Widdershins by Charles de de Lint

feeling that had briefly woken me this morning, and how I’d realized what it was when I finally got up. I looked back and forth between them as I spoke, the way you do when you’re telling a story, and caught the pleased look on Christiana’s face before she was able to hide it from me.
    “I get the feeling you know something about this,” I said.
    She shrugged. “Well, I might have talked to Mother Crone this morning.”
    I wasn’t sure if she didn’t know Galfreya’s real name, or simply wasn’t using it because Christy had yet to be gifted with it. Fairy are very particular about that kind of thing.
    “What did you talk about?” I asked.
    “You. I . . .” She sighed. “She had an enchantment on you, Geordie—I’ve known it for ages. That’s why you’ve been going to the revels so often.”
    I felt a little sick hearing that.
    “You mean all this time . . . ?”
    She shook her head when she realized where I was going.
    “No, it wasn’t an attraction spell,” she said. “Whatever you and Mother Crone had going on between you was real.”
    “But then, why?”
    “She said she’d had a premonition that if you weren’t kept close to her court, you’d be in danger.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense.” I looked at Christy, then back to her. “What kind of danger?”
    “She doesn’t know,” Christiana said. “But she believes it’s real.”
    “So why did she turn off this enchantment?”
    “I asked her to.”
    This was making less and less sense.
    No, that’s not entirely true. Learning about the enchantment did explain why I’d had this compulsion to keep going back to the revels, even when something more interesting was going on. Just last week, Whiskeycrow were in town for a gig, with the promise of a great session afterwards, and I’d really wanted to go. I hadn’t played with Fanny and the rest of them in ages. But the night of the session, off I’d gone to the mall instead.
    What didn’t make sense was Christiana’s involvement in all of this.
    “Why would you do that?” Christy asked her before I could.
    She shrugged. “I don’t agree with coercion enchantments, no matter how well meant. And . . .” Her gaze went to me. “I felt it was holding you back.”
    “From what?” I asked.
    She looked uncomfortable.
    “Christiana?” Christy asked.
    “From having a real life,” she said. “Okay? And I know how that sounds.” She turned to me. “It’s not like I think I can run your life better than you or anything. It’s just—”
    “The revels were holding me back,” I said.
    She nodded, then cocked her head. “You don’t seem mad.”
    “I’m not. I was kind of thinking the same thing. It just didn’t occur to me until the . . . well, I guess when the enchantment was lifted.”
    “Oh.”
    “If I’m mad about anything, it’s at—” I almost said Galfreya, “Mother Crone’s putting it on me in the first place.”
    “Except she thought she was protecting you.”
    I nodded. “It’d still be nice to have actually had a choice in the matter.” I sighed and laid my head back against the sofa. “I guess that explains why she never wanted to go anywhere. Why it was always me going to the mall.”
    Christiana nodded.
    I turned to Christy. “See, this is why I don’t like getting involved with any of this. Magics and fairy and everything weird. It makes life way too complicated. It was so much easier to just not believe in any of it.”
    “Kind of late for that,” he said.
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “And you kept bumping into it anyway.”
    I couldn’t argue with that either.
    “C’mon,” Christiana said. “Magic’s not so bad.”
    “Easy for you to say. You reap the benefits, living in the otherworld and all. And you don’t have some death threat hanging over your head.”
    “I didn’t say it was a death threat.”
    I nodded. “I know you didn’t. But it has to be something pretty serious if Mother Crone felt she needed to put a spell on