Emily was standing in front of her aunt’s front door. Her own front door. The weather-beaten wood of the porch creaked beneath her boots as she shifted nervously. Everything looked so worn.
She didn’t have her keys. There hadn’t been a reason to take them with her and Emily had been worried about losing them in the wilds of the Sidhe. With a deep breath, she rang the bell. Silence stretched out and Emily wondered if Janice was even home. With a start, she remembered the watch she’d packed away some point after realising its uselessness in the Sidhe. She dug through her backpack, hands shaking. Without its magical depths, the bag was stuffed to the gills.
“Hello?” Janice spoke quietly from the stairs behind her. Emily abandoned the bag and turned in to face her aunt. Her heart pulled like taffy. Janice looked so old: bands of grey showed at the roots of her hair; worry lines etched where there’d been only marks of laughter before.
“It’s me! I’m back, I have an answer, did you get my letters?”
Janice stayed on the stairs and Emily stopped mid-step.
“Aunt Janice?” A million things ran through Emily’s head. Maybe this was a different dimension—no, that was stupid., Faeries were fantasy, not sci-fi. She realised that her aunt’s long hair had been cut into a no-nonsense bob.
Janice cleared her throat, unbelieving. “Emily? You, it’s—oh dammit.” She ran up the steps and crushed her niece in a hug. She said something, but her voice was thick with tears and Emily pulled back to arm’s length and asked her to repeat it.
“I said it’s been ten years, Emily. Yes, we got your letters, but you’ve been gone a decade.”
Janice got Emily inside quickly after at least one worried look around the trailer park. Emily stopped cold just inside the door, open backpack hanging off one shoulder. Everything appeared the same on the surface, but the more she looked, the more incongruities popped up. New throw pillows dotted the couch and rugs covered what were probably worn spots in the carpet. On the coffee table lay what had to be a portable computer, but Emily had never seen one that slim or known anyone who actually owned one. Next to it was the painfully familiar half-full tumbler of iced tea. Before she could take in much more, Janice steered her niece to the couch, her grip tight on Emily’s arm. While her aunt twisted the blinds closed, Emily slid the backpack to the floor and rested her head in her hands, looking at the unfamiliar rug beneath her feet.
“Why don’t you want the others to know I’m here?” Emily’s voice was muffled, aimed at her knees. She felt the old couch sink and shift as her aunt sat down.
“I’ll explain it to you soon, but can you wait until Becky gets here?” Janice pulled something from her pocket that Emily knew must be a mobile phone even though it was the size of a pack of cards and had a full-colour picture of a meadow on the screen. Her aunt pushed buttons, sighed, and leaned back, still holding the phone.
“Is it on speakerphone or something?”
“What?”
Emily frowned. “Is it ringing right now?”
“Oh.” Janice laughed, the sound harsh and close to tears. “I texted her—like how with a pager you send short codes? Only you can do sentences now.”
“But that’s a phone.”
“Yes.” Abruptly, Janice grabbed her niece in a crushing hug. “We thought you were dead. I got your last letter five years ago. I’d hoped you were just trapped over there or something, but when we didn’t hear from you again—”
Emily pulled back. “Five years! But I wrote you just last week. I mean, even if time passes differently on each side, why a break that long?”
“There’s no sense to it.” Janice fumbled at a box of tissues on a side table, sniffling. Emily’s softened her voice. “I’m sorry.”
Janice waved one hand dismissively while wiping her nose. “I knew that time passed differently. No way you can guess what it’ll be until you’re out of it. A day could be a hundred years or just a week. Or there could be no time difference at all. But regular communication just stopping for that many years? I don’t want to say what I thought.”
“That I was dead? That maybe I’d decided none of you were worth coming back for?”
Janice paused, about to blow her nose. She nodded. Emily continued carefully. “How long were you gone? You were in the Sidhe for a long time.”
“I left the mundane world in 1868 and returned about 112 years later. Subjectively, I wasn’t in the Sidhe too much longer than that.”
“Shit.” Emily shook her head. “I can’t even imagine. What was new to you, everything?”
Janice laughed again, short and half-choking. “Nearly. And everyone I’d known was dead.” She smoothed back Emily’s hair, which sprung back, wiry, as her hand passed. “I’m glad you were only gone ten years.”
“Aunt Janice—” Emily paused, uncertain of how best to approach it. “Do you know what everyone here did? They’re not, Auntie, they’re—”
The door opened as Becky let herself in. “I told them I had a migraine, though with the total lack of ventilation at the salon, I might as well have had one.” She closed the door quickly behind her, wide eyes on Emily.
Janice sat up straight, crushing a tissue in her hand. She looked at Becky but spoke to Emily. “They’re wretches, manipulators, and complete bastards. Becky is the only one left that I trust.”
The woman’s shoulders fell. She shrugged off her jacket; she still wore a salon apron underneath. “And I knew what they were doing and I didn’t stop it.”
Emily sat cross-legged on the bed, her bed, staring at the wall. Her aunt had left Emily’s room mostly untouched. Other than tubs of winter clothes and some empty boxes from electronic gadgets, it was the same as when she’d left. The collage of magazine pictures and photocopied album art still mostly stuck to one wall, though some pieces were only hanging on by a single, brittle piece of tape, about to join the handful littering the carpet.
Fresh sheets were on the bed, but every other surface had a thick layer of dust obscuring the junk jewellery and knick-knacks accumulated in a childhood.
“I kept up on dusting in here for a long time,” Janice had said when she’d ushered Emily to bed after hours of talking. “But I just couldn’t keep it up, after a while.”
The three women had spent a long time going over what Emily had done and what she’d learned. Her aunt sat quiet while she talked about the king and Emily wondered if Janice still loved him. When she told them about the queen, her aunt bit back tears, shredding a tissue in her fingers.
Becky was apologetic, face twisted in shame. “I keep, or kept, records so I could see what was happening, but I didn’t tell Janice or anyone else. I figured I couldn’t stop it anyway, plus—” She flushed, unable to finish.
“Plus, it would be something different that happened, right?” Emily couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. “Something to shake up the day-to-day, something new to record.” The other woman nodded, sienna-and-steel hair falling in front of her face. Emily’s heart stirred but the Folk’s careless attitude still stung too deeply for her to really care.
When Becky spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper. “Janice would read your letters to everybody as soon as we’d get them. After a while, there was some grumbling that everything was taking too long, that you were tarrying on your journey.”
“I still didn’t know what kind of people they all were,” Janice cut in bitterly. “They’d played their parts so well for so long, but this close to the finish line, their masks were slipping.” She looked at Becky and touched her lightly on the hand.
“So I finally talked to your aunt, told her what I knew. That was just before your last letter.”
“Which they still don’t know about.”
Emily frowned. “So, they don’t know I talked to the king?”
“No.” Janice shook her head. “They still keep that arbour up, fresh flowers every midsummer, like they think you’ll come walking out of it any day.”
“They’ll know you’re here soon, if they don’t already.” Janice pressed her lips together angrily. “It’s up to you how you tell them and how much.”
The gooseneck lamp lit Emily’s hands in harsh shadow when she tore her eyes away from the wall. Becky had gone home and Janice to bed hours before. Still used to the Sidhe’s endless stretches of time, Emily had sat down to think and hadn’t moved since.
Unfolding her legs, Emily felt shooting cramps reminding her that here she was nothing but another mortal. Her knife belt rose up awkwardly as she stretched and she unbuckled it. Curious and careless, Emily slipped the knife fully from its sheath. There was no glow and the blade was only a sensible eight inches. Dried and darkened blood stained the metal, patchily filling in the engraved “Luck.”
Emily lay back, still holding the knife. She’d need to clean it. She was wondering how best to do that when she fell asleep.
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: