Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  Furthermore, I really didn’t want to have to empty my portable toilet any more than necessary.

  It was hard to light a fire under Skyhollow and his people, to give them a sense of our urgency. Some of them might have lived through war, but they would have no real way of remembering it. Threatening them with its potential devastation would be as useful as threatening a dog with heavy taxes.

  So I gritted my teeth, watching the sun turn silvery pale as it climbed toward its apex. At last King Claybriar himself lost patience and gently ordered Skyhollow to let us through the portal.

  “You wound me with your haste,” said the duke. “But I shall do as my king commands, in this as in all things.” His eyes were half promise, half plea, regarding the commands of the king he hoped to satisfy at a later date.

  The portal, apparently, was at ground level. After peeing one last time to be on the safe side (I didn’t foresee much chance for a potty break during the heist), I packed all my things back into my backpack. Now I got to experience the dizzying nightmare of climbing down the outside of the main tree, which somehow felt more precarious than climbing up. Again, Claybriar was invaluable, hands steadying me now under an arm, now under a thigh, now at the small of my back. I tried not to think too hard about where those hands had recently been.

  I’d expected something similar to a Gate, despite the fact that Caryl had already told me more than once that they weren’t the same. But the “portal,” as it turned out, was less of a structure and more of a mental transition, a weakness in reality that had developed between two locations bearing a strong emotional and causal connection. One area of the estate grounds, shaded by drooping salmon-colored blooms, bore a concave wooden wall that had been plastered over and painted with a mural of the White Rose. We were to stand at just the right spot by the wall and simply imagine ourselves at the actual location until reality melted to match our perception.

  In theory this could be done anywhere in Arcadia, if one had a strong enough mind, but a portal was a place that had been specifically weakened time and time again until anyone could do it with barely a thought. That said, using a portal to an unvisited spot was difficult for anyone, doubly so for a first-time portal traveler, and quadruply so for me in particular that morning. True belief was a necessary part of the process, and my sense of reality was so off-kilter that I could hardly wrap my mind around what I was experiencing, much less something a picture was merely suggesting.

  “Remember,” Caryl said to seemingly thin air at her left side—Alondra, I could only assume. “Wait by the portal on the White Rose side while we go into the palace. But if you get too cold, you can come back here—briefly—to warm up.”

  “Got it,” whispered a portion of thin air that seemed to be virtually vibrating with anticipation.

  Caryl went through with Elliott and, apparently, Alondra, as I didn’t hear any dramatic whimpers of dismay at being left behind. Caryl and Elliott’s success was marked by their simply vanishing, as though I’d been imagining them and the hallucination had dissipated.

  Claybriar stayed with me, even though he could likely have used the portal in his sleep by now.

  “Make the scene more real in your mind,” he said. “See the snow in the picture, and let that call up the feeling of it on your skin. You were in Daystrike before. Remember how the air smelled and felt in the forest. You weren’t far from the White Rose.”

  As he spoke, as I remembered, I started to feel the wind—not just imagine it but actually feel it. My skin prickled, from cold and from the uncanny, but then I lost the thread of it. Trying to do this while my senses were flooded with the weirdness of Skyhollow Estate was like trying to reach orgasm with a circus calliope playing loopy music in the background.

  The futile effort made me remember something I hadn’t thought of in years: those times when my dad had been in a foul mood and I’d hidden in my room, trying to will myself elsewhere. In particular, I’d developed a fixation with the movie Mulan. How many times, at age nine or ten, had I squeezed my eyes shut, just knowing with all my heart that if I imagined a yard strewn with cherry blossoms, made it real enough, I would open my eyes and find myself there?

  As a child with eyes closed I could make it so real that I was there, and each time I’d leave them closed longer, trying to get my new reality to “stick.” But every time I opened my eyes, the fantasy dissolved into the drab reality of my room, leaving me bitter and empty.

  Now, in Arcadia, I felt like that child again, betrayed by the useless promise of my imagination. I clenched my fists in frustration.

  Claybriar pulled me close, his palm gently circling my shoulder blades. I closed my eyes again, hard.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t overthink it. Just hold on to me so I can take you with me. It’s going to be cold there. Remember Daystrike? It’s just like that, except it’s daytime now, so the sky will be a very pale green. It’s windier, too, because there’s a big clearing the air can sweep through.”

  I felt it. It was real this time; it actually tugged at my hair. I shivered and opened my eyes. Saw bright snow and pale green sky and sucked in a lungful of frozen air in shock, coughed it back out as my lungs rejected the cold.

  “Claybriar!” I said, still hugging him. “You took me with you!”

  He looked down at me, clearly not having fully expected that I’d still be there. The surprised warmth in his eyes, his wondering smile, made me no longer care what the hell he’d done to the duke last night.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said softly. “It was you, believing in me.”

  • • •

  The portal deposited us near enough to the base of the White Rose that I had to crane my neck to see the towering, dizzying whole of it. It was exactly as Claybriar had described it: an architectural and gravitational impossibility.

  The “stem” that erupted from the snow-blanketed meadow was untouched by the local winter. It looked to be made of jade or a similar vividly green stone, and from this distance there was no sign that the whole thing hadn’t been carved from one unimaginably enormous piece. There would have been more than enough room inside the stem for a generous spiral staircase, making the column’s entire organically undulating length traversable by terrestrial creatures, but even if there had been such a thing, it would have taken a healthy person a full day to climb. For me it would have been a living hell.

  There was no door, no window, no indication that the stem was hollow or was meant to be anything other than support for the tremendous palace that unfurled atop it, rebelliously massive against the mint-green sky. Haloed by a white-gold sun were four stories of concentric architecture cleverly disguised as gilt edged, creamy petals.

  The visual spectacle of the Seelie palace was so overwhelming that it flowed into my other senses, crashing through me like an orchestral chord and a rush of warm water. It occurred to me that I would at some point have to return to a place of graffiti tags and discarded Raisinet boxes, sneakers dangling by knotted laces from telephone wires. The injustice of it brought tears to my eyes.

  “Say what you will about the sidhe,” Claybriar murmured, “but my people don’t have anything even close to this. No one does.”

  Caryl and Elliott were waiting for us at the portal, which on this side was marked by a freestanding mural of the Skyhollow oasis. Around us the snowy meadow was dotted with concentric rings of other murals, hundreds of them. Caryl, perhaps seeing my tears, moved silently to stand closer to me.

  Before I’d quite finished crying, four pairs of harnessed winged horses, varying in color but each a matched set, wheeled down from the great pointed jade sepals of the palace toward us. Hanging between each pair was a strange contraption of rope and leather, made stiff with a wooden frame and lined all on the inside with fur. The structures made great important thunks on the ground, spraying snow, just before the horses alighted on either side of them.

  As Claybriar left my side to climb into one of the contraptions, I got
a better look. It was a kind of basket with a single seat inside and a smooth wooden bar to hold on to for security, like a damned amusement park ride, as the animals launched themselves into the air. Off and away Claybriar went, as though he’d done this hundreds of times, which he probably had.

  “I don’t know what the fuck made me think I’d be okay with this,” I said in a thin little voice as I stared at the pair of palomino pegasi who were watching me with sentient purpose, their impractical flaxen manes dragging in the snow.

  “Go on,” said Caryl. “It’s perfectly safe. Close your eyes if it helps.”

  It didn’t. I squeezed them shut the second I climbed in, but I could feel all that empty air underneath the swaying basket, feel every shudder of my steeds’ wings vibrating through the ropes. The air was cold and thin, and even though I had been careful to empty my bladder before this, I still somehow came pretty close to peeing myself.

  But then we landed, far above the world, with the thump of wood and leather and the clatter of hooves. Carefully I opened my eyes, only to be nearly blinded by sunlight on white stone. Claybriar and Caryl helped guide me past a tall, steel-blue guard with yellow wings. She saluted His Majesty as we passed through a triangular doorway, and I had just enough time to register a sort of vague surprise at her show of deference before she was out of sight. Once we’d passed through, the winter’s chill abated immediately, and I found myself in the high, white heart of the Seelie Court.

  32

  There’s a phenomenon known as Stendhal Syndrome, which some people say doesn’t exist. Plenty of doctors in Florence could attest to it, though, given the number of tourists who come to them after face-planting at the Uffizi Gallery. There is only so much beauty the human soul can take before it tries to rip itself right out of your cruel joke of a body and ascend.

  That’s what it felt like to me, anyway, as I found myself in a luminous vaulted paradise, surrounded by an embarrassment of angels. These were not marble statues on display in alcoves, but slender, winged sidhe going about their unfathomable business, glistening like diamond and fire opal and mother-of-pearl. The milky stone floor seemed to pitch under me like the deck of a ship. Thanks to the slight weight of the backpack, plus having set my knee at sprinting resistance, I couldn’t compensate too well for my inner ear malfunction. I’d probably have fallen if not for my attentive Echo and the strong arm he looped around my waist.

  “This is my first time here without Elliott,” breathed Caryl from nearby. “I can only imagine how I would feel if I had never seen it at all.”

  “You’ve been here before?” I said into Claybriar’s chest. Or at least that’s what I intended to say. I think what I actually said was “Beef bore?”

  “All the national heads and regional managers come once a year to pay respects,” Caryl said. Then, after a moment: “Take your time.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. Words now, at least, but my voice sounded like it was coming from across the room. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “You aren’t fine,” said Claybriar. “I’m supporting your entire weight right now.”

  “Are not,” I said.

  Claybriar let go of me, just for a quarter of a second, to prove his point. It was as though there were nothing between my ass and the floor but two lengths of ribbon. He caught me before I could collapse, then straightened me gently.

  “Give yourself a minute,” he said.

  “I’m not sure a minute will help,” I said. “A blindfold, maybe.” But even as I said it, I knew it wouldn’t do much good. It wasn’t just the infinite shades of near white that exploded like a rainbow against my retinas; it was the harmonic echo of footsteps against the stone and the antique scent in the air, powdery and musky sweet. Now, too, the warmth and the woodland smell of my Echo’s body against me added a visceral source of dizziness to the spiritual elation that was already turning my limbs to Jell-O.

  Claybriar and Elliott helped me to a bench at one side of the hall so that I could sit for a moment. Caryl hung back, her eyes alight with childlike wonder as they roamed the high arching expanse of the ceiling. As Elliott drew away, crossing my line of sight, I momentarily confused him for Alondra before remembering that the real one was supposedly still freezing her ass off down by the portal.

  I leaned over and put my head between my knees, feeling the weight of my backpack shift uncomfortably toward my neck. “It’s a pretty close race,” I said, “but I think I functioned slightly better with a concussion.”

  Claybriar patted my arm. “Deep breaths.”

  I had been so overcome by my first impression that it wasn’t until I tentatively raised myself to lean my backpack against the wall that I realized everyone was staring at me.

  We often say “everyone is staring” to mean “a few people have given me lingering glances,” but in this case, literally every single fey in my eyeline was gazing at me, and only me, relentlessly, even those who were walking past on their way somewhere else. It was like the reverse of the painting whose eyes follow you around the room, only several times creepier.

  “Have they never seen a human before?” I whispered.

  “It’s the iron,” said Claybriar.

  I blinked. “I remember when I first met Winterglass, he said it ‘sang’ or something. But no one’s looking at Ell—at Alondra.”

  “All of her iron is covered by her suit,” said Caryl. “It muffles it.”

  My gloved fingers reflexively found the seamlike scar on the left side of my head. “Ah.”

  “On Earth,” Caryl said, “you are part of the general white noise of metals and electricity. And some fey are less sensitive to it when occupying human facades. But here, you are rather disruptive, it seems. We ought to have made you a hat.”

  “How bad is it for them? Is everyone going to instantly hate me?”

  “It is difficult to describe to someone without arcane senses,” said Caryl. “But if we are to continue the auditory metaphor, think of it as a feedback whine from a microphone.”

  “Yeah, that’s super attractive,” I said. I glanced at the nearest passing sidhe, whose forehead bore two delicate, shell-pink horns. As she breezed by, glaring, I said, “Sorry.” She started and averted her eyes.

  “Your color’s better now,” said Claybriar. “Think you can stand?”

  I tested my arms, lifting myself a half inch by the heels of my hands. “Yeah, things seem to be in working order,” I said. “Elliott, you still remember the word to listen for?”

  “Champion,” he said in Alondra’s sweet, lilting voice.

  “So,” I said. “We’re doing this?”

  “We’re doing this,” said Clay.

  “The queen’s audience chamber is on the top floor,” Caryl said, and helped me to my feet.

  • • •

  There was one main flight of stairs that cut all the way up through four floors, broad as a church at the bottom and slowly tapering. At each floor the landing branched off into hallways edged with gold and white balustrades at the near side, overlooking the grand foyer. At the apex of the staircase stood an arched set of double doors. The doors were flanked by a pair of icy-pale guards, alike enough to be brothers, with broad feathery wings the color of an overcast sky.

  “Shit,” Claybriar murmured. “These guys.”

  “You know them?” I whispered back.

  “Greyfall on the right has an Echo; he can speak. Silverwind won’t understand you. They’re both ornery as hell.”

  Real, actual sidhe guards. This was the part where my plan stopped being a plan and became an actual performance. Underneath the latex of my surgical gloves I felt my palms start to sweat.

  “Try to say as little as possible,” I murmured back to Claybriar.

  “What?” he said in a tone that suggested he might be getting a little too used to being king.

  “The less you say, the less the truth can fuck us up,” I said. Though even he didn’t know exactly what I planned to do in the meeting. I�
�d taken a page from Alvin’s book here. If you want people to seem appalled, sometimes you have to actually appall them.

  I wouldn’t have thought the guards could stand any taller, but they did as the four of us approached. Like the other sidhe, they glared at me as though I stank, but they were professionals and gave Caryl and Claybriar a thorough once-over as well. Elliott was the only one they didn’t examine minutely; he wasn’t invisible to them—he just projected an aura of drab insignificance. Because he didn’t have to speak aloud to cast a spell, they had no way of knowing they were being enchanted.

  “I am Baroness Millicent Roper of Los Angeles,” I said, addressing the guards. “Her Majesty is expecting me, and my companions.”

  The guards exchanged a look, in the way sidhe tended to do when in silent communication. Then Greyfall said, “Come with me, then.” I’m not sure why it surprised me that his English was London-accented; it would make sense that his Echo would be local.

  As he turned away to push on one of the doors, I saw that he had a long tail, like a lemur’s, ringed in gray. The huge door eased open, soundless.

  “I’d prefer that you remain outside,” I said to him. “What we plan to discuss is for the queen’s ears only.”

  “As you wish,” said Greyfall with a condescending smile, holding the door open for us. Let the ignorant human think herself unwatched, his expression said.

  Good. I wanted him to think I was ignorant. Because it was the only thing that would explain why I thought I could get away with what I was about to do.

  The audience chamber, being at the pointed apex of the rose, had a high peaked ceiling, every inch of which was covered with paintings that would have made Michelangelo gnash his teeth with jealousy. Hell, maybe his Echo had made them. On the dais at the center of the room, flanked at a distance by two sidhe ladies-in-waiting, was an antlered throne carved either from bone or pale wood. I couldn’t tell from my current distance, nor did I look long, because next to the pale throne reclined an enormous lead-gray gryphon, and sprawled upon the throne itself, one leg thrown comfortably over the arm, was the white-winged Queen of the Seelie High Court.