Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
The changelings were gone.
Their minders wept, tears without substance leaving trails along their diaphanous green skin.
They tore their hair, and their sobs were more painful to my ears than the banshees’ cry, for their lingering mortality rendered it so.
But I had no responsibility to these wretched creatures.
I did not bring them to Faery, I had not stolen away their children or ruined their lives.
I turned from them and steered my mount away from where the changelings had dwelt, riding behind the Dark Fool, with Jamie seated before me on my saddle.
I would not leave him behind to be raised by ghosts. Let him stay in my palace; it was too large for just Lileas and myself, and the garden wanted for children to laugh and play.
“You can sleep under a sky glinting of starlight,” I whispered to him, “or in a chamber like the depths of the sea. Wouldn’t you like that, my love?”
He nodded, at first, I believed in agreement—but no, he was nodding over, lulled by the rhythm of the horses’ hoofbeats into a fitful sleep.
Heavily I felt the Dark Fool’s silence and disapproval at my back. “I suppose you think freeing the changelings was wrong—”
“Wrong?” Amadan cut me off with laugh. “You are queen here. Nothing you do is ever wrong, and nothing we fae do is ever sin. Banish such notions from your mind.”
I began to, I hoped. “There is no shame in Faery. Understood.”
“Recklessness is another matter,” he continued. “Did it not occur to your mortal-stained mind we weren’t done with the changelings yet?”
Done with the changelings. My skin went cold.
Amadan had said the changelings were our surety against the Teind.
We seduced mortals. Danced them to death.
Brought them to the Underhill as slaves, or entertainment, and returned them only when everyone they ever knew had died.
It was unthinking, or it was deliberately cruel.
It was nothing mortal children should ever have to endure.
I glanced at the slumbering Jamie, cooed to him, ran my fingers across his ruddy curls.
The Dark Fool clucked his tongue softly. “Perhaps you were wise to keep one mortal pet. ’Tis convenient to have a minion who can touch the rountree and tolerate iron.”
I stared at him, my gaze tracing the outline of the scar on his cheek. “You know that from experience, do you?”
Amadan did not reply, and I was too exhausted to press.
As the Fool and I rode on, we found ourselves in a stretch of forest where the trees had all gone bare, and a crust of greyish snow covered the ground. The chill did not bother me; however, Jamie shivered and nestled in close.
I thought warmth at him, softness, and safety as I pulled him closer, then turned to look at the Dark Fool.
“Winter, still?” I whispered. “Is this another glamour?” But the barren, wintry forest did not seem like glamour, not like the changelings’ winter.
That had been idyllic: a carpet of powdery snow, the trees evergreen and robed in glistening white.
This was a lived-in cold, the snow yellowed and soiled, crunching beneath the hooves of our mounts.
The bare trees seemed pitiful, possessing not even the dignified threat of those in my visions of the world gone bare and dead.
A clump of wet snow fell off the naked branches down the back of my cloak.
It smelled all wrong. Like mud and old leaves.
The air was icy and uncomfortable and pulled at me the way late winter does, when you have had enough of the chill and staying indoors and are ready for spring to finally appear, but she will not.
The grass slumbered beneath the mantle of hoary grey, as if the thaw would never come.
Amadan pulled his steed to a halt. “Do you not recognize it, Your Majesty?”
I shook my head.
“This place is the opposite of glamour, and you have wrought it yourself.”
His words made no sense. “The opposite of glamour”? What could that be? And surely, I would recognize magic I had wrought myself.
I pictured my magic radiating outwards, like feelers on an insect or tendrils on a tree. Did I taste mortality? Not in the sense of death, exactly, more impermanence and the ordinary, life without that extra layer of magic Faery held.
I opened my eyes again in surprise. “It feels mortal. Like the other side of the Veil.”
“It is mortal,” Amadan said. “You brought a pocket of Faery into the mortal realm, did you not?”
Malcolm. I’d slowed time in his room to stop the path of his illness. I never thought that small magic would impact the realm of the fae.
“This is the echo of your deeds, my liege. There will always be one, and you must pay attention to it. Balance matters more than anything to us fae.” He pulled on the reins of his horse, directing it away from the magicless patch. “Let us go around.”
And just as he said it, a tiny, winged creature fluttered into my shoulder.
Out came Amadan’s hand, with those uncanny long fingers. “Vermin.” He plucked her from my shoulder, letting her dangle for a moment from a single fragile wing.
“No!” I cried out and caught her just before Amadan let her fall to the ground.
The pixie clung to me, wings of delicate green spikes quivering with every motion, her chest heaving in panic.
Amadan rolled his eyes. “She’ll bite you.”
I did not care. “So did Duncan Smith bite me, when he’d a toothache and was out of his wits with the pain.”
Amadan rolled his eyes, visibly disinterested in anything to do with my mortal life. “Majesty, you should not waste your time or effort on one such as this.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” I stroked the sprite with my finger, feeling the delicate warmth of her breath upon my skin. “We will not hurt ye, little one.”
“Only a thistle pixie,” Amadan supplied. “Such as you might find caught in your stocking. Crush it under your foot.”
Obviously, I would not. I brought the sprite to my eye level to examine her more closely.
Her skin was green and knobby, even sprouting tiny leaves.
I touched her slightly with the tip of my finger.
She crept away but did not leave my hand.
Her wings flexed behind her, and I noticed one of them was crumpled and wet.
No, there.
It was torn.
The sprite hugged her arms around herself and shivered. Her large eyes leaked violet tears.
I stooped over to examine the plants around me. To my right stood a willow tree, whose bark might do for pain. I scratched it with my fingernail, then offered my finger to the pixie. “Take it. Eat.”
Like the slightest brush of a feather, she licked the tip of my finger.
“Good. Now about that wing.” It was gossamer-thin, like the finest silk. Easily torn. I could not stitch it, with my enormous hands and their clumsy fingers, without causing her great pain.
Amadan heaved an aggrieved sigh. I paid him no mind.
My gaze caught upon another nearby tree, this one a maple leaking sap. Not the season for it, surely, but Faery grew as it would.
Faery sap was as sticky as in the mortal realm.
I placed the sprite down gently on a tree stump and snatched up a handful of grass, sorting through it for the widest, yet most supple blade, then used it to gather the sap.
Gingerly I scraped off the excess until only a thin veil remained. “Mab grant this works.”
I applied the makeshift bandage to her torn wing. She stared fearfully at first, but I stroked as lightly as I could, and added a final, “With the queen’s blessing,” as I touched her wing with my lips.
Her wing glowed, specks of light floating like scattered gold dust upon the air. Warmth flowed within my veins, and my heart kindled like the flame of a welcoming hearth.
The green grass blended perfectly into the torn wing.
Not just in color. It vanished. The sprite waved first one wing and then another.
Then both fluttered together. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have known she had been injured.
Off she leapt, spinning a friendly little circle and brushing my cheek before she flew away.
“If you are quite through,” said Amadan dully, hoisting me back upon my steed.
It is most annoying to be so reprimanded by someone whose help you need to mount.
“She is my people too,” I said. “I care for all of them, from the highest of the Sith to the lowliest brownie.” I settled myself behind the sleeping Jamie, who had barely stirred throughout the encounter. What a tired little mite!
“I do not deny it,” Amadan asked. “But, Majesty, where does your healing come from?”
I glanced up, eyes narrowed in confusion.
“You are no saint, and we have no benevolent God,” he continued. “How then do you heal?”
What a peculiar question! “I am still learning the extent of my powers,” I admitted. “Previously, I used the healing gifts of plants, herbs I plucked in the forest and the garden, brewed into tisanes or pounded into poultices.”
“And you asked their leave?”
Well, of course I hadn’t. They were plants.
“Never did you wonder what was dying because your patients were living?” Amadan shook his head. “But, oh, Your Majesty. You will understand in time. I will be there to help you pick up the pieces when you do.”
And form them into a shape of your own choosing, no doubt.
I had other plans.