1-15 R

It took almost a minute of deep breaths before I managed to stop shaking. Another minute to convince myself that I needed to at least think about what she’d said. That moment he’d actually hurt me was when he’d gotten all weak, so maybe she was right. But there was still the wolf…

Clenching my fists was enough to stop that shaking. I pushed the thinking back to ‘eventually’. Right now letting her touch me, even if it was just my hair, was as far as I could go. My neck didn’t untense after I nodded.

“Great!” Her arm reached out beside me and left the bar of soap on the edge of the tub. It was a blocky rectangle of white. Then she scooped the pitcher down in the water and tilted my head back with one hand and started to pour.

A dark stain spread across the water with it, slowly fading as it dispersed.

“I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? I’m Agatha, though that name belongs to the House these days. I do this and that for it and the Masters, but I suppose I’m the closest thing to a housemistress for those of us not in service to a specific Master.” She snorted in a way that made imagining her smile reappearing easy. “Heavens know I’m no proper maid these days, for all that I do the work of one.”

She started to massage my head, almost. One hand making little circles on my scalp while the other combed through my and untangled the leftover knots. Both present and accounted for, with no mystery extras.

I started to unwind a little bit under her touch, eyes closing as I listened to her humming. It almost sounded like Greensleeves? I started to slouch down into the water again until she hooked her arms under my shoulders and pulled me upright again. The unexpected contact barely made me twitch.

That – that wasn’t right.

My eyes snapped open. I stiffened as I realized how quickly I’d jumped from not even being able to look at myself to letting another woman wash my hair while I was bathing. My heart started beating faster again as I stiffened up, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or at least, she didn’t care.

I did, though; was this a normal response to something traumatic like the last few days had been? I could see it making sense that I’d latch onto the most normal thing – or person – that I’d seen since this entire nightmare had started. But that still didn’t feel right. I was in the home of actual Faeries; how did I know that this wasn’t some illusion? Magic? A calming spell?

I mean, sure, I might have needed it. I still didn’t trust anyone, especially a stranger, to mess with my mind.

I knew one way to check, though it had me wrapping my arms around my stomach before I tried it. I was expecting it to hurt or make me nauseous, since I still didn’t have a good understanding of it and almost everything I’d seen since the ritual had been painful to look at with it.

I waited until her hands moved away and then turned just far enough to see her as she unstoppered a vial on the edge, letting out something that smelled faintly of flowers. Then I slipped into that other vision, the magical Sight, and braced for a wave of nausea and sensory overload.

It never came.

The room looked darker than before. The light crystals were fainter like this, somehow, and the walls might as well have been sucking in the light that I saw magic as. The brightest thing was, well, me. The water under me was even murkier like this, but it shone around my limbs. My skin was brighter than anything else I could see and… oh.

The water hid absolutely nothing when I looked at it like this.

I looked away and tried to spot Agatha before I could start panicking again. She was there, obviously, but she was so dim. A nearly blank spot that was like a dirt-caked flashlight with nearly dead batteries that was shining on the other side of a field, whereas the crystals in the ceiling were regular flashlights in the same spot and I was one seen from across the room. She was, easily, the least magical living thing I’d ever looked at, and there were no visible threads of magic running between us.

Come to think of it, did the Fae count as living? They hurt to look at like this, but they didn’t look like Tammy or me or even her when I did this. The difference was hard to put into words. It came from inside of us, but for them it was like a shell, or a wrapping.

My vision snapped back to normal when she started talking. She was rubbing stuff from the vial between her hands. They’d started glistening.

“Turn back around please, Ma’am. This stuff should soak into the stubborn bits and make them clump up. It’ll need to sit dry for a few minutes before getting wiped off, then I’ll do a rinse and we’ll start on the shampoos and oils. You’re going to positively shine once I’m done with you. Now, for the story I promised you…”

I listened to her, thoughts still too jumbled up to say anything or complain. If she was using magic here, it wasn’t anything I could see. I’d try to give her the benefit of a doubt, at least; she was helping me, or at least said she was trying to, and acting like everyone I met here was working against me would be unhealthy.

The floral scent got stronger as she rubbed it into my hair, but it wasn’t a flower I recognized. Not that I had a particularly good sense of smell to start with. It reminded me that she’d left the soap bar on the edge, in easy reach. I definitely wasn’t going to stand up to wash properly, but I would need to use it. When she bundled my hair up overhead and slipped a few pins in to keep it upright, albeit in a precarious and heavy bun, I reached out to grab it.

The soap didn’t smell like anything, really, and it was hard. Even when I ran it along my arm it was more abrasive then smooth, but it still felt good. Like it was actually cleaning me, on top of scratching that little itch in the back of my head that wanted to scrub my skin off after what had happened. At least it didn’t get instantly slippery once it was wet, so I could keep scrubbing with it underwater and not have to give up that comforting privacy screen of cloudy liquid.

“Your grandfather was – honestly? I don’t have the words, Ma’am. People here in Ash knew him. Not just our House, but all of them. Even other Courts. There were so many names for him that it got hard to keep track. Aufrey was consistent, at least, but the way some of the Masters talk it was something relatively new for him. There were a few that sounded like titles or honorifics that people made up, but well, I would actually believe some of them. There was one only one that would get the Masters riled up if they heard us using it, though: The Mortal Lord.”

It felt like that should’ve had some power or significance to it. Instead it just fell flat, a vaguely ominous word without context. She was quiet for a few seconds, refilling her pitcher. The water that went into it went from cloudy to clear when I blinked.

“Like I said, I only actually met him once. Time’s a bit wobbly out here, but the House keeps it at least sort of reliable so I’m sure that this was in my first decade here. The babe I’d come with was just starting to go through the changes, so it couldn’t have been longer.”

She tapped me on the head. “Rinsing now, if you need to move a bit to finish up down there, here’s your chance.”

The water had an even bigger and darker stain this time as she rinsed it off, but the bits of hair that fell across my eyes were blonde again. She dumped at least three pitchers’ worth of water over my head as I shuffled around to get at the backs of my knees and the spots I hadn’t been able to reach before. It was unpleasant, trying to keep everything below my shoulders underwater, but I managed.

“This was the first time I’d even heard of him outside of rumors. I was cleaning the Great Hall – during one of the moods where it stays a hall – when he came in for his first visit. Or well, the first since I’d been here. I didn’t really know the etiquette by heart yet, at least not the rare little bits like how to react to a visitor like him. Guests weren’t my job anyway, so I just kept cleaning. Of course, everyone else had stopped what they were doing; nobody wanted to miss out on what would be at least a year’s worth of fuel for the rumor mill. Not even the Masters.”

She ran her fingers through my hair and hummed in approval.

“Starting on the shampoos now. Anyway, he had on these metal boots that day. They were the first thing I saw of him, really; silver and shining, with etchings that squirmed when I looked at them. What I cared about at the time was that they were tracking ash through what I’d just cleaned and just had to be tearing up the floor. The Masters never came in unannounced, not through that door, so I just told him to move.”

She laughed at that.

“Heavens, I was an idiot. The Masters, they have this presence, right? How creation bends around them here, I guess. No matter how they choose to look or how they hide it, you can always feel one of the Fair Folk in these woods. If you try. When I finally looked up, he had something like that. It wasn’t the same, but I can’t for the life of me say how it was different. I can’t even describe it really, just that it was just as foreign as they used to feel.”

Some of the shampoo dripped down my face and I ended up in a spluttery coughing fit when it found its way into my mouth. Agatha patted my shoulder encouragingly as I worked it out and spat into the bath water, not commenting at all until I was back to normal.

“So I told him to move, right? Then I saw that. Everyone had heard me. I’m sure at least a few of the other servants – and probably a Master or two – were just waiting for him to put me in my place. I was expecting it myself, honestly; heavens know I got smacked by the Masters more than was healthy those first few years. They hit harder than the bastard I left, that’s for sure. Aufrey – he looked that kind of important, so I expected him to act like them.”

The coughing had loosened up my throat enough that I gave up on staying quiet. That didn’t sound like him; he almost never even got disappointed. The closest I’d ever seen him to angry was when I’d broken my arm after Tammy dropped me out of the tree.

“I can’t imagine him doing that.”

“Right you are Ma’am; he didn’t! The man that even the Fair Folk respect? He apologized. I’ve cleaned up after a lot of weird men and beasties – plus more things that weren’t either that I still can’t really figure out – and let me tell you: that doesn’t happen. Nobody that’s visiting ever acknowledges the staff unless it’s to order, yell, or flirt. Not before him, not since.”

She twisted my head a little bit. My neck popped.

“Talking about this? It’s making me realize that I barely remember that whole decade. Things were changing too fast for me to get anything really locked away in my head. Aufrey’s still there, though, clear as day. I haven’t been able to forget him – I doubt I could even if I wanted! There’s still two things that stand out, though.”

“What are they?”

“Well, the first is that he apologized. How he apologized. I mean sure, he said he was sorry, but then he took off the boots. Shoved them straight into one of those bags that’s bigger on the inside – those are absolutely amazing for laundry duty by the way, if you ever need to do it – but all he had under them were socks. He did it every time he came through here, after that. Just took off his shoes at the threshold and went around in those. The darned man never even wore the same ones twice! Just imagine it, this tall, chiseled, and brooding sorcerer – or whatever he was, I don’t rightly get witchcraft – walking around in the most ridiculous socks and stockings you’d ever see. I swear he made a game of it and there was nobody with the bullocks to call him out on it. Us servants didn’t really have a motivation to though – we actually ran a betting pool on what color his next set would be, or what pattern. Won it three times, myself!”

Wait, was that why there were so many weird socks in one of the hall closets that we’d never seen him wear? I’d thought those had been Mom’s or something that he just wouldn’t throw out. While I was thinking about that she took her hands away and scooted her stool back with that same wooden scraping sound as earlier.

“Sorry to pause the story Ma’am, but I’m done here. Everything else is best done over by the mirror, so I’ll let you finish up. Just rinse off when you’re done, grab the towel, and we’ll get started on the rest. Can’t take up all our time gabbing, sadly. I’ll be over by the mirror – don’t worry, I’m not one to peek.”

Her footsteps went off to the side and when I looked back she was fiddling with the tray. Her head was down, facing away from the mirror. That was as good as I was going to get, probably, so I rushed through with washing my face and underarms. They’d been hard to get before without pulling my chest out of the water. I spent about thirty seconds with my hand on the plug, just staring at the dark water. When I pulled it, I rushed to let more water in. I mixed the hot and cold to keep it just on the edge of tolerable, then started using the pitcher to rinse out the last of the shampoo and soap.

That’s when I saw the spot.

The stubborn spot on the back of my hand. A grey patch of caked on ash that had been soaked in blue blood, right between two of my knuckles. The skin around it looked stained. Like a finger had pressed down, hard, and smeared it around.

Where he’d held me.

I scraped at it with the soap until the skin was raw and red. The bar fell apart. So I started scratching. I didn’t stop when the color was gone, or when it started to hurt. Not until the pain turned sharp and my fingers came away bloody.

The rest of the rinsing was rushed. I closed the taps and let the tub drain as I jumped out, trying to keep my eyes off that hand. The bloody side of the towel I dried off went onto the ground as I tried not to slip on the wet wood. The second towel wrapped around me, from just above my breasts down to mid-thigh. Way too exposed for comfort, but still better than the alternative.

This towel was so white that I didn’t want to bloody it. I kept the stinging patch on my left hand covered with my right, which wasn’t easy while keeping the towel tight against me. The shivering on the walk over to Agatha wasn’t just because the air here felt cold.

She sat me down on the stool without a word, then grabbed a hairbrush and started running it through my hair. I kept my eyes down and both hands holding the top of my towel up. I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see myself.

She’d gotten halfway through before breaking the silence.

“You’re awfully stiff again, Ma’am. I know you don’t want to listen to an old bat like me, but you should really relax. Save the tension, the worrying, and all of that stuff for when it can actually make a difference. A person can’t stay all taut like that forever without something snapping. I’d hate to watch it happen to you.”

I relaxed, but not by much.

“There, that’s better! You still don’t have to talk, but I believe I’ve got some stories to finish for you. I told you about the socks already, but that wasn’t the main thing. Sorry, I get distracted a lot when I actually get to talk to someone like this. The Masters aren’t exactly conversational, most of the time, and the House doesn’t really talk. Not like you and I.”

“The unforgettable bit is that he cleaned the entire Great Hall for me. It would’ve taken me days of nonstop work on my own – and that’s if it didn’t decide to change before I finished. You’ll see what I mean by that in a few hours, Ma’am. It’s breathtaking, the first time. Anyway, he helped me up after saying he was sorry – my knees haven’t hurt the same since, by the way – and then he knelt down himself and grabbed my rag.”

She sat down her brush and started to fiddle with something off on the table that I wasn’t willing to turn to look at. I tried to swallow the knot in my throat and managed to get out a few words.

“He did it by hand?”

“No no no, Ma’am. Or well, sort of? Hands definitely got used and they were his, but not the way you and I have hands. No, he pocketed the rag for some reason. Still no clue why, actually. Guess I’ll never know now that he’s gone. Then made this grand sweeping gesture across the room. It had to be for my benefit, since even servants with the Gift here don’t actually need the hand stuff for things. He has to be so far beyond us that we can’t even compare. However he actually did it was way over my head, that’s for sure, but I saw what he did. The floor started to ripple. Like a heat haze that you could feel, I think, or those mirages that sailors always talked about. I swear, I’ve never seen the wood of the House shiver like that, not before or since. It went out like a rock into a pond, but instead of waves it was little hands reaching up from the wood. They were each smaller than my thumb, like miniature versions of mine. Right down to the weird knuckle on my thumb.”

She held up her right hand in the mirror and waggled the digit. She was clutching a handful of hairpins, or at least that’s what they looked like, in her other fingers.

The knuckle didn’t look all that weird.

“Those things were tough. They went all through the hall in a few seconds and picked up the people and furniture. Then they started sweeping. No rags or water or anything; they just grabbed or pushed or dragged everything on the ground that wasn’t wood and passed it along until the hands by the door tossed everything out into the Wood. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen here, ma’am, and that’s a high, high bar.”

She started smiling again before I looked down at the table again. Despite it all I had to bite back a laugh when I saw that she’d stuck some of the pins in her mouth while juggling a brush and a vial of oil between her hands. They stuck up, one almost poking into her nostril, and bounced around like a Walrus’s tusks. She didn’t say anything until she had a part sectioned off and was running the brush and oil through it.

“The little wonders waved at me once they had everything cleaned out. Then they all just sank back into the floor. I swear they’re still around here somewhere; something keeps loosening any bad stains I go to clean up and I know I see them around sometimes. It’s not all that outrageous no matter what people say about me, right? Even back home something a man like your grandfather did would stick around a bit, I think, but here it literally can’t help but leave some echoes.”

She moved onto another section of my hair while she was paused. Whatever the oil was, it made my hair shine. Literally. It was reflecting some of the light here when she rustled it around, looking more golden than the usual flax color. Hesitant as I was to think it – it was actually pretty.

“The other thing I won’t forget were his eyes. You have them too Ma’am, with that purple and the gold and the green. His cheeks too, I think. You’re exactly what I expected when I heard his daughter had kids; you’re a spitting image of her.”

Nobody had ever said that before. Then again Grandpa didn’t like talking about her and nobody else we were around had known her. We’d never had any pictures up, either. For the eyes, though, I could sort of see what she meant. People always said they were hazel and that the purple look was just light being weird – but looking here it was a lot more like a dark purple than a distorted brown where the threads of gold and green ran through the iris.

“His eyes, they had something more though. I can’t put it into words, but whatever it was isn’t there in yours. It was like time stopped when I looked up into them. I know I sound like some rich mistress waxing poetic about her beau of the week while she fans herself on a fainting couch, Ma’am, but it really did feel like my heart sped up and everything else slowed down. Everyone that saw it says it was just a few seconds. To me, it was like a lifetime.”

She sighed and put in the last of the pins. Her hands hovered in the air over my shoulders for a bit before she dropped them to her sides.

“Everything around me faded away. The floor, the great hall, him – all that was left were his eyes and vague blurs that squirm away when I try to remember them. The pounding in my chest was like I’d been running for hours, the warmth on my skin was like the sun had been beating down on me the whole time. It’s not a feeling you get here, Ma’am. I felt my hair moving in a warm breeze that rustled leaves around me, twirling around as it carried the faint scent of flowers and bark. That was impossible too – there’s no wind in the House, not like that. No trees here have had leaves, ever. I know I’ve been here for a while, but I remember what a windy forest sounds like. It shouldn’t rasp like that.”

She sniffled and wiped a few tears away with the back of her hand.

“It’s like I was falling into somewhere else, somewhere and someone different. I could feel my skin start to prickle and my bones start to shift around, like I needed to change. To be whatever I was remembering – whatever was still in his eyes. He stopped it by looking away. It didn’t hurt even when everything snapped back in place. Not until it all hit me. The sadness. As crushing as when I saw my own daughter dead and fled here. I was missing something and I couldn’t even say what it was. The thoughts, the feelings, they ran off just as quickly as everything else. All that was left were the scraps of memories.”

“He had this sad smile on his face as he steadied me there. It didn’t reach his eyes. The happiness it had started with stuck with me, but with the rest it was so hollow. There had to be more to it, but it just wasn’t there. I never asked him about it, never even went up to him again. I was always too nervous or too busy or he just came through too fast for me to catch him. Then he had your mother with him and I almost did, but the Masters actually stopped me. Said to let dead things lay.”

She sucked in a breath and put down the brush.

“The last time I saw him, she was gone and he just looked so – so broken. Now he’s gone too, and I’ll never know what it was. I don’t even know if I’m better off this way.”

She was quiet for a few seconds and her voice was trembled when she did talk.

“It was part of his past, I think. Something special. Even if other people had felt it or seen it, it wouldn’t have been the same. I can feel that in my bones. It was still just a piece. And knowing that the rest was out there, that something hurt him so badly and I didn’t know what it was, then that it’s just gone now? I can feel it missing if I look, a gap that he left that won’t ever heal. When I think about it, it’s like a hole rips open in my chest and a rope goes taut around my throat.”

The tears took both hands to wipe off that time.