The next morning Syla offered me bread and jam and more of the awful tea. I accepted the bread and jam—which was made from some delicious red berry I’d never tasted before—but passed on the tea.
Afterwards I didn’t know quite what to do with myself, trying not to trip over the hem of the long tunic as I paced the space like a panther in a cage. The fourth or fifth time I stumbled, Syla finally looked up from her book.
“Give me your shoes,” she said.
“I don’t like going barefoot,” I said.
She snapped her fingers impatiently and the shoes began quivering on my feet, the ankle straps unbuckling of their own accord.
“Wait,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
The shoes went still.
I pulled them off and handed them over.
She fondled them like she had a fetish. “These are pretty,” she said, and as she handled them, they shrank a couple of sizes.
“You have big feet,” she observed and slipped the right shoe on her own foot. It fit perfectly. She admired her foot from every angle and then shook it off.
I noticed she had a perfect pedicure and wondered how she managed that.
“Magic,” she said, and as I watched, the polish on her toes shifted from a Christmassy red to a berry pink.
And suddenly, it was as if a mental block had been removed and I flashed on a childhood memory I’d buried deep. I was out shopping with a friend and her mom. My mother had given me money to buy something I wanted and when we went into a shoe store, I saw a pair of really cute pink sandals.
Purple was my favorite color then and I’d desperately wanted to find some purple sandals to go with my wardrobe of purple t-shirts and shorts. (My mother indulged my preferences and that year I don’t think I had a single piece of clothing that didn’t have purple on it somewhere.) “Do you have them in purple?” I’d asked the clerk.
“No, hon, only the colors you see out.”
“Pink goes with purple,” my friend’s mother had pointed out and I didn’t want to contradict her because I didn’t want her to think I was a brat. So I’d just looked at the shoes, really hard and then I picked them up and took them to the cashier.
“You changed the color of the shoes,” my friend said to me. “You’re weird.”
“I like purple,” I said, as if that explained it, and happily handed over my money.
My friend and I never went shopping together again.
When I got older, I realized I could change the color of my odd eyes too—making the blue one hazel or the hazel one blue to match the other as my mood dictated. Few people ever really noticed but if they did, I simply said that I was wearing contacts. No one ever questioned that.
I could do other things too, quiet things. Once when my mother was going out to meet a friend for lunch, I’d mended a run in her stocking without her noticing because I knew she’d be embarrassed if her friend saw the run.
And when she was dying, I’d done other things, things I really shouldn’t have been able to do. And Hugh helped me.
At the end of her life, she’d been in such pain that the medication couldn’t touch it but Hugh and I could ease it with a touch. We took turns keeping vigil over her. Our father thought we were too distraught to leave her, but in fact, we were keeping her alive because we weren’t ready to let her go.
Then one night, as the moonlight streamed in a window bright enough, we were making shadow puppets to amuse her, she told us it was time for her to leave.
“I need your help,” she’d told us. “But get your father first.”
So we’d fetched our father and while he held the hand of the only woman he’d ever loved, Hugh and I held her other hand and together we opened the door.
“I love you,” she said to us all, but her eyes were on our father alone. And then the part of her that was mortal fell back against the pillows and the shining part of her floated away on the moonlight.
She turned around, just before she disappeared, and blew us a kiss and I felt the weight of it on my cheek.
I came back to the present when I realized Syla was talking to me.
“Here,” she said, holding out a pair of ballet flats she’d apparently fashioned out of my heels. “If you’re too dainty to run around in your bare feet.”
I took the shoes gratefully.
“Thank you, Syla,” I said, my voice a little husky from unshed tears.
“Now get out of here,” she said irritably. “I have work to do.”
I hesitated a moment. Get out of here and do what? I thought.
“I can have Marus show you around,” she said.
I kept forgetting she could apparently read my thoughts.
“No, I like wandering around on my own,” I said and made a hasty retreat for the door.
***
I soon realized Allard was following me. At first I thought he’d been sent to spy on me but I soon realized he was guarding me so I slowed down to allow him to catch up. He fell into step with me like a dog coming to heel and we walked for a while in silence. At one point we passed the great white stag with the silver antlers and the beast bowed to us.
We walked past a field of flowers that was all shades of blue and I stopped, enchanted, thinking that it would make a beautiful Instagram post. The thought made me laugh and the sound of my laugh seemed to please Allard.
Away from the witch and her awful spawn, Allard didn’t seem so sad and although I would not say he was carefree, there was something lighthearted in his step.
I still couldn’t tell what sort of a creature he was. He was big, with the bulk of a bear but a snout that was more wolf-like. He was covered with rough patches of what looked like tree bark held together with some sort of rubbery membrane.
He was not beautiful but the more time I spent in his company, the better I felt, as if he somehow had the power to alter my mood just by his presence.
We walked for hours and he showed me wonders.
There were animals in the Verge that did not exist in the human world. I saw a green chipmunk with a purple stripe down its back. Allard “called” to it in a chitter that sounded like its own language and the little critter came to me and allowed me to pet its little head.
We saw a strange bird that looked like a red peacock trailing feathers of flame and light. It took flight when it saw me, dropping several of its burning tail feathers. Allard gathered them for me in a bouquet and handled them without the fire scorching him. When he handed them to me, the flames tickled and I laughed.
Everything was beautiful and strange and I found myself wondering how wonderful the fairyland itself must be if this was only the Verge. But every so often as we wandered, we would come up against an invisible barrier that prevented us from continuing on our path. And every time that happened, we would turn around to see that we were in hailing distance of the cottage.
As the day darkened toward sunset, I realized I would have to go back to the cottage for the night.
“Syla will be expecting me,” I said.
He nodded sadly.
I thought of the dream I’d had the night before and the question I’d been meaning to ask him all day but somehow hadn’t. “Can you come to me in my dreams?”
The hangdog expression on his face disappeared. He nodded yes and looked at me hopefully.
“Come to me, Allard,” I said. “Come to me by moonlight,” I added, repeating a scrap of a half-forgotten poem.
***
Syla didn’t seem particularly curious to know how I’d spent my day. She just pointed me to the table where some sort of stew was sitting in a gently steaming pot. Marus was in one of the chairs, spooning up the food and eyeing me curiously. “You were gone a long time,” he said accusingly.
“I was exploring,” I said. Syla snorted. I did not want either of them asking any more questions so I asked one of my own. “What was happening in the world when you came to fairyland?” I asked.
Syla was intrigued enough by the question to put her book aside. Marus just rolled his eyes.
“We came here in 1993,” she said. “It was a terrible year. You cannot even imagine how terrible.” She gathered her thoughts. “A bunch of religious wackos in Waco got killed when the FBI stormed their compound.”