Roses and Rot (24 page)

“I have always wondered why you humans celebrate time’s passing, when you yourselves have so little of it,” he said.

“Maybe that’s why we celebrate,” I said. “Because we’re still here.”

He cocked his head, a snake watching prey. The nerves at the back of my skull told me to flee before that regard. My heart fluttered like a dying bird.

“Or maybe we just like the champagne.”

He laughed, and his laughter echoed in my head. “I like the shape your words make. You are such a little piece of time. I can make you take up more of it.”

The floor spun from under me. I was falling, falling, falling.

The room, the lights, the party were gone.

Only black as I fell, a veil spun from nothing wrapping me like
cerements. Spinning into emptiness, unmoored from myself, slipping out of my skin. Coldness crept, ice-like, into the gaps in me, crackling along the emptiness, hoarfrost, and desolation.

Falling. Forever.

Ice in my blood. In my soul.

Curling through the darkness, the scent of a forest. Sharp and green, bright resin and rich loam. A white stag, horns climbing from its brow. Spring sending shoots through my veins.

The call of a horn, and the blackness split and cracked.

Floor, solid, beneath my feet.

Words in a language I did not speak, burning the air. Hands pulling me back into my skin, into a body needled with frostbite.

I opened my eyes.

“If you kept us better fed, we would not hunger so on our own.” He spat the words at Gavin, blood the color of tarnish dripping from his mouth.

“And I have told you that you will not cross out of our bounds unless you control your hunger. You will go from this place, now, and you will not return.” Gavin was something dread and terrible, his bones electric beneath his skin.

A clock chimed. The air vibrated like lightning had passed through unseen, and all around the smell of leaf mold and pine needles, the mineral coldness of river waters foaming white over rocks, the musk of running animals.

A burst of rot and a smear across the air and lights so bright against my eyes that I stumbled.

And my hands were caught in Gavin’s, and the room was only music and the clink of glasses and the song of a hundred small conversations. Candleflames and champagne and dancing. “You are well?” he asked.

My feet followed his through the turn of a waltz. “Yes,” I said, and in saying it, I was, the word a spell of its own.

“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, the horns still reaching like a crown. “That should not have happened.”

Brushing it off meant everything was fine. “It would hardly be a party if at least one of the guests didn’t misbehave.”

He smiled, but there was tightness in it, and his eyes were dark and far away.

The music slowed, and I danced with Evan again, holding on, leaning in to him, letting the warmth of his body call to me. For the small eternity of the song, he was all there was, his heartbeat beneath my own, the cedar and sandalwood scent of his skin surrounding me. Here, now, real.

The clock ticked forward. All of the clocks, an echo of time itself.

Clocks were everywhere—fixed on the walls, set in the centers of tables, hanging on the very air. There was no escape from the marked time, no way to avert eyes from its passing.

Trays glided through the crowd, carrying glasses full of champagne, a universe of effervescing stars. A hand, red-gloved, plucked a glass, and then the rest of the woman bloomed out of the air in front of me. The scent of roses was everywhere. I tasted it on my tongue like liquor. “Are you having a good time?” she asked, voice lingering over the last word.

“I’m certainly having an interesting one,” I said.

“You hold your truth as if you were one of us, weighing its value in scales so as not to spend too much of it.” Words bloomed like ink over her skin as she spoke. “I had an artist before. A painter. Mediocre. You, though.” She stroked her hand down my throat. “You might be more useful. Would you like to be my artist?”

A painter before. The story Marin had told me months ago,
about the painter who had left Melete, unworthy of his muse. I didn’t want to be anyone’s, but I also didn’t want to piss her off. “You do me great honor.”

“I know.” She clinked the rim of her glass to mine. “Think on it. Anything written can be changed.”

She walked away, and I felt like I had escaped.

Janet stood separate, like a shadow, her dress the same medieval green gown as the stained-glass woman hanging over the door of her house. She had wrapped herself in reserve, but her eyes watched the Fae like they were holy and she had come here on pilgrimage.

I bumped into her on my way out of the restroom, and she grabbed my arm, hard enough to leave bruises. “They would give you such power over them, and you don’t even see it. You are as much of a failure as my daughter.”

She yanked her hand back and pushed past me, but she was the least of what I cared about, so I didn’t ask, didn’t follow. I slid back into the glamoured shine of the party.

Helena and Gavin danced, her hair the only bright spot atop a dress that was a column of stark black. Her face was so pale as to be nearly translucent, and I thought I saw tears sparkle on her cheeks. But she danced with him until the end of the song, and did not look at Janet as she walked away from her, after.

The clocks became more insistent, and the people in the crowd called out numbers, encouraging the new year in. As if, without our voices, time might stop.

Three.

Two.

One.

The striking of the clock and the kisses and the golden sparkle of the wine. Glasses smashed to the floor and the mirrored reflection
of the night stretching on until forever. Faces bright and wild. Skin flushed with lust and alcohol. Cheers and celebration and loss beneath it. The death of one time, to usher in the next. The Fae, feral and beautiful. And hungry.

Waiting.

A new year.

Bleary-eyed and still recovering from the New Year’s celebrations, I stumbled into the kitchen. Water was running, and the air smelled like sulfur and soap. Helena stood hunched over the sink.

She shut the water off. “I didn’t burn the eggs on purpose, if that’s what you were wondering.”

I hadn’t been. Her eyes were red, last night’s makeup raccooned around them. “Helena, are you okay?”

“She named me that because of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, you know.” Her voice was harsh and cracked.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Can I make you coffee? I’m desperate for some.”

She nodded, sat down. “Because Helena was the one of the four mortal lovers who caught Oberon’s eye. He felt sorry for her, so he told Puck to help her. It all goes wrong, of course—Janet didn’t think about that part, I guess—but that was what I was supposed to be. Someone who would be pathetic enough that the Fae would offer to help.”

I set a mug down in front of her. She didn’t touch it.

“I was almost fourteen the first time we rode into Faerie. I thought it would be an adventure. All the books at Janet’s have stories about Faerie in them. She’s obsessed. With them. With the place. But, like, not with the stories where the fairies will rip your heart out for breathing wrong. The ones where they’re the most
beautiful, and the most perfect, and just waiting to share their gifts with the chosen one. You know how those stories are.”

I did know. Full of happily ever afters and fairies who could be tamed with a dish of milk left out overnight or by speaking their true name. Pretty stories. Easy ones. Nothing helpful, nothing true. “So I’m guessing no Angela Carter.”

A laugh tore from her throat. “No. Not so much. I didn’t even know those stories existed until after I’d been to Faerie.

“So I thought Faerie would be great. The best. I wanted to go. By that point, I knew I had been born there, and so I’d built up this story in my head that my dad was Fae. Told myself that was the reason that I’d never met him. Because he couldn’t live here. I thought maybe he’d recognize me that night, tell me I could stay, live with him. Learn magic. All the stuff you think when you’re thirteen, and stuck with a mom who doesn’t love you.

“Once I got there . . .” She closed her eyes, swallowed. “Well. It’s not like the stories. Not the nice ones, anyway.”

Helena went silent. I reached out, pulled my hand back when she continued. “But we got back, and Janet explained to me about how the beautiful woman I met that night, the one at the head of the riders, was the Faerie Queen, and she had stolen my dad away. That she had made a bargain with Janet, and that I was the key to winning him back.

“I believed her.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “You were a teenager. She’s your mom.”

She reached for her mug, and it skidded from her hand. “Then she told me how I could get him back, what I had to do. Be the tithe, prove myself, and it would break Tania’s spell.

“I’ve been trying all my life to be able to do that, to make it so he can love Janet again, and come back, and I can get to know him,
and it turns out that I’m an idiot, and pretty much everything she’s told me is a lie.”

“That’s what you and Gavin were talking about?” I asked. “You know what, I’m hungry. Let me see what I can make.”

I wasn’t. Even the idea of food was enough to make my stomach contemplate rebellion, but Helena was pulled in on herself and shaking, and I thought food might help. “French toast?”

“Yeah, okay.”

I beat the eggs and milk together. “What made you believe him?”

“Oh, he wasn’t the one who told me. She did. While you were dancing with that creepy guy who almost—what did happen?”

“Awful.” I shuddered. “Don’t ask.” Back home in my room, I hadn’t been able to bear the darkness. Every time I closed my eyes, I was falling again. Slipping away into nothing. I’d put all the lights on, slept in fits and starts.

“Anyway. She was watching, and said that I needed to be more like you and your ‘whore sister’—sorry, I don’t think that about Marin anymore, but it’s what Janet said—and put myself in their way. Flirt. Whatever. Look how Gavin had come to your rescue when you needed it. My talent clearly wasn’t enough to make me anything other than mediocre, and being mediocre wouldn’t break the Faerie Queen’s curse.”

“That’s really gross,” I said, and set the french toast on the table. “Here’s the syrup.”

“There was a Fae woman near us, who had been one of Tania’s best friends. She was furious at Janet for what she said about Tania, and said the tithe didn’t work like that, that it couldn’t, and that Tania wouldn’t have needed magic to take any man she wanted, certainly not from someone like Janet.

“Then she did something to Janet that made her have to speak
the truth. All of the truth. The whole thing about me being able to save Thomas, break the curse—it was a lie. She lied to me, she said, because she knew from the beginning that I was untalented and worthless, a waste of her time.

“She said she was trying to motivate me, to make me something other than ordinary, and she thought if she gave me a nice story, maybe I’d try harder. But as it had turned out, even with two parents who had been good enough to live in Faerie for seven years, I was still nothing.

“And don’t tell me that was a lie, too, because all of that was forced out of her. So.” She stabbed at her french toast, set her fork down without eating.

“Just because she believes it, doesn’t make it true, Helena.”

“That’s what Gavin said, too.” Helena smiled, but her eyes were blank, lost. “Thing is, it also doesn’t mean it’s not. Because that was the other thing I asked him. About the hourglasses. Why she couldn’t just give me one. So now I know that if I were good enough, as good as you or Marin, it wouldn’t matter what Janet thought.

“I’d have one.”

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a house made of mirrors. Every surface showed her reflection: the walls, the floors, the ceiling. She lived there alone, but never felt as if she were, surrounded by so many copies of herself.

With so many selves around, the girl did not notice at first when they began changing. Small things, at the start. A reflection that moved a blink before she did, or one that turned left when she turned right.

Even when she did notice, when the reflections began to walk into a room before she did, when they sat still as she moved, or
moved when she did not, the girl was not concerned. Reflections, after all, are lies, not true selves. These were just lying more than they had in the past.

The girl knew that she was true. She was real. Blood and bone and breath, not just someone else’s reflection, light and air, only visible if someone else was looking.

But air is the same as breath, and who is to say who is seen, and who is not?

But then. But then.

The reflections began to leave the house of mirrors. To walk away from rooms the girl was in, and never to come back. They left, they disappeared, and yet she was still there.

The girl began to feel diminished. To feel as if she was the lie that was cast by the reflections. She felt alone, uncertain of what to do.

She wanted them to come back, those other selves, even changed as they were. To return with the pieces of her that might change their hair, or wear a different color, or dance when everyone in the room was sitting. She once had all of those pieces inside of her, she knew it.