A very long time ago, back in the mists of time, or possibly in 2022, I was on Tiny Bookcase podcast, with a story written for the prompt ‘Currency’, which needed to be around a thousand words, if I remember correctly (see above: mists of time.)

While the hosts had great stories, they were funny and political and satirical, and I’m afraid those are things I can’t do.

I’m more a skinning yourself to prove your love kinda writer, so my take on the prompt was a bit different.

And I do love a good old bargain with the Fae story, especially one involving changelings.

Currency – CL Hellisen

In a city swarming with human faces, we are foreigners filled with wanting and emptiness. We pass through the world like unburied myths. Changelings and sleepers, cast out of the kingdom.

At night I prowl the webwork of lanes and alleys, closes and circles, waiting until enough time has passed for me to risk another summoning. There are few of us left — our names are gone, our connection to our ancestral world erased, but the memories of those who betrayed us are long.

I’ve walked my soles thin as moth wings, tattered, leaving trails of rubbery grey dust. The skies spill over with stars, and people hurry past, their shoulders hunched, heads bowed as if they do not want to see me.

Outside the city, the trees lean, striving to touch the brick, the glass. They want to press the concrete into softer shapes, crack the tarmac. I leave the buildings behind me and push my way through long white grass to reach the dark damp of undertree, green-canopied.

The old names were inscribed into my soft belly skin by my mother and grandmother, whose own skins were blackened with scriptures. Who lost their names, one by one, and when my turn came, there were hardly any to hand on to me. 

And now, I have found no one to whisper my remaining names back to me, to trace the shapes with an index finger, a pointed tongue.

One day the names will run out, and I will be human, or my children will be, or their grandchildren. The way home will be closed. Until then, I must keep trying, as all those who came before have tried, waiting for a slip.

In a hollow space where the trees are stepped with wide mushrooms and the ground is colder than it should be, I clear a circle, scraping mulch and old leaves out of the way. I make a doorway to hell.

Or fairy land.

They’re much the same. 

Summonings are easy. Anyone can recite the words, speak the names of some duke or duchess, some minor royal of the blood. It’s keeping them there that will cost you.

I mark a cross in my circle door; lay a gift in each quadrant. A cat paw to the north east, a jawbone from an unmarked grave below it. To the south-west I give silver — a bangle stolen from a teenage girl — and in the north east I pour an eggcup of brandy.

I step out of the circle, crouch down and knock the soft earth with my knuckles three times, say the name of a cousin I have met rarely and briefly.

When he appears, he sneers at my paltry summoning gifts, at me. ‘One of you,’ he says, and I bow in answer.

‘Well.’ He throws his cloak of seal-skin black from his shoulders, glares at me with eyes of ivory, blank and empty. ‘Name it, cousin.’

‘I wish to find a consort.’ It seems so prosaic and human. I almost wish I could catch the words in gossamer nets and stuff them back into my mouth, chew and swallow them. Except I have been alone too long, and loneliness can break you. This is something the fairies do not understand.

The duke scoffs. Such a small thing, to trap a man or woman, to bring them to heel and bind their hearts in wire threads. ‘I can give you that,’ he says. ‘But it will cost you.’

As if I didn’t know. ‘A name.’ I tilt my head as I remember the scars that wove across my mother’s skin, the places that had been erased, bartered. I take a breath and open my palm, hold out the little blade that has, like magic, been passed down through our family.

He grins, plucks the knife and waits as I strip my top to stand shivering, skin stippled with the faint misting rain that drifts down between the leaves. I look up to the trembling sky as he traces a square of skin, slides the sickle blade under to peel a name loose.

I think only of the shape my breath makes, the way it spirals. I let the pain wash over me in cold joyous shivers, and when he has taken my name, I let the sting of regret go with it.

Another name gone, and there are so few left now. A handful carved into me, when the first of us had thousands.

‘There,’ the Duke of Faerie says, the strip of bloodied skin with my now forgotten name dangling from his fingers. ‘And in return.’ He snaps a brooch from his lapel. It looks like a rose, but the petals curl around a silvered skull, and when I close my hand around it, hot breath screams against my palm. ‘Pierce the one you want, name them, and you will own them. They will love you forever.’

The one I want. He has slipped. We knew one of them would one day. I bow and thank him, and his sneer turns indulgent, like a man who has seen a pet dog dance on its hind legs.

‘A moment.’

He pauses long enough for me to step through the doorway and plunge the brooch pin into his throat. I see the moment he realises his error, the sudden emotion in his widened eyes.

I may no longer know the names of my earth-cursed family, but I still know his.

Photo by Miriam Espacio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-standing-near-trees-3354135/