Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
The air is sweet and tastes like freedom. I tilt my face toward the sky, reveling in the warm sunlight. As my gaze drops, my heart begins to race as it truly hits me:
I’m in a world of fae and magic.
Men and women wander the street, going about their business as though their unnatural features are utterly unnoteworthy.
I see a couple laughing, linking arms with each other and spinning around a bend.
There’s a father and his children, dutiful assistants for today’s trip to the grocer.
A girl flies overhead chased by two others, shouting something among themselves that’s lost in the sounds of their buzzing wings and magic.
Everyone has something unique—horns and hooves, tails and wings. I see bright pink hair and catlike eyes. I should be terrified. Find fear! my better sense shouts at me from the back of my mind. These people are your mortal enemies.
But I’m not afraid. My heart beats with a rhythm that matches their footsteps.
My eyes drink in everything about them. And my feet want to run toward something utterly indescribable—I’ve no idea who or what or where it might be.
I want to see and touch everything around me.
My drab world has found color and I want to make it mine.
“If you keep gawking, people’ll notice.” Raph tugs my hand and jerks his head to the right. I take his cue and we begin to move.
Each building in Dreamsong is more magnificent than the last. They’re made of wood and stone, iron and glass.
Silken bedsheets hang out to dry on lines strung across the street, perfuming the air with lavender and soap.
I stop at one particularly stunning gate to run my fingertips over the ironwork.
Thousands of tiny holes have been punched through a thin sheet of metal, turning it into delicate lace.
Metal ribbons and bows are unfurled along it, so lifelike that I’m shocked they don’t blow away in the breeze.
“Come on.” Raph tugs my hand again. “I thought you wanted music, not…what was it that you were doing just now? Human magic?”
“No, humans don’t have magic.” I chuckle softly. My eyes are still on the gate even as he pulls me away. “I was admiring it. The construction is so beautiful; I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It looks pretty normal to me.” He shrugs. Oh, to grow up in a world where all this is normal. “This way.” We round the building with the lacy gate, duck through a back door, and enter a small courtyard in a far corner of the lot. “You wait here.”
“All right.” I remain in the shadow of an arbor as Raph scampers up to a kitchen door and knocks several times. It opens and a red-faced maid pokes her head out.
“The mistress of the house is going to skin you for certain this time. You can’t keep calling like this.”
“She doesn’t have to know I’m here. Can you get Ralsha?” Raph clasps his hands and holds them up like he’s begging. The woman puts a hand on her hip and arches her eyebrows. “Fine, I’ll give you a delivery whenever you want it,” he says. “But you’re not getting anything else out of me.”
“Good boy. Wait a moment.”
Everything has a price here, I remind myself as I watch the interaction.
I must remember that and pay attention to every word people use.
Luckily, I have experience with this thanks to my father.
It’s not just what people say, but how they say it, he would tell me.
Pay attention to everything. Before Joyce arrived, he even let me sit in on some of his meetings and asked me for advice after.
That was one of the few times I could use my sense about lies to be helpful to someone beyond myself.
Ralsha is a young girl, no older than Raph.
But where Raph has short auburn hair, Ralsha has long deep violet curls.
She squeals at the sight of Raph, throwing her arms around his neck.
There’s clearly some young love brewing and I bite back a warning to them both.
Maybe the fae are immune to the pitfalls of love that we humans must endure.
Regardless, their mistakes are not my business.
With some eyelash-batting from Raph, Ralsha goes back in the house and returns with a cloak. Raph gives her a peck on the cheek and a wink before returning to me. Ralsha melts into the doorstep until she’s summoned back inside by the maid I saw earlier.
“Here you go. It’s actually a good cloak too. Ralsha’s mum is the best tailor in Dreamsong. Ralsha says she’s got an enchanted loom that weaves invisible thread into fabric.”
“If it’s invisible thread, how would you know it’s there?” I grin.
Raph considers this for far too long. It only makes me grin more and he sticks out his tongue at me. “If she says it’s there, it must be.” Oh, right, they can’t lie. “Now, turn around and let me put this on you.” He holds up the cloak.
“What service.” I laugh softly and turn.
“Well, I told you I’m the best guide—” His words halt. I flinch instantly. I know what he’s seen because of this stupid silken dress and its stupid swooping front and back. A small finger presses into my spine between my shoulder blades. “How’dja get this one, miss?”
He’s a child. He doesn’t know any better. He doesn’t know that it’s rude to ask about people’s gnarliest scars so plainly.
“I don’t remember,” I murmur. As I say the lie, a metallic taste fills my mouth.
But it’s not just because I’m lying. I tasted blood that day too.
I’d bitten my tongue from the screaming and thrashing.
I smell the singed aroma of burning flesh peppering my memory.
“I’ve had it forever. Since I was a little girl.
No older than you. It’s always been there. ”
He snickers. “It’s wicked-looking. You must be one tough human to endure something like that and still be all right.”
I shrug the robe onto my shoulders, feeling much less bare. My ugliest secrets are hidden once more beneath the armor of fabric. “I like to think so.”
“Good. You have to be tough to survive the fae.” He grins again and we’re back out in the streets.
After another few minutes of walking, we come to a tavern.
I hear the scorching-hot strings of a well-played fiddle.
Underneath is a feverish drumbeat, setting a lively pace for the other performers.
A panpipe soars above them all, stringing together a melody that turns the whole raucous collection of sounds into breathless song.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“The Screaming Goat.” Raph smiles. “You wanted music. There’s none better in all the fae wilds. Well, don’t just stand there. Go in.” He gives me a shove and I stumble toward the arched entry.
There’re no doors or windows to the Screaming Goat, just columns and archways that make up the front facade, letting in the sunshine and letting out sound.
There are also no chairs, only high tables that men and women stand at, stomping their feet to the music and watering the ground with frothy ale.
My eyes are drawn to the low stage opposite the entry where the band plays. Men and women twirl on a dance floor in front of it.
“Try to look less conspicuous, gosh.” Raph pulls me to an empty table by one of the archways. He scrambles up onto the half-wall and stands on it like he owns the place. A barmaid comes over and sets a flagon in front of me. “Hey, where’s mine?” Raph whines.
“Maybe when you’re older.” She winks and walks away.
“Rude.” Raph rolls his eyes.
I almost miss the whole exchange, I’m so focused on the music.
The lively jig is played in common time.
The man with the panpipe leaps across the stage, egging on the dancers with his own fancy footwork.
I’ve seen only one music performance before.
My father brought a traveling band to one of his last parties for the Applegate Trading Company after I begged and begged.
The party happened to be on my birthday and he couldn’t refuse, despite all but banning music following my mother’s death as “too painful.”
Joyce got to pick the music that night, so of course it was some dull collection of stuffy instrumentals played by men twice my father’s age.
Gods forbid we actually had genuine fun at one of those parties.
But if we had, this is what our manor might have looked like, might have sounded like.
I try to imagine it and the thought is accompanied by a comical image of Joyce nearly losing her head from all the stomping across her ridiculously expensive rugs.
A smile crosses my lips. I’m tapping my foot along to the beat.
My gaze drifts as the man with the panpipe spins and I see a whole pile of instruments off to stage right.
Leaning against them is a lute. It’s not nearly as fine as my mother’s, I can tell that from here.
But the strings are intact, and I would bet anything it’s in tune.
“What’re all those?” I ask Raph and point to the pile of instruments.
“Instruments for performers.” He shrugs. “I see people go up and take them whenever the bar is quiet. A silent tavern is a sad tavern,” he says as though he’s repeating someone else’s words.
Surely I’m misunderstanding. “So anyone can play those?”
“I think so.” I wish I knew if he was telling the actual truth or just the truth as he knows it. “I’ve never seen anyone get in trouble for playing them. Oh, wait, do you want to play?”
“No, no…I’m not any good.” Yet even as I say that, I’m popping my knuckles. I’m itching for the harmonies to the panpipe’s melodies that I know are trapped in the strings of the lute.
“Eh, you’re likely right.”
“What?” I look at him, the echoes of Joyce and Helen suddenly tangling with his words.
He drops his voice: “You’re a human. There’s no way you could play well enough to keep up with fae. I’m sure you’re just blown away by the quality of our bards.”
I am. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t keep up. I think I could…
Stop that noise!
Mother, she’s doing it again. She’s playing the thing!