Georgie exhales, leaning closer.
“Who are you?” he asks.
I turn and walk deeper into the marshy woods, not sparing him another glance. There is no satisfactory answer to his question, nor any reason to respond. And yet, I find myself taking care to move slow enough for the boy to follow.
In this prehistoric domain, every tree and rock is a constant reminder that inanimate things still live. Logs fallen centuries ago are covered in life—sprouting a writhing mass of plants, vines, and moss. Curled brown leaves blanket the marsh and buds of green blossom, swaying and fluttering under the talons of tiny birds. All of it is falling apart, decaying, but also growing up, clawing and pushing—alive.
If my clockwork failed and I fell to the forest floor, limbs frozen, I wonder if I would know the quiet pleasure of becoming part of this eternal cycle. Lying still under the creeping moss, would I come to understand the colossal patterns that grow roots in millennia? Or will I always live in this series of eye-blink moments?
I continue to walk, wisps of my torn white dress tracing the water’s surface. The boy called Georgie follows. I know he has already seen too much.
This boy. His master. They do not belong here.
During my sojourn, I have witnessed a kind of beautiful logicka nestled in wild places like this. Every forgotten stream chooses its meandering path according to rules older than humankind. I have urged my thoughts to wander the same paths.
It is men who take the lovely natural patterns of the wood and smear them into hard corners and straight lines and flat spaces. I have grown to hate the sight of a redbrick chimney looming through tree branches. The erect spine of a steeple feels so simple and primitive compared to the great chattering canopy of a millennia-old oak, alive and ancient, wind sifting through its many outstretched arms.
I despise the humans, and yet I am evidence of their craft.
A lost mastery over nature has manifested itself in my form—the form of avtomat. Long ago, a race of man took the tools of the wilderness—dirt, clay, metal, bone, and wood—and twisted them into a simulacrum of themselves. My hatred smolders, but it can never fully ignite with the knowledge that the ones I despise made me.
And I was made to serve them.
I stop in the center of a damp meadow, surrounded by narrow ranks of pine trees that seem to judge. Turning, I wait for the boy to emerge. By now he is muddy and scared, a tentative vision of golden light splitting shadowed trunks.
Sitting on a canted log, heels dangling, I wait for him.
“Hello?” he calls, approaching slowly.
I turn my head to look at the blond boy, my torn face empty and placid. He is quite beautiful. It will be a shame to kill him.
“Are you well?” he asks. “What’s happened to your face?”
Remembering to breathe, I fill my lungs and speak for the first time in several years. My voice feels as though it belongs to someone else, from some other time, as a complicated mechanism still performs its work in my breast.
“I am Elena,” I say. “My face is this way because I am not of your race. And because I am very old.”
Surprisingly, he accepts this without question.
“You’re of the honest folk, ain’t you? The fey folk of the wood? My ma used to speak of your kind.”
All strange things are cloaked in myth, eventually.
“Are you a queen?” he asks.
I nod.
“Where’s your kingdom?”
“It is fallen. Once, I studied by candlelight in stone halls buried within barrow hills. I danced in golden palaces. But the others of my kind have left in search of their own purpose, and now I am alone.”
I look in the direction of the rough voice I heard earlier.
“And what of your family, boy?”
He pauses.
“My master and I are traveling through. Looking for work.”
“Truth rings like a silver bell,” I respond. “And lies fester.”
The boy and his master are not in these godforsaken wastes looking for work. Not when an abandoned mansion full of forgotten treasure rises from the marshes less than a mile from here.
He blushes and looks away.
A few have tried, but the remote location and the mansion’s reputation for being haunted have kept thieves at bay. And those who came too close to my deserted home have found me waiting for them in the countryside.
I hear shouting beyond the meadow. Georgie!
“You and your master shouldn’t have come here,” I say, bowing my head. The torn skin of my face crumples into a frown as I gather my resolve. As I stand up from my perch on the log, the boy’s tanned face goes pale.
“Does…does it hurt?” he asks, his breath whispering over dry lips.
I blink, surprised by the question. It is his own life he should worry for, not mine. Reaching up, I run fingers lightly over my jawline.
“Nothing here can hurt me,” I say.
I’m closer to the boy now. He is a bit taller than me, gangly and lean. His limbs are strong, but I can see ribs rippling under his rough canvas shirt. His teeth are white and eyes sharp, and a stipple of bruises ride the ridge of his neck.
Georgie?! You bloody bastard!
This master of his bears more inspection.
“And you?” I ask.
“What d’you mean?”
“Do you suffer, Georgie?”
He smiles weakly, backing away.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?”
PART II
A cruel master; the suffering of youth; and an offer of assistance.
Life is an unfoldment. To understand the things at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.
—Hypatia of Alexandria (AD 350)
Watching him retreat from the flooded meadow, knees flinging mud, I decide I like this rough boy—even if he is too young to know anything and will likely never live long enough to learn.
This affection is an unfamiliar feeling. Rare.
Too many human beings have come and gone, too rapidly. But I sense something calm and still in this youth. He does not seem to know fear.
Georgie reminds me of my brother.
Peter and I fled to London sixty years ago. Before that, we watched generations rise and fall on the moonlit streets of Moscow. Across countries and time, we saw modes of dress and languages melt through infinite configurations. But the people always remained the same. Made of flesh and bound to it, all folk obey routines of food and worship and family. Praying to their gods, they despise themselves for their weaknesses while at the same time claiming the rest of the world as their own.
I took the mansion after my brother abandoned me to fight the war in India. For a time, I entertained myself by holding court with the world’s great minds. But I found a dispiriting sameness among them. None could see beyond my childlike form, and their condescension never ceased.
Great men and women, surely, but shortsighted.
Defluat amnis, the time runs on, and I grew tired of humanity. Their faces seemed to ebb and flow, endless waves lapping a dirty beach, each generation inching progress forward like a meandering line of rotting sea foam.
Once I had learned all they could teach, it was logical to send the faces away from me. And in the crumbling shell of my mansion I rambled alone in dark hallways—the ghost of a child who was never born. One day, I had the urge to walk out the front door. Leaving it open behind me, I continued into the wild gardens and then beyond into the damp wood where the humans believe fey kingdoms lurk.
And now this boy has led me back home.
Georgie and his master are bivouacked near a small stream about a half mile from the mansion. In the misty night, I spy them through vines and moss
y tree limbs and my own tangled locks. The boy seems to sense me, glancing nervously into the darkness. His master, a coughing, spitting vulture of a man, senses nothing but his own base needs.
The gaunt middle-aged man must be a leatherworker by trade. He sits beside the fire and scrapes flesh from a stiff horse hide, knuckles caked in rusty blood. He does not speak to the boy except to curse him or give him an order to tend the fire or fetch a tool. Though his master clearly fails him, Georgie watches, alert. I notice the boy’s fingers twitching as he imagines moving them in the same practiced patterns as his master.
Lurking around the fire, the master quaffs gin and menaces the boy. It causes me to think of the twin stilettos sheathed at my hips. The talented mechanician who revived me from a fathomless sleep found these ancient weapons already in my possession. They are sized for a child and I use them as naturally as I think.
“Come, it’s time,” the master says well after dusk, grunting as he rises.
The boy dutifully begins to stuff a haversack with limp canvas bags, tying it with a thick hemp rope. At the same time, he speaks low and quiet.
“Are you quite sure? Perhaps we’d better wait until morning or—”
“That preventive man will be there during the day, watching over the wreck. The one who caused your delay earlier, isn’t it? You seen him yourself, or has your memories failed you?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
The old man lunges and slaps Georgie across the face. Then he snatches away the knotted rope and violently lashes the boy. The motions are fast, even for a human, off-balance and filled with anger. The boy is knocked to the ground where he lies writhing, not daring to stand up or cry out.
“But nothing,” grunts the master, tossing the rope down. “Obey me and stop working that jaw.”
As the man hitches his leg back for a kick, I draw a stiletto. The ring of the oiled blade leaving its metal sheath is unmistakable, even cloaked as I am in darkness. The frogs and crickets of the wood cease their cacophony. The stream trickles silently past my feet in silver ripples.
The master twists his head slowly, bleary eyes wide to the night.
“What’s out there?” he asks, standing over the bleeding boy. “Who is it?”
I am a pale statue, unseen in the gloom beyond the ring of feeble light thrown by their peat brick campfire.
“Boy, d’you know who’s out there?” he asks in a low voice.
“I don’t, master.”
The master is silent, nervously picking at his fingers with the scraping knife. Finally, he says, “Load that canvas and don’t make me strike you again. We enter that manor at midnight, if we have to face the devil himself.”
The boy finishes preparing in silence, and my blade finds its sheath.
Finishing his work, Georgie steps a short distance into the darkness. He stops beside the stream, kneels in the mud, and wipes blood from his forehead with dirty palms. His cheeks are streaked with tears. The raised welts of the beating stripe his forearms and neck.
“Why do you allow it?” I ask, from the shadows. “You are stronger.”
Georgie hesitates, then continues washing his face.
“My master makes decisions. I live with them.”
“You are trapped under a yoke.”
“A yoke is the chance to do good work, ma’am,” he responds, shivering.
The boy has been beaten and neglected, his education ignored, dragged through this world over rough cobblestones. Yet his spirit thrives. I wonder what unique quality of mind, what blindness, allows him to survive? It is a strange variety of armor that this boy wears—and I have no weapon to break it.
“What made you this way, Georgie?” I ask.
He shrugs, standing up and wrapping arms around himself. His skin is smooth and pale, a dark crescent of blood gleaming over his eyebrow.
“What else is there?” he asks. “What else can you do?”
“Leave,” I say. “Go out on your own.”
“My fees are paid up. It’s a seven-year term.”
“You could walk away.”
“I’d lose my apprenticeship,” he says. “I’d lose my trade.”
“Everything will be lost eventually. All things are moving away from us. Why not let them go?”
“Pardon me, m’lady, but I suppose I’m only good at hanging on,” he says, eyes wide and unseeing in the darkness, his teeth shining as he smiles to himself. “Perhaps I’m ignorant, but it’s all I’ve ever known to do.”
“You are not ignorant,” I say. “It’s all any of us do.”
PART III
An old manor house—abandoned, or seemingly so; a pair of criminals; and a realization.
One for sorrow, Two for mirth.
Three for a funeral, Four for birth.
Five for heaven, Six for hell.
Seven for the devil, his own self.
—Nursery rhyme, 1700s
The abandoned mansion looms out of the night, windows dark, roofline cutting through silvery sheets of light rain. As I walk nearer, I see the accumulated damage of long neglect. I sent the servants away all at once on a fall afternoon. The doors and windows still hang open like skeletal, broken jaws.
Crates have been delivered in my absence, dumped along the front path. They must have been sent by my brother from distant places, artifacts and treasures looted during his long time at war in India. Only the solitude and secrecy of this place have allowed them to remain unmolested. Ahead, the sculpted figure of a water nymph emerges from a mossy fountain, feet lost in black water and decayed leaves. Her lips are rough stone, pursed as if she is about to shout a warning.
Hushed voices resonate under the hiss of raindrops.
Seating myself beside the fountain, I allow my body to become still in the way of stone—just another inanimate facet of this estate, like the carved gargoyles perched among shuffling crows along the sagging roofline.
Soon, two foolish men come creeping through the night.
The bigger one is drunk and unsteady on skinny legs, a vicious-looking knife clenched in one hand. And the other is my Georgie, hunched over with a haversack and a heavy pry bar.
“…four, five, six…seven,” whispers the boy.
“What’re you muttering about?” asks his master.
“Counting the ravens, sir,” he says, pointing up at the roof.
Seven dark-feathered shapes dot the gutters, black feathers waxy under the light of a full moon. “One for sorrow, two for mirth—”
“Bah!” interrupts the master. “Nursery rhymes. There are no bloody omens in the flight of birds.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hand me the bar,” says the man, striding past me and mounting the front steps. The door is halfway open, bloated with rain and stuck.
“Sir,” says Georgie, complying. “I fear we’re attracting an awful evil gaze, coming here like this.”
“What’s abandoned is ours to take,” responds the man. “And this wreck is occupied by nothing but spiders and mice.”
“I…I—,” stutters Georgie, eyes landing on me where I sit beside the fountain.
“What?” hisses the master.
Finger to my lips, I stand and walk away silently.
Allowing the men to continue, I enter the mansion through the pantry door. My bare feet tap over rain-swollen wood as I explore familiar halls. Distantly, I hear the boy and his master as they stumble through the cold darkness.
There is only one room that matters to me in this mansion—the parlor.
It is the room in which I once wrote letters and took my correspondence. The room in which I first delved beneath the layers of my own artificial flesh. The piles of notes and half-finished experiments carry the secret of my true existence.
I wait in the hallway outside the parlor door, listening patiently as the two intruders ramble through empty corridors. Occasionally, I hear a clink or rattle as items are placed in the canvas sacks. It does not move me, to be robbed. Objects no longer have any meaning. Only the knowledge matters.
Besides, Georgie doesn’t know any better. I would be doing him a favor to remove his master from the world. And I could allow the boy to survive it, with his assumptions of my fey ancestry. Ultimately, it is to my advantage to let him spread rumor of a fey queen protecting this cursed manor and its wild gardens. The superstition of the people is strong, and it guides their behavior with more power than the rule of law.
Through the window behind me, a great moon pushes her face through a haze of clouds. Her gentle light lands on my shoulders, illuminating my small silhouette.
A flicker of candlelight curls up the stairwell, batting shadows through clinging cobwebs. The man hacks and coughs, kicking leaves around the sweeping wooden staircase. Georgie’s voice is low and insistent, begging his master to stop.
The master’s head appears at the top of the stairs, dark eyes glittering. He inspects the great hall and its paintings and gilded cornices. Again, I am unnoticed.
But the boy sees me.
“Oh no,” he moans. “Master, please, we must retreat now.”
The man peers into the moonlight, shading his eyes and taking a tentative step forward.
“What…what is that?” he asks. “Is it a doll?”
“Please, master…”
He moves closer, not understanding.
“What is that thing?” he asks.
Georgie tugs on his master’s arm, digging in his heels. The man turns and shoves him to the floor, the heavy canvas sack dragging him down. Shrugging off the straps, the boy crawls, supplicating himself, begging and pulling at the man’s heels.
Stopping before me, the master leans closer. He reaches out a shaking fingertip and touches the cool mask of my face.
I step back and draw my stiletto.