The Truth of Things Unseen

The first time I saw the fae girl was the night Aunt Hettie died.

It had been thirteen years since Hettie had come a-calling for her goats and found me instead, broken on the wheel amidst shattered pines, a little monster even then, clothes stuck with blood, face slashed open by the flints. I wiggled the stumps on my left hand and touched my ear self-consciously. Time hadn't improved my looks.

She had cared for me after a fashion, I hadn't died anyway. The scratch left on her leg by the shadow had never healed right. She had stomped on, tending her goats, complaining about the price of apples. I ran errands for her, and she fed me whatever food she had spare.

The undertakers laid her body out on the table in the parlour, wrists and ankles bound with white cords against the rising. I didn't think Hettie was going to be rising, she looked frail and crisp as pastry. The scratch on her leg was livid purple, like it had sucked the juice out of her.

Black-clad mourners flapped like storm crows. They nattered about the price of fish and the unseasonal weather. They sprawled on her chairs and drank her barley wine. They eyed up her furniture and slipped her silver teaspoons into their pockets.

None of them met my eyes. I was bad luck.

A prim old woman with tight, white curls leaned into her neighbour. "Touched by a shadow," I heard her whisper through a mouth full of fruitcake.

"No wonder," replied her neighbour. "Boy like that in the house."

"Folks should know better, dragging monsters down out of the hills."

The mourners glared at me and I stared at the rug, waiting for them to look away. No point arguing with folk.

A priest stooped over the corpse like a buzzard at the carrion and sprinkled an economical measure of holy oil from a greasy vial. The oil smelt of mould and spread into round yellow stains on Hettie's tablecloth. Hettie would have hated it. She always liked a tidy table.

"Out now," muttered the rector, shooing the mourners out the front door, into the garden. I hung back in the frame, unwilling to leave her. "Fine then, stay if you want," he snapped at me, "but don't let it touch you."

The priest took a thin silver knife and dragged it across her throat. There was no blood, but a little whisp of black smoke rose from the wound. He cut again, deeper. Something went out of her, like a breath, and she sagged in the middle. He cut once again. The thing coiled in the air above her then faded in the evening sunlight. He covered the wound with a cloth.

"Done?" asked the rector.

The priest nodded and wiped his knife, then mopped his brow on a cloth.

The front door stood ajar. The evening air was fresh on my face. I walked right out of the cottage, slipped between the mourners on the front steps, and nobody noticed at all.

The cool evening sky had faded into a hushed shade of blue-green, not yet brightened by the rosy blush of sunset. The cows in the fields above were lowing for the milking. The bats were darting in and out amongst the eves hunting for insects. I watched them fly. Little lives, little deaths. No one mourns the bugs.

Behind the cottage, where Hettie's cornflowers swayed in her garden, trees grew up the bank, leading into the forest beyond. Here was the barn and the hayloft where I slept. Even though she cared for me, Hettie had never gone so far as to allow me to sleep inside. She had never been one to tempt fate.

There were feelings banked up behind a door somewhere in my chest, and some desperate part of me was leaning up against that door, holding it shut while the cold fingers, scritch scratched on the other side. I could feel the emotions there. I didn’t understand them, and I feared that maybe they were stronger than me. If I let them out, perhaps I would never put them away again.

I rubbed at the broken places on my face. The only person in the world who cared for me was gone, and who would feed me now? How would I live? Where would I sleep?

Friendly shouts came from the direction of the alehouse. I had coins in my pocket. A glass of mead, maybe another. I could forget it all. I could keep drinking until the feelings were all washed back down.

I felt eyes on me. I glanced up at the roof. Luck was crouching there, with his ragged cloak flapping out behind him, face painted in black and white squares, stupid scraggy clothes made from stitched together pieces of other clothes, rags and tassels and cloth of gold. He raised one finger and pointed North, out into the trees.

I picked up a rock and hurled it at him, but slipped in mud and hurt my arm. I chucked another but flubbed the release like a turd-eating simpleton and smashed a chimney pot instead. No point trying to hit Luck with a rock.

I rubbed my arm and yelled at him instead.

"You did this!" I knew he could hear me from the way he tilted his head, but he didn't reply. He never said anything, not to me anyhow. "You leave me alone, I ain't done nothing to you!"

Luck shook his fist; a rattle of dice. The shouts from the alehouse grew louder and I heard the beginnings of a fight. Once again he pointed north, into the trees.

"I ain't going in the woods. I'm going to drink until I'm drunk. You try and stop me."

He didn't move, just stared down at me with his every colour eyes. I felt the weight of them on me. The sounds from the alehouse were no longer friendly. I could hear things breaking.

"Fine then," I muttered. T’aint no use arguing with a curse. I clambered over the back fence and scrambled up the bank, up to the place where the village stopped and the wildwood began. I placed my feet and gripped the tree branches like ropes, leaning back and hauling myself, hand over hand, higher and further away from the lights of the houses.

I crested the hill, emerging from the trees, onto the chalk downland. To the west, beyond the Telbridge and the river, the last dregs of the blood-red evening pooled on the edge of the horizon and a narrow moon set sail amongst the clouds, swift and sharp as the keel of a trading ship. Rabbits grazed by the first moonlight. Chalk and flint lay scattered, glowing like knucklebones, half buried beneath the close-cropped grass and the wild, uncaring stars.

It was better than the alehouse, Luck was right. It was fresh and free. It made me think of bigger places.

The walking was easier here. I strode out quickly, swinging my legs and arms to get the blood into them. The rabbits scattered before me, low bodies pressed flat to the ground. I had no bow or I might have shot one. No knife for the guts or flint for the fire neither; my pockets were bare.

Far below in the valley, Telbridge Hearth nestled safe around the river, a bead on a bright thread. There were lights in the harbour and more lights on the coloured boats that drifted slowly up and down, from Teleth Kier, through the Sister Villages up to the Netherby Stacks, hauling skins and kegs and cloth and vegetables and all the other inconsequentialities of village life.

Smoke rose from the storied chimneys of the ale house. The fight had quietened down. Life continued, but not for Hettie.

Further down along the river, the smoke towers of the Firepot flickered and flared, and in the far distance, between the hills, beyond the Barrowlands, the metallic sheen of the ocean gleamed bright as legend beneath the journeying moon.

Still I wandered on, down the slope on the far side of the bluff, down into the Western valley. The trees were different here. The air was damp and moss hung from the branches like beards. Little rivers flowed amongst the saplings, and I scrambled across them, finding steppingstones, careful not to get my feet wet.

You will have heard the tales of the Western Valley. Tales whispered in the alehouse around the guttering fire. Tales of folks disappearing as though taken by the vapours, then reappearing in the village months or years later gibbering and swaying like Lennel men. Tales of a green witch who squats in a Fae ring, who can burn a man black with her eyes. I headed West towards the tales, trusting the thin moon to light my way. I don't know why, I think I was looking for something different, something that wouldn't remind me of her. Perhaps the vapours would take me too. Perhaps I might lose myself and never have to think again.

Dark pools of water lay down in the scooped out hollow of the valley, the pressed down shadows of things that were no longer there. Old thistle heads snatched at my trousers in the dark. The saturated moss squelched beneath my boots.

There are sucking things that crouch in marshes. Lights that bob across the water. Cold hands that curl up from the silent pools, waiting. A hundred years they wait, crowding and crushing together like vegetables planted too close, waiting for an unwary traveller. They snatch an ankle, silently forcing their way into boots and mouths, slowly claiming the eye sockets and the navel until a person is choked or drowned or quietly rent open down the middle like bread dough.

I hurried onwards, avoiding the water and began climbing up the next bank. The air here was warmer. It was as though I had travelled south towards the Summer Lands, though I had barely been walking a thrice-hour, and by my reckoning, I was still going West.

I kept climbing, on and up, until at last I found what I had only half admitted to myself that I had been seeking.

"Grendlewald," I whispered to myself, the wall of monsters, and the name sent chills creeping down my spine.

The wall was made of huge old broken stones, piled higgledy-piggledy one on top of another, completely smothered in vines and creepers. It was entirely derelict, more of a piled-up ridge than a wall, though the carvings on the ancient stones told me that they had once been something more.

One day I will tell you the tales of the Aden and the old kings, buried but never forgotten. Tales of armoured witches and Ragwraiths, black and massive, blotting out the stars. Tales of Night Crawlers and Corpse Nests and the raggedy wolves with the hands and faces of children. When they eat you they hold you still and take little bites. I will tell you these tales, but not today.

This was a Fae place, a place no sane man would willingly walk. It was not a place for telling tales, it was a place where a person might disappear.

Unwilling to stop moving, I turned left and followed the curve of the wall, careful not to touch the ancient stones. The Grendlewald came around in a great sweep, heaped with ivy and climbing plants, a ring that circumscribed the whole hilltop.

After a quarter of a mile, the path dipped into a hollow. A cliff rose to my right and I walked at the base of it. The wall balanced on the brink of the rise, fifty feet over my head. I lost sight of it for a few minutes behind thick trees and undergrowth, but I followed the base of the cliff until I found a way back up and soon reached the wall once more.

I trudged on. By my reckoning, over a mile of stones had now passed to my right. The trees did not grow right up to the wall. None brushed against it and no branches overhung it. It was as though the natural forest wanted no part of whatever lay beyond. The silent moon followed me as I walked, watching over my shoulder.

See a hill with stones a-crowned,

There the fairy queen’s a weeping.

Walk the ring of stones around,

Can you catch her while she’s sleeping?

Beware the things beneath the mound,

Beware the eyes that come a-peeping.

The old words came into my mind unbidden and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I walked the ring. I don't know why I did it, perhaps I was hoping the queen would come out and take me.

Instead, I found something else, something I should never have found at all.

I saw it first as a dim glow, like a fire, but white, somewhere between the trees, up over the rise. The grasses danced merry black shadows, and the thin twigs reached long shadows back between the trees, cast from one world into another.

As I came closer a gathering brightness lit the woods, shimmering across the underside of each leaf, each one turned to swaying silver, and a sudden breeze rushed through them, setting them all a-swish and a-shiver.

I thought there must be a fire, but the light was cool and steady, silvery as a second moon, shining upwards from below like a mirror’s reflection, white fire on water, coming up from beneath.

I dropped into a crouch and stalked the brightness, hunting it as I would hunt a rabbit, placing each footstep deliberately, ball to heel, step-stepping between fallen leaves and brush, I know how to move quietly in the forest, how to stalk a deer, how to lift each foot, careful for the drop of a pebble or the crunch of a snailshell, one foot then the next, toe to heel, feet like knives between the forest litter.

The brightness grew and swelled as I moved closer until I reached the top of the rise, and there she was, bright as the morning, and her radiance hurt my eyes, and I was blinded by her.

Her name was Fentallion, Miradel of Erin, and she shone, brighter than all the stars, and I did not know it then, but from that moment forth, she was mine, and I was hers, and that was the way it would always be.