“Cousin Saracen,” Leaf murmured, masked head suddenly hunched, as if she feared to be hit. And: “Leaf,” he said, his voice strongly Scots-burred, original template to her merest imitation, “what is’t ye’ve done, my poor, small fool? Tae bring this one here, tonight...”
“I thought to show her, only. only that.”
“Ye should not have, as well ye know.”
“Yet she’s blood, kin—Jess Nuttall’s boy’s girl. You remember, aye? And...my friend, also.”
“That’s no account of mine, girl. Ye know my mother’s views.”
“But—”
He waved her protest away. “Show her the whole truth, Leaf, then loose her tae go, while she still can. Bid her see straight what she half-glimpses already, and let that be an end on’t.”
“And what of her company?”
“Him? oh, he’s e’en now caught, mazed fast—our families must have their will of him, to work away his debt. No concern of either of ours, therefore—not like her.”
Leaf sighed. “I know it,” she said, softer still, almost into her neck.
And...first we were standing there, then we weren’t, swerved sidelong into some smaller chamber all filled with moss and apples, sticky-sweet and vaguely rot-stinking. By my foot, the pale flower of some woman’s hand reached up from further down, submerged below the wrist in the rocky floor, splayed fingers discoloured by decay.
“Don’t look there,” Leaf told me, raising my head by the chin, as my vision swam. “Here, Nuala, best of all friends. Look to me, only. Look to me.”
And her mouth opened, the mask’s mouth, wide and wider, wider still. ‘Til it seemed the entire top of her potato-pale skull might tip back, drop free and roll away, leaving her nothing but teeth and tongue, gaped open wetly to the world. Except...
...it wasn’t a mask, of course. At all. Just her, the real her, finally visible, without the lies. Without—
—“The glamour.”
I don’t know what I said. What noises I might have been making. Which is odd, because I know for sure that I could hear her—Leaf, bending in above me herself as her cousin watched, lowering herself so we were eye to eye once more, where I crouched gibbering on that half-rotten, hand-flowered floor. And saying, sadly, as she did:
“Tonight we guise no more, for ‘tis the time of it—this one night of all the year, when we may walk abroad unremarked-on, wearing our own faces in jest as we cannot, any other time, or risk a broken covenant. And I did so want you to see me true, if only for the once.”
I gaped, and she sighed, and her cousin reached out a six-fingered hand to my shoulder, pushing me out through the Hill’s wall. I saw the roots and stones rush by me, through me, sifting my very atoms, resistlessly as rain. And then it was dawn, the cold light of day, and I was lying staring up into the sky, my spine hurting, every bone in my body lit up with what seemed like one single, awful ache.
They still ache like that, sometimes, even now. That’s when I know I’m seeing something I should probably pay attention to.
—
Here are some things I believe, now, though I have little or
no proof for them:
My mother is probably the tree they found her purse in, hands upflung into pleading branches like Daphne, with bark growing over every part of her. or maybe she’s a stone instead, standing frozen somewhere on Dourvale’s streets, with only the sun crawling across her skin to tell her time is passing. Maybe she’s buried in Stane Hill, same as Milton once was, except further down. One way or the other, I don’t expect to find her alive. I don’t expect to find her, not even if I was to finally start looking.
At Stane Hill, the Druirs’ seat, Leaf touched me to get me in, not that she probably needed to, and I touched Milton to get him in, not knowing he wouldn’t be able to leave without me ‘til he’d worked off the food he took. Blood opens the door, you see—both ways, probably.
The older I get, the more I watch Leaf ’s cousin surface in me—handsome Saracen with his poison-blue eyes, eternally young and unspeakably old, who once carved his name on a table to impress my grandmother, back when she was still sweet young Jess Nuttall. I sit in my apartment with my part-fairy bones aching, off and on, longing for my great-grandfather’s hedgerow, the hole beneath and the woods beyond. It’s my inheritance, after all.
We have the stink of human on us, we quarterlings, too much so for the eldest of our blood to ever find us sweet, Leaf ’s voice whispers to me sometimes, late at night, whether I’m dreaming or awake. The hills will not open for us; the rings are closed forever. Who can we turn to, therefore, except each other? Which is why no one will ever be coming for you but me, Nuala, just as no one will ever be coming for me, in the end, but...probably, possibly, if I only wait long enough...
(Oh, how I hope, my dearest, my only friend. oh, how I pray.)
...you.
I know myself, you see, at last. I’m no monster; not that Leaf was one either, not entirely. But in one particular, I agree with her completely: this Iron World hurts me, and I’m tired of guising. I want to take off my false face and see the one beneath, maybe the same one I used to draw, over and over: wrinkled like a nut, peeled like birch. And one day soon...
...very soon, most likely, given it’s October again, and Hallowe’en draws near...