Roses and Rot (18 page)

Today, the bridge was only halfway there. A crumbling arch that stopped midpoint, leaving only air to cross to the other side of the river. For the space of a breath, I thought about running across it, throwing myself into Faerie with nothing more than the belief it
would be there, waiting to catch me, if I just ran fast enough. Hands in a theater, clapping to bring Tinker Bell back to life. I do believe, I do.

But it hadn’t been speed that had gotten that headlong rush of horses into Faerie. It had been that night, the tick of midnight’s clock. It had been Gavin riding at the head of the mad gallop of horses. The horned and crowned magic he held had thrown open the doors of his hidden country, and given us a path to enter it.

The rush of the Mourning below me was rapid and deep, the air cold. Without magic, I wouldn’t run into Faerie—I would fall from the bridge, soak myself, and freeze.

“It won’t work. You can’t get there like this.” Evan’s voice.

“Oh, I see you’ve decided to start telling me things now. Even before I ask. Lucky me.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Imogen. I didn’t mean to.”

I believed him. It didn’t help. I was sure he hadn’t even considered the possibility it would hurt me. He probably hadn’t considered me at all, which was pretty much the problem.

“Look, I’m a big girl, Evan. I’m not going to sit alone in my room and pine if it turns out that what we had was nothing more than one really hot fuck. It doesn’t need to be anything more. But if you think you want it to be, you need to know that I won’t be with someone who lies to me, who is casual with me. If you want it to be more, you’re going to need to treat me as if I matter. I don’t want to be your everything, but I need to matter or you’re not worth my time.”

He was so close. I could smell the burnt metal scent that clung to him, remnants of his art. I took a step back.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”

He had to go, soon after. To Faerie. He tried, he said, to keep to a regular schedule. It reduced the chances he’d be pulled away in the
middle of something, let him make plans, sometimes, that needed to happen at a certain time and place.

“Like meeting me at the Market,” I said. “That was why Gavin was so weird that first night there. Not because he thought you should be working, but because he expected you to be in Faerie.”

Evan nodded. “It’s his kingdom, his people. My being there feeds it. He makes sure I’m not gone too long.”

“What does it feel like,” I asked, “when it’s time to go back?”

“Like a hook in my heart, pulling. It’s not pleasant, and gets worse if I ignore it. So I don’t.”

I watched him leave, expecting that it would have some extraordinary component, some ritual or magic word. But he simply walked to the end of the bridge, and then, between one step and the next, was gone.

Ariel and I were walking back from the world’s worst bar. There had, if anything, gotten worse since the previous time I’d visited.

“It’s like someone made a deal with the devil,” she said. “Like, Melete can exist, and can be this perfect refuge for art and artists, but in order for this to be possible, a balance must be maintained. And so never can a drink order be served properly on the first attempt, nor shall it ever take less than twenty minutes to get a gin and tonic.”

“Also, you can’t ever get edible food,” I said. “That grilled cheese they brought you was—”

“Neither. I know. Bread and tomatoes. Cold.”

Our breath puffed out in white clouds as we walked back home, the grass crunching beneath our feet. The Mourning flowed fast beside us, cold and dark as it raced over the rocks.

“Thanks for enduring it, though, Ariel. I just, I needed to get out of the house, and vent to someone about Evan.”

“No problem. You owe me a better class of drink at some point, though. When we’re both rich and—

“Imogen.” She grabbed my arm, stopped walking. “What the fuck is that?”

A naked woman sat in the river, combing her long hair. Her skin was pale as ice, and her eyes glowed green fire. She smiled at us, and her teeth were thin and pointed needles.

“That’s really happening, right? She’s actually there?” Ariel’s hand was tight on my arm, her fingers digging in.

My hand went to my neck, to the hourglass charm around it. “Yes. She’s really there.”

“Come in, come in,” the woman said, and her voice was water on rocks, was ice in a river, was peaceful drowning. “Come in, and I will comb the dreams from your hair.”

“Is that where they come from?” Ariel asked.

“Where else would you find dreams? They need nets to tangle in.”

“Right. Of course. Well, maybe another time. When it’s warmer,” Ariel said. “Have a good night.”

“And you.” The woman disappeared beneath the rushing water.

“They’re real,” Ariel said. “The Fae.”

“They’re real.” We stood, shivering, on the edge of the river. “I didn’t know you knew. Do you have an hourglass?”

“Not yet, although Angelica informs me it’s not that I’m untalented, it’s just that she thinks I want to be a rock star more than I want to be an artist, and so giving me one right now would be a waste.

“There’s still time for me to earn one, though, if I sort out my priorities when it comes to my art.”

“That’s . . . rude.”

“Considering that she knew exactly the kind of art I wanted to
make when she chose to work with me? Yes.” Still holding my arm, she started walking back. “And Gavin really is the king? Of Faerie?”

“He is.”

“Huh,” she said. “And yet still grumpy before he gets his morning coffee. Maybe some things are universal.”

“I can’t imagine the woman we just saw sitting down to morning coffee,” I said.

“Neither can I. What was it like to go there?”

“Beautiful. Terrifying. I want to go back, and I want to never see it again. And yes, I’d go as the tithe if I were picked. That’s how it was.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess I’m sorry I missed it. Because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.”

She was the first person I had heard say that. “Why not?”

“Seven years without performing? Are you fucking kidding me?”

I laughed. “Do you miss it that much?”

She nodded. “I want the charm and the chance, not because I want to go to Faerie—which does not get any less ridiculous when I say it out loud—but because I want to be the one who rejects them, rather than thinking that they’ve rejected me. I think seven years with no applause might actually break me.

“Plus, I want to succeed on my terms.”

“What do you mean?” We were back home now, on the safety of recognizable stairs, our own front porch.

Ariel unlocked the door. “Wouldn’t you always wonder? You get back and you make the
New York Times
bestseller list and your book gets made into a movie, or whatever it is that’s the signal of super-ultimate writer success. Wouldn’t you wonder if it was because you were actually good enough, or if it was just because of the Fae, holding up their end of this weird-ass bargain?

“I don’t want to walk through the rest of my career thinking that I didn’t earn my own success, wondering if my art really had been as amazing as people claimed it was, or if they had just magicked people into thinking I mattered.”

“But you would have earned it. That’s what the seven years is,” I said.

“I’d rather spend seven years making art,” Ariel said. “If you have the talent, if you make something amazing, the success will happen anyway. If you don’t believe that, working as hard as we do makes no sense.”

“Someone annoying is at the door for you, Imogen,” Helena called.

“Okay, I’ll go right down and take care of that,” I said.

There was a paint-spattered woman pacing back and forth on our front porch. “Can I help you?”

“Are you Imogen? You look like Marin said you would—tall, with long black hair. But I’ve been wrong about people before, so maybe you’re not.” Her words ran together like rain.

“I’m Imogen,” I said cautiously.

“Good. Okay, good. I’m Michelle. Marin said you were good at fairy tales, like, good enough to write your own. And I have one of these”—she dangled a silver hourglass from her hand, then stuffed it back into a pocket—“but, like, I barely know anything beyond Hansel and Gretel, and this isn’t really a candy house sort of thing, is it?”

“I’m pretty sure not.”

She was literally wringing her hands, squeezing the stress from one set of fingers to the next. “So what do I do? I looked on the Internet, and it said stuff about leaving out bread and milk, and not speaking their names unless you want to attract their attention, but I do want their attention, so how do I make something good enough that they pick me?”

It was an excellent question.

“Look, um, Michelle.”

She stopped pacing, stared, laser-like. I resisted the urge to step back, out of range.

“Here’s the thing. The fairy tales I know about, they’re in books. I don’t know anything about actual Fae. I didn’t know that’s what Gavin was, when I met him. I didn’t know that Faerie was right across the river. I don’t know why the Fae are here, or what they want from us, or how to get their attention, though I’d say you can probably skip the milk and bread deal. I’m pretty sure Gavin drinks whiskey.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

I sighed, scrubbed my hands over my eyes. “I’m really not. But I don’t know anything more about how any of this works than the rest of you.”

“Are you sure?” Her voice cracked, and she looked like she might cry.

“Look, give me your email, and I’ll send you a list of my favorite fairy tale collections. Maybe there’s something in one of them that will help you.”

“Okay.” She nodded vigorously. “It’s just so stressful, you know? Like, every little bit helps.”

“You’re right,” I said, thinking of demanding answers from Evan, from Marin, from Beth. “It does. I’ll send you the email. If you can’t find the books, come back—we’ve got at least some in the library here.”

I knocked on Marin’s door.

“Come in,” she called. She was sitting on the floor, folded into lotus position, and breaking in a new pair of pointe shoes, reshaping them to better fit her feet.

“So, I just ran into your friend Michelle outside.”

She winced, slammed her shoe into the ground. “Sorry about that.
She has a studio just a couple spaces away from me, and she’s really been freaking out. You’re the closest thing to an expert on this stuff I know.”

“Well, if I’m the expert, we’re all fucked. I mean, I haven’t come across any stories that look like what’s going on here. Believe me, you’d be the first person I told if I had.”

She paused. “Really? You don’t have any ideas?”

“Marin, I’ve spent most of my life thinking that fairy tales were, you know, fairy tales. Plus, all the stuff in them about how you’ll be fine if you’re just pure of heart and virtuous, and kind to the white cat that follows you through the woods or to the little old lady at the fork in the path—well, I don’t really think any of that applies. So no, I don’t have any ideas.”

I paused. “I mean, you’re dating Gavin. Have been almost since we got here. Do you have any insights, any ideas into how to impress the King of the Fae?”

“That’s not who he is when he’s with me.”

“Good,” I said, meaning it.

She set one shoe aside, picked up the second, whacked it against the floor. “Still, point taken. I won’t offer you up as a consultant again.”

“Thanks. Like I said, I couldn’t help her anyway.” I walked over to her window, watched the river run past.

“So, for something completely different, what do you want to do for Thanksgiving this year?” I asked.

“Besides the obvious part where we stay the hell away from our mother?”

I shuddered. “When did she stop asking you?”

“Oh, she still does. It’s random now—she only invites me to one of the major holidays each year. I’ve never gone to any of them.”

Holidays had always been even more awful than everything else when we were growing up. Our mother had seen them as performances, meant to showcase her.

When I was nine, I had been reading, and I hadn’t noticed the buzzer for the pumpkin pie going off until I smelled it burning. There hadn’t been time or ingredients to make another, so I had spent that Thanksgiving locked in my room, the visiting relatives told that I had the chicken pox. Marin had smuggled me a roll and a slice of turkey, both covered in blue fuzz from being stuffed in her pockets. I had eaten it all, even the fuzz. It had been the only food I had gotten that day.