Modern Faerie Tales Page 21

“Corny,” Kaye said, taking a half step forward.

  Still looking at her, Corny picked up the golden knife Roiben had dropped. The beginnings of a smile were on his lips as he lifted it.

  “No!” Kaye screamed, running toward Corny, frantic to stop him from stabbing himself.

  The blade plunged into Nephamael’s chest. Again and again, Corny stuck the body of the faerie knight, the knife making a sickeningly liquid sound with each thrust. Blood soaked Corny’s pants. A keening sound came from deep in his throat.

  The courtiers, Seelie and Unseelie alike, watched in rapt fascination. None made a move to help as Kaye grabbed Corny’s wrists and tried to wrestle him away from the body.

  He was shaking, but when Kaye pulled him forward to embrace him, she realized it was because he was laughing.

  “Look what you’ve done,” the Seelie Queen said. It took Kaye a moment to realize she was talking to Corny and not about him.

  A Seelie knight stepped forward and reached beneath his cloak. Kaye watched in horror as he brought out a long branch and smoothed it into a sickeningly familiar arrow. It was pointed right at her.

  “Roiben, end this or I will end it for you,” the Seelie Queen said. “I have been patient enough. It is long past time for you to return home.”

  Roiben’s voice was not loud but it carried through the brugh as he walked to where Kaye was standing. “I am home, Lady. Now tell your man to put down his weapon, and I will allow you to leave the Unseelie Court unharmed.”

  A hush settled over the Gentry.

  Kaye stood in stunned silence. Nicnevin had used Roiben well, far better perhaps than she realized. She had kept him close to her. She had used him against the rest of the Unseelie Court. Kaye remembered how they had drawn back from him when he escorted her through the crowd. He was not one of them, it was true, but he was remote as a king.

  No one challenged him.

  The Queen’s slim, perfect eyebrows lifted. “You dare?”

  Roiben’s sister took a step forward, but said nothing. Her eyes were pleading.

  He looked around the court, and Kaye could see him take a breath. Then he spoke. “Hear me and know the compact I offer. The solitary fey have gained seven years of freedom, but seven years will pass in the blink of an eye. Bind yourselves to me now, Unseelie and Solitary alike, and I will give you all of Samhain. Freedom from dusk until dawn forevermore.”

  Kaye saw several Unseelie creatures haul themselves up onto the dais. They did not advance on the Seelie party, but their toothy grins were all malice.

  The Queen stiffened. “I think, my knight, that you will find claiming a kingdom far easier than keeping one.” With that she turned, her long peacock cloak sweeping a circular pattern in the dust of the floor. Her knights and courtiers turned as well. Only Ethine hesitated.

  Roiben shook his head.

  Silarial looked back and, spotting Ethine, opened her cloak. Roiben’s sister let herself be embraced and drawn away with the rest of the Seelie Court. She never saw the cruel smile that played on the lips of the Seelie Queen nor the way her eyes met Roiben’s over his sister’s bent head.

  As the last Seelie left the hall, Roiben, self-declared King of the Unseelie Court, nearly fell into his throne. Kaye tried to smile at him, but he was not looking at her. He was staring out across the brugh with eyes the color of falling ash.

  Corny had not stopped laughing.

  The funeral parlor itself was small and Victorian. The furniture was ornate and dark wood. Even the wallpaper was somber, maroon fleurs-de-lis in a raised fuzzy velvet. There were people from school there, people Kaye only vaguely remembered. Kenny, Doughboy, Marcus, and Fatima were all sitting in a huddle, whispering to one another constantly, even when the preacher was speaking.

  Corny held Kaye’s hand through the whole funeral service, his fingers cold and sweaty and clasping hers hard enough to hurt. He didn’t cry, even when she did, but he looked pale and washed out in the black suit he wore. Each time she saw the bluish bruise on his cheek, it looked more obscene.

  Kaye’s mother had been terrified, thinking that Kaye had died too . . . so terrified that she’d resolved to commute into the city instead of moving there. Even Kaye’s grandmother was being nice. Ellen had dropped Kaye off at the funeral parlor that night and promised to pick her up again when she called. It was strange and kind of nice, everyone getting along, but Kaye didn’t want to get used to it.

  Janet was laid out like a painting, all red curls and red lips. She looked beautiful—Ophelia surrounded by bouquets of flowers that only Roiben could name. But Kaye could smell the chemicals they’d injected into her, could smell the rotting meat of what was left, and she almost gagged when they went close. She couldn’t, however, keep her hand from straying to the cold, oddly firm flesh of Janet’s arm. Kaye dropped the gift she’d brought—a tube of blue, glittery nail polish—into the coffin.

  Corny kept his death grip on her hand as he stared at the body of his sister.

  Afterward, Kaye and Corny stood outside, waiting for his mother to finish saying good night to the relatives.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Corny said, his voice very quiet, “my mom stopped by the store before we got here. I had to go in for cigarettes.” He reached into the inner pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out several straws with different-color stripes circling down their packaging. “A bouquet of Pixy Stix.”

  Kaye smiled. “I should be trying to cheer you up.”

  “You already did your white charger bit,” he said. “Check it out . . . rip this sucker open and you get genuine pixie dust. Tastes like sour sugar.”

  She laughed and so did he, a weird, desperate sound that spiraled up into the night sky.

  “What are you going to do now?” Kaye asked.

  “I don’t know. Shit, I still have to digest what I’ve already done.”

  “I know what you mean . . . but, you know none of it’s your fault, right?”

  “Except the part at the end with the knife?”

  “Even that part. Maybe especially that part.”

  “Next time . . . ,” Corny said, eyes alight in a way that Kaye was relieved to see until she heard the soft words that followed. “Kaye, I will never be powerless again. Whatever it takes. Whatever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He just squeezed her hand tighter. After a few moments, he said, “So how about you?”

  She shrugged. “Did I ever mention that I know how to make leaves into money?”

  “Yeah?” he said, eyebrows raised. His mother came over with a few relatives, and Corny finally let go of Kaye to get in the car. Her hand was damp and hot, and when the breeze hit it, it felt like she was wearing her insides on the outside.

  The last people had left the funeral parlor and they were locking up, so Kaye crossed the street to use the pay phone in front of the supermarket. She called her mother and then sat down on the curb in front of a plastic horse that rocked back and forth if you fed quarters into it. The fluorescent lights and the organic smell of rotting vegetables and the tumble of plastic bags across the parking lot seemed so utterly normal to her that she felt disconnected from the events of two days before.

  She hadn’t seen Roiben. It wasn’t like anything happened badly between them, it was just that she’d needed to take Corny home and he’d needed to stay and do whatever it was that new monarchs did. She didn’t even really feel bad that she hadn’t seen him. It was more the feeling of relief that you have when you know that something painful is coming, but you can avoid it for the moment. If she saw him, then she’d have to listen to whatever he really thought about the two of them being together now that he was King.

  Looking at the plastic horse, she summoned her magic. A moment later it shook out its mane and leaped down from the metal suspension it was held in. As she watched, it galloped away into the night, plastic hooves clattering over the asphalt.

  “There is something of yours I would like to return to you.” Roiben�
��s voice made her jump. How had he managed to get so close without her hearing? Still, she couldn’t help hoping any more than she could help scolding herself for doing so.

  “What?”

  He leaned across the distance between them and caught her mouth with his own. Her eyes fluttered closed and her lips parted easily as she felt the kiss sizzling through her nerves, rendering her thoughts to smoke.

  “Um . . .” Kaye stepped back, a little unsteadily. “Why does that belong to me?”

  “That was the kiss I stole from you when you were enchanted,” he said patiently.

  “Oh . . . well, what if I didn’t want it?”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” she said, letting a grin spread across her face, hoping her mother would take her time on the drive over. “I’d like you to take it back again, please.”

  “I am your servant,” the King of the Unseelie Court said, his lips a moment from her own. “Consider it done.”

  VALIANT

  For my husband, Theo, because he likes angsty, angry girls

  PROLOGUE

  For I shall learn from flower and leaf

  That color every drop they hold,

  To change the lifeless wine of grief

  To living gold.

  —SARA TEASDALE, “ALCHEMY”

  The tree woman choked on poison, the slow sap of her blood burning. Most of her leaves had already fallen, but those remaining blackened and shriveled along her back. She pulled her roots up from the deep soil, long hairy tendrils that flinched in the chill late autumn air.

  An iron fence had surrounded her trunk for years, the stink of the metal as familiar as any small ache. The iron scorched her as she dragged her roots over it. She tumbled onto the concrete sidewalk, her slow tree thoughts filling with pain.

  A human walking two little dogs stumbled against the brick wall of a building. A taxi screeched to a halt and blared its horn.

  Long branches tipped over a bottle as the tree woman scrambled to pull away from the metal. She stared at the dark glass as it rolled into the street, watching the dregs of bitter poison drip out of the neck, seeing the familiar scrawl on the little strip of paper secured with wax. The contents of that bottle should have been a tonic, not the instrument of her death. She tried to lift herself up again.

  One of the dogs started barking.

  The tree woman felt the poison working inside of her, choking her breath and befuddling her. She had been crawling somewhere, but she could no longer remember where. Dark green patches, like bruises, bloomed along her trunk.

  “Ravus,” the tree woman whispered, the bark of her lips cracking. “Ravus.”

  1

  Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

  —LEWIS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Valerie Russell felt something cold touch the small of her back and spun around, striking without thinking. Her slap connected with flesh. A can of soda hit the concrete floor of the locker room and rolled, sticky brown liquid fizzing as it pooled. Other girls looked up from changing into sweats and started to giggle.

  Hands raised in mock surrender, Ruth laughed. “Just a joke, Princess Badass of Badassia.”

  “Sorry,” Val forced herself to say, but the sudden surprise of anger hadn’t entirely dissipated and she felt like an idiot. “What are you doing down here? I thought being near sweat gave you hives.”

  Ruth sat down on a green bench, looking glamorous in a vintage smoking jacket and long velvet skirt. Ruth’s brows were thin pencil lines, her eyes outlined with black kohl and red shadow. Her hair was glossy black, paler at the roots and threaded with purple braids. She took a deep drag on her clove cigarette and blew smoke in the direction of one of Val’s teammates. “Only my own sweat.”

  Val rolled her eyes, smiling. Val and Ruth had been friends forever, for so long that Val was used to being the overshadowed one, the “normal” one, the one who set up the witty one-liners, not the one who delivered them. She liked that role; it made her feel safe. Robin to Ruth’s Batman. Chewbacca to her Han Solo.

  Val leaned down to kick off her sneakers and saw herself in the small mirror on her locker door, strands of orangey hair peeking out from a green bandanna.

  Ruth had been dyeing her own hair since the fifth grade, first in colors you could buy in boxes at the supermarket, then in crazy, beautiful colors like mermaid green and poodle pink, but Val had only dyed her hair once. It had been a store-bought auburn; darker and richer than her own pale color, but it had gotten her grounded anyway. Back then, her mother punished her every time she did anything to show that she was growing up. Mom didn’t want her to get a bra, didn’t want her to wear short skirts, and didn’t want her dating until high school. Now that she was in high school, all of a sudden her mother was pushing makeup and dating advice. Val had gotten used to pulling her hair back in bandannas, wearing jeans and Tshirts though, and didn’t want to change.

  “I’ve got some statistics for the flour-baby project and I picked out some potential names for him.” Ruth unshouldered her giant messenger bag. The front flap was smeared with paint and studded with buttons and stickers—a pink triangle peeling at the edges, a button hand-lettered to say “Still Not King,” a smaller one that read “Some things exist whether you believe in them or not,” and a dozen more. “I was thinking maybe you could come over tonight and we could work on it.”

  “I can’t,” Val said. “Tom and I are going to see a hockey game in the city after practice.”

  “Wow. Something you want to do for a change,” Ruth said, twirling one of her purple braids around her finger.

  Val frowned. She couldn’t help noticing the edge in Ruth’s voice when she talked about Tom. “Do you think he doesn’t want to go?” Val asked. “Did he say something?”

  Ruth shook her head and took another quick draw on her cigarette. “No. No. Nothing like that.”

  “I was thinking that we could go to the Village after the game if there’s time. Walk around St. Mark’s.” Only a couple of months earlier, at the town fair, Tom had applied a press-on tattoo to the small of her back by kneeling down and licking the spot wet before pressing it to her skin. Now she could barely get him to kiss her.

  “The city at night. Romantic.”

  The way Ruth said it, Val thought she meant the opposite. “What? What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing,” Ruth said. “I’m just distracted or something.” She fanned herself with one hand. “So many nearly naked girls in one place.”

  Val nodded, half-convinced.

  “Did you look at those chat logs like I told you? Find that one where I sent you statistics about all-female households for the project?”

  “I didn’t get a chance. I’ll find it tomorrow, okay?” Val rolled her eyes. “My mother is online twenty-four, seven. She has some new Internet boyfriend.”

  Ruth made a gagging sound.

  “What?” Val said. “I thought you supported online love. Weren’t you the one who said it was love of the mind? Truly spiritual without flesh to encumber it?”

  “I hope I didn’t say that.” Ruth pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, letting her body tip backward in a mock faint. She caught herself suddenly, jerking upright. “Hey, is that a rubber band around your ponytail? That’s going to rip out your hair. Get over here; I think I have a scrunchie and a brush.”

  Val straddled the bench in front of Ruth and let her work out the band. “Ouch. You’re making it worse.”

  “Okay, wuss.” Ruth brushed Val’s hair out and threaded it through the cloth tie, pulling it tight enough so that Val thought she could feel the tiny hairs on the back of her neck snapping.

  Jennifer walked up and leaned on her lacrosse stick. She was a plain, large-boned girl who’d been in Val’s school since kindergarten. She always looked unnaturally clean, from her shiny hair to the sparkling whi
te of her kneesocks and her unwrinkled shorts. She was also the captain of their team. “Hey you two, take it elsewhere.”

  “You afraid it’s catching?” Ruth asked sweetly.

  “Fuck off, Jen,” Val said, less witty and a moment too late.

  “You’re not supposed to smoke here,” said Jen, but she didn’t look at Ruth. She stared at Val’s sweats. Tom had decorated one side of them: drawing a gargoyle with permanent marker up a whole leg. The other side was mostly slogans or just random stuff Val had written with a bunch of different pens. They probably weren’t what Jen thought of as regulation practice wear.

  “Never mind. I got to go anyway.” Ruth put out her cigarette on the bench, burning a crater in the wood. “Later, Val. Later, loser.”

  “What is with you?” Jennifer asked softly, as though she really wanted Val to be her friend. “Why do you hang out with her? Can’t you see what a freak she is?”

  Val looked at the floor, hearing the things that Jen wasn’t saying: Don’t you know that people who hang out with the weird kids are supposed to be bad at sports? Are you hot for me? Why don’t you just quit the team before we have to throw you off it?

  If life were like a video game, she would have used her power move to whip Jen in the air and knock her against the wall with two strikes of a lacrosse stick. Of course, if life really were like a video game, Val would probably have to do that in a bikini and with giant breasts, each one made of separately animated polygons.

  In real real life, Val chewed on her lip and shrugged, but her hands curled into fists. She’d been in two fights already since she joined the team and she couldn’t afford to be in a third one.

  “What? You need your girlfriend to speak for you?”

  Val punched Jen in the face.

  Knuckles burning, Valerie dropped her backpack and lacrosse stick onto the already cluttered floor of her bedroom. Rummaging through her clothes, she snatched up underpants and a sports bra that made her even flatter than she already was. Then, grabbing a pair of black pants she thought were probably clean and her green hooded sweatshirt from the laundry pile, she padded out into the hall, cleated shoes scrunching fairy-tale books free from their bindings and tracking dirt over an array of scattered video-game jewel cases. She heard the plastic crack under her heels and tried to kick a few to safety.