The Changeling Queen

Samhain, Carterhaugh

I should have taken away the lordling’s heart.

With my nails sharp as talons, I should have pierced his breast, carved out a cavity inside him, and ripped out the pulsing organ with one hand.

Let the soil of Faery feast upon his essence, as he and I once had on honey and nectar.

There was a time I could have done so, and he would have thanked me for the pain.

Instead, I garbed him as any other of my knights, and hid him among our company.

Tonight, we make our Samhain rade.

His steed is white as milk, and he rides closest to the town, the sole acknowledgment that he, among all these riders, Aos Sith and Sluagh, pixies and elfin knights, does not belong. He alone is mortal, and the time of his death is nigh.

It must come at my hands, though once he was my lover. Our history makes no difference at all.

From out of the hedges creeps a mortal woman, scarce more than a girl. Her plaited hair is yellow, her skirts kilted above her knees.

And she goes great with child.

My heart seems to still within my breast. I did not see her there.

How did I, queen of all the canny fae, fail to notice this mortal girl?

For now, the scent of her mortality surrounds me, blood and bone turning to dust, flesh eaten by worms and decaying into the loam to feed the earth.

Sharp sweat rises from her, more than such a mirk and chilly night should warrant.

I sense she is nervous. Good. Mortals should be nervous when caught out on All Hallows’ Eve, while faery folk do ride.

Yet somehow, those nerves failed to stop her. I could almost be impressed.

The girl is hard to look at, even while she stumbles into our path and lumbers alongside the procession of trooping fae.

Then I see it. Her mantle—she has turned it inside out.

Clever girl, knowing how to beguile the senses of the fae.

I am not impressed for long.

The girl is not graceful, heavily as she carries the child within her, and she walks with determination, rather than speed. But we too do not rush; this is a somber ritual, full of pomp and ceremony, and there has never been any need to before.

No mortal would dare interrupt the faery rade.

She has caught up to the white steed and, ungainly as the girl is, grips its rider. With an enormous grunt of effort, she pulls Tam Lin off his horse. He falls, dazed, to the forest floor.

The rade stops by instinct, not at my command. The horses still, by no order from their riders. The nighttime forest around us goes unearthly quiet.

My breath catches, and I sit rigid, clutching tight to my horse’s reins.

“My queen.” My seneschal Lyel, riding beside me on a horse of dapple grey, tersely shakes his head. “This is not the time for intervention. Wait.”

This is a game we play, with rules we invented and never deigned to share. This girl, though; somehow, she knows exactly what to do.

On the other side of the Veil, something withers and dies.

I can sense it in my bones. Mayhap a single flower, a cowslip from my garden, or the eglantine that blooms against my palace walls.

It does not bode well. My skin grows tight, and a hunger pierces my belly, one that will not be sated by food.

I am immortal, ageless, but I feel the heaviness of my years upon me, as if I were a mortal woman, with all the fragility and weakness that entails.

No. I am no mortal. I have left behind all that is not powerful, fae, and pure.

She is mortal. The girl who now would claim Tam Lin.

She helps him to his feet. He stumbles and murmurs her name—Janet—before falling into her arms. She catches him, though he towers over her and, while lanky, is heavier than he appears. I have known the weight of Tam Lin atop me, beneath and beside me: this baron’s boy is a fit specimen indeed.

He trembles like a blade of grass in the wind.

His Janet holds him up and she holds on, clinging as if she loves him. Needs him. No doubt even thinks she needs him more than we do.

She thinks wrong.

My belly roils and my mouth tastes of wormwood. I cannot stomach this blatant theft of what was mine alone, what I claimed years ago when Tam Lin fell from his horse while hunting. I saved his life then. Ever since, he has been living on borrowed time.

“Hold him, will you?” I say, my voice like thunder in the silent forest. Lightning burns beneath my skin, and I hold my arm aloft, pointing. “Let us see how you enjoy this embrace.”

Tam Lin stretches and grows, taller, wider, heavier. Thick fur sprouts across his body; his ears grow round, hands become paws, his nails thick claws. He roars, in pain, in horror, or simply to release the beast within.

Tam Lin has become a bear.

He claws at Janet’s back, tearing through her kirtle and marking the skin. Drooling and frothing at the mouth, he holds her so tight he might squeeze the life out of her. Still, she holds him, heedless of the noise he makes, how he claws at her, and the blood he spills.

From the distance, far across the expanse of the Veil, comes the crack of a dead tree, falling into dust.

Rage is a maelstrom inside me.

I will not give up.

“Viper!” I scream, and so Tam Lin becomes, larger than any natural serpent I have seen, squeezing out Janet’s life in his coils. His fangs are sharp and deadly; venom drips off them onto the lady’s flesh, where it burns.

She cringes, she grimaces, her face goes green as grass. Yet she does not let him go. She will not let him go.

I do not wish to like this girl. Her courage is worse than useless; it is inconvenient, threatening to rob Faery, my Faery, of what it needs.

What we call the Teind.

I reach deep inside myself for a part of me I thought long banished.

What is most toxic to the fae, what is most common among the mortals.

I pull this vile substance from Tam Lin himself, the metal flowing through the blood in his veins, from every door hinge and lock he has ever passed, every knife and sword he has held, from armor and buckles and the shoes his horses wear.

Iron. I make Tam Lin into what I despise the most, what I most fear, even more than church bells and crosses, holy water, and prayer, for those harm us only so far as the belief in them. Iron is eternal, and so Tam Lin becomes.

Then I set him on fire.

Janet screams, and her cries rend the silent air of the forest around us. In her hands now is that which is too hot to hold, a burning brand. She cannot keep it too long in either hand; she’s blistered and burned enough as it is.

Yet, she never completely lets go.

Instead, she breaks into a run.

A galumphing run, with how unbalanced the state of her body has left her. I am startled, if only for a moment.

I cry out to the procession of trooping fae: “After her!”

“Your Majesty,” my pretty seneschal says, to keep me within the rules of our game. He does not need to finish. I know what he would say.

We are not to intervene.

“After her—slowly,” I grit out. As if so many fae, of all shapes, natures, and sizes, acting in accord, could move with any great speed. The brownies are short of leg; the lamiae must slither along as snakes do, and the fachan, for one, has only the single foot.

The Teind is getting away. I will not call it panic, the sensation rising now in my breast, but it is as close as the Queen of Faery can come.

What part of our land is now becoming desert? Where does the Underhill now recede further away from mortal realms? We need that connection to survive.

We need sacrifice, the gift of a soul, to survive.

At the moment, it does not appear Tam Lin will provide it.

I will not let him go.

We follow Janet to the well, the very place she must have met her young man, for it has long been a popular trysting place for the fae and the fae-they-seem.

Among the ferns and gorse, the well is now grown about with roses that bloom the dark crimson of my hair.

Janet trips over them; they catch at her skirts and the thorns tear at her ankles.

I smile, for the roses are an extension of me.

Janet does not stop until she throws the burning brand into the well.

A sizzling rises from within, and I feel it in my flesh, as though some deep and treasured part of me has burnt to ash.

It is not over yet.

From the well emerges a wet and naked Tam Lin. He stoops and shivers, water drips from the ends of his dark hair into his bonny grey eyes.

I wish I had ripped those out. Given him eyes of tree, that he should never have seen this Janet, who even now covers him with her mantle green.

Something breaks inside me. It cannot be my heart.

I am meant to yield now. Janet has won Tam Lin.

I do not remember how to yield. It is a skill I lost long ago.

Faery still needs him. The Teind must be paid.

I let no show of desperation cloud my face, but calmly dismount my horse.

My green gossamer skirts settle around me, bedecked with garnets like drops of blood.

I raise my arms as I stand before the procession.

“My people,” I say. “Our rade is ended. All Hallows is nearly through. Do you now return beyond the Veil.”

A mist rises around the creatures of the fae: riders and walkers, Sluagh and Aos Sith alike.

My seneschal looks at me in confusion, suspicion, concern. My words are his command, but he would act as my conscience and seems reluctant to leave us alone.

A conscience is a luxury I cannot afford.

I smile sweetly, reassuring him. “I will be safe. What danger can they possess, a pregnant woman and a naked man?”

Although I know his worry is not for me.

For Samhain is not over yet. And I am no worthy ruler of Faery if I give up Tam Lin without a fight.

And so, I begin my tale.