Once Upon A Time

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand

W.B Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

Mama always said to watch the water’s edge.

Maybe I should have listened.

But the lights are so pretty, and the voice, the song...Papa is calling for me, but I can hardly hear him over the singing. He always promised he would take me to Grandma’s farm someday, and I could see a real pony, maybe ride one. He said he learned to ride on the farm, and that Grandpa could teach me, too, maybe even on the chubby bay he used to win ribbons on.

This is much better. This pony bows to me, one spindly leg thrust out in front of her body as she curves her head down so the water weeds in her mane drag over the stones of the riverbank. She is singing, the lights in her eyes brighter now that she is out of the water. It is still so pretty, that light, that song. I cannot help moving toward her. I reach out my hand to pet her nose, and she lets me.

I smile.

She smiles back.

They should frighten me, I think. Those too many, too sharp teeth. Needle thin and silver bright. But I am not afraid. I know she will not hurt me. She is not supposed to.

She tells me so, when she stops being a pony. Her eyes are still glowing-bright, her teeth still far too sharp when she opens her mouth to speak.

“Hello, Elloranea,” she says, so quiet. She’s stopped singing, but I can still hear the music, somehow. There are more lights, dancing in the air around us. If I look for too long, the lights start to look like little people with butterfly and dragonfly wings. “I have come to take you home.”

I stare at her. The river laps at my bare toes, and I shiver. “That isn’t right,” I say, foggy and muddled. I feel like I am starting to wake up from a dream, but I get stuck. “That’s too long. My name is—”

“Shhh.” She places one finger against my lips, her own mouth curved into another smile, though she does not show her teeth this time. “That is a secret,” she tells me, and something in her voice says that we are playing a game. I start to smile, too. I want to play. “We shall shorten it, though, if you prefer, Elloranae. Perhaps...Ella?”

I shake my head, scrunching up my nose. “Ella lives down the road. They have too many chickens there.”

The lady-who-was-a-pony laughs, and the flickering lights around us grow brighter for just a moment. Distantly, I hear tiny, chiming voices whisper to one another:

“Why take so long?”

“Deep’s drownings are always fun, be patient, love.”

“Eclipsa, you promised—!”

“Hush, you.” The lady is suddenly not smiling. The air grows tight around us, and the water at our feet is black as night, where a moment ago I could see clear through to the pebbly bottom. My eyes go wide and I stagger back, gasping. I cannot get enough air. I cannot breathe.

“If you cannot keep your forked tongues behind your teeth, I shall simply pull them free.” The lady looks back to me as the piping voices subside to grumbles and titters, and the lights flicker faster. Suddenly I can breathe again. The water is clear once more. “Sprites,” she says with a roll of her eyes, as though that explains everything.

I stare at her, mouth open. The music begins to fade. I can think. “You...you’re not…”

“Shhh, little love.” She reaches out, and I flinch back. But her fingers, cool and damp, skim down my cheek. The music is back. She is so lovely, I just want to be near her. She is like Mama’s pretty friends who come and pat my head and tell me I am a little darling, but I do not believe them when they say it. Not like I do her.

“There, now.” She smiles again. “Are you ready, littlething? Do you want to come home?”

I nod. I want to go home. I want her to take me home.

“You must say it, Elloranae,” she whispers, and the small voices from the fluttering lights rise to a brief fever-pitch, before a quick glare silences them again. Then the lady shakes her head with a small laugh and cups my cheek in her hand. Her skin is cold. “No, that is too long you said, yes? Hmmm...Ellory, then.”

I beam. “Ellory,” I repeat, nodding. It feels right. “Yes. I want to go home.”

The lady straightens up, and her hand drops from my cheek to reach down for mine. I reach back eagerly--for a moment, as I watch her long, pale fingers wrap around mine, I think there is something wrong with her hands. Almost like there are too many bends to her fingers...

“Come, then.”

My hand in hers, I follow her into the water.

________________________________________

And once it fell upon a day

A cold day and a snell,

When we were from the hunting come,

That from my horse I fell,

The Queen of Fairies she caught me,

In yon green hill to dwell.

“The Ballad of Tam Lin”

I do not feel like a kept thing, though some of the Gentry call me such.

Tricks says not to mind them, that I am more Wild Folk than Seelie or Unseelie. I think they are right, though I suppose I am not truly meant to be any of those things. I know I am not.

But still, I am here, and no matter how they titter behind their hands, none of them turn me away when I hold out my hands and beg for food, or a new bauble to play with. I am charming to them, in a way. Even those most morose tend to tolerate me, so long as I play by the rules.

Every game has rules.

I know this game’s rules better than most. Better than them, sometimes. I have to. I think that is maybe why some of them don’t like me, though none would say it outright.

“Has Jette been to see you?”

I shake my head, twisting another daisy into the crown I am weaving in my lap. My friend huffs at me and sticks their head in between me and my work, making me scowl and huff at them in turn. “What? She is busy. She will come when she can.”

Tricks rolls their eyes, and the rest of their head follows. Their tail twitches as they hop around to my other side. “Sooooooo, why are we still waiting around then? Come, come! The sea goes nowhere, littlething, it will be here when she finally deigns to visit!”

I scowl again, but there is a smile trying to overpower it, twitching at the corners of my mouth. I bite my lip, looking out over the water from our little bluff.

Well...it is not as though my guardian keeps to a specific schedule…

We are in the mulberry grove, painted with fruit juice and laughing in the boughs of one of the taller trees, when we are finally found out.

“The changeling girl I can understand,” a voice floats up through the branches to us, lilting and imperious, “but you were meant to be watching her, phooka. Not...encouraging.”

Tricks rolls their head down into the crook of their elbow so they can make a face down at the owner of the voice, little black tongue stuck between their lips.

Grinning to myself, I call down, “I am not a changeling!”

A quiet laugh heralds the shaking of branches as we are suddenly joined by a boy with salt-white hair and eyes so blue they should make the lakes of Faerie weep for envy.

“No, you are not,” Rian agrees, smirking at me. He reaches out to tousle my hair and I duck away, glaring, which only makes him laugh again. “You are something much worse.”

Tricks hoots a laugh of their own and I stick my tongue out at both of them. Rian’s eyes glint behind the fall of his hair as he kicks his boots up onto the branch in front of him and leans back against the trunk of the tree. I settle in beside him, throwing my bare feet up beside his on the branch and forcing him to make room for me or risk me tumbling from the tree. His arm comes around my shoulders, keeping me steady.

It is always a bit of a gamble, to see if he will hold me or leave me to grasp the branches myself.

“Little terror,” he calls me, darting in to lick a red stain from the corner of my mouth.

I grumble and shake my head at him, more for the form of the thing than because I am really annoyed. “Spoiled princeling,” I retort.

We grin at each other.

Being raised among the Gentry’s own children is dangerous, true enough, but it has its own advantages. Not all of them like me so much as Rian does, but then again, none of their families are quite willing to risk riling a kelpie enough to really do anything about it either. Still, it is nice when we are like this: just the three of us.

“Ellory, Ellory, Ellory!”

Or five of us, apparently.

I am hardly the only human in Faerie, but for some reason Bluebell and Peaseblossom have taken to me in particular. Perhaps because they were there the day Deep brought me home, perhaps because the others tend to be glamoured or otherwise enchanted, and so are less fun to tease. Or perhaps they are simply fickle, and will tire of me eventually, though I know it has been some time since I came to live here.

The two sprites circle our heads. Tricks snaps at them lazily, and they squeal, darting up into the branches above us.

Rian rolls his eyes. “Pests,” he mutters. I feel his hands running through my hair, delicately picking out a few knots before he sets to work on weaving in new ones, then unweaving them in a pattern I have never been able to figure out: three, four, seven, four, seven, four, three…

The sprites are chattering above us, trading gossip from the Green Court with Tricks’s news from the deeper woods. I lazily pipe up with what I have heard from the coast—the Mists are changing, Deep told me last time I saw her, though I’m not sure what it means—and Rian chimes in with stories from the High Court.

I am nearly asleep when I hear Tricks’s voice by my ear. “You have salt in your pockets?”

“Mhm. And—” I yawn. “And rowan ‘round my neck.” I touch the strung necklace of dried berries.

“Good.” The hands stroking my hair this time are furred and clawed. I realize Rian has left, though not before tying a pale gold ribbon around the braid he wove into my hair. I smile. “That’s good, Lory. You can sleep here, then.”

I do.

________________________________________

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry, thirsty roots

Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”

It is not my first revel, but I am nervous anyway. Tricks is not with me; they do not come as often as they used to. They never really liked the revels much, they only came to keep an eye on me.

But I can keep an eye on myself now. Tricks still treats me like a child, as though I cannot tell golden Everapple from the safer fruits of faerie, as though I am foolish enough to make a promise with the Gentry. I do not need them to look out for me. I am no longer a child.

Despite Tricks’s worrying, I know it is the dancing that is most dangerous, at least to me. Mortals cannot stop on their own, cannot escape the circle while the music plays. Kinder Folk have pulled me from a dance when I am lost, but it is not a risk I wish to take tonight. However, the laws of hospitality make turning down an invitation tricky.

Which is how I find myself with my back against one of the banquet tables, a glass of elderflower wine in one hand while the other twists in the fabric of my skirts. The faerie before me is not Gentry, and she is Unseelie. Not that the Seelie are better, necessarily, but they tend to be less likely to rip your spine out in full view of half the gathered Courts of Faerie.

Usually.

“I appreciate your invitation,” I tell the dullahan with a quick dip into a half curtsy. I am careful not to thank her for it: they do not take kindly to thanks, they see it as an attempt to shift debt away. Faeries do not thank each other, they pay each other back. “But I am afraid I must decline.”

“Why is that?” She smiles, and I can see the death behind her eyes. I do not shiver. I do not let myself. “Has the banquet captured your attention, rather than the dancing?”

I am afraid. I do not want to be, but I am afraid. I am too eager to find an out to take care of her words. I should know better.

“Yes,” I tell her with a smile and a nod. “The Court’s feasts are a rarity to me, I’ll admit.” That should be no surprise; I have never seen her before, but she is fae and I am mortal. My feet are still bare beneath the finery of my gown. I am not on the arm of one of the Folk, I am not a bride or a servant, so I am a stolen child. Perhaps it is odd that I am unglamoured, but she must know I am no true member of the Courts. I never will be.

“Ah, of course.” Her smile grows and she reaches passed me to the table. I am very still. When her hand comes back into view, she is holding a slice of gleaming fruit to my lips. I do not breathe. I know that scent, so sweet and tempting, coaxing me that surely just one bite couldn’t hurt…

I cannot remember choosing to take that bite. I must have weighed the choice and picked the lesser of two evils. What I thought was the lesser. A bite of fruit is not the near-death sentence that a dance with a dullahan would have been.

Not for me.

I am happy now, I am so happy. Everything is lovely, everything is brighter than it was before. The Folk stroke my hair, my arms, laughing and cooing. They call me a little darling, a pretty bauble. I am jostled through the crowd. I see a face, eyes that are green—like mine, but with more gray. The sea at storm. He is mortal, too. He has no blood-red stain around his mouth, as I do, but those eyes are glassy. Enchanted.

“He no longer makes me happy,” the faerie at my elbow pouts. I do not know her, either, but she is not the dullahan. My heart aches. I do not want her to be unhappy. I do not want any of them to be unhappy.

She presses something into my hand. Cool, smooth, silver. I turn the knife so it catches the light, fascinated by the glint off the metal.

“You want to make me happy, don’t you?” Her touch on my cheek is cool, smooth, silver.

I do. I want to make her happy.

Red stains my lips, my hands, my dress. But it is wrong, a different red, a warmer red. It is not sweet, and it smells of iron.

Iron and salt.

The salt in his blood drops onto my tongue as I wipe my hand across my face, trying to focus through the sickly sweet fog. In moments, my mind is clear once again.

I run.

I am alone in a darkened hall of the bragh. The knife is still in my hand. I am crying, and the salt in the tears jerks me further from the drugged stupor of Everapple.

“Oh, Ellory…”

I jerk my head up, gasping. He was not supposed to be here tonight.

Rian kneels beside me, his eyes searching my face. I shake my head, though I am not entirely sure why. I cannot speak. I cannot stop crying, though now it is silent.

His thumb strokes over my cheek, smearing blood and the juice of faerie fruit. I tremble and lean into him, shaking my head again. My grip on the knife tightens. “I can’t—I didn’t—”

I am speaking like a mortal.

“Shh, shh.” His hand covers my eyes as he draws me against his chest. It is suddenly easier to breathe, now that I cannot see all the red. “I know. I know you did not want to.” I feel his fingers trace the shape of my lips; he cannot miss the smell of the fruit.

The Folk do not apologize. But I can feel the words shaped against my hair as he holds me closer. I am sorry.

His hand drops away, comes to rest against my side, and I feel his lips press to the corner of my mouth. He kisses away the red stain, like he did when we were children.

And then he kisses me properly, and it is not like when we were children.

It is like drowning.

I kiss him back.

________________________________________

Huge moons there wax and wane—

Again—again—again—

Every moment of the night—

Forever changing places—

And they put out the star-light

With the breath from their pale faces.

Edgar Allen Poe, “Fairy-Land”

I have learned much since I came to Elphame—Fairyland, I called it as a child. Tír na nÓg, Jette always says. It feels like a correction, but somehow it is not. “We all have many names,” she says. “The true name of this place…”

She never says anything more, but somehow I think I understand why.

I know my own name cannot sway me as it does the Folk, but I keep it secret anyway. I wear my stockings inside out. I make sure the salt in my pockets will not spill. Rowan and ash encircle my neck. I keep my dagger close beneath my skirts.

I go to the revels on Rian’s arm, though I have learned enough to keep me safe when the push and pull of the Court draws him away. Despite my mortality, I have a home here. Despite my wildness, my friendships with the Wild and Shy Folk, the Gentry allow me to move among them.

I am still human, still lesser. But none of them would risk a kelpie’s anger--nor Rian's--should I become simply another toy to them again.

I like to think I have grown stronger, but really I have just become more clever. I can move among them, now. I know the dance of the Courts, how to flatter and whisper and laugh, how to smile the right way so that they will believe I am harmless. You do not have to lie to deceive, and though the Folk know that better than most, they seem to forget that others can learn to do it, too.

These days, I am never harmless.

“You seem distracted, little love.”

I glance up at Deep to see her craning her neck around to eye me where I lay curled into her side. Her eyes do not glow as they did when she found me as a child, but they are pale and milky still. I shrug. “I was just thinking.”

“Of?”

Another shrug. “Nothing, really.”

She chuckles, pressing her nose into my shoulder affectionately. “Silly human girl.”

I smile, though there is a bitter twist to it. Yes. Silly human girl. Not faerie. Not magic. Just mortal.

I get to my feet. “I told Rian I would meet him at moonrise.” I nod toward the sea, where the sun has started to kiss the horizon. Our island has already begun to blush purple with dusk.

Deep huffs, sounding exasperated, as she climbs to her feet. “Ah, of course. Should I be worried?”

I roll my eyes. “If you are going to give me another lecture about keeping my legs closed around royalty—”

“I was not,” the kelpie laughs, and she is looking at me with human eyes. She cups my face in her hands and kisses my forehead. “I know you too well to bother.”

“Of course you do, Eclipsa.” It is a good thing faeries cannot lie; they are not very good at detecting sarcasm because of it.

I leave her at the shore, and, as I always do, turn back to wave when I reach the bluffs. She raises her hand in turn, and then she is gone, diving into the waves.

Rian is waiting in the mulberry grove just at moonrise, as he said. He strings a pale gold chain around my neck in greeting, dipping to kiss my cheek. I smile and reach up to touch the necklace, feeling the smoothness of the moonstone pendant beneath my fingertips.

“What’s this for?”

“Need I a reason?”

“Yes,” I laugh. “Faeries do not give gifts, they make bargains.”

“Perhaps I wish to…exchange it. For a promise from you.”

I raise one eyebrow. “Do you now?”

“Yes.” He kisses me. “But we can speak of it later. You can decide then if you wish to keep it.”

I laugh again, and pull him down into the grass.

It is well passed moonrise when we do speak of it, wrapped together beneath his silver cloak. Slender fingers trace the rounded curve of my ear—an endless fascination he seems to have—while he holds the teardrop shaped pendant in his other palm, and finally tells me the promise he wants in return.

I tell him yes.

________________________________________

And pleasant is the Faerie land,

But an eerie tale to tell

Ay, at the end of seven years

We pay a Tithe to Hell

“The Ballad of Tam Lin”