Chapter 8
Eight
Faery’s call was second to my human fear.
What more could be expected? I was a half-human, half-fae abomination, with no magic of my own.
No fae other than Morven had spoken to me until the Dark Fool came along, and he had found me lacking.
I was left to rot among the mortals, raised beside the cunning woman’s graceless brats.
Should I be found out and tossed into the fire, as Mairi told me some suspected changelings were, Faery would not even attempt to intervene.
The day grew late, though not as late as I had feared. In the forest, the trees cast so long a shadow twilight itself might have ridden in upon Amadan’s tail. It was eerie, and it was not, for twilight makes us fae feel well at home.
I fled the forest as a frightened child flees the shadows on the wall.
I had no name for my fear; my vision had been nightmarish, but I knew not what it might portend.
It might have been mere trickery, foisted upon me by one who did call himself the Fool.
Or it might have been premonition, and I had done nothing to prevent it, only recoiled in fear.
The sound of Amadan’s piping still rang in my ears, a tune I could almost hum, though it vanished when I tried.
His scent overcame me still, beguiling me like a fine wine, but try as I might, I could not recall his face.
I thought instead of the shepherd Thomas, with his bright smile and riotous curls.
When I thought of Amadan, I saw nothing.
No, that was not entirely true. I remembered well his cadaverous visage, the scent of dust and death, and his fungus-colored eyes.
We fae cannot lie with words but speak illusion like a second tongue.
I, however, had grown up outside Faery and could not translate it.
Whether the bonny forest or the barren wasteland was the truth, the elfin swain or the mask of death, I did not know.
Perhaps the answer was somewhere in between.
I only hoped one day I might understand.
In the meantime, I must get my pennyroyal into the house without Eamon’s notice.
I paused before the threshold to array my basket, laying the herb beneath the wildflowers I’d picked, chickweed and lousewort and gorse.
’Twas hidden enough, though the fragrance carried.
I hoped it was only my fae senses picking up on it.
When I arrived, Eamon was coming in for supper, and he met me at the door. I smiled sweetly and swung my basket, for what can be more innocent than a flower-picking maid?
“Bess,” Eamon said gruffly.
I inclined my head, avoiding the untruth, “Father.” “’Tis a lovely day, isn’t it? Spring is truly on her way.”
Eamon grunted, squinting at the clouds above us. “I reckon it will storm tomorrow.”
“Then it’s glad I am I picked my flowers today.” I clutched my basket, tilting my head at him. “’Twill brighten the empty house, don’t you think?” For the stink of death was gone, but the gloom of it was not. It was still lonely to live there, he and I alone.
Sometimes I wanted him to sit with me and tell me stories about Mairi, in hopes it might lessen his grief. But Eamon had sealed his heart behind walls of stone. There had never been any way I could break through.
“Hmm.” His eyes fell upon my basket. “I smell mint.”
Well, no, he smelled pennyroyal, but it was best not to let him know. “Mint is good for the ants in the pantry,” I said.
His brows lifted. “And are there ants in the pantry?” If he found so much as one, he would beat me sorely.
What had I been thinking? He and I could never comfort each other. He was more my master than my kin.
Why did I not leave him? Why did I not beg the piper to dance me under the hillside, far away from the realm of man? I felt like I’d been shackled here, like a timid sailor, too afraid to leave sight of the shore.
Faery was vast and unknowable as the ocean, and I did not truly believe I would float.
“I will make certain there are no ants,” I said, and fled to find a place for my flowers and to hide the pennyroyal from view.
“Ants in the pantry?” Morven sniffed as she swept the rushes across the floor. “D’ye think I keep such an untidy house?”
Eamon had gone to bed, and the room was silent, save for the brownie’s sweeping and the vermin rushing about in the rafters.
Only the hearth remained lit, and the firelight cast peculiar shadows on the walls: horned fae, crones with hideously misshapen lips, man-like creatures with hedgehog bristles instead of hair.
I kept waiting for these shadow fae to speak to me, or at least acknowledge me in some way, but they never paid me any mind.
I stood at the table, grinding the pennyroyal into a powder with my mortar and pestle.
I would bring some with me when next I visited the common oven and slip it to Glenna there.
’Twas not an ideal arrangement—I would far rather mix the brew for her myself and be certain she took it properly.
That is what Mairi Grieve would have done.
But I saw no way I could do so without drawing Eamon’s attention to us, or Rufus Baker’s. We must be discreet.
Morven waited for my response, hands upon her scrawny hips, brows beetling beneath her thatch of hair.
“No,” I said quickly. “I did not suppose you would have overheard.”
“Hmph,” was her reply as she beat her stick broom out the front door. “Well, there’s naught what goes on inside this house that I don’t hear, even in the daylight hours.”
I stared at the shadow fae, who stretched out and distorted when the flames grew high, then shrank back down again when they were dim.
Little half fae, I heard the voice of the Dark Fool say.
Mortal blood will out in the end. No wonder the shadows would have naught to do with me. Morven would ever be my only friend.
“Of course there are no ants in your pantry,” I reassured her. “You have always taken care of the house so well. Much better than I could, looking after Mairi while she was—” I broke off, choking down a sob.
Morven thrust her broom into a cobweb in the corner, and began a furious, incomprehensible argument with the spider residing there.
“’Tis my charge, isn’t it?” she said to me.
“To look after the kin of Mairi Grieve, by blood and by choice. She were a good woman and there’s many what owes her, in this world and the next. ”
I nodded in agreement. Once a brownie had the charge of a house, they could not leave it, unless the owners should offend their sensibilities with a gift or two.
Household spirits they were; “Some say we used to be gods,” Morven would always tell me, with a proud jut of her chin and her hands upon her waist.
Now you’re condemned to a life of drudgery. But Morven never seemed to see it that way.
I mashed the pennyroyal, while she dusted the kist in the corner. “Eamon did smell the herb and thought it mint. What other excuse could I have made?”
Morven paused in her dusting. “Some sense of smell ’e’s got, then. It’s not mint, I’ll tell ye that much, though I’d swear I had smelled it someplace before.”
“I am sure you have. Mairi Grieve used pennyroyal for women who needed their courses restored or found themselves in the family way.”
“’Tis usually the same thing, if only they would admit it.
Christians. Bah!” She paused, resting the broom against her hip.
“Wait, now. Is there something ye’re not telling me, lass?
” She scooted close, sticking her nose all but in my face.
“I dunna smell any man upon ye. Not one what’s been in ye, leastwise. ”
“Morven!” It erupted from me so loudly, Eamon groaned in his sleep upstairs.
“’Tis not for me,” I whispered. “Glenna the Baker’s Daughter did meet with a lover in the woods.”
“Ahh.” Morven did not resume her sweeping. “Ye’ve more nerve than I gave ye credit for, gel. Living in the house of Eamon Grieve and following the trade of Mairi.” She shook her head. “Ye’re not a trickster. How long do you think ye can keep this hid?”
I stared at the mashed pennyroyal, my cheeks flaring into warmth. Morven was right, of course. I was in far over my head. If Eamon found me out, my fate could be worse than Glenna Baker’s. At least she might take refuge in the kirk if need be. “’Tis only the once. Glenna is in desperate need.”
Morven snorted. “And the father? Seems he ought to be looking after Glenna and not you.”
I swallowed hard. “He is an elf lord.”
At this she chuckled. “So she says, eh? No better than she should be—not that there’s anything wrong with that, ’cept to Christian eyes. But these lasses are quick to blame it on a one of us.”
“I met him.”
Morven cocked her head.
It spilled out of me. “At Carterhaugh today. When I was gathering the pennyroyal. He had . . . hair. And . . . eyes.” I could not call to mind what sort of hair and eyes, so simply finished, “He was the handsomest man I had ever seen.”
“And here I thought ye’d set your sights on the lusty shepherd lad.”
My cheeks warmed all the way to my ears. “I have not. I would not know how to set my sights on anyone.” It is meant to be natural, I think, to mortals and fae as much as the little beasts in the forest. But I’d never had the time to learn.
Morven put a hand on her hip and waved the broom coquettishly, leaning forward as if to show me her bosom. “Why, good morrow, kind sir. I seem to have lost my ring in the haystack. Would ye help me look?” She wrapped her arms around herself, puckering her lips and making smacking noises.
I laughed despite myself.
“And after.” Morven spread her legs wide, rocking her hips back and forth, then dropped to her knees on the floor. She bounced up and down, making surprisingly human sounds of pleasure.
I could barely speak from laughter. “Stop! Eamon would have my head!”
Morven grunted. “Where’d ye think I learned it from? He and Mairi did have eight bairns.”
Now I felt vaguely ill.
“Imagine me trying that with the shepherd,” I said, “much less with the Amadan Dubh.”
But it was not hard to imagine doing it with Thomas Shepherd. My breath quickened and my belly fluttered as I envisioned tumbling beneath the moon at twilight, hearty enough to make the earth sing.
Morven had frozen in place. Beneath her shaggy hair, she looked white as milk. “Ye did not say the Amadan Dubh were the father of yer friend’s bairn.”
“I am saying it now.” I could not understand how drastically her manner had changed, from bawdy and joking to abject fear in mere moments.
Morven shook her head frantically. “Ye stay away from the Dark Fool. He were no friend to Mairi Grieve, nor, as rumor has it, to Queen Una herself. Too soft on humans, he said she was; held them higher in esteem than the Unseelie fae, her own blood. Nor was he the only one.”
“I am half-human.” I thought of the disdain with which the Fool had treated me, except when he had not. And yet there he went seducing Glenna Baker. How much sense did that make?
“Keep out of his business, any way ye can.”
“But Morven—”
It was no use. She ran from me, scurrying to clean the cobwebs from the rafters, and even my fae vision struggled to find her there.