The trees swung their leaves in the breeze, drinking thirstily of the warmth while letting streams of golden sunlight spill over to dapple the ground. Birds darted and bounced on branches, singing of satisfaction, hope and longing. Chipmunks climbed trunks and sought safe storage for the contents of their cheek pouches. The acorns lay among the leaves and mould and waited; most would become food, but a few, a very few, would join the titans in the sky above. And through all this, I flitted, my wings more colorful than any butterfly’s and more iridescent than any damselfly’s. The bumbling bees rarely dodged anything, but they all gave me wide clearance, as suited the deference due to any of the Fae.

I danced around drifting dandelion seeds, and spun with falling maple seeds as they twirled down. It should have been a time of gladness, but I closed my eyes and remembered Armano, dodging with me amid the roses, his skin golden as honey and his eyes a deep violet. His laughter made even the birds of the forest listen. Oh, my bright beautiful lover, how good it was to lie with you under the shimmering stars, and dance over frosted ponds, and ride the leaves on the autumn winds!

But he was gone from me. He’d done something silly–well, something abysmally stupid–at my behest, and the Queen had taken notice, and banished him to the mortal realms for–not a hundred, not two hundred, but five hundred and fifty-five mortal years. We the Fae are supposed to lie beyond time and not notice the passage of mortal markings, but still his absence burned at me. I’d considered many times to beg the Queen to banish me with him, could he not be forgiven, for her sentences punished me, who was innocent of offense, mostly.

I was spending too long at my tasks, nowadays. I made a last pass through the glen and found all to be in order, save for some ferns and sundews that could use a trice of tidying. I landed and started to untwine the leaves, but my mind was still largely elsewhere. Suddenly I tripped, twist-toed in a root, and before I could sort out my wings, I fell rum-tumbley-bump down a small hill onto my bum, then planted my face firmly on the ground. I saw golden toes twined in the moss afore my nose, and as I scrambled back and up, I saw the Queen! And so of course I had to get down again.

“Risatia, you’re moping around. The redbells are turning blue; what are we to do with you?”

I didn’t want to make a silly suggestion that would make matters worse, so I just looked downcast and contrite, and curtseyed a bit.

“I fear your thoughts are straying from these mundane tasks. I could perhaps give you something more challenging to do…”

I bit my tongue even harder, but she clearly wanted a response. “And what would you have me do?” I said at last.

“There are events disparate, scattered here and there within the Twixt and Tween, that might be better aligned to our advantage…”

That was significant. I could Tween a bit, as any Fae could, slipping into the shades, making myself unpresent and undetectable, moving unseen. But Twixting was leaping between scenes, between times, between worlds, and it was a power I didn’t have and didn’t expect to have without much more experience

And right away I knew what else she had meant; this job she had for me was one of those sequence things, where you can’t just let the events be their own in the sweep of the Twixt and Tween, twirling like butterflies in flowers, but you have to polish them to make them turn right, then chain them together in order like a huge puzzle and thread a string of time through them to leave them sparkling like beads. Sometimes all you’re doing is sorting out a silly mess and keeping it from tangling up something else of merit. But once in a while, you get something that sparkles even in the darkest night, and that’s worth keeping.

I drew a deep breath. “To fulfil your commands is my deepest desire, Your Majesty.”

Her expression altered by a hair’s fraction. “Since you say so, we must ensure that it bears some good measure of the truth, for it would never do to have my agents run the possibility of being forsworn. I’ll give you a charge of power with this anklet; it shall give to you a measure of the potency I enjoy, to skip about in the Furthest Reaches of the Tween, and go where I direct you. Perform this task well, and you may dare to hope that the true yearnings of your heart may find resolution.”

Of course she’d guessed it. I suppose I hadn’t been very subtle about sharing my feelings with my friends, passing squirrels, and the world at large. And she surely heard my heart skip in my breast the moment she hinted at the chance of my regaining my Armano.

“Also I give you this little guide, the Yelgra.” It was a circle with gems, woven from spider silk that bound lark feathers in a radiating spiral pattern. “As you complete your tasks, the gems will alight. If you wish me to regard your return with the greatest possible favor, do not return until all glow with equal puissance. Some of the tasks will be most trivial; others will test your limits, but all must be completed.”

“Also I warn you, you shall have to tread carefully; your ways shall take you on occasion to the mortal realms, and some under evil influence. Greemaunder may regard some of these actions as intrusive, or at least looser than the order that he insists to impose.”

Whatever Greemaunder had taken from the Fae in the mortal realms, he would never let go and would guard with fervor. I shuddered at the thought of screwing up and getting his attention. I resolved to start with the simple tasks, those chained to the smallest gems on the Yelgra, and took my leave of the Queen, bowing while flying backward through the air. I concentrated on the Yelgra, let the power flow from the anklet, and Twixted away…

Which is how I found myself in the middle of a group of silly sunflowers, trying to wheedle a little beetle to beat feetle and fly into the sky, and I remembered that they can’t help themselves, the silly things, because they spiral too much one way and not as much the other so they can’t keep things in balance. The moment I landed among them they tracked their way across the sky as if they had all day, and finally focussed on me like a bunch of Faetropes, and I was afraid they would start singing to me if I remained too long.

So finally I got tired of enticement, and I pulled a bit of power from the anklet and caused a few fire ants to wander into the scene, and suddenly the beetle had proper motivation to ascend. It unrolled its ridiculous wings, like a bald man sprouting long hair, and took to the skies. I watched it climb with increasing annoyance; it wasn’t headed for old tall grandma as it should have been. So I took flight myself and used my wingbreeze to assist, darting around and corralling that foolish beetle, with no help from the sunnies, thank you very much.

So I slipped into and out of the Twixt again, and there was a famous Poet’s grave, and the statue that’d had its surplus unpoetlike rock carved away fifty years after the gravestone had been made. Poor mortal lives are too short to properly savor acclaim. In any case, I immediately sussed the problem, for unless the poor chap had been done in by an axe to the neck, that statue was wildly unrepresentative, missing a noggin as it was. I landed on the statue’s neck and let my toes and soles feel the rough surface, trying to sense the location of its partner. And what do you know, it was up!

So up I went after, and there was a castle in the clouds, so I knew how I’d be spending that afternoon. It was one of Morgan’s old places that she hadn’t visited in ages. I swear there was a time when that girl was churning out a sky-castle a week, and just tossing the half-formed ones off into the sky if they didn’t strike her fancy, and now they just sail around the world, mostly unnoticed. I headed for the throne room, which had the best view, and there was that head, making out that it was the king of far-off Disphasia. So I knocked some sense back into that marble noggin, brought it back down to Earth, and used some snailshell mortar to fix it firmly back into place.

Next was a sojourn that took my breath aback from the start–right in the heart of one of Greemaunder’s strongest demesnes in the mortal realms! It was the Isle of Grayglass, as the Fae termed it, with sharp edges that slice the sky to shards and hide it, and boxes full of tight packed and unhappy people who’ve never run barefoot in a field in their lives. My heart quickened nonetheless, for I had a feeling in me, an Armano-is-near sensation, and I could not execute that task quickly enough, counting all the leftover time it would leave me to find him and clasp him in my arms and start making up for a lot of lost love-labor.

So I found a missing pup and returned it to its girl-child owner, a simple enough task, and then I had time to seek my prize. Over cacophonous grids choked with smelly metal beetles, each containing a few mortal souls, and through tempestuous tunnels of shrieking metal worms and squares of lights imitating flowers in an area called a “garden”, over a “skywalk” firmly bolted and pressed into the ground, I sought the feeling of my love, and oh boy did I ever find it, in a wee box inside another box, a thing called an apartment as it kept you apart from anyone else who might be living a life. I opened that door and leapt upon him and bore him down to this scruffy green thing made of short loops of yarn in some dumb imitation of grass. Oh, was he surprised to see me! And I was chattering on like a fool about how much I missed him and how much I wanted to wrap all of myself around him and get right to the you-know-what, and he was just looking at me as guys look at you when they aren’t all with you in spirit, and I thought it was just shock until his mortal kids walked into the room followed by his mortal wife.

Oh.

Oh, it took all of the self control I had, to not pull out the full power of the anklet and give him the crawling shabbers. I wanted to fill his nose with fire beetles and turn his generative parts into nettles and visit upon his rump the blurping buboes and turn his skin green and polkadot houndstooth purple with huge orange zits all over his hateful face…

But I had to conserve the power in the anklet, or I might never return to the realm of Fae myself. And I especially didn’t want to get old Greemaunder’s attention by loosing mordant spells without leave. Still, I cursed Armano in plain words on one side, and his mortal huss was spilling her ire into his other ear, so that his poor little male mind seemed to lock up, and he could only stare at a space between us with a frozen placating smile. And then I left him there. What better punishment could I bestow on him, after all, than to be chained to that loudmouthed complainer in a realm where he couldn’t even fly away!

I slipped back into the Tween and headed for my next tasks. In a world lit by a double star, I found a beast with two great horns and blood of liquid gold, pierced in the chest with an arrow of starmetal. Here I had to take my time, as I am no bloodsmith, but I stanched the wound and started it on the way to recovery. It thanked me in a language I could not comprehend, and ever since that time, my finger- and toenails have grown with a golden sheen.

I stopped in a glen and dropped a left-handed screw upon a clump of moss, and watched unseen as a rat emerged from the brush, sniffing and questing, took up the screw in his right paw, and made some trial thrusts with it. A gem lit up, and I pressed on.

And I came to another place where animals were going blind, with their eyes actually disappearing from their faces as if they had never been there. I learned that a witch lurked in the forest, and she was named The Dratchle, and no witch hunter would go after her anymore, for all came away robbed of their eyes.

I made my plans and Twixed away for some reinforcements, and when the time at last came that The Dratchle came stalking towards me, with her foul hound covered in blinking, rolling eyes, I took up a blanket and revealed about me a number of sunflowers. I cast a charm of light upon the witch, and the flowers turned towards her, and whenever she tried to take my sight, she took a flower instead, which appeared on her hound, to their mutual consternation.

While their attention was taken, I had time to activate my own charms, and the Dratchle at once took root, soon to join the harmless trees around her. I captured the hound and was able to return most of the eyes to their former owners, until at last another gem woke up in shining gold.

And so in the course of several years I made good progress in sorting the beads on my necklace of the Queen’s desire, and I found my anger cooling somewhat towards Armano, and took a desire to see how he fared.

But I did not sense Armano anymore on the Isle of Grayglass, so I Tweened outward in gentle steps, feeling my way towards what I felt with my eyes closed, and so I got a hint as before of where to go, and found myself descending towards a green lawn dotted with small gray monoliths.

And then I looked down and saw the tombstone, and the name on that tombstone was the name Armano had used when I had found him in that apartment in the Isle of Grayglass. All my power dropped away from me and my heart froze midbeat. It had never occurred to me that he might never come back to Fae at all, that he could die in the mortal realms, even though it’s right there in the name, that Faefolk can find their end there. I had just always thought that he would serve his time and come back to me, and… I just collapsed there and buried my face in the dirt and screamed, screamed and hammered at that mound that was all he was now, a bit of cold clay in a cold earthen pot. I had lost him again, and this time for good, and all my love for him and the world was wrapped up and trapped in a little bitter ball, there to wither into black stone.

There was a dry chuckle behind me, and chilling fear raced like a spike through my grief. I forced myself to turn over. There was old man Greemaunder, tall as a blasted runic tree, colorless like dead steel, rigid as a ruler, whose dominion over this world had been solidified by a small rider he’d slipped into an ancient stone shaped by Hammurabi.

“So this is what a Queen’s agent is supposed to look like, nowadays? She’s not picking them very well. You are one walking rules violation, and enormously inconsistent. That anklet and that necklace have got to go. And as for those ridiculous wings, you won’t even miss them. It’s not possible for them to even lift your body…”

He reached out with his claw of enforcement. Even with its strings wrung by grief and loss, my heart rose in me, and I twisted away. His claw snagged my anklet and tore through it just as I formed the way into the Tween, and I screamed and fled.



I didn’t get as far as I hoped. With my anklet broken, it had a fraction of its former power. I made it to a small glade, and was faced with the meager options that Greemaunder had left all the Fae in the mortal realms–withdraw to the Fae realm, let go of one’s magic and fade away, or hide in the nooks and crannies of nature left over between the steel and concrete outcrops of his rule.

For a while, I could do nothing but hide. The copse was a sad thing that could support no inner life, the life that supports the Fae, reality plus meaning. I became a shadow, subsisting upon a poor tree that would have been a tall mighty oak in centuries past, before poison clouds and stinking rains became the norm.

Eventually I burned through my grief, and got enough strength to slip through the Tween, though not the Twixt that without the anklet was closed to me. I made my way from forest to forest, as the years of the world burned around me and I lost track of time, which presses harder in the mortal realms than in the realm of Fae. I roamed out across the land, existing with the rainbows and haunting the mountains. I found here and there small ways to be useful, and gems still occasionally lit up on the Yelgra, and this gave me hope to keep going and not melt into the landscape and join Armano in nonexistence. Oh, Armano… I forgave him a thousand times as I roved through the still pines and the storm-tossed oaks.

I saw great footprints once in a desert land, too large for the wind to sweep away. And in a forest I beheld a tree that seemed to burn with the Queen’s flame, and I rushed towards it unthinking. But I felt no answering pull from the fire that remained in the anklet, and this saved me. I invoked a charm to dispel glamors and vapors, and saw a blackened old branchless tree, covered in grim runes. I studied these runes, and with a long burnt stick I altered one of the runes with a single line. The tree shuddered, then cracked asunder, and another gem lit up on the Yelgra.

And for a time I sojourned among the deerfolk, and assisted them with a certain matter of political succession, for which we evoked certain ancient magics that could bind two beings in one. Acting together, the affair was soon concluded, and another gem lit up. Only two remained dark, and yet I felt myself doomed to be stuck upon the mortal plane, with the events that could bring me home forever beyond my reach.

It was a long time before I came again to the graveyard in sight of the Isle of Grayglass, and I was scared to come but also I could remain distant no longer. Grayglass itself had changed, some of its glass boxes had disappeared and other arisen, and some of the metal beetles had taken flight. Within the city, people were going about their lives as if there was a gray wall around them, keeping the Man away. Greemaunder was an exacting taskmaster, the tictoc man who had broken time up into painfully precise little fragments that wound through the clocks with tortured clicks. So smoothly did he operate that most mortals never suspected that he existed, but only noticed how much more hectic their lives seemed than that of their forefathers.

I took a handful of white roses, stroked them with my fingernails to impart a whisper of gold, and laid them on Armano’s grave.

And behind me, there was a shadow, and the words “Excuse me,” and I would have leapt straight into the Tween right there, save that the voice was slightly familiar.

“I’m sorry to startle you, but my great-grandfather doesn’t often receive visitors. I thought I would introduce myself.” He trailed off, for I was looking at him with piercing intensity.

It was one of his descendants, but those eyes… they were his eyes. And that damned smug smile, as if he was just waiting for me to recognize him. “Armano?” I whispered, not daring to hope.

“My name from mortal birth was James Armand, ma’am,” he said, eyes twinkling. “But I can say I do like the sound of that name.” He bent and took one of the white roses and put it in his lapel.

I got it all of a sudden. It was like a lone tree I’d once seen in a field, blown over by a hurricane, no longer a tower of strength… but half of its roots stayed buried, and though its trunk was fallen and lay forever on the forest floor, its branches still grew up towards the sky.

Armano had fallen, but he had branched, he was still living, still fighting. I took him in my arms again, and we wept together.

Armano and I walked a long while that afternoon on the Isle of Grayglass, relating to each other our various scrapes and adventures. He told me of the latest news. The mortals had taken a renewed interest in space travel, ever since a seemingly friendly message had been received from another star. But opinions were sharply divided on whether it was wise to reply.

We passed around a vast crowd, some crying for and some against some proposed project to welcome alien visitors, and nearby there was a sign concerning the construction of an enormous tower that would reach into the sky. Another poster depicted vast and monstrous ant-like creatures marching over a tiny city, with the caption “Don’t Let Them Land!” A third was a movie poster with a lady of action in some distress, standing before an oval window.

“In some of this, I sense Greemaunder’s hand,” I said, and Armano nodded.

It was much later, on a small hill in a large park under the starry night, that he said, “I have an odd request of you. I need you to take us to the moon. The mortals have built a station there.”

“I wish I had that power.” I reminded him of the conditions under which I’d been sent journeying. “I can Tween now but cannot Twixt. My anklet gave me that power, but Greemaunder snatched at it and broke it.”

“I may be able to make the difference.” He brought forth from his shirt a small necklace like a ruby teardrop chased in silver. “I was made to wear this at exile. It’s supposed to bring me home at the appointed time, which is drawing rather near.”

“That’s wonderful news, my dear,” I said, “but before my tasks are complete, I cannot return.”

“And then you’d be stuck here, wouldn’t you, Risatia? Well, if that’s going to be the case, I’m staying where you’re staying. So please draw on the power I have here, and don’t stint yourself.

“I’m due to return home tonight, dear. You know how the Queen likes to arrange things; it can’t be a coincidence that we met each other at this time. There must be something we’re supposed to do together.”

We hugged tightly, then I drew the power and pulled us Twixtwise, and we were through, as I felt for the one place that would match the conditions he mentioned.

We arrived in a thing that was just a wee dome, a bubble of air, on a world without life, at least on the surface. But I could feel below, that Fae magic lurked, for this was Selene’s domain, often called upon by hunters. I kept Armano and I unseen when we arrived, and this was all to the good, for we were interrupting a conference of sorts. At one end of the table was a tall being with horns, a beast that would have been terrifying to me at first sight, save that there was a scar on its upper breast, a scar that I myself had healed years ago.

And at the other end of the table was old Greemaunder. He was mid-speech.

“…in any case, you must understand that however formidable your powers are, those I command are greater. There are none else suited to bargain on the Earth’s behalf. You will do best to accept my demand now; your race may certainly not return here, for the moon is a dead world and must so remain. I have enough to do with maintaining order below. There are many rocks like these elsewhere in the solar system, and you may betake yourself to one of those, if you so desire.”

The beast of metal blood leaned forward, speaking strange words into a box that translated them. “You present no terms that we can possibly find acceptable. The lunar globe has lain fallow overlong. Our return would but foster an age of friendly collaboration, as used to hold between our peoples. If you cannot give us better news, we shall seek others with which to bargain.”

Greemaunder smiled primly. “You shall find none others with the requisite authority; I have had ages to manipulate the law and I can assure you of that. Now, we have a world declassed from planetary status which you must find workable, as there is no alternative I can offer…”

Armano and I gave each other a glance. We appeared next to the beast, who reached towards me with a claw-hand as it recognized me.

“An it harm none, we accept your terms,” I said.

“By this token, the bargain is sealed,” finished Armano. He handed the beast the white rose at his breast.

The beast roared with joy. “Done, and done!” cried the translator, as Greemaunder shrieked in fury, advancing on us with his malice burning holes in his face–

But Armano vanished, and in a trice more, so did I.

We appeared at the queen’s court, and she herself was on the throne of petals under a full moon and the night sky, looking very pleased, as one might who had just gotten others to perform an unpleasant task for her. But I could not find it in my heart to be angry, for Armano was standing with me in Fae form, with golden skin and heart-melting smile. I knew it was a perfect ending to all, for the Yelgra was all aglow, every last gem of it, and in the sky overhead, as though we were seeing the return of ages old, the moon blossomed and bloomed with full color, shining with Fae radiance, a symbol of magic that none of Greemaunder’s Earthly works could gainsay

The Queen beamed alike at us. “Ah, is not the moon a nice bright pendant to hang from such a lovely necklace as the one you’ve made?”