Chapter 49 #2
The room darkened, and a growing pressure mounted in my ears.
The fish swimming through the walls began to change; fewer of them were small and colorful, or if they were brightly colored, the room had grown too dim to tell.
Instead, the creatures were large, cumbersome, with luminescent stalks protruding from their heads.
They had hinged jaws to eat any manner or size of creature, overlarge mouths, and oversharp teeth.
The inhabitants of the Unseelie marsh looked handsome next to such as these.
I shivered, though I am seldom bothered by either heat or cold. An ominous presence crushed me, as though we stood on the very ocean floor.
“He thought I would hurt him,” I muttered, an ache spreading throughout my breast. “Amadan made Jamie think he was in danger from me.”
The room had become so dark that Lileas was illumined by a passing jellyfish, glowing with unearthly light.
“But why?” I whispered, running my finger down the blade of my knife, scarce even noticing I had drawn blood. “Why would Jamie believe?”
I never hurt him. I never intended to hurt him. If my duties as a queen took me away from him, I had never meant them to.
My arms craved the warmth of Jamie’s small body; I longed to breathe in his scent of green grass and sweet porridge.
“If I may speak with candor, Your Majesty?”
I had nearly forgotten Lileas was even there. She calls me Your Majesty. Lileas no longer called me Fia, ever. She had not shared my bed in months, perhaps years. I had grown so careless of the passage of time.
Would we ever get that back?
She still waited for my response, cool patience evident in her reactionless face.
“Of course.”
So rigid she stood, as if bracing herself against a strong wind. Me.
“The boy was already afraid. The Dark Fool only helped it along.”
“Afraid?” I felt the air ripped out of me. The depth of the room became a crushing presence, too much for me to bear. “Of me?” I fair on croaked it out, disbelief robbing me of my voice.
“You are dark, my liege, and you are light. There is no ill in it; to reign here you must be both.” Her gaze went distant then, as though she could see through the ocean walls to another shore beyond.
“I know a little about being both.” There was a sad wistfulness to her expression that almost made me want to reach out; something in the set of her jaw that brought Lyel to mind.
But any good will I felt toward her was ripped with her next words: “Since you killed the shepherd, you have let your crueler side take control.”
Anger came first, rising through my flesh to the surface of my skin. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. Never to Jamie. No, never to my little man. “I am cruel only when I must be. I have only become what Faery needs.”
And neglected my wee human bairn in the process.
My head spun and the heat rose so high within me I expelled it through my fingers, and it cracked the surface of the wall. A nearby eel looked startled, and the wall began to leak.
“My liege—” Lileas’s eyes widened, fearful as Jamie’s had been.
Quickly I threw more heat at the wall, and the crack became a seam and then disappeared.
“What reason have I given Jamie to fear me, to believe I would ever cause him harm?” I clutched at my scarlet hair, and it ran down my wrists like blood.
“I saved him from his cruel parents. I took him away from the mortal realm to play with the pixies and dance all day. Never have I raised a hand to the boy. Never would I try to hurt him.”
Lileas spoke softly, her brows dipping with pity. “There was a time you would have said that for Thomas Shepherd as well.”
All I saw was red. The ground shook, and the clear walls of ocean threatened to collapse in upon us. “Go!” I roared at Lileas, a second before flame lashed out of my fingers in her direction. “I do not need you. I do not need any of you!”
Lileas fled the room but ducked her head back in for one last bit of advice. “The scrying bowl. It may show you where he has gone. Seek your answers there.” The door closed quickly behind her, before a half-hearted ball of flame exploded in her wake.
“I will seek my answers where I will,” I retorted, though my anger was losing its force. I stared at the knife still in my hands, then dashed it to the floor.
Only to pick it up again and run my finger along the blade until I raised a drop of blood. Then I tucked it into my jeweled girdle for later.
Returning to my own bedchamber, I shook my finger out over the scrying bowl, and as the blood swirled out across the water, Jamie appeared.
He stood in front of a small cottage, upon which the sun shone alarmingly bright.
Very young children were scattered around him, crawling infants and toddling bairns, children just old enough to speak in complete sentences.
I no longer tried to stop the taking of mortal changelings; if their parents cared enough about them, they would find the way to get their children back.
Like his aunt before him, Jamie stood the oldest among the changelings; by now, he must be nearly ten years old.
But in my eyes, he was still the wee poppet whose finger I had healed so many years before.
“Come back to me, my love,” I thought at the image of the bowl. “Who will take care of you now?”
Then, though I knew the scrying bowl was one way only, and Jamie could not know I watched him, the figure in the bowl seemed to stare directly out at me, a dangerous twinkle in his eye.
His mouth was too wide, his limbs too long, and it was not merely that Jamie had grown more than I was aware.
This boy moved wrong, too stiff, too rigid, without a child’s joy and life.
Then he shuddered, like a tremor in the earth, and his Jamie flesh began to shake off him, blowing away in the breeze like dust. What remained was no more than a manikin of leaves and twigs.
“The changeling.” I remembered encountering him walking home from the market, so many years ago.
I swallowed hard, an ache filling the pit of my belly.
I did not need the scrying pool to tell me where Jamie had gone.
If his changeling had returned to Faery, Jamie must be in the mortal realm. How did he even get through the Veil?
I did not need to wonder for long. The heaviness of this room continued to press down upon me, and I knew it was not only my emotions that made it so. What I felt was the weight of the seven-year, the hunger which came when the Teind was due. The Veil was thin, and Samhain was nigh.
I must find Jamie before it arrived.