The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  He left the room, leaving her standing in front of the painting. There was no need to be jealous. Mayfridh was beautiful and colorful, and of course she would have caught Jude’s eye. She caught everybody’s eye. But no trace of her color was left in the painting, and that meant it was all okay, right? Right?

  Christine sighed. Jude had been so attentive today. A back massage at six in the morning when she woke with a twinge, a cup of tea in bed, kisses and cuddles. How could she doubt him? Was this that old feeling of inadequacy, returning in a different form? Damn all these stupid insecurities, damn her frightened heart.

  Jude was at the door. “You like it that much?”

  She turned. He had changed into fresh jeans and a buttoned shirt. “Sorry, lost in thought.”

  “Come on, I’m starving,” he said, reaching for her hand.

  “Jude, do you love me?”

  He pulled her close to him and kissed her forehead. “You know I do, babe.”

  “You don’t love anyone else but me?”

  “I’ve only got room in my heart for Christine Starlight.” He gave her a quick squeeze and stood back to smile at her. “Really, Christine, I’m starving.”

  They met Pete and Fabiyan in the gallery, just on their way out for doner kebabs at the local Imbiss. She pulled her coat on at the door. The Friday night streets were full. Jude and Christine lined up at the Imbiss in the autumn chill, while Pete and Fabiyan went in search of hot glühwein to wash their dinner down. The foursome found a semiclean table next to a cabal of punks.

  “You know, we should have invited Gerda,” Christine said, carefully unpeeling her kebab.

  “We did,” Pete said. “She said she was tired. She said she wanted to save her energy for tomorrow night.” He had a chunk of lettuce and tahini stuck to his chin.

  “What’s tomorrow night?”

  “The gallery party,” Jude said.

  “Had your head under a rock?” Pete said good-naturedly.

  “Yeah, a real big one. I thought it was next week.”

  Fabiyan pointed down the street. “There’s Gerda. And Christine’s friend.”

  Christine turned to see Gerda and Mayfridh approaching. Mayfridh waved happily. “So she’s back.”

  “Back?” Fabiyan said. “Back from where?”

  “Back from . . . I thought she’d gone home for a while.” Of course, the gallery party. Mayfridh had expressed an interest in going. Christine shot Jude a sidelong glance. He was concentrating on his kebab; he wasn’t looking at Mayfridh.

  “Hi, everyone,” Gerda said as she approached. “You started without us.”

  “You said you weren’t coming,” Pete replied.

  “Yeah, and then Miss Miranda shows up looking for Christine. How could I say no to her?”

  Mayfridh squeezed in next to Christine and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I missed you,” she said with a shy smile. Despite her jealousy, Christine felt a wash of tender feeling. Mayfridh’s affection was so artless, her warm breath as sweet as a child’s.

  “You weren’t gone long.”

  “It was Eisengrimm’s birthday,” Mayfridh whispered in her ear. “He was one hundred and nine.”

  “Hey, don’t keep secrets, you two,” Gerda said, poaching Pete’s glühwein. “Miranda, do you need food?”

  “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Mayfridh said.

  Christine watched her, and watched Jude, and saw nothing pass between them that didn’t pass between any other two people there. She forced her fluttering emotions to still. She had been paranoid about Jude’s affection for too long; she didn’t want to project that paranoia onto Mayfridh. For the last three months Gerda had flirted with Jude shamelessly and nothing had come of that. Relax, relax.

  Dinner finished, they bought four bottles of wine and headed back to Gerda’s apartment for what Pete called “a piss-up.” By midnight, everybody was roaring drunk and things were getting rowdy. A knock on the door calmed the room to urgent whispers.

  “Shit, shit,” Gerda said, “that’ll be Mandy, for sure.”

  Pete turned the stereo down and Gerda went to the door. It was, indeed, Mandy.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Gerda said, “we didn’t realize how late it was.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, putting his hands out, palms up. “I’m not angry, but I am tired and tomorrow is a big night.”

  “Of course,” Gerda said. “We’ll shut up. God, I’m so sorry.”

  Mandy’s eyes swept the room and lighted on Mayfridh. Christine felt herself grow uncomfortable. He focused on her with a gaze that was somewhere between desiring and predatory.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said, walking into the room, hand extended.

  “Miranda,” she said, standing up and taking his hand. “I’m an old friend of Christine’s.”

  He kissed her hand and backed away quickly, apologizing with a laugh for spoiling their fun, and closing the door behind him.

  “We’d better get to bed too,” Jude was saying.

  “And me,” Fabiyan agreed.

  Christine kept watching the door that Mandy had just disappeared through. So very creepy. She glanced at Mayfridh, who offered her a grimace and a theatrical shudder of repulsion. So she had noticed it too.

  In the moment before Mandy had kissed Mayfridh’s hand, he had bent to her wrist and sniffed her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Christine found herself nursing a hangover the next morning, a cup of black coffee pressed between her hands, as Jude—remarkably refreshed—left for a morning’s work in the studio.

  “I can’t tell you how much I love my new painting,” he said with a self-satisfied grin as he disappeared out the door.

  She smiled. Good. When Jude enjoyed what he was doing, she felt the glow of his reflected happiness. Christine sipped her coffee and rolled her neck, trying to clear away the cobwebs. She was going to have to go sober at tonight’s party.

  There was a knock on the door. “Come in, it’s not locked,” she called. It had to be someone from inside the hotel or they would have buzzed downstairs. She braced herself, hoping it wasn’t Mandy.

  Mayfridh, beautiful without makeup, wearing one of Gerda’s outsize T-shirts and a pair of her denim overalls.

  “Hi. You want a coffee? I just brewed it.”

  “Yes, please,” Mayfridh replied, “black with no sugar.”

  Christine smiled as she poured the coffee. “Hell, you went hard-core real quick. Wasn’t it like a week ago I could barely get you to drink this stuff?”

  “Everything in the Real World is so intoxicating. Especially the toxic things.” Mayfridh took the cup gratefully and sipped from it. “You look tired.”

  “I am. And I’m supposed to work this afternoon. My boss has a wedding to go to.” She shook her head. “I’m going to be a real live wire at the party tonight.”

  Mayfridh was glancing around her. “Your apartment’s nicer than Gerda’s. Why is that?”

  “I think she just doesn’t clean up after herself.” She swept her hand around. “Jude, however, is a neat freak, especially when he’s got painter’s block.”

  “Would you let me see the rest?”

  “Sure.” Christine led her to the short hallway. “Okay, there’s the bathroom; you’ve already seen that. This is the spare bedroom.” She opened the door on four empty suitcases and a billion dust motes. “As you can see, we don’t use it. And this is our bedroom.”

  Mayfridh entered ahead of her. “It’s nice.”

  The bed wasn’t yet made and the curtains were still closed against the weak morning sun. “We can’t really get used to these German pillows. Jude keeps telling me to go buy some regular ones, but I always forget.” Christine sank down in the chair next to the dresser, and Mayfridh sat on the end of the bed. “I think he’s getting a bit annoyed with me.”

  “Do you and Jude fight much?” Mayfridh asked.

  Christine shook her head. “Hardly at all. He’s very patient.”

>   “Are you going to get married?”

  Christine perched her coffee cup on the dresser. “Maybe. One day. I’d like to, anyway.”

  “Have you talked about it with Jude?”

  “Oh yeah, of course. It’s complicated. You see, I get a big inheritance when I get married, and I think Jude is wary of what people might think if he asks me to marry him. He told me he wants to wait until he’s financially stable in his own right. I accept that.” And she tried really hard to believe it, because it was better than suspecting he didn’t want to marry her because he didn’t really love her.

  Mayfridh was frowning, her head tilted to the side.

  “What’s the matter?” Christine asked.

  “Does Gerda know all that?”

  Christine knew where this was going. “Ah, Gerda. Don’t listen to a thing she says about me or Jude or my money. Gerda just makes up her own version of events and doesn’t care about the truth.”

  “You don’t like Gerda?”

  “I like her a lot. She’s a lot of fun, but she’s really gossipy.”

  Mayfridh sank back on the bed. “Humans are something of a mystery to me.”

  “You mean you don’t have gossip in Ewigkreis?” Christine finished the last of her coffee.

  “I suppose we do, though it’s less complicated. Come and sit by me, I want to ask your opinion on something.”

  Christine eased herself out of the chair and moved to the bed.

  “Is your back sore?” Mayfridh asked, moving over to make space.

  “A little. It’s always worse if I’m tired or sick.”

  “Lie on your stomach. I can make it better.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Christine turned and lay down on her stomach. Mayfridh searched the curve of her back with her hands.

  “Tell me when I hit the spot,” she said.

  “Up a bit . . . there.” Christine felt the warmth of Mayfridh’s fingers through her shirt, and then a soft, lightly penetrating feeling like electricity. It spread the pain apart, making it lose its grip on her bones.

  “Wow, that’s amazing. How do you do it?” Christine asked.

  “Magic often gets left over in my hands from using spells,” she replied.

  Christine closed her eyes and let Mayfridh’s fingers work the area. The pain was still close by, threatening to swoop back into place the moment she took her hands away. It wasn’t the same genuine freedom she felt in Ewigkreis, but it was a wonderful relief anyway. Much more effective than the drugs, which merely dulled the pain, dulling all her other senses with it.

  “So, can I ask your advice about something?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “It’s about my Real World parents. Do you think I should visit them?”

  “Why do you want to visit them? I thought you’d forgotten about them.”

  “It’s coming back to me, Christine, just as my memories and fondness for you came back. The longer I’m here, the more I think of them.” In her distraction, Mayfridh had taken her hands from Christine’s back. The pain returned.

  Christine willed Mayfridh to continue the massage. “How would you explain what happened?”

  “I’d just explain.”

  “They’d never believe you.”

  “You believe me . . . remember?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go around putting spells on people.” Christine turned her head, saw that Mayfridh was sitting back, biting her lip, looking like she might cry. “Hey, don’t listen to me, I’m just tired and snappish.”

  Mayfridh’s fingers resumed their massage. “No, you’re right. I can’t go around putting spells on people. I didn’t realize it before. Sorry.”

  Christine let her head hang forward again, taking comfort in the sweet soothing electricity. “Look, forget what I said. You probably really want to see your parents, and they’d be so happy to know that you’re alive and well, whatever you’ve become. Maybe you should go. I can’t see the harm in it.”

  “Eisengrimm sees much harm in it.”

  “Why?”

  The magic was fading now as Mayfridh’s last reserves were spent. “I’m sorry,” she said, her fingers withdrawing. “I have no magic left.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Thank you, it was great.” Christine turned over and looked up at Mayfridh. “So what’s Eisengrimm’s problem with you seeing your parents?”

  “Oh, he’s just a grumpy thing.”

  “You once told me he was a wise counselor. He’s got to have a reason for advising you against it.”

  Mayfridh hitched a sigh and sank down on her belly on the rumpled covers. Christine curled a finger into her hair and pulled it playfully. “Come on, tell me.”

  “It’s not forever, Christine.”

  “What’s not forever?”

  “This favorable alignment. It’s so rare.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Mayfridh sat up. “You know I can’t tell you where Ewigkreis is. Nor can I tell you where it will be next. It moves every season, to other places, other times. And wherever it arrives next, there’s no way of contacting you even if I remembered you. Any passage is binding—it restricts me in a fairly narrow circle.”

  “So you mean . . . that this passage between my world and your world . . .”

  “Is temporary. Only until the last leaf falls on the birch outside the great hall.”

  “And you’ll disappear.”

  “No, you’ll disappear,” Mayfridh said solemnly, “and I’ll forget you.”

  “I’ll forget you after a while too, I guess.”

  “No, no. You misunderstand. I’ll forget you immediately. I’ll wake up in the Winter Castle, and everything will be as it always has been in Ewigkreis, and my memory of you will be so far distant in the corridors of my thinking, that I will never trip over it and remember you. Unless, of course, our worlds align so closely again, which I very much doubt they will.”

  Christine started to realize what this meant: she had only limited time to escape from her pain in the autumn forest. “So we don’t have long.”

  “No. Perhaps until early December. I’ll be gone by Christmas.”

  “Eisengrimm—he doesn’t want you to form a relationship with your parents that’s doomed to end so soon, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Such a longing filled Christine then, such a rolling, overwhelming desire to be thirteen years younger, to tell her parents not to take the shortcut, to keep her body whole and unbroken. Relief was slipping away from her, she was consigned back into her material limits. “He’s wrong, Mayfridh,” she managed to say. “He’s wrong. Even the scantest moments of joy are worth the pain that follows.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so. I know it with my whole heart. You should definitely try to find them.”

  Mayfridh beamed, threw herself on top of Christine and folded her in a hug. “Thank you, you’re right.”

  “Just be cautious, okay?” Christine said through a mouthful of crimson hair. “They may have moved back to England. They may not be around anymore.”

  Mayfridh sat back. “I already looked in the phone book. There’s a listing for Frith at my old address at Zehlendorf.” Her face grew serious. “Though it only listed my mother’s initials, and not my father’s. Do you think that means he’s dead?”

  Christine thought that was exactly what it meant but didn’t say so. “Just prepare yourself for any eventuality. That way, you won’t get hurt.”

  Not that it really mattered if Mayfridh got hurt; she would soon forget it all when her miraculous, luscious faery world swung away forever. Christine struggled with this new despair; the journey had only just started and already it was coming to an end.

  When Christine left for work, Mayfridh went looking for Gerda, but she was not in her apartment. She crept down the stairs and slunk through the gallery before Mandy, who was talking to a man in a suit, could see he
r. She knocked at Gerda’s studio door but nobody answered. She knocked again, then pressed her ear to the door. Sometimes Gerda used electric tools and couldn’t hear anything else. But all was quiet within.

  “Gerda’s not there.”

  Mayfridh looked up. It was Jude, leaning in the doorway of his studio, his head tilted to one side. Jude, impenetrable Jude. The spell Hexebart had given her had been utterly useless. There was no way into this secret of his, and she was unconvinced that Gerda was right about him, especially after what Christine had told her this morning.

  He smiled. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She went shopping, I think.”

  “Without me?”

  Jude wiped a paintbrush on a cloth in his hand. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she’s somewhere else. Has Christine gone to work?”

  “She left about five minutes ago.” Half a second too much silence intervened between his sentences and her responses, too great a fraction of her mind was directed to admiring his dark, smiling eyes. “Sorry, I’m probably disturbing you while you’re working. I’ll go back upstairs.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ve finished.”

  “The painting?”

  “Yeah, I finished it just now.”

  She felt her tongue hesitate, could imagine too clearly Eisengrimm’s stern voice. Then said, “Can I see it?”

  He seemed genuinely pleased. “Yeah, yeah. Of course. Come in.” He held open the studio door and ushered her ahead of him.

  She gasped. It was simply the most beautiful painting she had ever seen. Such an ache of clarity where dark swirling gray wheeled over bright white. Such somber, serious melancholy where brown and black collided. The colors so perfectly mixed that it looked as though a bright distant star pulsed weakly over the claustrophobic unions of gloomy shapes.

  “You like it?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s the most beautiful . . . beautiful thing . . .”

  He stood next to her, gazing at the painting. She felt the warmth from his shoulder. “Thanks. I think it’s the best I’ve ever done.”

  “You’re a genius,” she breathed.