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snarpThis is my Hana to Yume-style story exercise, as opposed to my Shounen Jump-style story exercise. I'm trying to bully myself into working on it again, and thus I empower the internet to yell stuff at me if I don't post chapter three within the next few weeks.
(I posted a version of chapter one last year, but I've rewritten it and request that you don't read the old version if you haven't already. (I'm not taking the old version down because I have a weird complex that prevents me from doing such things.))
Chapter 1
-
In a low, clear place in the Silent Wood, there was a well where you could go to make a wish, one only for yourself. There would be a price. A voice at the bottom of the well would tell you what that price was, and you could choose to pay it, or to walk away. And most people walked away.
And most people only went there once, because something told them it was better not to bother the well twice. But a few went back again, many years later, because something was telling them they could have another chance.
This is a story about one of those people.
Pasky Bay took his younger sister Pasky Pays to the well on the morning that she turned eleven years old. Bay was a Hero. He had gone at that age, too, and asked for the power to see when a person was lying. For his price, he was told to bring a Rabbit With A Dance to the Well, and throw it down.
The Rabbits With A Dance were seen only on starless nights high in the mountains at the northern edge of the world, and they did not let those who saw their dance live. There had been a few dozen humans - Heroes and Magicians and monsters (for all monsters are human) - who had encountered them over the centuries and managed to escape with their lives. The Rabbits weren't really rabbits, but rough shapes sewn together of musty black leather with long ears knotted off at the ends and gleaming black eyes, and mouths sewn shut.
When they came, they came in groups of six, and danced in circles around you, pattering and creaking and heaving gusts of dusty hot leathery air out of their poorly-sewn skins - they were possibly hollow - and the dance made you want to die so much that you did. The ones who escaped them returned home disinterested strangers, who looked at those they had loved out of puzzled, uncertain eyes, and could rarely find it in themselves to speak. Some important thing had been torn clean out of them, leaving an empty space.
No one had ever managed to capture a Rabbit before. Eleven-year-old Bay had listened to the well's price, standing alone in the quiet green wood with a wet spring shadow falling in his eyes, and simply nodded. Then, worried the well couldn't see that, he had said, "Okay."
The capture of the Rabbit was how Bay first began to be called a Hero. (Later he would do things that were somewhat more useful to society.)
But either his first battle or his wish had done something to him, something that turned him old and narrow before his time. At sixteen his long black hair had half gone gray, his words were chosen with care and mistrust, and sometimes, particularly when he could hear someone talking, he moved gingerly as if there was a tight place in his chest. He had not been seen to smile for many years.
Bay had six younger brothers and sisters, and each of the four after him had gone hopefully to the Well on the day that they turned eleven. Each had been given a bargain he or she could fulfill, though none ever made a wish as big as Bay's, or were named a price as high. For instance, the second-oldest, a girl named Jing, wished for various reasons more complicated than one might assume to become the best cook in Jirny City, and was asked to shave her head for ten years and not wear a wig. The Paskys, people said to each other quietly when they saw the siblings in the streets, must be blessed by the Old Fairies, to have all their wishes granted for such gentle prices.
But they said it quietly, for fear that Bay would hear. Bay did not believe that at all. He could not depend on anything.
Pays was the second-youngest and the youngest girl, and Bay took her to the well on her birthday as everyone expected. But though he bought them a private cabin on the train, he did not sleep. He sat awake all night on the hard seatbeds with thick green velvet stretched over them and the endless strings of yellow lanterns humming by outside the small window, watching his sleeping sister, afraid she might awaken at any second and do something terrible, probably to the restroom locks or something. She couldn't be trusted at all on public transport.
Bay's eyes always narrowed when Pays opened her mouth. There were people in the world who couldn't help lying, and he could stand being around most of them, but Pays was the only one so indecent as to have been born his sister. He wanted to put her wish off. He badly feared she would be the first of his family to fail, that people would look at him as having failed with her, somehow. He disliked that thought intensely. Pays was not much like Jing, who took good care of her fingernails and cleaned things without being asked. She was not like any of their clean, lucky, occasionally Heroic family.
Pays got in fights a lot, though afterwards she was never quite sure how. They just happened, like dew on the outside of a cup or litters of kittens in the fire escape. She was always covered in bruises and full of secrets and failing at least two classes and alone. Other children avoided her mostly, except when they somehow found themselves trying to pummel her (they couldn't explain it, either).
And every one of her brothers and sisters, even baby Lo Song, had at least one fairy - but Pays didn't. She hated each and every one of the two hundred different kinds of fairies, from Linen Ladies to Sea Sweeps to Demon-Eating Dogs to Fire Hats. She kicked them over and threw firecrackers at them and put salt in their food, something that all fairies of course hate. Putting aside what he was afraid Pays might wish for, Bay was almost certain that the thing at the bottom of the well was a fairy.
It would be a very rare and powerful one, of some secretive 201st race - a mysterious creature that had kept itself hidden for many long centuries, far out of the reach of human men and women. (Bay sympathized with the impulse.) A fairy like that would not be as forgiving of Pays' behavior as, say, his Thin Man, a white-faced little man fifteen inches tall and one inch wide, which spent the night on the train with its twig-like black-clothed limbs draped neatly over the cabin's curtain rod, and its sharp-toed black leather shoes and hard red fingernails occasionally tap-tapping against the window when the train jostled. Bay was expecting to have to fix it if Pays did something bad.
Pays knew what Bay was thinking. She usually did, though he couldn't return the favor. She suspected she was going to be her brother's arch-enemy or something when she grew up.
There was a little temple in the Silent Wood, where you stopped before you went to the well, so the monks could record that you'd been there. (It didn't mean anything; the well knew, and it would not forget.) It was early in the morning when Pays came with her brother, stumbling and still chewing on a rice ball she'd stolen from the dining car.
Because Bay was Bay, the monks asked him in for tea. The Thin Man went with him, walking with its cautious, mantis-like dignity beside him, coming barely up to the hem of his gray silk tunic. It looked back at Pays for a moment, its pale, smooth face stern, and then followed her brother through the doorway into the monks' living chambers. Pays was left alone in the temple. She knelt on the hard wood floor in the new white linen slacks and shirt Bay had bought her for today, a little too big for her. She thought the idea was that she looked small and innocent in them; maybe he hoped it would make the well go easier on her.
She listened to the boards creak from the little gray-pawed Dust Spirits running beneath them, and didn't pretend to pray until Bay came back, smiling and looking public. A gray-bearded monk with a tanned, knotted face like a walnut was with him. He looked sharply at her, like Bay hadn't been smiling a few minutes ago.
They led her outside to a little grassy path, a few clear meters in the middle of forest, with a fence of freshly-cut wood on both sides. Somewhere up ahead the fence disappeared, and there was a clearing with pale golden sunlight and soft green shapes in it. The sun was bright and the crickets were still chirping under the wet leaves, and the wind was icy. It was spring, and that was Pays' time of year. It was the season that lied the worst.
Bay gave her a gentle push that masked something else. She heard the monk softly turn and walk away across the slippery grass, and wondered what he was thinking. She took a step forward, nearly tripped, and started running, because abruptly she didn't want her brother looking at her anymore.
Pays had always suspected that she wasn't good enough. Today Bay, the Hero and her brother, had talked about her to people he didn't know. She decided that no one was good enough.
She didn't remember reaching the little clearing. She was standing there, breathing hard, under a false gloom that would end once the sun got a little higher or she stepped back a few yards. She looked around carefully, feeling like she'd broken into somebody's house. She found a fallen log to sit on at the very edge of the clearing, and looked in at the well. The trees leaned over and dripped dew into it; they were pretty; Pays guessed the monks had arranged them that way. The well was made of soft, rounded gray stones and was very clean, without a bit of moss on it like a proper ancient well should have. It was not at all impressive.
Like most children, and particularly those in her lucky family, she'd thought all her life about her wish. She had given up a lot as too big and likely to be wasted, because the well would want to cut her legs off or something and she'd have to turn it down. There were smaller ones, like being the fourth-best thief in Jirny City, that she still suspected she wouldn't get off with just shaving her head for, because the well probably cared about the difference between a Pays and a Jing.
(Incidentally, Pays wanted to be fourth-best because the two greatest thieves in the world, Ken Gley and the Boy With Big Dark Eyes, were known to reside in Jirny City, and if *those* two cared to live there, Pays figured there must be at least one other really good one. The price to be better than the likes of them would surely be too high for somebody like Pays to pay.)
She guessed that, what with statistics of risk and all (her brother Hih had wished to be the greatest actuary in the world and paid his ability to ever leave the palace where he lived now, and it had made him happier than anyone but he had expected; he talked about statistics a lot), she still ought to use one of those medium-sized wishes. She just didn't seem to want any of them enough.
There was something she had realized she wanted when she was running away from Bay. She wanted to be left alone. She sat on the log thinking. Then she flicked a beetle off her sandal and stood up.
Standing on her tiptoes, she peered over the edge of the well into the darkness, feeling the rough stone scrape her through her new shirt. There was something about the stone scratching her that felt more solid than anything else in the world to her. The well and Pays were all there was that was real, and maybe not even Pays. There was no smell of water; the bottom was a very long way down.
She propped her chin against the inside of the well, trying to look straight down. She said to the air, feeling awkward about it, "I want to be able to make it so people don't see me."
The well said, "I want to cut your legs off." The voice was that of a very old woman, watery and impatient. There was no echo - the old woman was right there with Pays.
But before Pays could say, "No, thank you," and go away and be miserable for most of the rest of the next couple of years, the well said sharply, in a different and younger voice, "No. Change that. It will only work - in the *dark*. It will only work in the dark. Take it or leave it."
Pays considered this somewhat dazedly. She had her own room now, was the thing foremost in her mind, and she could probably close her curtains and turn out the lights.
"Okay."
Something small and pale slapped her in the forehead just then, then fell back into the well and made a sound like smacking into someone's palm. She had the idea that it had been some kind of fruit pit. No one had ever told her the well threw things at you. Pays squinted down into the dark, wishing she'd been quick enough to try and snatch it. There were people who'd pay a lot of money for something the well'd thrown.
Then she realized she didn't want to be there anymore. She had had her wish; it was time she went home.
She walked slowly on the damp, slippery grass. Bay was waiting alone for her at the end. She ignored him, deep in thought. Pays didn't think the well-fairy was supposed to change her mind. Or forget to name her price.
Bay had given up waiting and was walking impatiently towards her, all lies fleeing before him. He had made his own decision, and was going to ask the question in a second, and he was sure he knew what the answer would be. He would know if she lied; he always knew.
Suddenly, she knew exactly what she needed to do. She smiled for the first time all morning.
Bay could surely have explained what had happened - if Bay didn't know, then no one did. But she wasn't going to ask.. All curiosity about her one-sided bargain had been forgotten, somehow, in the odd stillness of the clearing. Even if Pays had come away empty-handed, she would have solved all her problems right here, at this moment.
Bay asked, "Did you get your wish?"
Cheerfully, Pays told him, "I wished that you'd always be wrong about me."
And for five years, Bay never knew what the truth was.
-
Everyone must always pay a price.
-
Chapter 2
-
Pays was fourteen the next time she met one of the Old Fairies.
On the morning of the day it happened, she got up before dawn. She was going to visit her father, and then she would have a client to meet.
Bay was already awake when she emerged into the dim hall and slid the paper panel to her room shut. He was wearing black silk slacks and an embroidered gray silk tunic with a high collar and tie-closures. They were his medium-formal clothes, that he wore when the person asking him to fight a monster or break a curse was important, but not quite important enough to live in the palace. When he went to the palace, he wore green, the color of the forest like all Heroes are supposed to wear, and the red cloak the Crown Princess had given him when he'd rescued her fairy from a monster. Bay didn't like colors, but even Bay couldn't go into the Imperial family's presence dressed like a funeral.
He was eating a bowl of instant rice gruel while standing up, a wooden spoon in one hand and a letter he was reading in the other. Pays had seen the letter when she went to bed last night, lying on the floor of his bedroom where Jing had left it for him. There had been a map to their apartment building penciled on the envelope instead of an address, and a pretty good sketch of Bay that was mostly just messy hair and a frown. She'd stood there peering in the door for a couple minutes, wondering what a letter from someone who couldn't write looked like, but she hadn't quite been able to work up the nerve to step into Bay's room and tear it open.
*It doesn't matter what kind of front I put up for other people,* Pays admitted to herself grimly. *Where Bay's concerned, I'm just a coward.*
His gray rainjacket was already draped over his arm, and his brown canvas workbag was by the door, so he was just about to leave. Of his eleven fairies, only the Thin Man was in evidence. It had laid its chopstick-like body over the doorstep, and was looking mournfully up at a spider on the ceiling.
She stood there looking at Bay for a second, trying to figure out what to do. Since he had the kitchen light on, and the shadows in their living room never got very thick, she couldn't turn invisible and sneak out the fire escape like usual. She inwardly squared her shoulders and stepped firmly into the kitchen. Maybe he wouldn't make a scene.
Bay had forgotten to brush his hair again. Jing would have handed him the brush, but Pays just walked around him and got some bread out of the packet Jing had made for their lunches. He laid down the letter and turned to look at her out of wintry black eyes.
Ever since the day of her wish, Bay had not been able to tell when his youngest sister was lying to him. She was the only person in the world who could escape him. Just being in the same room as her made him angry. Pays was stubbornly proud of that.
He said grimly, "You're going to see him again, aren't you?"
She asked helpfully through a mouthful of bread, "Why, you need something from the shop?"
This was one of Pays' Four Secret Techniques, developed to convince Bay his power to see the truth didn't work on her: She asked him questions. Bay's heart felt that most questions were somehow lies, because most people didn't really want to learn anything new. So he could never tell which of Pays' questions really were lies, and which weren't.
Bay's right eye twitched. He hated it when people talked with their mouths full. He said curtly, "No. You shouldn't talk to Pann Ehr. There's no point."
None of Pann Ehr's children had lived with him since Pays had been very small. One day he had simply not come home, leaving Bay, who was just nine, to take care of his six little brothers and sisters. Bay hated him for it, which was why he had made up the nice clean new name "Pasky" for them all to have. Bay had wanted nothing of their father touching any of them.
So, out of sheer spite, sometimes Pays went to visit him.
She opened the front door and stepped over the Thin Man, who kicked her with one hard little foot indignantly.
"Pays," said Bay sharply. She found herself stopping, not wanting to. Someday she would figure out how to not listen to Bay. She hadn't yet; but someday. He said coldly, "I'm only saying this once - if he's in some kind of trouble -"
"You've actually said this four times."
(This was another of the Secret Techniques. She told lies that sounded like the truth. He'd really said it five, because he'd been so mad at her the second time that he'd repeated himself. He didn't remember that, though.)
"- If he's in trouble, don't try to help him. He's none of your business. You'll only get yourself in over your head."
"Is "over my head" similar to, like, guys trying to stab me, or do you mean in more a *dirty* kind of way?"
"You can't change Pann Ehr, Pays," he said, his black eyes hard as steel. "He'll never be any different. *Never.*" She flinched at the ice in his voice. She didn't see why he always had to tell her that. Pays couldn't imagine their father ever changing.
She hurried out before he could think of anything else to say, leaving the door swinging open behind her over the Thin Man's disapproving face.
-
These days Pann Ehr ran a medicine shop on Tal For Street. He knew all sorts of interesting things. Once in a while he would tell them to her. So sometimes she got up very early in the morning, stole something from Jing's pantry, and sneaked out the fire escape into the creaking old wooden city bathed in cool blue morning and the sleepy secret light of people's windows.
On these mornings the soft yellow lamplight was hers alone, and the dusty streets were hers, and the walk and its end were hers. This was important to Pays, whose family and luck and stories, and, especially, older brother, belonged to the whole of Jirny City.
So while she was alone and the world was hers, she walked over the flower-heavy bridges and up the vine-cracked stone stairs to Tal For Street, where two or three of the hundreds of little shops would just be sleepily pulling back their bamboo screens from over the windows. And wherever a hard enough bit of shadow fell from a building or a doorway and hit her in the face, Pays would be invisible, just as the fairy had promised. And at the end of her journey she would vanish into a small alley, and appear again under the lamp in her father's workroom.
"Random numbers," he said, squinting up at Pays' hand as she poured her tea. Pann Ehr was a tiny man, less than five feet tall and narrow as a river-reed, a little bent over and stiff at the hips because of something slightly awry with his spine. His hair was a thick, graying black braid down to his ankles, and he had an oddly sweet, rough sort of voice. Pays supposed his face was pretty enough, too. She guessed she could see why all those rich women who shopped here liked her father.
He said decisively, "You've got have kind of a random number thing going on in your head, is what it is."
She said, "Wait, what?" She'd been thinking about Bay, wishing she'd left before he'd had a chance to yell at her that morning; she hadn't heard what Pann Ehr had been saying.
"- Well, when you tell a lie, you've got to include plausible details. You know that," he said, sounding a little accusing.
Pays shrugged. She did, though.
"The details've got to be random. You can't ever fall into a rut - not even for a second, never let them catch you repeating yourself, that's where your credibility lies - you have to have keep that element of randomness going, somehow, when you're drawing up your plan, when you're giving the pitch. Every second, always keep it moving. Like I'm selling those dried leklin flower heads in little bags, right?"
Apparently he was. The teabags were pale violet mesh, and very special-looking with the little green flowers in them. Pays nodded.
"So why do you need those things to be in the little bags. I'm not just going to say, it's because they look real *special*, and I had extra teabags, but not jars or anything. So I say that they're from - they're from Simmalie," Ehr said, polishing his little round glasses impatiently on his old pink cotton robe. His hair was wet, so he must have taken a bath, but he hadn't yet changed into one of the silks he wore when the shop was open. He sounded grouchy - he didn't have his nice soft work-voice on, either. He never did with Pays.
"That's where they're from, from Simmalie, and - and, oh, they were drunk as tea in Konshi, for getting you to sleep and having calming dreams prominently featuring clouds (and clouds represent water and heaven both at once, so that's good), but only for women because it was popularly believed it made men "weak" - and I'll kind of shrug when I say that - shrug for me, girl? You're good at it - they were used in Konshi, but these I got right *here* were grown in Simmalie because Konshi has got other and more profitable agricultural exports nowadays, right?"
"It does?" Pays asked. Her father looked at her sulkily, some hair that had escaped his braid tumbling over his face. "So you just made all that up?"
"That's what I'm saying! I make everything up! That's what I'm saying. So now I've told this story about the leklin flowers. The story belongs to the leklin flowers. Just them. It can't be told twice. The next story about the next thing - I've got some mushrooms here, I don't know *what* these things are, so I'm gonna say no one'd better eat 'em - the mushroom story needs to be different. Needs to be... The mushrooms are grown locally by some nuns, they're for your air..."
He poked the dried mushrooms on his little tin scale, absorbed in some thought. "- I'm not gonna use that one, nobody likes nuns. - It's the element of randomness that gives value - the grain of the wood, some grit in the glaze. Randomness in stories and in prices. Unpredictability. If I price everything clean and staggered - like, this is fifteen, this is twenty, this is twenty five - that doesn't work. Twenty's got no story, it's too easy. Twenty-two and a quarter and some, that's a story."
"What story?"
"There's one in there," Ehr said firmly. "It's important. No one just buys *stuff*. They want a story. They want a story about *themselves*. That's what they pay us for, girl."
"When do you think anyone ever paid me for a story, old man?" Pays asked huffily. She didn't want to get stuck in an "us" with her father. Even if, in her heart, she knew she was just the same as her father. She knew just what today's client wanted from her.
"Yeah?" said Ehr, uncertainly. Ehr saw a lot of things to do with money and lying and women very clearly - but his children were just a colorful blur. He couldn't get a clear look at them. It startled him when they had ideas of their own, when they did things that he wouldn't do, or were disgusted by things he did every day. She guessed it was why he'd abandoned them. "Maybe. I don't know. I don't really know. I don't know anything, really..."
They were sitting on stools at the heavy wooden worktable in the back room of the shop, which was all covered with shreds of herbs and scraps of the little bags and papers he packaged them with. He had made the tea over a little kerosene burner he kept there. The box of empty teabags was on the edge of the table, and shreds of the leklin blossoms were scattered across it, releasing a sweet herbal fragrance whenever Pays or Ehr stirred the air.
The walls of the cramped back room were lined with thick wooden shelves. Most of them held neat rows of big jars of normal things - garlic and ginger and seaweed and mugwort and camellia oil, heavy-packed and patient-looking, weighing down the air with their solemn, ordinary perfumes. Some held smaller jars of odder substances, like dehydrated fish eggs and lion hairs, that were only rarely opened.
He kept a new, expensive digital rice cooker under the shelf beside the stairs, plugged into the room's single electrical outlet. The socket that should have been above it was covered with a thick X of electrical tape from where something had gone wrong. Sometimes he left his clothes lying around, densely-patterned purple and green silk robes, very old-fashioned and expensive and necessary. *If you look like you've got money,* Pann Ehr said, *People give you more. Natural fact of life.*
And then there were the really special things, the sharp-edged ones that were his best business - obscene-looking alchemical tools that were always hot or cold, or had to be stored in the shadow of an unlit lamp at all times; strange scrolls and books, twists of crumbling, ancient leather with sharp brand-new spells embossed on them; small metal machines from across the sea that he didn't understand but had brought home anyway. There was a cloak of some kind of very fine red fur that had been there for years, and a tin-handled hand-mirror that he'd bought from a cormorant fisher last winter, which seemed to reflect a similar room in a distant country, where you could always see rain falling outside a little window. (Ehr's back room had no windows.)
Pann Ehr's twisted mind had been winding its way up to something all morning, and now it unspooled. He said all in a rush. "Hey, were you going down to the river today? You don't wanna go down there today."
"Why not?" she asked, instantly suspicious. Ehr *never* tried to tell his children what to do. He didn't like the feeling he might be responsible for the consequences. And her client had requested a meeting place on the north bank - not really bright, given what he was hiring her for, but it wasn't her problem if he wanted to get beat up.
He shrugged, picking up the end of his braid and looking at it like it was interesting. "Something going on. I don't know, I don't know. He'll get mad at you, won't he, girl?"
"You think Bay doesn't get mad I come *here*?"
Ehr flinched at the reminder. He was frightened of his Hero son. Bay was twice his size, and was always extremely angry with him for many good reasons. Pays thought Bay's mother - whoever she was - must have been exactly like him, because he hadn't inherited a single thing from Pann Ehr.
"Girl," said Ehr, nervously. He only ever called them "girl" or "boy," except Bay, who about half the time he called "sir" instead. Pays wasn't sure he even *knew* their names. "Don't talk to Ma Hen."
"How come? She send someone to kill you again?"
"What are you doing saying stuff like that?" demanded Ehr, twisting his braid anxiously, and avoiding her eyes. "No reason to say a bad thing like that. Nobody killing anybody, now, here."
Ma Hen kind of ran the north bank of the Tsi Ri, and Bay'd had to talk to her the last time she'd tried to kill Ehr. In Pays' opinion, the whole thing had been completely Ehr's fault. Ma had *warned* him to keep away from her kyara wholesaler, and everyone knew Ma didn't mess around.
Pays had been in the back room, trying to read a 300-year-old book on bad-luck charms Ehr had been cleaning up to sell, when two men with short, thin swords under their long black coats had come politely in the front door to explain the problem to him. They hadn't hurt him because she'd been there (they'd seen her when she'd poked her head out to see why Ehr'd made that funny squeaking noise), but she'd had to keep giving him wine for almost an hour and a half before he'd calmed down. But the next week he'd gone down to the guy's boat again anyway. You'd think a man would know better at his age.
But Bay wouldn't have listened even if Pays had explained to him how stupid Ehr had been. Pays figured cynically that Bay thought he was the only one who was allowed to kill their father.
Feeling grumpily like she was the grown-up, as she often did around Ehr, Pays reminded him of that: "Didn't Bay tell you you had to keep off Ma's turf from now on? 'cause of the thing where she kills you?"
"I do keep away from her, now, I *generally* do, but recently there's been a thing. A complex but perfectly reasonable thing -"
"He'll be really annoyed if you get killed."
"Girl, I ain't going to like it *either*," said Ehr, sounding a little hurt. "You even care about my opinion? Oh, and Old Ban Min, too, there was a thing. You gotta say you're not gonna get near Ban Min, girl."
She stared at him. "Bald Ban that sells *swords*? Old man, what'd you *do*?"
"Nothing. Not a thing."
"You just said there was a thing."
"It's just business. It's nothing. Here, give me that, uh, that cup, you're done with that cup."
It was sort of amazing Ehr was still alive. With a growing sense of forboding, Pays watched her father finickily rinse out their teacups at his big work sink. Ehr had to've done something really big if he thought anyone might bother *her*. Pann Ehr himself was one thing, but you had to be *seriously* upset to mess with one of Pasky Bay's little brothers and sisters, even if it was just Pays. Everybody remembered what Bay'd done to Jing's fiance.
She'd have to find out what was going on. But even Bay couldn't get the truth out of Ehr when he was scared. When he thought he was in trouble, he got so deep into lying he mostly believed himself, and got angry when someone told him he wasn't telling the truth.
She'd have to ask some questions down at the river before she met her client, Pays thought grumpily. And if people were maybe going to try and kill her today, she'd have to borrow someone's fairy. She didn't want to do that. She hated fairies.
Standing up and shaking some petals of something out of her hair, she said to Pann Ehr, "Go to work, old man."
He looked up from a handful of something black and grainy he'd extricated from a jar, suspicious. He could be suspicious if he wanted - her father couldn't do anything to her. She went up the little stairs into the shop, all neat and clean and herb-smelling, and flipped the sign to "open" on her way out.
-
This morning had been strange for two reasons: one, Bay had been awake when Pays left; and two, May Leen hadn't been.
Most mornings when Pays left home early, the apartment was very quiet. Everyone but Jing and Lo Song slept in their separate rooms, and Jing and Lo Song slept in their room together; and all of them but Bay dreamed softly of bright lucky things, and Bay dreamed hard of cold bloody ones; and all was dark and silent except for a few of Jing's cooking machines she left on for the night. The rice-cooker and the slow-cooker and the bread-maker sat humming and gulping in the kitchen, their little red and yellow lights glowing gently and sweetly in the shadow-draped kitchen, and sometimes Pay stole some of whatever'd been in them.
In an hour or two her family would all be up and eating and losing their jackets and poking each other with their chopsticks and scrambling around getting ready for school or work or lunch, and they would clatter on the floorboards and leave toe-prints everywhere, and would get into each other's things, and their fairies would be mixed in there so you could hardly tell who was human and who wasn't.
But when Pays got up early, she rarely met anyone but the rain and May Leen. May Leen was Bay's worst fairy, the Roaring Girl.
There were two hundred known types of fairies. Most common and easiest to acquire were Martial Fairies (like Thin Men and Bottles-Under-Beds), who liked to fight, and House Fairies (like Linen Boys and Ships), who liked to clean and fix things. Then there were the Educated Fairies (like Slime Molds and The-Ends), who could give good advice, and sometimes could teach you spells, who were rarer and harder to get. Last were the Free Fairies - or, as most people called them, the No-Good Fairies.
Some No-Good Fairies *could* do things - it was just that they never bothered. Roaring Girls were incredible fighters, but they were so lazy, rude, self-absorbed, recalcitrant, noisy, and greedy, that it was universally agreed among humans that there was no point keeping one around.
And they were extremely, extremely difficult to coax into a contract with a human.
Part of the matter of a fairy contract was simply about personality. Different kinds of fairies liked different kinds of humans - a Martial Fairy generally liked somebody with a short temper and a lot of passions, while a House Fairy liked someone patient and gentle, and an Educated Fairy someone curious, intelligent, and maybe a little strange. Most people had a fairy approach them when they were pretty young, and what kind of fairy it was was considered to tell a lot about your personality. Jing's had been her very neatly-pressed Linen Boy, Mr. Lamp, while Bay's had been his perpetually irritable Sea Sweep, Crabby - a Martial Fairy, of course. Pann Ehr's had been an Educated Fairy, a beautiful, lazy, rose-petal-jam-obsessed Firework who called herself Lady Pearl the Completely Perfect, and had been wooed away from him a couple of years ago. Pays, of course, had never had a fairy come to her at all.
But fairies did not bind themsleves to human beings for love of their master, but for love of food. A fairy could eat raw fruits and vegetables - but they would have no taste, and would not satisfy his hunger. Only made things could nourish a fairy's body. And no fairy could cook.
It was a kind of magic to a fairy, even the most brilliant of the Educated, that a human being might take objects like leaves, seeds, and dead animals, and turn them into something that could be eaten. Something in the ritual entranced and confused them. Fairies grouped in huge numbers around food carts and outside restaurants where they could see the cooks working, watching wide-eyed and debating among themselves. Some of the ones with hands would applaud the completed dish, and the ones without hands might howl or warble with excitement. Others, more dignified, would debate amongst themselves the mysteries of the act of cooking, as if they were discussing something as distant from them as the movements of the stars.
Usually, the fairies that ate the most were happy with simpler foods - a Linen Boy or Bottle-Under-Bed, perpetually hungry as they were, would be satisfied with rice balls filled with sweet bean paste or a chocolate croissants. They didn't even mind if you didn't cook it yourself, as long as it was food. (They didn't particularly care about your personality, either.) On the other hand, fairies like a Ship - which ate a great amount, but only once every two or three weeks - or a Royal-rain-leaps - which ate just a teaspoonful on the last day of autumn - were generally extremely choosy about their food, and liked to be able to see it being prepared. A Ship required that its human own the land on which the wheat used to make its thousands of loaves of sweetbread was grown, and would watch the entire harvesting process, dragging itself up out of the water and however many miles inland it took on its forty great pink legs. There was a great migration of them to the Plain of Nie every year, with patient humans sitting at their helms patting their small heads. It was very secret exactly what a Royal-rain-leaps ate, but Bay and Prince Lyo - the only two humans to have one this generation - both disappeared on their own for several weeks in November to get whatever it was, and seemed to have a few more white hairs each time they returned.
Roaring Girls expected to be fed three times a day, but had extremely demanding tastes. And every one of them had a different idea of what they wanted. Pays had heard of a Roaring Girl who would only eat food that had been taken from children. May Leen would eat only chocolates or bean paste candies that were molded and colored to look like people - so she could bite their heads off, of course. Normally, this sort of attitude would have driven a species extinct. But while most fairies only knew how to accept gifts, Roaring Girls had, somehow, learned how to steal.
So a Roaring Girl was in a position to bargain, if anyone happened to want her. It was a mystery to the whole city why their great Hero Pasky Bay had wanted May Leen.
Pays looked down uncertainly at the unwanted fairy, who smiled innocently back up at her. Pays said uncomfortably, "...Is Jing here?"
May Leen just smirked and went back to her book. Pays uneasily decided not to ask again. May Leen made her nervous, and not only because the fairy could have tied her into knots, and then, surprised to discover that she couldn't undo them, chopped the knots open. Pays often had nightmares in which Bay's fairies did those sorts of things to her, and usually it was May Leen who was in charge of the activity. Pays left her frequent murderer there on the floor, and went to look for Jing.
She needed to borrow a fairy. She didn't want to - whenever she did, everyone in her family always, in one way or another, made her feel like a failure for having to ask. Jing was the least likely to make a scene, so Pays had wanted to borrow her Demon-Eating Dog. It was a plus that the Dog, a multi-purpose fairy who could both fight *and* clean absolutely anything, was unlikely to ask any questions, being as he couldn't talk.
Jing and Lo Song's room was empty, and all clean as always, with the bedding rolled up and stowed and the windowglass shining. Jing, the second-oldest of them, was eighteen; Lo Song, the baby, would be eleven next month. Lo Song's dolls and the cookbooks Jing didn't keep in the kitchen were put carefully away on the shelves along the back wall. All their clothes were shut completely in their chests without any edges peaking out. Jing and Lo Song were very neat people. Except for the brightly-colored dolls and cookbooks, everything in the room - the clothes chests, the shelves, the paint on the windowsill - was white, and none of it ever seemed to have any dirt on it. Even the sliding screens of their room seemed oddly brighter than any of the others, like a little bit of their sweetness had soaked into the heavy paper.
Pays did not like being soothed, and would never admit it when she was, but their room always somehow made her feel better about things.
Jing must be out shopping. Pays slid the door closed, frowning. She could take hours and hours at buying food, looking at the things on the shelves so hard they started falling off, if Lo Song wasn't with her to break her out of her trance. And Lo Song was at school. (Pays was supposed to be, too.)
Pays couldn't go down to the Tsi Ri alone if somebody was going to try to kill her. She looked uneasily down the hall towards May Leen, then went and stood in front of Jaki's room and stamped her foot on the floor. "You in there?"
His screens shook malevolently at her, and the spell-encrusted room let out a shuddering wheeze of stale air. But there was no answer. Jaki had covered his with so much black, wrinkled magic that no one but him could stand even to touch the screens. This was annoying to Pays, whose room was right next to his - there was a shelf against the wall she couldn't touch with her hand bruising purple.
She called over the sound of harsh breathing and little squeals, "I need to go maybe kill somebody. Can I borrow your stupid fairy?" Silence. Why had he had to pick today to go to school? Pays gave up and trudged reluctantly back to May Leen.
May Leen said drowsily, her head pillowed on her book, "Kill?"
"You like killing people, right?" Pays asked her warily.
"I like a lot of things," said May Leen, making it sound dirty, stretching some wrinkles out of her right arm. "Do you like *any*thing?"
"Nope," said Pays shortly. "Not today. You want to maybe kill somebody?"
"You like *secrets*," said May Leen drowsily, pillowing her head on her arms. She licked her lips at Pays with her rough purple linen tongue, and said, "Pick me up!"
She picked the giggling May Leen up, grimly arranging her head over her shoulder and trying not to think how easy it would be for May Leen to snap her neck. Pann Ehr never realized he was in trouble until he was in really, really deep. Pays wanted to find out what he'd done *today*. But unless Pays figured out a way to convince her not to, May Leen was going to tell Bay where Pays had taken her the first chance she got - she always told Bay everything.
She would just have to figure out some way to pay May Leen off.
(I posted a version of chapter one last year, but I've rewritten it and request that you don't read the old version if you haven't already. (I'm not taking the old version down because I have a weird complex that prevents me from doing such things.))
Chapter 1
-
In a low, clear place in the Silent Wood, there was a well where you could go to make a wish, one only for yourself. There would be a price. A voice at the bottom of the well would tell you what that price was, and you could choose to pay it, or to walk away. And most people walked away.
And most people only went there once, because something told them it was better not to bother the well twice. But a few went back again, many years later, because something was telling them they could have another chance.
This is a story about one of those people.
Pasky Bay took his younger sister Pasky Pays to the well on the morning that she turned eleven years old. Bay was a Hero. He had gone at that age, too, and asked for the power to see when a person was lying. For his price, he was told to bring a Rabbit With A Dance to the Well, and throw it down.
The Rabbits With A Dance were seen only on starless nights high in the mountains at the northern edge of the world, and they did not let those who saw their dance live. There had been a few dozen humans - Heroes and Magicians and monsters (for all monsters are human) - who had encountered them over the centuries and managed to escape with their lives. The Rabbits weren't really rabbits, but rough shapes sewn together of musty black leather with long ears knotted off at the ends and gleaming black eyes, and mouths sewn shut.
When they came, they came in groups of six, and danced in circles around you, pattering and creaking and heaving gusts of dusty hot leathery air out of their poorly-sewn skins - they were possibly hollow - and the dance made you want to die so much that you did. The ones who escaped them returned home disinterested strangers, who looked at those they had loved out of puzzled, uncertain eyes, and could rarely find it in themselves to speak. Some important thing had been torn clean out of them, leaving an empty space.
No one had ever managed to capture a Rabbit before. Eleven-year-old Bay had listened to the well's price, standing alone in the quiet green wood with a wet spring shadow falling in his eyes, and simply nodded. Then, worried the well couldn't see that, he had said, "Okay."
The capture of the Rabbit was how Bay first began to be called a Hero. (Later he would do things that were somewhat more useful to society.)
But either his first battle or his wish had done something to him, something that turned him old and narrow before his time. At sixteen his long black hair had half gone gray, his words were chosen with care and mistrust, and sometimes, particularly when he could hear someone talking, he moved gingerly as if there was a tight place in his chest. He had not been seen to smile for many years.
Bay had six younger brothers and sisters, and each of the four after him had gone hopefully to the Well on the day that they turned eleven. Each had been given a bargain he or she could fulfill, though none ever made a wish as big as Bay's, or were named a price as high. For instance, the second-oldest, a girl named Jing, wished for various reasons more complicated than one might assume to become the best cook in Jirny City, and was asked to shave her head for ten years and not wear a wig. The Paskys, people said to each other quietly when they saw the siblings in the streets, must be blessed by the Old Fairies, to have all their wishes granted for such gentle prices.
But they said it quietly, for fear that Bay would hear. Bay did not believe that at all. He could not depend on anything.
Pays was the second-youngest and the youngest girl, and Bay took her to the well on her birthday as everyone expected. But though he bought them a private cabin on the train, he did not sleep. He sat awake all night on the hard seatbeds with thick green velvet stretched over them and the endless strings of yellow lanterns humming by outside the small window, watching his sleeping sister, afraid she might awaken at any second and do something terrible, probably to the restroom locks or something. She couldn't be trusted at all on public transport.
Bay's eyes always narrowed when Pays opened her mouth. There were people in the world who couldn't help lying, and he could stand being around most of them, but Pays was the only one so indecent as to have been born his sister. He wanted to put her wish off. He badly feared she would be the first of his family to fail, that people would look at him as having failed with her, somehow. He disliked that thought intensely. Pays was not much like Jing, who took good care of her fingernails and cleaned things without being asked. She was not like any of their clean, lucky, occasionally Heroic family.
Pays got in fights a lot, though afterwards she was never quite sure how. They just happened, like dew on the outside of a cup or litters of kittens in the fire escape. She was always covered in bruises and full of secrets and failing at least two classes and alone. Other children avoided her mostly, except when they somehow found themselves trying to pummel her (they couldn't explain it, either).
And every one of her brothers and sisters, even baby Lo Song, had at least one fairy - but Pays didn't. She hated each and every one of the two hundred different kinds of fairies, from Linen Ladies to Sea Sweeps to Demon-Eating Dogs to Fire Hats. She kicked them over and threw firecrackers at them and put salt in their food, something that all fairies of course hate. Putting aside what he was afraid Pays might wish for, Bay was almost certain that the thing at the bottom of the well was a fairy.
It would be a very rare and powerful one, of some secretive 201st race - a mysterious creature that had kept itself hidden for many long centuries, far out of the reach of human men and women. (Bay sympathized with the impulse.) A fairy like that would not be as forgiving of Pays' behavior as, say, his Thin Man, a white-faced little man fifteen inches tall and one inch wide, which spent the night on the train with its twig-like black-clothed limbs draped neatly over the cabin's curtain rod, and its sharp-toed black leather shoes and hard red fingernails occasionally tap-tapping against the window when the train jostled. Bay was expecting to have to fix it if Pays did something bad.
Pays knew what Bay was thinking. She usually did, though he couldn't return the favor. She suspected she was going to be her brother's arch-enemy or something when she grew up.
There was a little temple in the Silent Wood, where you stopped before you went to the well, so the monks could record that you'd been there. (It didn't mean anything; the well knew, and it would not forget.) It was early in the morning when Pays came with her brother, stumbling and still chewing on a rice ball she'd stolen from the dining car.
Because Bay was Bay, the monks asked him in for tea. The Thin Man went with him, walking with its cautious, mantis-like dignity beside him, coming barely up to the hem of his gray silk tunic. It looked back at Pays for a moment, its pale, smooth face stern, and then followed her brother through the doorway into the monks' living chambers. Pays was left alone in the temple. She knelt on the hard wood floor in the new white linen slacks and shirt Bay had bought her for today, a little too big for her. She thought the idea was that she looked small and innocent in them; maybe he hoped it would make the well go easier on her.
She listened to the boards creak from the little gray-pawed Dust Spirits running beneath them, and didn't pretend to pray until Bay came back, smiling and looking public. A gray-bearded monk with a tanned, knotted face like a walnut was with him. He looked sharply at her, like Bay hadn't been smiling a few minutes ago.
They led her outside to a little grassy path, a few clear meters in the middle of forest, with a fence of freshly-cut wood on both sides. Somewhere up ahead the fence disappeared, and there was a clearing with pale golden sunlight and soft green shapes in it. The sun was bright and the crickets were still chirping under the wet leaves, and the wind was icy. It was spring, and that was Pays' time of year. It was the season that lied the worst.
Bay gave her a gentle push that masked something else. She heard the monk softly turn and walk away across the slippery grass, and wondered what he was thinking. She took a step forward, nearly tripped, and started running, because abruptly she didn't want her brother looking at her anymore.
Pays had always suspected that she wasn't good enough. Today Bay, the Hero and her brother, had talked about her to people he didn't know. She decided that no one was good enough.
She didn't remember reaching the little clearing. She was standing there, breathing hard, under a false gloom that would end once the sun got a little higher or she stepped back a few yards. She looked around carefully, feeling like she'd broken into somebody's house. She found a fallen log to sit on at the very edge of the clearing, and looked in at the well. The trees leaned over and dripped dew into it; they were pretty; Pays guessed the monks had arranged them that way. The well was made of soft, rounded gray stones and was very clean, without a bit of moss on it like a proper ancient well should have. It was not at all impressive.
Like most children, and particularly those in her lucky family, she'd thought all her life about her wish. She had given up a lot as too big and likely to be wasted, because the well would want to cut her legs off or something and she'd have to turn it down. There were smaller ones, like being the fourth-best thief in Jirny City, that she still suspected she wouldn't get off with just shaving her head for, because the well probably cared about the difference between a Pays and a Jing.
(Incidentally, Pays wanted to be fourth-best because the two greatest thieves in the world, Ken Gley and the Boy With Big Dark Eyes, were known to reside in Jirny City, and if *those* two cared to live there, Pays figured there must be at least one other really good one. The price to be better than the likes of them would surely be too high for somebody like Pays to pay.)
She guessed that, what with statistics of risk and all (her brother Hih had wished to be the greatest actuary in the world and paid his ability to ever leave the palace where he lived now, and it had made him happier than anyone but he had expected; he talked about statistics a lot), she still ought to use one of those medium-sized wishes. She just didn't seem to want any of them enough.
There was something she had realized she wanted when she was running away from Bay. She wanted to be left alone. She sat on the log thinking. Then she flicked a beetle off her sandal and stood up.
Standing on her tiptoes, she peered over the edge of the well into the darkness, feeling the rough stone scrape her through her new shirt. There was something about the stone scratching her that felt more solid than anything else in the world to her. The well and Pays were all there was that was real, and maybe not even Pays. There was no smell of water; the bottom was a very long way down.
She propped her chin against the inside of the well, trying to look straight down. She said to the air, feeling awkward about it, "I want to be able to make it so people don't see me."
The well said, "I want to cut your legs off." The voice was that of a very old woman, watery and impatient. There was no echo - the old woman was right there with Pays.
But before Pays could say, "No, thank you," and go away and be miserable for most of the rest of the next couple of years, the well said sharply, in a different and younger voice, "No. Change that. It will only work - in the *dark*. It will only work in the dark. Take it or leave it."
Pays considered this somewhat dazedly. She had her own room now, was the thing foremost in her mind, and she could probably close her curtains and turn out the lights.
"Okay."
Something small and pale slapped her in the forehead just then, then fell back into the well and made a sound like smacking into someone's palm. She had the idea that it had been some kind of fruit pit. No one had ever told her the well threw things at you. Pays squinted down into the dark, wishing she'd been quick enough to try and snatch it. There were people who'd pay a lot of money for something the well'd thrown.
Then she realized she didn't want to be there anymore. She had had her wish; it was time she went home.
She walked slowly on the damp, slippery grass. Bay was waiting alone for her at the end. She ignored him, deep in thought. Pays didn't think the well-fairy was supposed to change her mind. Or forget to name her price.
Bay had given up waiting and was walking impatiently towards her, all lies fleeing before him. He had made his own decision, and was going to ask the question in a second, and he was sure he knew what the answer would be. He would know if she lied; he always knew.
Suddenly, she knew exactly what she needed to do. She smiled for the first time all morning.
Bay could surely have explained what had happened - if Bay didn't know, then no one did. But she wasn't going to ask.. All curiosity about her one-sided bargain had been forgotten, somehow, in the odd stillness of the clearing. Even if Pays had come away empty-handed, she would have solved all her problems right here, at this moment.
Bay asked, "Did you get your wish?"
Cheerfully, Pays told him, "I wished that you'd always be wrong about me."
And for five years, Bay never knew what the truth was.
-
Everyone must always pay a price.
-
Chapter 2
-
Pays was fourteen the next time she met one of the Old Fairies.
On the morning of the day it happened, she got up before dawn. She was going to visit her father, and then she would have a client to meet.
Bay was already awake when she emerged into the dim hall and slid the paper panel to her room shut. He was wearing black silk slacks and an embroidered gray silk tunic with a high collar and tie-closures. They were his medium-formal clothes, that he wore when the person asking him to fight a monster or break a curse was important, but not quite important enough to live in the palace. When he went to the palace, he wore green, the color of the forest like all Heroes are supposed to wear, and the red cloak the Crown Princess had given him when he'd rescued her fairy from a monster. Bay didn't like colors, but even Bay couldn't go into the Imperial family's presence dressed like a funeral.
He was eating a bowl of instant rice gruel while standing up, a wooden spoon in one hand and a letter he was reading in the other. Pays had seen the letter when she went to bed last night, lying on the floor of his bedroom where Jing had left it for him. There had been a map to their apartment building penciled on the envelope instead of an address, and a pretty good sketch of Bay that was mostly just messy hair and a frown. She'd stood there peering in the door for a couple minutes, wondering what a letter from someone who couldn't write looked like, but she hadn't quite been able to work up the nerve to step into Bay's room and tear it open.
*It doesn't matter what kind of front I put up for other people,* Pays admitted to herself grimly. *Where Bay's concerned, I'm just a coward.*
His gray rainjacket was already draped over his arm, and his brown canvas workbag was by the door, so he was just about to leave. Of his eleven fairies, only the Thin Man was in evidence. It had laid its chopstick-like body over the doorstep, and was looking mournfully up at a spider on the ceiling.
She stood there looking at Bay for a second, trying to figure out what to do. Since he had the kitchen light on, and the shadows in their living room never got very thick, she couldn't turn invisible and sneak out the fire escape like usual. She inwardly squared her shoulders and stepped firmly into the kitchen. Maybe he wouldn't make a scene.
Bay had forgotten to brush his hair again. Jing would have handed him the brush, but Pays just walked around him and got some bread out of the packet Jing had made for their lunches. He laid down the letter and turned to look at her out of wintry black eyes.
Ever since the day of her wish, Bay had not been able to tell when his youngest sister was lying to him. She was the only person in the world who could escape him. Just being in the same room as her made him angry. Pays was stubbornly proud of that.
He said grimly, "You're going to see him again, aren't you?"
She asked helpfully through a mouthful of bread, "Why, you need something from the shop?"
This was one of Pays' Four Secret Techniques, developed to convince Bay his power to see the truth didn't work on her: She asked him questions. Bay's heart felt that most questions were somehow lies, because most people didn't really want to learn anything new. So he could never tell which of Pays' questions really were lies, and which weren't.
Bay's right eye twitched. He hated it when people talked with their mouths full. He said curtly, "No. You shouldn't talk to Pann Ehr. There's no point."
None of Pann Ehr's children had lived with him since Pays had been very small. One day he had simply not come home, leaving Bay, who was just nine, to take care of his six little brothers and sisters. Bay hated him for it, which was why he had made up the nice clean new name "Pasky" for them all to have. Bay had wanted nothing of their father touching any of them.
So, out of sheer spite, sometimes Pays went to visit him.
She opened the front door and stepped over the Thin Man, who kicked her with one hard little foot indignantly.
"Pays," said Bay sharply. She found herself stopping, not wanting to. Someday she would figure out how to not listen to Bay. She hadn't yet; but someday. He said coldly, "I'm only saying this once - if he's in some kind of trouble -"
"You've actually said this four times."
(This was another of the Secret Techniques. She told lies that sounded like the truth. He'd really said it five, because he'd been so mad at her the second time that he'd repeated himself. He didn't remember that, though.)
"- If he's in trouble, don't try to help him. He's none of your business. You'll only get yourself in over your head."
"Is "over my head" similar to, like, guys trying to stab me, or do you mean in more a *dirty* kind of way?"
"You can't change Pann Ehr, Pays," he said, his black eyes hard as steel. "He'll never be any different. *Never.*" She flinched at the ice in his voice. She didn't see why he always had to tell her that. Pays couldn't imagine their father ever changing.
She hurried out before he could think of anything else to say, leaving the door swinging open behind her over the Thin Man's disapproving face.
-
These days Pann Ehr ran a medicine shop on Tal For Street. He knew all sorts of interesting things. Once in a while he would tell them to her. So sometimes she got up very early in the morning, stole something from Jing's pantry, and sneaked out the fire escape into the creaking old wooden city bathed in cool blue morning and the sleepy secret light of people's windows.
On these mornings the soft yellow lamplight was hers alone, and the dusty streets were hers, and the walk and its end were hers. This was important to Pays, whose family and luck and stories, and, especially, older brother, belonged to the whole of Jirny City.
So while she was alone and the world was hers, she walked over the flower-heavy bridges and up the vine-cracked stone stairs to Tal For Street, where two or three of the hundreds of little shops would just be sleepily pulling back their bamboo screens from over the windows. And wherever a hard enough bit of shadow fell from a building or a doorway and hit her in the face, Pays would be invisible, just as the fairy had promised. And at the end of her journey she would vanish into a small alley, and appear again under the lamp in her father's workroom.
"Random numbers," he said, squinting up at Pays' hand as she poured her tea. Pann Ehr was a tiny man, less than five feet tall and narrow as a river-reed, a little bent over and stiff at the hips because of something slightly awry with his spine. His hair was a thick, graying black braid down to his ankles, and he had an oddly sweet, rough sort of voice. Pays supposed his face was pretty enough, too. She guessed she could see why all those rich women who shopped here liked her father.
He said decisively, "You've got have kind of a random number thing going on in your head, is what it is."
She said, "Wait, what?" She'd been thinking about Bay, wishing she'd left before he'd had a chance to yell at her that morning; she hadn't heard what Pann Ehr had been saying.
"- Well, when you tell a lie, you've got to include plausible details. You know that," he said, sounding a little accusing.
Pays shrugged. She did, though.
"The details've got to be random. You can't ever fall into a rut - not even for a second, never let them catch you repeating yourself, that's where your credibility lies - you have to have keep that element of randomness going, somehow, when you're drawing up your plan, when you're giving the pitch. Every second, always keep it moving. Like I'm selling those dried leklin flower heads in little bags, right?"
Apparently he was. The teabags were pale violet mesh, and very special-looking with the little green flowers in them. Pays nodded.
"So why do you need those things to be in the little bags. I'm not just going to say, it's because they look real *special*, and I had extra teabags, but not jars or anything. So I say that they're from - they're from Simmalie," Ehr said, polishing his little round glasses impatiently on his old pink cotton robe. His hair was wet, so he must have taken a bath, but he hadn't yet changed into one of the silks he wore when the shop was open. He sounded grouchy - he didn't have his nice soft work-voice on, either. He never did with Pays.
"That's where they're from, from Simmalie, and - and, oh, they were drunk as tea in Konshi, for getting you to sleep and having calming dreams prominently featuring clouds (and clouds represent water and heaven both at once, so that's good), but only for women because it was popularly believed it made men "weak" - and I'll kind of shrug when I say that - shrug for me, girl? You're good at it - they were used in Konshi, but these I got right *here* were grown in Simmalie because Konshi has got other and more profitable agricultural exports nowadays, right?"
"It does?" Pays asked. Her father looked at her sulkily, some hair that had escaped his braid tumbling over his face. "So you just made all that up?"
"That's what I'm saying! I make everything up! That's what I'm saying. So now I've told this story about the leklin flowers. The story belongs to the leklin flowers. Just them. It can't be told twice. The next story about the next thing - I've got some mushrooms here, I don't know *what* these things are, so I'm gonna say no one'd better eat 'em - the mushroom story needs to be different. Needs to be... The mushrooms are grown locally by some nuns, they're for your air..."
He poked the dried mushrooms on his little tin scale, absorbed in some thought. "- I'm not gonna use that one, nobody likes nuns. - It's the element of randomness that gives value - the grain of the wood, some grit in the glaze. Randomness in stories and in prices. Unpredictability. If I price everything clean and staggered - like, this is fifteen, this is twenty, this is twenty five - that doesn't work. Twenty's got no story, it's too easy. Twenty-two and a quarter and some, that's a story."
"What story?"
"There's one in there," Ehr said firmly. "It's important. No one just buys *stuff*. They want a story. They want a story about *themselves*. That's what they pay us for, girl."
"When do you think anyone ever paid me for a story, old man?" Pays asked huffily. She didn't want to get stuck in an "us" with her father. Even if, in her heart, she knew she was just the same as her father. She knew just what today's client wanted from her.
"Yeah?" said Ehr, uncertainly. Ehr saw a lot of things to do with money and lying and women very clearly - but his children were just a colorful blur. He couldn't get a clear look at them. It startled him when they had ideas of their own, when they did things that he wouldn't do, or were disgusted by things he did every day. She guessed it was why he'd abandoned them. "Maybe. I don't know. I don't really know. I don't know anything, really..."
They were sitting on stools at the heavy wooden worktable in the back room of the shop, which was all covered with shreds of herbs and scraps of the little bags and papers he packaged them with. He had made the tea over a little kerosene burner he kept there. The box of empty teabags was on the edge of the table, and shreds of the leklin blossoms were scattered across it, releasing a sweet herbal fragrance whenever Pays or Ehr stirred the air.
The walls of the cramped back room were lined with thick wooden shelves. Most of them held neat rows of big jars of normal things - garlic and ginger and seaweed and mugwort and camellia oil, heavy-packed and patient-looking, weighing down the air with their solemn, ordinary perfumes. Some held smaller jars of odder substances, like dehydrated fish eggs and lion hairs, that were only rarely opened.
He kept a new, expensive digital rice cooker under the shelf beside the stairs, plugged into the room's single electrical outlet. The socket that should have been above it was covered with a thick X of electrical tape from where something had gone wrong. Sometimes he left his clothes lying around, densely-patterned purple and green silk robes, very old-fashioned and expensive and necessary. *If you look like you've got money,* Pann Ehr said, *People give you more. Natural fact of life.*
And then there were the really special things, the sharp-edged ones that were his best business - obscene-looking alchemical tools that were always hot or cold, or had to be stored in the shadow of an unlit lamp at all times; strange scrolls and books, twists of crumbling, ancient leather with sharp brand-new spells embossed on them; small metal machines from across the sea that he didn't understand but had brought home anyway. There was a cloak of some kind of very fine red fur that had been there for years, and a tin-handled hand-mirror that he'd bought from a cormorant fisher last winter, which seemed to reflect a similar room in a distant country, where you could always see rain falling outside a little window. (Ehr's back room had no windows.)
Pann Ehr's twisted mind had been winding its way up to something all morning, and now it unspooled. He said all in a rush. "Hey, were you going down to the river today? You don't wanna go down there today."
"Why not?" she asked, instantly suspicious. Ehr *never* tried to tell his children what to do. He didn't like the feeling he might be responsible for the consequences. And her client had requested a meeting place on the north bank - not really bright, given what he was hiring her for, but it wasn't her problem if he wanted to get beat up.
He shrugged, picking up the end of his braid and looking at it like it was interesting. "Something going on. I don't know, I don't know. He'll get mad at you, won't he, girl?"
"You think Bay doesn't get mad I come *here*?"
Ehr flinched at the reminder. He was frightened of his Hero son. Bay was twice his size, and was always extremely angry with him for many good reasons. Pays thought Bay's mother - whoever she was - must have been exactly like him, because he hadn't inherited a single thing from Pann Ehr.
"Girl," said Ehr, nervously. He only ever called them "girl" or "boy," except Bay, who about half the time he called "sir" instead. Pays wasn't sure he even *knew* their names. "Don't talk to Ma Hen."
"How come? She send someone to kill you again?"
"What are you doing saying stuff like that?" demanded Ehr, twisting his braid anxiously, and avoiding her eyes. "No reason to say a bad thing like that. Nobody killing anybody, now, here."
Ma Hen kind of ran the north bank of the Tsi Ri, and Bay'd had to talk to her the last time she'd tried to kill Ehr. In Pays' opinion, the whole thing had been completely Ehr's fault. Ma had *warned* him to keep away from her kyara wholesaler, and everyone knew Ma didn't mess around.
Pays had been in the back room, trying to read a 300-year-old book on bad-luck charms Ehr had been cleaning up to sell, when two men with short, thin swords under their long black coats had come politely in the front door to explain the problem to him. They hadn't hurt him because she'd been there (they'd seen her when she'd poked her head out to see why Ehr'd made that funny squeaking noise), but she'd had to keep giving him wine for almost an hour and a half before he'd calmed down. But the next week he'd gone down to the guy's boat again anyway. You'd think a man would know better at his age.
But Bay wouldn't have listened even if Pays had explained to him how stupid Ehr had been. Pays figured cynically that Bay thought he was the only one who was allowed to kill their father.
Feeling grumpily like she was the grown-up, as she often did around Ehr, Pays reminded him of that: "Didn't Bay tell you you had to keep off Ma's turf from now on? 'cause of the thing where she kills you?"
"I do keep away from her, now, I *generally* do, but recently there's been a thing. A complex but perfectly reasonable thing -"
"He'll be really annoyed if you get killed."
"Girl, I ain't going to like it *either*," said Ehr, sounding a little hurt. "You even care about my opinion? Oh, and Old Ban Min, too, there was a thing. You gotta say you're not gonna get near Ban Min, girl."
She stared at him. "Bald Ban that sells *swords*? Old man, what'd you *do*?"
"Nothing. Not a thing."
"You just said there was a thing."
"It's just business. It's nothing. Here, give me that, uh, that cup, you're done with that cup."
It was sort of amazing Ehr was still alive. With a growing sense of forboding, Pays watched her father finickily rinse out their teacups at his big work sink. Ehr had to've done something really big if he thought anyone might bother *her*. Pann Ehr himself was one thing, but you had to be *seriously* upset to mess with one of Pasky Bay's little brothers and sisters, even if it was just Pays. Everybody remembered what Bay'd done to Jing's fiance.
She'd have to find out what was going on. But even Bay couldn't get the truth out of Ehr when he was scared. When he thought he was in trouble, he got so deep into lying he mostly believed himself, and got angry when someone told him he wasn't telling the truth.
She'd have to ask some questions down at the river before she met her client, Pays thought grumpily. And if people were maybe going to try and kill her today, she'd have to borrow someone's fairy. She didn't want to do that. She hated fairies.
Standing up and shaking some petals of something out of her hair, she said to Pann Ehr, "Go to work, old man."
He looked up from a handful of something black and grainy he'd extricated from a jar, suspicious. He could be suspicious if he wanted - her father couldn't do anything to her. She went up the little stairs into the shop, all neat and clean and herb-smelling, and flipped the sign to "open" on her way out.
-
This morning had been strange for two reasons: one, Bay had been awake when Pays left; and two, May Leen hadn't been.
Most mornings when Pays left home early, the apartment was very quiet. Everyone but Jing and Lo Song slept in their separate rooms, and Jing and Lo Song slept in their room together; and all of them but Bay dreamed softly of bright lucky things, and Bay dreamed hard of cold bloody ones; and all was dark and silent except for a few of Jing's cooking machines she left on for the night. The rice-cooker and the slow-cooker and the bread-maker sat humming and gulping in the kitchen, their little red and yellow lights glowing gently and sweetly in the shadow-draped kitchen, and sometimes Pay stole some of whatever'd been in them.
In an hour or two her family would all be up and eating and losing their jackets and poking each other with their chopsticks and scrambling around getting ready for school or work or lunch, and they would clatter on the floorboards and leave toe-prints everywhere, and would get into each other's things, and their fairies would be mixed in there so you could hardly tell who was human and who wasn't.
But when Pays got up early, she rarely met anyone but the rain and May Leen. May Leen was Bay's worst fairy, the Roaring Girl.
There were two hundred known types of fairies. Most common and easiest to acquire were Martial Fairies (like Thin Men and Bottles-Under-Beds), who liked to fight, and House Fairies (like Linen Boys and Ships), who liked to clean and fix things. Then there were the Educated Fairies (like Slime Molds and The-Ends), who could give good advice, and sometimes could teach you spells, who were rarer and harder to get. Last were the Free Fairies - or, as most people called them, the No-Good Fairies.
Some No-Good Fairies *could* do things - it was just that they never bothered. Roaring Girls were incredible fighters, but they were so lazy, rude, self-absorbed, recalcitrant, noisy, and greedy, that it was universally agreed among humans that there was no point keeping one around.
And they were extremely, extremely difficult to coax into a contract with a human.
Part of the matter of a fairy contract was simply about personality. Different kinds of fairies liked different kinds of humans - a Martial Fairy generally liked somebody with a short temper and a lot of passions, while a House Fairy liked someone patient and gentle, and an Educated Fairy someone curious, intelligent, and maybe a little strange. Most people had a fairy approach them when they were pretty young, and what kind of fairy it was was considered to tell a lot about your personality. Jing's had been her very neatly-pressed Linen Boy, Mr. Lamp, while Bay's had been his perpetually irritable Sea Sweep, Crabby - a Martial Fairy, of course. Pann Ehr's had been an Educated Fairy, a beautiful, lazy, rose-petal-jam-obsessed Firework who called herself Lady Pearl the Completely Perfect, and had been wooed away from him a couple of years ago. Pays, of course, had never had a fairy come to her at all.
But fairies did not bind themsleves to human beings for love of their master, but for love of food. A fairy could eat raw fruits and vegetables - but they would have no taste, and would not satisfy his hunger. Only made things could nourish a fairy's body. And no fairy could cook.
It was a kind of magic to a fairy, even the most brilliant of the Educated, that a human being might take objects like leaves, seeds, and dead animals, and turn them into something that could be eaten. Something in the ritual entranced and confused them. Fairies grouped in huge numbers around food carts and outside restaurants where they could see the cooks working, watching wide-eyed and debating among themselves. Some of the ones with hands would applaud the completed dish, and the ones without hands might howl or warble with excitement. Others, more dignified, would debate amongst themselves the mysteries of the act of cooking, as if they were discussing something as distant from them as the movements of the stars.
Usually, the fairies that ate the most were happy with simpler foods - a Linen Boy or Bottle-Under-Bed, perpetually hungry as they were, would be satisfied with rice balls filled with sweet bean paste or a chocolate croissants. They didn't even mind if you didn't cook it yourself, as long as it was food. (They didn't particularly care about your personality, either.) On the other hand, fairies like a Ship - which ate a great amount, but only once every two or three weeks - or a Royal-rain-leaps - which ate just a teaspoonful on the last day of autumn - were generally extremely choosy about their food, and liked to be able to see it being prepared. A Ship required that its human own the land on which the wheat used to make its thousands of loaves of sweetbread was grown, and would watch the entire harvesting process, dragging itself up out of the water and however many miles inland it took on its forty great pink legs. There was a great migration of them to the Plain of Nie every year, with patient humans sitting at their helms patting their small heads. It was very secret exactly what a Royal-rain-leaps ate, but Bay and Prince Lyo - the only two humans to have one this generation - both disappeared on their own for several weeks in November to get whatever it was, and seemed to have a few more white hairs each time they returned.
Roaring Girls expected to be fed three times a day, but had extremely demanding tastes. And every one of them had a different idea of what they wanted. Pays had heard of a Roaring Girl who would only eat food that had been taken from children. May Leen would eat only chocolates or bean paste candies that were molded and colored to look like people - so she could bite their heads off, of course. Normally, this sort of attitude would have driven a species extinct. But while most fairies only knew how to accept gifts, Roaring Girls had, somehow, learned how to steal.
So a Roaring Girl was in a position to bargain, if anyone happened to want her. It was a mystery to the whole city why their great Hero Pasky Bay had wanted May Leen.
Pays looked down uncertainly at the unwanted fairy, who smiled innocently back up at her. Pays said uncomfortably, "...Is Jing here?"
May Leen just smirked and went back to her book. Pays uneasily decided not to ask again. May Leen made her nervous, and not only because the fairy could have tied her into knots, and then, surprised to discover that she couldn't undo them, chopped the knots open. Pays often had nightmares in which Bay's fairies did those sorts of things to her, and usually it was May Leen who was in charge of the activity. Pays left her frequent murderer there on the floor, and went to look for Jing.
She needed to borrow a fairy. She didn't want to - whenever she did, everyone in her family always, in one way or another, made her feel like a failure for having to ask. Jing was the least likely to make a scene, so Pays had wanted to borrow her Demon-Eating Dog. It was a plus that the Dog, a multi-purpose fairy who could both fight *and* clean absolutely anything, was unlikely to ask any questions, being as he couldn't talk.
Jing and Lo Song's room was empty, and all clean as always, with the bedding rolled up and stowed and the windowglass shining. Jing, the second-oldest of them, was eighteen; Lo Song, the baby, would be eleven next month. Lo Song's dolls and the cookbooks Jing didn't keep in the kitchen were put carefully away on the shelves along the back wall. All their clothes were shut completely in their chests without any edges peaking out. Jing and Lo Song were very neat people. Except for the brightly-colored dolls and cookbooks, everything in the room - the clothes chests, the shelves, the paint on the windowsill - was white, and none of it ever seemed to have any dirt on it. Even the sliding screens of their room seemed oddly brighter than any of the others, like a little bit of their sweetness had soaked into the heavy paper.
Pays did not like being soothed, and would never admit it when she was, but their room always somehow made her feel better about things.
Jing must be out shopping. Pays slid the door closed, frowning. She could take hours and hours at buying food, looking at the things on the shelves so hard they started falling off, if Lo Song wasn't with her to break her out of her trance. And Lo Song was at school. (Pays was supposed to be, too.)
Pays couldn't go down to the Tsi Ri alone if somebody was going to try to kill her. She looked uneasily down the hall towards May Leen, then went and stood in front of Jaki's room and stamped her foot on the floor. "You in there?"
His screens shook malevolently at her, and the spell-encrusted room let out a shuddering wheeze of stale air. But there was no answer. Jaki had covered his with so much black, wrinkled magic that no one but him could stand even to touch the screens. This was annoying to Pays, whose room was right next to his - there was a shelf against the wall she couldn't touch with her hand bruising purple.
She called over the sound of harsh breathing and little squeals, "I need to go maybe kill somebody. Can I borrow your stupid fairy?" Silence. Why had he had to pick today to go to school? Pays gave up and trudged reluctantly back to May Leen.
May Leen said drowsily, her head pillowed on her book, "Kill?"
"You like killing people, right?" Pays asked her warily.
"I like a lot of things," said May Leen, making it sound dirty, stretching some wrinkles out of her right arm. "Do you like *any*thing?"
"Nope," said Pays shortly. "Not today. You want to maybe kill somebody?"
"You like *secrets*," said May Leen drowsily, pillowing her head on her arms. She licked her lips at Pays with her rough purple linen tongue, and said, "Pick me up!"
She picked the giggling May Leen up, grimly arranging her head over her shoulder and trying not to think how easy it would be for May Leen to snap her neck. Pann Ehr never realized he was in trouble until he was in really, really deep. Pays wanted to find out what he'd done *today*. But unless Pays figured out a way to convince her not to, May Leen was going to tell Bay where Pays had taken her the first chance she got - she always told Bay everything.
She would just have to figure out some way to pay May Leen off.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-11 11:09 pm (UTC)I only got through the first chapter, but I really, really liked it.
I will read the rest later as I am intrigued. And well anything with that title deserves to be read.
I am the worst person ever when it comes to actually giving helpful feedback.