Gabrielle had loved to dance once, but modern music bewildered her, brushing past her mind but never staying, and she could not bear the crush or the flashing lights. And it was hard to dance the minuet alone, though she could still follow the dance in her head. She remembered the figures, the little steps and the elegant tilts of the head. Her friends on the gallery walls likely remembered too, if only they would ever venture to speak.
Better than almost anything else, Gabrielle remembered that last dance with the silvery stranger whom it had been inconceivable to refuse. He’d had dark eyes and his voice had seemed to curl around her like smoke, making it hard to breathe or think.
She had been a widow then, and widowhood had not agreed with her – but there was much dancing to be had at the court of the sun king, and so she had danced. It had not been a bad life. She had had charming curled ostrich feathers for her walking hats, her own opulent carriage and a house in the country that she disliked because the halls echoed when she walked.
These days, her oldest friend was the ghost of a king who had died sometime in the Middle Ages and who ought to have been haunting his battlefield, except that no one ever came there apart from tourists in the summer. He’d been forgotten almost for as long as he’d been dead and there was little to haunt except a belated name plaque that was one of the few remnants of what he had once been.
Gabrielle had found him, haunting a museum, and he had somehow stuck. He haunted her kitchen, and the garden when the weather was nice. Gabrielle supposed he was another of her broken things, and sometimes she forgot he was there. He didn’t rattle chains and there was something comforting in the way he was always the same shape. Gabrielle sometimes wondered if perhaps she was a little in love with him, but she wasn’t certain what signs to look for and it wouldn’t have done any good to look, besides.
She read him bits of her novels, when she felt like it: he hung around, hungrily absorbing the words what broke the silence of his thoughts. She’d never asked what it was he brooded over: past battles, choices, or loss. She felt she didn’t quite have the right – he had never ventured to ask her why she had trouble keeping the same shape for more than a few hours at a time, or why she didn’t always remember her own name. He was a ghost, a custodian of his own eternal memory, and he could never understand about the watery footprints on marble. Or the mirrors.
She’d had a long time to think about mirrors. It hadn’t been a magic mirror that had stolen her reflection. Or, rather, it hadn’t been what she might have expected a magic mirror to be – it hadn’t been made of polished obsidian and there had been no mysterious symbols etched into the frame. It was nothing like the mirrors she had seen the court mystic use when called to amuse the king and queen, and their numerous attendants, with his prophesies and guessing games.
Of course, Gabrielle hadn’t really been watching the mystic. The court had teemed with alliances, dalliances and intrigue, and she had watched it all, another elegant woman in a robe of the finest satin. She had not been unhappy, or at least much less so than most of the flitting, laughing creatures around her. In a way, they had all been caged birds.
She couldn’t remember what she had been looking for at that particular gathering: scandal, intrigue or perhaps freedom. But she did remember the longing: so potent, it was almost a living thing twisting within her.
It had been the longing, perhaps, that had caught his attention. (Like blood in the water drawing in sharks, she learned later, when watching someone’s television through a kitchen window – she might have been an owl at that point, or a growth of ivy clinging to the warm bricks.) Gabrielle didn’t know what he had been: certainly not a ghost haunting palace fêtes, but there were older and darker things about and it hadn’t really mattered.
He’d had eyes like the obsidian mirror of her imagination, and when she looked into them they really did seem to reflect the future and the past. He’d moved like a night-time river through the bustling crowd. These strange, inhuman creatures were often glimpsed in the court of the sun king, drawn by the splendour and the silks.
There was always danger in talking or dancing with one of them. They did not always speak to the mortal courtiers, often choosing to linger around the edges, perhaps to absorb some of the humanity of the lavish ceremonies, to delight in the absurd pomposity.
It happened so very quickly that she had trouble remembering it – they danced a minuet, Gabrielle recalled. She had always been very fond of those – the elegant execution, the rustle of the silks, was enough to momentarily forget oneself. Then he’d led her to a secluded alcove of the room and smiled at her with those terrible eyes.
“It is very easy, you know – that which you want. Such freedom, Madame la Comtesse. You need only look. Will you look?” he’d whispered in a voice that held a thousand unspoken promises hidden just there, around the edges of the words. In the candlelight, it was impossible to mistake him for human.
He’d gestured carelessly at a mirror that hadn’t been there a moment before, as though he were merely offering to fetch her another glass of punch. The mirror had looked so ordinary that Gabrielle remembered thinking how shockingly out of place it was. She’d glanced at it, in a non-committal way, and carelessly adjusted a poudrée curl that had fallen over her shoulder. She had looked flushed despite the powder on her cheeks, her eyes a little too bright.
It was the lack of ceremony that had caught her, or perhaps she had had one too many glasses of ratafia, but she had looked in the glass. Really looked, despite the prickle of warning coiling like grape-vines along her skin. It had been a brief glance, but even that had been enough.
Then a marquis came to solicit a sarabande and the stranger with the obsidian eyes was gone. It wasn’t until she got home and tried to remove her mother’s rubies from her hair that she found what had been stolen. The mirror was long gone, by then, of course, and the stranger with it, but she still looked for it, even now, when she remembered. Such a strange, grisly souvenir – her reflection captured forever.
That night was Gabrielle clearest memory.
When it rained, she would leave the kitchen door open and sit with the ghost. For hours, they would listen to the dripping water and the falling rain. The kitchen floor would flood a little sometimes, when the wind was right. The cat would stalk out, but Gabrielle would stay seated at her table, her feet covered by cold water like a transparent tide, and the ghost would stay too, because he could not feel the water at all.
The ghost would hover about her, and she would read the concern on his impassive spectral face, her own eyes dark with a hunger or desperation for things she could never quite remember. She would tell him of her galleries and absently stir her cup of coffee, letting it go cold.
After the incident of the mirror, Gabrielle had quickly discovered that she was unable to cry. Once, in a desperate moment many decades past, she had acquired some onions and proceeded to chop them all, though she did not cook and the knife had felt awkward in her hand, but it had made no difference.
She hated that feeling. She would suddenly be struck with the coiled tension in her chest as if it would burst, and she would find that she could barely breathe as she hugged her knees and felt the desperation descend, but the tears would never come, nor the relief that was meant to follow.
Soon after, she would begin fading around the edges. The ghost would talk to her then, about battles and falcons, charters and people long dead, as if he could somehow talk her back into her own real shape with the sound of his voice. Sometimes he did, until eventually her chest uncoiled.
At other times she would suddenly find herself a cat again, or a bird, and she would disappear for days to wander around some museum, eyes flickering hungrily over the eternal faces on the walls. She would drink her coffee and let the scent of it curl around her, into her hair and clothes, until it was all she could smell. When she grew tired of the coffee and the tourists, she would leave and dust the portraits in her old house, because she couldn’t abi
de dust.
What an odd lot they made, Gabrielle would think then, caught in their strange little private world, she and the paintings and her ghost. They were each haunting the old house in their own way. She didn’t know what he was exactly – a memory, or a soul or some amalgamation of the two, and he did not know either. It took a while for her to become aware that he was always haunting the edges of her mind, too, even when she was a squirrel or a feather floating over the river.
Gabrielle had told him once, accusingly, that he could not hope to understand her tragedy. He was dead, and he was always the same. They wrote plays about him, films, and books. She had sensed the frown beneath his still face, and it had been terrible. Then she’d come back to apologise because none of it was his fault, and because she hated it when they disagreed.
Armed with a feather-duster, Gabrielle would stand precariously on antique chairs, her feet bare, and annoy the ghost. She would page through auction catalogues looking for old mirrors. When she slept, which was almost never, though she could lie still in the dark for hours, she often dreamt of breaking glass. It was a temporary joy, because she always woke up to find herself still in the old manor with no mirrors.
The ghost never came into her room, because he had an unusual sense of politeness for a king – not even when she didn’t emerge for days. But he would give her a look when she finally did, and she would shrug and start in on the coffee again. Somehow, he’d got awfully tangled in the heart of her, and undoing the tangles was more trouble than it was worth.
Something rich and strange
The Erlking drank his coffee black, no sugar. Penny rather thought he’d have done better with herbal tea, given his tendency to be inexplicably neurotic. It would certainly have helped with the twitching. Anyway, there was likely no coffee under the hills, so it was a wonder he’d developed a taste for it at all, never mind mastering the art of drinking it without wincing.
They were at the local coffee shop: the kind with squashy couches and rickety tables. It had pale wooden panels on the walls, and Wilhelm, the owner, was a troll. Nobody knew this, of course, except for the Erlking and Penny, who was rather good at eavesdropping.
Wilhelm was usually disguised by clever bits of enchanted spider silk to make him appear human, but given the standard mortal tendency to ignore the unusual, this was hardly necessary. Mortals tended to keep anything unworldly at bay by pointedly ignoring any traces of magic and indulging in mind-numbing mediocrity: that way, the barely-seen world often passed entirely unseen.
Wilhelm used to own a tavern in the Hinterlands: The Broken Keg, it had been called. But owning a tavern was a rough business even for a troll: no-one had appreciated his secret-recipe strawberry shortcake, and taverns were astonishingly flammable no matter how much expensive magical fire-proofing you did.
When some rowdy dwarves trashed The Keg in a bar-fight of epic proportion, Wilhelm had decided that he’d had enough. His gnomish nurse, who had refused to move on once Wilhelm had reached adulthood, had always said he wouldn’t be any good at tavern-keeping. A job for dimwits and scoundrels, she would proclaim while taking a fierce swig of his father’s finest fire-wine. Gnome-women made the best nurses not because of any silly instinct but because of their no-nonsense approach to child-rearing, and their wonderful baking.
Wilhelm considered his options, decided that his nurse had made a valid point after all, and moved camp to the mortal side. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do, step between worlds, Penny has mused idly after she’d finished listening in on his story.
She knew that there was a doorway to the fairy realms quite nearby, at least from what Wilhelm had once let slip. Penny imagined the door to be mystical and glittery: maybe hidden somewhere deep within an ancient oak tree. It went quite well with the overall ‘old stone and ivy’ medieval-town atmosphere of Aldgard University.
Not that she had much time to think about magical portals and the like. She had two essays due that week, one of which was a monstrous thing on the development of fifteenth century French harmonic practices. She definitely couldn’t be having with any portals just then.
And she was completely wrong about the magical oak tree anyway, as it happened. The door was wooden, with peeling blue paint. It was entirely unremarkable, and attached to an even less remarkable bit of storage shed not far from the campus lake.
Wilhelm poured the Erlking’s coffee and even made a go at some rather advanced latte art, while surreptitiously watching the girl sitting towards the back of the café. In her turn, Penny was watching the Alderking with a relaxed, contemplative look on her face.
Halloween was always an interesting time to see him and she let her thoughts drift back to three Halloweens ago, when she’d first set eyes on the Wild Hunt from inside of a collapsed tent.
She learnt later that you weren’t supposed to look the Wild Hunt in the eye, but to look away quickly the moment you heard the call of their bugles, the baying of their hounds or the furious pounding of their horses. She had instantly dismissed such nonsense out of hand. She had been rather curious about the Hunt.
The hounds were sleek, elegant things, faintly resembling greyhounds, with incandescent fur and eyes that emitted a faint glow in the dark, and the fairy horses were almost shadows. They were visibly restless and highly strung. The Hunters had watched her out of bony faces and flashing eyes.
It was an interesting end to a rather ill-advised camping trip and, as it turned out, the Erlking did not consider it his finest night either: he lost an enchanted violin in a card game to a mortal girl, which was certainly nothing to brag about. Penny had cheated shamelessly, but the Erlking hadn’t actually been able to catch her at it, which was only the right and proper fairy way of cheating at cards.
The violin was a beautiful instrument, made of enchanted spruce and maple, elegantly shaped, with a delicately carved scroll and silk strings. The sound it produced could be soul-searing and otherworldly, compelling or chilling by turns. The bow was a late 17th century pike-bill. Penny had fallen instantly in love with the violin, since it was so much superior to her own. The Erlking, however, wasn’t the losing type and, since he was quite set on winning it back, they’d played many a re-match since that day.
This was just another of their many meetings, and she was interested to note that he had dressed less ominously than usual, on this occasion. He was unusually tall, and in his black coat, over a black shirt and slacks, he looked too much like someone trying to fit in with the mortals around him to do even a half-decent job.
Penny couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was just something wrong about the whole ensemble. Maybe it was the eerie, liquid way he moved, or the too-bright eyes. Surely no one would mistake him for just another mortal – at least, not if people actually stopped to think about it.
She cast him a bemused little look and returned her attention to the tarot cards she was laying out before her. It was All Hallows, after all, and she was growing tired of playing ordinary cards. Besides, it was a good way of fitting in with the rest of the Halloween coffee crowd. Students really did dress up at the least provocation and the parties wouldn’t even begin for some hours yet.
The girl directly behind the Erlking in the queue wore a very creative, very pink fairy princess costume, and Penny wondered how many gauzy pairs of tights had been sacrificed to make the wings. The short fresher boy behind her was dressed as a very impressive papier-mâché hedgehog, complete with wonderfully crafted fluffy gloves.
He was obviously extremely pleased with the wicked-looking spikes sticking out along his back, having no doubt spent ages making them that sharp. His mates, the Jedi, the leering pirate and the demented leprechaun, completely shared his enthusiasm, if their occasional attempts to impale each other on the spikes were anything to go by. The fairy princess, whom the hedgehog kept narrowly missing every time he turned around to laugh with his mates, did not seem as impressed. She eyed the costume warily, and jerked to the right whenever it lo
oked like they would indulge in another moment of hilarity.
The eldritch king in front of them watched this with a great deal of mirth. This was exactly his sort of thing, Penny noted dryly, looking up from her cards again, while shuffling.
There were some who said that the Erlking was Death, though as mortal years drew on and away from the superstition of just a century earlier, fewer said it every day. There were others who said he was Eadric, a dead medieval lord from Shropshire, who slept underground and led the Wild Hunt – but they had it wrong too because the Erlking had never been mortal.
The Erlking was not Death by any stretch of the imagination, though he was sometimes the cause of it. He was just the Erlking, a creature of dischord and wild magic: nothing more, nothing less. And he was not even remotely human. He could be winter and misery, and a thousand different frights in the night. He was certainly Unseelie, with all the chaos that that implied. But Penny knew that he was also a little testy and rather a lot paranoid, extremely unscrupulous and a dreadful cheat when it came to any competition at all. Which rather made him more interesting company, all things considered.
No matter the anarchy that followed in his wake, or perhaps because of it, the Erlking was necessary: he had been part of the matter of the world since long before the mortals came and even longer before they picked up their shining swords of cold steel. He had once had full run of the world, with his courtiers and his hounds.
The Herlathing, the Wild Hunt, was a frightful thing to behold with their biting weapons, shields that glimmered darkly even when there wasn’t any moonlight, and the cold unbending gleam in their eyes. And when the mortals arrived at last, they were quick to catch on, to hide below stairs when the Hunt went by and to avoid mushroom circles no matter what it took.
Penny, however, wasn’t really the hide-under-the-stairs-with-a-box-of-salt type, which was probably for the best. When she met the Alderking on her camping trip, his hounds baying for blood and his attendants watching hungrily, she had blinked sleepily at them and at the tent, and then did the polite thing and offered to share her thermos of coffee.
From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me Page 2