You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,30

away. She would never pass for human; I’m not sure if she ever wanted to.

“The water girls brought the prize.” Harriet hurried inside after us with the tray. “Big and fat it was.” She motioned to a wooden bowl placed on a chair before one of the many fireplaces. In it lay Tommy Tipp’s heart. The faeries, about a dozen of them, tall and small, stood around it, looking at it. When we arrived in the circle they made room: it was our prize, after all.

I had imagined the heart to be damaged somehow; small and shriveled or black with rot. It wasn’t. It was fresh and fine, deep red and glistening like a polished jewel. Mara came to stand beside me and hold my hand. She was a young girl then, about fourteen by human standards. She wore some green and brown cotton skirts I had given her; they swept the floors when she moved. Brown feathers adorned her unruly hair, and her pale skin was dusted with freckles.

“Not to worry,” she said, softly in my head. “He was already a lost cause.”

I squeezed her hand gratefully. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Better now, that we can make you a new one, than twenty years from now when you have slaved for him and strived for him.”

“It is a gift, I suppose.” I was still looking at the heart. “Not many girls can build their husbands from scratch.”

“Take away the bad, add the sweet.”

“We only want to help.” Harriet put down the tray.

One of the water girls had lingered in the mound. She sat pale-eyed and water-drenched on a table, drying her hair. “Tasted like wine.” She licked her lips. “But he was tart, too, and bitter at times.”

“Aren’t they all,” said Harriet.

“Give us some room,” said Pepper-Man, and the three of us stepped closer to the bowl while the others stepped back. Mara lifted her hand as if to touch the heart, but I stopped her halfway there.

“Don’t. I don’t trust him anymore.”

“He is dead,” said Mara.

“For the time being,” Pepper-Man reminded her.

Harriet, Francis, and Gwen brought bundles of twigs, heaped them onto the floor.

Francis sorted the twigs into piles by size. “Let’s make Cassie a husband,” he beamed and sat down cross-legged on the floor. We joined him there and, one by one, chose twigs from the piles and set to twisting and braiding.

The new Tommy was a sorry sight at first, hastily made as he was, but Pepper-Man said the heart had to be fresh, so we were working against the clock—the faerie clock, as it was, which sometimes moves faster than ours. Tommy Tipp’s new body looked much like a scarecrow, twig fingers pointing left and right, one leg slightly longer than the other, but Pepper-Man said that it wasn’t important, the important thing was the idea of the man, not the anatomical proportions. Mara stuffed his chest with leaves and flowers, Harriet poured honey on his pelvis, enhanced now with a large stick of oak. Pepper-Man blew sand into his empty skull, Francis gave him river stones for eyes, and Gwen gave him lips of down. Finally, I crowned him with a flower wreath; braided with the stems were long strands of my hair. I suppose it was so he would think of me only.

We had left an empty cavern in the chest and Pepper-Man lifted the heart from the bowl and carefully placed it in there. We sealed the cavern with more leaves, glossy and green, and Harriet poured more honey on top—to make him kind, I think.

Then we waited. And waited. There was no magic spell, no potion to devour. Just waiting. All eyes on the wicker man on the floor, the new Tommy-to-be. There were more faeries around us now; at least twenty, maybe more. All of them were watching our handiwork. I still sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, closer than anyone to the lifeless wicker man. My heart kept fluttering, looking for signs; a twitch, a breath—anything that told me he was coming to life.

“Maybe we should have used roots.” Harriet was standing before me, hands on her broad hips.

“We could have filled him with the dirt soaked in his own blood from the place he fell,” Gwen added.

“Maybe his heart is too weak,” said Pepper-Man. “Maybe he was even less than I thought.”

I started to cry again then, had so dearly been hoping that this was the answer. Mara came to comfort me and pressed her soft cheek