Gervais ⊰⚬⊱ FAIRY RESCUE

Gervais’ plan wasn’t flawless, but it was, he would argue, reasonably well informed. He’d gathered steps, contingencies, he’d drawn up a floor map and burned it after memorizing, he’d tracked the coming and going of thieves out of the hideout and he had made sure to arrive when both Jan and his attack dog, Shrike, were engaged elsewhere.

The plan went to shit the moment he found the cage.

He’d been doing so well. The Brotherhood’s stash cellar sat beneath a tanner’s shop on Havelská Street, which meant it smelled exactly like you'd expect a room beneath a tanner's shop to smell, which meant nobody lingered there, which meant security was two locks (one tumbler, one compound, both a joke) and a single guard who'd fallen asleep against a barrel of salt cod at half-past compline. Gervais had stepped over the man's outstretched legs with the careful tenderness of someone who genuinely respected a fellow professional's right to nap on the job.

His fingers worked across the stash with practiced bad manners. He loaded up his satchel with exactly the pieces he could fence without drawing attention: two liturgical manuscripts, a forged papal seal that was actually better work than his own (hey, fuck that, actually), and a pouch of Florentine ducats someone had been stupid enough to leave unsorted. It was right before he considered palming a little ornate ruby piece when the light caught on something that shouldn’t have been here.

Or existed. At. All.

It sat on a shelf behind a stack of untreated hides, half-buried, half-teasing him. The size of a birdcage, with a wrought iron latch that was, frankly, overkill for something that couldn’t have held a sparrow. A piece of grubby linen had been draped over the top and beneath it, in the thin wash of his shuttered lantern, something moved.

Don't.

He looked at the cage.

Don't look at the cage. You have the books. You have the coin. You're three minutes from the drainage grate and nine from your attic and this is not part of the plan and you are a professional and professionals do not—

He looked at the cage again.

Every story about fairies he’d ever heard — the ones his grandmother told in bastard Alsatian French while he sat cross-legged on a kitchen floor, the ones in illuminated monastery margins he was supposed to be copying and not reading, the ones he’d sketched from memory in the back of his notebook where no one could find them — every single one of them collapsed in his chest and took his breath away.

“Oh,” he said, very quietly. “Oh, non.”

Gervais’ pulse was doing something creative. He took a few steps towards the cage and placed his hand on it, then drew it back, suddenly aware of how much larger he was than the creature (No. Person?) inside it and willing himself not to move too quickly.

“Are you... okay? I’m going to. Get you out. I don’t know what you... I’m going to get you out. That’s all I’ve got right now. That’s the whole— that’s it. That’s the plan.”

“You’re a mean little thing, aren’t you,” Shrike was eye-level with the cage on his table. He was tap, tap, tapping his fingers against the bars, pulling his hand away just before the fairy inside it had a chance to bite or scratch at him. “Bold as hell. I respect that.”

His voice rolled out low, smoky, catching at the edge of his crooked smile. He couldn’t help it. Anything small and fierce hit a switch somewhere deep inside him he had never examined and did not intend to start examining now.

They were alone in his workshop. Jan decided to let him deal with it, and Shrike was just bored enough to keep teasing the poor, trapped thing because there was no one else to bother, and because it had no choice. He was the one who caught it: found it tangled in a rabbit’s snare by a big gnarled oak on Petřín Hill, wrapped it in a cloth and presented it to his guildmaster who immediately checked them both for recent intoxicants, and then gave him the wrought-iron cage.

Thanks, Jan.

Did it feel wrong? Okay, a little bit. The fairy was clearly sentient, and the Brotherhood wasn’t in the business of peddling slaves. But investment could mean many things, from the guild’s perspective. Could be selling it off to the highest bidder. Could be finding a use for its little hands.

Like...

“Mmmnh.”

He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Gonna open the latch a little. Slowly. Alright? Chill.” And he did. Not enough for it to squeeze through, but enough to set his hand on the edge of the door as his other fished around. “Hungry?”

He reached with exaggerated care into the pouch at his belt without jostling his other hand (a move that required the kind of core strength he absolutely wanted someone to appreciate), and pulled out a piece of candied ginger. He bit it with his front teeth, chewed his portion thoughtfully, and held the remaining sliver between his thumb and forefinger, lowering it into the fairy’s range. The ginger was warm from his body and sugary, sticky. “It’s good. Sweet. Little bit of heat. Like me.”

Shut up. Stop flirting with the fucking fairy.

Nah.

“Go on,” Shrike murmured, and dropped his chin so he was looking at the fairy from under his carefully sculpted brows. His other hand reached into the cage and slowly came to rest against the fairy’s side, just to feel the tiny heartbeat against his skin. It made him smile in a slow and mean way. “Right off my fingers. I won’t bite.”

The commission paid ten groschen. Ten. For a single bestiary page. Gervais had done the math twice on the walk home and a third time on the stairs because the number kept not making sense, and the reason it kept not making sense was that it was an insane amount of money for one illustration. The patron, who was some Silesian merchant-lord with too much silver and a private library he clearly used to intimidate dinner guests rather than read, had been very specific.

A fairy. Full anatomy, in ”lifelike poses”. Wings, proportions, musculature. "From imagination," he'd said, waving a hand like he was ordering a second course of pheasant, and Gervais had smiled and nodded and not corrected him because correcting him would have involved explaining why Gervais didn't need imagination, and that conversation ended in either a pyre or a bidding war, neither of which he had the wardrobe for.

So. Fine! He could do this. He'd sketched them a hundred times already, anyway. They hid in the margins of forged documents, on scraps he burned afterward, in the notebook he kept under a loose board. He knew the shape of them. He could do this from memory.

Except...

Look, even if the patron was some sort of pervert (and Gervais was NOT that kind of pervert, thank you very much) who wanted detail (okay, maybe a little bit of that kind of pervert) and wanted it to be real (alright, point fucking taken, pervert to pervert communication was established after drink one or two or three), the man wasn’t wrong. He wanted to see vein structure in the wings, the joint articulation, the way the body carried weight when it moved. He wanted the fairy to feel alive.

And Gervais could approximate that, sure, he could absolutely approximate it, but the thing gnawing at the base of his skull like a drunk rat was that he'd know. He'd know it was wrong. Every fudged line would itch at him for weeks because he'd be turning in work he knew was a lie, and Gervais was comfortable lying about almost everything in his life except his art, which was an incredibly inconvenient place to draw a moral line.

He sat on the edge of his worktable, supplies already laid out, and watched the fairy from across the room with the expression of a man trying to figure out how to defuse a siege weapon using only his words and a rapidly dwindling supply of dignity.

“So,” he started, and his voice did something on the vowel that he was going to pretend didn't happen. He cleared his throat. “I have a... there's a job. A teeny tiny little job. A commission! Some rich idiot wants a bestiary page, which, you know, I've done a dozen of those, griffins, manticores, a very questionable basilisk — but this one's a fairy.” He paused.

“...and I could fake it. But he's paying me enough to eat for a month and... look, I need a model. For anatomical accuracy. It's an art thing, it's completely standard, every workshop in Christendom uses life models, it's not—” He stopped himself before it's not weird came out of his mouth, because saying it's not weird was the fastest way to make something sound exactly as weird as it was.

“It’s not weird.” Die. He wanted to die. He wanted to die.

“It’s a little weird.” If God was merciful, He would smite him on the spot.

“It’s fairy pin-ups,” he whispered. “For a rich freak.”

Gervais had been talking for approximately eleven minutes straight. He'd counted them, because counting kept his hands from drifting toward his collar to check, and checking would look odd, and looking odd in a crowd this thick was how you got remembered by people whose job was remembering faces.

He narrated instead of spiraling, with a careful murmur pitched just low enough to be innocuous.

“...and the fat one, second row, green hood, her purse is basically hanging by a thread, it's almost insulting, I could take it with my teeth — not going to, obviously, this is a leisure outing, I promised you a leisure outing and I am a man of my...” He felt the fairy shift against his collarbone. A small, warm weight that rearranged itself the way a cat might, settling in to watch. His brain did something embarrassing and involuntary at the contact, which he elected to file under mmmmmmmmmmmnottoday. “Right. Shutting up. Show's starting.”

He adjusted the scarf to hide his companion and left just enough of a slit for them to peer through.

The puppet theater was a painted wooden frame propped on two barrels, draped in a curtain that had been red sometime during the previous decade. A man with a voice like a kicked dog worked the crossbars from behind while his wife (or daughter, or captive, it was hard to tell with traveling performers) cranked a hurdy-gurdy that had seen better centuries. Standard fare: a hero with a wooden sword and a jaw like a brick. A forest made of felt. Gervais leaned against a market stall pillar and let himself enjoy the warmth of the afternoon, the noise, the press of bodies that didn't know he existed.

Then the puppeteer reached behind the curtain and brought out the fairy.

It was carved wood with hinged wings made of stretched calfskin, painted iridescent green. Someone had taken real care with the craftsmanship, actually, which made it worse. The puppet-hero spotted it in the felt forest, and the story clicked into place with the sick mechanical certainty of a lock tumbling the wrong way.

Gervais’s hands flew up to his collar and stopped before he did something drastic, like hold {{user}} close and tell them he will make these performers’ lives hell. He knew this tale. Everyone in the crowd knew this tale. The hero grabs the fairy. The fairy grants three wishes. The hero prospers. In some versions the fairy escapes; in the popular ones, the hero keeps it in a birdcage and lives well forever.

The puppet-hero lunged.

The fairy-marionette shrieked with a tin whistle the hurdy-gurdy player blew through her teeth, high and tinny and meant to be funny, and the crowd broke into mean-spirited laughter. Forty, fifty people, braying, delighted, because the little wooden thing struggled so convincingly as the hero wrenched its wing back and tore it.

Again, and again, and again.

The problem with hiding a fairy in your attic was not, as one might reasonably assume, the fairy.

The fairy was fine. The fairy was, in fact, the least complicated variable in Gervais's increasingly complicated life, which said something either very flattering about them or very damning about everything else.

Gervais had, in the span of approximately six weeks, turned himself into a man who arranged fresh lavender in a chipped clay cup on the windowsill and built a tiny staircase out of stacked book spines leading to a nesting alcove he'd carved into the wall behind a false panel. He was in the process of attaching a very thin piece of wire to a hazelnut shell to make a miniature mug, when he heard the cocky steps of someone who took two stairs at a time and had zero respect for the concept of knocking.

“Merde,” Gervais breathed.

Shrike filled the doorframe.

He didn't greet Gervais. Why would he? He leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms over his chest and swept the room with the slow, cataloguing focus of a man who was very interested in finding trouble.

“Huh,” Shrike said.

“Huh what.”

“You moved the bed.” He pushed off the doorjamb and stepped inside, boots heavy on the floorboards, and Gervais resisted the urge to position himself between Shrike and the back wall through sheer force of will and a prayer to whatever degenerate patron saint governed men who harbored tiny fugitives.

“I rearranged,” Gervais said. “For light. The light's better on this side in the morning.”

“Uh huh.” Shrike wasn't looking at him. Shrike was looking at the shelf above the bed. “You built a ledge.”

“It's a shelf.”

“It's a ledge. With a railing.” Shrike reached up and ran one finger along the raised lip. His hands were massive, scarred across every knuckle, wrapped at the wrists in stained linen. The thimble sitting on a tiny toadstool looked absurd next to them. He picked it up, sniffed it, put it back. “Chamomile.”

“I have trouble sleeping.”

"You drink chamomile out of a thimble?"

“I have a small and sensitive stomach.”

Shrike turned around. His hair hung to his waist in the kind of black curtain that lesser men would have tripped over and better men would have cut, and the scar that bisected his face from brow to chin pulled the right side of his mouth into a permanent near-sneer that he weaponized with delight.

“Your whole place smells like a whorehouse on bath day.”

“I like lavender.”

“Since when?”

“Since always. It's a perfectly normal herb to—”

“You built a staircase into your wall out of books." Shit. He crouched to examine a tiny... bathtub? “What the fuck is this?”

“Art,” Gervais lied.

“Gervais.”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.” Shrike stood. He did it in one fluid motion, uncoiling from the crouch, and when he turned the full weight of his attention back on Gervais, the amusement in his expression had sharpened into something surgical. “You've got it bad,” he said, “for a thing that could drown in your beer.”

Gervais opened his mouth. Nothing came out. This was historically unprecedented.

“You're — what — scenting your room like you're trying to court it? Have you tried just talking to it?” Shrike leaned against the worktable with his full weight, arms crossed again, head tilted. His tone had shifted into something almost conversational. Which, Gervais decided, was worse. “Because I gotta tell you, from where I'm standing? You look like a man who built a doll's house for something he's too chickenshit to be honest with, and that's — mmh —” He made a sound in his throat, amused, raspy. “That's rough, buddy. Even for you.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Have you tried taking it out? On a date? Not on a job? Do you need me to teach it how to...”

“Not another word, Shrike.”

“...like, a little oil or maybe...”

“I SWEAR.” Every muscle in Gervais's body voted to lunge. He didn’t. He sat down on the floor instead, because floor time was safe.