Chapter Fifteen #2
—life. It looks nothing less than magical, like the soft, warm carpets of greenery the Huldu sometimes conjure in clearings for their orgies and ceremonies.
But it goes on and on, up to the tall darkened battlements of the house itself, the sparse scattering of lit windows across the stonework.
Isnorvi makes a noise that’s almost girlish, almost like a giggle.
He tugs Duncan down off the wall and onto the grassy expanse.
“Want to see some humans, Duncan?”
Humans? Not really—
But before he can voice it, Isnorvi is off again, haring across the glamoured grass in zigzags like some demented squirrel, dragging Duncan with him.
Duncan struggles to keep up—as much with the idea that seeing some humans could be worth all this fuss as with Isnorvi’s manic burst of speed.
He feels a slow-seeping sense of disappointment, excitement fading, that all his birthday surprise is going to be is peering in at a bunch of clumsy, mucky mortals like the thralls you see shambling about camp…
And then they’re up to the house, up to one of the lit windows and peering in at the cozy scene on the other side of the glass, at things he’ll only later understand.
He sees a fireplace as tall as he is, wider than he can hold out his arms, a leaping, dancing fire on heaped-up logs within.
High ceiling, a glistening candelabra, soft light from lamps on tables around the room, chairs and sofa colored like the back of nettle leaves…
On the sofa, a young woman, cleaner than any thrall he’s ever seen, smiling a way no thrall he’s ever known has smiled, long dark hair gathered artfully up on her head.
She wears a gown that wraps her neck to ankles in deep, voluminous green.
He sees her face and her smile, and it’s like someone stabbing him in the belly with a saemdil blade.
Big, brightly colored book open on her knee.
And cuddled up with her, looking with her at the turning pages…
A boy.
A boy about his age…
—and the boy turns, as if sensing by glamour their presence in the dark beyond the glass—
A boy exactly his age—
A boy with his face—
Duncan gapes—mouth open to cry out with the shock—
A cool Fae hand, slapped across his mouth, irresistible force, muffling, killing his cry. Isnorvi, dragging him back from the glass and the glow. Isnorvi, laughing delightedly in his ear.
“Know who that is, Duncan? That’s your mama! The mama we took you from, the mama who never knew you were gone. The mama you can never, ever go back to now, because the changeling has her heart, now and forevermore!
“Happy birthday, Duncan, you tree-thief fuck! Happy fucking birthday!”
And they drag him, kicking and weeping and thrashing, away again into the Forest.
—
Duncan grimaced. Thin pain as he dripped iodine along the gashes across his ribs, the claw furrows in his shoulder, finally the fang gash in his scalp.
As wounds went, they were nothing much—in the trenches, he’d dressed far worse on himself and others, over and over again—but the iodine stung nonetheless. It always did.
Ideally, he’d get the damage stitched, if he made it home. For now…
Stripped to the waist, he murmured a quick and dirty healing charm Sal had gifted him a couple of years ago, hand pressed onto each affected area as she’d taught.
The trees whispered around him in the gloom, shook their canopies, as if in recognition of the spell.
He took scissors and bandaging gauze from his pack, bound himself up.
He tested the dressing, thought it would do, stowed his gear back in his pack. He dressed himself again.
In the quiet beneath the trees, he knelt by Stordalen’s mutilated corpse, stared into the dead black pupil-less eyes for what seemed like quite a while.
Who the bloody blue blazes are tha, Duncan? Really.
Garner’s parting question, dinging in his head.
The old man had left with the cryptic answer Duncan gave him and not another word, turning and slipping away between the sparser trees downslope from the farm, heading for open fields and home.
But the look he darted backward as he walked away was filled with the same fear he’d shown when he asked.
Whatever he’d seen when he looked at Duncan before tonight, it was irreversibly changed—a portrait on canvas slashed through and torn, a man seen in a mirror that had cracked.
Well, at least he’s not here to see this bit.
Duncan took a fistful of Stordalen’s luxuriant dark hair in his left hand, took up the trench knife in his right.
Proceeded to hack the Huldu’s head loose from its body.
It wasn’t easy work, even with the iron blade.
The talismanic effect of iron on dead Fae flesh was far less dramatic than its impact on the living.
No flash-flare burn, no searing dissolution.
Perhaps the tissue gave way somewhat more easily than its mortal equivalent would have, but a spine is still a spine, and it took some sweaty, determined sawing to get through it.
It was a while before Duncan could slice away the last retaining flaps of flesh and hold Stordalen’s head aloft.
Oddly, he felt no triumph now at all.
Who the bloody blue blazes are tha, Duncan?
He grimaced again.
I’m the biggest fucking mistake they ever made.
Biggest fucking mistake Isnorvi ever made, at least. The wrath of Svalenkari fell on him almost the instant they got back.
Duncan was not there to see it—the others had left him curled up and sobbing inconsolably between the roots of an ancient yew tree in the outer encampment—but the beating Isnorvi took lived in legend among the children for years after.
The Fae healed fast from everyday injuries; they could sustain burns and bruises and be whole again within hours.
Even broken bones, properly set, would generally heal in a few days.
Isnorvi walked wincing and limping for weeks.
It would be months before he dared be caught even standing close to Duncan, and though he stared broodingly across encamped clearings at the human boy sometimes, he never laid hands on him again.
The others were similarly evasive. Duncan never found out if they, too, were beaten for their part in Isnorvi’s scheme—if they were, it happened separately, and was done with a more judicious hand than Svalenkari’s.
All he knew was that the bullying pretty much stopped.
Drasvinad might sometimes mock him for the mortal clumsiness he showed around camp—high, cruel laughter tinkling like tiny silver bells across a clearing as he stumbled.
And from time to time, there’d be the odd shove from one of the others, but these incidents were few and far between.
But, of course, by then the real damage was already done.
So near as Duncan could work out, piecing it together as an adult, the Fae had taken him from Stac Dubh at not much more than three years old.
Young enough to quickly lose all memory of a mother’s face and warmth, save for, perhaps in the beginning, some tiny, hopeful expectation that someone—some big person, not a child—might offer comfort when he cried, but even that dwindling away in recall as life among the Fae became all his young mind retained.
He might have lived out his whole life with nothing left but that vague, faded inkling of loss, grown to manhood, become a thankful thrall, carried iron for his Huldu masters, died finally in the Forest without ever remembering what he had been.
It might all have sunk safely without trace, but for his birthday surprise…
Aye, Isnorvi had fucked up there, right enough.
The memories wakened, the mother’s face recalled, scarred-over wounds of loss ripped open, right down to the quick.
Presumably, it was what Isnorvi, in his feral young-Fae innocence, had wanted.
One exquisite extra measure of cruelty to overflow the glass, to bring the tears spilling out once more.
He’d apparently seen no further than that.
All adult Fae had the Sight to some degree, but it took them decades of growing up to attain it.
Isnorvi, evidently, had some ways to go.
Duncan wondered idly how much of what was to come Svalenkari had, in his fury, foreseen.
His mastery of the Sight was a legend across the Forest. Had he seen what would become of Duncan, where the renewed grief and loss would eventually drive him?
Or was he simply enough of a seasoned changeling maker, a good enough student of humans, to understand the damage to his future thrall that Isnorvi had risked for sheer malicious whimsy and spite?
Was it vision or merely the wisdom of years that drove his rage?
Or some muddied, half-clairvoyant grasp of things in-between?
Duncan looked up into the tree canopies above. He thought the sky beyond might be starting to tinge lighter with intimations of dawn.
He held Stordalen’s severed head high, for whoever and whatever might be watching.
See this, do you?
See how the mortal child returns with gifts for the Forest and all within?
The head swung from the grip he had on its hair. Spare gore dripped. Spotted his cheek.
He wiped it, smeared it in broad lines.
Lowered the severed head, held it pensive for a moment or two.
Then he turned it upside down pressed his bloodied fingers deep into the ragged stump of the neck. Smeared the gore he dug out on his other cheek, to match what was already there, then across his forehead as well.
Daubed with it, he raised his head to the trees and the brightening eastern sky.
Now do you fucking see?