Chapter 44 #2
Lyel paused for just a moment, and around him I saw twining vines of light, as though he too were somehow bound. I cocked my head, questioning, but my seneschal did not speak, only pushed Elidor forward, so that he fell on his knees.
Pity, treacherous as this one who knelt beside me, pooled in my heart. I grabbed his hair and forced him to meet my eyes.
“Oh, for what might have been,” I said.
Elidor’s eyes glinted with malice. “You haven’t rooted out the last of us.”
“Die,” I told him and slammed my dagger into his chest.
Time slowed, and Elidor fell backwards, gurgled. I had caught him by surprise.
Then the world fell away.
I saw desert. Rocks. Corpses.
Carrion birds cried overhead.
Blinked again, and Elidor hit the ground.
He had betrayed me. He tried to turn my people against me, killed my mother. Even so, it hurt to see him dying, for he was part of Faery and thus part of myself. I had to remind myself I did this to save us all.
I felt no relief, no satisfaction; a hollowness took me over, a hunger that was like none I had ever known. I was the desert, the bare rock, the dying trees. I had emptied and been refilled with need. The land still hungered.
The Teind had not been paid.
You haven’t rooted out the last of us. Elidor’s final words hit me even as I was dying inside, and Faery was dying too; Samhain was nearing its end and the Teind had not been paid. I stared madly around the assembly, desperate, my heart clenched by a grip of iron.
“Find them,” I howled, my voice hoarse as a woman who’d not drunk in days. “His partisans! Find them and bring them to me now! The Teind will be paid.”
Confusion erupted throughout the assembled fae.
Some pushed forward Aos Sith known to be friends of Elidor.
Some no doubt offered peers they did not like much, to get rid of them.
Others merely turned on their neighbors and began to feast. It could not sate their hunger, not as they hoped, but perhaps that did not matter to them now.
But a lone voice cried out, mellifluous under its desperation. “No! The Teind can only be paid with innocent blood.”
I looked towards the words, and they came from Lyel. No, Lileas. No, a figure who was both at once. Like they have always been.
“I am sorry!” they cried out. “It was laid upon us not to tell.”
I blinked, stared as Lileas lost her tail, as Lyel’s mailcoat turned to a flowing gown. “‘Us’?” I repeated. “Are there two of you, or only one?”
Lyel shook his head, and Lileas’s voice came from his lips.
“We are both and we are singular. The Dark Fool had us under a geas, that if we told you the truth, we would be bound to one form only for the rest of our days. But I care no longer. I am Lileas whether you see me only as Lyel, Lyel if you see me only as Lileas. Whatever shape I am bound into, I will remain both.”
My poor, dear friend. I placed my hands on their shoulders, resting my forehead against theirs. “I am Faery, and all of Faery is of me. I release you from this geas.”
Lyel’s angular features resolved into Lileas’s; her tail grew back, and her peridot eyes wept crystalline tears.
“Your Majesty is too kind, but it is all for naught if Faery does not feed this eve. The Teind requires an innocent’s life.
A consort, a king, or someone the queen loves is the strongest and best! ”
For a moment, I nearly thought she would volunteer herself.
Then I heard it. Hoofbeats, in the distance but getting closer. Snarling, barking dogs. The scent of rotting meat. A host of eldritch creatures that came riding forward, beings of death and eternity, doom, hunger, and rot.
The Wild Hunt.
Seelie and Unseelie both, my people grew silent, waiting to see what their queen would do. I lifted my head and did not let myself quake with fear, or with exhaustion. I stood as proud as the crown upon my brow.
The Horned One, hollow-eyed and dreadful, knelt before me, and his men followed suit, in a creaking of armor that echoed the sound of ancient bones. “You are our mistress now.”
The Wild Hunt showed me their allegiance.
I nodded and gave them my leave to rise.
The Horned One turned and gestured to the men behind him. Commotion spread through their assemblage, and a mortal man was brought forward, young and strong.
I knew him in a moment: the very mortal they had pursued on that fateful Samhain, years before, when I had claimed my throne.
Thomas Shepherd.
I fell back, my breath robbed from me. No, cried out the heart in my breast. No, cried the flesh that hungered for his touch: the hips he’d held, the throat he’d kissed.
I began to shake my head.
“Receive our gift,” the Horned One said, his voice as a tumbling of stone. “The Teind will not go unpaid this day.” It was not a request.
I cannot.
I knew what they asked of me, what they all asked of me, not only the Wild Hunt. Faery hungered; Faery starved. Faery needed blood to survive, maybe past this very Samhain, maybe beyond the next few years.
The Horned One faced me, and almost I saw something in his eyes, a light like a corpse candle, flickering in their depths. “We answer to your need, Mistress, if not to your desire. Choose wisely, my queen.”
And the Hunters released Thomas, turned to ride away—to hunt down what dark victim, I could not say.
My shepherd king did not move.
Samhain would not last forever. The time for me to act was now.
Lyel’s words echoed through my head: A consort, a king, or someone the queen loves is the strongest and best!
A swarm of twinkling tarrans encircled Thomas’s brow, making of themselves a crown of light.
Run, my love. Get yourself to safety and forget what you have seen this night. But I could not say these words, unless I wanted my very people, my land, my very self, doomed.
And Thomas, beguiled, confused, and handsomer than I had ever seen him, took a step towards me.
Margaret. He needed Margaret. What had I said to Thomas before I left? Tell her to hold you closely and never let you go. I feared I’d spoke to no avail.
Margaret of Roxburgh was nowhere in sight. There was no one to save Thomas.
From me.
I backed up against a tree, as if I could shrink away from the decision that faced me now. Flowers and sprigs grew along the branches and tumbled down into my wild red hair.
At my waist was the dagger that took Lord Elidor’s life.
I wished I could put an end to this. Stop it all. Unspool the past until we’d retreated beyond Thomas’s betrayal, past our lovemaking and even our meeting. Undo it all! However far back it took for us never to have met, for him not to ride on to his doom.
But I am not one of the Fates, merely the Queen of Faery. The past would stay in the past.
I surveyed my people, radiant in the moonlight, their faces stately and glorious, or wondrous and wild, gracious yet cruel.
As I must be myself.
Thomas frowned and cocked his head. “Wood nymph,” he breathed. “My Bess?”
It almost broke me then.
I must become unbreakable.
“Nay, Thomas. Do not name me thus.” Let him think dead the Bess he loved once—for I knew he had. Let not this last, cruelest fate appear to be at her hands. “Your Bess is gone. There is only me. Faery’s queen.”
Thomas stared, reached out a hand towards the left side of my throat, where a rosebud birthmark had once bloomed. He dropped it to his side, shaking his head. “You were ever both, my wood nymph. I always saw you as both.” He smiled, a little sadly. “Love sees more than you credit it, my queen.”
Does it forgive more as well? But no, I was Faery now, and forgiveness an entirely human need.
Thomas held no weapon, but his words cut me, stabbed me, made me cry out in pain. I was locked in his gaze, like a deer against a wolf, but who was predator and who the prey?
Mine was the hand holding the knife.
A chuckle emitted from him, dry and bitter, ill-befitting the occasion. “I always said I owed you my life. Never did I think the debt would come due.”
At once, he seemed to possess the strength of a thousand blessed heroes, shrugging his way out of the hands that gripped him on either side.
I opened my arms and he fell right into them, lips pressing against my own.
I had forgotten how sweet his tasted, how it felt to have him warm and firm against me.
Desire puddled inside me, the need to hold him and be held, the craving for contact, skin against skin.
If I wished to save my people, this could not be.
With one hand, I weaved my fingers into his curls.
With the other, I drove my knife into his back.
Skin parted easily, flesh resisted but tore; the blade found its way between his ribs.
And into his heart. Such a pain shot through my breast, it might have been my own.
Thomas’s weight sagged against me, and his head fell into the crook of my shoulder.
“Shepherd King,” I cried out.
His body dragged me down the trunk of the tree, until I was seated at its base.
I arranged his limbs comfortably, brushed the curls off his forehead, cradled his head in my lap.
His grey eyes stared wide, but his face was peaceful, brow unfurrowed, jaw slack, lips almost curved in a smile.
How was he at peace when every part of me waged an inner war?
His blood kept coming, soaking my skirts, and wetting the ground.
The soil feasted; anemones and poppies grew up from where he bled.
Vines of ivy and bittersweet crept over his legs, twisting around him as they pierced his skin and entered his veins.
His flesh did not rot, but foliage sprung up from his wound and spread to cover the rest of his body.
The shepherd king went from dying man to living vegetation without ever having been a corpse in between.
And I was reborn.
Blood roared in my veins like the thundering cataracts of the rivers of Faery; my heart thumped in my chest. My senses came to life, like a waterfall tumbling down the mountains, newly full of the snow melt and the spring rains.
Like lambs that leap forth, stumbling and playing in the spring.
I was autumn, winter, spring, and summer, the ploughing and the sowing and the reaping of the grain.
I was at once life and death, joy and sorrow, and if my tears fell like rain, they also nourished the land.