“I guess I do, Blake.” She nodded reluctantly.
“I’m leaving the gun here.” He laid it on the seat of the chair nearest the window. “That will let me use both hands on you. If you try to edge over toward this side of the bed, you’re going to get hurt a lot worse than you would otherwise. And no ventriloquism, understand? You’re good. I’ll give you that. But nothing you try is going to fool me.”
Where was the Theodore? As inconspicuously as she could, Viola felt for him with her feet. Nothing.
The big man was unbuttoning his aloha shirt. “You think you’re going to report all this when it’s over?”
Sensing the safe reply, she shook her head.
“I’ll say it was consensual. How many couples do think are having consensual sex on this ship tonight?”
Still wondering desperately what had become of the pink bear, she raised her shoulders and let them drop.
“Half. Maybe more. You and me will be in that half, just for tonight. But let me tell you this, if you do report it, something very, very ugly is going to happen to you. And quick. So you’d better take it like a little soldier and try to forget it as fast as you can. Maybe you’re wondering how I found out which cabin you’re in.”
“No, Blake.” She was trying hard to keep her voice from shaking, trying hard to blink away the tears. “You learned it the same way Tim did. You have to-I had to-give my cabin number to the waiter when I ordered.” It seemed worth a try. “Tim has already been here tonight, and he’s coming back.”
“Sure he is. Noises off, as the actors say.”
A plump pink arm was reaching for the blue steel automatic on the chair seat.
A half step nearer than that blue steel automatic, the big man had dropped his jeans. “Take a look. You like it, right?”
Shuddering, she shook her head. “You want me scared, d-don’t you? You want me t-terrified. Okay! Okay, I’m scared out of my wits. You did it. But-”
The big man edged nearer her, stepping out the jeans and blocking her view of the empty chair. “Take off that skirt!”
Slowly she stood, finding her knees so weak she nearly fell, and fumbled with the hook and the zipper. “I’m f-f-fat. You’ll see. I’m v-very f-fat and-and ugly.”
“Look lower,” the big man told her, “and you’ll see somebody who doesn’t think so.”
As though conjured by the big man’s words, the pink bear rose beside Viola. Both plump pink forepaws were wrapped around the blue steel automatic.
The big man’s jaw dropped.
So did Viola, sitting on the bed once more. When she had caught her breath, she turned so she could watch the big man and said, “Theodore will shoot if I tell him to.” Her voice, she found, had somehow steadied itself. “Maybe even if I don’t.”
The big man’s mouth worked soundlessly.
“Maybe you should lie down on the floor, or maybe just go without making any more trouble. I’m not sure which.”
“Please!” the big man said. “Oh, please!”
“Please is nicer, Blake.” Viola’s smile was shaky, but it was a smile. “I like please. Wait a minute. Let’s see what Theodore has to say to you.” She found the ring on the pink bear’s back and pulled the cord.
The pink bear lifted the blue steel automatic an inch or so, aiming it or appearing to aim it. Quite distinctly he said, “Want to close your eyes?”
****
The Opposite of Pomegranates
Marissa K. Lingen
The real difference between humans and fey is not the magic: there are human sorcerers, so thick on the ground some places you can hardly take a step without kicking one. (I do not advocate kicking sorcerers.) It isn't that we were born outside and they were born (or hatched or constructed) under there. Or maybe that is the difference, but not the crux of it, like saying a Russian is different from a Brazilian because their houses are far apart. There's always something else that's the heart of the matter.
And something else with the fey comes down to this: they only know how to make bargains. My bowl of milk for my housecleaning. Your freedom for your pot of gold. My answer to a riddle for your spell-but I get ahead of myself.
When my parents were young-and my parents were young for four hundred years under the hill-the fey got the notion that they might breed two changelings together and get from the continuing union a seemingly endless stream of changelings. Or at least an easier stream of changelings than the ones they'd gotten stealing from human cradles.
After her twenty-third month of pregnancy, my mother decided that this was not, in fact, the solution to anyone's problems. She was quite firm on that point. The Queen of Air and Darkness herself cowered when my mother yelled that day. They let her out on the hillside to finish the job in a mere three more months. In Victorian Ireland. With no money nor husband nor kin nearer than her nine-times-great-nieces, who were in Estonia. My mother spoke neither English nor Gaelic.
I'd like to attribute that lapse to them being fey, but humans sometimes turn out clueless, too.
Mother really wasn't sure which was worse: making her way as a single parent in that place and time or throwing her lot and mine back in with the fey. They decided not to give her a choice. After all, the point of breeding changelings had been to get more changelings. So back we came, both of us howling and red in the face.
I am told that I howled for three days running. I am told that I smiled only for three people: my mother, a fire elemental called Kezhzh, and the yeti who ended up raising me, a sweet soul named Alits. (Alits, in our 120 years together, has shared many theories of gender with me. None of them has impinged even slightly on Alits's own experience of the subject. I was sixteen before I understood that the gendered pronouns existed.)
Alits raised me in part because Alits was the only one who could do it without ear protection for the first two years, and in part because my mother had gone entirely mad. When she stopped howling, a few hours after being brought underhill, she wouldn't stop smiling. You can't leave a baby with someone like that. Even the fey know that much. So it was off to Alits's place for me, with tiny little mittens and a tiny little squirrel fur hood.
They allowed my father to visit on alternate Thursdays, when they could remember it was a Thursday in the first place. Thursday was not an important concept to the High Sidhe. Kezhzh was allowed to visit whenever he could stand the cold, which was more often than alternate fuzzy Thursdays. They taught me how to negotiate with a brownie and how to call tomten and which oceans were suitable for selkies.
They never taught me how to go outside.
It wasn't for lack of asking-there was about a decade when I asked Alits every single day. It didn't feel like a decade to me, but it must have to Alits. Finally I decided that Alits had won the battle of wills, and I would have to do something else to win the war.
But it turned out Alits had gotten there before me, too. I was
a favored changeling, small and winsome, and I bargained for knowledge easily, for favors, for treats and tricks and games. I cajoled my way into more than one place I shouldn't have been, and there was always Alits's looming furry presence to bail me out if I got into trouble. But that same looming furry presence made sure I was not going anywhere outside.
Finally luck was with me. I saw a rock sprite caught in a mite trap. He was a bright purple, veined with white; at first I thought that was his fury at the trap, but it turned out he was that color all the time.
"Want some help getting out of there?" I asked casually.
" No!" snapped the rock sprite. "Stay away from me, changeling! I do not accept your help!" He bared little white teeth at me, ready to snap if I came closer.
I shrugged and settled on the hill next to him. "Suit yourself." I watched him struggle. He glared. "I could make that go a lot faster, you know."
"I know, Alits taught you," he said, stopping to rest and think. "But I don't care to owe you a favor for it."
I shrugged again. He started to chant a spell. I whistled tunelessly.
" Do you mind?"
"Not at all," I said. "I was just thinking of the song I was going to sing tonight."
"I hope you sing better than you whistle," he said.
"I do. I'm singing at the revel Bald Obix is throwing. They're having all kinds of music and spell contests and dancing-of course dancing-and Alits is making banana enchiladas." Alits's banana enchiladas, with mol sauce and cherries, wrapped in flattened fairy cakes, are famous.
"Oh, yeah?" said the rock sprite. He was trying to feign disinterest, but I had the equivalent of five years of being thirteen. I can do disinterest like nobody's business. He didn't even seem to notice that he'd freed himself from the trap.
"Yeah," I said. "It's too bad you won't be able to be there. It's really something to see."
"Maybe I'll stop by," he said.
"Oh, I don't know. They have a door troll who'll ask you a riddle. If you don't know the answer, he won't let you in."
"I'm good at riddles," said the rock sprite.
I gave him my best skeptical look.
"How tough are troll riddles anyway?"
"The troll didn't make up the riddle," I said. "Canufiel the Brown made up the riddle."
The rock sprite looked daunted, and rightly so. You don't survive long as a High Sidhe if you can't ask killer riddles. Sometimes literally.
"I'll tell you the answer, though," I said.
The rock sprite's little purple features twisted. "For what?"
"Oh, nothing much, really," I said. "You know how generous we humans are."
He looked even more suspicious. "Tell me."
"All I want to know is how to open a door in the hill."
"Oh, no," he said hastily. "Oh, no, no no no. Alits would kill me."
"Alits is a big teddy bear," I said. "And Alits would never have to know."
"Forget it," he said. "Just forget it. I can make you a lovely necklace, charmed to give you the voice of a bard-"
"Bards don't know when to shut up," I said.
"To give you the seeming of any creature underhill."
"I got bored with shapeshifter games when I was a toddler. They always smell like themselves."
"To let you fly."
I rolled my eyes.
"Anything!" he screamed. "Anything but that! If Alits wanted you to leave the underhill, Alits would have taught you how! Alits has big furry white arms for ripping rock sprites to bits! Alits has pointy vicious ivory teeth for rending rock sprites' crunchy flesh from their bones! Alits has-"
"Alits has no idea that you're talking to me," I pointed out.
When he didn't immediately reply, I knew I had him.
So I whispered the answer to the riddles, and the rock sprite-glancing furtively around him-talked his way around the spell for me. They have a kind of code worked out, so that spells can be taught without being cast. This is particularly useful for battle magics. It also comes in handy when you don't particularly want to shout about what spell you're learning.
I would have to wait for the right time to open the door to the upper world. The rock sprite was a nuisance at the party, but no one knew I'd let him in, and I certainly wasn't going to tell them. He stayed well clear of me, too-not wanting Alits to have any reason to question him (or rip his arms off) when I went above, I suppose.
I finally got my chance when one of the Puck's cousins, a straggle-haired beauty called Fee, went missing. Or rather, when everyone noticed she was missing; she had been gone at least a month. No one could be sure. But they all turned out in force to find her. They suspected foul play. So did I, but what I suspected even more strongly is that they would all be distracted and wouldn't notice one more excursion outside, more or less.
I had just finished drawing the first spiral in silver dust when the rock sprite appeared. He was in such a hurry he had lost his hat. I had never seen a sprite without a hat. "Stop! Stop it! Now is not the time!"
"Now is the perfect time," I said, adding the first of the five runes. "Everyone is distracted."
"They'll be convinced that whoever took Fee took you, too!"
"So?" I said, drawing the second rune. "I'll be back before they notice, and if they did notice, I'd just explain to them that I wasn't abducted. End of story."
"You've never been out on the surface before, and you're not going alone!" The rock sprite leapt into the middle of my spell and spread its short, squatty limbs as far as it could reach. I sniffed and continued with the third rune. When the spell was complete, I said the word of power. The rock sprite squeaked in annoyance, but the hill fell away beneath him, and a door to the outside glowed.
He picked himself up and stood, arms akimbo, in the opening. "Go back, changeling!"
"Back? I'll go through you if I have to."
"Oh, yeah?" said the rock sprite. "Awfully tough for a human, aren't you?"
"You ready to find out?"
He deflated suddenly and mumbled something I couldn't make out.
"What was that?"
"I said, let me come with you."
I stared down at him. "I don't need a babysitter."
"It would make me feel better. Then I might have some chance of throwing myself on Alits's mercy and living through all this."
"I told you, she won't find out."
"I'll go with you," said the rock sprite in a slightly desperate voice. "Let me go with you."
If I stuck around arguing much longer, some human was going to notice a door out from under the hill, or the spell would shut down, or something. "Yeah, all right, come on," I said.
I'm not sure what I expected of the outside. Here's what I got: the colors are predictable, mostly. Under the hill, we have Sidhe ladies with eyes green as grass, but more often than not, we don't have grass green as grass. Things outside stay where you put them, or if they don't, you can see what happens to them instead.
Outside, things made sense in ways I didn't know I'd been missing.
"How strange," I said aloud.
"Yes, isn't it?" said the rock sprite. "And now you've seen the outside. Come on, then, back we go."
"You go ahead if you want," I said. "I'm going exploring."
"Outside isn't like under the hill!" protested the rock sprite. "You can't just go exploring!"
"Relax," I said. "I have a knife in my boots and an entire yeti's arsenal of defensive spells at my fingertips. What more could I need?"
Scuttling after me, the rock sprite did not reply.
We walked down a dusty road made of a drab, smelly black material. The rock sprite tried to stay in the grass, chattering at the human machines that passed us. I had no idea how much time had passed-not because it felt variable, but because it felt solid for the first time in my life-when we saw human buildings. The ones with labels said they were a bank, a church, and a diner.
"I'm hungry, sprite," I said. "You hide in the bushes. I'm going into that diner."
"Oh, no," moaned the rock sprite. "No, no, you can't. Really really. Alits will-"
"Kill you. You've said that part. Haven't I promised to protect you from Alits? Are you doubting my oath, sprite?"
"It's only effective if you stick around to fulfill it," said the sprite.
It dawned on me what he was saying. "Wait, so if I eat something up here-"
"Some things are fine," said the sprite hastily. "Want an apple? We can get you an apple. Or some nice cookies. Some humans do okay with cookies. The disir trained-"
"What can't I have?"
The rock sprite, intelligently, said nothing.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 36