“They are pretty,” I muttered, eyes on the floor again.
“They are dirty and crude, and sometimes they rot.” She was referring to an incident that same spring, when a discarded crow’s corpse went bad behind a set of classic fairytales. “Why won’t you just stop?” she sighed and sat down on my stripped bed. For a moment I almost felt sorry for my mother then, she looked so tired and vulnerable, eyes so honest and blue. But pity was a feeling I just couldn’t afford.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” I raged, pulled the white ribbon from my hair and threw it at her. It landed like a silken snake across her navy thighs. She picked it up and let it slide between her fingers, a thoughtful expression on her face.
“I put that in so you would look nice tonight,” she told me. “Father’s business associates are coming, you know that. I want us all to look our best.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s important that Father makes a good impression.” She reached the ribbon back to me. “Put it in … Go on…”
“I’d rather wear a turd on my head,” I said and stomped my foot, to no dramatic effect on the white carpet.
“I know you would.” Voice weary. “But just for tonight, Cassie, please be your best—”
“Maybe you should just hide me away up here,” I said. “Maybe you should leave me alone!”
“Yes,” she said, rising from the bed, lips a thin red line. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you should stay here for a while and think about what you’ve done.” She crossed the floor, paused in the doorway. “Put everything back in order,” she said, looking at the torn-up room. “You will be spending quite some time up here.” She went outside and closed the door. I could hear her footsteps as she disappeared down the hall, and later when she came back, jingling with the set of keys, heard her turn one in my door. Locking away the embarrassment that was me. I am sure she let out a breath of relief.
Unbidden tears formed in my eyes then, and I was sobbing as I hauled the mattress back onto the bedframe, dripping salt down on the bloodstains. I could hear the preparations downstairs: furniture pushed across the floor, bottles clinking together while they were put out on display. My father’s dark voice was a murmur through the floorboards, and young Olivia’s cheery voice giggled at something he said.
I shuddered.
I sat down on my unmade bed, pulled up my knees and cried, looked around at the mess Mother’s search had left. The books on the floor and the contents of emptied drawers: coloring pencils, notebooks, a collection of seashells and marbles littered the white sea of my floor.
I fell asleep on the bed, hugging my pillow.
I woke up due to the smell.
The room had grown dark around me; night had arrived. A cold draft came in through the window. Downstairs, I could hear them all, laughing and talking. Glasses clinked together; cutlery met china. But it was the peppery scent that engulfed me, and kept my attention enthralled.
My friend was with me, sitting by my side.
When Pepper-Man saw I was awake, he lifted a hand and put it on top of my head, tousling my hair in silent sympathy.
“They tore everything up,” I told him. “They threw all your gifts away.”
“Not to worry,” he said in my head. “I can make new gifts.”
“She will only find and throw away those, too,” I said.
“Then I will make even more.” His black lips split in a grin; his murky eyes blinked. A wreath of blackthorn twigs rested on his white, white hair. He took it off then, and placed it on my head instead. “You are my princess. It does not matter what your mother says or does, you will always, always have me.”
I smiled and touched the wreath he’d just given me, felt the prickly thorns against my skin. “They’re having a party downstairs,” I said. “But she has locked me up—I can’t go.”
“Would you like to?” His fingers were on my knee, caressing it softly.
“No, it’s a stupid thing. But I would like to eat. And I really need to pee.”
“Come with me, then, we will have a feast of our own, down by birch and brook, deep in the stones.”
“But I am locked up.”
“We won’t go through that door.”
“How will we go, then?” I looked at him wide-eyed.
He nodded to the window.
“It’s too far down. I can’t jump, I’ll break a leg.”
“Ride on my back, then,” he told me—and I did. I clung to his scrawny backside as his spindly legs entered the windowsill and the cold night air hit my skin. Pepper-Man crouched there, with me on his back, then he swung us both into the night.
* * *
A word on faeries, because I think you might be confused: they are not what you think they are. It always baffles me to see faeries in films and recent novels. Either they are happy elementals, strolling about in the woods looking after all living creatures like guardians of the earth, or they’re an alien race living among us since time immemorial, hiding behind some veil or deep underground; monsters, pagan gods, and stuff of nightmares. The latter is the more correct approach, of course. People used to be afraid of them; they stole milk and children, abducted brides and handsome men, tricked and cursed. Nothing to love. Fairytales were warnings, not an invitation.
Faeries are neither alien nor truly inhuman, though. They are just no longer alive.
Not that all dead people are faeries. I have come to believe that it’s all about the will to life, the strength of the Ki, the power of one’s essence. They are not the walking dead of movies, either, but spirits that have transformed and morphed into something new, a different kind of being. Faeries rarely remember ever being human; some barely look like people anymore. They live in the wild and feed off the land, attach themselves to life like leeches. They adopt traits and manners from their sources of life: trees, brooks, animals, us. They are a ragged band; some ugly, some strange. None of them are shimmering, unless they live near water, few of them have gossamer wings, unless they feed off dragonflies. I have never experienced them as particularly wise or kind. How clever can a farmer from the seventh century be, even after some hundred years living as a fox-hugging faerie? Still, they retain some humanity, a root. Desire, for one, a drive to reproduce—hence all those stories about faerie children and maidens lost. Hunger for riches is a human thing too, and vengeance is another. Those who live on humans are of course better at acting—and looking—like one.
Knowing what living humans want.
My Pepper-Man claims to have lived mainly on birch trees and ash before he found me. It was through his transformation that I realized how it all had to be. I will tell you more about that later, but for now, let’s continue further into the woods.
VI
That first time I slipped into the woods with Pepper-Man, I thought it all such a grand adventure. I felt proud to have escaped Mother’s punishment and her unfair accusations. I can’t recall being afraid at all, though the woods were dark and the destination unclear. I did have faith in my Pepper-Man, though. He walked beside me like a graveyard wraith, his dry hair whipping my face when the wind caught hold of it, his tattered clothes coiling and writhing around his skinny legs. I remember the full moon hanging in the sky, its pale light filtering through the branches. Even though I had known the trees in those woods my whole life, climbed them and picked their leaves, they looked like strangers to me now, draped in darkness and icy light. The path before us—one I ought to know like the back of my own hand—curled like a black snake through the underbrush. Even though I had no reason to think so, I sensed somewhere deep inside that it would lead me to places unknown.