Metro Winds (32 page)

‘I have not told you what I want,' I objected.

‘You will desire what you find at the end of this passage, I swear it,' he responded fiercely.

‘On your mother's soul?' I demanded, deciding he was teasing me.

His eyes widened at my words and he said, ‘Oh yes, on my mother's soul. I do swear it.'

Cloud-Marie threw a silken coverlet over the bed and I regarded the result of our labours with some satisfaction. A hundred part-stuffed mattresses still rose high, but now the bed looked merely quirky rather than grotesque.

We went to the kitchen, for I had decided to cook the meal my son's chosen would eat with my own hands. As I worked at kneading dough, I found myself remembering vividly how confused I had been when the handsome stranger in the lane had suddenly ended our conversation by walking away without trying to give me his telephone number so that I could let him know I had delivered the armlet. I had watched him go, wondering if he would glance back, but he had not.

My husband had told me later, when we lay twined and tenderly dissecting the steps that had led me to his bed, that his mother had forbidden him to look back once he had given me her token, saying if he did, I would be lost to him.

‘She was right, Ranulf,' I told him, startled. ‘If I had seen you look back, I would have suspected you meant to creep down the lane after me and rob me, or worse, I might not have gone along the lane after all.'

His response had been to lick my naked shoulder like a cat. Ignoring the way his tongue roused my senses, I persisted, asking why he had shown himself to me at all, for I might well have gone along the lane of my own accord, rather than turning back.

‘I had to be the one to invite you into Faerie,' he'd murmured.

‘How could the mere suggestion that I go along the lane be counted an invitation?' I demanded. ‘I did not see it as an invitation.'

He tenderly peeled a strand of sweat-stiff hair from my cheek, and kissed me with his cool lips before saying, ‘Of course you knew it was an invitation. I offered the ring and you accepted it. You did not understand why I had given it you, but you were curious and so accepted it. Curiosity is a form of courage, my love, and that is one of the essential ingredients for a maid who would enter the Princess Chamber. How else would she dare the spindles and locked doors of the tests leading up to it?'

‘What did it show that I chose the central path when the lane split into three?' I had wanted to know then. ‘I didn't make my choice out of any special wisdom or instinct. Was it luck that had me choose the right way?'

‘There was no right and no wrong choice. All three choices would have brought you to the Wolfsgate. There was only the need to choose. You see, humans generally act according to the ends that they imagine will come of their actions. The Threeways Path strips away the illusion that reason controls destiny. You would be surprised how many people, faced with the knowledge that reason cannot help them, find they cannot act. Many feel that in turning back to known ways, they retain control. A few stand indecisive, realising that even turning back is a choice filled with mysteries. They are the wiser, but if they stand too long, the Cruel Wind will come to drive them back to their own world just as it will blow at the back of those who retreat at once.'

‘What if you had chosen a faerie with mortal blood?' I asked, for though I had not been there long enough to meet other mortals who had crossed, I knew they existed.

‘I might have done, but it was my mother's advice that I hunt a mortal woman.'

That had surprised me, for I had secretly felt his mother looked down on me because I lacked even a drop of faerie blood. ‘She would not have had to face the Threeways Path,' I said.

‘Only princess candidates who are mortal face that particular test, but there are other tests for those of faerie blood. Each test, and the response of the candidate to it, is an ingredient in the spell that will be wrought by the Princess Chamber, and there are many ingredients, some stronger than others. There are some deeds done in response to tests that are so potent they require no other ingredient, though that is rare and cannot be predicted or relied upon.

I set the bread to its first rising and cleaned down the bench, pondering the tests I would set for my son's chosen, and wondering what sort of spell she and I would make between us. This done, I helped Cloud-Marie slice quinces for a pie and cut up wild mushrooms we then doused with spiced marinade. The shared activity and the smells of yeast and sherry and caramelised sugar made me think of Yssa, for it was from her that I learned to enjoy cooking.

She had treated it as if it were an art to delight all the senses, and so it had become for me, under her tutelage. She had been so honestly horrified to hear how I had fed myself before I stole the magic cloth from my husband, that I had become ashamed of my carelessness. In truth I had not known any better, because my own stiff mother had despised cooking as a bourgeois pursuit and cared not at all what she ate.

Yssa had liked the ease of the food conjured by the cloth well enough, but despite being faerie, she had preferred to cook our meals herself. I had not known enough back then to understand how unusual that was, but abashed by her reaction, I had dutifully offered to help her. However, guided by her pleasure in the activity and her skill, I soon began to look forward to those meals we cooked between us. It was Yssa who made me understand that cooking is to eating what painting a picture is to merely looking at it. She made me see that cooking was as wholesome and nourishing to the spirit as good food is to the body.

After her departure, with two children to care for, I had neither time nor patience for cooking and let the art and the love of it slip from me, relying on my magic cloth to nourish us all. It was long since I had cooked, but I had not forgotten what Yssa had taught me. In the midst of the fragrant heat of the kitchen, I felt such a longing for the faerie woman who had been my best friend in this world, in any world.

Yet when she had come to the door of the palace kitchen when I had been there one day early in my marriage, whey-faced and grim, I had no notion of how much she would come to mean to me. Still, I must have sensed what lay in the future, for surely it was not only out of pity that I invited her in, deliberately breaking the protective seal about the King's Palace which prevents anyone or anything entering without royal permission. When he returned from his questing, my husband was annoyed. A queen could ask anyone into the palace, he later explained, but no queen had ever done such a thing without first consulting her husband. I begged his pardon and then teased him for his pomposity. But later, when I mimicked his words for Yssa, she said soberly that the king was right, for the ban was there to protect me.

‘I need no protection,' I had laughed, for in those days I was loved well by the people.

I remember Yssa's reply.

‘You are a mortal for all you are the queen. Not all in Faerie love mortals.'

As Cloud-Marie set down the comb and began brushing my hair, I told myself that Yssa would have shared my disappointment in the first girl my son hunted, for she turned out to be little more than a coarse child.

She had been born in Faerie of the granddaughter of a mortal woman and a faerie man, peasant farmers who dwelt not far from the palace. I had learned this by smearing onto my mirror a gob of a magical preparation which one of the queens had given me.

I had finished all of my preparations and sat gazing into the mirror at my son, as he embraced his milkmaid with her rosy cheeks and soft round bosom. I saw how her foolish wide blue eyes bulged as he thrust the bespelled ring into her hands and began fumbling at her milky bosom. Seeing him paw her, I felt sorry I had allowed him to take a human shape, yet clearly she was amenable to his rough kisses. But when she tried to slip the bespelled ring on her finger, it would not fit over her thick knuckles.

My son scowled and snatched the ring back, running to the barn to hammer at it. When he brought the poor battered thing back and forced it on her finger, her mouth fell open as she listened to the instructions it offered. I watched my son lead her to the edge of the Wolfsgate Valley closest to the palace and point to the King's Palace, which would appear to her as nothing more than a mansion with spires and turrets. His chosen nodded eagerly and galloped off. Having the use of magic, she suffered no more than a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the nose in the course of the next three days, as my son, now beast-shaped, drove her hither and thither to keep her moving, at the same time making sure she would not be far from the Endgate on the third dusk.