“I think I couldn’t give a damn, as long as his check doesn’t bounce. A thousand dollars to play dress-up for a few hours. I’d be a fool not to do the damned party.”
Peter picks the rook up again and dangles it in the air above the board, teasing her. “Oh, his book,” he says. “I remembered the title the other day. But then I forgot it all over again. Anyway, it was something on shamanism and shapeshifters, werewolves and masks, that sort of thing. It sold a lot of copies in ’68, then vanished from the face of the earth. You could probably find out something about it online.” Peter sets the rook down and starts to take his hand away.
“Don’t,” she says. “That’ll be check mate.”
“You could at least let me lose on my own, dear,” he scowls, pretending to be insulted.
“Yeah, well, I’m not ready to go home yet.” Hannah replies, and Peter Mulligan goes back to dithering over the chessboard and talking about Monsieur Ordinaire’s forgotten book. In a little while, she gets up to refill both their coffee cups, and there’s a single black and grey pigeon perched on the kitchen windowsill, staring in at her with its beady piss-yellow eyes. It almost reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of, and so she raps on the glass with her knuckles and frightens it away.
12
The old woman named Jackie never comes for her. There’s a young boy, instead, fourteen or fifteen, sixteen at the most, his nails polished poppy red to match his rouged lips, and he’s dressed in peacock feathers and silk. He opens the door and stands there, very still, watching her, waiting wordlessly. Something like awe on his smooth face, and for the first time Hannah doesn’t just feel nude, she feels naked.
“Are they ready for me now?” she asks him, trying to sound no more than half as nervous as she is, and then turns her head to steal a last glance at the green fairy in the tall mahogany mirror. But the mirror is empty. There’s no one there at all, neither her nor the green woman, nothing but the dusty backroom full of antiques, the pretty hard-candy lamps, the peeling cranberry wallpaper.
“My Lady,” the boy says in a voice like broken crystal shards, and then he curtsies. “The Court is waiting to receive you, at your ready.” He steps to one side, to let her pass, and the music from the party grows suddenly very loud, changing tempo, the rhythm assuming a furious speed as a thousand notes and drumbeats tumble and boom and chase one another’s tails.
“The mirror,” Hannah whispers, pointing at it, at the place where her reflection should be, and when she turns back to the boy there’s a young girl standing there, instead, dressed in his feathers and make-up. She could be his twin.
“It’s a small thing, My Lady,” she says with the boy’s sparkling, shattered tongue.
“What’s happening?”
“The Court is assembled,” the girl child says. “They are all waiting. Don’t be afraid, My Lady. I will show you the way.”
The path, the path through the woods to the well. The path down to the well …
“Do you have a name?” Hannah asks, surprised at the calm in her voice; all the embarrassment and unease at standing naked before this child, and the one before, the boy twin, the fear at what she didn’t see gazing back at her in the looking glass, all of that gone now.
“My name? I’m not such a fool as that, My Lady.”
“No, of course not,” Hannah replies. “I’m sorry.”
“I will show you the way,” the child says again. “Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our Lady nigh.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Hannah replies. “I was beginning to think that I was lost. But I’m not lost, am I?”
“No, My Lady. You are here.”
“Yes. Yes, I am here, aren’t I?” and the child smiles for her, showing off its sharp crystal teeth. Hannah smiles back, and then she leaves the dusty backroom and the mahogany mirror, following the child down a short hallway; the music has filled in all the vacant corners of her skull, the music and the heavy living-dying smells of wildflowers and fallen leaves, rotting stumps and fresh-turned earth. A riotous hothouse cacophony of odors—spring to fall, summer to winter—and she’s never tasted air so violently sweet.
… the path down the well, and the still black water at the bottom.
Hannah, can you hear me? Hannah?
It’s so cold down here. I can’t see …
At the end of the hall, just past the stairs leading back down to St. Mark’s, there’s a green door, and the girl opens it. Green gets you out.
And all the things in the wide, wide room—the unlikely room that stretches so far away in every direction that it could never be contained in any building, not in a thousand buildings—the scampering, hopping, dancing, spinning, flying, skulking things, each and every one of them stops and stares at her. And Hannah knows that she ought to be frightened of them, that she should turn and run from this place. But it’s really nothing she hasn’t seen before, a long time ago, and she steps past the child (who is a boy again) as the wings on her back begin to thrum like the frantic, iridescent wings of bumblebees and hummingbirds, red wasps and hungry dragonflies. Her mouth tastes of anise and wormwood, sugar and hyssop and melissa. Sticky verdant light spills from her skin and pools in the grass and moss at her bare feet.
Sink or swim, and so easy to imagine the icy black well water closing thickly over her sister’s face, filling her mouth, slipping up her nostrils, flooding her belly, as clawed hands dragged her down.
And down.
And down.
And sometimes, Dr. Valloton says, sometimes we spend our entire lives just trying to answer one simple question.
The music is a hurricane, swallowing her.
My Lady. Lady of the Bottle. Artemisia absinthium, Chernobyl, apsinthion, Lady of Waking Dreaming, Green Lady of Elation and Melancholy.
I am ruin and sorrow.
My robe is the color of despair.
They bow, all of them, and Hannah finally sees the thing waiting for her on its prickling throne of woven branches and birds’ nests, the hulking antlered thing with blazing eyes, that wolf-jawed hart, the man and the stag, and she bows, in her turn.
New York City takes a lot of protecting. Luckily there are mages, like Matthew Szczegielniak, who are there to take care of the more unusual threats … like a cockatrice, a creature whose looks kill … literally.
CRYPTIC COLORATION
EELIZABETH BEAR
Katie saw him first. The next-best thing to naked, in cutoff camouflage pants and high-top basketball sneakers and nothing else, except the thick black labyrinth of neo-tribal ink that covered his pale skin from collarbones to ankle-bones. He shone like piano keys, glossy-sleek with sweat in a sultry September afternoon.
Katie already had Melissa’s sleeve in her hand and was tugging her toward the crosswalk. Gina trailed three steps behind. “We have got to go watch this basketball game.”
“What?” But then Melissa’s line of sight intersected Katie’s and she gasped. “Oh my fuck, look at all that ink. Do you think that counts as a shirt or a skin?” Melissa was from Boston, but mostly didn’t talk like it.