Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Propped on one elbow, Amadan languidly stretched out, displaying to their best advantage the toned muscles of his long legs. He wore velvet in the green of the deepest forest; a crown of ivy encircled his ebon curls.
Flame coursed inside me. I wanted to throw it at his head. I wanted to carve out his liver with my own perfect nails and feed it to the devouring earth below.
He had led the Hunt against my Thomas, then disappeared completely. I never thought I would see him again.
The bark upon my bedpost trees curled up and grew black. Roses dropped from the canopy, smoke rising like incense in some ancient temple, but it could not overpower the scent of forest loam and green moss, that touch of innocence made profane.
The overwhelming air of the Dark Fool.
He could not be here now. Had he any chance of buying my good will, it had long since passed.
“Amadan, go!” I waved my hands at him, and sparks flew from my fingers, sputtered out and dropped like ash to the carpet of grass.
He slowly sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and winding his arms sinuously around the bedpost. “Now is that any welcome for someone you as much as summoned?”
Did he not know what a perfect target he made in that position? If only I had a bow and arrow.
“When did I summon you?” I surely would have recalled such a dreadful lapse in judgment.
Every hair on my body pricked up. I felt as though I grew larger, more formidable, someone to be feared.
Amadan scratched his chin. “What was it you said, again? ‘The Dark Fool, does he make no appearance before the mortal moon grows full, I will bar from Faery evermore.’ Your exact words, my liege.” A wicked grin crossed his features. “But, little changeling, I have told you. I come and go at will.”
I closed my eyes and slowed my breath; opened them again and looked him straight in the eyes. “My name is Fia, not ‘little changeling.’ For you, it is ‘Your Majesty.’ And I will not be gainsaid.”
Amadan straightened, lifting his brows in mock innocence as he leapt off the bed. “I do beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” he said, in a tone suggesting he did nothing of the sort. He made a big show of smoothing the covers, then stood before me, hands clasped, eyes wide, meek as a small child.
As if I buy that for a moment.
Holding my fists closed and keeping all my anger inside me took more control than I would have sworn I possessed. “Where have you been?”
He pouted just enough to draw my attention to his sensuous lips.
I would like to slice them off with a knife.
“Your Majesty is sending me conflicting messages,” he said. “You are angry I am here, but first you were upset I was not. How do you truly feel?”
Like I would burn you to cinders and let the redcaps piss on your ashes.
“You missed my coronation,” I said coolly. “I chose my council today, and you were not there.”
“Oh, I would have made an abysmal advisor, Your Majesty. Nor have you seemed eager to take my counsel in the past.”
“That is not the point. I needed you to lead the revels at my coronation. You should have been present. The council would have had your head.”
“I needed time to think.” Amadan scratched the side of his cheek.
I imagined there the palest shadow of a rountree branch, marking his skin.
“Queen Una died eighteen years ago. We were a people without a leader. A people suffering from the absence of one. Twice seven years and more past, and the Teind was not paid. You do not know what danger we were in.” He swallowed roughly. “Are in?”
All at once, the flower canopy over my bed collapsed in a shower of petals, which dried to dust and blew away.
The bedposts turned skeletal, pitted as bone; the green carpet beneath us turned brown, then dried up completely; the floor became rock-hard.
Through the windows the skies turned a hideous shade, red seen through their veil of green, until that died as well, becoming brown and rust. I smelled bone dust and metal, almost choking on the dryness of the air. My nose bled.
This is a trick. Some illusion. The Dark Fool is master of those.
I was Queen of Faery. Surely, I could see through his illusions.
Amadan glided forward, his face a skull upon which clung only a few bare strands of ebon hair.
He placed fingers of cold bone on my shoulders.
“Then there you were, seemingly the answer to all our problems. The child we never knew existed. I am not the only one who questioned our seeming good fortune, I am certain.”
I thought of Lord Elidor and his partisans, who resented Una for having chosen a mortal lover over them.
I pulled away in revulsion, even as the nightmare vision vanished, and the Fool turned comely again. I stared out the window. The courtyard erupted with flowers. A little faun and a young boy around three played there together—my eyes snagged for a moment on the one’s red-gold curls. Jamie.
“And now?” I demanded. “Are you convinced I have the power to restore the land?” I rested my hand on the bedpost. From out of my vibrating fingers grew lush vines, curling their way upwards and sprouting leaves and flowers along the way.
The branches grew heavy with fruit, and I plucked an apple, glistening gold.
I bit into it, and the taste was sweeter than any fruit I had ever known.
I am the land; the land is me.
Amadan’s face softened, an almost mortal concern in his eyes.
“If only it were so simple.” His voice was gentle, lacking the hint of mockery that brought out the fire in my blood.
“The land has suffered greater neglect than you know. Than the others see. It hungers for more than its ruler restored. Your healing powers will not be enough.”
The fruit grew tasteless in my mouth.
“You say this to frighten me, for some evil scheme all your own.”
He shook his head slowly. “I am not scheming. Not in this.”
My eyes widened; my fingers went instinctively to stroke the birthmark that had once marked my throat.
Amadan moved close to me again, and he was his irresistible self once more—not to mention irritatingly taller than my new form. “What you need right now,” he whispered, “is a friend.”
My skin prickled. The scent of him, his overwhelming nearness surrounded me, sending my senses into a frenzy.
With enormous difficulty, like wading through a thick bog, I took a step away from him, turning my back.
“I have always needed a friend,” I said.
“When I was a changeling, with little idea of my true nature, belonging neither in this world nor the one above, I needed a friend. When I lived as a peasant girl, ignored and mistreated by the only family I knew, when Mairi Grieve was dying and recognized me not, when the man I called father cast me out of my home, with no place for me to go, all those times I needed a friend.” I spun on my heels to face him. “Where were you then?”
Piping in the forest, seducing young maidens. This was where Amadan had been. He as much as told me I was useless. Well, now I had no need of him. I stared, unspeaking, allowing my eyes, deep as garnets and sharp as knives, to reprimand him for me.
“I deserve that, I suppose.” Amadan ran his teeth over his lower lip like a nervous youth, tucked a curl behind his pointed ear. “Your Majesty, allow me to atone for my past behavior.”
A rare earnestness colored his tone. Resist it. Resist him. Though he looked like a boy now, no older than Bess-I-had-seemed, nervous and shy, he was not. Trickster, I had named him. Seducer. Fool.
He remained all those things. None of it had changed.
I snorted. “Why should I give you another chance?”
He swallowed, still appearing mortally awkward, no doubt aware I found that hard to resist. “Because you are our most magnanimous and gracious queen.” His hand cupped my cheek, and heat radiated off his body, pulling me closer. “You are Una’s blood, Fia. You have powers beyond your ken.”
He took my hand, and I stared at our joined fingers.
His were still too long. His scent overwhelmed me, which I had first smelled when Mairi Grieve caught the affliction that took her life.
You killed her, Amadan. I know she was naught but a mortal mayfly to you, but Mairi was as everything to me.
How can I possibly trust you after that?
Yet I did not move away.
“I saw what you were capable of, even untrained and in the mortal realm,” Amadan oozed. “You can do more here, with me as your guide. Think of all you can achieve.”
I recalled Thomas’s leg, the baroness’s plague, and the delivery of Glenna Baker’s child.
Of young Jamie, whom I had sent away from his malicious parents, into this land of marvels where no one would hurt him again.
The tinkling laughter of a child came from the garden outside. My eyes flew to the windows.
Amadan could not be trusted, but he could be used.
Like a seed newly planted in the springtime, beginning to send forth shoots, an idea popped into my head.
“My queen.” The Fool’s lips parted, and I wondered what sweet intoxication one might taste upon them. “There is no limit to what you and I can do.”
I moved closer, and his head lowered, so our lips were only inches apart. “I want to believe in you,” I whispered against the side of his face. “I want to work together. But you must prove yourself first.”