Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
The bell tolled, high crystalline chimes that seemed to splinter in his ears, put a shivery dinning on the inside of his head.
It went on and on, a manic repetition.
It followed him down the hill.
In the station, a flimsy wooden door with long-ago shattered glass panels led into the waiting room beyond.
With cold, methodical savagery, Duncan kicked it loose of its hinges—booted blow after blow after blow, until the whole door toppled, took half the frame with it, and crashed to the glass-strewn floor.
Blinking back tears, couldn’t seem to get rid of them.
The sound of the tower dweller’s multithroated hooting stuck in his head like some catchy tune you’d hear a soldier whistle down-trench and not be able to forget.
He dragged the door across to one of the waiting room benches, leaned one end of it up on the edge, and with the same measured savagery, stomped it to splintered fragments and kindling.
He stood for a few moments, getting his wind back.
The bell had finally stopped its chiming.
He gathered the larger fragments of wood, carried them out to the platform, and built a small fire next to Thunder Child’s footplate. He put his back to the locomotive and sat cross-legged before the flames. He lay the McCulloch across his knees and waited.
Darkness creeping in, thickening in the streets of Miller’s Frith, drowning the tree-shrouded, abandoned houses, the station, the paralyzed train.
The fire began to paint capering black shadows across the platform and up the station house wall.
The sun was long gone now, down over the shoulder of the hill, the waxing moon still tangled low in branches to the east. Above the trees, it looked like the same clear skies as the previous night, stars starting to pinprick through.
But for the first time that Duncan could recall that year, there was a raw autumn edge on the air.
The station door to the platform blew open, banged shut.
Duncan’s gaze shuttled rightward to the sound, watched the door repeat the trick twice more, then stop as if embarrassed. Whispers blew in on a faint, chilly wind, worried at the fire.
When he looked back to the flames again, Mebhuranon sat opposite him.
“Hello, Duncannn…”
Low carnivore purr in her voice, the effortless sensuality he remembered.
Her achingly perfect lupine features wavered and twitched in the heated air above the flames, perhaps a little more than the refracted light could strictly explain.
The curtains of unruly dark and silver hair streamed back off her forehead and cheekbones as if blown that way by a fierce wind he couldn’t feel.
Over twenty years since he’d seen her outside of dreams. He tried not to show the jolt it put through him.
“Meb,” he managed. “Didn’t take you long to get here.”
“It’s the Final Isles, Duncan. You’ve made quite the splash this time. What did you expect?”
“Something like this, I suppose. Did you bring the girl?”
“Did I have a choice? Where is Stordalen’s head?”
“Left it up at the bell tower.”
“Ah.” She tilted an elegant glance away from the fire, up in the direction of the church. “And how did you find the bell keeper this fine evening? Is the poor thing keeping well? Still talking to itself?”
He held down the gooseflesh shiver of recall.
“You did that to them?” he asked.
“The Forest did that to them. In misunderstood answer to some prayer they offered up, perhaps. Or in punishment. Who can tell? It listens, Duncan—I did tell you that once. But it’s a fickle god at best, and not much given to tolerating younger rivals. Perhaps it was offended.”
“And did the Forest enchant the bell as well? Because that’s not the story I heard.”
“Oh no, we did that. Not me personally, I wasn’t up here at the time. One of the local clan-masters. I understand it was by way of a joke.”
“Aye. Anyone could see the funny side of that.”
She smiled. Sharp ivory teeth. “Do you presume to judge us, Duncan?”
“No. I presume to take Miriam Rush from you and leave. Where is she?”
“All in good time.”
Rustle and crunch of autumn leaves disturbed, somewhere down the platform. Shadows leaning in. Duncan smiled thinly, curled his right hand on the butt of the McCulloch.
“Tell them to back off,” he said. “Unless they want to join Stordalen in the Gray.”
Mebhuranon shuttled her liquid black eyes to the side. The shadows retreated from the corner of his vision. “They don’t intend to attack you, Duncan. I think they just want to see you for themselves. It’s not every day a mortal kills a Final Isles noble and eats his heart.”
“I didn’t eat all of it.”
She tilted her head, preternaturally lupine once more. “No. But you ate enough, I think. As always, Duncan, you teeter on the brink of things. What are we to do with you?”
Oh, Duncan, what are we to do with you?
The words, striking through, dragging back, as she must know they would, the memory of the last time he saw her, the aftermath of the revels…
Picking her way, tall and svelte and utterly naked, out of the clearing in the hollow where the sated bodies of the other guests carpet the moss-soft ground.
Their body fluids gleam on her like snail track, across breasts and belly and thighs, smear from her lips, cling sticky in her tangled hair.
She trails her rainbow cloak along the ground behind her with one languid hand.
Faerie music still piping faintly in the stunned quiet between the trees at her back.
Shimmer and shiver of glamours expiring…
And Duncan—crouched watching from behind a beech bole where the giggling tree sprites have led and left him, paralyzed by what he’s seen.
His most recent bruises forgotten, numbed away by the spectacle of the Faerie queen in her abandon.
Through the thin, ragged cloth of the shorts that Svalenkari has had stolen for him, he holds on to his throbbing penis as if it’s the handle on the door to a room he’s trying desperately to escape.
He’s maybe eleven years old.
Helloooo, Duncannnn. Switching suddenly round the bole of the beech tree, finding him there—aha!—as if they’ve been playing hide-and-seek all along. Have you been watching me?
Terror, shock. Shame. His mouth moves, but no sounds come out.
She looks down at him for a moment, empty black stare. Then—something the Bright Folk almost never do—she makes almost human pupils of her eyes, squeezes the black out to the corners, leaves a violet residual core. She folds herself elegantly down to sit beside him.
There’s a scent to her naked body that he’ll never forget as long as he lives.
Oh, Duncan, what are we to do with you? You keep running away. Don’t you like the Forest? She leans in closer, all violet eyes and scent. Don’t you like us?
Some instinctive impulse—he lets go of his penis. Puts his palms flat on the mossy ground, pushes himself backward away from her, into the hard bark of the beech trunk.
I want to go home, he says.
Yes, but you can’t. Voice reasonable and kind, soft as the moss under his palms. She reaches delicately out, touches a bruise on his grubby shoulder with one cool hand. Is Svalenkari not making that sufficiently clear to you?
I want my mother!
Do you? Her hand falls from his shoulder, fingertips tracing down his arm, touches his thigh. Stays there. She leans close. Her scent, her violet eyes. Is that what you want? Your mother? Really, Duncan?
He’s trembling, a churn of feelings new and old, an upending of the steady yearnings he’s held on to for the years since Isnorvi’s birthday surprise.
He feels dizzy with the shift. He—it’s sudden, the realization—wants her to move her hand.
He wants those cool fingers to spider up his thigh to take his penis between them, he wants her to…
to do…do the things he watched her do among her kind down in the hollow and the revel…
The violet eyes, watching him close.
And suddenly, in the core of this new storm, he finds something new to hold on to.
A new uncovering, like the revealed violet pupils in the eyes that watch him so closely now—the sudden understanding that this creature, in fact, wants something from him, and it is his submission to her will and to the will of Svalenkari…
And he can deny it.
For the first time, he can stop them taking something they want.
I want my mother! Through gritted teeth now, a new, tightly focused form of the resistance he’s lived with for so long.
He swats the Faerie queen’s hand from his leg.
Breathing hard. Lets his voice out, rising to a shout.
You stole her from me and I want her back!
I’ll never love you! I’ll never love the Forest! I want to go home!
And Mebhuranon flinches.
It’s tiny. But it’s there.
The dawn quiet flows back in around his words. But they hang there in the air anyway, like the after-smoke from one of the glamoured lightning-bolt flashes Svalenkari sometimes likes to conjure when he’s angry.
Well, she says softly.
Dense inky black flooding back in across her eyes—it swamps the violet pupils, renders her gaze blank and pitiless and elf-like once more. He sees himself reflected back in each eye, small, grubby, at bay between the root sinews of the beech. She tilts her head at him, like a wolf.
You disappoint me, Duncan. Voice no longer soft now, something harsh and imperious and ancient rising in it instead.
For now I must own to Svalenkari that he knows better than I do, knows you better, at any rate, and so I will hand you back.
She prods at his bruised shoulder again, no delicacy in it now.
Maybe you actually enjoy these…caresses he rewards your rebellion with.
You humans are, when all is said and done, a brutish lot.
My caresses, at least, you will never know.