Mauritane studied the impression on the worn old coin. There, surrounded by a wreath of silver holly leaves, was the familiar face of the Lady of Twin Birch Torn, missing only her knitting to make the image complete.
"Hmph," said Mauritane, handing the coin back to Silverdun. "Take whatever Purane-Es deigns to give you and let's get the hell out of this place. We ride in one hour."
three pounds of gold
The prison stables were outside the inner wall, in a part of Crete Sulace that Brian Satterly had never visited. It was a low stone building that might have been a thousand years old for all Satterly knew. Guards and servants hurried across the snow-covered ground between the tower and the stables, stealing clandestine glances at Mauritane and his companions, their curiosity poorly hidden. The stables smelled of melting snow and wet horses and dung and straw.
Satterly stood just inside the stable doors, next to a brazier, watching Mauritane direct the final preparations for their journey. Satterly had heard the phrase "natural born leader" before but had never met anyone who truly fit the description until now. The prison staff who'd directed Mauritane's life since Satterly had arrived at Crete Sulace eighteen months ago now took orders from him as if they'd been doing so all their lives.
As he often had since his arrival in this world, Satterly felt useless and uncomfortable. With the Fae there were any number of social traps you could fall into. The wrong word at the wrong time could enter you into a blood feud; for a commoner (a group into which Satterly fell by default), looking a noble in the eye while he was eating was a justifiable grounds for murder. Accepting a gift from a Fae, under the appropriate circumstances, could make you beholden to the giver for the rest of your life. Of course, nobody could explain to Satterly what the appropriate circumstances were. It was something so basic to Fae culture that it was rendered inexplicable.
As a result, Satterly kept mostly to himself and tried to speak as little as possible. Saying nothing was almost always the right answer for someone in his position. Though the Fae were sometimes curious about the human world and its customs, most simply treated him as an outsider and ignored him completely.
Humans weren't unknown in the Fae world they way that the Fae were in his. Despite the ban on travel between the two worlds, a few managed to make it through from time to time for various illegal ends. It was one of those illegal ends that had landed Satterly here in Faerie.
There were a number of known worlds; Satterly wasn't sure how many. Earth was one of them, Faerie was another. The woman Raieve was from a place called Avalon, which Satterly had heard of but knew little about other than that the Unseelie had unsuccessfully attempted to conquer it a few years back. He'd heard the names of others but they were scarcely more than names: Annwn, Mag Mell, Nibiru, Pathi. Nobody Satterly had met knew anything about them. "Filled with monsters and that," Gray Mave had once opined when Satterly asked him.
In the past, there had been free commerce between Faerie and the human world, known to the Fae as Nymaen-literally the "place of men"-but a treaty between the Seelie and Unseelie had made such travel illegal hundreds of years ago. It was one of the few treaties, Satterly had been told, that had never officially been broken by either party, though Satterly had never learned why or what the purpose of the treaty had been in the first place.
It was difficult for him to believe that two years ago he'd never heard of this place or the Fae people. He now spoke Common every day and had even begun to dream in it. Sometimes lately he'd started to forget the English words for things. With a start, he realized that he was thinking in Common even now.
"Human," said Mauritane, breaking Satterly from his reverie. "Come saddle your horse in the manner you prefer."
Satterly started forward and looked at Mauritane, wincing. "I've never saddled a horse before."
Mauritane's glare said, don't they teach you humans anything? It was a look Satterly had received more times than he could count. But Mauritane only said, "Then have one of the stableboys do it for you. But watch closely, because I don't intend to do it for you on our journey. Every man carries his own weight."
Satterly followed the stableboy into his horse's stall sullenly. He tried to keep up with the boy's motions, but this was clearly a task the young Fae had been doing his entire life and his hands moved more quickly than Satterly could take in. "Can you slow down a little?" Satterly asked, feeling ridiculous. "Show me again how you hold the bridle before you put it on."
The boy looked at him a bit incredulously. "You've really never done this before, have you?"
No, Satterly thought. No, I've never saddled a horse. No, humans don't possess the Gifts. No, humans can't feel re. No, humans don't know the hundred million goddamn rules of propriety that every single Fae takes for granted.
"No, I haven't," he said.
"Well, it's not so hard once you get the hang of it," the boy said, chuckling under his breath.
"Fuck you," Satterly said, but in English.
Could anyone blame him for not knowing this stuff? Satterly was a physicist, and a theoretical physicist at that-he barely knew how to use the microscope he'd borrowed to bring with him to Faerie, let alone something as outre as saddling a horse. If he'd been born a hundred years ago, maybe.
"All done," said the stable boy, grinning. "Do you know which direction to face in the saddle, or can I help you with that as well?"
"Thanks," said Satterly. "I think I can figure that one out on my own."
Satterly's unexpected acquaintance with the world of Faerie had begun the night that his two-year-old niece set his sister's house on fire. Satterly had been in his office at Caltech, grading undergraduate physics papers, when Angela called. Since her husband had left, Satterly was used to getting upset calls from Angela at all hours, but this was something altogether different.
"Brian! I need you. Come quick!"
"What happened?"
"It's Leila. Just come, okay?" Angela had sounded petrified; he'd never heard anyone sound so frightened.
The drive to Irvine seemed to take hours. Satterly spent most of the time imagining his sister's little girl dead or hospitalized or kidnapped. He tried a dozen times to call her on his cell but she never picked up.
When he arrived, the inside of the house was a shambles. It looked like a tornado had hit. Angela led him into Leila's room, where Leila was sitting on her bed, playing with a doll. The blue curtains on the wall-the ones with ducks, Satterly recalled-were now singed and black. The dresser was charred, the plastic piggy bank on top of it melted; coins were scattered on the floor. There was white foam everywhere from the now-empty fire extinguisher that lay on the floor amid the chaos.
"What happened?" said Brian.
Angela took him out to the hall. "I was in her room. We were playing with dolls, just like any other day. Then she told me she wanted to show me something, something wonderful."
Angela started crying. "She started singing, Brian. She started singing in some weird language and then there was this wind and suddenly there was a fire and Leila got scared. She said, `Stop it, mommy! Stop it!' but I didn't know what to do. So I ran and got the fire extinguisher and sprayed it all over.
"Leila was crying, I was crying. None of it made any sense. And then it just stopped."
"What happened then?" said Satterly, holding her tight.
"Then she said, `I'm sorry, mommy. I won't do it again.' And she went right back to playing with her dolls."
Five minutes later, Evelyn Yeoh appeared on Angela's doorstep. She was a petite Asian woman with a serious face dressed in jeans and a sweater. She was carrying an odd little device that looked something like a compass but glowed with a hazy blue light. She explained about Leila, but it wasn't anything that Angela or Brian were ready to hear.
"Don't worry," said Evelyn. "When it happens again, you'll call me." She left her card. Angela wanted to throw the card away, but for some reason Satterly kept it.
The next time it happened, Angela ended up in the hospital with seconddegree burns. Standing in her hospital room, with Leila asleep in his arms, he called Evelyn Yeoh.
The scene at Satterly's apartment a few days later hadn't been pretty. Evelyn arrived, in jeans and a different sweater, this time carrying a black jewelry box. Angela was still in pain and was furious that Satterly had allowed this strange woman into their lives with her little devices and her ludicrous claims. Satterly was skeptical too, but if there were even a chance that Evelyn could help them, what could it hurt? They were way off the map already.
"Get ready," said Evelyn. "This will be the worst part. Removing the glamour, that is." She sat Angela down at the kitchen table with Leila in her arms. Then she took a small metal bracelet from the box and slipped it over Leila's wrist before Angela could object.
The instant the bracelet touched her skin, Leila shrieked. "Get it off? Get it off!"
Angela reeled backward, almost tipping backward in her chair, but before she could reach the bracelet there was a bright white flash and Leila suddenly changed in her arms. Satterly was awestruck; one instant his niece had been there, and the next she was replaced by a rail-thin girl with palest white skin and long, pointed ears. The little girl, who looked nothing like Leila, was pleading now, tears falling from her crystalline blue eyes.
"Don't send me back," said the little girl. Her voice was nothing like Leila's now; her words were stilted and strange, as though she were reading words in a foreign language from a script. "Please, please! They'll send a wolf to eat me if I get sent back. They promised!"
Evelyn reached out for Leila, and Angela pushed the little Fae girl away, horrified. "What… did you do to my Leila?" Angela whispered.
"I'm sorry," said Evelyn, picking up the girl. "But as I tried to explain earlier, this isn't your daughter." The little changeling wailed and buried her face in Evelyn's shoulder.
Angela refused to believe at first, threatening, then begging. Satterly sat and watched, his mind a whirl, unable to understand what was happening. What finally convinced him was the patient, sympathetic look on Evelyn Yeoh's face. This woman, he realized, had done this hundreds of times.
Angela, however, remained unconvinced, until Evelyn finally persuaded "Leila" to tell the truth. "They told me if I was good," the girl whimpered, her face still half buried in Evelyn's breast, "and never let on, that I'd be loved and taken care of in the Nymaen world. I never had no mama 'til now."
"How long?" said Satterly. "How long since they were switched?"
"Probably not very," said Evelyn. "It usually only takes them a couple of days to manifest."