The Stars and the Cookie Jar

“Ma, this is silly.” Bran squinted to look at her, in the last light weak as wishing. Fog was along the banks of the black river, and her own sight was starting to play her tricks: there were a dozen willow trees trailing into the water, a stand of sand plums with fruit low enough to reach;  a live-oak far out of place and improbably thick with muscadines. There were birds, strange indigo-and-silvery birds that had never been in the living world, and they came down to flirt and peck near Bran’s feet as if he’d brought them a gift of bread. “I’m worried for you – I never seen a fall like that, I thought Uncle Ambrose would take Mr. Stokes up for tempting murder – but you’re sending Mama crazy. You have to come home.” 

“Attempted murder,” she told him, because Pen would. It was never easy, following him when he spoke at one of his clips, and here she was just slow. It had taken her – minutes, maybe, in life; there were no clocks here – a long time to spot a very important thing. “Where’s your body, son?” 

“Brought it,” Bran said, puzzled. “You don’t?” 

“Hearth and embers, that’s why you were so heavy!” 

“Ma. Come on. You can tell me how it should be on the way back.” 

“I’ve tried the ways back, love.” Seelie shrugged. “It’s my time to stay, maybe.” 

“It’s not. I would know. Mama would know, the second you rolled the horse!”

“We don’t get to know –” 

“Stop talking like we’re other people.” He ruined the firmness of it by wrinkling his nose. “This is silly, I said. Can’t you see anything?” 

“You,” she said, the truth. “I don’t know if I’m glad or not. It’s dangerous here, Bran. I – we – only come when we must. And you leave your body home, next time, with someone canny for preference.” 

“Mama’s canny as hell, and they brought Uncle Ambrose and Uncle Will back up to our place, and I guess I mentioned, crazy. If Mama calls for Auntie Blodwyn we’ll have a damn four-corner coven in the parlor. Last night Auntie went out to Stokes’ plantation with her twelve-bore!”  

“Bran!” 

“She only shot up some windows. I guess I’m safer here, I meant.” Bran sighed. He took his eyes off her, uneasy, and then he squared his shoulders, straightened his coveralls, and kicked at the black water. The current leapt up for him, as she might have guessed it would; the bower where there had been bleakness snapped awake. “Listen,” he said, very softly. “I came like you wanted. I can hear you, and you can hear me, and we’ll do this polite. I’m Bran. My – well – neither of ‘em’s a girl every time! That wouldn’t work! My parents. You know them, but just now my Ma’s Seelie Coffin Green. Leave my Ma alone.” 

She jumped for him, when he turned from conversation to command. Got a hand on his denim straps and hauled Bran back from the water, so that the boy’s feet left the ground and Seelie’s backbone found it; she still saw, before everything was knocked out of her again, his small right hand as he finished a pinning-in-place gesture. He’s so like Pen. Stars hold steady, if he’s got their force to add to a knack like mine. 

“Why does your gift have to hurt?!” He spat, red-tinted, far enough out for schoolyard glory. “Ma, look.” 

There was a path just where the two of them had fallen, a path where she’d looked for one twenty times before. It was softly, newly green, familiar as the tangle of morning-glory vines around the porch railing; strange as any living, sun-warmed thing in this cold place. It was so alive, so lovely, Seelie put her hand down to meet the earth. A little of the twining green reached toward her; a quiet current of blue-grey looked as if it left her – or began where she did – and as she watched it brightened to something almost pretty, woven into all the green. 

Bran swallowed so hard, his throat clicked. “Oh, Mama’s going to skin me.” 

“They won’t.” She hugged Bran, hard enough for her rib cage to ache, and for the skip of a second she might have rocked him. “Bran-my-boy, my raven boy.” 

“Ugh, Ma, don’t want,” he grumbled, and shook away. “Do you need help up? I don’t know how you do anything in them skirts. Don’t say it! Uncle Ambrose’s the doctor and the crowner, and he says them and y’all and I seen.” 

“I leave that to your Mama.” She was tired but she could move, so long as the two of them kept to the path; things weren’t so faint and slow as they had been. 

“Add it on the pile,” he agreed. “We have to go, Ma, please!” 

For a long time, if time was something that could still touch them, they went on quickly as Seelie could bear. She was cold, and her head wanted seven tinctures she couldn’t name; she had never spent so long away from herself, from the mortal part, and pain had never been the thing to call her back. It was so sharp, so loud in all her senses, she had to talk through it or cry. 

“So tell me, Bran-boy, when am I meant to have gotten the knot around your Mama’s wrist?” 

He made a question-noise, as if it wasn’t worth a real answer. 

“You named me to the river, Coffin Green.” 

“Well, the river knows it’s true.” 

“It’s not, love, even if we – if the law was –” 

“True before we ever got here,” Bran answered. He’d picked up to a pace she couldn’t keep, and dropped back again. “When the many-masked came over the ice – there’s your minute for a twelve-bore – or that night the storm drowned all the oaks. I guess Mama could narrow it down some.” 

“When the…what?” 

“Maybe you ought to fall off Marigold again. I don’t mean that, Ma! But you can’t come asking like I remember. I do, but I don’t.” Bran stopped, in the middle of a dark path, and took her cold hand in his sweat-damp one. “Hold tight, please. This should be shorter. It’s the Baconian method, like school.” 

“Francis Bacon was the most mercury-addled stonewitch nature ever gave a knack – gods’ sakes, son, where did you get that?” 

“Mama’s coat pocket where it’s always been.” 

“Bran, you cannot – we do not –” 

“Yes, ma’am.” He couldn’t help tossing the Barlow knife end-over-end and catching it. “No, ma’am.” The blade alone seemed collarbone-to-navel on him, and Bran whisper-hissed Sharp! at the cut. He looked at the darkness in front of them on the path, the mist around their knees and the brambles waiting for them to stray. He spoke home, as Seelie would, and then he –

Bran cut from the ground to the horizon, like running the Barlow knife through butcher’s paper.  A hot, bright morning streamed in on them. He cast his forearm over his eyes and yelled from the shock of it, but he tugged hard at Seelie’s hand in his own and something went on pulling. The only thing she was sure of, for a long while, was that more Green siblings than any sane soul wanted per acre were standing in the parlor.