The Last Changeling (15 page)

As if summoned, Dagmarra's two brothers appeared from the darkness, along with an exhausted but apparently unwounded Aspen. He smiled at her, but the smile never reached his haunted eyes. Snail didn't even try to smile back. Behind him loomed a multi-limbed spider, the professor riding in an odd carapace on its back.

“The battle is over,” he called down, as the machine kept marching toward the wagon, “but the war has just begun.” He pulled on several levers before him and two of the machine's limbs reached out and began folding the stage back into the wagon. “We make for home as soon as . . .” he looked meaningfully at Snail, “
humanly
possible.”

I'm
not
human
, she thought, but somehow her arguments, her anger, seemed shallow compared to the misery that had been inflicted on all the people she'd tried to save: Fey or human, Seelie or Unseelie, their races had mattered little in the end. What had mattered was blood and bone and shattered hearts.

ASPEN HAS SOME ANSWERS

A
spen was willing to help pack up the wagon, but there was little he could do but get in the way. After the third time he'd been punched in the arm by one of the dwarfs for stepping on their toes, he took Maggie Light's suggestion to go to the twins' room and lie down. There had been other suggestions, most of them by the dwarfs, but they had nothing to do with packing up the wagon and were all anatomically implausible anyway.

He was so exhausted he entered the wagon from the wrong side and ended up having to travel the length of the wagon to get to the twins' room. There were scorch marks on the walls, and much of what had been stowed carefully was strewn about from the violence of the battle. Nothing seemed broken beyond repair until he reached the dwarfs' room and saw the birdcage lying in the middle of the floor, cracked and partially crushed, its tiny door hanging off its hinges. Beside it lay the bird, motionless.

Somehow, after all the death and violence, it was this small cruelty that finally made Aspen's tears well up. He looked closer, hoping that the bird was only sleeping—
On its side?
he thought.
Are you a child?—
but when he got near he saw a great gash across its breast and its innards spilled onto the wagon's wooden floorboards. But instead of blood and organs, the bird's guts were angular and bright, and the lamplight reflected metallically off of them. He reached out a finger to touch the strange items and snatched it back quickly when a burning sensation hit him.

Cold iron!

He popped his burned finger into his mouth to cool it and his saliva helped soothe the ache.

At the same time, he realized that the bird was not a bird at all. It was some made
thing.
A simulacrum animated, he knew not how or for what reason. He peered at it blankly for a moment more, then realized it was all too much for his tired brain to handle and stumbled away.

Alone in the room, Aspen collapsed onto a bed and closed his eyes. His ears rang from thunderous spells, his throat was sore from shouting, his sword arm ached from the butcher's work of battle.

I should feel better than this,
he thought.
We won!

Or at least,
he corrected his mind
, we did not lose.

But visions of the battle sprang into his head unbidden, and he wondered what victory was worth this price:

. . .
fire takes a peasant girl as she steps between him and the Border Lord ranks just as he flings his spell . . .

. . .
a sword cuts at his head, so he ducks and responds, sticking his borrowed sword into the stomach of a Seelie foot soldier who'd swung at him blindly . . .

. . .
he is caught in the press and pushes an old brownie away to clear his sword arm, noticing too late that he has pushed her right onto the pike of a charging bogle . . .

He'd killed enemies in the short battle, as well.
Lots of them
, he thought, trying to feel proud of his courage and failing. Instead, all he could think of was the spilled blood, the crack of bone. All he remembered were the faces of the ones he'd killed, all bearing the same look of surprise and pain as the allies he'd inadvertently slain. The memories brought him no relief.

He thought about removing his blood-soaked clothes—or at least his belt—but his hands were shaking so badly he didn't think he could manage.

So, he simply lay there trembling, all the while listening to the screech of the stage sliding back under the wagon, the whinnies of the unicorns as they were buckled into their traces, the creak and rumble as the wagon finally got under way.

Eventually, exhaustion and the rocking of the road got the better of him and he fell into a deep sleep filled with lightning, flame, and death.

• • •

H
E
AWOKE
AT
what he thought was dawn. But, when the sky kept getting darker and the sun lower, he realized it was actually sunset of the next day.

I have slept the entire day away and no one has tried to wake me.
He wondered if that meant they considered him a prisoner—or a friend.

Maybe they thought I was dead.
He pinched his left arm with his right hand.
Nope! Still alive. Lucky they didn't bury me.
He tried a grin at his small joke, failed, and worried he might never smile again.

Even knowing he had slept an entire day did not make him feel rested. He wanted nothing more than to pull the covers over his head and go back to sleep. He tried to find a compelling reason to get out of bed, but could not think of a single one. His escape plan with Snail seemed ludicrous now.

His plan to stop the coming war even more so.

I am as useless as a bull at a birthing
, he thought,
and if I lie here forever, the world will likely be improved for it.

He shut his eyes tight and waited for oblivion to take him again.

• • •

I
T
WAS
FULLY
light the next time he woke. Someone had left waybread and a tankard of water by his bed. He felt no hunger—especially when he saw that the bowser had nibbled on the edges of the bread—but he ate it anyway.

I assume after an entire day and night, my body requires sustenance.

He did feel a
little
better after eating. Though not so good that he thought himself a useful member of the world. But good enough to get up and go outside. Legs weak from lying in bed so long, he staggered to his feet and left the room, only to find himself in Maggie Light's quarters.

Much to his disappointment and relief, Maggie was nowhere to be seen. But a puff of orange-red hair sticking out of the blankets on Maggie Light's bed told him that Snail was asleep.

“Sleep on, my friend,” he whispered as quietly as a lullaby. She might not consider him as such, but it suddenly occurred to him that she was truly the only one he could count on. The only one who cared that he was alive in the world.

The dwarfs had not been in their room, but he had expected that. Whenever the wagon was in motion, they were invariably in the driver's seat. Perhaps they even took turns sleeping there.

He left that room and found himself in the professor's quarters. He did not want to see Odds, much less talk to him, so he tiptoed through. Opening the door to the outside, he clambered up to see the dwarfs.

As if to mock his bleak mood, it was a fine, sunny day. The cart now rolled over a smooth track that wandered a short distance across a small, open plain before disappearing into the southwestern mountains.

“What mountains are those?” he said to the dwarfs by way of hello.

Dagmarra's eyes twinkled up at him. “They are
skaap
,” she said, her voice a rumble.

“Skaap?”
It was not a name or a word he knew.

“Not Seelie.” Annar growled the translation.

“Nor Unseelie,” Thridi added, his voice not quite as rough.

“Nor the shifting borderlands between,” Dagmarra said, twinkle all gone.

Perhaps both kingdoms claim them,
Aspen thought.

“Have they a name?”

“Bonebreak,” said Annar.

“Or Stonebreak,” Thridi told him.

Aspen looked at Dagmarra.

She shrugged. “Or Heartbreak. Choose one. They will break one or all if you try to cross them.”

He looked at the craggy dark cliffs and snowcapped heights.
The names could be Seelie or Unseelie.
Or perhaps neither.

“Do we go there?”

“Be hard not to,” Annar called back.

“We'd go here but we already are,” Thridi added.

Dagmarra was strangely silent.

Aspen was about to restate his question when he noticed that they had company.

“What's that?” he said, pointing to something a short ways ahead of them, shimmering in the sun. “Another wagon?”

“An odd question,” Annar said.

“Unless you've gone blind,” Thridi said.

“Or it's an ogre in a
very
clever disguise,” they said together.

Dagmarra was still silent.

“Yes, well, it's a wagon then,” Aspen said, feeling as stupid as he always did when he tried to talk to the dwarfs. But he gave it one more try. “And there are two others, as well. But what are they all doing here?” He held up a hand. “No wait! I know. They're traveling. Getting pulled by horses. Fulfilling their purpose, you might say.”

Annar grinned up at Aspen, then poked Thridi. “I'm beginning to like him.”

“He
gets
us,” Thridi said, grinning as broadly as his brother.

Dagmarra spat spectacularly over the side of the wagon. The spit arced up, turned, and headed downward, its tail glistening in the sunlight like the trail of a flying snail, silver all the way to the ground.

Aspen saw now that there were people walking between the wagons as well. And a few people—a very few—were mounted on bony horses or mules.

He gave careful thought to his next question. “Why are we and all these others traveling to what seems to be—” He pointed toward the mountains ahead of them. “What seems to be awfully inhospitable territory?”

Annar looked at Thridi, who shrugged. They both looked at their sister, who once more spat over the side of the wagon. Then she shrugged as well.

“Odds is collecting,” she said.

“Collecting what?”

“Skarm drema.”

The dwarfs all folded their arms and leaned back, and Aspen knew he would not get another word out of them on the subject. He watched the mountains for a while, which seemed to be approaching the wagons rather than the other way around. It was mesmerizing for a few minutes. But soon enough he grew restless and went back to wake up Snail.

• • •

S
NAIL
WAS
SITTING
up in bed, yawning. Aspen smiled at her hair, which looked as if it was trying to escape her scalp. For the first time in days he felt the slightest bit happy.

That feeling lasted just as long as it took Snail to open her mouth.

“What do you know about changelings?” she asked without preamble.

Aspen cocked his head. “Same as you do, I imagine. Though not as
personally,
I suppose.”

“What?” Snail screamed at him. “You
knew
?”

He gaped at her. “You did not? How could you
not
? I mean . . .”

“You think I was given a tutor and history lessons like some toff?”

“Well, no but . . .”

“You think the Unseelie spend a lot of time
educating
their servants and underthings?”

“Um . . .”

“Did you think Mistress Softhands would ever tell me that I was
stolen
from my real folks and put right to work?”

He had no answer.

“
That's
how I didn't know.”

Aspen held up his hands in an instinctual attempt to stem the flood of angry words. It seemed to work, because when Snail spoke again it was in a lower tone.

“So, tell me,” she said again, “what do you know about changelings?”

Her voice might have been lower, but he didn't think she was any calmer.

She asked again, as if issuing a challenge to a duel. “What do
you
know about changelings?”

“What is it you want to know?” he asked.

She shrugged.

He knew very little, but what he did know, he told her, straight out and with nothing held back, friend to . . . well, whatever.

SNAIL MEETS HER CLAN

A
s Aspen began to speak about changelings, his face turned serious, as if weighing each word and finding it wanting.

“What is it you want to know?” he asked.

Snail was caught short by the question.
What do I want?
The only answer she could come up with was that she wanted to be back to what she was before.
A midwife's apprentice with few friends, but a life ahead of me that I studied for and enjoyed. And tipsy cake. And eating leftovers in the kitchen. And
 
. .
 .

Even she had to admit it was a pretty thin list. And as for enjoying her life, well looking back, it had certainly been better than the dungeon, the threat of the dungeon master, the escape across a river of carnivorous mermen, being tied up by a hungry troll, the race ahead of two armies, and the bloody aftermath of a battle.

It looked enjoyable in hindsight, and the truth was that she couldn't go back. This was now, not then. Two armies still searched for her. There was no one trying to keep her safe except an odd professor, an odder singer, three dwarfs, and a useless prince.

So I'd better learn more about this changeling thing
. She leaned in toward Aspen and gave him her full concentration.

“Changelings,” he was saying, “are human children stolen from their parents and brought into the faery world. And a simulacrum—a piece of wood made to look and act like a child, only badly—is left behind in the cradle or crib in the child's place.”

“I know
that
much,” Snail said impatiently. “But who stole
me
and how did I end up with Mistress Softhands?”

“Jaunty—my tutor—said that humans are simply better at some things than either the Seelie or Unseelie folk but rubbish at magic. They are better at mathematics and as good as mountain dwarfs at the making of . . .”

“Of . . . ?

“Things.”

“Things
?”

“Making gates and weaving cloth and brewing good ale and . . .”

“Midwifery?” She could feel herself get icy cold, as if a Frost Giant had laid a hand on her heart. Not that she believed in Frost Giants. They were just bogies to frighten small children into behaving. She used to think the same of changelings.

He nodded. “All kinds of doctoring. For the sorts of illnesses that can't be cured with spells. I do not know about midwives. Were your midwife tutors changelings?”

“They could do spells.”

“Then probably not.” He shook his head, but his face didn't change, so she had no way of knowing if he was lying to her.

Snail couldn't tell if she was shaking because the wagon was moving or because she was all a-tremble, finally deciding it was both. “Tell me more. Tell me how
I
came here.”

“I cannot say for certain.” His voice got lower as if he was ashamed of something. “I would have been only a child myself and living at the Seelie Court then.”

“Well . . .” She could feel her face now turning hot, sure that her cheeks were suddenly ablaze. That happened with redheads. And, now that she thought of it, didn't seem to happen to anyone truly fey. They only got whiter or pink, or looked confused, or downright angry. They didn't carry a fire on their cheeks.

“Well, what?” He looked truly puzzled.

“Well, what did your
tutor
have to say about that?”

He looked down at his feet, and the wagon made a sudden lurch at the same time. She saw something shift in his face, as if he had decided to lie to her and then decided it would not be a noble thing to do.

“Jaunty,” she prompted. “Your Unseelie tutor?”

He looked up, and his eyes almost held tears. “He said that because the Seelie folk look more like humans than most Unseelie, we are the ones who go into the human world and steal the children. To order. Only he didn't say
steal.
As I recall, he said
collect
. The Seelie folk
collect
the human children and bring them to a central tower, and then when there are enough to make it worth their while, the Seelie collectors take the changelings into the Shifting Lands and sell them to . . .”

Snail interrupted. “Sold? I was
sold
?”

He nodded miserably.

“How do you know. . . ?” And then she stopped herself. Aspen, as the Hostage Prince, probably made much the same journey. She could ask him, she supposed. It might hurt him to remember.

And then she shook her head.
This isn't about him. It's about me.
Only she had no memory of being taken, sold, exchanged. The hurt, whatever it had been then, was suddenly here. Now. And it wasn't a hurt at all but a blazing anger.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “it was actually better that way than the Unseelie going into the human world. I mean, some of them get hungry and eat . . .”

She turned away, furious with him. He just didn't think
that anyone beneath his rank might have feelings. That they might have had parents who loved them, mourned them.

Over her shoulder she said, “Better that
collecting
didn't happen at all. Just leave me alone, your royal high mucky-muck. Go away. I just don't want to talk to you anymore.”

She lay back down on the bed and pulled the covers over her head, counting slowly to a hundred.

Very
slowly.

When she was done, she peeked out and saw that she was alone in the room.

“Good,” she said. Though she knew it wasn't. Not really.

• • •

T
HERE
WAS
A
dress laid out on the bed. Snail doubted Aspen had left it there.

Maggie Light probably had. She was glad to change because her own clothes were crusted with the blood of all the wounds she'd treated.

She pumped water from the small cistern and washed her hands and face and the parts of her arms that were blood-soaked as well. She'd never been as dirty as this that she could remember. Midwives simply weren't allowed to get dirty. And after every birth, they got to soak for a long time in a tub of heated water. Even in the dungeon she hadn't been this filthy. Nor helping Huldra birth baby Og. Nor climbing the chimney while trying to escape from the Seelie castle. Nor traipsing through the fields and the bog. Nor . . .

She dried herself with a cloth hanging on a hook by the cistern and put on the dress. It was made of a soft, dark blue cotton that matched one of her eyes, with green threads shooting through the sleeves that matched the other eye. There was an apron, too, not striped like her apprentice apron, but a lighter shade of the blue and somewhat stiffer. Plus a pair of blue hose.

Nothing could be done about her shoes.

She took the brush that had been set out on a small table next to the cistern and attacked her hair until she beat it into submission. At last she was ready to go outside.

• • •

W
HAT
GREETED
HER
was a surprise. During her long sleep, the wagon must have come an enormous distance. They were now in a kind of large bowl set between high mountains.

In the bowl, buzzing like honey ants in a broken mound, were hundreds—maybe even thousands—of folk who, she had to assume, were changelings just like her.

She could see some of them were bandaged, and as she walked amongst them, they waved and shouted out their thanks. But others seemed untouched by any battles and hardly noticed her passage.

Cook-fires glowed all around. And families—or what passed for families, for she realized that many of the groups consisted of young people just her age—were busy cooking in great metal pots, not the usual pottery pans that the fey used for their meals.

The smells were enticing. She thought there might be onions and wild garlic and herbs for seasoning. But what meat in the pot she couldn't begin to guess. Venison or boar or rabbit or squirrel or . . .

She checked that the unicorns were still tethered close to Odds's wagon and was relieved to see them there, comfortably grazing on the grass.

Too new at being a changeling—a human she supposed she should call herself—she found she was shy about speaking to any of the families. Just nodded and smiled.

She started to turn back to Odds's wagon when a girl a bit younger than she came up, equally shyly, and held out her hand.

“Will you eat with us, physician?” she asked.

Snail thought for a moment that the girl was talking to someone else, someone behind her. But when the girl took her hand, Snail had to admit the invitation was for her.

She resisted saying that she was no physician, only a midwife's apprentice. She'd already brought one baby—one very big baby—into the world. And she had bandaged many a battle wound, saving limbs and saving lives as best she could. She supposed she was, in fact, some kind of physician/midwife now. Mistress Softhands often said, “A midwife is born in the birthing room as surely as the baby.”

Meaning,
she now realized,
that until you have been through the worst of it on your own, you cannot really claim the title.
And both the troll baby's birth and the battle doctoring she'd done on her own. Learning as she went, and making up the rest.

Bowing her head quickly, she said, “I would be honored. Call me Sofie.” It was the first thing that came into her mind.

The girl head-bobbed back.

Sofie. That was something she was never called, though it was her name. Mistress Softhands had used it once or twice. But it was as if Snail—the Snail who was awkward and uncomfortable and accident-prone—had died in the battle, the Seelie War, and Sofie had been reforged in its fire.

Sofie.
It was an odd name. Meaningless. Maybe that's why no one in the Unseelie Court ever called her that—just Snail and Useless and You There. And, once,
Duck
. Though that was less a name than a call for her to get out of the way of a flying object. She hadn't ducked fast enough and they all thought that was hilariously funny, so for a while it had become her name amongst the other apprentices.

Duck.

Well
, she thought
, I'll have to give the name Sofie meaning. It will be my own invention. It will simply mean what I want it to mean.

And so thinking, she went over to meet and eat with some of the members of her clan.