Wondrous Strange

  “Fine. Go have a look around outside then. See if you can find a kelpie tied up anywhere.”

  “I don’t even see why you think there’s any connection. That girl could have dropped her script anytime,” Maddox muttered as he turned to leave. “It could have been sitting there for days. Weeks.”

  Sonny had considered that, but he had also seen the girl—Kelley—with the very same script only an hour or two before he’d found it beside the Lake. He’d found the crushed rose. It was hers, all right. He knew it. Now he just needed to find out what she’d been doing there. And what, if anything, she knew about a dangerous Faerie horse.

  “Come, now a roundel and a fairy song….”

  The girl made her entrance through the center stage arch, lifting the trailing edge of her skirt and stepping gracefully up a set of stairs and onto the floating platform suspended by cables that represented Titania’s bower. Garlands of silk flowers hung from the tops of ivy-wound poles, and gauze and organza draperies hung in filmy panels around the sides and back. The whole thing was lit in shades of green, gold, and blue to mimic a dappled forest.

  It was sort of pretty, Sonny supposed, but nothing the least bit like any of the places where Titania and her Seelie Court were likely to spend time.

  Gauze wings sprouted from the girl’s shoulders, held there by elastic ribbon. Somehow, despite the ridiculous contraption, “Titania” managed to impart a kind of Faelike elegance to the lines as she went about assigning various duties to her fairy attendants.

  “Some keep back the clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits.” The girl finished her commands, reclining among the cushions. “Sing me now asleep, then to your offices, and let me rest.”

  A few members of the fairy dance corps flitted away into the wings to do her queenly bidding while the rest gathered about, kneeling or perching on the set rigging. They began to sing:

  “You spotted snakes with double tongue,

  Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;

  Newts and blindworms, do no wrong,

  Come not near our Fairy Queen.”

  The quaint Shakespearean lyrics wound through the air.

  “Philomel with melody,

  Sing in our sweet lullaby;

  Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby….”

  The song was like an enchantment.

  The stage lights seemed to flicker and dim.

  And the girl in the bower began to glow.

  IX

  K elley sighed a fairy queen sigh, and her head sank to rest on her forearm. She loved this part of the play. The chorus of fairy singers had wonderful voices, and the tune for the “Philomel” song was an authentic Elizabethan roundel. It was strange, though. Even though Kelley had found herself humming the melody almost constantly for the past few weeks, today it was as if she’d never really heard it before.

  I guess that’s what happens when you’re onstage instead of backstage, she thought, smiling to herself. Kelley felt her eyelids begin to droop as the murmuring refrain flowed over her like a babbling brook.

  “Never harm

  Nor spell nor charm

  Come our lovely lady nigh.

  So good night, with lullaby.”

  Dimly, as if from a great distance, she heard the actress playing the fairy named Cobweb say her line: “Hence, away! Now all is well. One aloof stand sentinel.”

  That was Jack’s cue to enter as Oberon, sneaking near to anoint Titania’s eyes with a magic potion as part of his trickery. Kelley lay still, waiting to hear Jack’s mellifluous voice. Behind closed eyelids, she sensed the lights growing warmer. They must have turned a spotlight on her.

  Part of her wanted to open her eyes to see how the lights looked, but she was just too comfortable. And anyway, they were running this scene straight through without the intervening “lovers” scenes, so she’d see soon enough—just as soon as Jack said his lines.

  “What thou seest when thou dost wake, do it for thy true love take.”

  Jack’s voice sounded way different from normal—the words hissing like a snake, sibilant and sinuous in her ears. The sound guy was definitely playing around. It was a cool effect. Creepy.

  “Love and languish for his sake.”

  The rest of the line fell away into silence, and Kelley opened her eyes to find herself on a mossy bank. On all sides, the forest loomed, a soaring black battlement of gnarled and knotted branches, but in the tiny, moon-strewn jewel of her grove, all was pristine and beautiful.

  She turned and saw someone standing in the shadows. Long hair hung in a loose sable wave to his shoulders, framing the sharp angle of cheek and jaw. A face she knew. Kelley felt the blood rush from her head as her heart thumped wildly. Moonlight glowed in his eyes, turning his gaze to silver fire, and the stark white branches of birch trees arched above his head as though he wore the antlers of a king stag. He was clothed only in leggings made of supple, dark-brown leather and belted with silver; his feet and torso were bare. Around his neck was a thin braided cord from which hung an iron-gray medallion. A dark line of glossy blood seeped from beneath the charm to trickle halfway down his chest.

  What thou seest when thou dost wake…

  He smiled. It was the saddest expression she had ever seen, full of unspeakable longing and heartache. Kelley felt her own heart tear in two.

  Far off in the distance, she heard the harsh, keening cry of a hunting hawk.

  Kelley’s eyes snapped open and she sat up with a start, glancing wildly around.

  She was in the theater, on the bower set. Frantically, she twisted to look over her left shoulder. For an instant, she saw him. He stood in the shadowed corridor of the stage-left wings. Instead of heartsick longing, however, his expression was one of shocked surprise. Her green eyes met his gray ones for the briefest instant, and then he was gone.

  “Much as I do not advocate the use of artificial stimulants, could somebody please provide our fairy queen with some bloody No-Doz before the next rehearsal?” Quentin shouted from the audience.

  Dreaming. She’d been asleep and dreaming….

  Kelley felt the heat creeping up her neck into her face as she realized that, aside from her director’s basilisk stare, there were about a dozen other pairs of eyes on her, all expressing various degrees of annoyance or amusement.

  “Right. That’s it for today, then, children.” Quentin got up and strode toward the direction of his office. “Either get some sleep, Miss Winslow, or dial down the Method acting, hmm?”

  Kelley glanced around apologetically at the rest of the cast, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. Her gaze fell on Alec Oakland, the actor playing Bottom, sitting off to the side of the bower platform with his fake ass’s head tucked under one arm. Fortunately, he was smiling.

  “Jeez, Winslow,” he said. “Did I bore you?”

  “Oh, God, Alec—I’m sorry! I didn’t get much sleep last night and…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Alec waved a hand in dismissal. “I don’t think the Q was really going to do much with our scene today anyway—it’s almost quittin’ time.”

  He stood and hefted the prop mule head. Kelley stared at it, chagrined, abruptly reminded of the horse in her bathtub. Alec held out a hand to help her to her feet.

  “You know,” he said as she stood, “I’ve been meaning to ask…do you want to grab a coffee together sometime?”

  Pain flashed in Kelley’s head, accompanied by the dream image of the shadowy figure in the forest.

  “Kelley? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah…”

  Alec was looking at her, concerned.

  “Yes, thanks. Just the sleep deprivation, I think. Um—coffee. Coffee would be nice. Sometime.”

  “You look like you could use some,” he joked, a hopeful expression on his handsome, freckled face. “Wanna go find a Starbucks?”

  Kelley laughed and held up a hand. “Maybe not so much today. I think I’m just going to head home and try and get some rest
…you know?”

  “Sure. Right.” Alec nodded and backed off a step.

  Kelley felt vaguely guilty and more than a little confused by her own reaction. A week earlier, she would have jumped at the chance to go out with Alec. Now? Now she couldn’t see past the twisting branches of her dream forest—and the dark-haired young man who stood beneath them, his eyes full of anguish. A moment of awkward silence ensued. Kelley reached out a hand to scratch the mule-head prop behind one fake, fuzzy ear.

  “Rain check?” she said, and tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice.

  “Absolutely!” Alec nodded, and his smile halfway returned. “See you tomorrow,” he said before loping off toward the dressing rooms.

  After a minute she followed in his wake, walking a deliberate path through the darkened wings where she’d seen—where she’d thought she’d seen—someone. But, of course, there was no one there.

  X

  T he boucca had Sonny by the throat.

  Sonny was furious with himself for allowing his guard to drop—Maddox had warned him about the boucca and not getting too close. But he’d been distracted by the boy with the ridiculous donkey head under his arm, and the uncomfortable surge of emotion that had washed over him when he saw him take the girl by the hand.

  The boucca wrinkled his nose, an expression of grim delight on his pale-green face. “I smell a Faerie killer.”

  “And I smell a pook,” Sonny ground out between clenched teeth. “Which of us is more pungent, I wonder?”

  A long, tense silence passed between them, and then the boucca threw back his head and laughed, releasing his punishing grip on Sonny’s larynx. “What’s a Janus doing down in Hell’s Kitchen on a day o’ the Nine?”

  Sonny rubbed at his neck, wincing. Sizing the boucca up, he dug into his messenger bag and tossed one of the onyx beads at him. “Where is it? What is it?”

  The boucca caught the bead out of the air, stared at it flatly for a long moment, and then tossed it back. “Not a clue.”

  “All right, then.” If Sonny was going to get any answers at all, he thought, he was going to have to play rough. A Faerie could be compelled to obey commands if one knew the secret of its true name. Sonny stared the boucca in the eyes and said gravely, “I do compel thee—”

  The boucca covered his pointed ears and began keening.

  Sonny pushed on, relentless. “By thy truest of names, I do compel thee, and thou shalt obey my commands, for I do call thee Robin Goodfellow.”

  The boucca’s shrieks suddenly turned to peals of laughter. “Oh, please!” he said finally, gasping in mirth. “That name’s not exactly the earth-shattering secret it once was, you know.” He wiped a tear from his eye, chortling. “You stupid great yob—you should get out to see more theater!”

  Sonny stood there, chagrined, the heat of embarrassment creeping up his cheeks.

  “Shakespeare spilled those beans quite some time ago. How do you expect me to go onstage night after night if every time someone chirps ‘Robin Goodfellow’ I fall to the ground in mindless submission?” The boucca shook his head in amused disgust. “I warned old Willie—gave him a scorching case of fleas, even. Bah—writers! Stubborn lot. Well, after that, the name sort of lost its potency, you know? Same with ‘Puck,’ so don’t bother trying. I can no more be compelled by those names than if you had just hallooed ‘Hey, buddy!’ at me.” He snorted and gave a parting shot. “Auberon’s breeding ’em up stupid these days, I see.”

  Sonny’s hands clenched into fists at the insult. Then he remembered the script he’d found, with the scribbled words: Kelley’s Script—Please Return (this means YOU, Bob!)

  Bouccas were notorious thieves.

  “Let’s try this, then,” he said. “I do compel thee by the name of…Bob.”

  The boucca stiffened and stopped in his tracks. He turned and pegged Sonny with a shrewd gaze.

  “Will you help me?” Sonny implored.

  Relenting, Bob the boucca said, “I’ve not a clue as to where it is. But…I do know what it is.”

  “It’s a kelpie, isn’t it?”

  “If you already know what it is, then why do you need me?”

  That seemed to confirm Sonny’s suspicions. He could press the boucca further on the matter of the kelpie, but there were other things he needed to understand now, and he didn’t know how far he could push his luck. “All right,” he said. “Another question, then.”

  Bob waited.

  “That girl. The actress playing Titania.” He nodded in the direction of the dressing rooms where she’d gone. “She saw me just now.”

  “I noticed that.”

  Sonny was beginning to lose patience. “I was veiled and she saw me.”

  Bob tilted his head, his expression maddeningly inscrutable, and said, “How is that possible for a mortal?”

  “That is my question to you. How is it possible for a mortal to have seen through my veil?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “What are you saying?” Sonny’s wariness of the ancient, powerful boucca warred with his absolute need to know.

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  Sonny took a deep breath. If he angered Bob, the boucca was likely to just vanish without another word. “Please. It is…important to me.”

  Bob cocked his head to one side, considering that. He seemed to shift and change in size and proportion ever so slightly as Sonny spoke to him. It was subtle, hard to notice unless you were only looking at him sideways—as if his appearance mirrored the slipperiness of what he said.

  “Do you know why Auberon shut the Gates, young Sonny Flannery?” the boucca asked.

  “Of course I do.” Sonny barely contained his frustration. “I’m a bloody Janus.”

  “You’re a Janus, certainly. And I’m sure you’re a fine one, at that,” Bob said, almost without sarcasm. He put up a hand to forestall any interruption. “And you’re a changeling—cradle-took from a mortal home to the Otherworld, just like the rest of your kind. But, unlike the rest of them…I happen to know that you’re also the only Janus that Auberon handpicked to raise under his own roof, at the very center of the Unseelie Court, almost as if you were a son.”

  “Do you have a point to make?”

  “Aye. I do.” Bob nodded slowly, returning Sonny’s steady gaze. “But not about you. About him.”

  Sonny knew well how Auberon was regarded by the majority of changelings and also by a good portion of the Faerie Folk: with suspicion and with fear.

  But the king had treated Sonny like family and, despite an arrogance that could border on casual cruelty, he had never given the young mortal a reason not to trust him. If Sonny was to be honest, Auberon had his loyalty and respect.

  “What tale did the mighty Auberon spin by the fire for his panting Janus pup about the closing of the Gates?” Bob asked, his voice thick with mockery.

  Sonny glared at him. “He closed the Gates to protect us.”

  “Which ‘us,’ little changeling boy?” Bob cocked his head, his tone quizzical. “The mortal us or the Faerie us?”

  “Both. He did it to protect both worlds—each from the other.”

  “What you call ‘protection,’ a goodly portion of the Fair Folk call ‘imprisonment.’ What else did good king Auberon tell you? What dire threat from the mortal world was our benevolent lord and master keeping his loyal subjects safe and sound from?”

  Sonny frowned. He failed to see what this had to do with him or the kelpie or the girl or anything he actually wanted to learn from the boucca. But he obviously had no choice but to play along with Bob’s game of questions. “He told me that, around the turn of the last century, as the mortal world measures time, a human woman found a way through one of the Gates to the Otherworld. And that she stole a Faerie child right from out of the cradle and escaped back to the mortal realm. So the king closed the Gates to keep it from happening again.”

  “And there’s thundering great hypocrisy for you!” Bob did a little jig and
swung himself effortlessly up onto the landing of a set of escape stairs. His eyes glowed fiercely. “Putting aside for the moment the fact that stealing children in the other direction was—up until that time—a sort of national pastime for the Fair Folk…don’t you think that whole story is a bit odd? Pretty drastic measures for one wee bairn gone missing, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It wasn’t just any Faerie child that mortal stole!” Sonny protested. “Granted it may have been a harsh decision at the time, but Auberon was well within his rights to make it. The child was his heir!”

  Bob was relentless. “And the fact that you were, what, the son of a poor crofter? Or that your friend who waits outside the door—whatsisname? Maddox—that he was a mere blacksmith’s child…did that then make it all right for the Faerie to cross thresholds and steal you from your folk?”

  “I…”

  “Do you not think that your own mother wept bitter tears at the loss? Tear at her pretty, dark hair and fall to the ground in an agony of mourning for her stolen child?”

  “What do you know of my mother?” Sonny demanded, suddenly furious.

  “Pretty thing, strong-willed, and a wild heart. Blue eyes. Lovely face…when it wasn’t all twisted up with grieving, that is.” The boucca spoke in low, thrumming tones. The glint of mischief was gone from his eyes. “The theft of you tore her apart. Tore her family apart. They all thought she’d gone mad. Husband up and left because he couldn’t stand the pain in her.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Do you not think a woman like that might have sworn revenge?” The Fae’s eyes glowed green as his stare bored into Sonny. “A child for a child?”

  “My mother—”

  “Could never have crossed into the Otherworld. No matter how strong, nor wild, nor willful. Not without help.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Yes. I did.”

  Sonny could only stand there staring at the boucca, mystified.

  “Now. There’s something to think about, eh?” Bob fell silent then. He crouched on the landing, utterly still, watching Sonny with his unblinking eyes.