Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
“You think this endeavor folly.” I sat mounted on my white steed in the courtyard and glanced over at Amadan as he mounted his own.
My words were a challenge, and they were not. I was queen, and not to be argued with or criticized in any way. Amadan, however, was my Fool, and permitted liberties no one else might enjoy. This could prove to be an interesting discussion indeed.
He sat rigidly straight, his face placid, but a storm brewing in his eyes. “Well, and I am the Dark Fool. Should I not be master of your folly?”
So, in other words, yes.
I had asked him to take me to the changelings.
Since I first arrived in Faery, the curiosity had eaten at me, this wondering about the girl whose place I took.
Whose mother I had known and loved, while she herself lived deprived of family, away from the mortal realm.
Guilt sat warm beneath my skin and heavy in my belly, made all the worse because I knew it was a mortal, not faery, thing.
A rain of questions spilled forth inside me as we rode out together.
How do the mortal children fare, away from their kin, apart even from their own kind?
Jamie’s kin had been atrocious, and I did not for a moment regret sending him out of the mortal realm.
But to what sort of life had I condemned Bess Grieve?
Whether I was truly ready to find out, I cannot say.
The Fool made a whickering noise, and his steed moved apace with mine. A peculiar iridescence glinted off its sleek coat, and for a moment, its eyes shone green as its master’s. I stroked my mount’s mane and whispered to her, “I would stay clear of him if I were you.”
Amadan pretended not to hear me. “Your Majesty, if I may be so bold?”
“I would be astonished if you were otherwise.”
He did not smile. “We have never had a queen who lived as a changeling before. ’Tis usually reserved for the old and infirm, or for infants whose mothers cannot produce enough milk. Faery does not look kindly upon, or even know what to do with, those reared in the mortal world.”
As I was. I sat taller in my saddle, making every effort to look not merely unperturbed, but unperturbable. “And your point is?”
“Until you lose the very essence of who you have been, you will never become the queen you were meant to be.”
The queen I was meant to be. Amadan’s words were a far cry from what Thomas had told me long ago: that I could become anyone I want. Queens do not have such freedom, after all.
Amadan lowered his voice to a timbre best suited for the bedroom. “She is only an identity you once assumed.” He did not need to explain that “she” was Bess Grieve.
No, she isn’t. Bess Grieve was a stolen life, loved and lost by the woman I in turn had loved and lost. We were strangers, yet she was everything to me.
I cocked my head. “Could you wear the face of another almost your entire life and not be curious what they were like?”
“Who’s to say I haven’t?” He chuckled at my look of horror, and there was a bite to it like the edge of a sharpened blade. “No one’s appearance should be trusted here. The sooner you learn that, the better.”
I thought of Lord Elidor, so fair of face and foul of speech. Of Amadan himself, who was a handsome swain most times, but sometimes a wolf, a Huntsman, or a walking corpse. Yet it was his advice I took now.
I stared straight forward, silent for a moment. “Well,” I said finally, “perhaps this is how I shall say goodbye to my former self. Face to face.”
“Indeed.” He did not sound convinced.
We continued along the path from the palace. At times it seemed we rode into the winter: frost coated the still-blooming primrose and columbine, and the trees were in full leaf, though dusted with snow.
This cannot be my doing. I have my emotions well in hand.
But while I rode with the Dark Fool, I could not trust I had anything well in hand.
Soon we came upon a fenced garden, blanketed with snow.
A cottage stood behind, like the dream of a crofter’s house, if it were newly built and never suffered the wear of weather and rain.
The sun hung overhead in a sky cerulean, not the deep blue of twilight.
My face turned towards it, and felt no warmth, even while I shuttered my eyes against its brightness.
That was not right, was it? I had not seen the sun in ages; I could not recall.
The little garden was filled with children, from wee bairns scarce able to walk, to those around seven or eight years old.
The older children tossed snowballs at one another, ran, and slid upon the snow.
The little ones made snow angels—or was it snow faeries here?
—and toddled about, giggling when they fell on their rears.
This is where I sent Jamie, this place of pleasure and delight. Naught but playtime, with no one to beat on or scold him at all.
If I felt a bit of wistful envy that I had not grown up in this beautiful place, but under the iron rod of Eamon Grieve, I do not think anyone could fault me.
Among the playing children stood taller figures, young women they appeared, mostly, in peasant kirtles or older garments, the costumes of days gone by. They were pale, with a greenish cast to their skin and hair; it almost seemed I could see through them to the trees and bushes standing behind.
“Good morrow,” I said to the nearest of these.
She shrank from me in alarm. Hurt, I turned my puzzled gaze to the Dark Fool.
He swung himself down from his horse, then put his hands on my waist to help me dismount as well. “The minders are shy among adults. The living in general, for that matter, though they love the children.”
I brushed his fingers away as soon as it was safe to do so. “What do you mean, ‘the living’?” I stared at the woman I had attempted to greet. No light of intelligence shone in her eyes.
“Well, they are not, you see,” Amadan explained. “At least, in the mortal realm they come from, they are not.” He wrinkled his nose. “Mayhap they smell the stench of it upon you yet, my liege.”
I ignored the insult. “What are they doing here?” Why is Faery littered with human ghosts?
“They have lost their children. Not to us, but it does not appear to matter.” He shrugged. “In their despair, they wandered into Carterhaugh and passed through the Veil.” His nose wrinkled. “They are not as entertaining as our usual mortal guests, but they perform a task no one else wishes to do.”
Looking after the changelings. “But it is awful!” My heart clenched inside my breast.
“You can send them away, Your Majesty.” Amadan scratched his chin thoughtfully. “To Heaven or Hell if your Christians are right. Or mayhap to nowhere at all. At least here they have some semblance of life.”
A half-life among the fae or death and whatever might follow. What a miserable choice to have to make.
I would not make it for them.
Amadan quirked an eyebrow. “Are you still glad you came?”
I turned my attention towards happier matters, the children playing delightedly in the snow. Some made a snowman, with but one hand, one foot, and a single eye in the middle of its forehead. “A snow-fachan, as I live and breathe.”
“The snow entertains them,” Amadan said. “A kindness, given what is to come.”
“What is to come—oof!” All at once, one of the urchins broke away from the crowd and came barreling into me. I nearly lost my balance, and Amadan made as if to pull the child away, but I held up my hand. I gathered the curly-headed tyke in my arms.
“Wee Jamie!” I exclaimed.
He raised his finger, the one I had bandaged for him many months before.
“Oh, aye,” I said, as Bess-I’d-seemed would have, “your finger is all better now.”
He knew me. With nary a word spoken, that became obvious.
Jamie knew me. Even in this unfamiliar skin, this tall, slender body and blood-red hair, Jamie recognized who I was.
Warmth kindled in my breast, and I had to blink my eyes to keep from weeping.
I squeezed Jamie tight and kissed his forehead.
“You appear to be acquainted,” Amadan said dryly.
I nodded. “He is my neph—” I could not finish it. Jamie was no nephew of mine. “We are old friends, Jamie and I.” To the boy, I asked, “Are you happy here then, little man?”
I had never meant to send him away to be raised by ghosts.
Jamie grinned and nodded, growing heavy in my arms. How much time has passed? I wondered. How much has he grown? Mayhap it did not matter. What mattered was, this one changeling at least we had not deprived of a loving home. And maybe among the others were children who were happier here as well.
I set Jamie down, and he ran off to play.
“Well, now,” said the Dark Fool. “You have seen to the changelings’ welfare, and we may go. It is clear they are subject to no harm—”
Before he could finish this thought, a little girl playing nearby caught a flying snowball smack in her face.
The child stood motionless with her mouth open, too stunned to cry. Her nose bled; it dripped down her face and onto the snowy ground . . . but where it fell was snowy no longer. The artificial winter lifted, the snow vanished as though it had never been, and the grass became lush and green.
And hungry.
The minders froze in place, flesh fading but their eyes burning bright.
“Mine,” one of them whispered, and began to approach the spilled blood.
I cried out, but Amadan held me back with an arm.
“They think it will restore their flesh,” he said. “But the blood was spilled in Faery, and it is Hers.”
The ghost maiden had been too late. The blades of grass lapped up the blood like a thousand tiny tongues. I should have been repulsed. Instead, this seemed natural, and I stared in abject fascination.
How the ground had hungered for this, how much did Faery thirst.
My pulse quickened and my belly fluttered. Hunger, thirst, and desire pressed upon me, and an appetite far darker, more demanding. It frightened me in its intensity, yet at the same time, I’d never felt more alive.
I am Faery, and Faery is me. And if my emotions governed her weather, her seasons, whether it was day or night, I was also subject to her hungers and needs.
Where the blood had spilled, a snowdrop sprang, luminous and perfect as the dawn.
The minders retreated into silence, eyes dimming, flesh becoming more diffuse, expressions growing placid again.
The injured child began to cry. Children clustered around her, asking what was wrong, didn’t her nose look big now, cor it was disgusting, wasn’t it, though?
My disgust was for the devouring ground beneath me, and the hunger we had briefly shared.
“Blood is easily come by,” said the Fool. “But Faery starves for want of souls.”
And this is the lot I have thrown myself in with.
Shame washed over me, burning in my cheeks, and thickening in my throat.
I pushed the other children gently away and pulled the child’s hands away from her injured nose.
“’Tis all right, sweeting. I do not believe it is broken, though it may be swollen for a bit.
” It mattered not that I was the queen and would be getting blood on my gown.
Someone was wounded, and she needed my help.
I was wrenched away by a hand on my shoulder.
“I will take care of that, thank you very much,” said a strangely familiar voice, one I had heard many times before, but never from this vantage.
I turned and stood face-to-face with the true Bess Grieve.