Except the Queen (19 page)

Suddenly the people ahead of me scooted to the far sides of the walk, leaving me a clear path. That made me laugh out loud, which further worried them. Clearly, I had a different kind of magic here and human folk were afraid of it. I tucked this knowledge away. Perhaps I could use it to get back to Faerie.

Booming the tree song and its chorus loudly along four more blocks to the green, I soon came to a pretty park that sat alongside a silvery river. The river was not like rivers in the Greenwood, which are narrow and wild, filled with riffles, rills, white water, and dark, peat-bottomed pools. This was a fat, domesticated river waddling between far-apart banks, singing sluggishly as it flowed. But at least there were trees.

And music!

Long before I crossed the wide street, before I went down a waterfall of stone steps, I heard drums and strings and a high wailing of some sort of pipe. The music was not quite fey, but it was fairylike. I almost danced down the stairs.

Ahead were many colored flowers—red and pink, scarlet and mallow. They were set in contained beds as if the gardener feared they might escape and run riot up the
hillside. I went to the nearest patch of greensward, took off my shoes, and let my toes wriggle in the green, though the grass was shorn like stubble on a human man’s face.

Easing down carefully, I turned over to lie with my face down in the grass. It did not smell like Greenwood grass, a scent compounded of dark earth, rain, and sun. Rather it smelled a bit like the black trash bags and a bit like the pickles I had eaten earlier, sharp and bitter. Still, it
was
green and after so many days without, I reveled in it.

All of a sudden, I heard the music again and realized that it had been silent for quite a while. Had I, all unknowing, silenced it? Perhaps it had already accomplished all it was meant to do—summoning me to this place.

Standing, I smoothed down my skirt, then began walking toward the sound, past the garden with its reds and pinks; past seats of wood and iron; past a woman lying on a stone, eyes downcast, gazing into a small pool. I might have thought her alive had not three children been bouncing on her side. The music grew louder, closer, insistent. I forgot the flowers, forgot the made-woman, and instead raced across the grass, shoes in hand.

Closer to the sluggish river, on a stand of stone, stood three musicians. Banging on a drum was a man as black as crow feathers, dressed in a long coat of many colors. Next to him, a slim girl with white-gold curls and an unnatural dark part in her hair sawed away on a fiddle. As she played, she danced, her striped skirts swirling about her. The third of the troupe was a young man with dark hair curly as a ram’s horns. He blew through a small silvery pipe as well as any Pan. Occasionally he put the pipe down to pick up a different instrument that looked very like a lute, only with a straighter neck. As his fingers flew over the strings, he plucked fairy music from the air, looking at sky, ground, trees.

They played jigs and reels. A few I recognized like “Toss the Feathers,” and “The Gay Gordons,” but the rest were strange to me, almost noise. Still, as my Dam
used to say before she went off to the West, “All one needs to dance is a fairy tune and two good feet.” Even my extra flesh could not stop me from dancing. Flinging the shoes to one side, I began to spin around and around and around, till I could feel my heart double its beat and the sweat run down between my thighs.

Eventually, minutes later—perhaps hours later—the music ended, though it was certainly sooner than a faerie band would have stopped. The black crow-feather man stowed his drum in a bag, then slung it over his shoulder. The girl put the fiddle back in its hard case. And the piper packed away his long-necked lute in a larger hard bag and stuck the silver pipe in a pocket of his shirt. Then he picked up a well-washed red hat that I had failed to notice before. I shivered to see such a thing, but it looked nothing like the one that dreaded creature wears, having a broad brim and some writing across the crown. Something about a bong, which made no sense. He turned the hat upside down, catching the coins and the paper that fell out. Some he took for himself and some he shared with his band mates.

“Forgive me, good folk,” I said, breathing hard, “I did not know you played for pay. I will give you all the gold I have. Even if it beggars me.” Putting my hand into my pocket, I pulled out the sachet that Jamie Oldcourse had given me. “It is little enough for the joy I have had.” I handed the sachet to the girl and sighed. Now I truly had nothing. Nor would I get more, according to Jamie Oldcourse, for another thirty days.

The piper looked at me sideways, from under leaden eyelids, as if they were too heavy for him to raise fully. He sniffed derisively, then with a stiff-legged bow, took the sachet from the girl, and thrust it back at me. “If that is all you own, lady, keep your gold. We want none of it.” He turned and walked away.

Oh, no. I was already indebted to too many. How could I be beholden to this stranger? And a rude one at that.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me do something for you. Let me read your faces and palms. At least then we will be quits.”

The black crow-feather man laughed, his voice all angles, as if laughter were not his native tongue. He started to turn away, but the fiddler girl said, “Face first?”

So I let my fingers run over her face like friendly breezes, and then stared deeply into her eyes. I shuddered with what I read there. “You have left a bad home,” I said, adding, “and a wicked father.”

Her eyes got wide and she drew back a bit.

“Who
are
you?” she asked. Then turning to the crow-feather man, added, “Chim, who
is
she?”

Chim shook his head. “Too old and too fat to be undercover. Bring her along till I can sort it out.”

I suppose I should have run, but when I quickly read him where he stood, I could see no evil in him, only a long wound in his past that the music was healing. And something about busybody aunts.

I remembered again Jamie Oldcourse’s third rule about friends and the need for them. The Man of Flowers was becoming one. But perhaps this trio would mean even more to me. After all, three is a number of enormous magical potential.

“I come gladly,” I said. “No need to bring.”

*   *   *

W
E WANDERED AMONGST THE TREES
, going far from the made-woman and the waterfall of steps. And then a persistent gnawing took my attention and I realized that I was starving. My stomach had begun the growl I now recognized as hunger. I was about to reach into my pocket and remove an apple, meaning to share it with my newfound companions, when the girl said, “Here!”

Here
was a small square of grass between trees. A thrush of some kind was singing flutelike from a low branch.

“
Catharus guttatus
,” said the piper. “Hermit thrush.” He set down the lute bag and took the pipe from his pocket. Putting it to his lips, he began to blow, imitating the birdsong perfectly. Then he left us to go stand under the birch trees, playing to the bird.

“Robin taught himself the pennywhistle because of
the birds,” the girl told me. “The guitar came after. He plays fiddle, too, though not as good as me.”

“And he has a bird’s name,” I mused. “I am partial to birds. Though
he
looks little like a robin.”
But cocky enough
, I thought.

“He named himself,” the girl said. “Even I don’t know his
real
name. And we’ve been friends on and off forever.”

“She says forever and means a year. As for his friendship, more off than on,” Chim said. “He’s never around when we need him.”

“I speak to birds, too,” I admitted.

The two of them looked at me strangely.

“Mumbo jumbo.” Chim reached into his drum bag and pulled out a large covering of some sort, spreading it on the ground. “I suppose you believe in magic, too.”

“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”

He houghed like a horse, through his nostrils.

But the girl paid him no attention, sitting down on the covering, and delving into a rather large bag named Whole Foods Market. Pulling out cheeses, cakes, tiny squares of some sort of brown color with nuts in them, she said, “Don’t mind Chim. He calls himself the ultimate rationalist though he is magic to his bones.”

I turned to the black man. “Chim,” I said, making a swift, small curtsy, “I am Mabel.” It was a safe name to give. I doubted Chim was his true name anyway. It did not fit him.

He houghed again, dismissing me entirely.

The girl patted the covering beside her. “He was brought up with magic and has disavowed it. Went to Princeton instead. Sit here, and never mind the gruntings of the rational mind. He moans more as the moon wanes, weeping about his missing children, though they are not missing at all but live with his ex-wife. And Robin moans more as the moon grows. What a pair!”

An invitation is never to be refused. I sat and took out the two apples from my pocket. “Let me add these to the feast.”

“See,” the girl said to Chim, “domestic magic. Loaves and fishes.”

“I see neither loaves nor fishes,” I said. “But Jamie Oldcourse says that people of the street must find power in small things.”

She nodded. “That’s true enough.”

Shrugging out of the strap of his drum bag, Chim set the bag down carefully. “The only magic I indulge in are these—magic brownies.” He picked up one of the brown squares and ate it in two quick bites.

“Brownies?” I shivered. “One does not
eat
brownies. Or spriggans. Or fairies. Unless one is the Dark Lord.” I gasped and put my hand over my mouth. Chim
was
dark-colored. He went to a Prince’s town. He had missing children. What had I fallen into?

“Flour, butter, eggs, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, baking powder, salt, and a pinch of . . . magic,” the girl said, popping a pair of the brownies in her mouth, one right after another, and still smiling. I could read only amusement there.

“Try one—if you dare.” There was a strange undertone in Chim’s challenge.

“Chim . . .” the girl began.

“She
did
ask,” he told her. “And May, you were the one who made the brownies and brought them to the park. I’m just being . . . neighborly. You always say that I am an un-friend at heart. Give me credit for trying.”

I glanced at the brownies. I could detect neither character nor magic in them. But perhaps I no longer had the ability to do so. “May I?”

They said together as if it were an old joke, “May you and May, too.”

May added, “And Maybelle for three, ding-a-ling,” which set Chim off into a series of unmanly giggles.

Just then Robin popped the pipe back in the pocket of his shirt, left the trees, and came over to sit down with us.

“Robin, what do
you
think?” May asked.

He looked at her quizzically but said nothing. Indeed,
he seemed a person of few words, as if fearing to give himself away.

“The brownies.” She dimpled at him and I could smell her desire, though he seemed impervious to it. “Should we let our guest have one?”

He turned and looked at me for a long moment. I felt naked under his gaze. Did he see the young and beautiful girl as I once had been, or the aged woman I was now?

“Two,” he said solemnly, as if his words were pennies and he a miser.

I savored the first brownie slowly. It tasted of sweetness and—oddly—of dried grass. The second brownie I ate even more slowly, trying to make it last. I had never eaten anything so wonderful, and wanted more, though I had been allowed only the two and would not beg another from the rude bird-boy.

“Here,” said May, “wash them down with this.” She handed me a clear bottle of water, though it turned out to have a sweet tang. Was this, too, an enchantment?

I drank several gulps and all of a sudden started laughing with delight.

“See,” Chim said, “magic!” before May shushed him with a finger to her lips.

But when I began alternately weeping and then laughing uproariously for no reason at all—I had to admit that it felt that a spell had indeed been cast upon me. “Are you fey, that you can make such magic brownies?” I asked May.

She must have answered, but that was the last I recall of the afternoon.

I
knew her by her smell, but she was not what I expected. Father had said she was fey and beautiful as he handed me a bit of her nest.

“Seek!” he had ordered.

What I seek, I find.

But she was not a slip of a faerie girl, rather a lump of an old thing, asleep on a bench in the park, her hip humped up like a mountain. And snoring. I had not found her so much as she had found me. She smelled a bit like my old, dear, dead dam—and fairy—two souls in a single breast.

Like me.

What is it that makes us the same
? I asked myself, kneeling and sniffing her carefully.

And then I knew that I could never give her—my new dam—to my father’s teeth and claws. Not if I could keep her secret. But it is hard, so hard, to keep anything from him when he raises his hand, when he leashes me with a look, when he strikes me with his iron-tipped stick. Then, oh then, I will do anything he asks.