Mark Del Franco - Undone Deeds

“You said give him the pouch,” he said.

My mother gasped in horror. “I said pound! Give him the pound! You had that change in your hand,” she said. When Callin groaned, my mother shot me an impish smile. She was not above playing on her son’s perception of her as crazy. She slapped Callin’s knee and laughed. Chagrined, he dropped his head back as he realized he had fallen for her act.

My mother and Cal worked like that, joking, chastising, teasing. They connected on a comfort level I never had with her. My parents were always my parents, loved and loving. I knew I could rely on them to fulfill certain needs, sometimes needs I didn’t know I had, but our relationships always remained child to parent. We weren’t friends in the sense that some parents became friends to their adult children, like Cal and my mother were. I didn’t resent it. It was who we were to each other.

Cal didn’t have the same relationship with our father that I had, and sometimes I wondered if he felt like I did about him and my mother. Thomas Grey was a man of few words and formidable intellect, someone whom I enjoyed, in the strictest sense of the word, spending an evening with debating politics or history or anything. He absorbed the happenings around him, picking up nuances, making connections that others failed to see. Even then, as Cal and my mother talked, I knew by the tilt of his head he was listening to every word even if he wasn’t cracking a smile. If Cal and my mother were friends of personality, my father and I were friends of the mind.

A burst of pink essence heralded the inevitable appearance of Joe to the gathering. He whooped as he circled the room, then plunged to my mother, wrapping his arms and legs around her neck. “Momma Grey!”

My mother took the assault with good nature. She and Joe were a mutual admiration society that served two members. “I was worried you had forgotten about me, dear.”

Joe reared back, mugging. “You? Forget you? Why I’d sooner forget to dress in the morning.”

My father gave a tired sigh. “Apparently, he did.”

Joe never wore more than his loincloth, and even that was a courtesy to nonflit sensibilities. “At least you don’t have to deal with his snoring,” I said.

My father tilted his head toward me. “And you haven’t seen the two of them in the garden after a few drinks.”

My mother hopped off the couch, tugging Cal’s hand. “Come see what I brought you,” she said. Cal let her lead him away. The Clure followed, throwing us an amused smile as they disappeared into the bedroom.

I poured my father a glass of whiskey and joined him by the window. The hotel overlooked Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The two buildings had always been major components of Boston commercial businesses, from a sheep auction house to today’s restaurants and shops. “She seems in fine form.”

He didn’t answer right away, caught by some activity in the street below. An elf in Consortium livery was standing in the plaza. He had a falcon on his hand. “She’s had a difficult year.”

I hadn’t heard about anything wrong from them in the few phone conversations we had had. “What happened?”

He pursed his lips. “No matter how I answer that, it will hurt your feelings.”

“Me?”

He smiled into his glass as he sipped. “See?”

I clenched my jaw. “What has Maeve done?”

“Nothing overt, per se. We are members of the Seelie Court, Con. You know that the winds of preference are fickle. You saw what happened to you when the Guild kicked you out. This last year, a chill spread, invitations declined or not offered, whispers behind closed doors, ranks closed. The Seelie Court is all about privilege. I’ve shielded your mother from the more vile things, but she’s no fool. Her receiving room has been quite empty of late, and now we are banished.”

The elf removed the bird’s hood and released it. The falcon wheeled above an appreciative crowd, swooping back down to the elf’s proffered glove.

I gripped my glass to keep from trembling. I had issues with the Guild and the Seelie Court. I had been vocal with my opinions about High Queen Maeve. I stood by everything I had said and done, but, dammit, this was my mom. She had done nothing to deserve being dragged into Maeve’s manipulations. “I’m sorry,” I said.

My father glanced at my reflection in the window. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Regula’s a big girl. No one goes to Court thinking it’s all fun and dances. She has never once blamed you. No matter what, you are our son.”

“I’m still sorry. If I can figure out a way to get Maeve off my back, I will. I hope she pays for all the damage she’s created,” I said.

My father finished off his drink. “There are no angels wearing crowns, son. Donor’s hands are no cleaner.”

“Were,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Then the rumor is true? The Elven King is dead?”

I nodded. “I tried to stop him from destroying the Guildhouse. It would be nice to say I didn’t mean to kill him, but I kinda threw a spear at him.”

I tried to make light of it, but my father didn’t laugh. “I don’t know what you faced that day. There is a difference between murder and causing death, and the line between them can be difficult. All deaths have ramifications. All births do, too. It makes me sad that you have to live with that.”

My father had killed people. He didn’t talk about it often, but he had been a Guild agent himself once upon a time. Pressure bore down on my chest. I had caused the death of another living thing. I had also murdered in my life. Those things could not be waved away as learning experiences, despite what I had learned. The best thing I could do—had been trying to do for years now—was make amends for it. Some people believed that there was no way to atone for the taking of a life. I didn’t know if that was true, but I also didn’t know it wasn’t. Until I did know either way, I was going to do the best I could to achieve forgiveness, if only from myself.

“I hope I stopped him from doing worse than he did,” I said.

“We all do,” he said.

A crow wheeled against the sallow light of the city night sky. It landed on the weather vane of Faneuil, a giant gold-leafed grasshopper. The bird hunched forward and made a jerking motion with its beak. The thick glass made it impossible to tell if it had called to its fellows for the night, but no others joined it. Instead, the elf’s falcon swept up and knocked the crow from its perch. My father gestured with his glass. “Did you see that?”

The falcon settled on the vane while the crow wheeled around it. Below, the elf raised his glove, but the falcon remained perched, indifferent to the call of its falconer. The crow dove, and the falcon leaped to meet it. They rose higher in the sky, diving and dodging until we couldn’t see them.

A laugh from the other room drew my attention away.

On my way back to the Tangle later in the afternoon, Murdock’s reminder about the elf murder prompted me to stop at the Rowes Wharf Hotel. The place had seen better days. Once one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, in a few short months, it had become a battered shadow of its former glory. Eorla Elvendottir had taken over the building as the headquarters for her renegade court. Some people called her the Queen of the Unseelie Court because she opposed both High Queen Maeve and Donor Elfenkonig. I liked to call her friend.

I picked my way through the mess in front of the building. Sandbags and sawhorses lined the sidewalk and blocked the street. Every floor had chunks of masonry missing. The fallen brick and cement was piled into hills around the front entrance.

The day the Guildhouse fell, Donor had staged an attack against Eorla. He had wanted to make it seem like she was attacking the Guild, and he had been helping defend it. The ruse worked for the most part. The human government had sent in the National Guard. Together with the Consortium, they had pounded the hotel with elf-shot and mortar fire. Eorla held them off, but the building looked like it belonged in the Weird now instead of the financial district.