Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
I sat before my mother-of-pearl vanity, its mirror surrounded by sea nymphs etched in a frame of gold.
The little nymphs moved as living creatures, strumming upon tiny harps of gold, or chasing each other’s tails as they swam—magical, but the view in the glass itself transfixed me more.
Blood-red hair spilled in a torrent past my hips; my eyes were either black or brown or red, depending on the angle of the light.
Like all the Aos Sith, I had cheekbones high and sculpted, and lips perfectly shaped, deep red, and swollen as if they had just been kissed.
It was a beautiful face. An inhuman face.
And, for the first time ever, my own.
Did my mother look like this? I wondered. Was Una fair-haired or dark? Did she have dimples, the same arch in her brow? Will my people see her in me? Will they even know who I am?
But if Una had left her mark in my features, it was Mairi Grieve who left her mark on my heart.
“Do not squirm so, Your Majesty,” said the tree-wight now styling my crimson locks. “The plaits will be crooked if you do.” Her skin was wood-dark, fingers rough as bark; I marveled that they did not snag upon my hair.
In my memories I heard another voice. “Och, don’t ye wiggle, bairn,” Mairi Grieve would tell me while she plaited my hair, “lest ye end up with one plait sticking out like a pissing cow’s tail.” She had made me giggle and her calloused hands were gentle while she smoothed out the knots.
I had become a different person since then. Lost Bess’s round curves and red-gold hair, cast aside her birthmark to become a rosebush blooming deep in Carterhaugh’s forest.
I had returned to the place I belonged, but it remained unfamiliar and new.
My handmaid passed her hand over my nightclothes, and they changed into a flowing gown.
The silky fabric, the same shade as my skin, clung scandalously over my bosom and shoulders, making it difficult to tell where I ended, and the gown began.
From the hem up, branches grew all around me, over my hips and waist, along my arms up to my shoulders, here and there dotted with glistening gems. I might have stood amid a wintry forest when the snow has not fallen, but the tree limbs shimmer with a hit of frost.
My garnet hair she adorned with pearls, and my pearly throat she encircled with a garnet-encrusted torc, that opened like a rosebud as it dipped towards my breasts.
I touched it in wonder, for the shape reminded me of the birthmark I had once borne, though not so warm or soft.
What would the shepherd think if he saw me thus?
A thorn caught upon my finger, and the drop welled up like the garnets at my throat.
“Oh, be careful, Your Majesty!” the tree-wight cried, and caught my hand in her own.
Gently she cupped it, then brought her thumb to her mouth.
With sharp little fangs she bit into it, and sap welled up instead of blood.
Then she rubbed the sap into my wounded finger, which stung for a moment.
Then, to my wondering eyes, the wound disappeared.
I raised the hand before me, flawless, perfect, no sight of any injury, recent or no. This skin had no history, no past.
“You healed me,” I breathed in awe. “I do not feel the pain.”
The wight tittered. “And what sort of attendant would I be if I let you feel pain? If you bled all over your beautiful dress?” She went back to tucking in a wayward plait.
She took away my pain. Faery took away my pain. And if the land could do that, what other wounds might it heal? Even ones I could not see?
I envisioned dark curls and grey eyes, then, with a violent push inside me, banished the vision from my thoughts.
“You look wondrous.” The tree-wight smiled. “Are you ready to claim your crown? The land craves ceremony, and its people need to celebrate.”
I smiled in the mirror and at the tree-wight, this time taking comfort in how inhuman it all appeared. “Yes,” I said finally. “I believe I am.”
It would only sting for a moment, after all.
Faery has no chapel or priests. It gives no place to the glory of God, for our only glory is ourselves. To mortal reasoning, we have no sense of the sacred or the divine. This mortal reasoning, like all other mortal things in my experience, lies.
Nothing could feel more sacred than the oak grove where I was to be crowned queen.
The trees shone with dancing tarrans, flickering lights that rendered the twilit sky as bright as day.
Every flower bloomed at once, impossibly, but was it not also impossible for any of these plants to grow without sunlight?
The cunning woman in me struggled to understand.
I was the cunning woman no longer.
I had become Faery, and Faery was me.
“Is it not magnificent, Your Grace?”
My thoughts were interrupted by the knight Lyel, who stood by my side and offered me his arm.
He cut a handsome figure today, garbed all in ivory and gold, with his buttery hair flowing down his back.
He still reminded me of his kinswoman, the chatelaine Lileas.
Would that she might stand beside me today as well.
I smiled as I took Lyel’s arm. “It is lovely indeed.” The scents of calendula and primrose, cowslips and rich green earth rose upon the breeze to fill my senses and lift my spirits.
No sunlight shone upon us, and yet I felt a rich warmth, as one coming in from the cold to sit by the fire.
The lightness, the joy, the pure happiness seemed strong enough to lift me airborne, did I not cling to the arm of my escort beside me.
It was all new, but somehow familiar as well, as though I had passed through the world I had known and saw it from the other side. The green grove and deep-blue sky recalled fair Carterhaugh, where twice I had saved a man’s life.
I would not be able to do it again. From now on, Thomas Shepherd—or, I should call him, Thomas de Lyne—would have to save himself.
A chill seized me, and all around us, the air grew cold.
The breeze picked up, teasing loose tendrils from my intricate braids.
Goose bumps prickled over my exposed shoulders and collarbones.
Half the tarrans in the tree branches grew dim.
Dark clouds amassed like the Hunt overhead, threatening rain.
I looked to Lyel in some alarm.
His pale eyes stared ahead, expressionless. “The grove is beautiful because you are,” he said. “You are Faery and Faery is you.” Just as Lileas had told me that morning. It fell heavier upon my ears now.
I had been content, joyful even, and the weather had been clear; the pixies danced merrily, and all around me was as spring in bloom. One wistful touch of melancholy, however, and the weather threatened to turn as well. Faery reflected how I felt whether I wished it to or not.
Must I now maintain my emotions, my very spirit, lest by contagion the land itself should suffer? I thought of my wasteland visions and shuddered inside.
How could one person carry all that, and allow herself to feel anything at all?
Who do you become, I had once asked Thomas, when everyone who told you who you were is gone?
Anyone you want, Thomas had replied.
The shepherd king had lied.
Because I am Faery, and Faery is me.
It was less freedom than I had ever known.
All manner of fae creatures had gathered for my coronation, from the tiny pixies to giants so broad and tall I could only see their legs, barely distinguishable from the oak trees surrounding them.
So many beautiful and outlandish creatures, dressed in their richest finery: silk and velvet, feathers and blossoms and leaves.
Some creatures did not bother with clothing, but shone their horns as smooth as glass, or dotted their shaggy hair with blossoms, clay beads, and stones.
And those were just the fae I could see.
There must be others, for we are creatures bred of shadow, oft spied only from the corner of the eye.
I walked among them: Aos Sith to sylph, moss maiden to nixie, each more radiant than the last. Like the blazing sunset they were to the mortals’ skies of grey.
Once I would have shrunk beside them, feeling myself fleshy and plain, but now I must believe myself their equal in loveliness, in grace, in that indescribable sense of the numinous radiating through our skin.
Yet, at the same time, I recalled the rough touch of a shepherd’s fingers against my once-fuller hips, cupping my heavier breasts, and a tang of melancholy flooded me that I could never let reach my face.
A choir of panpipes played, their music interwoven with wordless singing, somewhere between human voices and birdsong, beautiful enough it made me cry. If heartbreak had a sound, if joy a melody, the song contained them all.
It reminded me of a flute, played light and seductive, or deep and mournful, as the howl of a wolf.
If all Faery assembles here, where is the Dark Fool?
I told myself it did not matter. Amadan said he was second in power only to the queen. Well, I was that queen. I should care as little for his opinions as he had that half-blood changeling girl.
Yet in all of Faery, at least Amadan had been a familiar face.
I stumbled slightly, and Lyel caught me.
“Your Majesty, are you all right?” Concern furrowed his brow.
How appropriate. For wasn’t the Dark Fool like a pebble in my path? “Where is he?” I whispered. “Where is the Fool?”
“My apologies,” said Lyel, “but a coronation is a serious occasion, not one which needs his brand of entertainment. We can summon him for the feast afterwards if you like.”
I more than liked. I needed. Something told me I must keep an eye upon Amadan.
“Find him,” I said with more urgency that I should have displayed. I placed my free hand to my breast and took a deep breath, giving a reassuring smile. “’Twill be a merry feast indeed then.”
Lyel nodded and made a discreet gesture to a guardsman on the edge of the crowd, who then disappeared.
We moved on, gliding across the grass as though our feet barely touched the ground.
Behind us, fair sylphs tended to my train.
In front of me, a child skipped, tossing petals from his basket, dressed in green, with a jaunty cap upon his red-gold curls.
When he reached the center of the grove, the wee bairn bowed, peeling off to join a little goat boy around the same age.
They clasped hands and giggled, prating to each other in a tongue only they might understand.
I recognized the boy.
Wee Jamie.
Here in Faeryland, as I had promised. Safe, with no one to ever raise a hand to him again.
My heart grew full. I clasped my hand to my breast, blinking back the tears. He has even made a friend.
Lyel released me, moving to stand beside the other handsome Aos Sith, who would serve as my knights and attendants.
I held my head high as from out of the grove a single tree stepped forward.
No, he was a fae, but as wizened and ancient as any I had ever seen, his skin brown as bark, like the tree-wight this morning, his hair grizzled and green as lichen as it tumbled around his aged face.
Oaks grow mightier the older they become, and this one seemed ancient as Faery itself.
“Daughter of Una.” He spoke with a voice old and echoing as if from the bottom of an infinite chasm. “Are you ready to accept the burden of ruling this land?”
The burden. Of seeing my every mood reflected in its nature. Of preventing the dark wasteland shown to me by the Fool from coming to pass.
I am not, something cried out inside me. It was all pretense, wasn’t it? A mummer’s play in which I gladly participated, though I knew my own unworthiness.
Mortal thoughts, mortal lies these were. But I was Una’s daughter above everything else.
I am Faery and Faery is me. And the land Herself seemed to take over me, guiding my every movement and assuring me of what to do.
I took a deep breath. “I am.”
“Do you swear to rule the fae with just wisdom, according to ancient custom and sacred tradition, while you have the power to do so and to the end of your days?”
“I do.”
“Do you promise to honor the land of Faery as your own mother, to put Her needs before your own, to guard and protect Her to the best of your abilities and to the end of your days?”
Which mother? Both had abandoned me in the end.
Yet I must continue. “I do.” I bent low to the ground and kissed it, as a vassal might his ruler’s signet.
For all I was the queen, there remained yet something greater than me: the loam and the lush grass, the creatures unearthly and bizarre who dwelt in this place, where life came not from the light of the sun or fall of the rain.
I rose to my knees again, and the Old One held forth a crown.
Silver spikes alternated with golden leaves, and thorny roses twined all around it.
Beauty marked with pain, ephemeral blooms captured in eternal, untarnished stone.
When he placed it upon my brow, I knew a heavy sense of rightness, as if the crown had been there, unseen, all along.
“Then rise, Fia, Daughter of Una, Queen of the Underhill and Ruler of the Fae.” He held out a branchlike arm, which I took, and rose to my feet.
For the first time, as Queen Fia, I faced my people, arms raised as tree limbs do to the nourishing sun. All around me a cacophony arose, and the entire assembly cried out at once.
“Welcome, Queen Fia. Welcome to your new home.”