by Emily Tesh
It grew.
It grew, and it grew, and it grew, and it knocked the ewer off the table, and it turned the bed over on its side. When it could barely fit in the room anymore it put out flowers and fruit both together. Silver could feel the tree protesting against this uncomfortable business and didn’t care. He went off to get rid of his staff, and so get on with the business of becoming a half-mad monster trapped in the woods for the rest of eternity.
Now
While Maud was sleeping, Silver occupied himself with sulking. Fairyland lent itself well to sulking. Its flat dullness matched Silver’s mood perfectly.
Even so, eventually he grew bored. He went back to the others and picked up a notebook to make another sketch of the arrangement of monoliths, but he must have taken the wrong one. He had not realised Tobias had also been making pictures of the landscape.
They looked very different to Silver’s rough sketches—rather better, for a start. Tobias had managed to capture some of the sense of looming unpleasantness that the black stones carried with them. Silver found himself in the third picture, included for size beside the monolith he had been examining. He looked at it a little while: just a few strokes of a pencil, to create a dishevelled little figure with downturned mouth and sullen air. So that was how he looked. Well, it was how he felt, too. No one could accuse Tobias of being dishonest, now or ever.
“My apologies, Mr Finch,” Silver said airily, turning back to their sad little encampment, “I seem to have taken your notebook rather than my own; if you could just pass me— Damn.”
Tobias’s whole large frame jerked an uncomfortable fraction when he spoke; he had been motionless before. Silver should have noticed that stillness. Tobias always found something to be doing. But even the jerk of his shoulders was slow, and when he lifted his head his expression was strange and dazed. The dark earth was covering his boots as far as his ankles, and one of his hands where it rested near the lifeless soil.
“Tobias—Mr Finch—Tobias,” Silver said, panicking. Somehow he was at Tobias’s side, he was taking hold of him. The hand that he pulled frantically away from the ground was chilled through. Silver clung to it, pressing it between his palms as if he might force warmth through his fingers. The soil around Tobias’s boots was trying to harden into black stone like the monoliths. Silver said, “Stop—stop that,” as if he were scolding a child, which was absurd. The dazed look in Tobias’s eyes terrified him. “Get up,” he said, because Tobias was too big and too heavy to be moved if he didn’t choose to be.
“Stop,” he said again, only this time he said it in that other language, the language that belonged to the Wood’s memory, the language of old gods and dead wizards. “I command you.”
The creeping stone stopped its advance up Tobias’s calves.
Tobias shuddered all over and then started to cough into his free hand, the one that Silver wasn’t clinging to.
Silver had to let go of him. He backed off a pace, and then another. Tobias panted for breath, big shoulders moving. Then he stood, kicking away the black rock formations round his boots, and they splintered like glass shards. Silver opened and closed his hands a few times. He would have liked to take hold of Tobias just then; to feel for himself the warmth coming back into his chilled fingers. He had a terrible feeling that if he had spent only a little longer sulking, he would have returned to find just another black standing stone on the plain.
“Are you quite well?” he said. “What was that?”
Tobias worked his jaw back and forth a time or two and said, “Bloody bastard fairies.” He snatched up Maud’s pack and checked the knives and the pistol at his belt. “Bloody, bloody, bastard fairies. Thanks.” The last was abrupt. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“It took the girl,” Tobias said.
Silver hadn’t even noticed. The patch of ground where Maud had slept curled into herself was conspicuously bare.
“Couldn’t even shout,” Tobias said, and he turned to Silver for a moment and said “Thanks” again. Silver looked at his grim expression, the tightly controlled line of his mouth and his white-knuckled fists, and thought of how many times, over the centuries, Tobias had watched and done nothing as an innocent was swallowed by the supernatural. He had to be busy, was how Silver had always seen it, but now the perception inverted itself and he thought instead: He does not like to be helpless.
“My dear—” Silver winced to hear himself. “Mr Finch—”
“Let’s go.”
* * *
The fairy had left footprints in the black earth, next to the solid marks of Maud’s sensible shoes. The imprints of its long bare feet looked human enough to Silver: five toes, pad and heel. “If it was a man, I’d say he was starveling thin,” Tobias said as they went. “Not enough weight there.”
They were keeping to Tobias’s pace across the empty country now. Silver had to half-jog to match his long strides. Tobias did not let up. He was still talking. “It wanted the girl all along. Probably was lurking somewhere when we got here; that was an ambush. It waited for you to be looking the other way, didn’t like the risk. They used to run from me when I was the wood.”
“Did you get a good look at it?” Silver managed, out of breath.
“No. Came from behind me. Bastard bloody fairies. Silver and flint should do for it, but God alone knows what it’s done with the girl.”
Silver was shocked to feel a quite genuine stab of anxiety for Maud—not the conjured ghost of proper feeling he’d managed to put together for the Maud Lindhurst he’d imagined back in Rothport, but a real twist of worry. He had never had a sister. Maybe he would be a less selfish man now if he had.
The fairy’s trail led a winding path through the monoliths. For the first time since they’d begun exploring this place Silver felt as if they were actually moving, moving indeed faster and further than should have been possible. His sense of the drowned wood, on the other side, as it were, of reality’s curtain, was shifting too swiftly for ordinary space. He avoided looking directly at the standing stones. If he thought of Tobias kicking shards of black rock away from his boots like glass, he felt sick.
Then they came to the crest of a low hill and saw beyond it a small forest of monoliths, and in their midst a palace.
Here was civilisation, as Silver understood it. Here was the grand and the graceful, in the form of a gigantic dwelling-place all black arches and columns organised around a central plaza. But the palace was a ruin of collapsed walls and crumbled paving. A fine layer of black dust covered everything in view. Two sets of footprints cut through that dust, perfectly visible even from this distance: one person sensibly shod, and one with long bare feet.
In the middle of the plaza, covered in black dust like all the rest, was a dead tree, withered and grey. At the far end, open under the pink sky, was a dais. Six high steps led up to a throne that was nothing but a lump of black stone with intricate carvings about the base. At the foot of the steps, at the end of the trail of their footprints, stood Maud and her fairy.
Tobias took off at a run. Silver didn’t even try to keep up with him. He was out of breath anyway. He picked his way across the plaza with care, circling broadly around the dead tree, which struck him as sinister. By the time he arrived at the dais, Tobias had the struggling fairy in a ruthless grip as Maud cried out in dismay.
It stilled when Silver came close. Silver could see now what Maud had meant when she said her fairy was hard to look at. It had that same half-present quality that the satyr had possessed, before Silver had killed it. The light slid away from its spindly form and only seemed to catch its eyes, which were glittering and grey.
“Good afternoon,” Silver said to it.
The fairy hissed a word in what Silver supposed must be its own language. It was the same language he knew without knowing. The word was a remarkably rude one. Now he was close by the ugly throne, he could see that the marks on its base matched those he had found on a monolith halfway across the
desert that was Fairyland.
They matched, too, the broken stones of a dead god’s altar far away in Greenhollow.
Which meant that the being which Tobias had called the Lord of Summer, the monster Fabian Rafela had become, had begun as a fairy lord: which was just what Silver had first suspected long ago, before he was the Wood’s creature, before he ever made a fool of himself over Tobias Finch, before everything.
And he had this in common with Maud Lindhurst: he did like to be right.
“What happened?” he asked, in the language of the living world, not the dead one.
The fairy writhed against Tobias’s grip, but the big man held it firm.
“Something happened,” Silver said. “Isn’t that right? Because this was a kingdom, a mighty one, even, a kingdom of splendour and magic, and now nothing is here but the stones and the dust.” He could see it, almost, the black palace all lit up under the still pink sky, the twisted tree in the courtyard crowned in green, the throngs of suppliants before the merciless throne in this place that had kept itself secret and strong and strange, on the far side of the Hallow Wood, long ago. “And there were many of you, and now there is only one. The others—”
“Drowned,” said the last of the fairies. “All drowned.”
“In the ocean?”
“In time.”
Silver nodded. He knew what the fairy meant. He had pictured it often enough, started to dream it—dreams that were maybe his own and maybe the memory of something else that had once occupied his own position. He had wept in fear; he had laughed and pretended it was not happening; he had written his monograph and published it; he had ignored letters from his mother; he had grabbed at Tobias and clung to him the way a drowning man might strike out for an outcropping of salt-drenched rock.
“I beg of you,” the fairy said. “I beg of you, my lady,” and Silver remembered that its first interest had never been him.
Maud was halfway up the dais, three tall steps above the three of them. Why hadn’t Tobias noticed? Wasn’t it Tobias’s business to be alert to what, exactly, had become of the young lady they were supposed to be rescuing? But Tobias looked as shocked as Silver; he had not been paying attention. He had been watching Silver’s face.
Maud took the rest of the steps in three long strides and bent to pick up the object lying on top of the throne. A crown, Silver thought, before he saw it. He wanted it to be a crown.
Maud held it up and it was a mask. It was made of some pale material so delicate that the dull pink light of Fairyland penetrated it through and through, giving it a faint rose colour. It showed an androgynous face with faintly bloated features and blank, staring eyes. A death mask, Silver thought. Someone had taken a cast from the bloating features of a corpse and created this mirror image to rest on the empty black throne.
Maud held it up with two hands, and then she looked down at the three of them, Tobias and Silver and the captured fairy, and her big watery eyes seemed distant and strange.
“Yes, of course,” she said. Then she put the mask on.
It had no string, no hook, no fastening, but when she took her hands away, it stayed where it was. It was changing to fit over her long face, stretching out and rippling, the bloated look falling away as it clung and set over Maud’s living features. She opened her mouth and the mask’s lips parted. Then the figure on the dais let out a sigh, like someone terribly exhausted settling into a comfortable position from which they did not mean to rise.
Silver felt it in the land as the old power woke. The earth under their feet trembled and shook. A wind started to blow from nowhere, stirring up little storms of that black dust. The woman on the dais swayed on her feet. She blinked, once, twice, and the mask had had blank staring eyes with no holes to look through, but now Maud Lindhurst’s watery blue eyes were set in that strange face.
She threw her head back and yelled. Silver could not tell if it was a scream of agony or a roar of triumph.
The fairy broke loose from Tobias’s suddenly uncareful grip and fell to its knees. Its oddly glittering eyes had taken on a new gleam of dampness. Tears. “Mistress,” it said.
The woman whom Silver could not think of, now, as Maud Lindhurst turned her cold gaze down on it.
ILL-STARRED SLAVE, she said. WHERE IS MY KINGDOM?
Tobias muttered a heartfelt oath. Silver rather agreed with him. The Hallow Wood bred occasional dismaying monstrosities; his mother hunted terrors; he himself had once been the prisoner and victim of a fell entity which Tobias for one had counted as one of the old gods. The Lord of Summer had been a being of the same type as this dread lady, Silver could tell, but only in the way that a feral cat was akin to a tigress.
The Fairy Queen turned her gaze on the two of them. It passed over Tobias with scarcely a pause: MORTAL, she sniffed. Then her eyes met Silver’s.
JACK OF THE WOOD, she said. LITTLE BOY GREEN. WHOSE FLESH ARE YOU WEARING?
“My own, madam,” Silver said. “Which is more than can be said for yourself.”
The Queen ignored this sally. WHERE IS MY KINGDOM? she said again. WHERE ARE MY SUBJECTS? WHERE ARE THE THIEVES AND THE DANCERS AND THE LORDS OF EVER-AND-ALWAYS?
“Drowned, I believe,” Silver managed. The force of her attention was like a hailstorm. He wanted to put his hands over his face to shield himself.
DROWNED? DROWNED? I WILL NOT HAVE IT SO.
“Whether you will have it or not,” Silver said, “it is so.”
THEN I WILL REMAKE THEM, the Fairy Queen said. She lifted one of Maud’s long-fingered hands and pointed it at the withered tree at the heart of the palace.
It erupted in green. Silver felt like a tug on his heart the gateway that opened past it and into the Hallow Wood. He thought of the fairy stories he had loved as a boy; how often they began with a traveller lost in the wood! But the fairies had never come from the Wood; they had come through it, through the Green Man’s domain, from this dreadful place on the other side.
And the Queen would come through, walking among Silver’s trees. She would descend like a black storm on a world of railway stations and steam tugs. She would have blood, again, as she had demanded long ago. The practical folklorists of Mrs Silver’s acquaintance, quietly tidying up the confused remnants of the supernatural in a confidently modern world, would be as helpless before her as rats before a snake.
Silver found no secret well of courage within to defy her. He was a scholar, not a hunter. He thought she was fascinating; he thought she was astounding. He would have loved to somehow entice her into a conversation, even better if he had a notebook. He wanted to know who she thought she was, and where she thought she had come from; if the fairies really were a separate and magical species, or if as their looks suggested they should more properly be understood as human beings who had come under the influence of strong powers they did not understand. He wanted to make a grammar and a dictionary of her terrible earth-shaking language.
She was fascinating, and splendid, and eternal. Never mind clinging to a lover, or adopting an angry young lady, or keeping a cat; Silver could occupy himself forever in the service of the Fairy Queen. It would be service, obviously. She was not of a type to admit equals.
“Madam,” he said, “if you are to pass through the Hallow Wood on your way, might I have the honour of escorting you?”
The Queen descended the steps at a leisurely pace and, with an air of enormous condescension, accepted Silver’s proffered arm. It was still Maud’s arm in his; she was still wearing her men’s shirt. The face of the Queen had the bones of Maud’s long face underneath it. Silver made himself smile at her. She was extraordinary, but she was a parasite of the worst kind.
“Shall we?” he said, and prayed and prayed that Tobias would have the sense to stay close.
They walked arm in arm to the tree, and through the twist in space and time, and into the Hallow Wood. The ground under the Fairy Queen’s feet shrank away from her steps; the trees swayed away from her. “Just this way,” Silve
r said. “Just so.” He felt half as if he were coaxing a child, half as if he were trying to leash a rabid wolf. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tobias and the fairy following them, one to either side, each eyeing the other mistrustfully.
“Ah,” Silver said. “Here we are.”
They stood among the still trees of the Hallow Wood at the foot of a steep escarpment thrown up against the horizon ahead like a wall. Everything was silent and dim.
THIS IS NOT THE WORLD, said the Fairy Queen. I WANT THE WORLD. I WANT SERVANTS TO COME CRAWLING TO MY FEET. I WANT MY LORDS AND LADIES ABOUT ME. I WANT MUSICIANS.
“In just a moment,” Silver said soothingly. “Everyone will be very pleased, I am sure. Do you know, it has been hundreds of years, thousands perhaps, since anyone saw you, and yet people still tell stories of the Fairy Queen.”
STORIES! the Queen repeated, and laughed.
“They can never quite capture,” Silver agreed, “the effect of the real thing.”
She turned to look at him, Maud’s eyes in that cold, old face.
“I am something of a student of stories myself,” Silver said. “Fairy tales—folklore—you know.” Why would she know? Why would she care? “There is a myth, for example, of a great Inundation, common to many traditions, which describes the coming of a terrible flood.” He licked his lips. “And then there is another which says if you are accosted by fairies in the wood, be sure to cross running water; they cannot bear it.”