Roses and Rot (23 page)

“Silly, I know. But I couldn’t resist. Family and the holidays.” She looked at me.

I smiled. “That’s why I’m staying with Marin.”

“You know, Imogen, I wasn’t sure how it would work out, the two of you here together. I’m glad you’re so close, such a support for each other. But there’s something I’d like you to think about: If you’re chosen as the tithe, will you be able to leave Marin and go?”

The pain in my hand was almost bearable. “Of course,” I said. “She’d want me to.”

I was, at least, certain about the first part.

The Night Market returned at the winter solstice, darkly glittering in its beauty. The trees were hung with silver bells that chimed when the wind brushed against them, sending the night singing. A fire burned in the center of the Commons, the Yule fire, to chase away the long darkness, and welcome back the sun.

The air was fragrant with the warmth of roasting chestnuts, the resin green of pine, the smoke of incense rich beneath it. Under the moon, the snow sparkled like fragments of a mirror, and crunched beneath my feet as I walked through booths draped in greens, the brilliant red of holly berries, the waxen white of mistletoe.

“For you.”

I turned toward the voice, and out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed feathers falling through the air like snowflakes, eyes as
sharp as an owl’s. I breathed in the cinnamon and spice of the cup she held out, and the illusion melted away. A dark-haired woman wearing a feathery white scarf stood in front of me.

“A toast to the season,” she said.

I sipped at the cider. “Thank you.”

The cup was warm in my hands as I walked through carved sculptures of snow and ice. They made me think of the residents of Narnia, turned into statues in the endless winter. I had read the entire series to Marin when she had the chicken pox. Always winter, and never Christmas. But this was winter frozen in beauty, and I didn’t want to break its spell. For all the glory of Aslan’s reign, his return is when Narnia’s death begins.

Sleigh bells rang in the distance, and a group of people sang carols in front of the Yule fire. I thought I recognized Ariel’s voice in the harmonies, one of the angels, chorusing on high.

I walked into a booth shining with crystal and glass. Figures and fantasies, carved and spun and captured. Ice made unmelting, tears preserved. A constellation of stars, hung from ribbons of blue velvet, shading from the pale almost-white of thin milk to the richness of the midnight sky.

“How much for these?” I asked.

The man tending the booth lifted them down with wrinkled hands. “Nothing for you.”

“Please. They’re a gift.”

“Bad luck to those who take your money.” He spread them out on a black cloth. Each star was different in size and radiance. I stretched my hand toward them, then pulled it back and shook my head.

“Let her pay,” Gavin said behind me. “The prohibition is lifted for this.”

The older man bowed to Gavin, and named a price. Dear, but worth it. I gave him the money.

“Thank you,” I said to Gavin. “They’re for Marin. It wouldn’t have felt right to give them to her, if they had been free.”

“I understand,” he said. “Some things matter more when there’s a cost.”

The bells rang again, louder this time. Not just the silver jingles, or the motion of sleigh bells. Church bells, deep and sacred. Warning bells, hung from the heights of walls of ancient cities. Ringing in time, and out of it.

Clear and crystalline as the air, deep as the darkness, reverberating through the night. The sound pulled, a hook in my heart. I longed to follow it, to walk into the night and the snow until I could surround myself in the music. It wasn’t until the bells went silent and I felt frost on my cheeks that I realized I had been weeping.

“It’s a powerful thing,” Gavin said. “The turning of the year, and the return of the sun.” He handed me the package I had forgotten in the echoes of the bells. “Marin’s gift.”

I nodded my thanks, not trusting my voice. The bells hadn’t only been proclaiming the return of the sun, but the end of something, too. The past, burned away in the Yule fire. I hadn’t heard celebration in their ringing. I had heard an elegy.

There was a letter from Evan when I got home, wrapped with mistletoe, its berries waxen white. Promises of kisses, and a gift for the season. Promises for when we would see each other, the next time Faerie loosed him from its grip. Words that made me wish for him as I climbed into the winter-cold sheets of my bed.

Wakefulness drove me from it later. Piled under blankets, I was drenched in sweat, and when I sat up, the walls of my room pressed
too close. I put my jacket on over my pajamas and went outside to the porch.

Through the night, a horse galloped—whiter than the snow, whiter than the moon. Snow heaved up from his strides and fell again like stardust. Holly was braided into his mane, deep green leaves and berries red as blood. I felt the same ache in my heart as I had listening to the solstice bells, and longed to run after the horse, to follow. To ride once more along the bounds of Faerie and pay the tithe so that I might pass through them.

Melete ushered in the new year with an enormous glitter of a party. Black-tie and champagne, cut-glass chandeliers, and mirrored walls to reflect every sharp-edged sparkle back on the attendees. Lavish enough to remind us that we weren’t just some sort of pocket outpost for Faerie, but also a place that had been home to a deep pool of artistic talent—talent that had very wealthy friends.

I embraced the invitation to glamour and slunk into a silver shimmer of a dress, lined my eyes black, and painted my lips wine-red. When I saw Evan, I was glad I had gone to the effort.

He was wearing a tuxedo, but his shirt was embroidered all over, white on starker white, with a pattern that shifted and changed beneath my gaze. On his head, the coronet of tarnished silver he had been wearing on Halloween, bent and curved like thorns. There was a sort of haze around him, making him look backlit, carved in relief.

“You look . . . ,” I said, searching for words the rightness of which seemed peculiarly to matter.

“Yes?”

“Like a sacrifice.” The truth fell from my mouth like a stone.

“Ah. Gavin has dropped the glamour. This should be an interesting night.” Evan held out his hand, and I put mine in it.

I understood what he meant when we walked into the party. All of the impossibility of the ride through Faerie brought together in a ballroom. All pretense that the Fae were human had been let fall
like veils. It was quite clear that they were anything but. We had stepped sideways from the mundane, moved elsewhere from the ordinary.

Eyes like the darkness and bones too sharp. Horns that spiraled from brows and hair made of feathers, made of flowers, made of butterfly wings. Skin scaled like a serpent’s. Still beautiful, even when they weren’t. The Fae drew the eye until looking away was the pain of heartbreak, a pool of loss.

Everything looked dull, contrasted with their wild glory. Even Melete looked less than golden and perfect. The cracks in the paint, the scratches on the floors glared, as if the presence of the Fae was too great to bear. For the first time since I arrived, Melete seemed pale, ordinary. Mortal. The Fae were impossible, and they were the most real piece of the night.

Even knowing what I did about the tithe, about what dwelling too long in Faerie could do to a person, I understood why the world was full of stories of people who had worn themselves into nothingness, into death, in search of the thing that would let them stay in Faerie forever. Who had tasted Faerie food and starved themselves to death waiting for a second bite. It would be so easy to let myself go, and do the same.

Beneath the voices, beneath the music, beneath the champagne fizz and crystal chime of glass, the ticking of a clock. A counting down. Change. Ending.

“Will you dance with me?” Evan asked.

I nodded, and he pulled me into his arms. For a minute, two, three, that dance was all there was. His hands guiding as we turned across the floor, my feet in steps so old they could have been a ritual, a conjuring. The awareness of skin and the distance between it. I wanted him like breath.

The song changed, and the enchantment broke. Somewhere, a clock grew louder.

As we danced, I looked around at all the unfamiliar faces, women and men, polished and groomed and in elegant clothes. Melete’s donors. The gallery owners and the angels of the theater. Editors of white-shoe presses that spent their summer Fridays in the Hamptons. The ordinary ones, though not a one of them would have thought themselves such. “What will they remember tomorrow?”

“Some will convince themselves this was a masked ball,” Evan said. “Others will half-remember what they saw, and laugh about the eccentricities of artists. There will be those who remember the entire thing clearly, but blame it on an excess of drink or drugs. One or two will see it for what it truly is. They will never forget, and they will never speak of it.”

He spun me out, back in, dizzying turns.

“The rest of us,” he added, “will simply have a good time.”

“Do they remember Gavin, what he is, when they see him dance?”

“It’s part of the glamour. He’s larger than life onstage, not himself. The people who meet him, either here or there, they already expect him to be half-magic, so they don’t think about whether he might be more than that.”

We turned again, and I stopped, gasped. “Oh my God, is that Davina Harrison?” The tiny dark-haired woman talking to Gavin was enough of a presence to distract even from the Fae. Which was only to be expected from someone who’d won three Oscars and two Tonys in the past decade. No, I realized as I did the math. Not quite a decade.

“It is, and I should say hello. She was the tithe before me. Here—I’ll introduce you.”

Davina’s eyes landed on my necklace during Evan’s introductions.

“A writer,” she said. “How lovely. Come tell me a story.” She tucked my arm in hers and stepped away from Evan, away from the periphery of people trying to catch her eye.

“Will you go?” she asked.

No need to ask where. “Yes.”

“Good. Time is always too short not to grab onto anything that brings what You want closer. And there’s no sin in ambition, just denying it.” Her voice like honey, like whiskey, and no wonder people wrote plays as prayers that she would star in them.

“Are you glad you went? I’ve heard it can be hard.”

“Anything in life worth having is hard to earn.” She plucked glasses off of a passing tray. “Even for someone like her.”

I followed her glance. Marin was all in red, the firebird, the phoenix’s flame. As she and Gavin danced, the shadows of antlers branched over his head. When they moved together, it was like magic. Not the magic of Faerie, or of spells and incantations, but the magic of art, which transmutes difficulty into ease, which steals the eye and breaks the heart. The magic that gives the lie to reality. Already half-magic, Evan had said of Gavin, but even without being Fae, Marin was, too.

“She’s my sister.”

There was pity, then, in Davina’s eyes. “Well, I wish you both the best of luck.”

The clock, louder still, its count the echo of a great hidden heart.

I danced with Ariel, who was looking Dietrichesque in a tux that clung to her like honey. “I’ll give the Fae this,” she said. “They throw a hell of a party.”

“Do you know—”

She laid her finger on my lips, silencing my question. “Haven’t decided. I’m not thinking about any of that tonight. Tonight is for
champagne and dancing with pretty girls and gorgeous boys and the fabulous Fae. It’s for celebrating, and for stealing kisses.”

Smiling, she leaned in and kissed me, and I could taste the champagne on her mouth. “Happy New Year, Imogen.”

“Happy New Year, Ariel.”

Still the clock. Something ending. Almost. Not yet.

The candleflames crept higher, and the shadows deepened.

“I would dance with you, if you will.” The man wore unrelieved black, his hands covered by gloves of smooth leather. His eyes were black too, entirely so. Fae.

“Of course,” I said, and put my hands in his.

He moved like coiled shadows, and his touch burned my skin like ice, even through the gloves. He was all I could see as we danced, him and the lights reflected in the drowning pools of his eyes. My feet followed his steps as though all other paths were barred to me.