Chapter Sixteen #2
Eogan folded his hands behind his back and, to Ina’s immense irritation, chose that moment to become instructive. “Do you know, Queen Ina, how fairies age?”
She stared at him. “No.”
“Our childhood is quick,” he droned. “We age as rapidly as humans from birth to adulthood. And then we pause. We remain in that first youth for half our lifetimes, five hundred years or more,
only beginning to age well after we have had the chance to do all there is to do while strength and beauty course through every fiber of our being.”
He lifted one shoulder slightly. “I know I look as handsome as your princes, but I am more than two hundred years older than Prince Karai.”
Ina could not help glancing sideways, as if there might be a point hidden somewhere behind the vanity.
Eogan, seeing exactly that look, said, “The point, my queen, is that I was there when your Karai was still foolishly young and in love his very first time, courting the one you call the mirage fairy.”
That got her full attention.
He went on in the same measured tone, which somehow made the story strike harder.
“I was there when he was advised to stay away from her. I was there when he thought himself too clever for such advice. I was there when she seduced him and drove him into the blindness that gave him his creature. He will forever be a mole, fitting in its blindness,
because he failed to see her crimes in favor of his lust. You see, she killed many innocents in her attempt to rise to the power of Queen Emthil’s throne. She almost killed the queen. Karai saved the queen in the end. You, the next barley corn girl,
were promised to the burrow court because of his heroism, though of course, as you know, the other courts did not promise to abide by that.”
Ina stood very still to keep her jaw from dropping at the tale he spun her. “I thought I was promised to the burrow court because of…” She stopped, unsure how much she ought to say.
The canopy prince finished her thought. “Because of humans?”
She nodded.
He shrugged. “Yes, that was a reason too, though most of the fairy kingdom does not share the immediate concern Queen Emthil once had about the human threat. And there were other reasons even beside those.”
“Like what?”
Eogan waved a hand impatiently, as though the answer to that was unimportant. “We can spend all day discussing the politics of Queen Emthil’s court. Let me get back to what I was saying.”
Ina gestured for him to continue.
Eogan did. “Karai made the choice to imprison the mirage fairy. And together with all our magics, mine and his and the queen’s and the old prince of the sky court, before Prince Derran, and yes, even Prince Aikento’s, we bound her to the stone at the bottom of the ocean for the last two centuries.
We did our duty.”
He paused there for what might have been dramatic effect, but there was some annoyance in his voice as he continued.
“But if he had not been so blinded by what he thought was love, by his own vain belief that he had the wisdom to know love at such a young age, none of it would have happened. None of this would be happening now.”
When he stopped, the room seemed oddly quiet. Outside, wind moved through the leaves at the windows. Somewhere below in the palace a bell rang once, thin and distant.
Ina looked at him for a long time without speaking.
She had known Karai’s past held length and weight.
Of course it did. Both of her princes, as she had said, had lived centuries before she had ever opened her eyes in the human world.
Karai even a few decades longer than Derran.
She had known there must have been lovers, mistakes, loyalties, old griefs.
But this was not some quiet former romance left behind in courtesy and time.
This was blood and battle and a queen nearly murdered and a promise that had reached all the way down into her own life long before she had even been born.
She turned it slowly in her mind.
He was blinded by love. He failed to see her crimes.
And yet, she remembered what Karai himself had said in the library.
Bad actors will always act badly.
Perhaps, Ina thought, even if he had not missed every warning sign, the mirage fairy would still have become what she became. Perhaps love had made him slow, but perhaps cruelty belonged to her already.
Eogan spoke as though the whole history turned on Karai’s failure. Ina was not sure she believed in histories that neat.
At last, she gave him the same words she had at their council meeting, not all that long ago. “The past is in the past, Eogan. We cannot change that. We can only live in the present and do our best now.”
Eogan let out a breath through his nose, and she wasn’t sure if it was irritation or relief that time.
“You’re not wrong.” Then his eyes narrowed at her.
“But hear me well, my queen. I will do my duty, as I have always done, and I will go to the marsh court and protect Lugomir as well as I can. That I can give you.”
His voice did not rise, but every word after that landed harder.
“But in return, your Majesty, you must promise to do what Karai could not those many years ago. He could not bear to kill her, though the courts wanted her gone. He chose the method of imprisonment, and I believe it was for her a worse fate. She will destroy us all if she can,
seeking her vengeance for that punishment, and he may falter again when it comes to stopping her. If that happens, you must do what he cannot, no matter the cost.”
Ina’s mouth had gone dry. She nodded slowly anyway.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said, and heard for herself how hesitant it sounded. If Karai could not stop the mirage fairy, with all his power and wisdom, who was she to do anything against that kind of magic?
Eogan snorted. Again, he seemed to know what she was thinking before she had fully arranged it in her own mind. “You turned us all into our creature forms and then back again,” he said, “and you didn’t even have your wings then. Your only weakness is your self-doubt. Stop that.”
Ina blinked at him. The words were so plainly said, so impatiently thrown at her, as if self-doubt were merely an untidy habit she might be expected to put down with the rest of her clutter, that she nearly laughed.
She remembered the first time she had met him.
The same flippant impatience. The same look and voice that suggested the world would work much better if everyone around him would stop being tiresome and start making sense.
Then, he had used it to dismiss the very idea of marrying the barley corn girl.
Now he used it to tell her to stop doubting her own power.
The style had not changed.
Only the target.
Ina found herself smirking a little despite everything.
She was now nearly certain that the disapproval and hauteur were at least half-performance.
Not false exactly. Eogan would not have the patience to be wholly false.
But crafted. Chosen. A posture worn so constantly it had become his face to the world.
Under it, to her amusement, there appeared to be a man considerably less awful than she had first assumed.
While she was still thinking this, Eogan had already turned away and summoned an attendant with a quick gesture. “Have my travel cloak brought,” he said. “And send word ahead to the marsh court that I’m coming.”
The attendant fled with gratifying speed.
Eogan reached for a pair of gloves laid over the back of a chair and pulled them on with brisk, economical motions. “Where will you go?”
Ina looked at him as though the answer were obvious. “I must speak with Karai.”
Eogan glanced at her once. Whatever he thought of that, he did not say. He only nodded, as if the queen seeking the burrow court prince in the middle of a kingdom gone sideways was exactly the sort of errand the day required.
“Then go quickly,” he said. “And Queen Ina?”
She paused at the door.
“If you mean to trust him,” Eogan said, “do so with open eyes. Only he remembers her true name and her true shape. The rest of us… were made to forget.”
That stopped her. “Made to forget?”
He nodded as if she were slow to understanding.
“Yes, your Majesty. Of course, we remember what happened. That there was a mirage fairy, that she coveted the throne and rule of fairies, that she destroyed many lives to get it. But Emthil erased the knowledge of who – her name, her shape, her location, from all of us. Not as punishment to us,
but as punishment to her. The mirage fairy wanted us all to know her as queen, and Emthil took away her deepest desire.”
He paused, as if debating whether further explanation was necessary, and decided Ina did need enlightenment.
“And she did it to prevent some loyalist seeking the mirage fairy at the bottom of the ocean and releasing her. Or worse, some idiot stumbling upon accounts and drawings of her and falling in love enough to do the same. Except, of course, Karai.”
Her voice came barely above a whisper. “Not him. He can’t have…”
Eogan heaved an irritated sigh. “No, not him. That much holds true. Not unless he had a death wish, and I doubt that very much, given the current state of his affairs.” He looked her up and down, pointedly. Then he pursed his lips, annoyed again. “And yet, here we are.”
“But we know who it is now. Matilde,” Ina said.
He shook his head. “If she turned into that shapeless beast, your Majesty… I fear the real Matilde isn’t with us any longer. Her body is a vessel for the mirage, but she is not its master.”
Ina held his gaze a moment, debating what to do with that information. Then she said only, “I must go.”
And left him already halfway into the work of what might become battle.