By the time I reached the open market area that was my destination, I was beginning to understand that it was travellers and tourists in particular who were blind to me. The local people saw me, but turned their eyes away. This puzzled me mightily. I did not know then that the denizens of that city, which is a gateway to this world, had been affected by certain residual magic so that they were able to see what outsiders could not. This was not a power they acknowledged or enjoyed. In the deepest part of their minds where all minds join and become mystery, they knew the secret their city hid. Such knowledge is naturally unbearable for most mortals, and so amnesia has become a subtle art in that city straddling the gateway to Faerie. Thus, many who saw turned aside and at once erased that seeing from their mind.
What fascinated me most in the end were the few tourists who showed by their startled looks that they did see me. I was eager to speak to them, but without exception, anyone I tried to approach fled at once with half-shamed faces. I began to wonder uneasily how my time in Faerie had marked me and was glad to reach the open market and give my attention to my list. But when I tried to shop, I soon discovered that although most of the traders could see me, few would acknowledge or serve me. Those who would were invariably the eldest of the traders, and even they would avoid looking directly into my eyes after that first startled glance. They took the jewels I offered without comment and bagged my purchases. They were grimly courteous and the transaction would be so swiftly concluded that it was as if a door had been slammed in my face. I did not know if I was being cheated, but later, when I returned to Faerie, Yssa laughed at my suspicions, saying no mortal would dare to cheat a faerie.
‘But I am not a faerie,’ I protested.
‘You bear the mark of one who has been loved by a faerie,’ Yssa said, and for a moment the old grim grief showed in her eyes.
I wondered, as I often had before, what had been done to her in the past, but I did not ask for I knew she would not answer. Concern for her robbed me of the innocent pleasure I had taken in my purchases and reminded me of the look of pity I had seen in one rheumy mortal eye. No doubt the old man thought I had been stolen, rather than choosing to enter Faerie. It is true that mortal children are sometimes stolen, but my husband told me that usually they are unloved starvelings who have strayed close to Faerie. They are none the worse for their crossing, and probably far better loved and coddled than in their own world, since faerie folk breed so seldom that all children are precious.
But perhaps it is not always so that those stolen children were unloved. As I left the market, an old woman sitting on a stool outside her door had reached out to catch at my hem, asking with tears in her eyes about her little granddaughter, before her husband hushed her.
The old woman’s words changed my mind about going straight back to Faerie upon completion of my shopping. Instead, I made my way to the pension in the small lane where I had lived before my first crossing to Faerie. Scarlet geraniums still dangled in an untidy, vivid cluster from the third-floor balcony of my old apartment, but I saw the nose and the paw of a sleeping dog and a white shirt flapped on the line to tell me my room was now occupied.
What would happen if I knocked and made the concierge acknowledge me? Would she have my case stored in her attic or had it been sent home to my parents along with the report of my disappearance? The police had surely guessed what had become of me, for there must be many disappearances in that city, yet I knew they would never speak of it to the mainland police.
I turned away from the pension without knocking and found myself on the wooden bridge I had crossed on the first day I came to Faerie. Then, I had been wearing flat loafers of the sort my mother had favoured because they were comfortable and quiet. Such footwear does not exist in Faerie, but there, fortunately the highest heels are deliciously comfortable. Indeed I wore high heels to market, and it was hearing them tap tap upon the wooden boards that called to mind the loafers I had worn the last time I crossed that bridge, and made me suddenly decide to follow the same route I had taken on the day I had first travelled there.
I would go as far as the Wolfsgate, I decided, though this time I would not pass into Faerie by that route. I knew of a less contrary crossing close by that I would use.
My intended destination when last I crossed that little bridge had been a small private library. I had been granted special permission to enter it for an entire afternoon. I wanted to examine a certain ancient tome, which referred to an obscure incident in history that I hoped would form the centre of a thesis. I had stopped on the other side of the bridge to examine the letter of invitation from the curator, wanting to make sure I had correctly memorised the name of the street in which the private library was situated. I did not have a map because I had always taken pride in eschewing maps in new cities, and I had passed over the bridge several times already and knew it would bring me to the main thoroughfare from which ran the street I sought.
I had folded the letter and tucked it into my pocket, reassured to have remembered the name correctly, but realising I would arrive early if I went directly to the library. The curator had sounded particularly fussy, an old man unlikely to let me in the door until the specified time, so I decided to explore a little before making my way there.
As Cloud-Marie begins to comb my hair, gently teasing out the snags between her fingers, those two journeys over the same ground seem to fuse. I see myself simultaneously at twenty-two and at thirty-two, moving away from the bridge and turning to go along a canal. Two women slow to admire the opaque aqua flow of water lit with sequins of sunlight, the fringe of green moss waving in the currents along the edge of submerged steps in the canal. The older thinks how the water flowing through the canals in Faerie is darker because it is not water but pure forgetfulness.
Both women come to the piazza and the younger hesitates, trying to decide which way to go. The older remembers what the younger chose, plunges immediately into the narrow lane between two yellow buildings and is surprised to discover a small café had been built further along the lane where there was once none. She was surprised because change is rare in Faerie, and almost as rare close to its borders.
That younger self is left behind as I follow my older self along the lane and see how she was forced to stop when a group of noisy tourists suddenly comes pouring from an intersecting lane, chattering and gesticulating wildly. Unable to continue, she turns to watch how they surge past without seeing the café or her. Their attention is fixed on the formidably buxom woman leading them, her standard an upraised umbrella. She listens as their guide marches them back towards the piazza, explaining in a ringing voice that gondola are made crooked so as to be stable in the water.
‘Imagine that,’ murmurs a woman at the end of the group holding the hand of a small child.
Instead of responding to her mother, the child turns to look at me. That jolted me, I remember, even though I knew some mortal children were capable of seeing faerie until they learned to filter out uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. That thirty-two-year-old self stands staring after the child and its mother until they vanish from sight, then she turns and continues on her way along the lane until it spills into an open area before a cathedral. It is a breathtakingly beautiful building. Her younger self had almost gone inside, but her older self has a wariness of churches and cathedrals, for there is magic of a kind in them inimical to faerie.
I watch my older self turn reluctantly away from the cathedral, then gaze at the building opposite, which had so struck my younger self when she turned from the church.
I had been astonished, I remember, because it seemed so utterly familiar to me. I had never passed that way before. I knew the red-painted sill on the lower front window, the lion-shaped knocker on the front door, the broken shutter on the third floor, and wondered in bewilderment if I might have seen the building in a photograph.
That was when I noticed a lane between it and the next building. I shrugged off the queer feeling that it had not been there
a moment past, for how could a lane suddenly appear? I had smiled, then, realising the red sill and lion-shaped knocker and the other things that I had seemed to recognise were only visual clichés I had encountered a dozen times in films and novels featuring that city.
I had gone to peer along the lane, wondering if it would bring me through to the main streets where I would find the library, but it was too shadowy to see properly when I was standing in the sunlight, so I stepped into it.
Thus did my younger self step unwittingly and perilously into the shadowy space where the realms of faerie and mortal reality overlap.
A man sat smoking on a stoop a little way down the shadowy lane. He had a dark, sculpted beard and a mass of coal-black curls flowing over his shoulders. His long legs were stretched out in front of him and the end of the black cigarillo in his fingers was a burning eye in the shadows as he drew on it. He expelled the smoke from his lungs in a long sighing breath and then turned his head to look at me.
I caught my own breath then, having never seen a man so profoundly handsome and so singularly wild looking. He had a long, beautiful, angular face, a straight nose and bright, almond-shaped turquoise eyes flecked with gold that reminded me of the canal water. Dark hairs curled above his collar and showed at his wrists, which were muscular and strong, but instead of his skin being swarthy to match, he was pale as milk. Unabashed by my stare, he held my gaze as he took another long pull at the cigarillo. I had drawn closer without intending it and heard the sound of dry tobacco crackling. Then he took the cigarillo from his lips and sent it spinning away into the shadows further along the lane.
I felt a fool as I realised how I must appear, standing there gawping at him as if he were a statue in a gallery. I said in a brisk voice, ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if this lane will bring me to the main streets along the Grand Canal.’
He uncoiled and rose in a single movement, but instead of stepping towards me, he merely leaned back against the wall and slid his hands into his pockets, asking languidly, ‘I am not sorry that you disturb me, lovely lady. Are you lost?’ His voice was low and soft and seemed to insinuate itself against my skin like an affectionate cat.
‘I don’t mind being a little lost,’ I said.
As Cloud-Marie combs my hair, I blush a little at the boldness of my younger self, though I do not remember myself as bold, this being considered a serious character flaw by my parents.
I went back many times after that first shopping expedition, amassing brooms, dusters, cloths and other domestic and personal items enough to last a mortal life or two. Eventually the novelty of being able to buy what I needed palled for me, but I continued to cross and exchange faerie jewels for the things I needed out of simple necessity. Then one day my husband invited me to a picnic he had conjured for his mother’s court. It was all laid out upon magical cloths that would, once spread, offer whatever food and wine were desired in the thinnest golden plates and crystal goblets. He had got them on his last quest as a gift from a serpent sorceress whom he had done a service, he said, fluttering his eyelashes at me.
I scarcely noticed, for I saw at once how useful such cloths could be and was philistine enough to bundle up the nearest while my husband conjured for his guests an exquisite ballet of butterflies complete with orchestral accompaniment. It is amazing how one’s aesthetic senses fail in the face of simple, honest hunger. I meant to pull the cloth from under the plates and cutlery but discovered to my delight that, at a single deft twitch, all the dishes and leftover food upon it vanished. When the cloth was later laid out again on the floor of my bedroom, I was elated to find the dishes reappeared, gleaming and clean and bearing fresh food.
Yssa said I ought to see if the cloth would give us any food we wanted, so we tried it again, announcing what we wished before we opened it out. It did. It was Yssa, too, who discovered that if you opened the cloth when you were not hungry, it would provide other things, so long as what you wanted was not animate and would fit within the bounds of the obliging tablecloth. For the sake of mischief, she tried wishing for various magical objects, including another of the cloths, but the cloth was deaf to these requests.
‘I was afraid of that,’ Yssa sighed.
The cloth did away with the need to travel back to my own world, and this turned out to be very convenient for, soon after, my womb quickened, and I would not cross between the worlds for fear it might harm the baby inside me. In truth I had no interest in such gallivanting about and brooded no more upon my husband’s neglect of me. I would go again when the child was safely delivered, I told myself, and this time I would persuade Yssa to come too. But as it transpired, Yssa had gone from the palace before my son was born.
I missed my friend badly, but love for my son filled and absorbed me in a way I had not anticipated, being the victim of my mother’s cool boredom over having to tend to a child. Unlike her, I was not oppressed by motherhood. I found myself completely absorbed, which surprised me a little, for even aside from my mother’s example, I had never been the sort to yearn for motherhood as some do, nor to plan for it at some convenient moment in the future.
But when my son was born I became a devoted and adoring mother, and for a time concerned myself with little else than my son and poor Cloud-Marie, for by then I had her to care for as well.
As my son grew to boyhood, I was taken up with the nurturing and schooling of his body and mind. Cloud-Marie had no capacity to learn, but she was a sweet, silent companion and adored my son as much as he loved her. Of course she grew more swiftly than the boy, being fully faerie, and she was soon old enough to help me with him. Indeed he preferred her help in bathing and dressing and choosing his clothes. He did not need her help for long, though, and I was glad of it. I had not intended that she should be a servant, but almost without my noticing it, she began to wait upon me with such touching devotion that I could not bring myself to tell her that she need not do so. She got such contentment from her small services and she truly was a help to me, for this was also the time in which my husband began to woo me anew, once again sending invitations and courtiers from the Summer Palace. I suspect he had finally noticed my preoccupation.
I enjoyed his pursuit, even if it seemed rather childish and unreal, because I was sustained and nurtured at some deeper level by my son and daughter, for so I thought of Cloud-Marie. If I sensed my husband did not adore his son enough, I was not deeply troubled, for I had more than enough adoration to lavish on him.
In truth I was profoundly content, until my son’s affliction began to manifest itself.
When at last my husband returned at his mother’s behest, he did not come to the King’s Palace to see what ailed our son, but summoned me to attend him. I knew he was positioning himself for his defence and all of the angers and resentments of the early days of our marriage resurfaced as I was led down long elegant halls to his small formal audience chamber. I realised he meant to meet me here rather than in his private chamber because he wanted the setting to restrain me. Unrestrained, I told him bluntly of his son’s affliction, for by now I knew a good deal more than I had done. My husband grew very still for a moment and then he spoke not of curses or cures but of the need for our son to seek a bride. It was then he drew me a little aside and said softly, sadly, that it seemed that our son bore the same curse that had afflicted him.
I had guessed as much, but I felt the blood drain from my face at his confirmation of my fears. ‘I thought that I cured the curse by marrying you.’
He nodded. ‘You cured me, and I thought you had cured my blood, but the faerie who laid it upon the sons of our house was blood kin and a curse of blood against blood is very powerful.’
I stared at him in disbelief. ‘The faerie who cursed your ancestor was a relative?’
‘She was the daughter of the king, but she was not the daughter of his wife.’
‘She was an illegitimate daughter?’
He nodded, his expression sober. ‘I did not speak of the curse before
this, because there seemed no reason to dwell upon such dark matters. My mother had a vision as you lay sleeping in the Princess Chamber, which told her that the princess spell you wrought would be very strong, and that you would end the curse upon our blood. I ought to have understood it would not be so simple, for nothing in Faerie is simple. Perhaps it is in the nature of men to always think that they have found the ultimate princess.’
My face and heart flamed with wrath at his cruel words, but he turned from me to announce his decision to quest for a means of ending the curse upon his son and his line once and for all.
‘You would go away again, now?’ I screamed at him.
He looked down his nose at me, reminding me with his cool eyes and manner that we were in a formal audience chamber. Then he said very gently, ‘My love, listen to me. There is truly naught for me to do in what will unfold now. Our son must hunt a girl and bring her to the Wolfsgate Valley where she will be tested as you and other princess brides were tested. This is not a matter for a king, but for mothers and sons.’ My husband took my hand and kissed it, and I was so frightened and weary that I allowed his tenderness to soothe me as he told me that I must learn from his mother what was required of me in the bride hunting, for a queen had a vital part to play. There was no time to waste, he said, then he bade a servant lead me to his mother. I had no choice but to go, although I could not face visiting his mother immediately, so I dismissed the servant and went back to the King’s Palace to tell my son that he was to wed.
I had expected him to snarl that he did not want a bride, but he blushed and scowled at his feet, and my heart battered against my ribs in grief, for here, all unheralded, was the end of my supremacy in his life. He was ready to become a man when I had not finished having a child. I bit back sorrow and jealousy to say calmly that I would speak with his grandmother in the morning, to learn what was required in the matter of hunting a bride. I said nothing to my son of the curse, but I was determined to have the whole truth of it from my mother-in-law.
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