Let the rest go, Beth had said. As if the tithe, Faerie, everything I ever wanted, were all the same sort of thing as wondering if an editor would like my writing style, or as having a day where my words were flat enough to make me doubt myself. I couldn’t let the rest go; I lived in a house right next to it.
So I ran, as hard and as fast as I could, through Melete’s forest. Through trees gone skeletal and a marble-grey sky. Through the snow that fell like fat, white feathers. Not sticking to the ground, not yet, but chilling everything. Through the branches that whipped at my arms and plucked at my hair, through the burning in my lungs and thighs as I ran away, away, away.
But the Melete I ran through looked strange to me, and I was compelled to look for the places where Faerie overlapped. The trees, the grounds, the river looked unchanged, everything the same as it had always been, and the sameness haunted me, because I knew it was a lie. I couldn’t trust it, and I couldn’t trust myself, because I had been blind to the truth of what was all around me.
This Faerie tale was nothing like the ones I’d read.
I was also running away from the knowledge that I looked strange to myself. I spent too much time thinking, trying to see what it was in my words that had translated into a chained hourglass, wondered what would be the thing that would or wouldn’t mean that I was chosen. I didn’t know the rules, suspected it wouldn’t make a difference even if I did, but I still wanted to know them, wanted a list of what to do, to make the Fae choose me.
But in all the strangeness, the feeling that I had stepped through the looking glass instead of stopping at the reflection in it, I knew that it was only my perspective that had changed. The lie was only there because I knew what I wasn’t seeing.
The grass beneath my feet was still Melete. My writing was still my own, and I had still come here to try to change my life with it. I could still do that. That part hadn’t changed. Even if I hadn’t seen Faerie all around me, I could still write my fairy tales—mine might not be real, but I could still write them true.
I said those words to myself, but I didn’t believe them.
Everything had changed.
The wind picked up and the snow fell harder, sticking to the ground. The hourglass charm bounced against my breastbone as I ran past the mentors’ houses, through the falling light. The first days here had seemed to stretch out forever, but darkness came early now, even the sky helping to keep the secrets.
Past the dancers’ studios, and I looked for the light in Marin’s. I couldn’t outrun the ugly voice that told me I needed to be twice as good if I wanted to be chosen, because being Gavin’s girlfriend gave her an advantage. I could smash it to the back of my head, tell it to shut up, ignore it, but I couldn’t keep it from speaking, and I hated that about myself.
My being the tithe meant that Marin wouldn’t be. Never mind the other fellows—they didn’t fit into jealousy’s calculus that told me there was one place, and two sisters, and that all of this would come down to the two of us. One would speak diamonds, the other, toads. Never mind that both were uncomfortable and a curse—one was still better.
I felt like I should want Marin to be chosen—if I were truly the good sister, I would yank the chain from my neck and step out of her way. I knew she wanted the chance. She’d had time to think about it, to weigh the loss of seven years against the gain of absolute freedom, and it was a freedom she offered to share with me. Keep us safe, she had said. Us. I loved my sister. I felt like I should want this for her. And I did. But only if it couldn’t be me.
Then, at the forest’s edge—feathers spinning and twisting in the wind. It wouldn’t have even been a strange thing, not something to notice at all, except the rest of the day was windless and still.
More feathers, different shapes and sizes, colors from an entire aviary of birds, until the air was thick with them, until they were all around me, blanketing me, shutting out the sun.
Between one heartbeat and the next, all of the feathers fell to the ground.
A woman stood, looked at me. Her eyes banded, yellow like an owl’s. A close crop of feathers rather than hair on her head.
Words formed just behind my teeth, and then—
She exploded into a flock of birds.
I swallowed everything I might have said.
Echoes of wings faded across the sky and one feather—iridescent grey, almost silver—floated to the ground at my feet.
I picked it up and turned away from the studio lights, ran home. There was no escape from the strangeness, there was no putting Faerie and the complications of the tithe aside. The world had changed.
Today, the bridge was only halfway there. A crumbling arch that stopped midpoint, leaving only air to cross to the other side of the river. For the space of a breath, I thought about running across it, throwing myself into Faerie with nothing more than the belief it would be there, waiting to catch me, if I just ran fast enough. Hands in a theater, clapping to bring Tinker Bell back to life. I do believe, I do.
But it hadn’t been speed that had gotten that headlong rush of horses into Faerie. It had been that night, the tick of midnight’s clock. It had been Gavin riding at the head of the mad gallop of horses. The horned and crowned magic he held had thrown open the doors of his hidden country, and given us a path to enter it.
The rush of the Mourning below me was rapid and deep, the air cold. Without magic, I wouldn’t run into Faerie—I would fall from the bridge, soak myself, and freeze.
“It won’t work. You can’t get there like this.” Evan’s voice.
“Oh, I see you’ve decided to start telling me things now. Even before I ask. Lucky me.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Imogen. I didn’t mean to.”
I believed him. It didn’t help. I was sure he hadn’t even considered the possibility it would hurt me. He probably hadn’t considered me at all, which was pretty much the problem.
“Look, I’m a big girl, Evan. I’m not going to sit alone in my room and pine if it turns out that what we had was nothing more than one really hot fuck. It doesn’t need to be anything more. But if you think you want it to be, you need to know that I won’t be with someone who lies to me, who is casual with me. If you want it to be more, you’re going to need to treat me as if I matter. I don’t want to be your everything, but I need to matter or you’re not worth my time.”
He was so close. I could smell the burnt metal scent that clung to him, remnants of his art. I took a step back.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”
He had to go, soon after. To Faerie. He tried, he said, to keep to a regular schedule. It reduced the chances he’d be pulled away in the middle of something, let him make plans, sometimes, that needed to happen at a certain time and place.
“Like meeting me at the Market,” I said. “That was why Gavin was so weird that first night there. Not because he thought you should be working, but because he expected you to be in Faerie.”
Evan nodded. “It’s his kingdom, his people. My being there feeds it. He makes sure I’m not gone too long.”
“What does it feel like,” I asked, “when it’s time to go back?”
“Like a hook in my heart, pulling. It’s not pleasant, and gets worse if I ignore it. So I don’t.”
I watched him leave, expecting that it would have some extraordinary component, some ritual or magic word. But he simply walked to the end of the bridge, and then, between one step and the next, was gone.
Ariel and I were walking back from the world’s worst bar. There had, if anything, gotten worse since the previous time I’d visited.
“It’s like someone made a deal with the devil,” she said. “Like, Melete can exist, and can be this perfect refuge for art and artists, but in order for this to be possible, a balance must be maintained. And so never can a drink order be served properly on the first attempt, nor shall it ever take less than twenty minutes to get a gin and tonic.”
“Also, you can’t ever get edible food,” I said. “That grilled cheese they brought you was—”
“Neither. I know. Bread and tomatoes. Cold.”
Our breath puffed out in white clouds as we walked back home, the grass crunching beneath our feet. The Mourning flowed fast beside us, cold and dark as it raced over the rocks.
“Thanks for enduring it, though, Ariel. I just, I needed to get out of the house, and vent to someone about Evan.”
“No problem. You owe me a better class of drink at some point, though. When we’re both rich and—
“Imogen.” She grabbed my arm, stopped walking. “What the fuck is that?”
A naked woman sat in the river, combing her long hair. Her skin was pale as ice, and her eyes glowed green fire. She smiled at us, and her teeth were thin and pointed needles.
“That’s really happening, right? She’s actually there?” Ariel’s hand was tight on my arm, her fingers digging in.
My hand went to my neck, to the hourglass charm around it. “Yes. She’s really there.”
“Come in, come in,” the woman said, and her voice was water on rocks, was ice in a river, was peaceful drowning. “Come in, and I will comb the dreams from your hair.”
“Is that where they come from?” Ariel asked.
“Where else would you find dreams? They need nets to tangle in.”
“Right. Of course. Well, maybe another time. When it’s warmer,” Ariel said. “Have a good night.”
“And you.” The woman disappeared beneath the rushing water.
“They’re real,” Ariel said. “The Fae.”
“They’re real.” We stood, shivering, on the edge of the river. “I didn’t know you knew. Do you have an hourglass?”
“Not yet, although Angelica informs me it’s not that I’m untalented, it’s just that she thinks I want to be a rock star more than I want to be an artist, and so giving me one right now would be a waste.
“There’s still time for me to earn one, though, if I sort out my priorities when it comes to my art.”
“That’s . . . rude.”
“Considering that she knew exactly the kind of art I wanted to make when she chose to work with me? Yes.” Still holding my arm, she started walking back. “And Gavin really is the king? Of Faerie?”
“He is.”
“Huh,” she said. “And yet still grumpy before he gets his morning coffee. Maybe some things are universal.”
“I can’t imagine the woman we just saw sitting down to morning coffee,” I said.
“Neither can I. What was it like to go there?”
“Beautiful. Terrifying. I want to go back, and I want to never see it again. And yes, I’d go as the tithe if I were picked. That’s how it was.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess I’m sorry I missed it. Because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.”
She was the first person I had heard say that. “Why not?”
“Seven years without performing? Are you fucking kidding me?”
I laughed. “Do you miss it that much?”
She nodded. “I want the charm and the chance, not because I want to go to Faerie—which does not get any less ridiculous when I say it out loud—but because I want to be the one who rejects them, rather than thinking that they’ve rejected me. I think seven years with no applause might actually break me.
“Plus, I want to succeed on my terms.”
“What do you mean?” We were back home now, on the safety of recognizable stairs, our own front porch.
Ariel unlocked the door. “Wouldn’t you always wonder? You get back and you make the New York Times bestseller list and your book gets made into a movie, or whatever it is that’s the signal of super-ultimate writer success. Wouldn’t you wonder if it was because you were actually good enough, or if it was just because of the Fae, holding up their end of this weird-ass bargain?
“I don’t want to walk through the rest of my career thinking that I didn’t earn my own success, wondering if my art really had been as amazing as people claimed it was, or if they had just magicked people into thinking I mattered.”
“But you would have earned it. That’s what the seven years is,” I said.
“I’d rather spend seven years making art,” Ariel said. “If you have the talent, if you make something amazing, the success will happen anyway. If you don’t believe that, working as hard as we do makes no sense.”