Jim Baen's Universe

Fantasy Stories

The Opposite of Pomegranates

Written by Marissa Lingen

Illustrated by Verónica Casas

The real difference between humans and fey is not the magic: there are human sorcerers, so thick on the ground some places you can hardly take a step without kicking one. (I do not advocate kicking sorcerers.) It isn't that we were born outside and they were born (or hatched or constructed) under there. Or maybe that is the difference, but not the crux of it, like saying a Russian is different from a Brazilian because their houses are far apart. There's always something else that's the heart of the matter.

And something else with the fey comes down to this: they only know how to make bargains. My bowl of milk for my housecleaning. Your freedom for your pot of gold. My answer to a riddle for your spell—but I get ahead of myself.

When my parents were young—and my parents were young for four hundred years under the hill—the fey got the notion that they might breed two changelings together and get from the continuing union a seemingly endless stream of changelings. Or at least an easier stream of changelings than the ones they'd gotten stealing from human cradles.

After her twenty-third month of pregnancy, my mother decided that this was not, in fact, the solution to anyone's problems. She was quite firm on that point. The Queen of Air and Darkness herself cowered when my mother yelled that day. They let her out on the hillside to finish the job in a mere three more months. In Victorian Ireland. With no money nor husband nor kin nearer than her nine-times-great-nieces, who were in Estonia. My mother spoke neither English nor Gaelic.

I'd like to attribute that lapse to them being fey, but humans sometimes turn out clueless, too.

Mother really wasn't sure which was worse: making her way as a single parent in that place and time or throwing her lot and mine back in with the fey. They decided not to give her a choice. After all, the point of breeding changelings had been to get more changelings. So back we came, both of us howling and red in the face.

I am told that I howled for three days running. I am told that I smiled only for three people: my mother, a fire elemental called Kezhzh, and the yeti who ended up raising me, a sweet soul named Alits. (Alits, in our 120 years together, has shared many theories of gender with me. None of them has impinged even slightly on Alits's own experience of the subject. I was sixteen before I understood that the gendered pronouns existed.)

Alits raised me in part because Alits was the only one who could do it without ear protection for the first two years, and in part because my mother had gone entirely mad. When she stopped howling, a few hours after being brought underhill, she wouldn't stop smiling. You can't leave a baby with someone like that. Even the fey know that much. So it was off to Alits's place for me, with tiny little mittens and a tiny little squirrel fur hood.

They allowed my father to visit on alternate Thursdays, when they could remember it was a Thursday in the first place. Thursday was not an important concept to the High Sidhe. Kezhzh was allowed to visit whenever he could stand the cold, which was more often than alternate fuzzy Thursdays. They taught me how to negotiate with a brownie and how to call tomten and which oceans were suitable for selkies.

They never taught me how to go outside.

It wasn't for lack of asking—there was about a decade when I asked Alits every single day. It didn't feel like a decade to me, but it must have to Alits. Finally I decided that Alits had won the battle of wills, and I would have to do something else to win the war.

But it turned out Alits had gotten there before me, too. I was a favored changeling, small and winsome, and I bargained for knowledge easily, for favors, for treats and tricks and games. I cajoled my way into more than one place I shouldn't have been, and there was always Alits's looming furry presence to bail me out if I got into trouble. But that same looming furry presence made sure I was not going anywhere outside.

Finally luck was with me. I saw a rock sprite caught in a mite trap. He was a bright purple, veined with white; at first I thought that was his fury at the trap, but it turned out he was that color all the time.

"Want some help getting out of there?" I asked casually.

"No!" snapped the rock sprite. "Stay away from me, changeling! I do not accept your help! "He bared little white teeth at me, ready to snap if I came closer.

I shrugged and settled on the hill next to him. "Suit yourself." I watched him struggle. He glared. "I could make that go a lot faster, you know."

"I know, Alits taught you," he said, stopping to rest and think. "But I don't care to owe you a favor for it."

I shrugged again. He started to chant a spell. I whistled tunelessly.

"Do you mind?"

"Not at all," I said. "I was just thinking of the song I was going to sing tonight."

"I hope you sing better than you whistle," he said.

"I do. I'm singing at the revel Bald Obix is throwing. They're having all kinds of music and spell contests and dancing—of course dancing—and Alits is making banana enchiladas. "Alits's banana enchiladas, with molé sauce and cherries, wrapped in flattened fairy cakes, are famous.

"Oh, yeah?" said the rock sprite. He was trying to feign disinterest, but I had the equivalent of five years of being thirteen. I can do disinterest like nobody's business. He didn't even seem to notice that he'd freed himself from the trap.

"Yeah," I said. "It's too bad you won't be able to be there. It's really something to see."

"Maybe I'll stop by," he said.

"Oh, I don't know. They have a door troll who'll ask you a riddle. If you don't know the answer, he won't let you in."

"I'm good at riddles," said the rock sprite.

I gave him my best skeptical look.

"How tough are troll riddles anyway?"

"The troll didn't make up the riddle," I said. "Canufiel the Brown made up the riddle."

The rock sprite looked daunted, and rightly so. You don't survive long as a High Sidhe if you can't ask killer riddles. Sometimes literally.

"I'll tell you the answer, though," I said.

The rock sprite's little purple features twisted. "For what?"

"Oh, nothing much, really," I said. "You know how generous we humans are."

He looked even more suspicious. "Tell me."

"All I want to know is how to open a door in the hill."

"Oh, no," he said hastily. "Oh, no, no no no. Alits would kill me."

"Alits is a big teddy bear," I said. "And Alits would never have to know."

"Forget it," he said. "Just forget it. I can make you a lovely necklace, charmed to give you the voice of a bard—"

"Bards don't know when to shut up," I said.

"To give you the seeming of any creature underhill."

"I got bored with shapeshifter games when I was a toddler. They always smell like themselves."

"To let you fly."

I rolled my eyes.

"Anything!" he screamed. "Anything but that! If Alits wanted you to leave the underhill, Alits would have taught you how! Alits has big furry white arms for ripping rock sprites to bits! Alits has pointy vicious ivory teeth for rending rock sprites' crunchy flesh from their bones! Alits has—"

"Alits has no idea that you're talking to me," I pointed out.

When he didn't immediately reply, I knew I had him.

So I whispered the answer to the riddles, and the rock sprite—glancing furtively around him—talked his way around the spell for me. They have a kind of code worked out, so that spells can be taught without being cast. This is particularly useful for battle magics. It also comes in handy when you don't particularly want to shout about what spell you're learning.

I would have to wait for the right time to open the door to the upper world. The rock sprite was a nuisance at the party, but no one knew I'd let him in, and I certainly wasn't going to tell them. He stayed well clear of me, too—not wanting Alits to have any reason to question him (or rip his arms off) when I went above, I suppose.

I finally got my chance when one of the Puck's cousins, a straggle-haired beauty called Fee, went missing. Or rather, when everyone noticed she was missing; she had been gone at least a month. No one could be sure. But they all turned out in force to find her. They suspected foul play. So did I, but what I suspected even more strongly is that they would all be distracted and wouldn't notice one more excursion outside, more or less.

I had just finished drawing the first spiral in silver dust when the rock sprite appeared. He was in such a hurry he had lost his hat. I had never seen a sprite without a hat. "Stop! Stop it! Now is not the time!"

"Now is the perfect time," I said, adding the first of the five runes. "Everyone is distracted."

"They'll be convinced that whoever took Fee took you, too!"

"So?" I said, drawing the second rune. "I'll be back before they notice, and if they did notice, I'd just explain to them that I wasn't abducted. End of story."

"You've never been out on the surface before, and you're not going alone!" The rock sprite leapt into the middle of my spell and spread its short, squatty limbs as far as it could reach. I sniffed and continued with the third rune. When the spell was complete, I said the word of power. The rock sprite squeaked in annoyance, but the hill fell away beneath him, and a door to the outside glowed.

He picked himself up and stood, arms akimbo, in the opening. "Go back, changeling!"

"Back? I'll go through you if I have to."

"Oh, yeah?" said the rock sprite. "Awfully tough for a human, aren't you?"

"You ready to find out?"

He deflated suddenly and mumbled something I couldn't make out.

"What was

If you would like to comment on this story, or if you would like to submit to future "Letters to the editor" columns in JBU, please write us at letters@baensuniverse.com.

_{Note: If you want to remain anonymous, or unpublished, tell us that. If you're writing about subscription problems, please contact our subscription folks at members@baensuniverse.com instead. Thanks.}

Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. She is currently at work on a trilogy about early computing, Finnish mythology, and Cold War spies.

(To read the rest of this bio, and see other stories in Jim Baen's Universe visit Marissa Lingen's author page.)

Related Articles

• 'Ware the Sleeper

  There were bones where the children played: small, smooth pieces perfect for game markers on the black sand, and long shards Skalda remembered using for fence posts around imaginary horses. The tides washed them here, along with links from shattered chainmail and futile bits of armor.

• Build-A-Bear

  Sighing, Viola picked up the yellow schedule of shipboard activities and glanced at her watch. It was three thirty, still two and half hours till dinner.

• PogaHer father always called her "plain old goddam Amy."
• The Cold Blacksmith"Old man, old man, do you tinker?"
• The Thief of StonesAs I have been bidden, I will tell of how the sorcerer Merlin Ambrosius came to the shores of Ireland, and what he did there.