The deed was old and carefully-kept, folded once with caution twice for necessity and never ever opened or closed without great need. The drawer it lived in was well-made and kept out dust and draught and sun so the ink wouldn’t fade and the paper wouldn’t crease and it would stay there until it was needed or the end of time itself. It had taken my great-great-great-grandparents their entire lives to earn, and they’d taken some pains with it. They’d seen what happened to my great-great-great-great-grandparents when they didn’t have one.
It crumpled up in the palm of the faeman’s hand until it looked like last autumn’s leaves.
“Chicanery,” he said. Every syllable was neat and tidy and tight-lipped, which matched him in every bone.
The fae were peculiar as a rule, but I’d never heard of one like him before (at least in dress; in ice-pale face and dead-man’s hair he was every inch what I’d expected). The faeman was dressed in a suit that would’ve sobered a lawyer, had shoes that didn’t shine so much as simmer, and an expression that never wavered or loosened that reminded me of my dear great-grandmother, whose funeral had been attended by three, counting the gravedigger.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“No,” he replied without hesitation. “No pardon granted. You are unlawful. A hundred thousand lifetimes ago I dwelled with my kin under barrow we carved, under hill we delved, through glen we shaped, in this place we seized.” A long slim scroll sprouted from his hand like a mushroom; banded and branded with cold silver and red sealing wax: a deed to make mine shrink. “A thousand lifetimes ago your meager folk came here crawling and begging and grovelling for shelter. Your land-deed is purest fiction, and I am under every right to claim my rights against your squatting. By my right to barrow, and to hill, and to glen.”
And as the faeman held his deed the barrow groaned under his heels and the hill shuddered and the glen’s trees reached out long and fine so that they covered the sky from me. My house wasn’t big, and it looked smaller still in this shade.
“Now begone,” he said. “Three days you have to forsake your false deed and gather yourself and begone yourself. Past that, there will be consequences.”
“I will appeal,” I told him. And he didn’t laugh at me, because I wasn’t sure he could. But his mouth made the smallest smile you could think of.
***
I took my crumpled deed in my pocket and I walked down to the town hall, where the mayor was working very hard. People were giving him money and papers and he was taking the money and giving it to someone else and signing the papers and giving them to someone else.
“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I told the mayor politely after a few hours.
“Give it to me and go away,” he said without looking.
I gave the deed to him.
“Yes, yes, yes, excellent,” he muttered, and folded it up very very small and handed it to someone else.
“This isn’t money,” they told him politely.
“Hmmph,” he said. He folded it up very very small again and handed it to someone else.
“This isn’t a signature,” they said deferentially.
“Hmomph,” he harrumphed. Finally he looked at it himself.
“Well, that’s a deed,” he said. “How dull. What’s the problem?”
“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I repeated.
“Ugh, that’s boring,” the mayor said. “So tedious. Well, tell them to stop it. Who is that, anyways?”
“A faeman,” I told him. “Tall, with a suit. No joy in his face, but dangerous shoes.”
The mayor jumped so badly his chair popped apart. “Oh NO,” he said hastily. “Fae matters are a legal matter for the courts, not for the civic authorities. Precedence, you see, loads of precedence, laid down in tomes of legality and criminality and generality long long LONG ago. Go somewhere else to handle this, to someone else, who will do something else. Go away now please please please before anything happens.”
“I have three days-” I began.
“Good. Don’t be standing near me when this happens.”
I went home and ate onions and potatoes.
So. That was a day wasted.
***
I took my crumpled and creased deed down to the courthouse in the city, which was made of large grey bricks and filled with large grey men and held a judge with a large grey wig atop a high bench.
“This seems to be in order,” he said. “Who is this alleged landlord?”
“A faeman,” I said. “With a suit, and painful shoes, and a frozen pinched face.”
The judge turned greyer than his wig, lost six pounds from fright, and threw my deed back at me with shaking hands that tore little strips out of it sixteen times sixteen. “Precedence favours the fae,” he said. “Best be gone with you.”
“What precedence?” I asked.
“Who knows!” he said. “But they cite it, and they site it, and if you gainsay it then they SLAM it. Get out before you drag us into it and under it!”
“I,” I said. Then the bailiffs picked me up before my thought was finished and put me outside to finish it, where there was no point.
I went home and ate carrots and peas.
So. That was the second day done for.
***
I took my crumped and creased and torn deed to the homes of my relatives, asking aid from cousins to uncles to aunts. But when I told them of the faeman they all turned away, turned down their eyes, turned their voices low and sad and told me I could have a place to sleep at their homes until I could get my feet under me again.
“Precedence favours him,” they told me. And so on and on I heard.
I didn’t go home because I’d eaten everything in the house and had been too busy to harvest more from my garden. So on the evening of the third day I wandered, and when I was too tired to wander I laid down, and I closed my eyes, and I cried a little bit, and when I wiped my tears away I found out of sheer stupidity I’d used my deed. Crumpled, creased, torn, and tear-stained.
“This doesn’t mean anything to anyone,” I said. And I threw it down on the dirt, and I stomped on it and at it as if it were my worst enemy, and when I was done there wasn’t anything left but specks and fragments that could’ve come from a bird’s nest or a mouse-house or an ant’s crumbs.
Then I went home, and the faeman was waiting.
***
He was even longer and harsher in the twilight. His face gleamed and his shoes still rippled, but everything else about him was smeared dark and vast by the darkness that seeped from the sky, from the great shadow of the deed in his hand. It looked like a sword.
“Three days have passed,” he told me sharply. “I will take your deed now. And if you hesitate I will take it and take more than that, and if you deny I will take it and everything and everything else.”
“I don’t have it,” I said.
“How unfortunate,” he said, and that horrible little smile took his mouth again. “For whoever takes it is a thief in equal measure. Tell me, who is your accomplice.”
“Nobody,” I told him.
“Lies, lies, lies,” he chanted solemnly. “Your case is now plagued by false testimony. I demand of you now, by the barrow, by the hill, by the glen: WHO HOLDS YOUR DEED.”
Everything shook or I did, and it shook words out of me. “The dirt,” I gasped.
“What,” he said. There was no question, just a demand.
“The dirt, and the soil, and the wind, and the air. It meant nothing to anyone.”
It was the oddest thing. As my head swam the faeman was all that was fixed in the world to me, solid as a rock in my eyes. And with each word I said his face changed and changed until it was contorted in a perfect rictus of horror.
“What did you DO?” he shrieked.
“I threw it away,” I said. “It didn’t mean anything to any-”
“It’s not ANYONE that’s the problem here!” he screamed in my face. “Oh no, it’s not ANYONE. No ANYONE can gainsay me! No ANYONE has place over me! I am the first owner!”
“But-“
His arm shot out and his deed slapped me sharp across the face as fast as a snake. It made my skin hiss and I bit my tongue.
“You voided your deed, and gave it to the land,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t talking to me either. I’d seen that face on people before, but nobody’d ever warned me of what it’d look like on a fae. “But it doesn’t mean anything. It was a false deed. Precedence is on my side. Ownership is on my side. The land is on my side. It is mine. It is mine. It is mine.”
The trees reached up.
They reached up, and up, and up.
And the sky reached down.
And down, and down, and down.
They clasped above our heads and I felt like a puff of soap bubble above the sea. Around us the soil sighed, the dirt breathed.
The faeman was very still, except for his mouth, which was moving faster than anything I’d ever seen. “-precedence,” he was saying. “Precedence favours me I retain ownership ownership is for persons not places things cannot own themselves belongings do not belong. You are mine. You are not you. I am the lord of this land. I am the lord of this land! I AM the lord of this land!”
Sound left, and the faeman stood there, proud and upright and with fiercely shining shoes.
Then the barrow fell in with a sigh, and he fell with it and every stone after him, until nothing was left but an odd dent in a perfectly normal hillside.
***
I moved in with one of my relatives anyways. Staying there wouldn’t have been frightening, but it wouldn’t be right. I had no desire to infringe upon another’s space, not after it had been taken up so fervently.