Metro Winds (29 page)

As Cloud-Marie combs my hair, I blush a little at the boldness of my younger self, though I do not remember myself as bold, this being considered a serious character flaw by my parents.

I went back many times after that first shopping expedition, amassing brooms, dusters, cloths and other domestic and personal items enough to last a mortal life or two. Eventually the novelty of being able to buy what I needed palled for me, but I continued to cross and exchange faerie jewels for the things I needed out of simple necessity. Then one day my husband invited me to a picnic he had conjured for his mother's court. It was all laid out upon magical cloths that would, once spread, offer whatever food and wine were desired in the thinnest golden plates and crystal goblets. He had got them on his last quest as a gift from a serpent sorceress whom he had done a service, he said, fluttering his eyelashes at me.

I scarcely noticed, for I saw at once how useful such cloths could be and was philistine enough to bundle up the nearest while my husband conjured for his guests an exquisite ballet of butterflies complete with orchestral accompaniment. It is amazing how one's aesthetic senses fail in the face of simple, honest hunger. I meant to pull the cloth from under the plates and cutlery but discovered to my delight that, at a single deft twitch, all the dishes and leftover food upon it vanished. When the cloth was later laid out again on the floor of my bedroom, I was elated to find the dishes reappeared, gleaming and clean and bearing fresh food.

Yssa said I ought to see if the cloth would give us any food we wanted, so we tried it again, announcing what we wished before we opened it out. It did. It was Yssa, too, who discovered that if you opened the cloth when you were not hungry, it would provide other things, so long as what you wanted was not animate and would fit within the bounds of the obliging tablecloth. For the sake of mischief, she tried wishing for various magical objects, including another of the cloths, but the cloth was deaf to these requests.

‘I was afraid of that,' Yssa sighed.

The cloth did away with the need to travel back to my own world, and this turned out to be very convenient for, soon after, my womb quickened, and I would not cross between the worlds for fear it might harm the baby inside me. In truth I had no interest in such gallivanting about and brooded no more upon my husband's neglect of me. I would go again when the child was safely delivered, I told myself, and this time I would persuade Yssa to come too. But as it transpired, Yssa had gone from the palace before my son was born.

I missed my friend badly, but love for my son filled and absorbed me in a way I had not anticipated, being the victim of my mother's cool boredom over having to tend to a child. Unlike her, I was not oppressed by motherhood. I found myself completely absorbed, which surprised me a little, for even aside from my mother's example, I had never been the sort to yearn for motherhood as some do, nor to plan for it at some convenient moment in the future.

But when my son was born I became a devoted and adoring mother, and for a time concerned myself with little else than my son and poor Cloud-Marie, for by then I had her to care for as well.

As my son grew to boyhood, I was taken up with the nurturing and schooling of his body and mind. Cloud-Marie had no capacity to learn, but she was a sweet, silent companion and adored my son as much as he loved her. Of course she grew more swiftly than the boy, being fully faerie, and she was soon old enough to help me with him. Indeed he preferred her help in bathing and dressing and choosing his clothes. He did not need her help for long, though, and I was glad of it. I had not intended that she should be a servant, but almost without my noticing it, she began to wait upon me with such touching devotion that I could not bring myself to tell her that she need not do so. She got such contentment from her small services and she truly was a help to me, for this was also the time in which my husband began to woo me anew, once again sending invitations and courtiers from the Summer Palace. I suspect he had finally noticed my preoccupation.

I enjoyed his pursuit, even if it seemed rather childish and unreal, because I was sustained and nurtured at some deeper level by my son and daughter, for so I thought of Cloud-Marie. If I sensed my husband did not adore his son enough, I was not deeply troubled, for I had more than enough adoration to lavish on him.

In truth I was profoundly content, until my son's affliction began to manifest itself.

When at last my husband returned at his mother's behest, he did not come to the King's Palace to see what ailed our son, but summoned me to attend him. I knew he was positioning himself for his defence and all of the angers and resentments of the early days of our marriage resurfaced as I was led down long elegant halls to his small formal audience chamber. I realised he meant to meet me here rather than in his private chamber because he wanted the setting to restrain me. Unrestrained, I told him bluntly of his son's affliction, for by now I knew a good deal more than I had done. My husband grew very still for a moment and then he spoke not of curses or cures but of the need for our son to seek a bride. It was then he drew me a little aside and said softly, sadly, that it seemed that our son bore the same curse that had afflicted him.

I had guessed as much, but I felt the blood drain from my face at his confirmation of my fears. ‘I thought that I cured the curse by marrying you.'

He nodded. ‘You cured me, and I thought you had cured my blood, but the faerie who laid it upon the sons of our house was blood kin and a curse of blood against blood is very powerful.'

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘The faerie who cursed your ancestor was a relative?'

‘She was the daughter of the king, but she was not the daughter of his wife.'

‘She was an illegitimate daughter?'

He nodded, his expression sober. ‘I did not speak of the curse before this, because there seemed no reason to dwell upon such dark matters. My mother had a vision as you lay sleeping in the Princess Chamber, which told her that the princess spell you wrought would be very strong, and that you would end the curse upon our blood. I ought to have understood it would not be so simple, for nothing in Faerie is simple. Perhaps it is in the nature of men to always think that they have found the ultimate princess.'

My face and heart flamed with wrath at his cruel words, but he turned from me to announce his decision to quest for a means of ending the curse upon his son and his line once and for all.

‘You would go away again, now?' I screamed at him.

He looked down his nose at me, reminding me with his cool eyes and manner that we were in a formal audience chamber. Then he said very gently, ‘My love, listen to me. There is truly naught for me to do in what will unfold now. Our son must hunt a girl and bring her to the Wolfsgate Valley where she will be tested as you and other princess brides were tested. This is not a matter for a king, but for mothers and sons.' My husband took my hand and kissed it, and I was so frightened and weary that I allowed his tenderness to soothe me as he told me that I must learn from his mother what was required of me in the bride hunting, for a queen had a vital part to play. There was no time to waste, he said, then he bade a servant lead me to his mother. I had no choice but to go, although I could not face visiting his mother immediately, so I dismissed the servant and went back to the King's Palace to tell my son that he was to wed.

I had expected him to snarl that he did not want a bride, but he blushed and scowled at his feet, and my heart battered against my ribs in grief, for here, all unheralded, was the end of my supremacy in his life. He was ready to become a man when I had not finished having a child. I bit back sorrow and jealousy to say calmly that I would speak with his grandmother in the morning, to learn what was required in the matter of hunting a bride. I said nothing to my son of the curse, but I was determined to have the whole truth of it from my mother-in-law.

She was in the garden training a new falcon the next morning when I returned to the Summer Palace. She was feeding the vicious little creature bloody strips of meat, and the sight of her fingers black with dried blood made me queasy. I was ever shocked and shocked again by the visceral and almost casual brutality in Faerie, yet was it not there, hidden in between the lines of the oldest faerie tales? Is that not why the children of my world woke in terror and screamed after hearing a faerie tale, to the astonishment of their parents?

Seeing me, the queen gave the bird into the hands of one of the other queens, and laved her fingers in a bowl of petal-strewn water to clean them. Then she dismissed everyone and invited me to sit with her in a perfumed arbour.

She began by informing me that her son, the king, had sailed away at dawn and that he would likely not return for some time. I bit back my rage at the thought that he had done what he said he would do, wondering what sort of fool I was to have thought it would be otherwise. Nevertheless, I was angry enough to ask her if faerie kings had no interest in the bride-getting of their sons, even when it must save the boy from a curse conferred upon him by his father's tainted blood. I stabbed the words at her, making them an accusation, though it was not by her choosing that he had left. But I was as angry with her, almost, as with him.

‘You said the curse upon my husband's bloodline would be cured by marrying me,' I hissed.

‘And so it shall be,' said my husband's mother mildly, and to my complete surprise. ‘You have only to find the right bride and test her well to end the curse forever.'

‘But I thought that you meant I cured the curse when I married your son,' I said.

She laughed, and for a moment her habitual haughtiness was softened. ‘Do you really think that falling in love is an end to anything? It is only the end of the beginning for your kind no less than mine. It is in our children that our endings are written. As for us women, it is not as princesses we have true power, but as queens and mothers. It was as a mother that I scried out the future, and I saw that you would save my son, but more importantly, that you were the means by which the curse might be broken. But what I saw is only a revealed potential, which you must fulfil. I do not know how. It is a pity that you did not inform your husband sooner about the boy's degeneration, though, for he might have bade him seek a bride the sooner. As it is, there is no time to waste.'

I was chilled by her words, but furious too, for how could I have known my son was cursed when no one had ever thought to tell me the symptoms of that curse? As to confiding in my husband, ought he not to have spent time enough with the boy to see for himself what was happening, instead of dallying in the Summer Palace or questing? I wanted to ask her those things and to demand savagely how my son was to catch his bride – was he to be sent out to sit on a stoop in a lane and await a fool, as her son had done? But I only bade her stiffly to tell me what to do.

An echo of the anger I had experienced that day in the flowery arbour with my mother-in-law flows through me, and I have to fight the impulse to dash the brush from Cloud-Marie's patient fingers, for though I do not doubt my husband grieves over what came to pass as much as my mother-in-law, neither of them holds themselves in any way responsible. They do not say it, but I know they blame me, as indeed I blame myself. Yet even now, I do not know what I could have done to prevent what has happened.