by Dahlia Adler
“It is blasphemy,” Oberon says.
“He is nothing.” Titania tries to flatten the king’s bluster.
“For him to dance our dance—I cannot even think on it.”
“He is a bead, an acorn,” she says. “Nothing next to the king of the fairies.”
Her voice is more that of a reasoning sister than a soothing wife. Their marriage is woven more in power and esteem than in love. Titania forswore his bed long ago, and he minded little. She has her elves who sing her asleep, and their beds. He has Puck, whom I hope he loves in at least half the measure Puck loves him.
“I will not see that bastard darken our court again,” Oberon says.
Two words in the single declaration sting me.
Bastard. Oberon said the same word when he first saw Narciso, but I didn’t think he meant it as more than insult. Now, hearing it again, hearing Oberon’s anger seething beneath it, I understand. So this is why Narciso performed the dance so well, how he knows the particular bow of fairy courts. He is some fairy, some mortal.
Darken. To Oberon, to make something darker is to make it worse.
How little he would have wanted me if Titania had not wanted me first.
“Are you quite finished?” Titania asks. “He’s no threat to you.”
Her patience is wearing. The weaving together of their rising voices draws me back to when I was that small child, their stolen changeling.
Titania gained my mother’s devotion, and more of her, I imagine, though I do not know if Titania loved her, too. She claims my mother cared for my father but did not want the life and land they had grown on. That she wanted to leave the milpas and farming seasons of her youth. That she grew bored with the three sisters of squash, corn, and beans growing in earth as rich black as the night sky.
But in the same breath, Titania spins the loveliest tales of my mother’s homeland, the land where I was born. She waxes about the ash-rich earth beneath volcanos, the emerald and garnet of quetzals’ flight, the millions of orange-and-black butterflies that cover the land every autumn.
Titania tells me how she bid the sails of her ship to grow big-bellied with wind, that she sat with my mother on Neptune’s yellow sands, that my mother would delight her with the bright fruit of the hillsides.
Titania tells me that my mother would have wanted her to have me.
It should have been no surprise to Titania that if she claimed something pretty and rare, the king would want it for himself.
They laugh of it now, the row over me. How Puck, Oberon’s good robin, fetched a bewitched flower, struck by Cupid’s arrow. How its potion made Titania fall in love with Bottom, a man who, just for that night, had the head of an ass. How she declared her unending love to the gentle mortal, offered him jewels and a bed of pressed flowers. They marvel at a love enchantment strong enough to make Titania’s heart turn toward any man at all, and Bottom’s toward any woman’s, even the queen of the fairies. (Bottom, true to his name, happily follows every order of his gentleman Quince.)
Their happy concord was to share me, their changeling child.
Except that now, their changeling child slips away into the dark.
With each step, my heart pulls on me, trying to tug me back toward the fairy court. But I keep on.
I lost my mother. I was stolen from my father. I was taken from the land that grew my blood.
I will not lose the chance to know the first brown-skinned boy I have ever seen at the fairies’ court.
* * *
When I find Narciso, I watch him in his lonely vale. Only wild thyme and nodding violets attend him.
I hide, as I am well used to doing, appearing only when it will please.
Narciso flits through the steps of that same dance, the exact clicking of heels and turn of the calf. His lips move, as though he is counting out music that is not playing.
The silver boughs seem to acknowledge him. Even the hardwood of birches bends and sways, their rustling a kind of music for him. The eglantine and musk roses incline their blooms toward him. The land itself seems to breathe with him, as though he might turn the far-off mountains to clouds.
He finishes a step, swift as a shadow.
Then he looks at me.
Not for me.
At me.
With a small, exact glance, he places me precisely where I stand.
He smiles.
I withdraw into the dark. The satin bag I’ve brought with me swings against my legs. I stole a good portion of apricots and dewberries, purple grapes and green figs, and a heavy glass full of honey. It seemed only fitting considering our court’s lack of hospitality.
Now the offering seems paltry, almost comical.
I turn, and Narciso appears before me.
He has moved through the bush and briar as quickly as the piping of the wind. The shifting woods seem to produce him.
I draw back.
“Set your heart at rest,” he says. “I will not hurt you.”
This close, he smells of the cold brooks silvering the mountains.
“Not that you would take my oath, given what your mother and father say of me,” he adds.
This boy’s brown skin and soft smile loosen my tongue.
“They’re not my mother and father,” I say.
“They seem to have assumed otherwise,” he says. “I know well how they love to declare reign over things they want.”
“Did they want you, too?” I ask. “To keep you.”
“Hardly.” Narciso laughs. “I am the bastard son of a mortal father and a fairy from another wood. My mother feared the wrath of her own fairy king, little better than the one you know, and so I was raised by that mortal father and the mortal woman he later married. She loved me as her own when the mother who bore me could not.”
What must that be like? my heart asks before my thoughts can quiet it. For a woman to care for you as a child and not as an ornament?
I remember the weight in my hands and give him the bag.
He seems neither suspicious nor delighted. “Well, you’ve taken the trouble to find me, and it seems not to have been on Oberon’s word.” Narciso sits on a fallen tree. “I suppose you deserve the story.”
He offers me some of the fruit I’ve just given him. I demur. For as much as I usually enjoy eating, my stomach flutters too much for it now. And I fear if I move too much, he might reconsider. Not only telling me what happened between him and Oberon but also speaking to me at all, letting me near him.
He opens an apricot. “So you’re the child they rowed over.”
Now I wish I could vanish so I would not have to meet his gaze.
“I was a child that summer, too,” Narciso says. “Older than you but by little. You were likely too young to remember Oberon’s love potion.”
“I have heard enough of it,” I say. “I marvel that you remember. You were small yourself.”
“So you know of the flower.”
“The one he bade Puck fetch him,” I say, pained to think of it. If Oberon wants something, Puck will put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes to see it done. “Yes. I’ve heard much of it.”
“But do you know the tale?” Narciso asks. “The mermaids, and the arrow.”
“The who and the what?” I ask.
“The story Oberon tells is of a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, her song so dulcet and harmonious that the rude sea grew civil,” Narciso says. “The sky loved her music so well that certain stars shot madly from their spheres. And among them, Cupid flew between the cold moon and earth, if you believe such things. And if you can hear Oberon speak of Cupid’s ‘love shaft’ without laughing.”
I cannot. Plainly. I laugh loud enough that the trees prick up their leaves, wondering at me.
Narciso smiles, seeming pleased, though he still has not eaten the apricot. I wonder if he is wary of its provenance or simply distracted. Its amber sugar mixes with the scent of wild thyme on his shoulders.
“According to Oberon and his fairi
es,” he says, “the arrow’s fire was quenched in the chaste beams of a watery moon. And so it missed its mark, and in doing so, struck a flower.”
“Milk-white,” I say, for I know this part of the story, the flower itself.
“And then purple with love’s wound,” Narciso and I say together.
“And maidens call it love-in-idleness,” I say. I have heard this story a hundred times over, the bawdy tale of how Oberon made Titania fall in love with an ass. How Oberon set the juice of that flower on her eyelids, cursing her to lose her head and heart over the next being she saw.
“But what had that to do with you?” I ask.
“A few years from that summer, Oberon learned my family had a gift for finding certain plants,” Narciso says. “And so he commanded me to find a thousand more flowers like it. He dreamed of what mischief he and Puck might undertake, what power he would command with a glade of love potions.”
“But you were still a child,” I say. “How could he expect you to find a thousand more?”
“Because I could,” Narciso says. “There was a meadow of such turned flowers, and within my heart, I kept its secret. And Oberon knew it. So when I would not lead him there as he asked, when I would not give him and his sweet queen what they ever consider their due, there could be no concord. Titania and Puck would not let him harm a child, so all that was left to him, and for me, was banishment.”
“He tried to make you lead him to it?” I ask, softly, not in surprise but in recognition.
Narciso gives a sad breath of a laugh. “As though I were a pig bred to find truffles.”
I watch him turn the apricot in his hands.
“I am sorry,” I say.
He shakes his head. “It’s not your task to explain for the king.”
It is not the first time I have wanted to apologize for the fairies who have claimed me. Oberon could ask Puck to sprout the wings of a griffin, and the poor man would give his life to trying.
I wince to think of Titania’s words during the dance. The elm and the ivy.
“And I am sorry for what the queen said of you,” I tell Narciso. “How she said it. And where.”
“I say again, such things are not yours to excuse.” Narciso bites into the apricot.
“May I ask you something?”
Narciso dips his head once, a slow nod.
“You were”—I begin the question without knowing how I will end it—“given the name of a girl at your birth?”
He laughs. “A fine and kind way of asking. I am well impressed.”
I am learning his laugh, the low music of it.
“Yes,” he says. “Given a girl’s name, and it fit me no better than a wrongly cut blouse. But renamed by my good stepmother upon realizing the mistake. And since that day, I have been Narciso.”
“Narciso,” I say, letting my amusement show. “The name of the hunter who died for love of looking at himself in a pond?”
This boy holds little in common with that hunter. Yes, he is beautiful, and he seems to know it, but he also seems far too interested in everything around him to be caught by his own watery reflection. His eyes flit as easily as robins’ wings, missing nothing. Not a cloud passing over the moon, nor the turning of leaves.
“A name,” Narciso says. “And my stepmother’s reminder to be neither too taken with myself, nor to leave myself unexamined.” He hands me the second half of the apricot, the corner of an eyebrow quirked, as though daring me to try my own fruit.
I accept it. I bite into it, my eyes not leaving him, to show him both fruit and its bearer are safe to him.
I swallow the earth-laced sugar of the apricot. “Why did you return?”
Now he flushes, the brown of his cheeks warming to match the bloom on the apricots.
For the first time since we began talking, he will not meet my eyes and will not let me have his.
“I heard there was someone like me in Oberon’s court,” he says. “It seemed worth the peril.”
The quiet of his voice does nothing to dampen the weight of his words. This, the twin lodestars of our loneliness, pulls on us as surely as a moon.
I thought I had come here looking for him.
But he came here first, looking for me.
“So now you have the story,” he says. “Oberon wanted something, and I wouldn’t give it to him. Not for his favor. Not to avert his wrath. Not for anything. I was an obstinate child, so he decided I would come to nothing but a defiant youth, dangerous when full grown.”
“Was he wrong?” I ask.
The corner of Narciso’s mouth matches the quirk of that eyebrow.
“In this instance,” he says, “I think it falls to the questioner to decide.”
* * *
I try to let sleep take me. I try to let my body sink into the green give of the bower. But I think only of the smell of wild thyme on the wind and a brown-skinned boy who would not do as these pale beings bid him.
All I have tried to shut away, he has brought back, quick as any dream.
When I was small, when Titania and Oberon argued over me as though I were some disputed necklace, they called me Indian, a word I have learned that pale men—fairy and mortal—use for anyone with a color near mine, no matter what blood made them. To them, we are enough alike that we should share one word. To them, the differences between us are mere trifling detail. They think nothing of the cost to those who should rightfully decide the word’s meaning and those of us who would call ourselves by others.
That midsummer, the one in which Titania and Oberon declared me theirs, has become etched in court legend—a season in which the trees themselves breathed love. A season in which the love tangled between two men and two women became sorted in these woods, and in which the love of a changeling child, along with a few fairy spells, settled a dispute between fairy king and fairy queen.
Of course, none of that is exactly true. Simply ask Helena or Hermia.
Oberon credits himself with mending the unions of Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, when the truth, says Puck, is that the four of them staged the entire affair. They played the parts of lovesickness for each other. They did not want their parents to suspect the truth—that two and two would wed but that man and man would share a bed as well as wife and wife.
That summer found a happy conclusion for the king and queen, but not for me. For ever since then, I have lived here, in this flowering court where pale fairies eat swans not for the taste but because they are beautiful, and because they want to remind themselves that beautiful things are theirs to consume.
This flowering court, where a fairy king and queen each wanted a brown-skinned child only because the other wanted her.
Even now, almost grown, I am more pet than child. And they remain, to me, more king and queen than the mother and father they proclaimed themselves when I was too small to realize I was not just being brought to see the fairy court.
I was being folded away into it.
The warning Narciso’s stepmother gave him, the one laced into his name, finds me now. How much have I left unexamined? How many times have I heard Titania’s wistful claim that my mother would have wanted her to have me? How often have I heard assurances that nothing good waits for me outside the fairy court, that I should want nothing to do with anyone beyond it, not even the fairies who live deeper in the woods? How long have I thought this place of fear and bitter loyalty is the only one that would have me?
I could carry on chanting hymns to the cold, fruitless moon.
Or I could follow the dream that burns in me, bright as Venus in her sky. I could pull against the draw of this court on my very being, heavy as a stone in my chest.
The trees part as though to show my way back to the vale. The bowing of their branches guides me through the dark-dyed night.
At first, I think Narciso is asleep, the night butterflies fanning the moonbeams from his eyes.
But at my approach, he sits up, unhurried, as though he were only watching t
he wandering moon.
As though he has been expecting me back.
For the moment it takes him to stand, the words are caught in my throat. It seems an easier task to move storms than to loosen my tongue.
But I do.
“I don’t want to live unexamined either,” I say.
Without letting a moment fall between us, he asks, “And what do you propose to do for it?”
In the little time I have spoken with Narciso, I have learned his voice and manner enough to know this:
These words he has spoken are not challenge.
They are not dismissal.
They are an invitation.
* * *
The moon is a horned lantern the night of the midsummer masque.
Half-covering masks painted as wings and fanned with feathers hide portions of their faces, a gesture of modesty to the sky and all her stars. I wear my own, autumn blue embroidered with gilt, the same as my dress.
Because Oberon and Titania think I will obey, because I have always obeyed, they do not notice me bringing a handsome stranger into their midst. A mask of gilt-edged autumn leaves covers half his face, obscuring him. They do not note the brown of his exposed jawline, or his dark hands against the evergreen cuffs of his shirt—a shirt I stole for him. Alongside the rich cloth, the brown of his wrists looks as a branch within leaves.
Oberon calls, as he always does, for the musicians to play “King of the Fairies.” And when they do, I draw Narciso onto the grass, cool beneath our feet.
We dance, our hands drawing apart and then intertwining. Narciso’s fingers are warm as sun-touched bark.
We dance, our brown arms grazing each other’s waists and shoulders. We move so quickly that my fingers touch his neck. My lips brush his unmasked jaw, and he shudders in a way so slight, only I perceive it.
We dance, striking our heels with more certainty than the languorous fairies. We beat out each step of this dance, making it so hard and insistent, it is our own, instead of the flitting thing the court has made it.
We dance, with such force the ground conveys the rhythm, and the fairies draw back.
Oberon steps forward.