Immersed in Matter

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I admit it, after fifteen years of denying it: I, Owl out of Ginger, am half human, more my father’s son than ever I thought.

Everyone in my generation of faery has a human half. We all have the same human father. We never speak of it.

The race of faery was dying until our father came, sent as an ensorcelled emissary by our dead king. Before that, the only new children to enter the underground lands in three hundred years were those born of human women: halfbloods, never as gifted as their faery fathers. Most halfbloods stayed aboveground among humans, where their pieces of gifts could serve them well; the few who came to our lands were treated as lesser beings, servants, or sometimes slaves.

The faery I knew my own age or near it were my half-brothers and—sisters. The fraction of our human father in us was too small to show. We were all beautiful and skilled. We seemed entirely faery to everyone, with no stink or stamp of human. Most of us resembled our mothers; we looked different from each other, and our gifts were as strong as any among the purebloods. We were accepted as the next generation of faery.

Like everyone else, I never looked twice at the halfbloods who had been born aboveground, except to notice they were different, lesser. They smelled strange, and many were less than perfect physically. Fit for kitchen work, laundry work, work that involved dirt. Fit to pass among us as shadows.

My mother sang over my cradle when I was little about what kind of creature my father had been. She had loved him. She remembered him. She wished he would return.

I took it for a human tale and believed it not, just something with which to scare children. None of the other children I played with had mothers who sang such songs.

My generation was taught as previous generations had been—to pursue our own interests and gifts, choose our own teachers.

Mother taught me the basics of magic and survival, but my favorite teacher was Golden, who knew the languages and shapes of animals.

My mother was not happy with my choice of specialties—to shapeshift was to acknowledge our kinship with lesser beings, so the skill was disdained by the most prejudiced among us—but she indulged me, since that was where my gift lay.

Golden and I went up the tunnels and through the gates into the world above, where the lights in the sky changed and so did the temperature of the air, and water fell from the sky, as well as flowing in streams and springs. We wandered wild lands, swamps and forests, met animal people and saw what they could be persuaded to do. Golden had a gift for speaking with wolves and foxes. Bird language came more easily to my tongue. Golden taught me many lesser dialects, and together we learned cat language, though cats great and small ignored us when they liked, whether we got the accents right or not.

My greatest dream was to talk with horses.

I wanted to be a horse or own a horse. They related to people in a different way than other animals. They were so large and powerful, and yet they suffered humans to use them and ride them. I wanted to meet, know, and ride a horse. I wanted to discover the reasons for their cooperation with something they could trample.

Unfortunately, most horses lived with humans. Golden said horses ran wild halfway around the world, in places with lots of sand, but there was no gate that opened from our underground to that part of the world.

By choice, Golden would have kept me in the wilderlands always, but because I was fascinated by horses, I spent much of my aboveground time lurking near a road that led through the forest to a city. Traffic was frequent. Horses pulled carts of fruit, flour, and vegetables from the surrounding country to the city markets. Mounted messengers and soldiers passed on the road. Travelers in caravans rode horses or drove them, and guards traveled with them, on horseback. Traders and tinkers went both ways in horse-drawn wagons.

I listened to everything, to little herd dogs as they ran and nipped the flanks of goats and sheep, to cud-chewing cows and tinkers’ cats, to humans even—but most of all I listened to horses. I only half-understood their tales of travel and grass and water, fighting and running and carrying people. Their voices were low and wonderful.

Golden disapproved of my desire to know horses. They were too closely associated with humans. I had to sneak off to study them when he set me other tasks. Most often I went to the Feather Inn, a day’s ride from the city, and watched the human boys who worked in the stables. They saddled and unsaddled horses, removed, repaired, replaced bits and reins, combed and brushed the animals, fed and watered them and picked rocks and muck out of their hooves. They spread straw on the ground when it was too muddy, and mucked out the stalls, and slept above the horses in the hay.

At first I could not stand the stench of humans, but eventually I became accustomed.

One frosty evening at the leading edge of winter, when Golden had sent me out to study the night habits of deer, I crouched under a bush with one of the inn yard cats. She was pregnant and hungry. I brought her a fresh-killed rat.

“How can I get close to the horses?” I whispered.

“You won’t be able to, not while you stink of faery,” the cat said.

“What’s wrong with how I smell?”

“We know your kind means us no good,” said the cat. She had eaten the rat already and edged away from me as we spoke.

“I don’t mean you any harm, or them either.”

She flattened her ears. “All too often an incautious animal disappears though a faery gate and is never seen again.”

I hugged my green-clad knees and thought about that. I had seen animals underground: cats, dogs, even a tribe of foxes in one slowtime pocket where my aunt lived. The queen had a stable with horses in it, but it was fenced around with spell protections so strong I could never get near it. Whenever I tried, I found myself wandering the farthest reaches of the underground without any memory of how I had gotten there.

“I just want to talk to them. I don’t want to steal them.”

“I know the worth of a faery promise,” said the cat.

Perhaps she was right. If I really wanted to speak with a horse, my best chance might be to find one of my own.

“Don’t you think one of them would rather have me for a master?” I asked the cat. “Are humans so good to horses that horses want to stay with them? Humans hit them with sticks and straps. Humans make them work, even when they’re too tired and old. Isn’t there a single horse who would rather leave this place with me?”

“There might be,” said the cat. “I don’t generally speak with horses. They allow humans too much liberty. Get yourself inside and ask, but before you try, you’d better find a safer scent, or the cock will crow, the dogs will bark, and even the mice will squeak at you. Thanks for the rat.” She slipped away.

A safer scent. Golden had taught me two transformations: owl, and wolf. Sometime deep in the well of our history, there was a binding together with animals to acquire powers, and most of us shared some animal blood, though many tried to deny it, and many more never learned to work with it. At this stage in my magecraft, I could only transform into things that were part of my heritage, animals in my bloodline, and those were the only two who had left clear enough tracks for me to learn them—so far.

I melted back into the forest half a league, found a safe place up a tree, and called the owl out of me. The night shifted shape as I changed, became a place of lights and shadows, sounds and sights more intense, bright, and sharp. There was no solid darkness: I could see everywhere, and the sky was a place of many lights but no color. I spread silent wings and lofted, drifted through the air, scanned the ground beneath the trees for any sign of squeak or movement. Transformation always made me hungry.

Two mice and one vole later, I returned to the inn. Did I still stink of faery? I couldn’t tell. I sifted scents. My relationship to them had changed too: many things smelled much more enticing to me, and things I would like as my faery self disgusted me. The stable appealed to me because it was home to mice and rats and possibly baby birds. I flew in through the open hayloft door, delighting in the rustles of mice in the straw, alert to the sounds and scents of human, horse, and jingling tack from the floor below. I found a perch on a beam where I could look past the hayloft down into the stables.

Below me, horses. Horses. Warm and huge and smelling of hay and sweat and their own less-than-leather wild scent, a scent of things that run. Did I have any horse in me? Until I could speak to them, see how deep their language ran in me, I could not tell.

A hoot flowed out of me, my delight in being closer to horses than I ever had before.

Below me, some boy looked up. “An owl,” he said.

“A death bird! Scare it away,” said another.

Two boys climbed up into the loft and pulled rocks from their pockets. They stoned me. “Get out of our stable! Go prophesy death somewhere else!”

I flew away, stinging where rocks had struck me. I found my tree again and roosted. An owl wasn’t welcome, even if nothing knew it was faery. A wolf would be even less welcome. Dogs, the warped wolves who lived with humans, resented their wild cousins, and humans feared wolves. I had played tricks when I first learned wolf shape, sneaked up on humans camped in the forest and scared them from their fires, horses, and possessions. Golden made me stop. He said such actions put other wolves at risk.

Besides, horses hated wolves too. Even when I’d chased off their humans, horses at campsites wouldn’t let me approach them.

I climbed back into my faery self, dropped to the ground. I did a seek spell that took me to a place where deer were overnighting, and I spent the rest of the night watching them. Did my scent disturb them? It didn’t. Toward morning I climbed down and approached them. None feared me enough to run from me or threaten me. The young one even let me touch it.

My sister-friend Henna was drawn to deer, though she couldn’t take their shape. Her gifts lay in other directions: she could weave things into being.

I talked with these deer and couldn’t understand why Henna liked them. So much of their orientation was fear; they knew they were food to many other things. Where was the fun in being something that ran away?

I went home at dawn, wondering why Golden made me study animals like these.

The answer was simple: he wanted me to study everything. He gave me raspberry tea with ambrosia in it, sweet, tart, and fortifying, and we sat by the green fire on his hearth, below bunches of drying aboveground herbs that hung from his ceiling. “You have time, Owl, ages and ages. You never know when something you learn today will serve you in the future. Just now we’re living in peaceful times, but suppose there’s a revolution or an invasion. It happens. You should know deer tactics as well as wolf and owl tactics. . .mole tactics, ant tactics, slug tactics. You don’t know what the enemy

knows; you never know what you’ll need to know. Learn everything.”

After tea and questions I went home to my mother’s house under the unweathering sky of the underground, where time does not divide into days so easily as above.

How was I going to get closer to horses? Mice and rats could, but they could be stepped on. Chickens approached them, but people were too inclined to kill and roast chickens. Even if I could have turned into a mouse, a rat, or a chicken—and I couldn’t—I didn’t want to be a prey animal.

I had tried to learn cat transformation, but as far as I could detect I didn’t have that heritage either. When I was older and had acquired knowledge, wisdom, and skills, perhaps I would be able to transform into animals whose heritage I didn’t own, but that might take a hundred years, and I wanted horses now.

I lay on my feathersilk mattress, the scents of aboveground herbs around me—Golden gave me some to sleep on, for sharpening the brain, he said—and thought. What animal got closest to horses without being questioned?

Humans.

I had human in my heritage, though I’d spent my whole short life trying to forget or deny it. I owned human heritage with such a clear link that I could imagine the transformation without trouble.

If I accepted it—

I curled tight on my mattress and hugged my spiderwoven blanket to my chest. I had looked away so long. I turned my eyes inward and saw the streak of self that had come from my father. It lay along my spine. At first I thought it was gray, but when I really paid attention, I saw that it was shimmery and strange, all colors. It looked like no human thing I had seen before.

I reached toward it, felt it engage me, then realized how tired I was after a night of running and spying. I banished the father self back to its hiding place and fell asleep.

Golden and I went aboveground again when night was falling there.

Ice had formed along the edges of the creek, crisped the surfaces of puddles, furred the dead leaves on the ground. I pulled my cloak tighter around me. The first time I had seen snow aboveground, I had fallen in love with it—its whiteness, the way it packed into balls, and yielded and cushioned when I lay on it, the way it lay on everything and changed the look of the landscape, especially under the moon; I only noticed cold could hurt me later. Now I knew about frost and snow and ice: I knew to wear warm things and keep enough energy on tap to fire my blood when necessary.

“Tonight I want you to watch tree snakes,” Golden said.

Snakes? “But Teacher, they’re hibernating now.”

“So? Spend a night watching them in their sleep. Note how they store and conserve energy. Another tactic you may find useful later.”

“I want to try something else tonight.”

“Oh?” Golden hunched nearer me, eyes aglitter. He wore a pelt with heavy fur over his shoulders, the fur the same color as his tangled wealth of red-gold hair. I had wondered often whether it was the pelt of an animal self he had shed or if he had actually killed something to gain it. “Have you found another heritage animal?”

“I have.”

“What is it?”

I raised a shoulder in case he wanted to clout me, and whispered, “Human.”

He stared, red fire in his eyes that shone in the shadow that was his face. At last, he said, “Ah.”

I waited, then lowered my shoulder when he didn’t raise his fist.

He took my hand and led me far through the forest, away from the gate. When we reached one of his workspaces, a clearing with an underground chamber he had built where he stored baskets and the glass clippers he used to gather herbs, we stopped. It was a place only Golden and I knew.

“I’ve been expecting this,” he said in a voice that was more growl than faery.

“You have?”

“Only from you, Owl. Any of the others who’ve come to me for lessons would never take this step. I know you haunt the roadways and the inn yard.”

“I want to speak with horses.”

“As fine an excuse as any,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. Have you opened to your heritage?”

“Not yet.”

“Do it now, where I can supervise.”

I lay on the dirt floor of his underground lair and quieted my mind. I knew where to find the father self. I had only to glance at it, and it reached for me. Wait. “Golden, did you ever meet my father?”

“I did.”

“What was he like?”

“A difficult question, young Owl. He was never the same twice. It depended on who looked at him and what she wanted. He came to my house once, when he was between women, a state I never saw him in again. That was the only time I saw him without a glamour on him. I gave him tea and fruitbread.”

“What was he like?” I asked again.

“He was very young,” said Golden.

“Teacher. What was he like?”

Golden laughed. “There were so many questions I wanted to ask him. Who was he? Where had he come from? How did the dead king choose him to be the father of our children? Why did he agree to this mission? Was it just that he was a young man with a reprehensible appetite for sex? Did that make him the right one to give us our next generation? Had he any qualities of character he could pass on to his children? This was before any of you had been born, but three of you were coming. I never found him free again.”

“But what—“

“When I found him, he had just finished his time with Raven. I saw her hug him and kiss him good-bye and leave him in the common room of the queen’s palace. She wove a black feather into his hair. For her, he had been dark and tall and strong, with silver eyes. She touched his cheek and left him, and he melted.”

“Melted,” I repeated.

“Melted into what he must have looked like before. A boy not much older than you, with brown hair and hazel eyes, handsome but not particularly interesting as humans can be interesting. He looked—like many other humans. He looked tired and sad. I took him home and gave him tea and watched him. His hands shook until after he had some of my fruitbread. I had all my questions ready, and I never asked a single one.”

I lay silent. Presently, Golden said, “Fireweed came to my house to find him. She sat at my table and watched him finish his tea. He thanked me, then turned to her and smiled and changed into a tall white-haired giant with a beard to his waist and shoulders broader than mine. Her eyes filled with longing and delight. She led him away. I didn’t see him again for three months, and at that point, he was going off with Barley, and he had changed into a slender yellow-haired minstrel.”

“What did he look like for my mother?”

Golden scratched his nose and studied me. “His hair was black and thick like yours, and his eyes were yellow, like yours.”

My mother had peppery red hair and orange eyes. I was one of the few in my generation who didn’t look like his mother. I had always wondered where my coloring came from, but had never asked. No one treated me as though I looked human. In fact, I looked a bit like Otter, a friend of my mother’s.

“I resemble my father’s glamour?” That didn’t make sense. A glamour was for appearance, not for seed.

“Those of you who don’t look like your mothers look like what your mothers desired of your father.”

I had never heard of magic like that.

“Open to your heritage, Owl.”

Which heritage? What my father looked like, or who he had been? I closed my eyes and reached for that pale many-colored place along my spine I knew came from my father.

I had thought it only a fraction of myself, a part I could ignore, but as soon as I opened to it, it threaded all through me, a faint and gentle warmth that tendrilled out to my edges. I felt my organs squeeze and shift. My face tightened, and the bones of my skull closed in. The tips of my ears tingled, then shrank.

Too late, I thought, what if this change consumes me so I forget how to restore myself? My animal changes had been governed by the much stronger part of my heritage I had from my mother. Even though everything in my body changed, my largest self remained intact.

My father had given me at least half of myself. What if his half was strong enough to swallow what my mother had given me?

The final tingles and spirals of change faded from my soles and palms and stomach. I lay with my eyes shut, sensing myself.

The air felt colder on my face, and the scents of the night were fainter. Sounds had faded. At last I opened my eyes and found the night was dark, darker than I had ever seen it. I was surrounded by shadows, and I couldn’t see through them well enough to know what cast them. “Golden?” I whispered. Breath frosted as it rose from my mouth. My voice tasted strange. I had lost the edge that let me say things and make them true.

“Here.” He was a large looming shadow above me. Terror thrilled through me, sudden, senseless. Golden opened his hands to let out yellow light, and I struggled to slow my heartbeat. This was my teacher. He would not hurt me. Slowly I remembered and believed.

I sat up and took stock. I smelled my hand. Though the scent was faint, it was human, not my own. My fingers were longer, but square-tipped instead of tapered, and I only had four fingers and a thumb now on each hand. My skin had darkened to a color of those who lived outside aboveground during the day.

I touched my cheek, felt my nose. Bigger. My eyebrows felt heavier, but my hair was finer, and there was less of it. “What do I look like?” I asked. My tongue against the inside of my teeth felt different too.

Golden sketched a circle in the air. It filled with silver, an air mirror that showed me my new self.

I looked like half the stableboys at the inn, human and nondescript. I touched my hair: no longer black and thick, some shade of brown I couldn’t see very well with these eyes, and my eyes were a darker color than they had been, wider and not so slanted.

After a moment, recognition flickered through me. Somewhere I had seen this self before. I closed my eyes and chased the fragment of memory. There was a taste in it: peach. I had sat in my mother’s lap when she was much taller than I, and a man with this clean-shaven face sat beside her, touching along arm and thigh. We were all on the big soft blue chair in my mother’s bedroom, close enough that I could smell him. He smelled strange, different from everyone I’d met before, but I didn’t think, then, that he smelled bad. He smiled down at me and gave me a slice of peach, ripe and sweet, which melted on my tongue and tasted of the aboveground season of summer and a sun I hadn’t seen yet.

He kissed my forehead and stroked my hair, and my mother let him. He shared the peach with me and my mother until it was gone and we licked the last sweet, sticky juice off our fingers. We sat together like that for a long time, until someone else came and called him away. His eyes turned sad. He touched my hand and left.

“Oh, this is strange.” I felt my face and frowned at the mirror.

Father. I hadmet him. I wore my father’s face.

I turned from the mirror and looked at the night. Every direction I turned, I saw nothing but lighter darkness against dark, except when I looked up. The sky held stars, but they were smaller and dimmer than I remembered. “I feel blind and deaf and scent-deaf.”

I struggled to my feet. I felt weak and clumsy.

In the other transformations I knew, I had gained things as I lost other things. Owl gave me flight, and night sight so strong the world looked as well-lit as day, and hunting, and hearing so acute I could hear a mouse’s footfall from the sky. Wolf had given me speed, strength, and a wild world of scents.

What was good about this change? I was the same shape I had been, almost, but weaker in every way.

Horses.

Now I could approach horses.

Why had I changed here, so far from the Feather Inn? It would take me ages to get there in this form, stumbling all the way over things I could no longer see or smell.

The easy answer was to change into an owl or a wolf and fly or run, then change back to this when I was nearly there. I held out my right arm and thought, Wing.

Nothing happened.

“Golden,” I whispered. Had I changed myself so well I would never be able to change back? Was I trapped for the rest of my life in this form? How long a life could I lead, if I were truly human? Had I doomed myself to a short hard life and an early death?

“Oh, dear,” he said.

I hated my father!

“Wait,” said Golden. “Open to your heritage, Owl.”

As a human, I couldn’t summon up the instant change I had managed as myself. But perhaps —

I lay down again and closed my eyes, looked inside myself. For a long while I saw nothing, just the dark I couldn’t see through with the senses I had now. Then something sparked and shone. A glimmer along my spine, a heat under my skin. The more I studied it, the stronger it grew. I opened to it, felt it wash away what I was and restore me to what I had been.

I owned my mother’s nature too.

I sat up as my faery self, felt my ears and checked my fingers to be sure. But I knew: I could see and hear and smell again. I built my own air mirror, and summoned light to see myself, fingered my nose to make sure it felt the same as it looked.

I shifted to my owl-self.

“Wait,” said Golden. “Where are you going?”

“The inn.”

“Haven’t you done enough for one night?”

“No.” I flew through the brilliant night to the Feather Inn, taking joy from everything about my owl self. Along the way, I feasted on mice I tracked by tiny sounds and slaughtered with talons and beak.

I perched in a tree outside the circle of torchlight by the inn.

I feared to make this change. First I let myself be the faery Owl I knew and had been since birth. Remember. I looked at my green clothes. Had I ever seen a human wear such a slashed-sleeve tunic, such an elegant mage-embroidered cloak with warmth spells sewn into it, and such trousers and shoes? No. While I still had my own skills and powers, I changed my garments’ cloth so it was rough and brown, turned what was river leather about me into something coarser. I climbed from the tree, leaned against its trunk, took a last look and smell around, and sought my other self.

I opened my eyes to a muffled, hidden, freezing world. I shivered. Would the stable be warmer?

“Wait.”

I glanced down. Something large, dark, four-legged, and furred stood beside me.

“You’ll need money,” my teacher said. He was a wolf, and he spoke wolf, but even as this foreign self, I could understand him. A mercy. He dropped a sack that jingled at my feet. “You must be cautious, Owl. Take a few coins out before you go among them. Offer only one at a time in exchange for food or shelter or whatever else you can buy. Never show them you have more; they kill each other for silver, even such false silver as this, which will last only a day. They won’t know it is false, but remember, you must not be here when it disappears. Do you have your knife?”

I patted my sheathed dagger, which was made of firemountain glass.

“They will have iron,” he said.

I shivered. I had seen what iron could do to us. A man I knew had a shriveled hand because he had touched iron. One of my aunts had died of poisoning from brushing against an iron spike.

“It may not hurt you. It may be that your father has given you immunity, especially in that shape. If you see iron, test it. Put your hand near it. If you take no hurt of it, that’s good to know. Tell them as little as possible. Don’t trust them. I will wait here.”

“Thank you.” I took six silvers from the sack of coins, slipped them into my side pocket, and tucked the moneybag into my belt at the back, beneath my cloak. Stumbling a little, I made my way through the thin screen of trees into the muddy, churned, and torchlit inn yard. Most of the mud had frozen into ruts and peaks and hoofprints. It crackled as I crossed it. I went straight to the stable and peered over the half-door. No cock cried. No mouse squeaked. But a dog tied by the back door of the inn barked at me as I puzzled over the stable doorlatch.

Two stableboys came from the tack room, one chewing on something that smelled like bread and hot meat—half of it was still in his hand.

“What is it?” asked the other, who was taller but no less dirty. Both had straw in their hair.

I smiled, pleased that this, too, was a language I could still understand, even though I had changed into this lesser form. I had learned humanspeak along the roads. “I’d like to see the horses,” I said.

“Why?”

Why? Wouldn’t anyone? “Because they’re horses.”

“Are you daft?”

“No.”

The boys looked at each other. “You just want to see them?” said the chewing boy.

“Perhaps touch them?” I said.

The chewing boy swallowed, peered at me. “Hank, you go on back to supper. I’ll deal with this.”

“All right, Robin,” said the taller one. He went back into the tack room.

Robin came over and let me into the stable. “Where’re you from, then?”

“The forest.”

“And you want to see horses.”

“Yes.”

“You ever curried one?”

“Never.”

“Would you like to?”

“Oh, yes.”

He took another bite of his dinner, ducked into the tack room, returned minus what he had been eating, but with two brushes. “Show you on Bess, if you like. Got a stranger’s horse here that needs tending after that, and I could use some help.” He led me into a stall with a big brown horse in it. She was warm and smelled large and animal, sweaty and a little musty. She looked at us, lowered her nose to smell me. Her breath was hot and hay-sweet, and her whiskers tickled my face.

“Horse,” I whispered. I held out my hand and she snuffled it. Her nostrils flared.

“You can touch her. What’s your name, then?”

“Owl.”

“That’s a funny name. Here, Owl, stroke her nose like this, but then let’s get on with it.”

I ran my hand down the bony ridge of the horse’s nose. She pressed against my hand.

“Come on.” He handed me a brush and we moved farther back. He showed me how to brush Bess, how to look at which way the hair lay and brush with it instead of against it. It whorled some places and switched directions. “Don’t be afraid to brush her hard. She likes it.”

He left me at it for a moment, then came back with a wide-toothed metal comb and taught me to comb the horse’s mane and tail. “Watch her back hooves. Don’t pull too hard or she’ll kick you. You follow?”

“Yes. Thank you, Robin.”

“Eh. All right. You just keep working on Bess, and I’ll finish my supper. When I’m done I’ll show you the next job, eh?”

He went away and left me with the horse. I taught myself what she was as I stroked her. She let me touch her everywhere, so long as she knew what I was doing and I didn’t startle her. She let me hug her around the neck. She taught me a few words of her language: yes, no, oh, more of that, I like it!Horse. At last. I brushed her until she shone, then leaned against her side, my head to her ribcage, and listened to her heart. Did I have horse heritage? Could I open to this? Could I bethis?

“Here, now,” said Robin behind me in a testy voice. “What are you doing?”

I straightened. “Resting.” I had found no echoes of horse inside myself. Maybe that was a problem with this shape: maybe I couldn’t sense such things when I was in human form. Or maybe I had no horse in me to awaken.

I looked down at my hands. In one I still held the bristle-and-wood brush, but in the other I held the metal comb. My hand tightened on it. Was it iron? I let it fall, stared into my palm, which was whole, unmarked. I might have no horse in me, but I had enough human to protect me from the doom of cold iron.

Robin walked around Bess, nodding. “Good. You did good. You sure this is the first time you’ve touched a horse?”

“Yes.”

“No fear in you, is there?”

I looked at him. I had many fears. What if I were trapped in this form? I had changed out of it once, but that didn’t mean I could do it again. What if he attacked me? He was taller and had sturdier arms than I did. How could I fight when I could detect very little strength in myself? Could I use any of the skills I had learned underground when I didn’t know the self I was?

“Ah,” said Robin. “Well, not scared of horses, anyway, are you?”

“No.”

“Good. Let me show you Bruiser.”

I followed him to a stall at the end of the stable. We were greeted by a cascade of thunks as the horse inside kicked the walls. “Here’s the thing. We’ve given him food and water,” Robin said, “but we haven’t brushed him. He doesn’t like us. Come up here.” He climbed up a ladder to the hayloft. I followed him. “Now take a look.” We edged over to look down into Bruiser’s stall, and he stared up at us, whites visible in his eyes. He was tall and dark, with a white blaze on his forehead and one white stocking. He screamed and kicked the wall.

“Hank was all for letting you in with him to start,” Robin said.

I glanced at him and thought about that. Suppose this was the first horse I had tried to touch? What if it had killed me? I wouldn’t have gone into that stall, though. I’d seen other creatures with bad tempers. I knew enough to stay away, unless I had skills that could protect me. In this form, I didn’t think I had any skills. “Something hurts him?”

“Huh. Could be. Just figured he was a bad one, or has a bad master. He’s old. Had a hard life. You can see it in his hide.” He studied the horse, who stared up at us. “They don’t pay us enough to take good care of one like this,” Robin said. “It’s as much as your life’s worth to open that stall. We can leave him. He’ll do.”

The stable door opened. “Boys!”

Robin and I climbed down the ladder, and Hank came out of the tack room. An older man stood at the door, holding two horses by the reins below their chins.

“Well, here,” said Robin, “a job. Get you some more experience, eh, Owl?”

“Oh, yes.”

Hank snorted and tended to one horse, while Robin taught me the intricacies of bridle straps and buckles and saddle girths and blankets, how to rub a sweating horse down with a cloth before brushing it, and how to give only a little water at first to an animal that had been running, and add more later.

Everything we did satisfied something in me that had gone hungry a long time. I didn’t understand it. And who was Robin? Why had he decided to be nice to me? With most of the people I knew, I had to claim kinship before they would even speak to me, and then we had to compare skills and powers so we would know who was above, and who below. Politics were thick in the air at the faery court. Many had nothing to do but jockey for favor. Since it was all they did, they took it as seriously as life.

Another reason I liked working with Golden aboveground was that we didn’t have to concern ourselves with matters of status, except his as teacher and mine as student.

Golden had warned me to be wary of these humans. I tried to keep that in mind, but mostly I lost myself in the work, the wonder that I was finally able to touch a horse; its body heat and hair, solid strength, coiled power and speed and stamina, lay under my hands and brush.

When we had finished feeding, watering, and brushing the horse and stored his tack, we went back to the stall with Bruiser in it.

A cat walked along the top of the stall railing. “Who’s this, who’s this?” she asked, studying me with large yellow eyes. Bruiser kicked the wall below her, and she clung with her claws before she leapt to the straw near me. “What’s wrong with you?” she snarled at the horse, who kicked the wall again.

I knelt and held out a hand to her. She came and sniffed, stared into my eyes, did not recognize me, though I knew her: she was the one who had told me to find a safer scent. “What iswrong with him?” I asked.

The cat blinked. She looked toward the stall.

The horse peered out at us over the top of the stall door.

Robin said, “Come on, Owl, there’s nothing we can do for him, wild as he is. Want some tea?”

“You,” whispered the horse to me. “You.”

I rose.

“Where have you been? The old man took you away from me all those years ago, and you never came back! Where have you been?”

I walked to the stall, one slow step at a time.

“Boy,” whispered the horse.

I held out my hand to him.

“Don’t! He’ll bite!” Robin cried, but the horse only smelled me. Then he screamed and whirled away and kicked the wall with both hind feet.

“Not my boy. Not my boy,” he muttered, then stood, head hanging, breathing loudly, all his legs stiff.

I leaned on the stall door. “Did you know my father?”

Slowly his head rose. Slowly he stepped to the door, smelled me carefully, nibbled my hair. “Where is he?” he asked.

“No one knows.”

“I’ll take you, then.”

“Will you?” I opened the stall door and slipped in, though Robin cried out to stop me.

The horse trembled as I touched him, but he didn’t bite or kick me. His hindquarters were scored with whip marks. I still had a brush in my hand. I showed it to him, and he smelled it, then lipped it, then turned so I could brush him. “Who owns you now?” I asked. He had not been brushed in a long, long time. His hair was matted: layers of sweat, old shed hair, and the start of his winter coat made his hide a nightmare. Cold mud coated his lower legs. Scars old and new marred his hide. The corners of his mouth were thick with callus. Burrs were tangled in his mane.

“No one,” he said.

Robin brought me a bucket with warm water in it, two rags, a comb, a hoofpick. The horse quieted as I cared for him the way Robin had taught me. Hank came to watch and jeer, but when the horse kicked the wall nearest him, he went away again.

“Who owns him?” I asked Robin.

“Owl, you spoke to him, and he made answers.”

“Mm.”

“Did you understand him?”

“Ah,” I said. I thought: I had started to understand with Bess and the other horse, but everything Bruiser said was as clear to me as though I were talking to Golden or my mother. “Don’t you talk to them?” I had watched all matters of the stable from a distance until now, but with the enhanced sight of the owl, the enhanced scent perception of the wolf. I had seen stable boys talking to horses, and men talking to horses as they rode.

“‘Course I do,” said Robin. “They like the sound of a voice, if it’s calm. Soothes them right down sometimes.”

“Who owns him?”

“Who did he say when you asked him that?”

“No one.”

“Hah!” said Robin. “Caught you.”

“What?”

“He doesanswer, and you dounderstand. How is that?”

“Who owns him?” I asked for the third time. Underground, anyone who was asked a question three times had to answer with something like truth. There were many ways of turning questions away or changing subjects before the question could be asked a third time. Robin was skilled at this game too, I thought, but still, I had asked. Would he answer?

“A man in the inn brought him, but last I heard, he was offering to sell him for a fraction of his worth, could you but get the horse to cooperate. Now that he’s cleaned up so nice, maybe the man will find a buyer.”

“I’ll buy him.”

“Sure! A ragamuffin like you? Didn’t you come here looking for work?”

I smiled at him. “I’ll be back.”

I had never been in a human building other than the stable, but I had seen people go in and out of the inn. Some went in through a door at the back, and some went in through the front. Most travelers, once they had handed their horses over to be taken care of or seen to their horses’ stabling themselves, went in through the front door.

I took the brush, bucket, rags, and hoofpick back to the tack room and stowed them where Robin had gotten them from. Then I crossed the inn yard and went around the front of the building. My breath made white ghosts as I walked, and my face burned with cold.

The heat, smoke, and voices came out of the door when I opened it, and music: rough song and rougher playing on some instrument with strings, and the yeasty smell of beer, sharp overtones of wine, roasted meat, baking bread, smoke from fire and tobacco. People crowded around tables and a bar in a big, noisy, low-ceilinged, ill-lit room to the left. It looked more like the sort of party dwarves would throw than any I had seen underground; our gathering rooms were bigger, with taller ceilings, and the people wore better clothes and didn’t smell so bad.

The entry hall led past the room, with hooks on the wall where people had hung cloaks, now gently steaming in the heat from two separate fireplaces in the common room; a closed door stood to the right, and there was a staircase straight ahead that the hall hooked past.

I had several moments to panic before anyone in the room noticed me. Here I was, inside a human dwelling, near a bunch of humans, most of them bigger than I was, and I had shed my skills and powers. What if they decided to kill me?

But mostly they seemed happy with their meat and drink and each other. Laughter boomed. The song the minstrel sang was a funny one, and many joined in the chorus. Nobody looked as though they were about to leap up and stab a stranger.

A thin man in an apron came to meet me. “Young sir, what’s your pleasure?” he asked.

“I heard someone here wants to sell a horse, the big noisy horse in the stable.”

“Gallo,” he called over his shoulder. A large man in brown fur came away from the bar. “Horse buyer,” said the inn keeper before he plunged back into the common room.

“Truly? You’re interested in that brute of a—that wonderful creature of mine out back?”

“He looks strong.”

“That he is, young sir. He can kick through a stable wall in—he can pull a heavy load. He only wants a bit of handling. Are you good with a whip?”

“How much do you want for him?”

“Thirty silver pieces,” he said.

“Oh.” I didn’t know how many pieces of false silver Golden had given me, and he had told me not to show them in public. How was I supposed to count them out?

“Don’t look so crestfallen, young sir. Tonight could be your lucky night. I’ve just had a good run of cards, and I’m feeling generous. How about twenty?”

I bit my lip and stared at the floor, wondering if he would go lower. It didn’t matter to me how many he asked for, so long as I had enough. But apparently indecision was part of the game.

“Fifteen, then, but that’s final.”

“Hey, Gallo! Ten minutes ago you were saying you’d let the monster go for ten!” yelled someone in the room.

Gallo turned and snarled at the other man, then faced me again. “I’ll give him to you for ten, though it hurts my heart to let him go so cheap.”

“Ten,” I said. “Excuse me a moment.” I ducked down the hallway until it turned, took out my purse and counted out ten pieces of silver, then returned and handed them to him.

He bit them, studied them, smiled. “Will you want tack, then?” asked Gallo. “I’ll throw in his saddle and bridle for another two.”

Would the horse want to be saddled and bridled? I wouldn’t, if I were a horse. But maybe I should take the tack anyway. I could always throw it away later.

“That tack he’s got is only worth half a silver,” called the same man in the common room.

I dug one silver out of my pocket and gave it to Gallo. “Will that do?”

“Yes.” He tucked the silvers I had given him in his own pocket. “He’s all yours, God help you. All of you are witnesses!”

The nearest people in the common room laughed and nodded and waved mugs of beer at us.

“Thank you.” I had a horse. I had a horse. I ran out of the inn to the stables. I had a horse!

Now what?

“You did it?” Robin asked when I entered. “You bought him?”

“Yes. And his tack.”

“His tack! Hah! It’s worthless. The girth is nearly worn through, the saddle’s scuffed to pieces, and the reins are almost past mending.”

“Oh, well. I don’t imagine I’ll be using it much.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“Take him home.” Would he come? Down through the gate and into the underground? What would my mother say if I brought a horse home? We had room in our house for a horse, but if my mother didn’t like him, perhaps it was time for me to carve out my own living space.

If the horse wouldn’t come through the gate, what wasI going to do with him?

Hank brought me a very sorry saddle, a thin saddle pad, and sad reins with tarnished buckles and a heavy, sharp bit. If I were a horse, I wouldn’t want to wear any of this, especially that bit. It would cut the tongue.

I went to Bruiser’s stall and opened the door. He glanced at me. “Did you eat enough?”

He went back to the food bin and ate the grain I had put there, drank deep from the bucket. How was I going to feed him?

“You want me to help you put the tack on him?” Robin asked.

I looked at the degenerate bits of things in my hands. “I don’t think he’d like it.”

“How are you going to ride him, then?”

“Ride him?” I hadn’t thought this through. “But I don’t know how to ride.”

“I suppose it’s just as well, that brute. Probably wouldn’t let you stay on him anyway. What do you want him for, then?”

“I don’t know.” I walked toward the stable door, and Bruiser followed me. “Robin, thank you for everything.”

“Hey. Come back if you want work, Owl. I’m sure they’d hire you. You learn fast, and you’re good with the animals.”

“Thanks.” We passed Hank, who leaned, arms crossed, against Bess’s stall door. Then we were outside in the flicker-torch dark and cold. I led my horse into the forest.

He snorted and reared when we came to where Golden waited.

“It’s all right, horse. This is my teacher. He won’t hurt you.”

“Won’t I?” asked Golden, who was still a wolf. “Why have you gotten this animal, Owl?”

“It’s what I’ve always wanted, Teacher. You know that. This is my horse.”

“This is my boy,” said the horse.

“Oh ho,” said Golden.

“Horse,” I said, “I’m going to change now so we can get home before daybreak. Only—“

“What’ll you do, Owl? Fly off and leave the creature behind?” Golden asked.

“How far do you have to go?” asked the horse.

“A league and a half.”

“Climb on my back,” said the horse.

I studied the saddle, saddle pad, and bridle I held, wondered if they would help me. I climbed up into a tree and left them on a branch, then lowered myself onto the horse’s back. He stayed steady. His back was broad.

It was strange to be shaped like I was and this high off the ground on top of something that moved.

“Boy, hug my neck,” the horse said. “Wolf, lead the way.”

The horse carried me through the night all the way to the gate. I clung to his huge hard warmth, my cheek pressed to his neck, his coarse mane whipping against my face and shoulders as he ran, my legs splayed wider apart than was comfortable. I was shaky and rattled by the time we reached our destination, but elated, too: the horse had let me ride him.

“Thank you,” I said. I let myself down off his back and collapsed, my legs too wobbly to hold me.

The horse nibbled my hair. “You’ll have to learn better than that,” he said.

“You mean we can do it again?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, thank you.” I stretched out on my back and reached for my other self. It didn’t take me long to find it this second time. I wrapped myself in change, felt the arcane strengths and skills come back. The world of scents came alive, and my hearing sharpened. I felt the breeze stroke my face and hands. Better. Much better. I ran my hand through my hair and sat up.

“Who are you?” cried the horse.

“I’m Owl,” I said.

“You’re not! You’re not my boy’s son anymore!” He reared, pawed the air, backed away from me.

“I am,” I said.

“No! Nothing about you tastes or smells like him! Imposter. You tricked me!”

“Horse,” I cried. I held out my hand. He danced away, plunged, kicked out. Golden dove, knocked me over before the horse could fell me.

The horse ran away into the frozen forest.

Light washed the edge of the sky. Winter’s edge chilled the tears on my face. Golden shifted away from wolf, rose as his faery self, picked me up, carried me through the gate and home.

After I had slept, my mother made me dress in my best clothes and took me to a celebration in the queen’s court. The warmth was just right in the spacious room, and all the colors bright and clean and pleasing to the eye. The work of artisans was everywhere, leaves woven into our clothes, flowers carved or inlaid on the tables, knotwork patterns painted on the floor and glazed onto the dishes. The smells were light and delicious, some of them flowers, some of them food; ripe fruit, light cakes. Minstrels played, and many danced; those of us who didn’t dance, sat by rank at tables, and ate and drank and talked.

All the children of my generation were there, seated beside their mothers, dressed well and looking like younger, less troubled versions of the elders.

Golden was not there. He hated affairs such as this.

I sat beside my sister-friend, Henna. The halfbloods, those who were not my siblings and wore their humanity openly instead of hidden against their spines, moved among us, offering fruit and sweets on green glass trays. Everyone ate. Everyone acted as though the trays floated past them unsupported by visible beings.

I touched one serving girl’s wrist, and she paused, her yellow eyes wide, and looked at me. Her ears were as pointed as any of ours, her eyes as slanted, her chin as sharp; but she smelled human. She bowed so low her wrist slipped out of my grasp, and then she hurried away.

Henna stared at me.

We were not supposed to notice the halfbloods. We were not supposed to touch them. They were only allowed among us by grace. They should be thankful they were here in faery halls, instead of grubbing in the dirt above. These half-human lesser beings —

Half human. Who was I to condemn them?

I blinked, gazed around the great hall, saw suddenly half again as many people present. Those of us who stood, carried trays, walked among the seated, slipped past the dancing ones—

More faery than I had looked when I saw my father’s face in Golden’s mirror.

I did not know the names of any of them. I saw the girl I had touched standing against the wall, whispering to an older boy with round ears. She glanced toward me, dropped her gaze.

Where did they go when they were not serving us? What did they do? Were they kind to strangers, as Robin had been kind?

If I wanted to talk to one of them, I would have to find her sometime when no one else was around. I didn’t know if that was even possible, but it might be a thing worth trying.

It might be easier if I looked like my father.

It was one avenue I wanted to explore. And there was another.

I turned to my sister-friend. The skills Henna studied involved weaving: she wove light, water, air, and fire, and sometimes words and music into cloth, spells, food. Had she ever thought about our father? Had it ever occurred to her that he, too, had been a weaver, as he, too, had been a shapeshifter?

Did she ever realize he had been human under everything our dead king had done to give him the power to sire us? Had she ever asked her mother or her teacher what he looked like?

“Come aboveground with me tonight,” I whispered to her during a burst of laughter. Henna was the best of my friends, my favorite sister. I wanted to talk to her about what it meant to be children of our father.

She did not answer me until some time had passed.

But at last she said, “All right.”

Perhaps the horse would come back, and I could introduce him to another of my father’s children. Perhaps she would smell right; I knew I could smell right again.

I did not know what to hope for, but I hoped.

Nina Kiriki Hoffmanhas sold more than two hundred stories and several novels. Her works have been finalists for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Theodore Sturgeon, and Endeavour Awards. The Thread that Binds the Boneswon the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award. Her fantasy novels include The Silent Strength of Stones, A Red Heart of Memories, Past the Size of Dreaming, and A Fistful of Sky. Her third short story collection Time Travelers, Ghosts, and other Visitors, came out in 2003, as well as her most recent novel, A Stir of Bones (Viking).

In addition to writing, Nina works at a bookstore, does production work for a national magazine, and teaches short story writing through a local community college. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats, a mannequin, and many strange toys.

Author’s Note

“Immersed in Matter” is a piece of a much bigger tapestry, part of the dreamweavings of night, the stories I tell myself on the edge of sleep. I talk these stories out to myself as I lie in the dark. Every once in a while, one gets captured in a poem or trapped on a computer screen or in my journal. This is the second one to make its way into print. (“Flotsam,” in the anthology Firebirds, is another piece of the picture; chronologically, it happens later than this.)

Most of the children in Owl’s generation track down their father eventually.

And I’m sure the horse comes back.