Oberon had turned her into a deer from the waist down, and nothing remained of yesterday’s snake-tail but the memory of leaves against her belly-plates.  Megan tapped cautiously on the trail with four small hooves. 

Oberon did it to amuse himself, and to annoy the Queen.  Titania wouldn’t hesitate to transmogrify Megan herself, but she did not appreciate Oberon’s play in metamorphosing her handmaid.  What chimera would present herself, dusk by dawn, to do the Fae Queen’s bidding?

He was angry.  So angry.

Tap, tap on the mossy path.  A day to grow into a deer’s grace, then perhaps he would leave her alone for a while. 

Then he would look at her with thousand-year-old eyes, and she’d feel his anger take hold like a tremendous hand, and he’d twist and shape her body until the craving was appeased. 

Once he changed her head into a donkey’s, and laughed his black-moss laugh every time he saw her.  Titania bit her lip at that, casting her eyes down, and made her bower so cold that Oberon finally went off in a huff.  Megan knelt out of sight in the ferns, since the queen would not look at her.  Her shoulders ached, and hot tears crept down her cheeks, under the coarse, itchy hair

Lucky, she thought, bitterly.  So lucky your uncle is a Ranger.  So lucky you get to visit the Fae Reserve. 

Usually Titania’s attendants laughed at her human clumsiness and the shapes Oberon forced her to take—but they didn’t laugh at the donkey’s head.  They crept about her, silently, until she slept. Later she woke with a crick in her neck and her own face and a crust of dried tears.   

She scrubbed them away and stretched, feeling the rustle of the fairies around her in the weak green light before dawn.  The Fae slept through the darkest part of the night and the middle of the day.  Dawn and morning, dusk and twilight they woke.  She must too, since she had given herself to them of her own free will.

Free will.  Not really.  Was I supposed to watch Casey die?

Well, was I?

Most nights and afternoons she nested at the foot of a huge, lightning-twisted cedar.  For some reason the Fae didn’t like it, and left her alone while she slept.  Before she found her tree she’d wake to find her hair tied in elaborate knots, and the laces of her worn sneakers twisted in a way that took her hours to undo.

Megan scrabbled at the roots for the little hollow where she kept her comb—a gift from Titania in a generous mood—and dragged it through her hair.  She gritted her teeth as she worked at the knots. This last summer she had left them, let Peaceblossom and Moth weave her hair high and wild, let them dress her in acorns and ferns, shed her sneakers and danced like a dervish on the moonlit paths that wound through green pillars and velvet moss and the jet-black, diamond sprinkled waters of Puget Sound.  She knew it pleased the Queen, and Oberon too as he watched from under a canopy of boughs under the star-pricked sky.

And in summer’s magic, it pleased her.

But now fall was in the air, and she was recalled to herself, shed her frond-skirt and put on her shoes.  She wanted to be human again.

Maybe that was why Oberon was angry.

So lucky.

“It’s no use.  They’ll do it again tonight.”

A man leaned against the tree, dressed in worn jeans and a plaid shirt.  His hair was dull auburn, but gold sparked from it when he moved in the shaft of sunlight that struck from a break in the canopy.

He wasn’t quite human.  Years of living with the Fae sharpened her senses.  Yet he was nothing like a fairy.  The air around him tasted of earth and musk, and a little of the sweat of a working man or hunter.

He knelt, watching her.

“A human come to live with the Fae, to be Titania’s handmaiden.  I heard of it, but didn’t believe.  I haven’t been surprised in a hundred years.  Tell me how this happens.”

He narrowed his eyes and memories, unbidden, bubbled up like blisters.  She tried to fight it but it was like fighting Oberon when he changed her, like trying to swim in mud.

So lucky and it was cool at first but what was the use when you couldn’t go exploring the Reserve anyway and she was in charge because she was the oldest and Dad was always fishing and Mom was always shopping in those frou-frou shops and when Casey went to the boundary and crossed over was she supposed to let him go alone it’s not like she could tie him up and-

*           *            * 

“Casey!  Casey, stop!  What do you think you’re doing?”

In his left hand he held a tumble of wet rocks, with his right he hurled them at the trees.  The bark of the nearest cedars bruised with a wet spatter.

She ran at him, but he didn’t stop.  The long grass tangled her ankles.  Casey threw faster and faster and harder, and just as she reached him she saw two eyes blink open on the bark of a cedar, and then the faint outline of a shoulder, and she tried to yell stop, she tried to grab his arm, but he hurled the last stone as hard as he could and it struck beside the eyes and the sound was different, still wet but with a crunch like clay breaking instead of bark, and the eyes closed, and all she could see was a dark viscous splatter.

Casey froze, his mouth in a horrified “o.”

Splayed against the tree, like a dark speckled moth on a light speckled tree, was a hunched outline, slender and bark-clad.  It slumped down the trunk, and a wide dark streak followed it down.

“It’s a dryad,” Megan whispered.  All the dark spaces between the trees seemed to lean forward and listen.  “Casey, I think you killed her.”

“No,” he said.  “You can’t kill a fairy.  They’re immortal.  You can’t kill them.”

She walked forward in the squelchy undergrowth.  The dryad was hunched at the foot of her tree.  Even from this distance Megan could see that the side of her head was caved in.

Bile rose in her throat and she turned aside to vomit.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Casey, his voice hoarse.  “I didn’t mean to.  I didn’t know . . . .”

“Shut up,’ she snapped, kneeling over her mess.  She wiped her mouth with her sleeve.  “Shut up.”

The dark places between the cedars did lean forward then, and things moved in the shadows, and they came: Oberon, tall and clad in black and spangled with rain, crowned with broken sticks and spiderwebs; Titania, all russet and ochre, with hair that rippled to her waist and eyes that robbed every living leaf of its green. With them, a multitude of fairies, nymphs, fauns and tiny, nameless things that crawled between the cracks in the bark and through the litter of leaves.

Big, they were so big, and it wasn’t so much their size as the fact that when you looked at them, you couldn’t think of anything else.  They possessed the senses.

So lucky you actually get to see THEM I mean THEM the king and queen of the fairies and their train they never appear to mortals for all they came to beg refuge centuries ago so lucky-

Shut up.

She stayed on her knees in front of them and something twisted in her heart. You could die from seeing something so beautiful.

A faun crouched by the dryad and touched her head.  Somewhere someone started to weep, a dry, scratchy sound, grating in the wet silence.

“She is dead,” said Oberon.  His voice was deep and rough.

“Dead,” he said again, and his gaze caught the rock by the dryad’s head and went to the gash and the smear on the bark.

“Dead.” He looked straight at Casey.  Casey shuddered.

Human footsteps behind them, crunching through the leaves.  For a second Megan was angered at their intrusion, their bulk, the way they pushed through air instead of incorporating air.

Rangers, three of them.  Uncle Leroy on the right; she didn’t know the others.  They stared, astonished, at the Fae, and Uncle Leroy started to smile.

Even Rangers, keeping the boundary of the Fae Reserve, only caught occasional glimpses of sprites and pixies, and the dryads of the border.  Fifty, seventy-five years ago, you could catch a glimpse of a procession through the trees.  But then the Court withdrew into the heart of the forest, and you never saw them these days.  Megan saw in the three human faces the glad heartbreak she had felt.

Then Uncle Leroy saw Casey stricken and Megan kneeling.

“Megan?” He spoke to her because she was in charge.  “Megan, honey, what’s going on?”

“This boy,” said Oberon in his deep woodsmoke voice, mouthing the “b” as if it tasted bad, “this boy killed a dryad.  Not since Cromwell’s Bane drove us from Albion has a human killed a fairy.”

You lie, thought Megan, startled that she knew.  Oberon glanced at her, sharp as obsidian, and at first she thought she’d spoken out loud. 

Oberon pointed at the dark streak on the bark.  “Blood calls for blood,” he said.  “Within the fairy’s domain is fairy’s law.  He has trespassed and killed one of our own.  He will die.”

Megan’s heart beat hard, once, in her chest, and something sharp was caught in her throat.

“You . . . you can’t do that,” she whispered.

His look was like a blow. 

“No!” said Leroy, quickly.  “I mean . . . sir . . . .”

Who was the last human to speak to Oberon?  Washington?  Lincoln?

Oberon ignored the Ranger, watching Megan.

“Can’t I?”  He raised his hand and spread the fingers wide.  Suddenly he clenched them and spread them again.  One beat of a heart.

Casey cried out and fell to one knee.  His hand flew to his chest, leaving a smear on his t-shirt.

“No!” cried Megan, and the Rangers advanced.

Oberon clenched again, and Casey fell into the ferns.  His lips were blue.

“Stop it!” shouted Megan, starting to her feet.

Oberon stared at her, but kept his hand open.

“That’s not necessary,” said another of the Rangers, his voice squeaking with the strain. “We have laws to deal with this kind of situation.”

Uncle Leroy knelt beside Casey.

“Breathe,” Megan heard him say.  “You’ll be okay, son.  Just breathe.”

Oberon threw the Ranger a withering glance.

“Human laws,” he said.  “Cromwell’s laws, Natural Law, law of supply and demand.  I’ve had enough of your laws.  The boy will die.” His hand tensed.

He’s waiting to see what I’ll do, thought Megan.  And I was in charge.

“Stop!” she said again.  She thought furiously. “Wait! A trade!”

Oberon smiled, frosty.  “A trade, then; your life for his?”

Was that what he wanted?

“Is there a law?” Megan looked past Oberon.  Titania stood there, in her rustling garments with her eyes like leaves.  “One of your laws?  Is there?”

Titania tilted her head.  “There is.”  Her voice was a tinkling bell to the King’s basso.  “The law of geis, if my lord agrees.”

Oberon lowered his hand.  “If it pleases my lady,” he said, and grinned.

His teeth were pointed.  Megan felt sick.

*           *            *

“Geis!” said the fox-faced man, licking his lips as if tasting something new.  “Your service for your brother’s life.  For how long?”

“Until my lady pleases,” said Megan.

The man jumped back and cocked his head to one side.  Megan was startled.  He looked human until then.

“I wonder,” he said,  “if Oberon planned it that way, as soon as he saw the dead dryad.  He is almost as clever as me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To have a human bondservant, not a child stolen from the cradle, but a girl-woman, of her own free will?  Such a thing has not been done since before the Ban.  Tell me, are you bleeding yet?” His head wagged and he looked more and more like some long-snouted animal.

She gasped and laughed at the same time.  “That’s none of your business! And why would . . . ."

“Because your kind is made of dirt and blood and snot and spit, and there’s power in that,” he said.  She saw he’d grown a tail.

“He promised no harm would come to me.  That was part of it.”  She looked at her hands, feeling again Oberon’s, Titania’s clasped about them, in front of Casey, the Rangers, a stone digging into her knee.  Pledging her service.  Geis.

“Harm?”  He barked the word.  “The Fae aren’t human.  You don’t know what they mean when they say ‘no harm.’   What does a war chief mean when he says ‘no harm?’  A midwife?  A slaver?  A man of God?  He wants you like a pregnant woman wants to eat clay.”  He was yipping, and his ears were growing long and pointed.

“Who are you?”  she said, sharply.  He was more than half a dog already.

Suddenly he was again a man.  “I am Coyote,” he said.  “And I was here long before the exile Fae.  And I have come back.  And tonight, in the dark of the moon, I will come and tell you a story, since you told me yours so prettily.”

“Wait!” she said, although he hadn’t moved.   “Tell me . . . why is he so angry?”

“Angry?” he said, surprised and amused, as if she had guessed the answer to a riddle.

“Yes.  Every time he looks at me, even when he doesn’t hate me, I feel it.”

“Exiles are angry,” he said.  “I should know.  When the Fae came from Albion, hunted from their domains, how welcome they were in this grand new land.  And then they were pushed west, west, west again, as people, humans, strong in their earth-bound, flat-footed, blood and snot way, planted and ate and planted more to eat.  Pushed the Fae, and the Fae pushed the Indian: Oberon and Custer together.  And when they were, oh so kindly, deeded these lands, they pushed out my people, and with them Raven, and Eagle, and Bear, and the Thunderbird, and the demons of the lakes.  I know how Oberon feels.”

He stepped behind the tree and Megan knew if she looked, she would not find him on the other side.  The fairies played that trick often enough. 

*           *            * 

Titania wanted sand dollars.  Megan went to the shore alone: the fairies didn’t like the water.  Megan wondered why, because it was beautiful here, with dawn streaking the low waters blue and pink, and blackberry brambles growing to the water’s edge.  Sea-polished logs nestled in the flat pebbles of the shore.  Sometimes she liked to sit and watch the faint blur across the sound—a harbor town.  For some time she had not been able to remember its name, although she thought perhaps that was where she and Casey and her parents has been staying.  But perhaps it was somewhere else.  She couldn’t recall. 

A driftwood log moved, the pebbles underneath clicking.  A seal? She saw them, sometimes, their heads bobbing up and down in the waters of the Sound.  They didn’t ever seem to come up on the beach at the Fae Reserve, however.

It was bigger than a seal: walrus-sized, smooth and shiny.  It shifted again and she heard a faint moan.  She went closer, and the breeze brought her a distinctly fishy odor. 

The stranded creature was glossy, with black and white markings like a killer whale.  But it wasn’t a whale—Megan had never seen anything like it. 

It did have a large, whale-like paddle of a tail, and a set of flippers. But the head was blunt and round, and it had two enormous eyes, disproportionately large for the head.  They were the size of coconuts and had hardly any white at all—all brown iris and dull black pupil.  The mouth was huge, a long slit that bisected the head halfway round, with bulbous, rubbery lips.  When the creature gasped for air, she glimpsed rows of pointed teeth.

Over the eyes sprouted feelers, like a catfish’s: three above each eye, thin and supple—about two feet long and tipped on the ends with small round knobs.  There was a whistling sound as it tried to breathe and the fishy smell was very strong.

The huge brown eyes rolled up at her, and the creature stirred again.  It seemed to be trying to roll towards the water, fifty feet away, but could not gain purchase on the smooth rocks.  Megan studied its smooth black-and-white flank and saw a gash, about two inches wide.  Something protruded from the wound, and small bubbles of the thing’s reddish-ochre blood oozed around it.

She knelt beside it, hoping it wouldn’t whip around with those wicked teeth.  She touched its side with the flat of her hand.  It jerked once.

The object inside the gash looked like a thick stone sliver.  She touched it, and the creature flinched, then held still.  She grasped the splinter and pulled it hard—it was slippery and she had to wiggle it free. Dark thick fluid flowed from the wound.  Then, like a seamless zipper, the slit closed up on its own.  Except for the blood, there was no mark on the glossy hide. 

She looked at the object in her palm.  It was stone, a flint chipped and crafted into a sharp blade.  It looked like an Indian arrowhead, but she knew it wasn’t.  She’d seen these before, on the forest paths.  It was a fairy point.

The creature shifted again.  Dropping the Fae weapon, Megan braced herself against the smooth side and pushed as hard as she could.  The thing was solid, and heavy, and it took all her strength to roll it halfway over.

Her efforts seemed to hearten the creature, and it pushed with its flippers and tail.  Again she rolled it, and again.  The muscles in her back protested, but she kept on, grimly.

Was she not dirt and blood and sweat and snot?

Her shoulders were cramping by the time they reached the water’s edge.

As the Sound washed against the creature’s side it found new vigor and with a last mighty push it rolled into the water.  Salt sprayed her face as it cracked its tail on the surface, propelling itself into the depths.  She watched its wake arrow away from the shore of the Reserve. 

Quickly she gathered as many sand dollars as she could for the Queen.  When she went to look for the fairy point she found nothing but a smear of black ash.

“You stink of fish,” said Titania, when Megan brought her the shells.   “Don’t come back into my presence until you’re clean again.”           

Dirt and sweat.  Snot and blood.

*           *            *

The night was chilly and the smaller fairies liked to sleep on top of Megan, for she was warmer than they were.  Their cold bodies made her shiver.  Still, she managed to push free and sought the roots of her cedar. 

She dozed off and woke with a start, not to a stray Fae weaving sticks in her hair, but the silhouette of a man against the stars.  

“You owe me a story,” she said.

“What did you do today?  You smell.”

“Titania wanted shells, so I went to the water.  They don’t like to look at the sea.”

“They used to, when it was new to them.  I remember.”

Megan hesitated, then asked: “What had markings like a killer whale and huge brown eyes and feelers on the top of its head?”

He quirked an eyebrow.  “Kooshinga,” he said.  “A water-demon.  Could it be you saw one?”

She didn’t like his mocking tone, and besides, the incident with the Kooshinga was one of the only things that belong to her alone.  “You owe me a story,” she said again.

Coyote bent close and his eyes were enormous. 

“There was a girl,” he said, “a slave of a great chief.  One day, she found a lump of copper in the stream.  She found another, and another, and knew they must have their source upstream.

“She tracked the copper upstream, until she found a tremendous lump, an entire boulder.  Enough to buy her freedom, the freedom of a hundred slaves. 

“She took the lumps she’d found, hid them in her skirt, and polished them until they glowed.  Then she waited until the great chief held a potlatch, a feast for all his tribe and their allies.  She waited with the other women by the cooking fires, until she knew it was time for the hosts and their guests to outdo each other by offering rich gifts.

“She walked into the lodge, straight and proud, walked to the bench where her master sat, and everyone fell silent and stared as she passed by.  She looked neither to the left nor the right.  She walked straight to the chief and stood before him.

“He had feasted well, so he was in a good mood. 

“’What do you want, Little Maid?’ he said.  ‘A blanket, or a bowl, or a necklace?’

“’None of these,’ she replied.  ‘I want my freedom.’

“’And what do you have that would buy the freedom of a pretty slave?’ he said, admiring her courage. 

“For answer, she reached out her hand and dropped three pieces of copper on the hem of his robe.  In the firelight they shone like fragments of the setting sun. 

“’A fair gift, but not enough to purchase a slave,’ he said.  ‘You price yourself too cheaply.’

“’This is nothing,’ she said.  ‘In the woods is a great boulder of copper that I will show you and make no claim to, if I may be free.  More copper than anyone has ever had before.’

“’Tomorrow,’ he said.  ‘Tomorrow you will show me.  If you speak the truth, you shall go free.  But if you are lying, little slave, you will die.’

“The next day she led the chief to the boulder, and gained her freedom, and found her own man and lodge in the lands of the Kwakiutl.  And so my story ends happily.”

“What happened to the chief?” asked Megan.

Coyote grinned.  “Given so much copper, he was overcome with greed and kept it all himself, refusing to give rich gifts to his friends and rivals and allies.  And so he diminished in honor and stature, growing old before his time, and died clutching his boulder of copper, wizened like a spider.

“But we are not concerned with him.  We speak of the girl, who bargained with copper for her freedom.”

She stared at him.  “The Fae want copper?”

“Ah,” he replied. “Not anything so simple.  I’m going to have to tell you another story.”

Coyote slid to the ground, crossing his legs and resting his hands on his knees. “There was a time when all the animals walked the earth on two feet and spoke together, and Man was just another animal.  Then everything changed.  Something made it change.

“Sometimes it was one thing and sometimes it was another. Sometimes it was the Bears and sometimes it was Thunderbird.  But this is what I remember best.   I remember a shadow blotting out the sun.  I remember something like a great warship sailing the sky.  Immense and streamlined, like a dolphin, and the red-gold color of copper.  And how it sang . . . .”

He closed his eyes.  “Such a strange song, so alien, maybe even not music at all, it shouldn’t have been so beautiful.  But it was sad, and lovely, and all the animals stopped, staring up at the sky.  Some wept, some covered their ears and turned away, and some laughed.  That’s when everyone started to change, to become the way they are now.  The Beaver and the Wolf and the Frog and the Man.

“I was one of those who laughed.  And then . . . .”

He opened his eyes.  “It fell.

“There are many stories about Copper Woman.  How she was made by the One Who Made The World and made mankind from the stuff that came from her body.  How she married the Wealthy Chief who lives under the sea.  How she controls the volcanoes.

“But this is what I remember: Copper Woman came from the sky and fell, hard and enormous, into the soft earth beneath the shallow sea.  She sunk deep, and the islands grew above her.  She made things change.  So long ago, I can hardly remember.  Sleeping, she changed the world.  I wonder, what might she do if she was awake?

“Pieces of her still work their way up through the dirt.  Copper, but different from the native copper of the place, crafted, twisted, Wild Copper.  Every piece plays a part.  Every fragment tells a story.  This is what the Sidhe Queen craves.  Wild Copper.

“Since I came back I’ve whispered stories about Copper Woman, Wild Copper, every night, every noon to Titania as she sleeps.  I made her dream of it, and crave it.  She thinks it will give her the power to break free of these inlet woods, this tiny finger of land your people have driven them to.  She thinks the Wild Copper is tiny parts of a great magic.

“The Fae don’t know anything about machines.  Sitting cheek by jowl with humans a thousand years, they think they do.  But they were never at Trinity, never at Hiroshima, like I was.  They don’t know a damn thing.

“But you are still human.  You don’t get distracted by the pattern of the bark or a moonbeam.  You’re still dirt: you understand machines. I’ll help you find it.  You can buy your freedom from Titania.”

Freedom.  From Oberon.  From the fairies’ teasing.  From the fear that soon she would not want to be free at all. 

“What will happen, when Titania has her machine?”

His faced flickered, becoming birdlike, bearlike, again vulpine. 

“This is what I think will happen.  Copper Woman will hatch out of the deep mud.  She will awaken and break free.”

“Out of the Sound?”

"Out of the Sound.”

“Under the hills?”

He thumbed an itch away from his forehead and sighed.

“Under the hills.  She’ll tear them away from the wet bosom of the world like a scab.”

“But – everything will be destroyed!”

He shrugged.  “I am Coyote.  I ate my sisters to keep them in my belly and give me advice.  I slept with my daughters because I felt like it.  I changed a girl to stone because she wouldn’t marry me. What wouldn’t I do?  I would destroy the world as a joke.  I have, many times.  At least, I think so.  My memory’s not what it was."

“The question is: what would you do?”

She looked at the ground before answering, and when she looked up again, he was gone, as she knew he would be. 

*           *            *

Coyote showed her where to look: at the rim of the water, where the fairies wouldn’t go.  At the base of a sea-twisted pine she shoved pebbles aside until her fingers were sore, until she reached soggy sand.  She was about to give it up as one of Coyote’s jokes until she felt a force pushing back at her hands.  Fuzzy, like a mild electrical shock, it was almost-pleasant-unpleasant, like an itch begging to be scratched.  She dug a few inches deeper and found, sand-crusted, a delicate reddish coil that looked like a broken piece of antique jewelry.

She sat there looking at it until the sun began to set, and she knew Titania was awakening.

*           *            *

“I want my freedom.  I want to go home.” 

She knelt with her knees deep in the moss at the edge of Titania’s bower. 

The Fae Queen flashed her a look, not unkindly.

“So do I child,” she said.  “But neither of us is going to get what we want this day.”

In answer, Megan held out the copper coil.  She heard the hiss of Titania’s indrawn breath. 

“You know what it is, don’t you?  I’ll find you all the pieces I can,” she said.  “I’ll bring you every one of them.  But then I want to go home.”

Cautiously, almost flinching, the Queen spread her long pale fingers towards her and Megan fought the urge to scramble backwards, because suddenly the fingers looked like tentacles, the beautiful hand like an abbreviated octopus.  But she made herself hold still as Titania gathered the fragment between her fingertips.  Her face twitched as if it stung her, but she did not let go.

“Yes,” she said.  “Bring me the pieces and I’ll let you go.  I’ll break the geis.”

She drew in her breath as if to say more, and her expression was sad, but she looked again it the object in her hand and something else smoothed the sadness away. 

There was a stir in the undergrowth, a scattering of fairies, and Megan looked up, expecting to see Coyote.  But it was Oberon, in his silvery blackness.

He was in a foul mood: she could smell it, burnt fern and feathers in the dusk breeze.  Automatically she drew inwards, bracing herself against him and against the pleasure she was beginning to feel when he changed her.

Oberon looked at her with hooded eyes.  But Titania put out her hand, her attention still on the copper spiral.  “No.”

Oberon’s face became sharp and glassy.  “What did you say?”

“Leave the girl alone.  Your games tire me.”

He shot Megan a look that prickled across her skin like ants, and she was a ball of clay in the grubby hand of a toddler.  But then something stole through her, penetrating as Titania’s octopus fingers, but cool, green, comforting.  Her center, which was beginning to quiver and melt, stilled and became solid.  Titania’s green power met Oberon’s force, and this time, like paper embracing rock in a child’s game, prevailed.

She had not once looked at him.  “Go,” she said.  “Until you can come here in peace, go.”

The Fae King stood, a cold black flame of rage.  For a second Megan feared he would rise and consume the bower, herself, Titania, the Sound, perhaps the world.  But as a flame flickers he vanished, leave the smell of soot behind. 

Titania stayed, staring at her hand. 

*           *            *

“Why does she want it, Coyote?  Why does a Fae want a machine?”

She was digging in the soft earth beneath a bank of ferns.  Coyote told her to look there yesterday.  She didn’t see him but spoke out loud, on the chance that he was spying.

He didn’t respond at first.  But presently his voice came from behind her.

“Do you think Titania likes having you for a handmaid?  Dirt-girl?  Mucus-woman?”

She didn’t answer, still digging in the decomposed mulch.

“Do you think she enjoys Oberon’s games?”

Megan took a moment to answer.  “I don’t think she cares.”

“She has learned not to care.”

He appeared at the periphery of her vision and sat, well clear of the ferns. 

“Once they were Lord and Lady of the Wood.  Once all was in harmony between them.

“But things change.  Love intensifies and fades and grows again.  One seeks power.  One plays politics.  One is jealous and seeks revenge for wrongs real and imagined.  One wants a changeling boy for himself.  One falls in love with a mortal, and out again.  Cromwell’s Bane would have no power against what they once were.”

Two feet down, and something tingled in her fingers.  The force that surrounded the Wild Copper. 

“How do you know?”  She dug faster.  “How do you know what happened in Albion?”

He had gone, and his voice came from behind again, distantly.

“Of course I don’t know.  I’m making it up, like I made up the world.”

Her roughened fingertips touched smooth metal.

“Silly Coyote,” she said.  “Raven made the world.”

“Ah.  You are learning.”

He was gone, leaving behind a coil of laughter.

*           *            *

“It’s the last piece.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m dirt.  I know."  Nothing else had worked itself free.  The rest lay buried beneath the peninsula.

She held it out on her palm, and it gleamed like burnished gold.

Titania reached for it but Megan drew it back, fisting her hand by her shoulder, and for the first time her eyes met the Fairy Queen’s.

Leaf green and leaf brown and stormy, like the tops of trees tossing in high wind.  She smelled ozone and lightning, and felt the pull to run wild in that wind.  If Oberon’s power was that of spider webs and the dark places between the trees, Titania’s was of storms slashing though the forest.

Megan didn’t look away, but she squinted until her eyes couldn’t hold any more storm.

“Your promise, Majesty,” she said.  “You promised my freedom with this last piece.”

“I did,” said Titania, in a gentle voice that was a soft breeze counterpoint to her wind-tossed eyes.  “I will.  Give it to me.”

“Break the geis.”  Megan kept her hand clenched.  She heard a Coyote-size rustle in the dry leaves. 

Titania’s eyes narrowed and Megan learned a new thing: that the wind has the power to tear you apart.  She felt dog’s-warmth behind her and pulled the fibers of her being back around her, like a cloak.

The Fairy Queen’s beautiful eyes widened and the tempest became a gentle breeze, winding around her, caressing and seductive. 

“Stay with me, girl,” said Titania.  “Come with me across the sea, when I break Cromwell’s Bane.  I will be Queen of Albion then, and you will stay at my side.

“No, Majesty,” said Megan, her heart breaking.  “Our bargain.  Break the geis.”

“Don’t you understand?”  said the Fae, with a contemptuous sympathy.  “Don’t you know that your people, your family, died years ago? Have you no concept of how long you have passed here?”

Megan couldn’t answer.  Her mouth was dry.

“A hundred years, two hundred.  You have lived with the Fae.  In a season with us, your mother grows grey and brittle, and fades away.  In a year, your brother ages and dies.  For all you know, the world of men is gone.  Stay with us.  Live in beauty.”

Megan cried, although no tears came.  She shook her head.

Titania’s eyes narrowed, but there were no storms left for Megan.  “Very well then,” she said.  “I would have crowned you with English daisies, and shown you secrets no mortal has dreamed of, but you are a silly girl after all, in love with your human flesh and mortality.  Give me your hand.”

Megan stretched out her left hand, a grubby paw, and the Queen’s fine ivory fingers closed around it briefly and there was a prickle like nettles and that was all.

She was free.

Titania held out her hands: on her palm were six twisted fragments of copper.  Her beauty was terrible and cold and immense. 

Megan unfisted her hand and dropped the last piece into the Queen’s hands.

For a second they lay on her white skin like dull garnets.  Then they began to move.

She watched, and the queen in her beauty watched, as the Wild Copper twisted and turned and crawled together, piece to piece, crawled together and joined together, one by one.

Megan stepped back, stepped back again.  Titania was immobile, a smile playing on her lips, and something glowed in the cup of her hands. 

Megan forced herself to turn away and stumbled through the trees.  A rustle told her Coyote followed; he emerged from behind a cedar and waited for her.

*           *            * 

Despite herself, she drew close to his side.  He was warm, and smelled rank and foxy.  She knew he was afraid, too.

“What is going to happen?” she whispered.

He whispered back.  “I don’t know.  There is much I don’t remember.”  He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand.  “Sometimes I think I dreamed it all. Copper Woman with her balls of dirt and snot and sweat, the bears standing upright with their bows and arrows, marrying chieftain’s daughters.

“Did you know people cooked their food by the heat of the sun, until I gave them fire?  Did you know they went hungry until I made the beaver sisters give the salmon back?”

“No.  I didn’t know that.”

“I taught them how to live as men, and I bargained with River and Wind and Bear and Eagle to ease their lives, to give them time to weave and make pots and store food and create a people out of an animal. 

“But sometimes it wasn’t me, but Raven.”

His features flickered and looked, momentarily, birdlike.

Back in the grove, out of sight in her bower, Titania screamed.

“Run.”  Coyote’s breath was hot on her ear.  “Run as if Tsonoqua was coming after you.”

She didn’t think, but turned and ran, and sprawled as the earth shook beneath the trees.

Oh for four legs and a tail, she thought, and something inside her, the same something that knew to ask Oberon for her brother’s life, that knew about the laws of geis, something reached deep inside her and made her blood and bones remember what it was like to be a deer.

She sprang to all four feet and saw Coyote waiting for her, and ran until the woods closed in and became brambles.

Snake, said something. She saw the ferns grow over her head and she slithered through the undergrowth, rocks round and cool and bark scraping against her belly and her way was barred by thick spiny stalks of blackberries and something said…

. . . mouse . . .

. . . skitter scatter between the thorns like she was born to them and clitter clatter of tiny claws on the beach pebbles that were starting to shake and could crush a little mouse, break her skull like a dryad, and something said. . .

. . . girl.

Megan crouched at the rim of the water.  In the middle of the Sound the water was shaking like jelly, and wavelets crashed on the shore frantically, out of their natural rhythm.  Coyote was beside her, with his man-body and his dog-face.  Behind them the slope of cedars and close-knit ferns was shaking apart. 

She turned to the water. She could swim, but not fast enough, and Oberon had never changed her into a water-creature.  She didn’t have that pattern knit inside her.  Coyote watched her, eyes wide, and understood. 

“Leave me,” she said.

“Never,” said Coyote.

Something tore free deep underneath.  From the woods came a high-pitched keening.

She stepped into the water and the cold of it struck to the bone.  Pebbles and shells scraped against her bare feet and she made herself push on.  She was up to her waist, up to her neck, and now she had to kick off by herself.  The cold water made her limbs leaden and ripples were turning into waves, knocking into her and filling her mouth with salt. 

Just behind her and to the side was a flash of silver as a salmon leapt out of the Sound: grey and pink with Coyote’s lazy eyes.  It darted around her and underneath, brushing against her flank, her toes, but he couldn’t help her, and the waters were getting rougher. 

The rumble of the land stirring sounded like a freight train, like an earthquake.  She managed to float on her side and looked over her shoulder. 

The peninsula was lifting as something huge ripped from underneath it.  Birds flew, and other animals, squirrels and snakes and deer, darted from the undergrowth by the shore and plunged into the water. 

A hundred feet up the shore the earth gaped.  As it lifted and lengthened, Megan saw what was inside, what had been buried under the peninsula for millennia, what made it, and what would destroy it now: the flank of an enormous, copper-colored vessel, the same color as the coils and knobs of Wild Copper she had given Titania, some kind of trigger that rebirthed the ship when allowed to re-assemble. 

The submerged land beneath her was shaking and clots of dirt from the land were flying by her head.  She couldn’t swim away fast enough.  The little snakes that arrowed past her on the surface of the water had a chance: she didn’t.  She would die along with the Fae.  The silver salmon darted about her like a reflection itself. 

She looked down at him, willing him to swim for the other side, and saw two bulbous, brown eyes beneath her, behind them, a smooth black and white body.  She was paralyzed with the cold and hardly moved as the long feelers tickled her feet.

It surfaced beside her and it wasn’t until it nudged her that she understood.  She grasped one of the flippers and wrapped her legs around what she could of the slippery body.

It took all her strength to cling to the water demon as it drove towards the far shore, the harbor town, with powerful strokes of its tail.  She willed her muscles to lock into place, shutting her eyes against the stinging salt spray.  She could not block out the sound of the land behind her and all its creatures being torn asunder.

Rocks beneath her bare leg: the Kooshinga had brought them to the opposite shore.  Numb, she released her grip on its flippers and stumbled onto land.  Something silver flipped beside her and Coyote stood on the shore.

The Kooshinga rolled into the deep choppy water and vanished.

The sky was darkening, the sun turning sunset-copper although it was still over the horizon.  She spared a glance for the town splayed across the shore.  Stores and restaurants and little cottages were crumbling away, their paint long gone.  There was no sign of any people.  A rusty car squatted on a ragged shelf of asphalt that jutted where a pier had fallen apart, driver and passenger doors spread open as if the occupants had fled a hundred years ago. 

Across the Sound the peninsula was ripping itself apart.  As they watched, the land split open.

The craft that rose from its deep womb was larger than any ship or building Megan had ever seen.  Clumps of dirt, not clumps really but clots of land with boulders and trees, dropped from its terraces.

It was a dull red gold that blanched the bloody sun, it had wings and sails and delicate towers laced along its sides, it moved through the air with the controlled strength and grace of a seal in water, and as it moved it sang.  It sang a song to make you cry and laugh and cover your ears.

Copper Woman.

Megan felt Coyote’s hand warm on her shoulder.  She closed her eyes and let the song inside, free within her.

The song coiled and lapped at her very core, coiling like copper wire through her flesh.  It pulled and tugged and caressed.  It found the places soft and bruised from Oberon’s tinkering, and healed them.  It found the defenses she had built against him, and broke them apart.   It found the years she had spent with the Fae and braided them together.  It found the wet sound of a dryad’s skull breaking and pondered that.

She opened her eyes.  The ship was gone.

She stood on the pebbles of the Sound.  She had the legs of a deer, the tail of a snake, and the ears of a mouse.  And then, with a thought, she didn’t.

Megan laughed.

The waters of the Sound poured into the wound Copper Woman made.  Soon, except for an occasional tree that bobbed to the surface, no sign remained of that tongue of land.

“What do we do now?” said Megan, when she had stopped laughing.

“Now we make the world,” said Coyote.

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