Tales Of Arilland Part 6

"Lady Polecat," the baron's breath said into mine.

"Lord Fitcher," I replied.

The second time the baron kissed me, I was his wife. Not his first wife on paper, warden to his prison cell, but the first wife in the way that really mattered: the wife of his heart and soul. This love-our love-was true.

But for all the romance I was a practical young girl. I knew that this union did not exist outside this study, or this castle, or even before the cleric's G.o.d. We could lie together as man and wife, but that's exactly what it was: a lie. I could lie beside him for the rest of his days and watch him attempt to summon demon after demon until he killed everyone in the castle, and then Prelati, and then himself. Or I could give him what he wanted-what he needed-and set him free.

In my mind, there was never a choice.

Prelati handed the ebony-handled athame to the baron, but this time those beady black eyes never left mine. My love, my husband, drew the blade across his palm with a hiss. I took the dagger myself and did the same without so much as exhaling-I could risk losing neither his belief nor his pride in me for the next few moments. We clasped hands with the strength of two lovers facing the universe.

The candles' flames at the points of the star we'd sketched on the marble turned blue and, as before, the air filled with tiny points of light. The fireplace roared, and the thurible's smoke changed from sandalwood to rosemary. The cleric crossed himself. Thrice.

"It's working," the baron said without breathing, as if he might break the spell with a word. "Henriette, my love, it's working!" I would never tire of hearing my name spoken from those lips.

"I know." I tried to reply without gasping, but my body betrayed me. The baron tore his attention away from the magical room to see the dagger in my hand so covered in blood that it totally obscured the double blade. My virgin bride's blood dripped from my core onto the rune-riddled marble between us.

My true love held me in strong arms; had my silly girlish legs not already given way, they would have then. "What have you done?" He might have screamed this, but I only heard him whisper.

"Freed you," I said, or perhaps I said. Perhaps the only fragment to escape my lips had been "free," but that syllable conveyed the message just as well.

There was no blackness for me to succ.u.mb to, nor was there a legendary white light for me to follow. The room stayed exactly as it was, in stark detail, and I tried to commit as much to memory as I could before one ent.i.ty or another whisked me away to some great beyond. The baron knelt over my limp body, repeating "No" over and over again as if the chant might act as a tether to pull my soul back into my body. Prelati stood to one side of the circle in his solemn violet robes and bowed his head, praying to...something. So neither one of them saw the portal open and the man in black step through.

The man was followed by two angels, both terrible, one with wings of feathers and one with wings of fire. My sacrifice had not summoned a demon, then, it had summoned a G.o.d. This could only be Lord Death himself.

"We seem to have ourselves a dilemma."

Awestruck, Prelati fell to his knees beside the baron. The cleric pa.s.sed out cold.

"Bring back my wife." The baron did not implore Lord Death so much as order him to do so.

"See, that's just the thing." Lord Death crossed his legs and sat on the stone casually before them, before my dead body. The angels remained standing, one to either side of him, as did my ethereal soul. Exactly how much of the room's population could the baron and Prelati see?

"What your loving 'wife' has done here is sacrifice herself for you," Lord Death continued. "To bring her back would undo all that precious magic you've managed to accomplish."

The baron did not reply, but Prelati nodded.

"This girl has made you capable of love, of all things. She's also, in one fell swoop, stopped you from ever killing another child again. Am I right?"

The baron gave the idea some thought before nodding his own a.s.sent. Of course my love would no longer bother himself with children. The key to his prison had been there all along in the very thing he eschewed: divinity still had a soft spot for unspoiled females. The marriage ceremony had caught their attention, and the blood had kept it.

"I must honor this sacrifice, as much as it pains me to do so." Lord Death scanned the room, from the well-scrubbed floor to the cinder-strewn hearth. The angel of fire's wings burned ever brighter, and I choked on her ash.

The baron-my baron-took up the b.l.o.o.d.y athame and looked to a sky that was not there. "Then let me follow her."

Lord Death stayed his hand. "Yeah, let me stop you right there. See, if you do that now, it's not a sacrifice. It's suicide. That particular end will deliver you to a very different place. Am I right?" This was directed at the cleric who, having come to, nodded vigorously. "You will never join her, my dear baron, until you die by a hand other than your own. A death that serves to free the soul of someone else."

The baron looked to Prelati, who raised his own hands in defeat. Prelati's soul was well beyond saving.

"Please," said the baron, and it was a tone I had only ever heard him use to me. "Let her stay with me. There must be some way. Let her haunt me until the end of my days, if you must, but let her stay with me."

"I'm inclined to agree, actually," said Lord Death. "It would be a fitting end for both of you." He gestured to the angel of feathers and that bright light I'd heard so much about finally washed over me. There was a rush of wind and a choir of springtime. I felt blood in my veins and breath in my lungs and strength in my sinew. When my vision cleared, I was viewing the scene from a very new perspective, right in front of Lord Death's face. I screamed, and the dim study echoed with birdsong.

I had wings, indeed, but I was no angel.

"She will stay with you, as requested, until you are relieved of your earthly, fleshy prison." Lord Death stood. "You deserve each other." That mystic portal appeared again, and the angels of feathers and fire sped through the opening before him. Lord Death was halfway through before he turned back for one last remark.

"Oh. And Prelati-cut it out, already."

"Yes, my lord." They were the last words the magician said before they both disappeared.

Overwhelmed, the cleric fainted. Again.

My beloved took my earthly body down, down, down to my rooms in the bowels of his castle, where no one ever saw me but the fire and the ashes and Cook. I fluttered after him on awkward wings. He laid my body on the table: black hair, white dress, red blood and all. He spent a very long time arranging my limbs and clothes. I used the time to find currents of air around the room, getting used to my new body. When he was satisfied he banked the fire, closed the door to the room, and locked it tight.

He slid the key onto the chain around his neck that once bore a cross-now it held our wedding bands. He pressed his forehead against the door and whispered something, but I didn't catch it. In his hands-larger to me now than they ever had been-was a small white object. My bride gift. He must have rescued it from my pocket when he'd been arranging my dress! My rapidly beating little heart swelled with pride and I burst into song.

The baron raised the perfect white egg to his lips and kissed it, as he had once kissed me. "We have lots of work ahead of us, little bird. There's a floor in my study that needs scrubbing." I perched on his outstretched hand and he stroked my feathers with fingers that would be forced to draw new runes and symbols all on their clumsy own. "And then...let's find a new wife!"

UNICORN GOLD.

O nce upon a time, there lived a selfish young prince who was very bored. Moping about his castle one day, he overheard two men talking about a unicorn in the Wood. Unicorns were the most beautiful creatures in all the land, with hide like clouds and hair like rain and eyes like love, but they were swift and nigh impossible to catch. The only way anyone might capture one was with a harness of gold, fashioned by the hunter's own hand.

Suddenly, the prince wanted a unicorn more than anything in the world.

Knowing that he could not ask his father to fund his quest, he brought a small chest of what gold coins he had down to the smithy. The prince promised a third of the finished product for teaching him how to make the harness.

"It is not enough gold, highness," said the smith. "Then I shall borrow some," said the prince. And so he did. But his friends were all as selfish as he, and they did not spare much.

"It is not enough gold, highness," said the smith. "Then I shall beg for some," said the prince. And so he did, dressing in vagrant's robes and shaking a cup in the streets. But his subjects were all as selfish as he, and they did not spare much.

"It is still not enough gold, highness," said the smith. "Then I shall steal some," said the prince. And so he did, creeping into the jeweler's shop late at night and selecting the finest golden wares. But this jeweler was no ordinary shopkeep; he was a fairy who magicked his wares. The night after a theft, every bit of stolen gold, and any other gold kept beside it, would find its way back to its rightful owner.

Ignorant of the curse, the prince brought his bounty to the smith, who finally proclaimed it enough. By midday he was done his hammering, by late afternoon he wandered the Wood, and by dusk he was tired enough to rest his weary bones against the trunk of a st.u.r.dy old tree. By nightfall, he was asleep. And as the stars winked into the black heavens, so did the golden harness disappear bit by bit: a third back to the jeweler, a third back to those who had given their charity, and a third to the coffers of the patient smith for payment.

When the unicorn woke him, the prince stared up at her gleaming horn, her skin like clouds, her hair like wind, and her eyes like love. She smelled like mist and whispers. She felt like peace and home. She stood right there before him, and he had nothing to hold her.

"Silly, selfish prince," said the unicorn. "There was never a harness made of metal that could capture me. It is only gold from the heart which binds me." She laid her gleaming horn upon his breast. "Had you fashioned a harness from what lay in here, you might have had me." She lifted her head. "A false heart never won true love."

And then she was gone.

SUNDAY.

M y name is Sunday Woodcutter, and I'm ungrateful.

I am the seventh daughter of Jack and Seven Woodcutter, Jack a seventh son and Seven a seventh daughter herself. Papa's goal in life was to give birth to the charmed, all-powerful, much-talked-about Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Mama told him she had just enough in her for seven girls or seven boys, but not both. Papa was sure his dream would come true when Jack Junior was the first of us to introduce himself to the world. That dream died the morning I popped out - eight children later - and Mama declared her womb officially closed for business.

I never knew Jack Junior, but I know his legend. I grew up surrounded by overdramatic songs and stories of his exploits and adventures, a good number of which continue to pop up about the countryside to this very day. At a very young age, I decided that the truth about him laid in the pauses between the sagas and the stanzas, in those brief moments when a man is still a man and not a mountain. The silence paints a picture of a handsome, hotheaded youth of too many words and too few thoughts to precede them. One thought more might have stopped my eldest brother before he killed young Prince Rumbold's prize watchdog; one word less and he might not have goaded the prince's evil father into siccing the prince's eviler fairy G.o.dmother on him. Jack Junior was witched into a dog and forced to work in the slain mutt's stead forevermore.

For fifteen long years my father has dutifully paid the family's tax and t.i.the; and despite the fact that he harbors no loyalty to the royal family whatsoever, Papa wisely never says a word against them. As the unhappy incident happened the year before I was born with the whole of my family alive at the time save me I have always felt entirely left out of the matter.

My second eldest brother's name is Jack as well, but we call him Jackie. The youngest's name is Trix which everyone a.s.sumes simply stands for "Jack Number Three." They would be wrong of course, but none of us has ever felt compelled to correct them. Trix was a foundling child that Papa discovered in the limbs of a tree at the edge of the forest one winter's workday. Mama says she was resigned to the fact that since she already had eight children to feed, what was one more or less? I have a feeling I know the truth of that too. Attached to Mama's swift hand for discipline is the heart of a compa.s.sionate woman who could not abandon a child in the Wood, no matter how fey his origin.

My sisters and I- "What are you doing?"

Sunday's head snapped up from her book, her heart fell into her stomach, and every hair on her arms stood on end. She had chosen this spot for its solitude, followed the half-hidden path through the underbrush to the decaying rocks of the abandoned well, sure that she had escaped from her family. And yet the voice that had interrupted her thoughts was not familiar to her.

Her eyes took a moment to adjust, slowly focusing in on the mottled shadows that the afternoon sun cast through the dancing leaves of the trees above.

"I'm sorry?" She posed the polite query to her unknown visitor in an effort to make him reveal himself, be he real or imagined, dead or alive, fairy or...

"I said, 'What are you doing?'"

...frog.

It took Sunday a second to make her gaping mouth form words that made sense. "I'm..." All caught off guard like that, she found herself sputtering the truth. "Telling myself stories."

"Why? Do you have no one to whom you can tell them?"

It took her another second. "Well, no...I have quite a big family, actually. With lots of stories. Only..."

"Only what?"

"Only no one wants to hear my stories. I could tell them, but they wouldn't listen."

"I will listen," said the frog. "Read me your story, the story that you have just written there, and I will listen."

It was completely absurd. Absurd that Sunday was somewhere in the middle of the Wood talking to a frog who wanted her to make him what she desired most in the world: a captive audience to her words. It was so absurd, in fact, that she started reading from the top of the page in her book without another thought.

"'My name is Sunday Woodcutter-'"

"Grumble," croaked the frog.

"If you're going to grumble through the whole thing, why did you ask me to read it in the first place?"

"You said your name was Sunday Woodcutter," said the frog, "and I thought it only fitting to introduce myself in kind. My name is Grumble."

"Oh." Her face felt hot. Sunday wondered briefly if frogs could tell that a human was blushing, or if they were one of the many other colorblind denizens of the forest. "It's very nice to meet you."

"Thank you," said Grumble. "Please, carry on with your story."

She did. It was a little awkward, as Sunday had never before read her musings aloud to anyone. Her voice sounded loud and the words seemed foreign and sometimes wrong; she resisted the urge to change them or scratch them out altogether as she went on. For as long as she had sat under the tree writing them down, they were quickly read and over with in no time at all.

"I had meant to go on about my sisters," Sunday apologized when she got to the end, "but..."

"I interrupted you. Forgive me." Grumble hopped forward onto a closer damp stone. "As you can imagine I don't get many visitors. I thank you for indulging me with your words, kind lady."

"It was an honor," she said automatically.

"Do you write often?"

"Yes. Every morning and every night and every moment I can sneak in between."

"And do you always write about your family?"

Sunday flipped the pages of her neverending journal a gift from Fairy G.o.dmother Joy past her thumb. It was a nervous habit she had had all her life. "I do," she admitted, "but only because I am afraid to write anything else."

"Why is that?"

She shifted her legs to a more comfortable position beneath her skirts. "Things I write...well...they have a tendency to come true. And not in the best way."

"You must always be careful what you wish for," said the frog.

"Exactly," nodded Sunday. "So if I only write about events that have already come to pa.s.s, then there is no danger of my accidentally altering the future."

"A very practical decision," said Grumble.

"Yes," she sighed. "Very practical and very boring. Very just like me."

"On the contrary. I found your brief essay quite intriguing."

"Really?" The thought occurred to her that he was just saying it to be nice, because it was expected. And then she remembered he was a frog.

"Would you mind coming to read to me again tomorrow? I would love to hear more of the story."

If the smile Sunday knew was currently spread across her face didn't scare him off, surely nothing she wrote could. "I would love to."

"And would you...be my friend?"

The request was so charmingly humble. "Only if you will be mine in return."

Grumble's mouth opened wide into what Sunday took must have been a froggy grin.

"And...if I may be so bold, Miss Woodcutter..." he started.

"Please, call me Sunday."

"Sunday...do you think you could find it in your heart to...kiss me?"

Sunday had wondered how long it would take before he got around to asking. She had a.s.sumed from the beginning that he was either a fey-blessed amphibian or an enchanted man, and his overly proper mannerisms had her leaning toward the latter. A maiden's kiss was the usual remedy for that sort of thing. She was actually quite impressed that he had managed to sneak it in during the mere hour of their brief acquaintance. But he had been very polite, and as Sunday was surely the only maiden he would come across for a very long time it was the least she could do.

She placed her hands on the mossy stones of the ruined well and leaned down. His skin was b.u.mpy and slightly wet beneath her lips, but she tried not to think about it.

Nothing happened.

They sat there, staring at each other for a long time afterwards.

"I don't have to come back you know," Sunday told him, "in case you were offering just to be courteous."