by Marie Brennan
I grew up inside three cages, each more subtle than the last. Two my parents built in order to keep me safe; the third was of their making, but not of their will. The ores from which its bars were forged were accident, disobedience, determination, love, but the metal with which they are wrought is a malice that will never die.
Two cages I have escaped so far, though my parents strove to keep me safe within. Now I must go, in defiance of their wishes, to confront the one who holds the final key.
###
The first of my cages, and the most obvious to see, was the one called Home.
Home was very small to begin with. In my infant years, it was my cradle or my parents’ arms. They are and have always been loving; none can doubt that truth. No wet nurse had the suckling of me, and my nanny was there to lighten my mother’s burden, not to take it away entire.
This was unusual, I found out later. My mother is a lady, of high enough wealth and rank that she might have rid her hands of any child-rearing had she wished it. Most ladies of her standing did. But I was forever in her hold, or if not there, no more than three steps away. Too fond, some of the servants said, clucking their tongues at the folly of their mistress – I heard this later, for of course my infant ears understood them not at the time. She’ll spoil that bairn, keeping it close like that.
A few among them said other things, more quietly, where the rest of their number could not hear. She’s afraid. Thinks if she lets the child out of her sight for a moment . . . and who’s to say she’s wrong?
My father was less a part of my life, because he was more often away from home. He is a knight, and owes service to the king for that rank; he could not shirk it without giving offense. But when he was home, then often in his embrace I found myself, my chubby fingers reaching for his well-trimmed beard. This too was unusual, and I learned that sooner: few men of any sort, and fewer among knights, trouble themselves to do more than view their offspring from time to time, like a captain inspecting his troops. Thus assured of suitable health and growth, they return to their own business, which is not the raising of children.
The servants gossiped about this, too. My father feeding me, spoon in one sword-calloused hand, his shirt of fine cambric spotted with droplets of gruel. His delight in seeing my progress as I learned to grip, to roll over, to crawl across the floor. Never far from father or mother or both, never more than three steps away.
My tether grew as I did. Even the most doting of parents cannot remain so close to their child’s side forever, and had they tried, I would have known much sooner that something was amiss. When I hauled myself to my feet and began to walk, Home’s boundaries became those of our house. It is a fine snug manor, two storeys high – those stairs gave me great challenge in my early years, though now I take their steps two or three in a stride. But here, for the first time, I began to sense the bars of my cage, for I was forbidden to leave the house.
I thought little of this at first. It is the natural way of things for children to be subject to rules and bounds: I could enter the kitchen but not cross beyond the line of the great butcher block, for past there lay the oven and stove, on which I might burn my hand. That was no part of the cage of which I speak, but rather simple caution . . . and indeed, like any high-spirited child, one day I ran where I should not, laid my hand where I should not, and reaped the consequences. My father was upset, my mother was angry, and all was as it would have been in an ordinary household.
But less ordinary was the way the doors and open windows were forbidden to me. I minded very little when it was dark outside, for I feared the shadows without, and when the rain came squalling down or the snow lay heavy on the ground there was scant bait to tempt me out of the dry warmth of our manor. On a fine summer day, though, with the sun bright and the breeze carrying the intriguing scents of grass and growing flowers . . .
I could not be kept inside forever, any more than I could be kept within three steps of father or mother or both. I would have been a sickly child indeed had they kept me from the sun and fresh air. Soon enough – I believe I was four years of age, or thereabouts – the bars of the cage called Home were ready for me, and I was at last permitted outside.
I did not find those bars straightaway. I was still young, and so I did not venture far, only into the gardens that surrounded the house. Behind the manor lie our vegetable gardens, laid in regimented beds and reeking at times of manure; here our servants cultivate onions, carrots, marrows, and other things destined to grace our tables. On the western side are herbs: comfrey, chamomile, yarrow, and more, which my mother and her maids make into tinctures and ointments for when we are ill. To the east lie the stables.
But it was the southern side that became my favorite haunt, for there my mother grows her roses.
She loves all kinds of flowers, but roses above all. Everything from great showy blooms whose bushes require swaddling in burlap when the weather turns cold to small, stubborn climbing breeds whose tiny blossoms feel like a secret held close. Though as carefully tended as the vegetable beds, the roses always felt more wild to me. As soon as I was permitted outside I loved to wander among them, even crawling along the ground to go where no adult was small enough to follow. I came out with dirt all along my front and tears all along my back where the thorns had caught and cut, but my mother, laughing, said, “At least it’s safe in there.” With the foolish naivete of a child, I thought she meant I could not touch the stove from my prickly refuge.
The true bars of my cage, though, were not the gardens. Instead, this was my iron rule: I could roam where I pleased on the manor grounds, my parents decreed, so long as I did not go beyond the rowans.
These were planted all along the edges of our land, and I met them long before I knew it. My cradle was of rowan wood, though not from those trees, for they were too young to supply good timber. Above that cradle, too high for my infant arms to reach, a twig of rowan dangled from a red-dyed thread, and that did come from our trees. My father’s walking-stick was cut from one of their branches, and my mother made their berries into jelly every year.
Past the gardens, past the stables, past the paddocks in which we exercised my parents’ two fine riding horses and the two great cart horses that served the farms, the rowans marched in a regimented line, all around the manor grounds. A few were large, but most were small – for however quickly rowan grows, those trees were scarcely older than I was, having been planted shortly before my birth.
The cage called Home was barred with rowan wood. And when I was six, I was nearly lured outside it.
###
I did not mean to disobey.
I had grown old enough that I could roam quite well, and obedient enough that I was permitted out of my nurse’s sight. In those days the grounds of our manor still seemed large to me, and I was happy to ramble along the rowan line, gazing out at what lay beyond.
Mostly that was farmland, with pasture interspersed. In those fields our tenants planted oats, rye, and wheat, or peas and beans in the years not given over to grains, and I liked to watch them move up and down the rows as they plowed and weeded and brought the harvest in. It was less interesting in the years when a field lay fallow, resting from the hard work of producing crops, for then there was nothing to see.
Even had the fields to the west not been fallow the autumn I was six, I would have eventually wandered along the shores of the burn that day. It is my favorite part of our lands after the rose garden, for here some trees have been permitted to remain that are not rowans. The result is a shaded little grove perpetually graced with music, the trickle of the burn over the rocks that form its bed. When I was young, I spent long hours sitting within the bounds of the rowans, tossing pebbles or sticks into the water, seeking to make the biggest splash I could or placing silent bets on the course a stick would follow as it floated away.
But when I came to it that day, there was something new.
The bank plunged steeply from the rowans down to the water’s edge, and here and there exposed roots stood out from the earth like knees indecently bared. Caught among them was something shining and bright: a ball that seemed made of pure gold.
So busy was I gawping at it that I did not hear the woman until she spoke.
“Oh, at last – I’ve been hoping someone would come along!”
Tall, she was, even to one who saw not with the eyes of a child. Tall, and slender, and very gracious; I thought first of my mother, the only lady I knew. Certainly this woman must be a lady, for her gown was of fine green silk and the band that caught back her red hair was pure gold. No servant or farmwife dressed that way. And her voice was musical, sweet, as if every word she spoke were to be savored, no matter how banal.
“You’re a fine young lad,” she said to me, and curtsied just as if I were a laird. “What is your name?”
Six years old and obedient enough to be let out of sight, but in those days my manners were distinctly lacking. My mother and nurse had done their best to teach me courtesy, but when I hardly ever saw a stranger, I had little chance to practice those graces. In hindsight, I am glad of it: my rudeness may have saved me.
Not answering her, I merely stared, my gaze equally torn between the lady and the gleaming ball below. “What’s that?” I asked.
When my attention turned once more to her, she dimpled with an embarrassed smile. “That’s my ball. I was walking along the top of the bank here, tossing it for amusement, and it fell from my hand. Before I could do anything, it rolled all the way down and across the stream and caught in those roots there. I wanted to fetch it, but . . .”
She had no need to finish her sentence. Beneath the hem of her silken gown peeped the toes of golden slippers; skirt and slippers alike would be ruined by a slide down the muddy bank to the burn, and if she tried to cross the rocks of the bed she might fall. No lady would risk it.
I squinted at the ball. It had rolled a surprisingly far distance up the bank on my side before catching in the roots – I remember thinking so, that it was surprising, though it never occurred to me to follow on to the next thought. Of course it was no accident that the ball had come to be caught there.
My heart was as torn as my gaze. To retrieve the ball, I would have to pass the line of rowans, and this I had promised not to do. Promises, as my nurse and mother and father alike had told me, were sacred.
But they had also told me it was noble to help someone in need, and with my father a knight and my mother a laird’s daughter, did I not have a duty to uphold? Though my heart was not inclined to disobedience – not back then – I tried to reason my way to a resolution. Yes, I had sworn not to go beyond the rowans, but perhaps by that my parents only meant I should not go too far. They did not want me wandering out into the fields where I might get in the way of farmers, much less farther still, as a child’s whimsy might lead. To retrieve the ball, though, I had only to slip between two rowans and slide a few feet down the bank. I needn’t even put my feet in the water. I could balance on the roots, pry the ball free, toss it to – no, wipe it clean first on my sark, then toss it to the lady. A quick scramble up the bank and I would be back where I belonged, never having gone more than ten feet past where I should. No one would think anything of it if I came home a little muddy. I wouldn’t even have to say what had happened.
No. Honesty was also noble, and though I have broken that principle many times in my life – and intend to break it far more before I am done – to my six-year-old self, the proper course would be to confess my sins. When they heard my reasons, my parents and nurse would understand; or if they did not, I would take my punishment with stoicism and know in the future how I should interpret that rule.
The lady was watching me. “Oh, please,” she said, her voice sweeter than ever, “my fine strong lad, will you help me? For the ball is very precious, not only for its gold but for the sentiment it holds, and I would very much hate to lose it.”
I made up my mind. Noble aid, noble honesty, and if need be, noble stoicism. Better that than to act a churl.
Between two rowans, down a little edge of bank that almost formed a path, cling to the roots so I would not slip into the burn, and retrieve the ball. I could see it in my mind’s eye, and I had bravely set forth when I heard my father’s cry.
“Stop!”
Obedience was a habit deeply engrained. With my leading foot between two rowans, I stopped.
My father’s arms came hard around my waist, slinging me behind him like a sack of flour. I was so startled I didn’t even cry out. “Begone!” he thundered at the lady across the stream. “You are not welcome here!”
Her laugh was still sweet, but now it carried a poisonous edge. “I never thought I was. You have hidden yourself well, my erstwhile knight; it has taken me until now to find you. But now that I have . . . do you think you can keep your son safe from me?”
“I can and I will,” my father said grimly, while I clambered to my feet and stared from behind the safety of his hip.
“For now, perhaps,” the lady said, drawing herself upright. She seemed even taller, and the gold in her hair shone with its own light. “But I am patient. Can you keep him safe forever?”
She did not wait for an answer. Without me quite seeing how, between one blink and the next, she was gone, as if she had never been.
###
I sensed the bars of my second cage that day, when my father refused to answer any questions about who the lady had been and where she had gone. But in truth, they had surrounded me since the moment I was born.
My mother is a lady, my father a knight; this much I have always known. But they are strangers to the region, my maternal grandfather’s lands lying far away. Nothing to remark upon in that – it is common for women to leave their homes when they wed – but of kin, my father seemed to have none. The estate on which we live came into our keeping by some means I still do not know, even now, when so many of my other questions have been answered.
The estate does not matter. The rest of it, however, matters a great deal.
Living where we do, with me confined so close to home, I had little opportunity to play with other children. For companionship I had my nurse, a series of hounds, and one scar-faced cat who lived in our barn. I did not know, because I was not meant to know, that my parents chose our servants carefully; they gave preference to the unmarried and the old, those with no young children of their own. On another estate I would have the servants’ sons and daughters to play with, and those from the surrounding farms. But these were kept far from me, and our reputation suffered as a result.
Standoffish, many in the neighborhood said, placing the blame on my mother’s shoulders. Puts on airs, her being from the east and all -- her bairn too good for the likes of ours. My father escaped most of the censure, because the ways of the household were a woman’s domain. Had those whisperers spoken to my mother, though, they would have known airs were the furthest thing from her nature.
Uncanny, said others. Where did they come from, those two and their child? She’s from the east, but him? Who are his people? And why do they keep so much to themselves?
That struck far nearer the mark.
I heard these whispers when we went into the village, which we began to do after the incident at the stream. Or rather I should say that I began to do it, because until then I had never set foot outside our estate. That contributed to the whispers, for people in those parts did not take it well when a child failed to go to church. Every Sunday my mother had gone, and my father when he was at home, but never me.
It shocked me to be permitted this new liberty, so hard on the heels of my near disobedience. I had expected punishment, but received none, apart from a stern lecture; it was made clear to me that not beyond the rowans was meant very strictly, rather than in the general sense I had assumed. Not one fingertip, not one toe should pass their bounds. But once lecture was done, my father admonished me to be wary of all strangers and then closeted himself with my mother for private conference. When they emerged, they announced that I was to go to church with them next Sunday -- leaving the confines of Home for the first time.
The lane beyond our gate might have been another country, so exotic did it seem to me. I walked between my parents, who never troubled to ride the short distance into the village – those who accused my mother of airs should have taken that into account. My father sang psalms as we walked, his voice deep and fine, and my mother instructed me in what I must know to behave properly in church.
The tail end of her instruction was overheard as we approached, by a red-faced woman carrying one babe in her arms and trailing another who held tight to her skirt. She moved her free hand in a gesture I recognized, though I had never been to church: the sign of the cross, as if to ward my family away.
Not my family. Me. Her gaze skittered off me like water off a hot pan, and she hurried ahead through the church doors.
She was not the only one to behave oddly around me, but then, I suppose I behaved oddly around them, too. Be wary of strangers, my father had said, but now everyone save the party from our estate was a stranger. The interior of the church was dim and the service was in a language I did not understand, and so I could not help fidgeting and peering around, which did not improve matters any. “Faerie child doesn’t know what to do in God’s house,” I heard someone mutter, but I could not see who.
When the service ended, my parents ordered me to remain inside while they spoke to the priest. I did not need to be told that this was like the rowans: not one fingertip, not one toe should cross the threshold of the church until they came back.
They said nothing, however, of eavesdropping.
I was an honest child at heart, and so it took me a little while to screw up the courage to creep toward the door through which they’d vanished. I knew the principles of our faith, even if its ceremonies were new to me, and misbehavior in front of the rood seemed exceptionally wrong. But as I’ve said, I had begun to sense the bars of my second cage, and eventually curiosity drove me forward.
“– cannot disagree in principle,” the priest was saying. “Your bairn’s near enough the age for it, and it would go some way toward quieting the rumors about your family.”
“But you have reservations,” my father said, his voice a low, weary rumble.
“You know well I do. I had them six years ago, and nothing since then has sent them away.”
“Not even this incident?” my mother said sharply.
“My lady, it isn’t your reasoning I doubt, nor even the benefit. But what God will make of all we have done?” His sigh felt like it gusted beneath the door to chill my ankles. “Most days I regret that ever I did what you asked of me. But then you come in and tell me of this creature with her golden ball, and all those tales of your own past, yours and your husband’s . . . they gleam with new truth. And I can only pray that God will approve of protecting an innocent soul, however it may be done.”
My father said, “Then we are agreed,” and I had the wit to scamper back from the door before they could find me with my ear pressed to its old boards.
All the tales of your own past. I did what you asked of me. Children of tender years are accustomed to not knowing very little, but even then, I understood.
The bars of my second cage were made of secrets, and from that day forth, I began to test them.
###
One secret was revealed immediately: my parents had spoken to the priest about confirming me in our faith. Thereafter, and for the next year, I went to church every Sunday with my mother, and my father when he was at home, and afterward the priest instructed me in what I needed to know. In short order I went from a little heathen to a proper Christian child, well-schooled in all the rites I had missed out on before, and in my seventh year I took my first communion, which went some way toward quieting the village rumors about me – though not all the way.
“Mother,” I asked once, with deliberate ingenuousness, “am I a faerie child?”
“Certainly not!” she answered me sharply. “Do you doubt that I am your mother, or your father your sire?” When I allowed that I did not, she asked, “And do you doubt that we are human, and good Christians besides?”
“No,” I said, beginning to feel quite ashamed.
But my mother’s ire was not for me. “Tell me who has spoken ill of you, and I will see they do it no more.”
Even at that age I knew it was not admirable to carry tales. “I cannot remember,” I said, which was true after a fashion; I’d heard the whisper in an array of voices, and did not know who all of them belonged to.
The difficulty with breaking out of my second cage was that only two people truly held the key: my mother and my father, and neither of them would speak of what I wished to know. Who was that woman I’d seen down by the burn? Was she a queen my father had once served, that she called him her erstwhile knight? Why did we live so far away from any other kin? Why was I not permitted the society of other children? For even once I began attending church, even after I took the body and blood of our Lord from the priest, my mother frowned upon me playing with others in the village. One hot summer day a few of the boys invited me to the millpond, where they intended to swim, and you would have thought they wanted me to join them in baiting a wolf.
“But why may I not?” I asked, thinking longingly of that pond and its cool waters. There was no place at home where I could swim; even the burn was too shallow, and it lay beyond the rowans besides.
My mother clicked her tongue. “Because I don’t want you to drown. You don’t know how to swim.”
“Yes, and I will never learn if I never try,” I said, in what seemed to me a very reasonable voice. I was about ten at that point, I think, and starting to be willful.
All the willfulness in the world would have done me no good. “Boys like that,” my mother said, leading me back home, “are not kind, even when they feign otherwise. No doubt once they had you there, they would have ducked you into the pond and held you under, to prove how strong they are.”
I thought them no stronger than me, and in my heart I suspected my mother truly feared what the boys might say to me. I questioned the villagers in brief snatches, whenever I had the chance, and from them I gleaned a few hints amid the chaff of silly rumor: that scandal had chased my parents west, to this estate so far from either of their people. That I had been born much less than nine months after their wedding, which would certainly supply the scandal. That my father had no people anymore, at least none that would acknowledge him as their own – which seemed odd to me, if he were a knight trusted by the king, but I knew little of such things.
Of the lady who had tempted me by the burn, I gleaned only this, which my heart already knew: that she was no Christian woman, and perhaps no woman at all.
But in my thirteenth year, matters changed. From the east came riding a lady very different from the one I’d met that day, plump and weathered and graying at the temples. Although I’d been taught to be wary of strangers, my mother embraced this one and introduced her to me as my aunt, her elder sister. She was made a guest at our manor, the first we’d ever had.
By then I was old enough to be cunning. My father was absent, away on the king’s business, and my mother could not be with her sister at all times. No doubt she cautioned our guest to be sparing in what she said to me . . . but surely, I thought, this woman knew things, and I might persuade her to speak of them.
My opportunity came on another fine autumn day, not much different the one seven years before when I met the lady along the burn. My aunt was out walking, and I contrived to slip away from the tasks I’d been given to meet up with her.
“Scandal? Oh yes,” my aunt said, heaving a gusty sigh. “Your mother – I do not mean to speak ill of her, but she was always a disobedient, wilful girl. It’s a wonder she bore a son as well-behaved as you, given how you were conceived.”
I affected shame and contrition. “Then it’s true, what they say in the village? I was conceived out of wedlock?”
“That and more,” my aunt said ominously. “I’m glad you came to me, boy; it’s time you knew the truth of yourself. I cannot believe your parents have raised you in such ignorance.”
To begin with I could not believe my luck, that she unfolded her tale so readily. Then I was astonished, then horrified. She told me of my mother’s disobedience, going to a place forbidden to all young women, meeting my father – a disreputable man – and lying with him unwed. Getting herself with child, and disgracing the whole family with it. “She invented some absurd tale,” my aunt said with a self-righteous sniff. “Rescuing your father from some faerie queen, him a captive for seven years – utter nonsense, which I can hardly even recall now.”
At that I felt as if I came half out of my body. We were very close to the burn now, our paths having wended in that direction without me noticing. Where I had seen the lady my parents would not speak of.
My aunt was still talking. “Our father would have been within his rights to cut her off without a single shilling. Certainly your own father’s people want nothing to do with him now! I suppose it’s for the best that your parents chose to move away. But we’ve heard such odd rumors about how you’re being raised out here, and with your grandfather doing poorly as he gets older, he insisted I come to see if I can’t talk sense into your mother . . .”
Her words trailed off. Because we had come to the edge of the burn, and the lady was there once more, unchanged from seven years before. She curtsied to my aunt, but there was nothing of courtesy in it; only mockery. “I thank you for your service,” she said. “The boy would never have listened to me, but to the first kin he meets? You were only too eager to help.”
My aunt bristled at the condescension in her tone. “Help? I am afraid I do not know you, goodwife.”
That address was a calculated insult, for no goodwife ever dressed as that lady did. She only smiled, like a predator sighting its prey. “I may not be able to come near the child’s parents, since they won their freedom from me, but you are another matter. And you were only too eager to gossip with your father’s guest this April past, who told you so much about your strangely isolated nephew.”
Silence, as my aunt’s jaw slipped loose from its firm line.
The lady in green silk turned her attention to me. “And you, my fine boy. How long can you live in your cage of rowan, leaving only on Sundays when I cannot seek you out? Will you bring a wife within these bars, never telling her you are hunted by a faerie queen? I have the patience of an immortal, boy. Whether it is this year or seventy years from now, I will have you.”
Then she turned and walked toward the nearest tree, a hawthorn with a bushy crown. She walked toward it, and then she was gone, faded away into the green.
###
My third cage is the malice of a faerie queen, and from that one, my parents cannot loose me. All they can do is protect me, and it is as the lady said: that cannot last forever.
If I am to live – if they are to be free of the shadow that still hangs over them, the vengeance vowed when they slipped the faerie’s grasp – then I must take action myself.
The disappearance of the lady that day shocked my aunt into silence. Remembering how my father had behaved seven years before, I feared what might happen if my mother heard aught of our encounter. I thought it very likely my parents would make me take holy vows, live out the remainder of my life behind sanctified walls no faerie could ever breach.
And so I swore my aunt to secrecy. She was only too glad to comply, fearing her own consequences should her sister discover she’d let loose so many secrets. In exchange for not betraying her, I extracted a few more things: every detail she could recall of my mother’s “absurd tale,” what lore she knew regarding faeries.
The rest, I have discovered for myself. Why I have never been permitted to play with other children. Why the priest fears God’s judgment for his deeds. I have not come by this knowledge honestly; it has required a great deal of sneaking and lying, some of it even inside the church. But if my second cage is made of secrets, then truth is the sword with which I cut its bars apart – and the shield with which I will defend myself against the faerie queen.
I am prepared. It has been two years since that second encounter by the burn, and I cannot wait any longer; already my tenuous situation is falling apart. I am not a child, and there are expectations for a knight’s son, none of which I can fulfill. If I am to act, it must be now.
I slipped away this morning, before dawn, going past the rowans on a Friday, when it is forbidden for me to leave Home. I thought the lady might come for me right then, but had a second plan if she did not. In the grey and uncanny light of a foggy morn, I went widdershins around the village church, like Burd Ellen in the tale.
The world spun. And when I opened my eyes, I found myself on a green hillside.
###
“And so,” the faerie queen says with vast amusement, “you have delivered yourself into my hands. How practical of you.”
Her court stands arrayed around us, creatures as thin as mist and as gnarled as trees. I keep my gaze fixed on the lady and my back very straight. “I come to offer you a trade,” I say.
Her laugh is high and cold. “Why should I take anything you offer, when I already have what I want?”
“But can you keep it?” I ask. “My mother held onto my father when you transformed him into a serpent, a lion, a burning brand, all to win him free of you. Do you think she will do less for her only child?”
The lady’s mouth thins. She knows I am right. Even now, I suspect, my mother is searching for me. She knows the tale of Burd Ellen, too; I must be quick if I am not to find her here at my side.
“Meet my conditions,” I say, “and I will not cooperate with my mother nor my father nor any of my kin, if they try to take me from you.”
“As you have reminded me, you are her son,” the lady says, sweetly venomous. “You may try to escape yourself.”
My hand to my heart, I say, “On my honor as the son of a knight, I will break no pact I make with you.”
Her chin goes up as she considers me. Then she says, “Name your conditions.”
I cannot stop the flick of my tongue across my dry lips, but it should be no surprise to her that I am nervous. “My mother loves her rose garden second only to my father and me. In exchange for me delivering myself into your hands, promise neither you nor yours will bring harm nor blight to any rose she has raised.”
“I swear it,” the lady says at once.
My heart beats faster. “My father travels a great deal in his duties. In exchange for me delivering myself into your hands, promise neither you nor yours will bring hindrance nor peril upon any lane that he knows.”
“I swear it,” the lady says again, and a smile begins to curve her perfect mouth.
I clasp my hands behind my back, for they are shaking and I do not want her to see. “My third condition is this: that your vengeance ends. Once our bargain is sealed, neither you nor yours will strike at my parents, nor any of their living or lawfully wedded kin, nor any child or grandchild or other descendant of their line henceforth.”
The lady’s smile grows wide and fierce. “I can be generous as well as cruel. In recompense for the loss of their son, I will not only do as you say; I will bless your parents with a daughter, and she and all who come from her will be safe from me. I swear it.”
Relief breaks over me like a wave. Though my voice shakes like my hands, I manage to say, “Then our bargain is struck – and so I take my leave of you.”
Utter silence descends. In this uncanny place, there is not even any wind. I can hear with perfect clarity as the faerie queen whispers, “What?”
I cannot hold back my own smile. “Here I stand before you: the child of Janet Carter and Thomas Lane, raised a boy, but baptized Rose Mary Lane.” My voice firms, even rises to a shout. “I am a rose my mother raised; I am a lane my father knows; and I am the daughter you pledged to bless them with. I have delivered myself into your hands today, but by your own pledge, you have no claim on me!”
The lady rises to her feet in a storm of fury. Her courtiers break into snarls and roars – but mixed with it is shrill laughter. For there are some among faerie kind who respect a well-crafted trick, even when one of their own is its target.
I turn and walk away. This is the one thing I could not confirm, before I came here, but it is as I hoped: either keeping me in the faerie land would constitute hindrance or peril, or the lady has no wish to lay eyes on me ever again. I walk, and I come out in the ordinary grey light of a foggy morn, into the graveyard that lies beside the church.
My parents are there, clutching each others’ hands so hard that all the blood has been pressed from them. It rushes back at the sight of me, but they stand frozen, hardly breathing.
My mother whispers, “Are you – did you --”
“I am free of her,” I say simply, and then nothing more as their arms squeeze all my breath away.
I do not know what will happen after this. Whether I will go on as their son, despite the fear that someone will find me out, or live instead as their daughter, despite all the difficulties that will bring. Winning one’s freedom from a faerie queen brings new troubles of its own, as my parents know all too well.
But as we leave the churchyard, I realize something. My parents were waiting for me there – waiting, not pursuing. They were not walking widdershins to come after me, to save their child as my mother once saved my father. Not because they love me any less, but because they knew I was no longer a child, and I must win this contest for myself.
Only then could I be truly free.
© Copyright 2024 Marie Brennan
About the Author
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Game of 100 Candles and the short novel Driftwood, along with over eighty short stories. As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.