by Jane Yolen
He was exaggerating, of course. I was no more an elven princess than . . . than I was a full-breed elf. It must have been Solange’s old dress, sparkling in the globe worm’s light, that had given him that impression, even with a patch missing from the tumble down into the faerie trap. But I wasn’t about to give him a reason to change his mind. Maybe Unseelie princes didn’t eat princesses.
And then I had a wonderful thought: I have two names: Grey, the second in command. And Gargle. Gargle. The creature had simply been telling me his name. A cold tremor ran up my backbone. Now that I had the furry Wort’s real name, I was deeply ashamed. Pudding, meet Alice. I killed him. The tremor crossed between my shoulder blades. I’ve never killed anything before.
I didn’t have any shame about Grey. I hadn’t Shouted at him.
Yet.
“I haven’t seen Gargle since that great flare of fire, my lord,” Grey said in his weary voice. The voice didn’t match his looks. Slightly younger than the prince, he worked hard at looking stronger. But there were laugh lines at his temples, and his hair was the same as Dusty’s—golden, flyaway curls. He sported a small golden beard. His clothes were simpler than the prince’s—a gray silken shirt, a leather doublet, tight trews. Nothing at all like what my brothers wore.
The Unseelie prince noticed me trembling and stared at me for a moment. “Pudding Alice, what are you?”
I stared at him, not understanding the question.
“Was it you made that flare and disappeared Gargle, my good and faithful cave troll? His family will not be happy with you, not happy at all.”
He has a family?
The shame deepened. I had no answer. The best route all along had been to say nothing. Of course, saying nothing was not exactly my greatest strength. But now it was imperative that I try.
I smiled weakly.
“Untie her,” Prince Dry Voice said to Grey.
“But, my lord, she’s dangerous.”
“She’s not dangerous. But her mouth is,” the prince replied.
Grey shook his head, and at the same time tried to look as if he wasn’t shaking his head. “Then shouldn’t we gag her?”
At that, the Unseelie prince broke into a full laugh before turning and addressing me. “Sometimes I wonder if I am always to be surrounded by idiots and incompetents. Should I tell him or will you?”
I hadn’t a notion as to what he meant. Besides, I was doing my best to remain silent. So I bowed my head like a princess advising a prince.
He took that to mean he was to tell his hireling himself. He leaned toward Grey. “A Shouting Fey can speak through cloth, through wood, through stone,” he said. “The only way to stop her would be to cut off her head.”
I looked down at the floor, blinking furiously. Why had no one ever told me that? And as an afterthought, I wondered, Is it true? Is the Shout that powerful? I supposed I would have found out on my fourteenth birthday, when my tutorial in Shouting began. But I doubted now I’d ever have that chance. My eyes began to fill with tears, and I looked steadily at the floor until I was sure I wouldn’t weep.
When I looked up again, ready to ask the inevitable question, Grey was already drawing his sword from its sheath.
“As you wish, my lord,” he said. His handsome face gave nothing away, not anger, not fear, not eagerness to cut off my head. The perfect soldier.
I gritted my teeth, willing myself to be strong and not to faint. My head began to ache furiously and there was something throbbing in my right temple. If Grey brought that large blade down on my small neck, losing my head shouldn’t hurt for long. Or at least I hoped so. And at least it would stop the headache. Too bad I no longer had the Cloak and couldn’t go invisible. If it worked. It didn’t appear to be all that predictable.
Appear. Cloak of Invisibility. I’d made a joke right before dying, with no one to tell it to.
Good-bye, Mother; good-bye, Father, I thought, and began to go down the long list of brothers, sisters, cousins, Aunts, and my Great-aunt, all of whom would surely miss me. Being dead, I couldn’t very well miss them. Or tell them my Will, not that I had much to give away.
In sudden misery, I thought of all the books I’d never read, all the stories I’d never hear. How I’d never told Mother I loved her.
Then, just as suddenly I stopped my mental babble, found my courage, and gave myself a kind of mental slap across the face. I opened my mouth, and prepared to give a really loud Shout to put both of these Unseelie men out, remembering just in time that we only get one Shout per day, and I’d already used up mine.
• 8 •
THE PROPOSITION
Think, Gorse, think! I heard Father’s voice in my head. So I bit my lower lip and really tried to figure things out.
Why, I thought, would an actual Unseelie prince be living in a cave?
I answered myself: He’s Under the Hill.
But surely—I continued thinking—Under the Hill is supposed to be a metaphor. A fanciful statement meaning another realm, hard to find, difficult to get into. Not—you know—an actual cave.
I looked around in the lowering light. Stone walls. Stone floors. Stone ceiling with stone pillars dropping down and stone pillars flowing up from the floor.
Clearly and unmistakably a cave. I’d seen pictures of them in a book about caves, in the C section of the library.
So I was right back to the original question. Why would an actual Unseelie prince be in an actual cave?
I gave it more thought. On the one hand, Prince Dry Voice was probably wicked enough to have been sent into exile. His second in command certainly seemed awfully ready to take heads off at the prince’s whim.
On the other hand, the prince was handsome enough for love, unrequited or otherwise. Maybe, I thought, he tried to steal another Unseelie prince’s wife. I liked that. Made him both sneaky and romantic.
I smiled. Then I worried that I was trying to make Dry Voice a hero and not the villain that he surely was, trapping girls who belonged to a different court and hauling them below ground.
And what about those “visitors” who told him about the Shouters? Could they have been the Uncles? Were they actual visitors or had they fallen in through a magick trap just like me? And—another awful thought—had they told the prince everything over a cup of tea? Or at a dinner, after which they were the main course?
So there I was, stuck somewhere between admiring Prince Dry Voice and fearing him, liking him and hating him. I was getting no closer to the answers.
Also, I was no closer to finding either the dropped Cloak of Invisibility or the spindle.
Or discovering a way out of the cave.
Or—
Suddenly, interrupting the cascade of my thoughts, a hundred globe worms lit the cavern. The fire was once again flaming in the hearth. No matter how much I feared Grey’s sword, the prince was certainly efficient.
Now I could see clearly that the cavern was no simple cave, but rather a great chamber, draped with elegant tapestries, all of which seemed to depict hunting scenes. In one, fey hunters, their golden hair pulled back in mare’s tails, sighted down long bows at fanciful beasts that had too many horns, or too few legs. Some of the beasts ran crouched over, and some ran upright. In another tapestry, the size of a coverlet, a collared unicorn lay imprisoned within a small white fence. It reminded me of something I’d seen before but couldn’t actually name. In a third, vicious dogs savaged the unicorn that lay meekly bleeding, while its blood dripped over the edge of the tapestry, dangling there, seemingly ready to drop onto the cave floor.
I turned my head and saw tables I hadn’t noticed before, groaning with food: boned and deboned meat of cattle and lambs, three kinds of fowl, sitting on golden platters; breads in seven sizes from tiny muffins to long, twisted loaves lay in willow baskets; green salads and gold salads and
salads made with vegetables dyed all colors of the rainbow overflowed pottery bowls. Though how the prince and his obviously fine chef knew about rainbows stuck down here was something I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t imagine at that moment where they could have found cows and lambs either.
On one enormous plank of polished wood lay stuffed fish with their tails in their mouths; on another, ice dishes were aflame with peppers and flowers. Flagons decorated with jewel-encrusted dragons sat brimful with something red and sparkling that I hoped was wine. Or grape juice. Or even the squeezings of beetroot.
There was an entire table holding cakes and puddings, from deep dark chocolate of the forests to the light, white coconut meat of the desert isles. Not that I’d ever had any deep dark chocolate or white coconut, though I’d read accounts of them and seen pictures in the books on food in the C section of the library: Cookbooks and Culinary. My mouth filled with desire and drool.
I was enchanted by it all. Hunger imprisoned me far more efficiently than had the handsome henchman.
Suddenly, I heard a wisp of a fiddle followed immediately by the high keening of a pipe. Both fiddler and piper appeared, dressed in motley like fools, dancing to their own tunes. They were followed quickly by three young tumblers, who leaped and somersaulted after them, the stone floor making no difference to their acrobatics, for they never missed a step and were so graceful, I couldn’t hear a single footfall.
Finally, in came what could only have been the Unseelie Court itself: fey men and women in full regalia, wings tipped with blinking lights. They were dressed for a grand ball, that much was certain, for all had lace at the neck, bodices of green and gold, and proper masks with the exaggerated features of gargoyles. Great-aunt Gilda had often regaled us with stories about masked balls where princes fell in love with masked ladies, stories her Mother had told her. These fey folk looked just like the ones in the tales.
In marched the courtiers in time to the fiddle and pipe, laughing behind their hands, gossiping, looking not at all different from how Fergus and Banshee must have looked in their prime, judging from the paintings hanging in Great-aunt Gilda’s hall. Or like Solange, Darna, and Willow when they played dress-up in the Aunts’ old gowns. But I had never seen such sumptuousness, such elegance, such beauty. Suddenly our ratty belvederes, our tatty pavilions and follies, our hand-me-down clothing, our small, homey picnics seemed threadbare and embarrassing.
The courtiers drew themselves into a circle that encompassed the entire Great Hall and slowly began to dance. Their laughter only ceased when they performed the strict figures of a pavane, as if a somber face were needed to accomplish the difficult steps. Or perhaps they were simply counting the beats as they went, as my brothers and sisters and I had done when Great-aunt Gilda taught us the dance. Except for Dusty, of course, who just threw himself into any activity with vigor.
“Instead of rigor,” as Great-aunt Gilda always said of Dusty’s dancing, with a sniff.
Whatever the reason, the courtiers danced with little grace and less joy. Unseelie to the core, I guessed.
There was a small bit of movement at the edge of my vision, so I turned my head. Prince Dry Voice was now sitting on a high throne I hadn’t seen before, and at his right hand was Grey, his hand on the great sword with which he’d volunteered to take my head off. I was sure it had been the movement of that hand to that sword that had caught my attention. Neither of them were looking at the dancers, but at me.
Suddenly I wondered at the party and the partiers. They were too beautiful, too perfect. Immediately, I thought, Is it a glamour, all these lords and ladies of the Unseelie Court? I wanted desperately for it to be real. Especially the food.
But suddenly I gaped at the dancers, at the tables, at everything, trying to grasp the truth. Probably, I thought, they’re really only enchanted rats and bats and moles. Or Gargle’s family. And then an even twistier idea came to me: Perhaps it’s the dark cave that’s the real glamour.
I shook my head. How am I to know? How will I ever know?
The prince rose from his throne and held out his hand to me. I’d no choice but to take it. His hand was as cool and dry as his voice.
“You must be hungry, Pudding Alice,” he said. “Let us eat.” And he led me to the groaning tables.
As we crossed the space, I smelled something that was neither sweet nor savory, and was certainly not food. Rather the smell was cool, earthy, herbal, slightly sour, almost damp.
A cave smell. I reached out and brushed my fingertips across a waterfall of stone that grew down from the roof. At once, I remembered what such a thing was called: Stalactite. It had been in the book about caves.
I knew then that there wasn’t any food there for me, not real food, because it had no smell. Only the cave had a smell. As Father used to say, talking about glamours, “Your eyes and ears will lie to you, but smells never lie. Trust the smell.” My stomach growled out a warning, because faerie food—if it’s glamoured—is dangerous to eat, even for us fey. Eating such fare makes you forget who you are and what your mission. It changes, even stops time. Or, as Father had once explained, it doesn’t so much change time as change one’s perception of time.
“I’m not hungry,” I said. “Not hungry for that food, anyway.”
“I wonder why it has taken you this long to figure that out,” Dry Voice answered, and we both knew that he didn’t just mean the food. He meant the glamour. He waved his hand in the direction of the dancers, musicians, and tables of food. They disappeared at once.
“Majesty . . .” It was Grey at his side. I didn’t need to look to know his hand was on his sword. His hand was always on his sword.
“She will not Shout at us, even though she knows,” the prince countered. “We now understand each other, Pudding Alice and I.” He spoke the name, Pudding Alice, with a certain quiet irony to let me know that he’d known all along it wasn’t my true name.
But I was more interested in the other thing he’d said, and started to think—really think—about that.
He’d said, “We now understand each other.”
Understand what?
Maybe he meant I understood about the glamour. But then I realized that I was really thinking about the fact that Prince Dry Voice didn’t seem to know I only had one Shout in me till another day ticked over. He didn’t seem to know that none of the Shouting Fey could give more than one Shout a day. And how could he, if Fergus and Banshee had left the faerie courts before they’d had children who were the start of the Shouters? And maybe he ate the Uncles before they told him all they knew about us.
I shuddered.
Perhaps the Uncles hadn’t actually known about the once-a-day Shouts. After all, which Aunt would have ever let out that bit of information to a mere human? Gardenia? Never! Glade? Grania? Goldie? It was unthinkable any of them would tell the secrets of our magick to anyone not of the Family. And I wasn’t about to let Dry Voice, an Unseelie prince, know. The threat of a Shout was worth a lot to me. Let him think I could Shout all day and all night long. It made things almost even.
Almost.
“Understanding,” I said thoughtfully, “is easy to get and easier to lose.” It was something Father had once said to Dusty when he’d been sent to the library by Mother for a telling-off. Pretending to be asleep among the books, I’d heard Father’s soft, thoughtful voice as he scolded Dusty, but I had never understood what he’d meant until now.
The prince chuckled, and his voice was like wind over the last of the harvestable corn. “Now leave us alone, Grey. You breathe in conspiracies and breathe out venom. I will not have our little princess envapored with such air while we deepen our understanding.”
Grey left us, but only so far as beyond the direct light of a taper set in a deep sconce anchored into the cave wall. I could no longer see him, but his shadow arm on his shadow sword was still visible, and I d
idn’t forget for a moment that he was close by. I knew him now, had read about his kind. He could edge into a room, and no one would see him, almost as if he had a Cloak like Banshee’s. But if you looked for his shadow, he was always there.
The prince took me by the elbow and steered me toward the hearth. He tried to act companionably, but there was steel in his grip. That grip said plainly that he was in control and I was not to run away—even though we both knew I’d nowhere to run to. He guided me firmly toward a small stone table near the hearth where two chairs sat close together, legs under the table, as if for warmth. Pulling one of the chairs out, he gestured for me to sit down.
Suddenly feeling as if all that I’d been through in the past few hours was sinking heavily down the insides of my legs, I was more than willing to sit. I was so tired, I might have even fallen asleep where I stood. But once I sat, the danger of sleep would loom even greater. And I needed to think about my plans.
Luckily, the prince gave me little time to nod off. He had much more to say to me.
“So—here,” he began, “is my proposition, Pudding Alice. As you have guessed, I cannot leave this cave, this dungeon, that has been my home for more years than I can count. Nor can Grey, who came willingly with me, my ally, my cousin, my good right hand. We have been Cursed to remain in this place.”
I hadn’t guessed any of that, except that Grey was certainly the prince’s good right hand. However, the information that Grey was also Dry Voice’s cousin was very interesting indeed. So I nodded and let the prince think what he liked.
“Why don’t you just fly out?” I said.
He laughed sourly. “We have been triply Cursed, child. To stay here and to become wingless are two. The third is that any magick traps we have made work only one way. You cannot fly out, only in.”
I think my mouth gaped. To be Cursed once might be an accident. To be Cursed twice was certainly done with huge malice. To be Cursed a third time . . . well, if he meant me to feel sorry for him, he’d done a really good job. If he was telling the truth. But why had they been imprisoned? And did that make him more to be feared—or less?