Cassandra

— CHAPTER 42 —

  Wings

  Ilvi and Cassandra walked across to the weavers.

  Ilvi, knowing all the weavers, explained what they wanted to an old male fae with a neatly trimmed silvery-grey beard who had been weaving a dense fabric with a pattern of tangled vines.

  ‘You want me to make dragonfly reins?’

  Ilvi and Cassandra nodded. At least he wasn’t laughing.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I want to ride a dragonfly,’ said Ilvi.

  The old man raised his eyebrows. ‘As I said: what for? You have a perfectly good set of wings on your back, Ilvi.’ He nodded towards Cassandra. ‘Now, you, I would understand.’

  Cassandra could almost hear Ilvi’s brain ticking.

  ‘Oh … will you make Cassandra some reins then?’

  The old weaver smiled and nodded. ‘Come back after lunch.’

  They wandered back to the agora where they had left Oonnora’s basket of food.

  ‘I thought you were going to tell the truth,’ said Cassandra.

  ‘I did,’ said Ilvi. ‘Can I borrow your reins when you get them?’

  Cassandra laughed. Ralina had been right about Ilvi’s ability to think quickly under pressure.

  ‘You know,’ said Ilvi, ‘he was right. This makes more sense for you. If you could ride a dragonfly, it’d be almost like having your own set of wings.’

  Cassandra grimaced. She had already thought of that but, ‘I’m afraid of heights.’

  Ilvi shrugged. ‘So, don’t look down.’

  Was everything really that simple for Ilvi?

  When the reins were finished, Cassandra was stunned. The weaver hadn’t merely run up a quick piece of strap, he’d woven each of them a beautifully decorative circle that Cassandra would have been happy to wear as jewellery. A huge lump of emotion swelled in her chest to realise that some fae, such as this one, were starting to treat her as one of their own.

  As they walked back, lunch was in full noisy swing at Ith and Iznaya’s, but they bypassed it and made directly for the agora. Ilvi whistled for the dragonflies again and soon all seven were zooming around their heads. Cassandra tried very hard to stand as confidently as Ilvi did, but she had to shut her eyes to do it.

  As before, only three dragonflies landed when Ilvi whistled, two disappeared and two continued to buzz around. Cassandra had been wracking her brain during lunch for the names of the rest of Santa’s reindeer.

  ‘I know.’ She pointed in the direction that the two rascals had disappeared. ‘Vixen and Blitzen.’

  Ilvi ignored Dasher and Dancer, who were still buzzing around. Prancer was on the ground. As she walked towards him, Cassandra said, ‘Try to use his name as often as possible so that he learns it.’

  Ilvi nodded. ‘Hello, Prancer. You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Prancer?’ She patted his head and gently slid the reins over. He remained still and allowed her to do it. She sat behind his head again, holding on to the reins, and commanded him to take off. It was a great success. Ilvi was able to stay on while he flitted and swooped around the agora until she told him to land.

  ‘Come on, Cassandra. Have a go. It’s easy.’

  Cassandra grimaced.

  ‘I know you want to.’

  Cassandra laughed. She did, dearly, want to, but she wasn’t sure if she could do it with her fear of heights and propensity to vomit. ‘Maybe just a little go? Not too high? Or fast? Is there any way of controlling that?’

  ‘Try riding this one.’ Ilvi walked over to the smallest dragonfly, who also seemed to be the most sedate. ‘What’s her name?

  ‘Cupid.’

  Ilvi patted Cupid’s head. ‘Hello, Cupid. You’ll look after Cassandra won’t you?’ She held her hand out towards Cassandra. ‘Give me your reins.’

  Cassandra was wearing her woven strap around her neck. She pulled it off and handed it to Ilvi, who slipped it gently over Cupid’s head, saying, ‘She’s been watching and understands. Come and try.’

  Cassandra walked over and patted Cupid as Ilvi had done, but she was nervous to get on.

  ‘Go on. I’ll be flying right beside you. I’ll catch you if you fall off,’ Ilvi promised.

  Cassandra swallowed and stepped one leg over Cupid’s body. She gingerly lowered herself to sit down. Her bottom had no sooner made contact with Cupid’s back than Ilvi said, ‘Up.’

  Cassandra grabbed the reins in terror, but she wouldn’t have needed them. Cupid took off slowly and steadily, and then hovered close to the ground.

  ‘Oh, look at that,’ said Ilvi, ‘she’s taking care of you. Tell her to go higher.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I want her to.’

  ‘You want to fly around just above the ground forever, do you?’

  ‘Not forever, maybe, but for a while.’

  ‘You might as well walk.’ Ilvi rested her hands on her hips and frowned at Cassandra. ‘You wouldn’t have got on her if you didn’t want to try flying.’ Her unvarnished logic could be very annoying. She waited a few moments and then impatiently said, ‘Up,’ and Cassandra found herself being lifted higher into the air. She would have shouted at Ilvi, but she was too scared to look down at her and do it properly. Keeping her chin up and looking out into the tree tops, Cassandra’s fear was soon replaced by the exhilaration of being airborne. She felt so safe on Cupid that when Ilvi, flying just below, called out to her, she only experienced a fleeting frisson of fear when she looked down.

  From then on, there was no holding them back. The two girls and their dragonflies spent the rest of the afternoon getting used to each other. Comet buzzed around with them and Ilvi spent some time riding him also. As their confidence grew, the dragonflies flew higher and faster, swooping and soaring.

  The biggest problem the girls found was that the dragonflies would change direction abruptly and even fly backwards. The first time it happened, Cassandra slid off forwards, over Cupid’s head, dragging the reins clear off with her. It was pure luck that they were not far from the ground at the time or else she would have fared far worse than the fright and bruises she received. ‘What happened to you catching me?’

  ‘You’ll have to fly a bit higher if you want me to catch you,’ Ilvi said. ‘I’m not that quick.’

  After that, Cassandra was sure to keep her knees tight around Cupid’s body and tried to be aware of the subtle tensing of the dragonfly’s body a split second before she changed direction.

  For the first time since coming into this strange new world, Cassandra forgot her troubles and was truly happy. When she arrived home late that afternoon, Oonnora recognised it instantly and was so obviously relieved that Cassandra felt bad for having been such a worry to her.

  Over the next few weeks, Cassandra spent every possible moment with Ilvi and the dragonflies. Before long, her fear of heights was completely cured. She became increasingly attached to Cupid, and judging by the way Cupid started following her around even when she wasn’t riding, the feeling was mutual.

  From then on, Cassandra was barely seen during daylight hours without her dragonfly.

  — CHAPTER 43 —

  Lookout

  No one noticed Lorcan sitting in the big banksia tree high above the revelry.

  He was watching Cassandra. His plan to keep his distance was becoming increasingly difficult as time went on, but at least he wasn’t communicating with her. He’d been keeping an occasional surreptitious eye on her since their visit to Zabeth’s. He hadn’t been sure which way she would go. Would she give in to the inevitability of her fate and start to settle in, or would she plummet into the depths of depression? She appeared to have chosen the former. He found himself feeling absurdly pleased with how well she was doing. He’d seen her riding a dragonfly around and was impressed by her inventiveness and appreciative of Ilvi’s willingness to be friends with the human pariah.

  He had never taken much notice of Ilvi before, although he knew her mother, Bealen, quite well because she was a watcher. He realised, with a pang of guilt,
that his disinterest was probably because Ilvi wasn’t one of the girls who fluttered in front of him and tried to gain his attention. Didn’t that just go to show that he wasn’t as immune to those flirtatious advances as he liked to imagine himself? The revelation annoyed him.

  A shout from above made him glance up to see Ilvi tearing through the canopy after a boy. Unfortunately, Ilvi was no good to Cassandra as a friend at the revelry. She was rarely on the ground, and her boisterous aerial play was not something Cassandra could safely participate in on a dragonfly. In any case, Cassandra was flightless at night when her dragonfly was asleep.

  Cassandra looked beautiful tonight. Her dress was simple and she wore no jewellery. There was nothing to distract from her natural beauty and no attempt made to add to it. It was one of the things he liked best about her: she was guileless, almost naïve. Her appearance was refreshingly different from the fae girls. The smooth curve of her wingless back made him itch to rub his hand over it.

  While he watched her, he became conscious of odd things. Although she was smiling, he started to realise that her smile was frozen in place. The longer he observed her, the more his own facial muscles ached in sympathy. He tuned in to her emotions: far from happy, she was lonely and self-conscious. He tracked her progress through the crowd and noticed that the only people she really talked to were Tani, Oonnora, Brack, Ith and Iznaya. She exchanged a few words with some other adults – Garris’s parents and a few of the artisans – but she rarely spoke to anyone her own age. He even noticed some fae looking at her with icy disdain when she passed by.

  Chayton’s group were standing in a loose circle directly under the tree he was sitting in. As Cassandra walked past them, one of the boys whistled at her and another called out and asked her to dance. Then the entire group laughed. He was still open to her emotions and her humiliation stung him until he had to shut it off. She ignored them all with admirable dignity, but it shouldn’t have been necessary. He accepted now that she hadn’t intentionally brought this situation upon herself, but he saw no way out of it for her. She sipped slowly from her drink and eventually moved to the refreshment table to collect a replacement.

  Lorcan continued to watch Cassandra drift as he eavesdropped in to the conversation below. He was unable to see faces from this angle, so it was difficult to tell who was talking.

  ‘You’re cruel,’ a girl said, still laughing.

  Lorcan thought the voice belonged to the girl with blonde ringlets: Brack’s apprentice. He knew her voice because it was annoyingly high and she had a tendency to yap at him whenever he was forced to participate socially. Girls like her were a major reason he was sitting hidden in a tree.

  ‘Cruel? Me? Never!’ Chayton’s voice. ‘It was an experiment: I was testing how easy humans are to influence. Haven’t you heard? I’m thinking of becoming a watcher.’

  Lorcan wanted to laugh out loud. There was no way that would ever happen. Watchers needed to be self-disciplined, patient and, although hating humans was acceptable – after all, who didn’t? – there was, nevertheless, a strict moral code to adhere to. The others in Chayton’s group also thought the idea was hilarious. Over the laughter, Lorcan heard another voice.

  ‘She’s only human. Everyone knows they don’t feel real emotions.’

  Lorcan’s anger was rapidly building into outrage. It didn’t matter that he once preferred to believe the same thing himself. Now, hearing these fae voice that opinion when referring to Cassandra repulsed him.

  ‘How easy are they to influence, Chayton?’

  ‘So easy it’s boring. I put her to sleep like that.’ Chayton snapped his fingers.

  ‘Yeah?’ another boy challenged. ‘What about the rest? She seemed to be in love with you.’

  ‘But only when you had your hands on her, eh, Chayton? She wasn’t that easy from what I could see.’

  Chayton humphed. ‘I barely had to touch her. Some soft words, a bit of eye contact, a kiss – done. The subliminal stuff was almost overkill.’

  Lorcan was now shaking with rage. In his opinion, fae should never use subliminal influence on humans. It was one thing to use it on each other because they understood it, knew it was happening and could resist it if they chose to. In fact, used on other fae, it had a far milder effect and couldn’t even be called subliminal because they were conscious of it. On a human, it was very potent. To use it on an unsuspecting human, Lorcan believed, was immoral – unless it was for defensive reasons. Not many fae shared his view. He knew that Eerin and Oonnora had both used it on Cassandra, but at least they had done it for her own benefit and only mild, harmless, one might say medicinal, influences. What Chayton had done, according to what Lorcan was gathering from the conversation below, was a violation. It infuriated Lorcan that Chayton was crowing about how easily he’d been able to influence Cassandra when, from all other accounts, she had turned out to be surprisingly resistant to mind control, even more so than the usual resistance inherent in humans with fae sight. Both Eerin and Oonnora had reported needing to either combine their efforts with other fae or draw on the additional power of physical contact.

  Lorcan was visited by an intense desire to give Chayton a dose of his own medicine and meddle with his weak mind. He knew he could do it, and it was only that certainty that held him back. He’d never had much time for Chayton, but now he was completely disgusted with him. Cassandra was, to all intents and purposes, Chayton’s adopted sister. He had a moral responsibility to look after her, but instead he’d treated her despicably purely for his own entertainment and that of his friends.

  Cassandra had been uprooted from everything dear and familiar to her, held captive in this unknown world and had thought she’d found companionship – no, love! But she’d been no more than a challenge to Chayton: a bit of fun, something to brag and laugh about. Lorcan tried to remind himself that he shouldn’t care but, so help him, he did. He felt a ridiculous desire to step in and fill the role that Chayton – the moron – didn’t want: friend, confidant, protector.

  He had clearly lost his mind.

  Cassandra was now standing watching the musicians. Garris was stealing the show as usual, playing his red sanopo with his typical flamboyance. Cassandra would be mistaking Garris’s sanopo for a saxophone – the curvaceous shapes of each were almost identical – but the sanopo was made of wood, not brass, and used a double, rather than single reed. There was little doubt that a sanopo had somehow been the inspiration behind the human invention of the saxophone. Lorcan smiled, recalling Garris’s propensity for picking up other people’s instruments and playing them, despite not knowing how and doing a very bad job of it. Done by anyone else, this would be extremely annoying, particularly for the amount of time Garris usually went on with it, but Garris had the sort of personality to pull it off and have everyone laughing.

  Everyone loved Garris, Lorcan included. Although Garris was thirty-three years older than Lorcan, Lorcan’s maturity made the age difference negligible. Lorcan couldn’t remember Garris ever not being his best friend. Garris was one of the few – probably the only – male fae even close to Lorcan’s age who Lorcan didn’t find stupidly immature. There was no doubt that Garris could be immature at times, but his antics never seemed stupid: in fact, they were usually quite clever. Girls often described Garris as ‘cute’, much to his vexation but Lorcan’s amusement. He came across as laid back and disinterested in details such as appearance, and usually he was that way but, as with Lorcan, there was a private side to him that only his nearest and dearest ever got to see. He could be serious, sometimes even broody. He was sharply intelligent and profoundly insightful. It was a quality that allowed him to see beyond Lorcan’s perfect exterior to the flawed interior. That Garris knew him so personally and was still his friend never ceased to amaze Lorcan.

  Tonight, Garris had bubbles effervescing from the bell of his sanopo. Cassandra’s smile warmed and became genuine for a moment, and Lorcan was absurdly grateful to Garris, despite knowing that Garris didn??
?t even like Cassandra and would not have been deliberately aiming to please her. He also experienced a sharp stab of guilt knowing that he and Garris had been two of the most vocal opponents of her adoption into the community. At least, in the beginning. Garris hadn’t noticed Lorcan staying quiet on the subject lately, but Lorcan couldn’t claim to have supported her, either. He’d been a coward, letting Garris and the others who shared the animosity continue to huff and puff without any input from him. He was no longer publicly attacking her, but he wasn’t defending her, either. He was as responsible as any of them for her lonely situation.

  Cassandra floated onward like a ship adrift. Ilvi dived down and swooped past her. That drew out a laugh from Cassandra, and Lorcan smiled along with her. A boy approached and attempted to talk to her. Lorcan noticed Cassandra stiffen and could tell that she wasn’t feeding the conversation. Her smile had fled. The boy took her hand and gestured towards the dancing. Cassandra resisted and said something with a weak, fleeting smile, shaking her head. Lorcan didn’t need to probe her emotions; everything about her body language screamed discomfort. The boy read it, too. He dropped her hand, offered a crooked smile and flew away. Lorcan watched with a heavy heart as Cassandra’s eyes darted around, scanning to see if anyone had noticed. She appeared to be about to cry, but then he saw her pull herself together, fix her smile back on her face and wander on. Eventually, she made it to the edge of the agora nearest her house. She turned and surveyed the crowd for a few minutes, a picture of nonchalance, before backing stealthily out of the light.

  Lorcan knew she was on her way home.

  — CHAPTER 44 —

  Intervention

  The next night, Lorcan was determined not to go to the revelry.

  If he saw Cassandra making her forlorn circuits around the fire, he knew he would have to intervene.

  He sat at the beach in his favourite spot on the edge of a ridge of sand and gazed across the peaceful waters of the bay. The hard, spiky grass grew over the sand behind and around him, right up to this edge, towering high above his head. In front of him, the sand stretched naked, but lumpy with human footprints, down to the water. The tide was coming in. When it was high, the water would lap against the bottom of this ridge and erase all evidence that humans had ever stepped foot on the beach.