From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  In France, they said, someone had built an angel that turned always to face the sun. Olympia could only gaze out at the mute silent world, and try to mouth words that felt so close now.

  She would perhaps have ended up in a cabinet of curiosities in some princely palace, dusty and forgotten. But the eye-glass maker, who could never hold his porter, was forced to abandon her in the night after a rather vicious tavern brawl.

  No one noticed the whirring automaton in the shadows. The ticking of her clockwork was lost beneath the shouts and oaths. Alone, she walked out into the darkness, and met the wizard just a little way ahead, looking thoughtfully up at the moon, next to a fashionable barouche.

  “Oh, hello,” he said to her in a strange accent. He knew just what she was, to her surprise. The wizard, for he made a point of telling her he was not an alchemist, had been passing through the university in search of a book, the Liber Logaeth. That was when he’d happened to hear about the scandal of a professor’s automaton daughter and decided to see how such a thing would unfold. The professor, who had been forced to flee Berlin in disgrace, had been conveniently in possession of the Logaeth too, though the wizard had since recovered it.

  “I feel as if I have known you for a lifetime. Or perhaps it is that I knew you lifetime ago,” the wizard whispered earnestly, puzzled by her. “Perhaps it is the Logaeth. I am Kestrel.”

  It was fortunate that the wizard found her when he did: she had just been about to wind down. He rewound the clockwork, and then he did something so that it should never win down again.

  Suddenly, in his patient, friendly eyes, which did not look at her as if Olympia were an ornament or a fever dream, her words surfaced at last. They were scratchy and awkwardly shaped at first, like her first attempts at embroidery, but they were there and he could hear them.

  Having been stolen by the eye-glass maker, Olympia had never had occasion to hear what had happened to the student who had told her his name and imparted his feverish words. The wizard, unlike the vanished Nathanael, hardly spoke at all, though he did appear to see her and not the ghost of his own delusions.

  When Kestrel did speak, it was to tell fanciful stories or remark about the spell for turning into a cloud of dragonflies. He ruminated a whole half hour on the remarkable orange of the haze of dawn, which one could capture to aid in turning things back from other things.

  Olympia asked him with her rough words of the Sandman, who stole the eyes of disobedient children, of whom Nathanael had told her in a horrified whisper, but the wizard did not think much of any person who bore such a silly name, and waved the story away like a bothersome moth. He shifted impatiently in his coat of blue superfine and a preoccupied look appeared on his face.

  “I am going now. Somewhere or other. I never stay long in such places, for they are quite dull.” He seemed already gone, as though he had been drifting away from the moment they had met. “What will you do?”

  It was an interesting and perplexing question. What would she do? Olympia would perhaps go looking for something. For humanity maybe, or a soul: love or herself. She wanted more than anything to know mortal things. To learn time, sorrow, joy, amusement and love. Most of all, love for that was the thing with which all mortals were preoccupied in one way or another.

  But surely you had to be human to love... She thought that she should like to have a true humanity more than anything else.

  “Souls are a curious thing,” the wizard said, his attention momentarily back in the world she knew. “I know many tales about sea-things who gained souls through marriage to human knights and the like. They never end well – betrayal, you know, is a very human thing too and they never expect it, the sea-things. The tales are remarkably popular for all that.”

  “Are they true?” Olympia asked raspily.

  Kestrel appeared to consider this, wrinkling his brow thoughtfully. “True? In a manner of speaking. All things are true to some extent. But I wouldn’t try to find soul that way. I doubt a gifted soul ever takes root, even if you do marry a knight. A knight is only human, after all.”

  Olympia thought a moment, wrestling with words and meanings until they lay flat in her mind, like coloured handkerchiefs laid out on the bed. “How would you find one?”

  “Me? I would try the Market. In fact, I think I may do that anyway, though I’m not in the market for a soul just right now, so to speak.”

  And somehow, so easily as that, Olympia fell into going with him. They made for odd pair, she in her raggedy dress and the wizard in his marvellous frock coat – cut in the very latest fashion and a cravat so well-tied that only magic could possibly have achieved such perfection. His coat had seemingly endless pockets from which he pulled out strange devices, and brown packets of something he called liquorice.

  Kestrel told her that he had picked his name after his favourite bird, because a wizard never told anyone his true name. She told him hers because the novelty of being addressed directly and by name would surely never wear off.

  They seemed almost to travel through the whole world. He had a slim brown tome with him, that he called his book of hours, because it stopped time and stretched it at will, spun it into patterns and wove it into shapes. It came in rather handy.

  They stopped in Vienna because Olympia asked him to, to look at the automatons whose eyes were duller than hers. Kestrel didn’t speak as they wandered the exhibition because Olympia didn’t either. She trailed dejectedly among the clockwork dolls, looking for something unknown. Then he talked her into going dancing, because he wanted to test a spell that would help him match her perfect timing.

  Wizards, Olympia soon learned, were givers of gifts or strikers of bargains. They made castles out of a dream and a wisp of passing cloud, and they changed your shape or granted eternal life. Wizards were always handing out hearts or taking them away, or swapping them for crystals and rose petals. Kestrel liked to tell her about wizards, and not only the good ones. From him, Olympia learned about opinions, and perspective.

  Hers was perhaps not a very good wizard, because she had yet to see him summon a castle or offer to conjure her a human heart. But he did have a magical horse called Midnight, who was made out of sky and stars, and who could leap worlds in a single bound.

  Olympia saw many curious things as they walked through the world: gilded ballrooms, gritty towns and grittier taverns, palaces and even little bits of northern wilderness where the Korrigans roamed the waters.

  Keestrel, she discovered as her eyes grew accustomed to mobile human faces, was a rather beautiful creature. He seemed always poised on the edge of a dream, his thoughts lost somewhere just a little above your head. Sometimes he would pull books out of thin air and then discard them just as enigmatically. He never said what he was looking for.

  He scribbled in his little book sometimes, and signed his name with letters that wriggled and rearranged themselves. She found comfort in looking at the shape of his name, for it reminded her that she was by far not the oddest nor the wildest thing on the earth.

  With every day that Olympia spent out in the world, she found that she had more words: proper words, not just the shape of them or the idea. She wondered if she had learned a little humanity from the wizard, but she had no way to be certain that he was any more human than she. They paused sometimes so that he could study an arrangement of confectionary in a glass window or a fluffy brown bat that had fallen out of a tree, and sat peering at them in confusion.

  Olympia talked now, because she could, enjoying the feeling of words. All the while she wondered if her companion had the faintest notion of what he was searching for, or if perhaps that was how he spent his life, travelling through the world. Possibly, he looked for many different things and forgot each of them along the way.

  As they walked on, he told her more about the Market, where you could buy keys to magical worlds and potions and bottled dreams. You could purchase fresh lightning and stale memories. Olympia wondered if she would really be able to purchase humani
ty when she got there, or the ability to love.

  Kestrel did not believe in love, or perhaps he simply wasn’t in the least concerned with it. Olympia wasn’t even sure if he came from the same world as she. Somehow, they had wondered out of the world she knew, and into another one. Maybe they had also wandered out of time, but it was difficult to tell. They didn’t talk about how they would get back. Olympia didn’t much care and the magician didn’t seem to think about such things at all.

  One day, when they paused for a rest, Kestrel made her a metal rose that was a beautiful breathless silver. It was such a wonderful gesture that Olympia felt something twist inside and wondered if it was not her clockwork gone somehow awry. Gifts and friends were new to her, and all the more wonderful for their newness.

  She learned about laughter and compassion as they travelled through worlds and she learned about magic and the way the scent of spring permeated everything it touched, drawing you in.

  Sometimes the wizard spoke the languages of birds, when he remembered how, and he could reach back into the past and pull out astonishing wonders with a flick of his wrist.

  He told her stories of people who became birds for their crimes, and of wizards who became birds because they wanted to, for a while or for ever. He had himself changed shape on many an occasion – into clumps of lavender, a falcon and even a pebble on the beach of stream that fed into the Danube.

  Kestrel told her many odd things about the Market too, his eyes bright as lightning, until the Market had grown and flourished like a tree in her thoughts. She wondered aloud if she somehow remembered the Market from another time. Kestrel told her that it was quite possible, that time was only linear because so many people made is so.

  The Market was a fairy place, he warned, but all the nonsense one heard said about finding goblin markets wasn’t really true at all, Kestrel told her. You couldn’t ever get there by following the path left by the moon on the water or by wishing really hard. It was the barely-seen world, but it was always there, on the fringes and around corners.

  You just had to walk and know where you were going. It was easier than one would expect: you didn’t have to embark on a special quest, live backwards through time or step into any fairy circles and spin widdershins.

  You took one step out of the world and it was just there, where it had always been, among the mortal stalls selling food, shawls and old boots. It masqueraded as a thrift market, sprawling lazily behind all the tacky stalls upfront, which sold tourist junk and curios: key rings and t-shirts and dolls.

  And if you didn’t talk to goblin men when you got there, they’d assume you to be rude and strange. But if you did, you could have an adventure and see the world in a different haze. Indeed, you could have any number of adventures: your own, or someone else’s. A quest, or a miracle or maybe even a dream.

  You don’t have to do anything special to find your adventure, either: just wander along from stall to stall, browsing among the antiques and the strange dusty pieces you couldn’t quite identify. But you had to be the right person and you had to find the right object, the one that seemed to call to you from among the old hats, yellowed lace gloves and rusty gramophones.

  You had to wait for it to snag your hand, and you would never quite be sure whether you’d found it or whether it had reeled you in like a fish out of the milling crowd.

  Kestrel paused his story then and looked at her gravely, his grey eyes opaque. “There is an adventure there waiting for anyone who’d care to find it,” he said. Olympia’s mind lit up with the possibilities of such a thing, as the wizard continued his narrative.

  There are rusty, peeling old cauldrons hanging on equally rusty chains, just waiting to be bought and cleaned. Perhaps, one could brew a love potion in it, or immortality. Perhaps, if you were to look into one on a moonlit night you would see your fortune laid out before you. Perhaps, there was one that could feed an army and never grow empty. But to everyone else they would be nothing more than shabby cast-iron, about as magical as a postage stamp.

  There were old boots, and worn, embroidered slippers from decades gone-by: the kind that might grant wishes, bring good luck, or help you stop stepping on your spouse’s toes when next you have to dance at a wedding. And there were shawls, many and magical, which could lead one on a series of coincidences meant to change the world, even if it’s only your world. Some were bright, embroidered gaily with a pattern of wild flowers and berries and mushrooms. Some appeard to be made of gossamer, or bits of magical wool.

  A burgundy velvet hat with a fetching lace trim might come with its very own ghost, a jazz singer just waiting to let her voice live again, weaving around a smoky room, or caught in the scratching of an old vinyl record. (Olympia had no notion what any of these might be, but somehow it didn’t in the least matter and she felt entranced all the same.)

  As one might expect, there were also silver rings, gilded goblets and old swords.

  Kestrel seemed particularly delighted by these. “Perhaps,” he said, “some actor would someday come looking for a weapon for a play and find Excalibur by mistake!”

  Olympia had heard about Excalibur, for Nathanael had been very fond of romances and had dedicated a whole day to explaining them to her. She drank in Kestrel’s stories, eager and transported.

  (Olympia barely noticed as they stopped to rest at a fashionable chocolate house, surrounded by duchesses and princes.)

  “At the Market, you must keep a particular eye on the old keys,” the wizard instructed, ordering himself chocolate. “Especially the rusty ones much too big for any lock made in the last hundred years. The door-handles, too. They can open doors to a myriad worlds, if only the right person turns them, and they are just waiting for a chance to jump into your hand. ”

  “But surely – ”

  “You can never quite close the door again once it’s been opened and you’ve peeked to see what waits beyond. The keys lie in graceless piles, waiting patiently, as they have been doing for longer than anyone could guess. Just waiting for the one unsuspecting soul buying an old key on a whim.”

  The Market was the one place where you could find a candle that never flickers, to light your way through the shadowy world of dead things and lost dreams, where empty promises and forgotten memories gather, packed like old snow. The moon only shines there in its darkest phase and there had never been any stars there at all.

  On a steel table near some old paintings there is to be found a box with a heart in it, beating with life and magic. It’s surrounded by china shepherdesses, glass animals and a yellowing crochet table cloth. The woman working at the stall would be hard pressed to tell you where it came from and how it got to sit so innocently next to the pink porcelain ballerina. She would still sell it, of course, all the while expressing her confusion, naming a price that would come to her out of nowhere. Perhaps someday a young man will buy it, or a middle-aged woman in a stylish dress, and return the heart to its owner, and see what comes of the whole thing.

  You never quite know where the magic will take you.

  (They were trudging over pale snow now, though Olympia had no idea how that could be when they had just rested in summer, but she could not feel the cold and it did not really matter.)

  You might spend a day or a week wandering along the stalls, trying to remember what it was you had been looking for, the memory just on the edge of your mind, yet teasingly out of reach.

  You would likely try one of the rings, fanciful and plain, rare and worthless, engraved with mysterious initials and brittle promises. Many would slide off your finger, though they look like they should fit, but maybe one will get stuck and you’ll buy it, and spend all of your trek home peeking at it on the bus, unable to look away for very long.

  “The fairy cakes at the cupcake display are exactly what they appear, and you shouldn’t eat them unless you want to be stuck in the Otherland forever. A dangerous notion, for the perilous realms are perilous indeed,” Kestrel laughed. “Unlike the cupcakes
, the Otherland is never what it seems.”

  Olympia wondered if this applied to the wizard also, with his strange pale hair and far-away eyes, and decided that it must.

  You’ll pass the stand filled with eclectic jewellery and jars of beads that glistened like dew, and come across an open area, where musicians are just setting up. Their music will pull you in, and steal you from yourself for a moment. It will sound perfectly ordinary, but somehow not quite like anything you’ve heard or will ever hear again.

  You won’t be able to hum it afterwards, though you may very well try, and if you ask whether they sell recordings or music sheets, they will look at you and laugh, their eyes dancing like their melodies.

  There are golden fire birds in cages, preening their scorching feathers, hidden behind a display of old rugs, voluminous dresses thirty years out of fashion, and a rack of dusty old coats. One of those will make you turn into a wolf, or perhaps a bear, if you wear it during the gibbous moon, but you have to pick the right one. Or maybe it must pick you: as your hand runs absently over it, and you’ll feel it shiver or bristle beneath your touch.

  There are the obligatory palm readers, jingling and looking out of hooded eyes at the pale world. But it is the others you ought to watch out for: the ones who look quite ordinary and wear knitted jumpers. After all, there is some truth to be found in every lie, in every tall dark stranger you will soon meet, and sometimes the little sliver of truth can be the most dangerous part.

  The jewellery boxes, some brightly painted, others dull silver, move about strangely when you don’t look at them directly. One of those is sealed for the person who comes looking for a shard of winter or a breath of summer.

  There are whole quarters overflowing with perfumes, potions and rouge. There are broken swords awaiting fate and smoky warped mirrors you shouldn’t look into for too long. Even if you just let your eyes pass over one swiftly, you’ll think you’ve glimpsed familiar eyes.