The Children(65)

She cradled the hand, looking at him. A glittery heat was gathering in her chest and fingertips. Up close she could see his lashes were as black as his brows, his arms haphazardly scattered with tattoos. A cowled skull, a bar code, a sun with a mournful face. Black bands of differing widths circled his wrists. Running up his inner elbow, in lowercase, eat the rich.

So the first thing she said to Arthur Borelli was this:

“My mom is rich.”

He saw where she was looking and flexed his arm. “Hope she tastes good.” He wrinkled his nose. “Ew, never mind. Sorry. So, uh. What’s in the notebook?”

Ennis would be mad if she told him. But Ennis got mad a lot. Her brother lived in a parallel world, a realm where their parents and the visitors didn’t even exist. He’d walk right past them, as if they were invisible. Honestly it didn’t seem worth the stress. Still. She probably shouldn’t tell Arthur anything.

“It’s a story,” she said. “About a boy who falls in love with a girl he sees in his dreams. He goes crazy looking for her, all over the place. And when he finally meets her, she’s young and he’s a hundred years old. The whole time he was dreaming of the future. And as soon as he sees her, he dies.”

Arthur was silent long enough for her ego to shake, crack, threaten to crumble. Then slowly he said, “Dude. That’s hardcore. I love it. It’s like a ‘Wandering Aengus’ retelling, with a sci-fi twist.”

All the cracks in her ego sealed up with gold. Trying to sound indifferent, she said, “Yeah.”

“So, I have an idea.” His thumb was tapping against his fingers in repeating counts of four. His black brows went up and he looked faintly insane. “You let me read your story, I’ll let you read mine. Then we meet in three days to discuss. What do you think?”

Three days. Maybe he’d still be here then, maybe he wouldn’t. Her parents’ houseguests rarely bothered saying goodbye. Even the kind ones, the funny ones, the ones who taught her how to write a sestina or play a G chord or make a butterfly out of a dollar bill. Their departures were as abrupt as Anne’s had been, long ago.

Guin narrowed her eyes, thinking. Then carefully she detached the story from her notebook. “Don’t lose it, okay? And don’t show it to my parents. And don’t—if my brother talks to you, don’t mention it.”

“I won’t do any of those things,” he said solemnly. His fingers brushed hers as he took the pages and they were cool, sparking watery against her skin. Then he reached into his back pocket and took out a paperback, bent like the cup of a palm. Its cover was plain and read,

the wandering country

arthur borelli

advance reader copy



“Oh.” She held it in two hands, looking. “It’s a whole book.”

Arthur laughed. He really did look like a living willow tree. Like a mythical curse, half undone. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. You can just read the first chapter, if you want. To make it even.”

Guinevere shook her head. What she was trying to say was she didn’t know he was a real author. This made it ten times scarier that her pages were in his hands.

“Three days,” said Arthur. “Then we’ll talk.”





Thirty-Four

2003




The Wandering Country begins with a boy traveling by train through a nighttime landscape, alone. He’s been on the move a long time already, there’s a sense of endlessness to both his journey and the night. As the train advances toward an iron-gated city, it’s halted by the rise of a thick fog.

From inside the fog, strains of music can be heard. Heady perfumes come and go—fruit, ocean, incense, the saps of unnamable trees. Strange figures can be glimpsed within it, some of which seem intent on entering the train. The passengers are nervous but unsurprised, which puts into context certain things mentioned previously in passing: the iron latches and frames on the windows, the heavy salt canisters in each car.

Eventually, a passenger calls the fog by its name: the Wandering Country. It’s a fey terrain that rolls through human territories like a tumbleweed, imposing its dangerous rule. Then a brakeman discovers a gap in a window’s iron casing. A head count is ordered; passenger numbers are found to be greatly reduced.

The remaining travelers gather in the heavily protected dining car. At the suggestion of the eldest among them—an opera singer, continually feeding bits of cake to a pet she keeps in a covered cage—they decide to tell stories to pass the time.

Each tale is seeded with oddities that bring into focus a picture of the world beyond the fog, like ours, but not entirely. And each reveals its teller’s hidden connection to the changeable realm pressing at the windows.

Among the cast is a disgraced duchess and a heartbroken pirate, a famous inventor and a wicked little girl with a veiled companion. When it’s the boy’s turn to tell his story, he presents it as a fairy tale.

It tells of a gifted ironworker who becomes too boastful in his claims of fortifying his cottage against the Wandering Country. The fey become intent on stealing his children to punish him, and in the end one slides through a keyhole he carved, in his hubris, from a piece of labradorite.

As he reaches the ending of his story, the boy—not really a boy—undoes his window’s iron latches and lets the fairies in.