Chapter 5: A Great Deed that Shall be Told Among Men Forever-After

  “You fucking bitch!” Matt cried. Harry and Kate looked on awkwardly as the little bushy-haired woman hopped off the bus and strode up to Georgie. “How could you do this – Look at me, I became a freak, because of you!”

  “Bloody hell, Matt, keep your voice down,” Kate hushed, looking around the street anxiously.

  Georgie herself didn’t immediately answer, instead her face paled, and she met his eye for a moment before gncing down at her feet. Harry supposed he couldn’t bme her. Georgie could see the consequences of her magic just by looking at them, and she seemed to noticeably flinch whenever she met Harry’s eyes, but he and Kate had at least been cordial with her. Indeed, he had been doing his best to put on a brave face even after her first entreaties upon the gods to reverse their enchantment had met with only a slightly embarrassing silence. How much worse then, to be met with the pain and distress that her actions had caused, entirely without the mask of civility?

  “I… I’m sorry, alright.” She muttered after a moment. “The truth is I didn’t expect any of what I said to… you know – work?”

  “You are sorry?” Though Matt had lowered his voice following Kate’s rebuke, the result was only a sort of shrieking hiss. “Do you think that your apology means anything now? You have ruined my life!”

  She sighed helplessly but returned him a hardening stare. “Yes, well, you’ve ruined a lot of things too, you bastard.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Matt bristled, before drawing himself up into a pilr of lofty patriarchal condescension quite at odds with his squeaky female form. “Listen to me, Georgina. Perhaps we can both admit that there are problems in our retionship, but that only means that we must learn to communicate like adults. Instead, you choose to call upon this strange bck magic? Cast evil curses? No, you must change me back this instant, and then…”

  “The only problem in our retionship, you preachy little shitbag, is that there ever was one…”

  “Look, this isn’t helping,” Harry cut in between the two of them as the situation began to deteriorate, “Can we not just worry about reversing this spell thing?”

  “I don’t trust her,” Matt shook his head, peering over Harry’s shoulder at her with suspicion. “I believe she wishes to take us somewhere and transform us into frogs or even worse!”

  “Matt, please stop talking for like two minutes, or I’ll bloody sp you myself,” Kate scowled at him dismissively before turning back to Georgie, “Look, it’s been a really long day. Do you really think your mother can help us?”

  “I think so,” Georgie said. She took a breath to calm herself and set off down one of the mppost-lit streets, gesturing for them to follow her. “I mean, she’s the high priestess, so I bloody hope They’ll listen to her.”

  “The high priestess – of Apollo and Artemis, you mean?” Kate said, raising her eyes in curiosity.

  “Apollo-Artemis,” Georgie corrected, “But yeah.”

  Harry shook his head in disbelief as the sheer weirdness of it all once more reasserted itself. “So, your mother worships the Greek Gods, and you asked them to cast a spell on all of us?”

  “Not all of you, no.” She gnced sorrowfully back at him, “And it’s just the one Greek God, to be fair, it’s just that Their identity is - I dunno - fluid, I suppose. It feels a bit less insane when you grew up with it.”

  She sighed, “It even feels strange to say it out loud, you know. As a kid, the first thing I learned was not to talk about our faith, not even when they gave us that silly garbled hash of it in school lessons. Hell, we even joined the local church for a bit.”

  Kate furrowed her brow. “And for all that secrecy, it was still the first thing that came to mind with Matt? To curse him by the old gods? Georgie, what did you think would happen? I mean, even if you didn’t think for a moment it would actually work, you must have known how mental it would have made you look?”

  “I… Yeah, I know,” she muttered, pointedly keeping her head turned away from Matt. “Honestly, I can’t expin it. I know that I was angry, so angry I couldn’t even think straight, like I wanted to hit him and keep hitting. But instead, something else spoke to me. The Lord-and-Lady is my patron, after all, and all the stories tell of Them punishing wicked men, teaching them the error of their ways. So, I found myself reaching out, almost without knowing what I was doing, and after that the right words just seemed to appear on my tongue.”

  She gnced around herself, shivering a little at the memory. “We should take the next left.”

  “You didn’t know what you were doing? Give me a break.” Matt said sullenly. He had taken to trailing a couple of yards behind the other three, gazing down at the pavement in misery. “You should take responsibility for your actions.”

  “Oh, you would know all about that,” Georgie rounded on him, eyes bzing. “You’ve never taken responsibility for a single thing in your life, Matt. You know, when you say things like that it makes me think the best thing to do would be to leave you like you are now, a lost little girl. That’d show you what it really means for a piece of shit like you to get what’s coming to them.”

  Matt looked at Georgie in horror, but she shook her head, trembling slightly. “But no, luckily for you I’m not like that. This is what taking responsibility looks like, or I’m trying my best at least. I’m spending my Friday night slogging around town with my prick of an ex-boyfriend, and I promise I’ll do everything I possibly can to see you right – you and Harry – before you’re out of my life for good.”

  ‘For Good?’ Harry saw his friend’s mouth silently shape the words. “Georgina, you are no longer wearing your Pandora bracelet.”

  She gnced down at her wrist, which was bare of its customary silver band. “Don’t worry, I didn’t throw it out. Never got the chance actually, it disappeared with the rest of your stuff.”

  “What do you mean, it disappeared? That was an expensive present.”

  “Well, yeah.” Georgie gave a little sigh. The frostiness hadn’t really left her voice, but her tone gave Harry the impression of a trainee doctor trying for her best bedside manner. “But it was a present I got from a boyfriend who doesn’t currently exist. Think about it, those clothes you’re wearing now – they’re not Matt’s are they?”

  “I found them in the wardrobe,” Matt muttered, tugging resentfully at the hem of his pink and white stripped scarf. “They had appeared there this morning.”

  “Exactly,” Georgie nodded, “And all your old stuff disappeared as well, right? As far as the world is concerned there has never been a Matt Schmidt, only Mathilde. And, since I’m not gay, it’s safe to say that we never dated, and so you never gave me that silver bracelet.”

  “And that’s how you knew the spell had worked?” Harry added, “Because it had disappeared?”

  “Yeah, that and a few other things. All the couple pics of Matt and I are gone, as you can imagine, and it wasn’t too hard to pick out a new girl’s face on our css group shot.” Georgie bit her lip, “None of which told me I’d accidentally dragged you into all of this, of course, Harry – I didn’t know about that until I saw you in the Union actually.”

  “And you recognised me then?”

  “Well yeah, I guess. I mean you do look pretty much exactly like Harry would as a girl – “

  “I’m like five feet tall!” Harry winced, a little annoyed to realise that despite his protests he was exactly the height that his instincts told him he ought to be. Compining about being short was all well and good, but if he actually tried to imagine himself back at his old height, it felt as weird and unnatural as if he were wearing stilts.

  Georgie chuckled back at him, “Nah, you’re not quite that small; you’re 5’2 at least – trust me I’m a doctor, I measure lots of people. But you still look a lot like you did as a boy, blonde hair, pale blue eyes, the freckles. I could easily see you as Harry’s sister. And of course, Kate was there as well, and she’s usually to be found with either you or Gwen, and you both looked so intense that I guess the whole thing just sort of clicked.”

  She slowed her gait and turned them once more into the yard of a small, semi-detached council house that didn’t look anything like the sort of pce that the High Priestess of Apollo-Artemis ought to live.

  “Here we are,” she said, taking a deep breath and sliding her key into the lock. “Mum, are you in?”

  “Right here sweet-pea,” came the answer and, with a gesture, Georgie led them all inside.

  *

  “You did what?” Georgie’s mother said in disbelief, hopping out of her armchair and pacing across the living room carpet like a caged panther. She seemed a nice enough woman, her brown eyes were warm and kind, and the lines on her olive face spoke of someone who smiled often and well, but right now she was regarding her daughter with cold horror. The look on her face made Harry shiver a little and he lifted the little pink teacup to his lips and took a warming sip.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Georgie said, gncing up at her mother. Her voice was measured but a little unevenness had slipped into her breath and Kate slipped her a hand. “I was so angry and upset, and the words just came out of me – mum, I’m so sorry.”

  Her mother stared at her a moment longer, her entire body wound as tightly as a spring, then she tugged the back of her neck, gncing around as though she were looking for something that would tell her what the hell she ought to do. Finally, she took a deep breath and met her daughter’s eye once again. “Our Lord-and-Lady is not your pything, Georgiana, I have told you this many times. Nor are They a source of power to be idly wielded in pursuit of petty vengeance.”

  “Petty vengeance?” Georgie bristled back despite herself. “Mum, you don’t understand, Matt’s been making a fool of me for months!”

  “As you have just told me,” her mother answered. Alone amongst them, Matt had taken neither a seat nor refreshment, and the woman shot him a look of such withering contempt that he shrank even further into himself and even took half a shuffled step back towards the door.

  “And so, yours is to take whatever earthly measure any other spurned lover might,’ she turned back to her daughter, “Break things off with him of course, burn his pictures and tell everyone you know what a piece of lying filth the boy turned out to be.” The woman paused, holding Georgie with a look of cold iron and she was less mother now than priestess, an eerie remnant of a lost age. “It is not yours to abuse our position. To call down the wrath of the Eternal Sky in pursuit of your earthly vendetta both demeans yourself and disrespects our patron. Am I understood?”

  “Yes.” The reply was barely audible.

  “I…” She paled slightly as she regarded her daughter, and Harry noticed a slight tremble in the crook of her elbow. “I need you to see the seriousness of what you have done, sweet-pea, and it is something you must never even think on again… But look, even saying all that, it’s not something you could have done by your will alone. You might have called out to the Lord-and-Lady a hundred times and never once achieved the slightest thing. For your, erm, curse, to work, They must have chosen to answer.”

  Harry balled his little hand into a fist and then flexed his fingers back out again. A little sliver of doubt had begun to grow at the back of his mind. He had, until this point, imagined the magic as a sort of witch’s spell, an invisible and imperceptible fireball that had by sheer chance caught him inside its bst radius. Weird though it was, it was easy enough for him to imagine that such a thing might be reversed, perhaps by someone with the right spell book. This, though, the precise and deliberate hand of an ancient god that reached out as much for its own unknowable purpose as in response to the invocations of mortals, didn’t sound like that at all.

  “So, your Lord-and-Lady wanted all this to happen?” he asked, feeling his voice quiver slightly. “He – I mean, They – did this just because They felt like it?”

  Georgie’s mother shook her head, “I do not presume to know the mind of my patron – it is all that mortals like us can hope for to have even a simple understanding of Their will. Yet certain things are known to be pleasing, and it is at least possible that…”

  “Ja, I can understand it now,” Matt piped up. “Your Lady wanted to punish me for the terrible way in which I have behaved. I want to say to you that I am sorry, Georgina. I was a bad person and most of all, I was a bad boyfriend for you. I would like very much for you to forgive me.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” Kate muttered, rolling her eyes.

  “Matt, just shut up for a minute, would you?” Harry sighed impatiently, trying to ignore the gnawing anxiety festering in his gut. “Look, Mrs. Williamson, you can fix it can’t you? I mean, none of this is even anything to do with me – it’s Matt she cursed, wasn’t it? I was just, I don’t know, in the way?”

  “I will offer what help I am able,” she replied, perching herself back on her armchair, “But it would be wrong of you to think that I can simply change you back with a snap of my fingers. Georgie, you have asked for this to be undone?”

  “I have, just a couple of hours ago.” Georgie nodded. They had tried it straight after meeting her, in fact, in the Union building’s prayer room, appropriately enough, though her arcane chants and eldritch evocations had met with no response.

  “And you are my daughter, and a sworn sister of the order, our patron would be certain to at least hear your pleas.” She sipped her tea. “And yet both of you remain as you are. I can only surmise that They wish it so.”

  “What do you mean, ‘They wish it’? – So I’m supposed to stay a girl my whole life because some ancient god thinks it’s funny?” Harry’s nerve finally snapped, and he felt his cheeks flush red with anger at the thought of it.

  Mrs. Williamson only gred at him. “Have you learned nothing of the powers you speak so brashly of? You insult a god – an Olympian! And yes, you might spend your brief, flickering span as a woman, or perhaps even a stone statue or a dung-fly, should it suit the momentary whim of even the least of their number. My patron is not given to such cruelty – mostly - but do not presume to speak of Them with such disrespect, as though you were an equal. If it pleases the Lord-and-Lady that you remain a girl, then that is exactly what you will be – save only if you are able to humbly convince Them otherwise.”

  Harry opened his mouth, but no words came, and with sick dread he realised for the first time how utterly powerless he was before this unknowable thing whose existence spanned the fall of long-dead civilisations. An ice-cold shadow brushed against his spine as he caught a glimpse of something vast and dreadful, an infinity that made everything he knew seem less substantial than a spider’s cobweb on a breezy day.

  “And how, do you think, might we convince the Lord-and-Lady?” Kate whispered into the heavy silence.

  “There are legends, passed down by our order, of people who have boured under a simir curse. There’s the story of Thea Honoria, st of the Romans, for one, the Lion and the Huntress is another, and of course the Rosebud Queen.”

  “And in all of these stories, they get changed back in the end?”

  “If they wished it – some of them did not, after all was said and done. But each had to prove themselves to the Lord-and-Lady to win that chance.”

  “You might,” Georgie said reluctantly, “You might come with me to St Michael’s tomorrow. What could be a better way to prove your worth than to volunteer at the hospital?”

  “Ja?” Matt gnced up, “If it helps to fix this mess, then I will do it.”

  Her mother nodded, “That seems like a good idea.”

  “And me too?” Harry added, “I mean, I’m not doing medicine obviously, but if there’s an extra pair of hands needed…”

  “No,” Mrs. Williamson said suddenly. “Forgive me, I don’t know quite how to expin this, but Harry, that is not your path.”

  “But you just said…”

  “Yes, I agreed that Matt should go, not you and Kate.” She met Harry’s confusion a little apologetically. “Look, this isn’t easy to expin, but that is the Lord-and-Lady’s will.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Not in words, no. They rarely deign to speak, even to Their high acolyte, but with practice one can learn to open one’s mind to their influence. The Lord-and-Lady requires that Matt help at the hospital – I am sure of it. They consider it fitting that the boy who thinks himself a prince ought to humble himself as the Nazarene once did, by washing the feet of the poor and the sick. For you and Kate, though, your story is not one of pride and sin. Though you may help at St Michaels as you choose – certainly no harm will come of it – to allow you to believe that this is the price of your restoration is to tell you what I know in my heart to be untrue.”

  “Wait, you said Harry and me?” Kate said quickly. “I’m just as I’ve always been, aren’t I? It’s Harry and Matt that were changed.”

  Mrs Williamson shook her head, “As to that, I have no answer. I can only say that you are involved in this as surely as the other two.”

  “So, what can we do instead?” Harry said, a little desperation creeping into his voice. “Is there anyone else we could help, some good we can do?”

  “‘Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great deed that shall be told among men forever-after’” Georgie whispered, her eyes deep in thought.

  Harry looked at her in confusion, but Mrs. Williamson only smiled, “Go on, sweet-pea.”

  “Well, you always taught me that the old, Greek virtues were different to our own. You have to help people, sure, but you have to strive for greatness as well. It’s like with Eirene and Roxanna –“

  “They were always your favourite bedtime stories when you were a little girl, “

  Georgie rolled her eyes, “The point is that they helped lots of people, of course, but they also sailed the world and fought monsters and all that stuff. That’s why we still tell their tales today.”

  “But there aren’t any monsters to fight,” Kate said, “And Harry could barely fight off a housecat as he is now.”

  “That’s not necessarily the point,” Mrs. Williamson said patiently, “Think of it this way, to live a good life there are two sides, like a yin and a yang. Kindness is most important, you have to help people, be of service to those around you, but you also need to self-actualise. Achieve your dreams, sy your demons, do wonderful things that will make you will look back at the end of your life and smile. Matt, who has excelled in all things and yet thinks only of himself, must do penance by learning humility and compassion. You two, who as far as I can see have done nothing especially wrong, must instead satisfy the Lord-and-Lady’s curiosity by doing something, well, heroic.”

  “The football…” Kate said suddenly, “The University Cup, it’s the first time it’s been held for the women’s team. We could win it!”

  Mrs. Williamson smiled, “That does sound like the sort of thing people would talk about - if not ‘forever-after’, as the poet says, then at least for years to come. And I believe my patron would find that most satisfactory.”

  “But…” Harry scratched his head, “That’s all well and good, but the final is weeks away, isn’t it?”

  Kate nodded, “The tenth of March, I think, or was it the seventeenth?”

  “I would advise the twenty-first,” Mrs. Williamson said quietly, “The spring equinox is a sacred day of my patron, and for the sake of a few days more I believe the gesture would be well received.”

  “Six weeks?” Harry looked at her in horror, “But… Is there nothing you can do now?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Harry, but I must be very pin. There is nothing that either I or Georgie could ever do, in the way you mean. We are ordinary people, the same as you. What my daughter did yesterday was call on the aid of a greater power than any that we can understand. A power that, for Their own reasons, chose to answer. And I tell you now, with certainty, as High Priestess of that power and Conduit of Their will, that these are the terms of your bond. Return hence with a token of your heroic deed, on the day that the sun and moon are in perfect bance, and your true form shall be restored to you – there is no other way.”

  ‘Six Weeks?’ Harry looked down at himself in shock, seeing as though for the first time the soft skin and slender limbs of his new form. He had allowed himself to float through the day, fixated on his pursuit of first Georgie and then her mother. Even as he wore out his body to exhaustion, trouping for hours around campus and into town, he could tell himself that it was a kind of test, that all would be made right at journey’s end, and that he would look back upon this day as a sort of bizarre fever dream. It was a novel experience, really, after all, who would not be intrigued at the prospect of spending a day as the opposite sex?

  Now though –

  “I just need to get some air,” he heard himself say, rising from the warm, squashy sofa and staggering out the front door. He looked around a moment and watched his breath turn to dragon smoke in the frosty night. Then, with nowhere to go and no idea of what to do next, he settled for parking himself on the driveway wall.

  Now though, he resumed as if the thought itself had followed him outside, he could no longer use his physical exertions as a hiding pce, nor pretend that Georgie or her High Acolyte mother could easily make it all go away. He was alone, face-to-face with the awful truth that he was stuck like this for the next month and a half at least, and that was even assuming he could win a football cup he barely remembered anything about. The girls team usually won, he remembered that much, and he had always wished them well, and Kate most of all, but it was hardly as though he had studied the tournament tables.

  In the meantime, he would have to live – truly live – as a girl, in a way that he had not yet had to truly face. For one thing he was by now badly in need of a shower, and a half-remembered glimpse of his bathroom shelf, overloaded with floral-scented shampoos, vender soaps and facial moisturisers swam into his mind’s eye. His daily life would be changed as well. Csses, as he had discovered, might be much the same as ever, but his retionships with his cssmates would be completely remade – they would remember him no longer as Harry the footballer but only as Holly Jane, and he still hadn’t really any idea of who that was. And he would of course be pying on the women’s soccer team now, which meant socialising as one of the girls as well.

  It occurred to him that he might prefer to keep to himself, to py the games and then squirrel off back to his dorm, but he at once felt this was a bad idea. He couldn’t say why, exactly, other than that it felt somehow, well, inglorious – contrary to his assigned task of behaving heroically, of becoming the best possible version of himself. Nor in truth did these doubts quite seem his own, and for a moment he wondered if this sort of slightly alien gut-feeling was what Mrs. Williamson meant when she spoke of sensing for her patron’s intent.

  He would have to be sociable then, if he could manage it, and that meant he would need to deal with dressing as a girl too. Though he could stick to jeans and T-shirts wherever possible, Kate, Gwen and the rest usually made some effort to make themselves up for nights out at Rio’s. Even then, he supposed he might get away with it, he could probably attend most party nights in nothing more eborate than a scrunchied ponytail and a polo shirt, and it would be fine.

  Except – Harry looked down at his shaking hands - Except it didn’t quite feel fine. There was nothing especially wrong with going out to Rio’s on a Friday night looking like you had come straight from the library, but to do it again and again for weeks, while your friends dressed up in cool, sexy party frocks? Harry had rolled his ankle once in high school, had stood on the sidelines watching his mates py football for a month while the swelling went down, and he recognised that same feeling now – he’d be missing out on the fun.

  He flinched; the thought was one he would never normally have had. He was one of the ds after all, he was Harry Owen; he liked footy, ger, and girls, and sometimes in that order. And yet the more he thought on it the more it was impossible to escape the dawning certainty that something deep within him had shifted. Were he to stand his ground, force himself to think and feel and be not as he wanted, but as how he thought the old Harry might want, then the weeks to come stretched out as a long, hopeless abyss before him. But perhaps, just perhaps… he didn’t need to.

  He allowed his thoughts to wander, just a little, imagining himself not the strapping, broad shouldered boy of only the day before, but standing in line for the disco with Violet Bradshaw, wearing a chocote brown dress and her best pair of heeled pumps, and it made her feel… good.

  A moment ter she realised it could also make her feel very silly indeed, and she quickly retreated back to a safer vision of hoodie and jeans, but somewhere along the way a little knot of stress and discomfort and, well, wrongness, had come loose in the back of her mind, and though she hadn’t really noticed it until now, once it was gone she couldn’t quite bring herself to conjure it back into being.

  “Harry?” Kate said as she slipped out from the front door and handed over the purple bomber jacket. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said gingerly. “It’s just… I guess we’re in this for the long haul then?”

  “I mean, it’s only six weeks,” Kate said softly, “Christmas was longer ago than that.”

  “Still, its…” she looked down at her feet, and she exhaled. “Kate, could I maybe just be Holly to you while this is going on? It’s just that I’ve spent the whole day trying to be two different people and, well, I guess if I’m going to be stuck this way for weeks, it might just be easier if we, well, go with the flow?”

  It wasn’t quite a lie, not really, but it was the most she could bring herself to say. The truth – the whole truth - was that being called by her old name had begun to feel wrong somehow, it was just so ugly and ill-fitting and… and boyish. She knew of course that Harry was who she was meant to be, where she had to fight like hell to get back to, but under the strange magic of the curse, the sheer masculinity of the name couldn’t help but chaff at her like a sort of itchy straitjacket.

  Her friend regarded her shrewdly, and she wondered for a moment if the other girl had seen more than she had intended. Finally, Kate gave a solemn nod, “Ok, we can do that. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable.”

  “I… thanks.”

  They stood a moment and then both gave a little chuckle to dispel the silence. “Holly then, or Holls if you like, that’s what Violet was calling you this morning wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, either’s good, I guess.” Holly shrugged with a little smile of resignation.

  “Holls then,” Kate smiled, “Do you fancy getting back inside? Its bloody freezing out here!”