Except the Queen (4 page)

I threw myself on the floor, reaching out a tentative hand to touch the doe-white skin of her foot.

“Oh Gracious Queen, our Queen, your worthless servant begs you—”

It was useless of course. Even as I had begun pleading, the Queen spit forth a banishing spell that pierced my flesh the way summer hail shreds the tender leaves. Groveling in pain, I wept quicksilver tears, unable to speak further.

A murderous clap of thunder hurled me from light into dark, from mist into mire. I groaned, my cape soaked through, my face pressed into the soggy earth. I turned on my back, and gasped as rain pelted my cheeks, and pooled in my eyes. I reached out a hand for protection from its stinging cold, seeing only the thrashing branches of storm-tossed trees.

“C’mon, Grandma!” a shrill voice shouted. “Get up, damn it! I can’t carry you.” A small hand tugged at mine, now grown swollen and useless.

Dazed, I struggled to my feet, only distantly wondering where the Queen had exiled me.

“C’mon!” the voice insisted and I looked down through the sheeting rain barely able to make out a girl-child, feral from the look of her matted hair and ragged clothing. “Hey, somebody give me a hand with this one!” she whined.

From the rain-soaked bushes came an explosion of small bodies, some human children by their clothes, some spriggets and hobs, their naked pelts slick with rain. I balked like a nag refusing to plow but they shoved, cursed, and finally kicked me into motion.

I lumbered down a steep embankment, the girl-child tugging frantically at my hand as though we were being chased by unseen demons. Infected by her fear, I stumbled over root and mud to catch up to her.

“Get down,” the girl ordered.

Aided by other hands tugging on my cape, I was pulled to my knees and then forced to lie prostrate in the drenched grass. Twin ribbons of light swooped over us and when the night returned to darkness and rain, the children helped me to my feet again.

“Who are you?” I asked, finding the sound of my voice strange—thick and husky, as if I had caught a human chill.

“Later, when there’s time. We have to get you over first.”

“Let’s go! Or we’ll miss the train!” shouted a lanky boy, his hair shaved into spiral patterns over his skull.

“You gotta run,” commanded the girl who was still holding my hand.

I started to trot with a clumsy gait, when I saw again the twin lights approaching. “Wait! Wait!” I shouted, trying to drag my companions to a halt.

“Aw, shit. We got no time for this,” the boy yelled and slapped me on my flanks. “Run, now! Or we’re all dead!”

I ran nearly insensate with terror, as the children dragged me by the hand over a gravel path and across a hard road to the other side. Midway, blazing lights captured us in a net of silver rain, a horn blared an alarm, and the monster screeched and swerved, but still we ran, our bare feet pounding the unyielding roadway, until we had crossed over.

Crossed over . . .

I was panting, the breath knocked from my chest, my feet burning from the hard slab of the road. But the children continued to push and pull, curse and cajole, dragging me farther into the woods on that other side until again we were on the crest of a hill. Below us on the edge of an open field, I could just make out the rails of iron
gouging the earth. Even on the hill, I tasted the bitterness of rust.

Looking around wildly, I realized that I was now alone with the children, for the spriggets and hobs had not ventured onto the road. They had been there only to see me off into my exile, no doubt to report back to the Queen that I was now fully lost to the Greenwood.

“Let’s go,” said the lanky boy, grabbing my arm at the elbow.

I resisted his grasp and stumbled back onto the ground. “I pray do not kill me thusly. Do not tie me to the iron that her hands may be clean of such a shameful death. For though I have wronged the Queen, I do not deserve this. Give me a dagger of silver and let me end my disgrace with some honor.”

Another girl, this one with hair rolled into a hundred braids like the mane of a fairy horse, clasped my face in her small hands. She leaned in close so that I could see her simple, heart-shaped face in the dark. “We’re supposed ta help you. Not kill you. You gotta trust us. There will be wood over the rails and you’ll sit on that and the iron won’t burn you. I promise.”

“You’re changelings, aren’t you?”

“Once, but not anymore.” She shrugged, releasing me.

“Tossed out like the trash,” retorted a third girl in a dress of pieced furs.

“Shut it,” snapped the boy. “Didn’t she promise to bring us back if we helped?”

“Who promised?” I asked.

“No time for talk. The red-eye’s almost here,” the boy said. He grabbed at my cloak, roughly bringing me to my feet again.

A shrill whistle screamed over our heads. The children were moving at once, dragging me in their tow to where the path of rails curved away into the forest again. An iron dragon screeched as it rumbled over the rails, steam exploding around the long segmented body snaking across the field.

Now we were running toward it, and though I gagged at the stench of its bellowing breath, I let the children pull me alongside its slow-moving flanks. The boy was searching as each armored segment passed, until at last a long wooden tail appeared. A door slid open in its side and a stout pair of arms reached out with expectant hands.

“Take a hold and jump in,” the children shouted.

Before I could protest, those broad-fingered hands grabbed my wrists, and I was forced to run faster alongside the open door or fall beneath the dragon’s churning belly and onto the iron rails.

“Jump! Jump!” came shouts from all sides.

I pulled in a gasping, painful breath and jumped . . . landing hard on the threshold of the door. My legs dangled uselessly over the edge behind me, my arms nearly wrung from their sockets, my stomach roiling against the poisonous iron. I flailed like a reluctant mermaid. But the grip on my wrists remained tight, nails digging in and cutting the flesh.

The iron dragon picked up speed, and I was relieved when at last I felt the planks of dried oak beneath my cheek and thighs. Effortlessly, the huge hands hoisted me up until my back rested against a wooden wall that rattled and bucked as the iron dragon galloped over the rails.

“Good. You have come,” said a gruff voice, chuckling. Actually it was more of a growl and the sound of it lifted the hair on my beck.

I stared up at my rescuer, visible in the flashes of distant lightning. Long hair billowed in the wind, sweeping across the rough-hewn features of a hag. In the middle of her broad forehead, thick brows met over a bulbous nose. The mouth was a wide grin filled with glimmering teeth above a knobbed chin. Between the black strands of drifting hair, the eyes flared red like embers ignited by a gust of wind.

“Who are—?”

“Shut the door!” a man’s voice barked and two others
rose from the shadowed recess of our hold to push their shoulders into the heavy wooden door, so that sky, the rain, and even the faintest hint of light were obliterated.

Only the eyes of my rescuer, still holding my gaze, continued to burn.

T
he sun rose and as I lay in the nest of covers, I heard the dawn chorus struggling through what I would later come to know as glass. It was not spring of course, where birdsong pulses with life and invitation. Now they sing more quietly, in anticipation of autumn, bidding one another safe passage to the summer lands far away.

But for the moment, they were so muffled, I believed that this strange enchantment had somehow stifled the very birds.

And then I saw again those hands that I had concluded were my own. Rough. Plump. Squared fingers. Aching joints. With not a bit of the old, familiar magic in them, the magic that used to rush along the blue rivers down the back of my hands and the front of my wrists.

I turned my palms up and then down, as if by moving my hands, I could make them change back to the way they had been in the Greenwood. But they remained horrid, gross, inert troll hands. To look at them made me shudder.

Now, we fey understand glamour. We live our lives surrounded by it. We wear our young faces, our lithe bodies without consciously thinking about how we got them or why. They are as they are. We are so painted with the stuff of glamour that every movement elicits desire, every cough a laugh, every tear an ocean. We know we
are glamoured, but we forget it as well. It is simply a cloak against the cold, a mask to hide the ugly. We do not think of the stink of a cave full of bones, or how dim it is. It is to us as well as any viewer a palace of diamond-sharp lights and the overwhelming scent of roses, for glamour makes it so. We do not feel how coarse leaves are against the skin, or how prickly the nest we lie in. Silk and down is what we see. We fool ourselves that we gain succor from dew, the taste sometimes sweet, sometimes tart when there is no taste at all.

Magic disguises. Magic contrives. Magic convinces.

And I had no magic now. My rigid, aching fingers told the truth. When a carer—young and pretty in a red striped overgown—gave me a mirror, the fat, old lady looking back at me told me the truth.

At first I’d thought she was some visitor come to beg a potion from me, like the old ones wanting surcease from wanting. I thought her a stranger until I watched her speak the very words that were in my mouth. Over and over and over again until even I
had
to understand.

She said/I said, “Where is this place?”

She said/I said, “Who are you?”

She answered/I answered, “I do not know.”

But I knew.

The woman was me. I shook my fist at her and she shook hers back.

And then I cried.

Yet even as I wept, I watched her in the mirror and it was not pretty oceans that fell from my dark eyes, just a drizzle of snot from my nose, and tears like globules of fat running down my large cheeks. And hers.

I lay back down heavily on the bed. Looked down at the flaxseed cloth on my body, this body, this sunken, fallen, flabby body. And knew that for me, for some reason, there was no glamour anymore.

And while I was engrossed in my misery, all alone, the young carer long gone to others needing her, a knock sounded on the door, like a knell. A voice spoke so cheerily, like tinkling bells, I wondered briefly if I were
wrong. Perhaps there
was
still some glamour in the human world.

“Hello! I’m here to help you. May I come in?”

Of course with magic, entrance must always be asked for, before it can be offered. I have known this since . . . well, since forever. No one except the Queen can enter unbidden. Though the carers had—the girl with the mirror, the mean woman with the needle of sleep.

I looked up and saw Miss Jamie Oldcourse for the first time. Plain-faced, plainspoken Jamie Oldcourse, with a body like a twisted oak and a face like a peach left too long in the sun and sunken in upon itself. Still, her voice belied her ugliness, her lameness, and she had a name like a glade, or a lea. For the first time in my life, I had nothing to say.

Miss Jamie Oldcourse did not seem to notice that I was suddenly tongue-tied, or at least she did not let that stop her. Even without my offering, she walked in as if she were the Queen, and sat down next to me on the bed. She took my hand in hers. Her skin was peachlike, too, soft and slightly fuzzed. I let her keep my hand. Indeed, without magic I had no will to take it away.

“Now, dear,” she said, and I heard for the first time behind the sweetness, that hint of sour. Or maybe it was a hint of strength. Hard to tell. “Now, dear,” she said, “no one seems to know your name.”

“One does not give away a name just for the asking,” I replied, firmly. It is the first thing a fey learns. “Or one gives away power.”

“Power,” she said and smiled. Then nodding wisely added, “People of the street must find power in small things.”

“I am not of the street,” I answered back. “I am of the hill and the trees, the moonlight and . . .”

Still smiling, she interrupted, “Then give me something I may call you,” she said with a smile. “
Hey you
seems so awkward.”

It did not seem awkward to me, but I looked over at the mirror again and this time saw just my face and neck
and a bit of my shoulder. I gave her the name of
that
thing, with the fat cheeks and the wattle.

“Maybelle,” I said, thinking of a farmer’s cow not far from our grove. A brown-and-white cow with enormous dugs and big dark eyes. In this body, I looked remarkably like her. “The farmer’s Maybelle.”

“Mabel Farmers,” she said, trying out the name. “A name not much used these days. But I think it suits you.”

Oh what a coil, what a curse is naming. But suddenly I was stuck with Mabel. I thought:
Next I shall have to eat grass and moo
.

“And I am Jamie Oldcourse,” she said, freely handing over her name without fear I might use it or abuse it. “
Ms.
Oldcourse. Your social worker.”

I spat out her name, at the same time thinking of her as a toad, a tadpole, something silly and insignificant. Waiting for the change . . . which did not come. I shook my finger at her. I made a puff-mouth at her. And still she did not change. I said a word of transformation in the Old Tongue, then in the Middle Tongue. And
still
she did not change. She was right not to fear me. I had no magic anymore. Not an inch of it, not an ounce. I said her name again, this time with a kind of resignation. “Miss Jamie Oldcourse.”