1

It is I, I, villainess

It is almost a year since she has been gone. Much has changed around us, but on waking in that first whetted-blade moment of every morning, her absence is no less sudden, no less biting.

Though memory may be the sum of him, man is fashioned forgetful. Quickly we fall into step with the customs of the crowd; quickly we turn away from the pressures of that which ails us to worship at the altar of escapism, our great idol. It is far easier to bandage injuries out of sight than nurse them, is it not? But no bandage can wrap thickly enough to stifle the fated weakness of a mother’s heart.

In every tribulation there is a culprit. Saints and prophets aside, we are tried because we laid bare our throats to the didactic blade tucked into the folds of everything that passes through our fingers. The wounds are dealt by our own hands; we are the ones who cannot see through our pain and regret to their unbearable source. And so I shall make no excuses. I am my own culprit.

Fay blames the men who were eventually found and brought to trial. She is too young and too generous yet to feel the inner linings of fault and blame. Younger and fiercely attached to her sister, she is now just as fiercely adamant to keep her alive. She wears her hair the way Fremesk used to do it for her, having wrestled the help from me to finally learn how to do it alone. Every Thursday she leaves fresh flowers in both their rooms, careful to disturb nothing of Frem’s but the gathering dust. Today we are making sfogliatelle as we once did every year on the Saturday before Frem’s birthday. Tomorrow she would have been nine. And as long as she is occupied thus, Fay is almost content.

If it were down to me, what would I have done?

“Mama,” she says. “You’ve stopped again.”

Left this house. Burned or buried her clothes, her toys. Regretted it all in due time, and longed for the cherry tree she had planted on the veranda, or the faint indent of her head on her pillow that Fay so religiously checks every night in seven-year-old solemnity.

“Sorry, darling.” I cut another triangle of dough, gave it to her to roll. “At this rate, you’ll clear me out.”

She snorts. I watch her handle the rolling pin, slightly too large and so a little awkward in her thin hands. Her bones are elfin. She could have been my daughter in truth. Already her profile is maturing; tell-tale signs of her feline bloodline. Since Frem, she has been locked away in some internal schoolyard I dared not use my particular talents to probe. The approaching birthday tradition has coaxed her back, however, as though she had known I wouldn’t be inclined to stoke those ashes unprompted.

“You’re not listening.” The words cut through my reverie.

“I am.” Absent-mindedly I began kneading again. “Say it again.”

“When will the dragonflies come to see me?”

My hands stilled on the batter. “Dragonflies?”

“Frem used to have all those visitors in the garden.”

It is the first time she’s mentioned Fremesk so directly in months, despite the daily rituals, the unspoken preferences and observations. The room is suddenly colder. I had been prepared for everything but this.

“They were not dragonflies.” I pushed a fist into dough. “They’ll never visit you.”

I am convinced even now that it would be wrong to interfere somehow, to nudge her along a road less painful, one that eventually led out of mourning. Just as it would be wrong to covertly pry with my magic into her little-girl world and get my fill of all that’s been ailing her. One day, she will lose something else or someone else, and I won’t be there to buffer her heart, and she’ll realise what I had done. I don’t know that she would forgive me.

She is quiet atop her stool, standing in uncertain stillness.

Suddenly the heart convulses in my chest. “Have you seen them?”

Her eyes are almost lidless in ingénue. I know it before I hear it. “Sometimes.”

Panic spreads a sickening flush up my arms, my chest. It is too late to downplay the gravity of the situation. Fay keeps her eyes on the worktop, as though she’d realised she had let something slip. Her hands were trembling on the pastry.

The world had been divided into two eras: before Fremesk, and after Fremesk. With Frem, all the ties between us and her father’s world had been severed, much to my relief, in ways the divorce had never achieved – not that I had been able to spare much of me to appreciate this on losing her. I had long dreamed of finally turning my back on the Sidhe, just as their son had turned his on our budding family, and her blood ties to the court were the only thing that dragged unwillingly between us to fan the bitter connection alive. But Fay was no grandchild of theirs; no blood child of mine, even. There was no reason I could think of for them to leak back into our lives again … and yet, there stood my little pirate, melting pastry with the heat of the anxiety radiating from her fumbling hands.

“Fayruze. Look at me.”

I didn’t know what I was going to say, but whatever she had seen on my face hardened the child-rounded edges of hers in an instant. She dropped the rolling pin and stiffened before me, doll-like.

“You let them see her. You pretended you didn’t like it but you let them anyway.”

The accusation and its astuteness stopped me short in my tracks. I’d never seen her envy Frem anything.

“That was different. They were –” I struggled to bite back ‘family’. “They were a part of her.”

“Why couldn’t they be mine?”

“They were her father’s friends, they would have been very important for her when she grew up.”

We both winced at that, but she was too aroused now to let the sting stop her.

“A part of her? Like family?”

I flinched visibly. Few people of this world can read my mind, and it is ironic that one should be not yet eight. She’s glaring at me now, and I imagine for a moment that I can almost see the fur rising from her. It did nothing to reassure me.

Accusingly, every word served up individually with bell-like clarity, she comments, “You said you can choose your family.”

The panic clapped gleeful hands in my chest. Of all the things I had left to lose, this was the greatest. We had never questioned our relationship, Fay and I. It was as strong as mine and Frem’s had been, though she has known I am not her biological mother since before she was old enough to understand what that meant. Fear melted away whatever other anxiety I’d had.

“They didn’t choose to be our family, not for a long time.” I found myself in front of her, my arms around her shoulders rubbing flour into her hair, her thin frame stiff on the stool against me. “I would never have kept you away if you would have been safe. They wouldn’t have hurt her, but I couldn’t be sure about you. You’ll get visitors of your own, only for you.” And if only I could stop them. “And I would have had to keep Frem safe from them, too.”

She looks up at me, face wiped clean of the anger, the moment of accusation spent. But a wall was back up, and it was higher and more solidly built than anything she’d held up against me before. If she felt – and no doubt she felt – surprise or interest over the tidbit-promise I had thrown at her in my panic, she wasn’t willing to show it to me. Not that I’d expected that. It’s been a long time since she took bribes or fell for distractions. She left without a word, all questions – for now, at least – stifled.

Everything begins somewhere. More importantly, everything has an end. Instinctively I knew this would be the last year that we prepared a batch of sfogliatelle the Saturday before either of their birthdays. I put the ritual pastries in the oven for the last time.

We’re on a steady slide down the rolling hip of summer, clinging to her skirts like a child. Our parting will be gentle, for she is surely the most motherly of seasons. It is the coming months that I am dreading-craving. Spring is your playmate, winter your stern godfather. But autumn is the childhood fascination your parents never approved of, tried to stamp out; the lover you left behind.

And as such, you greet October with open arms and a hammering heart.

Some mistakes, some misjudgements, scratch their way out of long-silent tombs to patrol the tortuous corridors of your memory, perhaps break out and offer your guilt to the world and its jury. And if we are finally passing judgement, prayers are my sole allies against them.

O Lord, let man melt away in prayer

First and final lines (italicised) are borrowed from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.