Sparrows and the Mockingbird: Queen
The hard-packed dirt road puffed dust into the still, sun-drenched air with every footfall. The sky was achingly blue with the only clouds far in the distance, forming a wall of darkness I was not excited to face. Sweat poured down my back and my black hair felt like it was melting into my skull. At least I was getting my summer color back early this year. “Bring a sun hat, she said.” I grumbled under my breath, even though there was no one around to hear my discontent. “It’s going to be hot, she said.”
The only real reprieve I had was (astoundingly) found in my circlet, so often such a burden, such an irritation, and yet today the not-quite-metal felt like a cool weight on my head. Probably an insurance policy to make sure I didn’t die of heat exhaustion before my contract was out. Two more years and I could die on my own time again.
This particular Court was an old-school one, much to my poor sunburned skin’s disappointment. I’d opened a door in Alice Springs three hours ago at midday, during the lunch rush at some underpopulated tavern, hoping that a couple of mundane luck charms were all it would take for me to know which direction to walk in without getting lost. The bartender took one look at what I had and practically spit in my face, like it was somehow my fault southern hospitality didn’t extend as far as Australia.
No, instead I was led around back to where the cook was smoking a fat cigarette leaking sunlight and handed a couple of opals to polish some life into. Granted, it was quite decidedly not the hardest menial task I’d been given in the past few years but it did suck out enough out of me to leave me walking through basically desert without enough spark to keep the sun off my heat sink hair. In retrospect, it was probably intentional.
As my rhythmic footfalls lulled me into a transitive state, I was left to ponder what had been bothering me for the better part of a fortnight. The ingredient itself was simple, straightforward, but like every errand before it, the methods for actually getting my hands on it were going to be tricky at best. The easiest of them always ended up being that way.
The blood of a fairy queen.
How hard could it be?
Sweat dripped in a straight line from my hairline into my circlet. I automatically went to wipe it away, only to be thwarted as always by its airtight seal to my flesh. No matter how much I wanted to itch the skin beneath, to get out any dirt that it felt like I was accumulating, I couldn’t treat my body like it was my own. A growl of frustration slipped from between my teeth as I swiped at my head ineffectually, the noise seeming to hover in the air before me, shivering in the heat. What started as my imagination, took root in nothing but airwaves as I slowed to a stop.
The rippling in the air began to fade as my frustration edged into curiosity. Suddenly being given the key to the castle, I allowed my irritation to remount, this time in the direction of these ridiculous fairies and their arbitrary rules of engagement. Why live like civilized people where they could be sought out and petitioned? No, of course the veil coming down was simply a human problem and it was us intruding on them, not like it wasn’t their kind in the first place who thought they had the right to waltz across the world without even knowing how to properly connect to WiFi. Though I would have been remiss to dismiss people like Julius Ward who got to simply command their indent to-
The curtain of vibrating air pulled back to show off the grand front gates to the court. Puffing a strand of hair from my face, I tried to pull my composure into a human glamour as I approached the suddenly audible noises of a duel.
The plain wood gate was cracked open and the roar of a crowd spilled through. Stepping inside I was confronted with the juxtaposition of old, new, and neither. Several of the (presumably?) fair folk around me wore workman’s boots and heels, bell bottoms and bucket hats while an equal number looked like they’d stepped straight from local myth, right down to a few women having hair that behaved like slowly falling ash. Vendors hawked food that smelled heavenly and drinks that looked sinful. Pennants fluttered in the air leading the eye into the sky, where what was a blue expanse was now obscured by fluffy white cloudbanks that somehow looked outlined, as if an ink drawing brought almost to life. Passing through the crowd, I opened a heart shaped locket that I kept hung on my keychain, allowing just a pinch of the excited energy of the crowd to leech into my safe keeping.
“Hey you!” a hand hard as iron encircled my wrist like a manacle. Shocked, I looked up - and up and up and up - into the pure obsidian eyes of a fae woman. Her hair was pulled back and away from her face, the better to show off the proud tilt of her lips and the strong prow of her nose. She was astonishingly human looking but no one fully mundane would have eyes like that, eyes that suggested having stared at the sun until it blinked. “Put that back!”
I blinked sluggishly, caught up by her beauty. Without thinking, I twisted my mind to send the pinch of energy spiraling out of the locket and back where it came from. “Sorry,” I mumbled, trying to regain my mental footing. “Bad habit, you never know when you might need a bit of anticipation to fuel you through the day. I was actually looking for the dueling grounds if you wouldn’t mind pointing me that way?”
As soon as the emotion was out of my hand, the woman released me, her lip twitching in what was almost a smile. I pretended not to notice how easily I had slipped into asking a favor of someone like her, as if I hadn’t been in the business long enough to know better. Wordlessly, she pointed me deeper into the throng of people. I nodded my head instead of properly thanking her, slipping a business card from behind my ear so she could collect on my favor more easily. As I trotted off in the indicated direction, I hoped she wouldn’t come during business hours.
The arena itself nearly left me stumbling into it, a supernaturally perfectly sunken pit in the midst of a bustling market. Creatures sat on the lip of the thing, staring down and around at the spectacle as others peered over their heads. A few creatures with fluttering wings buzzed over and through the air, several of them speaking into cell phones or jotting notes onto a palm pilot. Below, two women (though the term felt reductive when applied to them) clashed violently on well churned mud. One had skin the color of freshly tilled earth and seemed to bend with the air itself, her chest and arm painted with daubs of paint that practically glowed in the artificial twilight. The other was shaved bald and seemed carved from sandstone, right down to the patchwork cracks that spread across her skin, growing and shifting with every breath.
They were both poised, ready to strike the other down with nothing in their hands but potential. Without warning, both sprang into action, the sandstone woman crouching low over the ground, skimming the tips of her fingers across the mud, letting them grow into sudden spines of stone that she sent hurtling in her opponent’s direction, only to meet the wall of the arena as the other tumbled through the air more graceful than the most delicate will o'the wisp I had ever seen. As she came towards the ground again, she brought with it a slice of pure air that pinned the bald woman to the ground. Lying in the mud, I watched the ground around her split and harden and attempt to grow into some sort of defense only to be buffed away by the winds at her opponent’s disposal until the ground itself was eaten away, leaving the bald creature on a pedestal beneath her people.
As the winds tore around her, the victor came down upon empty air and, with a delicate touch, plucked the eyes from the loser’s skull. No scream could be heard from that otherwise gaping mouth to match the gaping pits where her eyes had once been, or perhaps if there was it was drowned out by the tornado, the crowd, or both. With the look of a satisfied cat, the last woman standing swallowed each eye to the crowd’s resounding approval. I felt my stomach lurch at the display and instead watched the bald woman dissolve, her remnants swept away by the wind, surely to be inhaled by an unwary traveler. I had to wonder what would happen then, what the worth of such a fine dust would be an what its purposes might-
Ah. Of course.
Frantically, I reopened my locket and for the first time tried to funnel something real into it, not entirely certain what I could do to attract the remnants of the loser of a fairy duel. As my heart sped up, it seemed that my desperation was the only attraction necessary, the same emotion as that which the losing queen must have felt with her dying breath. I blinked away tears as a few granules of what had once been a living, breathing person settled on the interior of my hinged heart and condensed into thick, shining blood.
I slipped away, into the twilight air, my body feeling heavier with each step and my heart weighing just a little more than it had that morning. The crowd behind me cheered.