Aimee Ogden - [BCS307 S01] Read online

  Buttercream and Broken Wings

  Aimee Ogden

  Willowbright flitted from shadow to shadow in the trees, watching the gravediggers mutter and complain as they threw dirt into the gaping wound in the churchyard. The old widow, who had often left small beer and salt herring on her windowsill for Willowbright, lay lifeless at the bottom of the hole. Now that she’d finally gone beneath the stones in the churchyard, Willowbright had been left alone, unserved by human hands.

  Autumn had arrived like an unwelcome guest, altogether too early, stealing the last of the summer-fruits, and with no gift of greeting in hand. Favored fey might overwinter on the largesse of the Queen at court—if they shared with Her some glimmer of glory stolen from their own human patrons. Without the widow, Willowbright had no such thing to trade upon.

  The old woman had no human mourners, so Willowbright stayed; if not to mourn, then to mark her passing at least. By the time the widow’s grave had been covered over and the gravediggers sat atop the new wound in the earth to pass a cup between them, the moon had pressed its thumbprint deep into the sky. Willowbright wrapped her arms around her hollow stomach.

  She didn’t need and could only bear so much human want and whim. Just one wide-eyed child or hopeful housewife, to offer her what little she required and could not, by the rules of such things, take for herself. A relief, in some ways; a worry in others. Without their gifts, she could not survive forever. She frowned down at the gravediggers, one of whom now straggled out of the cemetery, one of whom had paused to relieve himself beside the fresh-turned dirt. Clever hands and fast wings alone wouldn’t feed and warm her the long winter through.

  The Court, Willowbright knew, laughed behind their wings at her and her far-between patrons. But she was the one who should be laughing, not those who were forever flitting to the petulant stomp of an oversized foot or the crook of a great clumsy finger.

  Starlight prickled her wings as she lifted her nose and tested the air. The phlox embroidering the tree-roots below offered dankly scented nectar; not far, a patch of wood-sorrel could provide stolid sustenance. Willowbright craved something more substantial than nectar and sweeter than sorrel. She stirred her wings and set off deeper into human holdings.

  She skimmed low over the squatty cottages and mossy fences, hiding when a crow’s shadow slid coldly over her, then again from a pair of wild fairies. She watched them pass from the cover of an oak bower as they flew by, naked but for mud and berry-stains. Faint light limned their well-patched wings, where they had carved out shimmering scales and fed a length of batskin or spidersilk to the hungry gap, and bone chips chattered where they hung from the ragged margins. When one threw back her head and laughed, silhouetted by tallow-fat moonlight, she looked almost like one of the Good Folk. Were they looking Willowbright’s way? She waited, breath stilled and wings trembling, until the wind had swept away their raucous cackles.

  The evening’s cool breeze let her glide for a few easy minutes, scanning the terrain below. Taking an egg from the friary’s coops would have appealed, if she were able to help herself to human food without spoiling it. Unless clearly abandoned or freely offered, it was no good to her. Perhaps the wreckage of a meat pie, or a child’s splattered porridge?

  Or then again perhaps something better! An acorn cap of milk and a slice of buttercake, sitting upon a tree-stump out where the goat-keeper’s fence nestled up against the forest, as if attending upon her arrival. Too good to be true. But when Willowbright cast a suspicious eye around, she found no living thing but trees and stars and moon and, at a distance, the humped backs of sleeping goats.

  Sometimes the townspeople left offerings for fairy favor. If the goat-keeper desired hers, Willowbright would mark his fence to warn the Good Folk not to pluck his herd for paintbrushes or pillow-stuffing. It would wear off after a week, but then, a meal, even such a very fine one, would wear off long before that. He could feed her again if he wanted more. The goat-keeper would make a serviceable patron; though she preferred cow’s butter to goat’s, both far outpaced winter starvation.

  She alit on the stump and lifted the acorn cap. Not milk but sweet cream, petal-silken, and it cooled the fire at Willowbright’s core. She gulped it all, lest it was no offering and the touch of fey lips should sour it.

  A human girl crouched opposite her. “Hello,” she whispered. “Please don’t fly away.”

  Willowbright stayed but kept her wings unfurled. She’d take flight if the girl tried to grab at her. Besides, fine wingmanship made a good impression on susceptible humans, especially the young. Which this one seemed to be—Willowbright had little practice gauging human ages, but this looked like more than a child and less than a woman grown. A pretty thing, whatever her age. Poppyjoy had several human admirers of her own but only the miller and his wife, and a pair of old men from the friary—and one of those had dreadful pockmarks. The Queen, of course, had six, most of them pretty youths. Like this one.

  Willowbright lifted one hand, giving the woman-child an opening to elaborate on her invitation. Fairy speech was beyond human ken, but hopefully this creature wasn’t too dull to recognize a polite overture to conversation.

  “Oh—thank you.” The girl settled to her haunches in the grass, which brought her face nearly level with the stump. Her clothes were homespun and her feet bare but unstained with grass or mud. Not the goat-keeper’s girl, then. “I hope you don’t mind it’s only the half of the buttercake. I ate the rest. I’m sorry.”

  Willowbright shrugged and broke a crumb off the cake, intimating magnanimity, deeply desiring the girl to get on with it.

  The girl’s hands crushed deep valleys into her apron hem. “My stepsister is—plain.” The word ugly shimmered beneath the too-bright surface there. “My stepmother is worried she’ll never marry while I’m under the same roof. It wouldn’t be seemly to marry off the younger one first.”

  Willowbright’s lips twisted. Trite, but easy enough. A goose that lay a dowry’s worth of emerald eggs, perhaps, to buy a suitable suitor. Boring, though not old-man-with-pox-scars boring. Willowbright had that within her power. She flicked her fingers: go on.

  “Make me ugly,” the girl said quietly. She wiped away the miniature mountains she’d creased into her apron. “Make me so ugly they forget to hate me. So ugly they forget I’m there. My time will come, I know. But for now let me be too far beneath them for me to be trouble.”

  A spark caught the easy tinder of Willowbright’s attention and took flame. Now that was more interesting than any number of gem-shitting geese. But then interesting alone didn’t polish Willowbright’s wings. She cocked her head and put her hands out. Well?

  The girl gnawed her lip. “My firstborn.”

  No. Willowbright didn’t work on credit. Nor did she care to deal with the obligatory attempt to worm out of the bargain by the time such a child arrived.

  “A ring of gold.” The girl touched her apron pocket, then jerked her hands back to her lap, as if she thought Willowbright would snatch it if she knew its hiding place. That wasn’t the way of things. Didn’t the girl know anything? “It was my mother’s.”

  Willowbright didn’t care if the ring belonged to the humans’ own father-God; she shook her head again. Gold’s sparkle lured the eye, but it was so heavy. Let Poppyjoy and Swallowmoon weigh themselves down beneath earthmetal’s pull; she had something simpler in mind. She held her hands cupped in front of her, then moved them to her mouth, miming tearing, gnawing, chewing.

  “Food?” The girl’s face creased. “You want—food? That’s all?”

  Willowbright nodded, glittering all the brighter for her satisfaction. Hardly a grand gift, but glory had never yet f
illed her belly.

  “You shall have it, then.” She thumbed the hidden ring. “I promise.”

  So they were agreed and bound. Willowbright pointed at the ground: wait here.

  One nanny goat lay at a distance from the herd, its knobbled knees tucked under its chin. Its slash-pupiled eyes fluttered beneath long lashes when Willowbright stroked its hide, but it didn’t wake, not even when she dug her hands into the hoary flesh below the neck, not when she tore the hide clean free. Not even then, and never again.

  The girl stared when Willowbright dropped the goathide on her lap—stared, but did flinch. Willowbright gestured to her shoulders, then to the goathide: put it on!

  The girl grasped the edge of the hide and whirled it over her back. Where it met her body, the goatskin became as her own. For a moment her eyes peered out through the ragged holes where the goat’s had been, pupils huge and dark instead of barred. Then its features settled into place, its face imposed upon hers.

  Still recognizable but undeniably altered: her smooth skin gone rough and blotchy, glossy braids flat and stringy, bright eyes dull. Asymmetry disrupted the even lines of her nose and cheeks, put crooked the straight-laid paths of her teeth. Her hand fluttered to her chest, where she found the secret line of false flesh over true, and flensed it back over her scalp and neck. For a moment her face was fully her own again. Then she withdrew once more inside the goatskin, and her lopsided mouth twisted. “Thank you. Thank you.” She knelt down and pressed her forehead to the ground. “Three times I thank you, daughter of the Fey Forest.”

  Willowbright fluttered her wings modestly when the girl rose with a line of fresh dirt on her scabrous forehead. A good bit of magic, by her judgment, and it would last until it had served its purpose. In the meantime... She swept a dainty hand over the crumbled buttercake and empty acorn cap.

  The girl nodded. “Yes. Of course. Come to the cottage just west of town, the brewster’s house with the field of heather behind it. I’ll set out cream and sugar for you every night so long as I live under my stepmother’s roof.”

  A fine arrangement, sweetened all the more by the adulation that poured off the girl. Willowbright curtsied, and wondered why any fey creature would choose to scrape a wild living off the forest floor when humans were so eager to wait upon them. They weren’t all so bad, if you chose carefully and bargained well.

  Winter dragged its corpse-white body through the valley, pulling down trees and flattening roofs. The abandoned wasps’ nest where Willowbright made her papery home fell to a hailstorm; it split open on the roots below, where the phlox would crawl carelessly over it come summer.

  She didn’t bother asking the Court for help. With only one human vassal, she hadn’t the status to be afforded housing in the abandoned badger sett where the Queen kept Her rooms. And while the Queen might listen sympathetically to her sorrows, Willowbright could not abide the looks from behind lowered lashes and fluttering fans that she’d get from Saltfrost and Echo and Poppyjoy.

  So she found a scrap of poplar fluff, and made herself a little capelet, and huddled in the nests of sleeping ground squirrels and hibernating hedgehogs when the winds cut sleet-sharp through her. Sometimes hunger’s claws scraped her up from shallow sleep, but the cold—the cold gnawed her bones and left lingering marks.

  And when daylight shone blinding-bright upon the snow, at least Willowbright could still visit the brewster’s cottage, to find her thimble of buttercream or crisp oatcake. She never saw the goatskin girl, but gratitude slipped down her throat as sweetly as the cream. The reverence due a fairy in all her glory might not be so readily supplied to one in Willowbright’s undignified state. The poplar-wool encumbered her wings and made a drunken stutter of her elegant arcs.

  No matter. She let frost feather her wings until she was a shimmer upon the sky. On fresh-fallen snow she was invisible, and she left no footprints to follow when she went down to the brewster’s cottage.

  Until the day when she crossed the whispering fields of heather to find two fairies already on the brewster’s sill, guzzling her cream and devouring her saffron bun. No one of consequence, no one of the Court. Two nameless slips of glimmer and glow, and they dared—! Willowbright shrieked and shot from snow to sill with a single wing-snap.

  The other two scattered in a flurry of crumbs. Before she could decide which to pursue, both had passed beyond her reach. They disappeared on a swirl of laughter, headed toward the village, to dance on the baker’s bread till it failed to rise or sour the dairyman’s milk. If a fairy couldn’t enjoy human food, some satisfaction could be had in seeing that no mortal mouth took pleasure in it either.

  That these two could barge unwanted into Willowbright’s bargain meant that the rules that bound such things had begun to unwind. Her magic had served its purpose and come to its end.

  Then she would see the girl again soon, goatskin or not. Snippets of soul were like entrails; tug at one bit and the rest tumbled after. She scooped the remainder of the sodden saffron crumbs into her cape, where they left sun-colored stains.

  At the forest’s edge she stopped short. A wild fairy grinned at her amid a tumble of dead lives and dirt-smeared snow, with her arm crooked around a squirrel’s throat. Red lines scored her face and her already tatter-patched wings had taken more damage from the beast’s small sharp claws—but the fight was over. Willowbright was there only long enough to witness the shine leaving the squirrel’s eyes.

  “Like what you see, tameling?” The wild fairy’s chest heaved when she dropped the squirrel. She licked blood, her own or the beast’s, from her knuckles. “Always more where it came from.” She bent and tore the squirrel’s pelt from its body.

  Willowbright stared at the steam that rose up off muscle and sinew. The wild fairy shook out the pelt, then looped it around neck. It skewed her wings, but she showed no concern as she hefted the carcass over one shoulder. “Only the Queen may slay the creatures of the forest,” Willowbright said, her voice aquiver. When the wild fairy looked at her, her tongue tripped thickly. “Only the Queen may wear their pelts.”

  A snort. “Suit yourself, tameling, and I’ll suit me—both of us as we like.”

  “If you had a human, you would get what you need...” Willowbright stumbled on the half-truth. “And you wouldn’t need to risk breaking the Court’s laws. The Queen could order your wings torn off for this.”

  “She could order my wings torn off for not liking the color of my eyes.” The wild fairy’s laugh was thunder in the snow. “Why not build yourself an iron cage in the alewife’s kitchen, tameling, if you like it so well?”

  “Stop calling me tame!” Willowbright shrilled, but the wild fairy only shrugged the squirrel higher upon her back and disappeared deeper and darker into the woods.

  Willowbright hated to venture from her borrowed shelter of nests and dens; the wind cut like bramble-swords through her cape. Still, she visited the stump at forest’s edge each time the ice moon rose. And on the third night, her patience paid.

  The girl hunched on the stump, a creature of gooseflesh and not goatskin now. Willowbright alit upon her trembling knee. The girl had flung the goatskin—only a hide, now—over her thighs, and Willowbright knelt to pull a flap of bristly flesh over herself.

  “It’s you,” the girl said, and the slit of her smile echoed the moon above. A feverish glow brightened her eyes; it would be a shame if a winter grippe snatched her from Willowbright’s reach. “I need your help again. Please.”

  Willowbright stroked the goatskin, asking a question with the cut of her eyes. But the girl shook her head. “Not this time. It doesn’t matter anymore what she thinks. Not if you can help me.” A convulsion of her fingers twisted them deeper into the goatskin, yanking it clear of Willowbright’s legs. “I went to the pond to bathe, three nights ago.”

  She would have had to cut the ice to get to clear water. Willowbright drew the cape tighter, to suppress a shiver.

  She also would have left the goatskin upon the shor
e.

  “The margrave’s second son saw me there.” The girl fingered her wrists, where her cuffs did not cover snow-pale skin. “He wrapped me in his houppelande and he called me a swan-maiden, an angel.”

  They’d stumbled into familiar territory here. Willowbright knew the steps of this dance—the staid pavan of hearthfire and happy ending. A wedding gown and dowry set to a wealthy father-in-law’s standards. Perhaps she would have to conjure up the damnable emerald-egg goose after all.

  “He’s only a second son. But rich enough—or his father is—that he’ll get what he wants. And what he wants is me. My stepmother can’t tell him no, or she’ll find out how fast the knights of his march take their custom elsewhere.” Now Willowbright reconsidered the girl’s febrile gleam: not illness and not love, but the fervor of well-crafted calculation. “He wishes to see me again. His family will be there.” Her mouth twisted, and she fingered a hole in her sleeve. “When they see me like this, they won’t take me for an angel. I need a gown that glows bright as the sun, to wear to the margravine’s Twelfth-Day masque. And a mount, to carry me to the winter residence.”

  Twelfth-Day... Willowbright pointed at the moon overhead: tonight?

  “Yes. Now. Can you do it?” The girl’s breath rattled, as she remembered the courtesy due a fairy. “Please?”

  Willowbright pursed her mouth and waited.

  “I... I can give you...” Restless hands stretched the goatskin. “If I marry the margrave’s son—”

  Willowbright jumped up. Pretty promises were worth less than the breath it took to spill them. She cocked her wings and gave them a flick, as if she might take off. A pause long enough for the silly girl to use her brain.

  “Wait!” The girl leaned over Willowbright, and her golden head eclipsed the moon. “I know you don’t want silver or jewels. Tell me what would please you. If it’s in my power, I’ll give it.”

  Willowbright didn’t hesitate. She shivered, chafed her arms, pointed at the girl.