The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  He sobbed harder and she soothed him with her hands, staring straight in front of her. Could it be that Mayfridh’s believe spell had a use-by date? Was it wearing off, leaving only confusion and disbelief? Her own sense of belief was still strong, but she had experienced Ewigkreis firsthand.

  “It’s all right, Jude,” she said, “we’ll go. I’m happy to go on Sunday, I’m happy to pay for the tickets. It’s all right.”

  He took a deep shuddering breath and sat up, wiping his face with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s fine. I’m the one who wanted to leave, anyway.” She patted his thigh. “But I’m not leaving before I ask Mandy what’s happened to Mayfridh. He’s probably got a message from her that he hasn’t passed on yet.”

  “He’s not there,” Jude said, shaking his head. “I went up this morning after you left for work, and phoned again this afternoon. He’s not around.”

  Christine frowned. “Where is he?”

  Jude shrugged. “Maybe he had something else important to do. We’ll try again tomorrow. He’s always around on Saturdays.”

  Christine felt suspicion rise, but pushed it back down. Jude was out of his seat and handing her the pizza brochure with the airline’s phone number in the corner. “They’ll only hold our tickets until seven o’clock. You’ll have to ring them right away.”

  “Sure, of course,” she said, reaching for her purse to find her credit card. “Jude, what if Mandy’s not back at all? What if he never came back from Ewigkreis?”

  “We heard him upstairs,” Jude said. “He’s back. He’s around somewhere, don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry. “Yeah, right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Those nasty human people have been knocking on Hexebart’s door and ringing on Hexebart’s telephone all day. Can’t they tell she doesn’t want to speak with them? Can’t they guess that Immanuel isn’t home? They must surely be the stupidest of all races.

  Hexebart is bothered by them. She is trying to listen the house.

  Oh! Of course! They must be hearing Hexebart’s feet, up and down on the wooden floor. Hexebart curses her own silliness and enchants the floor to make it very very silent. Then she presses her ear to the boards and listens.

  At first, the house is quiet. Hexebart can hear her own heart, beating a dance in her ears. Then a voice, here, there. Sounds of water running. She centers in on Christine’s voice. Christine doesn’t know what to wear tonight. Jude is telling her she looks nice in blue.

  Blue, blue, Christine trusts you,

  Does she know you killed her parents too?

  Hexebart cackles at her own song. Delightful, delightful! In another apartment she hears a man whistling, the sound of him shaving. He is saying nothing so Hexebart centers in on another voice, the other woman, Gerda. Hexebart likes to listen to Gerda talking on the phone to someone named Garth.

  “Of course it’s suspicious,” Gerda is saying. “He proposed so suddenly and now they’re rushing back to New York. I just know that something is going on . . . Christine doesn’t know, though . . . Well, I think Jude has run into some financial crisis . . . Yes, I’ve always said that he only wants her for her money. She’s such a mousy little thing . . .”

  Hexebart laughs. Gerda is saying spiteful things about Christine, but Hexebart has heard Gerda talking to Christine in a different voice altogether. Gerda pretends to be Christine’s friend. How deliciously wicked!

  But, oh! Hexebart has an idea. Hexebart knows just the punishment for a spiteful gossip. She smiles just thinking about it. Gerda the gossip, gossiping Gerda, Gerda groaning and griping to Garth. But Gerda will have a nasty shock very soon.

  Hexebart listens. Voices die off, doors open and close. They’ve all gone out. Hexebart has the whole house to herself.

  She sits back and holds her finger up in front of her. It grows long and thin, just right for picking a lock. She creeps down the stairs and finds Gerda’s apartment door, and lets herself in.

  This room is full of warm soft things, but not as many as Immanuel’s. Hexebart sings a tune to herself as she looks around. In one of the rooms a sense of familiarity grips her, and she pauses, listening, smelling, looking.

  Aha! The nasty little princess has been here. Hexebart can feel it in her bones. She approaches the bed. Yes! The preening pig has slept right here, in this warm bed. Hexebart crawls into the bed and imagines Mayfridh sleeping here, while Hexebart was back in the well with the frogs and lizards. Oh, oh, she hates that changeling so much it burns! Hexebart clicks her tongue on her teeth and can’t even think of words for a song to sing about how angry she is. She hopes that Immanuel is torturing her slowly and pulling all her fingers and prickling all her toes. Hexebart only wishes she could do the same—what satisfaction!

  Hexebart turns over and thrusts her hands under the pillow, burying her face in it. She bites it, angry, angry. And her hand comes to rest on something smooth and cool. What’s this, what’s this?

  Hexebart draws out a picture. No, a photograph. In it, Mayfridh wears Real World clothes, and a thin gray woman next to her smiles a pained smile. Then Hexebart remembers: Mayfridh has a Real World mother. This is her.

  Hee, hee. Hexebart pops the photograph in her pocket. Later, she’ll make a spell to find out where this Real World mother is, and perhaps she’ll pay a visit, yes, perhaps she will. Hexebart has many people to call on here in the Real World, many new friends to fit into her busy schedule. She pops off the bed and returns to the warm sofa, curls up on it and amuses herself with thoughts of how surprised Gerda will be to see Hexebart when she gets home.

  You see, Sig,” Mandy said to the dead faery as he pulled out his bones, “if one is going to invade a country and take control of it, it should always be a peaceful country. They are far less prepared for such an eventuality.” His hands remembered the task and the blood flowed away into the river.

  Mandy waded farther out. The next part was messy, and he preferred to do it with the body deep underwater. He was up to his thighs now and, despite the cold, he enjoyed the labor, feeling both masculine and refined, both powerful and finely adept. Back to nature, that was the feeling. People went camping for the same reason: to feel they had returned to the basics, to touch once again that source of fundamental human practicality that urban living, with its shrink-wraps and its delivery services, removed them from. “Your own country, Sig, is woefully under-defended. I note that you, as a race, have become very peaceful. You all like each other. Nobody threatens the status quo. The royal guards are little more than dress-up dolls with swords and axes. I’ve easily avoided the one that rattles around the castle, and nobody has even noticed that the queen and her counselor have been missing for a day.”

  He pulled a gleaming bone free and threw it onto the riverbank. It landed with a whump. Sig wasn’t listening to him anyway. Mandy was growing weary. He couldn’t risk sleeping in the castle, so he had slept curled up at the base of a tall beech tree with stolen blankets and pillows. Not comfortable.

  Mandy sighed as his hands worked under the water. He wasn’t a young man anymore, and his original fantasies of killing at least a dozen faeries now seemed vastly ambitious. Perhaps he would only kill another three or four, and then take their bones back to Berlin, along with Mayfridh. She waited for him in the dungeon. What a clever idea of his to make escape mean certain death for Eisengrimm. Mandy wasn’t sure of the extent of her magic powers, and she certainly hadn’t used them to fight him off in the bedroom; even if she could open locks without keys, she wouldn’t dunk her companion in a barrel of burning embers. Mandy had been in to stoke them up an hour or so ago, and had enjoyed not answering a single one of her desperate questions. His silence had unraveled her, and she had still been screaming when he left.

  One thing she had said, though, was troubling. “Winter will come, the worlds will slide apart, you’ll be stuck here. Go home now, while you still can.” This was something he didn’t understand. He r
ealized he had little comprehension of many aspects of faery worlds. Could it be that Mayfridh’s warning was true? Or was it simply a ploy to scare him out of her kingdom?

  This job was taking too long. He’d come to rely too heavily on his boning vat. The back-to-nature satisfaction was growing dull as the muscles in his arms and hands began to tire. Just a few more faeries, then. That would be enough, including Mayfridh, to finish the Bone Wife. No point in being greedy.

  I’m afraid to die, Eisengrimm.”

  “Everyone is afraid to die, Little May.”

  Mayfridh leaned on the door, her face pressed against the barred opening. From here, she could see Eisengrimm’s crow shadow, obscured by bars and shifting in the firelight. It gave her some comfort. Otherwise his voice, disembodied in the dark, started to feel imagined, as though she were completely alone. “I’m glad you’re there, Eisengrimm. He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?”

  “He might not. He might give us a chance to escape. If he lets me out of this cage for even a moment I’ll tear him to pieces.”

  “Is the fire too hot? Does it cause you pain?”

  “No, no. I’m at a sufficient distance from it.” He sighed. “Mayfridh, you are the queen. You must be saved. I matter far less.”

  “Nonsense. I’m nothing without you at my side.”

  “I think you should try to open the door.”

  “I am locked in.”

  “We don’t know that for certain. I didn’t see if he had the enchanted keys. Indeed, how would he find them?”

  Mayfridh winced, knowing she had left the keys carelessly beside her bed.

  Eisengrimm continued: “Perhaps he set up this contraption precisely because he couldn’t lock you in.”

  “But if I open the door, I’ll plunge you into the fire.”

  “Yes. I know. But you would be free. You could save yourself.”

  Mayfridh’s fingers clutched the rusty bars. “Eisengrimm, how can you suggest such a thing?”

  “Because you’re the queen.”

  “I’m sick of being the queen.”

  “Then, because of the great love I bear you.”

  “And I should repay that love by being the very person to burn you alive to secure my own survival? I would never even consider it.”

  “He knows that,” Eisengrimm said, his voice so quiet she almost didn’t hear. “He is counting on that.”

  “I know we are locked in. I left the keys where they could easily be found. I also know that somebody will save us,” Mayfridh said. “Somebody will catch him, or notice we’re missing.” She knew, as Eisengrimm did, that this was not necessarily true. The entire village was in the process of gathering and storing the last harvest, preparing for winter. At this time of year, even her royal guards were sent down to the fields and the mill and the granary to help and only one maid was kept in the castle: poor Kat who was now dead. “We must have courage, Eisengrimm.”

  “I feel I have failed. Failed measurelessly.”

  She tried to focus on his shadow: his beak, the hunch of his wings. “It isn’t your fault.”

  “I could have done more. I was too trusting.”

  “You only had my description of his character to base your assumptions on.”

  “You left me in charge, and I let something evil go free in our world.”

  “I gave Christine the magic twine. I made it possible for him to gain passage.”

  Eisengrimm fell silent and Mayfridh closed her eyes. They had gone over this ground a hundred times already: the self-recriminations of the condemned. For a long time the only sounds were her breathing, her heart, the occasional pop of a burning coal.

  Then Eisengrimm said, “I wonder if I could break out of this cage.”

  She opened her eyes and located his shadow again in the dark. “How? It’s made of iron.”

  “But surely a large powerful creature could break it open. If I changed to Bear—”

  “You could be crushed to death.”

  “Or I could escape.”

  “You’d fall into the fire.”

  “Bear’s too big to fit in the barrel. I’d just knock it over. Perhaps I’d burn my paws, but I wouldn’t burn to death. And without the cage to constrain me, I could flee from the coals as soon as they spilled. I could break down this door, and yours too.”

  Mayfridh was tempted. In just a few minutes they could both be free. Her desire to survive overrode her reason. “Do you think the cage would break?”

  “I think there’s a good chance. Bear is large, the cage is small.”

  “But if the cage doesn’t give . . .”

  Eisengrimm pecked at the bars. Mayfridh could hear how sturdy they were. She had once kept a canary in it, until the contrast of its soft pale feathers against the black wrought-iron twists had distressed her so much that she had set it free. She thought of those sharp angles, biting into Eisengrimm’s flesh. “I think it’s too dangerous,” she said.

  “I could try it, and if I meet too much resistance I’ll shrink back.”

  “Can you do that?” She knew that Bear was a hard form for him to control.

  “I can. Mayfridh, I have to try something.”

  “We could wait. He might let us out to take us somewhere and then—”

  “Mayfridh, I am in a cage,” Eisengrimm cried out. “I cannot help you from this cage. He could kill you before my eyes and I would be helpless.”

  Mayfridh bit her lip, a sob rising in her throat. “But we can—”

  “We can do nothing as we are.”

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  “He could come back in ten minutes and plunge me directly into the barrel. I may die anyway. Let me try this.”

  For a few moments, Mayfridh felt as though her mind and her heart couldn’t stand the situation any longer. Surely she would start screaming, and scream until her heart burst and she died. She tried to force air into her lungs. “You’ll promise to shrink back the moment you’re injured?”

  “I’ll have to press against the cage with my body. I may be a little injured.”

  “Before you go too far, then. Don’t be foolish. You are more use to me alive than dead.”

  “I promise, Mayfridh. This isn’t an attempt to extinguish my own life. It’s an attempt to set us both free.”

  Mayfridh’s voice trembled. “Very well, then. Good luck, old friend.”

  Clutching the bars, Mayfridh focused on his shadow. It trembled and the crow features suddenly expanded, forming a black blob against the firelight. With an excruciating sound of bones and ligaments creaking, the black shape swelled, shuddered against the bars of the cage. Mayfridh heard a loud snap.

  “No, Eisengrimm! Stop.”

  Another snap, a horrible groan—half a bear’s roar, half a crow’s hack—and the shape shrank again, all the way down to a crow, which fell with a soft thud to the bottom of the cage.

  “Eisengrimm?” Mayfridh cried. “Eisengrimm, are you hurt?”

  “I think I . . .” He wheezed. The sound chilled her.

  “Eisengrimm, what’s wrong?”

  “I think I have broken . . .” His voice trailed off to a gasp and then he was silent.

  “Eisengrimm? Eisengrimm? What have you broken?” He didn’t answer. Sobs pulled out of her chest. “Eisengrimm, answer me.” She tried to focus in the dark. Was that movement shallow breathing, or just an illusion of the shadowy firelight? “Eisengrimm? Speak to me!”

  The cage was silent.

  Christine had never seen Jude so drunk and it alarmed her.

  “Come on, honey, one foot in front of the other.” He leaned on her heavily, her back twinged, but she had to get him up the stairs to the apartment somehow.

  “Can’t,” he said, grabbing for the banister, missing it and dropping.

  Christine released him immediately. Holding on to him would cause too much pain. He landed on his backside on a stair, and rested there. His skin was flushed and his eyes were glazed and he stank of cigarette
s and whiskey. They had been the first to leave Super Jazz—after Jude had thrown up on Sparky in repayment for the free drinks. Gerda, Pete, and Fabiyan were still at the club, no doubt speculating on why Jude got himself so wasted.

  “Jude, honey. Come on. Not far to go. Then you’ll have a nice warm bed to pass out in.”

  “Can’t,” he said again, leaning his head against the stair railings. “I’ll just sleep here.”

  “No, you won’t.” She grasped his hand and pulled, causing her back to shriek at her. She dropped him quickly, her fingers going to her spine.

  “Christine?” His drunken hands were fluttering up now, his voice all panicked and guilty. “Christine? Did I hurt you?”

  “Please, Jude, just get up and come to bed.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Come on. We’re nearly there, just a little further.”

  “I’m tired.” He sighed and put his head on his knees. “I’m . . . so . . . tired.”

  She pulled his arm. “Come on, Jude, please. I’m not going to leave you here on the stairs and I can’t carry you.”

  He straightened up, stood unsteadily. “No, of course. You can’t carry me. We’ll be home soon. It’ll be nice to be home, won’t it, Christine?”

  “Do you mean home here in Berlin, or back home in New York?” she said, her hand under his elbow to steady him as they took the remaining stairs.

  “Home where nothing ever happened to us,” he slurred. “Home where it was easy.”

  “Okay, whatever.” She had the key in the door. “Come on. Inside.”

  He shuffled in and she guided him to the bedroom where he sprawled on the bed, eyes closed. With a sigh, she unlaced his shoes and eased them off, unbuckled his belt, and took his wallet and keys out of his pocket. Then she turned him on his side and pulled the covers up. By now he was fast asleep; the absolute-and-entire sleep that only babies and drunkards know. Christine sat on the edge of the bed and watched him: his tangled hair, his pale fingers clutching the pillow. She was tired too, weary to the bone, but she couldn’t sleep without knowing if Mayfridh were safe.