Except the Queen Read online

  Praise for

  Except the Queen

  “A magical tale. . . . Unconventional narrative techniques and a full dose of magic and folklore give this urban fantasy a lyrical, mythic feel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A wonderful romp of a book, full of unlikely heroes and heroines, thoroughly nasty villains, and natural magic seen through a kaleidoscope’s eye in vivid, ever-changing detail. . . . The writing is fast-paced and powerful. . . . Except the Queen is indeed a treat for the fantasy lover.”

  —Patricia A. McKillip, author of The Bell at Sealey Head

  “This is a great urban fantasy with an atypical feel to the story line that enhances the otherworldly tale. Fast-paced from the onset, fans will welcome the siblings as each struggles with adjusting to the world of the mortals.”

  —Alternative Worlds

  “Reminiscent of the urban fantasy of Charles de Lint in their ability to blend human characterizations with the world just beyond the borders of human perception, the authors succeed in crafting a modern fairy tale.”

  —Library Journal

  “Jane Yolen really can’t be beat when it comes to traditional fantasy. This is a beautifully written novel.”

  —So Many Books, So Little Time

  “A fantastic read whether you believe in fairy tales or not!”

  —Sacramento Book Review

  “An unexpected delight of a novel. . . . I loved the little surprises along the way to resolution and the unexpectedness of this quiet, beautifully written book.”

  —The Book Smugglers

  EXCEPT

  the

  QUEEN

  Jane Yolen

  and

  Midori Snyder

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in Roc hardcover and trade paperback edition.

  First Roc Mass Market Printing, April 2012

  Copyright © Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder, 2010

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66451-3

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.

  For Terri Windling, Ellen Datlow, Isak Dinesen, Angela Carter, Alice Hoffman, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Pamela Dean, Patricia Wrede, Holly Black, Emma Bull, Patricia McKillip, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Shannon Hale, and all the other sisters of fantasy.

  —JY

  For my mother, Jeanette Snyder, who made sure I knew how to swim in the river of myth and fairy tale.

  —MS

  Table of Contents

  1 The Queen Remembers

  2 Meteora Spills a Secret

  3 Red Cap’s Dark Lord

  4 Queen’s Plaint

  5 Serana’s Expulsion

  6 Meteora Runs Away

  7 Serana Finds Herself

  8 Meteora Meets Her Guide

  9 Serana Moves In

  10 Juan Flores Observes

  11 Meteora Arrives in Town

  12 Meteora’s Home

  13 Sparrow’s Tattoo

  14 Hawk

  15 Sparrow’s Tattoo

  16 Serana’s Doves

  17 Meteora and the Dove

  18 Serana Receives a Message

  19 The Queen Scratches a Name

  20 The Dog Boy Marks His Territory

  21 Sparrow Under the Influence

  22 Meteora Learns About Mail

  23 Meteora Sends a Lesson

  24 Serana and Paperwork

  25 Serana Finds the Post Office

  26 The Dog Boy Seeks But What Does He Find?

  27 Meteora Finds the Changelings

  28 Meteora’s Melancholy

  29 Serana Among the Trees

  30 The Dog Boy Finds

  31 Serana Is Rudely Awakened

  32 Serana’s Scare-bird

  33 Sparrow Buys a Present

  34 Meteora in the Garden, Meets a Jack

  35 The Dog Boy’s Plaint

  36 Serana Sees Portents, Signs

  37 Hawk and Aileen

  38 Meteora Meets Red Cap

  39 Serana Recoils

  40 Hawk Casts a Net

  41 Sparrow at the Crossroads

  42 Sparrow’s Plan

  43 Meteora Has More Questions Than Answers

  44 Summoning the Dog Boy

  45 Serana Decides

  46 Meteora Receives a Present

  47 Sparrow Sleeps

  48 Meteora Insists

  49 The Dog Boy Scratches an Itch

  50 Serana Has Five Days of Peace

  51 Sparrow Steals a Letter

  52 Meteora and the Arum

  53 The Queen Searches

  54 Serana Castigates the Arum, Her Sister, the Boy, the Girl

  55 Sparrow Longs

  56 Robin and Sparrow in the Garden

  57 Meteora Regrets

  58 Sparrow’s Anguish

  59 Hawk’s Discovery

  60 Meteora Enters the Battle

  61 Serana and the Crones

  62 Serana and the Crones Prepare for Battle

  63 Sparrow and the Bananachs

  64 Robin Binds the Wounds

  65 Meteora Moves to Vinnie’s House

  66 Serana in Flight

  67 Dark Passage

  68 The Bridge

  69 Sparrow Begins a New Tale

  70 Meteora Writes a Letter

  71 Three Crones

  About the Authors
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br />   1

  The Queen Remembers

  You are in the forest that is not your own. You squint at its brightness; the sunlight bleaching the familiar green, the scent of the trees dusty as pressed flowers. You have come out of curiosity, and shivering beneath the glamour you are wearing, you roam through the quiet pines and birch. You have left behind your armor, your rank, your power, your great age. Here you are young, beautiful and fragile as the lily, your throat white and perfumed. Birds trill a warning and fall quiet. And then you hear it, a man singing softly under his breath, something tuneless, without true shape to change the world.

  You stop and wait, frozen as the deer, for this is what you have come to see, to learn, to experience. For an eternity you have existed in another time, but now you are in this moment, and desire burns away the practiced control.

  You see him weaving in and out of the sunlight, his chestnut hair stippled like a fawn’s hide. Yet he moves purposefully, hunting for you. You can smell the oil of his rifle, cradled in the crook of his arm. Alarm prickles your skin, crying run. But you will not. You want to see what happens. You want to know what it feels like, that pain that is human love, that weakness that binds stronger than spells. You, who have never given so much as a mustard seed of power for free, you have come to give yourself away.

  The man moves into the clearing and hesitates as if he knows you are there. And why should he not feel you? Have you not come here the last three days to spy on him? He is well made, with a comely face that pleases you. He is dressed like an oriole, the dark wool of his coat partially covered by a shrill orange that makes it easy to spot him even in the brush.

  You study his face, wondering if you can allow yourself this indulgence. All the others have had their dalliances, their madcap affairs—everyone except the Queen. But you are here now and strangely calm as he turns toward you. You raise your arm and the dun-colored sleeve covers your face as you bend from your supple waist. You hold your breath for you hear the soft snick of the gun, feel its eye upon you, and you brace yourself for the stinging touch of iron.

  The shot cracks the air open like a nut and it is too late to change your mind. You cry out as the bullet passes beneath your ribs and out your back. How could you have known it would hurt so much? Blood spills, staining your white shift crimson and you fall into a nest of autumn-bitten bushes. You can hear him now, running toward you, the gun dropped behind him when you screamed. Already he bleeds too; despair, hope, and love spilling out for you as he runs to where you wait, wounded in the bloodstained green.

  2

  Meteora Spills a Secret

  In the Greenwood, the fey do not write accounts of their own doing. Yes, we have bards whose entire lives are spent composing heroic verses to praise those we claim as heroes or those great and terrible loves that have nearly destroyed whole clans. Yes, we have history. But we do not care much for personal memory. When you live each day as we do, nearly immortal, there is no day that is unlike the other, there are no rites of passage but those of the seasons, there is no memory of consequence. Each day is the same tale, so there is no need to remember it at all.

  But the Queen has requested that my sister Serana and I chronicle our time in the world and so it must be. And in this body unexpectedly aged by exile, it is indeed comforting to record these events for myself and my sister. We can no longer return to what had been for us a blithe and pretty life among the green. We have been transformed by exile that made us strangers dependent on the generosity of other strangers quite unlike ourselves. Our fey lives have been deepened with the tincture of mortality.

  How it began was simple enough. Serana and I had escaped to the edge of the Greenwood, looking for sport. Lovesick boys wandered in these margins, saplings with sad eyes and dirty nails. There were rough-hewn men sometimes, but then, we were strong enough in magic to tame those flat-footed satyrs into playmates. We were beautiful then; our bodies fleshed full and ripe, skin scented with honeysuckle, and shoulders dusted with amber pollen. Bees kissed our mouths and our lips as ruby as pomegranate seeds.

  On that day we heard the moans and the soft slap of skin against skin before we saw the couple. Serana, her berry-black eyes wide with delight, placed a finger against her lips to remind me to be still. I suppressed the giggle, though it bubbled in my throat. We crept silently through the brush, following the sound, stopping only when we had reached the boundary between our world and theirs. The green shadows hid us in the leafy arms of a viburnum, its tiny fruit dangling like drops of blood.

  On a field of cut grass, someone had spread out a blanket, and on the blanket was a golden-haired child in a pale blue dress sleeping soundly on her back. Pretty thing she was, with pouting lips, creamy round cheeks touched in the middle with a bright red blush. Serana and I exchanged looks and I knew what she was thinking—that we should steal her; bring her back to court as our precious pet, our wild strawberry.

  We glanced around and realized that the couple had indeed slipped into the woods a little way so as not to disturb the napping child. Their moans were reaching a crescendo, something that of course amused us even more than the child. We crawled through the bushes and parting the branches, we saw them.

  It was known that the Queen did not engage in carnal play as the rest of us did. She held herself aloft, as though her power and her crown made her untouchable to such passionate fires. Or so we had thought. Even as I write this now, I am struck remembering how vulnerable she looked in his arms—head thrown back, the pulse of her veins against the white skin, her shimmering hair falling on the ground like spilt honey from the comb.

  And the man? Mortal, we knew by the gamey smell that prickled our noses. We were shocked into laughter. Imagine our haughty, Highborn Queen rolling in the dirt with a common man. I recall very little of his looks, only that we could not fathom how this man had found favor enough in the eyes of the Queen that she should shield the brilliance of her power beneath a glamour intended to make her seem ordinary as a haymaker. And I know that even as we choked on the surprised laughter, the sound escaped in peals that rang clear as a wind chime disturbed by a breeze.

  The child began to cry. The couple sat up, dazed for a moment. Wariness hardened the man’s features as his eyes searched for us. We were not afraid of him, for we knew he could never see us in the Greenwood. But the Queen could and before she could rise from the ground, Serana grabbed my hand and we ran, scampering through the dense brush like squirrels back to our own nests.

  The Queen was cold and merciless and we knew that punishment would be swift and unpleasant if we were found. So all that day and night we hid in the hollowed trunk of a knotted pine, our arms wrapped around each other, fearing the sound of her hunting horns. Serana whispered hiding spells softly over and over, and I—for once—was very quiet.

  But except for the patter of rain that fell on the second day, the Greenwood remained silent of rumor. On the third day we came to the conclusion that perhaps we had escaped unseen. And perhaps, if we kept the secret to ourselves and told no one, the Queen might never know that it was us who had spied upon her in the woods.

  “You must never tell,” Serana warned. “The Queen will not forget this.”

  * * *

  WE RETURNED TO COURT AS innocent as lambs. Seasons came and went, and though there were many times I wanted to spill our secret while frolicking with a new playmate, I did as my sister instructed and remained quiet about it. But my cheek twitched during the solemn court rituals to see the Queen standing at regal attention, so unlike that time in the woods. And then I would feel Serana’s hot gaze, the stern set of her lips beneath her flashing eyes, reminding me to forget that old secret once and for all.

  But an arrow loosed in the world must eventually find its mark, and there are few secrets that do not eventually fly into the shell of an ear.

  I was napping in a field, when through my dreaming I overheard a pack of boogans talking as they set traps on a farmer’s field.

  “D
o ya think he’s the one? You know, the one that giped the old girl. Aww . . . can you imagine that, then? Her on her back, legs to the sky. What a sight, eh?”

  “Nah,” chaffed another voice. “She said it were a different man. Not a farmer.”

  “What then?”

  “The mason, you know, a man who lays the bricks.”

  The boogans were guffawing now. “He laid her, ’tis true. Trowel in hand, he stuffed her, he did, working that yellow hair of hers into the dirt, while the babe wailed in its cradle.”

  From the depths of sleep I blurted out, “What did Serana tell you about the Queen and her man?” I sat up and rubbed my eyes, confused. Then turned in horror to see the boogans, stunned into silence.

  They stared at me slack-jawed, their bottom tusks more in evidence than usual. They were surprised as much by my question as by my sudden resurrection in the field. But their expressions quickly turned sly, then nasty, the leers splitting their faces till they looked like frogs.

  “Oy, then, so the Queen herself is a-laying with the mason. Busy man he is. And she got with a wailing baby too. Now that is news!”

  “No, you misunderstood me. Not the Queen.” I tried to call the words back into my mouth.

  “You said the Queen. Your sister was it told you?” The boogans snickered. “We all heard you and anyway who cares if it’s true or not? It’s a good lark. And we’ll just blame the pair of you if we get caught.” Their heads goggled excitedly. “Let’s away then, boogans, there’s more tricks afoot to be played with this thread of news than watching a farmer’s old nag turn lame in one of our holes.”

  They dashed away into the green and I knew that within a heartbeat, the story would grow and I would be the root of it no matter how far the branches spread, or how bright the leaves of the tale unfurled. I spoke from a dream and there it was, the secret nocked to the quickest arrow in the quiver. There was nothing I could do to stop the rumor. I had to find my sister to warn her. We needed to hide, somewhere safe from the Queen’s wrath. The Highborn clans were gathering at the Great Hall, Under the Hill, and I prayed that we might have the chance to scamper while they were so engaged.