Except the Queen (15 page)

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
, S
PARROW
woke to find herself coiled on the floor, mouth parched from the heat of the fever, eyes burning as though scrubbed with sand. She was shaking with chills, every muscle in her back and legs contracted and screaming with pain. She swallowed four aspirins but they did nothing to ease the agony.

“I can’t take this anymore,” she croaked, and wrestled her body to a sitting position. “Think girl,
think
.” Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine what might offer relief that didn’t involve killing herself. And then she remembered Marti’s wisdom teeth surgery. Marti had prided herself on using plain aspirin, hoarding the Vicodin the doctor had handed her for a future “just in case” moment.

“Well, it’s just-in-case time,” Sparrow said aloud.

Staggering into Marti’s bedroom, Sparrow ransacked the closet, pulled open drawers, but found only clothes. She peeked into the little baskets beside Marti’s bed. There were condoms, hair ornaments, vials of body oil. But finally, in Marti’s jewelry box, Sparrow found an envelope and when she opened it, almost cried seeing the long white pills. She quickly swallowed two without water, and stuffing the envelope into her jeans, returned to her own room.

As the opiate coursed through her veins, the pain in her muscles gradually subsided. She uncurled her legs and stretched out, relieved at last. For a quiet half an hour, she thought she was through the worst of it. Until she started to cry.

She couldn’t stop herself; the sobs rose in her chest, issuing forth like the cries of a wounded animal.
What’s happening to me?
she thought. She was very afraid, but
she had no idea of what. Exhausted, she still forced herself to get up and start pacing with staggering footsteps around the room.

Lily whoofled her concern once, then just watched from the foot of the bed.

Sparrow didn’t want misery and grief, she wanted the razor-sharp edge of rage. But the sorrow wouldn’t leave her.
What to do? What to do?
As she paced for a third time around her room, she suddenly understood what her body had already known: she had to walk off the nameless sorrow that threatened to drown her. And she must cry it out until there was nothing left of it. Only then would she figure out what had been done to her. And only then could she make Hawk pay for poisoning her. Pay deeply. Pay endlessly. Pay well.

I
watched in the mornings and then again in the evenings for signs of Serana’s dove. I fretted knowing only too well how dangerous life on the wing for a simple dove can be. I fed Baba Yaga’s cat whenever I could and now it was beholden to me not to harm the creature when it returned.

Before going out, I left a small scattering of seeds and dried berries on the bedroom balcony, hoping to glean more information from the pigeons and doves that gathered there to feed. I was aghast when returning from the Co-op to find bloodied feathers and a discarded pair of pigeon feet on the walkway. Looking up, I discovered a sharp-shinned hawk watching my balcony from a nearby roof. I could not in faith deny the beautiful creature her sustenance, but I didn’t want to encourage her to find her victuals on my balcony either. So I stopped leaving seeds, and just watched.

I forced myself from the house in the late mornings, going to the Co-op to assist Julia in her little herbal shop. She turned out to be a good student. I had to show her only once how to combine herbs into a tea and she remembered. She had a good sense of smell, too, and with practice learned to recognize the potency of herbs from their scent. Small farmers who brought produce to the Co-op now brought us living plants and took away our lists of others we required: red root and yarrow, white
sage and arnica, wild ginseng root and cinquefoil. In only a few days Julia gained confidence with her new knowledge and I was able to use the paper money to purchase fruit, cheese, bread, occasional packets of cigarettes for the hands—and food for the cat.

I, too, became a student, though Julia was unaware of how much I was learning from her. The Co-op was a sleepy place. Especially in the late afternoon. Then only a handful of ragtag children ever seemed to wander in to buy a few items, occasionally coming by the herb store to utter small exclamations of surprise before moving on.

“Wait ’til school starts up again, then this place will be insane,” Julia warned, carefully drawing a spire of Hag’s Taper on a card announcing one of our new remedies. “It’s still summer so most of them are home. A couple of weeks from now, the neighborhood will be jumping. Hope you live on a quiet street,” she said, looking up at me and smiling. “It can get pretty loud around here on Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Oh, my place is very quiet,” I assured her, though not with much confidence. The inhabitants of Baba Yaga’s house continued to battle over the troll music the boys insisted on playing. I did nothing to stop it myself. Indeed, I could not turn them into puff balls and scatter their annoying dust to the wind. I could only hope that they would soon leave, migrating like noisy rooks to some other place. And recently one of the girls in the floor below me had cried at night with sobs that caused me to turn in my sleep.

“Lucky you! I’m surrounded by three houses filled with jackasses. Two nights ago a bunch of us called the cops because they kept setting off firecrackers in the middle of the night right into the frigging street! I thought they were going to set the trees on fire.”

Of course! That’s why Baba Yaga enjoyed her house, deep in a forest of badly behaving children. What punishing lessons had she already meted out? I wondered with a little shudder.

“Hey, can you hand me the envelopes and stamps
from that drawer?” Julia asked, looking up from her drawing. “I want to mail this out to my sister Annie. She works at a medical clinic, but I think she’ll dig it, even though she’s all about straight medicine.”

I looked in the drawer and found the envelopes, though I could not find wax or stamp. “There is no stamp here,” I said, rifling through the papers.

“Oh, here, they are,” she said, pulling out a sheet with little squares, each holding a picture of a bell and the word “forever” inscribed on it. She peeled one off, put it on the envelope—and it stuck there! She placed her decorated card inside and carefully wrote on the front of the envelope.

“What are you writing?” I asked, curious. This seemed a useful way to send messages.

“Her address at the clinic, of course.” Her blue eyes twinkled with amusement. “Sometimes I wonder about you . . .”

“Address?”

“Name, street number and name, city and zip.”

“Ah,” I answered as though I understood.
Best she not become suspicious.
I watched as she placed it in a basket where—it appeared—other envelopes were headed for their intended readers. All of them carried the little picture of the bell, which I suddenly realized was what Julia called a “stamp.” And studying the writing, I realized that these “addresses” were the locations of the future readers.

Quickly, I memorized the requirements: a name, a number, a street, a city, two letters that indicated perhaps a province or a shire, and then a series of numbers for which I could find no explanation at all.

“Yeah, I know, it’s old school,” she said, and I realized she thought I had been teasing her with my questions. “I could have just e-mailed her, but you know, I still think it’s fun to get letters in the mail, don’t you?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, thinking of Serana, and a letter somewhere perilously traveling on the wing.
E-mail
,
another word to learn
.

While I worked, I constantly checked the basket, waiting to see what would happen to its contents. I was watering a little pot of marjoram when a man in blue came to the counter, took the basket of envelopes and emptied it into a bag on his shoulder. I was startled and then pleased to see the design of an eagle on the bag and thought it a much stronger and more reliable carrier than a dove.

*   *   *

I
WALKED HOME SLOWLY THAT
night, realizing that there were more children beginning to gather on porches and in front gardens. They were burdened with boxes, mattresses, desks, and lumpy chairs. They were moving in, wearing down a path in the trampled grass as they lumbered from their huge vehicles to the houses. Around me the streets buzzed like a spilled hive, their excitement palpable in the rising noise of their arrival. From opened windows music poured forth, some which made my steps lighter, others which hurt my ears.

But I also noticed that joining the students in the activities were the glamoured forms of more sinister folk.
UnSeelie folk.
Fall was approaching and the crisp nights, the faint hint of decay in the leaves gave power to the Love-stalkers and Bloody-Bones who pretended to languish in the disguise of drunken young men engaged in seemingly harmless banter with clutches of doe-eyed girls. Beneath the hem of a long green dress I saw the goat hooves of a Glaistig, her beautiful human arms wrapped around an unsuspecting boy, demanding he dance with her there on the street. I averted my eyes from his adoring look, as he happily embraced his coming death. Though I saw them, my eyes still keen despite the loss of my own magic power, they saw in me only an old woman, stumbling, and weak. I could do nothing for those mortal souls ensnared by the darker clans. That was the way of it. Night and winter were coming, and only the Queen could protect mortals if she chose.
And she didn’t choose
, I thought angrily, scandalized by the very public and flagrant hunting of the UnSeelie host, a
full two moons before the change of seasons. They had no rights yet to these streets though they seemed to claim them without consequence.

And I, who had never even given much thought to humans before, much less worried about their being hunted either early or late, mused upon it all. Did being old change me? Or had I—by becoming old—become mortal as well, which changed my attitude toward the humans? I wanted to ask Serana. She understood these sorts of things as I did not. I would send her mail as soon as I heard from her again and could get an address. I hoped she would understand about addresses.

*   *   *

S
HAKEN BY WHAT
I
HAD
seen, I then discovered a party of boisterous louts spreading out over the steps and porch of Baba Yaga’s house. Music was hammering the air, shaking the glass windows and driving every living creature from the trees. I confess, I immediately forgot my concern for human children and in my anger would have at that moment gladly sent them all to their ruin amid the UnSeelie host.

“Grow claws,” I admonished myself. “Be Baba Yaga.”

I approached them, frowning and squinting my eyes in what I hoped was a look of menacing disapproval. They stared back, bleary and stupid like stunned bulls. Clearly they considered me in the wrong place and any moment would disappear and leave them to their swill. A girl came out of the house, screeching in high-pitched laughter, saw me, and stopped instantly. She went inside the house again, which I took to be a sign I had won some battle until she returned with Nick and Alex, looking irritated, their faces flushed with spirits and bad humor.

“The music stops now,” I said, going up the steps.

“It’s not late,” Alex complained. “We don’t have to turn it down until after ten o’clock.”

“The music stops now,” I repeated, “or you will be removed.”

“Yeah, fuck that,” Nick said. “We signed a lease for a year and you can’t just kick us out.”

“Are you sure about that?” I said, raising my voice over a pounding drum and angry troll chant. I was bluffing of course. I had no idea what could or could not happen here.

“Hey, buddy,” a man called from the shadows. “Turn it down or I’ll call the cops and stand here while they ticket you for noise and underage drinking.” He stepped forward into an oval of light cast from the porch light. He was gray-haired with a grizzled beard, but still straight and strong in limb. He held his arms ready at his sides, his legs planted as though he were prepared for trouble. He carried a small hammer in one fist, and a much used chisel in the other.

The boys on the stairs stood awkwardly, their legs as unsteady as those of newborn colts. “Shit, I’m outta here, dude,” they muttered and sauntered down the path, edging away from the gray-haired man. He continued to watch Nick and Alex, whose angry sneers and furtive glances at each other betrayed their uncertainty.

“Fuck,” Alex muttered as he turned abruptly and stomped into the house. In midhowl, the music stopped and a deep abiding silence filled the street.

I turned to thank my rescuer, but he had already returned to the shadows, though I could have sworn I caught the faintest whistle of a familiar tune, a reel to which my sister and I once danced until the tall grass of a moon-swept field was well and truly trampled. And then I heard the soft sounds of cooing above in the ancient ash and rushed inside as fast as my stump-muscled legs would allow.

*   *   *

L
ATER, SITTING BESIDE AN OPEN
window, the dove resting in my lap, I read Serana’s letter by candlelight over and over. Though it was short, the dove had labored to carry it over great distances. I touched the words, sensing in the thrum of each letter her hand on the quill. I held the
paper to my nose and inhaled the scent of a foreign city, dusty and oily, mingled with Serana’s distinctive musk of pressed roses and sweet rue. I cried to know that she shared my fate, stripped of magic and locked into a hag-bound body.