Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
My heart yet craved its shepherd king. The words spoken between us did not matter; what his father demanded of him counted for nothing.
I still felt his fingers lightly brushing the rose at the side of my throat, heard him saying, “I am proud of you, my Bess,” as no one ever had before, mayhap no one would again.
I longed to feel my flesh pressed against his on our rough straw mattress, the dog Cullen curled in contentment on the cottage floor.
I deserved these things. I should have these things.
I should demand Thomas recant what he said, that he would marry Margaret, that it was his duty to do so with his brother dead and he the baron’s only heir.
My claim was not to be forsaken. I am not to be forsaken, said a voice inside me, a voice which frightened me a little, truly.
We have a bond. The thread of it still encircled my broken heart.
But Thomas was a free man. Thomas had a choice, and love would not allow me to take it from him.
And so, I would leave this mortal realm. Faery called, and I would go.
My heart of flesh pounded in my breast, and my feet slapped against the path, slick with wet and carpeted by fallen leaves. Tree limbs brushed against my clothing, and it felt like caresses, like I was something holy, and they wanted a touch. ’Twas comforting and alarming, both at once.
Then my vision changed, revealing the world beyond the edges of mere human sight.
Here and there tiny faces peeked their way out of the undergrowth, not wild beasts, or not only wild beasts, but winged creatures, twig-like men whose limbs had too many joints, delicate maidens who bore beasts’ heads like masks.
The Veil parted, and Faery poured out into the mortal realm.
Hair rose on my arms and legs, and the air around me buzzed with magic.
Three times I had resisted this call. I no longer understood why or how. The mortal realm was full of heartbreak and, regardless of our bond, the man I loved could not protect me from that.
He was only a man, after all.
“Were you ever truly mine, O Shepherd King?” I asked. “For all you loved me, I may have been only one of your light women in the end.”
Claim him, my inner voice commanded. His will is naught, fragile mortal he is. Take him for your own.
No.
I sniffled and shook my head. Love grew inside me, like a diseased plant I should long since have torn up, lest it infect the entire garden.
Love could not protect me from iron, or the insidious cross.
It could not give me the one thing I thought I had wanted.
If I could, I would have torn the heart from my very breast, that I should not need to feel such misery any longer.
Instead, I headed home.
A heavy weight fell from me, something I could not bear to look at or consider, lest I find myself weeping at the loss. Better to lock that part of me away. It would be easier.
Ever had I been two people: the seeming of Bess Grieve, and the fae I was inside.
With the parting of the Veil, Bess went silent, and my fae side took over.
I ran for the joy of it, like a bounding hart or the currents of a river after a hard rain.
My feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.
I outran everything I had been, all the roles I had played, every expectation forced upon me, however unreasonable they might have been.
From now on, I would be governed by my will alone.
The world will be governed by your will alone.
I heard these words in the rustling of leaves, the call of nightbirds, and the whisper of the winds through the grass.
From far behind me came the sound of hoofbeats, and possibly, at the far edges of my awareness, the baying of hounds.
This stopped me short, breathing heavily, ears pricked up. Hunting on Samhain. What fools these mortals are after all. The Veil between mortal earth and Faery grew thin. The wise kept to their homes on this night, for, as Mairi Grieve told me, the Wild Hunt seeks its prey.
I paused to listen, fought the urge to keep running, endlessly running without thinking, losing myself in the forest, losing all separate awareness completely. Why should I cling to mortal weakness and fragility?
They belonged to someone I no longer was.
Yet I could not ignore the hounds.
Nor the cry that came from the far edge of the forest. “Bess!”
Thomas.
What was he doing here?
What business is it of yours now? Do not stop for the shepherd. He is the Baron de Lyne’s, not yours.
My protection could hold Thomas no longer. But I?
I had not given up my claim.
The forest shadows deepened, grew colder. The trees curled with menace, and where once the night creatures seemed adoring and precious, now they snarled at me like vicious beasts. My welcome was conditional, it appeared.
So be it. I would not be obedient to a wood.
In time, the wood shall be obedient to you.
“Bess!” Thomas called again, with greater urgency, his voice ringing out through the forest.
Bess is not my name.
Yet I knew no other.
“Bess, come back. It is not safe for you out here.”
It was safer for me in the forest than for him, with the Veil thin and the Hunt on the prowl.
“Go away, Thomas.” I forced the words out, as though I had not spoken in years. “We have parted, you and I. You said it yourself.”
But he came for me. That had to mean something.
The shepherd king worries whether I might be lost or devoured by beasts. Even while he mourns his brother and makes peace with his father, plans to marry another. I am not forgotten after all.
Not forgotten meant not forgetting. Not forgetting meant I could not leave him behind.
A horn sounded, cutting through the forest air. Hoofbeats pounded, unearthly, like thunder. The forest thrummed with vibrations, which shot into my bones. If I glanced behind me, I would see the Hunters riding their spectral horses, their hounds slavering over the scent of mortal blood.
“Wood nymph, please—” He broke off into a scream of pure terror.
What it sparked in me, I cannot explain. I was as a she-bear, defending her cubs. The Wild Hunt would not take my shepherd king. I had protected Thomas once before. I could do it again.
With deliberate speed I turned and ran away from the Veil, towards the mortal world that had shut me out. Towards the sound of Thomas’s voice.
In the distance, the hounds bayed, and I heard a howling deep and mournful as an enchanted flute.
Above my head, cloudy shapes of horses and horned riders rode through the night sky.
Sparks flew from their hooves; their armor was as shadow but creaked like the grinding of bones.
A shock of terror rocked my mortal heart, while the fae inside me knew recognition and dread-filled stillness.
The Hunt dogged my heels, but their hunger was for Thomas.
They would not take him on my watch.
I kept running, and my feet slid upon the leafy path.
The tree branches no longer caressed me, but snagged on and tore my clothing, tripping me.
We were no longer partners, this forest and I.
Yet I ran as a doe runs, bounding through the ferns until I came upon a clearing in the woods, where I was certain no clearing had been before.
And there lay Thomas, fallen from his steed, which was nowhere to be found.
“Your beast knew well enough to avoid us,” I muttered under my breath, as I bent beside him.
And then, louder. “I forbid you to come or go by Carterhaugh, Thomas Shepherd. There are safer paths for a mortal like you.” If the Hunt should pursue him again, or Amadan did, I might not be around to intervene.
Save him or not, I could not play this game among the mortals any longer. I had grown too large for that skin.
Thomas’s limbs shuddered, askew in a way I misliked greatly, like a doll abandoned by a small child. Even worse than the angle of his body was the expression on his face. His eyes stared wildly, his mouth gaped wide with horror, like some grotesque carved onto a chapel wall.
I feared his wits lost, his body broken, that he might never be the shepherd I knew and loved again.
I turned around to see many armed warriors behind us, horned and with skeletal faces, the largest and most ancient with a spear at Thomas’s throat.
When the Hunt comes to a people, it means war. When it comes to a man, it means his death, and he meets neither rest nor salvation at the End of Days.
This I could not allow.
I stepped in front of Thomas.
The breath of the hounds blew hot on my skin, and the stench of rot rose from the bodies of the host. Rot and grave dust and yet somehow, the slight tang of flesh.
An air of moss and loam and something innocent turned foul and profane.
My eyebrows raised, and I noticed one among their number whose face was shadowed almost completely.
When the moonlight hit it, it illuminated flesh, not bone.
Amadan Dubh.
Again.
Bile rose inside me, curdling my belly. False trickster. Liar.
He had sworn to do no harm to Thomas. Had told me, “I will leave the shepherd be until you are done with him, and care not whether the wild beasts should tear him limb from limb.”
If and when that time should come, I would be the one to make the choice.
Thomas moaned; he might have whispered my name, too soft to hear.
The Hunters held themselves still. Perhaps their spears lowered a bit. They seemed only slightly less likely to kill me than they would my love.
“Who dares to stand between the Hunt and its quarry?” said their leader, the Horned One. His voice echoed through his helm like a great cavern, roaring like the sea. Every sound to ever frighten fae or mortal resonated in his voice.
I swallowed my fear and squared my shoulders. “I do.”
“Half-blood.” The Horned One’s head dipped slightly, eyeless sockets passing over me like footsteps over my grave. “We have of yet no quarrel with you. Leave us our prey.”
“Yet I do have quarrel with you.” My eyes fixed upon the Dark Fool as I summoned stony rage. “There is one among you who has sworn he will cause the shepherd no harm.”
“Is there?” said the Horned One. “But what shepherd is this? I had thought him a nobleman instead.”
“That does not matter. There are rules, and I will hold you to them. I have claimed this man, and he is under my protection. He will not be harmed by the likes of you.”
Then, horribly, the Lord of the Hunt began to laugh—a malicious sound, chuckling at someone else’s misfortune, a gleeful, triumphant gloat. “Your bond is broken. Your man allies himself with another instead.”
Margaret of Roxburgh. It hurt, oh, how it hurt to admit this truth.
“Nevertheless, you cannot make him your prey,” I insisted. “I will not have it. I have not released my claim.”
The Horned One took a step forward, flooding my senses with the chill of dread. “Who are you that we must heed your will?” Something in his voice made it more than a simple challenge. This question stood at the crux of all I had experienced thus far, and everything to come.
Who was I?
“I . . .” I faltered, on the cusp of discovery. I am who the wolf says I am. I will deny it no longer. Manipulative as he may be, even the Dark Fool cannot lie.
The Wild Hunt waited, and the forest waited with them, eerily still, excruciatingly silent. Like a criminal about to make my last confession, I still might find execution on the other side.
The answer they craved was on the tip of my tongue.
I am called Bess, youngest daughter of Eamon Grieve. But it is not who I am. I am the cuckoo’s child, given to Mairi Grieve, who served our late, beloved Queen Una as midwife.
No. Not given to Mairi Grieve. Taken by Mairi Grieve.
I pictured her standing in the doorway of the old cruck house, shouting at the fae outside: “Ye will not take what I have claimed!” And later, her whisper, “I was only trying to protect a child.”
Which child? Whose?
Una’s daughter had a mortal father. So had Amadan said. The babe would have been half mortal like I was.
Had she survived.
Mortals can lie.
A quiet assurance welled forth from my inner core.
The Lord of the Hunt spoke like thunder receding in the distance. “Can you answer, changeling? Do you at last know your true nature?”
I must reply. There was no other salvation for Thomas, or for me.
“I was raised by a mortal midwife, Mairi Grieve. She was brought to Faery to deliver the daughter of the queen.” A queen who died, but bore a living daughter, who would claim the throne of Faery in time.
It appeared that time was now.
“I am that daughter,” I said in quiet wonder.
All at once, in a terrifying creak of armor, the cadaverous Huntsmen dropped to their knees. The forest filled with a radiant green light and in a single voice, horrifying and glorious, they spoke.
“My queen.”