Give Sorrow Words

by

Seanan McGuire

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.

--William Shakespeare, Macbeth

December 19th, 2014

When Aster had requested that I see a healer of the mind to supplement the work she was doing with my nerves and physical form, I admit, I had hoped that she was overstating the difficulty of such a healing. True, she had told me that it would be harder than such healings as I had experienced in the past. With magic, all but the very direst injuries can be resolved in the span of an evening, and almost anything more severe than that will prove mortal. As I was not dead after walking around with such a widely unhealed wound in my mind, I had expected, on some level, that I would be told over and over how difficult these things were, only for my eventual healer to chant a practiced line of spell work and wipe it all away.

Alas, healings such as the one I sought are truly not such easy things to conduct. The injuries to my mind had been intangible things, much like the injuries which had soured my magic, and while I might think myself beyond them, they lingered. They had become a part of me, my thoughts finding ways to route around them, to avoid contact with the parts that had been damaged. Those patterns of avoidance were much of what my new doctor said we would need to work on.

"You're allowed to upset people, Simon," she had said, during our very first meeting. "They're not going to stop loving you just because you get one thing wrong."

I had so many examples to the contrary that it seemed impossible she could be correct, but she was firm on the point, and so I was making an effort to believe her, to let her guide me along paths of healing and positivity that would, with time, ease some of the devastation away.

"You'll never be exactly the man you were before this began, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can thank him for what he gave you, you can mourn him, and you can find a way to heal and be happy knowing that you already did the most difficult thing of all: you survived, and you found the strength to ask for help when you needed it."

I still wasn't sure that psychotherapy was going to be the solution to my problems, but Dianda had been so relieved when I finally approached her to ask about it that I didn't have the heart to say I wanted to stop, and besides, I had only had two appointments thus far. While both had been exhausting and painful, I could see some improvement. It was easier not to assume that every mistake would lead to my summary dismissal from the family I was struggling to construct.

Dr. Isobel Voss was a changeling, as had been promised, half-human, half an equal blend of Daoine Sidhe and Siren, born in the Kingdom of Evergreens, having relocated down the coast to the Mists after Arden's assumption of the throne. Her practice was small but thriving, and her clientele was almost entirely fae, changelings struggling with the pureblood dominancy in the hierarchy, purebloods struggling to adjust to the rapidly changing pace of the world, and people like me, who had been so deeply traumatized by life in Faerie that we were on the verge of withdrawing and purging ourselves of emotional connection.

It is a form of recovery largely reserved for the pureblooded, whose lives can span centuries and who occasionally need to sunder themselves from the burdens of their past. Someone who has withdrawn and returned to society is, in many ways, a new person, old bonds cut, old memories purged, consigned to the emptiness not even the night-haunts can access.

It is customary for one such as I, whose life has been touched by such important figures as two of the Firstborn, whose days have crossed with such monumental events as the deaths of kings and the recovery of Oberon himself, to visit a Library prior to their withdrawal, to allow the Librarian to preserve what of their life prior to that point deserves the honor of memory. Then they go, off into the mists at the edge of the Summerlands, and nothing touches nor troubles them, not monster, not ancient magic of unspeakable malice, not other fae; we leave the wandering ones to their contemplation and their forgetting.

There was a time when I grieved my now former bride, for I heard that she had retreated into the mists. We had been apart for decades by that point, August gone, Oleander come to my bed, and October born to Amandine's, but I had still loved her deeply, and had always believed on some level that we would find our way back to one another. Only her withdrawal had been incomplete. She had wandered as if in a daze, rattling at doors no one else could see, and so we had all believed her lost.

But when she returned, she had done so with memories and grudges well-intact, still mourning our absent daughter while punishing her present one, still resenting my failure to call August home. It was tempting to believe she had tried and failed at disconnection, that her love for me had been one of the few casualties of the process, but honesty forced me to admit that she had done no such thing. She had simply taken a little time to herself and returned unchanged. She had never loved me as I had once loved her.

Withdrawal might have been the answer, had I remembered what it was to care for others before August's return and Patrick's inexplicable offer of a home, before Dianda's impossible support of same. Now, however...

I was a disgraced man, still marked for a villain in the lands above, denied by his brother and divorced from his first beloved, and yet I had never been richer in the affection of those who truly mattered to me. both my daughters accepted me for the man I was. The people who chose me were willing to support my recovery, and to let me take the time I needed to find my way back to them.

I had never in my life been so free of pressure to live according to what someone else needed, and it was an almost crushing lack of obligation. In the absence of people telling me who I was supposed to be, I felt unmoored and off-balance, like I might topple over at any moment. Dr. Voss assured me that this was normal, and was in part a natural result of my mind beginning to process some of what I--and by extension, it--had been through.

It was important, for my recovery, that I learn to think of my mind and myself as the same creature yet entirely distinct at the same time. We needed to cooperate to continue our existence, but at times, I would need to do things without overthinking them, and my mind would need to do things without consulting the part of me that made actual choices about our shared life. it was a perplexing, sometimes dizzying construction of self, but it worked, and the more I allowed the strange, sorrowful beast that was my mind to wander as it would, the more I felt as if I could face the next night, and the night after that, and the one after that, all the way until the day I stopped my dancing.

Which would be very far in the future if I was allowed to have a say in the matter. More with every day that passed, I understood how much I wanted to live. I wanted to see August bloom in the absence of Amandine; I wanted to see my new family joyous and thriving. I wanted to see what my relationship with October would be, now that she had almost forgiven me for the actions of my past.

A forgiveness I had not yet earned and might never understand, but was grateful for all the same.

Because of the hours kept by the human world and those kept by the fae, my appointment with Dr. Voss was the end of her day and the beginning of my night, and now that I had been cut open and scoured clean for another evening, I made my way along the hall toward the hall where I was to meet Patrick and Dianda for our night's second meal. August and Peter might join us, if they were unoccupied by their own concerns, or they might leave us to our own devices.

August seemed to be thriving in her role as child of the house. She was several hundred years old, and an adult by the standards of any reasonable society, but playing the child's part, however temporarily, allowed her to adjust to the Undersea without being subject to the scrutiny and judgement of adulthood. Dianda had made it known to her household that I was not entirely well, although not the precise nature of my supposed illness, and so they were more forgiving with me than they might otherwise have been, but August, they judged as they would have any young thing.

She would chafe against it eventually, seek more freedom, or even to begin courting, if such a thing was of interest to her--she had never expressed such a desire in my presence, and might be one of those individuals for whom happiness was entirely internal, not tied to the love of another--and be elevated to the position of adult within the knowe. Once that happened, her Undersea etiquette would need to improve immensely. Until then, she deserved a chance to relax and play, and enjoy the freedoms she had never had on land.

Speaking of freedoms, and my daughter, August's furious shrieking rang down the hall a few seconds before the girl herself, racing after her brother with wild eyes and even wilder hair. She appeared to have been stirred from her chambers while not yet through her evening ablutions, which would mean she had lingered abed far too late for polite company. She was still wearing a dressing gown fastened over her nightdress, and her hair was a wild cascade of tangles down her back.

Peter was laughing as he ran, hands full of paintbrushes. He didn't spare me so much as a glance as he went barreling by. I plastered myself against the hallway wall, and August followed after him with the same single-minded devotion. I honestly wasn't sure she realized I was there before she was on her way past, running deeper into the knowe without missing a single step.

I didn't attempt to stop them, only watched as they rushed down the hall, a true child and a child of etiquette, playing like they hadn't a care in all the world.

I believe it's customary for me to follow that thought with a question of whether I was ever that young or that innocent, but as I knew full well that I had once been both, all I could do was laugh. I was a privileged, pampered little boy, growing up on a large estate with a twin brother, a tolerant older sister, and a peer fostered to be my friend. I had been young and innocent both. It was August who I sometimes feared had never been given the chance to be those things, trapped as she'd been in a tower with an emotionally absent mother and a father whose duties to a monster often lured him away.

For her to be joyful now made it easier for me to believe that any pain I experienced in the healing of my damages to be justified. Anything, to keep her laughing.

They were gone, off along the hall to cause chaos for whomever encountered them, and so I pushed away from the wall and resumed my walking toward the chamber where the rest of my family awaited me.

Cephali occasionally rippled out of nowhere as I approached, decorative segments of wall or ceiling becoming people with the lower bodies of great octopuses, their tentacles wrapped around garlands and lengths of silken ribbon. They had started doing me the courtesy of appearance after I spoke with Helmi and explained how anxious it made me to be watched without my knowledge or consent; to truly feel comfortable, I needed to know that all the eyes upon me were visible ones. She was still the only Cephali allowed in my quarters, and even then, she knocked before entry. Most occupants of the knowe treated the Cephali as friendly inevitabilities when they were about their business, no longer really noticing them or their works, only noticing the absence of those efforts, on the rare occasions when something interfered with the normal performance of household duties. I might eventually reach that point. For now, I preferred to see them, and not to wonder if I was alone.

"Good evening," I said genially to each Cephali I passed, matching my words with a bow of my head. They answered by jerking their own chins upward, toward the ceiling. Cephali had inherited a somewhat unusual view of hierarchy from the octopus side of their natures, and viewed status and threat as both being connected to height. It was part of why they spent so much time dangling from the ceilings. It made them feel safe to know that they were the tallest things in the room. This extended to the way they acknowledged people who weren't absolutely cemented as above them in the social structure.

Patrick had been concerned, at first, that I would take offense at their apparent dismissiveness. I found it charming. Everything else in the Undersea was topsy-turvy compared to my understanding from above, why not the basic manners with which people chose to greet each other?

I continued onward until the increasingly familiar, increasingly comforting sound of Dianda's laughter drifted down the hall. It was less hectic and strident than Peter's mirth had been, and I thought it rather less likely that she was planning some horrible act of mischief. Less: not entirely un. Merrow were surprisingly playful when met in their own environment, and not in the naturally hostile boundaries of a meeting on the land. Their reputation for militant hostility when threatened was an accurate one; it was just that a Merrow on dry land felt threatened as a matter of course, and was thus always hostile.

Here beneath the sea, the Merrow of Dianda's household--and Dianda herself--were still quick to anger and prone to flashes of temper, but they were at the same time pleasant, playful people who very much enjoyed the time they spent with friends and family, and prioritized comfort above many other things, including the strict laws of etiquette and poise that still ruled so many interactions on the land. It was refreshing, and a beautiful change from the world in which I had been so long struggling to survive.

I picked up my steps, hurrying after the sound, only to hear Dianda say, quite clearly, "Stop, stop! Simon will be here soon!"

Her giggles were salt rubbed into the wound her words had struck, and I stopped dead, leaning to the side until my shoulder hit the wall and I knew it would hold me. Only then did I close my eyes and take a moment to catch my breath, trying to force down the hurt, which I knew full well was disproportionate to the situation.

During my time in Evening's custody, when she had given me over to Oleander for her amusement, I had not been allowed to make choices about...much of anything, really. I ate what I was told, drank what I was told, slept when I was told, and most importantly in Oleander's eyes, allowed her access to whatever part of me she desired. I had spent over a hundred years with no bodily autonomy, and while I hated the responses that time had driven into my heart, they were still mine to carry. I had never asked my spouses to refrain from displays of affection in my presence, but they seemed intent on doing precisely that, to spare my sensibilities.

They didn't mean to hurt me. If anything, they were trying to spare me pain, by not reminding me unnecessarily of what I was no longer able to allow myself to have. But it ached all the same when they behaved like courting teens sneaking around behind an oppressive parent's back, all for the sake of a stolen kiss.

And here it was the first night of Yule! For the next twelve days, even here below the sea, we would be keeping the fires burning to encourage the return of the sun. That had seemed odd to me when I was a child, for the sun was the enemy of illusions, without which Faerie would fall, but my mother had set me down after she heard me saying we might be better off without the sun, taking me to the garden and holding me closely as we looked up at the sky, streaked with sunrise and still bruised from the passage of midnight.

I had been fully fae by that point, and had been since before I could remember, but still I had known her as my mother, her hands rough against mine, her hair already beginning to lighten at the temples as age turned her gold to silver.

"Look, my foxling, look at that sky," she'd said to me. "See how the color changes? That's the sun returning."

"I know that, Mam," I had replied, and tried to squirm away, for I'd been fast and hot and anxious, in the way of young things since time was born.

"Faerie doesn't change," she'd said, stubbornly holding me where I was.

"No, Mam." I think that was when I'd realized that she was saying something important, because that was when I'd stilled, letting her hold me, letting her show me the shifting sky.

"Left alone, Faerie would stay the same forever, and every illusion would stand like a shell, growing thicker and heavier and harder to put aside with every year that passed."

"Yes, Mam."

"But that isn't any way to live. That's a very pretty thing to look at, but it has no room for merriment, or mischief, or boys like you and your brother, or people like me." She'd kissed my temple then, lips cool, and I will forever be glad for that morning in the garden, because that's one of the only times I can remember my mother kissing me. She had been properly reserved whenever there was company about, knowing her place as a human partner in a faerie marriage bed, and I had been a young boy, full of fire and fussing, with children my own age encouraging me to run wild whenever possible. Quiet moments between us had never been as common as she would have liked them to be--or as I now wish they'd been.

My brother and I had grown up with two mothers, and never thought it odd. Amy had been horrified when she first came to us, and realized by the traceries in our blood that Celaeno had been the one to carry us beneath her breast when we were sleeping in the waters of the womb, changeling boys tangled and twined together. September had always known which of our mothers bore us, and never thought it mattered in the least, for we were her brothers, and that made us precious beyond price, and even after I'd learned the truth of our origins, my only regret had been that we were too young when subjected to the hope chest's pull to make our own choices. Out of all the changelings I had ever known, we were the only ones not to be given the Changeling's Choice. Celaeno had been forced to stand there as her infant sons became something she would never be, something she loved but which would always be apart from her, and we had been forced to stand aside and watch as our mother--our only remaining parent by that time--grew old and died. It had been infinitely cruel.

But she was the one who taught me the value of the sun's return. When the sun rose, it pulled down illusions. It kept them from stagnating where they stood, from rotting us into stasis. We needed the sun's return.

Even here, deep below the surface of the sea, we need the symbol of rebirth it represented. So we hung the garlands and we lit the fires, and we coaxed the light to come back to us again. Dianda had assured me, repeatedly, that August and I would both enjoy our first Yule in the Undersea: that even without the sun, we would know the light returning.

I pushed myself away from the wall, trying to get my emotions back under some semblance of control. If I was this hurt by the thought that they hid their amorous activities from me, how was I meant to recover? How was I meant to reach the point where I could invite them to reach for me, rather than leaving me at a safe remove, a husband in name more than reality?

We lit the fires: the sun returned. I was taking the necessary steps for my own healing, and I would find my way back to the man I desired to be.

Or I would die trying.

#

Patrick and Dianda were seated at the table set for our luncheon, their chairs a reasonable distance apart and only the slight dishevelment of Patrick's hair betraying the activities I had briefly overheard.

"Our children are attempting to kill each other," I said, by way of hello. "Do we know why?"

"Peter got into August's studio when she opened the door," said Dianda, as calmly as if this sort of thing happened every night. "He grabbed a bunch of her brushes and ran, and she's been giving chase ever since. They seem to be enjoying themselves thus far."

"Indeed." I took a seat, spreading a napkin over my knees. Peter's legs had an unfortunate tendency to transform themselves to fins when he least expected it, a quirk which could easily send him sprawling. For their game to have been going on for more than a few minutes, August would have to be slowing or stopping entirely every time he fell down, giving him the time to collect himself.

"She's very good with him," said Dianda. "I'll admit, I wasn't sure she would be, when you first asked if she could come with us. She's had some poor examples of what it is to care for other people, and I was concerned."

Much as I wanted to leap to my daughter's defense, I had to admit Dianda had a point. Amandine wasn't what I would call a good role model when it came to being kind. "She likes feeling as if she's useful to someone, I think," I said. "Everything here is so new to the both of us, and while Peter knows more about the way things work here in the Undersea than she does, there are things she knows more about than he does. It balances."

"They suit each other," said Patrick. "They decided they were family."

"I married you," I said, with some amusement. "Doesn't that mean we had already decided the same thing?"

"Yes, but we couldn't decide for them," he said.

"I suppose not." I began scooping lunch--some sort of seafood casserole--onto my plate, not quite meeting their eyes.

"How was your session?" asked Dianda, carefully.

"It went well, I think." I added some salad, for the sake of balance. "We're discussing a great many things, most of which I'm not quite ready to talk about as yet."

"I see," she said, care replaced by disappointment.

"I promise not to remain a burden any longer than my recovery requires." I filled my glass with wine, not bothering to taste it first. Helmi would have supplied the table with an excellent vintage. "And the two of you needn't stand apart from each other out of concern for my sensibilities. I'm a big boy. I can handle knowing that my spouses, who've been married for a century and have two children, love each other and sometimes demonstrate it."

Patrick's cheeks reddened as he glanced away. Dianda grimaced, just a little.

"You heard that?"

"I did," I confirmed. "It was very sweet, in its own way, to know that you were so concerned for me? But entirely unnecessary, I assure you. I know the two of you enjoy each other's physicality. You don't have to try to hide it from me. I'm not a child."

Even if I were, it was normal for people to kiss each other in the presence of their children, if not to go much beyond kissing. I was being shielded more completely than Peter was, and that was part of the reason it stung so.

"We're not trying to hide anything," said Patrick. "We just didn't want to make you uncomfortable by..."

"If the next word out of your mouth is 'flaunting,' I'll throw a tomato at you," I said, pleasantly. "That was a standard method of expressing displeasure when we were younger, wasn't it?"

"The theater was certainly a lot more fun in those days," said Patrick. "Surely you can understand how we might be concerned--"

"A man who kisses his wife is not flaunting anything, nor is a woman who kisses her husband," I said. "My current inability to relax shouldn't keep you from comforting one another, and if it does, something is very, very wrong--something which may be beyond our capacity to fix. I agreed to come home with you because I was afraid and you said you loved me. Love me now by trusting me to tell you what I can and can't endure."

They exchanged a look. Dianda sighed. "We'll try," she said. "I make no promises as yet, but...we'll try. For your sake."

"That's all I've ever asked. Now. What are tonight's festivities?"

"Helmi and the staff are finishing the decorating," she said. "Peter will have to stop tormenting August at some point, as they'll both be expected to come to the kitchen to braid the bread for supper. Can't do that with a fistful of purloined paintbrushes. Once that's been done, it'll be set to baking, and we'll go to the fissure and light the Yule fire."

I blinked. "Come again?"

"The Yule fire," she said.

"It was strange to me at first," said Patrick. "It'll all make sense in a few hours."

"Is this one of those cases where, if we request more details, you refuse to give them, or else answer only in ridiculous nonsense that nonetheless proves perfectly true?"

He nodded.

I picked up my fork. "Fine, then. I won't ask."

Patrick looked oddly disappointed. "Not at all?"

"No. I'd prefer to let you surprise me without any preemptive torture." The fish casserole was excellent. Most of the knowe's food was. Helmi would have tolerated nothing less. "I'm sure whatever it is, it will be spectacular."

Dianda laughed.

"If nothing else, he's got us there."

#

After lunch was finished, we separated to go about our own enterprises, Dianda to the running of her court, Patrick to his workshop, I to my lab. I was still working on refining the potion that allowed us the ability to temporarily breathe beneath the waves. I might be working on it for years, and the thought was an exhilarating one. There was so much room for improvement, and they had put so much trust in me by agreeing to let me try, the idea that I might succeed was second to the glory of the work.

Adding ground Merrow scales and a few stabilizing drops of Dianda's blood to the mixture seemed to improve its positive properties, while reducing the negative. Testing would be a long and complicated matter, and in the meanwhile, I would keep tinkering. Tinkering is a joy not to be understated.

Several hours passed before there was a knock at my door and I looked up, blinking in my surprise. "Yes?"

"Count Lorden?"

"Ah, Helmi. Enter."

The door opened, and the Cephali who effectively served as Dianda's chatelaine all but spilled into the room, cherry red tentacles coiling as they gripped the floor. "The baking of the bread is upon us," she said, formally.

"I see. Is this a ritual I'm expected to attend?"

"It's customary, yes," she said, managing not to make it sound as if I were a fool for not knowing that already.

"Well, then, I suppose I can hardly refuse." I set my tools aside and rose, stretching to work the kinks out of my spine. "Are you allowed to tell me what this involves, or am I meant to be surprised?"

"The children of the house have been braiding the dough that will be the morning's bread, and the next several days' as well," she said, reaching out to wrap the tip of one tentacle around my wrist and tug me gently along. Her touch was so unlike anything I had ever experienced on the land that it didn't trigger my usual revulsion for contact, and I didn't pull away, allowing her to guide me. "All of it will be placed under stasis charms, and we'll eat it until it's all gone."

"I suppose whoever finds the bean will be slaughtered in the kelp fields?"

"And they call us barbaric, here below the sea," she said, sounding horrified. "There's no bean, and no sacrifice. We'll eat, and be fed by the fruits of harvest, and wait for the lights to tell us the sun's returning."

"How is it that we have bread this far below the waves?"

"Wheat can be carried by divers, of course, and we cut the dough with dried kelp," she said. "The bread we bake here combines two worlds, much as your marriage to our Duchess does, and it symbolizes the growth and harvest that happens only in a world which remembers what it is to change. Without the sun's return, there would be no planting. Without the long days of the year, there would be no fruiting, no ripening, and we'd go hungry now. It's best that we remember that."

"You take Yule very seriously here," I said, as we left the chambers I shared with Patrick and Dianda for the hall.

Once the door was closed behind us, she untangled her tentacle from my wrist, trusting me to walk alongside her without guidance. That trust lit a warm fire in my belly, and it felt almost as if the sun had already gone away and returned again.

"We do," she agreed. "The actual sunlight doesn't penetrate here. Our illusions last for longer, and our enchantments can be woven without the need to stand up to the dawn. And none of that matters when set against the need to renew the magic that makes our existence in these depths possible at all."

I paused to consider this. Many creatures of Faerie exist according to natural laws which the mortal world would call impossible. Helmi was quite clearly a mammal. She was also quite clearly a cephalopod, and I couldn't see a way the human understanding of biology would label her as capable of life. She had lungs, yet breathed the water perfectly well, without the need for visible gills, and the speed with which she changed color was beyond even the most clever octopus's capabilities. Magic had created her. Magic sustained her.

Helmi nodded, apparently following my thoughts through the look on my face. "It's more than just those of us who were born this far down," she said. "The knowe exists despite a thousand reasons that it shouldn't, filled with airy chambers that can't possibly be here, standing up against unthinkable pressures. We're in the sea of the Summerlands, not the waters of Earth, but still, the water knows we shouldn't be here. The sea always knows what doesn't belong. We take Yule seriously because the sun's return refreshes the magic that allows us to be here at all. Without it, we would all just...wash away."

That was a perspective I had never considered. On the land, in the open air, while we might build impossible palaces, the worst thing they could do was collapse. We wouldn't drown. And while there were air-breathing fae whose biology was as tangled and self-contradictory as Helmi's, they were less common than they seemed to be beneath the sea. If the sun's return after the dark of winter refreshed the magic that sustained Faerie, as Helmi seemed to believe, most of us would survive its disappearance.

Oh, we wouldn't be happy, but we'd be alive, and it seemed that was more than the Undersea could hope for.

"I don't know if the magic would go away when the sun failed to make its symbolic return," I said, voice slow and thoughtful. "It might. We're not meant to live in this reality, so far from deepest Faerie. The Summerlands are the mortal world tolerating us. If they lost their grip for some reason, it might be enough to cut us off entirely from what sustains us. Without Oberon to reopen the paths that lead deeper, it could be the ending of us all. So I can't say whether you're right, but I can't say you're wrong, either. Taking matters seriously when the answer isn't available is the most sensible thing we can do."

"Yes," she said, sounding pleased. "So we bake the bread and we hang the flowers, even though we can't grow them here, and we light the fire, and we wait, and we hope. If one day the sun fails to return, we'll know it was because the land lost their faith in the ritual, and not because of something we did. It's what we have."

It didn't seem like enough. I nodded and kept following her, along the curve of the hall and all the way to the kitchen, where I had not previously had cause to set foot.

It was a massive, chambered room, the ceiling even more vaulted than that in Dianda's receiving room, the walls lined with shelves and with cooking equipment. Larders stood open in every wall, sheets of shimmering cold keeping their contents from spoiling. As we entered, Cephali appeared, dangling from the ceiling and clinging to the walls, a half dozen of them in all, none familiar. I glanced at Helmi. She smiled a quick, encouraging smile, then nodded.

This was all the Cephali in the room, then. No more were lurking to startle me, and knowing that allowed me to relax.

A large table split the kitchen down the middle. August and Peter were standing at opposite ends, quite covered in flour. August had brushed her hair at some point, and it was dusted in white, making her look like a ghost of herself as she turned and grinned at me.

"Papa, come see!" she called.

"What am I looking at?"

"The bread, silly."

"Ah, yes. The bread, the bread."

The bread in question was a single great braided loaf that reached almost from one end of the table to the other. It was the untextured white color of a fish's belly, utterly untouched by flame, and looking at the ovens, large as they were, I couldn't imaging any way they were going to bake it.

"Are we meant to eat this raw?" I asked.

"Of course not," said Dianda. I turned, and there she was, entering the room on Patrick's arm. She was followed by a small procession of her people, most of them Peter's age or younger; the children of her current generation of courtiers. They fanned out to take up positions around the table, falling into place like the tumblers of a lock. I frowned.

"I'm still not seeing how we bake this."

"Everyone remembers that the Merrow can change shapes and sing storms," said Dianda. She moved to stop beside me, still holding onto Patrick's arm even as she bumped her shoulder against my own. "They forget that we also control the weather. Children! Open the Yule!"

All around the table, the children of Merrow descent raised their hands to the level of their hearts, palms turned toward the waiting dough. The other children, August included in their number, stood as they were and watched, then joined hands behind the backs of the Merrow, so that they formed a circle with the Merrow just inside, and the table and the bread inside that circle.

"Dark is gone, recall the dawn," chanted the Merrow children, and "Winter's done, bring back the sun," chanted the others, and the air between the children's hands and the bread lit up golden with sunlight as they called the summer sun into the room.

I frowned. "The sun is nice, but it won't bake bread," I said. "Not normally."

"Ah, but they're calling the idea of the sun as much as the sun itself," said Dianda. "And the idea of the sun can bake bread better than any oven has ever done. They'll hold it there until the bread's done through--which should only take a few minutes--and then they'll let it go, and the Nixies will throw the stasis spell over the full loaf before we go out to light the fire."

I turned to her. "This is very elaborate."

"Are you telling me the land doesn't have any rituals around Yule? Or just that you've been observing them for so long that they all fade into the background for you now? Patrick tells me they do candle-lighting on the land. We don't do that here, but the Cephali will spend the next three nights going through their progression of colors, until they've shifted from spring to winter and back again, in honor of the shifting of the sea. The Asrai are looking at everyone's fortunes to see who's going to need kind tides in the year ahead, and the Cetacea are clearing the waters for the end-of-Yule dance. You can attend that, if you feel ready for that many people. It's quite popular. Most of Duchy will be there."

"Dear," said Patrick, mildly. "You're leaving out the important part again."

"Ah, yes. It takes place in the open sea."

A dance outside the knowe? I had no idea how that was supposed to occur, but given how calm Patrick was about the matter, I had to assume some sort of magic would keep those of us who needed air to breathe from drowning.

"Fascinating," I said.

"We don't do things exactly the way you do on the land, but we do them well," said Dianda, sounding a little smug. "We keep our fires burning, and we remember that all of Faerie began in the same place, a very long time ago. Before the land and sea came to divide us, before we learned that we were anything more than one family. We find our joy."

"May it always be so simple," I said, and looked back to the bread, the summoned sunlight baking its crust to a golden brown and pulling out all the details of the braid, the fingerprints pressed into the hardening crust, the tiny braided roses someone had added around the ends. It was a beautiful thing, impossible without magic, but all the more glorious because the magic was there.

Because it was joy.

Dianda bumped her shoulder against mine again, a glancing touch, but enough to ground me back in the moment. "It's time," she said, and when I turned to look at her, she dipped a hand into her skirt and came up with a small, stoppered bottle, which she offered to me. Patrick had an identical bottle already in his hand.

I nodded to him, and together, we popped the stoppers free and drank the unpleasant potion within. Peter was moving closer to August, offering her a third bottle, and she grimaced as she took it and drank its contents, then laughed and tousled his hair, apparently unbothered by the taste. The two of them turned away from the table and moved to join us, as out of the crowd several Nixies appeared and moved forward, their hands moving in the first sweeps of the stasis spell that would protect the bread for the holiday's duration.

Dianda stepped away from Patrick, and he let her go, the both of us watching as she moved toward the door. Once there, she stopped, and turned, and in a loud, carrying voice, called, "I am Duchess Dianda Lorden of Saltmist, daughter of Morcan, son of Carwyn, son of Efa, daughter of Amphitrite, and by right of crown and scale, I declare these are my waters to keep and care for. Does any wish to dispute my claim?"

No one said a word. I didn't move, barely daring to breathe in case there was some custom I didn't know well enough to avoid violating. After several long seconds of silence, Dianda nodded, apparently content.

"Then come, and we will remind the sun why it shines even here in the deepest depths," she said, and led our procession out of the room and down the long hall to a room I had not been in before. Like the room where we normally arrived from abovewater, it was filled with air, and had a floor. Unlike that room, the floor surrounded a hole the size of a small lake or very ambitious pond, and its depths were deep and inscrutable.

There are two customary ways to enter or exit an Undersea knowe. Some doors open directly from the walls, and have an unpleasant tendency to cause localized floods when used. They seem to be mostly reserved for emergencies, times when the effort of cleaning up the water is worth the speed of egress. Others, used for more common comings and goings, involve swimming down through pools in the floor, or up through same, and allowing the natural gravity of water to keep the rest of us unwetted.

Dianda walked straight to the edge of the pool and over, dropping down into the depths. The full group followed her, Patrick reaching over to take my hand in his as it came our time to jump. The potion had more than done its job by that point, and I followed without hesitation.

The water was warm. It buoyed us up, allowing us to fall at our own rate. I held onto Patrick's hand, watching as the tunnel around us became a rainbow of flashing fins and coiling tentacles, Dianda's subjects shedding their more bipedal forms for things that suited their oceanic environment. Shapeshifters are more common in the Undersea than they have ever been on the land, and people like Helmi, who can't shift at all, are rarer than those who can.

Peter swam by, towing August, and I waved at them before Helmi grabbed hold of my wrist, and Patrick's as well, and went jetting off after Dianda. Being towed by an octopus was odd compared to being pulled along by a Merrow, and I relaxed, allowing it to happen.

As a group, we swam perhaps half a league, stopping when we were a little more than a mile and a half from the knowe. Looking back, I could see it gleaming in the distance, a shimmering mother-of-pearl spire inviting us home. Patrick nudged me with his shoulder, encouraging me to face forward. I did.

We had come to a submerged valley of a kind, its walls lush with kelp and ridged with volcanic rock, its floor all but clear. Dianda swam forward, descending farther as she did, and when she reached the center of the valley, she raised her hands as the children had above the bread. As the children, she called sunlight out of nothingness, focusing it to the point of becoming fire.

And to my deep surprise, the water in front of her caught, burning a lambent and shifting green. I stared. Patrick laughed.

"Natural gas vent," he said, voice low. "It leaks up from the earth, and if you light it, it burns for about two weeks. A Yule fire below the sea, that doesn't go out."

"Magic," I breathed. We lived in a world of enchantments and illusions, but some things could still be glorious, especially when unexpected.

Dianda swam away from the flickering green flame, which continued to burn, and back to our group. No one else moved, and as we watched, the valley around the flame lit up in a dazzling cascade of rainbow colors, blue and purple and green and orange and a deep pink that verged on red. It was like she had called the aurora borealis down to the bottom of the sea, and as I rested my head against Patrick's shoulder, I smiled, trying to take it all in.

Some moments make everything seem worth the fight of reaching them.

#

The remainder of the first night of Yule passed peacefully, in baking bread and hanging garlands, and when we slept, all three of us in our shared bed, we did so without unkind dreams or fears assaulting us in the small hours of the afternoon. I woke feeling more refreshed than had been my norm for some years, and brewed myself a cup of the tea Aster supplied me--the truly potent blend would be served later, in her quarters, but this would get me through the first hours of the evening. I didn't like to think of myself as dependent, but someone who is injured or ill may need their medicine without such thoughts, and I tried to class myself the same.

My injuries were invisible ones, but still I had suffered them, and still I must be kind with myself until they were healed and faded into memory. Time alone would not suffice.

Patrick and Dianda were already waiting when I came to join them at the table for first meal, their own beverages in their hands. Dianda sipped from her cup, then asked, "How are you feeling this evening?"

"Reasonably well," I said. "Like being social, and like I'm not going to flee screaming if asked to hang branches in the halls. I have another appointment tomorrow, and hopefully that will be enough to see me through the remainder of the holiday."

"I hope so as well," said Patrick. "We're very proud of you for being willing to seek and accept help. I hope you understand that."

Part of me recoiled from his words, wanting to take them as condescension or pity. The rest of me held its ground, allowing a trace of pride to rise to place of dominance in my thoughts. Yes, this was difficult. It was difficult to admit that I needed help, that I had any weakness at all, that I couldn't resolve everything entirely on my own. It was difficult to believe that I was worth helping. But I loved the people around me, and to admit that they were as clever and precious as I believed them to be included admitting that they couldn't be entirely wrong about me. For one of them to make such a grave error in judgement was believable. For all of them to do so strained credulity.

"I do," I said, as graciously as I could manage, and began to fill my plate. "What is tonight's plan?"

"Baking cookies and decorating the library," said Dianda. "If the Cephali weren't so fond of an excuse to hang things from the ceiling, I would shorten the decorating by half the holiday, so that we could spend the first half hanging things up and the second taking them down. But they're wedded to the idea that every high point in the knowe deserves the chance to be draped in ribbons, and so it seems I must allow it."

"You act like you hate this, but we both know you adore it," said Patrick.

"I do," she admitted. "But it's messy and I don't like it. It would be better if all the ritual woods didn't need to be brought down from the surface. If we could use kelp and sea apples instead of oak and yarrow, it would seem a lot less like we were saying the land was the only culture that matters."

"Are there roses that grow beneath the sea?" I asked, suddenly interested.

Dianda nodded. "We have whole gardens of them."

"I would like to go there. I'm sure they would have alchemical applications, and I'd like to learn them."

"I'll arrange a tour after the spring tides have settled," said Dianda.

"It's appreciated."

Patrick was looking back and forth between us, and as we settled the matter, he sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

"Sometimes it astonishes me how quickly you've adapted to life down here," he said finally. "It took me over a year to be comfortable with the idea of venturing outside the knowe, and you're asking to tour the gardens."

"I like gardens," I said, with a small shrug.

He started laughing, and was still laughing as I finished off my toast and rose, cup in hand.

"I need to see Aster for my tea," I said. "Where shall I meet you?"

Dianda looked pleased. "Are you assisting in the festivities today as well?"

"Peter and August both are; it seems the least I can do. And I've always enjoyed Yule. I rather miss the bonfires." The sea outside was still burning with a soft borealis of light, but it wasn't the same. "I would be delighted to serve in whatever capacity my lady wishes."

"Oh, get ready to hang a lot of garlands," she said, with what sounded like almost malicious glee.

I laughed. There was something purely delightful about being surrounded by people who felt like they could tease me--and more, in feeling like I could be teased, like it was safe to be teased, like they would still love me at the end of it all.

I spent the night hanging garlands, as threatened, and watching Helmi dangle from the fixtures, and laughing more than I had laughed in years. I laughed until I felt I might be drunk on laughter. Every meal was accompanied by another slice of Yule bread, still as fresh as if it had just been baked, and every plate was filled. I saw more of Dianda's subjects than I had known existed within the Duchy; apparently, Yule was one of the times when they were all welcome within the knowe, and they came and went as the mood struck them.

Peter ran wild in the halls with gangs of children near to his own age, while August spent her time in her study, or speaking with the younger adults of the community, taking her first cautious steps out into the greater society was had joined. She might not have chosen this life as much as I had--if even I could be said to have chosen it, rather than simply agreeing to it--but she was adapting. We were all adapting.

During my session the next night, I tried to explain the feelings this was stirring in my heart. Envy was there, certainly; a strange longing for the ease with which my daughter was adjusting to our new circumstance. But joy was also present. Joy at the milestones already passed; joy at the milestones I could see yet ahead.

When I was finished, Dr. Voss looked at me, solemn over our video connection, and said, "I think, Simon, that it's time you allowed yourself to believe that you're allowed to ask for things. When you want them, you can ask. You won't always get what you ask for, but there's no shame in wanting more."

I looked at her and frowned, trying to put her words into the context of myself. I had so much more than I could ever have asked. How could I even dream to ask for gifts beyond that?

My confusion must have shown, because she smiled, and said, "We'll revisit this later. For now, I'd like to discuss your feelings about the holiday--"

Our session ended, as always, with me feeling like I'd been scraped out and put down for the wind to carry away. I made my way along the hall to the room where I'd be joining the others for lunch, and paused when I saw that another garland had appeared above the door.

Several minutes passed. I didn't move. I was still standing there, looking upward at the greenery, when Dianda appeared in the doorway. "I could have sworn I heard--Simon! Why are you standing out here? We've been waiting for you!"

Wordlessly, I pointed upward. She followed my finger, then scowled.

"I'll call Helmi straight away. I told her to steer clear this year, but it's traditional, and she must have thought no one would notice. I'm sorry. Just ignore it, and come to lunch."

"It's tradition," I said.

People assume that all mortal Christmas traditions are exactly that--mortal, or Christmas, tied to a religion that has no place in Faerie. They don't understand that many of those traditions were picked and chosen from other practices common when the religion in question was new, or that just as we acquire human trends, they have sometimes acquired things from us.

Mistletoe is a very fae plant. It's a parasite, as we are, in our way; it affixes itself to another even as the Summerlands have affixed themselves to Earth, feeding off the larger reality to keep ourselves alive. It blooms all winter long, small and poisonous and perfect. The tradition of hanging it high for the amusement of lovers has been with us since the beginning.

It's a party game now, but once, it was a way of testing suitability, and letting the young experiment in ways that manners and etiquette would otherwise never have allowed.

Once, now, and always, it's an opportunity.

"Tradition isn't important," said Dianda.

"Leave it," I said, and she stopped, staring at me.

It might have been the first time I told her what to do since I'd come beneath the sea. Always, I had been careful to ask, to demure, to keep from asserting myself too directly. If I never pushed the boundaries, I could never be rebuffed.

Now was the time for trying. It was Yule; the mistletoe was hung; it was a sweet cliché, with centuries of tradition behind it, and it had done great things for better men than I. I took a step toward her, until we were very close. Close enough to touch.

"You've been doing a brilliant job with the Yule festivities," I said. "They've been some of the smoothest I've seen."

"You have no basis for comparison."

"I do on land, and those are frequently far less elaborate, and far less smoothly organized," I said. "Your people should be proud."

"I'll tell them," she said.

I paused to catch my breath, then asked, "Did you marry me because you wanted to, or because you wanted to make Patrick happy?"

"The two are one and the same," she said. "I would never have entertained the idea if it didn't make him happy to consider, but I would have refused if I'd found you poor company, or repulsive to be around. You have always been a good man in my experience. You amuse me. And Maeve knows, you're easy enough on the eyes. I married you for both reasons, more the second than the first, but I fail to regret it on either end."

"Good," I said, and leaned forward, and kissed her.

It was the first kiss I had initiated since our marriage, and after a moment of surprise, she kissed me back with more vigor than I would have thought possible, keeping her hands carefully at her sides as she did. When she broke away, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. I leaned up and plucked a berry from the mistletoe.

She laughed when I flicked it at her, then looked up, and smiled. "Two more," she said. "Shall we call for Patrick?"

I nodded, for once wordless, and stayed as I was while she went to fetch our husband.

My healing would be more than a matter of weeks, but it would happen. Of that I was sure. For this place, for these people--I would do the work. However much it hurt.

And we would see the sun return.