Metro Winds

  ‘He is wounded, but not mortally,’ Yssa says and kisses her daughter, who snuggles closer. Then she looks down at me again and says, ‘My sister sent me to the palace because she said you could end the curse. She had dreamed of you and then you came stumbling into the Wolfsgate Valley, green and helpless, wolfmeat for certain sure if she did not help you.’

  ‘Your sister?’ I murmur.

  ‘She was cursed,’ Yssa tells me gently. ‘I do not speak of the curse that afflicted your husband and son, but the one laid upon she who cast that curse: Alzbetta, who loved a human that betrayed her. My half-sister.’

  ‘But that was aeons past,’ I stammered, then remembered that faerie folk are all but immortal and assume whatever age they desire. ‘How can she be your half-sister . . . she killed her half-sister.’

  ‘She killed Thayla who was the other daughter of her father,’ says Yssa. ‘I am the other daughter of her mother and loved my sister well despite all she had done in rage and passionate despair. Ages past, I went to dwell with her in the Wolfsgate Valley when she was banished there by the king to live trapped forever in the form of a black she-wolf. It was no hardship, for I am solitary by nature and have the gift of understanding the speech of beasts and birds. I was not unhappy and at first Alzbetta and I fared well enough, but she was desperate to find a way to break the curse, not to save herself, but because, when the king banished her by trapping her in her wolf form, she had been with child by the mortal she had slain. She had no magic in her beast form, but I did, and I found a spell that would arrest the course of the child’s growth in Alzbetta’s belly. Then my sister begged me to find a way to transform her back to her true form so that she might safely bear her child. I strove endlessly to discover what we needed. I read books and spoke to witches and faeries and sorcerers, but in every instance I failed. My sister took her rage and despair out on humans who entered the valley, and especially princess candidates who were lured there to thwart the curse she had laid upon her father and all the sons born of his line, though I begged her not to harm them and did what I could to help them.

  ‘Then one day, Alzbetta came to me and said she had dreamed a human woman would one day come to the Wolfsgate Valley with the means of saving her unborn child from the consequences of her terrible folly. Thereafter she left off harming any human and only waited, with the child she had carried inside her for so long, and I waited with her.’ She sighed. ‘It is very hard to be unaffected when you live with bitterness and regret and fear. It turned me in upon myself and made me more of a loner than ever, so that I did not regret the lack of love and children in my own life.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, beginning to understand a great deal.

  ‘One day, Alzbetta came to me and said that you had come and had passed the three days of testing, and that you were a candidate for the Princess Chamber. Somehow, neither of us had expected that, for not all humans who blunder here are summoned. Alzbetta told me she had seen you safe to the Endgate, and that we must wait to see what would come of it. I do not know what we expected, for her vision had shown nothing but that you were the key to saving her child. You were made a princess by the chamber and you wed your prince. Years passed until my sister lost patience and bade me go to dwell in the palace and see what I could learn.’

  ‘And what did you learn?’ I ask.

  She laughs. ‘I learned to laugh and sing and to take pleasure in teaching something to another creature. I learned kindness and gentleness and generosity and patience. I learned, my dear sister, to love you, and that enabled me to love a man.’ She sighed. ‘You at least were worthy of my love, for you had cared for me and called me sister and loved me long before I was able to feel anything but bitter weariness. You gave me room and tenderness enough to grow.’

  ‘But you did not find out how I am to save your niece?’

  ‘I did not know, until I was in the midst of birthing my own child, then all at once I understood that no answer could be found until Alzbetta’s child was born. Therefore she must be born. I went back to my sister, leaving my daughter with you, for I knew she would grow well in the warmth of your steady love, as she would not have done in the shadow of the strange desperate anguish of my sister’s life in the Wolfsgate Valley. I told Alzbetta that she must bear her daughter and though she feared what would come of it, she let me unknit the spell that had frozen her womb for hundreds of mortal years, and she bore her child at last. A female.’

  ‘The red-gold dog,’ I murmur.

  She nods. ‘My sister was aghast at first, but I bade her be patient, for she was alive and might yet be transformed by some means we had yet to discover, connected to you. I took my niece to the mortal realm then, because if she had remained in the valley the grey king would have killed her. It is a glamour laid upon the wolf pack of that place that they must seek the life of any maid, mortal or faerie, who enters their valley. My sister wept but it was done. She remained in the Wolfsgate Valley, waiting, while I brought her daughter to your world and dwelt there with her. And so we lived these long years since I left the King’s Palace. Indeed you may laugh to hear that I dwelt all this time in the very demesne where you had once lived, and each day I brought my niece to the Wolfsgate to run a little in the area before the guardian trees, where Alzbetta could come to her.

  ‘Until the day Alzbetta came and told me she had seen your son, and that he had fallen to the curse and was almost wholly a wolf,’ Yssa said. ‘I saw it all then and bade my sister drive him through the Wolfsgate to the mortal realm when next she saw him.’

  ‘You thought to mate them?’ I ask her.

  ‘I thought to save them, for if he chose her and she entered the Princess Chamber in the King’s Palace, she might be transformed into a princess and he, having hunted a true princess bride, would be rescued from Alzbetta’s curse. But I could not bring her to him or he to her by any action of my own without disqualifying it as a hunt. Their meeting must come about by your son’s doing. I was pondering how it could be managed when one night, very late, I glanced out my apartment window and saw what I first thought was a white dog clawing at the yard where my niece had her kennel. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when I realised he was a wolf, and must be your son. Later it came to me that the ground both sides of the Wolfsgate must have been saturated with my niece’s scent, and being a beast only by magic, your son had scented this same truth in my niece. I saw them touch noses and then my clever niece lifted the latch on the door to go out to him. I gathered up my things and followed as fast as I could, knowing he would bring her through the Wolfsgate where the grey wolves would be gathering just beyond the guardian trees.’

  I must have made some small startled sound, for Yssa, who had sat down on the floor beside me with Cloud-Marie still clasped in her arms, looks expectantly at me.

  ‘You think that the Princess Chamber will heal her wounds?’ I ask.

  ‘You told me the Princess Chamber completely healed you of all the cuts and bruises you had got in the valley during the testing,’ Yssa says. ‘But I think it will only heal in the process of transforming a maid into a princess.’

  ‘And if she is not a princess when we open the door?’ I ask.

  All of the brightness and strength in Yssa’s lovely face fades, and for a moment I see in her face all the centuries that she has lived. ‘Then my niece will be dead, and your son will remain a wolf. But the mother of your husband foresaw that, through you, Alzbetta’s curse upon his line would be broken, and Alzbetta saw it too, so how else can this come to be, save that my niece become a princess bride?’

  Later that night it grows very cold and I insist Yssa and Cloud-Marie have my bed, for I know I will not sleep. I tend my friend’s hurts and we pick at the supper I prepared for her niece. Yssa praises the bread and we both laugh because it is her recipe I used. When she and Cloud-Marie sleep, clasped in one another’s arms, I sit vigil by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, working intermittently at my small tapestry. My mind is full of all that Yssa
has told me, and with thoughts of my son, who waits too, wounded, though I do not know if he understands that his fate and that of an innocent girl are dependent entirely on the enigmatic magic of the Princess Chamber.

  I think of Alzbetta, the black she-wolf, who saved my life, whose curse had afflicted my husband and my son, who had died protecting him and her daughter. I think of Yssa whom I believed had abandoned her daughter, only to find that she had entrusted her to me, certain that I would love her. I marvel that all of our stories come to this deep, dark, dangerous, impossible valley of love for our children.

  We would give our lives for them, I think, all of us mothers. Yet sometimes all the love in all the worlds might not be enough to save them.

  Morning comes, and it is Cloud-Marie who finds me slumped awkwardly in my chair. For a moment I think I must have dreamed it all, but then I see Yssa is behind her.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says. ‘I can’t bear to wait any longer.’

  So we walk together, the three of us, Yssa who is the sister of my heart, and Cloud-Marie who is the daughter of my heart, to find out if the Princess Chamber has made a princess of a red dog.

  Both Yssa and Cloud-Marie stand back to let me grasp the doves, and when I open the doors, I gasp, for the room is red as blood, red as fire, red as the petals of a million roses, and the scent of them! Oh, I remember, in this moment, the wonder of my own awakening in this same room, in this same sea of intoxicating crimson.

  ‘Look!’ whispers Yssa, and I look and see on the bed, where once I lay, a young woman. Long and slender and naked she is, with skin as white as milk and a great wild mop of red-gold hair. There is not a mark on that white skin as she sits up and stares about her in bewilderment. I see her grow still. She is looking towards the fire and I look there, too.

  And I see him lying in the petals before the hearth, even as my prince once lay, waiting for his princess to wake, my son the wolf prince, his pelt white save where it is laid open in red wounds, head unmoving upon his paws.

  Yssa catches me as I sway.

  ‘Wait. Wait and see,’ she hisses, for now the girl slips down from the bed and runs lightly through the red petals towards the white wolf, utterly unselfconscious in her nakedness. She kneels beside him and strokes him from his head to his tail. Her touch is sensuous, and to my everlasting relief, he lifts his head to look at her. She bends to kiss his muzzle and, all at once, he is not a wolf but a man, naked and white and perfect as she. But when she lifts her head he is again a wolf. Yet she does not seem dismayed by his transformations. She strokes his pelt and strokes it and he is a man again and rolls back against her knees, his eyes languorous with desire.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I murmur.

  ‘I don’t either,’ says Yssa. ‘But he lives and she lives, and perhaps this is beyond our part in their story. Perhaps the time for the power of mothers and aunts is over. Now they must write their own story and seek their own ending.’

  Yssa draws me from the room and closes the doors slowly. I have a last glimpse of the tawny princess reaching again to kiss a wolf and of a powerful young man with hair as dark as his father’s reaching up to draw her into his arms. Then the doors are closed.

  Yssa puts one arm around Cloud-Marie and another around my shoulders, and she ushers us away from the Princess Chamber. She kisses Cloud-Marie and says to me, ‘You have raised my daughter for me, and you have done all you can for your son. Now you must think of yourself.’

  ‘Myself?’ I say the word as if I do not know its meaning.

  Indeed I do not know what I can be, for if I am not wanted as wife or mother anymore, what am I? As if she reads my thoughts, Yssa stops before a mirror and turns me to look at myself. I see a woman who is not young, nor is she old. There are secrets in her eyes, and lines about them, but her mouth is full and warm and softly red and the silver is only a glimmer of the frost on the dark golden tresses that fall over her shoulders.

  Yssa says, ‘Your story is not only their story. He will be king and she will be his queen. But what of you?’

  I think of going to live with those other queens in the palace of tears, growing old as they mirror my ageing back to me. I think of sending word to try to draw my husband back to me. I loved him and love him still, I realise, but he has gone now. I imagine remaining in the King’s Palace in my little rooms, working on my tapestry and sometimes walking in the mist garden, and in time, minding the children of my son and his princess bride. I think of laying myself down in a field of flowers where I would sleep forever, and dream. But suddenly that seems a mawkish, morbid vision.

  ‘I need to find a new dream,’ I say, and I am surprised by the brisk impatience in my voice.

  ‘I think you ought to go back to your own world for a time,’ says Yssa. ‘The boy and my niece will need time alone now, and if you do not mind, Cloud-Marie and I will join you after a little. There is much in the lives of mortals that immortals do not know and I would like to study it, and to see more of your world. In truth, I like the idea of a world where being a princess or a queen is not all there is. And Cloud-Marie will not want to be parted from you for long.’

  ‘I could go to the land where I was born and wait for you there,’ I say, the words forming on my lips even as they are forming in my mind. ‘It is a land surrounded by sea and I once lived on the very edge of it. When I sat up in my bed, I could see the waves rolling in. I always wondered how they did not roll over me.’ I fall silent, but the thought of going back crackles through me like an electrical current. I think of a beach where I walked as a girl; the soft, salted scent of the warm air that played over my skin like a caress. I imagine how it will be to lick my lips and find they taste of the sea.

  ‘Cloud-Marie will like the waves,’ says Yssa.

  Cloud-Marie waves at her mother, and gives a chirrup of excited laughter, and suddenly we are all laughing.

  THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SHADOW

  I gaze through the windscreen at the unbroken, ornate facade of building after building, art nouveau and baroque details picked out delicately by the buttery gold of the streetlamps. It occurs to me that the thousands of tourists who travel to this city would feel they are stepping into the past, yet when this street was new, it would have looked very different. Night would have been an all-consuming darkness. The brash electric light that denotes the modern world and appears to have defeated and driven off that ancient darkness – from the streets, from corners, from the hearts of men and women – is an illusion.

  Darkness is eternal and it will find its way, its crack, its vein.

  The castle appears as the taxi driver promised, seeming to be lifted above the snarl of old town streets surrounding it on beams of light, to float in greenish illumination. He glances at me in the rear-view mirror and tells me in brutish English that the lights are switched off at the castle just before midnight. I imagine sitting somewhere, in a café perhaps, and waiting to see it swallowed up by the night.

  ‘You have business?’ he asks with a touch of irony that suggests he has some inkling of my affliction, though it is virtually unnoticeable at night. I consider telling him that the turbulent history of his country, the stony eroded beauty of this city that is its heart, fascinated me. But in the end I say only, ‘Yes, business’.

  Thinking: a strange business.

  I do not know how I lost my shadow. After the first shock wore off, I told myself it was freak chance. My shadow might not even have known what it was doing when it severed itself from me. I could easily envisage myself walking and hesitating at some slight fork in the street, my shadow going on, sunk in its own thoughts, failing to notice that it did so without me. Seconds later, I would choose the other way. Maybe after a time it realised what had happened and retraced its path, but by then I was long gone.

  That was one of my earliest theories – hopes, you might as well say. One does not like to admit the possibility that one’s shadow has left on purpose. I consoled myself with a vision of my shadow, slipping fra
ntically along walls and paths searching for me, wailing as forlornly as a lost child, occasionally plunging into pools of shadow and emerging with difficulty because it lacked a form to pull it from the larger shadow.

  Now, I can more readily imagine its relief at being cut loose. It may have been a fortuitous accident that freed it, or maybe it saw its chance to be free, and took it. Either way, I blame my passivity for our estrangement. As a child, caught within the roaring machinery of the relationship between my parents, I had learned to defend myself with stillness. But having gained the habit of passivity, I could not rid myself of it, and so as an adult I found it almost impossible to engage with life. I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it.

  But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us. Without it to anchor me to the earth, I became dangerously detached. I dreamed of the reassurance of its company, its small tug at my heels, its soft movement before me, feeling out my path like a blind man’s cane. Without it to bind me to the earth, I was like one of those astronauts whose each step on the moon is so buoyant it seems they might at any second step into infinity. I feared that without my shadow I would soon make just such a step into oblivion. I had understood at last that I was diminishing without its darkness to balance me, and knew that something must be done.

  The taxi swerves violently to avoid another taxi that has tried to pull out from a side street and the driver mutters what sounds like a curse.

  I note indifferently that I had not felt the slightest fear at our near collision.

  That numbing of emotions was as unexpected a side effect of my affliction as my detachment from linear time, and as easily as my grandmother slipped one stitch over another with her delicate, sharp needles, I slip.