A Dance with the Fae Prince by Elise Kova
Chapter 15
The air issweet and tastes like freedom. I tilt my face toward the sky, relishing in the warm sunlight. As my gaze drops, my heart begins to race as it truly hits me:
I’m in a world of fae and magic.
Men and women wander the street, going about their business as though their unnatural features are utterly un-noteworthy. I see a couple laughing, hooking arms with each other and spinning around a bend. There’s a father and his children, dutiful assistants for today’s trip to the grocer. A girl flies overhead, chased promptly by two others, shouting something between them that’s lost in the sounds of their buzzing wings and magic.
Everyone has something unique—horns and hooves, tails and wings. I see bright pink hair and cat-like eyes. I should be terrified. Find fear! my better sense shouts at me from the back of my mind, these people are your mortal enemy.
But I’m not afraid. My heart beats with a rhythm that matches their footsteps. My eyes drink in everything about them. And my feet want to run toward something utterly indescribable—something that I’ve no idea who, or what, or where it might be. I want to see and touch everything around me. My drab world has found its color and I want to make it mine.
“If you keep gawking, people’ll notice.” Raph tugs my hand and jerks his head to the right. I take his cue and we begin to move.
Every building in Dreamsong is more magnificent than the last. They’re made of wood and stone, iron and glass. Silken bedsheets hang out to dry on lines strung across the street, perfuming the air with lavender and soap. I stop at one particularly stunning gate to run my fingertips over the ironwork. Thousands of tiny holes have been punched through a thin sheet of metal, turning it into a delicate lace. Ribbons and bows are unfurled along it, so lifelike that I’m shocked they don’t blow away in the breeze.
“Come on.” Raph takes my hand and tugs. “I thought you wanted music, not…what was it that you were doing just now? Human magic?”
“No, humans don’t have magic.” I chuckle softly. My eyes are still on the gate even as he tugs me away. “I was admiring it. The construction is so beautiful; I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It looks pretty normal to me.” He shrugs. Oh, to grow up in a world where all this is normal. “This way.” We round the building with the lacy gate, ducking through a back door and into a small courtyard in the back-left corner of the lot. “You wait here.”
“All right.” I remain in the shadow of an arbor over the side door as Raph scampers up to a kitchen door and knocks several times. It opens and a red-faced maid pokes out her nose.
“The mistress of the house is going to skin you for certain this time. You can’t keep calling like this.”
“She doesn’t have to know I’m here. Can you get Ralsha?” Raph clasps his hands and holds them up like he’s begging. The woman puts a hand on her hip and arches her eyebrows. “Fine, I’ll give you a delivery whenever you want it. But you’re not getting anything else out of me.”
“Good boy. Wait a moment.”
Everything has a price here, I remind myself as I watch the interaction. I must remember that and to pay attention to every word people use. Luckily, I have experience from my father in doing so. It’s not just what people say, but how, he would tell me. Pay attention to everything. Before Joyce came around, he even let me sit in on some of his meetings and would ask me for advice after. One of the few times I felt like I could use my senses about lies to be helpful to someone beyond myself.
Ralsha is a young girl, no older than Raph. But where Raph has short auburn hair, Ralsha has long, deep violet curls. She squeals at the sight of Raph, throwing her arms around his neck. There’s clearly some young love brewing and I bite back a warning to them both. Maybe the fae are immune to the pitfalls of love we humans must endure. Regardless, their mistakes are not my business.
With some eyelash batting from Raph, Ralsha goes back in the house and returns with a cloak. Raph gives her a peck on the cheek and a wink before returning to me. Ralsha melts into the doorstop…before she’s summoned back inside by the maid I saw earlier.
“Here you go. It’s actually a good cloak, too. Ralsha’s mum is the best tailor in Dreamsong. Ralsha says she’s even got an enchanted loom that can weave invisible thread into fabric.”
“If it’s invisible thread, how would you ever know it’s there?” I grin.
Raph considers this for far too long. It only makes me grin more and he sticks out his tongue at me. “If she says it’s there, it must be.” Oh, right, they can’t lie. “Now, turn around and let me put this on you.” He holds out the cloak.
“What service.” I laugh softly and turn.
“Well I told you I’m the best guide—” His words have a distinct halt. I flinch instantly. I know what he’s seen. This stupid silken dress and its stupid swooping front and back. I feel a small finger press into my spine between my shoulder blades. “How’dja get this one, miss?”
He’s a child. He doesn’t know better. He doesn’t know that it’s rude to ask about people’s gnarliest scars so plainly.
“I don’t remember,” I murmur. As I say the lie, the metallic taste fills my mouth. But it’s not just because I’m lying. I tasted blood that day, too. I’d bitten my tongue from the screaming and thrashing. I smell the singed aroma of burning flesh peppering my memory. “I’ve had it forever. Since I was a little girl. No older than you. It’s always been there.”
He snickers. “It’s wicked looking. You must be one tough human to endure something like that and still be all right.”
I shrug the robe onto my shoulders, feeling much less bare. My ugliest secrets are hidden once more beneath the armor of fabric. “I like to think so.”
“Good, you have to be tough to survive the fae.” He grins again and we’re back out in the streets.
After another few minutes of walking, we come to a tavern. I hear the scorching hot strings of a well-played fiddle. Underneath is a feverish drumbeat, setting a lively pace for the other performers. A pan flute soars above them all, stringing together a melody that turns the whole raucous collection of sounds into breathless song.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“The Screaming Goat.” Raph grins. “You wanted music. There’s none better in all the fae wilds. Well, don’t just stand there. Go in.” He gives me a shove and I stumble toward the arched entry.
There’s no doors or windows in the Screaming Goat. Just columns and archways that make up the front facade, letting in the sunshine and letting out sound. There are also no chairs—only high tables that men and women stand at, stomping their feet to the music and watering the ground with frothy ale.
My eyes are drawn to the low stage opposite the entry where the band plays. Men and women twirl on a dance floor in front of it.
“Try to look less conspicuous, gosh.” Raph pulls me to an empty table by one of the archways. He scrambles up onto the half-wall, standing like he owns the place. A barmaid comes over, setting down a flagon in front of me. “Hey, where’s mine?” Raph whines.
“Maybe when you’re older.” She winks and walks away.
“Rude.” Raph rolls his eyes.
I almost miss the whole exchange, instead too focused on the music. The lively jig is played in common time. The man with the panpipes leaps across the stage, egging on the dancers with his own fancy footwork. I’ve only ever seen one performance before… My father brought a traveling band to one of his last parties for the Applegate Trading Company after I had begged and begged. The party happened to be on my birthday and he couldn’t refuse, even despite all but banning music following my mother’s death as “too painful.”
Joyce got to pick the music that night. So of course it was some dull collection of stuffy instrumentals played by men twice my father’s senior. Gods forbid we actually had genuine fun at one of those parties. If we had, this is what our manor might have looked like—might have sounded like. I try to imagine it and the thought is accompanied by a comical image of Joyce nearly losing her head from all the stomping across her ridiculously expensive rugs.
A smile cracks my lips. I’m tapping my foot along to the beat. My gaze drifts as the man with the panpipes spins. It’s then I see a whole pile of instruments off to stage right. Leaning against them is a lute. It’s not nearly as fine as my mother’s, I can tell that from here. But the strings are intact and I would bet anything it’s in tune.
“What’re all those?” I ask Raph and point to the pile of instruments.
“Instruments for performers.” He shrugs. “I see people go up and take them whenever the bar is quiet. A silent tavern is a sad tavern,” he says as though he’s repeating someone else.
Surely I’m misunderstanding. “So anyone can play those?”
“I think so.” He shrugs. I wish I knew if he was telling the actual truth, or telling the truth as best he knows it. “I’ve never seen anyone get in trouble for playing them. Oh, wait, do you want to play?”
“No, no…I’m not any good.” Yet even as I say that, I’m popping my knuckles. I’m itching for the harmonies to the panpipe’s melodies that I know are trapped in the strings of the lute.
“Eh, you’re likely right.”
“What?” I look at him, the echoes of Joyce and Helen suddenly tangling with his words.
He drops his voice. “You’re a human. There’s no way you could play well enough to keep up with fae. I’m sure you’re just blown away by the quality of our bards.”
I am. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t keep up. I think I could…
Stop that noise!
Mother, she’s doing it again. She’s playing the thing!
If you play the lute one more time I will chop off its neck or yours.
Helen’s and Joyce’s words drown out the music for a dark second. I stare at the soundless instruments from underneath the weight of all the words they filled me with. So much of Joyce and Helen pressing down on me, making me small. Never enough of me to stand against them. Never…
Laura’s temple is against my knee. She tilts her face up toward me. One more song before bed, she mouths.
“No,” I whisper.
“No, what?” Raph is confused.
Understandably so. He wasn’t there the day my hand in marriage was sold for fortune. He wasn’t there the day that I vowed to never again let them or anyone else trap me, make me feel small, turn me into a tool instead of a whole person.
“You’re wrong. I can keep up.” I glare at him. “And I’m going to show you.”
“Wha—wait!”
I’m already weaving across the dance floor. I approach the stage with enough intent that the panpipe player gives me a nod with his goat-horned head. I return the gesture and he steps away. It looks almost like permission.
The thumping of the dancers’ feet rumbles behind me. The deep resonance of the drum is within me. The music drowns out every word Joyce or Helen ever said for a brief and glorious minute while I step onto the stage and head right for the lute, slinging its strap over my shoulders.
“Hello, friend,” I whisper, lightly strumming, soft enough that no one will hear but me. As I suspected, it’s in tune. “Shall we?”
I spin and step forward, falling into the melody. My foot taps along with the beat as my fingers begin to move on instinct. The other players regard me with excited glances and encouraging smiles. They nod their heads at me, I nod back at them.
Now a quartet, the music is richer, deeper. I lock eyes with the fiddle player, a woman with a head shaved to display similar tattoos to what Shaye and Giles have. She grins at me and nods. I nod in reply.
We’re not speaking with words, or thoughts, or even gestures, really. There’s direction in the music that we hear. Little signposts along the way that say, if I play this, you play that. And, together, we make music all our own, made for this moment and that will never be heard again.
We turn emotion into song.
Sweat drips down my neck as the tune shifts. The fiddler breaks away from the rest of us, rising to a crescendo, demanding all attention. The rest of us fade until she comes crashing back down in a new melody.
I recognize this, I realize.
“There once was a lass with hair so fine,
I saw her dance and said she’s divine.
So I took her down to the mer folk sea,
And said Jilly will you marry me?”
The whole taverngives a whoop in time. Everyone unites in song for the chorus.
“Soon there will be a wedding,
A vow an’ a kiss an’ a proper bedding.
Soon may the Jilly-lass come,
Down by the mer folk sea.”
My hands flyacross the lute. There are only short breaks between the chorus and verse. Barely a few notes. I always loved this song for that reason. It was a challenge to play and even harder to sing.
“Now Jilly and I are a family of three,
We live on down by the mer folk sea.
Jilly went to the shore one day,
And looked the mer folk’s way.”
Another whoopbefore the second chorus.
“Oh no, sweet Jilly girl,
You’ve gone t’far where the sea ocean whorls,
Jilly was taken away,
For her wishes sh’ll have t’pay.”
My hands flyacross the strings. I’ve come as far into the song as I know. I glance over to the drummer. He looks my way. The other man and woman do as well. Expectant.
My fingers seize and halt.
That voice…the person who led the singing… Sick, hot, horror crashes over me. It was me. I was the one singing. I wish I could go and curl in a corner and die faster than the song is.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a deep, masculine voice fills the room with song.
“But Jilly will be coming back,
I’ll go out when the ocean’s black.
I’ll break’er bond wit’ the cold, dark sea.
Because the best mer folk is me.”
As the tavernwhoops a final time, I look to the source of the voice. My fingers continue to play on instinct now that I’m no longer wallowing in the horror of what I’ve done.
I lock eyes with Davien. He’s singing with the rest of them, leading the tavern toward the end of the song.
“Soon there’s a beach of three.
Jilly girl, child, and me.
Soon we’ll be happy again.
And we’ll live to a hundred an’ ten.”
The musicians continueto play as I duck away from the band and back to the side, returning the lute to where I found it. My face is flushed and I can feel it only get redder as I step off the stage to a small amount of applause. I try and duck my head with shame…but the encouraging smiles people give me, the pats on the shoulders…by the time I reach Davien, I’ve a smile of my own.
“You look horribly smug.” He sounds upset, but his face hasn’t received the note, because he wears a grin that seems almost impressed.
“I don’t know if smug is the right word.” I look back toward the stage, where the band is still playing and people are still dancing and twirling. I only just finished performing, and already want to go back. “I’ve never done anything like that before, and I’m surprised by how good it felt,” I admit to both myself and him.
Davien seems startled by this admission because he promptly changes the topic. “You really shouldn’t be wandering by yourself alone.”
“I thought it was safe in Dreamsong?”
“It is.”
“And Vena told me to go and enjoy the town. That’s what I did.” I shrug. “Besides, I wasn’t completely alone. Had the best guide in all of Dreamsong.”
“About that…” Davien’s voice gets heavier with frustration and he looks over to the table Raph and I have been standing at. Hol is there now. He stands next to a woman with long black hair and curving ram’s horns. The two are giving a proper scolding to Raph.
“Hey—” I push past Davien. “Don’t be mean to him, he was only helping me. I asked him to.”
Hol gives me a very, very tired look. Even though they couldn’t have been talking with Raph for more than a few minutes, he looks as if he’s had this conversation for hours. “There’s a difference between ‘being mean’ and necessary discipline.”
I shudder. He sounds just like Joyce.
“Do you know what you could’ve done?” the woman snaps at Raph.
“I wasn’t gonna harm her!” Raph insists. “I just wanted to see how long she could dance for.”
The woman grabs him by the ear and tugs on it lightly, hissing into it, “She’s human. She breaks far easier than we do.”
“I agreed to his terms willingly,” I say. I can’t stand to see Raph treated this way because of me. I wonder what they’ll do to him. I can only imagine fae punishments will be even worse than Joyce’s. “I don’t mind one dance.”
A heavy hand falls on my shoulder. I look up to see Davien. “You need to be more careful about the deals you make here,” he says solemnly. “You agreed to a dance without setting any terms, any limitations. Raph could’ve made you dance until you died from exhaustion. He could’ve made you dance into a river.”
“But…” My voice quivers slightly. Just when I thought I was safe. “He said he wouldn’t hurt me.”
“He wouldn’t have intentionally. But Felda is right, he didn’t think through how it might impact you. He’s young and foolish.”
“Now,” Hol says firmly. “You will absolve her of all deals she’s made with you.”
“Do I have to?” Raph whines.
“Yes, now.”
Raph looks to me. He kicks dirt off the wall he’s still standing on. Hands behind his back, looking guilty, he says, “Your debts are paid, all has been gained, nothing is owed, we stand as equals.”
They sound like magic words, so I expect to feel tingling across my body, but I don’t. I feel as normal as I did when I made the deal with him. But if what Davien said was true, I unknowingly gave this little boy immense power over me.
“And apologize to her,” the woman, Felda, says.
“Sorry,” he obliges, barely managing to look me in the eye.
“All is well,” I say. “And thank you for releasing me from my debts.”
“I really wasn’t going to hurt you,” Raph insists under his breath.
“That’s enough of you for one day.” Hol picks up the lad and sets him down on the ground. “I believe you still have business with Vena. You should get to it and not keep her waiting. It’s because of her we have a roof over our heads at all. So take your duties to contribute to Dreamsong more seriously.”
“Right, right.”
“We’ll see you at home later,” Felda says, her voice softening some. She reaches for Raph. In my mind’s eye, she grips the boy with both hands to further shake and scold him. But instead she pulls him to her for a tight hug. “We love you, Raphy.”
“Eww, Mom, there’s people, ugh, love you too,” Raph mumbles and scampers off. But not before his mother lands a kiss on his forehead.
“We really are so sorry for his actions.” Felda straightens and scratches the back of her head, looking guilty on her son’s behalf. “He can be a handful at times.”
“I’m not upset,” I remind them. I’m still confused as to what I just witnessed. In an instant, she showed him more affection than even Joyce showed her own flesh and blood daughters.
“Still, as an apology for our son, we would like to offer you a seat at our table and extend every measure of hospitality to you both,” Hol says.
“It would be our honor to dine with you.” Felda bows her head toward Davien.
“As it would be ours. Lead on.” Davien motions for the door and the couple leads the way to my first meal with the fae.