The Peculiar

“You’re not from the Faery Bureau Inspectors, are you?” she asked. “Or the Court of Thorns? Or the government?”

“I’m-well, I’m from England,” Mr. Jelliby answered stupidly.

The faery woman gave a nervous laugh and unbolted the door. “Oh. I’m not. Let’s get you out of the rain, then, shall we? Unless you like the rain, of course. Some folks do. It’s good for selkies, heals boils on nymphs, though I’ve never known it to do anything for- Oh!” Her hands went to her mouth when she saw Bartholomew. “Oh, the poor little Peculiar! He’s thin as a fish bone!”

Bartholomew tried to peer around the faery, into her wagon. Then he looked at her. Poor little Peculiar? There was no disgust in her voice, none of the fright of the goblin in the bazaar, or the petty evil of the peddler in Old Crow Alley. She sounded more alarmed by his resemblance to a fish than the fact that he was a changeling.

Yes, well, we don’t have to eat him with parsnips, now do we, Mr. Jelliby thought, as the faery woman ushered them into the wagon. It was tiny inside, cramped and warm, and cluttered with parchments and bottles in pretty colors. Bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling. Candles dripped in fantastical shapes down the shelves. The wagon was too small to hide anyone, and Hettie wasn’t there.

The old faery busied herself with sweeping up the shards of a pottery bowl from the floor. “Oh, such a mess,” she whined. “Don’t get many visitors, I don’t. Not good ones anyway.” Her voice was creaky and old, a bit like the faery butler’s. Friendlier, though. Perhaps too friendly for one who has just had her far-off clearing invaded by strangers.

“Madam, we’ve come on a matter of great importance,” Mr. Jelliby said.

“Have you, at that?” She tipped the shards into a cat dish. It was full of milk. “And how comes it that an old greenwitch like me can help such good sirs as you? Are you sick? Has the cholera gotten one of you? I hear he is quite busy in London now.”

Mr. Jelliby stamped the wet from his shoes and took off his hat. He? “No, not cholera. We need to speak to you about someone.”

The faery straightened, joints popping, and hurried a teakettle to the stove in the corner. “Don’t know many someones anymore. Who might it be?”

“The Lord Chancellor. John Lickerish.”

The old faery almost dropped the kettle. She wheeled around to face them. “Oh,” she whispered, eyes quivering. “Oh, I meant no harm. Whatever he’s done, whatever he’s doing, I meant no harm.”

Mr. Jelliby’s hand fell to the grip of his pistol. “We’re not here to accuse you, madam,” he said quietly. “We need your help. We have reasonable proof that you are connected to Mr. Lickerish, and we must know why. Please, we must know!”

The faery knotted her hands into her apron and began pacing to and fro, the floor of the wagon creaking with each step. “I don’t know him. Barely at all. It’s not my fault!” She stopped to face them. “You won’t take me away, will you? Not to the cities and their horrid fumes? Oh, I would perish!”

“Please, madam, calm yourself. We’re not taking you anywhere. We simply need you to tell us things. Everything.”

The faery’s eyes flicked to the pistols. She looked from Mr. Jelliby to them and back. Then she returned to the stove. Tea hissed as she poured it into blue china cups. “Everything. .” she said. “You’d be dead of old age before I was halfway through.” She brought the tea and slumped into her rocker.

Bartholomew didn’t take his cup. Hettie isn’t here. Nothing was here but a mad old faery. They should be leaving, running back across the fields to the coachman and Leeds. Not drinking tea. He tugged at Mr. Jelliby’s sleeve, opened his mouth to say something, but the faery saw him and spoke first.

“Life’s hard out here,” she said, and her voice was petulant. “Folks in the cities, they work in factories, always among the engines and the church bells and the iron. And they lose their magic. I couldn’t do that. Out here I can hold on to bits of it. Just little shreds. It’s not like home. Not really. But it’s almost there. It’s as close as I can get.” Bartholomew knew she was talking of her home in the Old Country. She must be very old indeed.

“And I need to live!” the faery woman wailed. “I’m just an old greenwitch and nobody wants my help anymore. Faeries come once in a while out of the big cities when their young ’uns cough blood, but they can’t pay much. And I had to sell poor Dolly for glue, so there was no more traveling the circuits. I need to live, you know!” A strange spark came into her eyes. “The Lord Chancellor sends me gold.”

“Does he,” Mr. Jelliby said coldly. “And did you know he’s been killing changelings? Or does he pay you so well that you don’t care? I will thank you to tell us now what this is all about. In honest words. What is the Lord Chancellor planning?”

The greenwitch looked about to cry; Bartholomew suspected it was more because of the disapproval in Mr. Jelliby’s voice than because of any of his actual words. “You don’t know?” she said. “You’re trying to stop him, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here. And you don’t even know what you’re trying to stop?”

Mr. Jelliby gulped at his tea. He didn’t know. All he had was fragments and pieces-the bird, the message, the conversation in Westminster-but they didn’t really add up to anything.

The old faery scooted her chair a little closer to him. “He is going to open another faery door, of course.”

Mr. Jelliby blinked at her from over the rim of his teacup. Bartholomew made a little sound in his throat, partway between a gasp and cough.

“You didn’t know that?” She giggled, scraped even closer. “Yes. The faery door. He’s going to open another one. Very soon, I think. Tomorrow. The last one happened by itself, see. A natural phenomenon brought about by a lot of unfortunate coincidences. There have always been cracks between the worlds. Things have always been slipping back and forth, and there are many tales of humans who have found themselves in the Old Country quite by accident. But this new door won’t be a crack. It won’t be an accident. John Lickerish is engineering it. Commanding it into existence. A massive gateway in the middle of London. In the middle of the night.”

Mr. Jelliby set down his teacup sharply. “But it’ll be carnage!” he exclaimed, aghast. “Ophelia, and Brahms, and- It’ll be Bath all over again!”

“It’ll be worse,” the faery said, and her face split into a smile then, so bright and toothy it made Mr. Jelliby’s skin crawl.

“It won’t work,” he said, looking studiously at a braid of garlic above the faery’s head. “The bells. The bells will stop it. They’re always ringing. Every five minutes. Mr. Lickerish won’t be able to get a spell in edgewise.”

“Ooh. The bells.” The faery continued to grin. “Bath had bells. Bath had iron and salt, and not a few clocks and it was still blown six miles north of the moon. Bells don’t help against magic like that. They might stop a pisky from giving you a wart or muddle a minor enchantment, but they won’t keep a faery door from opening. Not a road to the Old Country.”

“Then what do we do?” Mr. Jelliby almost shouted it. “We can’t just sit here! How do we stop it?”

“I don’t know.” She was so close now. Mr. Jelliby was certain he could smell her- flowers and smoke and sour milk. “It’s a complicated process, opening a faery door. I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. All I know is that Mr. Lickerish needs a concoction. Plants and animal parts. I give it to him. It’s a binding potion, that concoction is. It lures a sort of faery called the penumbral sylph, can pattern whole flocks of them and make them do what someone tells them to. But I don’t know what he needs sylphs for. I’m just a tiny thread, see. A tiny thread in a great big spider’s web.” She made a scuttling motion with her fingers.

“He sends me his notes in a mechanical bird. A bird out of metal, did you ever hear of such a thing? And I do what they tell me. But those changelings. .” Her grin fell from her face, and she shrank back into her chair. She looked suddenly frightened and sad again. “I don’t know what they’re for. Poor, poor creatures. I don’t know why he’s killing them. I’ve sent nine bottles to London. A lot of little ones as well. Little bottles. So little. And. . and last I heard there had been nine deaths. You are from London, yes? I saw it from the dirt on your shoes. Perhaps he’s been trying over and over again to open that door. Nine times over. Nine times you could have died in your bed and were spared.” Her gaze turned to the window. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t, truly. And when I heard about the changelings in the river, I knew right away it was him. But, oh, don’t make me think about it. I