Tithe (12 page)

Kaye concentrated, letting the energy swirl around her, feeling it run through her. It seemed to ebb and flow with each beat of her heart.

They were driving back when Kaye pointed to the hill. “Look at those lights. Wonder who’s up there.”

“I don’t see anything.” He looked at her sharply in the rearview mirror.

Cemetery Hill was a large sloping hill with a steep incline on the side that faced the highway. That side had neither graves nor tombs, and in the winter kids would blithely go sledding, piling spare mittens and scarves on the monuments. An abandoned, half-built mausoleum stood at the base of one gently sloping side. With two levels but no roof, the top was overgrown with smallish trees and vines. There were dozens upon dozens of monuments, tombs, and gravestones erected around it.

“Think that’s where the Unseelie Court is?” she asked softly.

“I want to see it.”

He drove into the graveyard.

They parked along the tumbled-stone path. She stared through the rear windshield at the darting lights as she waited for Corny to walk around and open her door.

“Those are definitely faeries,” Kaye said.

“I can’t see anything.” There was an edge of panic in Corny’s voice.

Kaye followed the lights, saw them dazzle and turn, keeping just enough ahead of her that she could not see them clearly. She sped up her pace, boots crunching the frost-stiffened grass. They were so close she could just snatch one out of the air.…

“Kaye!” Corny called, and she turned. “Don’t fucking leave me behind and make me have to wonder if I’m a goddamn nutcase for the rest of my life.”

“I’m not leaving you! I’m trying to catch one of these things.’

Suddenly there was an impossible explosion of fireflies, darting in and out of the trees. It must be well past midnight and too late in the season for fireflies anyway, the chill of autumn and recent rain stiffening the grass beneath their feet with frost. But the insects darted around them, each blinking for a long moment, then gone, then blinking again. Then she looked at them carefully. They were little winged creatures, even smaller than those she had snatched at. One flitted close to her and showed its teeth.

Kaye made a shrill sound.

“What?” Corny said.

“Not bugs … they’re tiny, nasty faeries.”

He dropped Kaye’s hand and snatched at one, although it darted out of his grip. “I can’t see anything. Are those the things … what you saw from the road?”

She shook her head. “No. Those lights were bigger.”

He squatted down, his breath rising from his lips in puffs of white vapor. “Can you see them now?”

She shook her head. “Lutie said something about the opening being in a brown patch of grass, but practically the whole hill is covered with brown grass.”

“Maybe the patch is bare by now.”

Kaye knelt down next to Corny and cupped her ear to the ground. There was faint music. “Listen. You can hear it.”

He moved to her side and pressed his ear to the ground as well. “Music,” he said. “Sounds like pipes.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said, the smile on her face before she remembered that this was not a good place they were trying to enter.

“Let’s walk a circuit around the hill. We’ll both look for any patch that seems weird.” Corny stretched from his squat and waited for her to start walking.

The graveyard was unnaturally quiet. The moon was, if anything, fuller and fatter than it had been when she last saw it. It seemed unnatural; the thing looked bloated in the sky, and she thought again about the sun bleeding to death while the moon grew tumescent with devoured light.

The newer, granite gravestones were all polished to an unnatural mirror shine that reflected her and Corny as they passed. The older markers were a pale, milky marble, grass stains and dirt washed out by the moonlight. Pale as Roiben’s hair.

“Hey, what about that?” Corny pointed to a patch of grass that did seem a different shade of brown.

Kneeling down beside it, Corny pulled back a corner as though it were the flap of a sod tent. Corny leaned in.

“No,” Kaye said. “I have to go in there alone.”

“I want this,” Corny said. “You said you wouldn’t leave me behind.”

“It’s probably not safe for
me
to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Kaye shimmied into the entrance. “I promise.”

The music seemed louder now, pipes and laughter swelling in the quiet night. Kaye heard Corny say “You get to have all the fun” as she followed the song inside.

“Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible dissembling
Music in the granite hill”

—LOUISE BOGAN, “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom”

She slipped inside the hollow hill.

The air itself seemed thick with sweetness, and breathing was disorienting.

Long, low tables were heaped with golden pears, chestnuts, bowls of bread soaking in buttery milk, pomegranates ripped in half and half again, violet petals on crystal plates, and all manner of strange delicacies. Wide silver goblets sat like toads on the tables, upright and overturned in equal proportion. Scarlet-clad faerie ladies brushed past men in torn rags, and courtiers danced with crones.

Revelers danced and sang, drank and swooned. The costumes were varied and completely unlike medieval clothes. They were more like some demented, organic couture. Collars rose like great fins. Outfits were composed entirely of petals or leaves. Ragged
edges finished off lovely dresses. Ugly, strange, or lovely as the moon, none were plain.

“The Unseelie Court,” she said aloud. She had expected something else, a cave, maybe, filled with gnawed human bones and faerie prisoners. Something simple. Looking out into the throng of revelers, she didn’t know what to think.

The room itself was massive, so large that she wasn’t sure what was on the other side. Far across the room, what looked like a giant, slouched near a dais. Each step seemed to push her in a new direction, full of splendors. A fiddler was playing an improbable instrument, with several necks and so many strings that the fiddler sawed his bow at them wildly. A long-nosed woman with freckles and ears like a jackal’s juggled pinecones. Three men with red hair and double rows of shark teeth dipped their caps in a pile of carnage, soaking up the blood. A huge creature with bat wings and limbs like stilts sat atop a table and lapped at a beaten copper bowl of cream. It hissed at Kaye as she passed it.

Above them all, the domed ceiling was frescoed with dangling roots.

Kaye picked up a goblet off a table. It was ornate and very heavy, but it seemed clean. She poured a thin, reddish liquid from the silver carafe in the center of the table. Small seeds floated at the top, but the drink smelled
pleasant and not entirely strange, so she took a swallow of it. It was both sweet and bitter and went to her head so that, for a moment, she was obliged to hold the table for support.

She took a silvery apple from a pile of strange, thorny fruit, turned it over in her hand, and gingerly bit into it. It was crimson on the inside and tasted like watery honey. It was so good that she ate it core and all, till she was licking her hand for juice. The next was brown and rotten-looking as she bit into it, but the meat, though gritty, tasted of a fiery and sweet liquor.

She felt an infectious giddiness come over her. Here, nothing she did was strange. She could twirl and dance and sing.

All at once she was aware of how far into the crowd she had gone. She had been turned around so many times she no longer even knew which direction was the way back.

She deliberately tried to retrace her steps. Three woman walked past her, silver gowns trailing like fine mist. The low cut of the identical dresses showed off the women’s hollow backs. She looked again, but their concave backs were as smooth and empty as bowls. She forced herself to keep moving. A short man—a dwarf?—with intricate silver bracelets and shoulder-length black curls leered at her as he bit into an apricot.

Every moment became more unreal.

A winged boy skipped up to her, grinning.
“You smell like iron,’ he said, and reached out a finger to poke her side.

Kaye scuttled away from his hand to a chorus of laughter. Her eyes focused on the pale grasshopper green of the insect wings attached to the boy’s back.

She pushed through the crowd, weaving past dancers leaping in complex intertwining circles, past a clawed hand that snatched at her ankle from beneath the heavy scarlet cloth on one of the tables, past what looked like a debauched living chess game.

A satyr with a curly beard and ivory horns was hunched over, carefully ripping the wing off a small faerie trapped in his meaty fist. The thing screeched, beating its other wing hummingbird-swift against the fingers that held it. Pale green blood dribbled over the goat-man’s hand. Kaye stopped, stunned and sickened to watch as the satyr tossed the little creature in the air. It flew in desperate circles, spiraling to the earthen floor.

Before Kaye could step close and snatch it, the man’s boot stamped down, smearing the faerie into the dust.

Kaye reeled back, pushing folk aside in her haste to get away. Angling through the multitudes, she thought of her own foolishness in coming here. This was the Unseelie Court. This was the worst of Faeryland come to drink themselves sick.

Three men in shimmering green coattails, their arms and legs long and skinny as broomsticks, were pushing a doe-eyed boy with grasshopper legs between them. He crouched warily as if to spring, but each time was unprepared for a sudden grab or push.

“Let him alone,’ Kaye said, stepping up to them. The boy reminded her too much of Gristle for her to just watch.

The men turned to look at her, all of them identical. The boy tried to slip between them, but one of the skinny men locked his arm around the boy’s neck.

“What’s this?” a skinny man asked.

“I’ll trade you something for him,” Kaye said, scrambling for a plan.

One of the men snickered, and the other drew a little knife with an ivory handle and a metal blade that stank of pure iron. The third threaded his hand through the boy’s hair, tipping his head back.

“No!” Kaye yelled as the iron dagger stabbed into the boy’s left eye. The orb popped like a grape, clear liquid and blood running down his face as he screamed. The flesh hissed where the iron touched it.

“So much better with an audience,” one of the skinny men said.

Kaye stumbled back, reaching around on a nearby table, finding only a goblet. She hefted
it like a small club, unsure of what she was going to do with it.

One skinny man drew the iron blade over the skin of the boy’s cheek, down his neck as the boy trembled and squealed, his one good eye rolling weakly in his head. The iron left a thin red line where it passed, the skin bubbling to white welts.

“Going to save him, poppet?” another of the skinny men called to Kaye.

Kaye’s hands were shaking, and the cup seemed nothing more than a heavy thing she held; certainly, it was no weapon.

“We’re not going to kill him,” the man who was holding the boy’s hair said.

“Just softening him up a bit,” the one with the knife put in.

Fury surged up in her. The cup flew from her hand, hitting the shoulder of the man with the knife, spotting his coat with droplets of the wine it had contained before falling ineffectually to the dirt floor, where it rolled in helpless circles.

One of the men laughed and another lunged for her. She ducked into the crowd, pushing aside a dainty woman and sidling through.

Then she came to a sudden halt. Half hidden by three toad-skinned creatures hunched over a game of dice, there was Corny.

He was wedged against an overturned
table, a goblet tipped in his hand. He was rocking back and forth with his eyes shut. A puddle of wine was soaking his pants, but he didn’t seem to care.

Revelers were packed in tightly around her, so she scuttled under the table.

“Corny?” Kaye said, breathing hard.

Corny was right in front of her, but didn’t seem to see her.

She shook him.

He noticed that and finally glanced up. He looked drunk, or worse than drunk. Like he’d been drunk for years.

“I know you,” Corny said thickly.

“It’s me, Kaye.”

“Kaye?”

“What are you doing here?”

“They said it wasn’t for me.”

“What wasn’t for you?”

The hand with the goblet in it stirred slightly.

“The wine?”

“Not for me. So I drank it. I want everything that’s not for me.”

“What happened to you?”

“This,” he said, and twitched his mouth into something that might have been a smile. “I saw him.”

She looked quickly back into the throng. “Who?”

Corny pointed toward a raised dais where
tall, pale faeries spoke together and drank from silver cups. “Your boy. Robin of the white hair. At least I think it was.”

“What was he doing?”

Corny shook his head. It hung limply from his neck.

“Are you going to be sick?” she said.

He looked up into her face and smiled. “I am sick.”

He began singing “King of Pain,” softly and off-key. His eyes focused on nothing, and he was smiling a little, one of his hands toying idly with a button on his shirt. It seemed as though he was trying to rebutton it. “There’s a king on a throne with his eyes torn out. There’s a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt. Oh-oooh, king of pain, I will always be, king of pain.’”

“I’m going to find him,” Kaye said.

She looked at Corny, who was muttering, wiping the inside of his goblet with a finger that he brought to his lips.

“Wait for me here, okay? Don’t go anywhere.”

He didn’t make any reply, but she doubted that he could stand anyway. He looked well and truly wasted.

Kaye reentered the throng, weaving toward where Corny had pointed.

A woman with thick braids of crimson hair sat on a tall wooden throne with edges that
came to worn peaks and spires. It was wormed through with termite holes, giving it the appearance of a lattice. At her feet, goblins gamboled.

Roiben walked up to the throne and went down to one knee.