Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
It was only thinking of Cobble that saved her.
She got a flash of him falling, and the reason he had done so hit her.
He doesn’t care to really understand how this place works, she thought. He only thinks from his stolid, superior, old posh perspective. And just like that, she flipped. She found her feet on the clouds, and the clouds became the ground.
Because of course there was no up and down here.
There was only what you made of it.
And she made it easy.
Now she could look above her at Cobble. Crouched on that staircase, with his wand out, still furiously trying to use it to
drag her to him. He tapped it against the stone as she watched. As if he thought it had gone faulty maybe. After which, she
had to laugh. She was exhausted, and still winded, and worried about what would happen here. But somehow it just came out.
Though naturally, Cobble was not pleased.
“You nasty little thing pulling that trick,” he hollered down at her.
Then he scrambled to the edge and attempted to fly his way down.
Even though she knew he didn’t have to. If you stepped confidently off the end of one staircase, it would set you on another that hadn’t seemed to be there—another unrule he simply did not understand.
All this time spent keeping this place for people like you, and you don’t even know that, she thought with some bitterness.
But it was all right.
It meant something else, too.
Something she could use, despite his sputtering protests.
“Let’s see you fool me twice,” he said as he wobbled down to what he probably thought was the ground. Then he advanced. He
jabbed his wand at her menacingly. As if he had great power over her. As if he had the same power as he did in the human world.
And was seen in exactly the same way.
“Do you know how the Aerifen were made, Professor?” she asked as conversationally as she imagined he’d once started in on
Bram. If someone were to have just a little sip of your blood, now and then, what would happen? she pictured him asking. Over cups of tea and crumpets.
The idea made her rage.
But she kept it off her face.
She waited, for the second time, for him to do only what he knew.
“Why would I care about a thing like that?” he spat.
And she smiled. She carried on, with one of her much-loved tales of old.
“People think they are fen gone wrong. That the name means literally that. But what I found strange about this is fen do not
understand anything being inherently wrong.
They do not think of each other, or of us, in those terms. They only think of deeds.
Of whatever has been done. Of whatever has been felt, in a way that they feel, too.
Their language is all in emotion, all in love speaking to love, pain speaking to whatever soothes it.
So I looked into it a little more, and you know what I found?
Arei means ‘life.’ It means to give life, where grief for its absence burned.
No Areifen come from this place. There are no skin
suit vampires. They are all human, almost lost to terrible tragedies, made able to endure. Don’t you think that’s beautiful?
They heard our grief, they found children wandering alone and in pain, and they tried to make them all right again. They exulted
them. Gifted them with names if they had none, places if there was nothing left for them, tried to return them to families
whole, unknowing that we would scorn their gift,” she said, unsurprised that he barely listened to her meandering through
her own memories, and all the unapproved accounts she’d read. All the things she’d opened her heart to fully.
And that he of course had not.
“We scorned their gift because the gift was foul demons,” he said, creeping forward as he did. That wand trembling just a
little now, as he realized it wasn’t quite working the same. But still he came.
He walked right into her carefully chosen words.
“And yet you stole it for yourself.”
“To even the field of battle.”
“So for terrible reasons, too. Not to honor them or ease misery. But to create it, in their name. A perversion of their gift.
As terrible as the terrible meaning people like you attributed to the word Areifen. To everything here, really. All the times the books claim that fen—and every other thing here—will tear you apart, the moment
you set foot on the upside-down sky. When really, it’s nothing of the kind. They tear people apart for one reason and one
reason alone: because someone does what I have just said that you did,” she informed him, and as she did, she heard that music.
The one that sounded like the old song.
About it being hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They just want everyone to be able to dance, she thought.
And now the professor was very close.
“I have done nothing wrong,” he said, as he tossed his wand away.
He bared his teeth instead, ready to sink in. But she didn’t flinch. She didn’t back away. She tilted her head and listened
instead, for the great horn of the hunt. The endless hunt that drove trespassers mad. Or at least, trespassers who scorned
and sullied and spoke only in hope of harm.
“Yes, but, Professor, the thing is,” she said, “I don’t think they quite agree.”
Then she watched as nothingness became shapes, in the dim light. A hand of sorts where none was, the blade of a kind of face.
Glittering skeins of something that wasn’t silk—and all of it reaching for him.
It was only when they touched him, however, that they became like mouths.
Like rows and rows of tiny biting teeth, sinking in wherever they found purchase. Horrifying in one way. And yet at the same
time, she didn’t think she had ever looked upon anything so beautiful. It was like seeing the feeling finally there is justice. Like hearing in her heart that something was fair.
As he screamed, amid the maelstrom.
And was carried away into darkness.