Except the Queen (35 page)
Authors: Jane Yolen,Midori Snyder
I entered the apartment and realized that Robin, too, was gone. My eyelids quivered, always a trouble sign. Though I had not seen Robin and Sparrow together, I
knew for certain that they had already met. I heard it in the tunes he played each night. The tunes were not meant for these old feet, but for someone much nimbler than I. I only hoped that she was careful, for there were still too many unanswered questions about the boy.
Tapping the envelope against my wrist, I tried to feel the intention of whoever had tampered with the letter.
Could Robin have done this? Maybe.
Yet I had seen the changes in him. Each day spent in the garden with Jack had tempered his callowness, made him more agreeable company.
But
someone
had meddled with the letter. I immediately dismissed the girl Marti and her boyfriend whose name I had never learned. They would have had no interest in my mail, and besides, they were away on holiday. The Hands never went out of my rooms, or so I believed. As for Jack—foolish I may have been for taking up with him, but I trusted him now. Or at least I thought I did.
Then who stood to gain from the letter’s knowledge?
Missing
knowledge, I corrected myself. For there was someone who had the better part of Serana’s wisdom and that someone was not me. I needed to watch and learn who had stolen my sister’s words. I needed to warn Serana that we had been followed from the Greenwood. To whom did we matter so much? Certainly, not the Queen who had sent us away.
* * *
I
SHOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE
moment Robin sauntered into the garden the following morning with the pot of arum in his hands. At first I laughed to see it, thinking it a ribald joke. But by the end of day, I knew it had been a mistake to allow such a potent plant into the Great Witch’s garden. Oh, it was trouble all right, the very trouble my sister and I had hoped to avoid.
Two nights later, I walked to the edge of the park, where the trees gave way to the shore of an enormous lake. The full moon cast a glistening path across the restless
water. I turned from its light and looked up, searching for a nest I had seen not too long ago, high in the canopy of an ash tree. I tucked my tongue behind my teeth and gave a sharp, short whistle.
“I have need.”
Silently, a goshawk lifted from the dark trees and circled overhead. I held up my arm, wrapped with one of Baba Yaga’s shawls and offered her a perch. She alighted amid a flurry of wings and I was shocked by the pain of her talons digging into my arm. I had ridden such hawks as a sprout and never felt fear. But now, I trembled before her golden eyes and sharp beak so close to my face.
I know the rules of calling a hawk to service. Bringing out the remains of a mouse, killed the day before in a trap in the basement of the house, I gave it to her. She swallowed it whole, the whipping tail disappearing last. I tied a rolled letter to her leg and whispered my sister’s name and destination. She lunged into the air, her talons raking long scratches in my skin through the cloth. But I did not cry out, only watched as her powerful wings lifted her high above the trees and out across the water’s silvery path.
Sometimes a goshawk is more reliable than an eagle. And I only hoped that my letter would reach Serana in time to do some good.
Dearest Sister
I am troubled. Someone tore away the last lines of your letter before it reached my hands. All that was left was your proclamation “I know this.” If I could spell as I once did, I might know the truth of these wayward words. But now I can only stare at the ruffled edge of the paper and wonder who has the advantage of your knowledge. Please write back soon—the hawk will wait for your reply, though not for long.
I am edgy. And your Robin even more so since he planted the arum in the middle of the garden. I thought he did it as a joke, an affront to my old age. I went to pull it out stalk and root, but no
sooner did I touch it than the Jack’s own laughter stopped me and I blushed furious, my hands wrapped around it as though to throttle youth and sex. I have left it, but, oh, what misgivings.
I saw Sparrow today, leaning out on her porch, hands clenched on the railing like a fledgling balanced for a first flight. Robin turned his face up to stare hungrily at her. And that damn plant bloomed, spreading pollen everywhere in the sudden gusting of the wind.
Worried as a tree knot,
Meteora
Y
ou travel the edges of the Greenwood, looking for the road that leads to the world. How many roads have disappeared? you wonder. No one sweeps them clean anymore and few carry their old names. Gone are the fairy knolls, the bridge of trees, the fairy’s walk that once might have pointed the way to mortals seeking the path between briar and lily. Now it has become difficult for you to even find the roads
out
of the Greenwood. They are covered with iron and rust, with concrete and steel. The grass no longer sings to announce the way, the brush no longer parts to let you through. The old ways are going, soon to be gone for good.
It is love that drives you out of your woods. Love for the clans who mistrust you now, who know too much about you and are consumed with envy. It was the love of your realm that sent you in search of the one thing that might restore vitality, life, and the power of a world both bright and dark. It was love that changed your body from a pure vessel, untouched by age to one ripened by love, torn open by love, altered forever in the act of creation. It was love that kept you in the world too long.
You should have left the child on a stranger’s doorstep, even on the steps of a church, though the spires could spear your heart and the crosses burn your flesh. But once you looked into that perfect rosebud face you
could not part with her—flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood. You could not stop the tears that flowed any more than you could dam the milk from your breasts. And you knew that only this love could heal your world. So you stayed, wanting more time.
And then it all went so very wrong.
You hid your sorrow; you hid the love that had changed your body. You designed a desperate plan with no certainty of succeeding, hoping for delay. And when the truth was known you did what was necessary, committing murder, holding some hostage to your bidding and forcing others out into an exile you refused to imagine to buy but a little time and confuse them all.
And you knew that He would not rest idle but seek to find. You brought her in the world to strengthen the world through love, but He will use her death to strengthen His world through hate. And if He succeeds, then the balance of your world will tip like a fallen candle whose wick is drowned in the flow of scalding wax.
Oh, for love that aches, that heals, that makes all things possible.
And so you have come alone, treading the paths that no longer announce themselves. But you know it is here, in a city of glass and iron and stone that you must seek first. You must find the hound. You must stop him. Leash him. Or take his heart.
Meteora, sister, oh fool, fools both of us. Me to write the word arum in a letter when I already knew that someone—even someones—could read what I wrote. And you for leaving the letter about.
Why did you not move forward against the arum the moment you saw it? Surely you could have guessed that if there was arum—the Wake Robin—in the garden, that you should root it out, burn it, bury it, cut it into a million pieces and scatter those pieces into dry sea sand. You were bright enough to know what the mandrake root meant, but not this? Sister, I weep. It is not only Robin the plant will awaken. Someone else is waking, too. Not just your Red Cap. He is dangerous, true. But we both know what the true danger is.
The crows know it. The stars know it.
The sleeper wakened is someone more twisty, more devious, more cunning than we can guess. And how did I discover this? I read all this in the tea leaves—spearmint for settling my already unsettled stomach—upon receiving your latest letter. The leaves formed a kind of crown, though, when I turned the cup around, I saw that it was not a crown but a fence, a hedge, a knot of vines.
I am so horribly afraid, sister. We have meddled in something larger than we are prepared for. It is a Matter of Kings, of this I am sure. What are such homey tricksters as ourselves doing in this hedge? Surely we will not come out of it whole.
And here I was just thinking we knew what we were about. And I playing with falling in love with an old man. I, who am still young in my heart and giddy.
Fool you, but more fool I not to warn in the letter both top and bottom in code.
Wait! The above was written but an hour ago. An hour. Sixty small minutes. A tick of the human clock. Outside the wind has ceased its moan. The stars are looking coldly down, except for the Red Star. It alone shines like an ember in a long-banked fire.
I have been watching out of my window and feel rather than see something below, coming through the spindly trees. Time is stilled, my sister. The clock that came with this place, stands with its hands clasped at midnight and does not move.
I hear the bells on her horse’s bridle. Just the one horse I think, not the entire Fairie Rade. And what is odder than that—the Queen riding alone along a human street? What is she thinking? Who is she seeking? I am so afraid, I am like a mountain shivering through an avalanche.
So I do the only thing I can. I am sending this message stuffed into a wooden locket, tied with twine to a pigeon’s neck. The hawk did not stay for an answer. In a moment I shall whisper your name and your city and your street in the bird’s ear.
If you do not hear from me again, or if I write and do not say the name of your favorites, consider me dead. She comes now through the trees as if down a straight road. She has already crossed the river of blood, and her coming has stopped all
the clocks of Christendom. Even the recorded holy man on the mosque down the block no longer calls out.
It is a moment of reckoning. I shall not give her your name. I will not tell her where you stay. Not even if she plucks out my too human eyes and replaces them with eyes of wood.
Sister, speak of me with love. It is something the Queen will never do. I send a kiss for eternity. I will not mind the pain as long as you are safe.
Serana
S
parrow plunged her hands into the bathroom sink, the foaming soap clinging to her forearms. She was washing her lingerie—not the cotton panties that were unraveling around the waistband, but the green silk pair, lined with black lace. The bra that matched had a bit of padding to give her too slender body some shape. She almost never wore them, and the few times she had, she’d been too reluctant to go through with any romantic entanglements. Looking up in the steamed mirror, she saw that her normally pale cheeks were pink. The black hair clung to her temples, and her eyes glittered, pale gold grains of pollen still lurking in her eyebrows.