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King Goldmouth, with his goblin’s ears, snarled into the heart of their talk. “Who cares? If a vampire I must be to live and dance and howl at the sun, then let me show my teeth! They paid their price, we’re fools not to take it! To have let them hoard it all this time. And I shall take the first, all of it, for I alone thought to turn the wheel again. I shall drink it and live forever and rule forever and eat forever and turn utterly to gold—don’t you look at my arm like it’s poison!—and none of you will ever be able to stick a knife in me. Goldmouth’s Feast, Ten Thousand Years Long!”
“No,” Mallow said softly, but in her voice moved a hardness she had always known she owned in some deep cupboard of her heart, but rarely taken out, even for company. No Magic turned inside her, end over end, growing cold and implacable. She strode forward and leveled her needle-sword at the King’s throat. It joined there a sudden and unexpected green lance, balanced in the Green Wind’s lovely, jeweled hand. The Wind’s stare could have curdled stone, but she said nothing.
It happened so quickly Mallow could not afterward say for certain who moved first. Goldmouth broke the green lance as easily as a branch and seized the Green Wind’s neck in his fleshy fist. As soon as he turned from her, small and not green and with nothing but a needle as she was, Mallow buried her blade in his side. The Winds sprang toward their sister, and Mabry, too, all screaming and bellowing and Mallow could not even hear herself think. Blood gushed warmly over her hands, black clurichaun blood, night blood, and full of stars. Goldmouth pressed his golden fingers together and pushed them into the Green Wind’s throat. Green tears spilled from her eyes. She choked and gagged as he worked his hands into her.
And then the King reeled, screeching. Black starry blood streamed everywhere in inky ribbons. Mabry Muscat had drawn the Blue Wind’s azure cutlass and sliced Goldmouth’s arm off at the shoulder. The Green Wind fell to the ground, clawing at the severed arm in her mouth, dragging it out of herself, slipping in the spreading blood. Mallow tugged her needle free of the King’s sodden body. And three things happened in the same moment:
Goldmouth’s cloud-hounds shot into the air, knotting around Mabry Muscat’s throat and tying off before he could gasp. The light blew out of his eyes and his body fell to the streetside.
The Leopard of Little Breezes roared so loud and long every soul in Fairyland clapped hands over their ears.
Goldmouth’s broken hand opened on the cobblestones beside the body of the Green Wind. In its golden palm lay a tiny, dazzling green leaf.
A great battle followed—but that is not important. To be sure, Goldmouth’s clouds frothed into a rage, and the Great Cats of Nephelo rose up to fight them in the great, stormy sky. In years hence they would call the battle the Nor’Easter, for its squalls turned the heavens black and brought rain onto every head. The Red Wind shot so many clouds with her scarlet pistols and Iago, her Panther, tore so many with his teeth that afterward she would be called Cloudwyf, and the cowed nation of clouds would be hers to rule and ride. A bonny knight, Mallow rode upon Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes. With her needle stitched cloud to cloud until a thread of wind pierced a hundred hearts all in a row. Great cries were uttered, loyalties made, and far below the people of Fairyland fled home or took up their brooms and bird-mounts and carpets to join the fray. Grandbabies would be told of the day, rest you certain.
But that is a battle story, and battle stories belong to those who fight them. How a battle feels is impossible to tell, except by nonsense: It felt like a long rip. It felt like a weight landing upon me, over and over. It felt like red. It felt like a bell unringing forever. What can be told is that when Mallow and her Leopard and the Red Wind and all her brothers and sisters landed, Goldmouth still lay in the wreckage of his black blood, dying in between his breaths. Beside him, two strangers stood whole and with so much sorrow in their faces that the Red Wind staggered to see it. But beside the sorrow lay a rueful humor, as though a joke had been told while the war raged, and only now did these two youths catch the punch line.
One was a pretty young woman with brown, curling hair and a simple white dress with a few pale ribbons trailing from it. She wore a bonnet of valerian and heartsease. The color in her cheeks gleamed rich as bread and sun-rosy, and her feet were bare.
The other was a man with a neat, pointed beard and kindly eyes which had become the most beguiling shade of green. He was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. In his hands he held a long green lance, quite whole.
“He died to save her,” the Leopard growled. “And now he must take her place. It’s different for
each Wind. Red will need to be tricked by her replacement into putting on a white gown. Gold will be killed. So it goes. Long ago, a girl named Jenny Chicory loved a boy, and meant to be a water-duchess in the Seelie before going on the Great Hunt. She drowned saving a little boy in green, a boy she did not know from a stranger, from a pirate band with a whale on their side. She could not let him go down into the waves, and woke up all in green with a job to do and no more a happy maid with a suitor at her door. Now Mabry’s done it, and he can’t take it back, nor go home with her to Winesap any more than she could leave the sky windless. The gales of the upper Fairyland heavens would shatter her, as they would have shattered him. In the doldrums of summer, sometimes, they arrange to meet at sea, where the sails droop and crow’s nests swelter. I imagine they’ll keep that date.”
Jenny looked at her Leopard with a grand and sorry love. “We are used to it,” she said thickly. “And storms must sometimes come to Winesap, too.”
Mallow looked down at the dying King. His breath did not stop or slow—a clurichaun his age had reserves of will waiting to be tested. He might live years in distress but not die. She considered what to do. She considered the Gremlin and the Green Wind. She considered poor, crumbling Pandemonium. She considered the shattered goblet and that blue and cloudy blood, the wettest of all possible Wet Magics, mingling with all the other blood that had poured out onto the square, wretched, dull, of use to no one.
Mallow knelt. She drew her needle and pricked the thumb of King Goldmouth’s golden hand. Slowly, as slowly as he had pushed his fingers into helpless mouths, she pushed her needle in, pulled it through, and made her stitch. Beneath her hands, a thick, glassy thread appeared. She made another stitch, and another, hauling up the clurichaun’s feet to his chest and beginning to cry a little despite herself, so exhausted and revolted and determined and sorry was she.
“I told you,” she said as she sewed. “I didn’t want to muddle in Politicks—and there is always Politicks, even when folk promise it’s just a party, or a revival, or an exhibition of every kind of magic. I didn’t want to meet a Fairy boy or dance at Fairy balls. I only wanted to read my books and learn a bit of magic. Why couldn’t you have been a better King? Why couldn’t you have left that poor world alone? Why couldn’t you have been better?” She hit him with her fist and he did not protest. She had not hit him hard.
By now, Goldmouth’s knees covered his face. He could not speak. A very neat seam ran across his nose. His eyes pleaded, but Mallow went on sewing up the King, stitch by stitch, into a package no bigger than her hand. The last of his astrological tattoos showed on the top of it, and she handed the whole thing over to the Red Wind to close away. Mallow’s skin dripped starry streaks of royal blood.
The girl who would find herself, against long odds, Queen before dinnertime stood up and looked at her new friends, at her darling Leopard, at the glittering needle in her hand. Then she looked to the empty, hollowed-out city.
“Well,” Mallow said, feeling a wave of powerful practicality break on her heart. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
How to Raise a Minotaur
When I was young, I was a minotaur.
I grew out of it, of course. You can hardly believe it now, I know, such an upstanding young woman, in a blue suit, with a briefcase. No one with a briefcase can have such a secret. And yet, my horns once pierced the dining room ceiling. You grew out of your obsessions with dinosaurs and primary colors. I grew out of shaggy, bowed legs and hooves like copper clanging. We are not so different.
It is not easy to raise a minotaur. They break everything in sight, instinctively, compulsively. If there is a crystal dish on the table, a minotaur will seize it up and crush it to pieces in her teeth, weeping all the while, helpless to stop herself. It is her nature, and though you ought not to punish her for it, you will, and severely. She will look at you with huge, bovine eyes, uncomprehending, wanting so keenly to please you. That dark stare will sink you in misery, and you will buy her a lollipop. Thus, she will look for sweets after every act of destruction, nose your pockets for sugar, and you will want to hit her, because your amputee grandmother gave you that dish when you graduated from college. Maybe you will hit her. She will greet your slaps with those same cow-eyes, the same trembling, hairy jaw.
Your friends and colleagues will, of course, question your sexuality. A child like that cannot have come from sweet, quiet Dan and Barbara, Caroline and John, Laurence and Janet. What, exactly, have you done to deserve such a changeling in your expensive, honest, Amish-built crib? Rumors will fly: Dan angered his boss by trading on company information on the stock market, and the CEO—faceless demiurge!—punished John with such feats of black magic as men of that order are capable of. Caroline fell in love with a mail-room cretin so hopeless that he could hardly manage the mechanics of mounting her. Laurence, pitiful man, fashioned a complex machine in his basement out of catalog parts so that Janet and her pre-linguistic paramour could achieve simultaneous orgasm, hermetic revelation, and explosive conception while Laurence turned the crank. You will have to answer these suburban accusations with aplomb, a smile, and a proffered cocktail. Your minotaur will be of no help to you as she sits in the corner and devours her dolls. The clock in the hall will tick; she will make plans to eat it later.
In school, the minotaur will be unwelcome and unloved. There will be talk of transferring her to a special needs course. However, your minotaur, her pigtails arranged to hide growing horns, will not be unintelligent. That has never been the issue with such children. In fact, your minotaur will love to read, will devour, quite literally, whole libraries in an insatiable passion for books. She will need glasses by the time she is five, so fervent will her reading be. Of course this is not a generally accepted method of learning, but when your minotaur pipes up at breakfast and lists the attributes of cephalopods in alphabetical order, you will have no doubt of its efficacy. Unfortunately, third grade teachers are rarely so enlightened. When she is discovered with Tolkien halfway down her throat, weeping Elvish declensions, she will be put aside with the other difficult children, in a classroom with no sharp edges. You will be sad, but by that time your other children will be starting to show their talents, their bright blond hair, their eager, attentive faces that never contort in paroxysms of bovine pleasure.
It will not be long before she starts demanding youths and maidens. This, obviously, will present a logistical problem. My advice is to begin with dolls. This will forestall the inevitable. The small minotaur hardly knows what she begs for—it is a desire, a demand which comes from her deepest marrow, her protoplasmic self, her most regressed and atavistic heart. She will be satisfied by plastic and cornsilk and eyes that slide open when the head is tilted. She will rip off their heads in disturbing ways and line her bed with their bodies. You will try counseling, but the Adamic language that you have learned to understand will not be greeted with warmth or empathy by a board of professionals. Best to keep up a steady supply of dolls while such placebos suffice.
With puberty, all things become more difficult. Girls will be girls. One day you will go to tell her to come down to dinner and open the door on the football quarterback entangled in her sheets, an expression of horror and need on his face, which will be buried between her brown, vaguely furry breasts. Parts of him will be in her mouth—she does not yet really know what she wants to do with these youths, much as a dog who finally catches a cat will often just stare at it in confusion. His head did not come off easily, so your minotaur made do with the rest of him. Next week it will be the chess club, all seven of them, kneeling around her in awe, straining towards her, hoping she will chose them to kiss, to taste, to swallow. Of course the quarterback will never tell anyone that he laid a hand on the freak from special ed, and the chess club admits to no acquaintance who cannot master the Lasker-Bauer combination, so for awhile, at least, you will be safe. Until she starts bringing home cheerleaders.
With these girls, the minotaur will be shy. They are everything she is not: shining examples of soccer prowess, after-school activities, 4-H club, even an academic decathlete or two. Girls who love horses, the color pink, boyfriends with red cars, ice cream, getting into college. Your minotaur will ply them home with promises of community service credit, a note on their record about working with the developmentally disabled. In her room she will gawk at them, ask them to pet her, to love her. They will not understand, and will bring her a drink of water or ask her to work extra-hard on her multiplication tables, unable to comprehend her lectures on calculus and probability. When they hug her goodbye, the minotaur will be quite dizzy. Eventually, when one is too beautiful for her to bear, your minotaur will bite her. Perhaps on the shoulder, perhaps on the hand, or the knee. She will not bite hard, at first. The 4-H girl will recoil, but then remember her teacher’s advice not to be shocked at anti-social behavior from such a problematic child. The next time will be harder. Your daughter will know such a thrill when her teeth first touch flesh—something like what you felt the first time you tasted vanilla, ran a mile, held your first child, had an orgasm, all together and all at once. A terrible rightness will fill her blood. The tips of her fingers will tingle, like the first time she ate a book. She will try to cover up her act with a kiss, like the ones she gave the boys. Most of the girls will not understand. Maybe one, maybe two will kiss her back, ashamed but excited, and your minotaur will find other ways to taste those girls—but it will not be as good as biting, and she will know she is not like any other girl, even the girls who are not like other girls.
If you are a perceptive parent, or very well read, you will come to a decision. If you are not, well, you have my pity. You and your spouse will sit down to the kitchen table amid bank bills and health insurance policies and half a pork roast and say to each other: what else can we do? You will draw up plans: plumbing, ven
