Tam Lin retelling??????!!?!
I love Tam Lin, and I love Janet, but there are no retellings that take advantage of the fact that a) Janet was the kind of weirdo who set out one morning to lose her virginity to the mystical creature squatting on her land with a reputation for having sex with and/or demanding tolls from maidens, b) Tam Lin is what you get when a fairy queen takes a changeling, i.e., a badly-socialized, magic-addled waif of a Romantic poet, with more dramatic instincts than common sense.
All I want in my life is for to Janet march into the ruins of Carterhaugh, yanking up roses by their roots, and for Tam Lin to show up, demanding her kirtle green or the price of her maidenheadâ
Only for her toâstay? afterwards???
And thereâs this weird three-week span where Janet justâŚdoesnât leave, but keeps having sex with him, and looks at him with her serious dark eyes and a scowl, and then laughs at himâat him! Tam Lin, beloved of the Fairy Queen!âand Tam Lin falls inexorably and horribly in love. (He likes her ankles, and the unlovely knob of her knees; he kisses the pox-scars at her cheek and though Tam Lin is beautiful and fair beyond measure, he is jealous of her, the scar where the shears cut into her hand.)
She scoffs when he shows her magic. âWhat use is it?â she asks as he offers her the dazzling armful of jewels. âI can make cheese and parse a contract, speak a little Latin for the church-men and add up my fatherâs yearly taxes. Can your magic do that?â
She is different than everything heâs ever known, and Tam Lin is in love. Then she leaves.
Tam Lin spends exactly eight months pining, panicking, wondering if she will ever come backâand yes, writing epically bad poetry about Janet, His One True Love, Whom He Shall Tragically Pine For His Whole Life Long. He compares her to a dove. Itâs bad. (The Fairy Queen has him sit beside her at Midsummer, and studies him with cool eyes, flat and lovely as silver. He shudders beneath them, he didnât used to.)
(Afterwards, he is sick in a bush, his stomach trying to empty itself of the rich fairy sweets, the meats he loved in his youth, that taste of ash and nothing more on his tongue. Is it real? Janet had asked. I want nothing that is not real.)
Tam Lin pines so long and so longingly that heâs shocked when Janet herself shows up on the even of Halloween. âAre you sick?â he asks, because heâs never seen anyoneâs middle swell up like that, like she swallowed something huge, and it sits in her stomach still.
âNo, you ass,â Janet, His One True Love, says. âIâm with child.â
Tam Lin blinks. âOh,â he says faintly.
âŚâŚand she held him fast and feared him not, and afterwards, heâs curled up against her side in the weak morning light of All Soulsâ Day. Heâs still shivering from the feeling of his skin tearing off and then twisting up around him, twisting him into another shape. Itâs fine, itâs fine, he just has to keep his pawsâclawsâhands fisted in Janetâs kirtle. Until he remembers that his throat is human can only make faint guttural noises, that he cannot purr. He cannot wind himself around her, coils ofâno, no.
âCome on,â Janet says, not unkindly. Her fingers are very gentle, where they comb through his furâhair. âCome. Come with me.â
She helps him to his feet, and Tam Lin is dizzy with how light he is, absent the Queenâs geas. He could detach from the earth and float away.Â
Except Janet is there, holding onto his hands. âWell?â she asks, and it is the first time Tam Lin has seen her uncertainâher arms full of lion, a snake, and still sheâd held tight, but now he is a man, and that is a different sort of animal.
âI follow you,â Tam Lin says, and he does.
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