Chapter Twenty-Two – Teresa

Over the next few minutes, I managed to calm the shaking. It was harder to convince myself to listen to what the lady was saying. It – it had felt dispassionate, what he’d done. The only real, recognizable emotion from the Faerie had been when he hurt me. The second the pain had started, he’d gotten all weak.

Why hadn’t that happened with the wolf? Or the boar?

Well aware that she was still there behind me, I took a deep breath and unclenched my fists. That thought could come later. Right now, I was as ready as I’d ever be for this. The tension didn’t leave me, but I managed to squeak out an assent.

As if she’d been standing there ready the entire time, she chirped, “Great!”

A little shuffling later she’d set a bar of soap on the edge of the tub. A blocky, white rectangle. Then she scooped a pitcher down into the water beside me and tilted my head back before pouring.

I twitched at the touch. A dark stain spread across the water, slowly fading as it dispersed.

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

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

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

That – that wasn’t right.

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

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

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

I knew one way to check, though it had me wrapping my arms around my stomach before I tried it. I was expecting it to hurt or make me nauseous, since I still didn’t have a good understanding of it and almost every experience since the ritual had just been one pain after another.

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

It never came.

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

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

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

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

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed at that.

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

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

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

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

“I can’t imagine him doing that.”

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