Monstrous Little Voices Read online

  “I asked them to teach me,” I say, to the gold smoke of Ariel’s current form. It eddies in acknowledgement, sparks flying out as the glamour takes hold. “We came here, and I wanted to be a scholar. And Ferdinand aided me, at first. He thought it novel, and maybe right, that a girl raised in isolation would want to learn. But when I wouldn’t restrict my interests to suit him—when I wanted to learn physiognomy, astronomy, history, and not just music and manners—his humour for it faded.” I step from the bed with more strength than I’ve had in days, and into the tub of waiting water, conjured by Ariel. Sweat and blood slough off like scabs.

  I do not talk about Ferdinand; about the child we lost, or that child’s begetting. I am not ready for that. Not now.

  Not yet.

  When I am clean, I dress in clothes of Ariel’s choosing—stolen clothes that render me boyish, breasts bound, hair hidden—and wonder at myself, that I’m not afraid. Or I am afraid, rather, but not of this; not of the unknown, and not of Ariel.

  “Are you ready?” Ariel asks. Her form is mine again, though traces of gold smoke linger, limning our hair like a halo.

  “Yes,” I say, though I’m not sure for what, and as she sets a hand on me, I feel the spell of my disappearance settle on us like ashes.

  “SEE, HERE?” ARIEL pointed at the eggs, three pale-shelled things the size of small fruit snugged tight in a woven nest. “Baby nightjars hatch from these. The mother lays them, and they hatch on their own.”

  We’d climbed the tree together—no leopard-flights today—like the children we both resembled, but only one of us was. The shells were warm to the touch, and as we made our way back to the beach, the feel of them lingered on my fingertips. We didn’t speak; Ariel was in the middle of a lesson, and the silence between us was a companionable thing, worn easy with frequent use.

  At the edge of a promising tidepool, Ariel dropped to his haunches, dark eyes darting as he sought out a subject. “There!” he proclaimed. “Do you see it?”

  “The starfish?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes! Such strange things—if you cut off one of their arms, not only will it grow back, but the severed limb will turn into a whole new starfish. But then, we have the neighbouring seahorse—there, can you see?”

  I squinted into the water. “The fat one, with the stripes?”

  “Exactly!” Ariel beamed at me. “It’s pregnant, and male. When his babies are born, they’ll burst from the pouch in his stomach like a puff of dandelion seeds on the wind, a flock of little seahorselings.”

  Another child might have disbelieved him; but I lived alone on an island, and could hardly have known that this wasn’t the usual way of things. “Is my father like a seahorse, then? Did I come from him?”

  “You came from him, but not that way,” said Ariel, suddenly solemn. “Your kind is born from a mother—”

  “Like the nightjars?”

  “Yes, but not from eggs. You grew in a womb, within her body, and when you were big enough, she pushed you out into the world.”

  I frowned at Ariel. “If I have a mother, then where is she? Why isn’t she here?”

  “Your father could tell you that, but I cannot.”

  “Because you don’t know?”

  Ariel sighed and rocked on his heels. “Because he’s forbidden me to.”

  “TAKE ME TO Titania’s court,” I say, suddenly.

  Ariel stills. “You don’t want that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just escaped one court!” She waves her hand at the palace behind us, stark grey lines against the evening sky. “Why trade it for another?”

  “Because,” I say, and hesitate, trying to think it through while so enamoured of the prospect as to imperil any rational examination of its consequences. “Where else can I go? I want to learn, to study, and I cannot do it here; not without a male patron, and as I am now feigning death in order to avoid such oversight”—my throat tightens sharply—“that option seems an especially poor one.”

  “I thought,” says Ariel, softly, “that you might want to return to the island.”

  I stare at her. “With you?”

  “Perhaps. If you wanted. Or alone, if you did not.” She sighs, shoulders tightening, and stares out into the human dark. “I still go there, sometimes. Often. I have made a truce of sorts, with Caliban. In the end, we were both captives.”

  Hearing that name aloud is an unexpected pain. “I hated him, once. And then I pitied him.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I know better. He was a reflection, Ariel.” I cannot keep the bitterness from my voice. “His lusts were mimicry. Nothing more.”

  We are both silent at that. There is no comfort in it.

  “Take me to Titania’s court,” I say again, when my voice returns. “Save for this past year, my whole life has been lived in magic, and at least there, I need not hide it.” I look at Ariel and smile. “Perhaps I might even venture to be myself, whoever she is when you’re not wearing her face.”

  Ariel flinches. “I’m sorry. I can change—”

  “No. Don’t.” I lay a hand on her (my) arm and give a gentle squeeze. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Another silence, softer than the first. We are relearning ourselves, it seems.

  “I cannot take you,” Ariel says at last. “Not because I don’t want to, but because I have duties elsewhere—duties I have already prolonged for the sake of your rescue, but which I can stay no further.”

  I lift my chin, defiant. “Then I shall make my own way there.”

  Ariel laughs, proud and pleased and sudden. “What, all the way to Illyria, alone? And why not? But let me furnish you with a guide, at least, to give you an introduction. As it happens, I have a friend who’s travelling that way. Mind, he’s an impish thing—though not all imp, if you’ll credit it—but he’ll keep you safe and see you entertained besides, or I’ll eat my name.”

  “Eat your—” I begin, but abandon the query as unimportant, fixing on what matters. “Who is he, then? And where can I find him?”

  In answer, Ariel closes her fist. When she opens it again, a tiny red-breasted bird is nestled in the dent of her palm, chuffing its feathers against the cold. Its eyes glow bright, and with an impatient chirrup, it shoots off like an arrow, trailing a tiny phosphor-wake through the air behind it.

  “Come on,” says Ariel, and together we follow the bird, out through the city gate—still spelled silent, unseen, unknown—and onto the dusty road. Whenever it gets too far ahead, the bird circles back to chirp at us, until we’ve followed it over hill and briar, past ridges and stones to a thicket of trees and a smallish clearing within them. A cheerful fire crackles in a makeshift pit, and next to it sits a long-limbed man with a pair of horns peeping out from his tightly-curled hair.

  As we step into view, the bird flies straight at him, cheeping. He looks up, startled and happy all at once, then laughs as the bird alights on the tip of a horn. It gives a final chirp and dissolves in a shower of sparks.

  “Ariel!” he exclaims. “And—what’s this? A human child?”

  “Well met, Puck,” she says, smiling. I feel suddenly shy, and let Ariel guide me over, taking a seat by the fire as she clasps Puck’s hand. He looks at me with obvious curiosity, noting our shared features.

  “This is Miranda,” Ariel says. “My island charge.”

  “Is she, now? And here I’d thought the story half a myth.” He leans on his hands and grins at me. His skin is a light, warm brown, and the curls of his hair are copper in the firelight. “A pleasure, I’m sure, though what you might want with me, I’ve no idea.”

  “She wants to go to Titania’s court,” says Ariel. “And I want you to take her there.”

  “DID YOU ASK him?” Ariel said. They were a leopard now, but whether that meant male or female wasn’t clear. “About your mother?”

  I frowned, confused, and sat down on a rock. I felt strangely empty, light, and the hairs on my arms stood up. “I don’t know,” I said, slowly. “Why? Should I have done?”

  Ariel’s whiskers rippled. “You went away to ask, and now you’re back. Did you change your mind?”

  “My mind?”

  “Miranda? Are you all right?”

  “I can hardly say.” I hugged my knees, but let them go as Ariel laid their head in my lap, their velvety paws stretched out beneath my thighs. “I feel so odd. What did I mean to ask about?”

  “Your mother.”

  “I had a mother?”

  “You did.”

  “Oh. That must have been nice.”

  Ariel chuffed in distress. “If I was unbound—”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not, Miranda. You know it’s not.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do. You did.”

  “Still.” We sat together, looking out at the twilit ocean. “It’s a lovely evening, don’t you think?”

  Ariel didn’t answer.

  “YOU WANT ME—me!—to take this child as a votary to Queen Titania?”

  “I do.”

  Puck looks flatly at Ariel. “Have you forgotten why I’m wanted at court?” He turns to me and says, wryly, “Queen Titania is less than delighted with me at present.”

  “And why is that again?” asks Ariel, amusedly.

  “You know why.”

  “Miranda doesn’t.”

  “Miranda isn’t asking.”

  Both fairies look at me. I flush, not knowing whether to laugh or flee, but can’t resist the temptation of knowledge. “Why is Queen Titania wroth with you?”

  “Because,” says Puck, “I am King Oberon’s envoy—or one of them, anyway—and as certain of the Queen’s attendants took it upon themselves to mock me in that capacity, I took it upon myself to make them regret it.”

  “What Puck means to say,” says Ariel, “is that he made Moth fall in love with a tortoise and bound Mustardseed’s hair to a willow-tree, and as both fairies failed to see the humour in his trickery, King Oberon has sent him to make reparations—for the hurt to their dignity, and to the dignity of Queen Titania’s court.”

  “Exactly!” Puck says. “I’m in disgrace, and as undeserving as I am of such acrimony, I hardly see how Miranda could benefit from my stewardship.”

  “That’s because you’re looking at it backwards,” Ariel says. “Queen Titania holds her votaries—and their presentation—sacrosanct. Bringing her Miranda will be seen as a show of good faith on your part—and as a penitent offering, too, as you might just as easily have taken her to the King. Miranda won’t share your shame, you foolish imp; she’ll lift it.”

  “A pretty politician you are,” says Puck, and when he smiles, I see the points of his teeth, as needlemouthed as a deep-sea fish. “And why, pray tell, would you do me such a favour?”

  “The favour is for Miranda,” Ariel says, with weary patience. “You know as well as I the rules surrounding human votaries: they must approach the court on foot, by mortal means, instead of being spirited there by the fairie roads. I have no time to walk that path, but you, in your penitent state, must take it regardless.”

  “And more’s the pity,” Puck grumbles. “My feet ache.”

  “I am a font of endless compassion.”

  “You’re a font of endless something, ’tis sure.”

  I laugh at that, the sound startled out of me like birds from a copse. How strange these fairies are! And yet I delight in their bickering the same way I delight in my newfound lack of pain and duty both: as a freedom once longed, but unlooked for.

  “Will you take her, then?”

  “Oh, Ariel, Ariel—best of spirits! Airy friend!” Puck wags a finger. “Must you be so transparent? By your own admission, I’d be doing you the real favour, as you value the child and cannot shepherd her yourself. And as moved as I am by your paean to the use of votaries in appeasing your Queen, it would—as I’m sure you can appreciate—go against my nature to accept your charge without bargaining.”

  Ariel bares her throat to the sky, as though in supplication to the firmament and its bright adjudication. “Bargain with me, then.”

  “I could do that,” says Puck, and flicks his gaze to me. “Or I could bargain with her.”

  My heart begins to pound, but my voice is steady. “What manner of bargain, sir?”

  “Miranda—” Ariel warns, but Puck cuts her off with a laugh.

  “As I’m a magnanimous Puck, that’s entirely up to you, child. What’s your preference—chance, skill or trade?”

  “What’s the difference?” I ask, feeling bolder than I sound.

  It’s Ariel who answers. “Chance means betting in a game of luck; if you lose, he won’t take you. Skill is a game of, well, skill; and again, if you lose, he won’t take you. And a trade means you offer him something valuable of yourself—a favour, most likely—in return for his help. Though of course”—and here she glares at Puck again—“you’ll have to haggle for it.”

  “What sort of trade? I have some coin, but somehow”—I meet Puck, whose eyes gleam—“I feel you have little use for such currency.”

  “Just so,” says Puck, and yet my hand still moves to the purse at my borrowed belt. I ought, perhaps, to feel awkward in men’s clothing; some acknowledgement of a transgression which, at the very least, should shame me in its brazenness. But then, I am already an unnatural thing, and whatever else can be said of me, I’ve always had a practical streak.

  “If not coin,” I ask him, “what is it you want?”

  “Memories,” he says. “Or else—”

  But I don’t hear what comes next. Fear drags me down like an undertow.

  The stars vanish.

  I STARED AT the wall of the cave, at the writing scrawled across it, shaky shale script on darker stone.

  “I don’t remember,” I whispered. “I don’t understand it, Ariel. Why?”

  Ariel, shaped as a white-furred she-wolf, leaned against my leg and whined.

  I slid to my knees and buried my face in her glowing fur, anemone-soft and just as mobile, rippling as if in some unseen current.

  “He fears you,” Ariel said. “It’s in the nature of sorcerers to covet knowledge more than company. He fears what you might learn; what you might do with your learning.”

  “And so he steals it from me. Over and over. Like water eroding stone.”

  Ariel whined again, low and sad.

  “What if he comes here, too? What if he wipes the wall?” With my memory unreliable, it was all the true record I had of my conversations with Ariel; of what I knew about the world beyond my father’s lessons.

  “Then I will remember it for you,” Ariel says, with a wolfmother’s fierceness. “I’ll help you rewrite it, again and again, like the tide that builds the sandbar.”

  A fragment of memory came to me, and I choked on a laugh.

  “Sandbars are precarious, Ariel. You taught me that.”

  A wet nose bumped my collar. “True,” she said. “And yet, correctly placed, they can wreck galleons. Remember that, too.”

  “I will,” I whispered. “If he lets me.”

  “CAN YOU SPEAK, child? Are you here with us?”

  A soft hand strokes my back. I open my eyes, and firelight rushes into them—warm air, warm light. My throat is raw as an uncooked fish.

  “No memories,” I rasp. “I will not trade them. Not for Titania’s crown.”

  The hand on my back—Ariel’s, of course—continues its gentle circuit. “Of course not,” she murmurs, apologetic. “Forgive me. I should have thought—”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Miranda—”

  “Miranda,” Puck says, suddenly. Belated recognition sweeps his features—bright, then dark, the sun obscured by clouds. “You’re that Miranda. Duke Prospero’s daughter.”

  Something in me hardens. “I am more than my father’s child.”

  “Clearly, as you are here.” He looks at Ariel, almost contrite. “One child is much like another. You told me of your island charge, I knew of Duke Prospero’s return, but didn’t connect the two.”

  “And would it have changed things, if you had?”

  “Perhaps,” Puck admits. “And yet...”

  “And yet.” Ariel snorts, derisive. “Go on, then. Make your bargain.”

  Puck looks at me, assessing. His gaze is a weight, but unlike the stares of some of the men at Ferdinand’s court, it holds no barbs: no lust, no disparagement. As though his sight can sift the grains of my soul like sand through an hourglass.

  “Miranda,” he says, “in deference to the inherent mischief of your escape, in trade for my services as protector, friend and guide, I will accept no lesser payment than the colour of your hair.”

  I blink at him. “Is that a literal offer, sir, or a metaphoric one?”

  He laughs, delighted. “Literal, dear child, though if you’re to deal with the fairy courts, you’d be wise to keep an eye out for such promising loopholes in future. Well? Do we have an accord?”

  My hair is bound beneath a cap, invisible to me; yet Ariel still wears my face, her red mane drifting lionish about our jaw, cheeks, chin. I think of my bloody sheets (red, red), the tearing loss of what might have been my firstborn child, and decide I have russet enough to spare.

  “We do,” I say, and extend my hand, as a gentleman might and a lady ought not; but perhaps, I think, sudden and lightning-sharp, I am both those things, and neither.

  “Done,” says Puck, and clasps my palm. His grip is warm, and a tingle of magic threads between us, fine as ravelled silk. It feels as though we cradle a spark between us, something in the hollow where our hands are joined, and as its heat intensifies, I flick my gaze to Ariel.

  “Oh!” My free hand flies to my lips. I startle and smile behind my fingers, but don’t quite laugh, watching as Ariel’s ruddy hair turns white as snowfall, its brighter colours leeching away in time to the pulse of Puck’s magic. Even her brows and lashes fade, which makes me wonder if, when I next undress myself, I’ll learn other, more private changes. (Like so much else, the thought should make me blush, I suppose. But it doesn’t.)