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[ Back to Part I | Masterpost ]
The next Sunday the Sidhe came back. When he realized I had done non-Faerie-related things all week and not a jot of writing, he had a fit. A conniption fit, as my grandmother would have said, complete with bulging eyes and unmanly shrieks.
I nibbled on a gingersnap while he leapt and pranced and generally flew about the kitchen spouting a guttural Faerie language I did not understand.
“You,” he said with a long finger pointed at me, “are a disgraceful—”
“Hey,” I interrupted, disgusted and wiping at my arm, “watch it. You’re spitting on me.”
And to think, it had taken me three days to convince myself I imagined the whole Faerie-has-contracted-me-to-write-a-short-story-YAY! thing. Then the Sidhe reappeared out of a shadow, and I jumped onto the crazy-bandwagon again. (Because let’s face it, people—if I wrote all of this down and you happened upon it and read it, you would never believe a single word was true.)
“You will complete the tale by midnight,” he was demanding. “You will write until your fingers are as knobbly as Rumplestiltskein’s!”
I wanted to ask if Rumplestiltskein was an actual member of Faerie—and, if so, why did his parents gift him with such a horrible misnomer?—but the thought led me to a better idea. “I’m going to name you,” I declared.
He stopped ranting and looked indignant. “I am not a pet.”
“Well,” I said sweetly, knowing how this would go if rumors are to be believed, “there is another option… You could tell me your real name.” When he said nothing, I cried, “Excellent! I dub thee Spock!”
The Sidhe did not appreciate my choice.
“Tsk, tsk, Spock. The tips of your pretty pointed ears are turning green with temper.”
His hand halted mid-air on its way to cover one of his ears. “My blood is not green.”
Oh ho, somebody here watches Star Trek besides me, I thought.
A flush started up his neck, bringing more color into his otherwise pasty-pale skin.
“I won’t tell,” I mock-whispered, and said more formally, “Shall we get to business then, Mr. Spock?”
This time it was I, writer klmeri, who led the way to the bedroom. The Sidhe followed.
The Invisible Prince
He pulls curiously at the loose fabric over his arms and shoulders and leans in to smell it, his nose twitching at the mixed scent of sweat and something like cider served at a tavern…
“It’s clean!” interrupts the girl named Joanna.
He looks at the small honey-haired child. Since she is frowning, he frowns too. “Who cleans it?” he asks, recalling belatedly that clothes are human fur, in a sense, and are kept free of dirt, fleas, and the like.
She plucks the bunched bit of shirt from between his fingertips. “I do,” Joanna says somewhat haughtily, as if he is questioning her ability to wash clothes. “’N don’t scrunch up your nose like that. My Papa’s got a nice smell.”
He never said it wasn’t a nice smell.
Her frown deepens as she observes him, beginning from the top of his head down to his feet. Her gaze lingers at his feet; he looks at them too, wiggling his toes against the wooden floor of the cottage.
“I gave you some socks,” the girl child remarks in exasperation. “Why aren’t you wearin’ socks? Don’t you know you can catch a chill without them? That’s what my Papa says.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t like anything on his feet. Why do humans always want their feet covered? Are they as embarrassed about feet as they are about other body parts they have? Sometimes he thinks living as a beast is simpler, at least in the sense that a beast does not need to hide what he has.
Joanna finds one of the socks beneath a table (where he had hidden it) and waves it in his direction with an imperious “Put it on!”
He retreats onto a bench against a wall and tucks his bare feet under his body. She calls him stubborn. Old Bill called him stubborn when, after three days of the grimiest chores in the tavern, he was still scrubbing away at ten years’ worth of hardened ash on the hearthstone, mute as ever, but unwilling to give up the only work offered to him. Stubbornest, strangest fella, Bill had said, to come begging to the tavern’s kitchen door. Yet the tavern-keeper was fair and let him stay since it was obvious he could be a kitchen-hand, if a clumsy one.
He snarls at her (lightly so as not to frighten her) what he snarled Bill each time the man complained about his behavior: “Not stubborn!”
She gives him a look he hasn’t seen before and says, dropping the sock back to the floor, “You’re more of a child than I am.”
She does look like an adult, he thinks, with that severe slant to her eyebrows and her lips pressed so primly.
Joanna takes it upon herself to provide entertainment for her new friend. She leads him around the main room of the cottage, pointing out the interesting things like the herb bundles hanging over the window sill and the current storybook her father is reading to her at nighttime and the jar in the cupboard the mice frequent because it contains a mixture of seeds and stale bread crumbs Joanna likes to feed her favorite winter wren. She shows him the loft she pretends is her tower when she plays Rapunzel and her favorite yellow hair ribbon. Together, the pair poke their curious noses into every corner of the house, save one room.
The room belongs to her parents. He isn’t allowed in there unless invited and even she, the daughter, is subject to this rule, especially in the hours before dawn (unless it is just her Papa inside, but he doesn’t understand what she means by that). Joanna’s clever eyes fix on him as she says this, and he returns her stare with a blank one of his own.
“You don’t say much,” he is told.
He opens and closes his mouth like a gasping fish before blurting out, “I ask too many questions.”
“But you’ve asked none.”
Yes, because he will ask too many. He learned on his own too many questions earn him less answers. He has to wait until he has a good question—an important question—that cannot go unanswered.
Like, “What is my name?”
Joanna would not know, so he doesn’t ask.
At the rattle of a latch, the child bounds away their mess of an up-ended cupboard and nearly tips over a stool in her enthusiasm to get to the cottage door. “Papa’s home!”
Hearing this, he hurries back to the bench and fits himself onto it, throwing his arms around his knees.
A voice says not unkindly, “Careful now, sweetheart. Papa’s not as young as he used to be.” The edge of the door shields Joanna and her Papa from sight but, listening, he likes the timbre of the man’s voice. Then the door is closed to reveal someone who is the complete opposite of Joanna—tanned as she is pale and richly dark-haired rather than fair. The man does not look like her sire until, that is, his features arrange into something very similarly unhappy to Joanna’s expression when he refused to put on the sock.
“Who’s this?” the man wants to know in a sharper tone.
Joanna slips from under the protective clutch of her father’s hand. “I found ‘im, Papa!”
The man could brand him with the green blaze of those eyes.
He says, not fearful but rather awed, for lack of exceptional conversational skills, “Hello.”
Joanna’s Papa grunts in return, a clear unfriendliness pinching at the corners of his eyes. Then the broad-shouldered man carefully studies the innocent expression of his child. “Jo, it’s one thing to bring home pets but this—” Here he narrows his gaze at the stranger seated guilelessly in his home. “—is a man. What’d I tell you about—”
“But he was naked,” interrupts the little girl, not wanting to be fussed at, “’n it was snowing.”
‘Papa’, like a bear, rumbles deep in his chest and shields his cub.
Tensing, he instinctively recognizes the look in the man’s eyes as danger abound.
“He was what?” Joanna’s father repeats menacingly. The rumble becomes a growl directed at the interloper, “You keep over there where I can see you. Damn it, Jo, stay behind me!”
“But, Papa!” The girl tugs on her father’s hand. “He ain’t harmful, I swear. Remember, I told you about the—”
“Enough!” snaps the man. Then, casting those fierce eyes about the room, he adds in growing alarm, “Where’s your mother?”
Joanna crosses her arms in a sulk behind her beloved Papa. “Mamma’s gone again. I tried waiting but you was taking too long to come home so I went to find her but found Sockless instead.”
The room throbs with a heartbeat of silence.
“Sockless?” her father mutters, the edge of threat receding from his voice.
Sockless? He is wondering the same thing but has sense enough not to echo the question, not while Papa still looks faintly like he wants a good reason to chase him back into the woods. The cottage isn’t as expansive as a tavern but it is nicely arranged for its size.
And the tips of his fingers and nose are warm again.
Joanna points at an accusatory finger in his direction. “He won’t wear socks ‘n when I tried to tell him he had to, he sat on his feet!” She turns an aggrieved look on her father. “Now he’s gonna catch a sickness and die a’fore I can train him.”
The man stares at his daughter for a long moment before replying slowly, “Joanna, a man is not a pet—even a… brain-addled one.” Now the man addresses him. “You should leave, mister. We aren’t looking for trouble and since my daughter doesn’t seem upset because of you, I’ll take that as a sign you’ve done her no harm. Meaning I won’t tell the village warden you’re around. But,” his eyes remain hard, “we don’t take in strays.”
He doesn’t understand everything the man is saying but he recognizes its tone of rejection easily enough. He has heard that rejection many times in the past; most people aren’t as charitable to an awkward adolescent as they might be to a small child; he imagines they would be even less so to a full-grown man.
He wills his frozen muscles to loosen sufficiently so he can slink with caution along the wall to the door and slip from the cottage. Joanna’s father’s eyes track him beyond the door. When he reaches the invisible boundary between cottage and wilderness, he is stopped short by an exclamation of “Mamma!” Joanna’s cry echoes like the excited shrill of a bird.
With long-honed instincts, he pauses to lift his face to a cold wind and breathes in. A scent of bitter but familiar magic freezes his lungs.
“Joanna!” comes a second shout, but the child pays no heed to the frightened call of her father.
He moves to interrupt Joanna’s flight past him, equally afraid the Winter Queen is nearby and Joanna may run headlong into her. Just barely recalling her father’s warning to stay away, he looks apprehensively over his shoulder at the dark-haired man instead of chasing the child. However, the man does not spare him a glance as in his sprint after his daughter down the snow-and-mud packed lane.
He licks his lips, uncertain, then lopes after them. He isn’t supposed to follow, undoubtedly should not to preserve himself, but he imagines a father without his child and a child without her father; apprehension and a tiny flare of guilt urges him on. Slowing from a trot, he comes abreast of a tree whose branches are bent miserably under hoarfrost and lingers there, watching the scene unfold ahead of him.
Joanna kneels beside a woman in a snow drift, shaking limp hands in her own, until the father orders the girl to move back so he can cup the woman’s face and say something to her. At the slow droop of the woman’s head and shoulders, the man sheds a dark brown cloak and tucks it around her body.
He can hear Joanna asking excitedly “Did you find it, Mamma?” over her father’s insistence that she be quiet. The woman seems to wilt further.
“But the redbird on the bough told me where to go! That’s what he told me!”
Her Papa cuts into her wail with “Jo! Go in the house!”
For the second time Joanna takes flight, heedless of anyone in her path, tears on her flushed cheeks and an angry downturn to her mouth. Her feet stumble once but she shoves away his attempt to catch her and cries, “Let me alone! I won’t help you find your name!”
Had she struck him he would have been less surprised. He backs up to the trunk of the tree, ignoring the roots scratching painfully against the still tender flesh of his feet.
Somewhere beyond his shelter a world-weary voice repeats “Jocelyn?”
The acrid taste of magic grows until it is pervading, burning in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. The woman, standing on her own now, is less than two arms’ length away from him. She sheds crumpled leaves from the ribbons of her muddy dress like a dying tree; and her hair, similar to his, is a burnished gold coin. It is the woman’s eyes, however, which catch him fast, twin pools of a winter-dark river, too deep, too seeing.
“Jocelyn.” The man takes the woman’s thin shoulders in his hands, protective again, and urges her away. “Let’s go.”
Her “Hello” is neither weak nor tentative; it is as strong as the sudden, demanding rise of her arm, fingers outstretched to touch him. He stares at those long, elegant fingers, seeing not the ring of silver on one finger or the dirt under the nails; he sees another hand, also finely boned and elegant, running its moonlight-pale fingers through fur.
She makes a small protest when he jerks back, slipping and sliding over a large root to his knees.
“What are you?” she asks at the same time Joanna’s father insists, “Jocelyn, leave him be.”
She tilts her head back to look at the man. “Is he a guest?”
“He… was a guest of your daughter’s.”
Those eyes return to him.
Joanna’s father asks in low plea, “C’mon, Jocelyn, he is no one. Let’s go home.”
“I thought I was lost,” the woman says, eerily serene. “I thought the redbird had lied to me again, to keep me suffering, and I called and called— Oh, Leonard,” she murmurs, “I have despaired I would never find it.” She leans into her husband for a brief moment. “Invite him in.”
Leonard recoils without visibly moving away from her but his voice already sounds of defeat. “Jocelyn, we don’t know him.”
“I know the beast in his eyes,” she says and abandons them to glide down the cottage lane like a graceful wrath in a tattered gown.
He doesn’t dare move under the hard gaze pinning him to the tree.
“Beast, huh?” says the husband. “Well, keep your beastly nature to yourself.” Those eyes rake over him then seem to realize he is already trembling and bare. The man, though gruff, seems less hostile when he adds, “You may be scrawny but cowering doesn’t suit you. Get up, then, and come in.” His voice drops to a mutter as he strides away. “Likes his toes in the snow. Only an idiot.”
He stays where he is until the sun drops below the horizon and his breath is close to crystallizing in the air. He doesn’t run from the cottage because he isn’t willing to give up a chance to be human; but he doesn’t leave his huddle against the tree, either, unable to tell a lie from a truth and welcome from pity. It isn’t until the door to the cottage opens and Joanna leans out, lantern in hand, to call him—Sockless! of all things—like her pet to-be-trained that he crawls from the roots and decides he might as well spend a night on a warm floor if given a choice.
During that first night sheltered in the cottage, he stirs awake from a fitful sleep to find the mother, Jocelyn, leaning over him. She glows in the darkness of the cottage’s loft.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I am looking at a beast that is a man,” she replies. “How did you change?”
He drags the coverlet over his exposed chest, wondering how long she has been watching him in the dark. He doesn’t answer her question.
Jocelyn grabs at his face, her sharp nails cutting a pattern of half-moons into the skin of his jaw. The bitter magic comes rushing back and chokes out the regular air from his lungs. He makes a noise, an urgent let me go!, and when she does not, he howls in his throat and thrusts her away. They lock stares, the woman on her knees and him in a defensive huddle, until a light flickers to life below the loft.
“Mamma?” a sleepy voice calls.
Jocelyn shudders and presses her hands to her chest, twisting the cloth of her white gown between her hands. The wild taste about her melts into a kind of pain. “Please,” she begs, “tell me!”
There is a thump as Joanna’s lantern hits the bottom rung of the ladder. “Mamma?” the child whispers again, sounding uncertain.
He does nothing, can do nothing but stay squatted over his straw bed, waiting to see if he needs to fight or flee. At last, Jocelyn moves toward the ladder and climbs down. He can hear their voices without peering over the edge of the loft.
Joanna is saying, “It’s all right, Mamma, but you can’t wander at night, remember?”
Jocelyn murmurs something.
“It’s only Sockless up there ‘n you shouldn’t spook him,” whispers the child insistently.
“He’s a beast,” Joanna’s mother whispers back.
“I know,” says the girl, “that’s why I brought him home. But he can’t help you until we help him first.”
The morning meal is uneventful but tense. Leonard glares at him from over a bowl of porridge, Joanna carries on a conversation without response from anyone but herself, and Jocelyn remains out-of-sight. After picking at his food, he removes himself awkwardly to the bench along the wall and watches Leonard watching him. He is used to this silent game and can do it for hours, as a beast has to be patient to hunt properly; but the man is not as patient as he. With an eventual annoyed sigh, Joanna’s father drags a plain wooden chest from a corner of the large room and takes out the tools of his trade.
Joanna, who up to this point had been cleaning their porridge bowls with the sluggishness of a long-suffering kitchen-hand (he used to be one of those, so he recognizes the disgruntled slant of her shoulders), forgets what she is doing and bounds around the long oak table to say, “What are you making, Papa?”
The man smiles as he threads a needle with practiced ease and begins to set a line of stitches in a long piece of cloth. “If I had a child who was less of a tomboy, I might be working on her new dress for the Midwinter festival. But there is no point in making something new when the old has to be patched first.”
She stares at the back of her father’s head. “If I had pants to wear, I wouldn’t tear my dresses so bad.”
His hands never pause in their work but he chuckles. “If you had pants, Jo, you’d tear them up too.” Her father adds more slyly, “So you don’t want that dress with the tiny bells for Midwinter?”
“Oh yes of course, Papa!” she cries. “But you’re so wonderful you can make them both!” She hugs his neck from behind and then scampers over to the open chest. The girl turns toward the bench after picking something out of it.
“C’mere, Sockless,” she beckons.
He shakes his head.
She narrows her eyes. “Sockless.”
He isn’t a bad pet. Come to think of it, he isn’t a pet at all. He shakes his head again with a stubborn set to his jaw. The stubborn set to her jaw is identical.
Leonard interrupts their competition of superior stubbornness. “Might as well do what she wants, Sockless,” the guest is told dryly.
Joanna calling him a pet name is okay because she is a child. This fierce-browed man, however? He doesn’t like it. Standing up, he declares, “My name is not Sockless.”
Leonard looks pointedly at his bare feet. “Then either put on a pair of socks, or tell me your real name.”
Joanna, hearing more in his silence than Leonard would, tells her father, “He doesn’t have a name.”
The man puts down his needle, arguing, “Everybody has a name.”
“But he doesn’t know his yet,” Joanna explains. “I told you, Papa, he’s lost, and he can’t get found until he has his name back.”
Leonard is clearly working through this by the deep line creasing his forehead but there is no trace of meanness in his face. Finally Leonard looks at him, his daughter’s Sockless, with a new expression in his eyes. “I heard of people forgetting who they are” comes the slow response. “Is that what happened?” the man asks, searching his face for confirmation.
Joanna shoots her new friend a sad shrug, as if to say he won’t understand, I’m sorry.
He nods mutely to Leonard.
“Oh.” The tailor’s fingers play across the set of fresh stitches. “That’s—different, then. Sorry to hear it. That’s a bad thing to have happen to a man.” He sighs. “I guess you can stay until you know your name,” he finishes in an almost murmur and picks up his work again.
Joanna could be sunshine breaking through heavy clouds. She grabs his hand and tugs him over to the table but won’t let him sit down. With great cheer, she holds a piece of string along the length of his arm.
“Jo,” her father asks in a strange voice, “what are you doing?”
He wordlessly poses the same question.
“Well,” the golden-haired child says to them both, “you cannot expect him to wear your clothes every day, can you, Papa? They’re much too big! I’m gonna make him new clothes.”
Leonard closes his eyes. “Sweetheart, last time you tried to sew—” He doesn’t complete his sentence but instead opens his eyes and holds out his hand. “All right, give it over. I’ll see what I can do for Sockless.”
The girl tosses him the string as though she never intended to keep it. “Thank you, Papa!” Cheerfully, Joanna returns to the basin of soap and water to clean the rest of the bowls.
He makes certain to remain motionless as the man measures different parts of his body; yet being so close to Leonard allows him to catch that rapidly becoming familiar scent he first noticed on his clothes. He wonders why it appeals to him so much.
He tries to tell Joanna’s father he knows he cannot expect to live on their kindness. On the third day of his stay, he follows Leonard behind the cottage to a pile of wood and a stump and watches, fascinated, as Leonard cleave logs in two with an ax. Soon the man’s breath puffs white in the air and he is swiping at beaded sweat upon his brow.
The task looks simple enough. He points to the ax. “I can chop.”
In fact, one of his chores was chopping lots of carrots for stew at the tavern. The wooden logs look like big carrots—sort of.
But Leonard seems to think he is asking to turn cartwheels and dance on his head. “I’m not giving you my ax,” he is told. “Being a house guest and being a trustworthy house guest are two different things, kid.”
Leonard has taken to calling him ‘kid’ rather than Joanna’s favorite nickname. He does not like kid much better than Sockless.
An idea occurs to him. Picking up a short log, he places it on the stump, hands on either side, and holds it there. Leonard shifts his grip on the ax, not fully paying attention, and mutters a short “Thanks” and “Move back.”
But he doesn’t move, not as the man swings the ax over his shoulder or before the man realizes a person is in danger of being split down the middle. Leonard leaps back at the last second and the ax is jerked to the side and discarded into the snow with a curse. Wild-eyed and not quite frothing at the mouth, Joanna’s father snaps, “Are you stupid?! I could of killed you!”
He calmly walks over to the abandoned ax, tests the weight of it in his hands, and tries to split the log himself, ignoring the enraged huffing of the man at his back. The blade only goes halfway through the wood and sticks there. He stares at his failed attempt, circles it once in contemplation, before tugging again at the ax’s handle. It doesn’t want to come out of the wood.
How could he be unable to chop this thing? He’s human, isn’t he?
“Here, like this.” Leonard turns the log on its side and uses his foot to hold it down while he yanks out the ax. After the man stares at him for a brief time, Leonard hands him the ax and repositions the log upright on the stump. A sweep of his hand is permission to try again.
Failing one time is bad enough; failing twice makes him very mad. Leonard puts a stop to his bare-footed kicking at the dumb piece of wood.
“I’ll say it again—you’re scrawny. You look like you haven’t done a day’s hard work in your life, so it’s no wonder you don’t have the muscle to split wood.”
He mutters what Bill always used to tell him after a long night of curious questions: “Shut up.”
Leonard isn’t offended by this. “For telling the truth?”
That gives him pause. He pulls up a shirt sleeve and looks at his arm, then compares it to Leonard’s.
Leonard, surprisingly, puts a hand on his slumped shoulder and says without a hint of joking, “All you have to do is practice enough.” Then the man rolls down his own sleeves and takes off his gloves and offers them with “It’ll make your hands sore, though, as well as your arms, so wear these.”
He doesn’t know what to say. He watches Leonard disappear around the side of the cottage.
Practice.
He had to practice at words when he was a boy; he is still practicing at words as a man. He has to practice at reading, too, which isn’t any easier now than it was eight years ago. Being human seems to be all about practicing at things.
Since he wants to be human, he determinedly lifts the ax in his gloved hands and goes back to trying to chop wood for Leonard and his daughter.
(And Jocelyn, but he doesn’t like to think of her.)
As he practices, he resolutely ignores the undeniable sensation of being watched. She is out there in the woods at his back, making those crackling noises as she moves about. Whether it’s Jocelyn or the Winter Queen, however, he cannot tell.
Not knowing the difference between them is what scares him most.
It isn’t so terrible being under the constant, somewhat suspicious supervision of Leonard or spending his days chasing after Joanna in the snow. The part with Joanna he enjoys most because she, like him, knows something of the wilderness about them in a way a regular human would not.
Of a chattering squirrel high in its nest in a tree, she says, “He’s mad ‘cause somebody stole his nuts.”
He stops rolling a ball of snow between his hands and listens for a moment before agreeing. In fact, the squirrel is naming its mate as the culprit. He wonders if that is a tendency of mated animals rather than mated humans, as he has never noticed Leonard speaking angrily to Jocelyn.
…Though Leonard accuses him of plenty of misdeeds, like eating the last biscuit at dinner despite that Joanna had been the obvious biscuit thief. Strangely, Leonard’s complaints don’t bother him nearly as much as they first did. He understands better now that the man is bristly by nature.
He and Leonard have found a fine line to interacting with each other without violence and seem to walk that line well. Had he known how to do that when he was younger, it would have benefited him greatly. Bill, even, had a tendency to cuff him upside the head when he acted stupid; Frank, on the other hand, was a drunkard and more prone to outright belligerence. A growing boy-man underfoot was an easy target for a temper—and Frank and he had their share of fights, which were often to his disadvantage because he wasn’t good at fighting without teeth and claws.
Joanna takes advantage of his distracted thoughts to put snow down the back of his shirt. She giggles while he yelps and flails around trying to shake the coldness out of his clothes.
“You dance funny,” he is told afterwards, when he has the coherence to listen.
“What’s dancing?” he asks.
Joanna’s mouth drops open. An unexpected “PAAPPPAA!” raises the hairs on the back of his neck.
Her father comes running, which means Leonard had probably been watching them muck about in the snow drifts from the window of the cottage. “What’s the matter, Jo?” he demands, hurrying toward them.
“Sockless doesn’t know how to dance!” she cries.
Leonard is not given time to reply, and neither is ‘Sockless’ given time to run away. They are summarily shoved together with a resounding smack of foreheads.
“I’m too short to dance with him properly,” Joanna is saying, oblivious to their mutual horror, “so you dance with Sockless and I’ll direct.”
“I am not dancing with him,” snaps Leonard.
Joanna bursts into tears.
He has never seen a small child cry so hard and, well, it’s Joanna so he hastily grabs for Leonard and pulls the man close with an apologetic look. “We’re dancing!” he calls, not bothering to figure out what that could possibly entail or what dancing should look like.
The sobs disappear as suddenly as they began. Joanna sniffles but her eyes are dancing. For the first time, he notices they change color like her father’s, lightening from brown to brown-green.
It’s hard to ignore the glare boring into his forehead but he manages ignorance of Leonard’s displeasure valiantly.
“Papa,” the girl chirps, skipping over to them, “you gotta hold his hand—here—and his waist here.” She moves their limbs like they are two of her dolls. Then, clapping her hands in a rhythm, she begins to hum a tune.
Leonard says next to his ear, “I don’t like you,” as if the sentiment needs to be expressed.
He drops his gaze and pretends deafness. “What are you doing?” he asks when the man moves at him.
“You’re supposed to step back when I step forward” is the grumbled reply.
Oh. He steps back, but it doesn’t feel right at all—the gap between their bodies widens.
“For the love of—wait until I move first, kid!” The hand tightens at his waist. “If you tilt, we both tilt.”
It takes a little more explanation—and Joanna slapping at his legs—to get the rhythm of dancing with Leonard. He kind of likes the activity, unless Leonard steps on his foot or he feels unbalanced. But this close to Leonard he can smell that hint of cider and sweat again—and pine, too, after it has been warmed by the sun. If Leonard smells of these things, what does he smell like? Before he can ask, they finish moving in a full un-interrupted circle and come to a halt.
Leonard congratulates him, “That wasn’t half bad.”
Because he feels something new, something unexpected, he has to look away. His eyes seek out Joanna and her approval.
Except Joanna is no longer watching them.
Leonard follows his gaze and the man’s relaxed posture goes rigid.
In the window of the cottage, Joanna is sitting behind her mother, no doubt plaiting the woman’s long golden hair as she likes to do. She is focused on her task, but Jocelyn—Jocelyn has eyes only for her husband and the beast, dancing in a slow, sweet circle upon the winter snow.
Jocelyn sits next to him rather than her husband at dinner that night. He is uncomfortable at her closeness but powerless to voice his discomfort. To make matters worse, Joanna’s father barely acknowledges his presence at the table.
Halfway through the meal, Leonard excuses himself. He wonders how long it will be before Leonard talks to him again with more than abbreviated words and vague noiseless gestures.
Jocelyn props her chin in one hand and watches her husband’s retreating back. “He does not understand you.” She speaks for the first time since the meal began. The food on her plate lies untouched.
Joanna, crumbling a piece of unwanted bread, has no attention for either of the adults.
Jocelyn returns her eyes to his face. “You can behave like a man. You can dance like a man.”
He is uncertain if this is a compliment or a subtle reminder his actions are only pretense. He cannot help but snap, “I was meant to be human.”
She is silent for the time it takes Joanna to sigh in abject boredom and leave the table. Then Jocelyn responds as though no lag existed in their conversation. “And I was meant to be a beast. We are kindred, then.” She rises gracefully to her slippered feet, tells him, “You can only have my life if you are willing to trade.”
With those final words, she goes not to the room she shares with her husband but to the cottage door and slips out into the starless night, heeding a call none but she can hear.
He pretends to fall asleep but lies quietly, hardly daring to breathe, until the sounds of the cottage are little except a lull of crackling fire and the scurrying feet of mice. Then he slips down the ladder, out of this warm home which isn’t his, and into the wild where he is still most comfortable.
On a small hill far from sight and smell of the cottage, he sits and stares at a half moon and realizes he has forgotten his purpose. Joanna makes him forget, whether this is intentional or not; Leonard, perhaps more so, makes him forget.
He shivers.
Boy is not a name. Son is not a name. Sockless, not matter how desperate he may be, is not a name. Not a true name.
He can forgive himself for not finding his name the first time; he was young, newly human, and too enamored of letting the man and woman take care of him. He can, if reluctantly, forgive himself for not finding his name the second time. He had to adapt to being on his own in a world he didn’t understand; he had questions to ask, people to observe, and chores to do; he had a girl named Janice who attracted too much of his attention.
But now?
Time is whispering by and he has been heedless of its passing, too caught up in appeasing a child who cannot comprehend the urgency of his situation (even if she somehow knows he is not truly human) and dodging a woman who looks too much like a Winter Queen. He has also spent his precious days hoping a man named Leonard might treat him with something other than the recognition of one stranger to another; that the man might, in fact, begin to like him.
I don’t like you.
But Leonard does not. Leonard likes his daughter. His wife.
He remains a nameless beast beneath this skin; it is the nameless beast Leonard sees in him and does not like. Therefore he must have his true name and shed the beast first.
Another lesson learned, he thinks, lifting his fingers to touch aimlessly at drifting flakes of snow. Humans can sometimes discover things in backwards order but, in doing such, have a clearer vision of why they must practice and learn and achieve.
He discovers he wants Leonard to like him for the man he can be. And now he knows why he must have his name.
A gusty sigh blew across my ear and I practically fell out of my desk chair in surprise.
“Love is tedious,” intoned Spock wisely from his hither-to unannounced position behind me.
I hadn’t waited for him in the kitchen like last Sunday because I had been excited to work through my story. In fact, I sort of assumed he might be fed up with his duty and decide to leave me well and truly alone.
Apparently not. “You realize you cannot discontinue the story at this venture,” the Sidhe dryly informed me.
I climbed back into my chair with a grimace. “Why’s that, Spock?” I asked, mainly to irritate him.
He made a noise of displeasure at his nickname but did not correct me. “I feel I should enlighten you of the existence of certain fans of your…” He waved his hand at my laptop. “…monstrosity. Does this knowledge ease your worry?”
I gaped at him. “Really? But how—?” I had shared this story idea with no one despite my misgivings of a Sidhe as a capable beta-reader. How did he know I was worried about the fairy tale’s reception by my peers?
“Do not think,” he told me, “you are not under surveillance by every being of Faerie. We must have this completed. On time,” he added with a sniff. “Now do continue, k-l-meri.”
Faerie folk or not, who was I to deny a fan base their chosen method of crack? So I returned to writing under the watchful eyes of my very own, freakishly (and unexpectedly) Vulcan-like supervisor.
The Snow Girl and the Red Wren
“For the sake of everything sane, stop fiddling about!” Leonard kneels in front a chair and pulls at the strings tangled about the golden-haired man’s fingers. “Did nobody teach you how to lace boots?”
He winces when Leonard yanks the laces tightly, causing the top part of the boot to squeeze uncomfortably around his calf but says nothing as Leonard proceeds to give the next boot the same rough treatment.
The man complains, “I swear it’s like having another kid in the house.”
“I am not a kid,” he protests without thinking.
Those eyes—more brown than green today—flick up to his, surprised. “No, you aren’t—which is why I haven’t figured out why you have the education of one. Forgettin’ your name usually doesn’t mean forgettin’ everything.”
That’s unfair. He plants one of his now properly laced boots against the man’s knee and shoves slightly in retaliation. “I can’t learn if no one wants to teach me.”
The man wraps his hands around the toe of the boot and holds it still, frowning.
“Papa!”
Leonard lets go and stands up, a flush of red spreading along the side of his neck. “Joanna,” he says in a strangled reprimand, “don’t sneak up on us like that!”
Joanna, hands on her hips, wants to know, “Why aren’t we going? You said we were going!”
The man lifts his hands with “All right, all right. No fussing, sweetheart. Papa and Sockless—“ Leonard drawls the name with amusement. “—were just talking. ‘N trying to get his boots on without breaking ‘em.”
‘Sockless’ is given a wary but firm stare and told, “You can’t take off them the whole time we’re outside.”
His feet already hate the confinement but it is best to nod in agreement. He knows now Joanna is determined to have her way, more so than he ever thought a human could want to, and if he doesn’t have her, he doesn’t have a place to stay. Leonard would toss him out, helplessly nameless or not.
Once Leonard disappears to another room Joanna gives his shoulder a sympathetic pat. “It’s hard to get him to like you, I know,” she tells him, “but you have to keep tryin’, Sockless.”
If he thinks too hard about how she knows what she knows, he will hurt himself. So he doesn’t think, but instead sorts through his knowledge of fairs. Janice had coaxed him out of the tavern early one evening into a street crowded with people and laughter and dancing and wheels of color. Of all the things which happened to him in the company of the tavern’s Bill and Janice, and even the mean-hearted Frank, the fair was brightness in a dark time. It was a reminder humans know how to be joyous, not just bitter.
His stomach turns with excitement at the thought of experiencing that joy again. He smiles at Joanna and lets her tug him to the door of the cottage while listening to her cry aloud, “Papa, we mustn’t be late! What if all of the gingerbread is gone!”
Leonard’s voice is lightened by laughter as he returns, a small cloak in hand. “There are always plenty of sweet breads at a fair, Jo. We can’t leave until you’re ready.”
Once cloaked, Joanna spreads her arms wide and spins in a twirl of bright red. She giggles as the cloak settles about her again and lifts its hood to hide her grinning face. The red-hooded little girl rejoins her friend at the door, taking his hand. “Everybody’s ready now!” she announces. Her father, he notices, stares at their linked hands, something indecisive but fleeting passing across his face. That causes a prickle of warning at the back of his neck. He stays utterly still when Leonard, smiling but with a new consternation in his eyes, gently takes his daughter’s other hand and tries subtly to maneuver her away. Joanna, oblivious to the tension between the two men, only clutches harder at her friend’s hand and pulls them both out of the cottage.
“There’s gingerbread and ribbons and puppet shows—” the child chatters between them.
A darting figure at the corner of his eye catches his attention. He looks up, watching the dive of a bird to a tree branch where it settles with a chortle. It picks at one of its red feathers before tracking their procession down the cottage lane, still laughing.
Puppets are fascinating, especially when beating one another with oversized sticks. He thinks so, Joanna thinks so, but Leonard does not and is too busy skimming through groups of people with worried eyes.
He doesn’t know why but he asks if he can help.
The man bounces his leg in clear agitation and mutters, “She said she’d meet us here. I—oh, damn, I shouldn’t have let her go by herself!”
“Where?” he asks, already guessing Leonard is speaking of his often absent wife.
Leonard glances at him. “Her father’s place.” He jerks his chin in a certain direction. “Up the hill.”
“Oh.”
He has never been on the hill, not even as a beast. It’s well-guarded by men with bows.
“Can you watch Jo?”
Shocked, and perhaps showing it, he nods mutely. Leonard works his way through the tight crowd of people and is soon swept from sight.
Joanna grabs his hand with a roll of her eyes and a “I never thought he’d go! C’mon!”
“But—” he protests, looking at one female puppet screeching and whacking another, supposedly male puppet.
“We can make our own show at home, silly,” says the little girl. “Now is not the time to dawdle!”
“Fairs aren’t for dawdling?”
“Not when we have somewhere important to be.” Joanna squeezes his hand as she drags him between two booths and to the outskirts of the fair. He looks forlornly over his shoulder at a giant of a fellow snacking on a headless gingerbread man.
“You aren’t paying attention!” comes the accusation as he stumbles around objects and over his own feet, tethered, it seems, to a flying machine that is an energetic child.
“Sorry. What are we doing?”
“Visiting my friend,” Joanna says. “The redbird knows your name!”
He suddenly isn’t missing the fair at all. “How?”
They duck under a fence where a donkey is tied and brays at them in dismay for leaving him behind when an adventure is afoot. He calls out an apology to it but the donkey only snorts and bares its buck teeth with a promise to bite him in the future.
When they come to a low wall—the “lower gate” Joanna calls it—he stops because Joanna seems rooted in place. She gives him a long, considering stare. She asks, “If you get your name, do you promise to help my Mamma?” She sounds too serious for a child of six.
“But how can I help?” he wants to know, having no clue himself.
“Just promise me!” she asks of him urgently.
So he does.
It occurs to him belatedly that Joanna might have no more clue what her Mamma needs from him than he does.
Leonard’s heart sinks as a housemaid leads him into the occupied parlor of Jocelyn’s father ‘s house. The lord, now sporting silver-gray hair at his temples and lines of age, is relaxing by a fire. His father-in-law seems surprised by the visit, which makes Leonard’s stomach sink.
“Leonard,” the man waves him forward with one heavily ringed hand, “what brings you here? Is there not a festival in the village this evening? I know how fond my granddaughter is of festivals.”
“Sir,” he says with a hastily made bow, even now uncomfortable in the lord’s presence despite their amicable relationship. “I came in search of my wife. She was to invite you to join us at the town fair.”
The sudden alarm in the lord’s eyes mirrors Leonard’s. Pushing a lap blanket, he hurries toward Leonard. “You let her travel alone?”
“I have a child—” Leonard swallows, barely stopping the words and an unusual child-like man from spilling forth. “—to watch, sir.” He adds more softly, “I also vowed I would never chain Jocelyn to my side. When she… wanders, I can only hope she remembers her family and returns to us.”
“Hope is a fragile thing, made to be broken, I’m afraid.”
His father-in-law sighs deeply, not unlike Jocelyn’s sigh when she has lingered at the cottage too long and feels trapped by its four walls. Leonard does not know how to answer that sigh from Jocelyn’s father any better than from his wife.
“She is not here, Leonard. Perhaps she is looking for you and Joanna.”
He shakes his head, knowing such a thing would never happen.
The same question always surfaces: why? She has a good life and family who loves her, a husband and a child; Leonard works hard so Jocelyn wants for nothing and yet… what does she require that her current life cannot provide?
Leonard does not realize he voiced this aloud until a hand lands on his shoulder. The lord squeezes it in genuine sympathy. “You are a good man, Leonard. If Jocelyn could love you, she would.”
Hearing the echo from Jocelyn’s mouth years past, he stiffens. But he cannot say he does not understand; he does now, too clearly. Jocelyn’s heart is consumed with a love for something else and always has been. He is but the man devoted to her who makes her life bearable until she can have what she truly wants.
Whatever that desire is.
Leonard rakes a hand through his hair. “Your words give me no comfort,” he admits. “Every time… it is harder for me to watch her go but also harder for me to continue to worry for her when she is gone.” He looks at the circle of silver on his left hand. “Some days I am so angry I feel more like a beast than a man. I want to lock her in our room no matter how she cries or begs but I simply can’t,” he finishes, choking on a deep-seated shame.
“I know your heart exactly,” Jocelyn’s father comforts him. “I have often struggled with the same feelings since she began to wander as a child. I gave into my anger more times than I care to remember. I did not want to lose her, she who is the only part I have left of my wife.” The lord sighs again.
Leonard murmurs, “Jocelyn’s mother? You never speak of her.”
The man returns to his chair and sinks into it, inexplicably weary, to face the fire. His voice, too, is filled with shame. “I cannot. I was crueler to her than any other.” He laughs lowly, a strange sound. “Jocelyn is too much like her father.”
Leonard slowly circles the man and the chair. He has never had more than a passing polite conversation with Jocelyn’s father. In truth, he knows he need not have been afraid to speak to the man. His father-in-law is also a person who both loves and suffers because of Jocelyn. He asks, “What do you mean?”
The lord’s eyes grow distant with memory. “I married Jocelyn’s mother despite my love for another. Though our marriage was not an unhappy one, I continued to see this other woman. Once my wife was with child, my shame became unbearable and I ended the affair. But the death of my wife was more horrible than you can imagine, for I had to no chance to earn her forgiveness or try to be the husband she deserved. We were only beginning to know one another.” He looks up to Leonard then and confesses, “Yet even now does she still linger in my thoughts. Perhaps a guilty soul such as mine is not meant be redeemed, or forgiven.”
Out of respect, Leonard allows the bitter man a moment of silence. He prepares two drinks from the carafe brought in by a servant and offers one to his father-in-law before remarking quietly, “She must been special, this other woman you loved before your wife.”
“Yes,” agrees the lord. They savor the taste of the strong mulled wine. “She is a winter star—beautiful to look upon but always far from reach. I should not have wanted her but I was as foolish as every other mortal man who thought he could love a fey without repercussions.”
Leonard goes cold, though the fire is hot in the fireplace and the room warm enough to bare skin. “Fey?” he repeats.
The lord’s face, lined with years of guilt, suddenly hints at a younger, more confident man. The lord raises his glass in a mocking salute to an absent presence. “Hair and eyes as black as a raven’s. Skin of pearl. She was—is—perfection. That is the lure of Fair Folk, Leonard. They know how to draw us into their world and turn ours to illusion.”
He inhales a sharp breath. “You cannot mean you were enchanted, sir. Fair Folk are an old wives’ tale! Stories I read to my daughter.”
“I have loved one, Leonard. I can tell you They are as real as we are—but colder of heart,” he ends gravely.
“Were that true, then we should all fear to sleep at night.”
The lord simply stares at him.
Leonard denies the idea fiercely. “Am I to believe in ghosts and goblins now?”
“Believe what you will. Belief cannot change the truth.”
Seeing the certainty in his father-in-law’s eyes, Leonard swallows the lump in his throat. “I must find my wife, and return to Joanna.”
Jocelyn’s father nods somewhat absently. “You know where to search for her,” he says, returning his stare to the fire. “She will be looking for Them, exactly as her old man once did.”
Comprehension dawns at last, and Leonard’s drink slips from his nerveless fingers and shatters upon the floor in streaks of amber liquid and glass. Jocelyn’s father is dismissive of the mess, never taking his eyes from the hearth’s dancing flames. “Call a maid in to clean it.”
But Leonard is no longer listening. He knocks into a servant come to investigate the noise, forgetting to apologize for his rudeness in his swift flight from the house upon the hill.
Joanna clasps her hands in front of her and calls, “Redbird, what is the name of this beast?”
Something cackles shrilly in one of the nearby trees. At Joanna’s side, he turns a slow circle, hoping to glimpse this redbird. Joanna repeats her question.
Leaves rustle as a blur of red moves from tree to tree. A miniature man leaps into sight upon a wide bough high above their heads. The creature is unlike anything he has seen before; its nose is long like a beak, its skin nut-brown. Beady, black eyes regard them with curosity. About its shoulders is a red cloak tailored to its small size; an uncanny a replica of Joanna’s cloak, he realizes.
“What does a name matter to a beast?” the Redbird whistles from between pointed teeth.
Joanna is prevented from stepping toward the creature by the hard grip of his hand. He shakes his head fiercely at her. She frowns, too unafraid to understand his wariness.
“So this is the beast,” clucks the Redbird, scurrying to another branch to better observe them. “Such a pretty beast—but nameless, tsk-tsk-tsk.”
Joanna huffs. “I told you that already! You said you knew his name.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I do know,” the little creature assures her, chattering. He cocks his head at the pair of humans. “But no one gets something for nothing. What will you give me for a name?”
“You cannot give me any name. I want my true name,” he says with a firm set to his mouth.
The Redbird tilts its head to the opposite side this time and grins. “Clever, clever, clever! What will you give me for your name?”
He asks what it wants.
It hops to the lowest branch of the tree, still some feet above them, and whistles long and low. “I trade only in precious things,” it announces. “Dragon’s gold and mountain gems and mortal hearts. You have one of those, beast—a mortal’s heart.” There is a sly squint to its tiny eyes. “We can trade: your name for your heart.”
He puts a hand to his chest, wondering how such a trade would be possible.
But Joanna does not like this idea. “You cannot take his heart, redbird! That’s not fair!”
“Then you trade with me, little snow girl,” the Redbird says, displaying its teeth. “On your sixteenth birthday, bring me a heart that belongs to you.”
Joanna looks up at the redbird, worrying her lip. “But where would I get an extra heart?”
“Ask your mother” is the mysterious reply. The Redbird rocks the tree limb in obvious excitement. “Can’t get something for nothing, no, no, no!”
A snarl has been building in his throat since the creature appeared; he lets his distrust be heard and tugs Joanna away from the thing in the tree.
She digs the heels of her boots into the snow in resistance. “No!” the girl cries, smacking at his hand. “We can’t leave without your name! I won’t be sixteen for ages, Sockless! I can find a heart by then!”
He drops to his knees in the snow and holds her still by the shoulders. “Trading in hearts is bad. We will find my name some other way.”
She looks close to crying. “But Mamma can’t be happy until she’s free, and she can’t be free until you show her how.”
He shakes his head sadly. “No, Joanna. I don’t know how to be free. I’m sorry.”
She starts to cry in earnest. He pulls her close but his eyes search the copse for the creature in red.
There.
It moves swiftly through a dark pine, higher and higher, to the very top of the tree before flinging itself into the air. A bird—a winter wren—spreads its red-feathered wings and catches an air current. Circling above their heads, it cries out once before flying south.
He thinks he hears cackling all the way back to the fair.
A man standing by the lower gate spies their return. With alarm, he recognizes the slope of the man’s shoulders as Leonard’s and his heart contracts painfully. Leonard’s thunderous expression, contrasted by the pallor of his skin, is all the more frightening because of the terror lurking in his green eyes. Once they are within arm’s reach, Leonard sends him to the ground with a hard-knuckled blow. Pain blossoms fire-hot in his jaw.
“Papa!” Joanna gasps, shocked.
Leonard’s voice trembles with rage and fear. “I should have known better than to trust you. I don’t know who—or what—you are, but you won’t take my child!” he spits. “Keep away from Joanna!”
“No, Papa, no! It’s my fault!” the child protests, pulling futilely at her father’s clothes.
But Leonard, deaf to her pleas, forces her away. When they can no longer be seen, a new shadow detaches from the distant backdrop of trees and comes to kneel beside him. Jocelyn touches the corner of his mouth then studies the gleam of his blood on her fingertip.
He cannot see her dark eyes for the depths of her cloak’s cowl but they hold him nonetheless. She croons to him, “I will help you.”
“Why?”
Her answer, when it comes, is surprisingly sincere. “You saved my child. The redbird wants to snare Joanna as he once did me, and you would not allow it. For this, I can help you. Come.”
She rises and moves silently from him, not bothering to check if he follows her.
He asks as they walk, “Where are we going?”
“To my father’s house,” the woman tells him. “He is not unkind to beasts.”
The house upon the hill is less grand than he imagined it might be, for he remembers Janice’s frequent late-night tales (mainly complaints wrapped up in story-telling, he eventually realized) of wealthy lord’s families and their piles of hoarded gold. The lord himself is ordinary-looking, with a only trace of his handsomeness from youth. But he is also kind, as Jocelyn said.
“You have summer eyes,” her father comments, peering at him from the depths of a large upholstered chair. “I always thought Jocelyn’s eyes would turn to summer like my wife’s but they never did. Who are you, son?”
Jocelyn is occupied looking at herself in the gilded mirror above the fireplace. “He does not yet have a proper name,” she remarks, her back to them. “He is still a beast.”
“Nonsense, Princess. Am I to call him what I please, then?” questions the man.
“Joanna calls me Sockless,” he offers.
The lord has a deep bellow of a laugh. “Oh but Joanna is a gem! But that won’t do; you must have a man’s name. Do you like Christopher?”
He thinks about it. “No.”
“George?”
“No,” Jocelyn interrupts. “Your name is George, Father.”
Looking at his daughter with raised eyebrows, the lord wonders, “Why is it terrible to know two Georges, Jocelyn?”
She has returned her gaze to the mirror’s reflection; her mouth shapes a soundless question: Do I look like my mother?
“You may take my father’s name,” the lord decides. “Tiberius.”
He tests the sound of it. “Tiberius.” It is strange, but not.
“Tiberius is a brave name,” he is assured. Yet the man is looking at his humming, golden-haired daughter as he says this.
The glass of mirror gains a strange opaqueness as Jocelyn’s melodious hum lures not only the attention of the lord but also the household servants, drawing them in as an enchantment might. He is immune to its pull but, ever-curious, approaches the mirror to discover the opaqueness is actually a veil which stirs and shimmers once he stands opposite of Jocelyn. A soft glow begins to line the frame of the mirror, working its way inward to a central point.
Then, as the veil parts, he quickly looks away, certain whatever is lurking behind it is nothing he wants to see—or wants to see him.
Jocelyn stops humming. The sudden silence stalemates the magic in the air. “Tiberius,” she names him, turning so they are face-to-face. “A mirror shows a man his true self.”
He disagrees. “Mirrors can lie.”
“This mirror cannot lie to me,” the woman says too softly.
“As a husband cannot lie to you?” He meets her blue-black eyes in an unspoken dare. “As a redbird cannot lie to you?”
Her lips part.
“Who are you?” they ask of each other.
A sharp cry—a pained cry—shatters the remaining magic around them and, in doing so, cracks the mirror framing their twin faces.
He turns, alarmed, as the lord attempts to rise from his chair but crashes to his knees on the crest of the cry.
“I saw them,” the man gasps, “in the mirror!” He keens and clutches at his chest, almost doubling over.
Jocelyn is a statue but he is not. He kneels, eyes wide, at the lord’s side but does not what he should do. A servant quickly follows suit, questioning fearfully, “M’lord? Are you ill?”
A shaking hand lifts to cup his cheek, the fingers calloused and rough against his smooth skin. “Her face—her face was your face, boy.” The lord’s eyes move beyond him to Jocelyn. “And her face was my daughter’s. In the mirror.” The lord crumples against the servant, putting a hand to his mouth as if to catch a sob. His face is unnaturally pale.
Jocelyn stirs and addresses the circle of house servants gathering at the open door. “Father is unwell. Take him to his chambers.”
“What ails him?” he asks, looking at her.
“I do not know.” She drifts away to a closed door, eerily unalarmed.
“Where are you going, m’lady?” a maid cries to her.
A withered old man in plain brown attire answers instead. “She’ll go to where the wild roses grow. Never mind her; fetch the new garden-hand to help carry m’lord upstairs.”
Jocelyn, heeding none of them, vanishes like a ghost from the room.
“Ridiculous. Are these people deaf, blind, and dumb?”
I ignored the Sidhe as I finished The Snow Girl and the Red Wren.
He continued, “I blame this Winter Queen. How foolish to have lain with a mortal! She was obviously disgusted with herself and took revenge upon the king—”
“Lord.”
He said flatly, “Excuse me, lord—by stealing his rightful heir.”
Is that what they did in his Faerie? Make others suffer for their mistakes? I argued, “Jocelyn is his heir too. Honestly, must you think with a two-dimensional brain, Spock?”
The Sidhe’s mouth twitched.
I smiled at the laptop screen and said, “Do you want to know what happens next?”
He resumed his position by my shoulder. “You assume I care.”
Since his actions belied his words, I only shook my head and returned to the world of Jim and Bones.
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 I – from December 4, 2011
