My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (43 page)

“Stupid,” she whispered, and gave the portrait a nudge with her toe. She wanted to kick it out into the mud but didn’t dare. Tricked by a dream into hoping, and hoping for what, dancing and a pair of strong arms? “Stupid,” she said again, with more venom. You’d think she was new to despair and just learning its tricks. She stumped into her boots and made for the hen house. The axe was in the chopping block, and she thought maybe today she’d do it. What good is a hen that won’t lay?

About as much good as a girl who won’t marry, said a voice inside her, and she rousted Potpie, who gave a sleepy blink. “What do you say, old girl? Did you make me any breakfast today?”

There would be no egg. Neve knew it. It was pathetic that she still checked—proof that hope had its hooks in her, whatever she might think—

She let out a chuff of surprise. There
was
an egg. “Well done, you,” she said to Potpie, unreasonably pleased for such a small thing as an egg. She reached for it. Took it. She picked it up and held it and knew that it was not an egg.

It looked like an egg.

But it wasn’t an egg.

An egg feels like nothing but what it is. This was too light. It was air and shell and something, but that something was not yolk and fluid, and Neve should have wanted to drop it—not even
wanted
to but just done it instantly, instinctively, as a reaction to a wrongness. But she didn’t drop it. She did not, in fact, sense a wrongness. She held the egg, and it was warm and smooth, and it fit her palm like a rightness.

Breakfast forgotten for the second day running, she carried it back across the yard, and once she was inside she looked at it some more and weighed it gently, hand to hand. Something shifted in it when she moved it, and she wondered what to do. She could leave it as it was, intact. But eggs aren’t meant to remain intact, are they? They’re meant to open. To disclose.

So she cracked it, gingerly, and the sound it made knocking at the rim of her old clay bowl was like a note of music. The eggshell split and opened and the something inside it … sparkled. Neve spilled it into the cup of her palm and couldn’t believe her eyes.

It was a beetle.

From her dream of Nasty Gully. Here was one of the jewel beetles, and it had a diamond for a body—as big as her thumbnail, and as dazzling as a star encased in crystal—and two half moons of milky jade for wings. They were set on cunning hinges and opened at her touch, and its head was an emerald with cabochon eyes of some stone she couldn’t name, soft pearl pink and flecked with gold. Like in her dream, it was set on a ring and fit her finger just right, as though faeries had measured her for it in her sleep.

At first there was only wonderment, her staring at it and opening and shutting its jade wings in slow, astonished delight. Then the questions crept in.

How?

And, of course …
who
?

*   *   *

So the world was not dead, but it was so altered as to seem a new place—and not a better one. It was dirtier, paler, tarnished with sadness, and the Dreamer felt himself lost in it. He still didn’t know how much time had passed, but he understood that it was
too
much.

That the Dreamers had, by their absence … forfeited.

But how had it come to pass? Where were the others, and why had none of his brothers or sisters come to wake him? Did they sleep too, in their own far-flung hills? Had their feathers been stolen as his had, their wits and senses dulled? He would have to find them and draw them out of the earth, but first, something bound him here.

Some
one
bound him.

She had asked for his protection. No. She had done more than that. She had
summoned
him, even through the barriers of the colorless, choking sorcery that had held him in its stupor. He owed her for that. When he went to find her, it was to settle a debt.

And then he saw her.

He saw her, and the clamors and stinks of this new world fell away, as murmurs overcome by a bright surge of song. He saw her on her lonesome road, her brightness ill-concealed by the dun disguise of such dull clothes, her grace scarcely hindered by the mud-caked weight of boots, and his panic died away. His was the panic, you understand, of one who has overslept and is late for work … when the work in question is the making and keeping of the world. It would return, and all the world-clamor with it, but for now, it was silenced by the sight of a girl.

She was so alone, so brave and so afraid, and so beautiful. His heart—that had beat with the earth’s slowest pull since it first tested its turning—slipped into a new register, as sweet to his blood as birdsong to his ears, and it liked it there.

She was not his subject. He had conjured green in its every variation and carried it with him out of dreams. He had given storms to the world, and riverbanks, and bees. But the shape of this girl, the fierce gloss of her eyes, and the layers and treasures of soul and mind that were in her to discover, that was none of his doing. The Dreamers were the gods of all things
but
mankind. All the rest they had made, but not these striving things, that had made themselves.

For better or worse.

He was the god of tide-lap and wingbeat, talon and pearl. She was the goddess of …
herself.
And he could not look away from her.

*   *   *

Neve went through all the paces of an ordinary day: the walk to and through town, the row of girls at their hoops, and tiny stitches on an altar cloth for some far-off cathedral she couldn’t even imagine. Nothing was different, but
something was different.
She had put Spear’s miniature into a pocket of her apron, and the jewel beetle into another. Into one pocket—can you guess which?—her hand slipped again and again, and, each time, her cheeks flushed with the confirmation that she hadn’t dreamed the first good surprise to ever come her way.

She tried to stop herself from wondering what it meant, to take it like a story from her book, where logic could find no firm footing. It wasn’t easy.

Who?

All day long, that one word lurked behind every other that she spoke, and when she wasn’t speaking—which was most of the time—she was wondering, dreamily,
Who?

“Well?” Dame Somnolence wanted to know. “Did you give him the flower?”

Neve nodded. “He ground it in his fist and came again last night.” She took out the miniature and let it dangle from its chain.

Seeing that she was not distraught, the old woman misunderstood the reason. “Well, won’t the coffin maker be pleased,” she sniffed, her big, doleful eyes going narrow with the affront of advice ignored. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Neve didn’t try to explain. What could she say? That she’d called for protection and been answered? When she even dared to think it, she saw how preposterous it sounded, doubted it all anew, and had to slip her hand into her pocket and cup the beetle in her palm.

She was so preoccupied that when, walking home that evening, she passed Reverend Spear on the high street, she unthinkingly did as he had bid her the day before. Half of it anyway.

She smiled.

Oh, the smile wasn’t for him. It was on her face already when she chanced to turn his way—it was slight, and quizzical, and dreamy, but certainly a smile—and with difficulty she kept it from sliding off. She didn’t blush, as requested, but the smile seemed to suffice. He stood in a company of men—leering, knowing looks from all of them—and didn’t stop her but only nodded, gentlemanly, though his eyes burned at her, hot with something that was not anger. That was worse than anger.

Never mind. It was best not to draw his ire.

I’m not for you,
Neve thought. She had twenty-three days till the Christmas Eve gather, and the understanding had come to her slowly through her wonder that the beetle in her pocket—worth such a fortune, she didn’t doubt, as had never been seen on this island before—meant her freedom from both Spear and Fog Cup, even if it meant nothing else. She could take ship any time she wanted and set sail toward any life she wished, and that was a reason for smiling, certainly, but it wasn’t the best reason.

Someone had given it to her. Someone was out there. She felt him.
I will free you, and I will lift you.
Those were his words from her dream. He had freed her already.

What now?

*   *   *

What now?

A chain of mornings, and the Dreamer made the world anew, in miniature, for her. On the third morning he gave her a bottle that held every birdsong in the world. Each time it was opened, a new one floated out, and her favorites could be called upon at will.

A spider next, that would weave her wonders: gloves of gossamer enchanted against chill, and such lace as human craft could never equal.

On the fifth morning it was flowers. That is to say, she opened her door to find her mud yard in bloom: an impossible winter garden, blossoms from all the world’s array. His favorites were here, dreamed in another age and so extravagant and improbable that beside the isle’s hardy vegetation, they were like dragons among donkeys.

It thrilled him to see her wade through them, vivid with delight and lost to her waist in a bay of color, dressed half in petals over her usual drab. She cut a bucketful of stems and took them in to brighten her poor room, and so the next day he gave her a tapestry to hang: a scene in vibrant colors that would change day by day, and show the world to her in glimpses.

On the seventh day—it shamed him to the roots of his teeth that it took him so long to think of it—he gave her food to eat.

She was hungry. This bright and wondrous girl. The Dreamer had no words for his dismay.

He made her a basket that replenished itself whenever its lid was unlatched, and which yielded something new each time. Like the jar of birdsong, her favorites could be called upon, and within a few days she
had
favorites—a luxury she’d all but forgotten.

And every day that passed, he found it harder to keep a distance between them, but he did keep it, and watched as wonder brought new light to her face. Her eyes had been brilliant the first time he saw her, but that had been the sheen of unshed tears.

This was happiness.

She spoke to him—from the porch, or on her walks to and from town, as though she knew he could hear her. Soft
thank-yous
at first, and then words strung together, her shyness wearing off until, a few days in, it was natural to her to speak to the air, to the wind that escorted her, warmer than the isle’s salt breezes.

As the Dreamer’s heartbeat had slipped into its new rhythm, so did he slip into this ritual of courting. What did he know of humans? Here was time to learn: twenty-four days until the cycle came to its end, and what then? He had decided. He would stand before Neve and hold out his hand, in the way of her people, for all to see.

So would the other man, who walked in such arrogance and pride that he didn’t guess he wasn’t Neve’s only suitor—let alone that her other suitor was a god.

The Dreamer watched him come each night and leave his dry and useful tokens on her porch. A wooden spoon, a bottlebrush, an apron of sturdy gray. He watched him pause, every time, and stand in the yard, staring at the door as though he could see through it.

Considering. Considering.

Considering too long before finally going away. On the eighteenth night, it was raining hard, and the Dreamer watched him stand in the downpour, jaw clenched and water coursing down his face as he struggled with himself … and lost. He turned his head slowly, first one way and then the other. To be certain he was alone before he stepped onto the porch.

He was not alone.

He didn’t reach the door.

The Dreamer didn’t kill him, though it would have been so terribly easy. Fragile flesh, fragile spirit.
Where is your god now? Will he come to protect you, or is that not his way? Does he only appear when it’s time to punish, or is it simply that that’s when you summon him?

He contented himself with spinning the reverend toward home and planting a fear in his gut like a canker: from this day on, whenever he sought to master a woman, whether by threat or strength or even with a look, the fear would flare and overtake him—so wild and sudden it would drop him to his knees to cower in terror, gibbering for solace from his distant, punishing god.

One supposed his life would be quite different now, and his parishioners’, too.

And then it was the Dreamer’s turn to stare at Neve’s door, rain coursing down his face, the feel of her radiating outward as though she were a sun and he a flower. He understood temptation, but not the weakness that would succumb to it. He turned his back to the shed and stayed there through the night, standing guard in the rain, which, though it was his own creation, he’d never felt in quite this way before.

Six more days, he thought, and wondered what Neve would make of his final Advent gift to her.

And wondered, with a frisson of nerves, what she would make of
him.

*   *   *

Scarman’s Hall was the grandest structure on the Isle of Feathers, and never grander than on Christmas Eve. The gather was the social event of the year, and the betrothals were its heart. Every marriageable girl had been planning her gown for months, and every suitor his final gift: a ring.

Neve had a ring already. It had been her first gift from the Dreamer—the jewel beetle—and she’d carried it in her pocket ever since.

Tonight she would wear it on her finger.

She would also wear the dress she’d made of fabric he had given her. It was blue as the sky and as cunning as all his gifts: it wasn’t one blue but
every
blue—all the hours and moods of the sky. From minute to minute, it changed its hue, deepening from cobalt to midnight and setting out stars. And when she smiled—she discovered, looking at herself in the mirror that had also been a gift—it flushed to sunset orange, as bright as flame.

Imagine: the last of the plague orphans turning up at the gather in such a gown! It was like the story from Neve’s book, about the cinder maid and the fairy godmother. She didn’t have a pumpkin coach, though, or slippers made of glass—only of spider silk, with a sheen like dew on a petal—but she had her old cloak and boots for the long walk, and when had she ever had qualms about mud on her hem?