Perhaps a hundred years passed.

  He held a flask of water to my lips. Quicksilver, crystal, icicle, liquid diamond. Just water. Followed by a blackberry. A raspberry. An almond. The tip of his finger dipped in honey. I sucked it eagerly.

  “Milkmaid,” he said.

  “Go away.” I pressed the hand that pressed my face, keeping him near. “I have nothing left to give you. And anyway, why should Jadio win? Keep your gold. Go back to the Ways. There’s a war coming. No one’s safe…”

  “Hush.” He slipped a purple grape into my mouth. A green grape. A sliver of apple. His scars were livid against his frowning face.

  “Milkmaid.” He sighed. “I can do nothing without a bargain. Even if I–but do you see? It doesn’t work without a bargain.”

  I felt stronger now. I could sit up. Uncoil from the fetal curl. My legs screamed as I stretched them straight.

  He’d been kneeling over me. Now he kept one knee bent beneath him and drew up the other to rest his chin on. This position seemed an easy one. The frown between his brows was not of pain but inquiry.

  “I heard how you were… I could not come sooner. I was too deep within the Veil.” He smiled. His teeth glowed. “With the Deep Lords, even–in the Fathom Realms beneath the sea. Do I smell like fish?”

  I sniffed. Green and sweet and sunlight. Maybe a little kelp as an afterthought. Nothing unpleasant. On an impulse, I leaned my nose against his neck and inhaled again. He moved his cheek against mine, and whispered with some shortness of breath:

  “Milkmaid, have you nothing to offer me?”

  I shook my head slightly so as not to disconnect from him.

  “You are not to take my cows in trade! Gods know what you Gentry would do to them.”

  It was he who drew away, laughing, and I almost whimpered at the loss.

  “Much good they’ll do you where you’re going.”

  “Eh,” I shrugged, pretending a coldness I did not feel. “Da has probably already sold them off for mead.”

  “Perhaps he did,” my friend agreed. “Perhaps he sold them to a hunchbacked beggar whose worth seemed less than a beating, but who offered him, in exchange for the fair Annat and the dulcet Manu, a wineskin that would never empty.”

  For that alone I would’ve whapped him, had he not tucked a wedge of cheese into my mouth. The finest cheese from the finest cow that ever lived. It was like being right there with her, in that homely barn, where I sang Mam’s songs for hours and Annat watched me with trustful eyes.

  “You have my cows already.”

  “Aye.”

  “So I can’t trade ‘em. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

  “Nay.”

  I smoothed my silk dress. Three days worth of wrinkles smirked back at me.

  “Time moves differently, you said, in the Veil?”

  He nodded carefully, smiling with the very corners of his mouth.

  “It does indeed.” He sounded almost hopeful.

  “Well. That being so, would you take in trade a piece of my future? See,” I rushed to explain, “if he gets that gold, Jadio means me to wear his crown. Or a halo, I can’t tell. When that happens, you may have both with my blessing, and all the choirs of angels and sycophants with ‘em.”

  “I do not want his crown,” the little crooked man growled. For all he had such a tortuous mangle to work with, he leapt to his feet far faster than I could on a spry day.

  “You’re to wed him then?” he demanded, glaring down.

  Oh.

  This needed correcting–and quickly.

  “He’s to wed me, Mister, provided he deems this night’s dowry suitably vulgar. Oh, do get on going!” I begged him. “Let us speak no more of trade. Leave me with this tinderbox and caper on your merry way. For surely as straw makes me sneeze, I can withstand Jadio’s torments long enough to die of them, and then it will all be over. But if he marries me, I might live another three score, and thatwould be beyond bearing.”

  He snorted. A single green flame leapt to his finger, dancing on the opal there. The light lengthened his face, estranged the angles from the hollows, smoothed his twists, twisted his mouth.

  “I’ve a trade for your future.” His voice was very soft. “I’ll spin you a king’s ransom of gold tonight–in exchange for your firstborn child.”

  “Jadio’s spawn?” I laughed balefully, remembering that hot dry hand on my neck. “Take him–and take his father too if you’ve a large enough sack.”

  “You barter the flesh of your flesh too complacently.”

  “No one cares about my flesh. It’s not even mine anymore. I’m not even meanymore.”

  “Milkmaid.” He stared at me. It was strange to have to look up at him. How tall he seemed suddenly, with that green flame burning now upon his brow. “Some of my dearest friends are consummate deceivers, born to lie as glibly as they slip their skins for a fox’s fur. I was sure they were lying when they told me you were sillier than you seemed, soft in the head and witless as a babe. Now, I must believe them. To my sorrow.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Your flesh,” he murmured, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “How can you say no one cares for it, when I would risk the wrath of two realms to spare it from harm?”

  My heart too full to speak, my eyes too full to see, I lifted both my hands to him. When he grasped them by the wrists, I tugged gently, urging him back to the floor, and to me.

  He fingered the ribbon of my bodice. Triple-knotted as it was, it fell apart at his touch. The sleeve of my shift sagged down my shoulder. Our eyes locked. There was a pearl button at his collar. A black pearl. I unhooked it. For the first time I noticed the richness of the black velvet suit he wore, its fantastic embroidery in ivory and silver, the braids and beads in his hair.

  “Were you courting a Deep Lord’s daughter?” I asked. “Is that why you were in the Fathom Realms? Did the distant sound of my sneezes interrupt you mid-woo?”

  The sound he made was maybe a “No,” more of a sigh, slightly a groan. Then I was kissing him, or he me, and we were both too busy happily undressing each other to do much talking, although when we did, it all came out sounding like poetry, even if I don’t remember a word of what we said.

  Of my wedding three days later I will say nothing.

  That brutal night of consummation, and all nights following until Jadio marched east with his armies to meet the Archabbot at the drowned city of Lirhu, I will consign to dust and neglect.

  Though I would not have wished Jadio near me again but we had an impregnable wall spined in spikes between us, I did regret the loss of the pageboy Sebastian. Upon taking his leave, he told me with his usual feral insouciance, “I’ll probably not return, Gordie. You know that?”

  I knew the look in his yellow eye–that of a fox in a trap, just before he chews off his paw to escape. Not long was that rusty iron bracelet for Sebastian’s wrist. Nor would too many months pass, I guessed, before King Jadio learned this cub would never again come to heel.

  “Luck.” I clasped his arm. “Cunning. Speed. Whatever you need, may it await you at the crossroads.”

  “Same to you, Your Majesty,” he said with a cheeky grin. (He had no other kind.) “If I can’t stick around to see you hacked apart and flung about, you may as well live a few years yet.”

  I flicked the back of his russet head. “So young and yet so vile.”

  “You’ll miss me.”

  “More than I can say.”

  “Gordie?”

  “Aye?”

  “When he comes to claim his own, ask yourself, the One-Eyed Witch lives where?” I blinked. That was the name of an old children’s skip-rope rhyme. But Sebastian did not let me catch up with my thoughts. “Go to her. She’ll have a notion how you’re to go on.”

  Gentry pronouncements are often cryptic, indefinite, misleading and vacuous–which makes them, amongst all oracular intimations, the most irritating. But just try to interrogate a fox when everything but his tail is already out the door.

  In my neatest printing, I wrote, “The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where?” on a thin strip of parchment. When this was done, I whittled a locket out of ash, the way Mam had taught me, shut Sebastian’s advice up safe inside it, strung the locket with a ribbon, and wore it near my heart. It had not the heft of ivory, but it comforted me nonetheless.

  After Jadio’s departure came nine months of gestation, the worst of which I endured alone.

  I was face down in a chamber pot one morning when a messenger brought me news of the Archabbot’s victory at the Cliffs of Lir outside the drowned city. Heavy losses to both sides, after which Jadio’s soldiers retreated, regrouped, and launched several skirmishes that further decimated the Archabbot’s armies.

  Some weeks later, another messenger came to shake me from my afternoon nap. The Archabbot had found the lost heir of Lirhu wandering the ruins of the city. The prince, dead King Lorez’s only son, was still enchanted in the form of a great black bear and wore a golden crown to prove it. This bear had challenged Jadio to hand-to-hand combat in the field for the right to rule Leressa.

  Jadio had defeated, beheaded and skinned him, then drove the Archabbot’s armies out of Lirhu and into the Wayward Swamps.

  In the turmoil of their retreat, the Holy Soldiers abandoned a most singular object: a glass coffin bearing the sleeping Princess of Leressa, whom no spell could wake. This too they had discovered in the ruins of the drowned city. Jadio claimed the princess as a prize of war but did not destroy her as he had her brother. He would have sent the coffin back with the bearskin (it was explained) but he feared some harm might befall it on the road.

  The bearskin made me sick every time I saw it, so I avoided the great hall and took my meals in my rooms.

  When at last the hour of the birth came upon me (and an early hour it was, sometime between midnight and the dusk before dawn), I bolted the door to my room and paced the carpet like a she-wolf.

  I wanted no one. No chirurgerar with his bone saws and skully grin. No Prickster midwife with tainted needles and an iron key for me to suck that I might lock up the pain. I’d do this alone or die of it. Mam survived my bursting into this world, after all, screaming blood and glory. Mam survived fourteen years of me before she up and snipped her mortal coil from the shuttle of life.

  “Mam!” I pressed my back hard against the bedpost. “Please. Let Jadio’s spawn be stillborn. Let him be grotesque. Let him be soup, so long as I don’t look on him and love him. I don’t want to love this child, Mam. Don’t let me love this child.”

  After that I screamed a great deal. And once I fainted. I seem to remember waking to a voice telling me that this was not the sort of thing one could really sleep through, and for the sake of my cows, my house, my hope of the ever-after, would I please push?

  If he hadn’t’ve called me Milkmaid in all that begging, I might’ve chosen to ignore him utterly. But he did, so I didn’t.

  Some hours later the babe was born.

  “Give her over, Mister!”

  “That your rancor may cast her forth into yon hearth fire?”

  “I did not know she would be yours! Come on! Give. She’ll need to feed.”

  “Had I tits, Milkmaid, I’d never let her go.”

  I smirked sweatily, winning the spat. His cradling arms slipped her onto my lap, where he had arranged clean sheets and blankets, a soft pillow for her to rest upon. She was a white little thing. White lashes, white lips, white eyes. Silent when she looked at me. No mistaking her for a mortal child. A Gentry-babe through and through.

  “What’s your name?” I asked my daughter. She blinked up from her nursing, caught my eye, grinned. Gentry-babes are born with all their teeth.

  The little crooked man laughed. “She’ll never tell.”

  “Not even her mother?”

  He laid hands on my belly and the bleeding stopped. Aches, throbs, stabbing pains, deep bruises–all vanished. Warmth spread through my body. He stroked my hair once before walking quickly to the hearth, turning his hunched back to me. I stared after him. Best, perhaps, he could not see the look on my face.

  “That you are her mother does not matter,” he muttered. “There is war between our people. The Gentry have learned never to speak our names out loud. Not to anyone. Too much is at stake. Our lives. Our souls.”

  “You have those, then?”

  No answer. He crouched near the hearth, poking at the blinding green flames there. In my lap the baby choked.

  “What’s wrong?” I yelped. I lifted her, tried to burp her. “Did I–I didn’t curse her, did I? When I was giving birth? And all those times before. Little one, my sweetest girl, I didn’t mean you! I meant Jadio’s son. Never you.”

  My friend came to my side. “It isn’t that. It’s the milk. The more magic flowing through a Gentry-babe’s veins, the less able we are to suckle at a mortal’s breast.”

  “She’ll starve!”

  “Nay, sweet,” said he, “for do I not have the prize cow of cream-makers in my very barn?”

  The panic clenching my heart eased. “She can drink cow milk?”

  “She’ll suck it like nectar from Annat’s udder. It’s what we like best.”

  “But–“ I stared at my baby’s still white face, the bead of milk trembling on her lip. I wiped it off quickly, for a rash of color spread from it across her skin, along with a feverish heat.

  He touched one finger to her mouth. The rash vanished. “She must eat. She will die if she remains, Milkmaid. You owe me her life.”

  “What?”

  “Our bargain.”

  “You said Jadio’s–“

  “I said your firstborn.”

  “You didn’t say ours.”

  “Nay, but it mightn’t have been.”

  “You!” I picked up the nearest pillow and threw it at his head. Another and again–until the bed was in disarray. “You swindler! You cheat! You seducer of innocent maidens!”

  My arm was weak, but he did not duck my missiles. Pillows bounced from his fine black clothes. He stood very still.

  “Take me with you!”

  “I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  “You are wed to another.”

  “As if Gentry cared for such mortal nonsense!”

  He shrugged. By this I knew he cared.

  “I was sent,” he said softly, “to fetch three things from the mortal realm. My quest is done. When I return to the Veil, the Ways will close behind me and I will breathe this cursed air no more. You cannot follow.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “You came to me. To help me. You took the Ways. I’lltake the roads. I’d chase you to the Valwode itself, Mister, no matter that it’s forbidden. Into the Fathom Realms even! Do you think I fear the drowning?”

  He shook his head again, more slowly this time, as if it wearied him. Then he approached the bed and lifted up our daughter from my arms. She sighed deeply, whether content or dismayed no one but she could say. My tears fell onto his sleeve. When they touched him, they turned to diamonds. None of my doing, I’m sure.

  As he made to leave, I grabbed the tail of his velvet jacket, fisted it hard as I could and yanked. I knew it could shred to smoke the instant he desired it. Velvet it remained.

  Desperately I cried, “A bargain! I’ll bargain for the chance to win you. Both of you. It doesn’t work without a bargain, you said. Let me…”

  Before I’d blinked, he’d turned back ‘round again, his free hand flush against my cheek. His fingers were cool, except for the silver ring, which burned.

  “Gordie Oakhewn,” he said, “you have seven days to guess my true name. If on the seventh day you call it out loud, the Veil shall part for you, and I will pull you through into my household, where you might stay forever with the child, with me–as, as my–in whatever capacity you wish. This is our bargain. Do not break it.”

  I pressed a frantic kiss to his palm. “Call you by name? But you said Gentry never–“

  Smoke.

  Gentry leave semblances of the children they steal. My semblance was a red-faced boy-brat who squalled like a typhoon and slurped my breasts dry. For two days he kept me awake all hours and scratched me with his hot red hands. On the third day he sickened and turned black. We buried him in the garden of Jadio House. A peach tree shaded his grave. I wondered if any lingering levin of Gentry magic would affect the taste of its fruit.

  The chirurgerar assured me that sudden deaths were not uncommon among firstborns, that Jadio’s was a virile enough appetite to populate a dozen nurseries, that it was none of my fault. It was kind of him. His grin seemed less skully than sad. He left me with a soothing drought which I did not drink. I had packing to do. Maps to consult. Lists to make. Lists of every name I ever knew or could invent.

  That night I recited to myself:

  “There’s Aiken and Aimon and Anwar and Abe

  "Corbett and Conan and Gilbert and Gabe

  "There’s Berton and Birley and Harbin and Hal

  "Keegan and Keelan and Jamie and Sal

  "There’s Herrick and Hewett or whom you might please

  "So long as you love me, your name might be…”

  “Sneeze?” asked the three-legged fox who had climbed through my casement window. “He’s not the one allergic to straw, Gordie. Remember?”

  “Sebastian!” I scrambled up from my escritoire. “How do you do?–you’ve learned to skinslip!–no more iron bracelet?–what a handsome fox!–your poor hand!”

  Next a vixen slid through the aperture, shuddering off her russet fur as she leapt to the floor to stand bright in her own bare skin. Her hair flamed loose about her shoulders. The only thing she wore was a heavy gray signet ring on her index finger. I’d seen it once before on the Archabbot’s own hand. There was a smear of rust upon it that I knew to be blood. Had she taken it off his dead body? Had she bitten it off his living one? Either thought made me grin.

 

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