Act III

Something of Her That Doth Fade

 

 

“HERE ARE THE rules of the votary’s path,” says Puck, arms swinging as we walk. The sun beats down on both our backs, though where a cap conceals my hair—now gleaming white, as verified by my reflection in a convenient rain-barrel—his head is bare. A glamour, he says, conceals his horns from all human sight save mine. Not that he’d find less welcome as a fairy—even the most fearful man knows better than to slight one—but Puck, it seems, of a piece with his mischief, savours anonymity. “Are you listening, Miran?”

It isn’t quite a masculine name—or at least, it’s no proper variant—but like my bound breasts and borrowed trousers, it serves to disguise the truth. And in any case, I find I rather like it.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“Good. There are three rules—we’re fond of threes, we fairies. Rule the first: all supplicants must reach the court by mortal means, though this does not preclude fairy guidance, as you see.” He grins and gestures at himself. “Rule the second: if importuned by any fairy, spirit, god or ghost en route to the Court—and votaries, where anticipated, are often importuned, the better to judge their character—you must escape unaided, or else wait three full moons before reattempting your pilgrimage.”

“Am I likely to be importuned, then?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Puck says, blithely. And then, at my raised eyebrow, “Or, well. It’s not entirely unthinkable, but as I’m not a member of Titania’s court—and as I’m neither known for shepherding votaries nor expected, on this occasion, to bring anything other than my charming self—you should be safe. It’s me who’ll have to watch for harassment.”

“And should your harassment not worry me, too? I’d hate to be deprived of my guide.”

Puck laughs, warm and pealing. “Your concern is touching, but deeply unnecessary. Did Ariel not tell you, child? I’m a trickster, and though my enemies try as they might, it’s tricky to trick a trickster with even the trickiest trickeries. And in any case, should anyone try to trick me”—his smile turns vulpine, sharper even than his teeth—“they must do so in the knowledge that I’ll trick back.”

“A boastful thing, aren’t you?”

“Modesty is for saints, which I most certainly am not.”

“Indeed? You shock me, sir!”

“Excellent! I do so love to be shocking. Which brings me, via roundabout means, to rule the third: that, should the Queen accept you—and there’s no guarantee of that, whatever Ariel might have said—she will do so either by offering you a boon, or, more likely, by asking you for a service. And whatever she asks or offers, your refusal means your ejection from the Court. She will not consider you again.”

A shiver runs through me. “What if she asks for something I’m unwilling to give? Can I not bargain with her?”

“Some have tried,” Puck says, with a sidelong glance, “but seldom successfully. When boldly done, she respects the attempt, but values her will above a new servant’s wishes.”

“But could I still stay on, if she said no?”

“It depends on the circumstances. If she rejects your supplication outright, she may still let you remain as a human visitor. Your access to the court would be restricted, and you’d have no formal place, but it would be something. If you refuse her, though—then no, I cannot imagine she would do other than cast you out. It would be an insult, child, and as my current predicament attests, the fairy courts do not take insults lightly.”

I bite my lip. I have a sudden, pointless urge to turn and look behind me, back to Naples and what I’ve left. The city is no longer visible, and yet I feel the tug of it behind my navel, grief and guilt and grime.

“You can’t go back,” Puck says—lightly, such that it ought to seem a question, and yet we both know he’s not asking.

“Ariel cast a glamour,” I say, forcing myself to stare at the road ahead. “They think I’m dead. They think”—I hesitate, stumble on the truth like an unexpected stone—“they think the miscarriage killed me.”

Puck’s silence is an alchemical thing, as though his very presence transmutes the air. Softly, he says, “I sometimes forget how young you humans are. How brief your lives, and how very perilous their various inceptions.” He blinks, as though considering something, and when he looks at me again, his eyes are more alien than Ariel’s ever are. “Should I be sorry for you? Or sorry with you? Or should I be something else?”

“Why should you be sorry, when I am not?”

The words, though mine, surprise me to a standstill. Puck halts, too, but doesn’t speak.

“I’m not sorry.” The words feel strange in my mouth, like moss. “I’m something, certainly. I grieve, though I don’t quite know what for. But I’m not sorry. Does that make me monstrous, do you think?”

“I have met many monsters, child. You resemble none of them.”

“It’s just—I should.” I hate my tears, the mess they make of me. “I should feel worse than this. About leaving. About what I’ve done.”

“At whose insistence? Surely you don’t want to feel worse?”

“No, but—”

“Is anyone demanding it of you? Am I? Is Ariel?”

“No, but my father, my lord husband—if they knew—”

“But they don’t know,” Puck says, cutting me off. “That’s the whole point, is it not? Unless I miss my guess, it seems to me that, even had you stayed, they would have wanted you to feel other than you do, be other than you are. That being so, your departure hardly makes a difference: if they realised the trick, they’d require the same as if you’d never made it—which is why you made it, and why their ignorance frees you all. You see? It does no good to dwell.” He pauses a moment, as though to grant me space enough to comprehend his logic, then thumbs the tears from my cheeks. The gesture is gentle, a shocking intimacy; and yet I smile at it. Puck grins back, then spreads his arms and shuffles an impatient jig. “There, now! Though grief has its place, I am, as you see, a merry Puck, and Illyria is not so near a march that we might dawdle. Come, come! Run, run!”

And off he shoots like Ariel’s conjured sparrow, sprinting down the road.

I have not run since the island. Ladies, Ferdinand said, and princesses especially, have no cause to run. My father agreed.

I launch myself in pursuit of Puck. My laughter is my rebellion.

 

 

MY FATHER SLEPT when I slept, so Ariel said, in order that I not wake him. And when I slept—unnatural, still—it was because he made me.

But what if I slept unaided? What if, when the time came for his rest, I slept already? Would he deepen the slumber? Or would he—lulled by his own sense of power—see no need to take that extra measure?

“How drowsy I feel!” I said, and lay down in the afternoon sun.

I closed my eyes.

I waited.

Slept.

And slept—

—and woke.

 

 

THE INN IS small: by no means does it resemble a palace, but next to an island’s comforts, the straw ticking in my pallet is luxurious indeed.

Puck, however, does not share my sentiments.

“The ground was more comfortable,” he mutters, wriggling against his own pallet. “Straw just pokes. And itches! I’d sooner nap on a sleeping crocodile.”

“Ariel was a crocodile once. He made himself all gold and blue, and swam me down the river on our island.”

“He?”

“He was he that day.”

“Huh,” says Puck. “Huh.”

“What?”

“You just answered a question I didn’t know was in need of answering.”

“How so?”

“I have always thought,” says Puck, “that mortals are natively predisposed to think of themselves—and therefore of every other living creature—as immutably male or female. I’m much older than you, remember, and I’ve never seen anything to make me doubt it. But you, Miran-Miranda”—a strange thrill goes through me at this double-naming, though I can’t articulate why—“seem perfectly amenable to the truth of things. It gives me pause. And as you may intuit, I am seldom given to pausing.”

My pulse feels abruptly loud. “Ariel raised me more than my father did. I never understood why he insisted on calling her only him, regardless of shape or preference. He tried to explain it once”—I swallow the memory, hot and sharp—“but I didn’t understand.”

“Indulge me,” Puck says, but so gently as to belie insistence. “What was his thesis?”

“That most spirits, most fairies, were male, and only appeared otherwise as a means of tricking mortals into licentious perils, though he never quite explained why that was such a wretched fate, either.”

“And how, pray, did he justify this conclusion?”

I clench my hands in the ticking. “That magic is powerful, and men are more inclined to power than women. More suited it, and capable in its wielding.”

“Your father,” Puck says, “is an ass.”

I make an inelegant choking sound. “Puck!”

“You disagree? You think the appellation an insult to ass-kind?”

“Puck.”

“If you’re going to employ that tone of voice, you might as well use my long name, too. Like this: Robin Goodfellow.” His mimicry is flawless; I snort against the pillow, pulling the blanket up over my head to hide my obscure embarrassment.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” I say, slightly muffled. “It isn’t at all funny.”

“Sometimes the gravest things must, of necessity, become the most comic. It’s how we know they haven’t destroyed us.”

“My father,” I say. I tug the blanket down again and blink at the ceiling. Everything is dimly shadowed. My stomach turns. “Must we discuss him at such an hour?”

“Not in the slightest,” says Puck.

We fall to silence.

Sleep is a long time coming.

 

 

THE BOOK WAS old and heavy, the pages salt-warped into scalloped waves. I’d seen it before, of course—and carried it; dusted it; watched my father read from it—but never been permitted to sneak more than a glance at the contents. And yet, of all his precious tomes, I still knew it was the one.

I’d seen him use it often enough.

My father rumbled in his sleep—snoring, Ariel called it. Heart tripping triple-time, I carried the book outside, sitting crosslegged beneath the lamp I’d made with Ariel, thin branches woven into a ball, lined with pale, dry seaweed and filled with fireflies, hung from a branch beyond the cave. It glowed like a tiny jaundiced moon, just bright enough for the purpose. Human magic wasn’t the same as fairy magic, I knew that: what Ariel did effortlessly, as an extension of her self and nature, took my father years of study, time and will and sacrifice to achieve a lesser outcome.

I opened the sorcerer’s book, and began to read.

 

 

ILLYRIA IS FAR away by any means, but farthest of all by foot. Puck’s pace, I suspect, is meant to go gently on me, but the gulf between fairy stamina and the mortal kind is evidently vast enough to remain unbreached regardless of his consideration. My body aches, but with a fierce sense of utility. A full year spent in Ferdinand’s court without running, moving with no let and plenty of hindrance through narrow spaces, fettered by expectations and heavy skirts both, and now—

Now, I am returned to the world, and thence to myself. My muscles burn with pleasant use, a good ache in my arms and back when Puck consents to let me carry our provender—“Like a two-legged mule,” I say to him, and pride myself on his laughter—and when I sleep, though our bed be grass, it is deep and dreamless.

And alone.

We talk, Puck and I, to pass the time, but safely—about the towns and hamlets we traverse, the woods and fields, the fickle rules of Fairyland; about the gentle mischief he makes with the people we encounter. Or mostly gentle, at least: our third night out from Naples, a sneering freeholder refuses us a bed in his barn, muttering lewd remarks about the nature of shiftless young men more fond of each other’s company than of right behaviour. My face flames at the indictment, and though Puck’s response is more personable—he bids the man goodnight, then leads me away—he swiftly cloaks us both from sight, then spends a merry hour first persuading all the cats on the property to abandon it, then coaxes in a dozen odd families of mice, encouraging them to sleep in the selfsame barn whose shelter was denied us.

“He could starve,” I say, as Puck, still chuckling to himself, makes camp beneath the vasty spread of an ancient, field-adjourning tree. “If the mice eat his crops—”

“He’s a man alone,” says Puck. “No living wife, his children grown and gone. Every mortal with a grain of sense knows better than to rudely refuse hospitality to travellers in fairy country—which, as any fool also knows, this is. I merely repaid his ill-wishing in kind.”

“The consequences of your prank will long outlast the effects of his rudeness.”

“Does he know that? For all he cared, we might have died of exposure or been set upon by brigands.”

“But we’re fine!”

Puck glares at me, the first true flash of anger I’ve seen from him. “We are, yes, because of what I am. Which is why my retribution is scaled to rebuke the worst possible outcome of his actions—because, as you rightly say, he didn’t know that. And not only didn’t he know, Miran, but he didn’t want to know, in case it upset his precious mortal dignity.” A sizzle of lighting licks between his horns, as though the ivory twists are a chemist’s alembic. “I will never understand this bizarre fixation modern mortals have with sex. You weren’t always like this!” He shakes out a blanket, fabric snapping sharply. “You used to have orgies!”

The noise I make is utterly inelegant. Puck jerks his head sharply, then seems to recollect my presence. He snorts softly, lips twitching. “Apologies,” he says.

“Not at all. You make a, ah, compelling argument.”

Puck laughs and sets the fire. We sit before it, backs to the broad trunk of the tree, and share the sliced ham, apple slices, bread and cheese we purchased that morning, as pleasant a supper as I’ve ever had.

“I’ve always learned quickly,” I say, slow and soft, the words coming out of their own accord. Our small fire burns brightly, red-gold on black, the rest of the world a blurred silhouette beyond. “And on the island, my father made sure... that is, he tried to teach me manners, propriety. Feminine virtues.” Puck chuckles at that, and I half return it. “I learned very well. But we had no cutlery.” I gesture with my last heel of bread. “That was considered a grievous fault, at court; that I had no table manners. Such a strange thing to matter! And I had no fashion, either no sense of how hair or clothes should be styled, for whatever obedience I’d been taught to show, such things were the providence of women alone, and for all his knowledge, my father neither could nor would have enlightened me about them.”

Puck tosses a piece of apple aloft and catches it in his mouth. Chews, swallows. Glances at me. “I had heard,” he says, as though discussing nothing more personal than tomorrow’s weather, “that Duke Prospero’s daughter went willingly to her marriage.”

I stare at the fire. “What is willingness without knowledge? Without true choice in the matter? All my life, my father had taught me one set of truths, and Ariel another. And on the island, inasmuch as I could, I cleaved to Ariel’s wisdom, for it at least pertained to my personal circumstances, to my self, and not to some abstract world beyond all access. But then the ship came, and Ferdinand—”

I break off, stomach twisting as if to rid itself of supper. Puck waits me out, and when I speak again, my voice is barely louder than the crackling of our fire.

“Ferdinand was the perfect audience. I performed for him that version of myself I’d been taught was owed to men, and he replied exactly as I’d been told he should, with courtesy and smiles and confessions of love. He married me even before we left the island, did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Well, he did. And I thought... I thought, after so much doubt and tension as to what I should be and how to live, after all I’d endured, it almost felt a relief to know what to expect. That if I behaved a certain way, the outcome would be predictable. That I could leave the island. That I could be safe.” I bow my head, tears trickling down my cheeks. “But it wasn’t that. I wasn’t. And by the time I began to realise... I was more marooned at court than I’d ever been by the ocean.”

“You would not be the first wife to feel so.”

“You’ll forgive me if I think that makes it worse, not better.” I try to smile, though even in the attempt, I know it for a failure. “He would... as a husband, he would take, and I was obliged to, to—lord, I want to say endure, but can it be that if sometimes I found pleasure, too?”

“One meal is not all meals,” says Puck, so levelly as to betray that he’s keeping his voice in check. “That a dish please you one night does not prevent poor appetite or preparation—or, dare I say it, both—from diminishing its appeal the next.”

I nod, though scantly. Later, I know, I’ll linger over Puck’s absolution, but right now, any greater acknowledgement will crack me open. “I think—” I say instead, and stop, the words too big for my mouth. “I often felt, with Ferdinand—that is, there were times, and maybe if I’d not been raised with Ariel, the thought would never have occurred, but as it did—I often felt that such, such pleasure as I found in him, in his body, was as much envy as desire.”

I hug my knees and brace for a condemnation that does not come. Puck looks surprised, but not hostile, and into this flushing silence, the truth flows out of me like water.

“I am—I know I am new to desire, and all my husband taught me was that wanting should be his province alone, with granting those wants my chore. Certainly, I envied him the decision, but it was not—is not—the whole of it. On the island, there was hardly need to think of myself as girl or woman, except inasmuch as my father told me to, for I had no real source of comparison. Caliban was inhuman, my father defined himself as a sorcerer more than as a mere man, and Ariel could be anything she pleased. But then there was Ferdinand, and for his sake—and for my ease—I took the role I’d been told to take, but though I tried to obey, it was... I wish I could say it was just the skirts, that I chafed only at the expectation of manners, but it wasn’t that, Puck, it was language, the words, the feel of them. I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me. But they weren’t always wrong, that’s the worst of it; some days I revelled in being called lady, but then the day would pass, the sun would rise and fall again, and the same name felt like a collar, bringing me to heel; or else a corset, squeezing me into wrongish shapes for the adoration of strangers.

“But are they wrong? I still don’t know. But, oh, I wish—I wish—I could change as Ariel does, that flicker-flash between girl and man; I wish my form could be all the forms my heart desires! The moon has phases, does it not? We call it full and half and harvest, but through its wax and wane, it remains the moon, and we love it no less—must I be any different? I must not, for I am not. My heart is a moon, and some days I am full and bright within myself, a shape that fits my name, and then I fade, and mirrors show only a half-light shared with a silhouette, an absence my form reflects; and then, in the dark, I am dark altogether, until I regrow again. Why should such a thing be any more difficult to grasp than the fact that some think me dead, and yet I live? The contradiction is only in their perception of what I am; and though killing me would perhaps solve it to their satisfaction, it would not undo the truth of me.”

I sit back, trembling with an exhilaration near to relief. I look at Puck, and his smile is the softest part of him I’ve yet seen.

“Miran-Miranda, I would not undo the truth of you for a thousand years of life, and anyone who would is an utter fool.”

I am crying still, but as I wipe my eyes, I find their salt has no sting. I smile at Puck, and with a gentle shrug, he flicks his gaze to the fire, long legs stretching as he shifts.

“You’re quite right, of course. Forms and hearts and names—we build ourselves with words, but a tool is not the same as the substance it shapes; and if the substance changes, then why not the tool?” He flashes an insouciant grin. “Consider, for instance, my northern cousin, Loki, who once gave birth as a dapple grey mare. He is what he is, and if that be many things instead of one, then who are we to say otherwise? Fairy, god or mortal, I see no reason why anyone should define themselves by a single flesh alone, when such seemings are always subject to alteration. As well to say a grown man is unnatural for cultivating the beard he lacked at birth as to call you anything ruder than your name for desiring what you weren’t born with. Why should one change be called natural, and the other not? Crowns and shoes don’t grow on trees, and yet we alter ourselves with the wearing of them. Mortals! Such nonsensical creatures.” He makes a gesture half-fond, half-disgusted, and tips me an apologetic wink. “Present company excepted, of course.”

“Of course,” I say, and something in me opens like a once-clenched hand, the better to grasp new things.

 

 

KNOWING WHAT I needed and obtaining it were two different things, and only through Ariel’s agency was I able to succeed. He spoke to the wind and summoned, on a distant breeze, the feathers I needed—eagle, crow and dove—and stole the crucial lock of hair from Prospero’s sleeping head. When my own hand faltered, Ariel spilled my blood in the carved stone bowl, sparked fire to burn the feathers, hair and herbs, then brought me the purest, whitest sand from the far side of the island.

It was Ariel who became a bolt of storm-lightning, arcing down into the ash and sand to fuse it into jagged glass, and Ariel who helped me shape and smooth a single flat piece of it, small enough to fit within my palm.

But when the moment came, it was I—and I alone—who wielded what we’d wrought.