The Rose Bargain

If my favorite story in Faeries of the British Isles was about faerie doors, Lydia’s was about the faerie king. We made Mrs. Osbourne tell it over and over again until it was as well-worn as the grooves on her butcher block. As the story goes, long before Queen Mor, when England was a wild place, the portal between worlds was open. The Others passed through freely, looking to make bargains and use fragile humans as their playthings. Milkmaids would wander off into the night and return at sunrise, strangely hollowed out. Fields would turn to ash in a single afternoon, others would sprout wheat of pure gold that melted in the rain. Babies were snatched out of their cradles, strange copies left in their stead.

Clever humans knew to stay away from the edge of the forest, not to let a stranger inside after dark, and never to respond to someone calling your name if you did not recognize the voice doing the calling. There was one such girl who thought she was very clever indeed.

Her parents, terrified by their daughter’s remarkable beauty, kept her locked up on a country estate much like ours, tucked away from the world outside and the dangers that lurked there.

The girl was content to live a quiet life with her garden and her brothers and sisters and her books. But on the evening of her eighteenth birthday she heard music so beautiful she couldn’t help but weep. With big, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, she followed the music beyond the safe walls of her estate and into the bordering woods. It was there, under a willow tree, that she found a man strumming a lute. Except it wasn’t a man. As she got closer, she noticed something just the slightest bit off about him, his too-long fingers, his pointed ears, his face so beautiful it made her weep harder, and she knew she had stumbled upon one of the Others she’d been warned about.