Nobody's Children

Sarah had been coming to the Labyrinth for over half a decade by the day on which she found its king, with a freshly stitched cut on his right cheek, playing with a wished-away child -

- widdershins thirteen times around her room, colourful walls pinwheeling together, and dizzily through the mirror; forget which way is up (the dizziness helps) and hop twice to the left, because it's Tuesday (maybe) and play skip-rope with the ceiling fan, then out through the skylight into the long dimly-lit gold stone hatcheries of the False Alarms.

Do not walk too slowly, or their seeds, little unintelligibly chattering rocks with human teeth, which follow you to the corridor's end, will bite through your hamstrings to keep you there – whether to chatter at you or eat you slowly from the feet up, Sarah has never cared to think about, especially given how the corridor's length seems subtly to alter with every moment one spends in it. Of course, one can always zip their mouths shut, but she feels a bit bad for doing so.

Thence, step through your shadow into the hall of pools, where every direction save the one you stand on is down, the still waters shimmering with the slow serene movements of things that might be koi; step through whichever pool feels right -

-and into the moss garden at the heart of the maze, in the centre of the castle, at the crux of the infinity symbol emblazoned on the king's minotaur-head amulet. It took Jareth four years in her time, forty at least in his, to show her to that place with its deep, still hot springs bubbling up through blue-grey granite, dark loam and deep green moss, under the sun-dappled shadows of thirteen vast twisting trees, so ancient that Precambrian fossils press through their weathered bronze bark. The ground there is like deep green velvet and lichens hang in shining silvery-green curtains from the trees' limbs; some of them watch, curiously, the goings-on there, but they are sleepy, in such a serene place. In the mornings, the dew that gathers on the moss forms the most exquisite liquor in any known world, gathered in tiny drops each reflecting the world in odd miniature.

“It was my sanctum,” Jareth had told her, with his little mocking smile. He had not explained the past tense; he had never explained whom he mocked, save once, when she asked if it was her, to ask if she thought so. She had no answer.

Autumn now littered the verdant ground with copper and saffron. The hot springs here did not smell of sulfur; she inhaled deeply of chilly air fragrant with green growing things, frost, and the spicy musk of dry leaves. Last she had visited, three days ago, it had been high summer.

The part of her a romantic would have called her heart ached, hot and tight, at the thought. Sarah simply called it sentiment, and stepped softly onto the spongy moss to watch the regal, prickly Goblin King dance with a child who couldn't have been more than four. She'd seen him with the wished-aways before, singing to them, dancing with them and the goblins, tossing the little bold ones high and catching them as they crowed with laughter. And she thought perhaps she had seen sorrow perched amongst his sharp, fine features upon their departure, when he found a loving home for them Underground. He always did.

Never before, though, had she seen such unabashed joy as now informed every fibre of his being. Perhaps it was the place; once he had explained that he brought the most deeply damaged ones here, to a place of peace and healing – or perhaps it was the season; she knew autumn to be his favourite. Regardless, sight of the angry red line marring his cheek caught her of guard as he whirled in a colourful spray of leaves, spinning the laughing child whose arms reached up and out in an echo o wings before wrapping snugly around Jareth's neck.

Her gaze caught his, but he motioned her still when she started to wave, so she waited until his song turned to a lullaby and he carefully laid the child down, tucking it into the leaves.

“The little one was cruelly treated, and would fear you,” he explained as she drew near.

“I thought that might be the case.” Still focused on the cut, she lifted one hand halfway, as if in a mime of touching his face. She did not do so; in six years, she had never touched him. “You're hurt – more fighting?”

“Of course. Gwydion's lordlings think that if only they ask pointily enough, I'll start letting them take changelings again.” An old bone of contention; the Goblin King would let no ruler of the Underground take changelings (a practice which usually condemned the human child to military life and invariably consigned the fae one to iron madness) on pain of hostile relations with the Labyrinth, citing that his wished-aways provided quite adequate interchange with the Above. He spoke the name of the High King of the Seelie Court in the same manner in which one would shake dog shit off one's shoe.

Jareth, having nestled the child in to his satisfaction, crossed to the nearest tree to retrieve the cloak he'd left there. It must have grown colder since he brought the child out, for he wasn't dressed for it and, she noticed as he returned, he walked with a limp.

“Why not?” she blurted, regretting it instantly. He blinked at her owlishly as he crouched by the small sleeping figure, draping his cloak over it and smoothing the cloth gently with a gloved hand.

“Why not...?”

“Why not let him? You could join Queen Mab's court, then. Stop getting hurt defending other people's children.” The thought sickened her nearly as much as the sight of Jareth injured worried her, but she couldn't let it rest. Maybe this time his insistence, for all she would not have liked him so well without it, would make sense.

“I've told you!” He surged to his feet, then stumbled, righted himself even as she darted forward to catch him, and whirled on her, a leaf spiraling from his wild hair as he paced past her. More leaves crunched softly under his boots. “We border realms, sworn to neither Court, we need borrowed vitality, from Above, with so much of the worlds' energies divided between there and the Courts. You know this!”

“Zharko doesn't! His realm thrives on riddles posed and solved, and bridges metaphorical and otherwise, and Aki's on the dreams of the dying, and neither of them has such potent magic at the heart of their kingdom as you do.”

Step step, step step, step step, and he turned on her again, blue eyes cold as the frost edging the leaves, and standing so close that she felt his body's warmth.

“And?”

“Why can't yours?”

Whatever rose through the frost turned it to ice, so she could not read him at all. As if she had not been there, he limped back to the child and knelt beside it, stroking the backs of narrow fingers lightly through its hair so that, for all it had whimpered and stirred in its sleep, now it grew still and smiled.

At long last he spoke, as if to the encroaching dusk, “Were it given you to establish a kingdom, what principals would you set at its core?”

A kingdom, a kingdom, she thought rapidly. It did not do to be caught flat-footed in conversation with Jareth. Not 'democratic ideals,' then. She grinned wryly to herself.

“Well...freedom of choice so long as it doesn't interfere with other people's right to the same. Right to freedom of speech, press, and peaceable assembly. Justice. Duty to the basic welfare of one's fellow citizens...” Groping for more, she added, helplessly, “Neutrality in international affairs?” but Jareth just smirked sadly, knowingly, and petted the child's hair before meeting her gaze, his hand motionless now and his expression devoid of any mockery.

“And what of kindness, Sarah? Is it so terrible a thing on which to found a realm, that it should be left out in the cold?”

She would have scoffed at the question from anyone else. Idealistic; unenforcable; not to mention offensive to infer I hold no stock in such a universal value.

But from proud Jareth, kneeling in the duff, from Jareth still as deep water with one hand resting as if in benediction on the sleeping child's head – from Jareth, it gave her pause. Her breath tripped over something very sharp.

She gave it time to right itself, then knelt facing him and lightly, unerringly, cupped her hand over his uninjured cheek. Her hand trembled slightly from the lightness of the touch. After a few heartbeats, his breath resumed with barely a hitch. The sharp, fine angle of his cheekbone under chilled skin, fine unto translucence, nested in her palm; his breath warmed her wrest and, delicate black branches against the storm-dark shadows under his closed eyes, his lashes ticked he heel of her thumb. She'd never seen him look so fragile, or so strong.

“No.” Slowly, she stroked his hair back with her other hand. “It isn't.”