The sun rose and as I lay in the nest of covers, I heard the dawn chorus struggling through what I would later come to know as glass. It was not spring of course, where birdsong pulses with life and invitation. Now they sing more quietly, in anticipation of autumn, bidding one another safe passage to the summer lands far away.
But for the moment, they were so muffled, I believed that this strange enchantment had somehow stifled the very birds.
And then I saw again those hands that I had concluded were my own. Rough. Plump. Squared fingers. Aching joints. With not a bit of the old, familiar magic in them, the magic that used to rush along the blue rivers down the back of my hands and the front of my wrists.
I turned my palms up and then down, as if by moving my hands, I could make them change back to the way they had been in the Greenwood. But they remained horrid, gross, inert troll hands. To look at them made me shudder.
Now, we fey understand glamour. We live our lives surrounded by it. We wear our young faces, our lithe bodies without consciously thinking about how we got them or why. They are as they are. We are so painted with the stuff of glamour that every movement elicits desire, every cough a laugh, every tear an ocean. We know we are glamoured, but we forget it as well. It is simply a cloak against the cold, a mask to hide the ugly. We do not think of the stink of a cave full of bones, or how dim it is. It is to us as well as any viewer a palace of diamond-sharp lights and the overwhelming scent of roses, for glamour makes it so. We do not feel how coarse leaves are against the skin, or how prickly the nest we lie in. Silk and down is what we see. We fool ourselves that we gain succor from dew, the taste sometimes sweet, sometimes tart when there is no taste at all.
Magic disguises. Magic contrives. Magic convinces.
And I had no magic now. My rigid, aching fingers told the truth. When a carer—young and pretty in a red striped overgown—gave me a mirror, the fat, old lady looking back at me told me the truth.
At first I’d thought she was some visitor come to beg a potion from me, like the old ones wanting surcease from wanting. I thought her a stranger until I watched her speak the very words that were in my mouth. Over and over and over again until even I had to understand.
She said/I said, “Where is this place?”
She said/I said, “Who are you?”
She answered/I answered, “I do not know.”
But I knew.
The woman was me. I shook my fist at her and she shook hers back.
And then I cried.
Yet even as I wept, I watched her in the mirror and it was not pretty oceans that fell from my dark eyes, just a drizzle of snot from my nose, and tears like globules of fat running down my large cheeks. And hers.
I lay back down heavily on the bed. Looked down at the flaxseed cloth on my body, this body, this sunken, fallen, flabby body. And knew that for me, for some reason, there was no glamour anymore.
And while I was engrossed in my misery, all alone, the young carer long gone to others needing her, a knock sounded on the door, like a knell. A voice spoke so cheerily, like tinkling bells, I wondered briefly if I were wrong. Perhaps there was still some glamour in the human world.
“Hello! I’m here to help you. May I come in?”
Of course with magic, entrance must always be asked for, before it can be offered. I have known this since . . . well, since forever. No one except the Queen can enter unbidden. Though the carers had—the girl with the mirror, the mean woman with the needle of sleep.
I looked up and saw Miss Jamie Oldcourse for the first time. Plain-faced, plainspoken Jamie Oldcourse, with a body like a twisted oak and a face like a peach left too long in the sun and sunken in upon itself. Still, her voice belied her ugliness, her lameness, and she had a name like a glade, or a lea. For the first time in my life, I had nothing to say.
Miss Jamie Oldcourse did not seem to notice that I was suddenly tongue-tied, or at least she did not let that stop her. Even without my offering, she walked in as if she were the Queen, and sat down next to me on the bed. She took my hand in hers. Her skin was peachlike, too, soft and slightly fuzzed. I let her keep my hand. Indeed, without magic I had no will to take it away.
“Now, dear,” she said, and I heard for the first time behind the sweetness, that hint of sour. Or maybe it was a hint of strength. Hard to tell. “Now, dear,” she said, “no one seems to know your name.”
“One does not give away a name just for the asking,” I replied, firmly. It is the first thing a fey learns. “Or one gives away power.”
“Power,” she said and smiled. Then nodding wisely added, “People of the street must find power in small things.”
“I am not of the street,” I answered back. “I am of the hill and the trees, the moonlight and . . .”
Still smiling, she interrupted, “Then give me something I may call you,” she said with a smile. “Hey you seems so awkward.”
It did not seem awkward to me, but I looked over at the mirror again and this time saw just my face and neck and a bit of my shoulder. I gave her the name of that thing, with the fat cheeks and the wattle.
“Maybelle,” I said, thinking of a farmer’s cow not far from our grove. A brown-and-white cow with enormous dugs and big dark eyes. In this body, I looked remarkably like her. “The farmer’s Maybelle.”
“Mabel Farmers,” she said, trying out the name. “A name not much used these days. But I think it suits you.”
Oh what a coil, what a curse is naming. But suddenly I was stuck with Mabel. I thought: Next I shall have to eat grass and moo.
“And I am Jamie Oldcourse,” she said, freely handing over her name without fear I might use it or abuse it. “Ms. Oldcourse. Your social worker.”
I spat out her name, at the same time thinking of her as a toad, a tadpole, something silly and insignificant. Waiting for the change . . . which did not come. I shook my finger at her. I made a puff-mouth at her. And still she did not change. I said a word of transformation in the Old Tongue, then in the Middle Tongue. And still she did not change. She was right not to fear me. I had no magic anymore. Not an inch of it, not an ounce. I said her name again, this time with a kind of resignation. “Miss Jamie Oldcourse.”
She smiled. “That’s right. Like the golf at Saint Andrews.” Clearly something she said often. If it was an explanation, it meant nothing to me.
And so we met, my spirit guide to this new and awful Eden, and Miss Jamie Oldcourse became the first of my Helpers. For in this new world, one cannot navigate without them; the rules are so particular, so peculiar, and so dissimilar to the fey’s.
First there is the Law of Papers. One cannot move, buy food, nest, heal, or otherwise live without papers. And of course I had none.
Second there is the Law of Restraint. Humans believe in it, the fey do not. Why consider restraint when you have magic that can overcome all restraints at will?
Third, is the Law of Friendship, which seems to supersede family, sept, clan, or court. It would be a long and hard while before I was to truly understand and trust this.
Three rules. Three unbelievable rules. But I quickly realized that as I was to live in this place for the unforeseeable future—and that time would be of the Queen’s choosing, not mine—I would have to learn these rules. Even if I did not believe them. This did not make me happy and I told the Glade so.
She laughed. Again that tinkling, bell-like sound. I have never liked bells. I told her that, too. Which made her laugh anew.
It was not a good beginning. But at least it was a start.