Except the Queen (26 page)

He had even—in the depths of one night dream—called me such. “Grandma,” he croaked.

In response, I wrapped three more long strands of my white hair around the blue stone. Then I put the stone in his pants pocket. At this rate, I shall go bald.

The three days he stayed with me, he refused to open his eyes for more than a blink. Refused to open his mouth to answer my questions. Allowed me only to lead him into the water room to pee as if he were the old one, not me.

I watched him most of those three days as a mother her newborn, but by the third day, with nothing left in the cupboard for either of us, I left to get more food from the store.

Before going downstairs, I locked the door securely behind me, sprinkling the last bits of all my binding herbs on the jamb. Knowing it was the only thing I could do that might keep the boy safe. Then walking quickly down the street, I went to the bodega.

The Man of Flowers looked at me askance, and I do not blame him. I was a wrecked ship on the shore, red-eyed with sleeplessness, frantic with worry, like a deer before hunters.

“Are you . . . ?” he began. As if by magic, lines like old runes appeared on his forehead, signaling concern.

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. I could not involve him in this. “Grandson,” I lied, liking the sound of it.

“Ah,” he replied. “The children—they break your heart.”

I nodded, but all the while I was thinking about this buying and selling of things to eat. Once I would have searched out the petals of shade-loving trillium or the sweet sap that drips behind the bark of trees. Once I would have beaten out butterflies for the nectar in red flowers. Is that not the burden of my tune these days? Once . . .

Instead, with nearly the last of Jamie Oldcourse’s money, I purchased eggs and milk, garlic and peppermint; the tiniest carrots stripped of their earthen coats; a cheese veined with blue like marble; three apples, red on one side and golden on the other, because that betokened summer and winter at the same time; and a package of blueberries so impossibly large I thought they must have been made by magic. After much thought, I also added a crisp hollow cracker that longs to be filled with something sweet. And, remembering the magic brownies, chocolate. I think if there is one thing humans have that the fey do not, it is chocolate.
If the benighted scare-bird wants to eat
, I thought,
then I shall feed him. At least until I winkle out why he is here.

I also bought a pair of gardener’s gloves that were hanging over the potted herbs. They were ugly things, a crass green that never grew in a faerie garden, and far too big for my hands, even with the swollen knuckles I now had, but I desired them.

“Are you here?” the wheat-faced man asked.

And indeed, he was right. I was not there. I was back in that funk of a room with the scare-bird. I was in the Greenwood gathering things to eat. “Where else would I be?” I asked.

He nodded and bagged the groceries without speaking further, but there was another star fruit in the bag when I got home that I had not paid for. My debt to the Man of Flowers was mounting, but I did not have the energy to worry about it. All my worry was turned toward my bile-blood boy.

Outside of the store, I passed some boys as tough-looking as the men of the Wild Hunt, their faces pinched with anger, their eyes dark and compressed like nuts that contained only rotten centers. They were talking about creatures I did not know,
Sticks
they called them. Or perhaps it was
Spicks.
And laughing angrily at a joke about the neighborhood going, though they did not say where. They reminded me of the young Highborns, so full of their own worth they could grant none to any other. I hunched my shoulders and walked on by. They looked through me—old age being better than a Cloak of Invisibility—and did not see me at all.

When I got near home, I stripped a rowan branch of its leaves. Below the tree an odd thistle grew, and I took that, too. One never knows when such things will be found again.

Upstairs, the boy was still sleeping. I made myself a salad of greens and herbs, some to keep me in health, some to keep me safe, especially from the Wild Hunt boys.

And then I lay down by the scare-bird and slept.

*   *   *

O
N THE FOURTH DAY, OR
rather the night, the scare-bird sat up, smiled, and waved his hand at me, not like a grandson to his granddam, but more a princeling to a servant—and an overbearing princeling at that.

I came over to see what he wanted, and realized that I knew him. Knew him from the green park near the fat river. He was the young man with the pipe who had called the birds. Who played the long-necked lute. Who even played a fiddle, or so said the girl with the spring name. Of a sudden, I remembered that he called himself Robin, and as puffed up as a robin he certainly was.

How could I have not recognized him from the first? What magic had disguised him, besides the magic of a dirty face, wet hair, bile blood, and a cover over
his head as he slept? How could I
not
have known before?

And then I remembered the magic brownies, not to think kindly on their chocolate-ness, but to remind myself how they had befuddled my mind—made me laugh and cry and then sleep as though dead. Perhaps he had been even more susceptible to them. Perhaps they had corrupted his very nature and made him unrecognizable—to himself as well as to me.

No wonder, though, that I had taken him in. Not because he had asked for sanctuary, but because of what I owed him. He had given me back my coins, and done it with words that were both Highborn and low. My body knew what my mind did not.
Perhaps
now the debt is paid. Even overpaid
, I thought.

But first the princeling beckoned. “Goddess,” he said, “but I am starved.”

I almost throttled him, but—as if under a summoning—went directly to the kitchen to make him something to eat.

Taking out three of the six eggs I had just purchased, I carefully coddled them in their shells. I did this in case the boy was really a wicked spirit, a changeling who would then be forced to speak out in wonder and disclose himself. But he just gobbled the eggs down and demanded three more.
Three more!
They were to have been my own dinner and breakfast as well. I ground my teeth but said nothing.
Does he not understand how indebted I am becoming to the Man of Flowers, to Jamie Oldcourse? But what princeling ever cares about the woes of others?

As he ate, I sat down in the big chair by the window, drew a piece of almond-colored paper to me, and leaning on the sill, wrote to my sister of the boy’s sleep and wakening and all of my fears.

After he finished eating, belching loudly, I put aside my half-written letter and tried to name him.

“Robin!” I said, but he did not recognize the name, or else did not want me to know the dart had struck true. Either way, it was not his True Name. That I would have known at once for had it been, he would have bowed to me, groveled, begged to do me service.

However, he gave another name so freely, I know it was not his True Name either.

“Vanilla Blue,” he said. Yet he neither smelled like the fresh, sharp vanilla nor had any of the longing that the color blue conjures. I suspected he understood the power of Names and was playing with me.

Well, two could play such small games. I told him to call me Auntie Em, borrowing the first initial of my sister’s name. For some reason that made him giggle, though I could not figure out why.

He went to bed soon after, and that was the whole of our conversation.

As soon as he slept, I finished my letter to Meteora.

I
sit outside at a small table that is covered with a thin sheen of dirt and coffee stains. The girl who waits on me takes no notice of the filth, but merely writes my request for tea on a pad and disappears. She has several tattoos, none of them mine. They are crude designs, stamped into her skin with no sense of how the furrows of ink should nestle against the body’s curves. She will age and they will age, sagging without grace until her skin resembles the mottled hide of a toad. I turn away, bored and irritated.
Not much longer
, I remind myself.
Not much longer
.

I stare at the humans passing me on the street. They are young, but already their flesh sings of weariness. Better to free them from their anxieties, their uselessness. I do not feel remorse or shame for the bargain I have struck with the Dark Lord’s loathsome servant. But I swallow a mouthful of the scalding tea the girl has brought in an effort to wash away the rancid taste of our encounter, for Red Cap poisons the air with his graveyard breath.

Red Cap
. I whisper the name without fear, for I know him better now. He tried to impress me with signs of his power; the stink of carnage that flies from his mouth, the claws that scratched and fondled his prick, and the eternal well of pain in his stone eyes. He boasted that his
hound was on the trail of the child in a far-off city, that I had nothing to offer him. But I did not purchase his tale for he wears the leather collar of his Dark Lord, and though it is decked with onyx, bloodstones, and rubies, it serves a function other than fashion. He has come to me because he has been ordered by his Lord not to fail or his head will rest on a pike. His own servants will feast on his carcass and another will be enjoined to wear the cap o’ blood.

I have no such allegiances to the Queen, nor do I fear her reprisals for she will not venture from the court. And there is no one among the Highborn who would come forth as her champion. She has walled herself away from the bitterness of the clans who have watched their numbers and their world dwindle. They remain at court, mute but filled with anger, clinging to a fading past.

The tea, despite the taste of human pollution, cleanses my palate. I dip my finger into the black brew and begin to trace a wet, circular line on the table. A sending designed to call its brother etched into the neck of the girl who resisted me. I can see her face, a lean oval, the cheekbones rising beneath moss-colored eyes, the kissable truculent mouth, and a small white scar at the corner of her upper lip bearing witness to an old beating. I hesitate, wondering if she might actually be the Queen’s lost whelp, for there is in her features and in the defiant blood traces of the fey. I shrug. It doesn’t matter whether she is or isn’t. I only need Red Cap to believe it and his own hunger makes him an easy dupe.

The pattern forms beneath my finger, and I dip my finger again into the cooling tea to draw more lines across the table’s scummy surface. I do not need the girl to come to me to snare her like a hare in a hunter’s noose. The knot of trouble on her neck will do as I ask. I do not need to collect her blood, only truss her slowly in the spider’s silk of my tattoos: the adder and scorpion to bind her will to mine. When she is weakest, I will claim her, a valuable hostage, in a game of power between the Queen and the Dark Lord.

F
rom her place at the foot of the bed, Lily growled deep within her throat. Sparrow lifted heavy lids and stared at the moon-washed ceiling. She nudged Lily with one foot to quiet her and felt the dog’s tensed body. Turning her head toward the bedroom door, Sparrow became aware of the dull thumping and banging from the floor below punctuated by men’s raised voices.
Anger?
She closed her eyes again and settled back into the pillow.
Maybe just drunken defiance.
With Alex and Nick it was hard to tell. Mostly they were just bristle and balls.