Part II: A Beggar's Bargain
The prince starts; he nearly pulls his face from the queen's touch, but stops himself just in time. There is a new sort of cold in Hermione's chest now, a human sort of cold, a vernal dread.
He did not know, she tells herself. That horror in his face - he could not have known. At least there is that; at least he did not willingly lead Hermione to her death.
He has never looked more human than he does now; the raw weakness of fear and panic casting lines and shadows across his face; and suddenly, he looks at Hermione; and there is pleading in his eyes; the pleading she was preparing to do only weeks ago, across from him in their troika; a pathetic sort of desperation, which has been the sum of his sulking and moods and surliness; and Hermione tells herself, she is a minister. This is a negotiation; she was sent here to mediate; she is only in another council meeting, someone has proposed an amendment she disagrees with; now it is her turn, to argue her side, to present her objections.
Hermione stands, her satin fluttering to her side. "I beg your ear," she hears herself say; her voice sounds reedy and breathless, mortally frail. "I beg your ear, as the winter council's representative."
There is a harsh echo of silence, following her proclamation. And then the queen, for the first time, gives Hermione her attention; her eyes are inscrutable, empty. It is for the better, Hermione tells herself. There is no emotion to play against here, only reason.
"The prince – " she starts; her throat is suddenly dry, as it was the very first time she spoke aloud in council. "The prince is the bastion of our two peoples' unity; if he is to leave his mortal kingdom, then he will no longer – "
"What do we care of your mortal kingdom?" asks the queen. She has bent down, to peer closer at Hermione as she speaks. There is no ire to her tone; it is only an earnest question.
Hermione clears her throat once, twice. "Our mortal kingdom can bring you – "
"You fear death," the queen says, tilting her head. "I understand, little one, but it will be quick for you." And she reaches forward her hand, as if she is reaching to brush something from Hermione's cheek –
"No!" Hermione shrieks, and stumbles back, a step, and then another. "Wait! Please, no! I – I – I can make a trade for my life." The pleading tumbles from her lips; she has never felt so helpless; she has never felt the promise of death so closely before.
The hand stops. Hermione is pressed against the iciness of the wall behind her; she does not think the cold will ever leave her bones; she shall never feel true warmth again for the rest of her life – but then, that may not be very long past today.
The queen is considering her curiously. "What do you have to trade?" she asks, gazing into the empty air thoughtfully, as if she is only musing aloud to herself.
What does Hermione have? Not even the clothes on her back, any longer; not her books; not her wisdom; not even Tal, though to have to trade Tal – no, it wouldn't do to even think of it. She has…what? Old children's stories and the constant shadow of her father's respect and wilting memories of him alive and all the nights she has spent weeping into her pillow, into Tal's fur… what use is any of it to a Faie, what good has any of it ever –
Hermione pushes a breath out through her teeth. It seems mad. She feels mad; perhaps she has already been mad some time now. "A tear," she says softly. "I will give you a single human tear, in exchange for my life."
And suddenly, in the queen's face, there is…something; something which shifts, a moon drifting behind the clouds, a sun cresting a horizon. "A tear?" she says, and Hermione nods, her breath still coming ragged with terror.
The queen's hand lowers. "Now?" she asks.
Hermione pinches her eyes tight, taking all the despair, the hopelessness, the coldness, letting it take over her heart, but nothing comes; her eyes are dry; they sting with exhaustion. She opens them again.
"Give me time," she whispers.
The queen considers; there is still something other about her, something which has changed her expression, her temperament; at last, Hermione places what is now dancing in the queen's eyes – it is a hunger.
"Three nights," the queen says at last. "He comes of age in three nights, and three nights you shall have."
There is no bed and no door in the room Hermione is given; only a seat carved from the wall, and her dress, which keeps no warmth against her skin. There is light from inside the walls, an arched gap where a door might have been, and a window which looks outward; dark waters, rollicking, trembling, far below her.
She waits what she thinks are several hours; it feels like hours, anyhow, and then she slips off her tinkling shoes, and creeps from her room into the barren hall. She wonders if there are Faie all around her, staring at her; she wonders if there is even one sent to her room; but there is no point in wondering now. If she is caught, she is not any worse than she would have been otherwise.
As she searches the endless halls, and rooms, and corners, making notches every so often in the ice as she goes, she recites the stories to herself once more, so she does not forget what she is searching for – 'and the greedy magician heard of a cloak, a cloak which had great powers, but it was hidden in a far-off land of ice and hoar' – 'and the princess was stolen from the palace one night, and brought to the land of ice and hoar, and placed in a glittering cage, with every gift and luxury waiting for her inside – '
Hermione thinks, perhaps she will be searching the whole night; the whole three nights and days; perhaps she will come upon the queen in her chambers, and be frozen in that instant. But at last there is a change in the air; she cannot explain it, except to say the air is less forbidding against her cheeks, the cold less intrusive; there is a room with light spilling out of it, and she walks slowly towards it, unsure of what she will find within –
The prince is pacing the confines of his room; he startles as she appears on his threshold. She never thought he should be such a welcome sight to her, that drawn, unhappy face of his.
"Are they here?" she asks softly, gesturing around.
"If they are, I cannot see them either," he says, and sighs heavily, and drops to sit on the corner of a bed, which his room has been given, unlike hers.
She takes it as an invitation and comes further into the room, perches on one of the seats. "We need to find a way to free you," she says matter-of-factly, because she does not know how else to begin. If she only views it as a puzzle, perhaps it will be easier to solve.
"And there I was, thinking you only cared for yourself and your own life," he says snidely, bringing a knee to his chest and resting his chin upon it. "Or perhaps I missed where you threw my life into your little bargain as well?"
Hermione feels herself color, against all odds, even in this land wholly barren of warmth. "Well, seeing as I've come here to find you, I should think it fairly evident I am trying to help. But if you don't want my advice, perhaps due to how young and inexperienced I am, I suppose I will go back to my room." And she stands; and she thinks, if he had not interceded, she really would have left, desperation aside; and all due to this bothersome pride of hers, clinging onto the tatters of her fate to the very last. But she does not need to know for certain, one way or the other, because he does intercede. He is even more desperate than her, it seems.
"You have thought of something, then?" he asks quietly. "There is something?"
The naked hope in his voice shames her; she should have chosen her words more carefully. "N-no," she says, her voice stumbling again from its usual surety. "At least – not yet. But we can think of something together. I just need to learn everything that you do; about Faie, about their rules."
His expression hardens at her words; his jaw sets. There is a strange play of light against his pale skin, the crown of birch which sits so perfectly in his hair, unnatural, glowing shadows at the angles of his face; already, he seems less physical, less earthly than when they first entered Seabane; but his eyes are still grey; and they are the same eyes she has sat across from every day as they traveled across the snowlands.
Finally, he throws himself carelessly down onto his back. "Oh, very well; a few stories, and then off to bed," he says in sardonic lilt; and begins.
It is difficult to know how much time passes; but at last, the words exhaust themselves; his voice grown gravely towards the end, unaccustomed to such continual use, perhaps.
Hermione has learnt many more things about Faie now; a childhood's and life's worth of them, everything he has seen and thought and wondered every year of every visit. She learns, too, from the way his tone pauses at times, from the way he does not mention certain things, or skirts over them without emotion, that he has never gone on a visit without being afraid for it; that as a child, he used to beg and cry every year for his father, his brothers, anyone who would listen, to not send him, all to no avail; that he suspects, if it were not for keeping peace with hoar-folk, his family should have been rid of him long ago.
But of everything he has shared, she cannot yet see anything that can help them; some of it she knew already; others she cannot think of a use for; frustration blooms inside of her, heated and unproductive, and close on its heels, drowning fear – if she cannot think of something; if there is nothing to think of…
"The princess escaped," Hermione says at last, into the silence between them.
He lifts his head to gaze at her, as if she has gone mad, which she has already established to herself that she has. "You cannot mean from the children's tales?" he asks with disbelieving scorn.
"My father…" (when was the last time that mentioning him hurt her chest so deeply?), "my father – he always said that there is a little bit of truth in everything, if only you look hard enough."
"And where did that lead him?" he says, but there is no harshness in it. She can see he is tired; she is tired as well, and needlessly arguing with him will get them nowhere.
"I haven't been able to cry," she says quietly. "I tried for hours in my room tonight, before I came to see you. But… I still have two nights, and I only need the one tear."
He does not say anything for some time. "I thought you understood," he finally replies, still staring at the ceiling. "I thought you were only buying yourself time. We Faie cannot cry, and I don't imagine you will either, while you're still in their land."
It is a pretty irony indeed, that whenever Hermione has wished most to hold firm, the tears have always come; and now, when she wishes most dearly to cry, not the slightest drop will form.
She recites to herself as she makes her way back to her room from the prince's; this time, she recites to herself all she has learned, trying to sift through anything which might aid them. According to him, he has never seen a way to leave or arrive at Seabane; the city simply appears, and disappears, when he is ready to depart. 'But the gate?' she asked him; 'perhaps if we go out to it?'
'We won't ever reach it; the path just stretches on and on,' he answered; and there was a shame in the way he said it, his gaze low, that made her understand he has already tried; perhaps visit after visit, perhaps as a frightened child, wanting only to return to his home.
He can see the other Faie, but they do not speak to him; he has only ever spoken to his mother, the queen. If he tries, they do not answer, and even if they did, he is certain none of them would help.
"Was there dancing tonight?" Hermione asked him. "Was that what they were all doing?"
"Faie do not dance," he told her gloomily; and she wonders, then, whose longing she felt in that great, empty hall, of winding melodies and glittering dresses.
Somehow, though she retraces her notches precisely, she returns to her room far faster than before; and when she enters, she sees that while she was away, someone has strewn atop her seat the most beautiful, radiant coat of white fur.
In truth, none of the children's tales end happily; the farmer's daughter is turned into a snow-hare; the magician is cursed to wander in madness as long as he has the hoar cloak. And the princess escapes; but not before the Faie place a shard of ice in her heart, which keeps her unhappy always, and which makes her yearn for their hoar-land for the rest of her days, even as she sits in her dearest, familiar home.
Hermione does not mean to, but once she has wrapped herself in the fur, she dozes. The strangest dreams come to her; of dancing in endless ballrooms with the prince, and with Tal, in turns; and sitting at a window, with the darkest ebon hair down her back, longing for the eternal winter; and of a young queen wandering barefoot in a forest, who touches tentatively the forehead of a sleeping man -
The next day, they go sledding.
When Hermione awakes, she is startled to find her hair has been carefully rebraided, and her dress is new, the brocade gilt and satin spilling colors of pearl and lapis across her skirt. She does not know who brought the fur coat to her, if she is even allowed to have it, so she leaves it in her room, though not without great regret, and wondering whether it would be there on her return.
When she steps from her room, it is not into the hallway. She is suddenly outside, though it is not any more or less cold than her room had been, and before her stretches a landscape of ice, and flurries of snow falling over her gently, onto her lashes, her hair; she understands that she is standing atop a lake which has frozen over. From here, she cannot hear the waves anymore.
She panics; all was for naught; she has been sent to her death – except now it would not be painless, as first promised, but long, and lung-burning, and tortuous.
But then, through the snow she sees a swirl of green, and the prince is striding towards her, tall and slim and oddly opalescent; for a moment, her vision gives way, and it seems he is stretching far above her, like the queen, a looming, glass-carved silhouette, all hard glints and angles; and then she blinks, and he is before her as always, eyes flashing grey and haughty.
He stretches his hand out to her; she thinks, for a moment, he wishes her to take it, but it is a small, dark flask in his palm which he is offering her. To her frown, he says, "I may not have been able to find a way out all these years, but I've at least found ways to make it more bearable."
Still she stares at the flask, uncertain; she knows enough to not drink at a Faie table; but if he is the one offering it to her… It would be safer to refuse, of course; and yet – there is a desperate sort of necessity suddenly, that she be able to trust the prince; because if not him, then she is wholly alone, and alone human, in this unworldly, crystal-embossed fairyland.
She takes the flask, her hand trembling slightly, and tips it into her mouth. At once, the most beautiful, bubbling warmth courses through her body; it is gone just as quickly, but it is enough to remind her once more of the blood in her veins, to make them itch deliciously beneath her skin; to fight the numbness which has been trying to crawl, snake-like, into her heart.
She hands back the flask; she means to thank him, but his hand brushes hers as he takes it from her, and she is so surprised to find he is warm against her skin, that her words disappear into the cold puff of mist from her lips.
A sled has appeared before them; the queen is curled in its back, bundled in furs and fine silks, and with a glittering antlered crown tucked into her black hair. Her cheeks shine blue. She stretches a hand forward. After a moment's hesitation, the prince accepts it, and she lifts him into the sled, brings him gently to her side, tucks him carefully in with her furs.
Hermione wonders if Faie feel after all; if she is witnessing a love that sits in a mother's heart, this cold creature, more delicate with the prince than his mortal family ever seems to have been.
The sled has not sped away yet, so Hermione decides she is allowed to enter. She climbs up gingerly, and sits across from them, careful to never stray too close to the queen.
There are no horses, but the sled pulls forward as if there are; Hermione thinks she can hear the faint murmur of bells between the falling slivers of snow. She remembers wondering whether they will pass the gate on their ride; whether there will be a chance to escape then; and then time slides into a strange shape, undulating like the hills they traverse, up and down, and after that, she cannot disentangle her memories clearly. There are moments where she feels she is looking down upon the whole stretching breadth of ice, the seas, the palace; at others, a single snowflake is so clear in her eyes she can see with perfect clarity each skeletal, thread-thin line of frost.
There are moments, too, where the prince before her ebbs and flows; one moment he is laughing at her with grotesque glee, another he is solemn and melancholy; another he is leaning forwards, eyes grey and ablaze and inviting –
'The magician, the snow-hare, the princess. The hoar-folk, the cloak, the farmgirl.' She recites to herself, and recites, and recites; and all at once, the sled is no longer moving, and the prince and queen are gone, nowhere to be seen; but it has stopped before an arching doorway, through which she can see her room.
Hermione wonders how long she has been alone; how long she has been sitting in this sled, muttering the same words under her breath, over and over. She wonders, though it is not important, if the prince was spirited away, or if he left her there by his own choice.
Food and drink has been brought to her room, but the coat is still there as well. She slips it on, tying it around herself; it is not warm, precisely, but it gives her a comfort her Faie-gifted clothes, stiff and sleek, have not.
She pours the drink out through the open window, so that she would not be tempted to have it; and then tentatively, she eats a few of the berries, a bit of the candied figs. They are bitter and sour on her tongue, and prickle icily at her lips. Then she sits, and thinks of her father, and squeezes her eyes, and tries to cry again; but all the grief is caught in her throat, and the burning of her nose, and refuses to move, so she only finds herself coughing instead – a rattling cough of chill and dryness.
Finally, she stands, and, still in her fur, she pads outside, into what is a hall again, and goes in search of the prince's room.
"Draco?" she whispers into the gloom; for there is no light in his chamber, and there is no shape upon the bed which she can make out, either. A movement at the far wall tells her where he is; he had perched on the edge of the window, dangling his legs out over where the cliff-face falls away into the sea many miles below.
He turns to her now as she comes to stand behind him, and the light flickers into his room, but still dimly.
"Where did you find that?" he asks, his hand reaching out to brush the fur at her arm; but he stops himself.
"It was in my room," she says, "when I got back this morning. I thought you might know…"
But he shakes his head, frowning.
Tentatively, for she fears heights terribly, she scoots onto the ledge, and fits her legs through, and sits beside him. He is still wearing his green cloak, his birch crown, but the rest of his clothes have been changed, as had hers.
She wishes to ask what happened on the sled ride. Instead, she says, "What are they like? The ones I cannot see?"
He stares down into the darkness of the leaping ocean waves; he shudders, and she is close enough to him to feel the movement. "They are…" he trails off, considering his words, "there is this feeling when I look at them, they are so terribly…cold."
And then he seems to realize the obviousness of what he has just said; and he looks at her, and for a moment they stare at one another; and then suddenly, they are both bursting into laughter; quiet at first, and then growing louder, and then so much that her stomach hurts from the effort of it; and if she had ever laughed like this back home, she would have been wiping away tears from her eyes; but here, of course, there were none.
The second night is gone; they spent it talking and talking, spinning new ideas, each less reasonable and more fruitless than the one that came before it. For so long she has prided herself on always having the answers, and now she has none, even though there is only the one question that matters; and her pride curdles, turning in on itself pitifully, bitterly; even as she is talking, there is always in her head the refrain of self-reproval, of the disappointment in herself that her father had never worn outwardly, but that she knew he had probably always concealed in his heart. She can see the precise moment that Draco lets go of his last strand of hope; when his animated manner of speaking subsides, and he becomes reticent, and leans against the window frame, and stares out expressionlessly into the gloaming waters. The resignation settles onto him as gently as the flakes of snow, and even though she continues speaking, and though she keeps her voice firm and bright and determined, she can see he is no longer listening to her.
She slips out of the window, but cannot bring herself to leave yet. Instead, she sits on his bed, and then she is opening her eyes, and he is no longer at the window, or in the chamber.
Back in her room, it is a book this time which has been left on her seat. She recognizes it instantly as her book of fairytales, which she had brought onto the troika. She picks it up and hugs it to her chest with a painful tightness.
Hermione wakes once more, and she is not in her room any longer; she is lying on a beach – a beach of hard, cool pebbles, and the foaming, lustrous tide of palest blue, coming within several feet of her toes. Another new dress, with purple-blue leaf and ornate lettering in a language she does not know, running the length of her sleeves; and the same chiming shoes.
This time, she is not afraid, and she is not startled when she sees Draco standing several paces away from her, his cloak fluttering in the frigid wind, looking out into the waters. A silver-gleaming boat dances in the waves, just out of reach of the shore; almost a skiff; and in it stands the queen; and she reaches forward her hand, and the heads of the waves bow, retreat, so there is now a path of pebbles and glinting opal seashells to reach the boat.
Again, Draco walks to the boat, takes his mother's hand, is lifted in. Hermione follows in his path, though she fears at any moment the waves might come alive, and crash over her; and she does not know from where this knowledge comes, but she feels certain that to be touched by them should be the same as to be touched by the queen.
This time, however, Draco stretches a hand towards her, and helps her in; and again it startles her, how human his palm feels against hers, when everything else about him becomes ever more unfamiliar; his cheeks and skin are become luminescent, strands of his ivory hair are now tangled in his crown, as if they have grown in around it; he slides tall out of her view, and then back when she shakes her head to clear the vision. Again, his mother hugs him to her side, and the skiff sets off, and the rimy air violently fills Hermione's every breath.
This time she begins to recite to herself right away; it as close to a prayer as she will ever come; 'The magician, the snow-hare, the princess; the hoar-folk, the cloak, the farmgirl. The magician, the snow-hare, the princess…'
She has never seen water like this before; the diamond patterns in its crests, the crystalline winking, the entrancing shimmer of pearl foam; and in its every breath and groan, there is the flutter of such an unendurable loneliness; there should be swimming; there needed to be swimming; there used to be such beautiful days of swimming, and laughter, and picnics on the shore, with the sweetest red wines and the summer peaches and –
"No!" And she feels a violent pressure on her wrist, and she is being yanked backwards harshly from the edge of the skiff; and she realizes, with horror, that she had been stepping forward, one foot over the water, only a moment from diving in. She turns towards Draco, who is still grasping her wrist with steel tightness; and there is such a wild gleam in his eyes, that for a moment she thinks something else has happened -
But no; he lets go of her wrist; the panic is receding somewhat from his eyes, though his chest is still moving fiercely with his breathing; and they hold each other's gaze; and she understands, she understands him perfectly – when there is so little to cling to, you must cling tightly. Somewhere in the back of her throat, the taste of ripe, honied peaches still lingers.
They return to shore; and alight on the pebbles, far from the reach of the waves. Snow has begun to fall again.
The queen bends down to Hermione. "One night," she murmurs, pressing a finger to her own chin consideringly. "You have until morning; but you will be fetched from your room soon enough tonight."
"I – I don't understand," Hermione says; she can still see the entrancing curl of the waves, how close she had been to letting them take her – "Fetched for what?"
The queen straightens, flurries of snow ornamenting her hair, shining alabaster against its blue-darkness. She is so tall that Hermione has to step back to still see her face. "Tonight, my son comes of age," the queen says calmly. "We will celebrate all the night long."
A/N: As always, thanks to everyone who is reading!