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“The question I need you to think about is her.”
“What about her?”
“Will she come for you?”
“I don’t know. If the curse is broken I don’t know if she can.”
“Will you miss her?”
William stands at the brush where the city ends and the tree canopy’s shadow begins and for the first time he hears nothing. No voice on the wind beckons him closer. No roots or brambles reach out to pull him in. For a moment he thinks, maybe she doesn’t see him, but that’s impossible. Maybe she just doesn’t want to. Somehow that’s almost worse.
But the forest doesn’t outright reject him, either. She could easily draw the trees too close together for him to pass, or send some snarling thing to chase him away.
Of course, William thinks, she wants to make him to seek her out. She won’t allow him the pride of believing he was compelled to return, if he wants to see her he’ll have to come crawling back on his own. William keeps his chin up, does as he always does when he can’t win: pretend there is no competition. Why would there be? He’s just visiting a friend is all.
Her palace is easy to find, for him at least. He walks until the branches above become a vaulted ceiling, the willows dew-beaded curtains and the stones under his feet the tiles of a mosaic. A long wooden table sprouts from the floor of her great hall, with seats of moss-covered rock at either end. William takes the smaller of the two. It’s almost quaint, how berries and herbs spring from the table in front of him, how boughs bend to drop their fruits. Even a fat pheasant sits still on the table, waiting to be eaten.
William plucks a dandelion from the spring feast laid out before him. “Did you put all this together just for me? I’m flattered.”
“Well you rarely visit, I wanted to do something special.”
Her voice reverberates from the stones beneath him. The low rumble comes shooting up from the ground as the fluttering unfolding of a million flowers and the shuffling of a million leaves and for the first time in a decade those big, gold eyes are staring at him again.
“Besides,” she says, leaning forward to rest her chin in her hand. William pretends not to notice how she’s draped herself in green and white bark, or how the branches at her head hang down as willowy autumn-colored vines in what is obviously meant to evoke curling brown locks. “You seemed upset. Is something wrong?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing interesting anyway.”
“It must be something if you’re desperate enough to come to me for help.”
“I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details.”
“Come on William, what kind of queen would I be if I couldn’t do so much as lend a listening ear to the woes of my subjects, inconsequential as they may be?” She blinks her yellow eyes. She doesn’t need to, they both know that. It’s just something she does because she thinks acting like a person is funny. “Tell me what happened.”
Her voice is light, flitting between her songbirds, bubbling up from her creeks, but she’s not asking anymore.
William swallows, hard. “A friend of mine died.”
“That’s always the danger with friends, isn’t it?”
“But they weren’t supposed to.”
“Supposed to what?”
“Supposed to die. They were like me, kind of.”
“Another changeling?”
“No, one of those fallen things. The ones that started showing up when everything went wrong.”
“Can I ask how?”
Of course she can. “The church got them.”
She keeps staring. Her eyes pin him in place like a butterfly to a board. “And then what?”
“They burned them,” he spits. “I’d been tracking them for a while and by the time I reached the city where I heard they were staying they were ash.”
The wind shakes through her leaves in a kind of sigh. “Unfortunately those creatures are outside of my power.” She’s gotten better at it, shaping her wooden face into something like human pity. “It’s a shame but there’s nothing I can do about their comings and goings.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“Aren’t you going to eat? I know you’re hungry.”
William gives her a tight smile and snaps the pomegranate hanging in front of him off its stem. No point in denying it—when all else fails him he eats from her table, out of her hand.
She pretends to eat too, even though the fruits just rot in her fingers and sprout again somewhere else in her branches. Eating. Sighing. Pitying. Blinking. William heard once that when training a dog you’re supposed to get on eye level with it.
“Your highness—”
“We’re just talking, William. You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, are we on a first name basis now?”
“Well, no,” she giggles. “But you can call me Tania.”
She ripped that one straight from the ballads. Just like the pomegranate. One thing William has learned about her after all these years is that she gets almost as much amusement playing into her own press as she does finding new ways to fuck with him.
“Tania—” The name, the idea that she could even have a name, feels forced and awkward in his mouth. And if her snickering grin is anything to go by she knows it. But William would never want to appear ungrateful when she’s so graciously deigned to let him address her in such a friendly manner.
“Yes, William? Is there something else you need from me?”
“How many others like me are there? Immortals, I mean.”
“I couldn’t tell you about fallen folk or any other cursed things outside of my jurisdiction, but if we’re talking about evergreen changelings like yourself, most people stupid enough to bet their eternity at my table are stupid enough to get themselves killed in other ways.”
She pretends not to know the weight of her words as they fall from her lips like overripe fruit. Her voice is always so sweet when she reminds him that he is alone.
“But you know you always have this place,” she says, almost as if on cue. Which isn’t too far off, she’s run through this script a couple times already. “You always have me.”
The sun burns low and red through her boughs. William excuses himself with a nod towards the glowing horizon.
He makes it two steps from the table.
Even convulsing on the stone floor in a writhing, screaming tangle of bones and fur, William can feel her hand on what is supposed to be his back. No one has held his hair back any of the times he’s thrown up in chamber pots or alleys behind taverns, but he imagines it feels something like this.
She has jobs for him to do most days. He’s still her servant, after all. A lumberjack to be scared off here, some deer populations that need cutting there, but his main purpose is to find players for her illimat table. Sometimes they’re hunters led to her parlor by a beautiful white coyote. Sometimes they’re gamblers left with just enough coin to accept his invite to a rematch. Sometimes they’re townspeople lured to the woods with the promise of a charming young man’s company.
He plays with them most days. He never loses to mortals and there’s not much else he can lose to Her. His winnings are usually small—modest sums of money, a few names, a handful of years on other people’s lives. Not that he has much use for them. Though there’s always the hope that someone will lose in the same way he did, that he can pull someone into her thrall along with him. But then when they lose their names, their limbs, their memories, their bodies, when their terrified shrieks twist into betrayed howling and squawking it’s always his eyes that they meet first. Lucky for him the woods are big enough that he never sees them again.
When he was much younger one of his governesses tried to keep him from wandering into the woods with stories about fair folk. Sometimes they kidnapped children and fed them to the devil. Sometimes they allowed humans into their great feasts, only to trap them in debt of unpaid-for food. Sometimes they charmed handsome young people to their glade palaces and kept them there while centuries slipped by unnoticed and all their loved ones withered away.
William has no loved ones. If anything he welcomes the opportunity to make eternity go by faster. And loath as he is to admit it he’s not trapped here, not really. He’s here because he wants to be. Because he’s lonely and she’s here and she’s awful but she understands. It’s the same reason she keeps him around. She’s immortal and she’s bored. And she tolerates him, despite everything, and that’s probably more than he deserves from anyone.
And she’s kind, sometimes.
“There’s a couple of church soldiers camping out to the east,” she says one night. “I want them gone.”
“Then get rid of them,” William says, perched by her ear. It’s autumn.
She shrugs. “I thought you might want to. They’re from the parish that burned your friend.”
She can definitely feel him tense at that, talons going tight around her shoulder. “And what could I do? I’m a bird.”
Then the wind shifts, just slightly. The air is thicker, more humid. William feels the turning of the seasons in his bones as they start to crack and as soon as he realizes what’s happening he flaps clumsily from her shoulder to the ground with wings bent in the wrong directions.
Normally the seasons only change at sunrise and sunset, but these are her woods and she can bend the rules. William staggers to his feet a coyote.
“I’d get going if I were you,” she says. “You don’t have long until morning.”
Three figures sit around a dying fire, all in the same red and white robes and simple bird-shaped masks worn by the church’s lower ranking soldiers. The sky through the trees is a dull gray, threatening blue any second. So William doesn’t waste a moment on thought before lunging at the first to step foot outside of the camp.
Their limbs flail under him as he tears at the leather of their mask. He barely notices the screams or the shots until one blasts clean through his hind leg.
Which wouldn’t be so bad, were it not followed by the rest of his bones cracking open in tandem.
Maybe in a decade or two he would be able to pick himself up a little faster, but as of now he still needs a few breaths after sunrise before he can think again. Unfortunately for him, that’s just enough time that the first thing he feels through the slowly fading pain of transformation is a shin digging into his back. The next is the dirt against his cheek and his chest, followed by the cord around his wrists.
A fist in his hair yanks up and he’s facing the two looming bird masks. One of them is groaning, with a hand pressed to a rip in their eyehole.
“Is this him?” says a voice behind his head.
“I’m sorry, do I know you?” William hisses through teeth full of dirt.
“It has to be,” says the uninjured of the two, evidently ignoring him. “Unless there’s some other silver-haired changeling luring people into these woods.”
“Is that what this is about? Well why didn’t you just say s-“
“Silence, demon!” The hand at his scalp grinds his face back into the ground. “Someone grab that paw over there, could be valuable.”
“Um, Sister Abernathy?”
“Is there a problem?”
“No Sister, but, his leg. He’s grown a new one.”
“Yes that’s interesting, now help me get him back to the basilica so we can burn him.”
“Well that’s the thing, is maybe we don’t necessarily need to burn him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, changeling bones go for a pretty penny and it seems this one’s got limbs to spare.”
“Hoarding coin is a sin, Sister Marianne.”
“We wouldn’t hoard it. Some would go to the church, of course.”
“And if the Monseigneur asks where it came from?”
“If we give him enough I don’t think he will.”
“Listen.” William’s nose is bleeding. “If you want money I have money, we don’t need to-“
“I said stop talking!” The one pinning him down strikes him across the face with the butt of her revolver. There is a hood pulled over his head and two pairs of rough hands hooked under his arms and finally the rabbit heart that’s been thrumming in his chest ever since the morning frost set in takes over. He kicks and thrashes but all that gets him is elbows jammed into his ribs. It’s three against one and he’s never been very strong, at least not on his own, but he won’t call for Her. He can’t. He is blind and bound and being dragged towards a fate worse than death and it is not worse than the thought of Her pity and Her sighing songbird voice and Her blinking gold eyes.
But beneath his digging, dragging, scraping heels he can feel the woods grow thin. Gable is dead. Margaret is dead. Another mile from the forest and the only person who’d care enough to come looking for such a wretched, lonely cursed thing might not be able to reach him.
So William caves. He calls for help. He screams her name—the one from the ballads, the one she let him have—until his throat is raw, until he feels the ground shake.
The priests’ shouts are so short William isn’t sure he actually heard them.
He tears the bag off his head just in time to see a mask disappear beneath the shifting roots of an oak tree.
William walks home alone. She’s waiting in the hall with her human face on. He doesn’t move as she unties his hands and wipes the blood off his face. She makes a show of dressing the blisters on his wrists even though they both know they’ll be gone by nightfall.
“I’m not going to thank you.”
“No need.” She can put on as much human sympathy she wants, there’s an air of divine smugness that never leaves her.
William doesn’t leave the woods for a while. She doesn’t say anything about it, but she leaves the idle illimat board out.
He confronted her once, about her mockingbirds. They’d follow him around the forest with Margaret’s waterlogged last words.
“I don’t control them,” she’d said. “You know how mockingbirds are, they just repeat whatever they hear.”
She lied, he knows that now. How else would they have gotten Gable’s voice?
“Hello?” It says. “Is anyone there? Forest Queen? Your forest highness?”
William cocks his gun. He’s going to kill it. He’s going to kill her bird and for once in his terrible life she’s going to get angry. She’s going to get so angry that she rips him to pieces and that’ll be it. The end of a story that should have been over in the river.
“If anyone is listening! I am looking for a Travis M-“
BANG
“Shit! Gable?!”
“You-! You fucking shot me!”
It’s them. And they’re alive. They look like shit, covered in dirt with twigs sticking out of their hair and a hole in their shoulder but they’re here and they’re alive. It’s the closest William comes to crying that whole century.
He catches himself almost throwing his arms around them and grabs the front of their shirt instead. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looking for you! Why did you shoot me!”
“Keep your voice down, are you stupid? She’ll hear you!”
“Oh I heard,” she says. If she had breath William would feel it on the back of his neck. “Is this the one you told me was dead?”
“Don’t.” William can’t tell if it’s a threat or a plea. His hands tremble, fisted in Gable’s shirt so tight it starts to tear. She can’t kill them, can she? They’re immortal. They’re an angel. They’re outside of her power, she said it herself.
“I just came to say goodbye,” she sighs. Wooden fingers ghost over William’s shoulder. It might‘ve been a kind gesture, if he couldn’t feel them itching to hook under his skin and into his bones. “Well, good luck to you both. Watch out for the river, I hear it’s rough this time of year.”
William takes Gable’s hand and tells them to run. Not that it makes a difference. She could keep them if she wanted to, easily, but Travis doesn’t slow down until Gable pulls him to a stop.
“Wait, wait. You told her I died? Did you think I died?” It’s comforting to know they haven’t gotten any faster on the uptake. Hopefully it’ll be a while before they notice Travis still hasn’t let their hand go.
He shrugs, and tries his best to keep the sag in his shoulders from looking too relieved. “Must’ve been some other angel.”
Gable doesn’t understand his insistence on finding the narrowest, slowest, shallowest part of the creek to cross, and even then making them find a fallen tree to use as a bridge rather than just wading through, but they humor him.
It’s almost night when they reach the edge of the forest. The journey out of the woods is always longer than the journey into it.
Despite everything, he looks back.