Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I know how this sounds,” Patrick says in a low, cramped tone, “but there is a bird following me home.”

There is silence from the other end of the line. Cautiously and from far away, Joe asks, “Do you… do you mean a lady?”

Patrick shoots a glance back over his shoulder that he believes is surreptitious, but is actually quite obvious and panicked. Fifteen feet behind him, there is a large black crow with a jagged halo of crumpled feathers cocking its head at a bit of refuse on the sidewalk, its black eye glittering with curious malice. It stabs at the scrap of garbage with its gleaming beak, its whole body jack-knifing with the sudden, violent movement.

“No,” Patrick says between gritted teeth. “I mean a giant frigging crow.” A raucous cawing noise comes from behind him, sounding like terrible laughter. It makes the hair on his arms stand up.

Actual laughter comes through the phone, a startled incredulous bark of it. Patrick scowls and walks faster. His heart is thundering in his chest, squeezing his lungs and blurring his veins. A thick, haunted feeling wends around him: there is something dark and unnatural and ill-meaning about this crow, he knows it. He feels it. He does not want to sound (or be) totally insane, but this bird watched him busk for over two hours with an intelligent, listening sort of look in its beady eyes, and now it is following him home, and at this moment he feels quite unsafe. It is stalking him. He does not know why, but he knows he is not imagining it.

He looks back again. The bird is still studying the sidewalk casually and does not appear to have moved, except that Patrick has walked half a block and the bird is still just fifteen feet behind him. The distance between them has not changed. Patrick imagines he can hear tiny clacking bird footsteps behind him when he walks.

“I knew you should have taken self-defense classes,” Joe says in a voice that sounds serious but is actually sarcastic. “Before we sent you off to the dangerous big city alone! How are you going to protect yourself from this bird without jiu jitsu? Do you even have your pepper spray keychain? Patrick, tell me you didn’t leave your rape whistle at home!” Joe can no longer play it straight and his mockery cracks into good-natured laughter.

Patrick cannot explain the black foreboding that has twined around his heart like a creeping, thorny vine. “Joe, I’m serious,” he says. “I’m freaking out.”

Because he is a good friend, hearing fear in Patrick’s voice stops him from teasing, even though the claims Patrick is making are patently ridiculous. Because he is a good friend, Joe takes him seriously. Joe takes his insane-sounding irrational fear seriously. “Is there somewhere you can go? Can you get inside, off the street?”

It is a good suggestion. Patrick hears the grating, cawing laugh from behind him again. When he glances back, the bird is only ten feet away. It fixes its beady eye right on him and hops closer. Patrick has the feeling that it knows he knows it’s following him, and has dropped all pretense of being a normal crow out for an innocent scavenge. The crow hops quickly, gaining ground. Patrick is not watching where he is going, and he stumbles.

“Joe!” he cries, dropping his phone and his instrument case so he can use his hands to catch himself. The pavement bites into the skin without mercy, shredding his palms into blood and foam. His knees ache, the bones echoing painfully with the force of his fall. He scrabbles to pick up his belongings. The sound of his own panicked breathing fills his ears.

The scraping caw is right behind him now. Fighting against the metallic scream clawing up his throat, Patrick whirls to face his harasser. You can punt a bird, he tells himself. Kick it as hard as you can and run in the other direction. Get inside. Birds can’t go inside. He steels himself to strike, to lash out, to feel its fragile feathered body cave beneath his blow, crunchy and dry like a bottle breaking or terrible and wet like bursting a rotten fruit.

But there’s nothing there. The bird is gone. Patrick is alone.

*

Patrick does not want to explain to his roommate that he is a crazy person, so while he cleans the street grit out of his hands with burning peroxide and scrubs dried blood out from his fingernails he instead explains cheerfully how he tripped over his own shoelace, isn’t that silly, and by the way can you please make sure you fasten the security chain after you grab takeout from the delivery guy because it’s just that I noticed you forgot to do that last time and it’s not like one deadbolt is keeping us very  safe, ha ha, no big deal though, definitely a normal concern from a totally normal roommate.

Patrick found this apartment and this roommate on Craigslist, and has since come to the conclusion that this is not the ideal method of entering living arrangements. Even on normal days, when he has not been terrorized by a crow and is not babbling like a madman, Patrick gets weird vibes from the stranger he lives with. Patrick’s roommate is the taciturn sort, silent and serious. Usually when Patrick speaks to him he just stares with a vague air of distaste, as if there is nothing Patrick could possibly say that would improve upon the silence and he wishes Patrick would stop trying. Andy works as a cook at a vegan diner, and is disproportionately muscular for this profession. Once, Patrick saw him shirtless, and so knows that Andy’s throat tattoo and arm tattoos meet in the middle, covering his entire chest and back in endless whorls of color and pattern and design. Something about Andy makes it easy to imagine that this is his actual skin, that he was born with a painted hide. Patrick is sure he’s imagining it, but it seems to him that the throat tattoo was different when he moved in than it is now, and once he thought he saw the tattoo on Andy’s arm move.

He’s a weird guy, is the point, and slightly unsettling. But Patrick is very charming, and he is determined to win Andy over. He has only lived here a month, after all: maybe Andy is slow to warm up to new people. Patrick will wear him down.

Today, after the incident with the bird, Andy’s looming and slightly aggressive presence is too much for Patrick’s frayed nerves. He is babbling to cover his nervousness. Andy has not made a sound since he grunted hello. This may be because Patrick has not yet stopped talking long enough to breathe, and Andy has not had much of an opportunity.

“And so I think we can both agree that the point of security is to be, um, secure,” Patrick concludes his long-winded exhortation about proper locking of doors. “How was your day?” Patrick adds in a weak attempt to engage Andy in conversation.

Andy gives him a long look that feels deeply unsettling. Patrick is overly aware of the meaty look of his palms, the smell of his blood in the air. It feels intimate. It feels dangerous. After a pause so long Patrick gives up on getting a response, Andy answers, “Unusual.” Then he turns, walks down the hall, and disappears into his bedroom. Patrick is alone, bloody-handed over the bathroom sink, feeling inexplicably like he’s had a close call. Like he just barely escaped with his life.

It has been a fucked up sort of day.

*

It had been a fucked up sort of day, so it’s not surprising that Patrick is having a fucked up sort of night. All night he tosses and turns, flickering frustratingly between sleeping and not. At some point he sleeps deeply enough to dream. He dreams the crow is at his windowsill, tapping with its talon on the glass, croaking over and over, Can’t be a man without a heart. Can’t be a man without a heart. The crow wedges its clever beak under the edge of the window sill and begins, terribly, to scrape away at the rotten wood, as if it’s tunneling in. Patrick realizes he hasn’t locked the windows, just the door, because this is his first time being stalked by a bird and he is making all the rookie mistakes.

Patrick wakes up gasping and rockets himself out of bed, to the window, to lock it and duct tape the frame and possibly construct a barricade of milk crates filled with records. He peers out at the city street below, streaked with the first grey rays of sunrise, and feels the terror of the nightmare begin to leave him. “Just a dream,” he tells himself with growing confidence. “Just a stupid bird.”

What could a bird do to him anyway? Patrick is not an especially large man, but he’s certainly got the size advantage over a damned crow. In the hopeful pale daylight, Patrick can look at the events of yesterday as a foolish, embarrassing episode of a suburbs boy adjusting to life in the unwelcoming, sometimes threatening city. It was never about the crow at all, he thinks sagely to himself, and feels relieved to put the silliness behind him.

Then he notices the iridescent black feather on the sill and the small, gnawed-out hole in the wood of the frame. Patrick goes right back to panicking.

*

Google is no help at all. It confirms what Patrick already suspects: this is not typical behavior for crows. Not even hard-boiled, no-nonsense, streetwise city crows. He does learn that crows are considered ill omens by many cultures, learns that augurs often read crows as messengers of death, learns that crows eat carrion and remember those who have wronged them, learns that they are sometimes symbols of mischief, trickery, and transformation. It is likely, Patrick reasons, that crows are smart enough to open windows from the outside and do terrible, murderous things to sleeping individuals, such as eating out their eyes.

Patrick sensibly concludes that he is probably going to die. He doesn’t believe in magic, not anymore, not since. But he can still take a hint.

Still, he’s playing a coffeehouse this afternoon and needs to make a few bucks first if he wants to enjoy luxuries such as food today, so he showers and dresses in a plaid shirt and a hoodie and jeans and a hat he can hide behind like it’s any other day, and he takes his guitar and heads for his usual corner, a busy intersection in an artsy part of town where he’s guaranteed to pull in tips for playing folk music seriously, playing pop music ironically, and sometimes even for playing his original songs, although the kinds of days on which people stop to listen to those have their own kind of portents and magic and he can already tell today’s not that sort. He figures he’ll mess around with acoustic versions of metal songs and guitar versions of classical pieces for a while, drum up some interest, and then whip out Wonderwall. He made over $20 the last time he played Wonderwall. He doesn’t quite understand hipsters, but Patrick is more than happy to take their money.

When he first moved in and told Andy his plan—to break into the music business, and support himself by busking until he did—Andy had snorted like a beast and said darkly, “We pay rent with money, not songs. When you need a real job, let me know. We always need servers at the diner.” But Andy had been wrong. Bills come out of pockets when Patrick sings. In the month he’s been living here, Patrick has established his presence at his corner, and the same people come by day after day to listen to a few songs and toss him a few bucks. Sometimes he can almost see his singing tug at them, carrying them from buildings or across streets or out of cars to listen. Some people flip coins in as they walk by; others stand and listen for minutes or even hours, and they always pay more. One girl comes by most days and lays spring blossoms in his case with a wistful sigh. “I have no use for money,” she told him once, but the flowers she brings seem to hold their scent and brightness for an unusually long time. He doesn’t know where she gets half of them at this time of year: things are meant to die in the fall, but she always brings him something new and alive and different. His room is littered with water glasses with little bundles of flowers in them. They have not yet begun to wilt.

This level of success isn’t exactly normal, Patrick knows. Street musicians do not usually make much money—not as much as he’s making, anyway. He attributes this to beginner’s luck, or to choosing an exceptionally musical corner, and expects his good fortune to fade as people become accustomed to him. Whatever it was, his luck hasn’t run out yet, and he prospers. When he isn’t being stalked by crows, that is, he prospers.

He does not see any crows on the way to his corner, even though he jumps every time something moves in his periphery and his heart skips a beat every time he hears a bird. He holds his guitar case out in front of him like a shield. He makes it to his corner safely, and the flower girl is waiting for him there. It is not especially unusual for one or two of his patrons to be waiting for him. It’s not exactly usual either, but it’s happened enough times before that he doesn’t think anything of it.

At least, not until her gold eyes go wide and she asks, “What have you done?”

“Um—sorry—what?” asks Patrick. He fumbles the latch on his guitar case in his surprise.

Her gaze flicks back and forth through the air around him, her cheeks flushing and her breath quickening. “Foolish boy!” she cries softly. “Where are your wards?”

“Wards?” Patrick repeats dumbly. The word tugs at a memory he buried long ago, a memory of a muddy stream at midnight and a small version of himself, lost and squalling.

She gestures around them, at the street, at the trickle of passersby who are drifting in his direction though he hasn’t yet begun to play. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been warded?” The look on her face holds real fear now, and it is beginning to freak Patrick out. “Gods and feathers! You could have called anything!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Patrick says carefully, the way you talk to a person you suspect is unstable and may lash out at you.

But she doesn’t explain it. Trembling, she casts a sprig of lilac at his feet. It begins to brown and go sickly-sweet with the smell of rot before it even lands. “Guard your heart closely, musician. Play nothing made from that which you would not lose. Your carelessness has bought whatever’s coming.”

Patrick feels queasy as he watches the girl hurry away. The lilac has shriveled at his feet and weeps decay onto the sidewalk. He kicks it towards the gutter, shuddering. He does not feel especially like playing, not after whatever the hell that was, but the interested passersby are milling about and he would like to get some breakfast, eventually. So he hefts his guitar, slides the strap over his shoulders, and begins to fiddle with the tuning knobs. By the time his instrument sings sweet and true, he’s enchanted himself with the feel of stinging steel strings and the pleasant hum they send shooting up the neck of the guitar. It is always this way for Patrick: he falls in love every time. With the girl gone and the flower disposed of, it is easy to forget her strange warning. It is easy to play.

*

Patrick is setting up at the coffeehouse when someone says, “Curious thing happens when you play. Had you noticed?”

Patrick, tangled up in a microphone cord and scowling at the circuit board, does not take his eyes off his work. Actually he has noticed many curious things happening when he plays, but it is important not to think about that, important not to remember. It had been a nightmare and that was all, a strange nightmare that had torn open his childhood but left no traces in the waking world. No sense remembering what wasn’t real. No sense weeping over made-up memories. This is what Patrick told himself. This is what Joe told him, too.

“Mmmr,” Patrick hums noncommittally, biting the tip of his tongue while he tweaks the wiring of the speaker situation.

“I almost… feel it,” the someone continues. “Which I can’t do, ‘course. Art, beauty, horror, loss: all affairs of the heart.”

The voice, Patrick notices, is rather hoarse. Is rather croaky. It sticks against something in his head, reminds him of a different dream entirely. Gripped by a sudden terror, Patrick whirls around, still in his cord-tangled crouch.

There is no one there. Patrick struggles to unwind the cord from around himself, his heart quivering sloppily in his chest with relief. That he should be relieved to be hearing voices when there was no person there, really, is an indication of how fucked up his last two days have been. He will worry about his mental health tomorrow. Today he just needs to get through today.

But then to his horror the voice returns, saying, “Down here, Sir Pompous Tall Guy. Not yet so high and mighty that you can ignore your fans, I should think.”

Patrick lets out a strangled yelp, tries to step backwards, trips over the cord. Once again he is on his ass, his torn-up palms smarting sharply. Only this time the crow is there, next to his feet. If ever he was going to kick the thing, now is the moment. But he doesn’t. The thing hops closer, cocking its head to one side and then the other.

“Clumsy clumsy,” says the bird. Says the bird.

“Are you—are you talking to me?” Patrick squeaks. What he means is, are you real, you nightmare creature? What do you want and what are you and how did you find me and how do I make you go away.

The crow rolls its beady black eyes. “Course I am,” it says, sounding exasperated. “Anybody else being clumsy over here? No? Must mean you.”

“What do you want?” Patrick hisses. He considers fainting. He considers the possibility that he has already fainted, that this is a delusion. Because this is the most fucked up thing he has even seen, outside of his childhood nightmare about the market in the forest and the bargain by the stream.

The crow stops advancing, pausing as if to consider the question. Which is ludicrous, obviously, because this is a crow and crows do not consider how they want to answer questions because crows do not answer questions because crows do not speak.

“Want?” echoes the crow. “Not wanting. Or maybe… wanting. I have not wanted… oh, not for ashes and dusts, to and through each other. Centuries, it’s been. It is a forgettable feeling, feeling is. Wanting. Yes.”

This is not the clarity Patrick was hoping for. He is on his ass in a coffeehouse talking to a crow and, if the manager sees, he will probably not be invited back. “You can’t be in here,” Patrick says, changing tack. The crow is not talking sense, possibly because it is a talking crow, so Patrick gives up on getting answers and transitions into damage control mode. He doesn’t need to understand this situation to lock this thing down. He will figure it out later, after his gig, when it is not jeopardizing his career. “Birds can’t go inside. They cannot patronize coffee shops,” he goes on reasonably. The crow is just blinking at him quietly, which is more in line of what he expects from crows but is nonetheless more unsettling than when it was, impossibly, speaking.

Patrick winces in advance of the words about to come out of his mouth. “Listen. You know where I live. Why don’t you wait for me there? We can… talk... after I play.”

“I came here to listen,” the crow says as Patrick picks himself up off the ground gracelessly. If he is not mistaken, the crow is now eyeing him with reproach. “That is the want.”

Patrick inhales a small, helpless groan. The barista behind the counter is eyeing him strangely. He doesn’t think she has noticed the bird, yet: just the musician talking to himself and falling all over the place. “Well, see, the problem is that this show is for paying customers,” Patrick bullshits wildly. The crow tips its head as if thinking this over. “So unless you have money for a cup of coffee, I mean, my hands are tied.”

The crow ruffles his feathers as if hoping coins will fall out. None do. “No pockets,” he sighs, as if a pocket deficiency is the only reason crows do not use currency. Patrick feels like he is going insane, because this is a likelier explanation than the entire world going insane. “Very well. Give me your name, musician, to bind you to your word, and I will be gone from this place.”

“My name is Patrick,” Patrick says, squeezing his eyes shut as tightly as he can in the hopes that the crow will have vanished when he opens them.

“You may call me Pete,” says the crow.

This time Patrick gets his wish. There is a gust of air across his face, the sound of beating wings. The barista screams. There is a crash and then the bell above the door tinkles frantically. “Get out get out get out!” hollers the barista. “Filthy creature!”

Patrick hears the door fall shut again. When he feels ready, he opens his eyes. Lo and behold, the crow is gone. Just like magic.

*

“I need a weird favor,” Patrick calls out a moment after he hears Andy walk in the front door. “Was there a crow outside? You didn’t let it in, did you?”

Andy clomps down the hall and appears in the doorway of the bathroom, where Patrick is huddled in the bathtub with a blanket cowled around his head. Andy eyes Patrick steadily as if trying to organize a response. “There was not,” he says after a beat, “a crow outside.”

The tattoo on Andy’s neck is shaded with red and brown, like drying blood, this evening. Patrick is relatively certain it was not formerly red. “Great, that’s great,” Patrick says enthusiastically, nodding his head so forcefully he sees spots. “So anyway about this favor.” An insane-sounding giggle escapes Patrick’s mouth and he figures it serves Andy right, to be the one who feels disconcerted for once. “I need you to go into my room and board up the windows. Actually if you could board up all of the windows in the apartment, that would just—that would really take a lot off my plate. I have to stay in the bathroom for now. No windows in here!”

“Patrick,” Andy asks slowly, carefully, as if Patrick is suspiciously thin ice and Andy worries it will not hold his weight, “is everything all right?”

“Golden,” says Patrick brightly. “No crows outside, it’s a party inside, am I right?”

Andy studies him warily for a moment longer, then shrugs. “Sure, that’s a saying I’m totally familiar with due to normal people using it. If I do this favor for you, what will you give me in return?”

Patrick is a little startled, actually, by the smoothness with which this transaction is moving forward. “I’ll… owe you one?” he hazards.

Andy frowns, though, and shakes his head. “That is an incautious offer. You should take more care.”

This reminds Patrick of what the weird flower girl said to him this morning, before the world stopped making sense and crows started talking, and he bristles. “Well what do you want then, master haggler?”

Andy’s mouth twists at one side, like a tree root might. It is the closest thing to a smile Patrick has seen on his face in the four weeks he has lived here. Craigslist, man. “I want a song. One of your songs, to hear and have and keep.”

Patrick wonders if he is trying to describe an MP3. Patrick thinks that he is not the one who is bad at bartering. “Yeah, fine, of course,” Patrick says, because he has gotten the better end of this deal by far. “Is there a particular one you wanted?”

Andy shakes his head, which for a glimmer of a second seems to take up much more space in the bathroom than it ought to, almost as if… but no. One insane delusion at a time. Patrick is just rattled, he tells himself firmly, on account of being stalked by a talking crow. “It matters more to you than to me, probably,” says Andy. “I accept.” Andy gives a final jerk of his head, which still does not seem to be moving through space quite normally. Rattled because bird, Patrick repeats to himself. Psyching self out over nothing.

Andy leaves the bathroom, and a few minutes later Patrick hears the comforting sound of tearing duct tape. “Bedroom is blacked out,” Andy calls out eventually, and Patrick creeps from the bathroom and down the hall cautiously. His face splits into a grin when he sees the windows, the non-windows: Andy has taped cardboard up, totally obscuring the light of day. Patrick would prefer if he had used something sturdier, such as plywood or perhaps cement, but understands that these materials may not have been on-hand in the apartment.

“It’s wonderful,” Patrick says with real appreciation. Andy gives him a strange look as he heads to the living room to block out the sun.

*

Patrick wakes up at his window with shredded cardboard and duct tape in his hands. It is the cold wind on his face that wakes him. The window is open.

Patrick jumps back, dropping the torn cardboard, struggling to get the flaps of duct tape off his hands. His heartbeat is loud in his chest and short, jagged breaths knife out of his lungs. He is not feeling his best, safest, or most cheerful. He is not, in other words, feeling particularly hospitable.

“Patrick,” says a croaky voice from behind him. Patrick is too frightened and, frankly, pissed to feel much surprise when he turns around and finds the crow perched comfortably on his pillow.

“Of frigging course,” Patrick mutters, tearing the last of the duct tape off his arm rather savagely.

“Shouldn’t have given your true name if you meant to break your word,” rasps the crow that thinks ‘Pete’ is a sensible thing for it to be called. “Oathbreaker,” he adds reproachfully.

Great. Patrick is now referring to the bird as ‘he.’

“Apparently I am not,” Patrick says dryly. “Here we are talking, like I said we would.”

The crow opens his beak and then closes it again. He looks put out. Patrick takes a grim satisfaction from this. “Faerie reasoning,” Pete mutters. “Tricky and silver, that’s your tongue.”

Patrick feels a little bad, in spite of everything. Maybe he’s crazy—definitely he’s crazy—but boarding up the windows was a somewhat dishonorable way to treat a fan. Because that’s what the crow said he wanted: to listen. To hear Patrick play. “Would you feel better if I sang something for you?”

It’s a stupid offer, maybe. But then it’s been a stupid day. The crow nods pitifully, and Patrick sighs. “Any requests?”

The crow is silent, thinking. “The one with brown eyes,” he croaks at last.

But Patrick doesn’t have any songs about brown eyes. “I don’t know the one you mean,” he says. Pete does his crow best to caw a few off-key lines for him, but Patrick has never heard it before, and says so.

The crow’s beady eye flicks around the room. He looks alarmed. “Yesterday you played it,” he says, and Patrick is apparently spending too much time with birds because he can hear concern in Pete’s voice. “Your heart was in the words.”

Pete’s alarm scares Patrick, and in the darkness he begins to imagine he can feel a flickering space in his head where a song might have fit. He opens his laptop and finds a music file titled Whiskey Eyes. It is recorded on the same date he recorded several of his new pieces, but he is certain he has never heard of it before.

Patrick double-clicks the sound file to play it. It holds two minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Beside him, Pete bobs his whole body back and forth, as if to a beat. The bars on the equalizer jump up and down rhythmically.

Quietly, with a feeling like something is breathing coldly down the back of his neck, Patrick says, “I don’t hear anything.”

If crows could go pale—if you could see the blood draining out of a crow’s face—that is what Pete would do at this moment. Instead, his black eyes go wide, his feathers puff out, and he begins to quiver. Patrick thinks he looks frightened, but it is also possible that this is how crows do ‘tough.’

“Think,” the crow hisses sternly. “What have you traded?”

Patrick’s head feels blurry. He remembers his bargain with Andy. He remembers Andy’s ominous comment. He remembers Andy boarding up the windows, but does not remember upholding his end of the deal. All he has is the fuzzy edge of a memory about sending Andy an email.

Patrick opens up his sent box, afraid of what he will find. He does not believe in magic. He cannot. He will not.

There. He hovers his cursor over the email he sent. There is an attachment. It is titled Whiskey Eyes.

All the breath leaves Patrick’s lungs at once, as if he is falling, as if he has plunged into something very deep and very cold. “What—? How—?” Questions scrabble at his throat, choking him. He can’t think. He can’t speak. He can’t breathe.

“Faeries,” Pete says matter-of-factly. That an entire song has fallen out of Patrick’s head, that he has somehow gone selectively deaf, does not perturb the crow. But then, as a talking crow, Pete is probably accustomed to strange happenings. “You sold your song to faeries.”

“That’s not possible,” says Patrick, his heart frantic in his chest. He feels that he might swoon. “None of this is possible, I mean, but that especially is not—it was my roommate. Just my roommate. All he said was he wanted a song.”

Pete cocks his small feathered head at Patrick and says, “Ah. You can’t see, can you?”

Patrick touches the skin around his eyes, panicky. “What?” His voice is sharp, fragile. “Yes I can—look, I’m holding up three fingers!” He seems to realize there is a flaw with this plan and begins rifling through his desk as if he will find an eye exam in it. “It’s my ears,” he babbles. “I must be going deaf.”

Pete pecks his hand hard, which has the startling and painful effect of stilling him. “Ow,” says Patrick softly, but the crow is unmoved. “No,” Pete croaks impatiently. “You can’t See. Glamour glitters and you are fooled. I would have noticed sooner, but I just assumed that you were a bit stupid.”

Patrick has no idea what is going on, but he has been insulted by a talking crow and had a song stolen from his brain and still feels more like fainting than anything else, so he feels pretty good about himself just for being on his feet right now.

“Look here,” says the crow, and unfurls his left wing, his feathers shining ragged and blue-black in the moonlight. Patrick’s eyes catch on a cruel hole through the wing, looking like it was burned there. He can see all the way through.

The world jumbles, skips, snags. Something essential in the fabric of reality seems to sigh, wave its hands dismissively, and give. Patrick’s legs follow suit and he falls ingloriously onto his mattress. His eyes spin at the ceiling, uncomprehending.

The world has changed.

Chapter Text

Maybe he really had been blind, until now. It feels like Patrick has spent his life looking at everything through a reflection in a mud puddle: murky, indistinct, washed-out, and ugly. Like he has only ever really seen out of the corner of his eye. Like he can see in a whole new spectrum, now. Like he’s seeing ultraviolet.

Like there was another world, laid on top of the real one, all along: thick foggy glass that muffled and warped. There is nothing exactly out of place, nothing exactly different from how it seemed before, yet Patrick barely recognizes his own bedroom. Things do not fit together the same way anymore. The spaces between them are tighter, the cracks fewer. The shadows more plentiful, and the lights too.

Even his own hands look not-quite-his, though Patrick cannot name a single feature that is different.

Half-expecting the floor to lurch beneath his feet like the deck of a ship, Patrick edges to his window and peers out. The street below is streaked with blurs of glowing, multicolored light like he’s never seen before, like the aurora borealis pulled out of the sky, like a time-lapse photograph but in real time. One of the cars parked at the curb, Patrick notes distantly, looks less like a car the longer he looks at it, until he realizes it is large shaggy beast instead, ponderous chest heaving and air fogging as it breathes.

Meanwhile, inside the room, Pete is not a crow anymore, not quite. He is the shape of a crow, and the same general color. He gives the impression of being a crow, only with more movement: the concept of a crow with something else skittering around underneath. A concentrated tangle of jagged energy, ill-fit into feathers, beak, and claws.

As a thing sitting beside you on your bedspread, this is even more discomfiting than a regular talking crow.

Patrick wants to ask what happened but finds he does not need to. He can see magic now, he realizes. He can see magic that has always been there, clumsily buried, just below the depth of a first glance but too quick to get caught by a second one. Too strange to be believed even when it is noticed. He is not seeing a new world; he is seeing this one for the first time.

“What are you?” Patrick asks instead, because that is a question he does not know the answer to, unless the answer is simply not a crow.

The crow gives a biting caw, a humorless laugh. “I was a king, once,” he says. “Now I am not.”

“Does that mean you were human, once, too?”

“A crow cannot be king,” scoffs Pete, as if Patrick is being stupid on purpose when really, Patrick is being stupid quite naturally. Pete eyes Patrick beadily and gives a small huffing bird-sigh. “Very well, if you cannot be contented otherwise, I shall tell you the sordid tale.”

The crow puffed out his jet black chest and drew himself up proudly. Then he began to speak.

*

I gave my heart away carelessly, and now I have none.

It’s difficult to care. It doesn’t seem important, anymore. That’s the trick of being heartless: it doesn’t bother you that you are. Horror and loss are affairs of the heart, so I haven’t those either.

When I was king, there was nothing I loved more than merriment. Great festivals and feasts that lasted a week apiece, barrels of ale and jewel-colored pennants bright in my hall. Peers of the realm, foreign dignitaries, royalty from neighboring countries, esteemed magicians and storied knights: they would travel on ships and beasts and their own feet, for days or weeks or longer, to enjoy the famed hospitality of my hall. There was always something to celebrate, for when I had a heart, it overflowed with more joy than it could hold.

But joy was not all. The heart I had held darkness too, and it would come over me when the hall was quiet, when I was alone. It was a tiny pocket of black, reeking rot, but when the courtiers fell asleep and the fiddlers put the their instruments down, when the girls stopped laughing and the ale stopped flowing—in those moments I could feel it spreading, choking me, drowning me in bracken.

I so feared the darkness. I so feared being alone.

So I made a bargain with a faerie queen, one whose cruelty and beauty built her notoriety. She came to stay awhile, for my midsummer’s joust, always one of my favorite diversions. She was terrible to look upon, but you could not look away. I gave her my hospitality, as everyone did, though the bloodstains never completely came off her hands. She had a reputation for laying rather nasty curses on those who turned her away—besides which, I never turned away anyone. I filled every bed in my castle as often as I could. Did I not mention how I feared the silence?

Nights were the worst. No matter who you invited back to your bedchamber, there is always a moment in which they will fall asleep, and lay beside you sighing and warm and near as touching, yet leaving you utterly behind, following those roads no other can tread.

Of the faerie queen I asked, “Let there never be darkness so long as I reign. Let there be revels unending beneath a sun that never sets for so long as I am king.”

I so feared being alone in the dark.

Said the faerie, “Stopping the sun setting is a great and terrible magic, so it has a great and terrible price.”

She named the price and, though my pulse quickened in fear of it, I did not hesitate. Nor did I consider it too great, if she could truly give me what I was asking. She named the price and I paid it.

Have you guessed? Musicians are often clever. In exchange for eternal revels and ceaseless sunshine, she took my heart. She took my heart and did her spells in secret, though I heard the chanting, smelled the smoke.

That first day, when the sun climbed higher and ever more golden across the sky, I felt true joy inflate my chest as sure as breath. Or maybe it was only breath—it is hard to be certain, without a heart. But the dancing was gay and the ale flowed freely and all about my halls there were smiles, songs, and laughter; and I was not alone. How else would you describe happiness?

But as the day went on, my skin began to itch. I scratched it absently at first. I discovered a tiny black splinter, like a needle beneath the skin and pulled it out, but the itching did not stop. I discovered more splinters. Then my skin began to slough away beneath my touch and I could see that they were not splinters but feathers, sprouting from my skin.

My guests were so happy. The music was loud. The maidens were red-cheeked, the minstrels loose-tongued. I danced and drank and paid no heed to the itching or the feathers. Some side effect of the magic, I thought, or else some kind of skin condition. Uncle Arginald had had terrible eczema, after all. And that was when I thought of it at all. Without a heart, there is nothing to hang your troubles upon. They do not nag at you. Without a heart, you just keep dancing.

The merriment was great and the sun was bright and I paid it no mind. But then the sun began to set. By the time dusk fell, I was a man no longer.

It was impossible that the sun should set. It was impossible that the party should end. But let me tell you, everyone stopped laughing and dancing when they realized their king had turned into a crow.

“Faerie witch! I name thee oathbreaker!” I cawed, not with the voice of the man, not anymore.

In response to my accusation she swept into the hall, her presence spreading like ice through the hearts of the men around me. She announced grandly, “The sun sets and there is darkness, so by your own words it must be that your reign is ended.”

In my outrage I produced a squawk. The queen turned to my people, horrified and afraid. “A crow cannot be king,” she said, and they agreed.

And so it was the fae inherited my kingdom.

You must have a heart to be a man, you see. And you must be a man to be a king.

There is a way to break the curse, of course. There always is, with curses. In order to become human again, instead of this most heartless of creatures, I must receive the heart of another.

But I can’t remember why I’d want to do that. It seems inconvenient; I can see it weigh you down. And I—I am so light I can fly.

*

Patrick is not sure what he believes, exactly, aside from he seriously needs a drink of water. You cannot receive a story like that, to say nothing of the other things he has been the disturbed recipient of this evening, without some kind of drink to smooth it over. And since warm gin doesn’t sound totally ideal at 5 am, Patrick heads to the kitchen—leaving the crow looking quite comfy and snug on his goddamn pillow—for a glass of water.

Andy’s plaid pajama-clad ass is sticking out of the fridge. Patrick walks past him to get a glass from the cupboard and fill it at the sink. “What are you doing up so early?” Patrick asks brightly. On the one hand, he has reason to suspect that Andy tricked him into a faerie bargain and stole a song from his head, so small talk feels weird; on the other hand, he is desperate for any scrap of normalcy, and he has spent the last hour learning that magic is real and talking to a crow, so. Small talk with his unsettling roommate is the best option he’s got.

“Couldn’t sleep,” says Andy, pulling his head out of the fridge. “Kept hearing this cawing.”

Patrick looks at Andy’s face and feels his guts being scraped out of him. He drops his glass, which cracks and sends water spilling across his feet when it hits the floor.

Andy has horns. Andy has great dark twisting horns, ridged and curling from his heavy brow to circle his ears, cup his jaw, and curl back up and out in complicated, asymmetrical curlicues that end in savage, glistening points. Andy also has huge black eyes with yellow centers set deep within broad, flat cheekbones, and these eyes fix on Patrick. Andy tips his head to the side and the movement is strange, broken-seeming, the knife-point of his horns driving the abrupt twist of his neck.

Andy grins, and his too-wide lips pull back to show two rows of stubby, sharpened teeth.

Andy’s tattoos are definitely moving.

Patrick opens his mouth and closes it again. He would like to faint. He wishes he would faint, and wake up normal again, because obviously something set deep in his brain has snapped, allowing him to detach from reality. In his bedroom there is a talking crow who says he is a king under a curse, and his already standoffish roommate now apparently has scary teeth, scary eyes, and giant ridiculous horns.

Andy takes a step closer to him and a high squeaking noise escapes Patrick’s throat without his permission. “Why, Patrick,” Andy says in a voice full of mocking concern, “you seem frightened.”

Patrick wants to defend himself, because Andy is clearly about to devour him. Patrick wants to fight. Patrick raises his fist and cocks it back awkwardly, because he has not thrown a punch since he was a kid aiming at Joe’s head, and find that he does not actually want to strike Andy in the face. For one thing, will his fist even reach Andy’s face, or will Andy turn his head slightly in order to impale Patrick’s arm with his horn? For another, Patrick just isn’t entirely ready to touch someone so obviously impossible, because once he touches magic it will be unavoidably, inarguably real.

So he throws the punch, with a strength somewhere in between a buddy-buddy shoulder slug and actual violence, and he aims it squarely into the center of Andy’s chest. It is like punching a tree and Andy makes a soft, frowning oof but is otherwise unmoved.

“Okay then,” says Patrick, panicking. “Good talk. Gotta run.”

And he slides around Andy’s unmovable form and runs like hell.

*

“Joe,” Patrick says into the phone, not caring anymore how crazy he sounds, “I need you to be completely, one hundred percent honest with me. Are you a faerie?”

Patrick has locked himself into the bathroom. There is a—a horned man with scary eyes in the kitchen, and a talking crow in his bedroom, and there is really nowhere else he can think of that feels safe. You might think that leaving the apartment would be the cure to all his ills, but in here it’s just a troll-beast and a crow. He has no fucking idea what’s out there.

So Patrick sits on the closed toilet, eyeing the locked bathroom door, and calls the one person who always makes him feel better.

The one person who always makes Patrick feel better says incredulously, “Am I a what? Patrick, are you aware that it is five o’clock in the morning?”

“If you are in absolutely any way at all magical, I need to know about it right now, Joe Trohman. Note that I am using your true name and therefore you are compelled to obey me by the laws of the fae.”

“If you are in absolutely any way at all sober, that will shock me, Patrick Stump, because you are talking nonsense. I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait!” The note of desperation in Patrick’s voice catches at Joe, keeps him on the line. He has cried out wait in a voice, urgent and rising in pitch, that is more like his singing voice than his speaking voice. The word seems to hum, twitch, and resonate with its unsung potential.

“Remember how I was telling you my roommate is weird and unsettling?” Patrick is plaintive, on the edge of whining. Joe dodged his command to reveal his true nature, and Patrick isn’t sure if that means he isn’t a faerie or if that means he is. Patrick needs to know, needs to know, that there is at least one tiny part of this world that is still sane, or he will—will—well, something drastic is going to happen, that’s for sure. “And you were alternately assuring me I’m ridiculous and lecturing me about stranger danger? Well, basically, it turns out he’s got horns and yellow eyes, so he’s definitely, for-sure an evil warlock.”

“You are maybe not doing the best job of assuring me of your sobriety,” Joe notes.

“And that crow! That crow from before, the one that was following me? It’s in my bedroom, Joe. It’s on my pillow. I guess it compelled me to open my window in my sleep or something? Whatever, that’s not important. The important thing is, it can talk.”

Concern replaces the annoyance in Joe’s voice. Patrick can practically hear his brow furrow. It is familiar in an enveloping way. The steady, constant familiarity of Joe, his best friend since forever, is the most comforting thing in the world, like hot chocolate when you’ve just come in from the snow. “Assuming you’re not having a psychotic episode, which I am not entirely prepared to assume,” says Joe, “it sounds like things are very scary and fucked up in your apartment right now. Are you—do you feel safe? Are there any neighbors who can help you?”

“The crow says he’s a king. Was a king. Under a curse,” Patrick informs Joe. He is aware that he is babbling, but the words are bubbling up out of him like panic, like hysteria, and he isn’t sure how to make them stop. “And my roommate, who is a demon, he stole a song from me, Joe. Did you ever—did I ever play a song about brown eyes for you? Because it’s missing from my head, and when I play it on my computer, all I hear is nothing.”

And Joe, beautiful, blessed Joe, says, “Get somewhere safe and stay there. I’ll be there in two hours.”

*

Patrick does not follow this advice. He does not follow this advice for one very important reason, which is this: crows, apparently, can open doors.

The bathroom lock is not a very sophisticated one. It is the kind you can pick by applying direct pressure with a toothpick. So it’s not entirely surprising that a crow beak can do the job just as well. Still, it’s a bit of a shock when the door swings open and the crow is standing on the threshold, looking for all the world as if Patrick has been hogging the shower and he’ll be damned if he waits a minute longer.

“Worse things than me are coming, you know. They heard you play. They want to listen,” says the crow. He looks around the bathroom as though he has seen better. Which, if he really is a king, Patrick supposes he has. “Our first order of business should be getting you protection.”

Patrick’s guts clench up with ice at the thought of—things—coming for him. “I had an odd moment with my roommate just now,” Patrick tells the crow. “I think he knows you’re here, and feels kind of… menacing about it.”

Pete cocks his head to one side, black eye glittering inquisitively. “Then let us not be here. Where is a safe place?”

Patrick thinks about this for a moment. His instinct is to hide: whether it’s in this bathroom or an empty subway car or somewhere on the edges of the city, a park with bushes and trees where he can lay on the ground with his belly in the cool dirt and feel like the eyes are off him for a moment or two. But putting himself into a place where he is alone and far from help means it will be easy for magic to surround him. For horned and clawed and unnaturally talking creatures to sneak up and eat his heart out slowly and painfully with no one there to hear him scream.

For some reason Patrick has the idea that other people will make him safe from magic. That if he is surrounded by people who don’t believe in it, it will become less real. It will lose its power to hurt him. Patrick swallows and says, “Somewhere with lots of people—somewhere crowded. We’ll ride the commuter train around until I think of something better.”

*

Sitting in a train car with a crow on his shoulder while the sun rises, streaking the strangely changed city with its sanguine rays, the madness of his last few days start to catch up with Patrick. He hasn’t been sleeping well, for some reason, and he bobs in and out of consciousness as he’s jostled by the gentle movement of the train. The commuters give him a wide berth, possibly due to the live crow on his shoulder, and for a while he dozes without fulfillment. “Dangerous place for sleeping,” Pete murmurs into his ear. Patrick feels disoriented, fuzzy around the edges. His eyes won’t quite stay open. He views the world as through a veil, fogged and distant. Reality does not quite track.

“Not safe,” says Pete in his ear. “Not safe here.”

The next time Patrick’s gummy eyelids part, it’s in response to Pete’s beak, nicking his ear with urgency. He feels the gold gaze on him before he sees where it’s coming from: across the aisle, an ebony-skinned man in a business suit grins at him. Patrick has the creeping sense that he is looking at a river crocodile, not a man, although there is nothing in the handsome commuter’s flawless countenance that is out of place, that suggests he is anything more or less than human.

Staying awake is like trying to pull dough off his fingers: thick sticky strands stretched taffy-like from one hand to the other, too gluey to remove. Patrick is an insect caught in a drop of sap, not yet knowing it’s going to turn to amber. He struggles against the molasses-pull of sleepiness, thinking of teeth, feeling their phantom scrape against his skin.

No. Not phantoms. Pete jabs his beak, hard, into the corded tendon that connects Patrick’s neck and shoulder. Patrick feels the skin break—great, bird rabies—and jerks into momentary clarity.

“Run,” says Pete, “or you will die.” Maybe it is practice and maybe it is panic, but the crow’s voice is sounding more and more human. It is more frightening, Patrick finds, to hear plain, matter-of-fact fear in a human’s voice than in a crow’s voice.

Heart hammering now, Patrick lets his head loll, as if he is falling back under that syrupy-thick sleep that lines the train car. Through slitted eyelids he watches the crocodile-passenger, whose twitching nostrils imply that he can smell the spread of blood that is wetting Patrick’s shoulder, though the spot feels no larger than a nickel. Not much time, not much time, Patrick tells himself. His body is tensed to flee but there is nowhere to go, with the train hurtling along underground and no escape in sight. The trick is to stay awake until the doors open at the next stop.

Patrick focuses on the sharp throb of the puncture-mark in his shoulder. He bites his tongue to enhance alertness. He can feel the flesh creep along his arms as passengers get up and wander out of this car and down the train absently and suspects they are being compelled.

Out of the corner of his eye, the man in the green-brown suit and scaled boots looks less and less passable as human. Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick sees the barely-controlled thrash of a tremendous muscled tail.

The train begins to slow. The crocodile man begins to shift his weight onto his feet, preparing to spring.

“Now!” shrieks Pete, but Patrick does not need telling. The thing sitting across from him is plainly, now, a narrow-snouted crocodile with a man’s business suit bunched around it, the tie askew around the creature’s thick scaled throat, the hunger undisguised in its eyes with its powerful glamor flickering and faded. The moment the car lurches to a stop and the doors begin to open, Patrick propels himself forward, lunging low and leading with his chest. He strikes the crocodile hard with his head and shoulders, knocking the predator back for a life-saving second. Patrick flings himself skidding through the train car and out the doors, onto the platform. The other people on the platform look at him placidly, like a herd of cows under a thick blanket of enchanted oblivion, and Patrick feels sick thinking of what the crocodile-thing will do to them. He hears its belly slithering on the tiles as it exits the train, hears its claws clacking leisurely on the dirty floor.

Patrick shoves through the metal stile, runs up the stairs towards the street, and does not look back.

Patrick was wrong to think that being around people would keep him safe. Patrick was wrong about what magic was entirely. You grow up thinking magic is, well, magic: fantastical and beautiful and gentle and fun. Talking chipmunks and glittery rainbows and wishes that come true, heroes with pure hearts and villains getting what they deserve.

Magic, Patrick is realizing, is not that. Magic is crocodiles hunting you on the subway and crows following you home and losing your best song to a roommate with yellow eyes. Magic is curses and lies with consequences. There is not as much sparkle as Patrick would have expected—there is not any wonderment at all.

“That monster,” Patrick says, his voice shaking, “is going to eat those people down there, isn’t it?”

“Some of them,” admits Pete.

“Why?” Patrick’s voice has shaken into jagged shards. “Why did that thing come after me?” Patrick thinks a moment—the crocodile waddling lethally in a business suit did not strike him as the mastermind of the whole operation. Anyway, now it’s trapped down there, behind the stile, until Animal Control gets it contained, and that fate has the feel of an expendable flunky, not a predicament someone planned themselves into. He expands upon his question: “Who sent that thing after me?”

“Ah,” says the crow on his shoulder. Pete leans in and nibbles on the brim of Patrick’s baseball cap. This is obviously a play for time. “If I had to speculate,” hedges Pete. “That is, if I were a gambling bird, which I should say I am not…” Pete ruffles his feathers and straightens them painstakingly, twitching them back into place with quick, efficient twists of his beak. He sighs in the particular way crows sigh. Patrick is becoming exceedingly knowledgeable about crow mannerisms. At last he says, “I suppose that, if pressed to conjecture, I would hazard that it may have come after you… because you’re with me.”

Patrick is too tired and/or jaded to even be surprised by this information. “Let me guess,” he says wearily, and he’s read enough fairy tales in his life to formulate a reasonably good guess, once he takes for granted that all the other parts of the story, such as wicked sorceresses and subway crocodiles and magic in general, exist. “The faerie queen who cursed you and stole your kingdom is worried I will help you get your heart back, so you can be king again. And she doesn’t want that to happen, obviously, because… she is hungry for land and… power. Yes: land and power. So she sics her foulest minion on me and hopes I either get eaten on the commuter train or get scared, decide you’re too much trouble, and abandon you to your quest.”

The crow makes a noncommittal sound in its throat, but Patrick is feeling rather impressive and would appreciate a few moments of being lauded, so he presses, “C’mon, how’d I do?”

“I am not on a quest,” says Pete after a moment’s tuneless humming. “But I would prefer you did not abandon me to it nonetheless. I told you, didn’t I? The business with the heart being that I don’t want one, not really. Being a man sounds dreary, being a king drearier still. So she hasn’t any reason to kill you. I wonder if she might not want you instead. Your music is… compelling. And the fae are fond of merriment, after all.”

Patrick finds this theory less satisfying than his own. He also does not like the idea of being collected for a faerie court, enchanted to play eternally for their amusement. It sits uncomfortably near to a half-dream, half-memory, that he wishes not to own. What he remembers-and-not is impossible, so it usually doesn’t trouble him. But today is a day of impossible things.

He wonders, too, if it hasn’t got to do with Pete at all. If Pete was just the first thing that came for him. If other things have always been coming.

Realizing he is automatically walking towards his usual corner, precisely where enemies will expect him to be, Patrick stops at the crosswalk spanning a clear intersection. “Where are we going?” he asks the bird.

“Can’t go home. Can’t stay here.”

“And clearly I have a weird idea of where safe is,” Patrick adds. “You mentioned something about protection?”

The crow hops from foot to foot on his shoulder, excited, and then leaps into the air with a great wingbeat. Patrick sputters feather out of his mouth. “We shall go,” announces Pete, “to the Alchematician. But will you sing me something first?”

*

It turns out the Alchematician lives in the suburbs, so Patrick smuggles Pete onto the bus. He has never had a live crow stuffed down his hoodie before and finds that there is not much to recommend the experience. Patrick unzips his sweatshirt far enough for Pete to poke his head out and they ride that way, the crow nestled against Patrick’s chest. Patrick is surprised at how cool the bird is, for a living thing; he is surprised at the speed of the fragile, tinny heartbeat. He did not expect there to be a heartbeat at all, but decides it would probably be rude to ask about it.

They ride in silence.

Pete does not speak again until they’re off the bus, murmuring queasily, “I do not care for public transit. Flying is much nicer, you should try.”

Patrick’s life is weird enough without following up on why the crow thinks he’d be able to fly at will, so he doesn’t answer. They make their way quietly, then, down a shady oak-lined street of tall, narrow brick houses that are huddled up together. The further they follow the street, the more shambling and poorly tended the houses look, and the street presses in closer. The road has taken on a surreal, winding feel, the oaks lining it small, wet, and blighted, when the brambles start. Hedges choke their way up out of the gutters and sidewalks, thorns catching at Patrick’s shoelaces, and he feels claustrophobic for all the pressing green and brown. He trips over a crack in the cement only to look down at see that he is on a dirty, wending cobblestone path, not a sidewalk at all. The air begins to feel unseasonably cold.

At last Pete says, “Here.” They have come to a house.  A cottage, really: set back behind the dense hedges, it is sun-dappled as through many trees. It has the look and feel of a cabin buried deep in a forest, though it is within view of the street. Round, chubby stones make up the walls, cool and slick with lichen. Ferns spring, young and green, from cracks in the mortar. Ivy wends its way around the arched front door, old wood with wrought iron filigree. The small round windows are of thick yellow glass, the inner sills crowded with warped-looking jars and potted plants and other ephemera. Beside the root-knotted path that leads to the front door, a great green bush sags under the weight of cheerful red clusters of berries.

It has no house number, no mailbox, no garbage can or recycling bin. It feels like an old place, like a secret. Patrick begins to suspect that, for other people, the cottage is not there at all.

Patrick’s knuckles have only just brushed the door’s damp surface when it swings open. At first he thinks it has opened of its own volition; then a voice from below his line of sight demands crabbily, “Well? Is it Girl Scout cookie season already?”

Patrick is not a tall man, but the small black man beside the door makes him feel like a giant. Tiny, hunched and cavernous with wrinkles, the man looks ancient. He is neatly dressed in seersucker and houndstooth earth tones: a waistcoat, a gold watch chain, cuffed trousers, suspenders over a starched white shirt, an embroidered handkerchief jutting smartly from his pocket. Despite the neatness of his clothing, he has a rather rumpled presence. Tufts of grey hair grow wildly out from his walnut-like head. He wears large, thick glasses and an old-fashioned accountant’s visor. Patrick feels like he should have brought his taxes: this little man seems like he could help.

“We are here for a ward,” Pete announces, when Patrick’s scrutiny has crossed the border from polite curiosity into rude outright staring.

“Pah!” scoffs the Alchematician, because there is no doubt that this is who the little man is. “I would prefer cookies. Come in, then,” he adds long-sufferingly.

Patrick follows the Alchematician into his home, that in nearly every way resembles the long-forgotten stacks of a creepy library. It is a dust-choked catacomb of knowledge: every surface is piled with books, papers, arcane fragments of feathers and skins and engraved stones, vials of powders and fouler things, stoppered jars with green tinted horrors bobbing within. Plants, growing from unseen pots, spill vines, their leafy feelers twisting through the suffocating mess. On a cracked stone tablet, Patrick spies a small colony of merrily growing mushrooms.

There is an enormous cabinet, for all the world like a card catalog from that same time-ravaged library Patrick envisioned a moment ago. Beside it, teetering precariously atop a stack of bloated leather folios and grimoires, is a huge, heavy set of brass scales. But the centerpiece of the room is a great, overburdened roll-top desk, peppered with tiny apothecary drawers, groaning under the weight of papers and oddments, and putting off a distinctly waterlogged smell. Although Patrick can see no bloodstains, the whole cottage shifts and settles around him with a chill like the breath of death, and he feels like doom as well as magic mingles with the dust motes in the air.

Everything smells sweetly of rot.

“Wards,” the Alchematician is saying, leading them deeper into his musty home, “are ever so boring. Wouldn’t you rather be set on the path to greatness? Find your destiny in a cup of tea? Barter for a panacea—a cure for all ills? Or perhaps I can interest you in an enchanted dagger! Haunted by the souls of every life it’s taken, jolly good! How about a scrying? Or, ooh—fancy a curse on your enemies? Been ages since I laid a proper curse. Wonders and impossibilities are my wares, gentlemen, murders and miracles my purview. Anything you can dream can be yours, for a price.” The old black man cackles madly and the chill settles deeper into Patrick’s bones. He has the creeping feeling of being underground, though he can see weak daylight out the nearest yellowed window.

“What about a heart?” blurts Patrick. “A human heart.”

The Alchematician halts the procession to his sitting room and wheels around, leering. His amber eyes are fiery with hunger and youth behind his thick glasses. He almost, but not quite, has the appearance of a kindly man.

“Oh yes,” the Alchematician whispers. “I can get you one of those.”

Pete squawks in alarm and  takes to the air, sending dust swirling in his wake. “Just the ward today, thank you.”

The Alchematician’s face sours at that piece of news. “Well, it’ll cost you,” he says somewhat nastily. “There’s an additional fee for being a dreary old bore.”

For the next half hour, the tiny man buzzes around his cluttered front room, pulling powders and dried leaves and dehydrated pig hearts out of tiny drawers, grinding up berries from the bush out front and bones pulled out of desiccated lumps of fur, doing complex calculations with a hand calculator with a great brass crank, arguing with an abacus, referencing and cross-referencing sums in a madcap assortment of enormously ancient tomes. He weighs out exact volumes of Patrick’s blood, sweat, and hair before declaring, “And now I will need something precious from you. Nothing gambled, nothing gained, you see… Something stronger than fear must stand against the oncoming darkness and danger, for we cannot rely on fear to hold once we perceive the face of monsters.”

Patrick carries the first guitar pick he ever used in his wallet, as a talisman of sorts. As a symbol of his devotion to his craft. The Alchematician looks almost gleeful as he melts it down. He traps the foul fumes in the tiny glass vial into which he has been tipping meticulously indexed and weighed grams, drops, and drams.

When he is finished, the Alchematician seals the vial with wax and blood and binds it with a cord of hawthorn, horsehair, and hemp. He holds it up to the light and peers through the smoke and sediment within, frowning.

“You gave me that which is already given,” he says, scowling. “Your music looks like silver but tastes like tin. Perhaps others can be bought with hollow bargains, but not I! All you have done is weakened your own ward.”

This is gibberish to Patrick. Before he can say so, Pete intervenes. “Will it work?” the crow demands fiercely, apparently as unnerved by the Alchematician as Patrick is.

“Not well,” says the man with a shrug.

“That’s it,” announces Pete, “we’re going to a proper hedge witch. We should never have wasted—”

“Hedge witch?” sputters the Alchematician. “Hedge witch?! I have ten times the training of one of those charlatans! I attended the Academy of Alchematics, as you very well know, King of Nothing Much Anymore! I do sums! I could brew and bottle circles around a hedge witch! Name one, name just one who can best me, and I shall personally smite them! Only let me consult my star chart, so as to get the positioning right, and they will be smote! Why, even with compromised materials, one of my wards is worth twenty of theirs! A hundred! This will keep him safe enough, so long as he stays out of danger. Won’t catch any eyes or ears while he wears it, but he’ll catch blows well enough—blades are blades and blood is blood and there’s naught more could be done with his paltry contribution.”

Winded from his diatribe, the Alchematician pauses for breath. Pete’s eye gleams with mischief.

“I suppose we’ll see,” the crow says noncommittally. “But I hope this is your best work, Alchematician, or I will know it. And he will give you a bad review on Yelp.”

Patrick has been startled so often in the past few days that he no longer possesses the capacity to be surprised. So instead he just nods and repeats sternly, “On Yelp.”

Looking scandalized, the Alchematician has lost his skin-creeping swagger. “There is the matter of payment,” he says, sounding meek. Patrick can see his heart isn’t in it. “I’ll take five feathers, then,” he decides with a sigh. “All the auspices of a black bird with the power of a king—they’re dead useful, your feathers.”

“And rare, too,” Pete says pointedly. “Don’t get too many winged monarchs in these parts anymore, do you? Two feathers, I think, for a ward you yourself described as weak.”

“Outrageous!” cries the Alchematician, some of his vigor returning as he gets into the spirit of haggling. “My work was peerless; he tainted the spell of his own accord. Three feathers.”

“Done,” agrees Pete cheerily. With a great thrash of his wings, three ebony feathers are released to drift earthward.

“As for what you’re looking for,” adds the Alchematician, snatching up feathers quicker than snakes but sounding a bit glum. “The answers, the explanations, the middle to your beginning and the way to your end. You’ll have to turn back the clock and tread back the road. You must find where the map starts before you can follow to its finish.”

This, too, sounds like gibberish to Patrick, but Pete doesn’t seem to think it is. He cocks his head thoughtfully and then says, “Mighty decent of you, Al.” Pete shakes out another feather.

Chapter Text

To make a long story short, Patrick winds up in a record store with a crow on his shoulder, talking to it.

To make a short story long again, Patrick starts on this path at the bus stop. Pete is idly pecking at refuse in the gutter while Patrick paces in tight circles, his ward itching slightly on his chest, repeating to himself what the Alchematician had said about what he is looking for. Patrick is unsure what he’s looking for, personally, so it’s a bit like trying to solve a maze from the middle with no sense of where either end might be. Nonetheless, answers and explanations both sound appealing, so he chews on what the Alchematician said.

“The middle to your beginning and the way to your end,” Patrick muses. “That means the path I should take, right? The way to get from the crazy fucked-up-edness of talking crows—no offense, Pete—and subway crocodiles and mythical flowers that never die—to someplace that makes sense. Do you think?”

Pete stabs viciously at a cigarette butt with his beak, and appears confused and disappointed when it does not turn into a french fry.

Patrick moves on to the next part of the riddle. “Turn back the clock, tread back the road,” he says. “Obvious: that means going backwards, to something that happened before this, or maybe something we did before this? Like going to the coffeehouse, or back to my busking corner.”

“Your busking corner,” Pete repeats in a tone that is undoubtedly mocking.

Patrick Stump does not take guff from enchanted crows. He has recently decided this. Patrick speaks over him. “Find where the map starts and follow to its finish. He means we have to go backwards to go forwards. He means I have to go to the beginning, to where all this started!” Patrick feels briefly triumphant and then, promptly, disappointed. “But I don’t know where this started. Obviously. Thus all the paranoia and boarding up windows and shrieking when you showed up.”

Pete abandons his pursuit of inedible garbage and hops up the curb towards the bus shelter. “Was that the beginning?” he asks. “When I showed up? Was that the first indication of magic, of strangeness, in your life?”

Patrick opens his mouth to say of course it was but instead just stands there, mouth open, looking like he’s been struck. And he is struck, by a forceful, juddering wave of memory. A memory that he told himself was a dream, a nightmare, long ago. A memory that has doggedly pursued him, just beneath the level of his awareness, ever since, like a monster that is only visible when no one’s looking at it.

“It was not,” Patrick says after a moment, sounding rather sad, “the first indication of strangeness.” Pete watches him keenly, waiting, but he cannot name the dream-memory, not quite: it is swirled in fog, indistinct. He can feels the edges of it, the shape, but cannot close it up in words.

Turn back the clock, tread back the road. Patrick’s lips part for a soft groan. “I think we have to go there,” he says. “We have to go to the town where I grew up.”

*

So they take a different bus than they had planned, and move further away from the city rather than towards it. It is early afternoon when Patrick steps off the bus and onto the familiar main street of his hometown. In books, he has read about the feeling you’re supposed to get, when you go back home after you’ve changed and grown, after you’re different. You are supposed to feel like the town has gotten smaller and duller, when really it hasn’t changed, when it has stood still while you have moved forward, when it has stayed the small and you have gotten bigger.

Patrick does not feel this way, though. He moved out of this town—and, transitively, out of his parents’ house—barely more than a month ago. Since leaving, he has not hit the big time. He has played his songs on the street like a music prostitute; he has played his songs in coffeehouses for almost no money while exactly zero people listened; he has slipped into the early stages of psychosis, seeing magic and hearing crows talks and being chased by crocodile commuters, and he can still tell that he’s going crazy but he can’t stop himself, and he knows that soon he will no longer recognize the disconnect between himself and reality.

To sum up, he is not really riding home triumphant on a white horse, feeling big and different. Instead he feels small and scuffed-up and perfectly usual. He is not a conquering hero. He is—ashamed.

Patrick cannot bear to face his house, which probably has his parents inside of it, so he takes Pete to the record store instead. As a testament to how short a time he has really been away, the proprietor barely looks up from his magazine when Patrick pushes open the door, triggering the bell. “Hey, Patrick,” he says, turning a page. Patrick realizes with horror that, worse than having to answer questions about his Big City Life and whether he has Been Discovered, no one has even noticed he has gone. For a terrifying free-falling moment, he feels like he never left at all, like it’s all been one madcap hallucination. He touches the lump of the softly humming ward against his chest, its vibration under his fingertips a kind of proof of who is he and where he’s been.

Pete, perched gamely next to his head, is another kind of proof. Either Pete or the ward must be exuding some kind of glamor that encourages onlookers’ eyes to skate past the live crow Patrick is wearing like an accessory, because the owner of the record store does not comment, and neither had any of the bus passengers. Either that or Patrick is so utterly invisible that he could wear an entire suit of live birds out on the town and still, no one would see him. For his own sake, he chooses to believe it is the power of the ward.

Given how weird he’s feeling, ragged from pursuit, raw from strangeness, and slightly humiliated from his inglorious return to the suburbs, Patrick discovers he is actually having a pretty nice time with Pete. He digs through records, showing the crow his favorite albums and describing the ways they were important to him. He plays a few songs on the shop’s turntable and Pete does a bobbing crow-dance to the beat. Pete nips at his ear and teases him gently about his taste, comparing and contrasting Michael Jackson with minstrels who used to visit Pete’s court, and this feels warm and normal and good.

They are laughing as they leave the shop, Patrick harboring secret plans to return later and buy a Sisters of Mercy record Pete wanted to hear again and again, even though he has no idea what a crow would do with vinyl, or why he thinks it’s appropriate to give a crow a gift. They go to Patrick’s favorite diner next, animated conversation carrying them down the block and across the street like they’re lighter than air. So light I can fly, Patrick remembers Pete saying, and thinks he feels it.

The ward is definitely changing what people see when they look at him, Patrick decides, because the waitress frowns at him in a troubled way when he orders a BLT, fries, a strawberry milkshake, and “also just the biggest plate of fries you have,” but doesn’t bat an eyelash at Pete perched at the edge of the booth opposite Patrick.

The crow is quite moved by the experience of hot French fries. “No one has ever bought me fries before,” he says wonderingly, a sparkle of disbelief and gratitude warming his black eye. “They taste different like this.”

Patrick notices that the way Pete talk seems different, now. Not just that his voice is less rusty, but that his language is less rusty. He wonders how long it had been, before the last few days, since Pete had spoken aloud to anyone. He feels honored, low and warm in his gut, to be the one Pete chose to talk to.

The crow is less enthusiastic about the milkshake, which Patrick insists he try. Patrick is pretty sure that a few days ago it would have repulsed him to let a crow dunk its beak into his drink, but it turns out a lot of things don’t seem important anymore when you’re on the run from roommate trolls and commuting crocs and who knows what other black magic. Anyway, he likes Pete, now that the initial shock has worn off. Crows are larger than they look, from a distance; their gore-caked talons sharper, their beaks more deadly. And the fact that they can talk. That also came as a surprise.

So he sits with a crow in the dingy small-town diner he haunted as a teen, back when it was thrilling instead of unsettlingly sad to stay up all night sipping burnt coffee in a vinyl booth, back when he was a spectator of the kind of grey-faced adults still awake at four a.m. instead of one of them. And it’s nice. Patrick hasn’t had this much fun, this much companionship, since he was in college with Joe.

Joe. Patrick is startled to remember his friend, his best friend, who is probably in the city right now, assuming Patrick has been kidnapped or murdered or is wandering the streets, raving and insane. Patrick realizes for the first time that he does not have his cell phone with him, that he must have left it where it dropped in the bathroom when Pete opened the door. He can’t quite believe that was just this morning. He isn’t entirely convinced that the world won’t right itself again, if he could only get a good night’s sleep.

Patrick resolves that calling Joe is his number one priority. After dessert, that is—the apple pie is the best thing on the diner’s menu and he’s not ready to give up on introducing the crow to ice cream quite yet. He feels guilty, knowing that Joe is probably worried and looking for him while he has a nice afternoon on the lam, but he has also seen enough weirdness in the last 24 hours that he is able to push back the guilt. Patrick gets the sense he can keep it at a distance indefinitely if he focuses hard enough on magic and adventure and Pete.

With this strategy held loosely in mind, coupled with a true and passionate enjoyment of what is happening here, now, in the diner—turns out a brush with death even makes French fries taste better—Patrick flags down the waitress and orders two slices of pie.

At last, neither of them can eat anymore, and the tabletop has gone tacky with rings of milkshake sweat and stray sprays of salt. Patrick can delay no longer. “Well,” he says, straightening the edges of the bills he has laid on the table and feeling that he would rather have another shot at the crocodile than face this next part, “I guess it’s time you met my parents.”

*

By this point, Patrick is pretty confident in the ward-glamour-whatever’s ability to do its thing, so when Pete gets comfy on his hat, he doesn’t argue. It is strange to be a foot taller and the bird catches the wind, but otherwise he adjusts to Pete as a head ornament in the 15 minutes it takes to walk from the diner to his parent’s house. No one they pass gives him the look that can only mean “Sir, there is a crow on your head,” so he doesn’t even hesitate before he uses his key to let himself in the front door.

As he steps into the house, his mother is crossing the entryway carrying two coffee mugs. At the sight of him, she shrieks and drops them. She keeps shrieking, staggering a step back and raising a trembling hand to point at him. “P-Patrick,” she howls, “BIRD!”

This is Patrick’s first clue that something has gone awry with the glamour.

The second is when a broom comes down on his head from behind. Pete takes to the air just in time, his talons scraping Patrick’s scalp and tearing his hat half off his head, and Patrick is clobbered by the head of the broom. His jaws rattle together, nearly catching his tongue, and his brains are thoroughly shaken. Clumps of dust and unnameable detritus drift gently onto his face and shoulders while he stands stunned. Coffee laps unobtrusively at his shoe.

“Um,” Patrick manages. But he has not spoken into silence: his father, wielding a broom, is hot in pursuit of Pete. The broom swings wildly, showering them all with dust bunnies, while Pete squawks and hops and half-flies in narrow evasion. Patrick’s mother has resumed screaming. In a distant way, Patrick hopes no one steps in broken ceramic.

Patrick knows he must take action but isn’t sure what he can offer in way of reason or sanity. The situation already seems to have escalated beyond the point of intervention. Before he can make up his mind, his father slips in the spreading coffee spill on his next overzealous swing, and lands flat on his ass, broom still held out in front of him. He struggles to rise and Pete has the presence of mind to perch, safely, atop a curio of heirloom china. It is a good bet that Patrick’s father will not be willing to sacrifice the entire dinner service to get to Pete, but not a guarantee.

Into the momentary relief from the fracas, Patrick finally speaks. He hasn’t thought of anything good to say, so he says something stupid instead: “This is like a Three Stooges episode.”

His father gets to his feet carefully, panting and staring at Pete with lockjawed fury. Patrick quickly steps between the broom and the curio. “So you’re probably wondering about the crow,” he says. The broom lowers slightly at Patrick’s acknowledgement that bringing a wild bird into the house was a deliberate act and not an attack of corvine cunning. “I realize now that I should have called ahead.” Patrick is stalling for time. “But I wanted to come by in person, to give you the good news face-to-face, to surprise you…” This is the worst stalling tactic ever, Patrick realizes as the words leave his mouth and the pressure as to what he will say next increases exponentially.

“Patrick, sweetheart, what is happening? There’s a—a filthy crow—”

Pete caws defensively and the broom starts to climb skywards again. Patrick spits out literally the first thing he thinks of, which is: “I’VE DECIDED TO GO INTO MUSICAL THEATER.”

This half-shouted proclamation has the effect of halting everything. His parents both look away from Pete’s menacing form to goggle, wide-eyed, at their son instead. Patrick’s brain is reluctant to provide follow-up, to instruct him how that particular news flash is meant to connect with Pete’s presence in the home. It was just the first exciting news that popped into his head; it does nothing to simplify the present situation.

“Broadway,” he goes on sagely, nodding like everything makes perfect sense. “The lights—the billboards—make-up and stage direction. I have decided that my life’s ambition is to sing in musical theater.”

“That’s wonderful, dear,” Mrs. Stump manages. She is looking increasingly wild about the eyes; her gaze keeps dragging back to Pete. Patrick senses that he will need to take control of this situation soon or it will devolve back into an insane melee. Pete is shifting uneasily from his curio roost, fighting a nearly irresistible urge to take flight.

“How the crow ties in is this,” says Patrick, and then comes up empty. “What I mean to say is, the crow is necessary to my success in musical theater, because.” This is harder than he thought it would be. Patrick takes a long, slow breath, buying time. “I am auditioning for a role,” he says, and then scrambles wildly for the name of a musical, any musical, literally any musical in the world except Cats, “in The Pirates of Penzance.”

Patrick waits, surveying the messy scene to see how this news lands. To his great relief, his father begins to lower the broom again, looking puzzled. “Shouldn’t it be a parrot, then?” he asks, and Patrick is tremendously grateful that someone else is working alongside him to close up the plot holes in his fabrication.

Patrick waves away this valid concern. “Well, you know,” he says. “Not that many parrots in the city.”

*

Somehow, he and Pete both survive the evening. He confines Pete to his childhood bedroom apologetically while he is obliged to eat dinner with his parents, wishing he had not eaten quite so much at the diner, wishing there was not quite so much peril. Here, in the familiar and slightly faded home he grew up in, in the company of his parents, he cannot quite believe in magic. But he cannot quite disbelieve it either. He keeps waiting for Demon Andy and a legion of crocodiles in suits to burst through the patio doors. What if just being here puts his parents in terrible danger?

Patrick wishes he could believe that magic belonged in the city, that it would thin out and weaken among the repeating pattern of the suburbs, but a greasy eel squirms in his gut and tells him this is not true. He thinks of where they’re going tomorrow, he and Pete: he thinks of why they came here at all. He shouldn’t have fucked around at the record store, at the diner. He shouldn’t have stalled—shouldn’t have wasted time, not when they’re on the run, when they don’t know what’s coming for them. He can pretend things are normal but they’re not. He knows what lurks here, in the rolling green suburbs. He can almost remember.

It is a relief, to collapse into his narrow childhood bed shortly after dinner, after the concerned chitchat of his parents has finally died away. “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he says, studying the sticky-tacked constellations glowing greenly on his ceiling. Turn back the clock and tread back the road. Find where the map starts before you can follow to its finish. Patrick doesn’t know what the Alchematician meant, what questions he’s supposed to be answering. Maybe none of this would be happening at all, if Pete hadn’t come into his life. Maybe he’d be playing on his street corner merrily, unwarded, none the wiser.

Yeah, right. Patrick doesn’t believe it for a second.

“There was nowhere else to go,” Pete says simply. The bird nestles onto Patrick’s pillow, perpetuating his ongoing preference of being as near to Patrick’s face as possible, and cocks his small, shining head. When he speaks next, the words come slowly, with unusual care. “Crows are always alone, and do not mind it. They do not ride buses or listen to records or drink milkshakes or meet parents. Yet I would not trade this day for any price.”

Patrick falls asleep with the raspy echo of Pete’s words playing in his ears.

*

Patrick wakes up to snoring. He yawns, stretching out in his crowded bed, and opens his eyes. Bright morning sunshine seeps around the edges of room-darkening shades, casting the room in the cool blue bruise-light of snowy mornings and long-lost memories. His heart feels calmer today, surer of its purpose. He feels good.

Patrick rolls onto his side, snuggling deeper into the mattress, and sighs contentedly against the smooth dusky back of the sleeper beside him. Their bodies ripple together smoothly, folding up with the symmetry of a stream cutting its way through rock, one yielding over time til together they’re a waterfall. For so long, without knowing it, he has felt so alone.

Then Patrick yelps, kicks out violently, and shimmies backwards against the wall. With a familiar, undignified squawk, a naked man falls out of Patrick’s bed and onto the floor, taking the better part of the comforter with him.

There are feathers in the bed.

“What—who—what!” Patrick yelps, still scrambling backwards into the corner as if climbing the wall like Spiderman would make him safer. Would make his life less weird, more controllable.

From a tangle of comforter, a wild-haired, wide-eyed, absolutely beautiful head rises. It is attached to a smooth, leanly muscled neck and chest, also stupidly beautiful. It is life’s one small mercy that a corner of the comforter flops between the man’s legs, protecting Patrick’s virtue from this final frontal assault.

The man isn’t blinking quite right. His eyes are open slightly too wide. His head swivels a little too freely on his neck. He looks ruffled, like a bird when it puffs out its feathers. In fact, he is displaying several mannerisms that are distinctly birdlike.

Patrick looks from the pile of feathers in the bed to the stunned-looking naked man on the floor. He begins to feel unstuck from reality. Sometime in the night he must have finally gone insane.

Slowly, wonderingly, Pete says, “I don’t think I’m a crow anymore.”

*

Getting Pete out of the house as a man is a whole other thing. Not that getting him in as a bird was so easy, but a fully grown and very handsome human man dressed in ill-fitting old clothes that were in the back of Patrick’s bureau is even less plausible as part of an immersive, method acting preparation for Pirates of Penzance than the live bird was. Patrick imagines telling his mother, We were rehearsing our songs. Alone in my bedroom all night. How odd that you didn’t hear any singing! 

He thinks he would rather die than deliver this line.

Instead, Patrick engages his mother in an urgent, insistent conversation about whether she thinks there are sunflower seeds in the pantry and, if so, whether they may have fallen behind something, and eventually she’s so fed up that she comes over to help him root around and turns her back to the staircase. Patrick withdraws his upper body from the pantry in time to see Pete slinking around the bannister and towards the front door.

“Great, actually, I don’t really want them,” Patrick is saying, extricating himself from his mother, when he hears the most horrifying noise he can conceive of emanating from the living room: the rustle of a newspaper.

The blood drains out of Patrick’s head, crippling his ability to plan on his feet. That means his father is in the living room, in his armchair, drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper—two feet away from the front door. If he were to turn his page at this moment, he would be staring straight at Pete.

Patrick skids through the dining room on sock feet, windmilling his arms wildly from the opposite side of the living room. Pete stands frozen in plain sight of his father and the door. Patrick makes air traffic controller hand gestures to steer Pete towards the back of the house.

“Patrick, here they are, I’ve found them—” says his mother, emerging from the pantry, frowning at Patrick, who is obligated to pretend he was stretching enthusiastically. Pete makes a beeline for the back door, which is only one countertop away from his mother. Seeing no other option, Patrick envelops his mother in a bear hug, frantically urging Pete out the door with eyebrow movements.

“YOU’RE A SUNFLOWER SEED HERO, MOM,” Patrick booms far too loudly, trying to mask the sound of the door swinging shut. “Okay, gotta run!”

He takes the package of roasted seeds from her hand and bolts out the door after Pete.

*

They hop the back fence and Patrick leads them in the inevitable direction. There are too many things to say, too many questions he wants to ask. His feet drag them towards exactly where he doesn’t want to go.

If you follow Patrick’s subdivision, it comes to a border of trees that seemed a grand forest, when he was a child. You tromp through the grassy retention pond, through the swaying half-prairie plants, and past the trunks that are meant to disguise the unsightliness that lies beyond. Past the edge of those trees, you find a tangle of dirt and bike tracks, wild flowers and spreading clover and weeds, clusters of reedy trees that sway in the wind and a few larger, grander, with initials carved in—a few you could climb, if you could slip away without your parents knowing. For this dirt-hilled, leafy haven shields upstanding suburbanites from a ditch, in which there is a fence, beyond which rise up the loose rock and rusted metal and life-threatening thunder of train tracks. A commuter train runs these tracks every hour, on the hour, and you only have to bring home a grubby railroad tie once for your parents to forbid you to visit this area forever.

There is a hole cut in the fence, and you go under it. There are taller plants here, thicketing growths and thick, interlacing vines, and if you crouch beneath this canopy you find a half-rotten mattress and abandoned beer cans and a ring of rocks with melted plastic in their center: the telltale signs of teens. There will be broken glass bottles, discarded garbage, maybe even cast-off condoms, depending on your luck.

The deeper you go, the lower the canopy gets, until you are past the detritus of the big kids, until you are on your hands and knees and it is only the most wayward shards of glass that bite your palms and fill the cuts with that fine, dust-layer of dirt. Dead twigs and crisp leaves grind beneath you. You struggle further in, because you almost, almost see something on the other side.

You come out into a sun-dappled meadow, the train tracks on one side and fallen trees and beds of undergrowth and wild berries in all other directions. At the very edge of this meadow there are trees, thick soldier-like ranks of them, and you cannot see what is on the other side. At some point in the crawl you have lost your bearings, and you are no longer sure where you are, exactly, because there is nowhere in the subdivision or along the train line that would accommodate so much open space. You will play there, laughing and shrieking and luxuriating in the decadence of a secret, for one afternoon. You will be forbidden, when your mother inevitably finds out where you were, to ever return again.

A few other kids know of this place. They will tell stories about it. Not about pleasant, sunny days, but about nights. About witches and hags that eat the eyes right out of the heads of children, about goblins and trolls, about magic with ugliness at its heart, black and crawling, worming into the center of whatever it touches and spoiling it, first inside, then out. They will tell stories about a market on full-moon nights, when fairy tale creatures gather to barter, bargain, and trade. A market where you can buy all manner of peculiar things, if you have the right currency. The sight and sound and smell and taste of this market will leave you hollowed out inside, a husk that rattles, and nothing will ever fulfill you again. They only let you see it once, if they let you stumble into the circle of their lights at all. Some kids go crazy. But most kids who go in, a fourth-grade boy will whisper bravely, behind his hand on the playground, never come back.

This is where they’re heading, Patrick and Pete. Because this is where Patrick went, on the day his memory starts.

*

They walk in silence for a while. Sometimes Pete laughs softly and springs into a run. Other times his shoulders hunch and he curls protectively around himself. Pete finds a dead field mouse, half-eaten by some larger thing, and begins to cry. “I feel so much,” he whispers, cupping the ragged dead thing close to, but not quite touching, his chest. His hand keeps fluttering above the space his heart would be, slightly too skittish to touch. “Was it always like this?” Tears swell uncurbed out of his heartbreaking brown eyes. “No wonder I let her take my heart.”

Later, Pete finds a discarded lighter that still produces a flame, and laughs so gaily it fills the entire glade.

Finally Patrick finds a question he knows how to ask. He says, “Is it beating?”

Pete bites his lip, looking up at Patrick and then down again, his distinctly feathery hair falling across his eyes. “I think so,” he says. He is shyer as a man than he ever was as a crow. Patrick distinctly recalls crow-Pete being rather imposing and rude. Pete’s hand flutters at his chest again and then drops. “Would you…?”

They stop walking. Patrick turns to face Pete. Carefully, gently, he lays his palm against Pete’s chest. Beneath his touch, Pete’s heart judders and bellows and runs. Patrick is surprised at the warmth of him, at the way he feels Pete’s heartbeat all the way through him. He drops his hand away quickly, like he’s been burned. Now Patrick is the one who looks away.

“It is,” Patrick tells him. “It was beating on the bus. When you were a crow. I didn’t realize it, then, but… maybe this had already started.”

He imbues the word this with as much significance as he can. He is not quite willing to use the phrase your transformation.

Pete neither confirms nor denies. Patrick pushes, “Do you know why this happened? I mean… is the curse broken? Is that why the Alchematician sent us here?”

Pete is frowning. “I don’t know. It should not be possible. I felt… different, the first time I heard your music. I had not spoken for many years, before that. I had fallen into the habit of being a crow. It had not occurred to me in a long time, to interact. Crows are sideline creatures. We scavenge, watch, wait. We move in when everyone else has gone. I think I might have forgotten I had ever been a man, if I had gone on that way too long.” Pete shakes his head. “One thing I do know is that the Alchematician could not have done this. He is only a hedge witch, no matter the name of his order. He does not have the power to do—or undo—a curse like this, and if he did, we would never have been able to afford it.”

It is the longest speech he has made since he was a cheerful crow, making Patrick snort milkshake at the diner with a long, ridiculous monologue about the mind-boggling behavioral patterns of human beings on sidewalks.

“I took no one’s heart,” Pete says dolefully. “I did not seek this. I did not… want this. So no. I do not know the why or the how.”

I took no one’s heart. The words catch at Patrick, remind him of what Pete said before, about how to break the curse. I must receive the heart of another. At the time, Patrick assumed that had meant in the goriest way possible, torn still-beating out of someone’s chest and—put inside? Fed upon? Something gruesome by the crow—the act of which would ultimately forfeit his humanity, or some other faerie trick ensuring the sorceress queen kept her power forever.

Now Patrick wonders if it means something different.

Patrick is uninterested in such wonderings and where they might lead, he tells himself firmly. “There’s something I need to tell you, about me. I don’t know if it’s true or if I dreamed it. But I think… I think it’s going to be important.”

Patrick takes a deep breath. “On the first day of my life, I came to the faerie market.”

Chapter Text

On the first day of my life, I came to the faerie market. It was a summer evening, the kind with cool green air that hangs over the street long past sundown, and when my mom sent me to bed it was still light out. I could hear kids playing in the street. I could hear other things, too, almost: laughter carrying on the air, silver threads of music pricking at my ears, clear lyrical voices. They were far off, these sounds, and not quite real, but in my mind there was no doubt where they were coming from.

I had heard stories, I think, about the faerie market. I must have. Just like you hear stories about Bloody Mary, who appears in the bathroom mirror and cuts your head off if you say her name three times, or the old man who eats children’s bloody finger bones in his lumpy oatmeal, or the scarecrow that waits at the edge of the park to lure you away. I don’t actually remember any stories, but—I think I had already decided I would go there. I must have.

And that night, the first night I can remember, I did.

This is the path I took, slipping though the dusk and not meeting a soul. I remember feeling brave, like I was out playing Ghost in the Graveyard or Cops and Robbers, like crouching in bushes and muffling the sound of my breathing was all just part of the game. Like there was nothing in all the world real enough to hurt me.

I crawled for what felt like hours. Thorns caught at my shirt, my skin. I bled in tiny droplets, leaving red like breadcrumbs to mark my path. The tunnel got tighter and tighter until I knew I was stuck, knew there was no clearing I could reach, not anymore. And when fear closed around my heart, in the exact moment I yielded to despair, that is when the tunnel opened. I tumbled out into cold clover, into another world.

That night, in the clearing, I could See.

There were booths and stalls and many-legged creatures with rustling carapaces hunched over streaked stone altars. Herbs and bones and hanks of blood-dyed fiber hung beneath colorful canopies, bobbing glass lights. Firelight crackled and dance in all colors. Smoke hung in the air, and laughter, and brassy music that made my feet itch to dance. Everywhere there were faeries. Tall regal faeries in clanking armor or elaborately embroidered capes, doublets, and gowns. Squat warty faeries stomping around in bark and moss. Slippery-limbed, shining naiads with blue lips. Every one of them beautiful, every one of them monstrous. I do not remember the things that I saw, not when I try to. It was a nightmare. It was a dream. Everyone there had terrible sharp shark’s teeth bristling out of their mouths. That part is a memory, I think.

I walked past shoppers and hawkers, healers and thaumaturges, dancers and musicians. There was a stage, and rows of cut stumps and rowan benches laid out in front of it. Beautiful tall faeries bustled around the stage, rearranging things under starry cloth that rippled like the night sky, preparing for an auction. I approached the auctioneer, paring down his fingernails with a cunning silver knife, looking knowledgeable and important. I was a child, not very old—it was my seventh summer. I knew that when you wanted to buy something, you went to someone behind a cash register, and the podium was the closest thing I saw.

I wanted to buy something. I was not there by accident. I was there to trade.

I told the auctioneer what I wanted. He was delighted. He parted his lips in a slaughterhouse smile. “You’re in luck,” he told me. His breath smelled like rotten meat. This frightened me: you always expect that, if you manage to catch a faerie, if you manage to find one, it will be beautiful. Magic is supposed to be beautiful. “I know just where to go.”

The auctioneer closed his hand on my shoulder like a vice. His sharpened, steely fingernails bit into the tender skin of my collarbone. He steered me in front of him and I stumbled, not quite wanting to go. But I was brave too, by merit of sheer naivete, brazen stupidity. I had not wandered in by accident. I was no wayward child, to be scooped up and stolen and raised under a hill somewhere. I was a sophisticated shopper. I was a man in the know.

Somehow I had come by the impression that wanting something from these creatures would keep me safe from them.

The auctioneer led me away from the bustling hub of the market, the laughter and the dancing and the terrible-beautiful music. He led me through the trees and to a deeper, darker, quieter part of the forest. I heard the burbling of a stream before I saw it. It seemed peaceful here. The tree trunks shone like silver by the filtered light of the moon. Everything looked cast from metal, cut from glass.

He stopped us at the side of the stream, pursed his lips, and whistled a flat, three-note tune. The short, lilting melody rose up at the end, beckoning. Calling to something.

The surface of the stream began to churn. The stream was shallow, would not have come up past my ankles, and deeper than the deepest part of the ocean at the same time. Looking into it, trying to find the bottom, gave me terrible vertigo. For a moment I leaned too far out, perilously near to falling, felt myself being pulled down. I wanted to touch my face to the surface of the water. I wanted to see if it was a mirror or a portal. I wanted—

The auctioneer’s grip bit sharply into my shoulder, pulling me back. “Be patient, now,” he admonished. “There will be time enough for drowning deaths later.”

Out of the churning, foaming center of the stream, an oily, barnacled, green-haired woman split the surface. She rose in the center of the whirlpool, the waters stilling around her, the foam dissipating, drifting away to get caught by rocks. She was naked and scaled, slimy, with water plants wound around her trunk and limbs like scars. When she smiled, her teeth were green and furry with moss.

“Llelyana is the cousin of a siren,” my benefactor said. “Among us all, she is best suited to grant the boon you seek.” He shoved me forward, letting me go, and I stumbled again, nearly falling into her slippery embrace. “Ask it of her,” the auctioneer commanded me.

Still, still, I was not afraid. Not properly. With little-boy bravery, with a child’s courageous heart, I stared into her filmy black eyes and said, “I want to make music that everyone will listen to. I want to play songs that make people come and stay.”

And I think—if this was not a dream, if this truly is my first memory—I think she gave it to me.

*

Corvine expert he may be, but Patrick has no idea what that look on Pete’s human face means. He looks away, at his feet, at the fraying part of his jeans pocket, at the nettle-headed plant he’s been pulling spiky leaves off of while he tells the story. Patrick has never told the story before.

Patrick’s words have dried up. He wants to say more, to try and explain himself better than this. He would almost, but not quite, give anything, to be able to explain it.

But life isn’t—shouldn’t be—like that. You can’t just bargain and barter and trade for the things that you want until they’re all arranged around you, perfect, gotten. Getting things that way doesn’t count, not in your heart. Sometimes you have to work with what you have and move towards what you want the old-fashioned way: a hero on a quest through his own quiet, mundane story. Maybe it’s tempting to skip to the end, but if you do, what’s left?

Patrick rolls spiky leaves into juicy green balls between finger and thumb, then flicks them into the undergrowth. He wants to look at Pete. He will not look at Pete.

With a soft urgency, Pete asks, “What was the price?”

Patrick grabs the hard nettle bloom in his fist and squeezes, squeezes til the crispy spines bite into the flesh of his palm, squeezes til he feels the skin give in bright hot flashes. Then he lets go and studies his palm, angrier with himself with each welling pinprick of blood that rises. It’s all still real. He’s still not dreaming. What does his life mean, if this whole time he was never dreaming?

“I don’t remember,” says Patrick bitterly.

Ahead, Patrick can see the rustling opening of the tunnel. With the Sight, light and energy seems to swirl and suck around the opening. It looks like a much more dangerous passage than it ever did when he was a child. But maybe it’s just that he knows what’s on the other side, now. He knows what you can lose.

Patrick’s response makes Pete angry. It is the first time Patrick has seen this occur, either because before, when Pete was heartless, he didn’t care what happened to him, or because in all the lying and fleeing and peril they’ve been through, nothing has upset Pete until this.

“Careless!” Pete spits, his face contracting into hard lines and angry corners around the words. There is no kindness left in those flashing eyes. “Deals with the fae do not bear forgetting. Think, before you bring the world tumbling down!”

“No,” says Patrick. He is surprised by the coldness of his own voice. His own anger, his own grief, has risen up to meet Pete’s challenge. It curls thickly in his gut, a viscous purple-black pit of loss he cannot name, the sharp snapping anger of mourning thwarted, quickened and thickened with rancor as the years have stretched without him. “No,” he says again, and his voice is a broadsword made of ice, staggering and utterly without warmth. Pete takes a step back from the physical force of that one word.

“That is the price,” says Patrick. The creature in his gut is seething now, roiling to a boil. “I don’t remember. Not one memory from before—do you understand? They took it all. I don’t know why I wanted music, or who I was, or what I meant to do with it. I had gone through all these years believing it was a dream, or a story I told myself—and I had to believe that, because what else do you do, when seven years, your entire life on earth, every thought you’ve had and every emotion you’ve known, is stripped out of you? When you are a hollow boy, expected to grow up without anything inside you? I could not bear being a hollow man. So I lied, I lied to myself, and through all the years until now I believed it was all just a nightmare. That is the price I paid, Pete, and I don’t know why.” Patrick takes a deep, drowning breath. The green forest air is choked with despair. “I don’t know why,” Patrick says again. He feels as if he’ll die from it.

This is it, Patrick Stump’s darkest secret: he will never know what he gave up for a prize he will never know why he wanted. It tastes humid and ashy in his mouth, like secondhand smoke. These are words he built a life around not saying. Even to a man who was a crow 10 hours ago, what he is saying strains the seams of belief.

The expression on Pete’s face—the minutiae of human features, suddenly, seems so difficult to read; crow was simpler—is fixed. He steps closer to Patrick, extends a shy hand. Light as a feather, Pete strokes his fingers down Patrick’s cheek. Patrick wants to lean into the touch but fears that, if he lets himself go even a little bit, he will fall utterly apart.

“You are not hollow,” Pete says.

Kindness burns worse than recrimination. Patrick turns away. Without ceremony, he drops to his knees and crawls into the mouth of the tunnel.

*

As Patrick crawls, he allows himself to remember.

He remembers his last crawl through this tunnel vividly, remembers the journey home from the faerie market with a precise starkness. It was the first impression the world ever made on him: a shadowed, menacing place, peopled by creatures who smiled with too many teeth and not enough kindness while they gave you exactly what you wanted with an air of trickery, of soon-to-be regret.

That night, the first night of his life, Patrick wandered through unfamiliar streets for hours. He was dirty, his pajamas were torn, and the summer air turned cold in the darkness. Moonlight felt icy on his skin. He was utterly lost. He had no idea where he lived. When a neighbor found him on her way to the train, just before sunrise, his tears had dried in stiff and salty lines through the dirt on his cheeks. His chest was choked with hopelessness, with the crushing weight of being lost and alone. He had no shoes. His feet were blistered and bloody.

“Patrick?” she had said, her voice catching with alarm, the imperious clacking of her heels on sidewalk faltering. “Patrick, sweetie, is that you?”

Patrick, not knowing her, not knowing anyone, guessed. “Mom!” he cried, and ran into her arms.

There were doctors, afterwards. Psychiatrists and lengthy overtures in humming magnetic tubes that saw right through him. No one could make him remember. No one believed the story he told. He was new to the world, but he still learned quickly to stop telling it. The people who said they were his parents told him it was a nightmare, a story he told himself to explain whatever horrible thing had happened to him, to make meaning out of a terrible absence. Patrick had no better explanation, no reason to doubt these kindly, attentive strangers. So he began to say the words they said. He began to believe them.

Now he is crawling on his hands and knees back to a place he invented, and he is beginning to wonder.

If this is the true version of events, if magic is real and monsters exist, if every note he’s ever played and the soaring joy and peace he feels in the center of a restless heart when he picks up an instrument, if all of it was given to him in a faerie bargain—if it was bought and paid for with seven years of memories—if this is true, then when he plays, Patrick is not just making music. Patrick is making music everyone will listen to. Music that will make people come and stay.

Oblivion has not made him less dangerous. Patrick has been enchanting people for years. Bewitching them. Forcing them. That is the real power of magic. It takes away people’s choice. Everyone who ever listened to him play, who liked his songs, who stopped at his street corner or—Patrick’s stomach turns—gave him money: that was coercion. If his nightmare is instead a true memory, he has been playing away the free will of his listeners for exactly as long as he can remember.

Unbidden and horribly, Patrick’s thoughts turn to Pete. Pete, crow and then man, who looks at him so fondly. Who touches his cheek softly with something unreadable in his eyes. Pete, who heard him play once and has followed him since. Pete, who is compelled to follow.

Patrick wrenches his thoughts away again. He has no wish to drown in heartbreak. Not when he is crawling steadily towards a glade bursting with ill-intentioned fae. Instead he bends his mind to how he can use his terrible gift. He thinks of Andy, willing to do whatever he asked without question in exchange for a single song. He thinks of Andy, hearing him practice through the walls, hearing him record delectable tracks in his bedroom, and craving more of it, the taste of Patrick’s music on his tongue, delicious velvet slipping over his ears. He thinks of Andy’s barely-contained intensity and wonders if he was the one in control all along: if Andy has been bespelled ever since he first heard Patrick play.

If that is so, then Patrick did not need to run away. And he did not need to trade away his best, now forgotten, song. Music everyone will listen to. Music that will make people come and stay. Patrick can use this. He just has to think of how.

*

They emerge into an empty green clearing. It is silent and still, undisturbed by insects or wildlife, and the air is charged with spent magic. The air itself seems to thrum and glow, trails of power chasing one another through the sunbeams. Otherwise, there are no traces of the fae. Patrick is not sure what he expected: after all, it is not a full-moon night.

But this is where it started. This is the beginning of the map. This is the clearing where Patrick opened his eyes for the first time in his life, the first place he can ever remember. If the road goes back further, he does not know how to follow it, because the person who walked it wasn’t him.

This is where the Alchematician bade him to go. So here he is.

He scans the glade and does not see any answers.

Patrick is aware of Pete drawing near to his side, though he tries not to be. “Patrick,” Pete says, his voice kind but insistent. Of course it is kind. Has Pete ever spoken a cruel word to him? No: he probably hasn’t been able to. Patrick bound them up so tight with his treacherous music, the Pete he knows is probably nothing like Pete with free will. What an idiot he’s been, dazzled by his own illusion. Patrick’s heart contracts with bitterness.

“Patrick,” Pete says again, letting his feather-light touch flutter to Patrick’s shoulder. Patrick snatches himself away, burned and horrified by the depravity of it, the sick coercion and control that allows this all to play out like he might imagine it, Pete touching him as if he wants to when really, somewhere buried deep within him, there is the real version of Pete, Pete’s real wishes, probably recoiling, probably trying to take back control, while Patrick’s enchantment forces him—compels him—

“Patrick!” The third time Pete speaks his true name, Patrick’s attention crystallizes back to the present moment. “I think I know, now, why the fae want you. She must have been watching me, at least some of the time, through all the long years. To make sure I was no closer to having a heart, no closer to wanting one. And she must have heard you, just as I did. Hearing you play just once would not be enough for a creature like Heldega. I think that we have been running not from violence or capture, but from an… invitation to play for her court.” Pete looks down at himself, somehow still beautiful in baggy plaid shorts and too-small Hawaiian shirt that exposes his tanned navel when he moves his arms, and smiles wryly. “Of course, I expect she will be bent on violence or capture now. She will not like that I am human.”

The world is a hot, nauseous buzz in Patrick’s ears. He finds that he hopes the faerie queen kills him. How else can he be stopped? Even if he never played again—and the sorrow that moves palpably within him at the thought is inconceivable, it is tremendous, Patrick knows instinctually that he will never be able to give it up, no matter what playing costs those around him—he does not know how to undo all the enchantments he has already worked. How many people have heard him play? Have ambled past, hearing just snatches, or have sat and listened devotedly? In a lifetime he could never find them all. Even if he found them, he does not know how he would undo it.

Patrick is lost in his own misery, but Pete is still speaking. Shy now, Pete crouches in the grass to pick at the clover, stealing glances up at Patrick through his bangs. “As to my being human,” Pete begins carefully. “It occurs to me that there is one heart that… well… I wouldn’t hope it, wouldn’t dream it, and yet—I haven’t feathers anymore, have I?” Pete is smiling, bashful, and keeps looking at Patrick like there is nothing in the world that pleases him more than the fact of Patrick’s being there, each time he looks.

Politely, Patrick turns away from Pete and vomits in the clover.

Pete is startled to his feet. He takes a faltering step nearer. Patrick glares back at him, trembling with rage at his own self, and demands savagely, “There must be a way to break enchantments. To free people who have been bewitched. Isn’t there?”

Pete’s face cycles through several nuanced expressions that Patrick cannot read. Does not want to read. Patrick never wants to look at Pete again, truly: Pete’s face, Pete’s human face, is the ultimate proof of his wickedness. Pete the crow told him more than once: he did not want a heart. He did not want to be restored. Every irreversible thing Patrick has done to him has been against his will.

“There are a few,” says Pete guardedly. “But I haven’t—”

Whatever Pete hasn’t done, Patrick doesn’t hear it. Because at that moment a voice punctures the fraught scene unfolding between them. It is a voice Patrick knows well. Bored, it says, “How much corn syrup is in your heart? It is too sweet for my taste, this saccharine scene, lovers torn asunder by misunderstandings.”

Joe, who has risen to his feet from the shaded base of a tree where he had been sitting, waves a hand distastefully. “Let me lay real troubles at your feet.”

Patrick cannot believe what he is seeing. It is Joe, but it also is not Joe.

Joe steps into the light. Sunlight bursts and explodes where it hits his golden armor. His breastplate is encrusted with river rocks and large, uncut jewels, unimaginable wealth side-by-side with worthless stone. Even his chainmail shimmers, hazy glittering gold. He holds his pointed golden helmet against his hip as casually as a catcher’s mitt. His other hand rests on the hilt of his five-foot sword which is, incidentally, also made of gold.

The hardest part is Joe’s face. His eyes are all pupil, blacker than midnight beneath brown, half-curled eyelashes. His teeth come to points—not just the canines, but all of them, his smile serrated like a shark’s. A true memory, then, the mouths of the fae in this clearing. Joe’s ears poke up through his mess of curls, tapering at the very tips, just as pointed as the teeth. Worse than the things that are different are the things that are the same: his voice, the shape of his smile and his eyes, the familiar, friendly set of his face, the lines in his cheeks that accompany his easy, open-mouthed smile. The way he stands, the way his weight is distributed between his feet. His hair, his eyebrows, even his height. In every way but one, Joe is the same Joe he’s always known.

But Joe is also a faerie.

“Queen Heldega the Silverwitch is not your enemy, Patrick,” says Joe. Patrick is utterly numb. He can see Joe’s mouth move, hear sounds come out, but they do not form words. They remain simply sounds, incomprehensible. “She is not the one who stole your memories. Why do you flee from her messages, her messengers? If there is anyone who can help you get your memories back, anyone who can protect you from the lies of crows and the deceitful magicks of unbound fae, it is the Queen. She is the fairest, the kindest, and the most just. And she favors you by seeking an audience. Come to her court, Patrick. Bow before my queen, and she can make your dreams come true.”

Joe—and accepting that this is Joe is already a major hurdle that Patrick is not entirely ready to move beyond—is throwing around a lot of words Patrick wouldn’t be able to attach meaning to on his best day. Pete, however, is on the ball. Using his ruffled-feather voice, he sneers, “Unbound fae? Is that what you’re calling them—the ones who won’t kneel? Just because they aren’t bound to her doesn’t mean they’re ignorant, disorganized, unprincipled rabble. Seems to me that it’s the ones with power who are motivated to lie and manipulate those around them—seems to me that merchants are reasonably honest, given that they can’t prosper if their goods are only tin painted gold.”

That last, Patrick is sure, was a jab aimed at Joe’s ostentatious armor. Gold is soft, Patrick knows, soft but not light. It does seem a foolish choice for a suit of armor. Unmatched for flair, though, he must admit.

“Patrick, has he harmed you?” Joe is speaking again. He has dropped his helmet to the dirt. He is drawing his flashing golden sword. “How did he trick your heart out of you?”

“Trick me?” Patrick repeats dumbly. Joe is advancing on Pete with his sword, and his fury looks real. Patrick is having trouble making sense of how Joe can be a faerie knight and a liar and a spy for an evil queen but still invested in looking out for him, still defending his honor with the same devotion that has characterized their entire friendship.

His brain may be having trouble keeping up with currently unfolding events, but there is nothing wrong with Patrick’s body. It is a simple thing, less than a thought and easier than breathing, to step between the point of Joe’s sword and Pete’s chest. Feeling just bold enough to be reckless, Patrick leans forward until Joe’s blade is pressing into his chest, indenting his hoodie.

“My heart,” Patrick hisses, “was freely given.” Pete is the one who isn’t free, the one who never gave—couldn’t give—consent. Patrick’s hands tighten into fists even though he is unarmed, unarmored, and leaning onto the tip of a sword held by his best friend. This morning Patrick hates himself, and as a result, he’s feeling rather destructive.

“Patrick, let me help you,” Joe says appealingly. Genuine confusion shows on his familiar, strange features. He is using Patrick’s name an awful lot, Patrick notes, as if trying to remind Patrick of their long history, of Joe’s claim on him. Without joy, Patrick realizes that this is one friendship in which he can be assured he never enchanted or coerced.

Someone other than Patrick coerced Joe into this friendship.

“How long?” Patrick demands. “How long have you been in her service? Have you always been? When we met—was that an accident, or were you assigned to me?” He thinks about his ‘gift,’ his skill with music, his terrible ability to compel others with his songs. He would be a valuable courtier, wouldn’t he, for a power-hungry faerie queen?

Joe appears to be genuinely sorrowful as he answers. “Most of us… do not move through the mortal world, without… purpose.” This is a way of answering without answering, Patrick is aware. Patrick also no longer feels qualified to evaluate what’s truth and what’s lies. So he decides to buy in, to believe it: to believe that it is possible for their friendship to be true even if it’s built on falsehoods.

It’s not as if Patrick is above reproach, on the legitimacy of relationships front.

“Okay,” says Patrick, accepting it, accepting the whole impossible tangle. “And what is your assignment today?”

Joe hesitates again, looking pained. “It’s not just assignments,” he protests. “You must believe that I care for you. I let you go, didn’t I? I encouraged you to move to the city. I believed in you. I still do. I want—I want only good things for you.”

“But there is an assignment,” Patrick prompts, without accusation. He can feel Pete’s shifting energy at his back, his warm heart, his racing heartbeat. Something sharp in Patrick answers. Why not go with Joe, Patrick wonders? If he is to be a weapon, if he is to compromise and rob the will of everyone around him, and if he has selected this fate for himself—whoever he was when he chose it—then why not join this faerie court? He could get a doublet, stone-encrusted to match Joe. He could play music without conscience, enchant his listeners for their pain or their pleasure, be with his best friend and really make something of himself as a musician. There is no honest way for him to do this anywhere else, Patrick is realizing.

So why not go with Joe?

“Queen Heldega was not pleased when you came to the city. She perceives a dangerous disaffiliativeness among the unbound urban fae—a reluctance to bend the knee or swear allegiances. She liked you better in the suburbs, where she could more closely guard the influences on you. And yet what you have made of yourself here is quite promising. She feels that you are ready to join her court, now, as you were not ready before.” Joe grimaces, forcing out the next bit. “I am to bring you to her. From the moment you were given the Sight, I have been tasked with bringing you back to court. You will not be forced,” Joe hastens to add. “Once you are there. You will choose. The Silverwitch will offer to restore your memories, to wrest them away from the half-breed siren who robbed you, and offer you an honored place in her court. You may refuse her, if you wish, and she will let you go. But you must come. I cannot let you elude me any longer. You must come.”

Joe’s words are underscored by the reluctant pressure of his sword at Patrick’s chest. Joe’s eyes, black but still so expressive, tell Patrick, I don’t want to stab you. But if I have to, I will.

“Don’t trust a word he says,” Pete breathes into Patrick’s ear. “He belongs to her. Oathbreaker, oathbreaker.”

But where else is Patrick supposed to go?

“What will happen to Pete, if I go with you?”

“Nothing,” says Joe, “that wasn’t going to happen to him anyway.”

The glade explodes into violence.

Chapter Text

Mortal men, men with hearts, can die.

This is a feature that is relatively unique. It sets them apart from many other creatures, including faeries, elves, and enchanted crows. The fae are not so much immortal as they are undying; they are notoriously difficult to kill with any kind of permanence, and if they do age, they do it far too slowly for any mortal to observe in the span of a single lifetime.

Mortal men with hearts are especially vulnerable to having their throats cut from behind, or being stuck in the heart with daggers.

“I will cut his throat,” snarls someone Pete cannot see, someone who has crept up behind him and placed a shivering iron knife against his Adam’s apple. Several things happen in quick succession after this: the golden knight whips his sword away from Patrick’s chest, snagging Patrick’s hoodie with a violent ripping sound, and pulls it back so it quivers level with Pete’s eyeballs, two inches to the left of his head; Patrick clutches his hoodie shut as if it is a mortal wound and moves forward and then back in fruitless, desperate movements, because there is no room for him in between Pete and this death; and Pete pees, just a little, due to mortal peril and also a very different notion of urinary control in the avian kingdom.

It is obvious to everyone that neither Patrick’s good intentions nor the knight’s golden sword will be sufficient to stop the newcomer from cutting Pete’s throat. Pete thinks distractedly to himself that melting out of thin air is a very good trick that never would have worked on him when he was a crow. Crows, like cats, can see straight through enchantments.

The iron bites deeper into Pete’s throat when he swallows. Next to Pete’s ear, the interloper’s breath is warm and slightly ticklish as he speaks. “Harm the minstrel and I will spill king’s blood on neutral ground. This will be considered an act of war, and your Lady will be in violation of her treaty with the Free Folk.”

The golden knight sputters, detracting from his overall menace. As does the tremor in his arm from holding his sword cocked back, elbow next to his ear, at a threatening angle. Perhaps realizing this, he lowers the blade to waist-height. “If you spill his blood, my Lady violates nothing!”

“Ah, but I was not even here. You killed him in an unprovoked attack. That is what the witness will attest—will you not, Patrick?” The interloper sounds entirely too merry as he bandies about Pete’s death.

Patrick’s face alternates between horror, indignation, and rage. “Put that knife down right frigging now, Andy Hurley,” he spits. Hearing the name, Pete is able to place the interloper’s voice: it is the troll, the song-thief. Patrick’s roommate. Pete relaxes a little. There may be a knife at his throat, but at least he knows who’s holding it. He can guess at the troll’s motives, at his likeliest course of action. He wields Pete’s death, yes, but he is not a wholly unknown entity.

Besides which, Pete does not think Patrick will let any harm come to him. Pete’s a man again, isn’t he? You must have a heart to be a man. Pete has been watching humans for longer than he ever was one, and he has learned through observation that hearts are not given lightly.

Patrick does something unexpected, then. He balls his hands into fists, squeezes his eyes shut, and sings. “No harm will come to Pete,” he sings. The tune is unsteady at first, but his voice is full, rich, certain. Beautiful. “Throats uncut, traps unsprung. Arms unbound, heart unfound. Pete remains a crow.”

And just like magic—just exactly like magic—the blade drops from Pete’s throat. He gasps, replacing his shallow sips of air with a lung-emptying gulp of it. He rubs at his throat and turns to face his assailant accusingly. But Andy, yellow-eyed and asymmetrically horned, is staring through him. The golden knight steps sideways around him as if he isn’t even there, brandishing his golden sword at the troll.

“You’ll come with me, hedge knight,” growls Joe. “You’ll throw yourself upon the mercy of my Lady, and you will learn that her justice is terrible and her kindness is cruel. She will hear of the attempt you made on Patrick’s life.”

Patrick and Pete stare at each other, wide-eyed and wondering. “What just—” Pete starts to ask.

“Sssh,” Patrick hisses, interrupting. He glances at Joe, who is binding Andy’s hands behind his back with golden thread that is surely stronger than it appears. Patrick mouths, “They think you’re a crow.”

“Caw,” Pete whispers back. He has never seen anything like it.

*

Patrick agrees to come peacefully to meet Queen Heldega. He doesn’t see another way to lay this matter to rest. His one condition is that if someone tries to manhandle or restrain Pete in any way, ‘peacefully’ is no longer an option, and they will out find out together what kind of damage he can do. Perhaps because Joe now thinks that Pete is a still a crow, or perhaps because no one thinks Patrick can actually do much damage, he is amenable to this condition. Patrick trusts and does not trust Joe: he knows it is a trap, but he doesn’t see another direction to move in. He is not willing to stay still.

As for Andy, Patrick doesn’t know what he thinks. He is having a hard time wrapping his head around a scenario in which someone who looks so much like a villain is actually a good guy. And the whole knife-at-Pete’s-throat thing didn’t really make him come off as a good guy. And Patrick wants his song back. Andy took advantage, dealing with him like that before he knew the rules.

(Of course, he probably assumed Patrick did know the rules, based on his demonstrated tendency to use magic. Patrick remembers, suddenly, when they first met. Patrick had come to the apartment to decide if he wanted to rent what is now his room. Andy, intimidating, intense, and taciturn, had said, “You have no objection to living among the Folk?” Patrick remembers thinking that this was an unusual way to refer to vegans, but he was new to the city. He didn’t know the slang.)

(Shit.)

It turns out there is no magical travel shortcut that can get them to the faerie queen’s court. Joe leads them over the stream, empty of fae, and out through the trees. They emerge somewhere Patrick doesn’t recognize: a nondescript suburban neighborhood that is certainly not the one he is from. If he had to guess, based on landmarks on the horizon and geographical and architectural features of where they are, that they are several miles away from where he entered the glade. Patrick considers that there may be more than one way into the faerie clearing, that it is not actually part of his woods, but somewhere not quite anchored in traditional physical space: some amalgamation of noplace and everyplace along the train line.

Joe keeps his sword out in front of him, guiding Andy along. He has bound Andy’s hands up in his golden chain. Pete walks with his hand on Patrick’s shoulder, bobbing along with the lengths of their bodies brushing together, as if he would still be sitting there if he could. Patrick gets the sense that Pete takes comfort from feeling smaller, feeling pulled along and shielded by Patrick, feeling like he could crawl into Patrick’s hoodie if he wanted to. Shyly, not daring to look, Patrick slips a hand around Pete’s waist, snugging their hips up tight. Pete relaxes into the touch. Patrick feels a guilty pang, remembering that the only reason Pete feels safe with him is because he’s been enchanted to, but he can’t quite stop himself from feeling comforted and warmed by the contact.

They make quite the procession: Patrick in torn jeans, dirty hoodie, and hat; Pete in those cargo shorts and that horrible Hawaiian shirt, now with grass stains; a very angry troll with yellow eyes and tree bark armor being marched at golden swordpoint; and a faerie knight clad head to toe in golden plate, scowling.

Joe marches them along the tracks to the nearest train station. They clamber onto benches and sit among daytrippers and straggling commuters, waiting for the next southbound passenger train, and unbelievably, no one gives Joe or Andy a second look. A few people cast sideways glances at Pete’s outfit, though. Or maybe they’re seeing him as a crow. Patrick isn’t sure how widely his enchantment applies, but he assumes you have to actually hear his music in order to be bewitched by it.

Anyway, ridiculously, they sit and wait for the train. Pete eschews the bench and sits on the dirty concrete, stroking its rough grain wonderingly. It is the first time in hundreds of years he has had fingers. Even dirty pavement is a revelation. Pete leans against Patrick’s legs, tipping his head onto Patrick’s knee, and laces the fingers of one hand loosely through Patrick’s own. Patrick’s heart hammers in his throat so hard he fears he will choke on it. His mouth tastes like heartbeats.

Pete is enchanted, he reminds himself, trying not to luxuriate in the feel of the crow-king against him. The cruel part—and magic always has a cruel part, doesn’t it—is that while Pete is enchanted, Patrick is not.

Patrick is just plain old, mundanely, head-over-heels, stupid in love.

Andy begins to growl low in his throat, like a frightened dog, as the train thunders into the station. He turns vaguely green as their ridiculous party boards the train. “It’s the iron,” Pete murmurs into Patrick’s ear. Patrick gets goosebumps everywhere Pete’s breath touches. “Iron makes them sick.”

They are seated on the first floor of the train, facing each other, knee-to-knee in cramped quarters. The greenish double-layer of window glass casts the compartment into light the color of beach glass. Patrick wonders about the sword: what does the glamour make of the sword? Maybe everyone else sees Joe as a man with a cane, sees Andy (whose head and horns are in his hands, between his legs, his growling growing louder and distinctly moan-like as the train lurches out of the station) as someone who gets motion sick.

Joe cannot decide at whom he most wants to glare suspiciously, so he alternates. His glares to Patrick are interspersed with an appealing softness, as if he desperately wants Patrick to forgive him but dares not ask. “The Silverwitch can restore you,” Joe says quietly, after the silence has stretched past comfort. “She can return what was taken. You can be whole, Patrick.”

Patrick, tracing the shape of Pete’s hand with the lightest of touches, is somewhat distracted. “Except for whatever parts that deal would cost me,” he says. He does not take his eyes off Pete. This is the end, Patrick knows, or close to it. He can adore Pete now without shame, without apology, because he is going to give up everything to keep him safe. He does not have much time left for adoring.

And Pete is so, so beautiful. His ragged, feathery hair, black and silky and hanging in his eyes. The warm liquid brown of those eyes, flecked with gold; the way his eyelids squint and crinkle when he smiles. His wide, smiling lips. His flat white teeth. The smell of him, wild and dusty. The burning heat beneath his gold-brown skin. If Pete is the last thing he ever sees, he will be happy.

Patrick doesn’t know what’s going to happen. What he’s going to do. But he knows he might not be him anymore, after he does it. So he strokes Pete’s dear hand, tries to forget about things like Joe and magic and betrayal, and lets himself, just this once, stare.

*

They take the train to the heart of the city, but their journey isn’t yet done. Andy drops to his knees and retches on the train platform. He is green and wobbling. Joe is holding up much better, but he doesn’t look 100% either. No wonder he never wanted to leave the suburbs. Patrick wonders how Andy has coped, living all these years in an iron forest.

Joe leads them down a narrow, gritty flight of maintenance stairs that Patrick is certain they should not be on. It lets them out in dark metal tunnel below the tracks. The ceiling hangs heavy with wires and pipes. Patrick has never been particularly claustrophobic before, but he considers starting now.

“This way,” says Joe, so down the access tunnel they walk.

As they trudge, Andy begins to moan again. “Let me go,” he suggests to Joe. Andy’s bone-handled dagger clanks against Joe’s armored hip. “You’ve got your quarry. What threat am I? I am choking on this air. I cannot breathe it.”

Joe is unmoved. “You threatened my Lady,” he says mildly. “You will face her judgment. If she allows you to live—if you swear fealty to her—the iron will not bother you so much anymore. It is one of the many blessings Heldega bestows upon loyal fae.” Joe goes on musingly, “It is curious, that you were so eager to kill the crow-king, so eager to stop me from harming the minstrel. What is your interest, I wonder? What game do the unbound play?”

Andy spits onto the already filthy iron floor. “You say unbound as if freedom is a curse. As if we are loyal to nothing. We are not gormless fools just because we do not kneel. I am not a slave; this does not mean I act randomly and without purpose. Kneeling to your Lady would leave a fouler taste in my mouth than any amount of iron.”

Joe sneers and prods Andy in the back with his sword, making the troll stumble. The skin of Andy’s palms hisses, burning, where he catches himself on the raw metal floor. They walk in silence after that, Pete gripping Patrick’s hand so hard it’s painful. Patrick squeezes back just as hard.

Eventually, the tunnel ends. They go up another set of winding stairs and emerge into shadowed, dirty daylight.

They are inside a vast, abandoned terminal. The great glass ceiling overhead is filthy and brackish, clouding out all light. Sunlight pierces the room through broken panes, of which there are many. A great unmoving clock hangs on the far wall. Everywhere there are pillars and blank display boards. Patrick understands where they are: the old train depot. Once, this terminal was beautiful and bustling. It was abandoned, boarded up, broken half a century ago. Ground given to neighborhood decline, crime, poverty. Ground ceded against an onslaught of age and time, industrial collapse and neglect.

Glamour flickers at the edge of Patrick’s eyes. He sees two versions of the terminal at once: one, dust and broken glass, rotten wood and detritus. The other, clean and shining, with trees growing in place of pillars, with a soft floor of grass and flowers, with light streaming in through gaps in the tree branches. Intricate vines, heavy fruits, and lush flowers catch and reflect the healthy, nourishing sunlight.

Patrick is in an abandoned train station. He is also in a meadow. He understands before he sees the carved vine throne: this is the court of the faerie queen. This is the court of the Silverwitch.

A woman sits upon the throne. She is dark-skinned and achingly beautiful. Her hair falls in endless silver curls, all around her face and down her shoulders. Her eyes are the green of living things, of spring’s first tentative shoots. Her mouth is fuller and prettier than Pete’s, her teeth daintily pointed behind them. Her cheeks glow rosy. She wears an ornate damask gown that would be magnificent on anyone else, but on her is dwarfed by her own opulent beauty. The fabric hangs in waves of black and green, embroidered with a complicated pattern of silver. An opal half the size of Patrick’s fist burns on her forehead, cupped in a nest of silver vines.

“Welcome,” she says in a voice like music, and Patrick cannot help it. He falls to his knees before her, weeping. She is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. The clear harmonic tones of her voice undo him, because in a lifetime of pursuing composition and music and beauty, he has found it: he has found Art.

Pete’s knees knock against Patrick’s back as Pete nudges him urgently. “Patrick,” he murmurs. “Patrick!” Patrick looks up and sees, through his tears, that Queen Heldega’s gaze has fallen on Pete. He feels the thin threads of glamour he wove snapping. Beside him, Joe starts, seeing Pete as a man again.

“The minstrel I know,” Heldega says musically. “And if my eyes are not deceived, he brings with him the crow-king! But who is the third, dear Knight? What rabble have you brought before me?”

Using his golden sword across the troll’s shoulders, Joe forces Andy to his knees. “One of the unbound, my Lady. He made threats against you.”

Andy bares his teeth. His bottom canines jut like tusks, giving him a yellow underbite. “I am brought before you as an emissary of the Free Folk.”

“You are brought before her as a prisoner,” Joe spits, bearing down on the sword. Its golden edge nicks the tough skin on the back of Andy’s neck.

Patrick feverishly sways in and out of the Silverwitch’s power. He can tell, dimly, that the air is thick with glamour, that he has the power to see through it but not the will; Pete’s knees continue to pull at his attention, Pete’s hands fluttering at his shoulders, birdlike. But he is in a fog of adoration for Heldega.  He loves her with the whole of his muddy heart. He desires nothing more than to live and die in service of her, to fulfill her every whim.

“Who do you serve, prisoner?” asks the Silverwitch. Her voice is rich with laughter.

“Not who,” snarls the troll. “What. I am a Free Knight of the Realm, and like all those of my order, I have sworn to protect humans from faerie cruelty and mischief. To undo your wickedness and shorten your arm. We do not recognize your ill-gotten sovereignty. To us you are queen of nothing more than treachery and ashes.”

Andy’s impassioned speech is met with pleased laughter from the Queen. Patrick is swept up in her grace, her diplomatic composure. He would give anything to hear that laugh again. “How precious,” she says merrily. “And I suppose you would not object to the crow-king taking his throne back?”

“We would not object to war or pestilence or famine. We would not object to a meteor strike! Anything that would unthrone you and set free the fae and humans who have been pressganged into your service, Silverwitch, would be welcomed by my order.”

The Queen looks affronted for the first time. “Pressganged?” she asks in apparent horror. “Patrick, my love, rise and tell this beast that you would serve freely, with deepest pleasure, for love of me. Do you see sticks or strings or carrots, troll? He acts of his own accord. You cannot call trickery all that does not fit with your view of me. I am no tyrant, you unbound fool. If my throne is built of bones and blood, all has been freely given.”

Patrick rises to his feet and takes a stuttering half-step towards Andy. He has insulted the Queen, thinks Patrick reasonably. I must cut off his head.

He takes another half-step. Before he can go further, Pete catches his trailing wrist and closes the distance between them, quiet, quick. Pete’s other hand drifts lightly along the curve of Patrick’s cheek, ghosting over his jaw, turning his head with the most fleeting of touches. Patrick stares into Pete’s lovely, honey-brown eyes, set off by dark brows and lashes, and feel the world roll over around him.

Pete darts his head forward with the skittish canniness of a crow, and presses his lips against Patrick’s.

Pete’s mouth is hot, hot and yielding. His lips press against Patrick’s and then melt open. Patrick’s eyes slip closed and then open, as if for the first time. The world narrows to Pete’s kiss. Patrick returns it insistently, finding his own tongue forceful, starving, seeking solace in the wild, wet warmth of Pete’s mouth.

He could lose himself in this kiss as easily as in the Queen’s enchantment. Thinking it startles Patrick and he pulls away, breathing hard. Enchantment. Pete’s lips are pink and shining, his eyes soft and earnest and the most beautiful thing Patrick can ever remember seeing. The Queen’s glamour has fallen off of him like scales off his eyes. Out of the corner of his eye, she is seething, wicked, serrated and rusty as an old knife. She is not gentle or kind or beautiful. He does not wish to please her, or ever again hear her terrible, sawing laugh.

Pete’s hand is squeezed tight around Patrick’s wrist, his own breath coming swift as a crow’s hot heartbeat. “True love’s kiss,” Pete whispers, lips twitching into a bashful smile, eyes cutting down and then back shyly. “Heard a rumor it breaks spells and enchantments.”

The Silverwitch’s fury pours from her scabbed black lips in a scream. When Patrick tears his eyes off Pete and looks at her, she looks unchanged, yet the world is different. It is the same jarring sense of parallel as when he looked through the hole in Pete’s wing and Saw the world for the first time. Magic has been stripped away, leaving everything as it always was, but with Patrick fundamentally changed—altered—different.

She stands and hurls a blast of silver light at Pete. “You gave away your throne for fear of loneliness,” she declares imperiously. “You are weak, craven, selfish. You do not deserve to rule!”

The blow does not land. It deflects off him. Pete smiles, looking for a moment like a wolf and not a crow, and says, “Magic rolls off of crow feathers, Heldega. You were the first and last to ever enchant me.”

“End him!” Her yell shatters the air. The meadow around them begins to blacken and curl up in high-speed decay.

Maybe magic doesn’t stick to Pete, but arrows do. No sooner has she screamed it than a black-feathered shaft erupts from Pete’s shoulder. For one disbelieving second, Patrick thinks that Pete is turning back into a crow. A second later the whistle of the arrow through the air hits his ears, and he realizes what has happened. Pete has been shot.

A second after that, Pete slumps sideways, caroms off of Patrick, and collapses to the withering mossy ground.

Simultaneous waves of fury and grief crash over Patrick. The emotions hit with a physical force. His brain skips, catching on what Pete said a moment ago, too late, too late, feathered stuck and bleeding Pete.

Magic rolls off of crow feathers.

Patrick is on his knees again, bending over Pete, his hands moving uselessly in the air over Pete’s chest. Pete is keening with the pain and blood is everywhere, utterly destroying Patrick’s Hawaiian shirt, which by the way was always his favorite one, not that this is the important part of this scenario, but still. Patrick doesn’t know much about first aid or arrow wounds but the shaft is buried deep. It doesn’t look like a fatal shot—it is buried in the fleshy spot where Pete’s shoulder and chest meet, above the heart and not in it, but Patrick certainly doesn’t know where all the important arteries are, and based on the sounds Pete is making Patrick can tell he is in so, so much pain.

All around them there is a sudden skirmish: Heldega’s knights emerging in force and knights dressed like Andy melting out of the trees to assail them. The golden knight who loosed the arrow has been tackled to the earth, a knife hilt protruding from his neck, and it is this seconds-too-late attack that knocked the arrow out of its path, driving it into Pete’s shoulder and not his heart. Patrick doesn’t have time for any of it, the screams or the clash of weapons or the duels spinning out around them. The world narrows back down to Pete. Being shot with an arrow is like being kissed: it focuses the mind to one burning point, eclipsing all else.

Patrick should ask practical questions, like should I leave the arrow in or pull it out or are you okay or are you dying or what can I do, but when he opens his mouth what he asks is, “I didn’t—I didn’t enchant you?”

Whimpering, Pete rasps, “What?” His blood is rushing out of his body, pouring out between Patrick’s fingers where he’s trying to apply pressure to the slippery wound. “Patrick, I’ve been shot.”

“I am aware of that!” In his panic, Patrick feels slightly crazy. He is losing his grip. “But I—I thought with my music, I made you—I forced you to, um,” and it is the wrong moment for feeling awkward but Patrick is blushing like crazy and worried, even now, about sounding like a presumptuous asshole, “you know. Want to be around me. Like me. Um, kiss… um. Do mouth things with me.”

Pete looks at Patrick like he literally cannot fucking believe they are having this conversation, the particular arch of his eyebrows asking Now?! in an incredulous nonverbal tone that Patrick can hear as clearly as if Pete had spoken it. Or maybe it’s just the pain and the rapid blood loss that Pete’s face is reacting to, and not any particularly embarrassing or ridiculous behavior out of Patrick.

“Were you trying to enchant me to do those things?”

“What? No! Of course not! I would—I might want it but I would never—”

“So shut up,” Pete advises, gasping. He has never sounded more like a human or less like a crow. “When we met you asked me what I wanted. And at first I thought it was the music, the peculiar thing it made me feel. But you are the music, Patrick. There’s nothing your songs made me feel that isn’t—isn’t in you. You are the want. You always were.”

Patrick is stunned into silence by this revelation. He already knows he loves Pete. Pete’s human form is proof of that, sparing him the usual crippling self-doubt. But the idea that it is not coercion—that the way Pete looks at him is natural, organic, is a true reflection of Pete’s own wanting—what Patrick felt, when they kissed—true love’s kiss, Pete called it.

It kind of felt like it.

“Patrick,” Pete says, and his voice is weak and raspy and annoyed and scared and, yes, resonant with fondness, “do you think we could possibly, I mean if it’s convenient for you, have this conversation at a time when I am not shot and no one is trying to kill us? I know this is a terribly romantic setting, but this hurts very much and I think I would like to pass out now.”

Hands slick with Pete’s blood, embarrassment and pleasure and his own ridiculousness making his face flush, Patrick leans down and kisses Pete’s half-parted lips firmly. “Okay, but no dying,” Patrick says. It is a stupid time to grin but he feels himself grinning. He tears off a strip of the ruined Hawaiian shirt, which is not easy, emotionally, and clumsily binds the area around the arrow as tightly as he can. Pete cries out and moans while he does this, but being gentle isn’t going to staunch the bleeding. “I will want you alive so we can do mouth things later.”

This is the best first aid Patrick can give him, for now. He needs to get Pete to a hospital, but to do that he needs to get out of this faerie melee and away from the insane queen who wants Pete dead. Around them, knights have fallen. Rather more bark-clad knights than golden ones, to Patrick’s eye. They are moving ever closer, trying to finish Pete off, and in the middle of it all Heldega is wild-eyed and hurling bursts of magic and screaming about war and ruin and her rightful claim.

Patrick fits Pete’s hands on top of the floral print bandage and presses them down. “Keep applying pressure, all right? I’m going to end this.”

“No dying,” Pete says faintly. He is fading fast. “Mouth things later.”

*

Patrick walks through a corridor of violence to Heldega’s throne. As he passes by knights locked in mortal combat, their struggles still. Duels break apart and their faces turn to him. No one in the terminal seems to breathe. What he says next has the power to end the war before it starts.

Heldega’s fists crackle with lightning. She is beautiful, still, though in a different and more terrible way than before. She stands resplendent, half a goddess, in the midst of the chaos. Around her, her magical forest dies and regrows in pulsing waves. He wonders how much power it is costing her, to pump life into these illusions. He hopes she is weak and distracted, her attention split across too many pieces of magic, her hand in too many fights, the strength of her arm guiding too many golden swords.

It is a feeble hope, but it is his best nonetheless.

“What is Pete’s life worth to you?” he asks. The whole world listens.

The Silverwitch’s voice is cruel and lovely as she replies, “A kingdom.”

Patrick hasn’t asked, since Pete got his heart back, whether his feelings have changed re: ruling his kingdom. He is not prepared to barter away Pete’s throne without an explicit go-ahead, and he isn’t convinced that things are going so well with Heldega in charge that he should hand over uncontested power to her, either.

“And if Pete does not wish to rule it?” Weak but ringing, the voice comes from behind Patrick. He whips around, seeing to his disbelief that somehow, Pete has gotten to his feet. Somehow, Pete stands proud, defiant, bleeding, brave. Blood seeps through his fingers where they are clamped whitely around his shoulder. His jaw is set, his face grey.

“I will forfeit my claim for Patrick’s freedom,” says Pete at the same moment Patrick, panicking, blurts out, “I will join your court for Pete’s life.”

The Silverwitch smiles wickedly, her gaze flicking from one to the other. “Joe didn’t tell me how sweet you two are,” she purrs. “Yet sugar does not forestall tragic endings—rather the opposite, in my experience. Even if he abdicates, my claim to the throne is not legitimate as long as Pete is wholeheartedly alive. As he cannot be trusted to remain a crow, I see no choice but for him to die. Then I will have you, minstrel, if I want you. You may refuse if you wish, but eventually you will beg to serve me. You’ll see. There is no place for you in your own world.”

Patrick’s mind races, careening from one unhappy ending to the next. It seems obvious that he will have to defeat Heldega before she ruins them both. It is rather less obvious how he can possibly do this. “I’ll stop you,” he says anyway, puffing out his chest and aiming for boldness and bravery. He escaped from a magicked crocodile and saved Pete from Joe’s golden sword, didn’t he? He broke a curse and restored a king’s heart.

Patrick Stump is kind of a hero.

So, kind of heroically, he juts his chin out and stalks nearer to the Silverwitch and bluffs wildly. He is close enough for her to gouge with her talon-like fingers, if she wanted to, and he tries to forget what the Alchematician warned: not a very good ward, one that would protect him from finding but not fighting. Because he’d given it his music, making it kind of a feedback loop of magic, so that one spell tried to draw off another and the power wasn’t enough for real protection.

“This is your one chance,” Patrick blusters, voice even, blinking and breathing at a steady measured rate, “to surrender what is rightfully Pete’s.”

“Or else?” she asks delightedly. It is clear that this all is a grand game to her, that Patrick’s feeble rushlight of power is a grand amusement instead of a threat.

“Or we’ll take it from you,” says Pete, voice warm and slow as honey. With Pete as his back, without looking, Patrick can pretend he isn’t hurt at all. Patrick can think about his eyelashes and his lips and the crooked smile that shows white teeth. Love blooms fierce in Patrick’s breast, and he hopes the strength spills back into Pete through their linked heartbeats. He hopes that’s how the magic works.

Patrick has another thought, poised between the brink of self-defensive action and being struck down. (The only reason he’s been allowed to get this close, with no weapon and no power and no plan, is because he’s entertaining her. Patrick knows this.) He didn’t give his music to the ward after all. He gave his passion for it—a lifetime of ardor and enthusiasm. This is not a tainted piece of him at all, Patrick realizes. In fact, it may be the strongest. It is the only piece of who he was before that survived the loss of his memories, of his first self. It was passion for music that sent him to the stream beside the market, it was passion that led him into that bargain, and it is passion that has driven him through his life ever since. That is not a half-magic, it is a whole one. It is the one consistent, golden chord that runs through his entire self, from start to finish, before and after any enchantment.

His music is not a dirty thing. His music is strong. His music is the very thread of him.

Patrick feels the ward hanging on his chest flare suddenly, hot and bright, scorching his skin. His instinct is to tear it off before it burns him, but instead he stretches some intangible part of himself, directing it into the ward and giving the power a way to flow out. He feels it filling him up, liquid gold and strong as sunlight, pooling in his tingling fingertips, tickling the bottom of his belly, trickling into his toes.

He grins, showing his teeth. They glow.

Perhaps sensing the heady power shift in the air, the Silverwitch throws out thick binding cords. They wrap around Pete’s wrists, ankles, neck, and he tumbles to the ground. The cords try to bind Patrick but they shrivel and fall away from his light. “Seize him!” she shrieks to the knight at her right hand, who has freshly dispatched his oaken foe. “Stop him! Kill him if you must!”

It is Joe. For one moment, gold sword burnished with blood, Joe hesitates. Patrick takes that moment to let the power build, echoing and resonating off his heart, and flow into his throat and his fists. Everywhere he directs it, power shines through his skin. The effect is as if he has swallowed a sun. Joe does not look golden anymore, not in Patrick’s bursting light.

Patrick lifts his hands and fills his lungs with air. “Cut him down!” cries the Silverwitch. She whips her own hands through the air in arcane configurations and hurls bolts of light and sound that seem to stop just short of Patrick. Below his notice, he has begun to hum. He is singing to himself in his head to a swelling new melody, and the words of the song insist that Pete is hale, Pete is safe, Pete is well and whole.

Joe still does not move. His face is torn with pain and indecision as he looks from Patrick to Queen Heldega, with love and fear in his eyes at once. The word tears from his lips, surprising them all: “No.”

“Fine,” snarls the Silverwitch. Without even looking, she flicks a sizzling ball of grey smoke in Joe’s direction. It catches him squarely in the stomach and knocks him back. There is a crack where his head connects with the earth and the smell of cooking meat. Patrick feels a wrench of grief and wants to go to him, but Heldega wrenches a shining silver knife from her own hip and twirls it deftly. “I’ll do it myself,” says she.

Patrick had rather hoped that magic was her only trick. He’s been doing a pretty good job of deflecting magic; he is less sure about his ability to turn aside knives.

“Last chance,” she says, smirking, “to surrender.” Patrick feels the light that surges through him compressing under the weight of her power, like an oncoming storm. He does not know how much longer he can hold it off of him and Pete.

Casually, lazily, she uses the tip of her knife to raise Patrick’s chin. He tries to knock her arm aside with his glowing fists but she dispels his motion with a gesture. Invisible iron bands clamp around Patrick’s wrists. She wasn’t even trying, before, he realizes with a sinking feeling. She has ten times the power he does—ten times ten times. He and Pete are already dead.

Behind him, Patrick can sense Pete doing something foolish, like casting about for a sword to impale himself on, as if he could end this with his death. As if Heldega would be satisfied with simple power, simple victory. As if there is any way she lets Patrick out of here without first taking his life. Patrick routes more of that sunbeam strength into protecting Pete, even from himself, into wrapping him in a soft bubble of good intentions, and feels the heat leaving him. The knife kisses his neck and Patrick feels cold.

“Gods and feathers!” Andy’s voice is strained, his attention mostly absorbed by the duel to the death he is currently losing. Blood pours out of wounds in his sides, on his arms, at his horned forehead. All of this does not mask the total exasperation in his voice. “Sing, goldentongue, lest you look on death fondly!”

Right. In all the excitement and slaughter, Patrick nearly forgot about singing.

Heldega has bound his hands but not his mouth. He opens it, feeling the knife bite and part his flesh at the first note off his tongue, and sings. He sings a beautiful, paralyzing spell. The Silverwitch’s arm stalls before she can finish her slash, leaving Patrick’s throat only quarter-cut. Her golden knights slow and sway and still. Patrick sings to break old curses and spin new ones. He sings about curses and luck and going home. He sings not to feel the white-hot pain of torn skin and muscle in his own throat. He sings that Pete is king.

Heldega is still frozen, rapt with listening, when Andy’s iron dagger cleaves her head from her shoulders. Her face doesn’t change, not even when it falls to the mossy floor, not even when it rolls. When her body touches the ground it bursts into clover, so that a moment after Andy’s killed her it’s like she never was. The Silverwitch is exorcised from Pete’s kingdom with a gust of malevolence and relief. Andy bends at the waist, panting. Patrick cannot tell how badly he’s hurt.

All around the terminal, golden knights are coming awake again. They look dazed, blinking slowly as if they don’t know where they are or how they got there. They look past Patrick and, one by one, kneel.

“My liege,” says one. “How can I serve you?”

Patrick turns too, and sees that Pete is standing there still, gripping his shoulder around the arrow though the torrent of blood has slowed to a carmine trickle. He looks as surprised as anyone. On his brow, a plait of thorns, flowers, and jet black feathers imply a crown.

There is one gold knight who is not kneeling: Joe. Feeling as if he’s moving through a dream, Patrick kneels not to a king but to the unmoving form of his best friend. Joe’s golden armor is a molten band around his belly, sloughing away in thick drizzles like honey, puddling around him as it cools. This is the source of the cooked meat smell, Patrick realizes. Joe is the cooked meat.

“Come on, asshole,” Patrick whispers. “I thought faeries were harder to kill than that.” He pushes sweaty curls back off Joe’s forehead and leans in close, hoping to hear his breath. He wants to remove the half-melted golden breastplate, dimly thinking this will make it easier to breathe, but is afraid of how much of Joe will come away with it. Patrick feels for the pulsing thread of life and light and music in him, and experimentally tries to push it out through his hands and into Joe. “Live,” he sings, his fingertips dancing along Joe’s forehead, Joe’s chest, pushing sunlight into his veins.

And Joe lives. Patrick isn’t sure if it was the singing or he just didn’t hear it before, but suddenly there is breath scraping through Joe’s chest, and Joe opens foggy black eyes. “So you’re a healer now too,” wheezes Joe, and Patrick figures that if he feels well enough to tease him, chances of survival are good. Joe’s gauntleted hand finds Patrick’s and squeezes. “Faeries are… notoriously hard to kill. This is a scratch.”  Getting the words out seems to cost him, and Patrick can see he is in tremendous pain. “Go to him,” Joe urges, jerking his chin in the direction of King Pete.

Patrick leans forward and brushes his lips against Joe’s forehead, singing in a whisper, “Find relief in sleep.” Then he does what Joe bids him.

He goes to Pete.

*

Pete wears the crown and takes the throne. But he still doesn’t want to be king.

When he sits in the Silverwitch’s throne that first day, the last of her forest wilts and dies and crumbles to less than dust. They are left in the musty, derelict terminal. There is no hint of green: reds and greys predominate. Dead knights lie in pools of spreading blood and live knights slump weakly against one another, roughly tending their wounds, or else kneel before their frowning king.

The sunlight streaming through the broken glass seems a tad more cheerful than before, Patrick thinks, in spite of the decided grimness of their unglamoured surroundings. And there are birds in the rafters—lots of them. Their chirps and caws give the impression of being in the woods, even if only granite columns and steel rafters are in evidence.

Pete looks different on a throne. Somehow, in grimy, blood-crusted Hawaiian print, with his casually ruffled hair and an indecorous slumping posture, he looks kingly. His eyes seem sharper. He is less familiar this way: Patrick has not memorized every line and indicator of this king’s face. There is something grand about Pete, but it is a heavy grandness, tinged with sorrow.

Frowning, Pete plucks the arrow from his shoulder. It slides out of the flesh easily, without complaint. It seems not to have been as deep as it looked. There is no gout of blood and only a small, shallow wound in the place Pete drew it from. Healer, Joe said.

Patrick considers the prospect shakily. He is decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of himself wielding any kind of power. Healing, though—helping—that sounds like a good thing. He likes it rather better than the prospect of forcing people to stand and sway on the sidewalk, listening to him play for hours, growing hungry and missing work and paling with exhaustion while Patrick sings their lives away.

These are not helpful thoughts. Pete’s eyes catch his and, king or no, they are soft with fondness and worry. Patrick stands before the throne, feeling strangely formal. Should he be offering obeisance? Should he call Pete my liege? An insane giggle wells in his chest and he realizes he’s nervous.

“My selfishness, my folly, are the direct cause of the misuse and harm wrought by the Silverwitch. It is my burden, then, to set things right.” Pete looks up at Patrick through eyelashes and bangs, shy. He is rather more cautious and sorrowful as a man than he ever was as a crow. His voice aches with weariness and Patrick thinks that it is his heart that is the real burden. There is a soft wormy rotten spot in it: a creeping black rot of sadness that threatens to spread until it eats away at his every moment.

Patrick makes up his mind to help Pete carry the burden of his heart, no matter what kind of weirdness that means for his life. It’s not like things were so normal before, anyway.

Patrick does kneel, then, and clasps Pete’s hands in his own. Their joined hands rest on Pete’s knees. Pete looks alarmed by the gesture. “Don’t,” Pete half-squawks, that glimmer of crow that’s still inside him showing. “You have a look on your face like you’re going to say something grand and sweeping and binding and stupid—”

“I am,” says Patrick levelly, staring into Pete’s eyes.

“—and there’s a lot of magic here, and how many times do I have to tell you bargains must be struck wisely because magic has a way of twisting them til you’re tangled up inside—”

“I know that,” says Patrick.

“—and this isn’t the life you ever wanted for yourself, Patrick Stump, and I watched you long enough to know it—”

“I chose this,” says Patrick quietly. He squeezes Pete’s hands, which he has significantly not tried to free. “I chose it when I was seven, and I chose it again when I met you, and I’m choosing it again now. This is exactly the life I want for myself.”

Pete clearly wants to continue objecting but can’t think of anything to say. His mouth hangs open uselessly, having spent all of his good arguments in one staccato burst.

“Whatever happened to true love’s mouth things?” Patrick teases gently. He’s never been one to strike careful bargains and he doesn’t mean to start now: in this moment he will trade absolutely anything to see Pete’s pained face remade into a smile.

“C’mon,” he cajoles, pulling Pete’s hands into his chest, making Pete lean down so their eyes are level. “I, Sir Pompous Tall Guy, hereby do swear, in the court of the Crow-King, before these witnesses most honorable, under the heavens and in the eyes of the gods, that I love you. That I will stand beside you whether you’re a crow or a monarch or a—a pizza delivery guy. That I will stay even when the sun fails and the music fades and the merriment dies around us. Pete. You have my heart. Now stop being stupid so we can make out.”

And in the end, at last, it doesn’t cost Patrick so very much to make Pete smile. The king ducks his head, bites his lip, and is still grinning when Patrick’s mouth finds and devours his happy, greedy smile.

*

After all the fuss, it turns out that Pete wears the crown and rules his kingdom for just long enough to dissolve the bargains and unfair allegiances made with Heldega. He establishes civil rule, assembling a quorum of fae creatures that will hear complaints, make balanced rulings and resolutions, and reach agreement on emergent matters that concern the good of the realm. Then he abdicates. Of all Heldega’s courtiers and lackeys and supposedly devoted subjects, there is no outcry. Pete’s sovereignty, and his decision to dissolve the Faerie Court, are both embraced widely. Not even the crocodiles complain.

Many of the Silverwitch’s golden knights swear loyalty to the Free Knights of the Realm, of which Andy is elected Knight Commander. Joe is not among them. His wounds heal slowly and he tells Patrick he is weary of violence after a mortal lifetime of killing at Heldega’s behest. The command to befriend Patrick, to grow to truly care for him and be cared for in return, was of a starkly different flavor. It woke in him a desire for something more than mindlessly wielding a golden sword. Instead, he begins to teach Patrick what he knows of spells and salves and enchantments, the rules both written and unwritten of living among the fae. And also how to haggle. Everyone is deeply concerned about Patrick’s bargaining style.

On the day Pete casts aside his crown, pulling the thing from his brow and discarding it beside his vacant throne, he catches up Patrick’s hands and says, “I’ve been a crow and I’ve been a king. Now I want to be a man. Run away with me.”

Patrick says, “No.”

Patrick does not want to run. For the first time, Patrick has found a home. A home of his own making—a familiar place filled with faces he recognizes. And when he really thinks about it, what good ever came to Pete from running? Patrick wants to stand still, to put down roots, to grow around and into whatever obstacles they face. To thrive and flourish right where they are: sharing a crappy apartment with a vegan troll in the city, and figuring out day by day who and what they are.

When he puts it like that, Pete can hardly disagree.

They open their own stall at the faerie market. The market is rather more bustling and cheery than Patrick remembers. Even without crowns, folk bow when Pete walks by, and murmurs ripple through the crowd. Every soul in attendance and then some come by to gape on their first night. The next month, and the month after, the stream of gawkers gives way to genuine customers. Patrick turns out to have a knack for reversing curses, casting minor enchantments, and healing all manner of flesh wounds. He is best at easing pain. With well-placed chords and their remaining stock of crow-king feathers, Pete and Patrick craft amulets, talismans, wards, and omens. They sell these to fae and humans alike, and don’t mind if anyone calls them hedge witches.

Curse-breaking and household sorcery are both reputable and challenging occupations, but Patrick’s real joy is still in his music. On full moon nights, he plays without hesitation, without a thought or care. Faeries dance circles around him, long hair and bright ribbons and glittering wings fanning out around them while they swirl in the moonlight.

He plays during the day, too, though not on his corner anymore. With Joe’s help, he is slowly charting the line between making music and enchanting. Most of the difference seems to lie in intention. “Stop trying to make people listen, to make people stay,” Pete advises, at least two limbs wrapped around Patrick, as is his wont at any time Patrick is not actively locomoting. “You don’t need to. I’m staying. Invite them instead. Leave room in the music for them to choose if they’re enchanted, to decide if your song reaches in through their ears and unlocks something inside of them.”

It is a complex distinction, a tricky bit of not-magic. But with practice, he’s getting better. Soon Patrick is singing songs that could only catch the ears of the desperate, and not long after that he will just be another guy with a guitar, except on full moon nights. Patrick desperately wants to be just another guy with a guitar. He wants to find out how good he is, when he pulls every last bit of magic out. He has a hunch he’ll still be pretty good.

(Although he’d probably be better, if Andy would give him his damn song back. Andy and Joe have reconciled their to-the-death differences in order to band together and jointly harass Patrick about his reckless bargaining tactics. They are contriving to teach him a lesson. Patrick refuses to be affected by this.)

They are at the market one night, bantering happily with one another and doing their usual custom, meeting new faeries and human adventurers and tweaking illusions and recharging amulets for regulars. Patrick has just sung a lullaby to help a woman with her recurrent nightmares when an auburn-haired faerie he distantly recognizes approaches the booth.

The faerie smiles a shark’s smile and tips his ostentatious suede cap at them, and Patrick remembers. Of course: this is the midwife of his second life. The auctioneer.

“You have done the Free Folk a great service in usurping the Silverwitch and ending her unjust rule,” says the auctioneer. His lips are stained red; Patrick knows not by what. There are shreds of something black and sinewy stuck in his teeth.

“Didn’t do it for you,” Patrick says brusquely. He may have fallen head over heels into Fairyland, but that doesn’t mean he trusts its inhabitants. And Joe thinks he hasn’t learned anything from his mistakes!

Pete, who is wearing the badly stained, poorly patched Hawaiian shirt because he now claims it is his favorite piece of clothing, looks up from the thin branches he’s tying up with catgut to elbow Patrick in the ribs. Faeries particularly dislike rudeness. Anyway, Patrick kind of did do it for them, at least by the transitive property.

The auctioneer has raised one extremely thin eyebrow. “We would offer you a boon,” he says, a little frostily. “Llelyana has agreed to return your memories and, if you wish, we will take back your gift. You will be… a normal boy again, and play your songs without fear.”

And never heal anyone again. Or ease their pain. Or help them protect themselves from faeries and worse monsters.

It had seemed like this was what he wanted: to get his whole self back, to have the barbs removed so he could be safe for others to be around again. But here at the point of choosing, Patrick finds without surprise that he’s already chosen. Chosen not once but three times, and each time meaning it. Good, bad, dangerous, human, this is the only person he’s ever been, as far as he’s concerned.

So Patrick doesn’t even hesitate. This time he perceives clearly the magnitude, the cost, his own folly. His own gain. “No thanks,” he says, casting a sidelong smile at Pete, his Pete, his dusty, shining Pete. “I kind of like things the way they are.”

And everyone lives happily ever after.