Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Winds howled like a demonic wolf, battering at the heavy wood doors of the manor. Rain poured down in torrents. It slammed against the rubble-made walls and upon the stony path. I pulled my hood over my hair and clutched my cloak tighter around me as I made my way out into the cold.
’Twas nearly Samhain, the turning of the year. Winter was not far behind.
But in the manor house, I had given over one room to springtime.
Mab grant no one should enter Malcolm’s chambers before I returned.
Mortals would not understand what they saw.
I’d left the boy frozen in place, in semblance not far from death.
Was I deemed to be the cause of his chill, rigid state, what punishment might the baron devise?
I pictured iron chains around my wrists, my skin flaking from my bones as it burned.
No need to kill me on the gallows, for manacles alone would do the job.
Mayhap the shadow fae will help me. Watch over the bairn while I am gone. But would they, truly? Even if I was the liege they had named me, the manor house was no healthy place for fae of any ilk.
The Dark Fool had terrible timing. Glenna’s bairn had better be coming; should Amadan toy with me only, I would feed him his own hand.
No elfin swain awaited me outside the manor. Instead, a lad of around ten huddled in an alcove near the front gates, hair plastered to his forehead, rain dripping off the tip of his nose.
Glenna Baker’s brother.
“Young Master Baker, I . . .” I trailed off, catching something unearthly behind his childish visage. He held his nose high, and there was a slight arrogance in the tilt of his chin. I looked closer. In the gloom of the storm, his damp hair was iridescent, and his eyes flashed emerald bright.
This was no mortal lad.
He put a finger to his lips and gave me a secretive smile.
“Dark Fool,” I breathed.
He made a brief mockery of a bow. “G-g-good morrow, mistress,” he said in a childish voice, then added, low enough that only I could hear, “Would you betray my presence to the mortal scum?”
I glanced around us. Two guardsmen manned the gate, clinging tightly to the sheltering wall as they attempted to keep the rainwater out of their boots. They paid us no mind, and the rain fell sheets between us, obscuring their view.
“Why have you come?” My words were engulfed by the hard drumming of rain against the earth; I had to shout. “This place is lousy with iron. Doesn’t it bother you?”
He snorted. “I am the Dark Fool, and I will not be kept from my business.” How wrong he looked, with this face not his own, worse than when he had been the wolf. At least then he had not borrowed the semblance of an innocent child, someone I knew.
As you yourself wear the seeming of Bess Grieve? I shook it out of my head.
“My sister’s bairn is coming,” he said. “She said t-tuh send for you.”
“No.” My protest, spoken not from refusal but denial, was quickly swallowed by the storm. The babe could not be coming yet—the timing was unimaginably bad.
The Baker-boy-as-he-seemed clucked his tongue, and the Fool’s voice came out of his mouth.
“Is that any way to speak when you’ve made a promise?
” He played with his long fingers—far too long for a lad of ten years, oh, how ghastly long they were—and a sharp pain like a thousand tiny cuts pressed into my skin.
My foot moved forward with no effort on my part, like a dog pulled by a leash.
“No!” I cried out, doubling forward with the pain. “You will not steal my will.” Even as my other foot stepped forward despite my intention.
The boy shook his head. “It is not I, but your promise. The vow of a fae is not easily broken.”
So my flesh told me, the stinging skin, my very body pulling me forward through no effort of my own. I resisted, yet Glenna truly did need me. “A human bearing a half-fae child . . .” I didn’t know what difficulties that might present, in the birth and after.
They say Mairi Grieve was midwife to the Queen of Faery herself. And even she was able to save neither mother nor child.
Amadan had put the rumor into Glenna’s head, I was certain of that now. And if he had, and this was why Glenna sought my assistance, why I had gathered pennyroyal and been cast out by Eamon Grieve . . . Amadan had orchestrated every move that led me to this place.
And away from Malcolm’s bedside.
The Dark Fool held out his eerie hand.
I could not go with him. The baron’s son hung on a precipice between life and death. Yes, I had stopped the disease from taking him, but for how long?
“Release me from the promise,” I demanded, my voice low and rumbly as the air around us.
“Find Glenna some other midwife.” Cold it sounded, and I hated myself for it, just a little.
Yet I felt a tide pulled at me, great waves which I could not resist, however I dug my heels in the sand.
“I have work here to finish. The baron’s son—”
“Slumbers safely in the bower you have made of Faery stuff,” Amadan finished.
My jaw dropped in amazement.
He rolled his eyes. “What? Did you suppose the shadow fae came to the manor only to wish you well?”
Spies, they were. And I no longer had any faith they might guard the baron’s child.
“Glenna Baker is your friend,” Amadan continued. “Would you have her child face the horrors of baptism? Mortals oft throw faery changelings into the fire.”
I knew this already: ’twas a fate I had narrowly avoided, due to the kindness of Mairi Grieve. Clearly, I did not wish this same fate to befall my friend’s bairn.
The pang of guilt and worry was twinned by the invisible sharpness around me, the tight bonds that pulled upon me, the shards that dared to pierce my skin.
It was cruel, this game Amadan played, cruel the choice I must now make. The fate of Glenna’s child or the fate of the baron’s; to break a promise or to sever a bond. My insides grew as fragile as threadbare cloth.
“Come.” He held out an arm, more like an elfin gallant than a lad who barely reached my shoulder. “I know paths to reduce the journey to the blink of an eye.”
I wished to resist. To plant my boots in the mud, and let it turn to stone around them. But I would only leave my boots behind, and if my feet were glued, I must leave them behind as well. Such is the power of a faery’s vow.
And in a moment, I found myself, panting and heaving, outside the house of Eamon Grieve.
The journey had not been smooth. To travel as the Fool does, from shadow to shadow, between the mortal realm and the fae, it is not easy.
The world blurred around me; my head ached with it, and I felt thinned to the barest wisp and turned inside out.
By the time we arrived, it was all I could do to remain upright, and not collapse into the slippery mud.
Amadan, once more a handsome swain, not even wet from the downpour, thumped heavily upon my back. “Ill-accustomed to the Faery ways, you are. ’Tis what becomes of raising a fae creature so far from her home.”
“Oh . . . be . . . off,” I heaved, my hair hanging in sodden clumps, my elegant new kirtle clinging to me with the wet and cold. I straightened, scraped the hair from my face, glanced around myself in dismay.
The Grieve house.
“What trickery is this?” I sputtered. “Dark Fool, why have you brought me here? This is not the Baker house.”
The Fool’s laughter rang out then, melodious yet wicked. Recollections came to me: the gossipy beldames mentioning Glenna had a suitor. The Douglases’ servant saying Eamon Grieve remarried in haste.
The Dark Fool had said he would bring me to Glenna Baker, and those of Faery do not lie.
“No,” I murmured aloud. Eamon was Bess’s father. Glenna, Bess’s peer. That the two of them should wed seemed inconceivable.
For only a moment, Amadan stood there, a smile of pure wickedness contorting his face. “Remember your promise, Bess-you-seem.” Then, in an instant he vanished, and I was left to enter the Grieve household alone.
The grounds were wretched, Mairi’s herbs choked and dying on the vine. I must wend my way through weeds and briars even to make it to the front door.
And there were no beasts. No chickens pecking about the garden, no cow munching on the dead grass. Had I not known Glenna Baker and presumably Eamon Grieve lived here, I would have thought the home abandoned for years.
What has become of you, false father? You had the means for a loft, and nearly your own oven before I left.
Your father served as reeve, and you supported eight children.
You may not have been a kind father, but none of us starved.
Now we have grown, and the house falls apart.
The thatching smelled of rot; the door appeared to hang off its hinges when I pushed it aside to enter.
Such a decline hardly seemed of natural means.
To cross the threshold was an eerie sensation, like pushing against the wind. Yet I had been in and out of this house many times before without resistance. The house, filled with good Christians, had not then seen me as a foe.
It was less sure of me now.
A miasma of foul scents assaulted me as I entered: dead rodent, I thought, spoiled milk, rotting food.
The pottage upon the hearth had burned, been filled again, and burned again.
Rushes were strewn sparsely across the floor, barely enough to cushion the feet.
Cobwebs hung in every corner and the air was stale and full of sick.
It had become so small, this house I grew up in, chokingly so. There are homes not merely lived in, but loved in. These will always feel spacious, no matter how tiny; no matter how bare, they will always seem full.
The Grieve farmhouse was not one of these.