Metro Winds

  I had wanted to laugh at the sight of that awkward bed resting amid a sea of white petals, yet the formidable seriousness of the mistress of the mansion precluded it. Besides, I was so overwrought by all I had endured in the past days that I feared I might not be able to stop laughing if I began. What I longed for more than anything was simply to be able to lie down and sleep. I felt sure that I would wake with some sensible understanding of the surreal madness of the previous days. Perhaps even the bed would seem less outlandish in the daylight, after sleep.

  I realised my hostess was waiting for me to speak and pulled my wits together to thank her. She nodded and gestured to the bathing room, then withdrew, bidding me sleep well. Her servant closed the door behind them, leaving me alone.

  I thought of dragging down a single mattress to sleep on, but the mattresses were set inside the four posts of the bed in such a way that it would require two people to manoeuvre one out. I would have to sleep in the bed or brave the icy stone flags with no more than a blanket under me. I elected for the former; after all, given the things I had endured, it seemed almost decadent to complain about the height of a bed. I entered the gleaming bathing room but was too weary to bathe. Instead, I washed quickly and not very thoroughly and donned the thin nightgown I had been given. Back in the main chamber, I decided I must gather myself before climbing up onto the bed, and I padded about the room exploring, discovering a little balcony overlooking a garden swathed in shadow and mist. There was a chill wind, and before long, I retreated inside to warm myself by the fire.

  Drowsy with food and wine and fatigue, my mind drifted to the handsome, dark-haired man in the lane with his canal-green eyes. He had assured me that if I turned back and went this way and that, I would come in a few minutes to the main tourist path along the Grand Canal, but that this was the route for unadventurous tourists, not true travellers, such as I seemed to him. Flattered and intrigued, I had asked if there was some other way. He answered archly that if I took his lane it would bring me to a door in a wall beyond which lay a garden. I could cut through this to another gate that would bring me to a private yard. The lady who owned it did not object to locals passing though to the path alongside the Great Canal. It was a slightly longer route but very beautiful.

  Tantalised, I had reluctantly reminded him I was not local.

  ‘If you like, I will give you something to legitimise your trespass,’ he had offered, taking from his pocket what looked like a bone armlet. It was only when he gave it me that I realised from its lightness it was made of thin, sun-bleached wood.

  ‘What is it?’ I had asked.

  ‘It is the property of the lady. If you would take it to her for me, I would be most grateful. You can tell her Ranulf sends you to her with his regards.’

  His words were cryptic and a little suggestive and I had wondered if he was not the lover of the lady who owned the armlet and the garden, and meant to use me as a go-between.

  ‘What if I forget to deliver it?’ I had asked, to give myself time to think.

  ‘I do not think you would forget to do something you have said you would do,’ he told me, suddenly serious, and he reached out to cup my cheek for a moment in his palm.

  ‘Very well, I will take it, if you are sure,’ I had agreed, keeping my voice cool to belie my fast-beating heart. In response, he put the circlet into my hand and used his hands to fold mine about it, bidding me wear it for safety. It was too big to be a bracelet, but I had tried awkwardly to do as he suggested until he reached out to take it from my fingers and slip it gently over my wrist and up my arm as far as it would go above the elbow.

  I pressed the place where he had touched my wrist and thought of the way my skin had tingled at his touch, and the look of yearning in his eyes when he released me. It was impossible to think of him as a man playing a nasty trick on a gullible tourist. But when I produced the armlet just an hour past to my hostess, repeating Ranulf’s words, determined to deserve his faith in me despite all that had transpired, she had taken the thing from me and seemed to weigh it upon her palm, her expression haughty and at the same time distracted. Certainly it was not the look a woman gave when a precious object had been returned to her. She had eventually thanked me, and invited me in out of the storm-racked night, proposing that I stay as her guest, but there was no warmth in her eyes or words and I had the distinct feeling she thought me a tiresome fool. Yet she had sat with me while I ate and warmed myself by the fire, though she herself ate nothing and said little. In truth she had seemed relieved when I said that I was tired and asked if I might retire.

  It was only when she rose, leaving the wooden armlet carelessly on the table, that I noticed there were three exactly like it, threaded with flowers to form a low and intricate flower arrangement. There was a notch in the last, where a fourth ring ought to have fitted, and I realised with mortification that I had returned a bit of a table ornament with ludicrous ceremony. It did not help that I suspected the jape had been played more upon the lady than on me, for I had been the dupe who had enabled it. No wonder she had looked at me with such reserve. What a gullible bumpkin I must seem to her.

  My face had burned with shame as I followed her along the hall to the bedchamber, yet now, standing by the fire, I wearily considered the possibility that I might not be the first gulled into performing a fool’s errand, given the cool response of the lady of the house. And in the end, what was an unpleasant jest when compared with all that I had endured in the days after meeting him? I frowned, feeling almost dizzy with fatigue as I wondered if days could really have passed as I remembered. Was it not more likely that I had fallen asleep just inside the walled garden, after I had taken shelter from the sudden downpour, that I had dreamed days full of strangeness before waking, fevered and confused, to make my way to the oddly named Endgate?

  Surely I had imagined the impossible vastness of the garden, the wolves.

  For a moment I was tempted to seek out my hostess to ask what day it was, except that I could not bear to face her again so soon. Besides, I was so exhausted that if I did not lie down, I would simply topple into the flames.

  I staggered to the bed and clambered awkwardly up the mattresses, panting and cursing under my breath and wondering what sort of lunatic tradition required a great stack of mattresses and a floor covered in white rose petals. The smell of the roses and some elusive but heady scent under them was very strong and made me feel half intoxicated. I was perspiring freely by the time I reached the top and I thought I ought to have asked someone to take my temperature, but I could not climb back down now.

  I drew back the covers and crawled between the cool fragrant sheets with a long sigh at the marvellous softness of them and the pillows, and closed my eyes gratefully. On the inside of my eyelids, I saw again the handsome angular face of Ranulf, the curving lips, the gold-flecked eyes and the wild dark mop of hair. Even the graceful small movements of his hands were clear in my memory, as was the cool silky feel of his fingers against my cheek.

  ‘Fool,’ I muttered.

  I drifted into a dream in which I vividly relived my encounter with him in the passage. In the dream he suggested the lane would bring me to the thing I wanted most in all the world.

  ‘I have not told you what I want,’ I objected.

  ‘You will desire what you find at the end of this passage, I swear it,’ he responded fiercely.

  ‘On your mother’s soul?’ I demanded, deciding he was teasing me.

  His eyes widened at my words and he said, ‘Oh yes, on my mother’s soul. I do swear it.’

  Cloud-Marie threw a silken coverlet over the bed and I regarded the result of our labours with some satisfaction. A hundred part-stuffed mattresses still rose high, but now the bed looked merely quirky rather than grotesque.

  We went to the kitchen, for I had decided to cook the meal my son’s chosen would eat with my own hands. As I worked at kneading dough, I found myself remembering vividly how confused I had been when the handsome stranger in th
e lane had suddenly ended our conversation by walking away without trying to give me his telephone number so that I could let him know I had delivered the armlet. I had watched him go, wondering if he would glance back, but he had not.

  My husband had told me later, when we lay twined and tenderly dissecting the steps that had led me to his bed, that his mother had forbidden him to look back once he had given me her token, saying if he did, I would be lost to him.

  ‘She was right, Ranulf,’ I told him, startled. ‘If I had seen you look back, I would have suspected you meant to creep down the lane after me and rob me, or worse, I might not have gone along the lane after all.’

  His response had been to lick my naked shoulder like a cat. Ignoring the way his tongue roused my senses, I persisted, asking why he had shown himself to me at all, for I might well have gone along the lane of my own accord, rather than turning back.

  ‘I had to be the one to invite you into Faerie,’ he’d murmured.

  ‘How could the mere suggestion that I go along the lane be counted an invitation?’ I demanded. ‘I did not see it as an invitation.’

  He tenderly peeled a strand of sweat-stiff hair from my cheek, and kissed me with his cool lips before saying, ‘Of course you knew it was an invitation. I offered the ring and you accepted it. You did not understand why I had given it you, but you were curious and so accepted it. Curiosity is a form of courage, my love, and that is one of the essential ingredients for a maid who would enter the Princess Chamber. How else would she dare the spindles and locked doors of the tests leading up to it?’

  ‘What did it show that I chose the central path when the lane split into three?’ I had wanted to know then. ‘I didn’t make my choice out of any special wisdom or instinct. Was it luck that had me choose the right way?’

  ‘There was no right and no wrong choice. All three choices would have brought you to the Wolfsgate. There was only the need to choose. You see, humans generally act according to the ends that they imagine will come of their actions. The Threeways Path strips away the illusion that reason controls destiny. You would be surprised how many people, faced with the knowledge that reason cannot help them, find they cannot act. Many feel that in turning back to known ways, they retain control. A few stand indecisive, realising that even turning back is a choice filled with mysteries. They are the wiser, but if they stand too long, the Cruel Wind will come to drive them back to their own world just as it will blow at the back of those who retreat at once.’

  ‘What if you had chosen a faerie with mortal blood?’ I asked, for though I had not been there long enough to meet other mortals who had crossed, I knew they existed.

  ‘I might have done, but it was my mother’s advice that I hunt a mortal woman.’

  That had surprised me, for I had secretly felt his mother looked down on me because I lacked even a drop of faerie blood. ‘She would not have had to face the Threeways Path,’ I said.

  ‘Only princess candidates who are mortal face that particular test, but there are other tests for those of faerie blood. Each test, and the response of the candidate to it, is an ingredient in the spell that will be wrought by the Princess Chamber, and there are many ingredients, some stronger than others. There are some deeds done in response to tests that are so potent they require no other ingredient, though that is rare and cannot be predicted or relied upon.

  I set the bread to its first rising and cleaned down the bench, pondering the tests I would set for my son’s chosen, and wondering what sort of spell she and I would make between us. This done, I helped Cloud-Marie slice quinces for a pie and cut up wild mushrooms we then doused with spiced marinade. The shared activity and the smells of yeast and sherry and caramelised sugar made me think of Yssa, for it was from her that I learned to enjoy cooking.

  She had treated it as if it were an art to delight all the senses, and so it had become for me, under her tutelage. She had been so honestly horrified to hear how I had fed myself before I stole the magic cloth from my husband, that I had become ashamed of my carelessness. In truth I had not known any better, because my own stiff mother had despised cooking as a bourgeois pursuit and cared not at all what she ate.

  Yssa had liked the ease of the food conjured by the cloth well enough, but despite being faerie, she had preferred to cook our meals herself. I had not known enough back then to understand how unusual that was, but abashed by her reaction, I had dutifully offered to help her. However, guided by her pleasure in the activity and her skill, I soon began to look forward to those meals we cooked between us. It was Yssa who made me understand that cooking is to eating what painting a picture is to merely looking at it. She made me see that cooking was as wholesome and nourishing to the spirit as good food is to the body.

  After her departure, with two children to care for, I had neither time nor patience for cooking and let the art and the love of it slip from me, relying on my magic cloth to nourish us all. It was long since I had cooked, but I had not forgotten what Yssa had taught me. In the midst of the fragrant heat of the kitchen, I felt such a longing for the faerie woman who had been my best friend in this world, in any world.

  Yet when she had come to the door of the palace kitchen when I had been there one day early in my marriage, whey-faced and grim, I had no notion of how much she would come to mean to me. Still, I must have sensed what lay in the future, for surely it was not only out of pity that I invited her in, deliberately breaking the protective seal about the King’s Palace which prevents anyone or anything entering without royal permission. When he returned from his questing, my husband was annoyed. A queen could ask anyone into the palace, he later explained, but no queen had ever done such a thing without first consulting her husband. I begged his pardon and then teased him for his pomposity. But later, when I mimicked his words for Yssa, she said soberly that the king was right, for the ban was there to protect me.

  ‘I need no protection,’ I had laughed, for in those days I was loved well by the people.

  I remember Yssa’s reply.

  ‘You are a mortal for all you are the queen. Not all in Faerie love mortals.’

  As Cloud-Marie set down the comb and began brushing my hair, I told myself that Yssa would have shared my disappointment in the first girl my son hunted, for she turned out to be little more than a coarse child.

  She had been born in Faerie of the granddaughter of a mortal woman and a faerie man, peasant farmers who dwelt not far from the palace. I had learned this by smearing onto my mirror a gob of a magical preparation which one of the queens had given me.

  I had finished all of my preparations and sat gazing into the mirror at my son, as he embraced his milkmaid with her rosy cheeks and soft round bosom. I saw how her foolish wide blue eyes bulged as he thrust the bespelled ring into her hands and began fumbling at her milky bosom. Seeing him paw her, I felt sorry I had allowed him to take a human shape, yet clearly she was amenable to his rough kisses. But when she tried to slip the bespelled ring on her finger, it would not fit over her thick knuckles.

  My son scowled and snatched the ring back, running to the barn to hammer at it. When he brought the poor battered thing back and forced it on her finger, her mouth fell open as she listened to the instructions it offered. I watched my son lead her to the edge of the Wolfsgate Valley closest to the palace and point to the King’s Palace, which would appear to her as nothing more than a mansion with spires and turrets. His chosen nodded eagerly and galloped off. Having the use of magic, she suffered no more than a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the nose in the course of the next three days, as my son, now beast-shaped, drove her hither and thither to keep her moving, at the same time making sure she would not be far from the Endgate on the third dusk.

  At one point, watching in my mirror as he gawped oafishly at her washing her plump, filthy feet in a stream, I prayed that my son had chosen her to spite me or even out of laziness rather than that he was so crude as to desire such a bovine mate. I was certain by now that she would neve
r reach the Princess Chamber, let alone spend a night in it.

  The girl got as far as the door to the palace, where she took one look at me deliberately tricked up in all the glittering magnificence I could muster and fled gibbering, my ring still jammed upon her swelling finger. My son came raging at me, saying he would not let me tell him what to do. I laughed cruelly and told him if he could do no better in his choices than a trembling mooncalf who ran away in terror, he had better let me hunt for him.

  ‘At least I might choose you a full-grown woman whose desire for a husband will be robust enough to get her through the door,’ I said harshly. I dared not show pity or grief or fear. I had to shock awake the subtlety and refinement of taste that I had nurtured in my son, before the curse began to make itself felt.

  I saw I had wounded him, and prayed pain would wake his true self, but instead the beast looked from his eyes as he announced arrogantly that he would entice the next one so thoroughly, she would come to me without her drawers. It shocked me that he would say such a thing to me, and I told him with an icy bluntness that he would do better to consider choosing a maid with more mortal blood so that the Wolfsgate Valley would truly test her, else even if she managed to reach the chamber, she would not have what it took to become his princess bride.

  The next time he hunted he chose a bold beauty with wit and courage but still no more than a drop of human blood, so she had power enough to pass the three days in the Wolfsgate Valley as if she were in her own garden. My son had bitterly resented my forbidding him a human shape and was glad his chosen had magic enough to protect herself so that he need not reveal himself to her in his beast shape more than twice: once when he had brought the ring to her, tied in his mane, and at the end, when he led her to the Endgate. She sneered openly at Cloud-Marie who brought her to me and gave me an insolent and triumphant smile as she removed the now-battered ring from her finger – it had been removed by a blacksmith from the finger of the last candidate – and gave it to me.