Except the Queen Read online

  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.

  7

  Serana Finds Herself

  The 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 ha
nd. 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.”

  She smiled. “That’s right. Like the golf at Saint Andrews.” Clearly something she said often. If it was an explanation, it meant nothing to me.

  And so we met, my spirit guide to this new and awful Eden, and Miss Jamie Oldcourse became the first of my Helpers. For in this new world, one cannot navigate without them; the rules are so particular, so peculiar, and so dissimilar to the fey’s.

  First there is the Law of Papers. One cannot move, buy food, nest, heal, or otherwise live without papers. And of course I had none.

  Second there is the Law of Restraint. Humans believe in it, the fey do not. Why consider restraint when you have magic that can overcome all restraints at will?

  Third, is the Law of Friendship, which seems to supersede family, sept, clan, or court. It would be a long and hard while before I was to truly understand and trust this.

  Three rules. Three unbelievable rules. But I quickly realized that as I was to live in this place for the unforeseeable future—and that time would be of the Queen’s choosing, not mine—I would have to learn these rules. Even if I did not believe them. This did not make me happy and I told the Glade so.

  She laughed. Again that tinkling, bell-like sound. I have never liked bells. I told her that, too. Which made her laugh anew.

  It was not a good beginning. But at least it was a start.

  8

  Meteora Meets Her Guide

  In the utter darkness of my rumbling prison I passed the longest night I have ever known, one without the comfort of stars or moon. A suffocating heat gathered in damp waves, infused with the sour stench of unwashed humans. I wept noisily until an unseen hand touched mine, sharp nails scratching the inside of my palm. Briefly her eyes flared into reddened coals, the dim light illuminating the hag’s grotesque face.

  “Quiet,” she rasped, her breath pungent with wild garlic and leeks. Her callused hand cupped my cheek, holding it steady before gently raking her gnarled fingers through my sopping hair. “Show your courage, little one, and I will not harm you.”

  In the dark, I obeyed, stifling my sobs. Instinctively, I opened my senses to the aura of the power beside me, but there was only a deep well of nothing. Beneath my breath, I whispered the spell of shielding to hide me from the bold touch of this stranger. The hands continued to comb my hair, the splayed fingers snagging on the knotted tangles. I tried the spell of stabbing pain, followed by a spell of bursting sight. Desperate when none of those worked, I spoke in a loud voice the spell of endless shitting.

  “In the gut, a long, sharp sliver;

  Down and out, the soft brown river,

  Till I cry ‘Hold!’”

  This provoked a loud guffaw that ended in a snarl.

  I froze as the hollowed eyes flared brighter. In the light of those terrifying eyes, I studied her more closely. Her misshapen skull was framed by matted gray hair. The bulbous nose cast a shadow over purple lips that parted to display two yellowed tusks, one broken and jagged. A thick tongue uncurled between rows of tarnished metal teeth and licked my cheek. I sat still, my stomach lurching at the overly familiar gesture. She sat back again, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

  “Ah, bednjaga. It wasn’t enough to cast you out. They stole from you too.”

  “Stole what?” I asked, forcing myself not to reach up and wipe away the damp trail of her tongue.

  “Everything,” she answered. “Now you must rely on good manners. Something your folk have conveniently forgotten.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded, my pride pricked by her insult. “Get away from me, you hearth-hag.”

  Grinning wolfishly, the light of her coal-fire eyes glancing off the metal teeth, she held me fast by the wrist. “Manners!”

  “Help me, help me, good folk,” I cried to the others who were hidden in the shadows. “Help me, I am being attacked!”

  There was no answer. No rustle or movement, not even enough sound to indicate they’d heard but didn’t want to get involved.

  “They sleep,” she said. “Maybe I eat later, maybe not.”

  “I pray thee, Black Annis, daughter of Giants, do not eat me,” I burbled, suddenly very cold. “I am but small and insignificant.”

  She threw back her head and howled with crackling laughter. Beneath the hard knob of her uplifted chin I saw a necklace of delicate finger bones threaded with knuckles small as pearls. My heart leaped in my chest.

  “Not small anymore.” She poked me hard in the ribs. “But I would not eat you. You are not the sweet flesh and wine-blood of man, which is what I crave.”

  I lowered my head in a hasty bow of obeisance and real fear. Of course. I knew her now. “My abject apologies, oh most Glorious Mother of the Woods, Slayer of Wayward Children, and Undefeated Rival of Koschey the Deathless. I apologize. I did not recognize you before, not in this place of iron and wood. I am your humble servant,” I squeaked like a cornered mouse, and then dared her name. “Baba Yaga.”

  “That is better,” she croaked, releasing me with a pat of her hand. She leaned back, all the while sucking on her lower lip, scraping her tusks against the purple flesh. She was wearing odd clothes—odd in the sense that she was wearing any at all—for the little I knew of her, Baba Yaga was not beholden to the fashions of the Seelie court or of man himself. She was old enough to have roamed pristine forests in gleaming nakedness when the first man and first woman still wore their skins in innocence. She could not forgive their betrayal, the death of those perfect forests, and now wore the skin of old age, of mortal corruption, to remind those who encountered her that she had not forgotten.

  Serana and I had seen her once Under the Hill. Accustomed to the cloth of beauty and youth, we were goggle-eyed at her withered hide, her long sagging breasts hanging low over the bony chest. Her hips had jutted like the pelvis of a starved cow, the loose skin of her belly had lapped in folds over the tangled fur of her sex. But her spindled arms were wound wi
th taut ropes of muscles, her hands broad as spades with thick fingers that ended in black nails, sharpened to razor points. At that time she had refused all gifts of clothing the Queen had offered her: the finely woven cloaks with silver clasps, the silken green gowns, the lace chemises and pretty petticoats.

  Serana and I had talked about nothing else for days. How from a leather pouch slung low on her bony hips, Baba Yaga had withdrawn a necklace of little bones and knuckles and placed it around her neck. The court had flinched at the sight of it. Even Red Cap, there as an emissary from the UnSeelie court, bowed his head before the mocking challenge in her flaming eyes. All fell back from her, all except the Queen who bloodied her fine garments carrying the carcass of a new-slaughtered fawn and placing it as an offering in Baba Yaga’s hands.

  “Sleep,” Baba Yaga commanded as we rocked in the swaying box, riding over the iron rails. “Sleep, little one, no harm tonight.”

  I willed my eyes shut, the red flare of her gaze still visible beneath the skin of my lids. Despite her saying I was not her type of meat, I waited in stillness for those taloned hands to tear me to tiny pieces as she had done the slaughtered fawn. We had stood speechless, watching her eat her fill, watching as she rolled the bones into the bloody hide, tying it with the sinews, tossing it into her mortar. She’d climbed in after it. Then, snatching up the heavy pestle, waved it in the air until the mortar hovered a few feet above the ground. The ancient doors that protected our court Under the Hill shattered with a huge blast of splintered wood. She steered her mortar through the ravaged entry, poling the air with the pestle until she found the open sky again.

  Serana had said to me then, “Do not meddle in the affairs of that one, little sister. She will eat you whole and not even spit out the pips.”