Etiquette of Exiles
and other stories
Chrysoula Tzavelas
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Book 1
Stainless
Other Reasons
Wicked Stepself
Book 2
Children’s Game
Branwyn and the Stone
Etiquette of Exiles
The Winter War
Eden Falls
10 Ways To Refuse A Faerie
Her Daughter, Pinned To The Sky
Book 3
The Endless Silence of Forgotten Things
Far City Cheer Squad
The Wild Hunt Goes To School
When Yeracha Trembles
Afterword
Divinity Circuit Sample
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Chrysoula Tzavelas
Copyright © 2015 by Chrysoula Tzavelas
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-1-943197-08-8
Created with Vellum
For my readers. Yes, really. Nobody mattered more to this project than you.
Introduction
One day, this happened
and that happened,
and the faeries came back.
They came through doors in the wind
they would stay for an hour or a day or a week.
And then they would leave
Suddenly
Or
slowly….
Pulled away by invisible chains.
These are (mostly) stories about the first year after they came back.
The Books in this volume map to the first three novels in the Senyaza Series. There may be spoilers for early books in later stories.
Book 1
Stainless
She waited for him across from the opera house, wearing a cloak borrowed from a prostitute and the remains of her shoes tied around her feet. The falling snow made the illuminated building into something from a fairy tale. As a child, she’d liked fairy tales. Last summer, she’d thought she was in one. Even now, she hoped, although her feet stung with the cold. This was her last chance, and in a fairy tale she would certainly succeed in the end.
The baby shifted in her arms, and she whispered nonsense without looking down. It did no good to look down. She knew what she was here for, knew the baby was as hungry as she was. She knew the baby’s perfect face too well. Looking down hurt. Without him, there was nothing she could do. And when he appeared from within the opera house, tall, immaculately groomed, laughing with his gentlemen friends, she stumbled across the street and caught his sleeve.
He looked down at her, the laughter in his eyes vanishing. But instead of recognition, there was only mild disgust. “Dear child, do not grab at me.”
She wasn’t the girl he’d once known, not after the baby and everything else that had followed. Her carefully planned words fled. “William, William, it’s me, Julia. Don’t you know me at all? After everything? I’ve waited and waited—”
Realization flickered in his eyes, but all he said was, “You have the wrong man.” He glanced at his companions and repeated, “You certainly have the wrong man.”
Julia held the baby out toward him. “I do not! Look at her! She has your face, William. She is your child, yes she is, and I was a good girl before you promised—”
He knocked her aside as he stepped away. “She’s mad,” he announced loudly. “Or worse. There’s some who might have fallen for your game, little miss. I’m sure others have before. But not I. Not I.”
She lunged after him and fell into the snow, twisting her body to protect the baby. He turned and strode abruptly away. When his companions followed him, a footman lifted Julia to her feet and gave her a shove down the street. “Away with you, before you get into trouble you can’t walk away from, lass.”
She trudged a few steps, her thoughts as numb as her feet. The women who had sheltered her had said that if she confronted him with the baby, she could at least get some money. They were expecting her to return with money, to pay for what they’d given her. If she didn’t bring back money, she’d have to pay in other ways.
The baby squirmed in her arms, and she looked down at the little one’s face. Dark hair, like his, and bright blue eyes and a cleft in her chin, just like his. That he could deny his lover she almost understood, but his own innocent child! At least her own father had waited until her innocence had been ruined before he’d sent her away.
She was so cold. Her cheeks felt numb and her hands were thick and clumsy. She couldn’t go back home, or return to the kind women who’d advised her. And what was she to do with the child? She couldn’t feed her, couldn’t love her, couldn’t even warm her as she cried.
She stumbled again, and fell again, then realized she was on a doorstep. It would have to do. She patted down the loose snow, making a nest. A snowflake caught in her eyelash and blurred her vision, and the light’s reflection made the white nest glow like a halo. Sighing, she kissed her fingers and touched them to the snow, then laid her bundled baby within.
She didn’t look back as she stumbled away. She thought, over and over like a prayer, that this way her baby could have any future, be anybody’s child. But she kept seeing the halo and she knew the truth: that she was sending her baby back to God. Maybe, divorced from her, the child could find its way home. Maybe it wouldn’t be dragged down with her.
Something caught her foot and she fell a third time into the snow. This time, she couldn’t push herself to her feet again. What remained of her strength dissipated, pulled away by the street. There was nothing ahead of her and only ashes behind her.
At least the snowfall was pretty. She’d watch it for a while, her cheek on her hand, and then maybe she’d get up and go and return the cloak to the woman who had loaned it to her.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. The spark that had carried her this far was lost. With the baby gone, she just couldn’t care anymore.
A man’s boots stopped in her field of vision. They were odd, she thought dreamily. Cleaner than any workman’s boots, but sturdier than a gentleman’s. What kind of boots did the devil wear? They’d be pointier than this man’s, she decided, and fell into darkness.
* * *
When she woke up, she woke up to warmth. She was slumped over a table, her cheek resting on her folded hands. Had she fallen asleep during lessons again? Had it all been a bad dream: William, and her father’s castigation, and the baby in the snow? Hope lifted her the rest of the way to consciousness and she raised her head to look around for her sisters.
As quickly as it had blossomed, hope died. She was in an unfamiliar room, lit only by a dying fire in a large hearth. In the dim light she wasn’t even sure what kind of chamber it was. A kitchen, she decided after a moment. There were flagstones, and an iron pot on the hearth, and more hanging from the wall.
But that wasn’t quite right and she didn’t know why.
She looked down at the table, trying to remember how she’d arrived there. It was old and scarred, and the chair she was sitting in had a broken back and something prodding her through her skirt. Her fingers curled against the damaged table. She was so warm, far warmer than that little fire could account for. She remembered being cold. She remembered the snow, and putting down her baby, and falling.
Julia r
emembered the man stopping beside her.
He was leaning against the wall in the corner, watching her. She turned, she saw him clearly, and only then did she jump up in surprise.
“Sit down,” he advised her. His voice was rough and rusty. “Don’t be in such a hurry to get to work.” The dying fire flared, but the light reflected from his eyes was as cold as starlight and the devil’s laughter.
She sat down, all at once very frightened. He didn’t speak further, only looked at her, and her fear grew. A childhood habit resurfaced and she started gnawing on her knuckles so she didn’t cry out.
Then he said, “You should have died in the snow. You abandoned your child; what else did you have of value? You’d already abandoned morality, innocence, delicacy.”
Julia wanted to respond, but her mind was blank and all that emerged was a whimper.
“Shh,” he said. “You should have died, but lo, there is—” and Julia couldn’t tell if he said ‘mercy’ or ‘punishment’. The word garbled in her ears, which was odd because they were nothing alike. Were they?
He watched her confusion. “I have brought you here to keep house for me. You will be warm and fed. But you must obey my rules and you must never leave the house. There will be consequences if you do.” He paused. “Or you can return to dying in the snow. I’ll show you the way, if you wish.”
A log collapsed and sparks glowed on the hearth. Julia shook her head instinctively and whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
He smiled, the expression cracking across his face until seemed too broad to be human. “Irrational, sinful, and yet so typical. Will you accept my protection, then?”
Julia thought of everything else that ‘protection’ implied, and remembered William moving against her in the straw of the stable. This man frightened her more than William ever could and yet a single man’s ‘protection’ was the best she could hope for now. A small thing, to put off what waited beyond death for a while longer.
She bowed her head and said, “Yes.”
“How charming.” He cracked his knuckles. “First, clean this room. Don’t go exploring the rest of the house; everything you need is here. I imagine soon enough I’ll have your next chore. You may sleep, if it takes you that long, by the hearth.” His inhuman smile grew even larger. “My little Cinderella. But no prince will be coming for you, will he?”
Julia thought of her baby and couldn’t answer. She lowered her eyes and rose from her chair again. Her back twinged, but her fingers and toes were warm. That would take the place of any prince. “Do you want me to begin now, sir?” She brought her hands to the loosely gathered top of her dress.
When there was no answer, she looked up. Although she’d heard no door open or close, her new master was gone.
She sat for a long time in the near darkness. Even with her frightening master gone, her mind was numb. Though she was warm, the spark that she’d lost in the snow had not returned. In the end, it was only the empty gnawing of her stomach that drove her to look around.
The fire was mere coals. She found a cord of wood in a wardrobe in the corner, beside a bucket of water underneath a shelf stocked with cleaning supplies. He was right; there was everything, fresh and unused.
The coals resisted being coaxed into a full blaze, but she was a country girl from a household with only two servants, and she knew some tricks. She worked at her task without thinking, building the fire larger and larger. Her father would have scolded her for waste, but she didn’t care. When it was as big as the hearth could hold, she went looking for food.
At first she found only the remnants of food, in a kitchen so filthy it had probably never been cleaned. A sideboard displayed plate crusted with the remains of forgotten meals. The rag carpet crunched underfoot. The walls were coated in scum and grease. There was a tiny scullery but no pantry and she didn’t dare go through either of the big heavy doors that occupied opposite walls. One of them led outside; there were windows blackened by filth beside it.
Finally, in a small cupboard near the outside door, she found food: a rusted tin of tea, a stale loaf of bread, some hard cheese, and some withered apples. She ate an apple slowly, watching the fire. When she was done, she tossed the stem into the flames, took the bucket of water and the soap, and got to work, because it was either that or remembering.
The windows were disgusting. She could draw lines in the gummed on filth with her fingernails, and hard scrubbing with both brush and rag only lightened the grime. She caught a glimpse of the snow pressing against the windows and turned away to build up the fire again and to heat water. Once it was nearly scalding, she turned her attention to the grimy floors, scrubbing on her hands and knees. It was exhausting work, and by the time she managed to get one of the flagstones bright again, her water was cold and her arms ached.
She heated it again, staring into the fire until she fell asleep.
When she woke sometime later, the cauldron had boiled dry, and both the floor and the window were as filthy as they’d been when she started.
There was something wrong with the water, Julia eventually decided. It didn’t clean things properly. She scrubbed and scrubbed until her hands were swollen and her back ached. The floor or the table or the plate appeared clean until she looked away for a moment. But the cleanliness was a trick of the light and she always had more to do.
Her protector spilled out a sack onto the table. He left hard bread and dry cheese and old figs behind, and took milk and honey with him to the house beyond. As he did, he glanced around. “Your mother would be ashamed of you.”
Instantly Julia knew it was true. Her mother was ashamed of her, for her sin. And if her mother could see the kitchen Julia lived in now, her tears would be bitter indeed. What redemption could there be for a girl who couldn’t even clean a kitchen?
She sloshed grey wash water down the scullery drain and wondered where it went. She felt a kinship with it. They’d both been used up to no purpose, and thrown away.
A memory stirred, and she remembered holding something helpless. But she pushed the thought away.
Later he came in stinking of blood. His clothes and hands were covered in it. He began to strip out of his stained garments right in front of her: jacket, shirt and trousers. She watched in shocked anticipation, but all he said, “You haven’t done a thing with the kitchen, but perhaps you can manage to launder these,” before walking away.
“The water’s no good,” she called after him, after the door had closed. She didn’t dare say it where he could see her, not to her nameless master with the blood-stained clothes.
She tried. And much to her surprise, the bloodstains lifted right away, even off his white shirt. It was impossible.
“There’s a trick to it,” he told her when he reclaimed them.
“I just washed them as I wash my own clothes,” she whispered.
He gave her a look like she was stupid. “It’s not in the washing. It’s in the doing of the things that would otherwise stain.” He looked her up and down. “You obviously haven’t learned it.” He patted his jacket, then reached inside to a pocket and pulled out an undistinguished lump, which he frowned at before tossing it into the fire. “Next time, have the sense to check the pockets.” The smile he favored her with was as frightening as his first one. “You can keep whatever you find.”
The fire burned green as it consumed what he’d fed it.
After that, she made a habit of checking his pockets. One day, she found teeth in his jacket: back teeth, front teeth, big teeth and small teeth. She put them in a green glass bottle on top of the dust-shrouded mantle. They gleamed as she vainly scrubbed the floor, and she remembered when she’d lost her last baby tooth. She’d been twelve, like her second youngest sister was now.
Another day, she found a woman’s golden braid, cleanly cut and tied with a ribbon. She touched her own hair, grown out but still with ragged ends. Her father had cut her own hair when he’d learned of her pregnancy, stony-faced as she wept. He’d swe
pt the curls into the fire and they stunk as they burned.
She put the braid on the mantel, beside the bottle of teeth, and turned her attention to the walls. They were grey with grease and soot and badly needed scrubbing. Her fingernails made streaks in the grime that filled in with her filthy water. William had flattered her hair, when he first strolled with her outside the rectory. She’d always thought it was plain brown, but he told her that it was copper when it caught the sun, and he’d caught a curl around his finger, then asked her to dance with him with only the birds as their orchestra.
She wrote his name, and hers, in the scum on the wall: WILLIAM JULIA. Then she sloshed the entire bucket of wash water over the wall. She’d never named her baby. She’d hoped that if she saved that privilege for him, he’d take care of them, just like he promised he would.
When she woke up again, her benefactor was watching her. He smiled like a gargoyle and said, “You’re making it dirtier. That’s not how this is supposed to go. But at least you can clean my clothes.” He dumped a bag of laundry onto the flagstones, then pulled off his jacket again. “I’ve brought you a brush for the clothes. The mud can be so sticky.” Still grinning, he picked up the jar of milk from the table and walked into the rest of the house.
She left the clothing on the floor and went to clean the windows. They were icy under her fingers, with frost glinting when she managed to scratch enough of the muck away. She scrubbed the whole window, top to bottom, then emptied the bucket onto the floor and smashed it into the glass.
The vibration numbed her hands and wrists and the bucket dropped onto her foot and rolled away. The window remained unbroken, although the blow had scratched a tiny bit of tarnish off the metal setting for the pane. She turned to the door beside the window, the outdoor one her protector entered from in his stained clothes. It wasn’t locked. He never locked it. She could just walk away, walk back out into the snow and curl up and wait.
Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4) Page 1