Over the next few weeks, summer came to San Francisco so gradually that Viv, who was used to four very distinct seasons, could not tell the difference. If anything the days were chiller and grayer than they had been in the spring.
She kept up her sword-fighting practice with Noah, but their lessons had lapsed from nightly to weekly dates. At first they had tried sweeping through the city’s various parks, looking for mushroom rings or other spots likely to be crossover points between San Francisco and the fairies’ realm, but their diligence faded after several evenings of work turned up nothing. It was hard, Viv told herself, to find time for friends and her “second job” when she had a new boyfriend occupying her nights.
Her whirlwind flirtation with Auterre was becoming something serious, though neither of them had talked about it openly. She spent every weekend at his apartment, slinking home late on Sundays to her irate cat.
The first time she spent the night with him, he ran his long fingers over her skin, pausing over every scrape and bruise. His whisper-soft touches made her shiver. “Is this,” he asked softly, “something you have done to yourself?”
“What? No!” she protested. “I’m not a cutter! I’m just—accident prone.” And though she did not know whether he believed her, he hadn’t pressed the issue.
It wasn’t just vanity, she was almost sure, that made her leave the sword in the closet: as the cuts on her skin healed, so a sort of calm had settled over the city. Forays had been made on both sides, and now an uneasy sort of truce seemed to exist between herself and the fairy world. She did not want to upset it.
She kept her word to Irusan, and with Noah’s help created a website dedicated to stories of the King of Cats. They solicited original poetry from his SCA friends, although Noah vetoed her suggestion to decorate the borders of the page with animations of dancing cats.
She had not seen Irusan since that night in the woods, or Piper, but she did run into his human boyfriend on the subway one evening. She stared at him a moment before recognizing him: his cheeks were sunken and eyes so darkly shadowed that Viv forgot her manners and blurted out: “Raven! You look awful!”
He smiled a little, and as she fumbled for an apology, said hoarsely: “I’ve been sick. —What about you? You haven’t got your sword with you.”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t needed it. Listen, you said you were a, a shaman, right?” And when he nodded, “I think my house keys are cursed. Can you do anything about that?”
“What do you mean, cursed?”
“I mean they’re never where I left them. I set my alarm forty-five minutes early these days because I know that’s how long it will take me to find my keys. This morning they were in the pocket of a jacket I haven’t worn since I unpacked it. Last week they were hanging from the float in the toilet tank.”
“Sounds like someone’s playing a prank on you,” Raven said.
“I live alone,” she objected.
He shrugged. “I can do a cleansing ritual if you want. You can come back with me right now, if you have time.”
She eyed his thin frame. “Well, I wouldn’t want to impose...”
He smiled wanly. “I’m not dying. And I’m not even positive. My doctor thinks it might be mono.”
“Positive—you mean—for HIV?” she stammered.
“Viveka, you look shocked. Sweetie, this is the Castro. One in six of us are pos. I just assumed that’s what you were thinking.”
“No! I mean, it would never have occurred to me. I mean, not that I mind!” She put a hand to her mouth. “That was a dumb thing to say. That I mind. Why would I mind. I’m sorry, I’m going to quit talking now.”
“You’re cute,” Raven said flatly. “Come on, this is my stop.”
She followed him up to street level, and then through crowds of tourists gawking into the windows of sex shops, into the quieter residential streets. Raven lived above a corner grocery store, in a small one-bedroom with a lovely bay window. The floors were strewn with bright-woven rugs, and the walls hung with feathered masks, interspersed with butterflies behind glass casings.
“Wow,” said Viv, admiring one brilliant-winged specimen. “This guy is huge.”
Raven glanced over as he set down his things. “The butterflies are Piper’s,” he said. “It’s all that he owns. All he brought with him, anyway. And he keeps bringing home more.”
“He lives with you?”
“Well, sort of by default, yeah. He crashes here most of the time, anyway. Otherwise he sleeps on the street, it doesn’t seem to bother him.”
“Huh.” Viv went back to studying the butterflies. “They’re gorgeous, aren’t they? But a little bit creepy.”
“Well, that’s fairies in a nutshell.” Raven came over to the window holding a clay bowl. He held it out to her. “Okay, drop them in here.”
She fumbled for her keys and did as he said. “Hmm,” he said as they clattered into the bowl, tied together with a woven braid. “Is that what you use for a keychain?”
“It’s a friendship bracelet,” she said. “From high school.”
“You might want to get another one,” Raven said. “If your problem is really fairy magic, I mean. They’re allergic to worked metal. At least that’s why Piper says he can’t ever cook, or do the dishes. But here, let’s do this thing.” He took the bowl and set it on the floor, settling cross-legged behind it, and Viv imitated him.
Raven produced a bundle of herbs, one end charred, and struck a long-handled match to light it. The dried herbs flared briefly and then smoldered, filling the apartment with the scent of sage. Raven closed his eyes and began to chant softly in a language she did not know, waving the sage bundle over her keys. It smelled nice. Between the scent of the herbs and his lilting chant, Viv felt something inside her unclench, and fill instead with a sense of peace.
When Raven was done he simply picked up the keys and held them out to her, grinding out the fire against the bottom of the bowl. “I hope this helps,” he said. “If it doesn’t, get a big hunk of iron for your new keychain.”
She accepted the keys and returned them to her pocket. “Thanks. Do I, um, owe you anything?”
“First one’s free.”
She smiled. “Okay. Thanks.” She picked up her laptop case, got to her feet, and stood there for a moment, irresolute. “Hey, listen. It sounds like things—aren’t going so well with you and Piper?”
Raven lifted one shoulder and dropped it with a sigh, as if it tired him to do even that much. “I don’t know. It’s never been easy. He’s—selfish, and sometimes cruel, but just when I think I’m going to kick him out he—does something, or just looks a certain way, and I—want him. I want him too much.”
Viv studied his wasted face, wishing, for the first time in weeks, that she was carrying her sword, though she did not know what she might have done with it. “That sounds like fairy magic," she said. "Be careful with him.”
But he only gave her a twisted smile. “Sweetie, that kind of magic, a lot of men have. Don’t you know?”
And she blushed, thinking of Auterre. “I guess. It’s hard to do the sensible thing sometimes.”
“Maybe I’ll do the curse-breaker ritual on myself.”
“Maybe you should,” she said earnestly. But as he saw her out of the building, he looked so exhausted she wondered if he would even remember the conversation later.
On the way home she stopped into a hardware store and bought a Swiss army knife with a keychain handle, swapping it out for her old friendship bracelet. And that evening she fished Excalibur out from under a pile of dirty laundry in the back of her closet and gave it a few practice swings. If the sword resented its disuse she could not sense it; it whistled keenly through the air, balancing easily in her hands. After all, she thought, it was a thing of ancient power. It must be used to biding its time.
That night she was woken from sleep by a shrill scream of pain. She started out of bed before she really woke up, running into the kitchen and fumbling for the light-switch. It was only the flood of harsh electrical light that brought her fully to her senses. She found herself standing, barefoot in an old Oberlin t-shirt and pajama bottoms, at the door between kitchen and bedroom. On the kitchen counter was a tiny, fat, yellow-haired woman no more than six inches tall, wearing absolutely nothing but a peaked red hat, standing over Viv’s keys and shaking her hand as if she had burned it. She stared at Viv as if dazzled by the lights: then in the next instant she began to scurry across the counter, making for the hole in the wall.
“Wait—” Viv gasped, but something else was faster. Silk made a fluid hunter’s leap up to the counter and took a swipe at the fairy woman, who screamed, shrill and high.
“No!” Viv shouted, grabbing Silk into her arms, although it was like holding a clawed tornado: the cat was determined to get to her prey, and she escaped almost instantly from Viv’s grasp. So Viv lunged instead for the fairy, scooping her to safety only a second before the cat pounced again.
“Eeeeee!” screamed the little woman, burying her face in her plump arms. She was naked as a jaybird, but her hair was neatly braided, falling in two blond twists on either side of her face.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, I’ve got you,” Viv soothed, holding the fairy in her cupped hands. Though she was somewhat concerned for the little woman’s modesty, she could not stop staring: a deep thrill of recognition, fed by many childhood storybooks, ran through her. She was holding, in her hand, one of the little gnomes that she used to love to read about. “So there really are tomtes!” she marveled.
The fairy lowered her arms to peer up at Viv. “That’s one name for me,” she said. “Portune, brownie, hob-of-the-house—that’s what I am, yes, yes. Tomte to you, child.”
“So you’re the ‘mouse’ that Silk’s been chasing. And you were just trying to steal my keys again, weren’t you!”
“Of course I was,” the tomte said stoutly. “At first I swept the kitchen for you, and put everything in its place while you slept. But never did you notice, no, not once did you leave me a saucer of milk or a drop of aquavit or a bit of porridge as thanks. And many’s the night you went to bed without cleaning the dishes! Such a slatternly housekeeper you are, what’s a nisse to do? Of course I hide the household keys, and I sour your milk too!”
Viv blinked. “The milk’s gone sour?”
“The milk’s been sour from the day you brought it home! You haven’t eaten breakfast for a week though, so you never noticed.” As she said this her voice cracked, and she began to rapidly blink back tears.
“I’m—sorry?” Viv managed. “Yes, I’m sorry—Silk, get back.” The cat was restlessly circling Viv’s feet, even stretching herself up on her hind legs to bat at Viv’s elbow. Viv pushed her back with the side of her foot, edging the cat into the bedroom, and shut the door quickly to trap her on the other side. Silk immediately yowled in protest, but Viv ignored her, setting the tomte carefully back on the kitchen counter.
At once she lunged for the hole in the wall. “No wait—wait!” Viv cried, but it was no use: she got only a flash of the tomte’s dimpled white ass as she dove into the tangle of wires.
Viv sighed. “Fine, fine, you can come back in, Silk.” She cracked open the door and Silk leapt directly up to the counter, sniffing around the hole in the wall. Meanwhile Viv opened up the refrigerator and pulled out the milk. One sniff made her recoil in disgust.
“She’s right. Yuck.” She poured the spoiled milk down the sink, running the water until the last of the lumpy stuff was gone. Then she began rifling through the cabinets. “Let’s see—aquavit’s like vodka, and I haven’t got any, and obviously the milk is gone now, but—somewhere around here—aha.” She pulled out a dust-covered packet of instant Quaker oatmeal. “Porridge! With freeze-dried strawberry bits, no less.”
In the time it took to boil water she had a bowl of oatmeal. She set it carefully down beside the hole in the wall and called: “Thank you for your help, Missus Tomte! I made you some porridge.” She wasn’t really expecting an answer and didn’t get one. After a moment she just flipped off the kitchen light and padded back into the bedroom.
A moment later she was back, switching the lights back on just long enough to rinse off the spoon she’d used to stir the porridge. She wiped it dry on her pajama bottoms and set it in the drawer. “Dishes. Done,” she mumbled, and shuffled off to bed.