Red Cap? She saw Red Cap? Surely not. Not there in her far-city before the Solstice. Not in a place where iron binds the bones. He would not chance it. Not for long at any rate.
Yet how could she mistake him? Why should she lie?
I read the lines on the page again. I smelt the blood, so like iron, slamming through my nostrils. It burnt my nose hairs. I houghed like a goat trying to get the smell out.
Red Cap! I will not say his name aloud lest it become a summons. I hate that Meteora has seen him but it explains so much. The last Red Cap I saw was in a Lowland peel tower, where he waited for unwary travelers, his cap so stained with their blood it was a deep, pulsating, malignant crimson. His teeth were green and he was bent over with the weight of all his sins. No sin eater could have ever cleansed that hide. I left immediately and reported him to the Queen. As I had to, for she must know everything.
The Queen. Does it all come back to her? But what game does she play with the UnSeelie folk? Can they somehow have her in their thrall?
No more. My poor head reels with questions that have no answers, and soon I will be as useless as my bile-filled boy.
He stayed with me three days, hardly speaking, answering none of my questions, as if I spoke to him in an alien tongue. Then, when the moon became big with herself, as big as a woman in the last stages of birth, I could see he was hungering to leave. And suddenly I did not want him to go. Yes, he was a trouble, a pain under my breastbone, as if I had given him life. Though with the difference in our ages now, I might as well have been his granddam.
He had even—in the depths of one night dream—called me such. “Grandma,” he croaked.
In response, I wrapped three more long strands of my white hair around the blue stone. Then I put the stone in his pants pocket. At this rate, I shall go bald.
The three days he stayed with me, he refused to open his eyes for more than a blink. Refused to open his mouth to answer my questions. Allowed me only to lead him into the water room to pee as if he were the old one, not me.
I watched him most of those three days as a mother her newborn, but by the third day, with nothing left in the cupboard for either of us, I left to get more food from the store.
Before going downstairs, I locked the door securely behind me, sprinkling the last bits of all my binding herbs on the jamb. Knowing it was the only thing I could do that might keep the boy safe. Then walking quickly down the street, I went to the bodega.
The Man of Flowers looked at me askance, and I do not blame him. I was a wrecked ship on the shore, red-eyed with sleeplessness, frantic with worry, like a deer before hunters.
“Are you . . . ?” he began. As if by magic, lines like old runes appeared on his forehead, signaling concern.
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. I could not involve him in this. “Grandson,” I lied, liking the sound of it.
“Ah,” he replied. “The children—they break your heart.”
I nodded, but all the while I was thinking about this buying and selling of things to eat. Once I would have searched out the petals of shade-loving trillium or the sweet sap that drips behind the bark of trees. Once I would have beaten out butterflies for the nectar in red flowers. Is that not the burden of my tune these days? Once . . .
Instead, with nearly the last of Jamie Oldcourse’s money, I purchased eggs and milk, garlic and peppermint; the tiniest carrots stripped of their earthen coats; a cheese veined with blue like marble; three apples, red on one side and golden on the other, because that betokened summer and winter at the same time; and a package of blueberries so impossibly large I thought they must have been made by magic. After much thought, I also added a crisp hollow cracker that longs to be filled with something sweet. And, remembering the magic brownies, chocolate. I think if there is one thing humans have that the fey do not, it is chocolate. If the benighted scare-bird wants to eat, I thought, then I shall feed him. At least until I winkle out why he is here.
I also bought a pair of gardener’s gloves that were hanging over the potted herbs. They were ugly things, a crass green that never grew in a faerie garden, and far too big for my hands, even with the swollen knuckles I now had, but I desired them.
“Are you here?” the wheat-faced man asked.
And indeed, he was right. I was not there. I was back in that funk of a room with the scare-bird. I was in the Greenwood gathering things to eat. “Where else would I be?” I asked.
He nodded and bagged the groceries without speaking further, but there was another star fruit in the bag when I got home that I had not paid for. My debt to the Man of Flowers was mounting, but I did not have the energy to worry about it. All my worry was turned toward my bile-blood boy.
Outside of the store, I passed some boys as tough-looking as the men of the Wild Hunt, their faces pinched with anger, their eyes dark and compressed like nuts that contained only rotten centers. They were talking about creatures I did not know, Sticks they called them. Or perhaps it was Spicks. And laughing angrily at a joke about the neighborhood going, though they did not say where. They reminded me of the young Highborns, so full of their own worth they could grant none to any other. I hunched my shoulders and walked on by. They looked through me—old age being better than a Cloak of Invisibility—and did not see me at all.
When I got near home, I stripped a rowan branch of its leaves. Below the tree an odd thistle grew, and I took that, too. One never knows when such things will be found again.
Upstairs, the boy was still sleeping. I made myself a salad of greens and herbs, some to keep me in health, some to keep me safe, especially from the Wild Hunt boys.
And then I lay down by the scare-bird and slept.
* * *
ON THE FOURTH DAY, OR rather the night, the scare-bird sat up, smiled, and waved his hand at me, not like a grandson to his granddam, but more a princeling to a servant—and an overbearing princeling at that.
I came over to see what he wanted, and realized that I knew him. Knew him from the green park near the fat river. He was the young man with the pipe who had called the birds. Who played the long-necked lute. Who even played a fiddle, or so said the girl with the spring name. Of a sudden, I remembered that he called himself Robin, and as puffed up as a robin he certainly was.
How could I have not recognized him from the first? What magic had disguised him, besides the magic of a dirty face, wet hair, bile blood, and a cover over his head as he slept? How could I not have known before?
And then I remembered the magic brownies, not to think kindly on their chocolate-ness, but to remind myself how they had befuddled my mind—made me laugh and cry and then sleep as though dead. Perhaps he had been even more susceptible to them. Perhaps they had corrupted his very nature and made him unrecognizable—to himself as well as to me.
No wonder, though, that I had taken him in. Not because he had asked for sanctuary, but because of what I owed him. He had given me back my coins, and done it with words that were both Highborn and low. My body knew what my mind did not. Perhaps now the debt is paid. Even overpaid, I thought.
But first the princeling beckoned. “Goddess,” he said, “but I am starved.”
I almost throttled him, but—as if under a summoning—went directly to the kitchen to make him something to eat.
Taking out three of the six eggs I had just purchased, I carefully coddled them in their shells. I did this in case the boy was really a wicked spirit, a changeling who would then be forced to speak out in wonder and disclose himself. But he just gobbled the eggs down and demanded three more. Three more! They were to have been my own dinner and breakfast as well. I ground my teeth but said nothing. Does he not understand how indebted I am becoming to the Man of Flowers, to Jamie Oldcourse? But what princeling ever cares about the woes of others?
As he ate, I sat down in the big chair by the window, drew a piece of almond-colored paper to me, and leaning on the sill, wrote to my sister of the boy’s sleep and wakening and all of my fears.
Sister, I wrote, if only I had fairy gold, and could spend it prodigally I would, but alas that path is closed to me. I would not even care that in the Greenwood such gold often made my hands swell and hives to break out on my back and under my breast. I would dare more damage to this enfeebled, old body just to have much money at my command.
But of course I gave the scare-bird the last of the eggs and went without supper myself, all so I could question him.
After he finished eating, belching loudly, I put aside my half-written letter and tried to name him.
“Robin!” I said, but he did not recognize the name, or else did not want me to know the dart had struck true. Either way, it was not his True Name. That I would have known at once for had it been, he would have bowed to me, groveled, begged to do me service.
However, he gave another name so freely, I know it was not his True Name either.
“Vanilla Blue,” he said. Yet he neither smelled like the fresh, sharp vanilla nor had any of the longing that the color blue conjures. I suspected he understood the power of Names and was playing with me.
Well, two could play such small games. I told him to call me Auntie Em, borrowing the first initial of my sister’s name. For some reason that made him giggle, though I could not figure out why.
He went to bed soon after, and that was the whole of our conversation.
As soon as he slept, I finished my letter to Meteora.
So I worry about this boy, your girl, the puzzle pieces. But mostly I worry about that Red Cap you saw. Or think you saw, though I do not doubt your word.
You must tell me if you ever see Red Cap again. And I will let you know should I see any such myself. If the UnSeelie folk are truly moving easily into this world, well—there goes the neighborhood. (That is a joke I overheard in front of the Man of Flowers store, though it seemed more frightening than funny at the time. Perhaps it was meant to be both.)
Your loving Serana