The shattering of glass brought all of us running, from the library and down from our rooms and into a storm of wings and feathers.
The birds flocked and swooped, moving in tandem like a murmuration of starlings, down the hall to where Marin stood, circling back and up the staircase again toward me. A sea of them, in radiant colors. They flew past us again, the circuit tightening, a feathered whirlwind.
With no obvious signal, they changed course, flew back into the night, disappearing through the window their entrance had shattered.
“What was that?” Ariel, standing in the hallway near Marin, asked.
“It’s getting close to the equinox. The Fae are checking out their potential houseguests,” Helena said from below me on the landing. All of us were frozen, still.
“Those were Fae?” Ariel asked.
“Or their emissaries. Not all of them look human.”
“So if they’re coming here—and next time, I wish they’d knock, because it’s cold and that glass is going to be a bitch to clean up—does that mean it’s Marin for sure?”
“Or Imogen. She’s got a necklace, too,” Helena said.
“You could still change your mind, Imogen,” Marin said.
I walked the rest of the way down the stairs, began picking up the larger pieces of shattered glass. “I can’t, Marin.”
“You could,” she said. “You just won’t.”
“Oh my God,” Ariel said, her awe breaking through the beginnings of another fight.
“They were Fae,” Helena said. “Look at the feathers.”
They had fallen in the wake of flight, breadcrumbs to mark a path. Smoke rose from them now—violet, midnight, grey—a thick haze that smelled equally of roses and of rot. When the smoke cleared, the feathers were gone.
“Is this going to keep happening?” Ariel asked.
“Probably,” Helena said. “It did before.”
“Why did they come here, though?” Marin asked. “It’s not like I dance in the house.”
Helena stared at her. “Because talent is only a piece of the tithe. It’s also about who Faerie wants. I thought you of all people would have figured that out.”
The next morning, I stumbled out of bed to hear Ariel come into the house singing, belting the glory note so long that I wondered if it was true that the right note could shatter glass, and if we were about to find out.
“Are you drunk?” Helena asked.
“Just happy. You should be, too, because look what I got!” Ariel dangled a chain from her hand. An hourglass charm spun at the bottom of it.
The equinox was only a week away. “The new project is done?” I asked.
“It is.”
“What new project?” Helena asked.
“I got grumpy at Angelica for telling me I was doing art wrong, and at the Fae for taking my voice at Thanksgiving, so I wrote this whole thing about this guy, Thomas the Rhymer, who was this amazing poet, but then he hooked up with the Fairy Queen and she stole his voice, and when he finally gets it back, he can’t be a poet anymore because he can only tell the truth, and no one goes to a poet for that. It’s a musical.” Ariel was all delight.
Helena looked at me, and I shrugged. I had no more idea of what was going on than she did.
“Angelica says the Fae like stories about themselves, and I guess they liked mine.”
“Good for you,” Helena said. “Really. But why is that supposed to make me happy?”
“Because this is for you.” Ariel offered the chain to Helena. “That’s all you need, right? You put this on and go kick ass, and then tell Janet to fuck off.”
“You’d just give it up?” Helena’s hand twitched, almost reaching out, then falling back to her side.
“Going to Faerie for seven years, that whole thing’s not for me. I’ve known that pretty much since the beginning. I need to hear people screaming along with my songs. But if you want the chance, you should take it. Here.”
Helena swallowed hard, nodded. She took the charm from Ariel’s hand, and fastened it around her neck. It fell to the floor. She tried again, and again the necklace wouldn’t clasp.
“Let me try,” Ariel said. The necklace fell again.
“Stop,” Helena said. “Thank you for trying. But it knows, or they know. Whatever. It’s not for me.” She stepped over the charm and walked back up to her room. The door closed behind her.
“It was kind, what you tried to do,” I said.
“I thought I was helping,” Ariel said. “I thought if she just had a chance, maybe it would be okay.” She picked up the charm and shoved it into her pocket.
“Are you sure you don’t want to try yourself?” I knew Ariel was good; she could be one more obstacle in front of Marin.
“Very, very sure. Even if it weren’t seven years off of a stage, I do not want to go hang out with things like those birds that broke in here. It’s just too much. I will happily stay here, and make my art on my own.”
We weren’t the only ones afflicted by the curiosity of the Fae. As the clock ticked closer to the equinox, they were taking themselves out of hiding all over Melete to observe and consider.
“I’ve been standing here for an hour, and I still can’t figure out where the motor is, how it’s being controlled.” A tall man stood on the bank, staring at the moat around the house that Marin hadn’t yet staged her invasion of. “It” in this case was the smallish sea monster, acid-yellow and serpentine, swimming lazy circuits around the house.
“The motor?” I asked.
“It has to be. Some kind of engine that’s propelling it. It’s solid, so it can’t be projected or CGI.” The man’s voice was distracted, his face distant, as if part of him were somewhere else, marking theories on a whiteboard or adjusting gears.
The sea monster spiraled into a coil at my feet, casting a cat-like eye on me. Then it sank beneath the surface of the water.
“Amazing, the things people are working on here. I’m going to see if the artist lives there—I’d love to collaborate with them.” Shaking his head in awe, the man walked toward the house.
“That is what usually happens,” Beth said, when I told her about it later. “There’s always an explanation: ‘Someone made that’ or ‘artists are eccentric’ are built-in covers for nearly anything that happens at Melete. There are some years where not all of the residents know about the Fae, or the tithe.”
That seemed almost impossible to believe, that there could still be people here who didn’t know what kind of a place this was. Except. I hadn’t known, until Halloween, when there was no choice for me but to know. I had explained away all of the strangenesses that had happened: I was tired. I needed to eat something. It was stress, or shadows in the woods. If I hadn’t been chosen, or hadn’t lived in a house with other people who were, it was completely possible that I could have spent my entire time here willfully ignorant of the other world that Melete was part of.
“So they think they’re seeing next-gen animatronics.”
“Or performers rehearsing for a play, or whatever else they can wedge into the category of artistic expression. For some people, the lie is so much easier to believe than the truth, that they’ll talk themselves out of seeing what is right in front of them.”
“And the secret never gets out,” I said.
“And the secret never gets out. Not even the most creative of the common rumors about Melete comes close to the truth. That’s helped, of course, by the prohibition on direct speech about the Fae and the tithe, but it’s astonishing how little is spoken about when you consider everything that goes on.”
“The Fae dancing at parties and appearing as sea monsters in a residence’s moat,” I said, and shrugged. “I wouldn’t believe me.”
“Neither would I.” She poured jasmine tea into a cup with jasmine flowers painted around the rim. “You haven’t changed your mind about the tithe.”
“No,” I said. “I’m still sure.” The equinox was in three days. Campus was beginning to green and blossom, winter melting away to puddles, the trickles of the thaw a hundred small rivers, all running down to join the Mourning.
“And you can compete with—leave, if necessary—your sister?” she asked.
“I want to be chosen,” I said.
Beth met my gaze, held it. “All right. Then we should talk about what will happen at the selection.”
“It’s not just a deadline?” I asked.
“No. You’ll present your work. You’ll read a piece of it. The Fae will be there. It’s more a performance than a portfolio review.”
It made sense. I could email a file, or hand someone a manuscript, but that wasn’t an option for everyone. Marin, for example, would need to dance.
“What will happen?”
“It will be—” Beth paused, looked away. Opened her mouth to speak, closed it. “It will be intense. Forgive the word, but nothing else seems honest.
“For me, it was the most difficult thing to get through.” Her eyes were very far away.
She was usually so straightforward. The fact that she wasn’t now scared me a bit.
“More so than the seven years?”
“Going to Faerie as the tithe was unpleasant. Knowing what I know now, I would still do it, because what has come after has been worth what it cost me, but I won’t pretend the experience itself was an enjoyable one. Still, while I was there, I had before me the knowledge that it wasn’t forever, and the knowledge of what I would gain at the end. I could hold on to those things, and use them to push away everything else.
“The selection—I was afraid. Ridiculous, perhaps, but what I remember most is fear—fear that settled so deeply in me that I still can’t articulate it. I wish I could, Imogen. I feel like I’m failing you, and that’s not what I want.
“I’ll be there that night, if it helps for you to know that. Mentors, even past tithes, don’t participate in the selection, but I’ll be there. And your work is good. Remember that.
“Follow the instructions you’re given,” she said. “Be as strong as you can, and remember what you want.”
I knew what it was I wanted. It wouldn’t be difficult to remember it, no matter what the circumstances. But it was a want that was divided in two. To save Marin. To be better than her. Maybe the fairy tales were right to warn about the dark-haired older sister.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Helena said. We were on the front steps, wrapped in fleece jackets and blankets against the lingering chill, but the air was fresh and smelled like spring.
“For as long as I can remember, being this thing, this person who wrote poems on the way to being a serious and important artist, it was my job. That same length of time, I got told that if I did my job right, the asshole who contributed half my DNA would stop thinking with his dick and come back to my mom. I’d be a success; she’d be happy. That was how the story was supposed to go. That was my fairy tale ending.
“Finding out that my mom had lied to me, that none of that was ever going to happen, I just, I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know the point of me now.” She had pulled her hands back into her sleeves, tucking into herself.
“Do you still want to be a poet?”
“Maybe? I think so? I think I liked it. I liked the times when I felt like I was actually working toward being good at it. But I’ve never really thought about being anything else. So maybe I’d rather be a chef, or an electrical engineer. I just, I don’t know. I don’t know how to know.”
“You could leave,” I said. “Go anywhere else. Figure out what you want, who you are.”
“But this is home. I’ve never lived any place that isn’t Melete, except when I lived in Faerie. I was homeschooled, and then I studied poetry with Janet, because what up-and-coming young poet wouldn’t give one of their limbs to work with Janet Thomas?
“I don’t know if I want to go. I don’t know what there is, besides here. At least here, I can keep her away.”
“Janet?” I asked.
Helena nodded. She looked like she hadn’t been sleeping. There were bruised crescents beneath her eyes. Even the shock of her fuchsia hair looked muted. “This year’s the first time I’ve ever lived in a house that she doesn’t have keys to.”
“Have you talked to Thomas?”
“I have this half-written email saved in my drafts folder. I keep opening it up and changing three words, and then closing it again. I want to talk to him. I think. But maybe not.”
“He seemed okay when I met him.”
“Yes, but he might have been trying to get into your pants.”
I laughed. “Point.”
Robins hopped across the green-brown grass, pulling worms from the dirt. A Frisbee flew from the house next door, skittering to a stop at our feet. I winged it back, shouting an apology when it hooked left and landed in the moat.
“What would you do if you couldn’t write?” Helena asked.
I sat back down on the step next to her. “For a while in college, I thought I wanted to study classics. I had this amazing mythology professor, and she read us the opening of The Iliad in ancient Greek, and I could feel my hair stand on end. I wanted to do that. I took enough classes to get the minor.”
“What happened?”
“Latin verbs. And the fucking ablative.”
“And you can write,” she said.
“But if I had wanted it bad enough, I would have made myself learn the fucking ablative. Helena, you’re not even twenty-one, and you’ve published two collections. Of poetry. Which is not an easy thing to sell. You got in here. The issue isn’t whether you can write, it’s whether you want to. Don’t let Janet fuck with your head.”
She stood up, handed me the blanket. “When you put it like that, it almost sounds possible. I’ll think about it. I’ll think about all of it. Even emailing Thomas.
“Oh, and good luck tomorrow.”
The equinox. “Thanks. Do they make you go to this, too?”
She nodded. “I went before. When I was almost fourteen. Evan’s year. It was amazing. There weren’t that many choices, maybe twelve or thirteen, but they were all so good. So much talent. You could have filled stages, galleries. I wanted to weep from it, just being there.
“After, I imagined what I would do. Practiced the poems in my head. These perfect things that even the Fae would fall in love with.”
Her mouth twisted. “I was a complete fucking idiot, obviously. You’re right. I should leave. Because if I don’t, this is what my life will be like—being reminded of my failure every seven years.”
There was a letter from Evan in my mailbox. No decorations this time, no sketches on the envelope. Only my name.
I balanced it on my hand, as if the weight of it might give me a clue to its contents, contemplated throwing it away unread. Cursing my curiosity, I opened it.
This is not to tell you that I am sorry. Though I am, should you ever want to accept my apology.
It’s to wish you luck, tomorrow. I will be there, and I will be thinking of you.
Evan
I read it again and put it away. I wasn’t angry anymore, not really. Just tired, and achingly bored of the cliché of it all, the feeling that my humiliation had been part of a badly-written script. It wasn’t something I had the space to deal with. Not today.
Whether I might accept his apology or not, that wasn’t what mattered now. Tomorrow, the selection, that was what was important.
But first, there was one last fling before judgment day. The Night Market glittered like the last night at Versailles, light and sparkle and flash everywhere. The Fae weren’t even pretending to hide anymore, but walking openly in the Commons, clothed in the extraordinary.
They glittered, too, eyes like burning darkness, clothing bound with fireflies, footsteps that rang like bells, and hair that wept blood red honey from its ends.
The booths were almost as impossible as the Fae were, and this time, when I was offered gifts, I didn’t blush and demur. I knew what the stakes were, now. Knowing what I was prepared to sacrifice, I had no problem accepting all that they gave.
A silver dress, beaded like a fantasy from a speakeasy, and an opera cloak of black velvet, lined in green silk. A ring of tarnished silver, curled around itself like a climbing rose. The thorns gripped my finger as I tried it on.
“It likes you,” the woman said. She wore a rose collar around her neck, and in the firelight, I couldn’t tell if the red drops were blood or rubies. “Wear it for luck.”
“I’ve seen you before,” I said. “The rose garden.”
“I am often there. But my roses are even more beautiful in Faerie. Do you not think you should come to see them? That you deserve to walk in those gardens?”
She moved like a serpent, grace and danger coiled, and I fought to keep from backing up, away from her regard. “I would love to come and see them.”
“So many roses. Like you’ve never seen. You’ll perfume them; they will grow in your bones like a trellis, and their petals will turn the color of your happiness, or your heartbreak.”
Good. Great.
She stepped so close our shadows merged, and trailed her finger across my lips. Her touch the swift burn of bee stings. She shuddered. “Delicious. Oh, I do hope it’s you.”
Her ring still clinging to my finger, I rushed from the booth and back into the crowd of people and Fae. I wanted, desperately, to see someone I knew. But while I recognized faces in the crowd, even saw silver glints around people’s necks—all our hourglasses—there was no one I could go to who would understand.
Silence, so well kept that I wore it like a cloak, the glitter of the Market around me like the inside of a shattered mirror.
One sharp sob barked from my throat, and I slapped a hand over my mouth in an effort to stop another from following.
Overwhelmed by the night, by the Fae, I clung to my gifted finery and walked home, alone in the cold and silent darkness.