François

The approach of winter tinged the summer with a bite like pine needles. It wasn't cold yet, but François felt the winter in his bones–in his slender fingers and his tough skin grown to something, as it suddenly seemed to him at poignant times, almost like paper. It seemed that way to him now, as he twisted the apples from their dry stems and dropped them, gently, into the basket that balanced on top of his ladder.

He used to like winter, and he still did, but it no longer held the same magic that it did when he was younger. The snow was beautiful, but it was cold, and it was a cold that he couldn't shake from his bones anymore, even sitting in front of a fire. He certainly couldn’t shake it by running, or by building snowmen, and he couldn’t wile away the hours digging snow forts or romping through the forest. Now, winter was a time to sit and to think, and to rest, and that was its own good.

François climbed down from the step ladder, huffing from the movement and arming sweat from his brow before reaching up for the full bushel of apples and lowering it to chest height. Francois carried the full basket–it must have been twenty to thirty pounds– to the bed of his little gardener’s truck, and that was its own revel. He may be old, he told himself, but he was not old. He was sturdy and strong, with bones like knotted apple wood and calluses on his hands and feet.

He would come in from the garden and help himself to the salad that Ms. Marovy made from his lettuces and cucumbers and strawberries and she would fake a scoff of surprise. “The way you were wrestling that fence out there I thought you might be hungrier for a bowl of nails!”

Tough as nails was François Montand. Tough as nails and more stubborn than a goat. Ms. Marovy told him that he smelled like one often enough.

The apples were the final chore of the day, and though he had not gotten them all in, he had gotten in enough. François parked the truck in the garage and unloaded the baskets of apples, carrying them, one at a time, into the cold cellar that attached to the garage and the kitchen, lining them up, twelve in all, on a shelf against the wall.

The warm water was scalding on his cold fingers as he massaged them under the tap. Less so against his stubbled face when he tossed it over his cheeks and rubbed his eyes, working some of the warmth into them. He sighed, half contentment and half weariness, and rested against the sink with elbows locked, gazing out the window and letting the water run.

“Fraaaa-aaaance,” an older, female voice sang, and staggered footsteps descended the stairs.

He spun and grinned, and shook the water from his hands.

“Ms. Marovy,” his voice was a bass rumble.

“How’re the apples?” She swept into the kitchen in a white, shift-like dress, silver hair pinned and bunned up behind her head, looking for all the world like a ghost out of a Dickens book. She was magnificent.

“They’re apples, Ms. Marovy, and they were apples, and they will be apples.”

“Good, good.” She grasped the pot of tea from where it sat in the middle of the table and poured herself a cup. It was an old teapot, much chipped and much stained, but it was the teapot. It was her teapot.

She had given up on insisting that she call her “Jean” long ago, giving into “Ms. Marovy,” even when she was young and everybody else simply called her “Jean”.

“And the goats?”

“They’re goats…”

She shot him a playful, but no-less pinning glare, and he grinned again.

“They’re doing just fine. Magdalene should be giving birth any day now.”

Ms. Marovy nodded, holding the cup in her birdlike hands and sipping from it, warming her fingers.

“All good things, all good things. There’s soup in the fridge, if you’re hungry.”

France was hungry. He was always hungry, but, after tromping the fields, climbing ladders and wrestling goats, he was ravenous.

Ms. Marovy watched him like a hawk watches a mouse. What France never understood was that it was also the way that a mother watches a child, and the way a wife watches a beloved husband. She stood, rising with her mug of tea between her slender fingers. There was a moment, between now and then, when the light behind Ms. Marovy’s eyes dimmed, and then disappeared, and in the blink of an eye, François caught her just before her head would have collided with the tile floor. The mug of tea that she had held gently, but confidently, shattered and his knee pressed into the shards, drawing blood. Her hair spilled out around her head, trailing in the pooling liquid, and her chest fluttered with her eyelids.

***

The boxes that France rummaged through smelled of dust and mildew. The attic was dark, illuminated only by the circle cast from the pen light that he held between his teeth. The box was marked, “Christmas.” It didn’t take long to find that small tote box full of handmade ornaments: clay rounds imprinted with nieces’ thumbprints, popsicle-stick reindeer; tiny, potpourri-stuffed pillows. There was a small bottle of essential oil in the bottom of the container that France had packed there only the year before. Ms. Marovy insisted on hanging stockings every Christmas, and, every Christmas, she would sprinkle a little bit of the pine-scented oil on France’s stocking when she stuffed it. France sprinkled a little of it on hers, too, as if neither one of them knew what the other was doing. Now, he dug through the box, searching for the little vial.

Ms. Marovy’s breath was coming in jerking gasps, and he hoped that the oil might do something to help with the trouble. A little bit of Vapo-Rub, now that would do the trick. Ms. Marovy swore by the stuff, but he couldn’t find it to save his life so he figured that the pine-scented oil, with its hint of menthol and winter chill, might be the next best thing.

France swore as something pricked his hand, and he yanked it from the box. A single drop of blood suspended from the tip of a finger, glistening in the glare of the pen-light, and then fell, glittering, into the box, Gingerly, France moved aside the collection of kick-knacks, many of the more delicate ones wrapped in newsprint and old wrapping paper, peering down into the box for whatever it was. Probably a shard from a broken ornament.

The light gleamed off of the needle point of the item that he uncovered, and France’s heart sank. He picked up the crown with two fingers grown, suddenly, cold as death. It was woven from sprigs of holly wound around each other to make a continuous band. The leaves, which should have been brittle and brown, were still as green as ever, and the vibrant, mocking, greenery woke a cold rage within France that froze him solid.

***

He rubbed the cold oil onto the skin of Ms. Marovy’s chest as she slept in bed, the room now dark and warm, and settled back into the rocking chair at the bedside. His eyes gleamed in the darkness as he clutched the holly crown in one hand and kept watch over his ward like hound over a kill–watching, waiting, and praying that anything would have the audacity creep near enough to use his fangs.

***

“Hello, Frost-in-the-Moutain’s-Roots.”

The voice came just as France was drifting off to sleep, his chin resting on his chest as he slumped in the hard chair. He started awake, but did not turn and did not raise his head. There had been no sound of entry, but a bitter wind blew across his face from the window. The voice was as hard as it was sweet. It was not Ms. Marovy.

There was a presence in the room, too. It matched the voice. It was the feeling of dawn just as the sun creeps over the mountain tops, casting the valley in lavender and gold that paints the morning mists. It was the feeling of Spring and all that comes with it–tender green buds; crystalline streams still bitter with the ghost of ice; birth, and life, and growth. It too was wild abandon–the rutting buck, mad with lust; the wild romp through the woods and hills, driven by the warming earth and the maddening scent of the feminine promise. Behind it all, the voice was, as the presence was, cold. It was the cold of a clutch of freshly laid eggs decimated by a hungry weasel, or of burrows flooded by the spring thaw–of new blossoms, put out too soon, suspended in time by late frost.

“I’m called Montand now,” he grumbled, not raising his chin, fingers still interlaced in his lap where sat the crown of holly leaves.

“Ah yes, of course,” that enchanting, hard, voice purred, and twitched ever so slightly with the color of a smile. “You have thrown in with the humans. They need a human name by which to call you. That changes nothing. You will always be Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots.

When she spoke his old name, France felt something of his nature well up–part of that nature which he had spent such effort tamping down and forgetting: the insidious frost that sweeps over fields at the first freezing of Autumn, ice preserving everything–holding it in a single moment and never letting go.

Her scent filled the small bedroom, filled his head with its swirling, intoxicating, incitement. His legs ached to leap and be upon her, off into the night, the meadows, hidden places. He forced them to be still, and did not raise his chin. His eyes, though, gleamed in the darkness with something beyond the paltry rage, lust, or hunger of humans.

“Why are you here, my queen? You have no power here.”

“No,” she said simply. “I have not for these sixty years, you are right.” Her tone was a façade of disinterest that covered something hungrier. She stood over the bed, gazing down upon the frail, warm, body, its chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. France knew that she would be looking at Ms. Marovy not as a human upon another human, but as the flood upon the valley it is to overrun.

“And you yet do not,” France growled, the cold gleam in his eyes growing. His was not the covetous glimmer of that which devours that of his neighbor’s; his was the jealous, territorial glint which will abide none to take that which is his. He would never admit that it was also the greed of a father defending his young. He had been born Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots. He did not love, and he did not protect; he guarded and he hoarded. If he was that as which he had been born, then "love" was not within his nature.

“No, my dear, I do not.”

“Then leave this home and return when you have the authority to issue your covetous decrees.”

Her laugh tinkled like shards of spring ice. “You will name me covetous, my king? You will fault me hunger? You, who would steal those young, unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time of the year? You who devours the late crop and turns the earth to stone so none might grow more for themselves? You who would hold all the earth in your fist, frozen in one perfect moment for all time, simply so that you might not lose a single piece of it? If I were not there to warm you and loosen your grasp…” Her voice grew saddened, but François knew better. “Do you need me to warm you now?”

The pull in her tone, the lascivity in her scent, swelled to a height that was nigh irresistible. Honeysuckle and crystal clear water; flesh and sweat and vigor. There was nothing to do for it. It was the mindless elation of new life itself. His knees weren’t stiff or knotted; his mind was sharp and unyielding as the autumn ice that swallows the fern, the lake, turns the Earth to stone, and he gave it all over. He was across the room and upon her, over the bed and out the window, her warmth filling him up, him taking, devouring, stealing that warmth into the bottomless appetite within the core of his being.

François banished the thought and locked it away deep in his solid center. He raised his chin from his chest and his voice, as unbending as ever, belied the fury in his eyes that crystalized the very air between his grey eyes and her green. He seemed to swell all at once from an old man to something infinitely larger, infinitely older, and it was as if he had never been anything other. Autumn itself sat in the room, filling it.

“That is no longer my purpose.” The words, simple though they were, rang like a decree written on the foundation of reality.

“No?” the woman across the bed smiled. Through all of this, Ms. Marovy did not stir other than to draw breath. “That is a shame. I miss your touch.”

“Then you will go on missing it.” France stood across the bed from her, the frail, old, lady marking the barrier between them like the visage of an ancient queen carved in the stone atop her coffin. He did not remember standing, but his feet still itched to leap across the bed. His own presence battled hers, but the intermingling of their two only urged him on with greater power. They commingled like the intertwined breath of two lovers, locked together. He wanted to bite and to draw blood. He could already taste it on his tongue, but he locked that away too, deep in his granite center. She was stronger than she should have been. He had never been so nearly robbed of his senses when she had come into his territory before. Part of him hungered to grab her and never allow her to leave, even as that other part rallied to drive her, ragged, from his domain.

“Do not think that I don’t know who placed this cursed accessory in my path.” France raised a steady fist, clutching the crown so that its spines bit into the palm of his hand. “And do not think that it will sway me back to your shallow, self-serving, ways.”

“I placed nothing, my king.” Spring stood regally, spine straight and chin high. “Do not blame me for the inescapability of your nature.”

The two shared a glare that connected them as though by a silver cord of power, each battling the other for dominance in the small room.

“You are stronger. What have you done?”

She saw his thoughts in his eyes and looked down, the knowing smile twitching her perfect ears. She gazed longingly upon the form before her, raising a hand to cradle the silk-thin skin of one cheek. She halted before touching Ms. Marovy, unable to breach the final hair's-breadth in which radiated the heat of pulsing life.

“I have done nothing. You have done nothing. She has done nothing. But, she will soon do the thing that all humans do in the end, and your indentureship will be over. You will be free.”

“I am no prisoner. That is what you never understood.”

“No?” one quizzical eyebrow raised, perfect as a new blossom. “Then leave here.”

France said nothing, only stood as solid as the mountain.

“Then you are a prisoner.”

“I will not leave, because it is not my time.”

“It has always been your time, my husband, but you have fettered yourself to this human. Lucky for both of us their little lights fade away faster than a candle.”

“She is my charge,” France said in a growl that had fangs and claws.

The queen turned her flawless, sad, smile upon him, withdrawing her hand. “As you will, but I feel the waning of her light. I am sure that you can feel it as well. Will you continue to hold her to this world, as you would hold everything else, were I not there to loosen your grasp, frozen in a timeless, meaningless, moment?”

France indeed saw the flickering of the flame inside the woman. He had seen it grow dimmer every day for 60 years, but he would put a stop to that. He would hold onto her, perfect, forever, for as long as she desired. Nothing would take her before her time. He could hold her here for another century–another millennium.

“Her grasp on this domain weakens, and mine grows. Soon, this land will once again belong to us, and it will be time for you to return to your own people. You must make the choice: to hold her here, in eternal autumn, eternal twilight, or to let her go and return to who you truly are.”

“I will do as she wishes,” France said, holding onto his growl, but feeling the sharpness of it fade in his mind as he looked upon the sleeping form.

“Oh, my king…” her hand raised again, cupping his own cheek this time. The touch of it burned. “You can hold her forever, if that is your choice, but it is your choice. Do not pass the weight of it onto this poor woman.” Her words, ‘poor woman’ were of the tone with which one disregards a beggar on the street. It was the way that all of his kind spoke of humans–the way that humans speak of dead animals on the side of the road: with transitory sadness that will be forgotten barely a quarter mile later. He had grown to resent all of his kind for it–for the blindness that they could not see, and which they attributed instead to the insignificance of all those to whose level they deigned not stoop. “You may choose to constrain yourself for eternity, if that is what you wish, but it is not her choice that matters.”

He would. And if he was a prisoner, then he would be a prisoner.

She closed her eyes, lowered her arm and her chin. “You have until the moon is at its height to make your choice. Then I will return.”

France’s breath caught in his chest and the bitterness of his glare wavered.

Until midnight? It couldn’t be true. There was another month, at least. One hour?

France opened his mouth, raising his gaze from Ms. Marovy, but the beautiful, terrible, woman was gone. There was only a hole where she had been. The burning heat of her touch still glowed in his face, red where her hand had been. The absence of her scent left his heart in indescribable longing.

Midnight.

François gasped and lifted his chin from his chest. His bottom ached from sleeping in the hard chair, and the cold gnawed at his bones just as the sand of sleep filled his eyes. Ms. Marovy still slept, breathing in a regular cadence. The window was closed. The moon slanted through it in a slender, silver, slice, nearly devoured by the moon’s zenith.

One hour.

***

The day had been bright and warm when François–no, Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots–first came to the homestead that Ms. Marovy ran with Pete Chernigan. She and her farmhand shared the brunt of the work. Miss Jean Marovy had been strong–young and bright as the spring day when François happened upon the two of them. A cow was giving birth, and it was a difficult one. The two knelt in the field, Pete on one side of the ailing mother, and Jean at the back, elbow deep in lowing heifer. The mother did not make it through the ordeal. She died shortly after giving up the single, weak calf. That calf took a long time to gain the strength to stand, but Jean had only slicked off the gore from her arm and stormed off the the house in a fury as Peter took care of the newborn. She stood over the sink, bracing herself with locked elbows, and stared out the window while the water ran, a mixture of emotion that Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots did not understand playing on her face. It was anger, yes, and the elf understood anger, but it was also sadness and it was something akin to hatred. “Self-loathing,” François would understand later–an emotion that was as alien to him as it was to a blizzard.

There was something more important on the elf king’s mind, though:

Hunger–deep and uncontrollable. Had he desired to control it, he could have--after all, he could do anything he wished--but to shackle his desire was an urge, too, that was alien. Her golden hair was as straight as sunbaked grass, with strong legs under the heavy denim pants that covered them and flawless, cream-light skin. Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots watched her through the window as he lurked in the treeline, Peter busying himself with the calf.

***

There was a time when the elf was nothing but his hunger. It was a gnawing hunger that was never sated. Now, sitting in the dark bedroom beside the bed of the woman with whom he had lived for the last sixty years, that same hunger still gnawed at the pit of his stomach, but there was more that layered over it now.

He dared not touch her. The time would come, and he would act, but, for the moment, he only watched. The room grew colder and darker with the passing moments, and he fell deeper into the black pit inside himself. He would snatch her–he would–in a moment, and she would not have to leave until she was ready. 84 years was too young. 84 years was the blink of an eye. To the others of his kind, it was nothing at all; they saw humans the way that humans see a spark cast from a struck steel: there-and-gone more briefly than a flash of lightning.

The shadows were already gathering around her bedside, and they were hungrier even than the gnawing pit in France's core. They were hunger itself, and France heard them chattering amongst each other while they lurked. France was not worried. They could not come any nearer to her for as long as she was alive. They still had a time to wait. They had an eternity to wait, once François decided to act. He still had time to do that, as well. Now, he rocked in the wooden rocking chair and watched on, growing darker and colder as he waited for the useless excuse for a queen to return.

***

Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots grinned a wolf’s grin when the front door creaked open, letting the afternoon sunlight slant into the hall.

“Hi, can I help you?” She was wiping her hands dry with a towel. She stood sturdily in the doorway, dressed in a simple red flannel shirt and blue jeans. She was taller than the elf, but, then again, so was his wife. She was more beautiful than the king, but so was the queen. There was no apprehension in her face. She peered down at him from the entry, golden hair tied back and face set in a hard, regal mask of surety–not unlike somebody else that the king knew, and it was delicious.

“Good afternoon Madam, my name is, er…” Frost was quick and clever, and he cast about for the proper name. A name that he had used before, perhaps? Oberon? Too old-fashioned. Puck? Too obvious. Robin Goodfellow… Mmm, too youthful, and it wasn’t really him. The king of the Elves cast a glance through the open door into the sunny hall beyond Miss Marovy. It was a nice house–an old house, with old bones. His gaze fell upon a cardboard box full of empty jam jars and implements. “Montand Therapeutics,” the recycled box read. “Quality since 1798,” and below that, “Lyon, France.”

“Montand. François Montand. I was just travelling by and I saw your beautiful little farm and thought that I would inquire as to whether you had any work available.” He had not thought to plan the lie beforehand; it was just something that he did naturally. Humans lived in a world of such absolutes, and for them to tell a lie was to tell an untruth. For an elf to tell a lie was something different entirely, and he felt the molasses flow of the world around himself curve ever so as the lie exited his lips. Elves did not so much lie as they told “alternate truths.”

Miss Marovy peered around the stocky man into the gravel driveway beyond. “Where’s your car, Mr. Montand?”

François, too, peered over his shoulder. Drats, the damnable metal contraptions that humans whizzed about in, as if they didn’t have two perfectly good feet. “It, well, it in truth madame, it broke down a ways up the road, and I’ve been walking until I found a house. Lucky for me I found such a lovely home as this one, and, might I add, owned by such a lovely young lady such as yourself.” He flashed his wolf’s grin again, and, in his mind, it was quite dashing. Jean Marovy smiled back, watchfully. “I was working my way up to it, you see, but I am, truthfully, interested in gainful employment.” The world around the man shuddered again, as if great currents were shifting in their courses.

“Well, I’m afraid that I already have a farm hand to do the work,” the young lady Marovy said, tucking the towel into the waistband of her pants, “but I can offer you a cup of tea and then help you with your car. I’ll have to wait for Peter–that’s my farmhand–to get back from the barn to let him know I’ll be going out. Chances are he’ll spit and argue to do it in my place.”

“I would love a cup of tea! May I come in?” Jean stood aside, opening the door to its full arc. “And what was your name, dear?” Montand asked, stepping into the hall.

“Jean,” Jean said, shaking the small man’s hand with a firm grip. “Jean Marovy.”

“Jean, that’s a lovely name,” France beamed as he followed the woman into the kitchen. “This Peter, he wouldn’t happen to be a young man, about your age, dark hair, shaped like a beanpole?”

“Yep, that would be him. Did you meet him?”

“Well, not exactly, madame. I saw him as I was walking up to the door. He looked like he was rushing off somewhere in a hurry.”

The world rumbled.

“One of our cows just gave birth to a calf. It was a difficult one. The mother probably isn’t going to make it. I only just got back to the house a few minutes ago.”

“Oh, my condolences for your cow, madame–”

“Jean is fine.”

“--Jean. I don’t know if that was why he was rushing, though. It looked like he was getting ready to leave somewhere. He looked rather concerned. He didn’t even notice me as I walked up your driveway.”

The world shifted a final time and fell still, locked into some new orientation.

Jean only shrugged. “I’m sure he’s overwhelmed. He hasn’t been here long, and it was his first calving. He was probably just taking the truck down to the barn.”

“Hmm,” France accepted a steaming mug from the lady of the house after she poured hot water over the teabag from the electric kettle on the counter. “I see. Then he might not be back for a while?”

Jean was busying herself with cleaning the evidence of red from her nails under the tap. “Maybe, but don’t worry too much about it. If he’s not back up soon, we can both go down there and I’ll let him know that I’m going to help you with your car. Do you have anywhere you need to be?”

France’s grin, displaying altogether too many teeth, never faded. “Not at all. Only here. In the company of such a fine lady as yourself, I’m sure that there are all sorts of things we could get up to…” He said the words with his mouth, but he shaped them with the core of his essence, putting a glamour on them that would touch the heart of any mortal. He watched Miss Marovy like a predator watching a small animal, listening for the rush of her heart, or waiting for a flush of color to come into her face. She only leaned back against the sink, folded her arms, and looked at him, as stony-faced and resolute as ever.

“Excuse me? I don't appreciate what you're insinuating, Mr. Montand,” she snapped. "You can leave right the way you came if you're here to cause trouble." She planted a palm on the countertop, inches away from the handle of the long-bladed kitchen knife sitting beside the sink.

France’s grin fell.

***

The shadows were gathering so thickly that they were barely discernible from one another, but France watched them, guarding the bedroom like a large dog guarding its mistress. There was no need to bark; his gaze alone acquainted the specters with his bite.

The room was as silent as only the room of the dying can be. The moon did not cast light through the window anymore. It shone directly overhead, nearing the apogee of its climb. All at once, there was a shimmer in the air over the field outside and two figures appeared, shining in place of the moon and dressed all in white. They hovered over the ground, marching in a military cadence towards the window across an invisible terrain. The two held fanfare trumpets to their lips and a music like the tinkling of a thousand silver bells, as light as the patter of spring rain, rang out over the hills.

The air shimmered behind the two and another pair emerged, clad in gold and bearing emerald standards held high over their heads. When the air shimmered a final time, three mounted riders appeared over the field, side by side. The verdant robes of the first hung down around the horse’s flanks, swishing as the golden horse moved. The white, tight-fitting bodice and skirts of the third gleamed translucently in the starlight, highlighting a stark face full of sharp edges and merciless indifference. The queen of Spring rode between the two, resplendent in more colors than the eye could describe–pinks and blues, yellows and greens, purple, orange, red, and more besides.

Vultures. Damn vultures, the lot of them. France growled between his teeth and stood on joints that creaked, feeling the bitter, greedy, cold well up inside of himself, and knew that if they were vultures, then perhaps, too, was he. It was not yet midnight, and they would not enter this bedroom. It was his territory, and they had no power over it. It was not yet midnight, and yet here they were, prowling like hyenas around a dying gazelle. They were as brazen as the shades, who slavered over the sleeping form on the bed, but, he supposed, the hunger of the sylvan host was not for the old woman.

François stood in the window, as immovable as a mountain, and the host arrived outside it. The heralds lowered their horns and the music dwindled away into the night. The spring queen’s nut-brown mount, eyes rolling in its head either in ecstasy or terror, stepped lightly forward, and the four elves in front of her parted to allow her through.

France had all the time in the world.

***

“Of course, Madame–Jean.” I meant nothing by it I simply…” François did not understand why the glamour had not worked. He had felt the world shape itself around the world when he had spoken of the farmhand, but it had not even budged this time. Perhaps he had done it wrong. “I only meant to flatter. Please,” he allowed a trickle of enchantment trickle into his voice, turning it sweet and syrupy, “forget all about it.”

Nothing. Jean only stared at him. Perhaps a brief look of distraction flickered across her features, but then it was gone and her look was as unbending as ever. Then her expression softened. “Don’t worry about it. It’s been a long day already, and I’m on edge.”

“As long as I’m not on the edge of your knife then I’ll be happy.” France grinned, and Jean smiled softly, sitting at the table with her own mug of tea. It was not what he had intended, but at least he had not been turned out.

“So, you live around here? You’re not from any of the nearby farms.”

“Oh, I–” France started, and then Peter Chernigan burst through the kitchen door, bag slung over his shoulder and breathless.

Well, something had gone right.

***

“Your highness.” France inclined his head towards the queen outside the window, but it was not a servile gesture. He said the words like one might say “with all due respect,” when they know full-well that the “due respect” is exactly zero. The queen dipped her head in response. “Mother, Father,” France addressed to the pair behind her, and met their gaze.

“The time is upon us, My King,” the queen declared in her most regal tones, and they held at bay a force like an April thunderstorm. She did not, however, make to enter the home. She knew the limits of her power.

France smiled for the first time that night, showing his teeth. “Not yet.”

The queen looked to the heavens, watching the arc of the moon. “Very nearly. We have but moments.” She peered past him, into the bedroom. “The shadows are gathering. They know that it is nearly time for them to feed. Would you deny them?”

“Do you think that I would deny them?”

“You mean to ask,” she replied, turning her sharp gaze to him, “do I think you a fool?” Her expression did not change from the merciless mask of a queen, but she drew her venomous force around herself like a cloak, letting the world flow around it without dissipating its power. “I think you a man.” She let the words hang, crackling, in the air. “Not an elf, but a man.”

The two only watched each other through the window.

“Boy,” the woman in the ice-white dress interjected, “you are acting like a child. It is time for you to return to your own people and to abandon this little hobby.”

“Mother,” France responded, raising his gaze to meet the clear blue one, “this little hobby will be over soon enough on its own, and, I assure you, you will have your darling boy back in your talons when it is. If you long so for company, perhaps the frozen hikers trapped in the eternal winter on top of your mountains will have a kind word to give. If you force their tongue, that is, but I know that you have no qualms with forcing the world to bend to your whims.”

The gaunt woman smiled coldly. “I am Winter. It is the world’s role to bend to my whims. You are Autumn, and your time is upon us. I bend the world to my whims, yes, and would you destroy the balance simply because you will not make it bend to yours?”

“You don’t understand it yet, do you?” France chuckled, low and gravelly. “An eternity to contemplate, frozen forever and unchanging, and you still don’t get it.” He shook his head in bemusement. “You do not make the winter, and I do not make the autumn. The world spins and revolves, and if we stay still, it will spin on without us. We do not make the seasons any more than ripples on top of a stream create the rocks that cast them.”

“Don’t be silly, boy,” the man in the green robes spoke up. “Have you stayed with the humans so long that their foolishness has addled your brain? If you do not return to your own realm, your mother can never walk the world, your queen can never bring new life to the hills, I can never sleep and rest from this long reign.” His voice was blustering and jovial, and brought to mind the taste of chilled wine and fresh fruit, but, just as the others, it lacked something. It was the distillation of summer exuberance, cheer and warmth, and yet it lacked the vital human element to make those things lovely or loved. It lacked kindness. It was like an extraction of vanilla: it smells wonderful, and makes anything it added taste sweet and warm and welcoming, but you would not want to drink it.

“Father, you are the embodiment of light, and yet you cannot see. Do you ripen the wheat? Do you warm the lakes. Do you brush every apple with pigment to make it red and ready to eat? These things happen because it is their time to happen. They happen regardless of you.”

“They happen, boy, because it is my time to happen. And now it is your time to happen.”

“And for sixty years, there has been no autumn? The summer has reigned eternal, with no winter and no spring? You have felt it as well as I. The seasons change. The leaves fall. The winter comes. There is no need for me to hold it all in my greed. I do not need to covet every life. I need not take and steal and hoard. The trees will shed their leaves because it is their time, and the apples will ripen because it is their time. And it is my time here. My place.”

“You think that you can escape jealousy simply by coveting something different?” The resplendent queen asked, bedecked in all of the splendor of spring without any of the youth. “What are you doing now, if not holding and hoarding?”

The shadows were so dense now that he could barely see the sleeping form of Ms. Marovy through them.

All the time in the world.

France grinned his grin, and gathered his own power around himself in a mantle. He stepped back through the shadows, and his power grew to nearly a palpable level. Autumn, the great thief. The great coveter.

Holding the queen’s gaze, he reached back and grabbed the woman’s bare hand, allowing his power and his greed and his need to hold and to hoard flow from him into her, and the shadows were gone as if they had never been there at all.

***

Peter’s mother was in the hospital. An old illness had relapsed, and Peter did not know if she had long to live. Illness and disease was Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Root's specialty, and he did not feel bad about this. It was the way of life. Things were born and things died. Mortal lives were so brief and paltry that it wasn’t as if it made any difference if one of them died now or thirty years from now, and it brought something good out of it all anyway. It got Peter away and out of the newly-named France’s hair.

Why Jean seemingly repulsed his every effort at glamour and enchantment was beyond him, but the challenge only made the desire all that more enticing, and, with Peter out of the way, there was a need for a new hand on the homestead.

Jean didn’t trust him to be able to manage the work at first, but it did not take long to prove himself more than up to the task. He was good with animals. The goats took to him like an old friend, and the horses stood as docile as a lamb as he brushed their coats and cleaned their hooves. Though he was old, he was far from brittle. Tough as nails was François Montand, and, as he knew it, it was the truth. He wrestled fences and tilled the field, and no cow ever kicked over the milk bucket more than once; all it took was a look from those hard, grey, eyes.

It was a wonder, he thought, that humans condemned themselves to this menial labor when they could be out in the sun, romping and galivanting. The work was intriguing, like a glimpse into an alien culture, but he could see how it would get dull fast. Even now, after the first few times, he was ready to move on to something new, so he picked caterpillars off of the tomatoes and squished them between his gloved fingers; he replaced the broken shingles on the roof; he help Jean turn the ripe peaches into jams and pies; but always there was the milking and the tilling and the fences.

After a time, while France was repairing a section of fence that the goats had managed to chew and slip through, he realized, with wonder, that there was something almost enjoyable in the repetition of the dull task. There was something almost meaningful in the meaninglessness. When the fence was fully repaired, and the goats were back out again in the pasture, he stepped back and inspected his handiwork and, indeed, he felt something that he had never felt before. It wasn’t the elation of romping through the hills, stealing and eating and toying. It was something lighter yet more pervasive. He went inside and ate a slice of the fresh peach cobbler that Jean had baked, and the golden glow of satisfaction stayed with him for the rest of the day.

There was something that worried the king, however. Jean had not heard word back from Peter since he had left. There was nothing wrong with this in one sense; François was still working on her–wheedling and cajoling, and trying as he might to get her, impossibly, out into the warm heather, or at least into a bed. It seemed, however, that nothing he did had any effect. He had never experienced anything like it before. It was as if all of his charms slid off of her like water off of a stone. This was also why Peter’s silence was concerning: François had gotten rid of him. He had traded his own labor for Peter’s, and, for as long as the man was gone, François could not go back on his trade. It was a physical impossibility. An elf could not take without giving something of equal value.

Therefore, when France came back inside one Autumn afternoon from mucking out the stables to find Jean on the phone with the ex-farmhand, it came as an utter surprise to him when he turned down the option of retirement. After all, he had not yet gotten what he had come for, and there may have still been a certain glow smoldering in his chest from seeing those horses in their clean, fresh stalls.

***

The moment that France touched the skin of the old woman on the bed, the fluttering spark of life under her skin, down to little more than a cold spark, froze. It didn’t grow or swell. It didn’t flame back up into the blaze of youth, but it stopped fluttering. It froze in a single instant between flickers, glowing like the ember on the tip of a cigarette.

“You are in my territory,” François said levelly, never breaking his gaze from where it beheld the three mounted elves outside. “You hold no power here. If I am to covet, then I will covet something worthwhile. Would you rather I hoard dry leaves and rotting fruit?”

The queen sighed and turned her horse, walking back between the Summer and Winter.

“You,” François growled with dangerous implacability, “will not,” and he tightened his grip on the woman’s hand, stopping himself, barely, before something broke, “take what is mine.”

There was a gasp and a flutter of movement in the hand within his own, and France looked down into the cataracted hazel eyes of the woman that he would never admit he loved.

“France?” She croaked. “You’re hurting me.”

France loosened his grip and knelt by the bedside, holding her hand to his chest.

“It’s going to be alright, Ms. Marovy,” he said in tones of tenderness that would have made an elf snort with disgust. “I’ve got you.”

Jean looked out the window, and France didn’t know if she could see so far with the silver haze over her eyes, but she cleared her throat and asked, “Who are your friends? They are dressed so strangely.”

“They are not my friends, Ms. Marovy. They can’t come in.”

“France, call me Jean. Bring them inside, give them a cup of tea. It’s chilly out.”

France smiled and held her hand closer to his own ever-weathered cheek. “They were just leaving, Jean. They won’t be back here again. Not until you want them to.”

Jean nodded and turned her thin face back to France’s, turning from the splendid and terrible figures of the elves floating outside the window. “Did you get the apples in today?”

“Yes, Jean.”

“And are the cows locked up?”

“Yes, Jean.”

“You’re keeping an eye on Magdalene? Her kid will be coming any night now.”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Good.” And she squeezed his hand weakly. “There’s been something out these last few nights, hurting the cows and tangling up the goats. I don’t know what it could be.”

“I know, Jean. It’s taken care of.”

Jean looked into the hard eyes that were warmer than they had ever been sixty years ago and smiled. “You’re a good man, France.”

France smiled back, wolf’s teeth hidden. His eyes itched to close.

“And I don’t know what kind of moisturizer you’ve been using, but you don’t seem to have aged a day since I met you.”

He snorted and wiped an eye on the collar of his shirt. “Tough as nails.”

“And stubborn as a goat.”

“I’ll take you out to the stable tomorrow to see Marzipan. I gave her a good scrub today and she looks as new as a foal.”

Jean grunted. “I don’t think so.” Her smiled faded from her eyes, but stayed on her lips, a ghost of the sweetness that she had tasted. “I don’t think that I’m going to be around tomorrow, France.”

Something happened inside of him, then–something that felt like a five-gallon bucket of frigid water plummeting into his stomach from the top of a tall cliff, and a lump rose in his throat.

“You’re going to be fine, Jean. You can stay as long as you like. I won’t let you leave.”

Jean smiled again, wanly, and squeezed his hand, not daring to break his gaze.

“Bring your friends in, France. It’s getting chilly outside.”

France did not move to relinquish her hand, but the frigid–he did not know what it was at first, and then realized it–the frigid terror spread throughout his body, spreading from his stomach to his limbs and extremities, and finally to his brain, robbing him of sense and freezing him as solid as the little timeless spark in Jean’s chest.

“Come inside, everybody. Don’t linger.” Her voice was a force that was no more to be disobeyed than was a thunderstorm, and the elven host moved through the window to settle, soundlessly, on the wooden floor.

The queens of spring and winter and the king of summer, inexplicable, inclined their heads in a bow to the old woman, their expressions somber. Something changed in the host’s image. It grew darker and more melancholy. The golds and silvers of the heralds and standard-bearers’ faded to grey and black, and the bright colors of the royal gowns and robes lost something of their frivolity and grew more decorous. The colors did not changed, but they seemed to fade and harden and, in a way, become more real. The crown of golden wheat on Summer’s head turned to dull straw, and the ice of Winter’s bodice and skirt froze into something that did not glitter or shine; it was only ice–the kind of ice that lives in caves or in the deep of forgotten woods where there is nobody to see it.

“Jean,” François whispered, watching these changes. “You don’t have to leave. I can hold you here for years–centuries.”

Her eyes glittered as a tear rolled down the inside of one cheek and across the ridge of her lips. “You’re a good man, France. The best man I know. But it is my time. You couldn’t keep me here any more than you could keep the winter from overtaking the Fall.”

“I can, Jean!” he nearly shouted. “I can! Can’t you feel it?” The spark still glowed in her chest, not twinkling or waxing or waning, just glowing steadily.

“France…” she raised the hand that he was no longer holding and rested it on the velvet stubble of his chin. His father knew how to grow a beard, but he had never managed it. The best he got was a thin layer of fuzz like a peach. “I’ve known you for sixty years. Sixty good, long years. Didn’t you ever wonder why I allowed you to stay, even though you ran off my old farmhand?”

“Ran him off? I did–”

“Don’t you lie to me, Monsieur Montand, I know what you did.”

François fell silent.

“I liked you, France. You made my life better. You made the life of a very old woman worth having, but its my time to go. You need to let me go.”

“I–” he choked on the lump in his throat and couldn’t see for the blurring swell of tears in his eyes which he refused to blink away. He swallowed the lump and tried again. “I can’t lose you, Jean. You are the only thing that gave my life meaning. If you go, I’ll have nothing.”

Had he been able to see the love and compassion in the way that she looked at him, he would not have been able to hold back the tears. It glowed brighter than the glamor of Spring or the fervor of Summer, and it was warmer than any of the elves in the room. It was an entirely human glow, and the three royal elves shrank back from it. France bathed in it, and let it warm the depths of his granite heart. The rage and the greed and the lust and the reckless abandon that he kept locked away there burst free of their bonds and flooded into him, mixing and swirling with the aches of love and of loss and of grief.

“You have so much, France. You have yourself, and that is wonderful. And you had me, and you will always have me, but I just won’t be here. You have your hands, and your fiddle–I love it when you played the fiddle. You can't keep me here. As old as you are, there is something that you have never learned. You need to learn to let go.”

That was when France’s heart broke. The pain was like nothing that he had ever felt before. It was as if the world were tearing apart–as if his grip on the edge of a cliff slipped free, and he was plummeting and plummeting. At once, he was reeling and rebelling, and he was plummeting, unable, no matter how hard he railed against the world to stop the inarguable pull of gravity. There was no way that he could accept that the world was the way that it was. It must have been a dream–a nightmare. If only he could force the world to conform to his will, he could take control and change it. He drew his power around himself, all of his pain and rage and greed and sorrow, and pulled like a sailor heaving at a sail, drawing it around, changing course, and waited for the world to change around him, but it did not. Jean had always been impervious to his charms.

He blinked away the tears that clouded his vision and there she still was, smiling wanly and warmly up at him with eyes that, though clouded with age, were just as bright and beautiful as they had been all those years ago when she had opened the door to him. They watched him from a face that, though thin and wrinkled, was just as stern and self-possessed as the woman who had made him tea and sat him down at her dining table that spring afternoon. She was a rock around which the flow of his magic parted and could not shift, and he knew that he was falling.

France looked up at the three elves who stood, heads bowed in respect for the dying, and knew that it was time to go back. It was his time. It had always been his time. It was his time to let go, and to return to what he truly was: an elf. A dirty, heartless elf. He was the Autumn, and it was his time. Without thinking, heart swimming with everything he was and everything that he had become, Frost-in-the-Mountain’s-Roots bent and kissed Ms. Marovy’s lips. They were thin and cold, but her breath was warm, and she breathed it into him, filling him up with the warmth that was her love and humanity, and he let go of her hand, allowing it to fall to the bed covers. The heat of her burned inside of him, burned and burned, not like the scorching heat of the waking sun, as had burned the touch of Spring, but as the aching, glowing, satisfied warmth of a life well-lived and a job well done, and François let go.

The spark inside of Jean fluttered and disappeared, and then she was only dirt. Dirt amidst dirt, and François Montand was utterly alone.

Ms. Marovy stood from the bed, joints free of the pains and aches of age, and stood at the bedside, looking down that the body that had held her with winsome fondness.

“France?” Her voice was rich and youthful again. Gone was the tremulous effort of old-age, and gone were the cataracts that clouded her eyes.

He did not look up–only kept his eyes clenched as tears poured from between them, not allowing his shoulders to shake as he knelt with his interlocked palms that held the holly crown to his forehead as if in prayer. “Yes?”

“Stay.”

“I cannot. It is my time to go.”

“No, not anymore.”

France looked up, opening his eyes and wiping his face, and, for the first time, he felt the cold in his bones–truly felt it. His skin was weathered as old leather, and the warmth that she had breathed into him still flowed through his body, battling the cold from the window. For once, he realized, his did not feel as though he was carved from ancient granite. He felt soft and warm, and cold and old. Very old. When his eyes landed on the image of Ms. Marovy, they widened in wonder, and, if he had been able to see his own eyes, he would have noticed that the hard grey was tinged with hazel.

Jean stood tall and regal as a queen. Her grey hair tumbled down to her back, straight as dried wheat and frigid as autumn clouds. A tinge of grey had crept into her eyes, turning them hard and stony, but the kindness still lingered on her mouth. Her blue bed-clothes had been replaced by swathes of orange and red drapery that clung to her like a veil that drapes the carving of an ancient queen, and a thin yellow scarf wrapped around her slender neck. She gazed down at him, kneeling on the floor with kindly eyes and her hands clasped in front of her. She was more beautiful than an autumn wood painted in scarlet and gold.

“You smell like a goat.” She smiled at him, and he realized what was happening. He stood, and felt the weakness of mortality in his legs, almost falling again as the Queen of spring stepped up beside Ms. Marovy and took her hand. “And Peter isn’t back. Peter would have stayed here as long as he lived. Would you admit that your trade was not of equal value?”

The old man, François Montand, shook his head, wiping tears from his face with a sleeve that was rough against his skin.

“Marzipan needs you. She quite likes you, you know. I think that she may be more your horse than mine by now.”

“Marz–” François chuckled, laughing in spite of himself. “Marzipan?”

Jean smiled back. “The goats need you. Magdalene is going to be giving birth soon, and something has been sneaking into the barn at night. The chickens need you. The apples still need finishing. The kitchen could use a scrubbing.”

“Jean, I can’t. It’s not my–”

“It’s yours.”

“What?”

“It’s yours. It’s all yours. I bequeath it to you. It is a trade–value for value. The farm cannot look after itself.”

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t run the farm without you.”

The elf who had been Jean Marovy grinned a wolf’s grin and bent to kiss the old man’s forehead. “You’ve been running it for the past sixty years. I think you can manage another thirty.” She plucked the band of holly from his unresisting fingers and placed it upon her own head, where the spines clutched to her hair even as she tilted her head to gaze down upon the François with love.

“Thirty years…” France breathed, and Jean nodded.

“Thirty years. You might need to hire a farmhand, though.” She took his leathery, calloused palm in hers and gazed into his eyes. “Find me again in thirty years. I’ll be waiting for you. I have all the time in the world.”

François nodded, stricken in place by what he had lost and what he had gained, and Jean Marovy turned to the three elves behind her.

“I believe it’s time that we were off, yes?”

Summer and Winter inclined their heads and Spring grinned a grin like that of a fox.

“This is not your territory anymore. I should think that I have a right, but you three were not welcome to begin with.”

Spring laughed, and it sounded like the patter of April showers. “Maybe you did not choose so poorly after all, my king.”

“His name is François Montand,” Jean asserted, still smiling.

“Maybe you didn’t choose so poorly after all, François Montand.”

The four elves mounted their steeds, Autumn with her arms around Spring’s middle, and the heralds and standard-bearers took up their places before the host. The horns played a music like a thousand silver bells, and the procession made its way out the window and into the dark night. François watched as the eight faded away progressively until they were entirely gone, as if they had never been there to begin with, and the night was silent.

A voice sounded from somewhere perhaps distant or perhaps near, and it sounded like pumpkin pie and crisp, red, leaves.

“Find me, François Montand. You have thirty years. Maybe, some time in there, you can find the time to take a bath.”

Though tears still burned his eyes, and there was, both, a void and a presence inside of him that he had never felt before, François smiled and breathed the first breath of his life.

Thirty years.

He had all the time in the world.