Roses and Rot (21 page)

I write when I don’t know what else to do. When I don’t know what to think. To deal with the pieces of life that are too hard, too painful to think about otherwise.

That was pretty much why I started writing in the first place, to deal with the things I could only stand to look at out of the corner of my eye. Now, I can write for other reasons, too—for the joy of it, for the challenge—but that first reason is still there, beneath all the others.

So I took a candle and went to my room, high in the dark, the storm spinning past my windows in a haze of white, and I wrote.

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, the Queen of the Fairies met a mortal knight as they both rode out one morning. He was a comely man, well-formed and well-spoken, and so she took him as her own, there on the green hillside. He pleased her so, she took him back to Fairy with her.

And he went, and he was pleased to do so, for he thought the time he spent there to be only seven days and seven nights, and oh, the nights paid for all. But at the end of those days and nights, she put him from her, and he discovered that they were not days and nights that had passed, but years. He left her, lost. Lost from her side, and lost from the life that had been his before, and lost from all but his memories.

Once upon a time, as a knight rode out, he met the Queen of the Fairies. He wove flowers into her hair and kissed her moonlit skin, and she kissed him back, and made him her own. And when they finished, and when he slept, she sent him dreams, and in those dreams were death. Pale kings, pale princes, all cold and dead. And when he woke, he too was pale and cold, a shadow to haunt that wild hillside. Some of those he haunted fled into Fairy, and some of those returned, cold, to the world of that hill. But she never returned to him, nor he to what he had once called life.

Once upon a time, the King of the Fairies met a woman. She was beautiful and kind, and she danced as if the wind itself had blessed her feet. And he loved her, because that is the way of these things, and he took her to Fairy to dance with her forever, because that is what you do, when you are a king and you fall in love.

And the woman went away to Fairy and she danced with the king, and she danced, and she danced, until one day she did not rise to slip her graceful feet into her slippers. That, too, is the way of things.

These are not stories with happily ever afters, all of the different once upon a times.

Except they weren’t only once. They were always.

“I know Thomas a bit.” The scent of lavender rose into the air as Beth poured her tea into a cup the color of a cloudless sky. “He’s talented, certainly, and genuinely charming. But I’ve never met a man more driven by his libido. I have no doubt that he would have told Janet whatever he thought was most likely to get him laid, regardless of the truth.

“Especially as he had just gotten back from Faerie. Because you spend so much time being nothing more than a creature of constant emotion while you’re there, physical sensation is incredibly heightened when you return. My first day back, I spent an hour under the shower because I could feel every drop of water on my skin. It was almost a week before I could bear even the loosest of clothing comfortably.”

You made me feel real,
Evan had said. I thought I had understood what he meant, but maybe I had only gotten part of it.

Beth continued. “I also have no doubt that nearly everyone would rather believe that the Queen of Faerie stole their lover from them, than think he was quite happy to walk away and not look back.”

“You knew Tania, too,” I said.

“Oh, yes. She was the queen when I served, had been for a small eternity before. She was still dwelling almost entirely in Faerie when I knew her—she hadn’t yet decided to come out and play at being a human, an artist. And for her, it was play. An amusing distraction. Gavin is, from what I know of him, quite different than she was.

“Do I think she could have made Thomas love her? Absolutely.
Either by glamour or by more carnal means. It would have been no more to her than a snap of her fingers. If she had cared.

“But if Tania ever had a great love, Thomas wasn’t it, and Janet would have been less than nothing to her. So no, I don’t think she would have bothered to make Janet miserable. Janet was more than capable of doing that all on her own.”

“Here’s the thing I still don’t get, though,” I said. “If Janet is so desperate for Helena to have a chance to be the tithe, why doesn’t she just give her one of the charms, and then let her be judged with the rest of us?”

“Because that’s not how it works. I didn’t place an order for yours, or pick it up at the admin building. The day I gave it to you, I found it.”

“Found it?” I echoed.

“Bookmarking my calendar, so that when I turned the day over, there it was between the pages. I wanted to give you the chance, but I wasn’t the one who decided you’d earned it. That was why I needed your pages. To read them myself, yes, but also to pass them on to the Fae. They were the ones who made the decision. Much like they will make the decision in the spring, as to which one of you is chosen.”

The feelings of being watched that we had all had when we first moved in. Had they ever gone away, I wondered now, or had we just gotten used to the sensation?

“How long does Helena have?” I asked. “For someone to decide she’s earned her chance?”

“The charms can be given at any moment up until the selection is made at the equinox. But they don’t tend to be given late. I would say that if Helena doesn’t have one by the new year, she won’t get one at all.

“Still, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to go back.”

“Helena says she doesn’t remember it, from before.”

“Well.” Beth closed her eyes. “That’s probably for the best.”

“Did you know that Helena was Janet’s daughter?” I asked.

“No. This is my third time back as a mentor since they would have returned, if I can trust my math and my memory. So, two years besides this one that I could have seen Helena on the grounds.

“Which isn’t as noteworthy as it sounds—mentors may bring families with them, and unless you are in someone else’s house, you may well see a child without realizing to whom they belong. But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Helena before, and I certainly didn’t know that Janet had a child.”

“I can’t imagine what things were like for her, growing up,” I said.

I had seen kids playing on the grounds. Soccer or football or some variety of game that involved shrieking and running on the Commons. Riding bicycles. Running along the paths. Doing kid things. With friends. It was possible to come here and have a normal life in this very not-normal place.

Unless your mother locked you away like a secret in a tower.

Practically raised by wolves, we had joked. The monster and the metaphor, and the way they match up that makes the double-edged sword of wit. And then you realize what your words have done, and you weep because you’re both bleeding.

Once upon a time, there was a Fairy Queen with a heart made of flesh. Such a thing seems impossible, I know, but I have promised not to lie.

No one’s heart begins as a stone. Hearts are things that beat like birds in a cage, fluttering about, flying away from us at the least provocation. But once a crown is placed on a head, in that moment,
the queen is dead and long live the queen. So a heart must be taken out, and all its love placed into something unbreakable. Into stone, because one cannot love and rule, not without things even more valuable than hearts breaking.

You know this. This is why there are stories about the tears of a cold and marble-pale queen, each drop a miracle, a doorway large enough to let the dead walk living out of hell. Because for such a heart to love enough to weep, what else but resurrection could follow?

When she first changed her heart, the Fairy Queen liked the stone weight of it in her chest. The stone heart was strong. It would last forever. Changing a heart of flesh to one of stone was better even than hiding a life in an emerald, in a bird, in a tree. She did not worry that her heart would be stolen, that some accident would befall her.

And truly, she told herself, it was not as if she had lost anything. There are all sorts of things that look like love, that have its pleasures, that offer its heat and its tastes, and the queen enjoyed all of these things, her heart kept safe.

But sometimes. Sometimes even a stone heart can beat. Love, when it is true, is a force upon which even stone can shatter.

And so the stone-hearted queen looked, and loved. And she gave of herself, and even gave her heart. Her heart of stone, that beat once more in her chest.

Even a heart of stone can break.

He was her love and her beloved, and she would have plucked the sun from the sky and given it to him for the sheer joy of seeing it in his hands.

But to be loved in such a fashion is not a comfortable thing, and there are hands that will not bear such heat as a sun, casually given.
And so the beloved turned from her. He told her that her stone heart was cold, and that he craved a heart of warmth. He told her that love was not a queen set above him, but someone who would look at him as if he ruled.

And she was proud, and she was a queen, and she would not do those things, even for something called love, for to do so meant unbecoming who she was.

He walked away and did not look back. He thought nothing of her ever again, for who can break a heart of stone?

The queen made a vow: that her heart was hers, and that she would never again give it. It was a vow she kept all her days, though she kept always by her side one who would play, for her sake, at love. Not the same one, of course, never that. She changed them after a night, after a season, after seven years.

After and after, the stone-hearted queen died. And her heart of stone was taken from the opened cage of her body, so that it might be a monument to her passing. But when it was picked up, it shattered into a thousand, thousand pieces, as if it were tears, or uncountable grains of sand.

Snow blanketed Melete. Drifts heaped against the walls of the houses. The onion-domed red roof looked even more like it grew there after a photograph of Russia had been planted in New Hampshire.

When I stepped off the path, I sank deep enough that snow threatened to crest the tops of my boots. I wobbled as I walked, holding my arms out for balance. Once I got closer to Evan’s studio, there was a partially broken trail, and I shuffled my way through that.

I stomped the excess snow from my boots on his doorstep, and looked up to see orange-berried branches hanging from the gutters. “Is that some weird version of mistletoe?”

“No, but I’m happy to kiss you under it,” he said, dropping me back in an exaggerated swoon of a kiss. Flushed and laughing, I followed him inside.

The air in the studio smelled scorched, and I looked around to see if there was something new he was working on. There were shapes, obscured with drop cloths, impossible to discern.

He tracked my gaze. “I thought you were interested in seeing my older work.”

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to ask. I don’t love letting people see works in progress, either.” And I was here to see his older work, the art he had made before going to Faerie.