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Of House Guests and Winter Twins
by klmeri

Admittedly, the business of story-telling is not easy. It requires a constant state of daydreaming, practical application, more daydreaming, and some degree of connivance. To tell an unbelievable story in a believable fashion, the story-teller often begins with a hint of truth. Since the story to follow has elements of both the mysterious and the fantastical, here is my plainly told true-tale of how it came to be.

Part I

Space_Wrapped.

I vacillated in a brief moment of indecision before clicking the Post Comment button. Thereafter, I realized I had committed myself to the next two and a half months of pondering when I would get around to writing a story I had every intention of making great and no intention of spending my free time upon. I am not a procrastinator, per se, but I am a busy woman whose priorities fall somewhere between the categories of making money and trying not to go insane while making money.

Soon, confirmation came through email that I had the prompt of my choosing, and thus I laid my head upon my pillow that night with many thoughts of where I might begin a fairy tale—a tale of love, that is—starring the characters James Kirk and Leonard McCoy. Inevitably I fell asleep, having mentally plotted very little, on the drowsy thought of tomorrow. Tomorrow I would write something worthwhile.

How easily we can fool ourselves.

Indeed, tomorrow and many days thereafter were filled with an abundance of activity but no writing. On occasion guilt would trouble me because I knew I had made a commitment to entertain and yet had not made an effort towards that commitment. I assuaged most of this guilt by counting the days on the calendar above my office desk to be assured there was plenty of time left to create a fairy tale that would pass muster among the many wonderful Kirk/McCoy stories certain to be presented in the month of December.

This, of course, was when a series of strange occurrences began. Looking back, perhaps I failed to notice a few of them but in my defense I was preoccupied with the trials and trivialities of real life. The first occurrence which did catch my attention was quite a simple if unusual thing—so simple, in fact, I automatically dismissed it as harmless.

One morning I was amidst my normal routine (the act of balancing a coffee thermos on my portfolio case while digging for the car keys my purse seemed to have eaten) when I became aware of a great cacophony above my head. In the large oak tree beside my apartment building, there were birds—noisy ones. Yes, noisy birds in a tree are rarely considered unusual, except this circumstance was far from normal: birds of every kind lined the oak’s long and sturdy branches. It was such an extraordinary spectacle I forgot what I was attempting to do.

A neighbor who often walked his dog about that time of day was standing on the concrete sidewalk gaping up at the tree. We both ignored the excited yipping of his Yorkie.

“Would you look at that!” he exclaimed.

I did look, squinting against the sun. “Huh” was my only coherent comment. High above, an owl cocked its head sideways and hooted at me somewhat querulously, as though he was greatly dissatisfied at having his daytime nap interrupted and I was to blame. I gave a brief thought to Hitchcock’s famous The Birds, shuddered, and reeled in my wandering mind.

“Oh crap,” I gasped, brain back on track, and began to chant “Late late late!” like Alice’s white rabbit. The display of birds—hawks, woodpeckers, and peacocks, oh my!—faded into the background. Besides, I knew my boss would not accept an excuse of “But, Helen, it was a veritable zoo of fowl! Have you ever seen a mallard in a tree?” for tardiness.

I was told later the birds were messengers (because someone thought of carrier pigeons and took the idea a little too far) and their message was meant solely for me. It was an approval of my task of fairy tale writing and encouragement to stop ignoring said task; but sadly I did not speak or comprehend the language of birds. They squawked or sang shrilly and I drove out of the parking lot none-the-wiser.

Barring a jittery squirrel, the oak tree was empty when I returned home at the end of the work day. I skirted around drying patches of bird poop on the ground, mindful of my new high heels, and trekked up the stairs to my home. Then I closed the door, effectively shutting out the world, and did not care to open it again until morning.

As I said, I paid little heed to anything strange.

Not long thereafter, upon returning home from a short weekend vacation, I discovered my apartment in an immaculate state. Neat, orderly, and sparkling pristine, to be precise. The laundry had been sorted; the dishes washed and tucked away, even the two year-old dust bunnies dispersed.

I called my mother. “Did you stop by while I was gone and clean?” I asked her. I knew she had a hatred of menial work but I couldn’t fathom who else it might have been.

She thought I was joking. I assured her I was not. I could hear the rolling of her eyes as she argued, “Who cares if it was a friend, a vandal, or a Brownie? At least your house is tidy! Now why don’t you come over here and fix mine?”

I ignored that last comment and pictured something akin to the scene from Snow White where she and her forest friends engage in a sing-along while sweeping the floor and scrubbing dishes. The thought was so absurd, I laughed. I shouldn’t have.

It had been a Brownie, though I couldn’t have known this at the time. The Brownie had been sent to investigate the current status of my fairy tale work-in-progress. After browsing my laptop’s hard-drive and concluding the story was still lamentably unwritten, the Brownie had extra time to kill. Hence it cleaned my apartment, quite dismayed by the sight of dirt and dust.

(Later, when I argued the Brownie had violated my privacy, I was told plainly, “Then why do you leave your things lying carelessly about?” So this is my word of caution to you: never assume your personal electronics are safe anywhere but by your side. Brownies are, it seems, genius but morally oblivious hackers.)

The occurrences grew odder.

My mailbox turned up handfuls of acorns. (I never quite figured out the meaning of those acorns. Payment?) The left shoe of my favorite pair of boots continually disappeared and reappeared in random places, like the top of a bookshelf, in the kitchen garbage can, and at the bottom of the laundry hamper. (This made for an aggravating morning when I wanted to wear them.) Someone also lovingly placed a raven’s feather upon my doorstep for five consecutive days.

How did I know they were raven’s feathers? At the time I did not. I imagined some poor black bird (a large one, by the size of each feather which had been lost) to whom the feathers had belonged, stroked the very first one in brief admiration, and then tossed them one-by-one into the communal trash bin by the front entrance to the building. They were pretty to my human eyes but also useless.

The raven’s feathers were a warning. One might debate the point of sending a warning that, in general, nobody recognizes and I normally would, but a particular someone would be miffed and he was never my favorite of house guests.

Having ignored, dismissed, and otherwise explained away all the strange things that happened within a month’s time, I was caught unawares by the final—and most remarkable—one of all. It happened on November 6th. This was a Sunday, marked clearly in my mind for it had been the end of Daylight Savings Time and I celebrated the extra hour by sleeping in. That fateful evening, I let myself into my apartment after a trip to the supermarket to find my kitchen already occupied.

I can recall only a few things from that initial impression: the intruder was tall, thin as a willow, male; and he met my shocked stare with the most dispassionate, light-colored eyes I had ever seen.

I screamed.

He curled his upper lip in distaste. “What a dreadful sound.”

I screamed again and clutched my purse against my chest for protection. In my fear, I hadn’t sense enough to take out my cell phone and threaten to call the police.

The intruder sighed at me, apparently put-upon. “Humans. I am not here to terrorize you—well,” he corrected himself almost lazily, “not unless you fail to meet our standards.”

This caused me to whimper. “G-Get out! Get out of my house!” Now my sense was returning. “I’ve phoned the police!”

He tilted his head at me, not unlike the owl some weeks previous. “You have done nothing but scream,” he said pointedly. “Besides, no mortal is capable enough to arrest me.” He said the last part curiously as though it was a new addition to his vocabulary.

Which could be true, I thought in that instance. Here was a brand new serial killer and I his first victim!

“What do you want?” I said, frightened. It never occurred to me before why clichés were, well, clichéd; only until you find yourself in such a situation, do you instinctively plead things exactly like what do you want? and are you going to hurt me?

Rather than answering my question, he circled the opposite end of the kitchen counter and peeked into one of the abandoned grocery bags. “Where is your wine?” he wanted to know. “I could find no wine in your cupboards.”

The thought of a stranger waiting to accost me in my home, nosing about my belongings or not, was petrifying. I said, by way of attempting to calm myself, “I don’t drink” like we were two acquaintances having a slightly awkward chat.

He peered at me as he had peered into the plastic bag, less disinterested but not entirely convinced I had a relevant purpose. “You do not drink wine,” he reasoned slowly, voice soft and musical. “Why?”

It finally occurred to me this interloper wasn’t human. He had ears whose outer shells ended in delicate points and his eyes were slightly too large. His triangular face was framed by long fine hair, a sort of muted brown like the hair itself wasn’t sure if it had color. When he moved, it was with a preternatural grace.

I thought I could almost pinpoint what sort of creature he was; the name danced elusively in the back of my mind. Before I could stop my foolish hand, I reached out to touch one of his ears. “What are you?”

He drew back, hunching in on himself like an animal, and the flash in his eyes was a clear warning. Once out of range of my person he said, almost menacingly, “I am your supervisor.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

My bewilderment eased his tension. The intruder straightened and lifted his chin to peer down his nose at me. “You are writer klmeri,” he stated matter-of-factly. “You are assigned the task of writing a fairy tale.” His tone spoke clearly of his strong disbelief that I could accomplish such a thing.

No writer appreciates unjustified criticism. I puffed, and my chin went up too. “It’s pronounced k-l-meri.” I sounded out my pseudonym as kay-ell-mary. “How did you find out where I live?” I eyed him. “Are you some weirdo internet stalker?”

His slight bow was mocking. “Hello, k-l-meri. No, I am not affiliated with the internet. The flower sprites and gnomes manage Faerie’s IT division.” He gave a sniff of indignation.

My eyes lit up at the mention of Faerie, for I had an unhealthy obsession with subject. “Tir na nOg?!” I squealed, mangling the Gaelic pronunciation. Then, with a delighted gasp, “Are you a Sidhe?”

Now he eyed me warily. Apparently the Sidhe did not like the fact that I had dropped my purse and was crowding in on him because he turned abruptly (smoothly) on the heel of his soft leather boot and exited the kitchen. His lilt floated back to me. “Come,” he ordered.

I followed because I was more entranced by his presence than the powerful magic in his voice. I had many questions to ask, and I now desperately wanted to touch the tip of a pointed ear, if only to assure myself I wasn’t passed out on the kitchen floor in the middle of a lucid dream. But the Sidhe did not allow me any courtesy or affirmation of my mental health whatsoever.

When I entered my bedroom, he pointed austerely at my laptop. “Write,” I was commanded.

Again, his magic did not seem to have an effect on me. I looked at my laptop in dismay. “I can’t,” I said with no small amount of sadness. “Tomorrow is Monday and I haven’t washed my clothes for work—” My stomach growled. “—or eaten dinner.” I crossed my arms with a bit of dramatic petulance. “And I can’t think of a single thing to write!”

He interrupted my protest with another put-upon sigh and muttered to himself about the insanity of some queen named Mab. When he noticed I was listening with interest, he fell silent.

I felt bad. “Look, I’d love to write the fairy tale, okay? I want to, believe me, but there’s no time right now. Couldn’t you come back tomorrow?”

He looked unhappy. “You humans are so blithely obtuse!” He explained to me then about the plethora of signs from Faerie I had missed (some of which I did not mention and intend not to, as I am embarrassed by my lack of keen observation) and that I needed to shape up and get to work on my story because the High Council of the Court was getting impatient. Once impatience took root, bad things tended to happen—and would happen, mainly to me.

I had not realized anyone cared about the prompt except me and perhaps the person who created the prompt. I was astonished. “But what’s so important about a fairy tale?”

“Fairy tales are ridiculous,” he said with contempt. “Nonsensical. What wolf is going to dress in an old woman’s clothes just to eat a red-hooded little girl? He would simply snap the foolish human’s neck with his jaws if she crossed into his territory. He would only eat her if he was starving.”

“You do realize this is a modern age,” I said, inexplicably nervous, “with guns and bombs and stuff. So, um, wolves are going extinct.”

He was exasperated. “By the Greenman’s beard, this century is ridiculous!”

Ridiculous was clearly one of his favorite words, but I held my tongue and continued to listen.

The Sidhe took an agitated turn by my bedroom window (the movement seemed swift and fluid to my human eyes) before returning to his rant. “Can you comprehend what you’ve reduced my people to with your Disney and your non-religion and, ugh, internet? We are fading out of existence,” he said, “because humans haven’t the sense to believe in us. So we must resort to menial tactics like blogging. Do you know,” he almost raged in his light cadence, “that over half of my readership are Twilight enthusiasts? I am not a vampire.“

I giggled. He glared. I asked if he had fangs. He bared his teeth and, sadly, he did not have fangs.

“You can’t tell people what you really are,” I said to the Sidhe. “They will think you’re nuts. If I didn’t believe in you, I would think you had had plastic surgery on your ears. Trust me—people do that sort of thing these days.”

“We know that but Mab’s ex started the blogging fad and now we all have to contribute. Ridiculous. This is why,” he said severely, “you must write the fairy tale, k-l-meri. Tales of Faerie are rare these days. We need all the help we can get.”

I bit my lip. Had no one fully explained the situation to him? “Um,” I said hesitantly, “the content can be… flexible, right?”

He stared.

I tried to explain in another way. “You see, the prompt was made by a—” Do the Sidhe even have a definition for the term slasher? “—person who likes a certain pairing, a pairing of, er, two humans of the same gender…”

The fey being sighed again. “Do I care that your writing focuses on a sexual fascination between two males? Hardly. Humans are discriminatory beasts. Infantile compared to us.”

I somehow doubted he noticed the uncomplimentary nature of his arrogant words; and thus I doubted his ‘people’ were as wise as he claimed. Certainly they weren’t well-mannered.

“Well good,” I said, not one to debate pointlessly, “because Jim and Bones are hotties. Though I am more of a trio shipper myself—” I booted up my laptop, feeling inspired now. “—I think I can manage a decent fairy tale about two space cowboys. Minus the space thing, of course. And maybe the cowboy thing… or maybe not.”

Because he hadn’t interrupted my babbling like last time, I turned to look at my new supernatural writing supervisor. Upon seeing his deer-in-headlights expression, I asked apprehensively, “What?”

“Are you,” and here he sounded appalled, “a Trekkie?”

“If you mean it in the non-derogatory sense, as in Trekker.” I then beamed and answered happily, “Of course!”

He closed his eyes and seemed to slump in place. I assumed his unintelligible muttering was him laying a curse upon someone’s head. I inquired politely, and nervously, as to the identity of the person with whom he was peeved.

The Sidhe opened his eyes and snapped shortly, “Stop batting your eyes. You are exempt from my wrath. For now.”

I thought it best not to press the subject. Instead I said reassuringly, “We Trekkers are, in general, safe. But I bet the LOTR peeps would have a heyday with one of you!”

His voice dropped to a light strain. “We tend to stay away from Tolkien fans.”

I fiddled with my laptop for a bit then my desk chair and finally my pens—which I wouldn’t need but I was stalling for time. I glanced up at his ears again and imagined tweaking one of the points between my fingertips. I thought about Spock and then about Leonard doing the same thing to Spock. Hmm… I had once written a decent drabble in which Spock was King of the Fairies. If King Spock happened upon the human skeptic Leonard and Leonard’s fairy-obsessed friend Jim…

The Sidhe observed my glassy stare. “No,” he emphasized a touch stiffly, “there are no Vulcans in Faerie.”

This explained the sadly apocalyptic state of his realm. I, wise enough to keep this thought to myself, prepared to write—more resolute this time—by cracking my finger joints and posing my hands above the keyboard, every motion given its equal ceremonious due.

“Shall we begin?” I said with great cheer to my companion/watch-guard/supposedly would-be assassin if I failed.

A short yet fluid wave of his hand spoke of impatiently given permission to get on with it.

I began to type and simultaneously quote aloud: “Once upon a time…”

“How banal,” the Sidhe announced in a bored tone.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you want the fairy tale or not?” When he commented no further, I returned my attention to the word processor, re-read the opening line and, eventually, backspaced.

On the frosty eve of Midwinter, I wrote, a lord’s wife gives birth to a child.

The Fey Child

On the frosty eve of Midwinter, a lord’s wife gives birth to a child. The midwife swaddles the babe, which does nothing to muffle its first healthy cries of life, and places it into the arms of her assistant. She returns to the wife who is weak, like a limp poppet upon a pile of blankets, and presses a cool rag against the woman’s fevered brow. She recognizes well the new mother will not last the night.

The lord, gaunt of countenance, comes to the lady’s side but his face is only partly sick with grief. He clutches the pale hand of his wife and whispers in her ear. She turns her head from him and pants, the rattle of death deep in her chest, and calls for the babe instead. Her voice dwindles into stillness partway through the request.

The lord looks to the midwife and asks, voice strained, “The child?”

“Alive, m’lord,” she answers.

His eyes carry the pain of a guilty man. “Bring him.”

She goes to the adjoining room and is struck by a fierce anger upon discovering that the assistant, a last moment’s replacement for the usual young maid who had become unexpectedly ill, had thrown open the window and abandoned the cradle to the chill of an icy night. The babe is no longer crying. She lifts him into her arms with gentleness, afraid he too may be under a black shadow of death.

Her hands pull back the swaddling—and tremble at what she finds.

The babe blinks and purses its rosebud mouth.

She stares, disbelieving, until the moment her disbelief transforms into horror. The midwife crosses herself then crosses the child and takes it to his lordship.

“A girl,” he says, bemused; but only a moment passes before his bemusement blossoms into a softer wonder. He brushes at the golden fuzz crowning the child’s head.

Out of fear the midwife keeps her silence. The child does not cry as the lord jostles it clumsily. He bows his head, perhaps to hide his own tears, while his bundle smacks its lips, sleepy but ready to feed.

The midwife crosses herself again and prays. What a small mercy, she thinks, that the mother has passed. The woman would have known the truth the moment she saw the babe: that this changeling is not hers.

Years pass and the child grows under the care of a doting father and obedient household.

“Jocelyn! Jocelyn, you terrible little girl, where are you?” A nursemaid wrings her hands in the middle of a house garden.

“There, Miss, mind your frettin’,” intervenes a deeper voice. The gardener, a thin weathered man, rises from his crouch by a neatly trimmed hedge, brushing black dirt from his knees. “She’ll turn up. A rose, that one, but a wild one ye cannot tame.”

“Oh, she’s a wicked thing!” moans the woman. “M’lord shall have me flogged, he shall, if I don’t find her before the sun sets!”

The gardener leads the distraught woman over to a bench. “Nothin’ you can do ‘bout a child’s curiosity, Miss.”

She nibbles at her bottom lip. “I would agree were she—oh but you must understand, she’s not a normal child,” wails the nursemaid, thinking of her flyaway charge.

Hushing her quickly, the gardener cuts his eyes to the large, looming house to skim the windows for observers. “Don’t say such things,” he warns, removing his hands from her shoulders. “She’s a young Lady ‘n nothing… more.”

They weigh the mutual knowledge in one another’s eyes, gazes evenly matched, and let silence swallow the truth. The child belongs to the lord of the house despite rumors of her birth, and he will hear nothing ill said against her. Their loyalty lies with the lord; if he loves Jocelyn, they must love her too, for all that her strangeness frightens them.

The girl comes home before sunset just as the nursemaid is preparing to prostrate herself before her employer and beg for a swift death. The woman takes Jocelyn roughly by the arms and gives her a good shake. “Little girls mustn’t run away from home! Why won’t you learn?”

The girl is too surprised by this attack to reply.

A dismayed noise rises out of the nursemaid at the tangled state of the child’s golden hair. “And look at you! Dirty as a boy!”

Jocelyn squirms, crying out at last, “Let go!”

“No one will ever let you go again if you keep running away!” But the woman releases her as she warns this, her anger overwhelmed by relief.

“But I’m not running away,” protests the girl, stomping her foot, not nearly as afraid of the adult as a child should be. Jocelyn does not comprehend fear, the woman thinks.

“I was playing hide-and-seek—”

She gasps at this news. “With whom?” She cannot imagine the village children would be kind to a lord’s daughter; indeed, that is why the lord insists on the girl’s isolation, to protect her as if to shield a delicate flower. But, as the gardener said, Jocelyn is a wild rose.

The child pulls a dead leaf from her long hair and crumbles it between her fingers. “With the redbird, of course.” Her eyes are gleam like polished obsidian. “He hides and I find him.”

The nursemaid retrieves a hair brush to hide the nervous tick of her hands, positions the girl in front of the vanity, and begins smoothing out the knots in her charge’s hair. “Everyone has imaginary friends,” she says.

The girl tilts her head back, looking up at something only she can see. “The redbird is real, and he cannot lie to me.”

“Friends shouldn’t lie,” she agrees, working on a particularly stubborn knot.

Jocelyn twists around to stare at the nursemaid. “I never said he was my friend.”

The woman pauses, hairbrush aloft. “Then why would you play hide-and-seek with him?”

“Because he knows,” she says mysteriously, “what I want. One day he shall give it to me.”

After a moment of uneasy silence, the adult smiles with a trembling mouth and asks too brightly, “Which dress would you like to wear to dinner?”

“The new one, please!” Jocelyn abandons her tolerance for being groomed and skips away to her closet. Admiring the drape of a yellow dress in a floor-length mirror, she begins to hum one of her fanciful tunes. Then her eyes catch those of her nursemaid’s and the humming stops.

“Do I look like my mother?” the child asks curiously, as she is wont to do when observing herself in a mirror.

“I am certain you do. They say she was a beautiful and kind lady.”

A child needs a mother, especially a daughter. Surely this is why Jocelyn seems so strange, raised without the gentle curb of a mother’s love.

“Come, Jocelyn,” she beckons with an outstretched hand. “I will draw you a bath.”

The dress is discarded into a shapeless puddle of gauzy material and ribbons. Jocelyn lays her head against the woman’s side in such a way that, from any other child, would be a sign of affection. The nursemaid automatically strokes the girl’s hair, though she is secretly repulsed by the grime under her fingertips.

Yes, it must be the missing mother.

Jocelyn pulls back slightly to ask, “Do you know there are kingdoms under the sea like there are on land?”

“I did not,” she murmurs, playing along with whatever whim has sparked the child’s imagination. “I suppose only mer-people can live there.”

“Oh yes,” the child insists, “only special people. The redbird says I am special like that, otherwise I couldn’t talk to him.” Her eyes flick to an open window as she speaks.

The nursemaid guides her charge gently in the direction of a clawfoot bathtub. “Why would anyone want to live in a cold ocean, dear?”

As the ties on the back of her ruined dress are loosened, Jocelyn dreamily singsongs, “The Undersea is not for me; I live beneath the hill, not the sea!“

On Jocelyn’s sixteenth birthday and the day she meets her betrothed, the son of lord from a different stretch of countryside (where summer is long, quite the opposite of their winterland), the young couple disappears on a carriage ride extended too late into the day, much to their fathers’ combined amusement and the boy’s mother’s horror.

The next morning only Jocelyn returns to greet her father and her betrothed’s parents.

“Where is my son?” cries the distraught mother, clutching first at her expensive fox-fur shawl then at her husband, whose face goes from white to rose.

The lord gently ushers his daughter aside and asks, “Princess, where has that young Clayton gone? Do not be afraid to tell your poor papa.”

Jocelyn ghosts his dry cheek with her fingertips. “I could never fear you, Father,” she laughs.

“What of Clayton?”

Her elegant shoulders rise and fall carelessly. “He wished to prove his love to me, so I merely obliged him and sent him on a quest.”

For a long moment, her father is shocked into silence. When finally able to manage words, he wants to know, “What sort of quest, Jocelyn?”

She smiles her secret smile, lovely but terrifying, and again shrugs. “To fetch only a trifle, Father. A crown of oak and hawthorn.”

“But why would you desire a crown made of brambles? I could have one commissioned of the rarest jewels!”

“Why do I need a husband?” his daughter counters, then steps back and smoothes the wrinkles from yesterday’s dress. “If Clayton returns with what I ask, he shall have me. If he does not, then I will not be unhappy.” She nods graciously to Clayton’s parents and retreats from the room, softly singing a ditty of a prince she once knew, stolen by fairies.

The Tailor and the Maiden

Leonard is a broad-shouldered man of twenty with a brooding brow and dark, unruly hair. The brooding is a condition from assuming too much responsibility at an early age, his mother says, and his untameable hair is a legacy from his father’s family, passed from father to son for generations. In addition to her claimed expertise in genealogy, his mother is also an experienced herbalist while he, Leonard, trains to become a tailor like his father, who died some winters ago from an ague no one could cure. Currently Leonard is on a mission to spy upon the village apothecary, an herbalist’s sworn enemy (his mother’s words, not the apothecary’s, who is a sweet, aged man of seventy) when he first notices her.

She is beautiful to the eyes, yes, but there something else about the girl which strikes him as… different. Perhaps it is the dreamy drift of her fingertips over a skein of weaver’s gold thread; perhaps it is the unusual luminosity of her hair, or the graceful way she carries herself from one market stall to the next.

But she is different, he can see that.

Then he notices the richness of her attire and the hovering guard at her shoulder, and his hopes wither before they can even begin to bud. The young woman must be a visiting noble, not a commoner such as he.

Leonard is, if anything, a sensible person; but as he turns to leave the cobbled street, certain introducing himself would only be foolish, she looks his way and captures him.

Where her hair is bright, her eyes are incongruously dark. Yet there is a power in them that makes his heart’s rhythm fly and his mind forget every logical reason not to associate above his class. Then her gaze moves past him, releasing him, and Leonard resurfaces to the world, gasping for a forgotten breath.

Who is she?

Someone shoves at his shoulder, complaining about his rooted feet. “Quit yer dallyin’, lunk-head! Some of us got places to be!” bellows the man leading a wooden cart of a dozen caged and squawking chickens. By the time the irate man wheels his wares pass Leonard, the girl and her guard have vanished.

He spends the next fortnight moping about his place of work (he gets yelled at for sewing a jacket’s sleeves closed, which turned into a rather hilarious spectacle, in his opinion, when the jacket’s owner struggled to shove his arms through nonexistent holes) then moping about his home until his mother tosses him out of her makeshift shop for breaking a pot of rosemary.

“This is what unrequited love does, you silly child,” she tells him, shaking a shard of the shattered clay pot. “It makes you useless! So stop fooling about and go do what young men do.”

He rolls his eyes at her exasperated huffing. “I thought mothers were supposed to warn their sons not to be idiots.”

She turns back to her plants, saying, “If you don’t play the idiot once and a while, I might never have grandchildren.”

His mother frightens him more often than not; but her tacit permission sends him running back to the marketplace to ask after the name of a dark-eyed, golden-haired beauty.

The mysterious woman is a noble, he learns, and her name is Jocelyn. Jocelyn the Fair, a simpering lady selling handmade jewelry tells him. Buy her a trinket and she’ll adore you! Jocelyn the Fey, says another. When Leonard asks the old woman selling apples what that means, she smiles crookedly at him. “You don’t want that one, boy” is her warning. “The fey only bewitch. To love is against nature for Fair Folk.”

After polishing a red apple with a rag, she offers it free of charge. He runs his thumb over its shining surface and lifts it to his mouth to take a bite. Only then does he notice the small hole and returns the apple to the old woman. “It has a worm.”

She laughs. “Hard to see for all the pretty though, isn’t it?”

Her laughter seems to follow him home but his mind is too preoccupied with a name to care.

Jocelyn the Fair.

He waits by the weaver’s stall with a handful of fresh flowers for Jocelyn every third market day until she reappears. Under the glare of the young woman’s guard, he awkwardly introduces himself then shoves the bouquet of flowers into her startled hands. The woman looks it for a long time before slowly plucking a single yellow flower to twirl between her fingertips. The remainder of the bouquet is handed to the guard.

His heart sinks. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, feeling awful. “You don’t like them.”

She meets Leonard’s eyes and gives him the same thoughtful consideration as the flowers. “Where do flowers grow in winter?”

He frowns, taken aback by the riddle. “I guess… inside?”

Her laughter is nothing like the old woman’s; it is rich with lovely things Leonard cannot name, for he is inept at poetry just as he is inept at most things, like riding a horse or sword-fighting.

Jocelyn asks before turning away, “Why should a flower be tamed when it is meant to be wild?”

His shoulders slump under the rejection.

But then she adds very softly, as if for his ears alone, “I like wild roses best.”

The trouble he goes to to find a wild rose in a semi-permanent winter land makes his ears burn with embarrassment; yet when next he meets Jocelyn, one of his scratched hands offers her a single red rose which, amazingly, looks as fresh as the day he first plucked it. Perhaps this is so because of its intended romantic purpose. He smiles at the silly thought.

Jocelyn accepts the rose expressionlessly but the gleam of her eyes speaks of her pleasure, and his heart thumps hard in his chest. Ignoring the baleful glower of guard at her back, Jocelyn half-whispers, “Will you show me where you found it?”

“The place is a ways out,” he mutters, nervous but thrilled by the request. “In the woodlands close to the hills.”

“Then, tomorrow at dawn, I will meet you by the lower gate and you will take me there.”

He nods, thinking he would wait at the lower gate from now until the rise of the sun if it meant he would see her again.

She comes alone, sneaking through the town both cloaked and wrapped in shadows. Together, they slip beyond the lower gate and into the wilderness. To his chagrin, Leonard is disoriented more than once as they move into a copse of tall pines. But Jocelyn, hood thrown back to reveal the shining gold of her hair, seems to know well the path they are upon.

He describes the clearing where he discovered the solitary rose bush. She responds, “It would grow alone; it marks a border no mortal eye can see.”

“What sort of border?” he asks, curious.

Jocelyn’s blue-black eyes dance at him; her hand takes his, tugging him farther under the dark, hushed canopy of trees. Soon the crisp, cold air turns cloying, like heavy perfume heated by summer sun. Roseheads bob in greeting as they enter the clearing.

“I recognize this place,” Jocelyn remarks almost idly. “I used to play here as a child with—a friend.”

Hearing the sudden longing in her voice and afraid of what remains unspoken, he asks, “What happened to your friend?”

“Hmmm?” She looks at Leonard, brushing a few loose strands of her golden hair from her face. “He is here, I imagine, but I fear he and I cannot meet as we once did. Father does not approve.” Her mouth twists to something close to sardonic. “You have witnessed my second shadow.”

The guard? Yes. Leonard mumbles, “I’m sorry.”

Her attention has already moved elsewhere. Kneeling by the rose bush, the young woman touches first a soft red petal of an open bloom then, below it, a thorn. She whispers a few words in a lilting language, rises again, and lifts her head as if seeking something.

The hem of Jocelyn’s cloak carves a faint trail into the snow as she walks the wide circle of the area. He senses anticipation from her but cannot identify the reason behind it. What is there is to find in a forest but trees, small animals and, however bizarre, summer-ripe roses?

Without warning, his companion begins to openly beg: “Please! Please, I am here! Show me where!” Leonard is struck by the raw desperation in her voice.

“Why must you hide from me?” Her begging dwindles as she returns to the patch of wild roses bobbing in a nonexistent wind. She remains, head bowed, facing them for some time until Leonard realizes, surprised, she is crying soundless tears.

Uncertain, the young man offers her an embrace.

“The path is not here,” she whispers against the rough fabric of his cloaked shoulder. “I’m old enough now so why can I not find it?” Then, pulling back, she adds abrupty, “I must go” and wipes her wet face with the back of her hand. “If Father discovers I am not abed, I will lose what little freedom I have.” Her voice turns into a sigh.

He returns with her to the town’s lower gate, miserable as she, and expects this is an end their short acquaintance. Yet Jocelyn gives him her thanks and asks softly of him, “Will I see you again?”

The “Yes!” bursts from him. Leonard tempers his enthusiasm with a milder, “Only if you don’t mind.”

She nods somewhat absently, drawing the hood of her cloak to hide her face, and disappears into the daylight of early morning.

They make a routine of meeting in the marketplace. Leonard is too shy to hold her hand or say silly endearments, so he settles for enjoying her quiet companionship as they transverse the thoroughfare of buyers and sellers. Then one day, instead of walking at his side, she grabs his hand and pulls him into a empty doorway and, before he can ask what happened to her ever-present guard, kisses him.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers against his mouth. “What must I do? They say I am unfeeling but—imagine drowning in a lake, so close to the surface you can see the sun in the sky but unable to break through…” She lifts his hand to her cold cheek.

“How can I help?” he implores.

She kisses him again, more slowly this time. “I want to feel something other than this drowning.”

He is lost to Jocelyn in that moment.

Leonard’s infatuation grows into love. On a late afternoon of one of their trysts, he holds her in his arms while the last lazy rays of sun coil through the window of their rented room and paints their naked bodies in streaks of orange. Softly whispering, he tells her of how he feels and kisses her forehead, her cheek, her mouth.

Jocelyn remains slack in his arms, head turned and the look of dreaming in her open eyes. Is she picturing their future? he wonders.

At last a soft sigh stirs the silence. “Leonard,” Jocelyn murmurs, as though he is far away. “If I could, I would love you.”

He is too young and too human to understand her meaning. He thinks she is saying in her own way his worst fear: that she cannot marry him because she, as a lord’s daughter, must have a husband with wealth and standing. He will be nothing more than a simple tailor, earning enough to live but not enough for luxury. Leonard buries his face against her golden hair and promises, unable to imagine a world without her, “I won’t let you go.”

He visits her father, burning with both determination and fear, prepared to plead for Jocelyn; but the lord is surprised enough to say, “My girl loves you?”

“We love each other,” he explains. “Please, sir, doesn’t your daughter’s happiness matter?”

“Her happiness is all that matters. You say she… loves you?” repeats Jocelyn’s father, staring at him in faint surprise.

His temper flares. “Is that hard to believe,” he dares, “because I am not rich? Jocelyn isn’t petty.”

“You misunderstand,” Leonard is told. “I only meant—oh, never mind, young man. If you swear to protect her always, to cherish her as I do, I see no reason to deny your proposal of marriage. I learned long ago that Jocelyn must have what she wants.”

“Except her freedom,” Leonard says, thinking of the guard.

The man before him inexplicably ages, lifts a helpless, weary hand. “I have done what I can for my daughter. The matter of her freedom will soon be yours to decide. On this, only your heart can counsel you.”

My heart loves her, he thinks. How could she not be free with me?

He is too happy, imagining a wonderful life with Jocelyn, to notice the pity in her father’s eyes.

The Beast

To the eyes of the world, he is a beast. He has four limbs; claws for digging snow or scraping bark; and sharp, strong teeth for tearing the flesh of a meal. He has fur to keep warm from winter’s chill and a tail to aid in the balance of climbing of an icy rock or the creaking limb of a tall tree. Yet despite what he seems to be, the beast is not comfortable in his beast skin.

For his heart is not a beast’s. This he learns because she tells him what he really is.

Rested after a fresh night hunt, the beast is occupied with cleaning the matted fur over his paws when someone summons him. He is young and unafraid and quite curious because no one has summoned him before.

The summoner is tall and thin with the long raven’s hair and darker eyes still. Moonlight is both the lacework of her gown and the net of fire twining through her hair. The beast slinks easily to her feet and lays there.

“Do you know what you are?” Her language is fluid, like words shaping out of the stream. He can understand her.

He answers, “I am a beast. What are you?”

She kneels to run her fingers through the thick fur on his flank and he rolls onto his side in pleasure.

“I am the reason you are a beast,” she tells him.

“Do you make all beasts?”

“No, only you.” She rises again and lifts her hands into the air, seeming to capture it in spirals of color. “It is your eighth year. Once every eighth year, you are free to be what you truly are.”

The colors spread out and envelop him as her magic settles into his skin, working its way deep into his bones. He does not understand what the magic is doing until he is naked upon the snow, inside a new body. Upon inspection, he discovers many interesting things about himself: his legs are too short in the front to compensate for the extra length of his legs in the back; most of his fur is gone as are his claws; and his nose ends in a tiny blunt tip.

“Stand as I stand” he is told. He rises awkwardly on two legs, only to next discover the heavy bulk of his body is greatly diminished. Yet for all this new strangeness, he still feels young and free. His face is tilted until he looks up rather than continues to inspect the clawless toes of his feet.

“Listen well. You shall live as a human until the moon grows full again. Then you must return to a beast.”

He touches the smooth skin of his face, the round edges of his ears, his small nose. “Can I always be a human?” he wants to know, because this body could be better than a beast’s. Beasts are strong and fast, yes, but also solitary. Humans, mostly, are not.

Her words, like her magic, are saturated with power. “There is a way. If you tell me your true name, you shall never become a beast again.”

She leaves him then, disappearing almost instantly, but he is not interested in her departure. He plucks frozen red berries from a nearby bush and rolls them between his hands; when he puts one of them in his mouth, it has a horridly bitter taste.

Everything is new, and he delights in the investigation of it all. Once he has re-explored his wooded territory, his thoughts inevitably turn to others of his kind and their strange big dens. As a beast, he enjoys running amidst huddles of their noisy sheep; but when dogs start their frenzied barking he generally has to abandon his play. Being a human and no longer a beast, he now imagines he can run among them freely.

This is when he discovers a disadvantage of being not-a-beast. His nose is too small and silly to help him trace the path to a human settlement. It is beginning to burn instead, as his fingers burned when he stuck them through a patch of ice. His furless body, it seems, no longer feels the warmth of the stranger’s magic. He whines in his throat and looks back at the way he had come but a light snowfall has already hidden the imprints of his feet. Suddenly he wants his den, or any den, deciding he can find humans once he is warmer. But there is no choice except to keep moving.

When he finally breaks away from a thick copse of trees and into a wide field, he feels sluggish with exhaustion and cold. Collapsing into a groove of wet dirt and snow at the edge of the field, he tucks his legs up to his body.

Forever seems to pass; a bird calls out from in its journey. A hard-shelled beetle inspects the tip of one of his fingers before scuttling on about its business. When he is too weak to keep his eyes open, a new sound comes—the crunching of snow under heavy footfalls. He stays limp as strong arms bear him up from his icy bed and shelter his naked body in something rough but warm. It is longer still until he can open his eyes again; when he does, it is to look upon the face of a female human stroking his head and urging him to drink. He thinks he stays shaking and fevered for a long time but she is always there, a soothing presence, each time he wakes up.

She and a man (her husband, the farmer who found him in the field) ask him questions he cannot answer. He simply does not know how to answer them. So they teach him words.

One night the woman says to him, “You are a miracle, boy” as she tucks him into a small bed. She touches her belly, then his face with a new expression, crying but not sad. She tells him he is her miracle, a child brought back from death as none of her children ever were. He knows not what she speaks of, or comprehends it, or really cares.

A human is happiness, he decides, as he learns to run and jump on two legs and use his hands for things like picking snapbeans or putting on clothes (which he isn’t fond of doing at first, not until he realizes clothes equal warmth). The woman is affectionate; the man less so, but not unkind. If the woman is happy, he hears them talking to one another late at night, then so is her husband.

No one tells him happiness cannot last forever. He forgets what he is beneath the skin until on a cold, clear night he is awoken by a strange dream. In the dream, a Queen crowned with midnight roses speaks to him. “Beast,” she calls. “Where are you?”

He awakens and quietly pads to a frost-covered window. The moon is high and full; in the distance, past the farmer’s barren field, colors of blues, greens, and purples form a beacon over a line of trees. Not intending to be gone long, he takes the coat the woman made for him and sneaks outside as they sleep.

She is there, the Queen from his dream who summoned him; if she is a queen, he thinks, she must be the Queen of Winter, who keeps moonlight fire in her hair and is snow-pale with eyes of black ice.

“Hello,” he says as humans do, and shuffles closer to look at the illusion of dancing colors she has cast upon the snow.

“What is your name?” the Winter Queen asks.

“My name is Boy,” he replies proudly.

She glides close enough to press a hand upon the crown of his head. “You are a boy. The boy with the light of the sun trapped in his hair. But that is not your name.”

The illusion rises up into spires and ensnares him, binding his body back into its former, sleeker shape. With a fierce toss of his furry head, he protests being a beast again in a long howl. But the Winter Queen is fading, and he belatedly springs after her, sprawling into a bank of loose snow.

This is not what he wants! He will find the Winter Queen and tell her this.

He lifts his long nose, senses sharpened again, to catch the scent of her fey magic but there is only a bitter aftertaste. He is the beast, and alone.

He is afraid to leave the human couple who want him as family and spends several days lurking about the border of the farm. The man and woman search for the boy he was and sometimes he answers their cries with a mournful cry of his own. However his beast’s voice scares them, he soon realizes, so he stops crying. Their search for him grows disheartened until the day comes they quit searching altogether; the man tells his wife about finding a torn coat and animal tracks in the snow; they believe he is dead, eaten by a monster.

The boy is the monster but they could not know this, and he cannot tell them what he is. Eventually he realizes he must leave them behind to survive, this man and woman (father and mother) who are willing to love him, and retreats to the hills to resume his life as a beast.

Time moves on; winter is ever-present, whether it is lurking quietly during the short season of sprouting green, warm sun, and slow-melting river ice, or claiming the land for its own in blankets of sleet and snow. Winter is a way of life all things adapt to.

He wakes curled up in the hollow serving as his current den, human again for the third time. Crawling into the open, he startles a white hare and watches it dive into a patch of bracken, red eyes rolling in fright. Then he stands up, shades his eyes from the glare of sun upon snow, and starts walking. At one point he finds a puddle of half-frozen water and admires his angular face and sun-colored hair.

A doe eyes him warily from between two trees; it leaps away when he charges it, and he winds up face down in leaves and mud. He knows pride is his enemy, for he cannot accept this form is so clumsy and terrible at hunting. With a grimace, he decided he isn’t hungry anyway and, ignoring the bite of fresh snow on his skin, cleans the mud from his face before resuming his journey.

Find shelter. Find clothes.

Find humans.

It goes without saying find his name.

Last time he had tried to skirt the deal with the Winter Queen, hoping her magic could not reach in him in a human settlement; but he learned then nothing can prevent him from returning to a beast except the power of a name. This experience was traumatic, not for him but for the girl who had woken up to find a beast in her bed instead of her lover. The men of the village hunted him for days after that, and he had to run far, far away. Janice had claimed to love him, but who is going to love a beast?

Love is strange. He knows now he does not miss Janice or the tavern and its gruff owner Old Bill out of love, but he misses companionship and human touch. Sometimes he misses Bill’s roar in the early morning made to rouse him from his pallet of rags by the kitchen stove; he definitely misses the smell of baking meat pies; and more so, the tart taste of green apples and honey.

Memories come back to him, sharp and clear, now that his beast skin is gone. Would Bill and Janice remember the long-limbed, mysterious boy-turning-man from eight years past? Would they recognize him now that he is fully grown?

He learned much and has forgotten none of it: from Bill, how to read some words and when to curse; from Janice, when curiosity is good and when it isn’t, and how to love; from a mean-spirited Frank, that some people will hurt you if they can, even when you are not hurting them.

But he never learned his name. And words like “goose-headed fool”, “handsome”, and “son” would never break the Winter Queen’s spell.

This time he has to find what he needs.

There is a town to the west but he is trying to remember if any humans live farther out than the town, some place where he can beg for or steal what a human must have before he moves on. Hence he is not quite wondering aimlessly, lost in thought, when another human makes an unexpected appearance.

“Hello.” She is small, young, and watching him curiously. Her hair is only a shade darker than his own.

“Hello,” he repeats.

The girl clasps her hands in front of her and asks, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Cold?” he echoes.

“You don’t have any clothes. I’d be cold if I didn’t have any clothes.”

He thinks for a moment, lifts up one bare arm for inspection then the opposite arm. “I have lost my fur,” he explains.

She cocks her head. “Where did you leave it?”

He does not know that answer. “It… goes away, sometimes.”

“Oh.”

He stands very still under her frank stare, wondering if she is going to run from him or laugh or fling snow at his furless body as others have in the past. When the girl turns, he decides she is simply going to leave. She marches some steps away but then stops and tells him, “You’re supposed to follow me.”

Most humans become angry when he follows them.

“C’mon!” insists the girl. She points through a copse of trees. “I can get you my Papa’s clothes to wear. He’s a tailor so he can always make more.”

“But,” he half-questions, “I am a—” What is the word? “—stranger.” This is a bad thing to be, he knows.

“You’re somebody who’s lost his fur,” she replies. “You need more fur until the old fur comes back.”

He is not cold yet but she does not know that. The child is inviting him to follow her, and because she is unafraid of him, he does.

She chirps conversationally, “My name’s Joanna. What’s yours?”

“I do not know my name.” I am looking for it.

“Oh,” she says, checking over her shoulder to make certain he is still trailing at her heels. “Did you lose that too, like your fur?”

He shakes his head.

“Then it might be harder to find,” she warns him wisely.

Yes, he knows.

As I closed down the word processor window, bleary-eyed and tired from a long stretch of writing, the Sidhe demanded, “Is it done?”

“For tonight,” I said. “It’s past one in the morning and tomorrow—today—” I corrected myself, sighing deeply, “—is Monday.” How often would I have to remind him that my schedule accommodates him, not the other way around?

For the first three paragraphs, he had stood over my shoulder reading as I wrote. Suffice to say, that did not last long. I had told him to quit because his constant scrutiny was making me nervous. So he had chosen the only chair in my bedroom in which to sulk.

I turned to my house guest and admired the languid drape of his limbs. Alas, I did not imagine he had any intention of remaining that way for the duration of however long it took to write a fairy tale about Jim and Bones. “Will you be leaving now?” I asked politely.

His light-colored eyes were considering. “You will continue to write.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’ll try” was my mild reply. “Though your presence is most helpful!” I had begun to equate the Sidhe to my muse manifested.

I saw him recoil though his body did not alter its position, and I wondered if he had an ability to read minds. The Sidhe then sprang away from the chair, so quick a movement I barely saw it. Pausing briefly by my open bedroom door, he said, “I will return once each week until the tale is completed.” Then he was gone.

I sunk into my own chair, feeling depleted. A burbling noise arose from my stomach.

Funny, I had forgotten to eat. In fact, the world seemed to have fallen away while I was writing and the Sidhe was here. Only after he left did I recall things like hunger and cold and time. Was this a symptom of being in the presence of a fey being? Had he somehow muffled my senses to all but a single-minded focus to write?

If so, the Sidhe had the beginnings of an extremely profitable business. All he need do was rent himself out as a writer’s good luck charm. I snickered at the thought, reached up to my desk lamp, and clicked it off. But as I climbed into bed, reality crowded in with me. I groaned into my pillow.

Work in seven hours. Oh God.

He should have stayed, I thought in despair, because I’ll never get that fairy tale done without him!

Part II

Related Posts:

• [Masterpost] Of House Guests and Winter Twins – from December 4, 2011
• [Pseudo-Masterpost] Of House Guests and Winters Twins – from November 29, 2011
• Of House Guests and Winter Twins, Part II Cont’d – from December 4, 2011
• Of House Guests and Winter Twins, Part II – from December 4, 2011

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