Chapter Twenty-Two
Apart from the short trip two days after their wedding to sing the promised blessing over the son of the fae who made their wedding rings, Taz and Sephie had no reason to leave their rooms. Every now and again, there would be a knock on the door, and when they opened it, they would find a tray of food and drink waiting in the passage.
Which meant there was nothing Sephie wanted that she didn’t have in these rooms, at least for the moment.
She and Taz explored one another’s bodies, of course.
It was surprisingly good even from the beginning, since neither of them had much experience.
The bond made it so, of course, and once Sephie could feel Taz’s reaction and he hers, every encounter was better than the last.
They made magic, too, experimenting with their songs to test the dimensions of their power now that they were fully-bonded partners, and finding that they seemed to have no limits, at least with spells that could fit inside their rooms.
And they talked. About their pasts, their values, their hopes for the future. Sephie told Taz about her dream of a cottage. Taz tentatively suggested an amendment. “Could the cottage be on wheels?” he suggested.
And when he painted her a picture in words, she could see it.
“You and I,” he said. “A nice compact caravan and perhaps a tent for extra room when we stop to sing in a village. A couple of horses. Perhaps a cat. Window boxes of flowers and perhaps some pots of herbs. Traveling the roads of England, Scotland, and Wales. Entertaining with our music, but also teaching.”
She understood immediately. “Singing about freedom,” she said, softly. “About equality. About people having the right to be themselves and to have a say in decisions that affect them.”
“Ah, Sephie,” said Taz. “I love you so.”
*
One day, Ligard and Acha came to tell them that the elders wanted to speak with them. “We shall leave to allow you to dress,” Acha offered.
Sephie looked down at what she wore—Taz’s shirt, which she had pulled on to answer the knock on the door. Acha grinned. “We shall meet you outside.”
So Sephie and Taz dressed properly for the first time in… Sephie could not begin to guess how long it had been since their wedding. Here underground, they had no external reference, such as sunset or sunrise—but even without that, the time in the fae forests seemed to defy measurement.
“How long have we been here?” Sephie wondered. “It seems like no time at all since we sought refuge from Hebog in the forest. And yet it seems as if we have always been here.”
“It must be days,” said Taz.
“More than that, I think. The days blur into one another, but I think it must be more than a week. Perhaps even two weeks.”
But when they emerged from the cave, the weather was noticeably cooler, many of the trees wore autumn colors, and some had even shed their leaves.
Taz stopped just beyond the opening, turning his head to take in all the evidence. “Autumn?” he said, his voice heavy with disbelief. “Summer is over?”
“Winter approaches,” Ligard told him. “We have passed what you call the equinox, and the nights grow longer. Soon, the trees will sleep, and many of the animals, too.”
Late September, then, or even October. They had left Cousin Jasper’s estate in May, and had escaped from Hebog in late July. Had they really been in their rooms for two months?
“The elders wait in the meeting circle,” Ligard said, and he and Acha led the way.
Five fae waited for them in the clearing, one of whom was the older of the two women who had officiated with Uradech their wedding. Looking at their lined faces and remembering what Acha had said about how fae aged, Sephie realized that these five must all be more than six hundred years old.
Three of them were strangers, and Sephie would have said she knew all who lived in this forest, at least by sight. Had they come here just to see her and Taz?
“We greet the bard mage pair,” the woman proclaimed—her name, Sephie remembered, was Conchenn.
“Lady,” she said. “My lords and ladies.” She curtseyed, to Conchenn and to the other elders. Beside her, Taz bowed.
“It is time for you to choose, bards,” said Conchenn.
One of the others spoke. “You came to the forests for refuge.”
“The forests belong to the fae,” said another. “Seldom do we allow outsiders to stay.”
“We are grateful to the forests,” said Taz.
The five elders regarded him, their expressions showing nothing.
“Here is one of your choices,” said Conchenn. “If you wish to return to the outside world, we shall help you. We can take you to the forest nearest the place you need to be, so that you do not need to risk a meeting with the dragon lord or the man you call Hawk.”
That would be remarkably helpful. Not that Sephie and Taz had discussed a destination. At first, they had simply been running away. And then they had been in the forest with the fae, and somehow the outside had seemed unimportant.
“You have another choice,” said one of the elders, this time one of the men. From his wrinkles and the way he bent over a cane, Sephie guessed that he was the oldest of the five. “If you wish to remain in the forests, the forests will accept you.”
“We shall not make the offer again,” one of the women warned, and the other man told them, “If you wish to remain, it will be for life. You will forget your kingdoms and your battles, and live as we live. If you leave, you may be invited as a guest, but you will never again be asked to share our lives.”
“That is what we came to say,” said the other man. “We shall give you until next full moon to make a decision. He nodded at the other elders. As a group, they turned to the left, took a step, and vanished from sight. They had translocated to another forest, Sephie assumed.
“When is the next full moon?” she asked Acha.
“In three days’ time,” her friend replied.
*
Their decision was never really in doubt.
Though the peace and joy of the forests tempted them, they belonged, when all was said and done, in the outside world, with all its strife, turmoil, and sorrow.
Perhaps Sephie put it best when she told Acha about their dream of wandering from town to town in a wagon that was their home.
“Perhaps we can make a difference. Perhaps, as a bard mage pair, we are meant to use our gifts to help others to see their lives more clearly, and to understand that things don’t need to remain the way they are, with the rich and powerful trying to outdo one another and the ordinary people suffering.
Or perhaps I’m wrong, and our songs will change nothing.
But we have to try. We choose the road, Acha. ”
Before long, all their close friends among the fae had heard about Taz’s dream, which had become Sephie’s, too.
And so it was that three days later, they walked out of a forest of Scots pine, larch, and beech to look out over the Scottish Highland town of Inverness.
Out from under the trees, patches of snow decorated every shadowed patch of ground, but the sun shone, the town was no more than thirty minutes distant, and the fae had sent them on their way with a pouch of fairy gold.
“Real gold,” Ligard had said, laughing. “Guaranteed not to turn to acorns and water once you’ve paid your carriage maker.”
“We only cheat those who try to cheat us,” Acha had complained, “but the stories make us out to be the villains.”
“It is nothing to us,” Ligard had said, persuasively, “and it will help you to purchase your little house on wheels.” Both of which were true.
The fae used gold for decoration but regarded it no more highly than any other metal.
And the pouch contained enough gold to pay a carriagemaker to create just what they wanted, to outfit it, and to buy a team of horses, besides.
As it turned out, there was also enough to rent a little cottage in Inverness and to buy what they needed in the way of clothes and other personal items, since the fae robes that were all they had were drawing suspicious attention.
They formalized their marriage a week or two later, in a little church near their cottage.
And after that, they spent the winter singing for whatever audiences they could find, at first in the market square on fine days, and later—as word of their music spread—in houses and assembly halls.
They were cautious, using their magic merely to enhance the messages of their songs.
Here in the highlands of Scotland, not far from an historic battleground where many Scots had lost their lives, songs of defiance and anger were forbidden but popular.
Sephie and Taz chose instead to sing songs of sacrifice, songs about longing for justice, songs about unexpected heroes and heroines, who rose from despised beginnings to fame and fortune.
*
By the time spring opened the roads, they were ready to move on.
The carriagemaker had finished their wagon, and it was exactly what Sephie had imagined.
A little house on wheels, as Ligard had called it, with the space inside cleverly designed so every cupboard and surface did double duty, tables could be swiveled or tipped to tuck away out of sight, the bed folded away, blankets and all, and a little iron stove not only provided warmth, but also a hot surface for cooking.
One fine morning in late March, they drove out of Inverness, bound for Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and eventually England.
For the horses’ sake, they kept to an easy pace, and drove for no more than an hour or an hour and a half in the morning and the same in the afternoon.
They sang in villages and at farms, and stopped at night, pulled off the road in fields or clearings.
Around three days into the trip, they encountered trouble. It started with a woman lying in the middle of the narrow road. With forest on both sides of them and no villages for a mile or more, Taz was suspicious. “Where did she come from?” he muttered.