FEW FOLKS LIVE in the Wood Between. The Wood is not a place to call one’s home, for it is never safe, even at the best of times, and is predictably unpredictable. Nevertheless, Dame Imraldera had come to consider her little corner of the Wood as more of a home than anything else she had known.
The Haven in which she dwelt had been constructed by Faerie hands long ages ago, though it had since fallen into such disrepair that when Dame Imraldera first came to it with her comrade-in-arms, they had spent many days and nights (difficult to count in the timeless Between) repairing it. Thus she took more than a little pride in its stately halls and elegant, nature-rimmed chambers, and justly so. The library was particularly splendid, boasting shelves upon shelves of books, scrolls, parchments, and brass-bound tomes, most of which she had taken down in her own hand after learning to read and write in Faerie, a difficult but rewarding language. Here she kept histories and lineages, prophecies and prose, instructions for heroes on their quests, and obscure rules of etiquette, useful should one find oneself visiting faraway fey courts.
She also recorded poetry, the task at which she worked now. Most of the poetry in need of transcribing and cataloguing had been written by the same poet—the most renowned poet in the history of the worlds, to be sure, but a cheap rhymer, when all was said and done. Worse yet, he knew it!
But awareness of deficiency never stopped him from bringing more and more benighted verses to her, scrawled ingloriously on whatever scraps had been under his hand at the time. This latest had been written in what appeared to be beetle blood on a strip of birch bark that kept rolling back up on itself every time Imraldera opened it.
The poet little cared to make her job easier. And the rhyme itself made her cringe. It went something like this:
I wish I were in Rudiobus,
Where the mountain touches the sky,
Where Gorm-Uisce mirrors the stars,
And we’re together, Gleamdren and I!
“Well, you’ve got your wish now, fool cat,” the good dame growled softly even as her pen scratched away. “In Rudiobus with your lady Gleamdren, and far away from any work to be done. I hope you’re happy!”
This irritable grumbling was perhaps unworthy of her, but the poem went on in this, she thought, inane vein for ten full verses—enough to try anyone’s patience. Besides, she was a little tired and feeling ill used.
Imraldera was not herself a Faerie, though after more than one hundred years of life in the Wood Between and no sign of aging she began to suspect that she might be immortal. Her face was that of a young maiden, her skin smooth and brown, her hair glossy black and pulled rather severely back from her face and tied with a scarf so as not to interrupt her work. Her tunic was long and lavender, its billowy sleeves rolled up past her elbows, and underneath she wore green trousers of a light, loose fabric.
She made a sweet, if earnest, picture, Sir Eanrin thought when he stepped into the library. Her brow set in a stern line of concentration, her lips parted slightly back from her teeth (which were a little crooked—proof that she had been, at one time at least, mortal—no woman of Faerie would suffer such imperfection). It was a shame to disturb her, hard at work as she was, so Eanrin stood a moment, his hand on the doorframe, and watched her, glad at the sight of her and thinking many things that his golden eyes might have revealed had anyone been looking.
Then suddenly he sank down into the form of a bright orange cat, tail high and soft as the plume of Imraldera’s pen. “Prrrrrrlt?” he said, honey-sweet, and Imraldera dropped her work and spun on her stool to face him.
“You!” she said. “How dare you show your face after all this time?”
“Time, old girl?” the cat replied with another cheerful trill and a flick of his tail. “What do we care for time?”
“You may not, but I certainly do!” the good dame said. For a moment she looked as though she might throw her pen at him. “You said you’d be gone for a month, Eanrin. A month. Not three years.”
The cat shrugged a cattish sort of shrug and began grooming a paw. “I don’t see what you have to complain about,” he said between licks. “You were gone for, what was it, fifteen years at least? Gallivanting about your old world, bothering mortals with this, that, and the other. I’m not much on time and its nuances, but as I remember, three years and twenty years are hardly—”
Imraldera threw up her hands in exasperation. “It’s not the same thing at all! I was about our Lord’s work, tending to the needs of my people. They were—and are, last we knew—under invasion! It’s not as though I could simply leave them, with the Dragonwitch newly dead, no leader to turn to, and Faerie beasts crawling in at the borders.”
“Well,” said the cat, primly placing one forepaw beside the other and twitching an ear at her, “I was about my work as well.”