The Prices Paid with Slipper Glass
From our high, white tower, I watch the city sleep beneath the light of a fading moon. It is not quite midnight and the cobbled streets are silent, save for the distant clip-clop of iron horseshoes on stone.
In his crib, my baby gurgles. Newly fed, he smiles at me. He is my joy. My heart. My so little, but so handsome prince.
I lift him and sing to him as any mother would. But my singing is not for him - it is to quieten the dread that clamps my heart. Still, I dare to hope for kindness. Or if not that, at least for mercy.
But the church bell tolls, pealing thirteen, slow chimes. Wind gusts and the night air, already cool, drops in an instant to icy cold.
I hear her lapping at the bowl of cream. It is not yet four years since I first made this offering beneath the crooked trees in the shadows of the ancient stones, but it feels like something from another lifetime. I close my eyes and still the scream that burns unbreathed in my lungs.
I turn.
She is not how I remember, yet I know she is unchanged. I had thought her dress threaded with moon-silver, but see now it is rags of cobwebs, woven with freezing dew.
She lifts her face from the cream, a single drop still hanging from her too-long tongue. Her eyes fix upon me. I had thought them coloured violet and teal. But one is a yellow cat’s eye and the other has an iris of deep, blood red.
“The cream is going sour princess,” she mewls, and my heart revolts to see the tip of an animal ear, twitching above bedraggled curls.
I do not have to try to sound panicked. “I’m sorry,” I gabble. “I’ll get you more, I just thought…”
Her laugh is the sound of breaking mirrors. Bright, brilliant, but bad luck and edged like razors. “You could feed me cream for thirteen moons and still I would take him,” she tells me, and she tips the bowl, so that the last pearls of cream drip between lips the colour of fattened maggots.
I clamp my son tight. “Please!” I beg. “There must be something else. I have sapphires, gold and…”
Her laugh bites again. “The value mortals place on such dull, shiny things,” she mocks. “If I wished it, I could wear rings of summer-skystone, or jewels of captured stars. I could armour my arms with a hundred bangles, forged from daydreams and stolen kisses.” Suddenly she leaps at me, her hand gripping my chin. “You can keep your trinkets, princess,” the coldness of her breath forms a layer of ice on my skin. “But I will take your son.”
Her smell hits me as I shake her off. Too sweet, like meat rotting in the sun and swarming with flies. Gagging, I back away. “Another year then! A year to find your true name, or the answer to a riddle, or a sacred treasure, long-lost in a dragon’s hoard!”
Her mouth is filled with animal teeth when she laughs. Needles of saliva-slicked bone. “You hear too many stories, princess,” she says. “We have already made our bargain. Your firstborn for your first kiss with your dull-witted prince. Tell me, does he bore you yet?”
“It was never about his charms.”
“And the glamours I gave, so you could dance with him? They were never about your wishes.” She smiles and stretches her arms out for my son.
I raise my boy to gaze at his too beautiful face, and somehow I hide the savagery that fills me at the sight of his smile. I pretend I am broken and that I will surrender. “What will you do with him?” I whisper.
“Perhaps I’ll raise him as my own,” she moves forward, her hand hovering over my son’s head. “Fill him with magics and wed him to the royalty of my kind. Perhaps then he’ll lead our armies against your realm to rule them both as a fiery, faerie king.” Her grin stretches again, and it is colder than winter’s wind. “Or perhaps I will share him with my sisters, and we will eat him, still living - and screaming for the mother who abandoned him!”
I feel my skin tighten. I see the cruelty naked in that stare. And I remember again, how the only time she smiled on that night, not quite three years ago, was when I told her I would see my mistress’ daughters blinded. How I would tear out their eyes along with the tongues they used to laugh at me.
I am not blameless. I know this.
But I will not let this faerie bitch take my child.
I turn my back on her and place my son in his crib, removing the item resting there. My fist curls around its handle. I marvel at its smoothness, how cool it is against my palm. “You can have any other child in the kingdom,” I say, without looking around. “Any two. Three even. Or more. But you cannot have my boy.”
“You can’t stop me, princess. I’ll bind your legs with serpents, I’ll conjure winds to stall your arms.”
I think of the transformed creatures who first escorted me to this castle on the night of the dance and I shudder. The guests had seemed aware only of their fine clothes without ever noticing how fur tufted at collars and cuffs, nor how eyes blinked sideways and too long noses twitched.
But still, I clench my will and turn. I meet her miscoloured eyes - and I do not flinch. “Do it then,” I say.
Her wand is the thickened stem of a dead rose. Wilted petals droop from it. Grinning, she raises it…
Nothing happens.
The shock on her face is the sweetest thing I have ever seen, save perhaps my son’s first smile.
“Cream going sour can hide many tastes,” I spit.
She stumbles back. The wand hits the floor and falls apart, like the fireplace ashes I once swept away. “What have you done, girl?” she demands.
“Blacksmith dust,” I step forward. “Splinters, ground to powder, then stirred into the cream.”
“You would poison me with iron? You’d dare!” She lunges at me, her fingers end in curving claws. I once saw them rip off my master’s manhood after he took me screaming when the mistress was away. Laughing, we left him bleeding in the forest, as wolves circled, hungry for his flesh. I longed then for such weapons to protect myself.
And now I have one.
It cuts through her ragged, cobwebbed dress. It bites deep into her belly.
I have hacked through meat many times. I know the weight of it. The blood-soaked thickness of it. But faerie flesh is gossamer and dove-breath. There is almost nothing there. But still, as I rip my blade free before she collapses, there is something like blood. It covers my hand and her dress. It pours over the polished floor as she struggles and crawls for the window.
In the moonlight it glows like embers.
“Not even iron can cut us,” she chokes. “How?”
“Oh, it was iron,” I tell her. “But iron coated with melted slipper-glass.”
And now, at last, I see her fear. Iron-poisoned and split with a relic of her own power. I watch her understand the possibility of death. I see her know, at last, what it is to be mortal.
“Please,” she crawls for the window, one withering hand clutching the wound, ember blood spilling through her fingers. “Let me go, and neither I, nor my sisters, will send harm against you, or your boy, or anything you care about.”
I straddle her instead. One leg on either side of her back. I drag her head up. I press the blade’s edge against her throat. Her skin is like ice. It burns as it freezes.
“Too late,” I whisper into the animal ear poking through her hair. “You should have contented yourself with mortal trinkets and bowls of nearly fresh cream.”
She laughs rather than screams as the blade slices through her neck, then shrivels away where she lies. Blood-light melts to vapour save for a single, smoking drop. A moth the colour of candle-shadows alights on it. Unease stirs in my chest - for a moment it looks as though the moth is drinking the ember-blood. I move to stamp on it, but it flutters out of reach and is soon lost in the acres of midnight above the city.
I look again in my son’s crib. He is sleeping. I kiss his forehead and bolt the shutters closed.
I tip-toe to the marital chamber. My husband startles awake.
“Ellinore?” he says. Is everything alright? Our son?”
For a moment I envy his ignorance. His lack of wit and imagination. How he knows nothing of mirror-bane, nor dream-wort. Nor the words my mother taught me; words that conjure yellow eyes in smoke or the creatures from behind the glass. Creatures that will remake the world for only sad songs or cold cream - or the promises of an innocent’s blood.
I kiss him instead. “All is well, my love,” I tell him. And then I kiss him again and remember how he looked that night in his black-swan mask, as we danced until the night was set ablaze with stars. We dance again, the true dance of which all others are only echoes. And after we have lost ourselves in the wrenching sweetness of ourselves, at last we sleep.
I sing in the morning as I comb my hair. I sing as my husband rises to attend to affairs of state, to act exactly as I have advised.
I go in to see my son. Sunlight paints his room golden. The city beyond thrums with life. I chase away two grey doves that sit cooing on the sill. For a moment I watch the world, listening to the cries from the market, and the shrieks of distant children playing.
My son lies unsmiling in his crib when I go to him. A thumb-sized moth sits on his forehead. And as I see it, I remember how I bolted the window shut the night before. My heart freezes as I swipe at the moth, but it falls from his head, as dead as withered rose-petals.
I clutch my too quiet son too tight. I kiss his hands and his face and am reassured when his hunger wakens and he starts to cry.
I hum as I feed him. From where I sit, I can see the city roofs. I watch smoke curl from chimneys and the grey doves chase other birds from the sky.
And still my son feeds. Since starting him on fruit and bread some months ago, I have not known him hunger so for my milk. I shriek as I am emptied and his small teeth clamp down, trying still to feed on what is no longer there.
With an effort I pull him away, shocked to see pearls of bright blood beading on my breast. I look down and see my son smile - and I begin at once to scream.
Not because, for one delirious moment, his blue eyes looked to be violet and teal.
But because, in the next, one is a yellow cat’s-eye whilst the other has an iris of deep, blood red.
[This story was shortlisted in the fourth quarter of Writers of The Future volume 36]
