Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 21

"Aye," said the anonymous lord, "if you would keep a thief from me."

Now police cars were filling the intersection and both ends of the block. Edie looked nervously one way and another, waiting for men and women with guns to start piling out of the vehicles and charging forward, but for now they seemed content to wait.

New York's Finest knew better than to get between a magician and an elf-lord.

"A thief?" Matthew asked, with an elaborate glance over his shoulder. Edie could still hear the heaving breaths of the horse, smell the sweat and fear of the girl. "I see someone who has sought sanctuary in my city. And as you owe fealty to King Ian, you are bound by my treaty with him. What is she accused of stealing ... Sir Knight?"

"What's there before your eyes," the Fairy answered, as his companions of the hunt-men and women both-ranged themselves around him. "That common brat has stolen the great mare Embarr from my stables, and I will have her back. And the thief punished."

The mare snorted behind them, her harness jangling fiercely as she shook out her mane. "He lies!"

At first, Edie thought the child had spoken, and admired her s.p.u.n.k. But when she turned, she realized that the high, clear voice had come from the horse, who p.r.i.c.ked her ears and continued speaking. "If anything, t'was I stole the child Alicia. And my reasons I had, mortal Magus."

"The mare," said the elf-lord, "is mine."

Matthew did not lower his hands. "Be that as it may," he said. "I cannot have you tearing my city apart-and it is my city, and in it I decree that no one can own another. The girl and the horse are under my protection, and if you wish to have King Ian seek their extradition, he is welcome to do so through official channels. Which do not-" Matthew waved his hands wide "-include a hunt through Greenwich Village."

The Fairy Lord sniffed. "I have come here, where iron abounds, and where your mortal poisons burn inside my breast with every breath, to reclaim what is rightfully mine. By what authority do you deny me?"

He stood up in his stirrups. His gelding took a prancing, curveting step or two, crowding the horses and hounds on his right. They danced out of the way, but not before Edie had time to wrinkle her nose in the human answer to a snarl. "This is going to come to a fight," she whispered, too low for anyone but Lily and Matthew to hear. The whisk of metal on leather told her that Kit had drawn his sword.

"Why doesn't the girl speak for herself?" Matthew asked.

"Because," the mare answered, "His Grace had her caned and stole her voice from her when one of his mares miscarried. But it wasn't the girl's fault. And I'll not see my stablehands mistreated."

Lily squeezed Edie's hand and leaned close to whisper. "Edith? s.h.i.+ft to wolf form."

Edie shook her head. "I told you, it's been-"

"Do it," she said, and gave her a little push forward from the elbow.

Edie toed out of those boots and stood in stocking-feet on the icy pavement. She ripped her blouse off over her head and kicked down the stockings and the sequined skirt.

Everyone was staring, most especially the Fairy lord. Lily, though, stepped forward to help Edie with her corselet and gaff. She handled the confining underclothes with the professionalism of a seasoned performer, folding them over her arm before stepping back. Edie stood there for a moment, naked skin p.r.i.c.kling out everywhere, and raised her eyes to the Fairy lord.

"Well, I'll be a codfish," he said callously. He looked not at Edie, but at Matthew. "The b.i.t.c.h has a p.r.i.c.k. Is that meant to upset me?"

"The b.i.t.c.h has teeth, too," Edie said, and let the transformation take her.

She'd thought it would be hard. So many years, so many years of enduring the pain, of resisting, of petulant self-denial. Of telling herself that if she wasn't good enough for the Pack to see her as a wolf, then she didn't want to be one.

Once she managed to release her death-grip on the self-denial, though, her human form just fell away, sheeting from the purity of the wolf like filth from ice. Edie's hands dropped toward the pavement and were hard, furred paws before they touched. Her muzzle lengthened; what had been freezing cold became cool comfort as the warmth of her pelt enfolded her. The migraine fell away as if somebody had removed a clamp from her temples, and the rich smells of the city-and the horse manure and dog p.i.s.s of the hunt-flooded her sinuses.

She snarled, stalking forward, and saw the Fairy hounds whine and mill and cringe back among the legs of the horses. She knew the light rippled in her coat, red as rust and tipped smoke-black, and she knew the light glared in her yellow eyes. She knew from the look the Fairy lord shot her-fear masked with scorn-that the threat was working.

"So you have a wolf," the Fairy lord said, though his horse lowered his head to protect his neck and backed several steps.

"And your high king is a wolf," Matthew said. "You know how the pack sticks together."

This time, the gelding backed and circled because the Fairy lord reined him around. When he faced Edie and the others again, he was ten feet further back, and his pack had fallen back with him.

"I don't understand why the horse didn't kill you," he called to the girl, over Matthew's head. "They don't let slaves ride."

He yanked his horse's mouth so Edie could smell the blood that sprang up, wheeling away.

"Oh," said the mare, "is that why you never dared get up on me?"

As the lord rode off, spine stiff, the rest of the hunt fell in behind him. Edie was warm and at ease, and with the slow ebb of adrenaline, swept up in a rush of fellow-feeling for those with whom she had just withstood a threat.

A veil opened in the night as before, s.h.i.+mmering across the pavement before the phalanx of squad cars. Edie and her new allies stood waiting warily until the Fairy lord and his entourage vanished back behind it. The mare eyed Matthew quite cunningly. She planned this, the wolf thought. But the mare said nothing, and Edie would have had to come back to human form to say it-and what good would it do at this point, anyway?

"Well, I guess that's that," Matthew said, when they were gone.

He made a hand-dusting gesture and turned away, leaving Kit to handle the girl and the mare who had stolen each other while he walked, whistling, up the road to speak with the a.s.sembled police. Edie went and sat beside Lily, tail thumping the road. Lily reached down and scruffled her ruff and ears with gloved fingers.

"Good wolf," she cooed. "Good girl."

In New York City's storied Greenwich Village, on the island of Manhattan, there is a tavern called the Slaughtered Lamb. A wolf howls on its signboard. In one corner lurks a framed photo of Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man. The tavern is cramped and dark and the mailbox-sized bathroom-beside the grilled-off stair with a sign proclaiming the route to The Dungeon closed for daily tortures-is not particularly clean.

The Slaughtered Lamb (of course) is the favored hangout of Lower Manhattan's more ironic werewolves. Edie hadn't been there even once since she came to New York City. She'd been an outcast even then.

Now she strode west on 4th Street from Was.h.i.+ngton Square, her high-heeled boots clicking on the preternaturally level sidewalks of Manhattan. Her feet still hurt across the pads, but the worst was healed. She wore trousers to hide her unshaven legs. A cold wind curled the edges of damp leaves, not strong enough to lift them from the pavement.

4th was wider and less tree-shaded than most of the streets in the famously labyrinthine Village, but still quiet-by Manhattan standards-as she made her way past the s.e.x shops, crossing Jones in a hurry. An FDL Express truck waited impatiently behind the stop sign, rolling gently forward as if stretching an invisible barrier when the driver feathered the clutch.

She hopped lightly up one of the better curb cuts in the Village and crossed the sidewalk to the Slaughtered Lamb's black-and-white faux-Tudor exterior. Horns blared as she let herself inside. A reflexive glance at her watch showed 4:59.

Rush hour.

"And so it begins," she muttered to no one in particular, and let the heavy brown nine-panel door fall between her and the noise.

There was noise inside, too, but it was of a more welcoming quality. Speakers mounted over the door blared Chumbawumba; two silent televisions s.h.i.+mmered with the sports highlights of the day. A gas fire roared in the unscreened hearth behind the only open table. Edie picked her way through the darkness to claim it quickly, sighing in relief. It might roast her on one side, but at least it would be a place to sit.

She slung her damp leather coat over the high back of a bar stool and jumped up. She was barely settled, a cider before her, when the door opened again, revealing Matthew Magus and a tall, slender young man with pale skin and black hair that touched his collar in easy curls.

They sat down across from Edie. She s.h.i.+fted a little further away from the fire. "Edith Moorc.o.c.k," Matthew said, "His Majesty Ian MacNeill, Sire of the Pack and High King of Fairy."

"Charmed," Edie said, offering the King a glove. To her surprise, he took it.

"Edie is a New World wolf," Matthew said. "Apparently, your grandfather did not find her ... acceptable ... to the Pack."

"Oh, yes," Ian said tiredly. "It's about time the Pack got itself out of the twelfth century." He steepled his fingers as the server came over, and both he and Matthew ordered what Edie had. "I can't imagine what you would want with us at this point, though-"

Edie's heart fluttered with nervousness. "An end to exile?"

"Consider it done. Do you plan to remain in New York?"

Edie nodded.

"Good. The Mage here needs somebody to look after him. Somebody with some teeth." Ian paused as his cider arrived, then sipped it thoughtfully. Matthew coughed into the cupped palm of his glove. "The better to eat you with, my dear," he muttered.

The king regarded him, eyebrows rising as he tilted his head. "I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing, your Majesty."

Ian smiled, showing teeth. If Edie's were anything to go by, he had very good ears. He drank another swallow of cider, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and said, "Now, about that changeling girl and the horse that stole her-"

Old Leatherwings The old leatherman was late for breakfast. This was more than an unusual happenstance: George Dell had fed the wanderer supper and breakfast every thirty-four days for twenty-six years, and never once had the old leatherman missed a meal or made a sound beyond the creak of his roughsewn rawhide suit.

New York winters pus.h.i.+ng snow and New York summers walking alongside a furrow behind the oxen left a man knotted and strong as bent rope, twisted to suit his tasks. Dell wasn't young anymore himself. But he stomped into his thick hide boots, pulled his hat down stiffly with h.o.r.n.y hands, shrugged his oilcloth on over his coveralls, and went out into the cold March rain. Dell knew his farm like the back of his own worn-out hand, hills and brooks like ropy veins and age spots and skin weathered s.h.i.+ny on the grips of the plow. He knew where he'd find the old leatherman, if he was there to be found.

A red-tail hawk hunched in a naked birch halfway up the hillside. White tree like bone among the cast iron black of wet oak and maple; the hawk fluffed almost headless against the chill and rain. Another farmer might have cursed leaving his shotgun leaned up by the planken door, b.u.t.t propped beside the steel bucket of sand for the tall kitchen steps. Might have trudged back downslope, trudged back, shot the hawk off the branch and gone looking for its mate, if it had one. Might have crucified both bodies on the barbed wire fence beside the chicken coop, way to send a message.

But Dell didn't keep chickens since his wife died, and he knew foxes took more poultry anyway. A red-tail was more likely to eat a weasel than eat a hen, and weasels were bad on eggs.

He muttered to himself as he tromped through the pocked old snow. Maybe he decided to move on before breakfast. Maybe he decided to get breakfast somewhere else. Maybe he's snug by the fire he banked last night to keep him warm, roasting a squirrel on a stick and too contented to come out in the cold.

Maybe my hogs will butcher and smoke their own selves come fall.

Once there was a poor tradesman who loved a rich merchant's daughter and would have given anything to win her.

Jules Bourglay lay dying in a cave banked with rotten, spring snow, on the sh.o.r.es of a foreign land. A white tree thrust between the tumbled granite blocks of his rude shelter, an accusing finger pointed at the sky. A hawk he had followed from France and then for twenty-six years in circles from the Connecticut River to the Hudson crouched in the branches overhead.

Bourglay's fire had died to coals and his coals had died to ash. He held a thick, curved, three-sided leather needle threaded with sinew between fingers too cold to sew with, and his st.i.tchery was pulled over his lap like a cowhide blanket.

A wet cough rattled his chest like a s.h.i.+p's canvas in a gale. He laid the needle, which over time he had sharpened to less than half its length, on the leather and pulled his fingers into his sleeve, tucking the sleeve under his coat to warm his hand. He did not cover his mouth when he coughed again, but he spat blood and phlegm into the ashes when he was done.

The moisture didn't sizzle. A cold rain fell through the junctures in the stones. Twenty-six years he'd followed the hawks through these American states, from river to river and farm to farm. He'd swept a great circle steady as a clockhand, sleeping in caves even when beds or barns were offered, to be closer to the hawks. He'd held his tongue as the magic demanded, and he'd walked and he'd st.i.tched and he'd clothed himself in the leftover plates of leather. He'd eaten what strangers offered in their charity, and he'd known they thought him a madman. There was one hawk left.

He only needed one more day, he thought. Two, perhaps. But he could not walk, and he feared the hawk would leave before too much longer.

Slowly, Jules Bourglay slumped forward over his work, and fell to dreaming.

Once there was a man held captive by a wicked king so that his only hope for escape was to make wings of wax and feathers and to fly across the sea.

Inside the farmhouse, George Dell's older daughter, Hannah Wickham, held her older daughter on her knee, fussing rose-pink ribbons on the little girl's church dress. Widowed Hannah found George Dell a comfort, and widowed George Dell thought the same of Hannah. What five-year-old Stella made of these proceedings remained a mystery: she hadn't spoken a word since her father died, though she was as well-behaved and sweetly sad a child as any mother would cling to in her sorrow.

Hannah rose at Dell's shout from the yard and seated Stella on the tinderbox with an admonition to stay tidy. Graceful and strong, her brown hair twisted up and pinned, Hannah drew a robe around her shoulders and opened the kitchen door. "Pa? What is it?"

He stomped snow from his boots against the cast-iron hedgehog beside the door, and came in past her, his oilcloth dripping on the sanded puncheon floor. "The old leatherman is dying up the cave under the birch tree," he said. "I'll fetch the sled from down cellar. Get your boots on and out of your church clothes; I can't manage him alone."

"Mercy," Hannah answered, and went to do as she was bid.

Once there was an orphaned princess who was under a spell.

Dell had to kneel to crawl through the overhang of a granite cave made from half a dozen flat boulders tumbled together like so much split maple. "He's breathing," Dell called back to Hannah. "Pa.s.s me in the blanket. I'll have to drag him out."

He glanced over his shoulder to see Hannah's fair face as she squatted down, heedless of the snow and mud clotting the edge of her skirts, and shoved the folded blanket in. "Hand me up whatever 'tis he's got on his lap," she said, and once Dell had the blanket from her he did so, struggling with the soaked, stiff leather. Something glittering tumbled from it; a needle, he saw, and meant to remember it after he fetched the old leatherman out.

Roots dug his knees as he spread the blanket and struggled to pull the old leatherman onto it. "What is that thing?"

"It looks like a cloak-" A snapping noise, the clatter of vast leathery wings, as she shook it open. "A cloak, it is. A hood and all. It looks near finished."

The old leatherman was a vast slack weight in the narrow cave. Not for the first time, Dell wondered what duty or heartbreak had set the man wandering in circles, never speaking, living off the kindness of strangers and whatever he could snare.

Dell backed out of the narrow hole under the birch tree, dragging some two hundred pounds of fevered man and wet leather behind him. The blanket held together by the grace of his stern Puritan G.o.d alone. George Dell swore later he never would have managed without the snow.

The hawk screamed as he and Hannah bundled the old leatherman on to the sledge, and took wing as Dell leaned into the traces. He was halfway down the slope before he remembered that he'd meant to fetch the needle.

Once there was a nightingale who loved a poor scholar so much that she died to make a rose bloom in midwinter, so he could win the hand of his lady.

And yet his lady spurned him nonetheless.

The white clapboard-sided farmhouse made a warmer place for dying in. His hands ached with warming, and he thought if he wasn't so weary and comfortable before the fire he might even manage to open his eyes. But he was weary, and a woman's voice sang wordless tunes over him. And rest was close, after twenty-six years of walking. Very close, indeed.

But Jules Bourglay could hear the hawk calling outside.

And the sewing wasn't finished.

Once there was a cruel and beautiful maiden with eleven handsome brothers who had been transformed into ravens.

Hannah watched as her father heaved the old leatherman onto a pallet on the floor in the warmth of the kitchen. She washed his face while Stella clung to her skirts; his skin was tanned as insensate as his leather. She spread his cloak and his patchwork jacket out on chairs far enough from the cast-iron range that the leather would not crack and stiffen as they dried. Dell went out to unharness the oxen; they weren't making church on this Sunday.

Stella still clung as Hannah shook pale green coffee from the tin into a skillet and set the beans on the top of the stove to roast. Between pumping up water and setting that to boil, she shook them occasionally. The rain made the kitchen grey. She thought of lighting a lantern to cheer the room, but decided not to waste the kerosene.

When a solid knock sounded at the bottom of the door, she went to answer, thinking her father must have kicked the frame because his arms were too loaded with wood to manage the latch.

Stella hopped back, dragging Hannah's skirts with her, as a red-tailed hawk flapped into the room.

Once there was a young tradesman who learned too late who it was that had truly loved him.

George Dell had seen many a strange sight in his sixty years, but his daughter and granddaughter at bay behind the table while a hawk as big as a small eagle mantled over the form of a leather-clad vagrant on his kitchen floor was probably the strangest. He paused in the doorway, the leatherman's needle-which he had hiked back up the hill to rescue, on the grounds that there was always a possibility the old wanderer might live-glittering between his fingers. The kitchen reeked of scorching coffee beans; the only sound was the stentorian rasp of the leatherman's failing breath.

"Hannah?" He thrust the needle through his oilcloth slicker, and reached behind the door for the shotgun, realizing even as he did so that he could not shoot the hawk without shooting the old leatherman too. "What's happening here?" Hannah laughed softly, her back to the wall and one hand on the edge of the table. The other hand held her skirts in front of Stella, a pitiably fragile sort of barrier. "It seems the bird's invited itself to luncheon, Pa. And I'm not quite sure how to invite it back out again."

The hawk c.o.c.ked an arrogant eye at Dell, and he laid his other hand on the shotgun, but did not raise it. It flipped its half-open wings shut and waddled around to face him, awkward on the floor as a fat duck out of water.

"Mais oui, go ahead and shoot me," the hawk said in the dulcet tones of a lady. "If Jules dies before he sets me free, I might as well be dead in any case." George Dell blinked, and ever-so-slowly set the gun back down behind the door.

Once there was a poor but virtuous girl who could not spin straw into gold, though she tried with all her heart.

Her voice brought Bourglay back from the warm and quiet place he had dreamed himself into. Her dear, beloved voice: the only unchanged thing about her. He blinked once, slowly, and thought of examining his surroundings with care before he sat up, if he could manage to sit up. And then the cough took him like a convulsion, and his mouth filled up with slime.

He swallowed it, having no desire to spit blood and phlegm on some kind woman's clean kitchen floor.

"I am Natalie de Bouvier," the dear voice said, and feathers rustled. "And what you see before you, mes amis, is witchcraft and black magic, the vengeance of an ungrateful girl who fancied herself my rival and killed herself to transform me into the base creature you see before you. A tragedy, n est-ce pas?"

Bourglay fell back on his pallet when he tried to sit. The hawk hopped away when he reached for her. He rolled on his side and coughed again.