The Gusty Deep

The Gusty Deep

Lee Morgan

Published in the United States of America by

Queer Space

A Rebel Satori Imprint

www.rebelsatoripress.com

Copyright © 2022 by Lee Morgan

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover & initials are Baskerville Caps™ © Three Islands Press (www.3ip.com)

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60864-221-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60864-222-9

Dedicated to Rebecca Rose, the gifts that exceed common speech, and the fraternity of beings beyond description that we body-forth between us. Without you this story would never have grown these paper wings.

Ye who have yearn’d

With too much passion, will here stay and pity,

For the mere sake of truth; as ’tis a ditty

Not of these days, but long ago ’twas told

By a cavern wind unto a forest old;

And then the forest told it in a dream

To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam

A poet caught as he was journeying

To Phoebus’ shrine; and in it he did fling

His weary limbs, bathing an hour’s space,

And after, straight in that inspired place

He sang the story up into the air,

Giving it universal freedom. There

Has it been ever sounding for those ears

Whose tips are glowing hot. The legend cheers

Yon sentinel stars; and he who listens to it

Must surely be self-doomed or he will rue it:

For quenchless burnings come upon the heart,

Made fiercer by a fear lest any part

Should be engulphed in the eddying wind.

As much as here is penn’d doth always find

A resting place, thus much comes clear and plain;

Anon the strange voice is upon the wane—

And ’tis but echo’d from departing sound,

That the fair visitant at last unwound

Her gentle limbs, and left the youth asleep.—

Thus the tradition of the gusty deep.

John Keats’ Endymion

Contents

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Book 4

Book 5

Book 1

1

lux was getting good at managing the bodies. Her mother had allowed her to help wash and dress them since she was young. She used to say that corpses had a quiet story to tell, even though their tongues had gone still in their heads. There had been her dear little brother only nine months before. The boy was her only full sibling, with the others belonging to her father’s first marriage. The death of the boy had broken her mother, and that was when cleaning the family’s bodies had first become Lux’s responsibility.

He had been so little still his body had almost no story. The boy had just whitened away day-by-day, not eating enough, not thriving enough, until one morning near the end of winter he didn’t wake from his sleep. Lux had wept bitterly but it had been nothing by comparison to her mother’s heart-rung despair. She had clasped the tiny white body in her arms and refused to let go. After that Agnes couldn’t face it anymore.

When Lux’s sister perished only a fortnight ago, Lux had been called home from the nunnery her mother had sent her to and dissolved her novice-hood. Immediately Lux had known why, and she had dreaded every item she packed to return. It was partly because her mother was no longer coping, and partly because her sister Amelia had been promised to Father’s best friend who was now short of his bride.

Unlike her brother’s body, Amelia’s had a big story to tell. It had been the first time Lux had done the job alone. She had entered the room with a basin of warm water and plenty of washcloths and opened the shutters on the window. This was done first and was crucial, as without it there was some chance the soul could become trapped. Also, a reason Lux had barely dared name for herself, it would throw light on her sister’s body and allow it to tell its own story better.

She had expected to feel more when she saw her sister lying there. There was a certain dull relief at first, for Amelia’s sake, as she was free of the world’s ownership. It wasn’t that her gut wasn’t churning when she looked more closely, mainly that it had its origin in horror rather than grief.

There are some stories that one doesn’t want to hear a body tell. Amelia’s body told such a one. Her mother had taught Lux well enough to recognise which bruises were grab marks, and what kind of marks have been done to the body before or after death. She knew the faint bruising of suffocation. Although being a woman grown meant being able to deal with births and deaths Lux had tears in her eyes as she cleaned her sister.

It was difficult to know what to make of the bruising around her sister’s vulva, whether it had occurred pre or postmortem. Surely her sister hadn’t been dishonoured? Not after Father had policed their virginity so carefully? She had tried to talk to her mother about it. Agnes had shut Lux down as if it were an emergency, as if even mentioning it somehow made it her fault, as if the last of her sanity would crack apart if she had to hear it.

Then it had been her mother’s turn, the final disavowal of her responsibility to protect her last living child… As much as she hated her father for allowing the fair to come to town with her mother still laid out on the table, her rage and hurt was for her mother as well. She knew and she did nothing. Worse than nothing... Now it was Lux who had to be diplomatic with the priest as he argued about whether he would have her mother’s body in hallowed ground. Were faerie women indeed children of God who could be given Christian burial? The priest quoted the well-known folklore attributed to faeries: ’Not from the seed of Adam are we, but the proud angel fallen from heaven’, they say of them.

It was take him on or allow her father to threaten him with violence. Angry as he was, De Rue had still allowed the fair to come to town… There were bells and jugglers, minstrels and fools now, in their time of mourning. The occasional splash of animal torture, which seemed to bother none but her (a mark of her strange faerie nature that caused her to turn green at the sight of blood -so she was told), tinkers mending pots and pans, telling fortunes, selling cures, children running and playing. Creatures, sometimes even including humans, shat and pissed about the place in such abundance that you had to lift your skirts and dodge as you moved.

People looked at her but didn’t give their commiserations. None of the simple people believed that Agnes was really dead. The body back in the parlour was a faerie stock placed there to trick mankind, whilst Agnes was taken back to her own herd. They whispered that she didn’t have to worry about that brute De Rue anymore. Lux wished she could believe it. But the smells of her mother’s death were in her nostrils still. Surely faerie stock aren’t that convincing?

It wouldn’t be long before they’d send someone to fetch Lux back and scold her for being out of sight. Her older brother Geoffrey, who was so often tasked with following her around and keeping watch on her, had seemed quite relaxed on mead last she saw him. She had been under tightened watch ever since the betrothal had been swapped from Amelia to herself. It’s almost like they know the marriage is against my will, she thought sarcastically.

Lux had been seeing visions of things that no one else could see all her life so she didn’t jump when it appeared. Yet it was so strong that her heart leaped up in her chest and it was all she could do not to cry out ‘Mother!’ at the top of her lungs. Forcing herself to walk at a fast but dignified pace, Lux headed rapidly for where she thought she saw her mother standing in a shaft of sunlight, just within the trees. She had never seen a ghost stand in the sun like that. Somehow the simple folk were right! Her mother had just been taken back by the faeries and wasn’t really dead at all!

Agnes retreated into the trees as she approached but Lux followed at a run as soon as she hit the cover of the green.

Mother! she cried out softly.

Turning slowly from where she was shuffling away through the early autumn fall, Agnes came to face Lux. Lux gasped when she saw her mother’s face. She was ghastly pale. A thin slither of blood ran from her nose, she didn’t bother to wipe it away. There were many recent tales of revenants rising from the dead. It was known to happen in troubled times like these.

Lux, my sweet child, she said, her voice as flat and serene as one who had never known weeping. Her pale hair was undone and uncovered, disreputably tousled like an unmarried girl. You should come with me where I go. This world is cruel and its men are made of cold hard iron. Where I am headed there are men made of starlight and honey dew.

But, Mother! Look! You’re not even really dead! Come home with me. They’re going to put you in the ground soon if you don’t come home. Lux felt desperate. She loved her poor strange mother, despite her many betrayals, which were all born of fear and the weakness that came of so often being afeared. Without her mother there, Father would be crueler to her still. It had been her, after all, who had prevailed upon Father to send her to the convent when she had been reaching a woman’s years.

Look, baby child, Agnes whispered, her voice full of awe and child-like joy now as she raised her skirt. Lux stared in horror as her mother exposed herself. It’s all coming out now. All of it! All of that human mess. Lux covered her mouth with both hands and tried not to make a sound of disgust as wide-eyed she watched blood, and shit, and possibly parts of organs begin to clot and slither down her mother’s legs. It’s for the best, girl, her mother was saying while it happened. Can’t enter Faerie with that rot still inside me. No point being ashamed anymore. Humans and their stupid shame… She crouched down then as though to better evacuate the toxic humanity in her. She made a grunt of pain like someone in the late stages of childbirth. Something awful slithered out of her and then she became nothing but light.

Mother, Lux whimpered, falling to her knees. She thought she had reached out to clutch her mother before she disappeared, but all she was holding to her chest was an armful of muddy leaves. She threw them from her in revulsion as if they were the severed hands of faerie children, reaching up from the mold to pull at her hair.

Before she could get to her feet she heard a quiet but distinct sound in one of the trees above her. Lux jumped and swung around. There was a young man sitting on one of the high branches. His relaxed posture suggested he’d been there for some time. Getting hurriedly to her feet Lux tried to brush her clothes down. He had seen too much already. Doubtlessly he’d heard the whole exchange and thought her mad.

It is nice to meet another with The Sight, the young man on the branch said. He had a strange accent. Not just common, strange. Something from deep in the base of her skull told her she was in danger because his voice sounded like that.

I have no idea what you’re talking about, she said stiffly, trying to stop crying and wiping at her face.

He swung his legs down so he was sitting up on the branch and she was able to see that he was wearing greenish brown leathers in a style that reminded her of the tinker boys. When she caught a flash of the arrows in the quiver at his hip she took a few steps back preparing herself to run. She hadn’t been old enough to speak yet when the cautionary tales had started. The tales that involved men who looked like he looked, spoke like he spoke, those stories that never ended well for girls like her.

Be not afraid, he said softly, as though she were an easily frightened bird or startled doe that he wished to win the trust of. I mean you no harm. I have the Seeing also.

Who are you? she demanded. She was conscious of trying to reestablish the sense of herself as the social superior, it was all she had in this situation, after all.

My name’s Robin.

I’m Lux de Rue.

Oh, I know who you are, my lady. My condolences for your loss.

Thank you, she whispered. Did you… did you see her also? It was hard to ask because she had been punished too many times for Seeing. Her mother had no longer even been able to speak of it, so deeply did those scars go.

I saw some light. I’m not sure if that was hers or yours. I heard one of Agnes’ daughters survived her, and I immediately knew it was you. You weren’t here last time my people came through though.

I was destined for a nunnery, she replied. I was in fact a novice nun before my older sister died. I was then hastily brought out to fill his lordship’s convenience. One sister is much like another I suppose. Her betrothed, though distraught you understand, was able to simply keep his wedding arrangements unaltered and substitute me. The bride’s dress merely needed to be brought in slightly at the hips to conceal the difference. Her name was Amelia, by the way, the disposable girl that died.

You do not wish for this marriage then?

Lux realised it was the first time anyone had asked her. She laughed bitterly. If they had me in shackles I’d try chewing through my arm.

He didn’t laugh, though she’d intended it as a joke. It seemed best to try to laugh about as many things as possible. But you’re not in shackles, he observed. With no warning he leaped down from the branch in one motion disturbingly feral in its agility. Without words a sense of his greater animal power conveyed itself to her. A feeling that he was just coasting in his body at this moment, a latent force she couldn’t predict.

This is true. But I’m watched.

Not too well though. He pretended to do a quick scan of our environment. We are both outlaws you and I -after a manner of speaking.

For me you mean this symbolically, but for you…

For me I am an outsider because I see straight through all the lies the people in power tell us to keep us quiet, he added. They say a girl is less than a boy, but they say it only to convince her not to fight while they get what they want of her.

She couldn’t breathe because her heart was going so fast. Lux wanted to believe it was possible for a man to see through the lies the rest of his sex seemed to uphold to all their detriment. Are you trying to charm me?

No. I don’t even know if I’d want to charm you yet, not until I work out what sort of person you are. I simply see differently to what people tell me to see. I see in you a mind the equal of my own, and they trussed it up in vain baubles and a superfluous number of under skirts.

Lux could feel herself blushing at the mention of her underthings. She couldn’t guess him, she wasn’t sure if he meant to be suggestive or not. I think they’re a perfectly adequate number.

Instead of answering he came around in front of her and Lux saw his eyes for the first time. She realised that she’d not actually really looked at his face until now. I…

Know me? he finished for her quietly, his eyes engaging intensely with hers. He was close to her though nothing about his body language seemed sexually threatening or even suggestive. It was just intense. She nodded slowly as she began to place from where.

Yes. You’re the tinker’s boy that- She paused because what she wanted to say was, ‘that I wished I was brave enough to kiss’ but that memory was buried too deep beneath the layers of the ritual humiliation that had followed later at the hands of her father. It was on that very day that she’d had her first lesson in not being elf-wanton like her mother. He always told her he knew you could turn a faerie slut into a proper wife with use of the strap, because he’d done it to her mother.

Say it, please, Robin said, his tone showing a confusing vulnerability. I want to know for sure that you know me.

He had no way of knowing how he was wrenching at her damage. Robin wouldn’t have known about what De Rue would do with the strap later, how he used it to make her renounce her connection with Faerie, all because of how she’d touched that little boy… She had promised God she wouldn’t be a faerie like her mother. When the words finally got to the surface they tasted and felt bleak in Lux’s mouth. You’re the little boy the guards beat that day. She seemed to look right through him. Her voice was toneless because she was seeing the scene again before her. Your mother tried to stop them…

She was my aunt. But she was indeed as a parent to me.

You say was… Is she… dead?

He nodded but did not look at Lux. That same night after what you saw, they slipped into our camp with another man. We were playing music when they forced themselves upon her and killed her when they were done. That night was the end of my childhood.

Mine too. She wanted to say. He had been brave enough to speak of his terrible trauma maybe she should meet him there and tell him what had happened to her because she touched Robin’s face?

I’m so sorry, was all she muttered. There are many brutes among us, though we act the part of better to the Saxon. In truth I wish I were not one of them.

He raised his eyebrows. Do you truly wish it? Or is that a wish made by rich girls who have never had need to wish for anything serious?

His question stung like her father’s strap stung bare skin.

Do you mean other than her freedom? Or her dignity? Or perhaps her right to know what it’s like not to belong to another human being as though one were cattle? To walk the road alone as you do? Other than those wishes, I suppose a woman of my class has nothing else left to wish for but frivolities.

He looked at her for a moment before smiling ruefully. You stretch my speed with French and my vocabulary to frayed edges, my lady. But I am picking up new words from you already, and I’m guessing you probably proved me wrong just then?

She had been talking very fast. "This is not your first language… Of course Norman French is not your first language… Her assessment of his intelligence began to take flight and her eyes lit up as she lifted them eagerly to his. How many languages do you speak?"

Cymraeg, what they call Welsh, is the tongue of my mother. I learned English second. Norman French is still in a growth phase. I have a little of whatever the lowland Scots speak as well. Or at least think I do; they seem to nod to me.

She laughed and continued to gaze into his eyes, feeling slightly light headed and off balance. I’ve never even been out of our village. Hot on the heels of the dizzy feeling she realised her danger, and even more serious, his. Goodness. How long have I been standing here? I have to go back immediately!

Please don’t go! he cried, taking her arm as though it was involuntary and then removing his hand quick as a reflex. He would have been struck for such a liberty in any other circumstance, if he were lucky. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, my lady.

She flinched at being grabbed by a man because she was used to meeting with force. Afflicted by class rather than gender violence Robin flinched back equally at her flinch, as if he too expected a blow. A voice of cool reason in her head saw things more clearly. What would happen to him if you screamed and said he touched you? There would be no trial for him when my father’s men got here. They’d kill him for sport.

I’m sorry, he said again. My fault, too faerie. Too much like my father.

What did you say? she asked, moving toward him.

That I’m sorry? Oh, and about my father. Now that you know, you will never like me.

Why would I never like you? she asked, mystified by the way this breaking of the touch barrier between them had shattered the edges of his mischievous confidence and made all his youthful damage hang out.

Because I can’t lie, he replied. You will know who I am and as soon as you do you will run away and never come back here again.

She frowned. Who are you, Robin? You said before that you are faerie?

I’m Robin Goodfellow. The one your nursemaid probably warned you about.

The one whose father was a faerie man just as mine was a faerie woman?

He nodded. The same. I’m not nearly half so bad as the Wanted Posters say. A lot of things were taken out of context.

My people say you deflower virgins.

"Well your people would see what they do in others. Barely a third of peasant girls escape the unwanted attentions of your people’s men long enough to bleed a woman’s first blood."

They are little better to our own women! They are giving me no say in whom I marry, and shall be raped just as shamefully on my wedding night as ever your women were.

Will they do it in front of your six-year-old nephew, do you think?

Lux just stared at him for a very long time before murmuring. It was wrong of me to compare my troubles to those of your women.

No, I apologise, he said quietly. Suddenly he dared a light touch on her arm, which carried a heartbreaking need for comfort in it. As though he just needed to make physical contact with someone, dangerous though it may be.

But after what happened you have every right to feel-

Oh, I know, he said with a sudden steely certainty in his voice, a confidence that seemed to come out of nowhere. I don’t need your people’s permission to feel. That alone is mine. I only mean that my Aunt Eliza is many years dead and buried. Your fear is current; you have every reason to find it more immediate than my kinswoman’s long-ago murder. It is wrong of me to assume that you find her life less important because you are.... what you are… Yet it is hard for me to not... This is why I ask you again if you would like to be following your words about denying your blood with a matching action? Or are they just words? Baubles?

She was breath taken by his cheekiness. It was as if he truly couldn’t help it. Some puckish instinct put this edge of pride in him whether he liked it or not. The head ducking and the flinching was a learned behaviour, possibly even a sham, but the glimmer of challenge in his eyes, that part went to the bone. Cheeky is a word we use to describe the defiance of children. Why do I describe his pride that way? I’ve heard them described all my life as the ‘little people’. Many years ago I realised they weren’t talking about physical height and some part of me let them tell me their lives mattered less than ours. This was not what Christ taught us of our fellow man. And yet even the priests don’t seem to think it’s wrong.

I should go, she whispered. If they find me with you, they will kill you. You must know that.

It was fascinating to see the intricate work on his leather jerkin up this close, the tiny bones, beads and teeth that had been sewn into it. It was impossible not to wonder what he would smell like if she could get closer. She fancied he’d smell like the forest, as if he were a part of it. Not as ordinary human men smelled of ale and stale sweat.

You could say the same for nine out of ten things I do, he said softly. If it’s worth doing, you can guarantee someone has thought of a rule against it. He was close enough to her then that she could smell the leather of his clothes and the scent of horses that clung to him. He did indeed smell more like the outdoors than as others smelled.

Yes, Lux said suddenly.

Yes what?

Yes, I intend to follow through on my words. She pulled him close and stood up on her tiptoes to whisper to him with urgency. I am being held prisoner against my will at fear of my life. My sister died with restraint bruises and lividity around her womanhood. I am watched almost all the time. I am beaten if I resist, examined, humiliated… If I am given to the man, they mean for me I may end up like Mother.

It felt good to put the truth into words, as if, just by doing it now she could breathe again.

What sort of interior guards does your father keep and how many are there? Robin asked with all the appearance of seriousness. She looked at the unusual bow he carried and the knife in his belt and wondered what on earth they could possibly do against men in chainmail with proper swords. It was true that he was not the same as Norman men were. He was not a man of cold iron as her mother’s shade had called them.

"You’re not really that insane," she murmured.

"Are you joking? I’m barking mad. Norman men saw to that. Even I don’t know what I’ll do next. Meet me back here tomorrow same time."

What if I can’t get away?

Then I will kill the people who prevent you leaving, he replied. Lux couldn’t tell if he was joking and wasn’t sure whether she should have been more afraid of him than she actually was.

Have you ever loved a man, Clarice? she asked her nurse as the older woman bedded her down for the night. I mean really loved. Not what they made you do, but what you wanted to do, she whispered the last part, like the words themselves were part of a conspiracy between her and a fellow member of the powerless.

Her old wet-nurse made a quiet sound in the back of her throat. From the sound she knew that old as she was now Clarice knew and remembered, both about what it was to love a man and about The Conspiracy. Clarice dropped her voice accordingly, as people will when stepping into the presence of the holy in a cathedral. She lay down next to Lux.

Ah… You stretch a woman’s memory, sweet Rue. Those memories are old now and dust covered.

The poignant edge to her words told Lux otherwise. Tones of voice like that were a secret language between them that no one ever mentioned but all understood. It was a way of communicating without committing to words that could incriminate either of them should they be dragged out to testify against one another. Until Lux had met Robin as an adult man, she hadn’t known that men could speak that language. And yet you remember him, Lux said cautiously.

Aye, I do at that. Memories don’t keep you warm at night though, my girl. You know what keeps you warm at night? An intact maiden head!

Lux laughed and sat up in bed, turning to face the other woman. What, shall my hymen serve as a shelter from the heavens and come to house the poor in time? As its girth grows ever wider until the whole village can shelter beneath its majesty?

Clarice laughed despite herself. Lux had developed wit for this very reason. Often, she made angry people laugh despite themselves and they would calm down. She had discovered that even powerful people who pay no heed to wet, frightened eyes still love to laugh. She had deflected more blows to both herself and her mother through her sense of humour over the years than she had through begging or weeping. She was quick, but sometimes her wit carried the scent of fear. Some men grew up parrying for their life with a sword edge. She had parried with her tongue, which had been oiled and sharpened with anxiety.

"You know what I mean, Lux. The getting of memories is never so important as the keeping of a maidenhead. All of your future rests on that fine veil. No matter how handsome he may be or how kind he seems. If there was a man, which of course there isn’t."

Of course. What with my mother lying dead below? But to take our minds from all the death around us, at least tell me what his name was? Lux hit Clarice with one of her most winning smiles. She was lucky to have straight, white teeth. They are an asset. All purchasers of livestock check the teeth.

Clarice sighed. He’s not the man I married, sweet rue. But you’re old enough to guess that. Some stories are better left untold.

Those are the only kinds of stories I’m interested in, Lux said, seeing how far her former wet-nurse was willing to go when it came to The Conspiracy. In Lux’s mind she heard Robin’s voice. If something is worth doing you can be certain they’ll have come up with a rule against it.

Clarice sighed. Lux sat re-braiding her long mid-blonde hair. My selling point, that only my husband will be able to appreciate ever again, after my hair is covered by a wimple and veil on the day I become a wife. Lux worked on her hair in the hope that it would make Clarice feel relaxed and not set upon.

His name was Edwin. You’ve bled your first woman’s blood a while hence now, so you’re not too young to know. There’s a summer there when you’re young, maybe two if you’re lucky, where love seems so real. You believe for a moment that it’s worth risking things for. But then they discover you are bleeding a woman’s blood, and then it’s time to abandon childish things and start learning what we have to do to survive.

Lux frowned. She sensed without needing to see Clarice’s face all the unspeakable hardships and subjugations that those tight-lipped words glossed over.

What if we don’t have to, she whispered in the half dark. Such words were not safe to say with all the lights on. There were other words she kept buried even deeper, words that had been with her for many years now words to do with poison. Have I not tended enough of your welts for you to have learned it’s otherwise, my dear girl? Clarice said, the edge of tenuous pain still there in her voice, echoes of the Summer she glimpsed where she’d felt love touch her face like the sun and the terrible shadow it cast over the things she’d had to do since that day.

Your lord husband will be no kinder than your father, and can hurt you in ways you don’t know about yet, unless you learn to survive. You should count yourself lucky you have a warm bed and a roof over your head. I have not always been so fortunate. When you’re caught outside four walls with nothing but hunger and cold… that’s when you learn what men truly are. Tell me what good is the fickle promise of your summer-boy then? Pray you never trust a man!

Men with power, she muttered, her objection nearly inaudible.

What’s that, my girl?

I said, ‘men with power’.

All men have power! Clarice snapped back in a fierce whisper. Even the best of them will take your maidenhead without a pause with never a thought for how you will bear the burden of the consequences.

But think, Clarice, about what some women of my class have had done to men beneath them… I think… Well, it seems to me there is more than one kind of power.

"You think too much, that’s what you do, Clarice snapped. You have dangerous thoughts."

If thoughts are dangerous there must be something very wrong with our world, she muttered to herself more than Clarice.

You’re like a child playing with her father’s blade. You’re going to slip soon and cut yourself. We’ll bury you too before the grass grows on your mother’s grave at this rate.

But Lux couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t. It felt like her life depended on this debate, and perhaps it did. They’re important thoughts, she cried, turning and taking Clarice’s weathered hands in hers. Think about it. We are none of us innocent. We all pass the cruelty along to someone else who is less than us, don’t we? Father strikes me and I strike a servant the servant strikes a bondsman and the bondsman beats his wife and children who learn to beat the animals for fun. Look around you, Clarice! That is the world of man for you. What if this is a bad place she came to, my mother?

Clarice gripped her hand hard and shook her head. She looked furtively around the room as though she feared spies.

Now don’t you start talking like that! That was how your mother talked right before she did what she did. And don’t go saying in the town that she did what she did, alright? We all know. But part of being an adult is knowing when to be economic with the truth. Your father is trying to convince the priest it wasn’t her who did it, but we all know it was. T’was no accident.

Economic, Lux whispered, turning the word over in her mind. It was the perfect word to describe the way the human world dealt with both truth and kindness.

Lux knew the truth of her mother’s self-murder better than anyone; it was madness inducing to be expected to pretend it was an accident. How does one hang themselves from the willow trees by the river with her own apron by accident? Lux had found the body after all. Nobody else had thought about it but as Lux had pointed out, it wasn’t the apron her mother was wearing on the day, which suggested she had not been attacked and hanged by an assailant but had brought the apron with her to the site. How her father had glared at Lux for pointing out this piece of logic! It had seemed so obvious that she’d just assumed the adults had already seen it until they began talking murder. Sometimes it took Lux a time to realize when others dealt in deliberate duplicity.

Lux was fairly sure that if someone asked her outright what she saw that day and what really happened to her mother she would just start laughing hysterically and be unable to stop.

Who could blame her really? was all Lux whispered. She didn’t mention how she’d watched her mother take the house apart in a frenzy only the day before her death. When Lux tried to calm her and ask her what she was looking for she just kept saying ‘my faerie clothes’ and ‘where did he put it! My faerie clothes! My faerie clothes!’ Lux knew what that meant. When she couldn’t find the clothes she’d been wearing when she left Faerie, her mother had simply found a different way to put her wings on and fly away.

Now, Rue, your mother called you ‘light’ for a reason, she wanted you to conquer the darkness that swallowed h-

And yet you call me ‘regret’…

You’re speaking like you have faerie devils in you. You promised your father they were gone.

Lux could tell she was upsetting her nurse so she began to put on her placating tone. I’m sorry, nanny, really I am. I won’t have faerie devils in me anymore. Tell me one more time about how they found my mother and her brother in the wolf-pit? One more time before I must grow up and learn to survive?

Oh, very well then, Clarice said, lying back down and playing into the pleasing fiction that Lux was still a child and that all was well, when they both knew full well that it was not.

"The wolf-pits of Suffolk were still catching a lot of wolves in those days, when King Stephen was on the throne. These days the traps only catch a thin drizzle of wolves. The forests are nearly tamed now, but back when your mother first arrived it was still fully wild. Some villages were checking the pits when they found instead the two children. Their skin was green in hue, and they wore strange clothing, not speaking the common tongue nor eating the common food of mankind.

The little boy pined away so for the land of Faerie that he died within weeks, but the little girl… She was a survivor. She started to get well. It took a while but soon she was able to eat human food and her skin began to pinken. Many experts and men of learning came to look her over before and after the change and they all agreed it was miraculous. Now of course, Agnes, as they christened her, she was… different. It was hard for her. For a long time she used to go to the grave where they buried her little brother and talk to the mold there in her strange tongue. Many times she would speak of going back to her land with neither sun nor moon.

"But such was not her fate, as none knew how she had come to be here in the first place. She had just appeared one day in the wolf pits, as though she were one of those wild things they were trying to net and push out of the forests… Made sense that they caught her really. Whatever she was she was as wild as a she-wolf and as wanton, with a little cat in her and some crow besides. Mad as a headful of songbirds that one. But allowances were made up and to a point for her because she was a miracle. A faerie bride such as was spoken of in the time of heroes! Your father was willing to ignore her lack of dowry to win that prestige. To tup himself a rare faerie wench and father a line with faerie blood…

Of course, the poor man had no idea what he was getting himself into… That he didn’t! She was a beauty alright. Perhaps you’d say she still is even down there in her shroud. She looked too good to have a girl of your age, that is for sure. Though of course grief had left a darkness under her eyes at the end. Many men would have wed her for her locks and her eyes alone. But your father was not a man to be taken for a fool… If she’d married a younger man… Or perhaps a weaker one… things may have been different. But there are some men you don’t cuckold without carrying the mark of it for life, Clarice said grimly.

Lux didn’t need to be told about how her father had held her mother down and cut the word whore into her back. She had heard the screaming and been the one to wash the wound.

One can only wonder what the little boy would have done in the world had he lived? Agnes was bright; brilliant they’d have called her, if she’d been born a boy. But she had no damned common sense. None whatsoever…

I’m starting to feel this story is developing an ending containing a moral with a certain directional component? Lux asked with raised eyebrows.

Do you think? Clarice asked sarcastically. She gripped Lux’s hands sudden and tightly. If there is a man, -which there isn’t because if there was and I knew I’d have to tell your father immediately. But if there was, whatever he might seem, he would never be worth the risk you’d be taking. And he won’t stand by you, Rue. He’ll take your virginity like it’s light as air to him and then he’ll-

Is that how your summer ended?

Child, winter has been so brutal I can’t remember even the taste of summer.

If you knew I was going to… do something…

Then I would have to tell your father! That’s why I don’t know anything. You go to sleep now, foolish sweet child.

The tinker-man had been watching the house and the people who came and went. He knew the routines of the estate better than those who lived there. At nightfall like this when the shadows lengthened he took note of where the guard’s line of sight ended and where light was cast. Robin noticed much, but he himself was not the object of notice. As he moved around the grounds, he learned a lot just from overheard conversation.

Settled folk never really saw things, he knew, even things that were sitting right in front of them. They missed the extraordinary even more often than they missed the commonplace. They missed the small epiphanies that are always happening, the portends and prodigies… and the big ones too. Robin spent most of his time engaged in Noticing. Partly he did so with the patience of a hunter, engrained since childhood, partially because his survival and success depended on it, but also just because the world had not yet become over familiar to him.

Because the settled people lived in one place all the time and became complacent and bored with their environments their minds would just shut down after a while. Believing they had seen everything there was to see and observed all there was to observe about that same old place. After that a sleepy arrogance settled over them. They expected things to remain how they left them. The settled folk reminded him of a rider asleep on the horse’s back, going where the horse finds the sweetest grass with the rider having neither say nor awareness.

Settled folk were easy to fool. Lulled by repetition as they were, small things in their environment could change just a little each day. Even with a greatly significant change, a dangerous change for instance, so long as it happened as gradual as heating water over a fire, they would never feel it, or see it, until it was too late. He used this understanding to insinuate himself into environments over time so that people assumed he was meant to be there.

Robin had been picking their pockets while his family kept the crowd busy with music since he was five years old. He had the lightest touch in the business, but there was more to the art than just sensitivity in your fingers and a lot of gall. When you pick pockets, you learn all about how to tell whether someone’s mind is asleep or alert. With a little observation it was possible to see, that nearly everyone he met outside of his own people was asleep on their horse nearly all of the time.

You could tell it was true by how many of their purses you owned. It almost makes you feel bad when it’s as easy as it is with them. Like stealing from a baby. With Lux’s people all you have to do is nod, duck your head and say yes master and you could rob them blind, so asleep and fat and drunk on power are they. Was this why the girl had stood out?

As a woman she was not in control of the men’s actions. In her foremother blood would be women the North-men claimed as slaves back before they shortened their name to Norman. Mixed with Lux’s Viking ancestors would be those of the native Briton also, an internal soup of slave and plunderer. Would the energy of conquest or that of submission be the strongest in her blood? It was easier not to attribute his feelings to when they were children. It felt too raw to admit how desperately he’d needed that tiny shred of compassion she gave him. Was she merely there at the right time?

Every year when his caravan passed this way, he had looked upon her from a distance, watched her grow and wished her well. People said his imagination was susceptible at the best of times. He saw the world backlit by a mysterious light others couldn’t see. Some said that it was because of his faerie father who begot him on May Eve. Or because he was pulled loose from the womb of a dead woman through her stomach after her ghost eyes had already glimpsed the infinite?

They said he was touched. But after he’d found out who the girl was it was only reasonable? How many other young people alive in England at the moment have been the child of a faerie? There is me, and then there is Lux… We live in a bounded world inside, we hear about lands outside this, on the other side of the sea, but common folk never see them. There is only this white isle exploding with evil portents of war and revenants said to walk in many towns.

Robin both feared that the dead may again walk and thrilled to it at once. For he knew that whilst there were some dead whose memory he feared to look upon, there were also many due a reckoning, if the graves were indeed emptying. Faeries walk among us and there are strange light bodies seen to cross the sky in these times.

Or was it less about prophecies of coming doom and more that Lux seemed effervescent among the asleep-on-their-feet dullards she moved among? Was it like spotting a lioness pacing in a sheepfold unaware that she is a lioness? Does the sheep backdrop make her appear more wonderful than other lionesses that move with their own kind? Robin hoped it was just that. He hoped he would just help her to get to freedom and realise quickly that he felt nothing for her but the basic regard for another trapped, desperate human creature.

When he watched Lux de Rue from a distance, he watched her not like a man observing a woman, but like a man observing his own potential death and what features it possessed. Mentally he planned possible escape plans and for the ordeal this premeditated act would involve. There was nothing metaphorical about this risk he planned to take. He had never dared something like this, not with a family as powerful and highborn as Lux’s family. This wouldn’t just be breaking a young girl out of an arranged marriage, something he’d done before, it would be to thumb his nose at the occupiers.

Lux woke at the first thump, and the groan that followed it chilled her through to her marrow core. It was hard to wake, the sleep remedy her father had given her made it almost impossible some nights. Things would happen in the room, people would enter and leave, sometimes she dreamed she was touched in her sleep and she still couldn’t wake to verify it.

Clarice, who lay beside her most nights was still breathing deeply as Lux got quietly out of bed. Beyond the sound that woke her everyone else seemed to be at rest. There was no light under any of the doors as she stole her way down the hall. She wished she could take a candle with her, light it from the coals of the half-out fire, but she didn’t want to risk waking anyone.

When Lux heard or saw something she wasn’t always inclined to assume that everyone else could see or hear it too. So, woken in the night as she was by strange sounds coming from the room where her mother’s corpse lay, she didn’t dare get a second opinion about the sound. If they knew she was hearing things again father would have to beat the faerie devils out of her.

The fear of going in there, in the dark, alone, was not worse than the fear of her father. There was only an eerie quiet followed by a rustling of fabric that made the earlier chill in her bones feel balmy and warm. Swallowing hard and steeling herself Lux reached for the door, willing herself to push it open. It was a time of chaos in the land to be sure and there were many tales of prodigious happenings. Often it was told that those who went to the grave with a terrible secret had been known to return.

What could there possibly be to see more terrible than what she had already seen? She asked herself. Having seen her mother hanging there by her own apron, her bloodshot eyes bulging from her head and her purple tongue forced out between her teeth, piss and blood running down her legs, what was there left to see to shock or hurt more than that?

When she swung open the door the faint smell of death hit her in the face. It wasn’t strong but knowing where it came from made her gag on it. That’s all the rot inside her mother said had to come out before she could go back to Faerie. But it was only for a second she thought of this, because in the next instant she perceived the figure bent over the table. For a terrible moment she thought it was her mother somehow, bending over the table she’d formerly been laid out on. When a girl suddenly appears in the bottom of a wolf-pit one day you don’t necessarily assume she can’t come back to life as well.

But then, as her eyes adjusted further, she perceived her mother’s body lying beneath, and in that same instant she saw and understood the movements of the upper figure.

Father? she whispered, unable to prevent this whisper or horror.

He stopped thrusting immediately, took two panicky steps back and reached furtively for his breeches.

Lux! What are you doing out of bed!

Lux just starred with her mouth open. She looked at the uncovered body of her mother, partially unwrapped from its shroud with its legs pushed apart. Then back at her father doing up his belt. Then something even worse than what she had seen occurred to her. As it did, she tried to run but before she could make it to the door her father had crossed the room and grabbed her by the hair.

Lux cried out with pain and went limp. This had happened before and her body knew not to struggle. Before the sound could fully leave her mouth her father had clapped his hand over her face. His hand smelled faintly of her mother’s decay. Again, she knew something else that was coming before it happened. This wasn’t the time for going limp. If I do not get him to let go of me now it is my death I smell as well as hers. She knew the truth of those words as she’d never known or trusted anything in her life, it was like a voice from an older, wiser part of herself who knew everything that was coming slightly ahead of time. There had been many times when she’d been forced to submit but it was time now to fight.

This knowledge was like a surging wave in her. It rose up her centre as a strength she’d never known. As soon as it reached her head she wrenched her head violently backward and bit into his hand at the same time. Although he let go immediately, she didn’t stop biting. It seemed that now she had hold of him and could taste blood between her teeth she would never let go. If she let go she would die.

Get off me you crazy bitch! he cried, cuffing her in the side of the face. She fell back and jumped to her feet. He was after her she knew; she was only a few steps ahead of him. Soon his men would come, or he’d catch her in the hall before she could even make it to the front door. If he catches you you’re dead. The voice in her head gave her a burst of desperate adrenalin. Almost at the door she could hear his step behind her, hear his breath.

Lux tore out through the front door and it slammed behind her. It was too late for stealth. Her father could wake the guards if he wanted to. She was counting on him not calling for them. She was counting on not giving her the opportunity to start raving of what she’d seen him doing to Mother’s body. There would be no choice but to tell no matter the consequences.

Within a few steps she knew she was right because her father hadn’t paused, he had just pushed on after her. It was then that she knew she wasn’t going to make it. There was no way she could outrun him at a distance of this length, not with no shoes on. She was still running as hard as she could, and she could hear her father calling the guards now. It was his word against that of a hysterical girl child, who was going to believe her? So, he had sent the younger, faster men out to catch her.

Even with the big start Lux had on them she knew they would catch her quickly once she reached the forest. She wondered if they would just send the dogs after her. Would father set the dogs on her and claim it was a tragic accident? The dogs frightened her so much she considered turning around and putting her hands up, going down on her knees, begging for forgiveness, enduring whatever she must to avoid that fate. Then she smelled the forest…

It was close enough for the cool, mossy, clean joy shout of the forest’s perfume to hit her nose and mouth, cleansing her. If servitude inside the house was linked to the secret decay on her father’s hand over her mouth, then freedom smelled like green moss. Tears stung her eyes. She couldn’t lose it now that she’d smelt it. It was too late, just as with love sometimes it is too late. Even if it cost her life now she had to run towards freedom at any price.

Her body wasn’t strong enough but her faith in what she wanted was. It would have to be because faith was literally all she had left. Throwing back her head as she ran, tears streaming down her face like a child Lux yelled into the darkness with all her might.

Robin!

His name shattered the night, birds flew up at its wildness. Animals started in the dark as if were the cry of a witch shrieking for her devil lover. Robin Goodfellow! she cried again, her feet only steps from the edge of the forest and the guardsmen only steps away from catching her. Robin Goodfellow!

She was just about to plunge into the trees and cry his name again when something whizzed past her face so rapidly she didn’t see it, but it was close enough she felt the air displacement. The hissing was followed almost immediately by two hard ‘kthunk’ sounds. Spinning around to see what had happened, Lux got a brief moment to look back at the two guards lying on their backs with arrows sticking out of their chests. Lux stared for only a moment before turning back to try to see the source from which the arrows were coming. There was nothing except a branch moving in the gloaming-light.

Less than a second after she looked, she heard another arrow loosed that hissed for slightly longer before finding its hard, wet target. The hidden marksman had shot at this distance a man that was only just coming down the front steps. There was a new fear in Lux’s heart then. A man doesn’t learn to shoot like that from firing at targets, nor come to be in the trees outside her home by accident, long before the