Rowan and Heather

(continued)

By Eilis O'Neal

When she came home from work the next day, she found Rhys leaning against her door.

"Hi," she said. "Are you meeting Heather here?"

Rhys stepped out from under the bulb above her door, both standing now outside the halo of light. He wore, she noticed, a long black cloak with a high collar — the kind people wore to Renaissance fairs or bought in shoping selling gothic clothing. He smiled at her, a cat's smile.

"Oh no, not today. I was waiting for you."

"For me? Why?"

He kept letting something shiny fall from one hand into the other, something she thought she should recognize.

"I have a message for you."

He stopped fiddling. She jerked her eyes back up to his face. "From Heather?"

"You might say that. Catch."He flicked the shiny thing at her.

She grabbed the object and looked at it. Heather's ring lay in her palm. The air around her chilled, and when she looked up, Rhys seemed taller. She couldn't make out the edges of his cloak, and that feral smile twisted the corners of his mouth.

"She'll wait until midnight."

"Who will? What have you —"

"My Queen will," he interrupted. "After that... well, I'm sure you know the stories. So many unfortunate things can befall a human girl in Faerie."

"A human..." Rowan started softly.

"You can follow me if you want. Or you can wait. But my Queen does not like to be kept waiting."

Rowan stumbled after a shadow. Rhys walked ahead her, always too far away to touch, and always so quickly that she had to jog, though he seemed to expend no energy at all. The bushes and trees around them rustled, tiny laughter bubbling from behind the leaves. The streets lay cold and dark, and the only point of light Rowan could find seemed to come from Heather's ring she had slipped onto her finger.

They entered Murray park; she could see the newly installed lighting around the jungle gym. But Rhys led her deeper into the brush, making for a large oak that grew on a slight rise at the edge of the park. The summer tree, she and Heather had called it as children.

Rhys did not glanced back at her, and as he walked toward the tree, the hill opened.

Rowan tripped and fell to the ground. Rhys had disappeared into the hill, into a doorway cut into the earth from which a pale light glowed. Heather, she thought, imagining her sister surrounded by the spriggins and gnomes of childhood stories. The increasing snickering around her brought her to her feet.. She rubbed her grubby hands on her jeans, and walked into the hill.

She walked through a tunnel made of earth. Light danced from the lanterns hanging on the walls, but it was not enough to relieve the suffocating sense of being underground. Rowan shivered, though she felt warm. Heather's ring still gave off a faint glow, and growing stronger as she made her way down the tunnel.

Just when she thought Rhys must have tricked her, the tunnel spilled into a high room, making her throw one arm up against the sudden light. The laughter she had heard outside echoed in this room, bouncing off the high ceiling in a cacophony of inhuman voices. The creatures of story books lounged around the room — short gnomes, small winged sprites, brownies and pookas. These did not scare her nearly as much as the ones that looked human. Or rather, she thought, the way humans should look but didn't. Much more beautiful than any human, they hurt to look at, their fey, sinuous grace something her eye couldn't follow.

She clenched her teeth and took another step forward, and the laughter stopped. The people of Faerie turned as one to look towards the back of the room, to a raised platform where Rhys was slowly mounting the steps, his cape wafting around him. He stalked towards a chair and suddenly Rowan saw Heather sitting there. He touched her wrist, and she turned her head to gaze at her sister. But to Rowan, even from that distance, Heather looked like a doll, propped in a chair and made to move according to someone else's wishes.

"Let us be," a voice said.

Rowan dropped to a crouch, hands shoved over her ears, and tried not to scream. That voice still sounded of ice breaking and dogs baying after the hunt, only with a gust of power that had not been present at the Open Rose counter. One by one, however, the denizens of Faerie were departing, some fading as they stood, others shuffling off into connecting tunnels. Finally, when only Rowan, Rhys and Heather remained in the room, the Queen stepped out of the shadow.

She was beautiful in that same wild way that Rhys was, only more so. Shadows sharp as knives clung to her, and she had a cat's eyes. Her feet made no sound as she stepped towards Heather and put a hand on her head.

"Let go of her," Rowan shouted, scrambling to her feet and starting forward. "What have you done to her?"

The Queen of Faerie regarded her for a moment, then removed her hand from Heather's head.

"We have done nothing to her," she said. "This is all a dream to her. When she leaves here she will wake and remember nothing."

"What do you want with her?" Rowan demanded.

"I want nothing at all with her. The one I want is you."

The righteous anger that had been rising in her fled, sapped away by bewilderment. "What? Then why--"

Rhys leaned against Heather's tall chair. She could see, here in this strange room inside the hill, that he contained no human blood. He moved without awkwardness, as if he had no bones or was not answerable to gravity. His pupils vacillated, sometimes round like hers and other times as oval as a cat's. His feyness streamed from him, curling outward in seductive tendrils.

"Your names," he said. "Names are the last, best magic. Even humans should remember that. Your name protects you enough to keep us from casting a glamour directly on you. Hers," he said with a shrug, "it merely draws us closer. But then, you read about that in your mother's book. I wonder if she left it behind on purpose."

"Then you were there? I wasn't imagining it?"

Again, he shrugged. "Near there. But we were not ready to move that night, so I stopped you from reading enough to draw conclusions you shouldn't have."