“Fairies raised him and taught him to think. Very smart, very dumb. He can’t learn from his mistakes,” Rat-In-Boots said.
I almost felt sorry for the jerk. I’d kicked him hard. Really hard. He croaked as he fought to breathe, and all his friends just laughed at him. If he hadn’t been pulling some scheme to do much worse to me, I really might have felt bad.
“She is marvelous!” yelled a hideous little dwarf with a head bloated like a mushroom cap.
“She is exquisite,” agreed something much prettier, an impossibly skinny dryad stretched out all the way down a tree branch.
“We have to show her to the Queen!” urged a spiny hedgehog man as he jumped up and down excitedly.
Absolute freak show. Even the dryad girl was twice as tall and half as wide as she should have been.
Before I had a chance to tell them how interested I wasn’t in their Queen, Lost Boy found enough voice to whimper, “She isn’t pretty enough to see the Queen.”
Oh, hey, someone was human enough to feel resentment after all! I lifted my foot, then settled for planting my heel against his back and shoving him off the path and into a low ditch. His clenched and shaking arms and legs told me he’d paid enough.
“The Queen is this way?” I asked the assembled fairies, waving my hand down the path.
“Follow the sun, and she will rise before you like spring!” declared a flower that I hadn’t realized was alive.
“Her Majesty is every way, and all roads lead to her,” enthused the hopping hedgehog. Wow, was he ugly. His drippy, pig-snouted face was so ugly it had stopped being cool and gone back to just plain being ugly.
“Widdershins, child. Always move widdershins,” the dryad advised. Apparently, this was also hilarious, although it didn’t get as big a laugh as my kicking the gate dufus.
I took all of these suggestions together, gave them the proper weight they were due, and decided to ignore the carnival rejects and keep walking down the path. The scenery continued to be great. When I passed the out-of-scale trees, I came out in fields where huge stone monoliths had been scattered by a house made out of copper and steam pipes that had fallen upside down in the middle of them. That was one side of the road, and on the other, a jousting tournament featured more twisted little fairies riding domesticated hogs at each other. ‘Domesticated’ might be stretching the point. There was a lot of sliding around and crashing into each other. Dignity did not seem to be a high fairy priority.
It was a good thing I hadn’t said that out loud, or I’d have immediately been forced to eat those words. While I’d been staring at the wallowing pig knights, someone had switched the scenery around me. The path ended at a manicured green lawn, and I stepped into an elaborate royal picnic.
The picnic table was longer than my house, and the cloth heavily embroidered blue and white. Much less ugly fairies crowded the benches. Near the head of the table some looked almost human, with elongated faces and slanted, knowing eyes.
At the head of the table, in a carved wooden throne, sat the Queen of the Fairies. She might be too tall and slim to be human, but she was still pretty. Really pretty. Blonde and pale. Her eyes glittered with streaks of purple and gold, and she managed to be as thin as teenage girls wish they could be, without being bony at all. She lounged in her throne with the kind of arrogant dignity that Felicia couldn’t have hoped to pull off, fiddling with a little wooden box. As she made bits of it slide out along the sides, I decided it must be a puzzle box. She didn’t seem to be having any luck figuring it out. Any panel she slid out she’d slide back in so she could move a different one seconds later.
Her sparkly eyes lifted from the box to focus on me, and her echoing voice cut through the babble of a hundred murmuring fairies. “Human children are always welcome in my court, girl in red. If you need proof of how loved your kind are here, look to your hair.”
“They think red hair means elven blood,” Rat hissed up at me.
The Queen either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. She talked over him, her voice soft and lazy and friendly, but drowning out all other sounds. Actually, come to think of it, her hair wasn’t just blonde, it was a rich strawberry blonde. “As much as we love you, so few of you come to us unbidden. What brings you to our land cloaked in scarlet and magic and fear?”
Her crazy talk hadn’t quite gotten on my nerves enough, so I answered honestly, “I’m being chased by the Wolf.”
“You have earned our favor, human child. Earned it justly, through trial by combat. We will consider dealing with this beast of yours as our gift. Until then, be assured no animal so crude and violent is allowed in our domain. Relieve your tiredness, your fear, and your hunger. We will speak more when there is time.” Yeah, right. She was losing interest while still talking to me, eyes sliding back towards the box. Now, I might as well not exist as she twisted and pushed and slid, trying to open it completely.
“Don’t eat any of the food,” Rat-In-Boots advised me as I turned away from the useless fairy Queen. Really? What was the big deal? The Queen wanted me to eat and Rat wanted me not to.
Hamburgers, pizza, and international cuisine had obviously not caught up to fairyland yet. I saw lots of fresh fruit, especially in creams and sauces. Platters of meat were unidentifiable because they were slathered in more sauces and melted cheese. No two loaves of bread were alike, but they all had that heavy, rich look of a homemade loaf. I picked up a pastry covered in glazed sugar and cheese and lifted it up to take a bite, inhaling the sweet, deliciously rich smell of—
Booze.
I threw the pastry back over my shoulder and picked up an orange. Holding it up to my nose, I sniffed. Alcohol. A lot of alcohol, sharp and sickly. I threw that away and it bounced off a hairy blue man at the far end of the table. While his friends laughed, I grabbed a potpie off a fairy’s plate. It should have smelled like meat and bread. Instead, it smelled like gin, nasty and chemical.
“Is all fairy food drugged?” I asked Rat under my breath.
“All of it. That’s one of the ways they keep humans captive,” he whispered back. I glanced down at him while he was talking, then followed his gaze to the girl sitting at the table. The only other person here who looked obviously human.
She was nothing like the boy who’d guarded the gate. Like me, she had red, curly hair and fair skin with freckles, but she had to be three years older than me at least, and I had no illusions that I’d be lucky enough to be that pretty when I got to high school. This girl had fairy tale princess written all over her, and not just because of her face. She wore a dress made of glittering lace, layer after layer of it, and a silver filigree tiara perched in that perfectly clean hairdo. My hair must look like a bird’s nest built in a pig wallow right now. Oh, and I smelled like rat.
The mystery girl hadn’t noticed me. As distracted as the Queen, she chipped away at the tabletop with her knife to expand an already elaborate engraving.
I felt a certain sympathy for anyone who would commit graffiti at a fancy party like this, more sympathy when I looked at the dark wood and realized she’d had to cut away the tablecloth to do it, and more sympathy still for someone who would go to all this effort and make real art. Shaping up in front of this girl was … well, I couldn’t see it clearly. From this angle, it looked like a picture of the picnic itself, and that was pretty impressive for someone engraving with a table knife.
I’d also figured out fairies pretty well by now. I grabbed the spiky pixie sitting across from the redhead and threw it out of its seat onto the ground, then sat down in its place. Nothing happened except a few giggles. Yep. Fairies were real prizes.
The girl was so wrapped up in her carving she hadn’t noticed. As I sat down and stared at her across the table, she reached out and picked a corn cob on a spit out of a bowl, eating it with the dainty nibbles that were the only way you can eat corn on the cob without making a mess. I guess. She didn’t make a mess. I would have even if I’d been that careful.
Thumping my fists
on the tabletop, I demanded, “So who are you? Are you human, or a well-disguised fairy, or what?”
he other girl peered up at me, owl-eyed with surprise that a world existed outside of her carving. No, owl-eyed because she was drunk. She nodded a little too hard, smiled a little too brightly as she greeted, “Elizabeth Madrigal, I am, and pleased to make your acquaintance. And quite as human as you, which means you’re as human as me, in which case I hope you haven’t eaten any of the food yet. If you haven’t, you mustn’t.” She could beat Shakespeare to death with her English accent.
She’d already started nibbling the corn again. I almost reached for a skewer myself, but there was no way I was eating anything laced with alcohol. Still, “If it’s so bad, why are you eating it?” I demanded to know.
“I could not stop myself once I started,” she told me airily. Her eyes slid down to the tabletop. She began scratching at it again. Another bite, a swallow, and she went on, “After a while I got used to the magic, but it is no use. I can tell that I am enchanted, see myself do things I know I shouldn’t, but I am not under my own control. To tell you truly, I do not mind so much, but I did not want you to fall under the same spell and be unable to go home or ever see your parents again.”
I clenched my jaw and tried not to think words I had promised Rat I wouldn’t say. Out of fairness I’d had to give Elizabeth a chance, and she’d done exactly what I’d hoped she wouldn’t. She’d proved she was a good person in her very first breath. And drunk. Drunk out of her gourd, her first thought had been to protect someone else. This was going to be such a cluster—oh, forget it.
I stood up, looked at the Queen in her throne at the end of the table, and yelled, “I get a gift, right? For beating up the kid you keep chained like a dog at the gate? My gift is that you let this girl go. Right now.”
Her rainbow-eyed majesty ignored me entirely, but it would be mighty hard to not hear me if I had two fistfuls of her hair. I stormed up the length of the table to her, shouting, “Hey! Hey, you hear me?” She didn’t flick an eyelash, even when I reached for her — and the world spun in pain and noise and dizziness and I fell down.
It took an eye blink for me to catch up. I’d been tackled by fairies I hadn’t even seen coming, and as I glared up from the ground, two of them planted their feet against my shoulder and hip and shoved. I rolled a couple of turns across the grass and lay there. Ow.
My arm hurt when I used it to shove myself up, and my stomach ached as I stood, but these skinny freaks in their pastel eighties clothing had another thing coming if they thought I’d give up. I stomped right back up to the Queen, pounding the dirt with my heavy shoes and ready to kick. “Let the girl go!” I shouted.
I got within a pace of the Queen this time. The two elves in front of me didn’t move. Again, I got tackled from a direction I didn’t see, and I hit the ground hard and rolled. Then I lay there and took a few breaths to make sure I could. My head had bounced off the dirt that time, and sparks rolled across my vision. Things swam at the sudden movement, but I shoved myself upright, growling as I stormed up towards the Queen.
I tried to watch every direction at once. I couldn’t. The fairies that got me the first time were gone, but as soon as my arm reached for the elf on the throne something hit me from the direction I wasn’t looking, hard enough to throw me right off my feet to the ground. Which was way too hard. Ow. Ow, ow, ow. What an ache.
I would make them let Elizabeth go if I had to do it over the burning corpse of every fairy at this picnic. My arm didn’t want to push me up at first, but that was just because the impact had knocked the wind out of me. I took two deep breaths and pushed again, lurching upright and glaring furiously at the party of fairies. None of them were paying me any attention at all.
No, that wasn’t quite true. A fairy, more fox than tree and more tree than human, had Rat-In-Boots pinned to the table. The little guy squirmed, but couldn’t get free to help me and couldn’t bite the hand crushing him against the tabletop. And it might crush him, too. Crap. They liked humans. They had no reason to keep Rat alive.
I’d heard, but hadn’t noticed the music until now. I couldn’t see any musicians, and the slow, classical stuff hadn’t caught my attention. Now it did, because the music changed, and I knew that slow, sad brass melody. ‘On My Own’, from Les Miserables.
Anger burned inside me. I was so angry it hurt. I stepped carefully over to Rat-In-Boots, not threatening anyone, and asked him, “Can fairies read my thoughts?” They had to. There was no other way. As old fashioned as they acted, they shouldn’t know the musical existed. And somehow they picked it out of all of the history of human music? AND one of Eponine’s songs? They were making fun of me.
He stopped struggling and wheezed, “Yes, but like everything else about fairies—”
“Not in any way that’s useful, right.” I could hear the malice in my own voice. My face hurt more than my body, tight around my eyes and cheeks from my scowl. I was helpless, and they were taunting me.
Forget this place. Let the Wolf find me. Fairies were just a less obvious kind of monster. I wanted to get out of here.
Instead, I gently pried a bark-covered hand off Rat-In-Boots and scooped him up into my arms, then walked back to the empty seat and sat down across from Elizabeth. I wasn’t leaving her here. That was not going to happen.
Sloshed on fairy booze and fairy magic, Elizabeth didn’t notice me sit down. She carved away at the tabletop with her knife, scraping off a few shavings of wood here and scoring a line there. I leaned over as best I could, and upside down, it looked like a portrait of the picnic if you replaced all the fairies with boilers. I watched her scratch wavy lines into a curvy shape, texturing it until it became the hair of a little girl sitting at the table. I’d tried carving wood in art class once, and wouldn’t bet I could draw a stick figure on this surface. Elizabeth was scary good.
I ought to tell her that. “You’re pretty good at this.”
“You are kind to say so, Miss,” she began, and when she fumbled for my name her eyes glazed. I thought she was so drunk she’d forget she was talking to me, but she caught up. “I apologize, but if you’ve told me your name it’s quite departed me. I have trouble holding onto things since the elves took me. Could you forgive me, and tell me again?”
“I’m Mary.”
“And I, Elizabeth, in case I haven’t said,” she returned. I was losing her. The knife scratched a line in the wood, and her eyes followed it.
“Did you make the puzzle box?” I asked to keep her focused. They were both made of wood. For all I knew it was the same skill set.
Foggy eyes turned back up to me. She had such a friendly smile, the kind that makes you think getting drunk is harmless. “I did. Did you like it? The Queen seems very pleased. Truly, it should have been my masterpiece.”
I stared at that rosy smile, proud and self-conscious at the same time, and some of the tension went out of my shoulders. I set my elbows on the table. Until I figured out how to get her out of here, I might as well relax. I could say anything I wanted. This poor girl wouldn’t remember in five minutes.
“I didn’t think wood carving was on the approved list of princessly skills,” I prodded, bemused.
“A princess? Me?” Elizabeth chuckled back, “I could hardly be farther from a princess. My father is the grand master of the carpenter’s guild, it’s true, but he’s still a carpenter. He worked with his hands most of his life.”
That changed my next question completely. “How long ago did the fairies take you?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual.
“I wish I knew,” she answered wistfully, “I hope my parents aren’t worried.”
“We don’t have guilds anymore,” I whispered down to Rat-In-Boots, who was standing on my wrist. “Could she have been here more than a hundred years?”
Silently, he nodded.
“She doesn’t know, does she?” I whispered.
He shook his head.
Elizabeth hadn’t dr
ifted back to her engraving, but her eyes didn’t quite focus on me as she apologized, “Forgive me, Mary, but the fairy magic dulls my wits terribly sometimes, and I can be slow to understand. Could you explain what you’re saying again?”
“I’m pretty sure I can’t take you back to your family, but I still want to rescue you,” I told her, hoping I sounded calm now.
Her frown faltered, her expression becoming as clouded as her eyes. “It’s very kind of you to offer, but I don’t think you ought,” she answered me slowly. Her words slurred, exaggerating her already thick accent, and she stared over my shoulder. She looked lost, struggling to explain, “I think it may be too late to do so. The Queen loves the toys I make her far too much, and she’s … she’s woven her magic into me very deeply. She would never let me go.”
As she spoke, as her face grew pinched and haunted, her hand slid out across the table. I wanted to slap it away as she picked a strawberry out of a bowl of cream, but what good would that do? Then, she bit into the strawberry, and her tight expression eased. Smiling vaguely again, she resumed scratching away at the tabletop.
Mary, you should have stopped her. But it wouldn’t have done any good. It wouldn’t. They had her. The drugged food just kept her relaxed about it. I was stewing in frustration again, all the worse because Elizabeth had been nice to talk to.
I’d gone silent, and Rat filled in, “Did your father teach you to carve, Miss Madrigal?”
His voice shook her out of her dreamy engraving. “Oh, no,” she answered wryly, “He would never have been so irresponsible. Alas, he had his friends to be irresponsible for him.” Smiling, she almost focused on Rat as she related, “Everyone we knew were Masters in the guild, and they would bring their best toys and engravings to show each other. Then, when he wasn’t looking, they’d teach me how it was done. Father caught them more than once and swore blue in the face at them, but everything I made, he kept on a little shelf in his office.”
Rat approved. “Torn between love and responsibility. He sounds like a good man. I hope your wedding prospects didn’t pay the price.”
Quite Contrary Page 4