As he considered that, a woman’s voice behind him rose, infuriating him further. “Well, you see, my family has always been close to the faeries. My great great great great grandmother was even stolen away to live with them.”
Roiben wondered why mortals so wanted to be associated with suffering that they told foolish tales. Why not tell a story where one’s grandmother died fat, old, and beloved by her dozen children?
“Really?” the woman’s friend was saying. “Like Robert Kirk on the faerie hill?”
“Exactly,” said the woman. “Except that Great Grandma Clarabelle wasn’t sleeping outdoors and she was right here in New York State. She got taken out of her own bed! Clarabelle had just given birth to a stillborn baby and the priest came too late to baptize her. No iron over the doors.”
It happened like that sometimes, he had to concede.
“Oh,” her friend said, shaking her head. “Yes, we’ve forgotten about iron and salt and all the other protections.”
Clara. For a moment, thoughts of Corny and his betrayal went out of Roiben’s head completely. He knew that name. And dozens upon dozens of Claras who have come into the world, in that moment, he knew the women were telling a true story. A story he knew. It shamed him that he had dismissed them so easily for being foolish. Even fools tell the truth. Historically, the truth belongs especially to fools.
“Excuse me,” Roiben said, turning in his chair. “I couldn’t help overhearing”
“Do you believe in faeries?” she asked him, seeming pleased.
“I’m afraid I must,” he said, finally. “May I ask you something about Clara?”
“My great great aunt” the woman said, smiling. “I’m named after her. I’m Clarabella. Well, it’s really my middle name, but I still—”
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance” he said, extending his hand to shake hers. “Do you happen to know when your Clara went missing?”
“Some time in the eighteenth century, I guess,” she said. Her voice slowed as she got to the end of the sentence, as though she’d become wary. Her smile dimmed. “Is something the matter?”
“And did she have two children?” he asked recklessly. “A boy named Robert and a girl named Mary?”
“How could you have known that?” Clarabella said, her voice rising. “I didn’t know it,” Roiben said. “That is the reason I asked.”
“But you—you shouldn’t have been able to—” Everyone in the coffee shop was staring at them now. Roiben perceived a goblin by the door, snickering as he licked chocolate icing from his fingers.
Her friend put a hand on Clarabella’s arm. “He’s one of the fair folk,” she said, hushed. “Be careful. He might want to steal you, too.”
Roiben laughed, suddenly, but his throat felt full of thorns.
It is eternal summer in the Seelie Court, as changeless as faeries themselves. Trees hang eternally heavy with golden fruit and flowering vines climb walls to flood bark-shingled roofs with an endless rain of petals.
Roiben recalled being a child there, growing up in indolent pleasure and carelessness. He and his sister Ethine lived far from the faeries who’d sired them and thought no more of them than they thought of the sunless sky or of the patterns that the pale fishes in the stream made with their mad darting.
They had games to amuse themselves with. They dissected grasshoppers, they pulled the wings from moths and sewed them to the backs of toads to see if they could make the toads fly. And when they tired of those games they had a nurse called Clara with which to play.
She had mud brown hair and eyes as green as wet pools. In her more lucid moments, she hated her faerie charges. She must have known that she had been stolen away from home, from her own family and children, to care for beings she considered little better than soulless devils. When Ethine and Roiben would clamour for her lap, she thrust them away. When they teased her for her evening prayers, she described how their skin would crackle and smoke, as they roasted in hell after the final judgment day.
She could be kind, too. She taught them songs and chased them through meadows until they shrieked with laughter. They played fox and geese with acorns and holes dug by their fingers in the dirt. They played charades and forfeits. They played graces with hoops and sticks woven from willow trees. And after, Clara washed their dirty cheeks with her handkerchief, dipped in the water of the stream, and made up beds for them in the moss.
And when she kissed their clean faces and bid them goodnight, she would call them Robert and Mary. Her lost children. The children that she had been enchanted to think they were.
Roiben did not remember pitying Clara then, although thinking back on it, he found her pitiable. He and Ethine were young and their love for her was too selfish to want anything more than to be loved best. They hated being called by another’s name and pinched her in punishment or hid from her until she wept.
One day, Ethine said that she’d come up with a plan to make Clara forget all about Robert and Mary. Roiben gathered up the mushrooms, just as his sister told him.
He didn’t know that what was wholesome to him might poison Clara.
They killed her, by accident, as easily as they had pulled the wings from the moth or stabbed the grasshopper. Eventually, their faerie mother came and laughed at their foolishness and staged a beautiful funeral. Ethine had woven garlands to hang around the neck of Clara’s corpse and no one washed their cheeks, even when they got smeared with mud.
And although the funeral was amusing and their faerie mother an entertaining novelty, Roiben could not stop thinking of the way Clara had looked at him as she died. As if, perhaps, she had loved her monstrous faerie children after all, and in that moment, regretted it. It was a familiar look, one that he had long thought was love but now recognized as hatred.
Corny watched Val foam milk and wondered if he should go home. The crowd was starting to die down and they could probably close in an hour or two. He was almost exhausted enough to be able to crawl into bed and let his body’s need for sleep overtake his mind’s need to race around in helpless circles.
Then Corny looked up and saw Roiben on his feet, staring at some poor woman like he was going to rip off her head. Corny had no idea what the lady had said, but if the girl at the counter was any indication, it could have been pretty crazy. He left a customer trying to decide whether or not she really wanted an extra shot of elderflower syrup to rush across the coffee shop.
“Everything okay over here?” Corny asked. Roiben flinched, like he hadn’t noticed Corny getting so close and had to restrain some violent impulse.
“This woman was telling a story about her ancestor,” Roiben said tightly, voice full of false pleasure. “A story that perhaps she read somewhere or which has been passed down through her family. About how a woman named Clarabelle was taken away by the faeries. I simply want to hear the whole thing.”
Corny turned to the woman. “Okay, you two. Get out of here. Now.” He pushed her and her friend toward the door.