Samhain
Janet shrinks away, suddenly timid, shy. “I am sorry.”
It is an outrage she thinks the Queen of Faery needs her pity.
“It must have hurt.” Janet chews on her lips, looking suddenly young as only mortal whelps can do. “You went back home and your connection to Morven was severed.”
Why does she believe me so fragile? I, who command the hours and seasons, who will not allow dawn to break on this most auspicious day? I cast glamours in the blink of an eye, and curses from the words that pass my lips; I need feel only the slightest irritation to summon the storm.
She assigns mortal sentiment to me. It would be laughable were it not also so very inconvenient.
“Faery’s queen must be immune to hurt,” I finally reply.
“That does not mean you are.” This time it is Tam Lin who speaks, surprising me. But it should not. I snatched him away to the very Underhill. He has stood beside me, filling my cup at the feasts of the higher fae even before he shared my bed. He has seen me at my most pensive and troubled.
When the Unseelie thought to form their own court and I had to talk them down. When Jenny Greenteeth and the Leannan Sith fought over a mortal swain, I solved the dilemma by cutting him in half.
In short, Tam Lin has been privy to more of the queen’s moods and responsibilities than any mortal should have. I ought to kill him for that alone.
I ignore him instead.
“Brownies,” I tell Janet, “are the lowliest of fae creatures. Certainly, no fit companions for a queen.”
She shrugs. “It does not always matter where friendship is concerned.” Her eyes grow dreamy, and she starts to distractedly pull the petals off one of my roses.
It feels like peeling off my very skin. I wonder what she will discover inside.
“My nursemaid went off to marry when I was six years old,” says Janet. “I cried for weeks after that.”
I cross my arms over my chest, trying not to roll my eyes.
“Isabel changed, when she was married. Like a rushlight put out, gone was her spirit, and the light in her eyes. I swore it would never happen to me.” Janet smiles up at the mostly naked man who looms behind her. “Tam Lin ensured it would never happen to me.”
All this was on purpose then. She ran off to Carterhaugh intending to get herself with child. To force her father to wed her as she willed, and not as would benefit her house, her people, and her line.
I scowl, growing my thorns on the inside now.
They prickle and ache. “You are luckier than Glenna Baker then. And worse than Thomas Shepherd. He at least was willing to sacrifice for what his barony needed.” We are alike in that way, the shepherd king and I.
We did as our title and duty compelled us in the end.
As little credit as I would like to give to Margaret of Roxburgh, she saw to it de Lyne’s line did not die out.
I stare at Tam Lin, reading both Thomas and Margaret in his appearance now: his grey eyes, her straight hair.
Janet clings to the young man, like the mistletoe to the mighty oak. “I would have given up everything to be with Tam Lin.”
My eyes catch again on her scratches and wounds, caused by her efforts to save Tam Lin. Apart from those, Janet had to give up nothing for his sake.
“Once you sought an herb in Carterhaugh, the very one I meant to give Glenna Baker,” I tell her. “You did not wish to bear his child.”
“That was before,” Janet says.
Before she found out Tam Lin was de Lyne’s get, Roxburgh’s grandsire. She could have her pretty love and retain her noble status all at once.
Most of us do not get that chance.
Janet means to show me sympathy, but she only shows me her own selfishness in the end.
“If to save Tam Lin’s life means your father’s crops would fail, your very house fall into ruin, your fortune dry up like a well without the rain, would you still hold him so tight?” I demand.
If Samhain sang in her blood, and the land hungered, would she keep him in her grasp? If the Wild Hunt brought him to her like the lamb to the slaughter, and she had nowhere else to turn?
She might choose otherwise if she were Faery and Faery were her. Then the blood the land lapped up and the souls it consumed would become part of her. And though he lost his mortal body, part of Tam Lin would live with her always, as his corpse fed the hungry ground.
Death and life are part of the same cycle. There is naught and no one who does not, at some level, die so that others may live.
“That is not how it works for us.” Janet’s eyes narrow, almost as if she follows my inner thoughts. But what she says next has naught to do with me, or the Faery frame of mind. “You look to me for absolution I cannot grant.”
No. I look to her for sacrifice, for blood and loss and losing her fleshy heart to save my home.
I regret the transformations I caused Tam Lin to undergo. I should never have threatened Janet’s body, to make her give him up.
I should have threatened her very world.