Except the Queen (24 page)

T
he moon having left the sky, my brain was soon turned to boiled oats, my stomach filled up with bile. Heat and cold ran alternately through my veins, making me shiver as if being shaken by some large beast. I could not wake yet could not sleep. Still, I managed to sniff out my new dam and sit on her stoop, talking to her of wishes and longings. Or else I spoke in my dreams to someone else. When the moon is away, I cannot tell what is dream and what is not.

I have not reported to my father nor will I. I have sworn to guard. And yet with oats for brains, I am a weak guard indeed.

Father waits out the moon in the Greenwood, kenneled in his Dark Lord’s house, more dog than I. He licks the hand that beats him. He eats his own vomit. Neither bark nor bite belong to him yet still he thinks he is the alpha male.

Another day, two at the most, and the moon will begin its newest climb. And then I will howl. Oh, how I will howl. I will mark the street where my dam hides in her pretty house, talking to the doves whose little necks I can snap with one hand. If I want.

When
I want.

But to sleep again. To dream of a soft hand on my
brow. To rise in man’s form, not a dog’s. To guard whom I want. To love whom I want. That will not happen as long as my father lives, with his Dark Lord holding the leash that binds us both. But I can dream.

And do.

I
read my sister’s latest letter with growing horror. A Jack? She invited a
Jack
into her life? Had her brain, now encased in old bone, turned to mush? All Jacks are tricksters and guisers; they are breakers not makers.

Sitting in my room, I worried over this bit of information. A Jack! Might as well have tea with Red Cap! If she thought her green-haired girl a problem . . .

I grabbed up a piece of paper, leaf green like the girl’s hair had been, and began to write so quickly, it was almost impossible to decipher my scrawl.

Listen, my fern
, I wrote,
you have begun something you cannot stop. It will be a story that devours you even as it unravels. It will . . .

There was a noise outside. I put down the pen, as much to gain control of my roiling emotions as to see what was going on. I looked out of the window, and down onto the stoop. There was my scare-bird, back after a few days away. I had worried that the poor boy had died, been run over, run out, run off by who knew what kind of demons, his own or those I had dogging my footsteps. Or the ones, like the Jack, dogging Meteora.

Yet there he was, the stray, like a beaten dog, waiting for me on the stairs.

I flung open my front door and raced down the stairs. My cheeks flamed. My breath came in short gasps. I felt
my stomach contract, both delightful and awful in one motion. It was as if I were young again, going to meet a new lover. But this was a young man, scarcely old enough for a beard, and I an old woman. What I felt was sorrow and anxiety and relief all intermixed. Like a mother with her mite. Poor little straw man. Poor lost waif.

When I got to him, he looked up at me with such adoration and poverty of soul, that I took him by the hand and he did not resist.

“Who are you . . .” I began

He was mute, but his eyes, the blue-black of a peaty lake, were voluminous in their conversation.

“What
are you . . . ?” I wrinkled my nose. Rank as a badger, he smelled as if he had been rolling in a farmer’s midden. Or the contents of the black bags. “
You
need a bath.”

Taking him by the hand, I brought him up the stairs, stood him in the water room, and began to fill the big white tub. While the water ran, fast and hot and pure, I hastened back to where I kept the herbs. I pinched seven basil leaves from their stems, shook chamomile from the bottle, took a bit of sage and rubbed it between my hands till it warmed. Then I stirred in lavender, peppermint, and thyme all together widdershins with my left forefinger. I would have loved to have added clary and geranium to the mix, but did not have any to hand. I would need to visit the Man of Flowers again. But not now.

The scare-bird had not moved from where I had put him, but watched as I dropped the herbs into the tub that was now quite full of water.

“Now you,” I said.

Perhaps he thought I meant to strip him, for he crossed his arms over his chest. His clothes were as rank as he and I did not want to touch them. Instead, using a shower cloth to cover my hands, I pushed him, fully clothed, into the bath.

He sank immediately under the water. I left him for one, two, three long shuddering breaths on my part, then
thought the better of it and reached in to pull him up into a sitting position. I did not mean to drown the poor thing, only clean him and his clothes of their toxins.

But when I got him sitting, his eyes were closed and he hardly roused. I knew then that the poisons I had noted in his dreams must have run very deep in his veins.

While he soaked, I got out the stone I had found outside under the tree, the aquamarine for deeper cleansing.

“I give thee thanks,” I whispered to whoever or whatever had dropped it there.

Then I went into the cook room and got out salt as well.

Once again back in the water room, I held the stone up to the light. Its very color seemed just right for soaking up hot, fevered blood. I wrapped it in three strands of my hair—that hair that was lately golden and fine and now is white and coarse—then stuck it beneath his knees. Then I sprinkled him with the salt.

Afterward, I said the words. I may be stuck here in a body like a moldering toadstool—but I did not forget the words. This I wrote later to my sister.

Much later.

Standing there looking down at the boy for a long time, I saw the water was now gray, heading toward black. There was too much iron in the bones of this building for magic to work as it does in Faerie.

If it works here at all.

*   *   *

F
INALLY THE BOY WAS STRIPPED
down and asleep under my covers, the stone carefully clasped in his hand.

But do I really want him here?
Even cleaned up, there was a stink about him, like a wolf in a sheepfold or a dog in a farmer’s manger.

Still
, I thought,
he is here. And I have made him clean and made him mine though it has taken hours and all of my hot water to do so.

At the last moment before he fell into sleep, the scare-bird opened his eyes. I was stunned. Those were surely
fey eyes. Not the peaty ones I had seen out on my steps, but a deep bronze shot through with haze, the lozenge-shape of a cat’s eye. Or they were for a moment. And then one blink later, they were human again.

As I wrote to Meteora:

I
know well the sounds of my shop, even sequestered in my room: the metallic hum of machines, the chime on the door as it opens, the low conversation of the women waiting their turn. But my ear is also tuned to a deeper sound, the quiet crackle and decay of women’s bodies as charmed inks turn their spleens black as gall. I delight in their febrile pulses as my spells invade the marrow. I hum to the noise, shaping it into a death song so sweet that even the hollow-eyed girl I am working on offers me a hopeful smile. I stop tapping the needle into her skin and stroke her cheek. She closes her eyes, grateful for the soft touch of my hand, as tears escape from beneath her pale lashes.

They will all die of course; some quickly of an unnamed illness, others by their own hand. And some I help, like Jenna, whose skin was covered with my runes. I refused her, angry that the girl she brought me did not return. I went with Jenna down by the river, holding her hand while she stumbled and wept. I promised her peace, but did not tell her it would come in the grave. I summoned the monstrous Jenny Greenteeth to the bank and bid her feed. Hungry as always, Greenteeth made short work of the woman, taking her by the ankles as she waded into the river and dragging her beneath the dark current. What harm was there in that? Let her death
offer nourishment to even the least of our kind who are still better than any mortal woman. The water churned as I watched from the bank, and only when I saw the thick, ruddy foam rise and float on the swirling eddies, did I turn and leave.

I look up from my work, suddenly aware of the silence. I hear nothing; not even the ordinary sounds of the street and the shop. I reach to draw back the curtains of my private room when they are drawn for me with the fierce jerk of a gloved hand. I curse that I have become so used to the mewling of weak women that I have not thought to keep my dagger close at hand.

A woman fills the doorway, wrapped in a full cloak of gray with a hood that hides her face. I step back, into the room, opening wide my arms and bowing my head just enough to acknowledge the power of the woman who has silenced even my own song. The girl on the table turns on her side, curling her knees up toward her wounded heart where I had placed a tattoo of a bell that she may know only the clang of calamity.

Flushing with anger, I am outraged at the impertinence of my visitor. I was once Hugh, son of Etar, clan leader of Inver Chechmaine, though now I am known as Long Lankin, the knight of blood and death. No one enters my rooms without permission. Not even here in this mortal realm.

But the silence holds me bound. I cannot speak or spell until the unknown woman releases me. My mind rushes like water spilling over a dam.
Can it be the Queen?
For the first time a prick of fear invades my blood.

The woman stands on the threshold of the narrow room, and I know that from beneath the hood, she is surveying it, seeking to know what I have kept hidden from the Greenwood and the courts Under the Hill.

Though frightened, I am defiant, my rage burning with the righteousness of a Highborn Lord.
Let her look,
I fume, fists curling around the poisoned needle still in my hand.
Let her feel
my
power in the branded girl on my table. Let her smell it in the caustic stench of my inks.
Suddenly,
I do not care anymore that she knows. That any of them know.

She turns to me and pushes back the hood to reveal her face. It is in fact not the Queen, though the breath catches in my throat. It is Aileen, sister to Gwenth, my lost wife, and the only one who offered herself to me when I near drowned in sorrow. Despite my anger, I soften at the familiar sight of her face, the milk-cream skin framed by wings of black hair. I remember the feel of her breasts, and the comfort of her arms holding me while I grieved. But that was long ago and the bright gold eyes stare at me now with a mixture of pity and contempt.