The drear landscape is overlaid by a wide grassy lawn. Above, a coin-like sun sits in a boiled blue sky. The sun in Faery is brilliant but lacks warmth. The air smells stiflingly of flowers; a mélange of roses and lilies too pungent to be agreeable. The colors—celadon grass, emerald trees, azure sky, scarlet flowers—are luscious but lifeless.
“Come come!” the corgi chides. “Every second here is a year in the Waking World. There’s no time to waste!”
“My time in the Waking World is up,” Sylvie says. “So that hardly matters to me.”
“I don’t want to miss the party!” squeaks the corgi, springing at her knees, nipping at her velvet skirts with needle teeth, driving her, laughing, forward. Beyond the grassy lawn is a half-timbered house, sitting by a lake, both surrounded by a dense copse of trees: ash and oak, chestnut and cherry. A pair of swans float upon the lake; their red beaks bright blotches of sangyn against the dull black of their feathers.
A dash of glittering light coalesces before Sylvie and the corgi, becomes a tall woman, draped in spangled cloth: Mab, the Faery Seneschal. Her lips are red as pomegranates and her hair the silvery purple of stardust. At first glance, she’s beautiful, but a second look shows that beauty is tinged with the grotesque. Her mouth is too wide, her eyes too big, her fingers long and insectile, her skin as brittle and slick as porcelain. She’s dressed all in white, a maggoty shade of white that suggests not purity and renewal, but putrescence. When the faeries try to copy human fashions, despite their magic, they always get the subtle details wrong.
The corgi waddles towards the faery woman, fluffy butt wiggling in joy, shrieking: “Mab! Mab!”
Mab scoops the corgi up and allows it to dab at her face with its long tongue. Over its foxy head, she observes Sylvie: “You have grown so old since yesterday.”
“Yesterday was years ago to me,” Sylvie says.
“It is a terrible fate to be a human, to be young and fair, and then so quickly to decay.”
“A terrible fate indeed: to grow, to learn, to love, to create, to let go. Some say it’s a terrible fate to be a Faery; to stay unchanging and unfeeling for all eternity, to spend one’s time in nothing but frivolity and pleasure-seeking,” Sylvie answers.
The faery woman answers: “Our pleasures are our own. It is well, then, that we each are satisfied with how we are. Did you bring the guitar they call the Queen of Life?”
“I did.”
“Good. He pines, he says he must have it, he sulks for it. They have offered him the most famous guitars in the Waking Worlds: Lucille; Robert Johnson’s 1929 Gibson; Clapton’s Blackie; Page’s double-necked Stratocaster; Brakespeare’s Honeythroat. He wants the Queen of Life—only her. The Lord and Lady have become impatient. Come.”
Mab turns and walks toward the lake, the tails of her white gown slinking behind her like the segments of a worm. Sylvie and the corgi, who Mab had collapsed from her arms onto the ground, follow. The swans have moved to the edge of the lake now, fishing among the catkins. As Mab approaches, they scatter, trailing thin lines of wake behind them. Mab walks off the grass, out onto this wake, the corgi bouncing along behind her. Sylvie hesitates; and the corgi turns back towards her and yaps “Come on! Come on!”
So Sylvie follows, out onto the water, wondering if it will hold her—a human woman—as it does a faery woman. And it does; her footfall is as firm as if she walks on solid ground. The water of the lake is rising up around her; she’s sinking as she walks, an unnerving feeling only leavened by the consolation that since the only death in Faery is the Death she has trapped in the Queen of Life, she surely cannot drown. Though the water is rising around them, they are not getting wet; now the surface of the lake is above their heads, and they are walking down a sloping pathway that leads to—
An immense room, airless and dark, with a ceiling bounded by the lake’s volume, a huge mass of water poised directly above. Thin lances of light pierce the murky water, and darts of gold, black and white—carp easily as big as the fat corgi. Under this watery canopy hundreds of faeries weave and turn among each other, bowing and twirling, pairs coming together, moving apart, in some incomprehensible pattern. They are dancing, Sylvie realizes, their movements jerky, so strangely ungraceful for creatures of such beauty, hopping stiffly, elbows held at strange angles, steps shuffling and awkward. Their headdresses of bone and branch, ash and hawthorn, trailing moss and ivy, bend and sway like a forest in windstorm.
But the ballroom is completely silent, not even the sound of the dancers’ slippers on the floor can be heard. A stage looms above the dance floor and faeries stand upon its height, making motions with strange objects. One clutches a massive rock in each hand, pounding on the skull of a huge horned animal. Another holds a bone to her mouth; another blows on a large shell. A fifth has strung dry leaves on a long stick and shakes the stick like a tambourine. But these facsimile instruments make no noise, no music, no sound at all, or at least no sound that Sylvie can hear. The light shafting through the water wavers, too weak to provide much illumination, so the dancers, their clothes, their hair, seem, even through the enchanted sunglasses, grey and bland. And there on the dais opposite the stage, dark Oberon, with his moonlight hair and his icy eyes. And proud Titania, her rounded shoulders gauzed in heart’s-ease taffetta, a crown of tangled flowers—honeysuckle and heliotrope, yarrow and bluebells—poised on her head. And, lounging between them, Robert Mynwar, bright as the sun. In the Waking World, he glowed; golden hair, golden skin, sapphire eyes. Here, even in the wan watery light, he fairly blazes. Sylvie’s heart catches; she’d forgotten how breathtakingly gorgeous he is, so young and merry. He does not in any way look as sorrowful as the reports had made him out to be. He looks content, and relaxed, albeit a bit petulant; that last expression oh-so-familiar. A small mandolin nestles in his lap, glossy as a lap-dog.
“Proud Oberon, Fierce Titania, King and Queen of all who live Under the Hill,” Mab says. “You bid me send for the guitar called The Queen of Life, and I have done so.”
The corgi makes a sort of bow by settling its stumpy front legs to the floor, wiggles its glorious floof, and Sylvie makes a creaky curtsy. Oberon says: “And you brought a hag, as well, to mar our court, and give us pain to see such ugliness.”
Robert grins at this; he’s looking right at her, but there’s no glimmer of recognition in his eyes. How could there be? He hasn’t seen her in sixty years. But in his mind, it’s been only days; he remembers her, if at all, falsely.
Sylvie says, forcing a quaver in her voice, “Lord and Lady of the Hill, I ask you to pardon me. I come only as the servant to the guitar, the Queen of Life; when it is delivered, I shall withdraw.”
“Oh leave her be, Oberon,” Robert says, “Give me the guitar, granny—” He’s slinking down from the dais now, those supple hips swaying in the way that made all the young kids scream and faint. He thrusts the mandolin at her, takes the guitar-case, clasping it to his chest like a lover, before laying it down on the step.
“Oh you darling,” Robert says, when he opens the lid. “Oh you gorgeous gorgeous girl.”
He swivels into a sitting position; props the Queen of Life on his lap, caresses her curves, running his fingers over her frets, up and down her glittering strings. His eyes dance; the smile he bestows upon her almost breaks Sylvie’s heart anew. “Thank you, granny, for bringing her to me. Tell me, do they remember me in the Waking World? Or am I long forgotten?”