Roses and Rot (15 page)

“You look great!” she called.

We walked through a graveyard that had managed to generate its own eerie fog, and stood far back as a Headless Horseman galloped down the path.

“I think he’s letting the horse navigate,” I said.

“I think you’re right.” Marin laughed. “Speaking of horses, I was going to say hi to you and Evan last night, tell him how much I loved the carousel, but you two seemed a little preoccupied. And then a lot gone. Things are good?”

“Really good.” I smiled.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I eagerly await Helena’s scandalized pronouncements on your behavior and morals.”

“Yes, but I’m up on the third floor.”

“Details, details.”

I laughed. We spent the rest of the walk catching up. Normal conversation. Trivia. The kind of things you share when you live with someone, and so the peripheries of your lives overlap, but there are still secrets and unknown pieces. It was wonderful. I felt warm, perfectly happy.

“This is exactly what I wanted when I came here,” I said. “To be able to talk to you again. To have things feel normal.”

Marin nodded. “We should maybe think about getting a place together. When we’re done. I mean, if you want.”

“I’d like that,” I said. Then: “Marin.”

We were at the Commons, and it was changed utterly from the night before. All traces of the Night Market were gone. The lights in the trees were the cold white of the stars.

Evan’s carousel stood at the center of the Commons, surrounded by horses. For a moment I flashed back to my run through the woods, the great crash of horses across the path before me, the feeling of being pursued. Of being prey. I shook my head to clear it, and looked again.

“There’s Helena,” Marin said. “I didn’t expect to see her here.”

I hadn’t either. She had given me her publishing credits in the same breath as her name when we first met. If the hourglass was, as Beth said, a way to acknowledge the most talented residents, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t made sure we all knew she had a charm. She was already horsed, and looked unhappy about it. Beth and Janet were there, too. Beth smiled and nodded when she saw us. Janet’s gaze passed over me without acknowledgment.

Evan met us at the edge of the gathering, dressed like a prince from a fairy tale. There was even a circlet of tarnished silver around his head. “I hadn’t known we could wear costumes,” I said, smiling at him.

“I need to see your charms,” he said, stiff and formal, as if we hardly knew each other, as if he hadn’t nearly torn mine from my neck the night before. He looked at each of the hourglasses carefully, then let us pass. He led us each to horses, mine as black as night, and Marin’s as pale as the moon. They were saddled in leather and bridled in silver, with reins of thick bands of blood red silk.

“What is going on?” I asked.

“You’ll know when it’s time.” His face was blank, and there were no clues in his voice. He helped me up into the saddle, then turned and walked away.

“Evan!” I called after him. I saw him flinch against the sound of my voice. He heard me, but he didn’t turn around, didn’t answer.

Confused, hurt, I tried to get to Marin, but couldn’t navigate the press of people and horses. My horse danced in place, flicking its ears and snorting, as unhappy as I was.

More and more people arrived. The Commons was full of horses, and nearly all had riders. It was remarkably hushed for such a gathering, as if each of us was afraid to break the silence. People didn’t gossip, joke. I looked around to see if I recognized anyone else. There was Angelica, Ariel’s mentor, though I didn’t see Ariel. Off by himself, Gavin stood on the edge of the crowd. He watched Marin, and only her.

People were there in costumes, fabulous and grotesque and hideous and strange. The Green Man who had let us onto the carousel last night, and this time not just wearing a mask, but his entire body leafed and vined, and in boots made of bark. Someone beautiful, arrayed in pieces of broken things, mirrors and teacups and clocks. A woman whose skin was covered in illuminated script. “Do not read me,” she said, kneeing her horse to make it walk on. “Your eyes will change the ending.” The letters shifted as she rode away.

My head reeled, and I felt dizzy, drunk in my saddle.

Evan was horsed now, too, a horse as white as bone. A horn blew, low and long, echoing toward us from someplace out of time. Gavin walked through the parting horses and stepped onto the carousel. I saw then what I hadn’t the night before—there was no motor, no gears, no mechanics to turn the carousel. It should have been static, unmoving.

It wasn’t.

It spun slowly, in the opposite direction that Gavin walked. Shadows clung to the metal of the sculptures, filling them out, making them whole. Our horses began to move, a spiral outside that of the spinning carousel.

Faster.

The horn again, and the carousel spinning faster now. Gavin still walking, a procession of one, against its turning, and the shadows built themselves around him, too—a cape that fell from his shoulders, and a horned crown that reached up from his head.

Our horses were running now, moving faster with each circle, and with each circle the night became less recognizable. We rode in a dream of pale kings and princes.

A crack like lightning in the air, but shadowed, not bright. Gavin pulled himself up on one of those spinning metal horses, and it broke from the carousel, leaping over our heads. They landed next to Evan, one horse white and one horse dark, Evan crowned in silver and Gavin crowned in horns that grew like a stag’s from his temples, cloaked in shadows and magic.

The air shuddered. The horn sounded again, and the spiral of horses broke, too.

Faster.

We followed Gavin, followed that impossible horse made of art
and shadows as they ran, headlong and faster than the wind. With the reins wrapped around my hands, I twisted my fingers in my horse’s mane and clung to its back as we tore through the bounds of Melete. Lights hung in the trees to guide us, and I heard bells ringing clear even above the thunder of so many hooves, the thunder of my heart.

We raced through the woods and down the banks of the Mourning, past bridge upon bridge. With the night streaming out behind him, Gavin urged his horse toward a bridge—a bridge that was only half there.

Panicked, I heaved back in the saddle, yanking on my horse’s reins. They burned across my palms, abrading the skin, as it took the bit in its teeth and kept running.

“Ride, fool!” The imperative voice of the woman covered in stories. She urged her horse closer to mine, making it impossible to turn. Their hooves clattered across stone, across a bridge that continued over what had so recently been only empty space.

On the bridge’s other side, the stars above us changed.

The lights grew brighter. There were people among the deep green of the trees. They reached out, beckoning as we rode by, and I realized: what stood in the forest, what cried out and called as we passed, was beautiful, was strange, was not human.

They were made of the same otherness, eerie and compelling, as the masked and costumed riders, but in this light it was clear they weren’t masked and costumed at all. These were their true shapes, unglamoured. Bones at sharpened angles, pressing closer beneath the skin. Eyes without irises. Feathers for hair and teeth fanged as serpents’. From all of them a sense of longing, of desire made heavy, of want with hands and claws, that nearly knocked me from the back of my horse.

If I had fallen, I would have stayed.

I knew where I was, even if my thoughts raced away from the word. It was Halloween, Samhain, the end of one year, the beginning of the next, the walls between one world and the other the thinnest until the season’s next turn.

We had ridden into Faerie.

The horses did not check their speed. If anything, they ran faster still; we passed through the trees like a hurricane. The seeds of Evan’s trees grew all around me in this forest, like and unlike the ones I knew. Their shapes stark and almost human, as if there were souls trapped inside those reaching branches. I knew better than to reach back, but it was a near thing.

Faerie, like the Fae, was beautiful enough to seduce, but it was a seduction with nails and teeth, it was passion with blood. My skin felt electrified; desire scorched across it. I wanted to stay.

I wanted to stay.

Then the stars shifted again, and we were back in the known universe of Melete. Over the bridge again, and as they cleared it, the horses shied and scattered, running away from something heaped on the ground.

Marin. Moonlit, pale on the cold hillside.

I screamed, hauled on my horse’s reins, and this time it obeyed, tossing its head in protest as it came, dancing, to a halt. I slid, weak-kneed, from the saddle. “Marin! Marin, are you all right?”

“I have her.” Gavin, antlers crowning his head, scooped Marin into his arms. “I will see her safely back.”

“Will you?” His eyes, endless black, met mine. The air around him shook like smoke, and I could taste the burnt ozone of a lightning strike, of magic, at the back of my throat. He did not look anything like safety.

“I’m fine, Imogen. Just dizzy.” Her voice was quiet, but not panicked. “I fell. That’s all.”

There was tenderness in Gavin’s hands as he held Marin. He cradled her as if he would be her shield, and she didn’t look at anything but him. “All right,” I said, and took her horse’s reins along with mine, walked them both back toward the Commons.

The plain, ordinary Commons. Being back was like being in mourning for something. My eyes ached for what I wasn’t seeing. My heart echoed in a hollowed-out place in my chest. Everyone here looked faded. Human.

I shook my head, blinked, tried to make reality sit easier in my eyes.

“I’m not,” Evan said, behind me. “What they are.”

“Then what are you?” I turned to him as I loosed the horses back into the teeming crowd, watched as faces shifted from starlit and strange into ordinary, known. Though not his. Even though it was a face I had kissed, that had rested on my naked skin. He was, it seemed, not something I knew.

“What you are. Human. An artist, which is something they prize.”

“They,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I flung the word at him like a gauntlet at the opening of a duel.

“They,” he said. “The Fae. You know what you saw.”

“I know where I saw, not what.” His hand, tangling in the chain that I had needed to wear tonight, before it moved over my body. “And why you?”

“Because every seven years, Melete pays a tithe to Faerie. One of us. And almost seven years ago, it was me.”

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who was given a wish. One wish, just one, but it would grant her anything she wanted, the truest desire of her heart, the one she kept closest, locked away, barely taking it out to whisper its name.

“But,” she was told, “you must be very, very careful what you wish for. Be certain you ask for precisely what you want, else you will be disappointed. Or worse.”

The girl was the sort of girl who read books, and so she knew well the perils of wishing. Wish for the return of a beloved pet, now dead, and a rotting corpse walks into the yard to play fetch. Wish for everything you touch to turn to gold, and with a hug you’ve made your best friend a statue, and murdered her besides. Wish casually, and you waste whatever the possibility might have been.

So the girl was careful. She did not speak a wish, but waited and thought. Every time a desire formed itself in her head, she thought of how she might wish for it. Even then, she could imagine the wish turning in on itself, growing teeth. And so each time, she remained silent, and worked for what she wanted. Sometimes, what she would have wished for happened anyway, and she was glad, and clutched her wish close, like a secret, like a shield.

But one day she spoke. She spoke in haste, and without thinking, and she spoke in passion. She said, “I wish you could love me.”

There is a cruelty in a wish that comes true. It is weighed, it is measured, it is absolute. No less than the words that invoked it, but no more, neither.

This is the first thing she learned: Just because someone can love you doesn’t mean they will. This is the second: It is worse to know that someone can love you, and that they have chosen not to.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

I hugged my arms to myself as I walked with Evan back to his studio, the cold not from the night, but from inside me. Evan had offered his jacket, but I stepped away.

He unlocked the door. “Just, give me a minute, please.” He jammed his hands through his hair, so it was even more disheveled, opened his mouth to speak, then walked to the back of the building. The click and low hum of space heaters, the snap and sulfur flame of matches. “Electric lights hurt my eyes, after.”

I nodded, as if that were normal, as if everyone’s eyes should hurt when they came back from Faerie, as if there was nothing strange about going to Faerie in the first place. My hand clutched at my hourglass charm, hard enough to press its edges against the bones of my fingers, to crack the raw places on my palms open. The sharp pain was comfort.