Elfland

by Freda Warrington

  “That’s a lot of mights and mays to be afraid of,” Comyn growled.

  “Comyn, he’s telling the truth. The danger’s real. We must trust him.”

  “Well, I say to hell with the danger,” Comyn spat back. “Bring it on.”

  “And I would agree with you, but I have children to think of.”

  “And how is this slow, fading death better than a quick, violent one?” Comyn breathed out through his teeth, rage subsiding. “Vaethyr trust you, Bron. If you don’t help us, who will?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” Auberon replied. “To avert conflict, and stay in friendly communication with Lawrence. If we’re too quick to declare him the enemy, where’s the ruddy sense in that? We’ll only resolve this by negotiation, not war.”

  Phyllida said gently, “He is right, Com.”

  “I know.” Comyn turned to Brewster and slid gentle hands over the sunken rib cage. Phyll watched him, her face somber and haunted. “Don’t worry, Bron, I have the patience of mountains.” His voice tightened with pain. “I won’t do anything rash. But I’ll never forgive him for this.”

  “I’m sorry about Brewster. I truly am.”

  No one spoke for a minute or two. When Comyn turned again, there were tears in his eyes. Never in his life had Auberon seen him in tears.

  “We’re waiting for the slaughterman,” he said. “Will you wait with us?”

  After Sam had gone, Rosie lifted the crystal heart and held it up to the light. She’d been certain it would be a disappointment, a glass trinket. Instead, its sparkling fire enchanted her all over again.

  Could she wear it again, and pretend to her dear father that she’d had it all the time? Strange, that Sam had kept it safe all these years. Perhaps it was a magpie mask he needed, not a hawk.

  She pocketed the heart as Jessica came back in and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Am I right in suspecting that the infamous Sam has a crush on you?”

  Her mother’s body felt warm and safe and her hair smelled beautiful. “And on you, apparently,” said Rosie. “Probably on any female who can’t sprint away fast enough. Did you hear why he was expelled?”

  Jessica nodded. “It’s a shame, the way he’s turned out. Such a good-looking boy, and as charming as anything to me. I don’t want to judge him on hearsay, but you’re wise to keep your distance.”

  Rosie bit her lip. She’d never admitted her previous encounters with Sam. Her mother might have been less relaxed if she had. “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “Nor should you be. Never forget, we’re Aetherial,” Jessica went on firmly. “However human you look or feel, your core is Aetheric. When you feel ready for a lover—”

  “Oh, Mum.” She tried to squirm away, mortified, but Jessica held her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes, deadly serious, equals.

  “When you’re ready, Rosie, remember what you are. Nothing can take that strength away from you. Unlike humans, we have conscious control over certain of our physical processes. It’s our power.”

  Embarrassment fell away as Rosie remembered the talks—more from Aunt Phyll than from her own mother—about sealing her own inner chambers, controlling pleasure, secreting protective juices that would repel microscopic invasion of any kind. Learning awareness of her body, until it was as instinctive as breathing. “I know. I was taught well.”

  “So you can choose whoever pleases you—but no one can invade you, infect you, or impregnate you against your will. The power is yours.”

  The kitchen faded and they were two warrior queens in an older, more vivid world. Rosie felt a shining fire inside herself, as if her spine were made of gold. A handful of eccentric memories—her mother taking her out at dawn to bathe in dew, or to lie laughing and ecstatic under a full moon—now fell into place. It was about maintaining their Aetheric nature, regardless of the masculine barrier of Gates. She sensed green leaves all around them, flowers and ivy twined in her mother’s hair. She felt truly other.

  “Aetherials are layered beings,” Jessica went on. “There’s our human shape in the surface world, and the changed forms we may assume in the Dusklands or Spiral. There’s our core or essence, which equates to the human heart, soul and mind, but includes instinct, our sense of the flow of right or wrong. And then there’s the fylgia—the shadow soul, which dwells in the Spiral and always connects us there. It may take a smoky animal form, if you ever glimpse it at all.”

  “Mine would be a fox, then.” Rosie smiled.

  “Not necessarily. You know, your blood realm doesn’t always define your elemental leanings or character. I’m Elysian like your father, but I feel Sibeylan, drawn to air, birds, music . . .”

  “So yours is a bird?”

  “Oh.” Jessica looked startled. “Well, they’re hard to see clearly and the fylgia is very personal. You can think of it as a guide, the part of you that knows best . . . usually.” Her gaze lost focus. “It is hard, being unable to visit the inner realms to replenish those energies. So we have to make more effort to nourish our Aetherial side here on Earth. Nurture the animal, divine and elemental as well as the human. There’s no division in us.”

  “I feel I know this,” said Rosie. “It’s like a dream that I’d forgotten until you reminded me.”

  “Yes,” Jessica said sadly, “that’s how it is.”

  “So we’ve done sex, can we do death?” Rosie said, wry but serious. “I don’t see any white-haired bent Aetherials around. What about your parents?”

  Her mother’s shoulders drooped, expressing sadness. “Some Aetherials raise their children like birds; fling them out of the nest early and fly away. The moment Phyll and I were old enough they were away, touring with their orchestra. Cello and first violin. The house was always full of music . . . but they were gone too soon. Maybe that’s why I’m too possessive of my children, and Phyll has none. They aren’t that old, but . . . Didn’t your father talk about this?”

  “No, he didn’t. I don’t believe we’re immortal.”

  “Nothing’s immortal, sweetheart. Call us semimortal. We don’t age so much as fade, and then we’re drawn towards the Spiral. We need to go there. That’s why the older ones vanish. If my mother and father decided to go, I doubt they’d even tell us. They lose themselves deep in the heart of the Spiral and they’re transformed. They may come out again in their original shape, or they may rest in elemental form for a century or two, or be reborn entirely.”

  Rosie took this in, thinking that it sounded desolate, not comforting. She had a sudden, chilly vision of arriving home one day and finding Oakholme deserted, her parents simply gone . . . “And what if a mad axman bursts in and chops my head off?”

  Jessica pulled a face at her. “Then you die, and leave a mess on my floor, but your essence travels to the center of the Spiral and may, sooner or later, be reborn in a new form. You wouldn’t necessarily remember who you were. That depends on the individual’s strength of will.”

  “It sounds frightening. A kind of open-ended journey without a proper shape.”

  “But it’s exhilarating, too. I used to sing a song about it, ‘Kiss the Mirror.’ ”

  “I sometimes hear you singing, Mum, in my head. Maybe I’m nuts, but it’s kind of comforting. I wish you’d still sing. In reality, I mean.”

  Jessica gazed narrowly at her. “I can’t. My voice went. And you’re lovely but weird; a true Aetherial. Anything else you want to ask, love?”

  “Yes. Initiation?”

  “No. Not today. Not for two years.”

  “And will the Gates be open again by then?”

  “Who knows?” Her mother’s eyes darkened, as her father’s had. “I don’t know.”

  “Mum, everything you’ve told me has been about the Otherworld, about going in and out of the Spiral,” said Rosie. “But we can’t anymore. So what happens instead? We just die, end of story? Matthew might think he wants that, but I don’t. I want the journey.”

  As Sam trudged up the hill in the dark,
he looked back and saw lights shining in the windows of Oakholme. Ice sifted around him and he was wet, freezing, but he didn’t care. All he could think about was Rosie, Rosie, Rosie and it made no sense.

  He wasn’t sure when it had happened. He’d noticed what a nice shape she was as she entered the great hall, of course. Then finding her in his room—that was it. One moment she was just a spoiled Fox to mock and torment. The next, her plum-red mouth and sultry eyes and glorious burgundy hair and fearless spirit had plunged inside him and exploded every shred of common sense into a torrent of molten desire.

  Oh, yeah. That was purple but absolutely true. Hopeless. Every word he said only made her hate him more. Never mind putting his foot in it, he was chest-deep in crap every time he opened his mouth. He didn’t even know why he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  Close to the manor, he heard something in the bushes to the left of the house. He stopped and watched, owl-silent, until he saw the moving shadow. He stalked at a distance, all the way up the hill, creeping closer until he was at the summit, an arm’s reach away. The figure was sitting cross-legged with its back against the bulk of Freya’s Crown, eyes closed. Sam bit his lower lip. Then he reached out and clutched the figure’s shoulder.

  Jon gave a strangled yell, jumped so violently he almost launched himself off the earth. “Jesus, Sam!” His hair was stringy with sleet, his skin stone-cold.

  “What the hell are you doing, you prat?” said Sam.

  “What do you think?” Jon said angrily. “Leave me alone.”

  “A couple of points,” said Sam. “One, how the hell are you going to see into the Otherworld, when you didn’t even sense me two inches away?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Two, if Father catches you here, he’ll kill you.”

  At that, Jon turned even paler in the darkness. “You won’t tell him, Sam.”

  “No, but one day he’s going to catch you. If he thinks you’re trying to open the Gates, oh my god, you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  “I wasn’t trying to open the Gates,” Jon said. He jumped nimbly to his feet and stood there, a skinny bedraggled angel. Sam rose with him, saw scratches on his hands and face. On the ground lay a wreath of thorny twigs, intertwined in a rune.

  “No? Don’t leave the evidence lying around.”

  He kicked the object so it flew into the bracken and disintegrated. “Hey!” Jon exclaimed, trying to pull him back. Sam held him off easily with one hand.

  “Now get inside before you freeze to death.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jon said angrily. “I wasn’t trying to break through. I just wanted . . .”

  “What?”

  “To see Mother. To see where she is.”

  At that, Sam put one hand round Jon’s throat and pressed him back against the rocks. “You fucking idiot. You think she went through there? How and why? I suppose it’s as likely a place as any!” He let go, shoving Jon away. The touch was only to shake Jon up, not to hurt him. Sam took a few paces away, calming himself; then came back and said, “So . . . you actually have any success?”

  “No.”

  “No,” echoed Sam. “Because she’s dead.”

  “She is not dead!” Jon cried. “How can you say that?”

  “She must be dead,” Sam said quietly. “She would never have left us without a word for all these years, unless she’d died in the meantime. Even if she was in the Spiral, she wouldn’t have just forgotten us. You simply can’t face up to it.”

  “Oh, yes she would,” Jon answered with venom. “She just doesn’t care, that’s all.”

  He flinched as his brother turned on him again; but Sam let his hand drop, let the anger bleed into nothingness like the sleet. He walked away with Jon’s wounded voice following him. “You’re the one who can’t face it: She never cared about us.”

  5

  Not Quite Narnia

  Jon. Jon. Rosie wrote his name over and over again in swirling ballpoint letters. Jon & Rosie, Rosie & Jon.

  First love, unrequited love; it was a powerful drug. If she’d thought that the rest of her schooldays would be haunted by frustration, her heart would have broken on the spot; but she couldn’t think it. Not when each day brought fresh hope of seeing him, of reading volumes into the briefest glimpse or smile.

  Jon was friendly towards her, but always distracted, as if he had somewhere more important to be. He wouldn’t let her any closer. Rosie convinced herself that he was concealing some great secret pain. If he’d only confide in her, the barriers would crash down and they would be twining hands and whispering secrets.

  “Mel, do you think he’s gay?” Sam’s unkind revelation haunted her.

  Mel did a double take. “What? No chance.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “Having long hair and being a poser doesn’t make him gay, Rosie,” Mel said with conviction. “We need to make him notice you.”

  Easy for Mel to say. Radiant and sun-blond, she chose and disposed like a princess. Rosie felt invisible, like the earth-spirit she was. Her abiding impression of Jon was of him hurrying along school corridors away from her, preoccupied, his hair streaming around his sharp, dancer’s shoulders. He’d gathered a clique of hangers-on by then. Rosie tried to join in but she was always on the fringes, couldn’t find the key to the inner circle. The effort wounded her pride. She felt idiotic, like a fan stalking a film star, yet she couldn’t stop dreaming.

  Sam, meanwhile, had only a year or so left at school. He hung around with a bad crowd and, although she tried to keep out of his way, she was forever turning around to find him watching her from a distance. He was like a stalking panther, still and predatory, an ice carving in black-and-white.

  He’d taken up with a girl from the rough end of Cloudcroft, a stocky, ebony-haired creature covered in tattoos. Mel nicknamed her the Pit Bull. Every time Rosie went out, Sam seemed to be lurking with his gang, draping himself over this square-faced girl with her short, hard little fringe, and all of them glaring menacingly in Rosie’s direction.

  “He’s trying to make you jealous,” Mel said one day.

  Rosie was horrified. “Never. He’s trying to scare me. He once admitted he hates my family. He must hate me even more for standing up to him.”

  “So ignore him,” Mel said sensibly. “Let’s plan how we can get you and Jon together.”

  The usual thrill of misery fell through her. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “Well, there are plenty of other guys who aren’t so in love with themselves, if you’d only give them a chance.”

  “I don’t care about them. You don’t know how I feel.”

  She tried, but never could shake off the image of her perfect soul mate in Jon’s limpid brown eyes, his shy grace and long, artistic hands. She had only to glimpse him and it all started again.

  Oh, the drama. Mel tried on boys like shoes, but when Rosie loved, it was forever.

  Rosie turned sixteen, the age of knowledge and initiation. The Gates, however, stayed closed; there was no magical rite of passage for her; life went on as before.

  That summer, she and Lucas threw an end-of-exams party at Oakholme. It was an excuse for Rosie to invite Jon—but Jon, to her dismay, didn’t come. Instead, Sam arrived without invitation. When she took him outside and coolly explained that he and his gang weren’t welcome, he simply left; sardonically glowering, but resigned and gracious enough.

  “Still worth a try, pet,” he said, tilting one eyebrow at her as he went.

  The next evening, as Rosie was walking home alone from Mel’s house, a bulky figure stepped out from the shadows of a hedge. It was Sam’s girlfriend, the biker chick, all muscle and studded black leather. She was no taller than Rosie but could plainly bend her in half like a hairpin.

  “You stay away from Sam,” she said.

  Rosie didn’t know how to react. The winding lane was deserted. “I haven’t been anywhere near Sam,” she protested.

  �
��I saw you with him last night.”

  “Yes, telling him to get lost!”

  This only seemed to make the Pit Bull angrier. She swaggered forward, all menace and simmering violence. “I know your game. Every time Sam and me are out, I turn around and you’re there. You think you can take him off me. But he’s with me, you bitch.”

  “Yeah, you rich bitch,” said another voice behind Rosie, and there were two of the Pit Bull’s female cronies, both as big and tough as bodyguards.

  Fear flashed through Rosie. She knew she was doomed and nothing she said would save her. “I don’t want your stupid boyfriend!” she hissed.

  The first punch knocked her back into the arms of the bodyguards. As the second came she twisted to evade it and dived to the ground, gravel scouring her palms. A kick to the kidneys took her breath away. Part of her was paralyzed with disbelief that it could be happening; what use was her heritage if it lent her no powers to defend herself? More kicks. Winded, bruised and helpless, she curled up and tried to roll out of range. A hand grabbed her collar and dragged her half-upright. Her legs gave way. She tasted blood.

  The Pit Bull punched her in the stomach.

  As she collapsed, she instinctively fell sideways into the Dusklands. The world turned lavender and cobwebby. The three females were still laying into her but now the blows landed like gossamer. They looked less substantial, smaller and paler. In a trance, controlled by a deeper self, Rosie rooted her feet in the ground and stood up.

  What did her attackers see? Something translucent, she imagined, wild and wolfish with twigs for hair, rising like a specter between them. They froze. She heard one of the girls say, “Jesus.”

  The Pit Bull took a swing at her, which made enough impact to drop her to her hands and knees again. Then the attackers were fleeing in a welter of rubber-soled boots, the Pit Bull shouting over her shoulder, “You stay away from my bloke, you fucking freak!”

  When she staggered upright, almost disintegrating with delayed shock, a gentler voice whispered above her, “You all right, girl?”