“I did not.”

  “Well, he did. And I thought... I thought, after so much doubt and tension as to what I should be and how to live, after all I’d endured, it almost felt a relief to know what to expect. That if I behaved a certain way, the outcome would be predictable. That I could leave the island. That I could be safe.” I bow my head, tears trickling down my cheeks. “But it wasn’t that. I wasn’t. And by the time I began to realise... I was more marooned at court than I’d ever been by the ocean.”

  “You would not be the first wife to feel so.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I think that makes it worse, not better.” I try to smile, though even in the attempt, I know it for a failure. “He would... as a husband, he would take, and I was obliged to, to—lord, I want to say endure, but can it be that if sometimes I found pleasure, too?”

  “One meal is not all meals,” says Puck, so levelly as to betray that he’s keeping his voice in check. “That a dish please you one night does not prevent poor appetite or preparation—or, dare I say it, both—from diminishing its appeal the next.”

  I nod, though scantly. Later, I know, I’ll linger over Puck’s absolution, but right now, any greater acknowledgement will crack me open. “I think—” I say instead, and stop, the words too big for my mouth. “I often felt, with Ferdinand—that is, there were times, and maybe if I’d not been raised with Ariel, the thought would never have occurred, but as it did—I often felt that such, such pleasure as I found in him, in his body, was as much envy as desire.”

  I hug my knees and brace for a condemnation that does not come. Puck looks surprised, but not hostile, and into this flushing silence, the truth flows out of me like water.

  “I am—I know I am new to desire, and all my husband taught me was that wanting should be his province alone, with granting those wants my chore. Certainly, I envied him the decision, but it was not—is not—the whole of it. On the island, there was hardly need to think of myself as girl or woman, except inasmuch as my father told me to, for I had no real source of comparison. Caliban was inhuman, my father defined himself as a sorcerer more than as a mere man, and Ariel could be anything she pleased. But then there was Ferdinand, and for his sake—and for my ease—I took the role I’d been told to take, but though I tried to obey, it was... I wish I could say it was just the skirts, that I chafed only at the expectation of manners, but it wasn’t that, Puck, it was language, the words, the feel of them. I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me. But they weren’t always wrong, that’s the worst of it; some days I revelled in being called lady, but then the day would pass, the sun would rise and fall again, and the same name felt like a collar, bringing me to heel; or else a corset, squeezing me into wrongish shapes for the adoration of strangers.

  “But are they wrong? I still don’t know. But, oh, I wish—I wish—I could change as Ariel does, that flicker-flash between girl and man; I wish my form could be all the forms my heart desires! The moon has phases, does it not? We call it full and half and harvest, but through its wax and wane, it remains the moon, and we love it no less—must I be any different? I must not, for I am not. My heart is a moon, and some days I am full and bright within myself, a shape that fits my name, and then I fade, and mirrors show only a half-light shared with a silhouette, an absence my form reflects; and then, in the dark, I am dark altogether, until I regrow again. Why should such a thing be any more difficult to grasp than the fact that some think me dead, and yet I live? The contradiction is only in their perception of what I am; and though killing me would perhaps solve it to their satisfaction, it would not undo the truth of me.”

  I sit back, trembling with an exhilaration near to relief. I look at Puck, and his smile is the softest part of him I’ve yet seen.

  “Miran-Miranda, I would not undo the truth of you for a thousand years of life, and anyone who would is an utter fool.”

  I am crying still, but as I wipe my eyes, I find their salt has no sting. I smile at Puck, and with a gentle shrug, he flicks his gaze to the fire, long legs stretching as he shifts.

  “You’re quite right, of course. Forms and hearts and names—we build ourselves with words, but a tool is not the same as the substance it shapes; and if the substance changes, then why not the tool?” He flashes an insouciant grin. “Consider, for instance, my northern cousin, Loki, who once gave birth as a dapple grey mare. He is what he is, and if that be many things instead of one, then who are we to say otherwise? Fairy, god or mortal, I see no reason why anyone should define themselves by a single flesh alone, when such seemings are always subject to alteration. As well to say a grown man is unnatural for cultivating the beard he lacked at birth as to call you anything ruder than your name for desiring what you weren’t born with. Why should one change be called natural, and the other not? Crowns and shoes don’t grow on trees, and yet we alter ourselves with the wearing of them. Mortals! Such nonsensical creatures.” He makes a gesture half-fond, half-disgusted, and tips me an apologetic wink. “Present company excepted, of course.”

  “Of course,” I say, and something in me opens like a once-clenched hand, the better to grasp new things.

  KNOWING WHAT I needed and obtaining it were two different things, and only through Ariel’s agency was I able to succeed. He spoke to the wind and summoned, on a distant breeze, the feathers I needed—eagle, crow and dove—and stole the crucial lock of hair from Prospero’s sleeping head. When my own hand faltered, Ariel spilled my blood in the carved stone bowl, sparked fire to burn the feathers, hair and herbs, then brought me the purest, whitest sand from the far side of the island.

  It was Ariel who became a bolt of storm-lightning, arcing down into the ash and sand to fuse it into jagged glass, and Ariel who helped me shape and smooth a single flat piece of it, small enough to fit within my palm.

  But when the moment came, it was I—and I alone—who wielded what we’d wrought.

  Act IV

  Seachanged

  I WAKE TO the tug of cold, thin fingers against my arm. For an awful second, I’m paralysed; and then I scream and lurch upright, and someone swears, and someone shouts—and then the world turns gold and purple, black and silver, stars and embers whirling into a warp of air as someone tugs me down and sideways, up and through. The world’s veil lifts like a theatre curtain, passing me from here to there, and when I blink the shock from my eyes, I find I’m no longer in the mortal realm.

  I stand within the fairy roads, and stare at the ones who took me.

  There are two of them, both fairies, seemingly male and female. One is mottle-skinned, whites and browns in a calico patchwork, her kinky black-and-silver hair pulled into a multitude of tight, short knots. Her curves are wrapped in a flowing dress that leaves one shoulder bare, a gold torc circling her upper arm. The other is tall and lean and olive-skinned, his straight hair bound in thin, brown braids that hang to his middle back. His tunic is mustard-yellow over bird-brown hose, and both their feet, like mine, are bare.

  A recent memory tickles me, and something clicks into place. I lift my chin and laugh at them. “You are Moth,” I say, “and Mustardseed.”

  “Clever child,” says Moth, in a withering tone that says she thinks the opposite. “I’d ask who you are, but so long as the Goodfellow comes for you, it hardly matters.”

  The fairy roads take many forms. This one is earthed in bone-white soil, scattered with red stones. The sky is lilac, as pale as an iris-heart and devoid of sun, moon, stars. Beyond the white road, the red stones cover the ground completely, so that it appears as a jut of white bone against a field of blood. It is not a welcoming place, and the hairs on my neck stand up in animal fright.

  “You want him to violate the terms of his penitence,” I say—slowly, so as to be sure. “He’s meant to reach the court by mortal roads alone, but if he comes for me, he breaks his oath.”

  “Precisely,” says Mustardseed. He has an unctuous voice, and a narrow, thin-lipped smile. “So whatever you are to him—doxy, dupe or dependent—just be a good mortal and wait. You can’t escape the roads alone, and believe me when I say you’d be foolish indeed to try.”

  I draw myself up and meet his gaze. “I am a votary travelling to pledge myself to Queen Titania. By bringing me here, you’ve meddled with my pilgrimage.”

  Moth scoffs. “The Goodfellow doesn’t bring votaries to King Oberon, let alone Queen Titania. If you’re going to lie, at least try to make it plausible!”

  “Now sit,” says Mustardseed, and only as he draws it do I notice his knife, a piece of antler carved to a wicked point. “Or you will, I think, regret it.”

  Once before, what feels an age ago, I walked a different fairy road with Ariel. My knowledge is woefully limited, but it’s more than my captors think I have. I swallow, gaze fixed on Mustardseed’s blade, and force myself to nod.

  “I’ll be no trouble,” I say, and sit down on the soft, white soil, heart pounding as I think.

  “OH, MIRANDA. WHY must you disobey me?”

  My father’s voice was calm, but no less furious for it. I stared him down, clutching my glass so tight, my palm was near to bleeding.

  “I would not need to disobey, if you did not yoke me so tightly.” My voice trembled, raw with fear. “What threat am I to you?”

  My father shook his head. “Disobedience in a woman is a threat in itself. The world has a rightful way of ordering itself, Miranda. And when you act in counter to that, you leave me no choice but to intervene.”

  “No choice? You have every choice! And what world, pray, do you speak of?” I waved a shaking hand. “This is all the world we have! Your manners have no use here, father; no purpose beyond denying that I might choose my own!”

  He sighed, disappointed. “I wish I knew whence you came by these absurd notions. It would make your life, and mine, much simpler.”

  I could feel myself crying. “You wish me simple, but I am not that. I am whole, a person—I have my own mind, and I wish, I wish—”

  “Enough.” He raised his staff, a crackle of magic in the air. “You will obey, Miranda.” And with his free hand, he sketched a rune in the naked air, a tracery of light. “Forget today. Know peace. Be as you were—”

  The spell took flight, and as I screamed, I threw up my glass, light glancing along its edges.

  The magic hit like a thunderclap. My arm went numb, and in the boiling flash of the spell’s reflection, I had just enough space to see the shock on my father’s face before the force of rebounding magic knocked him down, staff tumbling from his hand. I staggered forward, ears ringing. He twitched on the sand, his eyes rolled back in his head. The glass in my hand was cracked, but I didn’t drop it, clinging all the harder as I went to my knees and pulled his head into my lap. He groaned, but his eyes still showed their whites, which meant I had time.

  I put my lips to his ear, and spoke.

  “This is my spell for you: forget all spells of forgetting. Forget you ever took my memories; forget my disobedience; forget our feud and its implications.” I choked, tears streaming down my cheeks, and forced myself to whisper the last of it. “Forget you ever desired me. Forget your shame, and mine. Forget.”

  And then I stood and walked away, the glass clutched tight in my hand.

  “HE’S TAKING HIS time,” Moth mutters, cutting a glance my way. “Either she means nothing to him, or he’s planning a trick. I don’t like it.”

  “Or else I really am a votary,” I say, cutting in ahead of Mustardseed, “and Puck therefore trusts that I’m capable of rescuing myself.”

  “You’re not,” says Mustardseed, but there’s a note of uncertainty in his voice that wasn’t there before. “And even if you were—”

  I tune him out and close my eyes, fingers sinking into that soft, impossible white soil, questing for a familiar edge. Please be here, I think. Please. Please. Please.

  “I HAVE TO hide it, Ariel. The book said if he ever finds it, the spell will come undone.”

  “You could cast it into the ocean—”

  “It might wash back up!” Panic clawed my throat at the prospect. I could scarcely believe what I’d done, such that even having succeeded, all I could think of was what my father would do to me if—no, when—he discovered it. “I can’t keep it anywhere he might chance across it by accident. Nowhere on the island, and not in the sea. Somewhere it can’t be summoned, can’t be disturbed. Somewhere safe, or I never will be.”

  Ariel stared at out at the sunset. “There is a place,” she said, softly. “Though reaching it will tax me. Being bound, I cannot go myself, but I think, if I try, I might yet open a door.”

  “Open a door? To where?”

  “The fairy roads.”

  “MAKE HER BLEED,” says Moth. “He’s always had a weakness for mortals, always binds himself to them in some way or another. If you hurt her, he’ll know, and then he’ll have to come.”

  Three heartbeats pass before Mustardseed answers. Then: “All right. A simple cut.” I hear, but do not see, his smile. “To start.”

  Here is the truth of the fairy roads: no matter how different they appear—no matter their tricks and changes—at base, they are all one road, a single path between here and there.

  “You hold her, Moth. She’ll likely try and bolt.”

  Please. Come back to me. I need you.

  Arm-deep in the snowy soil, my fingers close on a shattered piece of glass.

  Glass that was made of mortal earth and mortal blood, and which recalls its nature.

  I think of my hair-that-was, the coppery colour now bound up in a gemlike ball as red as the stones on this stretch of road. I think of Puck, who put that gem—a piece of myself—in his tunic pocket, pulsing like a secondhand heart.

  I grip my glass, and think of earth, and blood, and red, until the sharp edge cuts a line in my palm, a red seep into the ground.

  Moth’s hand tugs my cap away, revealing hair as white as chalk, as white as snow on a red-white road.

  Home, I think wildly, as Moth grips my hair, home, home, find Puck—

  “Grab her! Moth, what’s she—”

  “Gods, I don’t know! I don’t—”

  I fall between worlds like a stone dropped into a chasm.

  I BURIED MY glass in a field of lilies under a starstrewn sky. Ariel kept her door open for me all the while, and though I hurried, she still passed out when I came back, shaking and panting, reduced to little more than a kitten-shape. I pulled her into my arms and cradled her, crying into the soft white of her fur.

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Her rough tongue licked the tears from my cheeks, and for the first time in what felt like eternity, I laughed.

  I FALL IN an unglamorous heap at Puck’s feet. He yelps like a startled fox, stumbling back against our camping tree, then bursts into incredulous laughter, clasping his horns in his hands.

  “By every star, I wasn’t expecting that!”

  “Nor me,” I groan, rolling shakily to my knees. “Are they following?”

  “Not if I have a say in things,” Puck snaps, and having helped me up, he starts walking a widdershins circle around our campsite, sparks pouring out of his open palms as he chants beneath his breath. He claps his hands—cementing his wards, I assume—and a sharp thunder-scent fills the air, as if before a storm. It’s only then, as Puck returns to me, that I notice the lightening sky, faint lines of peach and violet creeping along the horizon like the livid fever-streaks of an infected wound.

  “How long was I gone?” I asked, for time runs differently in the fairy roads.

  “Almost a full night,” says Puck. He shoots me an appraising look. “How long was it for you?”

  “A half-hour or so, I think.”

  “Only a half-hour!” He looks delighted, dark eyes lit with mischief. “And am I right in thinking that your escape has something to do with this?”

  And he reaches into his tunic pocket and pulls out my shattered glass.

  I gape at him, unable to comprehend the sight of it. Slowly, I lift my own clutched hand and stare at the contents.

  I’m holding the gem that holds the colour of my hair, a faint rime of blood smeared across it.

  “It does,” I say, softly. “I—I buried that glass in the fairy roads some sixteen months ago, when I was still on the island. I never thought to see it again.”

  Without discussion or conscious thought, we seem to reach some physical accord. I hand him the gem, and he hands me the glass. Without a word, I bury it beneath the roots of the spreading tree, and then, together, we both sit down. I tuck my feet under a blanket, transferring just the barest patina of white soil in the process, and wait for Puck to speak.

  “The thing about magic,” my guide says, after a minute, “is that it leaves a residue, for those who care to look, and who know what to look for.”

  “Does it, now?”

  “It does.” He rests his wrists on his tented knees. “You, Miran-Miranda, stole your father’s memories.”

  “I did.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “HE NEVER TOUCHED you,” Ariel rumbled. The words were a breath against my ear, the two of us curled in the bower we’d built at the back of my memory-cave. Her form was that of the white-furred she-wolf, warm and comforting. “Not like that. Not more than the barest brush of skin or cloth, and then but rarely.”

  “But he watched me? Wanted me?” I squeeze my eyes shut, scarcely able to say it. “Touched himself?”

  “He did.”

  “But he won’t, now? Not again?”

  “He won’t.”

  “I’m truly safe?”