Metro Winds

THE WOLF PRINCE

for Heather



My son howls.

Hearing it, I start to my feet, the weight of the tapes try I have been working on pulling it from my fingers.

Cloud-Marie gargles thickly in dismay and begins to gather the fabric up from the floor. It is densely embroidered and difficult to handle. When she has managed to heave it onto the rack, she turns her big pale face to me and I wonder if she heard what I heard. One of her eyes regards me with great intensity while the other turns slowly away. I have always seen the drift of that wayward eye as an omen, and more than one decision has been dictated by its movement.

I think of the colour of the sky when I woke this morning: bruise-coloured with tinges of unhealthy yellow; an autumn sky. It used to be my favourite season. I loved the way the thick light soaked any wall in a slow buttery radiance, the rustling susurrus of dried brown leaves sliding along the pavement. Now it seems to me a season of fading sorrow.

It was the very end of autumn when first I came to that city which is the gateway to this place. I had a practical reason for my journey, but my true reason was something less rational, less definable and all but hidden from myself. Simply put, the city had seemed to suggest something that stirred my deepest longings. I do not doubt many people who visit it are drawn by the wonder of an impossible idea translated into a real and miraculously beautiful city.

Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely. Despite their longings, the majority will keep to the tourist trails, for the city is a maze designed not to trap victims but to keep them from its secret heart. Most tourists will buy maps and rely upon them to discover what the city has to offer. Seeming to document every tortuous alley as they do, the very complexity of the maps is a glamour designed to ensure that those following them will never wander far from well-travelled paths. Those sensitive or wise enough to suspect the truth and lay aside their maps may still baulk at crossing unknown bridges or following strange paths. Some instinct of caution will remind them of all the stories in which those who choose to leave proper paths come to enigmatic and unsettling ends.

That city keeps its secret well, for this is its entire purpose, the reason for its existence.

Suddenly I want the comfort of my own chamber. I sign to Cloud-Marie that I have finished with the tapestry and, leaving her to return the room to order, I rise and go into the hall. Touching a wall, I find it damp. It is always damp in this realm. In autumn the air is wet because the fallen leaves exude a fermenting steam that intoxicates all who breathe it. In spring, rain falls and falls in grey and slanting curtains that render the grass soggy enough to take a handprint. The air grows so wet that one feels breathing to be little more than a slow drowning. Even in summer, when building surfaces blaze white-hot and the cobbles burn through the soles of your shoes, it is damp, for the heat sucks a haze of water from the canals into the air. It forms a brackish sticky vapour that slicks all flesh and renders all cloth limp. Winter is worse, though. Icy mists rise up as slow and nacreous wraiths, seeping from the cracked black earth to hang almost immobile in the frozen air, breathing a chill, deadly film over the stone walls.

Last winter I caught pneumonia. I remember little of the illness except the way the light cut into my eyes, igniting a headache so astoundingly painful that it made me feel as if my head would explode. You can always tell a mortal who has dwelt here too many seasons, for they breathe as if the sea has entered into their lungs.

I remember the chilly delicacy of the air as it settled on me the first time I came here, how my skin rose into gooseflesh. Now it prickles at the memory. Or maybe a goose walks on my grave, for I suppose there must be a grave, somewhere in the future, waiting to receive me.

Disliking the tenor of my thoughts, I stop at a window on the side of the palace that overlooks the city and the canal rather than its sprawling grounds. I run my eyes over the ruddy carapace formed by the roofs below. Only a myriad of dark lanes and the glimmering threads of smaller canals show through it, except where the carapace splits wide open to allow the Grand Canal to pass between this palace and the one on the opposite bank. Between them, the gleaming silver surface of the water is ruffled with white and a cold wind slaps at me.

I feel Cloud-Marie’s warmth as she comes to stand beside me. She grunts softly but I lift a finger to quell her, for underneath the ebb and flow of my thoughts, I am still listening.

Did I imagine the howl? Such an imagining would require hope to give it force. The knowledge that I might still be capable of hope forces me to hope and, like a man made to walk on long-withered limbs, I stumble a few astonished steps, then fall. Because even if he howled, what salvation can there be for him?

‘It’s not possible,’ I say, speaking aloud without meaning to.

The dry croak of my voice startles me and, continuing along the passage, I discover that I cannot remember when last I spoke. I have not been out in many weeks. No one comes to visit, of course; they would as soon enter Dracula’s castle. I can guess that thorny rumours and barbed stories have grown around this palace and its inhabitants in a great wild thicket. If I were younger, they would make me a trapped princess and dream a prince to rescue me, but I am a queen and the prince is a king.

My husband did not change at all after he became a king. Of course, his kind can be any age once they have reached maturity, simply by willing it. Naturally enough he chose to be a young man in his prime most often, except occasionally as a whim when he fancied that wisdom is more compelling when it issues from withered greybeards.

Perhaps he takes that form now, or maybe he has grown weary of the demands of manhood and has made himself into a boy. I do not know, for he has gone a-questing these long years, and even before that, he left me and took to residing in the Queen’s Palace, often called the Summer Palace because it is always summer there.

When first he announced that he would go and live there, he used the weather as an excuse, telling me he preferred summer to the eternal autumn shrouding the King’s Palace. Ironically, it is the queen whose moods dictate the weather above the King’s Palace, but she can control it only so far as she can control her moods. Yet though my moods wrought stormy squalls and chilly rain, I do not believe he left me because of the weather.

The Queen’s Palace is prettier than the King’s Palace, and stands on the opposite bank of the great canal from it, being a rambling building of pale pink stone with a multitude of balconies and airy flying buttresses. A small, elaborately designed park surrounds it, full of complex and, to me, disturbingly lifelike topiary. Vast flowerbeds are laid out around the leafy beasts in geometric designs of abstract flowers that play sly tricks on your eyes. I have sometimes heard The Queen’s Palace referred to as the Palace of Tears, for this is where queens must go when their sons take wives.

She is not dead, of course, his mother, my mother-in-law. She dwells even now in the Queen’s Palace with all of the other mothers-in-law, though not her great-great-grandmother-in-law, who was human like me, and mortal. What a torture she must have found it to grow old and die among these evergreen faerie queens. But they were kind to her after their own fashion, for my husband told me once that they made themselves age with her, until she died.

So, my husband went to dwell with his mother and all those grandmothers, and for a time he played the prodigal son for them. In those days, the Summer Palace scintillated with unexpected life and self-importance and no one would have dreamed of calling it the Palace of Tears, for its halls rang with music and merriment. The queens adored my husband for the brightness he brought with him, and no doubt he dallied with some of them. Faerie folk are sensuous and there is no such thing as incest for them. They are monogamous only when they are in love. Love, for them, cannot be what it is for mortals, since love for us is mortal and therefore intensified with a bittersweet despair. Immortal love is something entirely different after the first heat; it is a slow relishing, a cool playfulness, an endless game of chess. Desire, too, is different for my husband’s kind, for there is no real urgency to have anything, no sense that time is running out. It was only when my husband went to live in the Queen’s Palace that I came to truly understand the nature of the difference between human and faerie desire.

My husband would summon me to the Summer Palace to attend sumptuous balls. He would not deliver the invitation himself, but send his courtiers got up as faerie godmothers or as cats in boots to deliver his invitations. His messengers would produce astonishing gowns, golden coaches and glass slippers and various spells or tests. One way or another I would be got to the ball. Once I arrived, my husband would claim me lavishly and there would be music and food and wine and dancing. For a little while I was amused if somewhat puzzled by these games, but I was no immortal who could play back and forwards in time eternally. I was a mother, and motherhood more than anything had shown me that time was not a playground but a stern and inexorable master. I became impatient with the games, yet still I went when he sent for me because I was a woman ripe in her life, and for me, that ripeness was not eternal.

My mortal desire transformed the virginal vestments the king had sent me to wear into provocative wisps of silk that barely contained me; they did not prettify or tame. Impatient desire was like a tiger within me, and sometimes my husband would gasp at the sight of me, as he had not done at that pale younger self. Then he would take me into his arms, whirl me into the dance and cover me with kisses as light and cold and insubstantial as snowflakes. But I was no longer a coy girl-woman needing his guidance and faerie tales to help me find the treasure-trove of my own passion. I would pull him with me away from the faerie lanterns and music and into the nearest dark room where we would couple, clasped together as tightly as the two hands of a single man. But the hands belonged to a drowning man, and despite passion, we would go on drowning.

I wonder now if the savagery of my ripe desire revealed in those encounters alarmed my faerie husband. My full woman’s passion was not the sweet, confused yearning of a princess, nor was it the ethereal and airy passion of the immortals who know that they have all the time in the world for pleasure. There were peaks and chasms in my desires yet untouched and I felt an urgency that only mortals can feel in striving for them, knowing they will die. I know my husband desired me, fascinated by the combination of hunger and desperation that is mortal loving, yet when he held me, I think there were times when he looked into my face and beheld a corpse.

Coming into my chamber, I cross to the fire and lower myself with a sigh into the deep, comfortable bucket chair that sits before it. For a time, I let myself be hypnotised by the play of the flames on the hearth, but the howl I heard seems to be echoing in my mind.

Cloud-Marie, seeing me shiver despite the fire, drapes a warm shawl solicitously over my legs. Then she begins to unbraid the dark golden syrup of my tresses and it comes to me as a chill foreseeing that, when I am old, she will do the same thing – lay the soft rug over my skinny shanks before unwinding my coarse grey braids.

She begins to brush my hair rhythmically, and I relax into the pull and tug of her ministrations. I watch her in the mirror, seeing how her whole simple wit is focused on grooming my hair. I consider speaking to her but words make her uneasy, and they are unnecessary anyway because she is gifted with a doglike ability to sniff out my moods. Even the signing is something that she understands and yet never uses. There is no need. She responds happily and devotedly to orders that ask nothing of her but simple obedience. They make her feel safe and she is centred by them.

I have drifted half to sleep when suddenly I sit bolt upright, for it has come to me that the last person I spoke to was my son. A chill runs through me to think it could be so, for the boy ceased to speak over two years ago. Can it really be so long? It seems to me that I have had conversations recently but I cannot recall the details of them. Perhaps they are only memories of speaking long ago.

There were so many conversations when I first came here. Everyone wanted to speak with me and hear my voice. But those same eager supplicants would turn from me now, and my face, once praised for its clever beauty, is regarded as the unlucky loveliness of a mask worn by false hope, to deceive fools.



My son’s loss of words was not a complete and sudden binding of his tongue. At first he lost a word here and there and I put it down to the coarsening carelessness of manhood. But his language continued to diminish and anxiety began to prod at me. I noted how he would pause a little too long when searching his mind for the word he wanted, and then he would give an irritated shake of his head and choose another. It would be a good choice, and perhaps I would not have noticed the hesitation if language and my love of it in all forms had not been the gift I chose to bestow upon him, a gift that had seemed to delight him above all the faerie gifts and enchantments he received. I read books to him and spoke of them and made him speak of them to me. I made him strive for precision when he wanted to tell me things; I demanded beauty, originality, wit. It was not long before he was my master and it was bittersweet to see him clench his teeth at some awkward description of mine, or at a word used in a careless way.

I decided that the diminishing of my son’s language must be some magical affliction; illnesses and plagues here are strange and unpredictable. Sometimes there are tempests of sorrow, which affect every creature and produce a monsoon of tears. At other times, great fat frogs rain from the sky. Once there was a sleeping sickness and everyone fell where they were and slept for days. How odd it had felt to be walking through a sleeping world suffused with the mysterious reek of red roses. Of course I was immune to the illnesses of my husband’s kind, just as he could not catch cold from me. But our son was a halfling and prey to the illnesses and strife of both worlds.

The loss of language went on until my son found he could no longer produce alternatives. He soon became frustrated enough to substitute the odd curse or to shrug lumpishly when a phrase eluded him. His brilliance was declining with the loss of his ability to express it. Even his demeanour lost its fineness. The daintiness of manners that had so delighted me degenerated into rough sprawling movements.

Eventually he came to shout and curse his frustration at me, he who had never raised his voice, for what need had he to do so when his words were soft scalpels that could inflict deadly hurts if he chose to use them as weapons? I longed to help him, but my desperate patience only maddened him by forcing him to acknowledge what he was becoming. When I tried to speak of it he would snarl at me to hold my tongue and lumber away.

I prayed that his intelligence and emotions were only locked up inside him and not extinguished altogether. I had to believe that, but I was becoming frightened. I set aside my pride and called for my husband, using the fragrant summoning mist he had given me in a cut diamond vaporiser. He did not come at once, and so I sent Cloud-Marie to the Summer Palace with a note for the queen-mother asking her to send my husband to me. She sent back that he was away on a quest but she had used her own magic to communicate with him. He would come as soon as he was able.

I will never forgive him for that delay. As it transpired, he could have done nothing, but he might have helped me to bear the weight of my terror. While I waited for him, I ransacked the fusty King’s Palace archives, poring over tomes and seeking some clue to my son’s affliction, longing for Yssa to comfort me, but my friend and companion had left the palace before I gave birth. I was desperate as a tigress to find a cure for my son, prepared to slay dragons and tear out the tongues of peacocks.

I found nothing.



It may seem strange that I did not discuss my son’s condition with my mother-in-law, but I feared what ailed the boy might be my fault. She had told me her son – my husband – had needed to marry a princess to break an inherited curse. She had foreseen that the right bride would end the curse forever, not just in her son, but in his bloodline. She had acclaimed me as that princess, but what if she had been wrong? Certainly the mark of the beast had been on my husband when we met, and so I know that marrying me did save him, for it vanished thereafter. But what if it was only him who I had cured, and not the curse?

My mother-in-law’s foreseeing ensured my welcome by her son’s people. I had basked in the adulation and gratitude heaped upon me, glad to believe I was what they said. As a repressed and unloved child, had I not felt that some special and important destiny awaited me? Had I not, as a young woman, felt the yoke of ordinariness about my neck as a dreary weight I was not meant to bear? Once I understood where I had come and what I had done, it seemed to me that I had found my destiny. It did not occur to me that even here there are limits to curses and cures and even to love.



I was disappointed quite soon by love, but perhaps it is so with all who love for the first time, whether their lover be mortal or faerie. I do not know the nature of the disappointment an immortal suffers, but it is in the nature of mortals to weave and sew a trousseau of dreams with which to clothe a beloved, though his or her form or nature is unknown. And maybe few men or women fit those glorious vestments or wear them long, willingly.

It was not that my husband ceased to love me, nor I him, but the promises that our heady beginning had seemed to make were not fulfilled. My delirious happiness faded. To begin with, I blamed myself. I was of the mundane world and it must be my fault the glamour of love had dimmed. Hence I did not speak of my disappointment to my husband because he seemed content, and if I complained, might he not learn to despise me? But in my secret heart, I blamed him, too, for if my feet stayed a little too close to the ground, it must be because his love had not wings enough to lift me above myself.

I became fretful and irritable with him and our lives. He did not reproach me or protest or demand what was the matter with me, he simply began to go more and more upon quests, and when he was in the castle, he was distracted and distant. This hurt, for in the beginning he had been enamoured of conversation with me, attentive to all I said and filled with desire to know my thoughts. I had imagined it would always be so, but now he did not question me and beg me to talk of this or that to him, and his eyes no longer followed me when I was within sight. It was not that he did not desire me, but that he desired only certain limited aspects of me. He knew part of me and felt he knew all. Too often, his caresses confined themselves to those that would bring us most directly to coupling. He rode and arrived too swift at his own destination for me to ride beyond irritation and anger and a growing melancholy to my own more distant pleasure. I would pretend fulfilment out of pride and anger and embarrassment and he would roll away with a pleased grunt to fall swiftly to snoring.

Staring at his sleeping form in the dark with longing and loathing intermingled so profoundly that I did not know where one began and the other ended, I felt myself transported to my childhood home with two cool, rational, intellectual parents who had taught me that if I would be loved, I must be considerate, modest, self-effacing, quiet. My marriage had taught me that I could be loved, and be vividly the centre of things, but now it seemed that this was only for a time. Now I must be a good girl again, and withdraw most of myself behind the serene façade of queen, suppressing anger and fear and longing.

Lying back against the pillows, I oft times wrapped myself in my arms and shivered under the slick of mingled sweat and restless desire, pining for him to wake just as fiercely as I had wished him asleep. I told myself I did not know what I wanted; I was perverse and difficult. I wanted tenderness and affection, but when he fell asleep with an arm over me, I would shift to make his arm slide away and then stretch, luxuriantly free of him.

Perhaps I would have coped better if I had been more independent, but I was a non-magical being in a realm where magic was the means to obtain everything. I had to rely upon my husband for all I needed. At first, no whim of mine had been too small to be fulfilled and even anticipated by my prince. But once we were king and queen, I discovered that many of the courtesies he had paid me were no more than part of that initial seduction. He forgot to conjure tea for me in the mornings unless I reminded him. If he slopped his supper wine, he would not wave a languid hand to spell it from the floor. He never thought to smooth our bed or pick up his underwear. I had been startled at first to find that, although he was king, there was no one to make his bed or wash his dishes or cook for him. Magic served here, but he must exert himself and it began to seem that he would rather use me than his magic.

There were times when life was impossibly difficult. I would sometimes have to ask my husband several times to banish dust or clean our clothing or conjure a meal or even the makings of a meal so that I could cook. Each time I must ask once, and then ask again. When he showed his boredom at my nagging, savage anger and bitterest resentment would come to scour me. But I did not express my rage, for I had by now resumed the habit of silence concerning my thoughts and feelings, nurtured by my parents. Certainly my husband had shown his dislike of my thoughts when they were negative or implied any criticism of him, and in the beginning I had been afraid to make myself a shrew in his eyes. A queen ought to have better things to think of than soiled underwear and dust mites, I tried to tell myself loftily. There was no shortage of food or wine, after all, if I would attend the faerie festivities every night. I never had to bother buying clothes, for my husband was all too happy to conjure splendid dresses and jewels for me, yet I could not wear those dresses more than once or twice since there was no way to launder such delicate fabrics without damaging them.

But gradually, perforce, I learned to fend for myself. Sometimes I would smile grimly at my reflection as, clad in my elaborate finery, I would pass a looking glass bearing a bowl of slops from the dishes. I felt powerless and furious at my powerlessness. I made our bed and picked up my husband’s discarded clothes if he had forgotten to banish them, because someone must do it.

‘I would have done it,’ he would laugh if he caught me.

Then why didn’t you? I would think angrily, and outside, thunder would rumble ominously among gathering clouds.

On days when I did not wish to attend a ball in order to break my fast, I would walk to the garden beyond the farthest wing of the palace, and there I would forage for wild tomatoes and potatoes, mushrooms and berries and quail eggs. I learned to set snares for rabbits and wild pigeons which I then roasted in clay balls on a campfire. When winter came I would bring the clay balls home and bake them in the embers of the fire. I might have gone in a carriage to the peasant farmers dwelling about the palace grounds, or even to the little villages to shop, but I was humiliated by the thought that all Faerie would guess how ill my king cared for me.

Better to endure in private. The pride I felt in managing was a hard, cold, wounded pride. Once, in a moment of weakness, I asked my husband to conjure rubber gloves to protect my hands when I scrubbed pots, but he laughed at me and asked if he was a tyrant to make his queen undertake such work. He waved a languid finger and conjured my hands smooth, saying lightly that he did not like the coarse feel of them on his silky, milky skin. I wondered incredulously if he was malicious in his refusal to ask how my hands came to be that way, but now I think he lacked all curiosity. His laziness was only faerie self-centredness and a lack of imagination.

I was not so sanguine then, and there was a blizzard that night above the palace. In the morning my husband gave me a baffled, wary look before going on a journey of some weeks. Despite my anger with him, I was lonely in his absence, and perhaps that was why I made a companion of a woman who came begging for some menial job. Certainly Yssa was comely enough, despite her drab attire, but she had a melancholy, wretched air that made it hard to see how fair her face was. She was not good company at all to begin with, for she seldom looked me in the eye, let alone smiled or sang or laughed. She gave so little companionship, in fact, that I found myself regretting my coldness to my husband and telling myself that it was mad to think that mere selfishness and a lack of imagination lay at the heart of my growing discontent. How could such small faults corrode such a great love story as ours?

I know now that love is not so sturdy and the fault was not so small.

Why did I stay? I asked myself as the years passed, as maybe all women do who endure indifference and carelessness or even cruelty from their husbands, and contrarily, the answer was different every time. I loved my husband, or I remembered loving him, or he could not help himself, or I wanted his hands on me again, or all men were like this, no matter what the world.

But the truth, which I acknowledged to myself only a long time after he left, was that the fading of love was not the fault of either one of us alone. I wanted something more substantial and demanding than I had got in my faerie prince; something harder and more consuming than faerie glamour. I wanted him to want me as a woman and a person, not just as a princess, but it was the princess he had hunted so ardently, who he desired.

It was Yssa who asked one day if I could not get all of the things I sighed for in my own world. My determined efforts to woo her out of the morbid grip of whatever ill fortune or unhappiness lay in her past had effected a subtle change in her so that she was less downcast and self-effacing than she had been, but it did not take much for her to withdraw into her original grim melancholy. Yet, her suggestion that I look for the things I wanted in my old world shone like a beam of sunlight through the murk of resentment that I had stewed for myself. I hugged her, marvelling that I had not thought of it first. Had I not been told a thousand times that there were a multitude of passages between this world and that which I still thought of as the real world?

With Yssa’s help, I made a mental list: good brooms and mops and soft cloths and rubber gloves. How I laughed as I made that mundane list and how happy I felt. How strong and purposeful I felt writing the names of toiletries I had not wanted to ask my husband to provide – tampons and roll-on deodorant, mothballs and even a surface spray to keep spiders from my bedchamber went onto the list, though this last proved a waste, for I discovered that human chemicals have no power here where even spiders and dung beetles are magic.

Yssa helped me to decide what to wear on my adventure, for I had explained to her that women in my world no longer wore full-length sweeping gowns with plunging décolletages. In the end we chose the dullest of my gowns, shortening it to knee length and picking off the lace and frills and beading to make it plainer. Then, just in case, I insisted upon Yssa bundling into my basket a cobweb grey cloak into which had been woven an invisibility spell. Of course I could not shop, invisible, but it would keep me safe if what I was to do proved unexpectedly dangerous.

I was about to leave when my husband came in, just returned from a quest. As always, Yssa withdrew when he entered the room, knowing he did not approve of the fact that I had invited her to be my companion without seeking his permission. Seeing me cloaked and carrying a magical hold-all basket over my arm, he regarded me with indulgent amusement. ‘What are you doing, my lady love?’ he asked, and some part of me melted at his voice as it always had.

But I told myself it was glamour, not love, and answered him coolly. ‘I am going to market in my world for food to cook and for new stockings and a winter coat. I will need money.’

I had not meant to speak of my journey to him, but suddenly I wanted to force him to understand that he had neglected me. I thought my admission that I went to shop for food would shame him, but he had that wondrous blindness some folk have which allows them to ignore hints and allusions and deal only with outright attacks. He merely kissed me and called me a funny child before bidding me enjoy myself. Then he conjured a pouch of precious stones for me to trade for coin. I had already prised some stones out of jewellery he had given me, and for a moment indignation near choked me. He spoke as if I wished to labour in my old world out of nostalgia. It did not occur to him that I might oft times be hungry or cold; that I might lack the most basic necessities because he did not provide them. But though accusations surged against my teeth like frogs and snakes, I kept my mouth closed, and took the pouch.

‘Just wait,’ I had vowed silently as I turned away. ‘You will get what you deserve.’ I said things like this many times through gritted teeth, without any clear idea of what I was threatening. My husband did not know that darkling well of bitterness existed in me, but I think it poisoned me a little, so that small matters became larger than they were, and I was sometimes cruel to him. I would turn away when he reached for me, even though I had invited his caress. I wanted to hurt him and I found ways to do it. Women, I have come to believe, are capable of monstrous cruelty if they do not act cleanly. Or cannot.

I put the pouch of stones into my basket and set off. Outside the grounds of the King’s Palace it was summer and gloriously bright. The walk in the sunshine with Yssa lifted my spirits immeasurably, and as we approached the nearest bridge that would lead me to my old world, I had to suppress a wild desire to burst into song. It was not the thought of going back to my own world that lifted me, but the fact that I had found a way to act.

I begged Yssa to come with me, but she baulked at the bridge where we were to cross, hanging back and saying that she would come next time. It was ironic that, although there were many ways from this world to my old world, and few in the other direction, faerie folk seldom crossed. Perhaps, like Yssa, they feared it, or feared what might be done to them, or feared mortality might be contagious. Impatient to be gone, I hugged her and promised that I would not be long.

I noticed immediately how few of the people about me seemed to see me, let alone notice the oddness of my clothes. I wondered uneasily if my time in the other world had thinned my essence in my own world, with its solid truths and heavy certainties. Then it came to me that perhaps I had always been less substantial than others of my kind. Might it not be that all the dreams and longings with which I had filled myself had rendered me less solid than other mortals, and so more able to cross between the worlds?

By the time I reached the open market area that was my destination, I was beginning to understand that it was travellers and tourists in particular who were blind to me. The local people saw me, but turned their eyes away. This puzzled me mightily. I did not know then that the denizens of that city, which is a gateway to this world, had been affected by certain residual magic so that they were able to see what outsiders could not. This was not a power they acknowledged or enjoyed. In the deepest part of their minds where all minds join and become mystery, they knew the secret their city hid. Such knowledge is naturally unbearable for most mortals, and so amnesia has become a subtle art in that city straddling the gateway to Faerie. Thus, many who saw turned aside and at once erased that seeing from their mind.

What fascinated me most in the end were the few tourists who showed by their startled looks that they did see me. I was eager to speak to them, but without exception, anyone I tried to approach fled at once with half-shamed faces. I began to wonder uneasily how my time in Faerie had marked me and was glad to reach the open market and give my attention to my list. But when I tried to shop, I soon discovered that although most of the traders could see me, few would acknowledge or serve me. Those who would were invariably the eldest of the traders, and even they would avoid looking directly into my eyes after that first startled glance. They took the jewels I offered without comment and bagged my purchases. They were grimly courteous and the transaction would be so swiftly concluded that it was as if a door had been slammed in my face. I did not know if I was being cheated, but later, when I returned to Faerie, Yssa laughed at my suspicions, saying no mortal would dare to cheat a faerie.

‘But I am not a faerie,’ I protested.

‘You bear the mark of one who has been loved by a faerie,’ Yssa said, and for a moment the old grim grief showed in her eyes.

I wondered, as I often had before, what had been done to her in the past, but I did not ask for I knew she would not answer. Concern for her robbed me of the innocent pleasure I had taken in my purchases and reminded me of the look of pity I had seen in one rheumy mortal eye. No doubt the old man thought I had been stolen, rather than choosing to enter Faerie. It is true that mortal children are sometimes stolen, but my husband told me that usually they are unloved starvelings who have strayed close to Faerie. They are none the worse for their crossing, and probably far better loved and coddled than in their own world, since faerie folk breed so seldom that all children are precious.

But perhaps it is not always so that those stolen children were unloved. As I left the market, an old woman sitting on a stool outside her door had reached out to catch at my hem, asking with tears in her eyes about her little granddaughter, before her husband hushed her.

The old woman’s words changed my mind about going straight back to Faerie upon completion of my shopping. Instead, I made my way to the pension in the small lane where I had lived before my first crossing to Faerie. Scarlet geraniums still dangled in an untidy, vivid cluster from the third-floor balcony of my old apartment, but I saw the nose and the paw of a sleeping dog and a white shirt flapped on the line to tell me my room was now occupied.

What would happen if I knocked and made the concierge acknowledge me? Would she have my case stored in her attic or had it been sent home to my parents along with the report of my disappearance? The police had surely guessed what had become of me, for there must be many disappearances in that city, yet I knew they would never speak of it to the mainland police.

I turned away from the pension without knocking and found myself on the wooden bridge I had crossed on the first day I came to Faerie. Then, I had been wearing flat loafers of the sort my mother had favoured because they were comfortable and quiet. Such footwear does not exist in Faerie, but there, fortunately the highest heels are deliciously comfortable. Indeed I wore high heels to market, and it was hearing them tap tap upon the wooden boards that called to mind the loafers I had worn the last time I crossed that bridge, and made me suddenly decide to follow the same route I had taken on the day I had first travelled there.

I would go as far as the Wolfsgate, I decided, though this time I would not pass into Faerie by that route. I knew of a less contrary crossing close by that I would use.

My intended destination when last I crossed that little bridge had been a small private library. I had been granted special permission to enter it for an entire afternoon. I wanted to examine a certain ancient tome, which referred to an obscure incident in history that I hoped would form the centre of a thesis. I had stopped on the other side of the bridge to examine the letter of invitation from the curator, wanting to make sure I had correctly memorised the name of the street in which the private library was situated. I did not have a map because I had always taken pride in eschewing maps in new cities, and I had passed over the bridge several times already and knew it would bring me to the main thoroughfare from which ran the street I sought.

I had folded the letter and tucked it into my pocket, reassured to have remembered the name correctly, but realising I would arrive early if I went directly to the library. The curator had sounded particularly fussy, an old man unlikely to let me in the door until the specified time, so I decided to explore a little before making my way there.



As Cloud-Marie begins to comb my hair, gently teasing out the snags between her fingers, those two journeys over the same ground seem to fuse. I see myself simultaneously at twenty-two and at thirty-two, moving away from the bridge and turning to go along a canal. Two women slow to admire the opaque aqua flow of water lit with sequins of sunlight, the fringe of green moss waving in the currents along the edge of submerged steps in the canal. The older thinks how the water flowing through the canals in Faerie is darker because it is not water but pure forgetfulness.

Both women come to the piazza and the younger hesitates, trying to decide which way to go. The older remembers what the younger chose, plunges immediately into the narrow lane between two yellow buildings and is surprised to discover a small café had been built further along the lane where there was once none. She was surprised because change is rare in Faerie, and almost as rare close to its borders.

That younger self is left behind as I follow my older self along the lane and see how she was forced to stop when a group of noisy tourists suddenly comes pouring from an intersecting lane, chattering and gesticulating wildly. Unable to continue, she turns to watch how they surge past without seeing the café or her. Their attention is fixed on the formidably buxom woman leading them, her standard an upraised umbrella. She listens as their guide marches them back towards the piazza, explaining in a ringing voice that gondola are made crooked so as to be stable in the water.

‘Imagine that,’ murmurs a woman at the end of the group holding the hand of a small child.

Instead of responding to her mother, the child turns to look at me. That jolted me, I remember, even though I knew some mortal children were capable of seeing faerie until they learned to filter out uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. That thirty-two-year-old self stands staring after the child and its mother until they vanish from sight, then she turns and continues on her way along the lane until it spills into an open area before a cathedral. It is a breathtakingly beautiful building. Her younger self had almost gone inside, but her older self has a wariness of churches and cathedrals, for there is magic of a kind in them inimical to faerie.

I watch my older self turn reluctantly away from the cathedral, then gaze at the building opposite, which had so struck my younger self when she turned from the church.

I had been astonished, I remember, because it seemed so utterly familiar to me. I had never passed that way before. I knew the red-painted sill on the lower front window, the lion-shaped knocker on the front door, the broken shutter on the third floor, and wondered in bewilderment if I might have seen the building in a photograph.

That was when I noticed a lane between it and the next building. I shrugged off the queer feeling that it had not been there a moment past, for how could a lane suddenly appear? I had smiled, then, realising the red sill and lion-shaped knocker and the other things that I had seemed to recognise were only visual clichés I had encountered a dozen times in films and novels featuring that city.

I had gone to peer along the lane, wondering if it would bring me through to the main streets where I would find the library, but it was too shadowy to see properly when I was standing in the sunlight, so I stepped into it.

Thus did my younger self step unwittingly and perilously into the shadowy space where the realms of faerie and mortal reality overlap.



A man sat smoking on a stoop a little way down the shadowy lane. He had a dark, sculpted beard and a mass of coal-black curls flowing over his shoulders. His long legs were stretched out in front of him and the end of the black cigarillo in his fingers was a burning eye in the shadows as he drew on it. He expelled the smoke from his lungs in a long sighing breath and then turned his head to look at me.

I caught my own breath then, having never seen a man so profoundly handsome and so singularly wild looking. He had a long, beautiful, angular face, a straight nose and bright, almond-shaped turquoise eyes flecked with gold that reminded me of the canal water. Dark hairs curled above his collar and showed at his wrists, which were muscular and strong, but instead of his skin being swarthy to match, he was pale as milk. Unabashed by my stare, he held my gaze as he took another long pull at the cigarillo. I had drawn closer without intending it and heard the sound of dry tobacco crackling. Then he took the cigarillo from his lips and sent it spinning away into the shadows further along the lane.

I felt a fool as I realised how I must appear, standing there gawping at him as if he were a statue in a gallery. I said in a brisk voice, ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if this lane will bring me to the main streets along the Grand Canal.’

He uncoiled and rose in a single movement, but instead of stepping towards me, he merely leaned back against the wall and slid his hands into his pockets, asking languidly, ‘I am not sorry that you disturb me, lovely lady. Are you lost?’ His voice was low and soft and seemed to insinuate itself against my skin like an affectionate cat.

‘I don’t mind being a little lost,’ I said.



As Cloud-Marie combs my hair, I blush a little at the boldness of my younger self, though I do not remember myself as bold, this being considered a serious character flaw by my parents.



I went back many times after that first shopping expedition, amassing brooms, dusters, cloths and other domestic and personal items enough to last a mortal life or two. Eventually the novelty of being able to buy what I needed palled for me, but I continued to cross and exchange faerie jewels for the things I needed out of simple necessity. Then one day my husband invited me to a picnic he had conjured for his mother’s court. It was all laid out upon magical cloths that would, once spread, offer whatever food and wine were desired in the thinnest golden plates and crystal goblets. He had got them on his last quest as a gift from a serpent sorceress whom he had done a service, he said, fluttering his eyelashes at me.

I scarcely noticed, for I saw at once how useful such cloths could be and was philistine enough to bundle up the nearest while my husband conjured for his guests an exquisite ballet of butterflies complete with orchestral accompaniment. It is amazing how one’s aesthetic senses fail in the face of simple, honest hunger. I meant to pull the cloth from under the plates and cutlery but discovered to my delight that, at a single deft twitch, all the dishes and leftover food upon it vanished. When the cloth was later laid out again on the floor of my bedroom, I was elated to find the dishes reappeared, gleaming and clean and bearing fresh food.

Yssa said I ought to see if the cloth would give us any food we wanted, so we tried it again, announcing what we wished before we opened it out. It did. It was Yssa, too, who discovered that if you opened the cloth when you were not hungry, it would provide other things, so long as what you wanted was not animate and would fit within the bounds of the obliging tablecloth. For the sake of mischief, she tried wishing for various magical objects, including another of the cloths, but the cloth was deaf to these requests.

‘I was afraid of that,’ Yssa sighed.

The cloth did away with the need to travel back to my own world, and this turned out to be very convenient for, soon after, my womb quickened, and I would not cross between the worlds for fear it might harm the baby inside me. In truth I had no interest in such gallivanting about and brooded no more upon my husband’s neglect of me. I would go again when the child was safely delivered, I told myself, and this time I would persuade Yssa to come too. But as it transpired, Yssa had gone from the palace before my son was born.

I missed my friend badly, but love for my son filled and absorbed me in a way I had not anticipated, being the victim of my mother’s cool boredom over having to tend to a child. Unlike her, I was not oppressed by motherhood. I found myself completely absorbed, which surprised me a little, for even aside from my mother’s example, I had never been the sort to yearn for motherhood as some do, nor to plan for it at some convenient moment in the future.

But when my son was born I became a devoted and adoring mother, and for a time concerned myself with little else than my son and poor Cloud-Marie, for by then I had her to care for as well.

As my son grew to boyhood, I was taken up with the nurturing and schooling of his body and mind. Cloud-Marie had no capacity to learn, but she was a sweet, silent companion and adored my son as much as he loved her. Of course she grew more swiftly than the boy, being fully faerie, and she was soon old enough to help me with him. Indeed he preferred her help in bathing and dressing and choosing his clothes. He did not need her help for long, though, and I was glad of it. I had not intended that she should be a servant, but almost without my noticing it, she began to wait upon me with such touching devotion that I could not bring myself to tell her that she need not do so. She got such contentment from her small services and she truly was a help to me, for this was also the time in which my husband began to woo me anew, once again sending invitations and courtiers from the Summer Palace. I suspect he had finally noticed my preoccupation.

I enjoyed his pursuit, even if it seemed rather childish and unreal, because I was sustained and nurtured at some deeper level by my son and daughter, for so I thought of Cloud-Marie. If I sensed my husband did not adore his son enough, I was not deeply troubled, for I had more than enough adoration to lavish on him.

In truth I was profoundly content, until my son’s affliction began to manifest itself.



When at last my husband returned at his mother’s behest, he did not come to the King’s Palace to see what ailed our son, but summoned me to attend him. I knew he was positioning himself for his defence and all of the angers and resentments of the early days of our marriage resurfaced as I was led down long elegant halls to his small formal audience chamber. I realised he meant to meet me here rather than in his private chamber because he wanted the setting to restrain me. Unrestrained, I told him bluntly of his son’s affliction, for by now I knew a good deal more than I had done. My husband grew very still for a moment and then he spoke not of curses or cures but of the need for our son to seek a bride. It was then he drew me a little aside and said softly, sadly, that it seemed that our son bore the same curse that had afflicted him.

I had guessed as much, but I felt the blood drain from my face at his confirmation of my fears. ‘I thought that I cured the curse by marrying you.’

He nodded. ‘You cured me, and I thought you had cured my blood, but the faerie who laid it upon the sons of our house was blood kin and a curse of blood against blood is very powerful.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘The faerie who cursed your ancestor was a relative?’

‘She was the daughter of the king, but she was not the daughter of his wife.’

‘She was an illegitimate daughter?’

He nodded, his expression sober. ‘I did not speak of the curse before this, because there seemed no reason to dwell upon such dark matters. My mother had a vision as you lay sleeping in the Princess Chamber, which told her that the princess spell you wrought would be very strong, and that you would end the curse upon our blood. I ought to have understood it would not be so simple, for nothing in Faerie is simple. Perhaps it is in the nature of men to always think that they have found the ultimate princess.’

My face and heart flamed with wrath at his cruel words, but he turned from me to announce his decision to quest for a means of ending the curse upon his son and his line once and for all.

‘You would go away again, now?’ I screamed at him.

He looked down his nose at me, reminding me with his cool eyes and manner that we were in a formal audience chamber. Then he said very gently, ‘My love, listen to me. There is truly naught for me to do in what will unfold now. Our son must hunt a girl and bring her to the Wolfsgate Valley where she will be tested as you and other princess brides were tested. This is not a matter for a king, but for mothers and sons.’ My husband took my hand and kissed it, and I was so frightened and weary that I allowed his tenderness to soothe me as he told me that I must learn from his mother what was required of me in the bride hunting, for a queen had a vital part to play. There was no time to waste, he said, then he bade a servant lead me to his mother. I had no choice but to go, although I could not face visiting his mother immediately, so I dismissed the servant and went back to the King’s Palace to tell my son that he was to wed.

I had expected him to snarl that he did not want a bride, but he blushed and scowled at his feet, and my heart battered against my ribs in grief, for here, all unheralded, was the end of my supremacy in his life. He was ready to become a man when I had not finished having a child. I bit back sorrow and jealousy to say calmly that I would speak with his grandmother in the morning, to learn what was required in the matter of hunting a bride. I said nothing to my son of the curse, but I was determined to have the whole truth of it from my mother-in-law.

She was in the garden training a new falcon the next morning when I returned to the Summer Palace. She was feeding the vicious little creature bloody strips of meat, and the sight of her fingers black with dried blood made me queasy. I was ever shocked and shocked again by the visceral and almost casual brutality in Faerie, yet was it not there, hidden in between the lines of the oldest faerie tales? Is that not why the children of my world woke in terror and screamed after hearing a faerie tale, to the astonishment of their parents?

Seeing me, the queen gave the bird into the hands of one of the other queens, and laved her fingers in a bowl of petal-strewn water to clean them. Then she dismissed everyone and invited me to sit with her in a perfumed arbour.

She began by informing me that her son, the king, had sailed away at dawn and that he would likely not return for some time. I bit back my rage at the thought that he had done what he said he would do, wondering what sort of fool I was to have thought it would be otherwise. Nevertheless, I was angry enough to ask her if faerie kings had no interest in the bride-getting of their sons, even when it must save the boy from a curse conferred upon him by his father’s tainted blood. I stabbed the words at her, making them an accusation, though it was not by her choosing that he had left. But I was as angry with her, almost, as with him.

‘You said the curse upon my husband’s bloodline would be cured by marrying me,’ I hissed.

‘And so it shall be,’ said my husband’s mother mildly, and to my complete surprise. ‘You have only to find the right bride and test her well to end the curse forever.’

‘But I thought that you meant I cured the curse when I married your son,’ I said.

She laughed, and for a moment her habitual haughtiness was softened. ‘Do you really think that falling in love is an end to anything? It is only the end of the beginning for your kind no less than mine. It is in our children that our endings are written. As for us women, it is not as princesses we have true power, but as queens and mothers. It was as a mother that I scried out the future, and I saw that you would save my son, but more importantly, that you were the means by which the curse might be broken. But what I saw is only a revealed potential, which you must fulfil. I do not know how. It is a pity that you did not inform your husband sooner about the boy’s degeneration, though, for he might have bade him seek a bride the sooner. As it is, there is no time to waste.’

I was chilled by her words, but furious too, for how could I have known my son was cursed when no one had ever thought to tell me the symptoms of that curse? As to confiding in my husband, ought he not to have spent time enough with the boy to see for himself what was happening, instead of dallying in the Summer Palace or questing? I wanted to ask her those things and to demand savagely how my son was to catch his bride – was he to be sent out to sit on a stoop in a lane and await a fool, as her son had done? But I only bade her stiffly to tell me what to do.



An echo of the anger I had experienced that day in the flowery arbour with my mother-in-law flows through me, and I have to fight the impulse to dash the brush from Cloud-Marie’s patient fingers, for though I do not doubt my husband grieves over what came to pass as much as my mother-in-law, neither of them holds themselves in any way responsible. They do not say it, but I know they blame me, as indeed I blame myself. Yet even now, I do not know what I could have done to prevent what has happened.



The first of many things the queen-mother told me was that her son had spoken the truth; our son must wed a princess bride.

‘It would be best if the maid he chooses has some mortal blood,’ she told me gravely and reminded me that in Faerie, a true princess was not a mere princess by lineage, as in my world. A girl became a princess in Faerie as the result of a spell brewed up between the prince and his mother, the chosen candidate and a magical chamber such as the one that I had occupied in the King’s Palace.

‘But I have no magic,’ I cried, aghast.

‘The instructions you give your son, the way he conducts his hunt for his bride and the way his chosen responds to the tests set for her are the ingredients of the spell. It is the Princess Chamber that will cast the spell, but only if all the ingredients required are present in enough strength,’ said my mother-in-law. ‘And the better the ingredients, the stronger the spell.’

She summoned the other queens to instruct me in the rituals and practices surrounding a son getting a bride. In sympathy, or perhaps by tradition, all of them came in the guise of elderly faerie godmothers and each bore a gift. I was given advice and old wives’ tales, tokens and spells and tomes to aid me. I heard the full history of the curse that afflicted my husband’s lineage, which had been brewed up by a powerful faerie maiden who killed the human man she had loved after he betrayed her, as well as his lover, her own half-sister. It was when she tried to close the gates forever between the human world and Faerie that the king intervened, forbidding it. Affronted, she cursed him, though he was her own father, and when she would not undo the curse, the king took her power from her, but he could not break the curse she had laid upon him and the sons of his blood. From that time, the moment a boy first became a man, he turned slowly and inexorably into a beast, until he was fully beast and had not the wit to turn himself into anything. She had known, of course, that without a true king, Faerie would fail and her revenge would be complete. So far, Faerie had not been closed off, but the ways had dwindled as each king sought the princess bride who would save him.

Later, when I returned to the King’s Palace, a storm cracked its whip viciously overhead, and lightning clawed at the sky, which responded with a hail of bitter pellets of icy rain. But I ignored the weather and my own fear and grief, for the faerie queens had told me, too, of the mother of that king, a wizened but powerful crone, who had spent herself spelling up the magical Princess Chamber in the King’s Palace and devising the rites surrounding it that would produce a princess bride capable of breaking the curse. Many princess brides had come from that chamber and had saved their princes from bestiality, even as I had done, but I was to be the one to save her son and all future sons.

So said my mother-in-law and so I must believe.

I bent my head and heart to this end, examining the strange and sometimes unsavoury tokens I had been given by the queens, and referring to the tomes I had carried off with me. I discovered that there were many rituals as well as rules connected to the getting of a princess bride, and that although I had no choice in the rules, I might alter the rituals or even dispense with them if I chose, that I might brew a more powerful spell. My husband had told me the day before that I must send my son to hunt a bride, but I now understood that it would be the imposition of the help or hindrances I deemed appropriate to test the girl that would give strength to the spell wrought by the chamber.

So, the rules: my son must choose a maid with some mortal blood in her, and she must enter the Wolfsgate Valley and endure three dusks there. He might protect her and aid her as best he could, but the more thoroughly she was tested, the more potent the princess spell would be.

The books made it clear that the prince had no say in anything save that he might choose the maid to be tested and interact with her, within the parameters set by the queen. I was so preoccupied with my research and my preparations that I had failed to note that something had been left unsaid in all the books just as it had not been said in the talk and advice in the garden of the Summer Palace.

None of the queens or books had said what would happen if my son failed to find a bride.



Would it have helped, I wonder now, if I had gone back to my husband’s mother, and demanded to know what would happen? Would it have saved my son for me to know the whole truth? But I did not go back, for I believed my mother-in-law when she said that it was my destiny to help my son find a princess bride to save him and his sons.



At length I got up from my bed, put everything neatly away and made a meticulous toilette before going down to supper. My son was there before me, all eagerness to hear how he was to get a bride. No doubt he had some notion of a ball. Would that it was so simple, I thought bitterly. I drew his grandmother’s formality about me like a ceremonial cloak and told my son that the reason he must take a bride was because he carried in his blood the same curse that had afflicted his father, which could be cured only by his wedding a princess bride.

His face darkened with anger, and he growled that if a bride was all it wanted, he should get one soon enough, for women were weak and easily caught. Had he not already dallied with several sprites? It was a churlish thing to say, but I comforted myself with the thought that these graceless words were a symptom of his degeneration. Once he had found his bride, he would become again the handsome, charming youth that he had been before the curse began to exert itself.

Ignoring his interruption, I told him sternly that he could not choose just any woman to be his bride. She must have mortal blood and be a worthy candidate for the Princess Chamber. His task would be to bring her to the Wolfsgate Valley, where she must remain for three dusks. He might protect her but he must not speak a word to her, from start to finish. Given his graceless manners, it had seemed wisest to forbid conversation. He should have a token I had prepared to aid him in getting her to the Wolfsgate Valley, and at the end of the three days, he must drive or lure her through the Endgate into the grounds of the King’s Palace, before the sun had fully set. She would then be tested by me and, if I deemed her fitting, conducted to the Princess Chamber.

My son’s scowl deepened. ‘How am I to know if the one I hunt can pass all of these tests?’

‘Choose a woman who can love, who is courageous and strong, and worthy of loving,’ I told him.

His insolence angered me, but in truth I did not know how he could best choose his bride. Inwardly I cursed my husband for his absence. He might at least have explained his choosing of me more clearly, so that I could better guide our son. But even more than for my husband I longed for Yssa, for being a faerie, she would surely have been able to guide me.

My son broke into my reverie, sullenly demanding to know why the maid must have mortal blood when pure-blood faerie folk were more fair by far and the girl’s power would be greater if she was wholly faerie. Was this not a condition I had invented, out of vanity?

I drew myself up and told him coldly that if I had my way, I would send him to hunt a mortal woman, for the wits and courage and will of any such who survived the Wolfsgate Valley would have been truly tested, since she had not magic to smooth her way and protect her. I ought to know, I added, for had I not survived without a skerrick of magic?

His cheeks suffused with angry colour, but something in my expression must have made him wary, for he said nothing. Turning from him, I drew myself up and announced in a formal voice that my son, the prince, was to hunt a princess bride, and that the hunt would begin in an hour. I needed time to complete the spell given me by one of the queens, which I would cast upon a small ring from my jewellery box. It would tell the maid that he who put it upon her finger was a noble young man under a spell that would be broken only if she carried the ring to a certain lady who was mistress of a certain mansion.

My son would have raced off at once, but I bade him wait patiently, and suggested he go and bathe and comb his hair and dress in comely attire before returning to my chamber where I would give him the token I had prepared.

‘All of these stupid f*cking rules,’ my son snarled, and slouched out slamming the doors.

When he set off an hour later, I threw myself into my own preparations. I set Cloud-Marie to scrub and polish the grand parlour as I sought candles enough to fill it with a warm haze of light. Then I went to the gardens and cut great armfuls of long-stemmed, perfumed lilies and sprays of lilac and wisteria, while Cloud-Marie lit and nursed the great stove in the bathing room, and filled and heaved enormous cauldrons of water to boil over the flames. These would boil and be topped up continually now, like the fires, until the period of testing was done.

I laid sheaves of cut flowers on the kitchen bench and went to the mist garden with a feeling of apprehension. Just as the queen had predicted, all of the rose bushes now hung heavy, weighed down by the dense, miraculous crop of white blooms that flowered only when a blood prince of the royal house of Faerie had begun his hunt for a bride. Their appearance meant that my son had truly gone seeking a bride, for if he had merely pretended, the roses would not have bloomed.

The petals from the bushes had to be plucked and strewn upon the floor of the Princess Chamber and on the surface of the bath-water ‘so thickly that her nakedness would not be apparent to her own eyes . . .’ There they would lie fresh and soft and fragrant as the moment they were plucked, until the morning a true princess bride lay within the chamber.

I tore rose petals off their blooms in handfuls, piled them in my wicker basket and carried it up to the Princess Chamber. Cloud-Marie was on her knees brushing the plush of the green runner on the grand stairs when I reached her with my fragrant burden. She laid down her brush and stood up to follow me, mouth loosely agape, for she understood as well as I that all of the other preparations had been no more than a prelude to this, the reopening and preparation of the Princess Chamber, which I had not entered since my own testing.

Coming to stand before the high double doors with their ornate carvings of roses and thorns, I set down my basket and wiped the palms of my hands on my skirt. Then I closed them about the smooth nestling doves that were the handles and parted them, expecting a resistance that acknowledged the long years that had gone by since I last passed this way, but the doves bowed to one another and the doors opened with the same silky willingness, as if there were no more than a whisper of air between yesteryear and today.

The doors swung inward, revealing the dark maw of the unlit chamber. I could see nothing at all, and I gestured to Cloud-Marie who shuffled down the hall to get two candelabra, one of which she pressed into my hand upon her return. I thrust it before me into the darkness, and after a long, uncanny pause, the profound shadows filling the room ebbed and allowed the light to enter. I stepped through the door, unsettled by the sudden odd feeling that the light had created the room, and before, there had been nothing but a black void.

I had not thought of the Princess Chamber since the night I had slept here, but on its threshold I remembered the almost suffocating intensity of the scent given off by the roses, which had flowed from the room to which my hostess had shown me. And that other smell, which I had fallen asleep trying to name, and now knew very well. It was the scent of magic, of course, and the room was thick with it.



‘Tradition,’ my hostess had told me, gesturing lightly, dismissively, to the petals that lay on the floor, the absurdity of the bed.



I set the candelabrum on a small table pushed against the whitewashed stone wall beside the door, and drew aside the long damask curtains that concealed the door to the small balcony. It seemed but moments since I had first drawn those curtains to discover the exquisite little balcony behind it, and imagined how lovely it would be to go out onto it in the morning and look down on a sunlit garden. I had no way of knowing that it overlooked a mist garden, where sunlight never fell.

A movement in the chamber behind me recalled me to the present and I turned to see Cloud-Marie looking at me with the soft, sucking, bog-brown eyes of a cow. I pointed to the fireplace and she nodded and lurched over to tend to it. There was no need to sweep or dust. All that needed doing, according to the tome my mother-in-law had given me, was to lay down a carpet of petals, heat bathwater, remove the ashes of the old fire, and lay and light a new one, then renew the bed.

‘The last and final task is the renewing of the bed . . .’

I had assumed this to mean the bed was to be made up afresh, but it was as perfectly made as a bed with dozens of mattresses piled one upon the other could be. I went over and took the rich fabric of the coverlet between thumb and forefinger, hauled it back and recoiled to find the sheets and the top mattress badly mouse-chewed. The reek of damp and mouse musk made me gag and I wondered why the cover had not been affected when the sheet and mattresses had got into such a state.

Cloud-Marie helped me drag all of the mattresses down and spread those that were intact about the room to air, then she cleaned the hearth and lit a fire that was soon crackling merrily, warming the chamber. Later, I would have her bring lavender and cedar balls and camphor to put between the mattresses. Now we dragged those mattresses that were entirely ruined into the hallway to be disposed of, and those that could be repaired we dragged to my sitting room. The rest we must pile up anew. I did not know how repairs could be managed but even as I pondered it, Cloud-Marie led me to a linen closet where there were silk sheets aplenty that could be sewed together as covers, and great bales of fresh cotton and wool wadding as well as goose down. I was surprised to see them, for even though I had bought them myself long ago at the market in my own world, after I had used them in a frenzy of making new bedding for my chamber and Yssa’s, they had vanished. I touched them softly, thinking that Yssa must have put them here. For a moment, my eyes blurred with tears, and I wondered what had become of her, but Cloud-Marie touched my arm and I pulled myself together. Soon we were both sitting back in my tower room, bent over the new mattress cases, our stabbing needles hard at work.

The next day, our eyes red-rimmed and burning with strain and lack of sleep, we carried the new mattress covers back to the chamber and half stuffed them with pure goose down so they would flatten the better. The number of mattresses was the vital thing, according to the books, not their thickness, and I remembered all too clearly my own astonished reaction to an elegant bed made atop a fantastic pile of mattresses that would have me lying closer to the ceiling than the floor.



I had wanted to laugh at the sight of that awkward bed resting amid a sea of white petals, yet the formidable seriousness of the mistress of the mansion precluded it. Besides, I was so overwrought by all I had endured in the past days that I feared I might not be able to stop laughing if I began. What I longed for more than anything was simply to be able to lie down and sleep. I felt sure that I would wake with some sensible understanding of the surreal madness of the previous days. Perhaps even the bed would seem less outlandish in the daylight, after sleep.

I realised my hostess was waiting for me to speak and pulled my wits together to thank her. She nodded and gestured to the bathing room, then withdrew, bidding me sleep well. Her servant closed the door behind them, leaving me alone.

I thought of dragging down a single mattress to sleep on, but the mattresses were set inside the four posts of the bed in such a way that it would require two people to manoeuvre one out. I would have to sleep in the bed or brave the icy stone flags with no more than a blanket under me. I elected for the former; after all, given the things I had endured, it seemed almost decadent to complain about the height of a bed. I entered the gleaming bathing room but was too weary to bathe. Instead, I washed quickly and not very thoroughly and donned the thin nightgown I had been given. Back in the main chamber, I decided I must gather myself before climbing up onto the bed, and I padded about the room exploring, discovering a little balcony overlooking a garden swathed in shadow and mist. There was a chill wind, and before long, I retreated inside to warm myself by the fire.

Drowsy with food and wine and fatigue, my mind drifted to the handsome, dark-haired man in the lane with his canal-green eyes. He had assured me that if I turned back and went this way and that, I would come in a few minutes to the main tourist path along the Grand Canal, but that this was the route for unadventurous tourists, not true travellers, such as I seemed to him. Flattered and intrigued, I had asked if there was some other way. He answered archly that if I took his lane it would bring me to a door in a wall beyond which lay a garden. I could cut through this to another gate that would bring me to a private yard. The lady who owned it did not object to locals passing though to the path alongside the Great Canal. It was a slightly longer route but very beautiful.

Tantalised, I had reluctantly reminded him I was not local.

‘If you like, I will give you something to legitimise your trespass,’ he had offered, taking from his pocket what looked like a bone armlet. It was only when he gave it me that I realised from its lightness it was made of thin, sun-bleached wood.

‘What is it?’ I had asked.

‘It is the property of the lady. If you would take it to her for me, I would be most grateful. You can tell her Ranulf sends you to her with his regards.’

His words were cryptic and a little suggestive and I had wondered if he was not the lover of the lady who owned the armlet and the garden, and meant to use me as a go-between.

‘What if I forget to deliver it?’ I had asked, to give myself time to think.

‘I do not think you would forget to do something you have said you would do,’ he told me, suddenly serious, and he reached out to cup my cheek for a moment in his palm.

‘Very well, I will take it, if you are sure,’ I had agreed, keeping my voice cool to belie my fast-beating heart. In response, he put the circlet into my hand and used his hands to fold mine about it, bidding me wear it for safety. It was too big to be a bracelet, but I had tried awkwardly to do as he suggested until he reached out to take it from my fingers and slip it gently over my wrist and up my arm as far as it would go above the elbow.

I pressed the place where he had touched my wrist and thought of the way my skin had tingled at his touch, and the look of yearning in his eyes when he released me. It was impossible to think of him as a man playing a nasty trick on a gullible tourist. But when I produced the armlet just an hour past to my hostess, repeating Ranulf’s words, determined to deserve his faith in me despite all that had transpired, she had taken the thing from me and seemed to weigh it upon her palm, her expression haughty and at the same time distracted. Certainly it was not the look a woman gave when a precious object had been returned to her. She had eventually thanked me, and invited me in out of the storm-racked night, proposing that I stay as her guest, but there was no warmth in her eyes or words and I had the distinct feeling she thought me a tiresome fool. Yet she had sat with me while I ate and warmed myself by the fire, though she herself ate nothing and said little. In truth she had seemed relieved when I said that I was tired and asked if I might retire.

It was only when she rose, leaving the wooden armlet carelessly on the table, that I noticed there were three exactly like it, threaded with flowers to form a low and intricate flower arrangement. There was a notch in the last, where a fourth ring ought to have fitted, and I realised with mortification that I had returned a bit of a table ornament with ludicrous ceremony. It did not help that I suspected the jape had been played more upon the lady than on me, for I had been the dupe who had enabled it. No wonder she had looked at me with such reserve. What a gullible bumpkin I must seem to her.

My face had burned with shame as I followed her along the hall to the bedchamber, yet now, standing by the fire, I wearily considered the possibility that I might not be the first gulled into performing a fool’s errand, given the cool response of the lady of the house. And in the end, what was an unpleasant jest when compared with all that I had endured in the days after meeting him? I frowned, feeling almost dizzy with fatigue as I wondered if days could really have passed as I remembered. Was it not more likely that I had fallen asleep just inside the walled garden, after I had taken shelter from the sudden downpour, that I had dreamed days full of strangeness before waking, fevered and confused, to make my way to the oddly named Endgate?

Surely I had imagined the impossible vastness of the garden, the wolves.

For a moment I was tempted to seek out my hostess to ask what day it was, except that I could not bear to face her again so soon. Besides, I was so exhausted that if I did not lie down, I would simply topple into the flames.

I staggered to the bed and clambered awkwardly up the mattresses, panting and cursing under my breath and wondering what sort of lunatic tradition required a great stack of mattresses and a floor covered in white rose petals. The smell of the roses and some elusive but heady scent under them was very strong and made me feel half intoxicated. I was perspiring freely by the time I reached the top and I thought I ought to have asked someone to take my temperature, but I could not climb back down now.

I drew back the covers and crawled between the cool fragrant sheets with a long sigh at the marvellous softness of them and the pillows, and closed my eyes gratefully. On the inside of my eyelids, I saw again the handsome angular face of Ranulf, the curving lips, the gold-flecked eyes and the wild dark mop of hair. Even the graceful small movements of his hands were clear in my memory, as was the cool silky feel of his fingers against my cheek.

‘Fool,’ I muttered.

I drifted into a dream in which I vividly relived my encounter with him in the passage. In the dream he suggested the lane would bring me to the thing I wanted most in all the world.

‘I have not told you what I want,’ I objected.

‘You will desire what you find at the end of this passage, I swear it,’ he responded fiercely.

‘On your mother’s soul?’ I demanded, deciding he was teasing me.

His eyes widened at my words and he said, ‘Oh yes, on my mother’s soul. I do swear it.’



Cloud-Marie threw a silken coverlet over the bed and I regarded the result of our labours with some satisfaction. A hundred part-stuffed mattresses still rose high, but now the bed looked merely quirky rather than grotesque.

We went to the kitchen, for I had decided to cook the meal my son’s chosen would eat with my own hands. As I worked at kneading dough, I found myself remembering vividly how confused I had been when the handsome stranger in the lane had suddenly ended our conversation by walking away without trying to give me his telephone number so that I could let him know I had delivered the armlet. I had watched him go, wondering if he would glance back, but he had not.



My husband had told me later, when we lay twined and tenderly dissecting the steps that had led me to his bed, that his mother had forbidden him to look back once he had given me her token, saying if he did, I would be lost to him.

‘She was right, Ranulf,’ I told him, startled. ‘If I had seen you look back, I would have suspected you meant to creep down the lane after me and rob me, or worse, I might not have gone along the lane after all.’

His response had been to lick my naked shoulder like a cat. Ignoring the way his tongue roused my senses, I persisted, asking why he had shown himself to me at all, for I might well have gone along the lane of my own accord, rather than turning back.

‘I had to be the one to invite you into Faerie,’ he’d murmured.

‘How could the mere suggestion that I go along the lane be counted an invitation?’ I demanded. ‘I did not see it as an invitation.’

He tenderly peeled a strand of sweat-stiff hair from my cheek, and kissed me with his cool lips before saying, ‘Of course you knew it was an invitation. I offered the ring and you accepted it. You did not understand why I had given it you, but you were curious and so accepted it. Curiosity is a form of courage, my love, and that is one of the essential ingredients for a maid who would enter the Princess Chamber. How else would she dare the spindles and locked doors of the tests leading up to it?’

‘What did it show that I chose the central path when the lane split into three?’ I had wanted to know then. ‘I didn’t make my choice out of any special wisdom or instinct. Was it luck that had me choose the right way?’

‘There was no right and no wrong choice. All three choices would have brought you to the Wolfsgate. There was only the need to choose. You see, humans generally act according to the ends that they imagine will come of their actions. The Threeways Path strips away the illusion that reason controls destiny. You would be surprised how many people, faced with the knowledge that reason cannot help them, find they cannot act. Many feel that in turning back to known ways, they retain control. A few stand indecisive, realising that even turning back is a choice filled with mysteries. They are the wiser, but if they stand too long, the Cruel Wind will come to drive them back to their own world just as it will blow at the back of those who retreat at once.’

‘What if you had chosen a faerie with mortal blood?’ I asked, for though I had not been there long enough to meet other mortals who had crossed, I knew they existed.

‘I might have done, but it was my mother’s advice that I hunt a mortal woman.’

That had surprised me, for I had secretly felt his mother looked down on me because I lacked even a drop of faerie blood. ‘She would not have had to face the Threeways Path,’ I said.

‘Only princess candidates who are mortal face that particular test, but there are other tests for those of faerie blood. Each test, and the response of the candidate to it, is an ingredient in the spell that will be wrought by the Princess Chamber, and there are many ingredients, some stronger than others. There are some deeds done in response to tests that are so potent they require no other ingredient, though that is rare and cannot be predicted or relied upon.



I set the bread to its first rising and cleaned down the bench, pondering the tests I would set for my son’s chosen, and wondering what sort of spell she and I would make between us. This done, I helped Cloud-Marie slice quinces for a pie and cut up wild mushrooms we then doused with spiced marinade. The shared activity and the smells of yeast and sherry and caramelised sugar made me think of Yssa, for it was from her that I learned to enjoy cooking.



She had treated it as if it were an art to delight all the senses, and so it had become for me, under her tutelage. She had been so honestly horrified to hear how I had fed myself before I stole the magic cloth from my husband, that I had become ashamed of my carelessness. In truth I had not known any better, because my own stiff mother had despised cooking as a bourgeois pursuit and cared not at all what she ate.

Yssa had liked the ease of the food conjured by the cloth well enough, but despite being faerie, she had preferred to cook our meals herself. I had not known enough back then to understand how unusual that was, but abashed by her reaction, I had dutifully offered to help her. However, guided by her pleasure in the activity and her skill, I soon began to look forward to those meals we cooked between us. It was Yssa who made me understand that cooking is to eating what painting a picture is to merely looking at it. She made me see that cooking was as wholesome and nourishing to the spirit as good food is to the body.

After her departure, with two children to care for, I had neither time nor patience for cooking and let the art and the love of it slip from me, relying on my magic cloth to nourish us all. It was long since I had cooked, but I had not forgotten what Yssa had taught me. In the midst of the fragrant heat of the kitchen, I felt such a longing for the faerie woman who had been my best friend in this world, in any world.

Yet when she had come to the door of the palace kitchen when I had been there one day early in my marriage, whey-faced and grim, I had no notion of how much she would come to mean to me. Still, I must have sensed what lay in the future, for surely it was not only out of pity that I invited her in, deliberately breaking the protective seal about the King’s Palace which prevents anyone or anything entering without royal permission. When he returned from his questing, my husband was annoyed. A queen could ask anyone into the palace, he later explained, but no queen had ever done such a thing without first consulting her husband. I begged his pardon and then teased him for his pomposity. But later, when I mimicked his words for Yssa, she said soberly that the king was right, for the ban was there to protect me.

‘I need no protection,’ I had laughed, for in those days I was loved well by the people.

I remember Yssa’s reply.

‘You are a mortal for all you are the queen. Not all in Faerie love mortals.’



As Cloud-Marie set down the comb and began brushing my hair, I told myself that Yssa would have shared my disappointment in the first girl my son hunted, for she turned out to be little more than a coarse child.



She had been born in Faerie of the granddaughter of a mortal woman and a faerie man, peasant farmers who dwelt not far from the palace. I had learned this by smearing onto my mirror a gob of a magical preparation which one of the queens had given me.

I had finished all of my preparations and sat gazing into the mirror at my son, as he embraced his milkmaid with her rosy cheeks and soft round bosom. I saw how her foolish wide blue eyes bulged as he thrust the bespelled ring into her hands and began fumbling at her milky bosom. Seeing him paw her, I felt sorry I had allowed him to take a human shape, yet clearly she was amenable to his rough kisses. But when she tried to slip the bespelled ring on her finger, it would not fit over her thick knuckles.

My son scowled and snatched the ring back, running to the barn to hammer at it. When he brought the poor battered thing back and forced it on her finger, her mouth fell open as she listened to the instructions it offered. I watched my son lead her to the edge of the Wolfsgate Valley closest to the palace and point to the King’s Palace, which would appear to her as nothing more than a mansion with spires and turrets. His chosen nodded eagerly and galloped off. Having the use of magic, she suffered no more than a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the nose in the course of the next three days, as my son, now beast-shaped, drove her hither and thither to keep her moving, at the same time making sure she would not be far from the Endgate on the third dusk.

At one point, watching in my mirror as he gawped oafishly at her washing her plump, filthy feet in a stream, I prayed that my son had chosen her to spite me or even out of laziness rather than that he was so crude as to desire such a bovine mate. I was certain by now that she would never reach the Princess Chamber, let alone spend a night in it.

The girl got as far as the door to the palace, where she took one look at me deliberately tricked up in all the glittering magnificence I could muster and fled gibbering, my ring still jammed upon her swelling finger. My son came raging at me, saying he would not let me tell him what to do. I laughed cruelly and told him if he could do no better in his choices than a trembling mooncalf who ran away in terror, he had better let me hunt for him.

‘At least I might choose you a full-grown woman whose desire for a husband will be robust enough to get her through the door,’ I said harshly. I dared not show pity or grief or fear. I had to shock awake the subtlety and refinement of taste that I had nurtured in my son, before the curse began to make itself felt.

I saw I had wounded him, and prayed pain would wake his true self, but instead the beast looked from his eyes as he announced arrogantly that he would entice the next one so thoroughly, she would come to me without her drawers. It shocked me that he would say such a thing to me, and I told him with an icy bluntness that he would do better to consider choosing a maid with more mortal blood so that the Wolfsgate Valley would truly test her, else even if she managed to reach the chamber, she would not have what it took to become his princess bride.

The next time he hunted he chose a bold beauty with wit and courage but still no more than a drop of human blood, so she had power enough to pass the three days in the Wolfsgate Valley as if she were in her own garden. My son had bitterly resented my forbidding him a human shape and was glad his chosen had magic enough to protect herself so that he need not reveal himself to her in his beast shape more than twice: once when he had brought the ring to her, tied in his mane, and at the end, when he led her to the Endgate. She sneered openly at Cloud-Marie who brought her to me and gave me an insolent and triumphant smile as she removed the now-battered ring from her finger – it had been removed by a blacksmith from the finger of the last candidate – and gave it to me.

I saw from her behaviour that she had courage enough and poise as well as beauty, but was there any gentleness in her, or self-control? When she asked to speak to the young man of the house, I told her that he would not come until daybreak and she responded with a request to sleep the night under my roof. She asked prettily enough, but there was no thought in her that I would refuse. When I said she might remain if she was willing to do a service for me, she acquiesced grudgingly. I set her a room full of straw to spin in a chamber suffused with a scented oil that rendered all magic useless, a gift from the queens, then I sent a twisted little man to offer aid. As I had guessed from her reaction to Cloud-Marie, the young woman’s beauty made her unforgiving of ugliness, but I had not guessed that ugliness would make her actively cruel. Rather than begging his aid or merely refusing it, the girl had jeered and thrown her shoe at the dwarf. Enraged, he had become invisible, pinched her black and blue, and then sliced off the end of her nose.

I had been sickened to see all the blood and mess, but the faerie queen who had lent the dwarf refused to command him to set the matter right. She was fond of the little fellow, she said sternly, and he was shaped to meet like with like. I could not argue. There was no denying the beauty my son had chosen had a short temper and a cruel streak and the outcome was her own fault, for had she been kinder and more polite, the dwarf would willingly have helped her. Even so, I could not help feeling sorry for her as she limped away holding a bloody kerchief to her ruined nose.

My son, restored to his true form, came snorting and bellowing to my chamber in fury. I saw that he had been roused to passion by two hunts and longed to slake it, so I let his anger pour itself over me without responding to it until the torrent ran dry. When at last he stood dumb and panting, my heart bled to see him so reduced, but I dared not let him see any softness in me. Instinct told me to be adamantine.

‘Did you really think a plump little mooncalf or a strutting strumpet fit to rule this realm?’ I asked sharply. ‘Or was it that you were not thinking? You were merely following the base and bullish urges of your loins, like any woodchopper or pig butcher? Perhaps in future you might think beyond bed sports when you hunt, since you will be king and will need a princess who can become a queen to help you rule this kingdom of Faerie.’

‘I do not want a queen,’ he snarled. It was only an unthinking riposte, and yet I thought that there was a bitter general truth in it, for was not I queen, and seemingly tormenter and obstacle to his every desire?

‘Do you want a princess bride who will save you, then?’ I asked, letting my tone become weary and disdainful. ‘For the qualities required by a queen are one and the same as those required for a maid to become a princess bride. Hunt again, my son, and this time choose a maid who will make a good queen, for only such a one will be able to save you.’

Despite his outrage, I saw in his next choice that he had listened, though he said not a word to me about our confrontation following the previous hunt. This time I sent my son out as a cat, hoping some of the subtlety and sly grace of the form would seep into him. I waited for his new chosen to come knocking at my door, and once more cooked and prayed that he had hunted wisely this time. I had forbidden myself to spy, but when the food was done, I went again to my chamber and used the last smear of the seeking salve on my mirror.

The maid my son had hunted this time was a faerie noble’s daughter with a goodly dollop of mortal blood from her mortal father, and this made my heart leap, for it meant she would be better tested in the Wolfsgate Valley and so bring more substance to the chamber than any of the others. She was not living with her parents, having run away from their strictness to live with a household of dwarfs. She did well enough in the Wolfsgate Valley, for she had some magic to aid her, but it was weak enough that she needed her wits and courage as well, and those she seemed to have aplenty. My heart soared and I was glad I had given my son the power to turn into a lion in order to protect her. He still resented the fact that I had made him a donkey in a previous hunt, feeling it made mock of him, though in truth he had made a fine, handsome beast and that form had tenacity and patience.

At dusk on the third day, his chosen came safe through the Endgate and soon was at the door telling me an eager tale of having received a battered gold ring from the mouth of a fish caught by a beautiful orange cat. This had happened, she told me loftily, while she sat watching fish flit back and forth in the depths of a well and thinking deep, pure thoughts.

Accepting the ring and the tale with some scepticism, I invited her in. She lifted her lacy hem fastidiously as she mounted the steps in her dainty shoon. Of course she had used magic to restore her appearance before knocking at the door, and I ran my eyes over her. She was a pretty creature with small, very white teeth, blue eyes, and a long swan’s neck, tiny shell-like ears and hair like a river of pale golden fire. But as we ate, I saw that her mouth was small and she seldom used it to smile and only did so sincerely at a mirror hanging on the wall. All of her attention was turned inward and she spoke of her life with the dwarves, explaining with relish how they had worshipped her beauty and lavished jewels and admiration on her. Indeed, her ears and wrists glittered with the gaudy weight of the gold and jewels she wore, and I was sure it had been these she had been admiring in the well rather than fish and philosophy.

She asked about my son, and I told her he would come the next day. She feigned a delicate yawn and asked if she might lie down and sleep awhile. It was cleverer than a request to spend the night, but still I told her that she could lie down under my roof only after locating a golden ball I had lost in a muddy field inhabited by magical frogs.

She agreed impatiently, certain her magic would enable her to find it, but she soon discovered her magic had no power in that field, which had been sowed with a certain herb I had been gifted, and so she must truly search. The unmelodious croaking of the frogs near drove her mad, so I used a magic shawl one of the queens had given me to transform myself into a poor old woman in rags and offered to sing a song that would make the frogs help her find what she sought. She answered pettishly that she did not need the croaking of a useless old woman any more than she needed the croaking of frogs to find the gold ball, which the sour crone of the house required before she could sleep there. She would summon her seven protectors, who would find the golden ball soon enough for her. She had already sent the pet dove they had given her to fetch them. Then she went back to trying to admire her reflection in the water.

Of course I did not allow the dove to deliver its message, having released from its jewelled box a simple confusion spell that would prevent it leaving, so my son’s hapless chosen passed the night in the field before stalking away at dawn in a filthy temper, forfeiting her chance to become a princess.

‘You are choosing the stupidest tests,’ my son snarled. ‘What does it matter if she cannot find a gold ball in a field, or turns her back on a beggar woman, if she has passed through the Wolfsgate Valley?’

‘You know perfectly well by now that the Wolfsgate Valley does not truly test any but a full mortal,’ I snapped. ‘That is the reason the queen sets tests, so that the lack may be answered. As to the girl you hunted this time, she was vain and ruthlessly self-centred. I would be surprised if she could tell me the colour of your eyes, for given her nature, the only thing she would have looked for in them was her reflection. There was nothing to her but a crafty cleverness, shallow wit and hollow beauty!’

I bade him hunt again, for time was running out for all of us.

The fourth maid he chose was a mortal who had come to Faerie when she was but a child. She had been adopted by a sweet merchant. She was plump and kind and had a soft full mouth and a gentle heart, which made her promise at once to help the unicorn that dropped the battered golden ring into her lap, but she was also exceedingly simple. She had no magic, being fully mortal, and survived the Wolfsgate Valley only because a faerie godmother had blessed her with luck and because of my son’s vigilance and vicious unicorn strength. I had given him that form in the hope that he would be inspired by it.

When she came to the palace to give me the ring, I assayed a test to see if she had even a modicum of common sense. I warned her specifically not to accept food from strangers, though she was hungry, but to walk in the garden, and I would send Cloud-Marie when a meal was ready. Within ten minutes, she took a poisoned apple from me in my old-woman’s disguise, and ate it. Loosening her stays and dribbling the antidote for the poison she had eaten into her lovely mouth, I thought it a pity she had not wit enough to temper her sweetness, for a queen cannot rely on luck and sweetness alone.

Still, she had pretty manners, and when I sent her off, saying my son had not really needed rescuing, she went trustfully, woebegone but wearing a bracelet of undying violets, and an instruction from me to her father to bid him wed her to his clerk. She had confessed to me that they had pledged their troth in secret as children, for her father would never permit her to marry so low.

‘You sent her away! You can’t do that!’ my son shouted. ‘I wanted her!’

‘I told her that your disguise was a trick and that you had no need of rescuing, so she ought to go home, and she went. If she had been wiser, she might have guessed I was lying.’

‘You are ruining my life,’ shouted my son, but there was fear in his eyes for the first time, and it broke my heart, for I realised that, with this girl, he had truly been trying to find a candidate who would please me.

It had struck me then that part of the problem faced by my son was that the curse had nullified all the grace and cunning of his faerie blood, leaving only the mortal part, and at his age, many mortal men are little more than lumpish boys without subtlety or finesse. How should such a boy be capable of choosing a girl who could become a good woman and a good queen? The next morning over breakfast I tried to talk to the boy about women and their qualities, and about wiving, but he listened with obvious boredom and resentment, tossing the ring up and down in his hand and occasionally letting it fall and roll away to scour my nerves.



Cloud-Marie ceases brushing to bring me honeyed tea, and I sip at it, grateful for its sweetness, its warmth coiling down into me. I close my eyes, but the thought comes nagging and plucking at me that, although I did not bid my son hunt again after the last dreadful hunt years past, I never did officially command him to leave off hunting. And the night before, pity for his diminished state had persuaded me to remove his chain and release him into the Wolfsgate Valley to run there for the night. I had used a bespelled chain my mother-in-law had given me to stop him roaming out of the valley in case he wandered into a village and devoured some hapless peasant with too little magic to stave him off. But it would not have prevented him travelling to the human realm.

What if he had gone there to choose another girl before returning to be chained up again in his yard at dawn? What if the howl I heard earlier was truly a howl signalling the arrival in the Wolfsgate Valley of his chosen, the beginning of a new testing?

Was it possible?

His father had found me there, and perhaps my son retained some dim memory of it, or it might be that my angry words about the worth of mortals tested by the valley had remained even when his human form was lost, to work their way to the surface of his wolf brain. But how could he hunt in the real world where wolves do not routinely run about the streets, and in that city of all cities, where there is no wilderness except the wildness of degeneration? At night he might conceivably pass as a dog, but even if he had managed to find the will to go there and to hunt, what sort of girl would dare accept a battered ring from the neck of a great white wolf? For him to come close enough to bestow it on her, she could not fail to see the savagery in his eyes and know him for a beast. And what of the ring? Certainly I had not taken it from him after what happened to the last candidate, but surely the ribbon had rotted long since, and the ring fallen into a bog or crack. But supposing he still had the ring, and had hunted a girl brave enough to take it from his neck? Would she imagine it could reveal the name of the owner of what she might suppose to be a tame wolf? But what human woman would then obey an eldritch voice issuing from the ring, commanding her to go thence and do this and that in order to free a nobleman’s son from a spell?

In the mirror I see that Cloud-Marie’s errant eye is turning sideways. My breath catches in my throat as she turns her head so that, for a moment, both eyes regard curtains I have not drawn in two years. I had not thought to ever open them again, for the window behind them looks out on the same mist garden as can be espied from the balcony of the Princess Chamber where, when a hunt begins, white roses bloom in profusion.

I know I must look out, have known it since the howl waked hope in me, yet if no roses have bloomed, my son is lost. But in this moment it is horror that deters me more than the fear of having to abandon hope, for, with all my heart, I do not want to be reminded of what I beheld the last time I entered the mist garden.

Cloud-Marie’s good eye turns back and holds my gaze, and I realise that I am not breathing. I release it in a hissing moan as I remember the scarlet beads of blood caught on my son’s muzzle. And though my mind shies from it, I remember following the trail of blood to the body of the young woman in the mist garden. She was dead because she had made the mistake of going outside, rather than staying in the Princess Chamber and sleeping as I had bidden her. I suppose my son thought she had failed, or that she meant to leave. Maybe she had intended to leave. Whatever the reason, he had torn her throat out.

I shivered, remembering the desolation and anguish and rage of his howls that night and for many terrible long nights to follow. I had wept into my pillow for hours, sick with grief for the girl and despair for my son, who had lost his last chance to save himself. That was when I had given up, for I knew the beast must have gained the ascendant for him to have slain the girl he had hunted for his bride.

Cloud-Marie and I buried her on a grassy knoll just beyond the mist garden, where the sun would fall, and although I told no one but my husband and my mother-in-law what had happened, word of the grisly tragedy got out, and thereafter no one came willingly to the King’s Palace. When anyone did come, I would often see them make the sign of horns with their little finger and forefinger, to ward off ill-fortune.

Steadying myself, I drive back horror and gather my courage before signing for Cloud-Marie to take the shawl from my lap. I am chilled to the bone by what I must do and it is not a chill from which any shawl or fire can shield me. She folds it with an oddly graceful and almost ceremonial air, and I feel her uneven eyes on my back as I rise and cross to the curtains. I have to make myself lift my arms, grasp one curtain in each hand and throw them open.

I draw in a breath of chilly wonder, for the garden below glows white with roses that are blooming more thickly than I have ever seen them do before. It might have snowed save for the intoxicating scent the roses give off, even in the clammy air. I draw in a breath and hear the light rasp of the sea in my lungs.

‘It is a miracle,’ I say, aloud, to the misty night or maybe to the stars. I feel how strange it is to use such a word here. Turning, I see that Cloud-Marie still stands by my empty chair, the rug cradled in her arms as if it were a babe. Instead of looking frightened or relieved or even happy, there is a listening expression on her loose features, and then I hear it.

A wolf, howling.

It is not my son. I know the timbre of his call, and besides, he is chained up. Nor is it the distinctive call of the leader of the wild pack whose demesne is the Wolfsgate Valley. It must be another wolf from the pack, and a picture forms inexorably in my mind of the black wolf.

Then my blood runs cold and I draw in a horrified breath, for I have forgotten the most important thing! If the candidate is a mortal maid, she has entered the Wolfsgate Valley without any magic to protect her or her prince to watch over her.

I turn and run to my son’s yard, heart pounding so hard that my ribs hurt. He is straining at the end of his chain to get as close as he can to the side gate, which opens to the short passage leading to the Endgate. His whole body is trembling with electric tension.

I hurry over and release the catch upon his chain. His fur is white and his eyes have the same gold flecks as his father’s, but over the paler grey of my own eyes. I cross to the gate and he watches me, pricking his ears. He knows this is the way to the Wolfsgate Valley, but it is only dusk and I have never let him out save at darkest night before. Nor have I made any attempt to fasten about his neck the magic chain that will limit his roaming. Does he understand what these things mean? Does he understand what he must do now? I pray so, else the blood of another maid will stain his muzzle and my hands. For a moment I hesitate, but love for my son and crippled hope make me unlatch the gate. I do not attempt to give him any instruction. There is only wildness in his eyes now, and the valley will do all the testing that is needed. My son’s task is to protect the girl and guide her at the last to the Endgate. Remembering the other howl, I tell myself that though my son might lack a rational mind, he knows in his essence what is unfolding, and I pray that his chosen has not already come to harm.

I open the gate and walk along the short passage to the Endgate, hearing him padding along behind me, panting. When I open the gate in the wall that separates the palace from the Wolfsgate Valley, my son passes through it. For a moment he stops in the clearing and looks back at me, standing in the gateway. I want to see a glimmer of human intelligence in his eyes, of love for me and knowledge of mine for him, but there is only an unfathomable wildness there, and then he turns away from me and looks out into the valley.

At that moment, far away, there is another howl. This time it is the deep throaty howl of the leader of the grey pack, and every hair on my body stands on end as I remember his red maw and ravenous eyes. But my son stretches his neck and gives a long ululating call in reply, then he leaps away and is gone.

Returning to the courtyard, I sign to Cloud-Marie that we must collect the petals for the Princess Chamber. I can see, writ in her body, that she does not want to go into the mist garden, and I do not blame her. It was always a strange and unsettling place, thick with the smell of magic, but I must go there at once, or I may lose the courage I will need to go there at all, and I have my part to play this one last time.

I steel myself as we make our way down to the mist garden, yet my heart pounds and my gorge rises as a vile picture comes unstoppably into my mind of the last candidate: the bloody gash at her throat and the spray of red so bright against her pale cheeks, the way her eyes stared so horribly and absently at the sky as we sewed her into her shroud.

I bite my lip hard and begin to tear handfuls of petals from the clusters of roses on the bushes and from those climbers trained over decorative frames which display the blooms in cascades and sheaves and coiling swathes. We gather petals for more than an hour, feeding them into my hold-all baskets until I decide we have enough. The scent of the petals is very strong because those on the bottom are being crushed by the weight of those on top.

I am about to signal to Cloud-Marie that we have enough when I notice a spray of shadow flowers beneath one of the bushes. On impulse, I bid Cloud-Marie carry the basket to the top of the stairs and wait there for me. She looks anxious but obeys me. As soon as she has gone out of sight, I pick a few of the tiny lavender-grey blossoms, then hurry through the garden to a gap in the surrounding wall and run lightly up the hill beyond. Being outside the garden, I see the sun has set and the moon shines brilliantly in the dusk, and illuminating the grave atop the knoll. I kneel and lay the flowers where I imagine her breast might be.

I swear to her bones that this new candidate will come to no harm at the hands – nay, the teeth and claws – of my son.

Returning to the palace, I take the petal-filled baskets from Cloud-Marie and we return to the Princess Chamber. As we strew the petals, re-lay the fire and renew the bed, which I never thought to do again, I find myself thinking of all of those maidens for whom I have made this same preparation. Five did not accept the invitation, and of those who did, nine turned back at the Threeways Path and seven of those who went forward did not pass through the Wolfsgate. Of the seventy-eight who passed through it, sixty-two failed the tests there in one way or another. Sixteen passed through the wood and came to my door, but three turned away without knocking. Of the thirteen young women who entered my house, two were convinced by trickery or reason to abandon their quest at once, five failed the tasks they were set by me and two refused to undertake them. One tripped down the stairs and broke her neck. That had been near the beginning and my son had been man-shaped and still soft enough to pity the young woman her fatal clumsiness. He had left her at the bottom of some steps in my own world, where it would appear she had stumbled. Only three had been shown to the Princess Chamber. Only two slept in the bed and neither had brought enough for the princess spell to be woven. The thirteenth was the last, she who walked in the mist garden and died in the teeth of the beast, my son.

I frown, realising the final tally is ninety-nine. I count again, certain I must have miscounted, but I did not. I lick my lips. The current hunt is the hundredth, and I have been too long in Faerie not to recognise an omen when I encounter one. Even the fact that I have never thought to add up the number of candidates before is significant. All at once I am utterly exhausted. It seems to me that I have not been so tired since I came to the palace seeking refuge after my own three nightmarish days in a walled garden that had turned into a wild valley full of wolves.

I stumble to my own bed, cast myself down and sleep. But there is no escape for, in my dreams, the memories await me.



There were three passages before me, all narrow, all identical, running away out of sight. With nothing to decide between them, for the handsome Ranulf had not told me the way forked, I chose the middle path, and as I stepped into it, a gritty wind whirled up out of nowhere, dragging at my hair and scouring my cheeks. Instead of coming from one direction it seemed perversely to be coming from all directions at once, though I could not see how that was possible in such a narrow alley.

The grit in the wind got into my eyes and they began to water. I felt my way along, eyes streaming, as I steadily cursed my foolishness for taking directions from a stranger.

A handsome stranger, my mother’s voice sneered, waspish with disapproval, for she distrusted good looks on principle.

I shook her voice from my head, reasoning that the bullying wind was not the fault of the man, though he might have mentioned the fork in the way. I could have turned back, but I went on, wondering at my ill-luck in choosing the one lane in the whole city that seemed to contain not a single doorway that could provide refuge.

After what seemed a very long time, the lane reached a small square. At once, the wind died. Bemused by the sudden silence, I gazed about the empty square in a sort of battered daze. The sun shone through ragged patches in the billowing banks of black cloud overhead and lit up odd details. Instinctively I moved towards the nearest patch of sunlight, my cheeks stinging as if they had been sandpapered. I touched them gingerly, wishing there was a canal running by so that I could wet them. But the square was closed, save for the lane I had come through. This explained why I had not seen any other tourist since entering it. But where were the people who lived in the buildings around the square? Ordinary citizens here appeared to regard the squares adjacent their apartment buildings as extensions of their living rooms or public meeting halls and they would come out on the slightest pretext, bringing chairs to sit on while they took the sun and gossiped or smoked or played cards. Yet here was a square empty of people.

I looked around more carefully, wondering if it was possible that the buildings were deserted. I had heard it said that the whole city was sinking into the water a fraction every year, and my own landlady had told me many first floors in buildings were not used at all. Perhaps these buildings had degenerated so badly they had been condemned, or had been sold to a developer who was yet to decide their fate. I grimaced at the thought of a KFC or a McDonalds or Taco Bell in this ancient place.

Then I noticed that one of the walls of the square was not the exterior of a building, but a high wall above which rose foliage. There was a door set into an alcove, which surely must be the gate Ranulf had mentioned. The stones of the wall had a weathered look that made it appear even older than the beautiful crumbling facades of the buildings around the square, and when I reached the door, for it was truly more door than gate, I saw a tarnished metal plaque affixed to the blackened timber, featuring a murky, heavily furred dog baring his teeth. I thought it might be a warning against a resident dog, but when I set my fist to the door and knocked, no dog came leaping and barking at the other side. The wood was pitted, charred and oiled but there was a small square opening in it crossed by two stubby bars. I stood on tiptoe to look through them and saw a stretch of open ground that ran to a line of trees whose branches flailed and twisted in the wind. I could not feel a breath of wind now, but perhaps the wall was shielding the square.

Though I strained to make out what lay beyond the trees, the clouds cast their shadows too heavily beyond the wall for me to see. I reached for the handle to the door, then noticed there was a lock in the wood under it, a great heavy thing of iron that looked as if it had not been opened in centuries. I was disappointed, for any moving parts would long ago have fused together in the damp sea air that permeated the place, and besides, there was no key. What had the man in the passage been playing at, saying I could use the door? Had it been a joke?

A voice hailed me and I turned to see an old beggar woman sitting on the cobbles by the wall. She must be a good deal more spry than she seemed, to have appeared in the few moments I had my back turned to the square. She was turning and turning a plastic cup in her fingers, her faced tilted in my direction, and feeling the same combination of guilt and pity that beggars always roused in me, I went to her, scooping coins from my pocket. No doubt she would spend the coins on drink or cigarettes, but at least I had given her the means to get some food if she chose. I leaned forward to drop them into her cup and she started violently.

‘What do you want?’ she shrieked, so loudly that I staggered back in shock. She turned her head awkwardly as if her neck was wrongly joined and, seeing her face, I almost gasped at her marvellous ugliness. Then it struck me that I might have frightened her, for there was a cloudiness in her eyes that suggested cataracts. Probably I had been no more to her than a dark shape looming over her, and from the way she had bellowed she was deaf, too, and so had not heard my approach.

I bent closer and said clearly, ‘I put in some coins. In your cup.’ Swift as a striking snake, one of her hands darted out and her dry bony fingers closed on my wrist like a manacle of twigs. I wanted to snatch my hand away, because now that she had moved, her ripe stench had risen to envelop me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said gently, trying to breathe only through my mouth. ‘I just put money into your cup.’

‘I am no beggar,’ she said. ‘I will tell your fortune for the coins.’ She gave me a smile that bared stained and broken teeth, and turned my hand to flatten it out. I endured this, thinking the mysterious man in the alley and the old woman must surely be partners in trickery, though to what end I could not guess. But a tiny part of me was also curious to hear what she might say about my future.

Idiot, my mother’s voice chided me.

The old beggar looked at me so sharply that for a moment I thought she must have heard the thought, but she only said, ‘When you were a girl, you dreamed a prince would come to claim you.’

As predictions go, it left something to be desired, but just the same, her words roused a queer reckless bitterness as I thought of the married lover for whom my parents had disowned me. ‘That is the wish of a girl. I am a woman and I have learned that there are no real princes,’ I said.

‘Oh, there are princes, but there is a price for the having of them,’ she answered.

‘What price?’ I asked, half mesmerised by her intensity. ‘I gave you all the coin I have and I do not have my purse with me.’ It was true, but I did not expect her to believe me.

‘The price is all that you have,’ she said. Then she released my wrist and tapped at the scuffed toe of one of my shoes.

A chill slipped down my spine, because how could she know about my safety money – the little flat foil package of notes I had carried around the world in the toe of my sensible shoe? I had forgotten it myself, but now I found myself imagining taking off the shoe and giving the notes in it to her, and then realised that I was doing just that.

Madness, I thought as she took the packet from me and slipped it into her grubby bodice. I waited to feel humiliated by what I had done, but instead I felt as if I had put down something heavy. It was absurd, but I straightened up, drawing my hand from hers to flex my shoulders.

‘Give me your hand again,’ the old woman urged, making a little crabbed gesture towards me with her grimy fingers.

‘I don’t want to know the future,’ I said, amazed to discover that this was true. ‘I will know it when it comes.’

‘So you will, child,’ she cackled, seeming pleased by my response.

My hair had begun to whip my cheeks and I realised the weather was about to show its claws again. ‘I think there is a storm coming,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to help you somewhere?’

The old woman cackled again and shooed me away. ‘I don’t need help, but you might.’ She rummaged in her skirts and drew out a length of light rope. She pressed it into my hand and then rummaged again before bringing out a disposable lighter. Bewildered, I told her I did not smoke, but she only grinned and bade me take the things she had given me, for I would have need of them ere the end. To my dismay, rain suddenly began to fall. I had stupidly brought my notebooks in a cloth bag, and I struggled to push it up the front of my coat.

‘Will you go through the Wolfsgate?’ the old woman asked, nodding towards the rain-lashed wall.

‘It is locked,’ I told her distractedly, realising the metal plate showed a wolf, not a dog.

‘It is?’ she asked archly.

I was about to say impatiently that of course it was, then remembered I had not actually turned the handle. I ran to it, hoping to get out of the rain and the wind on the far side of the wall. I was still holding the rope and lighter the old woman had given me and I thrust them into my coat pocket to take hold of the handle. It was slippery with rain and the mechanism shifted slowly as if the gate had not been opened for a long time. Then it gave a distinct click. I pushed, but still the door would not budge. Then I saw weeds and grass had grown in a thick tuft at the bottom of the door, jamming it firmly in place. I leaned my shoulder against the dark, stained wood and pushed hard. It gave with a tearing sound. As the gate opened wide, I turned to tell the old woman she ought to come out of the rain, but she had vanished. I had no idea how, but there was no sense standing in the rain wondering about it. I slipped through the opening and pushed the gate closed behind me. As I had guessed, the wall blocked the wind-driven rain, and I sighed with relief. Some rain was still falling but an overhang atop the wall jutted out to bridge the narrow gap between it and a hedge growing along the inside of the wall, so I slipped into the gap and moved along it until I found a place where there was enough space for me to sit down. Scraping together a pile of crackling brown leaves as a cushion, I settled with my back to the wall and pulled a shawl from my book bag to wrap around my shoulders, hoping the rain would not last for hours.

Too late to wish I had gone straight to the library, but the more I considered the events of the last hour, the stranger they seemed to me, and the more foolish my behaviour. I did not understand what had possessed me to take directions from a stranger, let alone to give my safety money to an old beggar, but it was done and my head was beginning to ache. I leaned forward to rest my forehead on my knees, closed my eyes and watched motes of light dance behind them, trying to let the soft sound of the falling rain fill my mind. I was not aware of falling asleep, but when I woke, the rain had stopped and I was lying stretched out along the base of the wall, my hair full of leaves. Luckily the rain had not seeped into my shelter.

I sat up, grimacing, combed my fingers through my hair and squinted at the illuminated hands of my watch. It had stopped, but it was dark enough that I knew I had missed my appointment with the library curator by several hours. I swore as I crawled out from under the hedge and got to my feet.

I went to the door in the wall and grasped its handle but, to my horror, it moved without engaging. Apparently it could be opened only from the other side. I rattled the bars and stood on tiptoe to look through them, only to see the square was as empty as before. I shouted out for help just the same, in the hope that the old beggar woman was nearby, but if she was, she did not heed my cries, or perhaps she did not hear them. Finally, I shrugged and turned to face the walled garden, thinking that at least I might have the pleasure of crossing it and the interest of an encounter with its owner at the other end, when I gave Ranulf’s armlet to her.

Feeling my arm to be sure I still had the armlet pushed above my elbow, I made my way across the grass to the line of trees, curious to see what lay beyond them. As I drew closer, I saw there were several rows of coppiced trees, planted in such a manner that each row prevented me seeing beyond to the next row. Fortunately they were planted far enough apart to allow me to squeeze through, and as I moved forward, I wondered how the trees managed when they were planted so close to one another.

As I wove through line after line of the trees, I began to wonder if I had not entered a tree nursery, for there was nothing aesthetically appealing in the suffocatingly close grid of trees. Then it struck me that the grid must curve, for the long fingers of light that managed to slant through the interlaced foliage were now striking the left sides of the trees where before they had struck the right sides. I turned to look left and saw to my horror that the view was exactly the same as when I looked forward. Or back! In any direction I saw only close-planted lines of trees. Was it possible I had been turning without noticing it as I walked? Or was it that the rows themselves were now marching at a slightly different angle?

I began to feel claustrophobic, but mastered myself. All I had to do was to make sure I was walking straight now and sooner or later I would reach the end of the trees. I set off again and counted fifteen rows of trees before I stepped out into the open. The brief surge of relief I experienced gave way to horror, for I found myself teetering on the edge of a low escarpment. A densely forested valley stretched away from the foot of the escarpment, bordered on one side by a long range of jagged white mountains. I had one brief, astounded glimpse of that long, narrow valley, then the ground crumbled under my feet and I fell.



Even all this time later, I sometimes have nightmares of that fall, from which I wake, heart pounding, half starting up. Of course, I had not entered any ordinary garden. No. I had passed through the Wolfsgate and, in doing so, had come to the very heart of Faerie. As tales and myths tell of the otherworld, the hearts of things are always larger than what contains them, so I had entered a garden only to find it encompassed mountains and a forest and streams and lakes. My husband told me later that there was no settlement in the valley, for the heart of Faerie was truly wild and inhabited only by beasts or to those given over to the beast in their natures. The most ferocious of these were the wolves whose territory it was.

The nearest proper dwelling to the Wolfsgate was the King’s Palace and all the rest of Faerie lay beyond that.



‘What if I had not come through the Wolfsgate?’ I teased my husband the morning after our wedding. His heavy beard had been shaven away along with the pelt of hair covering his body, though in truth it had not troubled me as much as maybe it ought to have done. Now his luxuriant black hair had been combed and trimmed into a handsome mane and he looked urbane and civilised. But his turquoise eyes were the same, save that the savagery in them had gone and they were full of laughter and delight.

He kissed me instead of answering my question, and his clever hands became so busy in so explicit a manner that I blushed despite all that had already been done between us. Satisfied, he held me back from him, examined my flushed cheeks smugly and laughed, a throaty growl that made my skin prickle. ‘You could never have resisted, faced with that gate. It blocked your way and it is your nature to refuse deflections and hindrances. Princesses decide their own limits and always transgress in order to discover them. It is part of what drew me to hunt you.’

‘So, courage and curiosity and some sort of subversive stubbornness are needed for the princess spell?’ I asked.

‘They are vital qualities, for those who would make rules must be able to exist beyond them,’ my husband murmured, examining a freckle on my breast closely.

‘And the old woman?’

‘Was my mother got up in that guise,’ he said, and he stretched out his pale, slender fingers over my bare breast, as if it were a ripe fruit to be plucked. ‘She said that she wanted to give you some tokens to aid you, if you pleased her.’



The sound of cutlery and the smell of toast and coffee brings me pleasantly to the present as Cloud-Marie manoeuvres the tray into my chamber. I sit up and smooth the bedclothes with more appetite than I have had in many a long day. When she has set down her burden, I sign for parchment and a quill, wanting to make a shopping list. I have decided on the meal I will serve my daughter-in-law and I mean to obtain the ingredients from our world, hers and mine.

After I eat and make my list, it strikes me that I can see the mortal girl my son hunts in my scrying bowl. The last thing I saw in it was my son bending over the girl he had slain and I have not looked into it since, but now I dress and eagerly mount the long spiral of stairs leading to the small, circular tower room. There is nothing in the room but the enormous stone scrying bowl filled with water so black and still it might have been a hole full of shadow. The bowl is a strikingly beautiful but sinister object from which power emanates like an electrical current. It was a gift sent by my husband.

I do not know if, when he set out the morning before our son began his first hunt, he intended to return soon, and became distracted, or if he always meant to return once our son found his princess bride, but I have not seen him from that day to this. He occasionally sends gifts. In the early days of his departure, they always arrived after I had sent missives to him using various magical devices he had given me over the years for this purpose, though he never sent any message with them. In recent times they come rarely, and still without a word of his whereabouts, though there have sometimes been small notes accompanying a gift, explaining its use.



My husband’s first gift came after I notified him of the failure of our son’s first hunt. It was a mechanical nightingale that sang with the tongue of any bird that ever existed. A pretty toy, it sits gleaming on my dresser. The brush and comb Cloud-Marie uses on my hair were a gift too, part of a set that included a magic mirror that would let me see my face at any age. It was a grim sort of gift for a mortal, but one day when I spoke my husband’s name to curse him, I noticed his face reflected in the glass. The image moved and I realised that the mirror was showing me him not only as he was but also where he was. He looked handsome and windblown, and the sky behind his head was like a sheet of raw grey silk flawed with lighter strands. I spoke his name beseechingly, and though he did not answer, his lips twisted. With longing or regret, I thought, believing in his love of me, for all his neglect. But when the mirror clouded and I saw him no more, I came to wonder if his pained grimace had been no more than the shape made of him by the spell he wrought to stop me spying on him. Or perhaps he had given up hope and did not want me to see it.

The mirror was ruined after that and would not even show my face, but on the verge of smashing it I hesitated, for it struck me that even if I could not see my husband, perhaps he could hear me. Often during the long years of failed hunts and growing despair that followed, I found bitter consolation in whispering curses into the smoky glass.

It was some months after the mirror clouded that the scrying bowl arrived. It will show you our son and that which he sees, said the little scroll that accompanied it.



The water in it does not offer a reflection of the shadowed stone walls of the room or of the four windows that look out in four different directions over Faerie, and there is not a fleck of dust upon it. There is no dust on any of the surfaces in the chamber, though I have not been here since my son last hunted. Is it magic that keeps the chamber clean or Cloud-Marie’s vigilance?

I cross to the scrying bowl and kneel, leaning over its rim to look down into the liquid blackness within it. That it does not show my reflection makes me feel dizzy, and I take a moment to steady myself and to gather courage enough to reach down into the bowl. I close my eyes, for I have always experienced a childish horror in doing this. Sometimes in nightmares things have reached back to grasp me. Once it was my son leaping out to close his teeth in my throat.

I feel the wetness of the water, if water it is, and stir my hand. Feeling it begin to whirl, I open my eyes and see my son in wolf form loping through the forest at a purposeful speed. But it is not a wolf form, I remind myself. My son is now a wolf in truth, and for a split second I do not see him as degenerate and cursed, but as a creature of breathtaking beauty and terrifying grace, a snow-white wolf prince.

I study the terrain he is speeding through, and understand he is heading towards the mountains. That my son goes this way can only mean that the girl has chosen to go towards the mountains, for there is no doubt he is going to her. I am eager to see her face and to discover if I can judge her character from it, but I cannot do so until he finds her. I withdraw, resolving to return after I have completed my preparations.

I descend from the tower, wondering why the girl went towards the mountains. I, too, had considered going that way when I woke in a bed of moss at the bottom of the escarpment. The fact that there was no way back up the sheer drop behind me meant I had no choice but to go forward one way or another, and my fleeting glimpse of the mountains had shown them to be extraordinarily beautiful. But I was forced to recognise the impossibility of a range of mountains on a muddy island in a lagoon. I settled instead upon climbing the long wooded slope I could see on the other side of the valley, which would offer me a view. I wondered what it said of the maid chosen by my son that she had decided to travel towards the mountains. Was she a fool who would follow any mad vision, or someone capable of holding to a vision despite the lack of concrete evidence?

In my chamber as I prepare myself for the journey to my old world to fetch the ingredients I will need, I focus my thoughts determinedly on the meal I will serve my son’s chosen, rather than worrying about what she is doing and why. I have decided upon a simple repast and not the elaborate feasts I have prepared before: sliced fresh tomatoes served with pungent chopped onions on thick slabs of fragrant rough bread, olives and a good parmesan broken into little crumbling pieces, and instead of eating inside, we will sup in the fountain courtyard.

I reach into the basket to ensure I have my pouch of jewels and gasp in pain. Withdrawing my finger, I find I have driven a hidden needle in a small tapestry deep into my thumb. When I withdraw it, blood wells dark and thick, and one drop falls like a ruby bead onto the white linen that is yet to be embroidered.

My hair stirs on my scalp, for surely this is another omen.

Dismissing my fears, I set off for the nearest crossing place. There are only a few ways from that world which was once my own to this one, but there has never been much difficulty or formality about moving from Faerie to the real world. Ever since the first faerie king opened a way to the mortal realm, fell in love and brought a mortal back with him, there have been numerous ways to cross. These are always closing and opening according to the whims of the king whose task it is to weave and renew the ways.

The first two crossing places are obscured by a mist which is nothing to wonder at, for mists of obfuscation are common in Faerie, and I feel only a mild irritation when I cannot find my way through them to the mortal realm. The third time, I use a wooden bridge I have often used before, remembering to check for trolls before setting foot on it. Few things are more tedious than having one of the great brutes grasp your ankle and force you to play their wretched riddling game for hours. Reassured I am not to be waylaid, I climb the steps to the bridge and set off into the thick mist, only to find myself coming back to the same bank I had just left, as on the last two attempts! I turn and try again, with the same result, though I cannot detect myself being turned around.

Only then do I recall reading in one of the tomes bestowed upon me by the old queens that once a prince begins to hunt his bride, the powers of kingship devolve to him, but that he cannot take them into himself until he has wed his bride. That meant there would be a hiatus during which the powers of kingship are inaccessible to the old king or to the one who would be king. At the time I read the words, I barely took them in, but now I am sure the crossing places have been slowly degenerating in the years since my son undertook his first hunt, and that some are now unusable.

Perhaps all.

I have thought little of my old world since the birth of my son, but I feel a stab of something very like terror at the thought of not being able to go home, and it comes to me that perhaps I am less resigned to living out my life in Faerie than I have believed.

When I am back in the palace, I calm myself, for the cure to one problem is the cure to both. If my son can hunt a true princess to be his bride, he will be saved, and then, as king, he can repair and reopen the ways between the two realms.

Forced to abandon my plan to obtain ingredients for the meal I will offer my son’s chosen, I find all I need in my garden or with the aid of the magic cloth. The meal itself does not take long. Once I have kneaded the bread and set it to rise, I slice tomatoes and onions and steep them in oil, brown vinegar and basil, and set out several cheeses and a good red wine. I consider going to look in the scrying bowl, but tell myself that too little time has passed. Better to wait a while longer, especially when I can do nothing, no matter what I see. I pace for a time and then go to my sewing chamber and sign for Cloud-Marie to get out my basket of threads. Taking up a needle, I begin to sew, but my thoughts run like a wolf through a shifty wilderness of fears and hopes that have grown up in me. They bring me at length and inexorably to the Wolfsgate Valley, to the moment that I woke at the bottom of the cliff over which I had fallen, utterly bewildered.



After dusting myself off and gathering my wits as best I could, I set off for the rise I could see, but the ground sloped down and I soon lost sight of it. I walked for half an hour using the position of the sun to keep a straight course, trying to figure out what had happened. It was impossible that this wilderness was on an island in the midst of a city. No, somehow I was somewhere else. The only thing I could imagine was that the man, Ranulf, who had given me the stone circlet, found me unconscious at the bottom of the cliff and carried me in a boat to some remote place on the mainland.

It made no sense and yet there was no other explanation.

I noticed that the carved ring had grown tight about my upper arm and I was about to ease it down when I noticed a small track winding through the trees to my right. My heart leapt, for a path meant people and I set off at once upon it. Gradually it wended its way up into a dense copse of trees and though there was no sign of human habitation, it curved in the direction I had originally intended to go, and I felt sure that it would eventually bring me to the bare hill I had seen that would offer a better vantage point from which to study the terrain.

Half an hour later, I spotted a small clearing a little way down one side of the ridge, where there was a rough hut. A subsidiary path split off and ran down to the hut, which seemed as picturesque as an illustration in a children’s book as I drew closer. Then I saw a man sitting on a stool by the door, whetting the edge of an axe. This sight was alarming enough that I hesitated, but feeling sure he had already noticed me, I did not feel I could turn tail like a frightened rabbit, so after a slight pause, I continued on. When I came to a halt, I saw the whetting stone still a moment as the old man looked at me, then he went calmly on with his work.

The sound of the stone on the metal set my teeth on edge, but I was in no position to be finicky. ‘Excuse me, but I am lost,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you have a map and could show me where I am.’

He scowled at me, or maybe it was a smile. It was hard to tell in a face so seamed and leathery and sprouting great feathery tufts of hair from incongruous parts. It occurred to me belatedly that he might not understand English, so haltingly I began to translate my request into the language of the land, but the man wagged his head and said something to me in words that, if they bore any relationship to the language I had just spoken, must be distant. A dialect, I told myself, dismayed. But I smiled reassuringly and tried to convey by hand motions and mime that I needed to find a way out of the wilderness. The man looked suspicious and even offended as I persisted, my cheeks growing redder and redder, but suddenly he laughed uproariously.

Completely taken aback, I stopped and watched him bellow and rock and slap his knee until his mirth had run its course. Then he pointed to me and to a path that ran away from the clearing towards a heavily wooded hill. I tried to ask if the path led to a village, but the best I could get from him was that I must go that way and that I should not stray from the path. He made the latter very clear. I mimed that I was thirsty and hungry, but he shook his head sternly and showed three fingers to me. Then he pointed along the path again. I took the show of fingers to mean I must walk three kilometres to find what I needed, for surely he would not send me off on a three-hour walk without water. In any case there was nothing to do but to go on, since I had no means of making him give me water or food and he was clearly waiting for me to leave.

Mistaking my hesitation for incomprehension, he again pointed insistently along the path and shook three fingers in my face. I nodded wearily and trudged off, consoling myself that it would be better anyway to find a place where I could beg a bed for the night, as it was growing late.

By now I had given up all hope of trying to make any sense of what was happening to me. I must go through it, that was all, and when I came to the end of whatever it was, I would understand it. There were times in life when that was the only thing you could do. The affair with the married man had been just such a thing; an inexplicable and inescapable folly, seen as such only from without. Sometimes you simply could not see properly when you were in the middle of something, no matter how clear-headed and certain you were.

The path narrowed to a mere track as it wound among the trees, which were thick enough that the path grew quite dark in places, certainly dark enough for me to have to slow down to be sure I had not strayed from it. The old man’s stern warning had impressed me, and now I thought I understood his insistence. He had been trying to tell me that I must not leave the path lest I lose sight of it and become irrevocably lost. I was uneasily conscious, too, that the day was steadily but surely drawing to a close. Whether or not I had reached a village, I would have to stop once it became too dark to see.

I was terribly thirsty by now, for I had drunk nothing since I had left the pension to seek out the library. Was it really possible this was the same day? If only I could find a stream, but I dared not leave the path. In faerie stories, the worst thing anyone could ever do was to leave the path. A path was like a clear intention that must be followed, but there were always other tempting possibilities trying to draw the hero or heroine away from their original pure purpose.

But I am not a heroine in a story, I thought. I am a historian and the daughter of two pragmatic parents who disliked imaginary games and thought imaginary stories the province of the foolish and uneducated. And I am thirsty. As if conjured by my desire, I saw a gleaming pool of water in a little clearing only two or three steps from the path. Head pounding with thirst, I hurried to the edge and flung myself down on my belly to drink. The water was ice cold and very pure. I drank until my belly ached and then I lifted my head to gasp a breath and saw it: a coal-black wolf sitting on the other side of the pool watching me with eyes that shone like mercury.

I froze, water dripping from my chin and the ends of my hair, but I could not push them back or mop my face without moving, for I was still kneeling forward, resting on my hands. On all fours, I thought, wildly. I could feel gooseflesh rising over my entire body, even on my scalp. I did not want to be eaten by a wolf. Especially I did not want to be eaten in the middle of an inexplicable adventure so that I would never know how it ended.

Except that I would know exactly how it ended.



It is not the end of the story that matters, I think, my needle darting in and out of the tapestry, but understanding the meaning of it, unless the end is the meaning. The memory of the extreme terror I experienced seeing the black wolf gazing at me is dimmed in my mind for a moment by this thought, by the sense of its importance. Then memory floods back, carrying me with it into the past.



The stone armlet suddenly slipped from where it had been lodged about my upper arm and fell down to give the back of my hand a good hard rap. I bit back a cry of pain, but perhaps I made some involuntary sound, for the black wolf suddenly rose.

I sat back onto my heels, lifting my hands to defend myself. The bracelet fell into the crook of my elbow but I ignored it. My attention was all on the wolf, padding to the side of the pool. It was close enough for me to see that it was a she-wolf, and it struck me there was nothing threatening in her demeanour, save that she had come closer. She had not hunkered down or snarled or shown any sign of aggression and she made no attempt to come around the pool, or gather herself to leap over it.

‘What then?’ I croaked.

She stiffened at my voice and lowered her head slightly, but her hackles stayed down and she did not growl. She only went on staring at me intently. I wondered if she could be a tame wolf that belonged to someone who lived along the path. I could not sit there forever, so very slowly I got to my feet. My knees cracked but the she-wolf only followed my movements with her silver eyes. Then she began to pad softly around the pool towards me.

Heart thudding wildly, I took one panicky step back, and then another.

She stopped and sat back on her haunches. I stared at her indecisively, feeling as if I were involved in some complex negotiation whose rules I did not understand, and which might end with me having my throat torn out. Then some impulse made me glance down and I saw that I was back on the path. When I looked up again, the she-wolf had vanished. Mind reeling, I suddenly became aware how dark it was. The trees about the pool seemed closer than they had been and I had not noticed until now how dead and black they were, branches stretching down towards the water like claws.

I shivered and continued along the path, knowing I would not be able to do so for much longer, for once it was dark, I would not be able to see where I was going. I imagined the black wolf shadowing me in the darkness, biding her time, though for what I did not know, since she had already had the perfect opportunity to attack me. My mind felt as unsteady as my legs, yet there was nothing I could do but walk, my eyes fixed on the vanishing track, my ears listening for the sound of paws.



‘A black wolf?’ my husband had questioned me later, looking sceptical and amused, and my needle slows as I remember the intimacy of that long-ago conversation.

‘Black and female,’ I answered. I was somewhat indignant about his scepticism, given that he was a faerie prince who had been well on his way to turning into a wolf when I wed him. But at the same time I had been distracted by the coolness of his white faerie flesh against which my body seemed to burn like a brand.

‘The wolves of the pack that dwell in the valley are all grey,’ he had murmured, taking my fingers from his chest and kissing their tips absentmindedly. ‘Perhaps it looked black in the shadows under the trees. Strange that a female was alone though; the pack usually stays together.’

‘Maybe she was a lone wolf?’

‘Lone wolves are male. More like she had new cubs in a den somewhere close by. You were fortunate she was alone. No wolf will attack a human alone.’ Gathering me close, he kissed me on the mouth, and said against my lips, ‘Fortunately I got to you before the pack arrived.’

‘I was frightened out of my wits when I saw her, but I don’t think she wanted to hurt me,’ I told him. ‘I think now that she was trying to get me back to the path and away from the black strangler trees growing around the pool. She stopped coming towards me the moment I was standing on the path.’

‘It was because you were on the path that she had to stop,’ my husband had corrected me, shaking me a little. ‘All of the wolves in the valley are ferociously wild. You saw that for yourself. They would have killed you if I had not distracted them so that you could get to the cave.’

I was not convinced, but now I was distracted by the memory of my astonishment when an enormous red bird appeared just as the wolf pack surrounded me. To my horror, the big grey wolf that was their leader had stepped right onto the path, which, until that moment, all of the wolves had seemed scrupulously to avoid. It was not until later I worked out that the path repelled the wolves only in daylight hours. The red bird had uttered a piercing scream and dropped towards the leader of the pack, talons outstretched, and the wolves had scattered. After a frozen moment, I had seen my chance and darted for the mouth of a cave.

‘I did not see a black she-wolf among the others,’ I finally told my husband.

‘Because she was not black,’ he answered indulgently. ‘She was a grey wolf you thought to be black who would have killed and eaten you with relish had she thought she could manage it alone, my pretty morsel.’ He slid his hands down my back and cupped my buttocks, and when his lips claimed mine again, I had forgotten about the black she-wolf.

My needle is still for a moment as I remember how it was to be held and cupped and pressed by hands that seemed as if they could never get enough of me. And yet they had ceased to want me. Was I no longer desirable because I had become a mother, or was it because I was human and ageing, if slowly, that caused my husband to turn from me? Or had the chemistry between us faded in the face of our son’s affliction? Perhaps all of those things had eroded the lustre of our desire. I resume my sewing, thinking that perhaps it is that the ways and paths to the body are closed one by one, by many things, and all without a person noticing, until a day comes when you discover there is no longer any gateway to the flesh.

I sighed and let my thoughts return to the moment I had entered the cave.



It was pitch dark when I remembered, with a burst of relief, the lighter the old woman had given me. I dug frantically in my pocket until my fingers found it. To my astonishment, when I pulled it out and flicked its flame to life, I found that it was not the cheap disposable lighter the old beggar woman had given me, but a heavy, beautifully engraved silver lighter. How had I not noticed that, I wondered incredulously.

There was no time to ponder it, for I knew it would not be long before the wolves came into the cave after me, and there was nothing I could use to bar the entrance or use as a barrier. The only possibility of safety lay in getting to high ground. Holding the lighter high, I saw a ledge jutting out some way up the side of the cave. I went to the wall beneath it and studied it intensely for a moment, then I extinguished the flame and thrust the lighter in my pocket.

I began to climb in utter darkness, feeling for the nubs and niches I had seen and praying I was not veering away from the ledge. I had not been climbing for more than a minute when I heard the wolves enter the cave. One of them gave a growling snarl, and when I heard it running towards me, I nearly fell from sheer fright. I froze and heard it leap and then fall back with a yelp to scrabble at the face of the rock beneath me. Only then did I know I had climbed high enough to be safe, though not by much, for I had felt the heat of its breath on my ankles. Forcing myself to be calm, I continued to climb slowly and very carefully. It seemed to take forever before I felt the ledge above me and, with a sob of hysterical relief, dragged myself up onto it. I lay there gasping and trembling for a long time before I could bring myself to sit up. Moving so that my back was against the wall, I prayed the wolves had gone, but one flick of the lighter was enough to disabuse me of that fantasy. The pack sat below the ledge, staring up at me with sullen red eyes. I spent an utterly terrifying night on my narrow ledge in the darkness with the smell of wolf all about me, and the knowledge that, if I slept, I would likely roll into the maws of the waiting pack.

Whenever I felt myself drifting off, I would flick the lighter flame on. One glimpse of the vigilant wolves was enough to bring me wide awake, heart banging at my ribs. Yet despite that, I did fall asleep ere morning, and woke with a terrified start only to find that the pale limoncello sunlight of the very early morning lay across the sandy floor of the cave. There was no sign of the wolves save for their criss-crossing spoors, but it took me another hour to get up courage enough to climb down and go outside.

The clearing where the red bird had appeared overhead was empty and wet with dew, which glistened like diamonds scattered on every leaf and blade of grass. It was beautiful, but aside from drinking my fill from a small stream beside the cave and filling the empty water bottle I had in the bottom of my book bag, I felt no urge to linger. I hurried to the path. A long red feather was lying on it and I took it up reverently to marvel at its beauty. That was when it came to me that the path would keep me safe so long as the sun was in the sky. Only later did I understand that the feather had imparted that knowledge. Another of my mother-in-law’s clever refinements.

Slipping the feather into my coat pocket, I set off briskly along the path. I paid no heed to the rational part of my mind that insisted a path could not protect a walker, because neither could a valley and a forest be contained within a wall on a mud island in the midst of a city, but here I was. Too many impossible things had happened for me to feel anything was impossible, save perhaps finding a way back to normality.

I kept up a good pace to begin with, but by late morning I was flagging badly. Aside from the fact that I had hardly slept the previous night, my shoes were beginning to disintegrate and I had fallen twice, grazing my knees badly both times. By midday I was so sleepy that I could scarcely keep my eyes open, so when I came to a grassy sunlit clearing, I simply lay down on the path, rested my head on my arms and slept. I had thought dimly that I would not sleep long lying on the hard ground, but I had not taken into account my exhaustion. When I woke I was horrified to find the shadows of the trees around the clearing had grown long and thin. I had slept for hours, and the sun was barely high enough to show above the tops of the trees.

Certain the pack of wolves had not done with me, I scrambled to my feet, wincing at the pain in my knees, and set off at a limping trot, praying I would find another cave or, better still, a house or settlement of some kind before darkness fell. But an hour later, I was still on a path surrounded by trees when I heard the distant howl of a wolf. I began to run, convinced the pack was beginning to assemble for the chase. Soon after, the ground began to rise once more, and as the slope grew steeper, I slipped time and again on the loose scree, opening up the grazes on both knees. Mopping at the blood trickling from the cuts, I was horrified to think of the scent trail I was leaving for the wolves, but I told myself that the steepness of the terrain gave me a better chance of finding another cave.

It was nearing sunset when I reached the top of the hill I had been climbing. I was bitterly disappointed to find that the trees were simply too thick to let me see clearly in any direction. Nor had I seen any cave. I felt like sitting down and weeping, but despair turned to terror when I heard a wolf howl again and the answering howls of other wolves, nearer to one another and to me than the wolf I had heard earlier. I got to my feet, quaking with fear, knowing the only other way I could protect myself was with fire. As swiftly as I could I began collecting dried twigs and branches and piling them up in front of a tree growing at the edge of the path. Once I had amassed a pile, I set a few strong limbs aside and then pushed a tissue from my bag in amongst a cluster of twigs on the heap. I took out the heavy, beautiful lighter and stared at it for a moment in wonder, but another howl made me glance up to see that the sun was minutes from setting.

I flicked the lighter and there was a little flare of brightness as the tissue went up, then the wood began to crackle. I unscrewed the nub at the end of the lighter and tipped a little of the fluid onto the end of one of the branches I had set to one side, then I screwed the nub back into place and held the branch into the flames. The glistening bark caught alight with a roar and a rush of heat, and not a moment too soon, for its light flared in not one, but many pairs of eyes, all red as the setting sun, malevolent and hungry, not cool and watchful as the silvery eyes of the black wolf had been.

I had built the fire in front of me, keeping the tree at my back, but I knew that I was vulnerable to attack from the sides. I meant to use the burning brand to protect my flank, but what if they attacked from both sides at once? The answer was all too obvious. For a moment a fury swept through me at the thought that I might die in such a stupid impossible way, and I brandished the burning branch and shouted, ‘Go away! I will not let you eat me! You’ll burn if you try!’

The red eyes continued to watch me, and seeing that the branch I was holding was beginning to fail, I bent down, never taking my eyes from the wolves. I groped quickly on the pile beside me for another branch, not daring to set down the one I held to pour more lighter fluid onto its replacement, but fortunately the second branch caught obligingly. I risked a glance at the pile of spare firewood and reckoned I had twenty minutes at best before the fire began to die. That was why the wolves had not tried to attack, I thought with a chill. They were waiting for the fire to go out.

In that moment, I knew I would die if I did nothing but wait. It occurred to me sickeningly that as well as giving off the smell of blood, I was probably stinking of fear.

There was only one thing to do. As surreptitiously as I could, I gathered up the remaining wood and then let it fall onto the fire in one armful. Then I hurled my burning brand towards the enormous wolf I had identified as the alpha male and turned to scramble up the tree. The fire gave a great whoosh and blazed up as I had hoped, but the leader of the pack must have realised what I meant to do and he leapt at me. The flames were too high and he gave a yelp as fire licked his flank. Then he was howling and rolling to quench his burning hide.

I had managed to reach the first branch and I glanced down to see the leader of the wolf pack glaring up at me with undisguised hatred. I climbed up to the next branch, realising that when the fire died completely, they would be able to get closer to the tree and jump higher.

When I reckoned myself high enough to be out of reach, I stopped, clinging to the trunk of the tree and gasping, unable to see anything below because smoke from the dying fire was billowing up and my eyes were streaming.



My husband told me later that he had been perched in a nearby tree as the red bird, poised to rescue me if I needed it. He had not intervened because, by managing alone, I was bringing potency and endurance to the princess spell.

‘So you were only to intervene if I was in danger of dying?’ I had asked. ‘That’s why you didn’t fly at the wolves when they came upon me the first time, outside the cave?’ We had been walking in the garden on the night after our wedding.

He nodded and said soberly, ‘It was hard to see your fear and do nothing.’

Remembering the soft gravity of those words, it comes to my mind as I thread my needle with celadon green silk, that if my son fails this last test, and all vestiges of what he was and what he might have been are fled, he will be wholly wild and it may be kinder to allow him to remain in the Wolfsgate Valley, to find whatever destiny he can as a wolf, rather than keeping him chained within the palace grounds. Perhaps he will join the pack. It would be a fine irony if he joined the wolves that had tried so hard to kill his mother.

A picture comes to me of the black she-wolf. Despite what my husband said, I never thought she meant to harm me. I saw her only once more and fleetingly, before I was free of the valley. Or maybe it was only a vision, I have never been able to make up my mind.



I spent another precarious night high above the wolves, this time in the tree I had climbed. Not trusting myself to stay awake, I bound my hands about the trunk of the tree using the rope the old woman had given me. I was wakened just before dawn by the pain in my hand, and was appalled to see that I had slept in such a way that I had cut off the flow of blood to my right hand; it was frighteningly numb and blue. When I finally managed to unbind myself, I suffered fiery pain as the blood flowed back into my fingers, but I welcomed it, knowing I must have come dangerously close to losing a hand.

I cursed my stupidity all the next day, as the hand throbbed and ached, but at least the pain kept me alert. By the afternoon, the sky was cast over with heavy black storm clouds. I worried that the loss of sunlight would render the path powerless to protect me, as at night, but told myself that perhaps I need not be so concerned for I had seen no sign of the wolves during that whole day. It might be that the grey alpha wolf had been more badly hurt than he had seemed, and was now somewhere far away licking his wounds. I hoped so, but I dared not assume it.

The terrain was now flatter and less richly green and fertile. There were still trees either side of me, but they were sparser and the ground under them was stony and barren. This was fortunate, for twice black strangler trees lurched for me, and both times I saw their movement in time to evade them. It was after this that I named them to myself, and kept a wary eye out for them. By mid-afternoon the path had brought me to a clear swath of ground between trees half lost in thick mist. I slowed down, but seeing that the path ran into the mist-bound thicket, I had no choice but to enter.

The path wound through the trees and into a foul-smelling bog where yellowish water lay either side in pools that bubbled and reeked. I poked the stout stick I had been using as a staff into the bog and found there was no bottom that it could reach, and when a droplet of the foul water landed on my hand, it burned like fire. Washing my hand clean with a little spit, I continued, determined not to put a foot wrong.

I had been walking for half an hour or so when I realised that it was getting dark. I could not see the sky because the mist was too thick, but it was too early for nightfall, so it must be the clouds. I did not know whether to wish for rain or not. Rain might wash the cloying, stinking mist from the air, but it might also cause the bog waters to rise, and already they lapped uncomfortably close to my feet either side of the path. I told myself I was a fool for putting so much thought into a wish! Of course I did not know that I had come to a place where wishes might indeed be granted.

Soon, it was so dark that I could see the bog water had a sickly luminescence. Unfortunately it was not the sort of brightness that illuminated anything. It merely diffused in the fog, making it more opaque. Finally, I gave up inching along and sat down where I was to wait till the clouds broke, hoping they would do so before the sun set so that I could get out of the bog. If I had thought the ledge and the tree uncomfortable beds, it would be worse by far to spend a night on this narrow path with glowing, caustic water either side of me.

At length night fell, and I ceased to worry about burning water or storms or wolves because I could hear something moving in the bog. At first it was no more than a flaccid splash. Then I heard the wet sound of something large. Heart beating very fast, I stood up and searched the water on either side of the path for movement with eyes made keen by terror. I could not see into the water for it shone like a mirror, but when a bubble burst, I flinched. I realised as I stood there peering uneasily about me, that it was not the water that glowed but the mist that had risen from it. The water was merely reflecting the glowing mist.

I heard another splash, closer than before. Whatever was moving was coming towards me and it sounded a lot bigger than a fish. I had seen the wolves as the greatest danger I must face, and I had focused all my fear upon the pack, but now I wondered if there were other dangers. What if one of them was even now approaching me in the bog, readying itself to rear up and take me? If only day would come, but by my calculations, sunrise was hours away. I took out the lighter and flicked it to produce a flame, but it only had the effect of making the mist and the bog shine. Worse, I had the sense that whatever was in the bog had heard the sound, for there was a long, listening silence.

That was when I saw her: the black wolf. She was standing some distance away in the shining mist, visible only because her extreme blackness gave off no reflection, but her eyes seemed to glow silver. She looked at me, then she turned and padded a few steps before stopping and looking back at me again.

Dry-mouthed, I wondered if I was mad to think she was offering to lead me from the bog. She took another step and turned back to look at me again. I took a step towards her, wishing I had kept the branch to use as a staff to test the ground ahead. She took a few more steps, then turned to me again. I took another careful step and then another; now sure she was leading me along the path, I followed more readily, reckoning that anything was better than sitting on the path waiting for whatever was out there to attack.

She brought me to the edge of the bog, but when I found I was treading on a grassy slope of firm ground and turned to see what she would do, she had vanished.



I never spoke to my husband of that second encounter with the black wolf after he mentioned that the bog gave off a vapour that produced hallucinations, remarking how lucky I was to have got through it in my right mind. I asked only where he had been when I was in the bog. He admitted that he had not realised I was trapped there and had been without, waiting impatiently for me to emerge.

I have thought more than once over the years of the black wolf, and not long before my son hunted his ninety-ninth bride, I mentioned her to my mother-in-law. She had given me a swift, dark look, saying there had been a black wolf bitch, but that her hatred of humans was stronger than that of any other wolf in the Wolfsgate Valley because she was the same faerie who had tried to close the gateway between Faerie and the mortal realm, and who had brewed up the very curse that afflicted my husband and my son.

‘She became a wolf?’ I asked my mother-in-law, wondering why my husband had not told me this when I had mentioned the black wolf. But then, as my mother-in-law related her story, I realised Ranulf would have disliked speaking of her because he had only just got free of her curse. Faerie folk do not like to dwell on unpleasant things, as a rule.

‘She was a shape-changer by her mother’s blood,’ my mother-in-law had told me. ‘She had taken that form to kill her lover and her half-sister for their betrayal of her, and she was still in that form when she cursed the king for stopping her closing the gateway to the human realm. So he punished her by trapping her power in that form. For a long time, she killed any human who came to Faerie by way of the Wolfsgate Valley, and the hunting of fully mortal maids became such a deadly business that it went entirely out of favour among princes.

‘But then there were no more sightings of the black wolf and it was thought that she had perished,’ my mother-in-law concluded.

It struck me that if she was right, I had been incredibly lucky to come safe from the bog. It seemed too much to put down to luck, but maybe I had been due a little good fortune by then.



I forgot the black wolf once I came out of the mist that shrouded the bog, for to my surprise it was dusk and the great bronze disc of the setting sun was casting a dull gold light over the façade of a large and imposing building of several levels behind a high stone wall. My heart leapt at the sight of it, and at that moment I heard the howl of a wolf, very close. I knew it was not the black wolf but a summoning to the kill by the pack leader, and I set off at a run towards a gate in the wall, stumbling and slipping on the stony, tussocky ground.

I heard another howl ahead and to the left and faltered, but then I began to run harder, remembering I was still following the path and would be safe so long as it was daylight.

The wall was further away than I thought and the sun was setting when the path suddenly forked, one side becoming a white paved way that appeared to lead directly towards the gate in the wall, and the other remaining the same worn and pitted track I had been following since the first day. If my husband had not been there, awaiting me in his golden wolf guise, I would have taken the wide pale path, which would have brought me to a pretty meadow full of wildflowers. Their scent would have put me into a sweet sleep from which I would never have woken.



Somehow of all the tribulations I faced during the three days of testing, that lovely, deadly meadow was the worst of them. The thought of it haunted me for some time after I was wed, and once I went into the Wolfsgate Valley to look at it. Standing a safe distance back, I saw the bodies of a dozen girls who had found a dreadful immortality there, and weeping, begged my husband to use his power to save them. He only kissed me, telling me it was my good heart that had won the aid of his mother by the Wolfsgate, in her crone guise. Then he sobered and added that he would have to touch the sleeping girls in order to wake them, and that none could walk on that meadow and stay awake, not even the king of all Faerie. He kissed me again and bade me pity the sleepers not, for they were said to dream endlessly of their heart’s desire, and perhaps it was a better fate than for them to wake and find their princes had long ago chosen another.

His words did not comfort me, and even now I sometimes think of that field of immortal sleepers with creeping horror, but this day, sitting with the heavy tapestry on my knee and waiting for my son’s chosen to come through the Endgate, it seems to me that it might be a peaceful end to a mortal life, to lie down in a meadow of flowers and dream forever.

Perhaps I will do that when I am old and weary, and see what dreams come to me. Perhaps I will do that if my son fails.

Cloud-Marie gives a soft gurgle, which is her signal that it is time for us to dine. One eye drifts upward and I shake my head, having made up my mind to wait until morning to look at the maid my son has chosen. After all, I must wait two more days before she can come through the Endgate, and better to wait until one of the nights is past. Knowing I cannot sit here for the whole time without eating or sleeping, I rise and Cloud-Marie and I go together to the kitchen to eat the food she has prepared. When the meal is done, I make my way to my chamber, bathe and put on my nightgown. Soon after Cloud-Marie arrives to comb and brush my hair before going yawning to her own little chamber.

I lie wide awake in my bed, staring at the ceiling, my thoughts full of the mortal maid my son has hunted, spending her first night in the Wolfsgate Valley. I pray for her sake that she is strong and clever and lucky, and that my son remembers he summoned her and watches over her well. I refuse to imagine what will happen if the little flame of awareness within him gutters and he becomes wholly wolf. I try to sleep, but I only grow more and more wide awake. Finally, I get out of my bed, dress myself and go up to the tower room.

I kneel beside the scrying bowl and, as usual, struggle with revulsion before I close my eyes and lower my hand into it. The liquid feels icy and my hand aches. It reminds me, for a vivid fleeting moment, of the pain I felt after I untied the rope to release myself from the tree where I had taken refuge from the wolves. I push the memory away, stir the dark water and open my eyes.

My son sits on his haunches amidst trees. He is gazing down into a clearing where a campfire flickers. Beside it sits a woman, her long blonde hair bound into a tight plait. She is warmly and practically dressed in jeans and a thick sweater and coat, and she is wearing solid hiking boots. There is a small bulging pack beside her as well as a stout, metal-shod walking staff, and I think wryly of the book bag and light coat and the empty plastic water bottle that were all I brought with me. She takes out a small silver knife and deftly slices an apple. I wish she would turn her head so that I can see her face. I note that she is sitting with her back to a great tumble of moss-covered boulders that curve around either side of her, and I feel sure she has chosen this campsite so that nothing can approach her save from the front.

I study her and it seems to me that her form is full and rounded and that her movements are too graceful and certain to be those of a young woman. She is older than is traditional for a maid, and yet what age is my son now, given that beasts age faster than humans or faerie folk and he has long worn his wolf shape.

My son stiffens and begins to growl. He is looking in the other direction and, following his gaze, I see with a chill that the wolf pack has gathered in a hollow and are tearing at some beast they have killed with efficient ferocity; a deer, by the look of it. I have the sense that my son is hungry and longs to join the feast.

Perhaps the grey wolves are eating so close in order to tempt him.

He looks back to the woman by the fire, now combing her hair out of its braid, and I see with astonishment that she is not alone. There is a large dog with a soft red coat stretched out beside her. She strokes it and I am so unsettled by the sight that I lose focus and the vision in the scrying bowl fades to blackness again.

There is nothing for it but to return to my room and lie down. I do not know what to think of the air of competence about the girl in the clearing, or of the fact that she has entered Faerie with a dog. Cats and dogs do cross, I know, but seldom, for their instincts tell them there are many things in Faerie that find dog and cat meat as sweet as human flesh.

But this dog did not wander across, I remind myself. The woman is clearly its companion and when I think of the tender way she broke off her grooming to stroke the dog’s head, I find I am glad to think that she has it to defend her, in case my son cannot control himself. Dogs have a loyalty that goes deeper even than the pack instinct of wolves, and I do not know if my son will be able to hold to his hunt. And even if he does, I do not know what will happen when the dog beholds him.

My mind drifts to the slight arrogance in my husband’s handsome face when he told me it was my trust in him that allowed him to prevent me going along the path that would lead me to the meadow of sleep flowers.

I realise I would not have trusted him in his wolf form, after being terrorised for three days by the pack, save for my encounters with the enigmatic black she-wolf. It was that, like her, he had not been grey as the wolves of the pack, which convinced me to go with him, even when he seemed to be leading me away from the safety of the ornate building behind its high wall. I am sobered to realise that, if not for my meeting with the black wolf, I would never have reached the Endgate before the last rays of the sun were extinguished by night. I would have fallen victim to the pack unless Ranulf had pitied me enough to transport me magically back to the mortal world, though I had failed him.

I slipped into a vivid dream of those last moments of my testing in the Wolfsgate Valley.



I was within sight of the gate which, like the Wolfsgate, was actually a solid door set into the wall, when I saw the grey pack leader burst from some bushes a little distance away, followed by several of his outrunners. I looked around for the golden wolf, but it had vanished.

Terror flooded me, and I broke into a headlong run, praying the gate would not be locked. Slamming into it, I grasped the handle, the hair on my neck standing on end as I imagined the pack leader’s fangs sinking into my neck or calf. But the handle turned. I shoved the door open, flung myself through it and slammed it behind me, then I sank to my knees, sobbing and trembling and gasping as the sun set and darkness fell over me like a cloak.



The next morning, when Cloud-Marie brings my tray, she is visibly unsettled to see me dressed and sitting by the fire. She gabbles a little as she dithers over where to set the tray and I sign for her to put it on the table beside me. I have no appetite but I do not want her to be troubled, poor soul. She makes me a coffee and brings it to me and I take it and smile at her. She does not return my smile, and when she gestures at the brush and comb sitting on the dresser, I nod, knowing it will soothe us both. I look into my bloodshot eyes in the mirror hung upon the wall beside my dresser and see how thick the shadows lie under them.

An hour passes and then two and I can restrain myself no longer. I set aside the tapestry I have been working at and rise. Cloud-Marie watches me, and grinds her teeth. Seeing her agitation, I cross to the window and sign her to bring me a hot chocolate, knowing that the making of it is a lengthy process. As soon as she has gone, I hasten across the room and draw aside the curtain that hides the tower-room stair. I make my way swiftly up to the chamber where the scrying bowl awaits me, kneel and plunge my hand in at once, only closing my eyes when I begin to stir.

I open my eyes and see that my son is moving again. I cannot tell where he is, save that the grass is long and dry and bleached blond, and there are no trees. He is in a part of the valley I have never seen before, which must mean his chosen is there, too. I have no idea what tests await her here but there is nothing gentle in the Wolfsgate Valley. I cannot see the girl, but he is clearly moving stealthily and carefully, stopping often to twitch his ears. I push away the thought that he is stalking her and take comfort in the absence of the grey wolves.

Then I remember the dog and wonder if he is wary of it.

‘Bring her to me, my son,’ I whisper, and the vision dissolves, but not before I see that he has left the high yellow grass for a stony foothill, on which rises what seems to be the ruin of a human dwelling.

Going back down to my chamber, I manage to sit in my chair before Cloud-Marie arrives and sip meekly at the chocolate she has made, though the sweetness makes me feel sick. I have drunk two-thirds before it occurs to me to check the petals carpeting the Princess Chamber. If my son has ceased to hunt, save for prey, they will be dying.

I sign that I want to go to the Princess Chamber, and Cloud-Marie takes the mug. By the time I reach the door with its dove handles I am calmer, but even so, when I open the door and see the floor is white with petals, I feel weak with relief and near to weeping. I close the door and return to my chamber where Cloud-Marie stands, still holding the cup, a bead of chocolate clinging to the down on her upper lip. I laugh aloud at the realisation she has greedily drained my cup and, taking it from her, I set it down and enfold her in a hug. At first she stiffens but then she hugs me back and burbles with laughter. When I release her she all but capers.

I sit down and look into the fire and think of her mother.



Cloud-Marie looks nothing like Yssa, and yet there is something in her mouth that sometimes reminds me of my friend. Yssa as she was in the end, not as she was when first she came to the palace, dressed in drab clothes with limp hair and dull skin, her back bowed under the weight of some sorrow whose cause she would not name. How wearily and resignedly she asked if she might have a place in the palace. How humbly and drearily she said that she did not mind what work she did. Lonely in the absence of my husband, I had impulsively agreed to take her in, making it my own little quest to drive the melancholy out of her. She did not smile, but only looked grim as she curtseyed and thanked me. Then she asked if I meant she was to be my maid.

I answered that she would be my companion and she nodded, half flinching. Her evident lack of delight in her new appointment piqued me and made me even more determined to win a smile from her.

I was thereafter unfailingly sweet to her, even though she would not meet my gaze and took all of my orders with a sullen glower. Once or twice I wondered if she thought I mocked her with my kindness because I surprised a look of real hatred in her eyes, but that seemed so unlikely that I told myself she only brooded on whatever hurt had been done to her. Whatever she had fled from to come to the palace had scarred her, and whenever her hands were not busy, she chewed her nails down to the quick. This human-like flaw endeared her to me, and I had gone from regarding her as a project to really caring for her. I gave her gifts and stroked her hair and kissed her and made her sing with me, refusing to notice her determined lack of response. I could see that her life at the palace agreed with her. Her skin soon glowed like a pearl and her fiery hair shone and rippled as she lost her thin, hollow-eyed look. It gave me pleasure to discover what a beauty she was, or would have been, I amended wryly, if ever she would smile or look anyone in the eye.

Then one day, we were walking in a field and I stopped to offer the stick of celery I had been nibbling to a rabbit. It was very timid and it could not make up its mind whether it wanted the vegetable enough to overcome its fear of me. It crept forward and shrank back and crept forward again many times until at last it came close enough to snatch a bite before bounding away.

I looked up to find Yssa watching me with a queer expression on her face. ‘You are very patient,’ she said. It was the first time she had ever said a word to me that I had not had to drag out of her, and I think she was as startled by it as I. It was on that day that I noticed her eyes, which I had thought grey, were a very clear, pale, turquoise blue, like my husband’s. It made me realise that I had never looked into her eyes before. She had always prevented it by looking down or away or by keeping her lashes lowered.

She must have regretted her momentary lapse, because she was full of sour grimaces and frowns for a few days, and did no more than grunt when I asked a question of her. But one night when I was struggling to brush my hair, she took the brush from my hand and said brusquely that it would be better to comb out the snarls first. I had been very surprised and a little bashful, for even as a child my mother had insisted I brush my own hair. When I had not managed it quickly enough, she ruthlessly cut it short. I had kept my hair short since, but in Faerie, I had grown it as my husband had desired, and something in the air had made it grow longer and more lustrous than ever it had done in the real world. Princess hair, I thought it, and I had liked to brush it, though there was eventually so much of it that my arms always ached.

That day, Yssa combed and then brushed my hair with long strokes, and as I watched her through half-closed lids, I saw a smile flicker about her lips, as if the act gave her as much pleasure as it gave me. I wanted to say a dozen things, but I held my tongue for the longest time, wanting nothing to disrupt the sweetness of this moment of surrender.

So I saw it and so it was.

I never did learn exactly what had happened to Yssa, for I liked her too much to intrude upon her sorrow by asking open questions. Once she said something that let me guess she had fled from family trouble, but I never probed for more information than she offered. Even when we became close as sisters, Yssa would freeze and withdraw if I asked any question about her past, and I learned never to do so. Yet I was curious and speculated endlessly about what had happened to her whenever she made some comment that seemed to refer to what had hurt her so.

Once, she said fiercely that there was no bond deeper than a blood bond. Another time she asked suddenly and very seriously if I had such a bond with someone in my world. She had to explain that she was asking if I had a sister or brother, and I had shaken my head, saying I was an only child to elderly parents who seemed more than anything else slightly startled to have got me. Certainly they had shown no desire to have another child. I went on to tell her, because she seldom asked me questions or showed any interest in my past, that when I had fallen in love with a married man they had disowned me with such alacrity I felt they welcomed my misbehaviour. I was surprised to see pity in Yssa’s eyes, and that night she had insisted on dressing my hair in a special elaborate style that must have made her arms and fingers ache. Yet her hands were very gentle.

I loved Yssa, but it was not until my son was born that I understood what she had meant by a blood bond. Coincidentally she fell pregnant soon after I did, to a faerie lord who had come to visit my husband. She had met him at a ball I had made her attend with me at the Summer Palace, and they had become lovers that same night. The next morning the beauty I had sometimes glimpsed had blazed in her and I guessed at once what had happened.

‘You have fallen in love!’

A complex mixture of elation and sorrow crossed her face, but she nodded and a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she said shyly, ‘I understand now why a woman might give up everything for love, and go mad at the loss of it.’

I did not understand her words, but I guessed they alluded to her past and asked no more. Yet it gave me joy to see her so radiant, for all I thought her lord a vapid dandy with an inability to focus on anything save himself, including his wife. Of course he wed her when she told him she was to bear his child, because children are rarely born to pure-blood faerie folk and they are greatly valued.

At first her faerie lord was happy in her pregnancy because he was so pleased to have fathered a child, but his interest in her and in his child waned as the months passed, and when she swelled and became inaccessible to him, he found other pretty portals more appealing.

Yssa was desolate, for unlike me she was not entirely enthralled by the baby growing in her. Then came the night she went into labour. I had given birth a week or so before, and I was nursing my precious son as I waited for her to bear her child. Unlike my labour, which was swift and only briefly painful, hers was long and full of many agonies. This surprised me, for I had thought a faerie would give birth with ethereal decorousness, all flowers and glitter instead of blood and screams. I wondered aloud if all faerie births were so hard, and the faerie crone who tended her said, ‘No more than all mortal births are painful.’ She was not in awe of me, for it was she who had birthed my son, and suddenly she said, ‘It goes deeper with some than others and that can make a difference. You withheld nothing in the birthing of your child, but this one would keep some part of herself separate from it.’

My friend was beyond hearing her words, but our voices must have penetrated the haze of pain, for suddenly she shouted out the name of a woman – Alzbetta – begging her forgiveness and swearing she would find some way to help her. Then she screamed until foam flecked her cheeks and hoarsely willed her body to rid her of the child and of the love she had borne its feckless, fickle father, cursing both. There was a hail of rain against the window glass and I shivered, for in Faerie, curses are not just words.

‘Can’t you use magic to help her?’ I whispered to the crone, hours later, for Yssa was grown pale as milk and there was a greenish shadow about her mouth and a feverish glitter in her eyes that made me fear for her.

The faerie midwife gave me a keen look. ‘I could try, but it would be dangerous, for there is a kind of primitive but powerful magic in birthing that will truck no other kind.’

My son stirred at my breast and I looked down at him and felt a fist of love close about my heart. For a moment it seemed that I could not breathe, for the joy I felt was so deep it was akin to pain. Then there was a grunting groan from the bloody birthing bed and I looked up to see the midwife lurch forward and reach for the baby being born.

Few children are born to faerie folk, and many are not fully formed. No one knows why, but the children are loved no less than a complete child. Yet my friend looked at her child only once, and bade the crone take the baby away. I came to Yssa and held her hand and told her I loved her, and promised she would grow to love her babe as I loved my son. I could not conceive that a mother would not love her child as I did and so my concern was all for my friend, rather than for the child. Yssa wept then, as I had never heard her weep, and told me that the child was misconceived. I held her close and called her sister and kissed her and said I would speak to my husband and see what he could do.

She drew back from me so quickly that she wrenched herself from my embrace, breasts heaving above the bodice of her bloodstained nightdress. Her pale blue eyes looked silver as she said, ‘Ask him nothing, for he will be no more use to me than my own lord was. I am done with men. I should never have allowed myself to be distracted from my oath. Now I must atone.’

‘What oath?’ I cried, but she would not answer. I stroked her hair until she slept and then I went to feed my son. I fell asleep with him in my arms and when I woke, I saw a tiny silver feather by my side. It was a magic Yssa had, to limn small objects in silver, and she had done it to many tiny objects to please me. As soon as I saw the feather, I knew she had gone. I could not believe she would go without saying goodbye, and I was not surprised to find that she had left the child behind. It was only when I went to the nursery to look into its cradle that I realised that aside from being physically deformed and mute, Cloud-Marie was a girl. That was a shock, for having a boy I had been unable to envisage any other sort of child.

There was a tiny silver shell on the baby’s pillow. I took it up and then I took up the baby. It opened its strange little cloudy mismatched eyes and I was surprised at the strength of the tenderness that I felt for the tiny deserted scrap.

An hour later, the midwife crone came and looked astonished to find me nursing my companion’s child, with my own sated son sleeping in his cradle beside me. But then she shrugged and said why not, for I had milk aplenty. No more was said of it, and by the time my husband returned from his latest quest, a long one lasting more than a decade, our son and Cloud-Marie were both twelve, and I told my husband coolly that the girl would replace Yssa as my companion when she was older. I did not tell him that she was Yssa’s daughter. In truth, I am not sure he had ever seen her.



That night, when Cloud-Marie has gone to bed, I return to the tower chamber and gaze into the scrying bowl again. My son is lying in long dry grass watching his chosen from the clearing. She is standing with her back to him and me, facing the entire wolf pack arrayed behind the enormous grey alpha wolf. If I had not known him by his size, I would have known him by the bald burn scar on his flank. The girl holds her knife in one hand, point down, and the metal-shod staff in the other. Her arms are bare and strong and her hair, which hangs loose down her back, is not blonde, as I thought, but a silken fall of silver hair. I am close enough to her now to see that I was right; her figure is too ripe to be that of a young girl. I tell myself I care not what her age is; if she is my son’s chosen and can save him, I will welcome her. But why is he behind her, instead of defending his princess?

She steps towards the alpha wolf and my heart jerks to see a deep, bloody scratch on one of her arms. The grey leader growls and gathers himself to leap. I bite my lip, willing myself to be still and silent, for a vision is like a bubble that may burst at an ungentle breath.

The grey pack leader, poised, gives a low growl and bares his teeth in a ferocious snarl. There is blood on his muzzle.

He leaps, but the woman, lithe as a girl, spins away with astonishing balletic speed and strikes at him with her staff. Then, hair flying, she spins and strikes again with her knife, but the grey wolf has leapt back.

My son moves his head to follow their movements, and I wonder again at his inactivity. Then I notice the black she-wolf is standing between him and the woman, also facing the pack. I have no doubt it is the same she-wolf who saved me, and when she shifts her weight slightly, moving into a crouch, my heart leaps into my throat, but she does not move. It is the enormous, muscled pack leader who leaps, and it is only when my son whines that I understand he has not moved or attacked because he is wounded.

The grey wolf twists in the air so that his leap brings him past the woman and closer to my son. I see at once that this was intentional, for now the woman is off balance and too far away to strike with knife or staff. But instead of taking advantage of this, the grey wolf lunges towards my son, lips peeled back from his teeth in a terrifying snarl. Before he can reach his quarry, the black wolf attacks him and drives him back with a ferocity that is shocking to see. Clearly the grey wolf did not expect the attack from the she-wolf. Nevertheless, though she is a female, he joins battle with equal ferocity, and for a moment the two wolves are locked in a deadly struggle of jaws and teeth and claws. Neither wolf gives quarter, and the she-wolf is courageous and relentless, but the pack leader has the advantage of weight. Yet, unexpectedly and without warning, the grey breaks away and again leaps for my son. I do not understand why he is so intent on reaching him, for he is clearly badly wounded, and it is the candidate being tested who is his proper quarry during the trials.

My son struggles to rise, seeing the grey wolf coming for him, but he falls back with a high yelp of pain.

Again the black wolf intervenes, tearing at the exposed flank and hind leg of the pack leader. He turns on her and again they engage, biting and clawing at one another, and sending out a bloody spindrift over the pale sandy earth. They break apart and the grey leader attacks again at once, going for the black she-wolf’s throat with open maw and murderous determination. She manages to evade him, but instead of attacking her he tries to get past her, and once again she attacks his rear. Snarling with frustration and rage, the enormous grey turns and they circle one another. To my dismay, I see that the she-wolf is limping and dripping blood.

The grey leader leaps once more, and this time the she-wolf moves too slowly to evade him. His teeth close on her throat and she gives a long, strangled howl of pain that is cut off suddenly by a horrible crunch. Even as the black she-wolf falls limply to the ground at the pack leader’s feet, a streak of red comes from behind my son, and to my amazement I see the woman’s red-gold dog attack the grey wolf. She is far smaller than he, but she is quick and brave and fierce and even as he snarls and snaps at her, the woman is there by the side of her dog. With a ringing battle cry, she strikes hard and accurately with the metal end of the staff, then slashes with the knife, opening a deep wound in the grey wolf’s chest. He yelps in pain and hunkers down, snarling at the woman and the dog, but together they are bright and terrible and formidable and the battle with the black she-wolf has clearly taken its toll.

I see his surrender in the loosening of his bunched muscles a split second before he retreats, and in moments he is gone, and the pack with him.

I want desperately to see the woman’s face, for there was something familiar in her voice when she cried out. But she has her arms around the red-gold dog, her face buried in its soft thick pelt, and now my son has dragged himself to the black wolf lying on the ground, her red blood soaking into the sand beneath her.

The red-gold dog comes to nuzzle at her with him, whining and pawing, but the black wolf is still and silent. The red dog lifts its head and howls and howls.

I do not know how to understand what I am seeing.

In my agitation, I let a strand of hair fall into the scrying bowl and the vision ends.

I sit on my heels for a long time in the tower room, cursing my clumsiness, for the scrying bowl will offer only one vision between a sunrise and sunset, but there is nothing to do but to go down. I long to go out and find my son, but I dare not, for if I intervene in any way during the testing, save to carry out certain specific tasks, the princess spell will fail. I run my mind over all that I have seen, and decide my son must have been hurt defending the woman against the pack, whereupon the princess candidate and her dog then defended him in a queer reversal of tradition. I cannot imagine how the black she-wolf came into it, and I pray that neither her actions nor the interference of the red dog have weakened or destroyed the princess spell that is being woven.

I think of the black she-wolf’s eyes growing dim as her blood rushed out, and tears start fiercely to my eyes, for she saved my life and now she has died defending my son, yet I do not know why she helped us.

My thoughts circle back to my son and I wonder fearfully about the extent of his wounds. It terrifies me that he might now lie near to death, but I cannot allow myself to give way to my longing to find him. I tell myself his attempts to rise were full of energy; I tell myself I would know if my son had died.

Cloud-Marie finds me standing and shivering at the bottom of the steps and she clucks and chortles with dismay and, can it be, irritation? I want to laugh at the thought, for I have never known her to be anything but utterly gentle and patient. She wraps me in a blanket and makes me sit down in my chair. She mops my cheeks and makes me drink water. Finally, helplessly, she begins to stroke my hair.

I watch her in the mirror on the wall. I seem to see her stroking the hair of an old woman whose tear-wet face is pale as snow, her eyes wide and dark with despair. I picture a field of deadly white flowers where I might go and make a bed. But I know I cannot leave Cloud-Marie alone, no matter what has happened to my son.

Angry at my helplessness, I order myself not to be a witless fool. I do not know the boy is dead. Likely he is hurt – even badly hurt, but he will heal and he will return to me. And suddenly I am shocked to discover I do not care if he comes to me as a wolf. I think of his ferocious beauty as he raced through the wilderness and know that he is my son and I love him, whether he be wolf or man. Only let him live!

If he fails in this last hunt, I will set him free in the Wolfsgate Valley and each day come to the tower and evoke the scrying bowl to watch him. I will see him hunt his food and in time he will take a mate and sire cubs. He will join the wild pack and perhaps a day will come when he will challenge its leader and become a wolf king.

I sign to Cloud-Marie that I want to lie down and she helps me to my bed. She takes off my slippers and covers me over. One eye watches me with anxious love while the other floats peacefully towards the window. Its calmness sooths me. All this hot bright pain will pass, it seems to promise.

I close my eyes and will myself to sleep.

I do not sleep.

I find myself remembering the relief and exhaustion I felt when I finally gathered the strength and will to rise unsteadily to my feet inside the Endgate, wondering where I was and who might dwell there.



I had made my unsteady way along the lane to a cobbled yard, where lamps with flickering flames cast enough light for me to see that the imposing building I had seen from afar was a vast, elegant mansion. There was a fountain in the midst of the yard where water fell in an endless glittering cascade from the tilted greenish-gold jug of a greenish-gold woman. This stood directly before a set of wide marble steps leading to a beautiful carved door, and as I gazed at it, I thought of the man Ranulf, telling me locals were permitted to pass through the private grounds of the property owned by the lady from the walled garden.

It was no garden I had trespassed upon, and yet I was suddenly certain that the door in the wall was the Endgate he had spoken of, bidding me find it and pass through. I seemed to feel the pressure of the armlet above my elbow, as if it were the hand of a man encircling my flesh and, ushered forward by that faint pressure, I mounted the steps. It was impossible that the armlet had not been dislodged during all I had endured since passing through the Wolfsgate Valley. I did not then know that my husband’s mother had bestowed a magic upon the thing that ensured it could not be removed except by a direct act of will. I reached the top of the steps, wondering if the armlet was like the red dancing shoes in the faerie story, which had to be chopped off along with the feet in them to prevent them dancing their wearer to death. But when I tried to remove it, the carved ring came off easily and sat light and innocuous in my palm.

I shook my head at my foolishness and slipped it into my pocket, hoping that its return would win me some kindness in the form of food and a chance to wash and tend my grazes and cuts. At the very least I would be free to pass through this property unhampered once I had brought the carved ring to its mistress. There was no question in my mind that it must be done, for the giving of the ring had begun the strangeness that had taken me over, and so to end it the ring must be delivered. This was absurd reasoning, but I was trying to hold belief and unbelief in my mind at the same time. Even as I planned to fulfil my promise to the turquoise-eyed Ranulf, I strove to convince myself that all I had endured was a vivid hallucination brought on by a fall or perhaps some sort of bite or fever that had come on me when I fell asleep under the hedgerow.

Certainly I had no intention of speaking of wolves and mountains or strangler trees and huge red birds to the lady of this house, or to whomever answered her door. I meant only to say I had hurt myself passing through her garden, in an effort to deliver the armlet as I made my way to an appointment. That missed appointment with the fussy archivist seemed to have occurred long ago in another life, and I longed to return to that rational life. I felt that delivering the armlet would deliver me back to it, to normality.

I gazed at the enormous door and hesitated. It was so ornate and imposing that I found myself afraid to knock. I was about to turn away and seek some less intimidating door at which I might humbly present myself when rain began to fall with the same sudden violence as in the moments before I had passed through the Wolfsgate. Even as I wondered at the coincidence, I heard the rumble of thunder. I told myself it would not matter if I got wet. The rain would wash off the fetid reek of the bog. (What bog, my mind asked fiercely.) But thunder rumbled again and the rain seemed to grow heavier, hammering down on cobbles, walls and roof with a cacophonous racket that extinguished any possibility of thought. I knocked at the door, but no one came, and I was forced to accept that my knock had been too feeble to be heard. Reluctantly I turned my attention to the great beast head that was the door’s knocker and discovered that the only way to lift the brutish thing seemed to be to put my hands inside its maw.

I might have baulked at that, but now the wind was blowing icy rain into the alcove. Gritting my teeth, I reached into the maw of the metal knocker and encountered a smooth grip. With a grunt of effort I raised the head of the beast high and withdrew my hand to let it fall. A sharp pain made me gasp as a single dolorous thud shook the door and the step under me. I had a vision of the sound reverberating though endless shadowed halls and tapestry-hung rooms with cold stone fireplaces. Looking down at my hand, I saw several long jagged scratches welling beads of blood. Only when I bent down to peer into the maw of the knocker to see what had cut me did I notice that the beast’s teeth had been sharpened to razor points.

Appalled, I stepped back, wondering uneasily what sort of person had a doorknocker with sharpened teeth. It did not occur to me that I had entered a world where it was mandatory to offer blood when one first seeks entry to any house.

I heard a sound from within and imagined a plump, kindly housekeeper who would take pity on my wet and bedraggled state and sympathise in broken English. She would tell me that her mistress was out for the evening, or better still, had gone abroad for some time. Then she would usher me into the kitchen to dry myself. It would be a vast, warm, cavern of a chamber smelling of fresh-baked bread and hot stew and she would press a thick towel into my hands and cluck over my wetness as she sliced bread and bade me eat. So enthralled was I in imagining the housekeeper that I could almost see her plump motherly face creasing into a smile as she insisted I try some lemon tea cake she had made – the sort of face I had wished my own mother had offered to the world and me, instead of her thin intelligent face with its small, wary blue eyes.

The door opened suddenly to reveal a ravishingly beautiful woman in an old-fashioned but clearly ruinously expensive evening gown, under the hem of which bare, pale feet peeped out.

‘Yes?’ she said languidly.

‘Ah . . . it is raining,’ I said, stupidly dazed. She was, after all, the first faerie woman I had ever seen and I had not yet learned to defend myself from the natural glamour of her kind. She made no response to my absurd pronouncement, save to open the heavy door enough for me to slip through the gap. I hesitated only a second, and stepped through into an entrance that could have served as a hall for meetings, it was so large. The roof was too high for me to see it, for the only light in the place seemed to be candles in holders set along the walls. Blackout, the rational part of my mind suggested, or perhaps the owner of the mansion was eccentric enough to prefer a less modern form of lighting. Certainly it gave the place atmosphere.

The barefoot beauty led me from the hallway along a passage, the milky white marble floor of which was softened by a beautiful plush oriental runner. Her bare feet made no sound but I did not dare to walk on the rug in my filthy shoes, so I flapped awkwardly along beside her. The hallway brought us to a large chamber where a magnificent tapestry hung. It was the only thing in the room and it was exquisite. I embroidered myself, and despite everything that had befallen me, longed to examine it closely, but my guide had drawn ahead of me, and so I made haste to catch her up.

I had it in my head that she was leading me to a kitchen or perhaps a laundry where I could wash, but instead she opened a door to a small, exquisite parlour where a very beautiful older woman sat working at a tapestry draped over an antique wooden frame. The woman gave me a searching look, and if I had not been shivering with cold, I would have trembled at the way that haughty, pale blue gaze seemed to peel away my skin and look inside me.

‘You have come,’ she said, peculiarly.

I could only nod and this seemed to be enough, for the older woman turned back to her embroidery, bidding the young beauty bathe my hurts and my person. I thought she meant I should be taken to a bathing room, but the young woman bade me wait, saying that she would return with water and ointments. Then she drifted away leaving me standing there, dripping on the flag-stones. The older woman flicked a look of irritation at me and bade me stand by the fire so that my clothes could dry. I flushed, for her tone told me she had decided I was a fool.

There was a deep, comfortable chair before the hearth, but I could not sit in it, wet and filthy as I was. Instead, I drew out its wooden footstool and sat gingerly on that, facing the flames and trying to marshal my wits so that I could make some sensible responses when she began to demand some answers. But her whole attention was bent on her tapestry. I watched her needle stab in and out swiftly, half hypnotised by the rhythm until my eyes began to close.

I started awake when the other woman returned wheeling a trolley. She set a large bowl on the flagstones by the fire, then began to fill it with steaming water from jug after jug. When the bowl was half full, she bade me bathe and she would go and get me some dry clothing. I ought to have been embarrassed at the discovery that I was expected to strip off my filthy clothes and stand naked in this room, with its mistress working at her tapestry, but since her cold blue eyes had already stripped my skin off, I simply took off my outer clothes, hesitated, and then stripped off my sopping underthings, all the while keeping my eyes on the older woman. She did not lift her head.

I stepped into the hot water with a shiver and used a sponge to lave water over myself. It was not nearly so satisfying as a long hot shower, and yet there was a medieval poetry in the sound of the water trickling into the bowl, the reflection of flames on my wet limbs, the lavender scent of the steam, which soothed me profoundly. Even so, by the time I was drying myself, my knees stung fiercely and my hand had begun to throb again.

The young woman returned with a white lawn nightgown that seemed to me fine and lovely enough to be a bridal dress. She slipped it over my head and the soft whisper of its movements over my skin gave me gooseflesh. When she commanded it, I sat obediently on a stool as my filthy, tangled hair was washed and combed, and finally she put a soothing salve from a little enamelled pot onto all of the cuts and bruises I showed her. The pain of them began to fade at once, making me wonder what was in the miraculous ointment. Some of the gashes were ugly enough that I had feared they ought to have been stitched, but neither woman suggested calling a doctor.

I submitted to all these intimate ministrations with docility, partly out of exhaustion and partly because I sensed they were part of the strangeness I had entered. When the trolley was wheeled away, I was so weary I could have curled up on the chair by the fire and slept, content as a cat, but a shawl was brought and wrapped around my shoulders and the mistress of the house rose to announce in her cold, high voice that supper would be served in the adjoining chamber. She led me there, where a cold repast was laid out on a long, beautiful table made of the same pale wood as the armlet in the pocket of my wet clothes. I sat salivating with hunger while the meal was served, but before I could touch a morsel, my hostess asked if I would go back into the tapestry room and see if I could find a golden needle that she must have dropped by the tapestry stand.

It was a strangely timed request, and menial, but her young companion had withdrawn for the moment so I nodded and went back through the door to the other room. The fire had begun to burn down and, as the candelabra had been carried to the room we were to dine in, the chamber was now full of shadows, which seemed to gather more thickly about the tapestry stand. I searched among my wet clothes for the lighter, at the same time retrieving the carved armlet so I could present it to my hostess, then I set about searching for the needle. It did not take me long to see the flash of gold, but retrieving it from the crack into which it had fallen took some ingenuity. But at last I carried it triumphantly back to my hostess, who still sat at the table, palms flat upon its surface, as when she had asked me to fetch it for her.

When she held out her hand, I laid the needle upon it and then I gave her the carved armlet.



Remembering my own testing has brought me to the very edge of sleep, but all at once a realisation flashes in my mind like a gleam of flame on a golden needle! Heart yammering, I throw back my covers, pull a shawl about my shoulders and hasten out into the halls until I come to the doors of the Princess Chamber. I take the cold doves in my hands, turn them and throw open the doors. The dazzle of white petals fills my eyes, blinds me with relief so overwhelming it is like a blow to the head, and I stagger against the doorjamb and cling to it, trembling and gasping for a long, giddy moment.

He lives and the hunt is still on.

I feel the approach of the third dusk as a quickening in my blood, and in that moment, I decide I will assay no test if my son’s chosen comes safe through the Endgate. It is my right and I have no doubt that she has been tested hard and well in the Wolfsgate Valley. But it is less that than the knowledge that she came when my son hunted her, though he is a beast almost wholly now, and she and her dog fought to protect him, that convinces me she is worthy. Unlike my mother-in-law, I will not hide my joy at seeing her come safe through the Endgate, in case she fails to satisfy the Princess Chamber. I will kiss her and call her daughter and daughter she shall be to me, I am suddenly sure of it. In that glad moment all things seem possible.

Cloud-Marie appears at the door, and I see by her expression that she knows the time as well as I. I sign my requirements to her. I do not know what expression is on my face, but she looks at me for a long moment with one curious eye, before she lopes away. It takes time but at last she comes up to my chamber bearing a laden basket and my cloak. I have dressed myself but I turn to let her drape my cloak about my shoulders and turn again so she can reach up to tie it at my throat, panting open-mouthed as she struggles to make her thick fingers perform the delicate task. I do not twitch myself away or sigh impatiently, but simply wait until she has managed it.

Finally she kneels before me to slip on my outdoor shoes and I touch her wiry golden hair and feel a stab of love for her. Perhaps I made some sound, for she looks up at me from that position and gabbles an enquiry. Her words are gibberish, but I know what she wants. I bid her get her own cloak and she gives me a gaping smile of delight before running to fetch it. As often before, I am struck by her capacity for joy in the smallest things. Perhaps the vacancies in her allow more space for joy, while the rest of us have little space for it and less and less as we grow older.

I shall not be like that, I vow. Not now and no matter what happens in the Princess Chamber. Though I grow old I will open myself to joy. For some reason, I think of Yssa and my heart aches for her. If only she had stayed and opened herself to the pleasure of her daughter’s sweetness she might, like me, have learned joy from her.

In my gladness at knowing my son lives, my love for Cloud-Marie and her mother grows more intense, for aside from my son and my husband, I have loved no one better in my life than these two, the sister and daughter of my heart.

Cloud-Marie returns, struggling into her cloak. I tie her ribbon for her and then I take up the basket and we set off, hand in hand. We make our way through the palace to the front door of the west wing, and come out into the beautiful fountain courtyard. Cloud-Marie gives a crow of excitement as she lollops alongside me.

My mother-in-law awaited my arrival within the house, but I will not be niggardly in my welcome. I am too impatient to behold the face of my son’s chosen. I know that I may not speak to her of the testing she has undergone, or of the Princess Chamber ere she enters it, but I need not treat her coolly. I will pretend to believe whatever tale she decides to tell me, until we are free to speak truthfully to one another.

I glance up and see clouds of darkness gathering overhead. It is always so at the beginning and end of a testing, I now know. Cloud-Marie senses my tension, rocks a little, so I take her big rough hand and kiss it and clasp it in my own. It flutters like a bird and then is still.

The sun kisses the horizon and we sit on the edge of the fountain together and wait and wait until the gate from the lane that leads to the Wolfsgate Valley opens. The silver-haired woman I saw in the scrying bowl comes stumbling into the fountain yard. She does not stop and gaze around her as I did, coming here that first time, for her head is bent low over the body of the red dog she carries in her arms. As she staggers closer, I see that there is red blood all over the hands that hold the beast so closely and tenderly.

My heart aches and I start towards them.

The woman looks up at me and all strength seems to run out of me, for I know her.



It is Yssa, and now I see the few strands of fire amidst the silver grey.

‘Quickly, Rose,’ she gasps. ‘The pack attacked as we were running for the Endgate. She was hurt defending me. We must get her to the Princess Chamber before it is too late.’

I am utterly confounded, but her command is so urgent and authoritative that I can do no more than obey. Instead of bringing her through the doors, I lead her around the house to the mist garden, and up steps that will bring us to the hall outside the Princess Chamber. She knows the way as well as I, but when we reach the closed doors of the Princess Chamber she stops and looks at me expectantly. The dog’s blood is dripping through her fingers onto the white marble floor and questions crowd my mind.

‘You must open the doors for her!’ Yssa cries.

I grasp the doves and throw open the doors and Yssa runs into the room, scattering and crushing white petals that spin in a fragrant blizzard in her wake. Heaving the dog over her shoulder, she climbs awkwardly up on the edge of the bed to lay the dog there as gently as she can. Immediately blood stains the pure white silk of the coverlet.

‘What are you doing?’ I gasp, but she only leaps down and catches my hand, dragging me after her from the chamber, slamming the door closed behind us. Then she heaves a great sigh and leans back against the doors.

‘I don’t understand,’ I whisper.

But Yssa’s eyes have found Cloud-Marie who has come after us, and she answers me almost absently, without taking her eyes from her daughter. ‘She is his chosen and we will see soon enough if the princess spell is wide and kind enough to encompass her. If not, she will die.’

‘But . . . she is a dog,’ I stammer.

‘And your son is a wolf,’ says my friend.

‘My son must wed one with mortal blood,’ I say.

‘My niece is half mortal like your son, and of royal blood besides,’ Yssa answers.

‘How . . .’ I begin, but now she is holding out a filthy, bloodstained hand to Cloud-Marie. To my astonishment, both of the girl’s eyes fix on the woman that she cannot know is her mother and she is smiling, her expression radiant.

‘Sweetling,’ Yssa sighs, and gathers her daughter to her in her strong brown arms. Cloud-Marie sighs as deeply as her mother, as if some long, hard task is at an end, and closes her eyes.

Tears fill my eyes and spill down my cheeks at the sight of them clasped together, but I think of my son and I do not understand. How can he have chosen a dog for a bride and how can a dog be the niece of my faerie friend and royal and half mortal besides? The questions in my mind pile one upon another until I cannot stand under the weight of them. I lean against the wall and then find I must slide down and sit on the floor in a billowing puddle of silk and satin.

Hearing the rustle of cloth, Yssa looks down at me, and there is love and regret in her face. ‘My dear friend, I knew your kindness and capacity for love would encompass even my poor girl. Had you not endured my resentment and bitterness with such patient grace that they were stilled in me and I came to love you?’

‘I don’t understand what any of this means,’ I say. ‘Where is my son?’

‘He is wounded, but not mortally,’ Yssa says and kisses her daughter, who snuggles closer. Then she looks down at me again and says, ‘My sister sent me to the palace because she said you could end the curse. She had dreamed of you and then you came stumbling into the Wolfsgate Valley, green and helpless, wolfmeat for certain sure if she did not help you.’

‘Your sister?’ I murmur.

‘She was cursed,’ Yssa tells me gently. ‘I do not speak of the curse that afflicted your husband and son, but the one laid upon she who cast that curse: Alzbetta, who loved a human that betrayed her. My half-sister.’

‘But that was aeons past,’ I stammered, then remembered that faerie folk are all but immortal and assume whatever age they desire. ‘How can she be your half-sister . . . she killed her half-sister.’

‘She killed Thayla who was the other daughter of her father,’ says Yssa. ‘I am the other daughter of her mother and loved my sister well despite all she had done in rage and passionate despair. Ages past, I went to dwell with her in the Wolfsgate Valley when she was banished there by the king to live trapped forever in the form of a black she-wolf. It was no hardship, for I am solitary by nature and have the gift of understanding the speech of beasts and birds. I was not unhappy and at first Alzbetta and I fared well enough, but she was desperate to find a way to break the curse, not to save herself, but because, when the king banished her by trapping her in her wolf form, she had been with child by the mortal she had slain. She had no magic in her beast form, but I did, and I found a spell that would arrest the course of the child’s growth in Alzbetta’s belly. Then my sister begged me to find a way to transform her back to her true form so that she might safely bear her child. I strove endlessly to discover what we needed. I read books and spoke to witches and faeries and sorcerers, but in every instance I failed. My sister took her rage and despair out on humans who entered the valley, and especially princess candidates who were lured there to thwart the curse she had laid upon her father and all the sons born of his line, though I begged her not to harm them and did what I could to help them.

‘Then one day, Alzbetta came to me and said she had dreamed a human woman would one day come to the Wolfsgate Valley with the means of saving her unborn child from the consequences of her terrible folly. Thereafter she left off harming any human and only waited, with the child she had carried inside her for so long, and I waited with her.’ She sighed. ‘It is very hard to be unaffected when you live with bitterness and regret and fear. It turned me in upon myself and made me more of a loner than ever, so that I did not regret the lack of love and children in my own life.’

‘Yes,’ I say, beginning to understand a great deal.

‘One day, Alzbetta came to me and said that you had come and had passed the three days of testing, and that you were a candidate for the Princess Chamber. Somehow, neither of us had expected that, for not all humans who blunder here are summoned. Alzbetta told me she had seen you safe to the Endgate, and that we must wait to see what would come of it. I do not know what we expected, for her vision had shown nothing but that you were the key to saving her child. You were made a princess by the chamber and you wed your prince. Years passed until my sister lost patience and bade me go to dwell in the palace and see what I could learn.’

‘And what did you learn?’ I ask.

She laughs. ‘I learned to laugh and sing and to take pleasure in teaching something to another creature. I learned kindness and gentleness and generosity and patience. I learned, my dear sister, to love you, and that enabled me to love a man.’ She sighed. ‘You at least were worthy of my love, for you had cared for me and called me sister and loved me long before I was able to feel anything but bitter weariness. You gave me room and tenderness enough to grow.’

‘But you did not find out how I am to save your niece?’

‘I did not know, until I was in the midst of birthing my own child, then all at once I understood that no answer could be found until Alzbetta’s child was born. Therefore she must be born. I went back to my sister, leaving my daughter with you, for I knew she would grow well in the warmth of your steady love, as she would not have done in the shadow of the strange desperate anguish of my sister’s life in the Wolfsgate Valley. I told Alzbetta that she must bear her daughter and though she feared what would come of it, she let me unknit the spell that had frozen her womb for hundreds of mortal years, and she bore her child at last. A female.’

‘The red-gold dog,’ I murmur.

She nods. ‘My sister was aghast at first, but I bade her be patient, for she was alive and might yet be transformed by some means we had yet to discover, connected to you. I took my niece to the mortal realm then, because if she had remained in the valley the grey king would have killed her. It is a glamour laid upon the wolf pack of that place that they must seek the life of any maid, mortal or faerie, who enters their valley. My sister wept but it was done. She remained in the Wolfsgate Valley, waiting, while I brought her daughter to your world and dwelt there with her. And so we lived these long years since I left the King’s Palace. Indeed you may laugh to hear that I dwelt all this time in the very demesne where you had once lived, and each day I brought my niece to the Wolfsgate to run a little in the area before the guardian trees, where Alzbetta could come to her.

‘Until the day Alzbetta came and told me she had seen your son, and that he had fallen to the curse and was almost wholly a wolf,’ Yssa said. ‘I saw it all then and bade my sister drive him through the Wolfsgate to the mortal realm when next she saw him.’

‘You thought to mate them?’ I ask her.

‘I thought to save them, for if he chose her and she entered the Princess Chamber in the King’s Palace, she might be transformed into a princess and he, having hunted a true princess bride, would be rescued from Alzbetta’s curse. But I could not bring her to him or he to her by any action of my own without disqualifying it as a hunt. Their meeting must come about by your son’s doing. I was pondering how it could be managed when one night, very late, I glanced out my apartment window and saw what I first thought was a white dog clawing at the yard where my niece had her kennel. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when I realised he was a wolf, and must be your son. Later it came to me that the ground both sides of the Wolfsgate must have been saturated with my niece’s scent, and being a beast only by magic, your son had scented this same truth in my niece. I saw them touch noses and then my clever niece lifted the latch on the door to go out to him. I gathered up my things and followed as fast as I could, knowing he would bring her through the Wolfsgate where the grey wolves would be gathering just beyond the guardian trees.’

I must have made some small startled sound, for Yssa, who had sat down on the floor beside me with Cloud-Marie still clasped in her arms, looks expectantly at me.

‘You think that the Princess Chamber will heal her wounds?’ I ask.

‘You told me the Princess Chamber completely healed you of all the cuts and bruises you had got in the valley during the testing,’ Yssa says. ‘But I think it will only heal in the process of transforming a maid into a princess.’

‘And if she is not a princess when we open the door?’ I ask.

All of the brightness and strength in Yssa’s lovely face fades, and for a moment I see in her face all the centuries that she has lived. ‘Then my niece will be dead, and your son will remain a wolf. But the mother of your husband foresaw that, through you, Alzbetta’s curse upon his line would be broken, and Alzbetta saw it too, so how else can this come to be, save that my niece become a princess bride?’

Later that night it grows very cold and I insist Yssa and Cloud-Marie have my bed, for I know I will not sleep. I tend my friend’s hurts and we pick at the supper I prepared for her niece. Yssa praises the bread and we both laugh because it is her recipe I used. When she and Cloud-Marie sleep, clasped in one another’s arms, I sit vigil by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, working intermittently at my small tapestry. My mind is full of all that Yssa has told me, and with thoughts of my son, who waits too, wounded, though I do not know if he understands that his fate and that of an innocent girl are dependent entirely on the enigmatic magic of the Princess Chamber.

I think of Alzbetta, the black she-wolf, who saved my life, whose curse had afflicted my husband and my son, who had died protecting him and her daughter. I think of Yssa whom I believed had abandoned her daughter, only to find that she had entrusted her to me, certain that I would love her. I marvel that all of our stories come to this deep, dark, dangerous, impossible valley of love for our children.

We would give our lives for them, I think, all of us mothers. Yet sometimes all the love in all the worlds might not be enough to save them.

Morning comes, and it is Cloud-Marie who finds me slumped awkwardly in my chair. For a moment I think I must have dreamed it all, but then I see Yssa is behind her.

‘Let’s go,’ she says. ‘I can’t bear to wait any longer.’

So we walk together, the three of us, Yssa who is the sister of my heart, and Cloud-Marie who is the daughter of my heart, to find out if the Princess Chamber has made a princess of a red dog.

Both Yssa and Cloud-Marie stand back to let me grasp the doves, and when I open the doors, I gasp, for the room is red as blood, red as fire, red as the petals of a million roses, and the scent of them! Oh, I remember, in this moment, the wonder of my own awakening in this same room, in this same sea of intoxicating crimson.

‘Look!’ whispers Yssa, and I look and see on the bed, where once I lay, a young woman. Long and slender and naked she is, with skin as white as milk and a great wild mop of red-gold hair. There is not a mark on that white skin as she sits up and stares about her in bewilderment. I see her grow still. She is looking towards the fire and I look there, too.

And I see him lying in the petals before the hearth, even as my prince once lay, waiting for his princess to wake, my son the wolf prince, his pelt white save where it is laid open in red wounds, head unmoving upon his paws.

Yssa catches me as I sway.

‘Wait. Wait and see,’ she hisses, for now the girl slips down from the bed and runs lightly through the red petals towards the white wolf, utterly unselfconscious in her nakedness. She kneels beside him and strokes him from his head to his tail. Her touch is sensuous, and to my everlasting relief, he lifts his head to look at her. She bends to kiss his muzzle and, all at once, he is not a wolf but a man, naked and white and perfect as she. But when she lifts her head he is again a wolf. Yet she does not seem dismayed by his transformations. She strokes his pelt and strokes it and he is a man again and rolls back against her knees, his eyes languorous with desire.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmur.

‘I don’t either,’ says Yssa. ‘But he lives and she lives, and perhaps this is beyond our part in their story. Perhaps the time for the power of mothers and aunts is over. Now they must write their own story and seek their own ending.’

Yssa draws me from the room and closes the doors slowly. I have a last glimpse of the tawny princess reaching again to kiss a wolf and of a powerful young man with hair as dark as his father’s reaching up to draw her into his arms. Then the doors are closed.

Yssa puts one arm around Cloud-Marie and another around my shoulders, and she ushers us away from the Princess Chamber. She kisses Cloud-Marie and says to me, ‘You have raised my daughter for me, and you have done all you can for your son. Now you must think of yourself.’

‘Myself?’ I say the word as if I do not know its meaning.

Indeed I do not know what I can be, for if I am not wanted as wife or mother anymore, what am I? As if she reads my thoughts, Yssa stops before a mirror and turns me to look at myself. I see a woman who is not young, nor is she old. There are secrets in her eyes, and lines about them, but her mouth is full and warm and softly red and the silver is only a glimmer of the frost on the dark golden tresses that fall over her shoulders.

Yssa says, ‘Your story is not only their story. He will be king and she will be his queen. But what of you?’

I think of going to live with those other queens in the palace of tears, growing old as they mirror my ageing back to me. I think of sending word to try to draw my husband back to me. I loved him and love him still, I realise, but he has gone now. I imagine remaining in the King’s Palace in my little rooms, working on my tapestry and sometimes walking in the mist garden, and in time, minding the children of my son and his princess bride. I think of laying myself down in a field of flowers where I would sleep forever, and dream. But suddenly that seems a mawkish, morbid vision.

‘I need to find a new dream,’ I say, and I am surprised by the brisk impatience in my voice.

‘I think you ought to go back to your own world for a time,’ says Yssa. ‘The boy and my niece will need time alone now, and if you do not mind, Cloud-Marie and I will join you after a little. There is much in the lives of mortals that immortals do not know and I would like to study it, and to see more of your world. In truth, I like the idea of a world where being a princess or a queen is not all there is. And Cloud-Marie will not want to be parted from you for long.’

‘I could go to the land where I was born and wait for you there,’ I say, the words forming on my lips even as they are forming in my mind. ‘It is a land surrounded by sea and I once lived on the very edge of it. When I sat up in my bed, I could see the waves rolling in. I always wondered how they did not roll over me.’ I fall silent, but the thought of going back crackles through me like an electrical current. I think of a beach where I walked as a girl; the soft, salted scent of the warm air that played over my skin like a caress. I imagine how it will be to lick my lips and find they taste of the sea.

‘Cloud-Marie will like the waves,’ says Yssa.

Cloud-Marie waves at her mother, and gives a chirrup of excited laughter, and suddenly we are all laughing.