Chapter 5

Chapter5

I should wake up.

And if I’m awake, then I should leave.

Or I should stay and learn where the fuck I am.

There are good reasons to do any one of those things, but unfortunately, it’s not a good reason that drives me forward to the wardrobe after Morven leaves. It’s the memory of the queen’s fingers on my mouth. It’s wondering if her eyes are as dark as I remember.

I’ll go down to the feast, and then I’ll figure out what to do. That seems like a good enough plan for now.

And as much as it irritates me, Morven was telling the truth about the clothes. Everything in the wardrobe is much nicer than what I’m wearing now, even though it’s all fantastical as hell—velvets and watered silks and brocades embroidered with gold and silver thread. They feel soft and silky to the touch as I run my fingers through them.

I have my doubts as I finally settle on a dress and start shucking off my dig clothes…my body is generous with its curves, and I have a hard enough time finding clothes that accommodate my tits and ass when I have an entire Internet to shop from. I’m not holding out hope that a random wardrobe in a random castle that shouldn’t exist is well stocked with plus-sized court gowns.

Except, impossibly, the dress does fit. It fits perfectly, as if it were tailored for me.

A dream dress, Janneth. Obviously it fits.

I find a tall mirror next to the wardrobe and admire myself in the bronze light of the fire. The dress is made of layers and layers of blush-colored tulle, the outermost layer stitched with small gold and silver stars. They glimmer while I look, as if I’m wearing fabric scissored out of the night sky and stitched onto the first breath of dawn. The bodice is boned and laced with corset laces, which after stumping around Edinburgh as a living history tour guide during my undergrad years, I’m able to lace and tighten on my own without a problem. The sleeves are sheer and detached, leaving my shoulders bare, and there’s a slit high in the skirt that exposes my leg when I move. You can see the tattoo on my thigh, the reds and golds of Frank Cadogan Cowper’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, a woman sitting above a cursed knight, pinning her long red hair up as she looks down at his armored, cobwebbed form.

A tattoo from a different time, for a different Janneth. A version of myself that I’d long ago said goodbye to.

At the bottom of the wardrobe, I find a pair of silver slippers that pair well with the dress, and on the dressing table, I see a slender diadem made of golden stars. I brush my hair until it hangs in gleaming blonde waves and then set the diadem onto my head. It winks along with my nose ring.

Dressed, I open the door to the hallway and see a dusting of leaves on the stone floor. Bright orange and ruby leaves that weren’t there when we were outside the room just half an hour ago. When I step, the leaves drift in a lazy swirl forward, beckoning me onward like a variegated GPS.

Follow the leaves.

It’s cool outside the tower, and I decide to grab my coat. The boxy, polyester thing is hardly court appropriate, but since I have a lot of doubts about how much that matters, I take it anyway. But I feel stupid carrying it, and I’ve only made it a few doors down the hallway angling off from my tower when I stop and try to think rationally about all this. Rational thinking is something insatiable girls have to learn at some point, and I’d had to learn it after I bought myself a one-way ticket from Kansas to come study abroad in Scotland and then spent months living on coffee, cereal, and leftover pastries from faculty meetings.

I’d especially had to learn it after the first semester of archaeology classes, when professors started tearing apart my fantasies of what archaeology would be, dusting off my imaginings, and showing the broken shards of my ideas for what they were: cracked, dime-a-dozen detritus.

Rational thinking or not, it takes me physically holding my coat to realize something I’ve forgotten, which is my phone, and I dig into my coat pocket to pull it out. It lights up right away, but as I’m opening my text messages, I realize I have no signal. Not even the gleam in a cell tower’s eye of a signal. Not unusual for this part of the Highlands, but sometimes if you’re on the right hill and the wind is southerly and the clouds are parted, you can catch a stray whiff of it long enough to check your email.

But not in the hot lady’s mushroom castle apparently.

I’ve stopped in front of a tall, mullioned window, one of its sides open to the night air. The leaves shiver fretfully around my feet, as if anxious about my pause in forward motion, but I ignore the magic leaves and turn my phone off and then back on again.

It doesn’t matter. Still no bars. And my battery is low, which probably also isn’t ideal.

I put my phone back in my pocket, and I have a moment when I think about how easy it would be to step on the ledge and then jump down to the moat below. It’s not an easy fall—maybe not even a safe fall—but I might be willing to sprain an ankle in the name of getting out of here. And if all this is a strange kind of dream, well, then falls are supposed to wake you up from dreams. I saw that in a movie once.

“It is a long way down to the water,” someone says from behind me, and it takes me a moment to process what they’ve said, not because it isn’t true—it’s patently true—but because they haven’t spoken in English.

Longum iter est usque ad aquam.

Latin.

Most legal and ecclesiastical documents from medieval Scotland were written in Latin, which means knowledge of Latin is something of a necessity in my area of research. But I haven’t heard it spoken very much since my undergrad studies—I read the stuff, but I don’t converse in it at the pub or anything.

I turn and face the person who spoke. He doesn’t have a ruff of moths or impossible eyes. He’s a pale, middle-aged man with grave features and a dark beard. Like the others I’ve seen, he’s wearing a cloak, but unlike the others, he’s in a doublet and trunk hose, all black and silver, looking like he’s stepped out of a portrait from Holbein’s emo phase.

“It is a long way down,” I say, my own Latin coming out halting and imperfectly conjugated. Then I have a thought—well, the seed of a thought, anyway. “Is there any way you can help me?”

“It would be my honor,” he says. “I expect you need help making it to the queen’s hall?”

“No,” I say quickly. “Can you help me leave? Can you help me get out of the castle?”

He gives me a pitying look. “There’s no leaving unless the queen allows it.”

I take in his strange clothes again, think about his Latin. “Not even for you?”

“My leaving would be…complicated,” he says, but doesn’t seem inclined to offer any more information than that.

I try again, still in Latin. Fuck, I wish I’d joined that Latin club at my university now, they have their meetings at a wine bar and everything. “If the queen doesn’t allow us to leave, then the only way to leave is by escaping. So…can you help me escape?”

“I’ve sworn to the antlered crown never to help a fellow mortal do any act that would displease a monarch of Elphame,” he tells me, utterly seriously.

I stare at him. “Well, can you…unswear…it?”

To his credit, he does look very regretful when he says, “I cannot. A vow to a crown of Elphame can only be forsworn at great cost.”

I close my eyes and sigh. “Maybe this is still a dream and it doesn’t matter.”

I feel him take my hand, and I open my eyes. The regret hasn’t left his face when he says, “This isn’t a dream, child.”

“This has to be a dream. A castle like this—fairies—” I don’t know the actual Latin word for fairies, so I settle for daemones. “It can’t be real.”

He pinches the top of my hand, and I yelp, yanking it out of his grip. “I promise you, this place is real, and you are awake,” he says. “You will be able to feel, taste…read…things we cannot do properly in dreams.”

I rub the skin on the top of my hand, bothered more than I can say.

“Please believe me,” the man says. “Please accept this. Your life will depend on it.”

“My life? What? Why?” I ask.

The leaves stir again at my feet, like an alarm going off to remind me I’m supposed to be moving.

“We must go down to the banquet,” the man says, offering me his arm. “It will not be good if you are missed.”

I don’t move to take his arm.

“I promise to answer any questions you might have—questions I am permitted to answer—on the way to the banquet. But please, we must go there now, or else we risk the queen’s anger.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” I grumble, but I take the man’s arm. The leaves around our feet give a hopeful flutter.

“It is worse than you can imagine,” the man says grimly.

The leaves skate along the floor in front of us as we begin walking, but the man doesn’t seem to need them. Much. There is a time early on when he and the leaves seem to disagree about which set of stairs to take; after wandering down an unlit corridor lined with brambles for a few moments, it becomes clear we should have listened to the leaves.

The leaves seem to know this too, because there’s something almost smug about the way they find us and lead us back to the right set of stairs.

“Okay,” I say and then remember my Latin. “So why will my life depend on my knowing this is real?”

The man seems to be thinking about what to say, and I recall the way he phrased his earlier offer. Questions I am permitted to answer. “The Court of Stags is one of the oldest courts in Elphame, and perhaps the proudest. They do not think much of mortals, and they do not think of violence and death the same way we do. You must be careful, watchful, and clever. You must not drift from pleasure to pleasure or from pain to pain. You must have intention with everything you do.”

“Or?”

“Or they will hurt you or hunt you or kill you. Death is very much like life to them, and the reverse is also true.”

This fairy abduction experience isn’t shaping up to be very awesome for me. “And you will not help me escape?”

“I cannot,” he corrects.

“And your advice is what then? To be…wary?”

“Wariness can get you far,” he says. “I’ve been in at the Stag Court for over four hundred years, and I’m yet alive.”

I look over at him. His style of clothing certainly speaks to a long-ago time, but then again, so does the clothing of everyone else here. And I’ve been in archaeology long enough to know that four hundred years old doesn’t typically express as a carefully groomed beard and a few wrinkles in the forehead. Four hundred years old looks like dry bones with some bits of hair and clothing left.

“You said I was a fellow mortal earlier,” I say. We turn the corner into a large, empty hall, and the leaves dance farther and farther ahead of us, as if impatient. At the end of the hall, I see a set of large double doors, made of wood but covered in the pale beams and tines of antlers. They are closed, but light glows from underneath. “Meaning you are mortal too?”

“Yes,” the man says. “And no. And yes. As I said before, it is complicated.”

I can hear music as we get closer to the doors, smell the inviting scent of roasted meat and sweet, flaky things.

“Now,” the man says, stopping us and taking both my hands. “There is much that I cannot say because of the vows I made long ago. But three things I am not forbidden from telling you, so please heed them well.”

I’m feeling a little disoriented from the whole this is real, fairies don’t sweat murder, this man is four hundred years old spiel, but I try to make my best heeding face. It must work, because he continues. “Firstly, words have an effect here that they do not in our world. And that is not a figurative statement—in Elphame, speech can shape the earth, it can summon destinies. For the people born here, language is different. Vows can only be broken with great pain, if at all, and lies can never be told.”

“Okay, okay, no lying,” I say, and even though the okays are in English, the man must get my meaning, because he gently shakes my hand.

“You are not listening. It is not that fairies should not tell lies, it is that they cannot tell them. Everything they speak, they must believe to be true. You are freed of that, being mortal and with mortal salt still in your blood, but I would still not lie here, not unless you absolutely must. The folk detest it.”

“Mortal salt in my blood?” I ask. I know that’s probably not the most important part of what he just said, but it is the creepiest.

He nods, as if he wanted me to ask exactly that. “You carry in your body the memory of the place you came from, but that flesh-and-bone memory will fade over time, and when it does, you will be bound to the land here and you will not be able to return. Or if you return, that return must be bought at great cost. But consuming salt from our world will forestall this process. So long as you salt your food here with mortal salt, you will be able to return.”

“So I just need to find…salt from my world. Here.”

“There will be containers on every table filled with mortal salt,” my guide tells me. “A long-ago monarch of this court made a vow of salt hospitality at his table. But like most things in Elphame, you’ll find there are some important caveats. Salt is only present at meals, and it is only provided, not offered. You must take it yourself, and you must be on guard against those who might convince you to eat food without it. A few bites, a few meals even, without it, and you might be safe. Might be. It is better not to risk it.”

I exhale. “So no lying, and eat mortal salt whenever I can. Is there anything else?”

The man casts a look at the antler-covered door, and a strange expression moves over his face. He opens his mouth again, abruptly swallows, and then clears his throat. “There is one other thing that I would have you hear. You should not feel safe.”

I think of the salt and the death is very much like life to them, and also of Morven’s little mortal toys are more fun comment. “Feeling safe is not going to be a problem,” I mutter.

He shakes my hands again. “Please listen. The folk here love a bargain above all else; they love price. One thing for another. You might be able to buy some safety that way.”

“But the queen said I could leave Elphame in three days! Are you really suggesting that something bad could happen to me in three days?” I pause, listening to what I’ve just said. Thinking back to the queen’s words in the library.

Realizing the deal I struck might not be as solid as I thought.

“There is safety in being desired,” he says. “If you wish no harm to come to you until you leave Elphame, it’s something to consider.” He looks at the doors again, and he looks at them not as if he’s thinking of room on the other side of them, but as if he’s looking at the doors themselves. The antlers, I realize. He’s looking at the antlers. “The queen is the most powerful person here.”

“And so she is the safest?”

He gives me a sharp look. “I did not say that. You must never confuse power and safety, not ever—and especially not in Elphame.”

He looks very much like he wants to shake me again—not just my hands this time but my entire body—until it’s clear that I understand.

“I won’t, I won’t, I promise,” I tell him, and he gives me a quick nod.

“We will go in now. You will be expected to sit by the queen. You would do well to please her—and don’t forget the salt.”

He takes a step toward the door, and I follow, but I pull on his hands. “Wait, you didn’t tell me your name!” I say. “I’m Janneth.”

He heaves a giant sigh, and considering how serious he is, it’s almost funny to see him look so put out by such a small request.

“You should know that names have power here, true and full names at least. Not over you, not yet, but for those of us without mortal salt in our blood.” He looks at me and seems to come to a decision. “Don Felipe de Moncada y Gralla,” he says in a low voice. “That is my full name.”

“Thank you, Felipe.”

He sighs again, like I truly tax him so, and presses his hand to the antlered door. It swings open in front of us.

It’s only as we step forward that my brain conjures up helpful information: I’ve heard Felipe’s name before. In the photocopied account that’s currently tossed haphazardly on a bed in a rural Scottish farmhouse. Felipe was—is—one of the missing companions of Hugo de Segovia. One of the companions who didn’t return from the castle of silver and mist.

Which means that if I had any doubt before, I can erase it now. This is the same place.

Hugo de Segovia and his fellow shipwrecked sailors somehow found their way into the heart of fairyland.