Small Consolation
After the performance, I searched the blue shadows around the car park for white wings.
For my mother’s stern face. They had nothing to reveal, but I was no less fearful.
If Trix had been any further downstage, she would have felt more than the brush of a wing.
My mother would have known this – if that barn owl had indeed been her, it was a warning.
I could have crossed the border then and there to confront her.
Put an end to the paranoia that had lived alongside me ever since I joined the BCBC.
The cowardly part of myself wanted to forget that performance had ever happened, to flee to the safety of the Dance Hall, and avoid making another crossing until absolutely necessary.
“Absolutely necessary” came around sooner than anticipated. Less than a week after the Kenwood Festival, Glen told me that all the courts had been summoned to an Inter-Realm summit, hosted by the Realm of Goldleaf.
* * *
As we walked behind my parents and uncle through the corridor to the Black Forest, where the Realm of Goldleaf hid in the space between firs and spruces, Glen and I exchanged subtle gestures.
One consolation, he said with a raised index finger. You won’t have to deal with Cressida.
I brought my palms together, not quite touching. Small consolation.
To join the summit, we had to follow a servant who I knew from previous encounters had been adopted by the Goldleaf nobility as long ago as Glen, but who had been kept the size of a child and outfitted in a pinafore of wood sorrel.
Her eyes were blue and vacant; I tried not to meet them directly as she gestured to a tall, thin trunk which, on close inspection, revealed a door to be pushed open.
I counted representatives from ten other realms: the Astral Realm had sent only a single adviser, but the others had sent at least two high-ranking nobles apiece.
Inter-Realm summits were not meant to happen more than once in a mortal generation. However, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the more recent oil spill in Alaska, meant that I had been dragged to two in a single mortal decade.
Were we not here only a day and a night ago?
The Countess of the Glacier Realm gestured to the ceremonial pond around which we all stood.
The last summit had actually been three mortal years earlier, in the Realm of Blue Jade, but my kin’s collectively lax grasp of time meant they were not very good at distinguishing the intervals between mortal-made catastrophes.
We felt only the impact, visceral and slow to fade, like biting into a mouldy lemon.
The mortals have become reckless, the Countess added.
I was glad that Glen was standing behind my shoulder, or I would have rolled my eyes at him. It would not be an Inter-Realm summit without at least one declaration that mortals were reckless, uncivilised creatures.
While the rest of the attendees agreed – they have gone too far, their meddling in the elements hurts us all, they can no longer be trusted to steward the earth, etc.
– I stole wary glances at my mother. I had braced myself from the moment we departed the Silver Realm together, waiting for her face to betray what she knew.
But, as ever, she was unreadable. Her eyes could bore into my soul, but there was no looking back into hers.
Unless she really did not know. Unless that barn owl had been an ordinary resident of the Heath after all, disturbed by the bright lights.
It was tempting to assume so. But I could not let my guard down for a moment.
Especially not when the discussion around the pond was so fiery.
These meetings were usually tedious more than anything else, an opportunity to complain about the inferiority of mortals to no particular end.
But this one was becoming particularly vitriolic.
They have destroyed entire cities, burned shadows onto stone. The Duke of Goldleaf cast searing images across the surface of the pond. Now, the waters of the Glacier Realm suffer in agony, choking on this… oil. A black death. He made a cross of his arms. We can stand idly by no longer.
His Goldleaf Eminence is right. The Moss Agate Baron jumped up, always eager to show loyalty. Where will it end? Not with their destruction, but ours.
We must intervene, the Glacier Countess threw up her arm, palm open, fingers closed tightly around an invisible blade.
Up to this point no one from my family had weighed in, but my father rose from his chair and, to my surprise, made a point with which I agreed.
And you would intervene how, exactly? Do tell. I am most intrigued to meet the billions of children you have been raising in secret.
The Glacier Countess went pink, and quickly conceded defeat, sitting back in her chair.
The clink of icicles around her skirts reminded me of the celesta that followed Trix’s steps as the Sugar Plum Fairy during Nutcracker.
I tried to take some comfort from this thought. To let it disguise my growing unease.
We do not need billions, the Duke of Goldleaf said with a sweeping arc of his arm. One of us can bring a hundred mortals to their knees in the flutter of a swan’s wings.
That gesture was not lost on my father, the king of swans. His nostrils flared; my mother rested her hand over his before he could lash out.
I wanted to stop this train of thought among the nobles and hasten the meeting to its end, so that I could shed my crown and return to the mortals, whose company I actually enjoyed. So I did something extremely out of character.
To wield control over a hundred mortals still requires millions of us, I pointed out, making little nesting dolls of my hands. Which we have not, and never will.
The Silver Prince argues fair, the Duke of the Onyx Realm said, which immediately made me suspicious.
He never offered niceties without a corresponding barb.
It was a trait he had inherited from his mother, whose story and likeness had allegedly been used by the mortal scribe Charles Perrault for the wicked fairy in La Belle au bois dormant, which eventually became The Sleeping Beauty.
The duke cast his kohl-rimmed eyes over me.
He could be of great help to this cause by getting his intended bride with child. The wedding, remind me…?
Soon, my mother answered on my behalf, calm as the pond before us.
My son speaks true. We have enough glamour to sustain our world.
She turned in a slow circle, encompassing the Black Forest and the realms beyond it.
But the Restless Lands, not. Unless some of you have warmed to the notion of integration…
At this, the nobles shuddered. The idea of migrating from our realms and returning to the physical lands we had once inhabited, copulating with mortals to create a new generation of half-blood nobles, was sacrilegious.
She might as well have used the gesture for “capitulation”.
I felt the shift of Glen’s feet behind me, and glimpsed him looking down, self-conscious.
We should concentrate our energy on growing our numbers, she concluded. Recover our strength of yore.
Stillness descended over the circle for a time, until the Marchioness of the Moonbeam Realm sighed and moved her arms without rising from her seat.
The root of these disasters is the greed and folly of mortal men. She gestured deferentially to my mother. Laura Rosethorn is right. We have not the glamour to win back control of the Restless Lands. But perhaps a curse among only the men might weaken them?
She, as it happened, often claimed that her likeness had been the inspiration for Myrtha in Giselle. I could believe it.
Unexpectedly, and to my immense relief, this was the proposal on which the summit ended: delegates from all realms would travel across the continents to see if any witches were still practising and receptive to the possibility of an alliance.
They are as amenable to inflicting curses as we are, the Duke of Goldleaf gestured with a sly grin.
On our way back through the corridor, my crown felt heavier than it had before. Keeping up appearances here exhausted me more than any full-length ballet could. I lightly tapped Glen on the shoulder, noting the anxiety in his eyes.
Witches…? I asked, pointing to a vein in my wrist as the gesture for “bloodline”.
He nodded, tempering it with a back-and-forth tilt of his hand. My grand-nieces, seven generations descended, are Wiccan. I hope they are wise enough to avoid attractive strangers who emerge from the woods with enticing offers.
Before he could go on, he halted abruptly and bowed his head. I stopped just in time to avoid colliding with my father, who had turned to face me.
My muscles tensed, and all hope left my body. That owl had been my mother. She knew, and she had reported back to my father. Now that we had left the summit, they were free to unleash hell on me without concern for their image among their peers.
My father cocked his head and smiled, resting a hand on my shoulder. My terror changed shape. Perhaps the Duke of Onyx’s retort about getting Cressida with child had inspired him to bring the wedding forward.
Slowly, he brought his open palm to his chest and closed it, as if holding something precious. I am proud of you.
What?
At last, you deign to engage in some diplomacy. He turned and continued walking. All my mother did was nod.
I exhaled with as much composure as possible. Never had I been so glad to receive a back-handed compliment.