no more than grunt when I asked a question of her. But one night when I was struggling to brush my hair, she took the brush from my hand and said brusquely that it would be better to comb out the snarls first. I had been very surprised and a little bashful, for even as a child my mother had insisted I brush my own hair. When I had not managed it quickly enough, she ruthlessly cut it short. I had kept my hair short since, but in Faerie, I had grown it as my husband had desired, and something in the air had made it grow longer and more lustrous than ever it had done in the real world. Princess hair, I thought it, and I had liked to brush it, though there was eventually so much of it that my arms always ached.
That day, Yssa combed and then brushed my hair with long strokes, and as I watched her through half-closed lids, I saw a smile flicker about her lips, as if the act gave her as much pleasure as it gave me. I wanted to say a dozen things, but I held my tongue for the longest time, wanting nothing to disrupt the sweetness of this moment of surrender.
So I saw it and so it was.
I never did learn exactly what had happened to Yssa, for I liked her too much to intrude upon her sorrow by asking open questions. Once she said something that let me guess she had fled from family trouble, but I never probed for more information than she offered. Even when we became close as sisters, Yssa would freeze and withdraw if I asked any question about her past, and I learned never to do so. Yet I was curious and speculated endlessly about what had happened to her whenever she made some comment that seemed to refer to what had hurt her so.
Once, she said fiercely that there was no bond deeper than a blood bond. Another time she asked suddenly and very seriously if I had such a bond with someone in my world. She had to explain that she was asking if I had a sister or brother, and I had shaken my head, saying I was an only child to elderly parents who seemed more than anything else slightly startled to have got me. Certainly they had shown no desire to have another child. I went on to tell her, because she seldom asked me questions or showed any interest in my past, that when I had fallen in love with a married man they had disowned me with such alacrity I felt they welcomed my misbehaviour. I was surprised to see pity in Yssa’s eyes, and that night she had insisted on dressing my hair in a special elaborate style that must have made her arms and fingers ache. Yet her hands were very gentle.
I loved Yssa, but it was not until my son was born that I understood what she had meant by a blood bond. Coincidentally she fell pregnant soon after I did, to a faerie lord who had come to visit my husband. She had met him at a ball I had made her attend with me at the Summer Palace, and they had become lovers that same night. The next morning the beauty I had sometimes glimpsed had blazed in her and I guessed at once what had happened.
‘You have fallen in love!’
A complex mixture of elation and sorrow crossed her face, but she nodded and a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she said shyly, ‘I understand now why a woman might give up everything for love, and go mad at the loss of it.’
I did not understand her words, but I guessed they alluded to her past and asked no more. Yet it gave me joy to see her so radiant, for all I thought her lord a vapid dandy with an inability to focus on anything save himself, including his wife. Of course he wed her when she told him she was to bear his child, because children are rarely born to pure-blood faerie folk and they are greatly valued.
At first her faerie lord was happy in her pregnancy because he was so pleased to have fathered a child, but his interest in her and in his child waned as the months passed, and when she swelled and became inaccessible to him, he found other pretty portals more appealing.