Lily woke when normal people went to sleep all around her. Before collapsing on her old bed, she had showered and changed clothes and she felt like a different person when she opened her eyes.
Different was perhaps the key word, she mused while stretching. This time, there was no urge to deny the events, to claim everything had been a dream. She was only too aware of her new reality. A new reality where one of the first things to do included listening for strange sounds that could identify potential killer faeries readying an attack.
She had been reckless, coming back to her grandma’s after the last two exits she had been forced to pull, but she had also been out of options. She needed to take a deep breath and sit somewhere and think. And prepare a trap for the cuelebre.
Step by step, she told herself.
Her first step was entering every room in the small house and turning on the lights. She was under no illusions. If the redcaps were back, or if something even meaner had been sent in their stead, then keeping the lights off wouldn’t fool them. The lights, however, would prevent her from not seeing them until it was too late. Even though it reeked of small child scared of monsters under the bed, going room by room and turning on every light available, big or small, was the best option she had.
Then she turned on the light in the living room and froze.
Someone had been in the house after all. The overturned couch was back in place. Every chair was where it was supposed to be. The spots of human blood and the rust-like dust of faerie remains had been brushed off and cleaned. The pieces of the vase she had used as a weapon and shattered against a bogey’s head had been picked up and placed in a neat pile where the original vase should be. The poker had been returned to its place too, and were it not for the odd way it was bent out of shape, Lily could have thought that her very real memories were nothing but madness after all.
But the vase was broken, the poker had been used as a weapon, and over on the table sat the small box full of iron nails. And she had to kill a dragon-like faerie and no time to wonder at the housekeeping abilities of a pack of monsters that didn’t seem to be home anymore, if her uninterrupted sleep through the day was any clue.
She grabbed the box, weighed it in her hands. The nails inside were of various sizes, from a full inch to barely a quarter, and they were in all sorts of states, from bent and rusted to brand new. There had to be dozens of them.
So she had a weapon. Now, how to use it?
Glaistig had said to use an offering. Troy had said she wouldn’t be able to slip the iron past the cuelebre´s sense of smell. She was inclined to believe him, judging from the way the redcaps had suspected iron as soon as she had stepped through the door the previous night—or had it been two days before? How long had passed already since her grandma went missing? Did time even matter anymore?
In any case, if Glaistig said she could use a ruse, and taking into account how offended she had looked when it seemed that Lily thought she was cheating, it seemed it may be crazy difficult, but possible.
What could hide the smell of iron? She took a handful of nails, brought them to her face, sniffed. If she was very hard-pressed, she might admit to a soft metallic tang in the air, but for the most part, it was unnoticeable. Perhaps the stench was more of a mystical thing, in which case she didn’t know how to counter it.
No. Focus on what you can control. Keep going step by step.
She took the box to the kitchen and set it in the counter. An idea was beginning to hatch. All her life, Lily had seen Mackenna leave the offerings out for the fair folk: bread, milk, honey. Every day she had been there, the small plates had been out in the porch, in the yard, or by the trees that farther on would become the forest. She could almost hear the words spoken with Mackenna’s voice fifteen years earlier to a wide-eyed child too young to understand them. “This way they know to which house they should not bring harm.” And harm meant blood and blood had iron.
Different, of course, but perhaps it could work.
Lily took out a container and mixed flour with salt. She also needed yeast and she found it where she had dropped it during the first encounter with the bogeys. She had a vague recollection of adding water too. Mackenna’s voice from old memories explained how more water would make bread tasty, but would also cause it to harden faster, and Lily decided to add in a cup and a half of milk instead. She wanted it to be soft and taste great and, if things went badly, there would be no time to lament that it had gone too hard. Then she added a bit of honey, because you could never go wrong with honey and faeries. When the dough looked just about right, she dumped it on the table.
And, on top of it, she dumped the nails. And she began to knead.
It hurt. She bruised her knuckles and the nails broke her skin. She gritted her teeth and kept going, watching while the dark grey disappeared in the dough. Specks of red flourished here and there, traces left by her wounded hands, but she only stopped when she had to yank out a particularly rebellious nail from her flesh.
The wee hours of the night came. She shaped the dough, making sure no nails poked through the surface. At some point, she realized it was not going to get any better.
Now, how long in the oven? She recalled waiting with all her inexistent patience for warm bread back in the day, but any approximation of time was beyond her. However, such a silly thing could not be the demise of her plan, could it? Surely there were cook books or something with the information.
Perhaps she should have consulted them before half revisiting and half improvising the recipe itself, but no matter. It was done and it would have to work. She put the bun of bread in the oven, washed her hands, and set about to search for the information.
Mackenna didn’t have proper cooking books. She had never bought anything like 100 Easy Recipes to Impress for Christmas or Cooking Fast and Delicious Meals with No Salt. That was more her mother’s sphere. Her grandmother bought notebooks instead and painstakingly wrote the recipes as she had learned them from her own mother, who had learned them from her mother. Lily found a small stack of such notebooks stored in a drawer. There was no index, no order to the contents. Some lines were scratched out and notes to improve the recipes were added in the margins.
“You couldn’t make anything simple, could you?” Lily muttered with a mixture of fondness and annoyance as if Mackenna could hear her wherever she was.
And, almost as if she could, a piece of paper fell from one of the little books while Lily carried them over to the table. She heard it rustle to the floor in the house’s eerie silence and went back to pick it up.
Dear Lily, it began.
She dropped the books.
If everything has gone according to plan, today is your eighteenth birthday.
It hadn’t. It wasn’t. Lily had to blink to clear her vision.
I began to write this little book of field notes when I was your age. I suppose it doesn’t seem like I was a very good writer, showing such meager results after so long! The truth is that many things shouldn’t be put to paper. They must be taught down the generations, for tradition has a special power all by itself.
But by the time I write this letter, it is more than clear that your mother will have nothing to do with the wisdom I can teach her, and I’m afraid I will not have enough time to teach you in her stead all that I would have you know. Sharing with you these pages seems to be the only way to ensure that a little of the knowledge I’ve gathered over the years remains, even if what can be safely written is but a fraction of what there is.
I have faith that, one day, you’ll find it in your soul to understand and embrace the real world your mother turned her back against. If that time ever comes, and if I’m not there any longer to guide you as my mother guided me, you’ll at least have these notes to help you as you learn.
Learning by oneself also has its own magic.
Love,
Grandma
While Lily held the letter, her grandma’s neat calligraphy went blurry and the signature dissolved into lines of gray.
She was crying. She could hear Mackenna’s voice saying those words. She could picture her writing the letter one day, alone in her kitchen, sad and hopeful and looking forward to the day she could give Lily the notebook. She imagined her, counting the years until she turned eighteen so that she would choose freely whether to believe the words on the piece of paper.
It hurt. It hurt even more to know that, if she hadn’t come here this summer, hadn’t been attacked, hadn’t met Troy… She wouldn’t have. She would have chosen her mother’s “normal” world instead of the real one.
Lily leafed through the notebooks, finding the one the letter had fallen from. It was written much like the cooking books, but instead of apple pie or stew, the entries mentioned cures for cattle feet and pixie pox, and there were indented comments here and there with bits of advice. She pressed the letter into place and took a deep breath. She wanted to sit down and devour the contents because she needed the knowledge and because it would help her not to feel quite so alone, but she couldn’t yet. She had a bargain to fulfill. Then she would find her grandmother and they would read the book together.
Decision made, she put the notebook aside and began to search a recipe for bread. When she found it, she saw it had been baking too long and rushed to get it out.
It was done. She stared at her offering, her weapon, as it sat cooling in the kitchen counter, an apparently harmless bun that fit in her hand.
“Okay,” she said aloud. “Let’s do this.”