The Winter King

Not all, or even most, of the great maze of the Labyrinth is in the world. Perhaps the best example of this is the Wide Tract of Rottenness, which looks like a dump in the form of a ring, some five miles wide at its broadest point, encircling the Goblin City. It is a mess, maybe even the quintessential mess, but the path through the Tract doesn't twist and contradict itself and go off on crazy angles. It's just a path.

The problem here is the Junk Ladies. They're probably not all ladies, or even women, but that's beside the point. Sooner or later, they all call themselves Agnes, anyway. Some taxonomists argue that they are a type of goblin; others say no, the Agnessi should, in fact, be classified as a sort of highly evolved hermit crab.


Either way, they are one of the multiverse's best-camouflaged beings. Indeed, it's difficult to see one, so ponderously do they move with their entire worldly treasure (junk, of course, to everyone else) piled on their stooped backs, until you collide with her, at which point she'll probably have something grumpy to say.
You'll wind up going with her, though. They're good at that. The nature of sentient beings, regardless of species, is always to have some portion of the mind devoted to worrying about things. What have I forgotten? Did I leave the lights on? Where are my keys? And the Agnessi – because, whatever they are, in some way, shape or form they run on things – latch on to that, like concerned aunties, all bustling and maternal, here now sweetheart, come with Agnes, I'll help you find your keys.

And there's the rub! Because next thing you know, you've found your slippers, too. And your journal. And your passport (thank god, those things are a pain in the ass to replace) and your granddad's pocket watch and your favourite teddy bear that you thought your mom gave to Goodwill and that book your ex gave you that you didn't really like that well but it reminds you of them and you're still a bit in love with them, and the photograph of your pet cat from when you were in college, and this, of course, is how Junk Ladies reproduce.

Sooner or later, you'll be calling yourself Agnes.

You're not Agnes now, though, so I can tell you that they didn't start out in the Labyrinth. Not even goblins started out in the Labyrinth. They just wound up there, before it even was the Labyrinth, because they were too unruly for the Seelie or Unseelie Court and too opportunistic for any of the smaller kingdoms, and they were the only species both hardy and foolhardy enough to brave the red wasteland's wild magic. The Agnessi, on the other hand, are relative newcomers. They came on their own but, like many others, though more directly than some, they stayed because of the king.

He was barely a king when he met them, freshly invested in power and with the black blood of his scarification still seeping through his white silk shirt. He came striding over the broken russet ground outside the maze; it had just begun to sprout long grasses and gnarly twists of trees and, under one of these, the Junk Ladies camped. There were only five of them, then. Most societies do not take well to Agnessi.

They huddled together when they saw him coming. The huddle quivered spikily with suspicion and old chairs, but Jareth just bowed, and quietly offered them apple cider. Fresh, he said, in the quiet, amused voice his detractors take for mockery. The centre had started growing apple trees. His voice all but hummed with pride.

The eldest of them had a wizened apple. She offered it to him, but he said, softly, his strong slender hands gently closing her twisted ones back round it, "Keep it, Agnes. It reminds you of the rain and sunlight Above, where you were born."

The eldest Agnes blinked a few times, and hummed and hawed and kept it. The youngest, then, offered him a little green bottle.

"It came with a changeling," she creaked, "fresh from Above. They've learned to make glass, there."

"Thank you," he murmured, smiling, and put it back in her hand. "Your little treasure is beautiful."

"You like glass?" rasped the fattest Agnes, putting a plump little star of a hand on the back of Jareth's glove.

She was pretty, still. She almost remembered when she hadn't been Agnes. "Here. It's dichroic glass. It ain't even been invented yet. It's from the future."

"I have rather a lot of future." His smile twisted her heart a bit. The terrible thing about the Agnessi is that they really are concerned about you, and she could see that he was bleeding, and she thought he looked terribly lonely, which was sad for such a lovely creature. "The shine in it looks like nebulas; do you know what a nebula is, Agnes?"

She didn't but, like most other beings, she was curious, so he told her about the stars you see in the shadows in the Eternity Room with its bewildering staircases, if you look just so. One of her sisters offered him a pendant in the shape of a star; and so it went, among the five, while the shadows lengthened and someone started a fire from the first fall's dry grasses.

They offered him treasures. They offered him trash. They offered him things sentimental, but he just smiled, sadly or amusedly or both, and told them why they valued those things. They offered him his first sword, but it was just a weapon. They offered him his first lover's red silk scarf, but he told them about the memory of an argument that ended in a kiss and left them (all save the fat one, who remembered) wondering if they'd ever been kissed.

In the end, dawn came before they found a single offer he would accept. People had broken away from them before, at some sudden reminder that there is more to life than things, but never before or since has someone sat all night with the Agnessi who has not, within a decade, begun to call themselves Agnes. When the slow golden light of the Underground poured itself over the budding high desert, the Agnessi bowed to Jareth, and swore to him as their King, and the Labyrinth as their kingdom.

They number among of his most loyal subjects. They don't call him Jareth, because Angessi keep only things, not names. They call him Winter, and for his lonely freedom they both pity and admire him. To them he is the taste of apples ripened in the season's first frost, mulled with cinnamon and cloves and chilled in snow; to them, he is a half-remembered dream as terrifying as it is enticing. They have never realised, and probably never will, that he is more bound than they will ever be.