Except the Queen (6 page)

“We spied her rutting with a mortal.”

“And you told?” she asked, one eyebrow lifted in amazement.

“I didn’t mean to,” I protested and then hung my head. It was my fault.
My
fault. Under the witch’s unrelenting gaze, I accepted that terrible truth. My fault, yet both—Serana and I—were paying for it.

Baba Yaga waited with bemused curiosity. Small flames flickered in the pale blue eyes. “So now you need help.”

My pulse quickened with reckless hope. “Yes, help,” I answered, forgetting my fear of the old witch in my desperation to change my fate and that of my sister.

Baba Yaga was silent, as though waiting for something else.

Manners
, I thought, frightened. And then:
A gift
. But how could I hope to parley for help with nothing to offer in return? My heart sank. I had nothing that might have interested her.

Baba Yaga yawned noisily to show her growing impatience, and I saw the broken tusk protruding through the mortal mask she wore. I murmured thanks to magpie habits and promptly dug around in the folds of my waistband while Baba Yaga watched me with renewed interest.

“I have a gift for you,” I said, and retrieved the pinkish lozenge of copper. I showed it to Baba Yaga, who frowned.

“What do I do with this?”

“It’s copper and will mold to your—your broken tooth. It will make it whole.”

“Let me taste.” She snatched it from my hand and placed it on her tongue. She rolled it in her mouth, from side to side as though it were a sweet. Rumbling with pleasure, she nodded her head. “I like it.” She spit the copper lozenge into her palm and began kneading it until it was soft. Then she folded it around the broken shaft of her tusk, shaping it to match its twin.

She continued to run her long tongue over the thin seam between copper and tusk until it appeared bonded and whole. Smacking her lips, she grinned. “Yes, I like this gift. I
will
help. And you, if you are wise, will survive. If not,” she shrugged . . . “
someone
will eat you.” She guffawed and slapped her thigh.

Then she looked me up and down. “Okay . . . first we dress you. No longer a little wood poppet. Now you are babushka—old lady, like me.” She reached into the leather bag slung over her shoulder and began to pull out garment after garment—far more than should have been able to be stored in such a small satchel. There were things I had never seen before, much less knew how to put on. Something to bind my breasts, to cover my sex, to swaddle my legs and arms; in short to hide the body that was once my pride and was now my shame.

J
amie Oldcourse tidied the papers—Law number one. She had me sign on this line and that. Though it took me some while to remember to put the name Mabel instead of Serana there, she seemed not to notice.

“Take your time,” she said. “I’m unfazed by your slowness.”

Unfazed
.
What a fine word.
It had a fey quality that I liked, a sense of magic and unmagic, Seelie and UnSeelie.

After all was signed, Jamie Oldcourse said, “Now to get you out of that hospital gown.”

Gown!
As if this short, thin, open-backed, gray, flimsy excuse for a covering had even a nodding acquaintance with a gown. I remembered gowns that were silk, the colors of sunrise, with rose-petal softness, and bedecked with water jewels. I reached for the little piece of silk on the bedside table, all I had of my old life. Picking it up, I rubbed it against my cheek.

“Now, now,” Jamie Oldcourse said, taking the silken patch from me, “let’s get you dressed in real clothes.”

Then she pushed and prodded me into human dressing. I suppose there was a kind of reality to them. They were scratchy, heavy, sogged with old perspiration and the breath of whatever human had worn them before me.

Unfazed
, I tried to pull the neckline down, kirtle the
skirt, roll the long sleeves up. Jamie Oldcourse laughed that tinkling bell laugh and warned me about tearing anything off when in public.
Law number two: Restraint
. I doubted I would ever learn that one.

And as Jamie Oldcourse was all the people I knew in the human world, I had to trust her.
Law number three
. My sister, my clan and sept—all the fey that I had known—were dead to me; my court locked and barred behind me. The green world gone. So I would, all
unfazed
, be Jamie Oldcourse’s friendly cow till I could get myself home again, however long that might take.

“Now,” she announced, as I stood in my uncomforting clothes, “we need a place for you. You aren’t sick any longer so the hospital can’t keep you. And I’m damned if I’ll let you back on the street. So we are off to get you somewhere to stay.”

I noticed she did not say
home
. I knew—
she
knew—that whatever
place
she found for me could not be called that, and I was grateful for her restraint. I grabbed up my piece of silk and stuffed it into the pocket of my human dress, hiding away the last of my feyness from prying eyes.

“What we want,” Jamie Oldcourse went on, ignoring what I had done with the silk as if I had actually been able to disguise my action with magic. “What we want,” she repeated as if the two of us were going to be living there together, “is some place high enough above the road that you can breathe. Close to the shops. And some trees.”

I nodded. I understood breath and trees, but what
shops
were I was still to find out.

“Yes,” I said.

She smiled. I had not used that word with her before. “Yes,” she repeated, “and I think I know just the place.”

*   *   *

I
T WAS A STREET THAT
had no name, but a number. Now we fey call things by names that make and unmake: Under the Hill, Sun’s Crossing, The Waters of Regret,
Way of the Deer. But give a lane or a lea or a place only a number? Unthinkable! Yet it turns out it is a very human thing to do. A kind of counting I do not yet fathom.

Jamie Oldcourse and I walked from the hospital, not more than a quarter mile, but my lumpy, bumpy, aching body protested every step. Her twisted, limping body made its passage with more ease and grace than mine. Was it only because she was long accommodated to it and I was not? Or was it some subtler magic than that? I squared my shoulders and looked straight ahead. If I had to be forced to live in this shape, I would take my lessons from her, and not from the Queen’s punishing hand.

The noise around us was appalling: squawks and squeals, honkings and squonkings, and a series of loud wails. More than once I put my hands to my ears.

Let the rivers run through me
, I whispered.
Let them stop the sounds
.

“Here we are,” Jamie Oldcourse said in her soft chime that yet muted the terror-noise of the street. Almost like a spell, I thought.

She stopped before a narrow brick house fairly shoved in between two stark buildings made of glass and metal. There were three or four thin trees planted on the walk outside. I reached out to touch the trunk of one of them, just to feel the green marrow within. A slight coolness ran through my fingers, nothing more, where once power would have leaped greenly into my hand.

On a branch above my head, a dove sat cooing to itself. Like most birds—all excepting owls, jays, rooks, ravens, and crows—it had little to say. Little, that is, beyond
food
,
sleep
,
fly
! But it did open an eye when I touched the tree. I am certain the dove recognized me for what I am, or at least what I had been, for it nodded its head and fluffed out its feathers.

I looked back,
unfazed
. “Should I go in?” I asked the bird.

It cooed an answer. “Eat, sleep, fly well, Old One.”

Old one!
I shivered palpably.

“At least there are trees,” I said.

“There are indeed.” She took out a small golden key and put it in a hole in the door. I heard something click.

“Now, lift the latch,” she said, “and go in. I will follow.”

Using the long sleeve to cover my left hand to keep it safe from the iron latch, I lifted the handle, pushed the door, and walked in, with Jamie Oldcourse in my wake.

We climbed three sets of stairs—me breathing rather too heavily for such a small climb—and there, at the top of the building, was a green door, always a good sign. Jamie opened it with another key, this one gray as stone. Gold and silver. Another good sign. Breathing heavily herself, she pushed the door open and ushered me through. “I hope you like it. It’s one of the nicer places.”

There were but four small rooms, colored improbable shades of pink, like old, blown roses. The walls felt too close, and crowded in like the sides of a cave. The UnSeelie folk may live in caves, but we of the Seelie court prefer the open spaces under the hill and over it. Still, there were windows in the front room looking down onto the trees, and water running from strange taps in a cooking corridor. The water tasted a bit off, not like the springs I was used to, but with a metallic burn. At least it was plentiful. Jamie Oldcourse showed me the cooker and the cooler. I could only guess at their functions, but I knew I would have time to explore once she left.

There was a nestlike bed in the small back room, but the window in that room looked out onto another building. Anyone might spy in while I slept. Anyone could fly from their nest into mine. With no magic, I could not make myself safe. I knew I could not sleep in there. But Jamie Oldcourse said nothing about my having to leave the bed where it was, so I determined to move it to the front room before I passed a night in my place.

My place
. I had already agreed, of course. The green door. The gold and silver keys. That was enough to convince my senses that I could at least make a nest of it.

Still, it was not
home.
Never home. Just a place of my own.

“Yes,” I said to Jamie Oldcourse. “Yes.”

It is a word that evidently means much to humans. And to be honest, at that very moment, it meant much to me as well.

*   *   *

S
O SHE LEFT ME THERE
, with the two keys that must have had iron at the core, so I had to pop them immediately into the pocket of my skirt. She gave me as well a handful of paper that she called money, telling me to spend it carefully on what I needed; me who has always spent my magic freely and with great ease, and who rarely needed anything at all.

“There will be more later, but this will tide you over now,” she said.

I clutched them tightly, which seemed to be the proper thing to do, for she smiled.

Then I listened as her footsteps went down the steps, and I heard the snick of the door open and then close. I thought about going to the window in the front room to watch her go along the numbered street, but instead I sat on a soft nesty chair and looked over the money in my hands. They were a strange green covered with writing and human likenesses and numbers I did not understand. I worried that they might be like fairy gold that one has to use quickly or it is gone.

What did I
need
? I already had a nest and water. I had clothing I did not like, but at least it disguised this sagging body. I was warm enough, high enough. And I was alone at last, to think, to feel, to plan.
And to mourn
. I missed the Greenwood, the meadows, the dances, the joy. I even missed Will of the Feather. But most of all I missed Meteora, my other self. I wanted to be angry with her, for it was her loose tongue that had brought me to this miserable fate. But I could not hold such anger against her. She was breath and blood to me, and I knew that in all likelihood, she too had not escaped the
Queen’s rage. My silly, little sister, out in the wilds of the world. What would become of her?

Suddenly I recalled the last words the Queen had shouted:

Was it meant as a spell? Or a curse designed to keep us forever apart? Tears welled in my eyes.

And as I was deep in these mournful maunderings, my stomach made a horrible sound. Of course, I did not recognize it at first. Under the Hill there is no hunger. When we want honey or mead or a sip of dew, a taste of berries, mushrooms—they are simply there. Wish and get. And in the hospital, regularly at times even I could recognize, I had been brought platters of things to eat. Of course in the hospital, it was not food I liked. Still, it was edible, and some of it had an almost pleasing sweetness, like the brown drink they called hot chocolate, though why it was called “hot” I do not know. It was tepid at best.

Nevertheless
, here in my new place, my body kept protesting. I placed my hand atop my belly—a belly so pouchy and distended that I did not want to look at it without clothes on. Still, as I felt the sound under my hand, I suddenly knew it for what it was. I had heard animals and humans make that sound. No—not the angry sound, but that other one. A growl. It made me laugh.

Then another growl.

I must go out
before the sun sets,
I thought.
I must chance the steps, go down the noisy street, and find some human market. Use my money quickly before it disappears.