouth than intruding on a family party. Slogging up a hill about two miles out of town, hoping that the summit would provide an inspiring view, he dug his gloved hands more deeply into his pockets and watched every breath cloud in front of his face. He was freezing and irritated and lonely and unhappy, and anybody who knew him could have seen that he was enjoying every moment of it.
He supposed the view was lovely, if one liked white. Snow-covered hills to his left, snow-covered Pennynine Mountains to his right—he could do this sort of thing in his sleep, prime a withie for white and cold and the clean sharp scent of the breeze. He spread his arms and shut his eyes to imagine it onstage—
—and tumbled down a grass-covered hill into summer.
He landed at the bottom of the hollow in an inelegant tangle of limbs and coat and cloak. He blinked several times, but the green didn’t turn to snow. Grass, ferns, a pear tree heavy with fruit, a hawthorn hedge. Bright flowers bloomed like strewn carpets. Seated in their midst was an elegant, spindle-boned young woman busily tapping at flowerheads with a single finger, making them turn different colors. Her hair was green, a shade that reminded him of sunlight shining through leaves. She looked up from idly changing the colors of the flowers, and didn’t seem at all surprised to see him.
“I was wondering who it was I kept sensing,” she said. “Waited for you this whole day, I have, and boring it’s been, as well.”
“Sorry,” he said mindlessly as he untangled himself from the cloak, which seemed determined to throttle him. A thorn-dreaming was this? The abrupt slide into summer was like to the Treasure dream where he’d been a Fae.
“I may have got it right—what do you think?” She gestured to the flowers all around her, and as she did they burst into a spiral whirl of colors.
It was beautiful and impossible, and he memorized it hungrily for future use onstage. As she turned to judge the effect, he saw the delicate, silver-veined iridescence folded neatly across her shoulders and back.
Wings.
Cade lost his knees again and sat down hard in the grass. “You’re Fae. You’re actually Fae.”
“Of course I am, ridiculous boy. Green Summer Fae, to be precise.” She faced him again, folding her long, slim hands in her lap, and tossed the hair from her face. Her bones were too sharp for beauty, and her ears came to extravagant points, and her eyes were green with flecks of gold. “You ought to know that,” she went on. “You ought to have remembered.”
“Sorry,” he said again, not sure what he was apologizing for.
“I suppose it has been quite a long time, by your standards. It always is, I find. I’ve given over taking offense.” She leaned forward a little, squinting at him. “Though I must say, you haven’t aged a bit. Most unusual, for a Human.”
“I wish I knew what you were talking about. We’ve never met.”
“Of course we have! Met, and more than met! We—” Her eyes went wide and she caught her breath. “Oh! But it isn’t you at all!”
“I’m beginning to think the same thing,” he muttered. It was hot, here in the summer sun. He unbuttoned his father’s coat and the topmost two sweaters. “Who did you think me?”
“You expect me to remember names? And it’s not my fault I mistook you for him. You’re very like.” She began counting on her fingers, stopped, frowned, began again, paused again, and finally shook herself with a ruffle of gleaming wings. “Four generations, mayhap five. I never had any use for numbers. But—yes, with as many years as you count them gone by—five generations it must be. Well, these things show up oddly in you Humans—eyes, noses, and the like.”
“I’m mostly Wizarding blood,” he told her.
“Not all, boy. Not all, by any means.”
As she watched him, mild amusement in her eyes, he suddenly wondered just how stupid he would prove himself to be, in the end. She was Fae; she’d sensed his presence in the area; she’d waited for him; he looked familiar to her.
“It was you,” he whispered. “I got it from you.”
If this was prompted by thorn—and he hadn’t sought his private supply in days—his imagination was working it for all it was worth.
She regarded him with vague interest, the way she might look at a shawl or book that had belonged to her own great-great-grandmother. An artifact, a curiosity of no real relevance, momentarily intriguing.
“How—I mean, what happened that you—that I’m—that you and he—?”
“I had a fancy to a Human lover,” she said with a shrug. “He wasn’t handsome, but he was the first I’d met in a long while who had enough Wizard in him to see me clear. He was rather sweet, as I recall—and he could make me laugh. Of course, I didn’t think it was all that terribly funny when I discovered there’d be a child! But I was young, and curious to see what it might turn out like. I ought to’ve known. Positively the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the presence of purebred Trolls. Everything Human about it—and it hadn’t even a hint of wings.”
“So you left it with some family or other.” Frostcroft, the name had been, of the girl who’d married a Watersmith and brought Fae and madness into the Silversun bloodline.
“It cried such an awful lot, and it really was ugly. Their baby was sickly and about to die, and they’d neglected the usual defenses against changelings—”
“Bells, red ribbons, daisy chains, ashes,” he recited dully. He’d always paid attention in school whenever anything to do with the Fae was discussed.
“Not even a single steel pin sewn into the child’s clothing!” She sniffed her disdain of such careless folly. “So it was hardly my fault. They got a healthy baby, didn’t they? So they’ve nothing to complain of.”
A healthy baby in place of a dying one … to which they gave their name and their love, never knowing it wasn’t their child at all.
“I was the one endangered,” she went on petulantly. “Their house was near enough to a Minster to hear the bells, but I didn’t even know that until I’d switched the babies the night theirs died, and took theirs to the burning ground. I gave it a decent fire—I’m not a barbarian!—but then some tiresome old man climbed the bell tower early in the morning, and of course I had to leave before the thing burned completely to ashes.”
“The child was a girl,” he reminded her.
“Was it? Yes, I suppose it was. And before you ask, I don’t recall any names and I never saw the baby again. Why should I?” She paused, and smoothed the folds of her dark green skirt across her knees.
“Their baby girl had red hair when she was born—”
“Well, of course she had red hair,” interrupted his great-great-great grandmother. “It’s those we’re drawn to, when we have to do such things. But it grew out black, after she got well.”
“Just like her face began to change until she didn’t look like either of her parents?” he suggested, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from her.
“That was the shape-shift wearing off, and very slowly. I’m good at subtlety. You may sit there all stiff and disapproving as you like, boy, but I have never neglected my spellcrafting!”
“No, you just neglected to care for your own child. She lived a very long time, you know.”
The Fae smirked and shrugged her shoulders. “She would, though, wouldn’t she?”
“She was my great-great-grandmother.”
She counted on her fingers again, and nodded. “So I was right! Five generations from me to you!” Pleased with herself, she twirled a finger in the air and the flowers began their color-dance again, dizzying him.
“Stop it. Please.”
“But it’s beautiful!”
“It’s making me feel ill.”
“Beauty sickens you? With a face like yours, I’d think you’d want to look at beautiful things as much as possible.” She sighed, and shrugged her wings again, and the rioting colors settled to quiet. “What did I give you? You sa
id you got it from me. What is it?”
“The futures.”
For an instant she looked delighted. Then she squinted into his face again and her fists clenched on her knees. “Why haven’t you thanked me, then?”
“It’s different for me. You—all of you—the prophecy is there, but nobody can trust what you say because you report only what pleases you.”
She looked bewildered. “Why make everyone unhappy by telling them about the ugliness that will come?”
“It’s not honest. It’s not the truth.”
Anger sparked in her eyes. “Are you calling me a liar, boy?”
“It’s not all of the truth,” he amended. “And anyone who believes the future will bring nothing but joy and sunlight and love—anyone who believes that is a fool.”
“Just because you’ve seen the nasty bits doesn’t mean you have to succumb to them.” She leaped to her feet and held out a hand, and one of the pears obligingly took flight into her open palm. “You’re a dull boy,” she announced, “and I don’t much care for your criticism. Truth is always beautiful, and anything ugly needs to be avoided and ignored. What’s the use of it? All it does is make one unhappy. You know you agree with me every time you look in a mirror. But I’ll give you a token to remind you, shall I?”
She tossed the pear at him. As it arced gracefully towards him, it changed from green to gold. He caught it, nearly dropped it—because it was very heavy. It had turned to real gold.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she challenged.
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“And it’s honest gold.” Mocking him now.
“Fae gold,” he said. “It’ll change back once I’ve left here.”
“It’s real enough right now, and real enough to me, and it ought to be to you as well! But if you’ve no use for my gifts, you ungrateful clod—” She snapped her fingers, and the pear became soft and brown and rotten in his hand.
Deliberately he clenched his fingers around the stinking, putrid fruit. It oozed out of his hand, dripping onto the blue and yellow flowers. “Sometimes I wish it could be this easy to be rid of your other gift.”
“Now who’s the liar? What would you do if you could no longer foresee? You’d live your life like every other ignorant, silly Human, blundering blindly from year to year—”
“At least I wouldn’t have to look at the ugliness! I wouldn’t have to know what kind of pain is coming!”
“Haven’t you worked it out yet? Yes, we can see the future, the wicked and awful things as well as the sweet. But we speak only of the good, and you still don’t understand why. If we told what we know about the evil to come, who would have the strength to face it? We choose to reveal what’s beautiful. Are the wonderful things any less true than the horrors we choose not to reveal?”
“But—”
“Oh, close your mouth, you stupid boy! If all you want to do is gripe about the dreadful bits, do it somewhere else!”
“Don’t you understand? People die!”
“Of course they do! That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet!” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and sighed her impatience. “Admit it, why don’t you? You love the inheritance that comes from me, because it gives you the power to choose!”
“My own choices. Not other people’s. I can’t make their choices for them.”
She gave a shrewd little laugh. “But I’ll bet you keep trying, don’t you?”
“How do I know what’s right? How do I know what to do?”
“You wait for the next vision. You do what you can, and you wait.” She cocked her head and smiled maliciously. “And how does this make you different from the rest of your dreary Human world?”
Cade stared down at his hands. There’d be no contending with her; everyone knew the Fae had an answer for everything, whether it was understood or not. He supposed he ought to count himself lucky that he wasn’t completely bewildered. This was probably because he was part-Fae himself.
All at once he asked, “He didn’t matter to you at all, did he? Your Human lover.”
“Why should he?” Her dainty little face scrunched up as if she’d bitten into a sour apple. “Oh, you mean I didn’t love him. How silly!”
“Do you even know how to love?”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said at once. Thinking of his brother, his friends, and Lady Vrennerie.
“Ever had a woman?”
“Yes!”
“More than one? Amazing! I trust they all kept their eyes shut. Did you love any of them?”
He took just a fraction of a second too long to answer, and she giggled.
“You see? Love’s nothing to do with who you want to lie with. You see someone, you want her, you bed her, and there’s an end to it.”
“But—but it’s supposed to mean something.”
She gave another impatient shrug. “Is the bed warmer, are the sheets smoother, if you’re wildly in love with the girl?”
“It’s supposed to mean something,” he repeated stubbornly.
“Come back in a dozen or so years and tell me if you still think the same thing. It’s really all very simple, you know. Bodies are bodies. Hearts and minds only complicate the matter.”
Now he knew where he’d got the cynical cast to his character.
And then it hit him with the force of a cannonball in the stomach: She was Fae. And so was he. And in the midst of winter here he was in sudden summer.
No, nothing to do with thorn, or his imagination. This was real. She was real. He eyed her sidelong, a smile of anticipation quivering at the corners of his mouth. “Tell me about the Rights.”
Her jaw dropped open and her wings rustled nervously along her back. “How could you possibly know anything about the Rights?”
“I do, though,” he said, not bothering to keep the smugness from his voice. “I know somebody took them, and hid them, and they’re still where he left them. I’ve a fancy to go looking.”
“The Rights.” She narrowed her gaze. “Tell me what they look like.”
“A necklet and a crown. Glass, with gold and silver threaded inside. Diamonds on the crown.” He paused, frowning. “Mayhap a bit dirty these days, underneath all that rock and mud for so many years.”
“If you’re thinking to use them, think again! The magic’s gone from them, boy. There’ll be no throning, no ruling—”
“I don’t want to use them, I just want to know where they are. And why,” he added, unable to help himself.
“If you listened to the part of you that’s me, you’d already know that!”
“Tell me anyway.”
“The Crown of the Fae King … the Carkanet of the Queen…” Her wings arched and then folded tight. “The Human king wanted them. They got lost.”
“I say they were deliberately hidden.”
“They’re gone, and their magic with them, so why bother?”
“What happened?”
She was silent for a long moment, and then started to speak. He would never know how long it took her to tell the tale. Time had no meaning in her world. When she finished, she arose without further comment or any attention to his questions, shook out her skirts, reached around to smooth the edges of her silver-veined wings, and walked away. She vanished between the pear tree and the green sloping hill. There was no doorway, no portal, no shimmer of magic. She simply walked into nothingness.
And he was sitting and shivering on packed snow, and if he hadn’t felt the pulpy rotted fruit still on his fingers, he would have thought he’d dreamed the whole thing.
He washed his hands in snow and pushed himself to his feet. It was very late in the afternoon now, though of the same day or a dozen years in the future, he had no way of knowing. He struggled up the hill and began the long trudge back to the village, shivering, all his bones feeling as if they’d been separately bruised by his tumble down the slope into the Fae world. His mood whipsawed between elation and dread, smug triumph and appal
led foreboding. If he wrote this, and Touchstone performed it—if all the Kingdom knew what he now knew—
“Quill! What are you doing all the way out here? We’ve been searching for hours!”
Mieka, splendidly drunk on homebrew, all bundled up in furs.
“Went for a walk,” Cade mumbled, frozen hands deep in his pockets.
“Halfway to the topmost Pennynine, by the weariness of you. Come on, back to the inn. We’ll have to shout for Jeska and Rafe along the way, they’re out looking for you, too.” Mieka linked elbows with him. “Yazz is triumphant! The fair Robel has accepted him, and when he has steady work they’ll be wedded—and that remembers me, I think once we have our new wagon we’ll have need of a driver, and Yazz would be perfect!”
Cade nodded.
“I knew you’d agree! It won’t be until summer, but she’s wearing his token and even had one ready for him, sly chit! Lovely bracelets they exchanged, too.” He held out his own left arm, though the chain of heavy silver links his wife had given him was hidden beneath many sleeves. “Ever notice how all that sort of jewelry is circular? Bracelets, necklets, rings—”
“Maybe that’s because fingers, wrists, and necks are usually sort of round, y’know?”
“All the promising things, they’re unbroken circles. Used to be they were crafted with magic, not just fused by a bit of magic like you did with Jed and Blye, but we live in decadent times. Mum has a lovely ring that’s come down in Da’s family for generations now—white gold, pink gold, and gold gold strands woven round and round—”
“But if it’s sealed with magic, how can it be handed down?”
“It unseals at death.”
“Or divorce?”
“Or divorce,” Mieka admitted. “But that’s a nasty bit of magic needs to be done, if divorce happens, and leaves scars—only not on the fingers.”
Cade nodded. He didn’t mention that Mieka and his wife wore matching bracelets, not rings. But he did wonder if, to an Elf, there were levels of commitment.
As if hearing his thought, Mieka went on, “There’s married, and then there’s bonded, for Elves. It doesn’t happen much these days, which is why you’ve never heard of it. Mum and Fa were wed almost ten years before it happened for them.”