Roses and Rot (16 page)

I knew it was real.

“Look, never mind. We can talk later. Or not. I need to go home, be with Marin.” I turned back for the door.

“She won’t be there.”

“What do you mean?” Panic’s claws around my heart.

“She’ll be with Gavin. He swore he would take care of her, and so he will. At the very least, he doesn’t break his promises.”

“She might need me. At least I could be there.”

He laughed, sharp and brittle. “Do you really think you can do anything for her that he can’t?”

“I’m her sister.”

“And Gavin, in case you didn’t notice, Imogen, is the King of Faerie. Which, in this case, counts for rather more.”

“Fine. Then let’s talk about that. Explain to me,” I said, proud that my voice didn’t stumble, didn’t break, “what the tithe is, and how it’s you.” I would start my questions here, with something small. Something I could talk myself into believing the answer to. Something that would sit lightly on my churning brain.

He leaned against the wall, closed his shadowed eyes. We sat on the floor, far enough away from each other that we couldn’t touch.

“There’s a bargain,” Evan said. “Faerie takes a tithe from the residents at Melete. Every seven years, a human goes, and remains there. Stays in Faerie for seven years. When the tithe returns, they get success. Guaranteed. Beyond your wildest dreams kind of stuff. You become a person whose art lives forever.”

“Forever,” I said.

“Think of the great names. Not just the ones still in galleries or on bookshelves after ten years. But the ones we still talk about, the works that still move us one hundred, two hundred years later,” he said, envy raw in his words. “You know the ones.”

“What’s the catch?” There had to be one. There always was.

“The seven years, for one. For some people who might be chosen, that’s enough to make them say no. There’s a lover, a life, a child—something that matters more to them than what would come after. Something that matters more to them than their art.

“I don’t understand those people,” he said.

“The catch,” I said.

“Faerie is a difficult place for a human. Think of what you felt tonight when we crossed over.”

That longing. That terrible need that had threatened to pull me from my horse, that reached up and grabbed at me even now. Marin, ghostlike, on the ground. I shuddered, and pulled my knees closer to my chest.

Evan nodded. “Yes. Exactly that. That’s the catch. It will feel like that, and worse, while you’re there. Always. Constantly. They feed on that emotion.”

“How long have you been back?” I asked.

His head dropped against the wall, his eyes on the ceiling. Somewhere else. “I’m not. Not all the way.

“Are you familiar with the work of Tania Arden?”

I blinked at the apparent non sequitur. “She’s a glass artist, right? Very precise sculptures. Mathematical, almost. Intricate, and very colorful. And . . .” My words slowed. “She died. A little over seven years ago.” A car accident, I thought. Something tragic and sudden.

“She was my mentor, when I first came here as a fellow. My mentor, and we became lovers, while I was here. Also, she was the Queen of Faerie.”

Jealousy sank its green and bitter fangs into me. His lost dead love—a gifted artist, and the Queen of Faerie. And I knew I shouldn’t let it hurt, let it matter, but it did.

“She was the one who told me about the tithe. I knew I wanted to go from the first moment I heard about it, but after she died, I wanted it even more. Living in Faerie would be like a tribute to her, I thought.

“I had thought being there, her home, being around what she was, would make her death easier for me to bear. It didn’t. You can’t go blank when you’re there, can’t turn off your emotions,
can’t deaden them, or cope by drinking, or exercising, or sleeping around. Emotions are what the Fae want, so every part of them becomes more. Heightened. What you feel, it turns back on itself, intensifies.

“Eventually, it became difficult for the Fae to be around me. My grief, my inability to feel anything else, was like a poison to them. They wouldn’t have cared if I died of grief, but after enough years around me, they were getting sick. So this year, Gavin allowed me a temporary and restricted sort of parole. I’m allowed to be here, on Melete’s grounds, for a certain number of hours in the day—more if I’m with him, or if I’m working on his behalf.”

“The commission,” I said. The carousel that had spun out a road before us, turned its figures into something eldritch, a horse for the King of Faerie. The trees, stretched and twisted in the close air of his studio, the moving shadows of the candleflames, making it look as if they moved in some faraway wind.

Faerie wind.

No. I pinched the inside of my wrist, reminding myself of where I was. Here. Not there.

“But wait. That makes no sense.” I paced across the room, walking farther away from him. “How can you be working in metal for him? The Fae can’t bear metal, cold iron is like poison to them.”

Evan shook his head. “In case you haven’t noticed, Gavin has no problem functioning in the modern world, as full of iron and technology as it is.”

“But it’s in all the stories.”

“And I’m sure there was someone, somewhere, with the Fae equivalent of an allergy. Tania used to laugh about that stuff, all the ridiculous things humans believed, like needing to call them the Fair Folk and whatnot. She said it helped them hide, because no one believed
anything that was true.” He leaned forward, wincing, closing his eyes against the light.

Then continued: “My working on the carousel, having it there tonight—it was a way for Gavin to bend the rules that he’s bound by. But it’s difficult for me to be here, even with his help. The tithe doesn’t like being worked against. There are consequences. I get pulled back.”

“That was you, then. On the other side of the bridge.”

He nodded. “It’s where I usually wind up, coming or going.”

“And the day I got lost?”

“That wasn’t me. But they wouldn’t have wanted you in here, would think nothing of trying to keep you away from me—it would have been a game to them. They don’t like my being distracted by lesser emotions.”

Lesser emotions. He had left my bed early this morning. “That’s why you write me letters. Not because it’s romantic, but because you can’t call while you’re there.”

“Yes.”

“Could you have told me about this, if I had asked?”

“Yes.” Quiet. As if the word were nothing.

“Bastard.” My hands fisted at my sides, and tears threatened to choke me. I swallowed hard. He didn’t deserve them.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I finally let myself ask the question.

“I didn’t know until last night when I felt the chain around your neck that it would matter. Not everyone who gets into Melete can be the tithe. Something about the power in the art—I don’t know, exactly. If you need to know the specifics, ask someone else.”

“Another thing you didn’t care about?”

“Yes, Imogen. Yes. The most important thing to me was that being
the tithe would help my art, would make it great. Even thinking that it would be a way to mourn Tania came far after that. I already knew I wanted it when she died. I didn’t care about the fine print. Any of it.”

“But you could have. Told me. There’s no rule.” Because of course asking again changes the answer.

“I could have told you. From the first day we met, yes. Though you should ask yourself exactly when you would have believed me.”

All of the things I had seen, and had talked myself out of believing. Again and again, until belief had no longer been a choice.

“And last night?” I asked, pinning myself, wriggling, on the blade, waiting for the words that would push it further.

“I wanted to feel again. Something real. I wanted you. Your emotion, your response. Can you imagine how overwhelming you were to me, after Faerie?”

“Maybe I could have. If you had told me.”

I pushed myself to my feet, held on to the wall for a moment to steady myself. “I need to go. I can’t be near you right now.”

If you look carefully at what we call fairy tales, there are very few characters in them who are actually fairies. None in Red Riding Hood, none in Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel, even the fairy godmother in Cinderella is, in older versions, a hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave, and watered by Cinderella’s tears. There are wonders and oddnesses, certainly, but fairies are rare.

It’s easy not to notice this. The stories begin as they ought—once upon a time—and end as we know they are supposed to, with everyone living happily ever after. And in a story with a witch, and a house made of gingerbread and candy, who will notice that no fairy appears? It’s not the sort of thing that even matters, except for the name we give to the stories.

Stories that have fairies in them, they’re crueler, more frightening. You’re cautioned not to say the word “fairy,” but to call them the Fair Folk, like pacifying the Furies by only speaking of the Kindly Ones. The Fair Folk won’t tell you their names, and you should never, ever, give them yours. They steal the things you value, even people, especially people who are bright, who are beautiful, who are talented. They take the best of us, and leave in return a bundle of leaves and sticks, or leave nothing, and return the person taken in seven years, or in one hundred, or able to speak only cold truths. They are beautiful and without mercy. Cruel.

Not just cruel. Capricious. They violate laws of guesthood and hospitality, with their food that entraps and money that turns to leaves or to dust in the night. They plague lovers for the sake of sowing discord between them, and lead travelers off the safer paths and to their deaths in the darkness.

Stories of the Fair Folk are not at all then what we think of as fairy tales, those moralistic stories wherein evil is punished and virtue triumphs, that were set safely in once upon a time, and had happy endings guaranteed. True fairy tales are horror stories.

I barely recognized the Melete that I walked home through in the early morning’s breaking hours. Every piece of it seemed strange to me again, some fantastical, impossible place, and I had been left in it without a map. The glamour of Faerie clogged my eyes, gritting like sand.

That same sand gritted in my thoughts. Faerie, the Fae, were here the whole time. Even though I had ridden through it, seen them—had drinks with Gavin, who apparently normally had horns on his head, for fuck’s sake—even though I had spent most of my childhood wishing I was in a fairy tale, the reality of it was too large to hold in my head. Which felt like my shock and disbelief
had taken form inside of it, and were trying to bash their way out.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of all people, I should have known. Fairy tales were what I had thought I knew, the thing I had thought I was an expert in. And yet.

We had lived next to them in these strange half-shared spaces ever since the day we moved in. I had stood on that broken bridge and looked across its border, and yet. As much as I thought I knew, I hadn’t put any of it together. I hadn’t seen. Hadn’t let myself see. Every time something had bled through, I had explained it away. Made it normal. Real, I had told myself, not knowing how much larger real was.

People ran by, laughing and shrieking, winged and horned, capes trailing behind them, and I froze. The gallop of hooves. My heart raced in my chest. I tensed to run.

The Headless Horseman, his costume slipping to the point where he was only Mostly Headless, whooped after them.

The end of the Halloween celebrations. Still the same day. Not Faerie. Melete.

Shaking, I heaved out a breath. Another.

In the stories, when people are stolen away to Faerie, they wake after one hundred years, certain that only one night has passed. They return home, shocked at the passage of time.

Dawn hadn’t even broken on the new day, and I felt a decade older than I had been only a few hours ago.

I went to Marin’s room first. It was empty, the bed neatly made. She was fine, I told myself. Gavin would take care of her.

When I finally got to my own room, I was trembling from exhaustion and felt sick, like poison ran through my veins. The last thing I wanted at that moment was to sleep on the same sheets where I had slept with Evan the night before. Didn’t want to remind myself
of the scent of his skin, or the rough scratch of his stubble, or the sound of his voice when he gasped my name.