A Fae Story

I

She fled through the forest in the night, beneath a full moon in a cloudless sky.

Purple bruises marked her neck, her chest, her thighs; a black eye marked her face. Each hissing breath felt like a knife in her side, digging deeper, twisting between her ribs.

A two-year-old boy squirmed in her arms.

The woodcutter who was once her husband followed not far behind, cursing and spitting, tripping on pine roots and splashing through the icy puddles. "By the Gods, Marie!" he called. "I'm sorry!"

In his hand was a knife.

She didn't stop. She stumbled between the trees and over the ferns and pine needles, her bare feet stinging in the cold of the night, her woollen shawl flapping in the wind. Late autumn gripped their corner of the world. The earth was frozen, the trees brittle, and still her heart burned.

She could not keep living like this. She had decided on that weeks ago. Even when he took her shoes so she would not run away. Even when he locked her in the closet for days at a time. No. This was not about her. He could do what he wanted to her. But she would protect the child with her life.

She could feel the boy's small warmth against her chest, his wide eyes peering into the darkness behind them, and he said into her shoulder, "Mama."

Her grip on him tightened and tears leaked from her eyes. She could see the moon between the trees above, casting its pale light into the forest, slanting pillars of grey descending down, illuminating the mossy ground. She ran until her legs gave out, and then she collapsed in the cold earth and sobbed.

From around her shoulders she pulled a woollen shawl and she nestled it beneath the boy, and she laid him in the shadows, in the ferns, on a cushion of moss. Then she eased to her feet and suddenly the woodcutter was upon her, whipping a fist across her face, and she crumpled to the forest floor, a marionette with cut strings, all loose and frail.

She lay there in the mud with blood running down her face, and he stood over her, panting. She didn't move.

The woodcutter set the knife in his pocket, glad he'd had no need for it. He heaved her into his arms. The child lay beneath the ferns, unseen.

The man started back toward the cabin, back toward the warmth and the candlelight. He was terribly tired.

He didn't spare a thought for the child.

II

The woodcutter carried the woman into the darkness, and then he was gone, and the forest was silent again. The child lay in the shadows and stared up at the moonlight threading through the canopy. "Mama?" he said.

The hours passed.

It was the mischievous spirit Spyre, smallest of the dragons and voice of the northern wind, who found the child among the ferns. He was on his way to the Silver River, where he planned on blowing down several saplings along its banks, when he heard a gurgle in the undergrowth. He tilted his head and crawled across the moss and mud, and there was the child, lying just as its mother had left it, swathed in the woollen shawl and staring up at the trees and the moon and the stars.

"Hello, little one," said the dragon, and he smiled a gleaming, needle-toothed smiled. The child was no bigger than himself, and it stared back eyes the crystal blue of a mountain lake. It squirmed in the shawl.

"Don't fret," he said, "I mean no harm." He looked about but there was no sign of anyone returning for the child. An offering to the forest? he thought. A gift? The Lady Mythilien would be pleased.

Or should he eat the child, and not tell her of his discovery? The north wind was a hungry beast, after all.

No. Control yourself. She would reward him for bringing her a child. He would bring it to the Heart of the Forest, then. Yes. He looked at the child with its fiery hair and soft cheeks and bright eyes, and he sighed and grabbed the bundled shawl with his hind legs. He began to flap his wings, pulling the child behind him. They travelled in silence between the pines, beneath the moon, deeper into woods. They followed a bubbling brook lined by moss-covered rocks as it twisted through the undergrowth. They passed a yawning hole in the ground, home to a family of pygmy wyrms. They reached the clearing in the darkest hours of the night.

All was silent in the forest. All was calm.

Hundreds of small stones formed a perfect circle in the grass of the clearing, and the dragon pulled the child into the centre and stopped.

Sphaera un et fae, he whispered.

The darkness seemed to press around them. A breeze hissed between the trees, smelling of pine resin and smoke, and it ruffled the grass. Then the ground rumbled and the earth fell away, and they were falling, falling through an abyss, through a chasm between worlds, spiralling into a deep and total blackness. The world was lost to him. All became still.

III

When she woke she found herself tangled in soft sheets. Her bed, she realized, in the house in the woods. She could smell him nearby, that stink of sweat and tobacco, and she didn't dare open her eyes. Not yet.

Her ribs were sore, and her temple felt like it might split open—or perhaps it already had. She tasted blood in her mouth, felt sticky warmth all down her face. She could smell candle smoke, could see the pink light of it through her closed eyelids, could feel the warmth of the room washing all down her body. She heard movement to her left. The scrape of a chair against wood. So he was sitting at the table by the window. He was facing away from her, then. She opened her eyes a crack.

Light, so much light. Piercing, stinging light. Oh, how her body hurt. She turned her head to the left, slowly, carefully, and she looked at the man through half-closed eyes. He was hunched there at the table, humming tunelessly, wood peelings collecting at his feet. He was whittling. He had the knife.

If she could make him set it down...

She eased into a sitting position, adjusted her weight, and stood up from the bed. The man looked back at her, his dark brows furrowed, his arm draped over the top rail of the chair. "Morning sweet," he said. "You've been out for two days."

Two days?

His words were slurred. On the table was a bottle of amber whisky.

"Where's the child?" she asked in a quivering voice.

"Not here."

She closed her eyes and took a measured breath. "He has been taken by the forest, then?"

"I suppose he has."

"Then it is just us."

"Just us."

She clenched her jaw.

Then she said in quiet voice, "Come here. I'm cold."

She pulled at the hem of her shirt.

He stood up and set the knife on the table, unclasping his belt and crossing the space between them. He grinned.

She put a hand on his chest, and breathed in the smell of whisky on his hot breath, of rot and tobacco, and they collapsed together on the bed.

"Wait," she said, after a moment. "Let me blow out the candle."

She untangled herself from the sheets and his limbs, and she walked over to the table and extinguished the flame. Grey light filtered through the grimy window by the bed. The rest of the room was bathed in shadow. Her fingers crept across the table to the leather hilt of the knife, and she gripped it tight, felt the steel weight of it in her hand, and she approached him, concealing the blade behind her wrist. He was staring at the ceiling. Then he looked at her and a smile twisted across his face.

"Ready?" he said.

"Oh yes." She crawled into the bed and the knife flashed in the light of the window.

He gurgled. Blood sprayed across the sheets, across the pillow, across her face. She screamed and slashed at his throat again. He put his hands to the wound and writhed, his eyes bulging. He writhed for a long time. Then his movements became sluggish. Blood bubbled between his lips. He blinked rapidly, and then he stopped blinking and he only stared, and then he was still. He lay half naked in the sheets damp with blood, gaping at nothing.

She tumbled off of him and onto the floor, vomiting and spitting, tears streaming down her face, and then she gathered herself. She stood over him in the room thick with the iron scent of blood. Her shirt lay crumpled on the floor, and she picked it up and pulled it on. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and staggered out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She opened the front door and stepped into the sunlit forest. Then she began to run.

***

Spyre opened his eyes. He was lying in a circle of stones, under a starry sky, in a field of swaying sedges. The child was with him, bundled in the shawl, its eyes closed and its breathing soft and slow.

He could see it on the horizon. A great oak tree towering into the night, taller than any structure made by man. It sparkled with lights, yellow and purple and blue, far up into the canopy. Fae lights.

Spyre nudged the shawl with his tail and the child woke up with a yawn. "See that?" said the dragon, and he nodded toward the tree. "That's the Heart of the Forest.

The child blinked curiously. "Mama?"

"Soon enough, little one," said Spyre. "You'll meet your new Mama soon enough."

The dragon began pulling the child through the whispering sedges, through the field, toward the tree.

They reached the Heart within the hour.

There was a pair of mahogany doors fitted into the bark, and Spyre opened one with his tail. He hummed an old elvish ditty to himself and pulled the child inside. He wondered what rewards the Queen would bestow upon him for his fine work.

Something shiny, he hoped.

***

She ran through the forest, sliding in the mud, tripping on roots and mossy stones, the cold air whipping her face and tugging at her hair. East. That was where she had fled. If she just went straight, followed the ridge as she had before, then she would find him...

She called his name until her voice was raw. Then she called some more. The hours passed, and the sky lightened from black to purple to dark blue. Sunlight spilled between the trees. Shadows stretched and warped as the sun arced across the sky, as it dipped back below the horizon in a splash of red. The shadows grew longer, wider, filling the space between the trees. The moon appeared, followed by the stars. Time passed. Still she searched for her child.

IV

Beyond the doors was a hall lit entirely by fireflies. Moss and vines crawled across the earthen ground, across the walls, across the dais where a throne of twisting roots sat. In the throne reclined a badger.

It was a large badger, larger than the child, and as it moved to stand up, its form warped. It became a squirrel, a lynx, a black bear, a doe, and at last a woman dressed in robes of green, like a stream of emerald flowing from her body. "What is this?" she said, as the dragon shuffled forward, dragging the child behind him.

"A human child, Lady Mythilien, found lost in the forest south of the Silver River."

The green lady stood from her throne and glided toward the dragon, her hands clasped behind her back, her mossy hair drifting about her head.

"It was alone?" she asked.

"Utterly. Abandoned in the forest, my queen."

A smile spread across her pale face, creasing her smooth cheeks, revealing a set of small, white teeth. "So you seek a mother, little one?"

***

The Lady Mythilien called the child Mthael—boy of the clover. "Come here, Mthael," she would say, in a voice like the summer wind. She would smile her perfect smile and pat him on his head, and give him a stick of cinnamon to chew on, or a honey comb, and then she would shoo him away.

She was not to be disobeyed. He learned this quickly, when he ignored her calls, or if he refused her gifts. Then her voice would become as icy as a winter gale, and her face would become a porcelain mask, and she would furrow her brow and meet his gaze, and he was always the first to look away.

She scared him, though he never told her so.

He lived inside the giant tree, in a room above the hall, where he slept on a bed of moss with a blanket of woven ferns. There was a round window fitted into the trunk of the tree by his bed, and from it he could see the rippling field of grass far below, and the oak grove to the east, and the glittering sea to the south. The Lady often found him at the window with his nose pressed against the glass.

The years passed, and the child became slight and nimble. His red hair grew long, brushing his shoulders and then his back, and his crystal blue eyes peered solemnly out at the world.

When she called upon him, he was quick to obey. She taught him how to read Northern Elvish, and how to tie fairy knots. She showed him the basics to magic weaving, and pyromancy. He worked with a quiet determination that pleased her.

When he was eight years old, he asked the Lady about his True Mama. "I know you are not my True Mama," he said softly. "So who is?"

She looked at him with her amber eyes, and her lips formed a thin line. "six years ago, you came to us. You know this, yes?"

The child nodded.

"You came from an ugly world. A world of smoke and ash. A changing world. Your true mother, your Mama, she gave you up. She left you to be taken by the fae, to live a good life away from the soot-stained world of the humans."

The human world was rotting, she explained. Magic was draining away. The humans festered in the south, so the spirits travelled north, to the Gateway in the forest. They held little power in the human world these days. That was why most of them lived here, in their own realm, away from the smoke and guns and iron machines of humanity.

"But why did she not come with me?" asked the child. "Why did she abandon me?"

"I cannot say," said the Lady Mythilien, and a smile crept across her face. "But you are here now, and we are together, and that is what matters."

The Lady made many trips to the human world. "She's looking for more children," Spyre told the child. "She's always wanted a family."

Each time she left, the child would follow her out into the field and watch her stand in the stone circle and whisper, Sphaera un et cindir—take me to the world of ash. She would vanish in a burst of green light, and he would walk back to the tree, alone. She never offered to bring him with her.

The child was thirteen when he asked the Lady if he could leave the world of the fae. "I want to find my True Mama," he said.

She looked him in the eye, and her gaze possessed all the warmth of midwinter frost.

"No," she said simply.

He held her gaze.

"Why? If the human world is as awful as you make it out to be, then maybe she's suffering. Maybe I can find her. Maybe I can bring her back."

She whipped him with a reed seven times across the back. "This is for your insolence," she said.

That night he lay on his stomach. His shirt kept sticking to his back. Moonlight filtered through his window and pooled on his bed, and it was then that he came to a decision. He would run away.

V

The woman stayed in the house in the woods for six years after the disappearance of her son. Each morning she made a pot of porridge, and each morning she set aside a bowl for the child, leaving it in the forest where she had hidden him.

By the fifth winter, she no longer left porridge outside. There was hardly enough food to sustain her own thin body, let alone a ghost's. By the sixth winter she had made up her mind: she would leave the house in the woods.

The woman wrapped a scarf around her neck, and pulled on her husband's woollen coat, and wiped the tears from her eyes. She packed a bag with matches, dried meat, and an extra pair of mittens. Then she stepped outside into the waist-deep snow. She trudged through the forest, heading south.

Soon she came upon a wide, snow-covered road that cut through the pines. It stretched from east to west, and she followed the faded signs to Old Islington, a small town on the frontier. She reached it by sundown. She counted twenty-three saloons in the town, and one hotel, where she booked a room for two coppers. She collapsed on the squealing bed and fell asleep.

The next morning she walked through the slush to the train station, and with the last of her money she bought a ticket to Silverdon. The city where she had been born, thirty years ago.

It was a seven day ride by steam train. It would leave by noon the next day, the clerk said. She still had twenty six hours.

The woman curled up on a bench in the train station. She watched the travellers come and go. She waited.

***

She arrived in Silverdon at nineteen hundred hours on a Sunday. It was a grey city. A flat city.

Withered spruce trees lined the muddy roadside while drunks and night revellers flitted in and around the saloons. The woman pulled her woollen coat tighter around her chest and hurried through the snowy streets, through the stinging cold, through the night. She scanned the rusty mailboxes and dark doorways, hoping she would recognize the house when she saw it. 1772 Southcourt Crescent. Maybe it had been knocked down, reduced to splintered wood and crumbled stone. Maybe someone else had moved in. It had been nearly fourteen years, after all.

She reached the cobbled cul-de-sac and stopped. A smile crept across her face.

It still stood, hunched there in the snow, just as she remembered. Flaking and green with wooden shingles and white gables; a pane of stained glass in the topmost window depicting the birth of the Sacred Daughter; a peeling balustrade around the veranda.

For a moment she simply stood there, in the slush and mud of the street, staring at the house. The living room window flickered with candle light.

She shuffled forward, past the tin garbage cans heaped with snow, and the mailbox with the copper digits 1772 nailed to the side. She climbed the two steps and crossed the veranda, and raised her fist to the faded red door. Her breath smoked in the cold air.

She knocked.

A shadow shifted behind the gossamer window curtain. No one opened the door.

She knocked again.

Please, she prayed, please be here.

A pause. Then the lock clicked. The door creaked open just wide enough for a white-haired lady to poke her face into the night.

"It's late," croaked the lady.

"Mum?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mumma?"

The door opened wider, and candlelight spilled onto the veranda. "By the Gods," breathed the white-haired lady. "Marie?"

But the younger woman had already collapsed into her mother's arms, and they stood in the doorway and held each other, not moving, not breathing, just passing warmth from one body to the other. At last her mother untangled herself and stepped back, holding the younger woman at arms length. "You look tired," she said. She closed the door and they stepped into the living room, into the warmth and the candlelight. A patched leather couch faced the front window, and they sat together between the wrinkled cushions and said nothing for a time.

"Where's your husband?" asked her mother at last.

Silence.

"Never mind that."

She peered at her hands, like crumpled paper wrapped around bone.

"When were you last here?" she said.

Tears prickled the younger woman’s eyes. "It's been fourteen years, I think."

Suddenly her mouth twisted into a sob, and she closed her eyes and ran a hand through her matted hair. She couldn't hold it back any longer. "Mum, we had a child."

Her mother looked up, startled. "Oh, my love," she said, as the woman began to cry. "It's alright. You're alright."

"He didn't want the child," she said between sobs. "He became more violent when the baby was born. So I tried to flee. It was stupid of me, to run away like that. I should have planned it out. Why didn't I plan it out?" She took a shuddering breath and wiped the tears from her face.

The white-haired lady pressed a cheek to her daughter's neck and said nothing. They sat together, intertwined on the couch, as the sky turned from inky black to burning red. The sun peered over the horizon.

Time passed.

VI

He gathered his scant belongings in a cloth sack:

Two rosy apples.

A carving knife.

Ten acorns.

Six willow leaves.

And a woollen shawl from his True Mama.

He worked quickly, silently, and then he crossed his room and opened the door that led into the twisting staircase, and he followed the steps down into the darkness, into the hall, and there was the Lady Mythilien asleep on her throne. He shuffled over the dirt floor, over the vines and ferns, and he had just reached the double doors that led into the field when a voice behind him said, "Where are you going, Mthael?"

He didn't stop. He burst through the doors and into the night, and the starry sky unfolded above him, and the Lady cursed behind him, and he reached the circle of stones and yelled, "Sphaera un et cindir!"

The ground rumbled. The grass swayed. A breeze smelling faintly of honeysuckle brushed his face. Then the earth crumbled beneath his feet and he was falling, head over heals, through the space between worlds.

***

He woke in a circle of stones, in a clearing in a frozen forest. He scrambled to his feet, but there was no sign of the Lady Mythilien. He peered at the starry sky, saw the Eastern Lamp glowing just as it did in the land of the fae, and he ran south, slipping in the mud, tripping on pine roots, his breath pluming between his lips, his nose pinched by the cold. The humans fester in the south the Lady Mythilien had said.

He never stopped running.

VII

The woman found a job as a seamstress in a warehouse by the river. She worked fifteen hours each day, and at night she returned to the wood-shingled house on the cul-de-sac, where her mother prepared meals of potato soup and brown bread.

One winter morning her mother did not wake up.

She made porridge for herself after that. At night she dreamed of the child she had lost. During the day she worked until her fingers bled.

The months became years.

"What am I doing?" she asked herself in the mirror.

VIII

The boy reached a wide gravel road and followed the signs to Old Islington. As he walked the stars faded. The sun rose.

He found a hotel, and asked the manager if there was an archive in town. "I'd like to find my mother," he explained. But the man only chuckled. "No need for one," he said. "No history worth recording in a town like this."

The boy lived on the cold streets for a time.

He found work with a logging company. He laboured in the forest around Old Islington, cutting trees, skidding logs, eating dried meat and beans for every meal. Once he thought he saw Spyre, scuttling up a tree. He remembered the words of Lady Mythilien—that magic was draining away. That the fae held little power in the human world. The drum of his heart eased slightly.

By sixteen the boy began renting the topmost room in the hotel, in the attic, for ten coppers per month. The days melded together and became a stream of grey. Each night he looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, at the purple under his eyes, at his matted hair, and he gripped the sink with his blistered hands and said, "What am I doing?"

He turned seventeen; he turned twenty; he turned twenty two. Red fuzz shaded his upper lip. Every day after work he climbed the five stories to his attic room and collapsed in his bed. He did not search for his Mama. He did not know where to begin.

IX

"By the Gods," the woman murmured. Her calendar read November 1873. Twenty years had passed since the disappearance of her child. She left her house and walked down to the warehouse, and informed her manager that she would be away for a time. "You can't do that," he said. "We need everyone for the current project."

"I'm sorry," she said, and then she turned around and left his office.

***

She made the cross out of driftwood. She painted it crystal blue, like her child's eyes, and nailed the smaller piece two thirds of the way up from the base. Then she bought a train ticket to Old Islington and boarded with nothing but the cross in her hand and ten coppers in her pocket.

She watched the landscape pass by: browns and greys, all faded and pale, like a watercolour painting. But it felt right, commemorating her son. Yes. This was the right thing to do. She smiled.

***

She walked among the pines, through the forest, over the moss and ferns and pine roots. She reached the cabin by noon. It was wreathed in moss and lichen, and fiddleheads grew between the rotted logs. When she walked around the side she found the door had been ripped off its hinges. She did not go inside. Instead she turned on her heal and headed east, following the small ridge of earth, just as she had twenty years ago.

After two miles of walking she reached large a patch of ferns.

She blinked. It was here. She was quite sure of it. This was where she had swathed the child in the shawl, where she had hidden him in the shadows, where she had left him to be taken by the forest. She crouched down and ran a hand through the dirt. It was cold, but loose enough to dig in. She set to work.

She dug a narrow hole, just large enough to fit the base of the cross. When she was done she took a step back and surveyed her work.

The cross stood two feet tall—a flash of blue against the brown of the forest. There were no flowers this time of year, but she would come back, and when she did, she would bring flowers.

"I'm sorry," she said to her child. "For everything."

X

He came upon the cabin in the woods during a skidding job. It seemed the forest was in the process of swallowing it whole.

He wandered inside, into what must have been a kitchen. His boots crunched on broken glass. Leaves and pine needles littered the floor. He wandered deeper, down a hall, into a bedroom. There was no mattress on the bed, just an empty iron frame.

He wandered outside again and stared at the cabin. It fascinated him. He couldn't explain why.

His timepiece read half past one in the afternoon.

He walked back through the forest, axe in hand, following the crude trail as it twisted toward the road.

He found the woman two miles from the cabin, crouched before a blue cross among the ferns. Her hair was the colour of smoke and fire.

***

"Lose someone?" said a voice.

The woman looked up to find a red-haired man standing some feet away, an axe hanging limply in his hand.

"Yes," she said. "Long ago."

"I'm sorry."

She stood up with some effort, and her aching back clicked. "I suppose life is just the process of losing things, isn't it?"

"Nothing so bleak as that, I should hope."

She chuckled and he smiled, and in that moment she caught a flash of blue.

His eyes.

Crystal blue, like a mountain lake.