Changeling Read online

  Changeling

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  This story is set in the same universe as Visitor and Queen.

  * * *

  The last mortal wore out and Grandmama wanted a new one, so they sent Bree.

  Well, first they named her Eliliand, but that was early and forgotten enough that nobody knew that name apart from Grandmama herself and Eliliand’s father. And the mortal they took was once named Bree but they called her Trinket, and in Trinket’s place because fair’s fair Grandmama sent - well. Bree.

  Bree the fairy cried a lot. She did not like her wings being tucked away with the magic of fair’s fair. She did not like drinking milk, nor how hungry she got when she wouldn’t swallow it. She did not like it when Trinket’s human parents picked her up and rocked her and she didn’t like it when they left her alone and she didn’t like it when they acted like she couldn’t understand every word they spoke. Bree was young but she wasn’t brand new or stupid, she knew everything they said, she could read. (But she couldn’t talk, or write, not until a mortal the age she was pretending could. Fair’s fair.)

  Bree was young enough to forget, though, exactly why all these things were the case. Exactly why they were so upsetting.

  By the time fair’s fair allowed her to talk, she had nothing to say on the subject. She was uncomfortable all the time and hated meat and dairy and didn’t want to be hugged and she was whip-smart with a book - but she was called Bree and three years old and human, probably, right, that would be the obvious thing for her to be, look at her human parents right there.

  This was why they had to send a very young fairy. If a grownup fairy were changed to look like a baby mortal, then they would inevitably act very inhuman - and then fair would not be fair.

  And fair was fair.

  * * *

  Bree was a very obedient child. She did not whine about how her back hurt, after they brought her to a doctor and the doctor said nothing was wrong and Mum said stop complaining. She did not turn up her nose at cheese and eggs and sausage after she turned up negative for allergies and Dad said clean your plate. She was not allowed to ask for a new bicycle again or neglect writing her uncle a thank-you note or eat her entire dark chocolate Easter bilby at once or stay up past nine or talk back to Mum or interrupt Dad or let her shoelaces stay untied or or or -

  It did not occur to her that it might be odd to have no choice in these matters until she had already been attending school for several years. Of course her friends said that their mums did not let them do things, and then often tended not to do them. And Bree did not have to do what her teachers said, except for Miss Hope with the tin of lollies (and everybody liked Miss Hope, largely on account of the tin of lollies, so it was not unusual to be cooperative with her).

  But when Bree was eight one of her friends (Bree socialized with other well-behaved children, both because they formed a natural clique and because her dad encouraged it) did not do her homework. And Bree had heard her mum tell her to do it.

  Bree did not bring this up with her friend. But she thought about it.

  As a general rule Bree herself did not tell people to do things. Her dad had told her not to be bossy, once, when she was four.

  But Bree had also been told, since then, Say please. And she found this gave her a bit of leeway.

  She experimented.

  “Please let me go to the movies.”

  “Please buy me that dress.”

  “Please don’t make me go to school today.”

  And her mum or dad (who were named, respectively, Anne and Sam Taylor, which information Bree had memorized in case she became lost) would absently give her leave to go, put the dress in the cart, call in sick for her.

  Bree didn’t know why she could do this, but she did have the feeling that she oughtn’t push it. Her mum and dad (and her grade two teacher with the lollipops and the one friend she had a habit of swapping lunches with) could do it right back, so she didn’t think she had best bring it to mind, or it would all be very Ella Enchanted until she found a prince and Bree did not think princes were in stock at the boyfriend store.

  When she was fourteen she did entertain thoughts of going to Canberra and whispering instructions to politicians, but if one did that it probably led to sinister gentlemen in suits carrying one away for sinister experimentation.

  Being fourteen also led her to try:

  “Please come with me to the dance.”

  But the poor boy stammered so as he nodded and promised, and looked so upset, that she called him the next day and said that she was not going after all and he had better find someone else and then hung up on him before she could make more of a fool of herself.

  And then Bree flopped face down on her bed and cried.

  * * *

  She convinced her parents that she wanted to go vegan for animal rights reasons, although Bree did not actually like animals, had never liked them, they moved wrong and their eyes were wrong. Her parents let her and she ate a lot of salad and a lot of fruit and a lot of cake that foamed up with vinegar and baking soda.

  Her friends thought she was strange for not liking animals. How could you not like birds. How could you not like koalas. But all Bree could think when she saw them was how uncomfortable it looked to be them, to have to move that way, to have eyes on opposite sides of your head, no hands, an unsmiling beak. To be edible.

  She did like the more attractive categories of bugs. Butterflies, mostly. Dragonflies and ladybirds. They were too simple to be uncomfortable or afraid, she thought, and so pretty.

  The more she sussed out how she was not normal the more aggressively Bree tried to do ordinary things. She went vegan but followed the herd in what music she claimed to like, which actors. She couldn’t bear dogs or cats or parrots but she wore pink and painted her nails and grew her gold-blond hair into long, long waves, and people thought she was pretty, and pretty people could get away with eating salad if they gave the impression of watching their weight. She took the same second language as her friends.

  She had to drop out of Mandarin. It was just - she couldn’t even begin to explain. It just looked like English.

  Well, it looked like English always did to her, at any rate. It was just words. The teacher said hello class and Bree said hello right back and the teacher said no, no, Chinese, “hello”, go on, it’s not so hard to pronounce and then got steadily angrier until Bree fled the room to the school office and transferred into Band and learned to force sound out of the flute.

  Her parents made her practice, and practice she did.

  * * *

  When Bree turned eighteen, her dad said, “You’re a grownup now, my girl. You can do what you want.”

  And Bree could almost feel something go snap.

  She did not have stand up straight she did not have to brush her teeth twice a day she did not have to wake up as soon as her alarm went off she did not have to call if she was going to be late she did not have to put half of her money in savings she did not have to wipe her feet before she came inside she did not have to hug her grandpa she did not have to say excuse me she did not have to practice music thirty minutes a day she did not have to she did not have to she

  did

  not

  have

  to

  let

  her

  back

  keep

  aching -

  Bree squeaked and bolted for the bathroom and leaned over the sink and breathed very hard.

  Had she been doing that to herself, the whole time - did someone tell her to do some long-forgotten awful thing with her shoulders or spine, or was it psychosomatic, Bree had not previously thought that “thinking about a purple elephant” sorts of orders were different for her than for anyone else but
what if someone just told her that she should feel like her back hurt all the time

  Bree peeled her shirt off, unhooked her bra.

  And Bree wanted to stop doing the thing - whatever it was.

  And just like that, just like magic, she was a butterfly-girl.

  She felt entire.

  Those were her wings. She could fly with them if she wanted. She could be lighter, she could be smaller, she could beat those black-edged golden gaudy wings and rise into the air, oh, she was dreaming, she was dreaming -

  The wings moved when she wanted to move them. It felt at least as natural as flicking her fingers. They’d been crumpled up, smoothed away, and no doctor had ever turned them up but there they were.

  Who had told her to put them away?

  She made a half-turn in front of the mirror and stepped on the piece of birch-bark paper that had fallen in a roll onto the floor when her wings had unfurled.

  And she picked it up.

  “Bree!” called Dad. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine!” she said, a little too high-pitched.

  She stuffed the paper into her pocket.

  With a deep breath, she folded her wings away, back into familiar pain, and put her top back on and left the bathroom.

  But later, when she had moved into her university dorm, and had her room all to herself with a lock on the door, she took them out again.

  And she read over her little roll of birchbark paper which she’d tucked into her toiletry bag.

  You are a changeling.

  If you have escaped your mortal captors and are ready to return home, the gate is thirteen kilometers north of the house you were left in, marked with a row of stones, and should be entered traveling due southwest. They can only keep you for as long as they can keep you; fair is fair.

  Grandmama has a place for you in the Court.

  Bree read it over, and over, and over, and she went to bed, because she’d signed up for early morning intro bio, and didn’t want to be late on day one.

  * * *

  In uni the Mandarin teacher was a native speaker and thought Bree was a prodigy. She evaded his pleas to enroll in his classes; the other students would only hear English. Or whatever. She still didn’t know exactly how that worked. Maybe this was why it had been so hard to learn to type; computers did not know what words were and could only accept letters. She still preferred to write her assignments longhand. Trying to spell with a keyboard was a nightmare.

  She took intro to this and that. She read her birchbark note now and then.

  Mortal captors. Fair is fair.

  Grandmama.

  What kind of place would Bree have in a court of butterfly-people?

  She’d undone her transformation all the way, now. It was ecstatic to be so free of squeezing awful whatever it was; the wings weren’t the only thing. Her parents had said that her joint aches were growing pains, that she felt gross and heavy because she was bombarded by media of girls thinner than her.

  When she was completely free of all her - magical whatever - Bree was only one and a quarter meters tall, spindly as any magazine cover model, winged, radiantly golden. Kind of flat-chested, but she was that even under her - shapeshifting? Illusion? She kept her fingernail polish and her hair when she changed and her clothes loosened around her, like she was physically morphing, not just shedding imaginary light. It felt real. She could reach shelves with her false height, and everything.

  Her face stayed the same.

  She could go back, look human, and she didn’t like it, it fucking hurt, although she was a grownup and could do what she liked, now, so she could take paracetamol for it and nobody said don’t do that, Bree, it won’t help, the doctor said it’s all in your head.

  She could just sprout wings and fly and slip into Grandmama’s court and there was a place waiting for her there. Supposedly.

  What kind of place -? She’d grown up in the same house they would have had to deposit her in. She could find the gate. She could find out what kind of place.

  But she had to look human to turn up at classes, so she did.

  * * *

  Bree made friends at uni, and did not take snacks from them (being vegan was an excellent excuse, although apparently Oreos were vegan, who knew; she had to say she was picky too). Bree passed her classes and learned to like cheap beer and always made the runs for it herself and was very careful to keep an eye on her drink for more than the usual reasons. Bree got a boyfriend but they broke up when she wouldn’t go down on him (she didn’t know what counted, and was willing to risk kissing but stopped there, and she could go ask Grandmama but who the hell even was Grandmama. Bree got a different boyfriend who did not have this complaint and they broke up over her emotional unavailability and she decided not to seek a new one right away. Bree majored in civil engineering because she liked cities.

  Moments of privacy were so tempting.

  And Bree tried, tried, to be careful, but she knew now how to make the hurting stop, and it was so hard to go on hurting even when she was alone, when she knew how to shrink and unfold. It was only a matter of time.

  “Oh my god,” screamed Chloe, bedecked in fluffy bathrobe.

  “Shh!” hissed Bree, slicing her wings into herself, exploding into human-gangling limbs and grabbing for her towel. “Shut up, shut up -” Just because she didn’t hear the water running -

  Chloe didn’t shut up. Chloe wasn’t her “real” name, by whatever butterfly-person reckoning considered reality; it hadn’t clicked when Bree had learned it. Chloe was adopted from the Philippines. Chloe had not wanted a cookie no thank you. She didn’t shut up: “What the hell, Bree!”

  “Shut up shut up shut up!” Bree went around her and locked the door and this time made sure the handle wouldn’t turn. “What did you see?”

  “You. Photoshopped in real life. You glowed and you had wings and you were tiny -”

  “Keep your voice down,” Bree begged, “please.”

  “What are you?” asked Chloe, hushed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you a fairy? You looked like a fairy.”

  “I said I don’t know. I didn’t even know until a couple years ago that I was a thing.”

  “How is that something you miss?”

  Bree dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t know! I don’t know anything!”

  “You know more than I do!”

  Deep breaths. Deep breaths. “If I tell you what I know will you believe me that that’s all I know? And not call scary men in suits to cut me apart?”

  “Yes,” Chloe promised, sitting on the counter, elbows on knees chin on hands, rapt.

  “I was - stuck shaped normal,” Bree says, voice low. “I don’t know exactly how I got stuck in the first place, but I think somebody must have told me to. People can sometimes tell me to do things and I can’t not, and vice-versa, I don’t do anything with this except get nice Christmas gifts and once I made a guy stop hitting on me at a - I don’t mostly do anything with it, anyway, it’s not a big deal. So before I can remember somebody told me to be shaped human and they swapped me for - the real Bree - I was a baby I don’t remember it I don’t know what happened to her! - and I was stuck until my dad told me that I could do what I wanted and everything I’d ever been told to do went away.”

  “Do your parents know?” asked Chloe.

  Bree shook her head. “Nobody knows. I don’t even look weird to doctors. Even if they’re looking. It hurts to be shaped like this and some of them tried to figure out what was wrong and they don’t notice.”

  “Can you fly?”

  “Probably.”

  “…Probably.”

  “How would I try it?” snapped Bree. “Where would I go? I get a lot lighter, I can flap, I could probably fly at least until I crashed into something and broke my neck, that’s all I know.”

  “When can people tell you to do things? And the other way?”

  “I’m not sure of all the rules. It see
ms to have to do with whether I’ve ever taken food from them but I don’t know I haven’t done science experiments with it. I can’t tell you to do things, I think because you don’t go by your birth name. I wouldn’t have let you shout.”

  “How do you know you were left in place of the ‘real’ Bree” (Chloe made airquotes) “instead of being a mutant?”

  “First time I let my wings out there was a letter folded up with them. It didn’t say very much, just - that I’m a changeling and I can go back where I came from if I want. And I think I can’t really be named Bree. Or more people would be able to boss me around. But I don’t know my real name, the letter didn’t say.”

  “That’s a dumb definition of real name,” remarked Chloe.

  “I don’t know how this works, okay, what am I supposed to call it, special magic ordering people around name?”

  “Fair,” conceded Chloe. “So when you went back what was it like?”

  “…I didn’t go.”

  Chloe looked like Bree had passed up a chance to travel to the moon or something instead of thirteen kilometers north of the house she grew up in and then slightly southwest. “You haven’t gone?”

  “No. I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know what’s there, I don’t know what I am -”

  “You’re obviously a fairy.”

  “- and I don’t know if I could ever come back,” whispered Bree.

  “Of course you could,” said Chloe. “Why wouldn’t you be able to come back? Why would a fairy get lost in Fairyland?”

  Bree shook her head, sick with wordless forgotten fear. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Chloe convinced her. Chloe wanted to come along. Chloe wanted to see fairies.

  Chloe said, “You know where you can fly? Where there’s fairies.”

  And Bree did sorely want to fly.

  Bree had a car, and brought Chloe with her.

  “Maybe you’re a princess.”

  “Why would they give away a princess to get a mortal baby?” asked Bree.