by Gaie Sebold
“Certainly, certainly.”
Stug signed, and shook hands, and smiled. Thring was his sort of businessman. One who understood things. His cherubic features and avuncular manner might be deceptive to others; Stug could see the sharp brain behind them, a brain like his own.
When Thring had taken his leave, Stug leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head, and allowed satisfaction to rise in him. Oh, if only that annoying little... even in the privacy of his own head, he hesitated over a word that was, by no definition, respectable... annoying little bitch, knew! He’d have her dancing to his tune, and he would get the Queen what she wanted, and all would fall into place, as it must.
The Sparrow School
“YOU LOOK MORE cheerful, Beth,” Evvie said. “What’s up?”
Beth waved the newspaper. Evvie gave it a scowl. “First time there’s been anything in there to make you happy. Thought it was all misery and disaster.”
“No, listen! ‘The Russian ambassador, M de Staal, will be giving an embassy ball on the fifteenth. All the ladies will no doubt be eager to see Lady Staal displaying the latest in fashions from the glittering Imperial Court.’”
“Didn’t think you were interested in all that, Beth, fashions and so forth.”
“It’s not about the ball, Evvie. It’s the fact that he’s giving one, and the way the article’s written.”
“I don’t follow.” Something was giving Evvie an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach, which didn’t at all match Beth’s cheerful expression.
“The paper’s not talking about how Russia’s trying to take over territory, it’s talking about the ‘glittering Imperial Court.’ And there’s a list of people who are going, and lots of them are government. That means things are calming down, after Panjdeh. There’s probably a proper article somewhere, that will explain it, only somebody’s taken the main bit of the paper.”
“‘Things are calming down,’” Evvie said, her voice sounding rather too far from her body. “Oh, good.”
A Russian doll. What if you told her you had a Russian doll.
“Evvie, are you all right?”
“Did they say he had a daughter?”
“Yes, a little girl. Evvie?”
Baba Yaga. The Queen has some quarrel with Baba Yaga.
“Beth, you understand this stuff better than I do. Say something happened, to the ambassador’s family. Maybe while he was at this ball, with his wife, if something happened... what would that mean?”
“What would it mean?”
“Say his little girl got... you know. Hurt, or kidnapped, or something.”
“Why on earth should something like that happen?”
“Never mind why, what if it did?”
Beth bit her lip, frowning. “Well... it probably wouldn’t be good. Not just now. I mean, actually, it might be pretty bad. Especially if the ambassador thought it had been done on purpose, I don’t suppose he’d be that interested in making it all right again.”
“D’you think it could mean a war?”
“On its own, normally – no. Maybe not. But just now, with everyone still so riled up about Panjdeh? And from what I read it was the Russian ambassador himself who did a lot of work to stop there being a war – he’d think – well, probably everyone would think – that it was done on purpose.” Beth whitened. “Evvie, what is it? Do you know something?”
“I gotta think,” Evvie said. “I... I gotta think.”
The Queen wants the Russian Ambassador’s baby. Because she’s got some stupid quarrel with Baba Yaga.
Maybe Stug really is working for the government – or maybe he’s a spy – or maybe it’s just about the baby, maybe that’s all it is? Does he not know? Not care?
And what do I do now?
She looked at Beth, and thought about Beth’s Uncle Berry. And about Old Jeff and Jenny Blake, and Davey, Bobby, William, Frank, Joe and how many more? How many Russians too? Dead and maimed and broken and grieving.
Because one man was mad for a son, and one vain, inhuman creature wanted to score a point over another, they would risk a war. Because neither of them would be fighting it.
It’s not right. It’s not right that they get to mess us about this way; Stug and people like him, and the Queen and Folk like her. They don’t care, they don’t care nothing for all of us that bleeds and breaks and mourns. Not a bit.
She sat silent for so long that Beth took away her cold tea and put another in front of her without her noticing until she burned her mouth on it. “Ow!”
“Sorry,” Beth said. “I told you twice it was a fresh one.”
“My fault. Beth... that ladder you were making for me. Is it done?”
“Well...”
“Usable, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Good, show me.”
“Evvie, what are you doing?”
“I got an idea. I think. But I need your ladder, and I need to talk to Liu.” She pulled the little jade fox out of her hidden pocket, and stared at it. “Hear that? I need to talk to Liu.” She saw Beth watching, and flushed. “I dunno,” she said. “He says he can tell when I need him, because of this, but... I don’t know if it still works. Or if he’ll come.”
“Tell me what you’re doing.”
“I can’t. I’ll be off out tomorrow night. I need your ladder. I should be back by two. If I’m not... you don’t know where I went, you don’t know me by any other name than Sparrow, and we never met before you came here.”
“Evvie...”
“It’s safer this way, Beth. You know where the money is, and who has to be paid.”
“Evvie, please...”
Eveline gave her a swift hug. “Don’t be a worry-wart. I’ll be right as rain.”
“Oh, Evvie, are you sure?”
“’Course I am.”
EVELINE FOUND LIU, eventually, seated on the roof of one of the old sheds in the grounds, which caught the sun in the afternoons. He hardly seemed to notice when she clambered up alongside him, but sat with his arms around his knees staring over the field where the shadows of the trees lengthened with the dying day.
“Liu... I’m so glad you’re here. Funny how you do that.”
“Do what?”
“How you’re always here when I really need you to be. Is it the fox? Or just you?” She grinned at him, but he didn’t smile back. He hardly seemed to have heard her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“I’m sorry I shouted at you. I didn’t mean those things I said.”
“It is no matter.”
“Yes it is. I had a lot on my mind, but that en’t no excuse for going for you like I did.”
She waited for him to ask her what was on her mind, but he only plucked a bit of broken slate from the roof, and began digging at the moss with it.
“So are we all right?”
“Of course,” he said.
“You sure?”
“I would not say so if I were not.” He still wasn’t looking at her, but at his own fingernails, as though there was some mystery hidden under them. Evvie couldn’t see what it could be, since his nails were always so clean it was astonishing.
“Liu, you sick or something?”
“Sick? No. Only, like you, my mind has... things on it.”
“You going to tell me?”
“Oh, it is all terribly dull. Tell me what you want instead.”
“How do you know I want something?”
“I know.”
“Matter of fact, I did want to ask you a favour. But I didn’t come up here just for that, you know,” she said.
“I know that, too.” His smile this time looked more like the one she knew.
She smiled back. “You said I shouldn’t get involved with the Folk. Well, I’m taking your advice, but... I need your help. Because I dunno who else to ask.”
“Go on.”
“Would you be able to get me something, from them?”
“What?
” The glance he threw at her was almost desperate.
“Is something up?”
“Not at all. It seems I must travel across the Stream of Blood in any case, it will be no trouble to bring back something.”
“You must? Oh, good. I need a baby.”
“What?”
Evvie snorted. “Your face! I mean a changeling, you daft ha’porth. Not a real baby. Can you get one? Well, when I say a baby... nearabouts three or four years. Little girl. Dark headed.” She’d managed to find out that much, at least. And it would be night, and the child would be well wrapped. It would have to do.
“That should be possible,” he said.
“Only it’d have to be soon. By tomorrow night.”
“Ah. That might be more difficult.”
“Liu, it’s real important. I can’t tell you why, because it might get you in trouble. If you don’t know, then it’s not your fault, right? Only it’s probably best no-one knows about it, or as few as possible, anyroad.”
“Oh, Lady Sparrow, what have you got yourself mired in?”
“I been asking myself that. But I got to do it, there’s no-one else. It’s not for me, see. It’s... well. Oh, I wish I could tell you but I daren’t. But it might stop a lot of bad things happening.” Liu looked at her, frowning. She sighed. “I’m sorry. But a doll en’t going to work. I’d ask Beth but I don’t think she could make something in time.”
“I will get you your changeling,” Liu said. “By tomorrow night. At the foot of the big oak,” he pointed to one of the huge old trees that edged the school’s grounds.
Evvie grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Liu, you’re a bene cove, you are.”
He squeezed back, briefly, and then let go. “If I cannot bring it myself, then I will send it.”
“Why wouldn’t you be able to bring it yourself?” Evvie said.
“Well...” Liu looked at his fingernails again. “It is possible I might not be coming back.”
“What? Why?” Evvie felt a sudden hollow in her stomach.
“I am, as you recently reminded me, half Folk. I think perhaps I have spent too much time here of late. Pleasant though this has been...”
“You’re leaving?”
Liu shrugged. “I might. I might not. Life here can be entertaining, but then, so is life among the Folk, you know.”
“I see.” She kept thinking she knew him, and then, he behaved just like Aiden – fickle, unreliable, not really caring for her or anything but himself.
Don’t lose your temper, Evvie. This changeling’s the best chance you’ve got to deal with this business.
And if you’re nice there might be a better chance he’ll come back.
“Well,” she said, “that will be a shame, you know, but I suppose you know your own business best.”
The Crepuscular
PRESSING HIS WAY through today’s entrance – a curtain of brilliant blue morning glory, that had, somehow, been coaxed open even in the soft light of the Crepuscular – Liu could not help but make comparisons. The Court of Ao Guang was, there was no getting away from it, of a level of magnificence that made the Queen’s Court seem... a little countrified. Of course, she favoured living décor – flowers, beasts, birds, her own peculiar pets. Ao Guang was more inclined to the unchanging glories of lacquer and gold.
Yet for all that the Queen’s Court had a liveliness of spirit, a playfulness that Ao Guang’s lacked. It was not only the glory of Ao Guang’s Court that was unchanging – the same faces, the same signs of status, the same dancers in the same dances as rank and position shifted up and down and sideways.
In comparison, the Queen’s was a constant Festival of Fools – the unexpected, the frivolous, the wild always hovered at the edges, occasionally slamming up through the very centre of things. It reflected the Queen’s own temperament, her capacity for impatience and caprice.
That was one of the things that made it so appealing – and so extremely dangerous.
Behind him, the vines shifted, whispering, back into place.
The Queen was draped across her throne. Her colours today were all blues, delphinium and cornflower, harebell and sapphire, her gown stitched with a thousand tiny pieces of gem-bright silk that stirred and shimmered like butterfly wings. She seemed to have acquired a new pet – a small girl. Her curls were as bright as a polished copper kettle, sitting in the hearth reflecting the firelight. Liu felt a jarring pang as the image conjured up the kitchen in the private part of the school – Beth, frowning over some bit of metal; Madeleine, small round glasses perched on her nose, at the other end of the table, reading or stitching, sometimes exclaiming over the latest scientific development; and Evvie, his Lady Sparrow, scowling over accounts, a swear word throttled at birth as she remembered her Mama was in the room, or plotting something. He could always tell when she had some new scheme brewing, there was a particular mischievous tilt to her smile.
He had always put his fox-self, his Folk-self, first. Footloose and without attachments, charming, risk-taking, irresponsible. Apart from his duty to his father, of course. But until now, that duty had hardly been an onerous one – his father had required little of him, neither company, obedience, or affection. And now... now he was at risk of torture, because Liu had not danced quick enough.
Evvie never required obedience either, of course – but company, and affection, yes. And to protect her he must risk her misery and fury, must risk her believing that he, like Aiden before him, had abandoned her...
He supposed he had his father to thank for that revelation. Caring about someone makes you so much, so terribly much more vulnerable, than only caring about yourself.
The Queen terrified him, even as she fascinated him. And he would not risk her knowing that he had become entangled with the humans. It was just the kind of knife she would love to twist.
He could not see – or hear – the Harp anywhere. Perhaps it had fallen out of favour? He felt a brief hope almost immediately followed by anxiety. If she no longer favoured it, then it would be easier to get it away – but if it had fallen out of favour, then it would not be so valuable to Ao Guang... though if he could keep Ao Guang from knowing... perhaps he could tell Ao Guang that she pretended not to care about its loss to save her own face – he would, might, accept that.
Even as his agile brain was shuffling possibilities, Liu was scanning the Court. Here it was harder to tell who was up and who was down; signs of favour shifted with the breeze.
“Why, it’s my Little Fox!” the Queen said. Her fingers twined in the human girl’s bright curls. The girl looked up at her with an expression of delighted adoration. Liu knew it well – he’d worn it himself. The Queen beckoned him with one pale, jewelled hand. The girl watched with bright interest as he bowed and walked towards the throne. “Have you brought me a gift, Little Fox?”
“I am desolated that I have found nothing that would even approach sufficiency, Lady,” Liu said. “I have searched the courts of this world and all others within my reach, but the memory of your beauty reduced everything I saw to dullness and inadequacy.”
“Flatterer,” she said, but she smiled. “Empty flatterer, to come thus empty-handed.”
“Oh, not quite, most radiant majesty. I have information that may please you, a little, though it is of course of the least consequence.”
“Information?”
“Perhaps I had better call it... gossip?”
Her eyes brightened, tilting up at the corners. For a moment she looked mischievously young, almost as young as the girl seated at her feet.
“Gossip! How delightful. What nature of gossip? Come, sit by me.”
He felt the waves of irritation and disapproval break against his back as he took his seat at the other side of her throne from the red-headed girl, and despite the more than slightly desperate nature of the circumstances, he could not help but take pleasure in it. Some of them tried far too hard to win her favour. And here he was, dancing along the edge of disaster, gambling with
barely a card to his name...
He felt her fingers in his hair, and shivered. “So different,” the Queen marvelled. “Midnight and fire. Here rough curls like a little dog, and here so straight and silken. Perhaps I shall keep you both, to decorate my throne room. What say you, Little Fox?” Her fingers ran down his nape, to feel the tremble of his skin.
“Who could ask a more decorative fate?” Liu said. “But I fear, that without the chance to leave your side and pick up my little fragments of chatter, my petty and unworthy gifts, you would soon find me dull company, and wish you had never seen me. Then my heart would be broken.”
“Perhaps,” the Queen said. “Tell me your gossip.”
So he launched into a set of the kind of trivia best calculated to appeal to the Queen: fragments he had heard from the wild Folk who never came to court, minor bitcheries, small tragedies, the proud brought low and the cunning triumphant. He would not mention Ao Guang, yet; it would not be politic.
She smiled and even laughed once or twice, but soon her fingers tightened on his nape, the threat of her nails pressing chilly crescents into his flesh. “Nothing from the human world? No new gifts that might please us, no news of the clumsy attempts of Our rivals to decrease Our influence there?”
“The human world grows ever more dull,” Liu said. “Noisy, and stinking, and tedious. They work and work like ants, and look only at what is in front of them; not what is behind, and around, and below. I beg you, Lady, do not ask me to speak of them, for I fear I cannot find a single entertaining thing to say on the matter.”
“Strange,” she said, sliding her fingers under his chin and forcing his head up, so he must look into her eyes. “I thought you most captivated by them. You have spent a deal of time there of late.”
“Being what I am...” He shrugged. “I felt something – I know not what. Sorrow? Despair? For I will never truly be one of your Court, Lady – never truly be one of your own. I am here only by your great grace and indulgence. I am a half-thing, and I know it. I sought some comfort, perhaps some brief escape from this knowledge, among the humans, but there is nothing there to compare with this. Yes, I am a traveller by nature, but if ever I thought I could be truly one of them, I know now that I cannot. For this, this wonder, this festival of all that is beautiful, and capricious, and terrible, and ever-new, and ever-old, and you, my Queen, at its glimmering heart – how could I not prefer it? I must travel there again, for that is what I am – a traveller. I am doomed to belong nowhere. But always my heart is here.”