Chapter 46
Forty-Six
In the morn, I asked Amadan to take me where even the brave knight Lyel dared not to go. To Faery’s darkest environs, where the Unseelie dwelt. For if I was Faery’s queen, I must know Her entirely, even the most distasteful parts, those once wont to cause me revulsion and fear.
To look at my face in the mirror now caused me revulsion, if not fear. Nor was there any point to it, in truth. I could trust that I was perfection, divine in my beauty, even while I could not meet my own eyes.
The sky above us grew dark. Natural twilight, as it ever was in Faery, but it did not feel natural to me.
I imagined ghostly hunters riding above us, and the dark sky of an approaching storm.
All around me I saw dark distorted figures, like the shadow fae who haunted me in Eamon Grieve’s house and in the room of the baron’s younger boy.
But when I strove to look directly at them, they fled, blending into the shadows all around us, like vermin fleeing from the light.
The forest thickened and grew dark, the crowns of the trees blocking out even the subtle glow of the twilight sky.
I smelled leaf mold, fungus, and rot. Heard only the relentless hoofbeats of the horses: squick and suck and squelch.
No. That was not how hoofbeats were meant to sound. Yet I could not doubt my own ears. I looked down, and there was indeed mud beneath us, but no ordinary mud, not brown as loam or tainted green from lichen and moss.
This mud was crimson, as dark as my hair and eyes.
I started in my saddle, scenting blood. “Amadan.”
He rode on unperturbed, though the mud was growing both thinner and deeper, until our mounts were ankle deep in a stream of gore.
“Amadan!” I said it louder. “Dark Fool. The path has disappeared. We are fording a river of blood!”
Amadan jerked the reins. “All the blood that’s shed on earth runs through this country.”
I stared at him, mouth open.
He fluttered a hand in a dismissive gesture. “It must go someplace. The mortals are done with it, and not even you, my queen, with all your healing power, can put it back.”
A whiff of coppery blood overtook me, and I nearly gagged.
This frailty is an old habit. I will give it up in time.
Beneath the blood and decay I smelled moss and loam, and something innocent turned corrupt and foul.
The scent of the Dark Fool. I stared at the back of his head, the long waves of his hair glimmering like raven’s wings even in this dark wood.
He would be my anchor, even while my mind swam, sloshed in my skull like the river of blood itself.
I could fall here. I am not yet so experienced a rider. If I should tumble into the river and be lost in the gore, they would never find me. Amadan need not even make excuses for where I went.
Yet this fear was as seasoning to a life too bland, and I did not let it turn me back now.
Amadan sat relaxed upon his steed, cloak of midnight spilling elegantly across his mount’s flank. “You are wise to remedy the shortcomings in your education, my liege. You don’t know how happy I am to serve as your guide.”
Happy and a bit too proud. I ought to have him flogged with the rountree branch when we get home. The tang of blood rasped in my throat; rotted vegetation overwhelmed my faculties, and I could no longer smell the Dark Fool at all.
Swamp gas rose from the marshlands around us, sickly green. I had the constant feeling I was being watched, and in the thick growth of reeds something protruded as slender and wicked as bone.
The terrain was unwelcoming indeed. But did it have to be?
I have summoned the winter; I have summoned the spring. A bit of concentration and I can make this wasteland blooming with flowers and bright as day.
I closed my eyes, envisioning the lightning beneath the surface of my skin. I pictured roses, calendula, foxgloves, the blooms of Faery and the familiar flora of the world above.
I opened my eyes, and a single rose bloomed, black and stinking of rot. Its thorns grew as long as my finger, impaling a songbird, whose wings fluttered once then stilled forevermore.
I cried out and reached for the bird. Amadan’s words came floating back to me: Never did you wonder what was dying because your patients were living.
My hand dropped to my side.
“My power is weak here,” I said. “I cannot affect it, no matter how I try.”
“Do not sell yourself short.” Amadan smiled. “You did kill that bird.”
My fists clenched and I glared at him. “Do not mock me. Why does my power not extend this far? What I am doing wrong . . . ?”
I trailed off, as a thin green arm emerged from the tallest thatch of weeds, its knobby fingers reaching out to grab the dead songbird, pulling it back into its hiding place. A peculiar slurping noise came from the bushes, and the cracking of bones.
Long fingers, stroking the side of Mairi’s face. I shuddered at the thought. Long fingers, parting my legs, exploring every surface of my body . . . This was the recollection I would keep from now on.
“Fideal have to eat as well,” Amadan said. “They prefer handsome mortals but are not particular when they are starved.”
He speared me with his gaze. “You have permitted them to starve. That is why your power is weaker here.”
And Una had displeased them, taken no Unseelie as her lover. Lord Elidor might have been the hands that poisoned her, but he was surely not the only fae to feel such resentment. What dissent, nay, what sedition might have brewed here in this nest of vipers as a result?
“You wished to know what you are doing wrong? Ignoring half of your kingdom for a start.”
I swallowed my revulsion and shook my head. “How can I have ignored them? I have never even seen this place before.”
Amadan laughed, and it echoed through the marshland, picked up by the chirping frogs and singing crickets, or other marsh dwellers I could not bear to think about.
“Obviously not,” he said. “Nor did I expect you would. Your pretty seneschal does not like to get his hands dirty, does he? He no doubt turns his nose up at such things.”
It was cruel, his mockery of Lyel, and right after he nearly bound him and Lileas with his geas. I did not take kindly to such cruelty.
But perhaps I must come to embrace cruelty in the end.
“You must see these things if you have any hope of becoming the queen we need.” He gave his steed a slap on the rump, and it grew gills, fins around its hooves and behind the ears. Its mane and tail flowed like sea wrack behind it as it raced for the river and leapt in.
Soon it was completely submerged.
Kelpie, I thought. Dark Fool, do you count yourself among the Unseelie as well?
“The river,” I muttered. “’Twas only to the knee moments ago.”
“Blood shed on earth does ever flow,” Amadan said. “This river shall never run dry.” He opened his arms wide, turning about in a slow circle, while his cloak billowed. “Come out, my people, Unseelie ones. Come, greet your queen.”
From the rotted trees and the hideous marsh, they came: water wraiths, the centaur-like, skinless nucklavee, and the brollachan. Redcaps stood in attendance, twisting their bloody hats in their hands.
I forced myself to consider the mottled and wrinkled and mucky flesh of those around me.
Not all were hideous. Some of the marsh wraiths were sylphlike and flawless in appearance; some of the kelpies threw off their equine appearance and stood as handsome men.
Yet there was an insidiousness to their beauty, like a silken tapestry laid over a bottomless pit.
I smiled weakly, feeling less like a queen than ever. “My people,” I said. “It is”—I choked on “lovely,” “pleasant,” and “a joy”—“an honor to meet you all.”
“Your people.” Amadan smirked, and I hoped none of the creatures present would notice.
“Yes, they are your people, Majesty. Faery is not only the pretty, and it is never ‘the good.’ If the Aos Sith are your flowers—and remember, dear, they’ve proven to have thorns—then these are your maggots.
” He gestured at the redcaps and boggarts surrounding him.
“Your maggots and your worms. Those who turn the corner from death into life again. They have never pretended to be otherwise. If you are a healer, you know life and death are two sides of the same coin, and for all your talk of life, you neglect its opposite at your peril.”
My blood receded from my skin, and a deeper chill filled me than I had ever known.