Snow Comes to Hawk's Folly

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  She hadn't asked a direct question, once again not part of the bargain. Guaire pressed his lips together. He should not have provoked her. He wasn't clever enough to outsmart her kind.

  "You dealt with me," Finn said. "Let them go."

  The corner of her pale lips lifted. "Do not think to order me, child."

  Guaire wondered how many people had dared to call Finn 'child' in the past. But then, the Lady had the right--he was certain of it now. "You said, Lady, that you've watched over me. What did you mean?"

  Her head tilted. "I do not hold you to blame for separating them. Finn was the one who betrayed her, and she would have found a way to leave him, whether you helped her or not. Death would have been an unjust reward for your actions, I think. So once he trapped you in horse form, I watched over you. If your life had been threatened, I would have intervened."

  Imogen stepped from behind him before he could stop her. "You knew what my father did to Guaire? And you allowed him to be tortured like that?"

  The Lady turned her eyes on Imogen, her expression curious rather than offended.

  Imogen made up for the Lady's coldness with fury. "He spent ten years with iron shoes nailed to his feet. He was crippled with pain and he still had to run. Why did you do nothing then? They shipped him across the ocean in the metal hold of an ocean liner, the bars of his stall iron, the floor under his hooves steel. He could barely stand when I first laid eyes on him. And you could have done something?"

  Guaire took Imogen's hand. "Why should she have?"

  Imogen fixed him with a frustrated look.

  The Lady stroked Patrick's hair. "True, the journey across the ocean must have been unpleasant. But tell me, young one," she asked, glancing up at Guaire again, "what did you gain of all your trials?"

  Guaire didn't owe her an answer, but if she'd truly watched over him all those years, he thought he should try to be civil. "If I hadn't come across the ocean, if I hadn't been trapped so, I wouldn't have my wife and my son. I thought Fate brought me to that farm. Now I wonder if it was you."

  The fairy inclined her head, as if acknowledging that. "Finn is too much like his father--too hot-tempered, a trait I see my granddaughter has inherited also." Imogen gasped, apparently just then grasping that the Lady of the Snow was Finn's mother. The fairy reached out one white hand to touch her cheek. "Would you really have cut out my heart, Imogen?"

  Guaire leaned closer to whisper, "You don't owe her an answer, Ginny."

  The Lady turned her dark gaze on Guaire. "I have answered your question, and you mine. The rest of this is not your concern."

  She flicked her slender hand in his direction, and Guaire felt himself falling. He landed on loamy, damp earth, only a hand's span from the railroad ties. He could feel the steel through the air and, alarmed, rolled away from it without getting up. Then he took several deep breaths to calm jangled nerves. No moon had risen yet, plunging the countryside into blackness, but somewhere nearby he heard the chittering of the hobgoblins. It was no doubt their joke to set the portal so near the railroad tracks.

  She'd finished with him, the Lady of the Snow, and sent him on his way like a truant child. As she would likely do with Imogen in a few minutes—or twenty years.

  ***

  Imogen felt cold with Guaire's absence. The Lady's casual gesture--her grandmother's casual gesture, she amended in her mind--demonstrated far more power than she'd ever seen before. "Where did you send him?"

  "A question for a question?" the fairy asked. The snowy ground about her bare feet was littered with dozens of pieces unraveled from the quilt.

  Imogen suspected she already owed a dozen answers, and wished she'd remained calm enough to keep track of what she'd said. "Yes."

  "Tell me, Imogen of the shaking hands, what do you think of this father of yours now that you've met him?"

  The bargain bound her into telling the truth. Imogen licked her chilly lips. "I'm not certain I can trust him, but he's not as bad as my mother led me to believe." She heard a hoof thud down in the snow behind her. "Yes, he betrayed her, but he'd never made her any vows. She should have known better than to expect more."

  Patrick wriggled one arm out of the quilt and stretched it out toward her. Imogen reached a hand toward his, but couldn't seem to touch his fingers.

  "I sent your husband back to the place where you entered the portal," the Lady said. "That was not an enthusiastic endorsement. Your father may want to stay in your world, but it's time for him to come home."

  Imogen closed her eyes and mentally pictured the quilt that captured Patrick's arms loosening enough that she could reach his hand. Then felt his warm fingers touching hers.

  The fairy sighed, shifted Patrick in her arms, and kissed his forehead. She held him out to Imogen. "I lack the enthusiasm to fight both of you at once."

  Imogen grabbed Patrick and held him close. It was a step in the right direction, but not the same as having him safe home. He threw his arms about her neck. "Mama, puppies!"

  She shook her head. "No puppies."

  "Puppies," Patrick insisted.

  "Hush, child," the Lady said again, and Patrick fell silent. "We've been having that same fascinating conversation for an entire day. He has to be the most stubborn creature ever born."

  Imogen dared to look up at her, surprised by the almost-maternal affection in those words. "He is, I think."

  "He will take a human wife one day," the fairy said. "As will his children, until no one remembers the likes of me. Even this little one, his world will be circumscribed. Too many things he cannot do and too many places he cannot go. Too much iron. Your world has no place for us any longer."

  Imogen carefully chose her words so they weren't a question. "I wonder if that's why you want my father to leave it."

  "Imogen," she heard him say, a warning tone.

  "It is time for him to take a wife," the fairy said. "I gave him twice a hundred years to live in the human world. In all that time you were his only child, and he managed to alienate your mother and thereby lose you. So Finn will stay here where I can oversee him, take a proper mate, and honor his vows."

  "That's…" Imogen stopped herself, and reframed her reply. "If he does so, I will never see him again."

  "True," the fairy said. "But I wonder why you care. You believed he'd conspired to take your son. You hold anger against him for what he did to your husband. I would expect you to be pleased to be quit of this side of your family."

  The Lady had included herself in that, Imogen noted, and recalled Guaire's claim that blood gave the Fair Folk ties into the human world, once acknowledged. For a moment silence reigned, broken only by an occasional grunt from a frustrated Patrick. "I've barely begun to know my father. Yes, I feel anger for what he did to Guaire, but I'm trying to understand. I never will if you force him to leave me."

  "You cannot live here, child," the Lady said. "You are too human. For you to know him better, he would have to live in your world."

  Imogen could hear her father snort, and suspected he resented their bargaining with his fate. She had no real power over the Lady, though, so it was little more than a charade. It would, however, shape the remainder of his life. "I would prefer that he stay near me."

  "What would you offer me to allow him such a choice?" the Lady asked, a real question this time.

  Imogen pressed her lips together. This was what it had come to--making a bargain that would allow her father to stay in the human world. And she had nothing to bargain with, save herself, which might have been the fairy's design all along. "I am only half human," she said, "but if you will accept it, I will offer you bread as long as I live."

  The Lady regarded her with raised brows. "That would give me a doorway into your world."

  Patrick wriggled, evidently working his way loose from the Lady's spell again.

  "I understand," Imogen said. "It's all I can offer."

  The Lady nodded. "Then I accept. Now, I think you should take that child away before he unr
avels the world." She laid a hand on Patrick's tousled hair. "May you have your heart's desire, little puca, when you are old enough to understand what you wish for."

  Imogen opened her mouth, but the world changed around her, and she stood in the darkness near the edge of her own farm.

  ***

  Imogen appeared between one breath and the next, holding Patrick on her hip. Guaire ran to them and threw his arms about them. Imogen shivered, and he held her tighter, grateful that the Lady had consented to give his family back.

  "Papa, puppies!"

  Patrick grabbed his shirt to get his attention, so Guaire drew back and lifted the boy into his arms. "Are you all right, Ginny?"

  Nodding absently, Imogen looked about them in the falling dark. "Where's my father?"

  He didn't really care at the moment. "What happened?"

  Imogen stamped one foot. "She was supposed to turn him loose."

  "Puppies," Patrick insisted.

  "No puppies," Imogen said, evidently having heard the request before.

  "No puppies," Guaire repeated, so Patrick would know his parents agreed on the topic.

  "Oh, wait." Imogen slung the bag from her shoulder and withdrew the last loaf of bread, and began tearing pieces off of the loaf. She scattered them on the rocks where the fox had waited. "Until I can set up some proper arrangement," she said under her breath, "this will have to do."

  As if that opened a door, her father came trotting through that space between one realm and another. And Imogen looked relieved, like she wanted Finn back, so Guaire held his tongue.

  ***

  Imogen's father stood in her front parlor, clutching his hat in his hand much as he had the first time she'd seen him. "So I have a year," he said, "to take a wife. That was my bargain with her, that I do so in exchange for Patrick's return."

  Imogen hadn't spoken to him that night, too exhausted to do much more than collapse in bed once they'd explained to Paddy and Mother Hawkes. "I'm grateful you were willing to do that for him. For me and Guaire as well."

  "I would rather have gotten him back by stealth," Finn said in a tired voice, "but I learned long ago that she usually gets her way. I should have known better than to try."

  He sounded suspiciously like a child who'd been caught trying to steal a cookie from the plate behind his mother's back. If it hadn't been her son in jeopardy, Imogen might have found his penitent tone amusing. "Why not tell me in the first place?"

  "I didn't know it was her, Imogen, I only suspected. I should have questioned how the information about your existence fell so easily into my lap in the first place. She manipulated me every step of the way."

  They were an odd family, she reflected wryly, bound by fairy blood to bargaining and oaths rather than the human example of talking out problems over dinner. That was a skill she was going to have to cultivate. "I hope you don't resent my interference, father."

  "I was surprised," he said. "I expected you would prefer me gone. But I am grateful. That world is no place for one of my kind."

  "You're half fairy," she pointed out.

  "Half," he said firmly. "I've always frustrated her because I take after my father."

  Imogen pressed her lips together. Her own mother had felt exactly the same way. "I…"

  "Mama, mama, mama!" an excited voice gasped in the hallway.

  Imogen had given Moira a few more days off before bringing her back to watch Patrick, neither she nor Guaire willing to let their son out of their sight quite yet. She went out into the hallway and spotted Patrick waddling in her direction, his movement impeded by the bundle of fur he awkwardly carried.

  "Mama, puppy!" Patrick crowed. He had his arms wrapped around the chest of a piebald puppy almost as long as he was, and surely far more patient.

  Imogen glanced up at Guaire and Paddy, who had followed him in. Guaire held a battered fruit crate in his arms and wore a resigned expression on his face. The crate had been stuffed with an equally battered blanket, and its contents squeaked.

  "Someone abandoned a litter of puppies at the entrance of the drive," Paddy said with a suspicious glance in her father's direction. "They're lucky Victoria didn't run them over with that motor car."

  "They're real dogs," Guaire said before Imogen asked. "Not hobs in disguise."

  Imogen sighed. "I thought we said no puppies."

  "Well, now we have puppies." Guaire retrieved the long-suffering black-and-white mongrel from Patrick's arms. "And don't think to send away a fairy gift. It would be unwise."

  She cast a glance at her father, but he just smirked. "You agreed to let her into your life, Imogen. I suggest you simply expect odd things to happen."

  "It could be a coincidence," she said faintly.

  Her father settled his hat on his head, nodded to Guaire and headed for the door. "Yes, child, it could be a coincidence. But I promise you, in our family, nothing is."

  THE END

  About the Author:

  J. Kathleen Cheney is a former teacher and has taught mathematics ranging from 7th grade to Calculus, with a brief stint as a Gifted and Talented Specialist. She is a member of SFWA, RWA, and Broad Universe. Her works have been published in Jim Baen's Universe, Writers of the Future XXIV, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fantasy Magazine, among others. Her website can be found at www.jkathleencheney.com

  If you liked this story, please look for the first meeting of Imogen and Guaire in

  Iron Shoes

  on Smashwords.

  About the Story:

  "Snow Comes to Hawk’s Folly" was originally published in Panverse 2, Sept 2010.

  Cover photograph by Melanie Plante

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