Beauty (48 page)

"What would a big infraction of the covenant be, then?"

"Well, they almost found out, didn't they, seven years ago, when they set out from here intending to give Thomas the Rhymer to the Dark Lord?" He made a disgusted face. "They came close then!"

I went back to the castle feeling dismayed but trying not to show it. I needn't have bothered. The people of the hills simply weren't paying any attention to me. Partly because of my mortality, I suppose, but partly something else. Some great event due to occur, something that was known of and planned for even before I came back, something mysterious that even Oberon doesn't speak of. There is whispering, something I don't remember from my former visit. In a land in which everything is known, nothing really hidden, in which all veils are merely seeming, what is there to whisper about?

Finding out will be more exciting than sitting in the Dower House growing lame(r) and blind(er) while Elizabeth simmers. So, when I've had my bath and something more to eat, I'll return to Faery.

The Sidhe are as nervous as sparrows, twitching at every sound. Some great doings are abroad in the land, but they will not tell me what they are. There are tents set up in the meadow, as though the Sidhe were expecting guests. Everyone pretends not to notice them.

I have been left much alone since my return, full of doubts and vagrant memories which sometimes overwhelm me. I spend much time thinking of Giles and of my life in the twentieth, wondering what I might have done differently with both. Sometimes I simply sit about, doing nothing purposeful, trying to make meaning of my life. It comes back to Mama, always. Why had I been born? For what? How had I failed her?

At last I begged her to walk with me in the flowery meadow, and among the copses I asked her to tell me what was going on.

"Going on?" She drew herself up and made her eyes glitter at me arrogantly. "Going on?"

"Come on, Mama," I said desperately. "You know what I mean. There's a definite mood of apprehension about."

"I don't know what you mean, Beauty," she said, striking a very dignified attitude. "I have no idea what you can be speaking of." She spoke as though to a stranger.

"Who is it that's coming?" I wanted to know.

She looked suddenly very haggard. "We're not sure who they are now," she admitted. "They were our kindred once."

"Then how do you know they're coming?" I asked.

"We just know," she said, the glitter in her eyes looking more like tears than arrogance. I tried to put my arm around her, and she pushed me away. "You should have come when you were young," she cried. "I told you to come to me when you were young! And when you came at last, you should have stayed. You went away, and now you stink of age and corruption. If you'd stayed when you were young, you'd have stayed young for a long, long time. So long, you'd have forgotten anything but Faery! I smell death on you, and it hurts me! I cannot bear it!"

Puck had told me about my smell, but hearing it from her was like being slapped. I felt totally mortal, unbelievably old. If I could have shrunk into wrinkles and ashes, I would have done. She stood apart from me, her back to me, and it was a time before I could answer her.

"Mama, I had to go away. Thomas the Rhymer was gone. I know you wouldn't have meant for it to happen, but it's likely Mab and Oberon would have used me for the teind if I'd stayed."

"Better me than you, is that it?" She drew herself up, proudly.

"They didn't break the covenant with you, Mama. They would have broken it with me. And you survived. Puck told me when you came back."

"Puck!" she sneered. "I have a daughter who not only betrays me but also associates with Bogles."

"Mama!"

"I should never have given you the gifts I gave you. You're merely mortal! You aren't worthy of them!"

"Mama!"

She turned away, obdurate, angry.

"Take them back," I said. "If that's the way you feel."

She was sobbing. The Sidhe never cry. "No, the gift once made remains. You are what you are because of me. I try, but I can't hate you enough to take the gifts away." And she ran away, back to the courts, leaving me in the meadow staring after her, longing for a mother's strong love and seeing a child's weakness. Perhaps she could have loved a fairy child. She had nothing to give me. She had never had anything to give me. It was the other way around, and I understood for the first time what Puck meant. The Sidhe did not have children in order to give but in order to get. Mortals have a strength that they need.

Ridiculously, what came into my head then was the third hank of thread. I had wanted for a long time to ask her about the third hank of thread. Now I could not ask. She was hurt with me, but hurt with something else as well, something she had been worried about when I returned. Something great and mysterious had them all in an uproar. I had needed her, and she needed ... what?

"Fenoderee," I whispered. "Take me to Carabosse."

He was there, holding the bridle of a horse. We went together, the same way I had gone before. Puck was waiting for us at the cottage door, and as I knocked I heard the susuration of clocks suspended into sudden silence.

"Come in," she cried. She sat huddled in a chair before the fire. Behind her, all around her, the walls were still covered with clocks. More hung down a hallway I could see through a half-open door, while others stood on the window ledges and in the corners, hung from the rafters, or lay on the table before her with their gears and hands spread out before them.

The only thing I could think of to say was, "There are few, if any, clocks in the fifteenth!"

"Fifteenth what?" she demanded.

"Fifteenth century," I said.

"Fifteenth, twelfth, first, makes no difference to me," she said.

Puck squatted on the carpet and picked at a toenail.

"I don't keep human time," Carabosse said.

It looked to me as though she kept a great deal of human time, but it seemed inappropriate to say so. "What are they for," I asked.

"Amusement," she said. "Entertainment. A hobby." She got up from her chair, leaning heavily upon a gnarled stick. I sensed little glamour about her. She evidently didn't care what she looked like. Her hair was sparse; her eyes were bloodshot; her forehead was high and corrugated with deep lines. She had a hump on her back and walked bent in half. She pointed her cane to one of the clocks on the wall and said, "That's Oberon's. The one next to it is Mab's."

I looked at them more closely. They were fine clocks, very beautifully made. Italian, I thought, eighteenth-century, perhaps. Enameled bronze and gilt, a matched pair.

"They've about run down," she cackled at me.

"Would you like me to wind them?" I asked politely.

"Would I like you to wind them? Ha, ha. So, you're a jester, are you? Beauty. Come sit by the fire. Have some tea."

She stumped her way back to her chair, and I took the one across from her, a comfortable rush-bottomed chair which fit me exactly. I had a feeling it would suit any guest exactly. For all its small size and sparsity of furnishings, the cottage was warm and comfortable.

She poured and handed me a cup, cream and sugar, the way I like it. There was no tea of this kind in the fourteenth, either, at least not in my part of the world. It seemed unnecessary to comment on that. It was real human tea. So were the biscuits, real. She and Puck seemed determined to feed me real food.

"You're getting older," she said.

I nodded. "That's my inescapable conclusion, Carabosse. Are you doing something about it?"

"About your getting older?"

"About this package I've been carrying about."

"Shhh," she said, glancing sidewise at Puck.

"He's known about it since I was a child," I said. "Puck knows more about me than either my mother or father ever did."

She glared at Puck, and he made a face at her, like an impudent boy.

"More than your father, certainly," she agreed. "Stupid man. Couldn't think of anything but his ridiculous pilgrimages. Wandering about, gazing at pieces of rotted bodies, thinking that conferred some kind of grace, all the time letting Westfaire go to ruin."

"It really wasn't," I contradicted, a little angered by what she had said. "It wasn't going to ruin, I mean. The roof was whole. All the walls were sound."

"Oh, child, I don't mean the beams and the stones. I mean the people who could have kept it and preserved it. You were his only child, and he almost ignored you. He didn't find you a good husband to help preserve Westfaire. Westfaire deserves preserving. That and a good deal else."

"He didn't find me a husband because you had cursed me," I argued, growing a little pink in the face. I could feel it.

"No, no, no," she said, waving her cane. "Before I cursed you. I looked at what he would do if I hadn't cursed you, don't you see? I don't go around doing indiscriminate curses. Besides, it wasn't you I cursed, remember?"

"Wasn't it Aunt Joyeause who changed your curse from death to sleep," I argued, wanting to get this business of the curse straightened out at last. "That's what the letter said."

Carabosse shook her head, to and fro, sipping at her tea, smiling a knowing, half-toothless smile. "Joyeause doesn't have the wits of a bat. She couldn't summon up a fairy gift if her life depended on it. And besides that, she tells lies. She was the only one near when I cursed Duke Phillip's lovely daughter with sleep."

"Duke Phillip's lovely daughter, and Westfaire," I pointed out.

"Well, yes. And Westfaire."

"Forever?"

"Let us say without a stated time of wakening," she said stiffly, warning me with her expression to press the matter no further. "I left immediately thereafter. Joyeause must have gone to your Mama with some fay and follet story about what she thought I'd said or what she invented to say I'd said or what she would have said in my place. It's like her. Such a silly-shee."

"I used to think all fairies were wise," I said sadly. The thought that Carabosse might be lying never entered my head. She was telling the truth, and I knew it.

"Some are and some aren't."

"So, what's happening, Carabosse."

"The Dark Lord saw you, is what's happening. First, in Faery, picking that vengeful herb to get back at that man. Then, later, in that mirror in Marvella. The first time, it meant little to him. The second time, it meant more. Your showing up in both places has a certain resonance to it. He didn't really see what you're carrying, but he scents it perhaps. He wants to put his nose on you and sniff you up, find out what you are."

Hearing it like that, even though I'd known it, in my heart, made me shudder. "Well, Carabosse, you must find somewhere else to put it, that's all."

"True." She sipped and nodded.

I sighed. "I didn't mean what's going on about the Dark Lord, anyhow. I meant, what's going on in Faery."

"The Bogles did a thing," she said, cocking her eyebrows at Puck where he sat on the carpet. "Oh yes, they did a thing."

"What have you done, Puck?" I asked him.

"The Sidhe wouldn't listen to us, so we've tried the only thing left to try. We've sent a message out of Faery."

"How have you done that?"

"How haven't they?" snorted Carabosse.

Puck settled himself for oration. "We've cried out by every hob and boggart, by the gruagach and the selkies, by the killmoulis and every lob-lie-by-the-fire capable of speech. Every pixie and nixie, phouka and glashan have carried our summons. We've sent the aughisky and the banshee out to howl, the bogan and the spriggans out to screech. The gabriel ratchets have honked the call into the sky, and the fuath have bubbled it down into the watery places beneath the sea.

"In the towers of the north, the durtters are grinding our words in their quern until the message rattles the stones beneath the mountains. Even the duergar have been constrained against wickedness and made to write our summons in the smoke of their fires. The cait sith prowls the edges of the world yowling our yowl, and after her come the black dogs, barking our bark. In all the times of earth until now, no such call has gone out from the Bogle-folk, and if there are any left to answer it, surely they will." He finished up with a fine, broad gesture.

"If they'd asked me," said Carabosse, "I'd have told them it wasn't necessary. I'd have told Israfel, and he'd have told his kinfolk. A few quiet words. All this hullabaloo wasn't needed."

"We wanted a hullabaloo," said Puck in a dignified voice.

"And what answer have you had, Puck?" I knew the answer already. What else could it be?

"The Long Lost are coming home," he said. "They're coming back to Faery. The Sidhe don't much like it. Oberon's wrathful and that makes his people edgy. Elladine's people are in no good mood. They're snarly, and snarly folk do stupid things."

"They're snarly, right enough," I said, remembering how Mama had flown at me, over nothing.

Puck replied, "If things get very bad for you there, with them, call me. It might be well for you to come visit my places. I've visited yours often enough."

"Maybe you should come stay with me," suggested Carabosse.

I shook my head, feeling confused and alone. "What am I supposed to do?" I asked. "What will be best?"

"Just go on," she advised me, pursing her old, wrinkled lips, leaning forward to place her hand on my breast, feeling the little fire in there. "Just go on. Being ordinary."

"With the Dark Lord hovering in the wings, sniffing and waiting to pounce?"

"We've talked about that, Israfel and I. If he pounces, we'll be there. Don't worry, Beauty. We're watching. We're good at that."

I tried to get more out of her and got nothing. She was closemouthed as a turtle, glaring at Puck out of the corner of her eyes, as though he had betrayed the secret instead of merely finding out about it.

He and I went out into the world and rode back to the castle. When we came within sight of it, we stopped and merely sat, seeing what was there. Things change about in Faery. What is there one day is often not there the next.

"Why is Oberon's castle always there," I murmured.