Chapter 79
THE DEAL
Oberon,’ I say without thinking, because thinking has suddenly become very difficult.
The king’s mouth breaks into a smile, but his laughter is slow to come.
When it does, the rest of his subjects follow suit, and it is the most unsettling sound I have ever heard, like standing in an orchestra pit without earplugs; somehow, somewhere, their laughter has sent a hurricane into the world.
The king looks at me, slicing the air diagonally with a slow, deliberate fingertip.
Not quite. He sweeps his arm behind him, which the other creatures immediately understand as an order to leave the clearing.
A few of them crane their long necks to get a last glimpse of me before huddling close to gossip with their neighbours.
Glen tries to run, but a snap of the king’s fingers puts invisible nails through his feet.
Before I can marshal my thoughts, a pair of white wings glides down from an open window.
By the time I register it as a barn owl, a pair of arched feet have landed on the flagstones in place of talons.
A white feather cloak over a gown of powdery snow.
A crown of white roses and brown thorns.
Honeysuckle hair. Only the owl’s eyes remain: black, with the faintest ring of green for an iris.
The queen is just as tall as her husband, and somehow even more intimidating. Her slow, watchful glide around me takes several inches off my height, like Alice shrinking to the size of a thimble in Wonderland.
‘I’m here for Sander,’ I announce, my voice echoing all wrong. I clench my fists and curl my toes in my trainers, grounding myself in as much reality as this forest cathedral will allow. ‘Please.’
They look at me the way one might look at a puppy trying to stand for the first time. Please? they mouth, delighted.
‘They don’t recognise him by that name,’ Glen says flatly. ‘You need to call him by his title.’
His title?
His… title.
Looking at Glen instead of the fairies recalibrates my focus, clears some of the mist. He’s right. I need to play by their rules.
I haven’t used ballet mime for years – it takes a few moments for me to remember the gesture for “prince”. I make a straight line of my hand and hold it to my forehead, once, twice: the tines of a crown. For emphasis, I open my palms wide: Well? Where is he?
The queen points at Glen and waves him away with purpose. Is she sending him to fetch Sander? I try not to look hopeful. Detach my face from my feelings.
‘No… mortal… has crossed over… for many a year.’ I hadn’t expected the king to speak. He sounds – to put it politely – out of practice. ‘How… did you… do this?’
Even though he’s using words, I err on the side of diplomacy and root around for another gesture from the BCBC repertory, this time from Giselle. I play an imaginary violin, unspool ribbons above my head: Music. Dance.
The queen’s black eyes widen, then invert until the black shrinks down to the size of a human pupil, leaving the rest of the space green. ‘You… are… dancer?’ Her voice goes in different directions, like wind through city streets. ‘Ballet?’
I put my hand to my chest and then, unable to think of another way to express the passage of time, slowly sweep it on a diagonal, as if casting something off. I… was.
‘With… our… son?’ she asks, the green and black narrowing until they’re evenly split.
I nod, hating how meek I feel, wishing Glen would hurry up.
The king turns to the queen and fires off a rapid series of gestures. It isn’t sign language per se – I spot familiar ballet mime shapes in what seems to be a complete sentence with its own syntax. But his face says the most: We should have known. Of course he would.
He turns back to me. ‘What is… your name… mortal girl?’
I haven’t been called a girl for a decade.
I remember something from fairy lore about names holding power, so I say ‘Trix’ rather than Patricia to be on the safe side, although I suspect there’s no such thing here.
Standing before them has brought home just how little I know, how little any of us humans really know, about anything.
‘Trix…’ The king wraps it around his tongue and gives me a sly look. ‘Do you know… from whom… ballet… came?’
At first I wonder if I’ve misheard, or if he’s phrased the question in a way that obscures its true meaning. ‘From whom ballet came?’
They nod patiently. I add “quiz on Western dance history” to the growing list of things I hadn’t expected when I set out for the Heath. Even in the most concise terms, I can’t think of how to translate the answer into mime, so I sheepishly say it out loud.
‘From fifteenth-century Italy,’ I begin, unsure if fairies even have a concept of nations, or centuries. ‘Then sixteenth-century France, and the courts of Versailles. Louis the Fourteenth,’ I add, when the glint in the king’s eyes encourages me to do so. ‘The Sun King.’
‘Ha! Sun King.’ He and the queen hiss, and suddenly I understand the answer they really want. Of course. It’s staring me in the face.
‘Ballet… came from you? From the fairy people?’
Is that the correct term – “people”? They stiffen at the use of “fairy”, but I have no idea which alternative to use, and I’m scared to ask.
The queen holds my gaze so confidently that I have no choice but to follow her around the clearing. She moves weightlessly beneath her snowy gown, tranquil as Aurora in the Rose Adage, and almost as young. They all seem to be immune to ageing.
How long would it have taken me to notice that Sander was, too?
She stops near a stone arch; Glen reluctantly steps through it, then to one side, with a bowed head.
Through the white cloud of my gasp, I watch a prince walk into the clearing.
A crown of moonstone thorns, with eye powder to match. A frost-laced indigo cloak. A face that hasn’t aged a day. He is looking at the floor. I can’t tell if he’s ashamed to be seen like this, or afraid to look up at me.
Then he does, and the heartache is worse and more wonderful than I could have ever imagined.
‘Oh my God.’ I stumble back, hands to mouth, ten years of pain hitting and leaving me all at once. The crowd of beautiful onlookers creeps in behind him, quietly fanning out around the clearing. ‘Sander.’
He stares at me. Am I a stranger to him, lost to the years as he was to me?
‘Trix.’
I run to him, as I ran so many times before onstage, steeling myself for a leap, except all the force goes into my arms, into throwing myself around him, fabric and skin and muscle and bone. He is real.
A scandalised gasp surges through the crowd, doubling when, after a moment of hesitation, Sander’s arms yield and wrap around me.
He smells like woodsmoke and winter sun, completely different to how I remember him from our stage call for Romeo and Juliet, on the cusp of summer, everything lush and colourful.
My neck is wet. He’s crying. ‘I cannot believe it.’ His voice is rusty. ‘The note, I… How? Why?’
‘What do you mean “why”?’ I whisper, half-hysterical. ‘What sort of ridiculous question is that?’
‘How long has it been?’ He shivers his hand through my hair, taking in the first signs of silver and white. ‘How… old are you now?’
‘A few months off forty,’ I say, my throat closing up as I begin to cry, too. We will never get that time back. ‘Dare I ask how old you are?’
The honey flecks in his eyes have dulled to grey. His laugh is a weightless, broken thing. ‘Even I don’t know. I’m sorry. Trix, I am… so sorry.’
Before I can kiss his sadness away, a cold hand turns my jaw. The queen’s eyes are ocean-green, and she has another question for me.
Though it physically hurts me, I step away from Sander and give her my full attention. She points between the two of us, the faintest furrow in her brow. What is he to you?
I turn back to Sander and open my mouth, but Glen cuts me off.
‘You need to declare it to the court. Without words.’
I angle myself until she and Sander are both in my sight-line, and point at my chest with my index finger. I curve my palms as if scooping water from a spring, pull them towards my heart, then extend my arms in Sander’s direction. I love him.
Still blinking through tears, he immediately makes the same gesture to me.
A mangled shriek comes from somewhere up among the mullioned tree windows.
The crowd comes alive with mutters, but the king and queen retain their composure.
Soften the noise with their hands, the way bakers ice cakes with palette knives.
Glen said it was too late for Sander, that he couldn’t leave.
I scan the memory of his note in my mind, searching for anything else of use now that I’m here.
Should I have left one of the rosemary twigs behind, so Fiona or Carolyn could cross over?
Would dancing Myrtha even work for them as it had for me?
Probably not; either way, it won’t help to dwell on that now.
Abandoning any remaining pride, I sink to my knees before the king and queen and clasp my hands in supplication.
‘Please, your… majesties. You are more powerful, more noble, than any human – any mortal could ever hope to be.’ I wish I was fluent enough in mime vocabulary to plead my case in their own language, but the risk of mistranslation is too high.
‘You have more time, more life, than all of us put together. Mortal lives are short, and fragile. We have to seize every opportunity for happiness we can.’ The cold seeps through the flagstones into my aching knees.
‘Sander, your son, the prince, whatever name he’s known by – for five years, he made me happier than I thought someone…
someone like me could ever feel. No one belongs to anyone, I know that.
But… I’m his. For as long as I live. Even if it can never be for as long as he’ll live. ’