The Autumn Castle (7 page)

“There’s just something about him,” Pete said.

Christine drained her beer. “I’m glad to hear someone else say that. It’s true, there’s just something about him.”

“Poor guy,” Jude said. “Imagine going through life being irrationally hateable.”

“There are worse fates,” Gerda said, indicating Christine’s empty bottle. “More beer?”

“More beer,” Christine said, gazing off down the long dark street. The giant TV tower at Alexanderplatz blinked against the
night sky in the distance. Jude was right, now she thought back on it. Mandy had been staring at her tonight. But that was
strange, because at first it had seemed as if he wanted to get away from her. He had said she reminded him of something and
then moved to the other end of the table.

“Where are you?” Jude said quietly in her ear.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a million miles away.”

“Just thinking about something,” she said with a smile, and decided not to think any more about Immanuel Zweigler.

Jude’s body was one of the undiscovered wonders of the world. His skin was hot and smooth, his lips and his hands were agile
and passionate and gentle. Late that night, the best way he knew how, he managed to take Christine’s mind off the pain.

“You’re a god,” Christine gasped as he slid back to his side of the bed.

He smiled at her in the dark. “The pleasure’s all mine, I promise.”

“Why do you love me?” she asked.

“Because you remind me so much of Christine Starlight, who I’ve always had a big crush on.”

She laughed. “Idiot.”

“Hey, you asked the stupid question.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“Yes, it is. Anyone who ever loves anyone truly loves them because of their indefinable essence, not because they conform
to some checklist.”

“A checklist would be nice though,” Christine said, rolling carefully onto her side. “Sometimes girls like compliments.”

“All right then. You’re beautiful and clever and kind.”

“No, it’s no good giving me a compliment when I asked for it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked for it. Because it’s not sincere. You have to give me one when I’m not expecting it.”

“But you’ll still know you asked for it, won’t you?”

“Not if you leave it long enough between this conversation and the compliment.”

“But if I leave it too long, you’ll remind me again and then we’ll be back where we started.”

Christine giggled. “Nobody said love was easy.”

He pinned her down and kissed her again, and her senses flared with passion. This bodily response was the only physical thing
that could match her pain for intensity. He let her go and she sighed.

“You know,” she said, “I had the strangest dream when I blacked out the other day. I was in a place where I felt no pain at
all.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“In the dream? Not much. Just silly dream stuff.” Telling him would be too much like acknowledging its power.

“Was it nice? To be without the pain?”

“It was incredible, Jude. Absolute freedom.” She locked her fingers with his under the covers and thought about how pain had
become a default setting in her life. Everything was geared around it. How she walked, how she moved, how long she could stay
in a conversation without distraction, how she slept, showered, ate, drank. “Do you think someone can go mad from pain?” she
asked.

“I don’t know. But you’re strong, you’ll be okay.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a dream,” she said carefully. “Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe I’m going nuts.”

“Hey, don’t worry yourself about silly things like that,” he said. “You’re perfectly sane.”

“But the dream was so—”

“Shh, you’re getting worked up over nothing,” Jude said, stroking her hair. “Don’t be afraid of shadows. A dream is only ever
just a dream.”

Eisengrimm!” Mayfridh swept up the corridor, setting the autumn-colored tapestries dancing in her wake. “Eisengrimm, where
are you?”

She poked her head into the dim, low-ceilinged kitchen. “Has anyone seen Eisengrimm?”

A flurry of fumbling curtsies and slack mouths and shaking heads greeted her. Idiots. She backed out and kept walking. Why
did people have to turn all silent and fearful in her presence? She was not a cruel queen. Nobody ever spoke to her with their
hearts, only with their heads—ever mindful of their careers, or their reputations, or their fortunes. Her own heart was aching
under the unexpressed weight of this truth. Eisengrimm was the only one she could tell her woes and insecurities to, and he
was a good listener and a good counselor. But he was a wolf. She couldn’t marry him or adopt him as a brother; he could never
be of her kind.

She threw open the door to the garden and called, “Eisengrimm!”

The garden was strewn with fallen leaves. She knew she had until the last leaf of autumn fell to find Christine, because then
it would be time to move to the Winter Castle and away from this favorable alignment of their worlds. Mayfridh couldn’t explain,
even to herself, why she had become so desperate to find Christine again. The faery world worked on the memory in strange
ways. She had forgotten so much about her previous existence, about Christine and her own Real World parents, but now it was
swirling back to her in gentle waves. All those warm memories, filling her with an unutterable longing for a simpler, happier
time.

Mayfridh lowered herself to the ground and stretched out on her back among the leaves. The sky was pale above her and she
breathed deeply. Every breath brought her closer to agreeing to make passage to the Real World. She reexamined all those nasty
fears about the disappearance of the king and queen before her—her faery parents. Perhaps they had not been murdered or killed
in an accident, but had good reasons of their own for disappearing. They would have known that, after the six-week period
decreed for their people to wait for their return, the throne would pass to their daughter. Perhaps they even had reasons
for wanting her to take the throne at nine years of age, though she couldn’t imagine what those reasons might be. A nine-year-old
girl is a poor ruler, a fifteen-year-old one even worse. She shuddered as she remembered some of her mistakes.

A leaf descended and brushed her shoulder. Footsteps alerted her to Eisengrimm’s presence.

“So there you are,” she said, turning her head to see him nearby, his jaw wrapped tight around a glowing object. “What do
you have for me?”

He loped over and stood above her. She could see now that his mouth was full of spells. He released them so that they bounced
over her. She sat up and gathered them.

“Sorry,” he said, “you know I can’t talk and carry at the same time.”

Three spells. She nursed them in her lap, tiny glowing balls of woven magic from the well. Two were the usual general-purpose
spells that Mayfridh could use as she wished. The third had a strand of brown hair threaded through it. “What’s this one?”
she said, holding it up.

“I had Hexebart weave a special introduction to Christine’s world. To prepare yourself.”

“I need not prepare myself. I remember it.”

“Things change quickly in the Real World. It’s not like here, where things don’t change at all. Twenty-five years is a long
time.”

“I see.”

“The other two are to use as you wish. To conjure the passage, to contact me back here, to protect yourself against emergencies.”

Emergencies? Her heart jumped. “So you think I’ll go?”

“I know not, Mayfridh. Do you think you’ll go?”

She fiddled with the spells in her lap. They were smooth and warm, feather-light. “Perhaps.”

“Perhaps, my Queen?”

Mayfridh narrowed her eyes. “Are you laughing at me?”

“You know wolves can neither laugh nor cry.”

“But if you could laugh, would you be laughing now?”

Eisengrimm nudged one of the spells with his nose. “Go on, Mayfridh. Try it.”

She collected the spells in her left hand and stood. “Fine, then. We shall go to the spell chamber, and I shall reacquaint
myself with the Real World.”

The Autumn Castle’s spell chamber was under the ground, above the crypt and the dungeons. No light permeated the gloom except
for the brass lantern Mayfridh brought with her, and the soft daylight from a tiny high window that opened onto the grass
outside. The room was cold, the rough-hewn stone bare of tapestries or hangings or anything else that might absorb magic.
Laid out around the chamber were mirrors and bowls and burners and ladles and mortars and pestles and bottles. Once, before
her faery parents had departed for the Real World, all magic in the realm had been spun and woven in here, rather than in
Hexebart’s well. Mayfridh always looked around the room with a sense of sadness. Its ghostly emptiness was a reminder of her
inadequacies as a ruler.

“One day, Eisengrimm—” she started.

“Be kind to yourself, my Queen. You are still young, and if you are patient and strong, this difficulty with Hexebart will
be overcome.”

Mayfridh had brought wine from the kitchen. She slumped on an unsteady stool in front of the long wooden table that ran almost
the length of the room and stood the bottle in front of her. Eisengrimm transformed to Crow and joined her. He used his beak
to uncork the bottle.

“I wish you would be Bear and use your hands. Why do you never change to Bear?” she asked him.

“You know it hurts my joints. Bear is so heavy. I’m bruised for weeks afterwards.”

“I don’t like you as Crow. I know you eat the eyes of dead squirrels in the forest.”

“As Crow, I can think of nothing tastier.” He clicked his beak on the table. “Come, Mayfridh. Pour yourself a cup of wine.”

Mayfridh reached for a cup and filled it with wine. Eisengrimm plucked out the spell that had Christine’s hair woven through
it, hopped across the table, and dropped it into the cup.

“What will it do?” Mayfridh asked as she waited for it to sizzle and shimmer into the wine.

“It will introduce you to the feel and pace of her world. As it is only hair, it will give you no insight into her personal
circumstances. If I could have snatched one of her eyes, I might have been able to furnish you with memories, dreams, visions
. . .”

“I prefer her with two eyes in her head, as I’m sure she does.” She swirled the cup and looked into it. The spell had vanished,
and the wine was now golden. “Well, then, I’ll drink it.”

“Go on.”

Mayfridh raised the cup to her lips and took a cautious sip. At once, unfamiliar sensations began to wash over her and she
closed her eyes. In a rush, with a sound like a great breath being expelled, she experienced—
refrigerator noise, demolition sites, antihistamines, newspaper ink, cheap plastic toys, techno-pop, eyelash curlers, Internet
porn, central heating, the
Love Parade,
roller coasters, roadworks, bookshops, building cranes, cigarettes, lawn mowers, airplanes, fluorocarbons, chlorine, shampoo,
traffic, Coke, Shrek, smog, bombs, PVC, FTP, DVD—

Mayfridh opened her eyes and caught her breath.

“My Queen?”

She closed her eyes again, and more sensations charged at her, slipped past her, and left their traces on her. “When will
it stop?” she shouted over the barrage of images, sounds, smells.

“Be patient, it should slow down soon.”

She took big breaths, tried to relax through the assault of impressions. Finally, as Eisengrimm had said, they began to slow,
to fade, to grow still. But she didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t want Eisengrimm to see the disappointed tears that pricked
at them, because now she was terrified, now she doubted she had enough courage to make passage to such a world.

“It’s awful,” she said, trying to keep her voice even.

“Awful?”

“And wonderful,” she added. “So full of wonders.”

“You will see it firsthand, the first of the royal family in over a dozen years to—”

Her eyes flicked open and she held up a finger to caution him. “I will not do anything I don’t want to do. I am the queen.”

“But Little May,” he said—he always called her by this pet name when she reminded him of her status—“what about Christine?
You want to see her again, do you not?”