Chapter 50
Fifty
Jamie was gone and I knew not how to find him to bring him back.
Faery is dangerous for mortals, but the human world can be just as bad.
Jamie had been seven years or more out of it, long enough perhaps to forget the cruelty done him by his true parents when he was only three.
Better I believe he had forgotten; else I must admit I had become so fearsome he would rather return to their cruel embrace than spend another moment in my own.
It was the Dark Fool’s doing. He poisoned the boy against me, made Jamie think I intended him harm. But my throat thickened, and guilt rode like a hag on my back. He could not have done so, had I not been so distant these past days. Months. Years.
I clenched a fist in the skirt of my gown. Jamie must return to me. He must.
The world of man was a wide, wide place.
Jamie need not have returned to the home of his birth, even if the changeling who lived there had returned to Faery.
How would Jamie even remember where it was, after such a long time?
No, the Veil thins most at Carterhaugh, the woods between our worlds.
Jamie must have come through there instead.
This eased my worries not at all. What if he fell into a hunter’s trap? What if reavers wandered the woods, hoping to steal from the Douglases’ herd? What would they do if they stumbled upon the boy, mute, disoriented, and with little recollection of that world at all?
I pressed my lips together, remembering the mother who turned a rountree branch upon Jamie to “beat the faery” out of him. The human world is so cruel to those with any difference at all.
I stood firm, squared my shoulders, set my jaw.
I would find the boy by whatever means I could.
Once we returned to Faery, I could repair the rift between us, become again the false but doting aunt who healed his finger, who took him away from the cruel world of his birth into a land of pleasure and delight.
I would make it again such a place for him.
I would sweep him into my embrace and never let him go.
I would never be abandoned again.
First, I must find Jamie. After so many years away from the mortal world, I could not do that alone.
I must summon the Wild Hunt.
I rode a horse black as my eyes to the forest at the edge of Faery.
Where the Veil separates us from the realm of man, I had once claimed my title to save Thomas Shepherd’s life.
How the wonders of Faery greeted me then, and how they yet ripped me away from the life I had built and the man I loved.
Forget that loss, even as the heart grows to stone within your breast. Thomas has fed the land, and you have saved your folk. Nothing means more than that.
I traveled alone, crimson hair whipping wildly across my face, needing neither my knight nor my chatelaine with me for this deed. I must reach into the darkest parts of me for what I was about to do, and I wished to cause neither of them distress or dismay.
Nothing you do is ever wrong, and nothing we fae do is ever sin. Amadan’s words washed over me. A bitter resentment rose that I worried so over Lileas and Lyel’s reaction. Who were they to judge? I would whip the disapproval out of them with a rountree branch if I must.
They have been your loyal servants, and your friends.
The turmoil inside me made the sky open with rain.
Thunder rolled in the distance, and a chill I was only mildly aware of reached down into my bones.
I closed my eyes and summoned the self I had been in the Unseelie lands, dark vines growing around my limbs, black ooze pouring down my hair.
The branched crown I wore turned to bone, entwined with thorn.
From the distance came the thunder of ghostly hoofbeats, a howling wind, and the baying of unearthly hounds.
The scent of carrion and rot filled the air, and my belly turned over from the stench.
My heart pounded, and it was all I could do to remain the queen composed, not to revert to the child fearful of the wolf at my door.
They are at your command, I thought, as the hoofbeats came closer. Be not afraid.
When at last the Hunt arrived, the Horned One knelt before me, and his men followed suit, in a creaking of armor that echoed the sound of ancient bones. I rule these, as surely as I did the Aos Sith and the gruagach, the brollachan and the redcaps. All of Faery was mine to control.
“At ease,” I said, never allowing my sense of command to dim.
The Horned One stood, and a cold so deep it made my bones ache rose off his flesh, along with the scent of decaying, rotting meat.
Memories returned of when I was a scared child cowering in my bed, while the storm raged outside, and Mairi Grieve faced down a foe I could not name.
How much more frightened of them must Jamie be! He has no Mairi Grieve.
I did not let that thought slip out, and the Horned One and I stood face-to-face.
“You know why I have summoned you,” I said.
The Horned One lowered his head. “You call upon a pack of wolves to return your missing sheep.”
From the Host behind him, one of the hounds leapt forward, snarling, blood and rot dripping from its maw.
I snarled back, then straightened. “I trust these wolves will not harm the lamb. If they do, they will taste the ire of the queen.” Will strong as stone, solid as the mountains, never to erode.
Shadows moved swarm-like beneath the Horned One’s hood, not a face, not a skull, something worse. “The land hungers,” he said. “Samhain is near. You deny it at your own risk.”
My insides were devouring themselves even as we spoke. “I deny it not.” And I patted the little knife I had tucked into my girdle. “I have made arrangements. But it will not be this one. He is mine.”
Mine forever. To hold and guard and keep safe like the last glimmer of kindness and humanity inside me. That was what Jamie meant.
A noise I cannot describe came from the Horned One; disapproval rolling like stones down a mountain, the growling of the hounds, and the grinding of bones. “At your bidding, we will keep our appetites in check. While we can.”
This was the best I would get from him. The finding of Jamie must be done quickly. I would not endanger his life.
And so, at the head of the Hunt, I passed through the Veil between the worlds.
We found ourselves on the edge of the wood, once so familiar to me, now gone peculiar and strange.
I heard the rush of the Ettrick water, saw the ferns and mosses, and the greenery given way to russet and gold.
The air was tinged with man’s woodsmoke, as I recognized from years before.
I even tasted a hint of the toxic iron, though it was far away and closed up in the mortals’ homes.
It behooved none to be out this night, when the Veil grows thin, and we faery folk do ride.
But one young boy wandered alone, less afraid of the creatures haunting the wood than of the queen in whose house he dwelt. There was little enough flesh left in my heart, but it cracked as I thought how lost he must feel.
I rode quickly, steeled myself against any softness or sympathy that might bleed through my mask, for the Hunt were as half-tamed horses who needed a tight rein to maintain control.
Softness to them was as weakness, so I pushed it down, though their scent of rot and carrion made my gorge rise.
Yet underneath it all I smelled green grass and sweet porridge, a warm and familiar scent.
Jamie.
The Horned One pulled his steed to a halt beside me, cocking his head. “The hounds have scented him and one other. Who else would dare to wander the woods of Carterhaugh on All Hallows’ Eve?”
I sniffed the air. “I smell nothing.” Nothing except Jamie, and beneath it roses, fleshy, tinged with blood and salt. I had torn one such from around my throat; it planted itself in Carterhaugh, and now it grew there still.
Then I was hit by something beyond smell.
A sensation. Being simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by something that sizzled like fat in the fire, crackled against the cold dry air.
A sense of wrongness, not moral wrongness, not sin, but as if two beings never meant to be in the same place suddenly rubbed against each other like flint against steel.
Rub too hard and too often, and we would ignite sparks.
“Bess Grieve,” I whispered aloud. “Somehow Jamie has found Bess Grieve.”
I had never thought to see Bess again. When I freed her, when I gave her all I knew of Mairi’s tutelage, it was meant as a parting gift, to enable her to make her own life away from Faery and its kind.
But she was Jamie’s true kin, perhaps the only one among them who was worth anything in the end.
I was only the cuckoo in his grandmother’s nest, taking Bess’s place temporarily, that was all.
Perhaps it was best that I turn back and go home to Faery.
I could not leave without the boy. Without him, there would be no guard against the Unseelie inside me, nothing more to preserve what had ever been gentle, kind, and good.
At my back, the hounds slavered, leaping forward, barking, and oozing rot. Samhain pressed upon them, as it did us all. They smelled mortal blood and would feed.
The hounds were of Faery and Faery was of me. The same hunger gnawed at my insides, and I thought, if I saw my face in the well at Carterhaugh, it would be as cadaverous as the Horned One himself.
“The boy tastes sweet,” said the leader of the Hunt. “The strongest Teind is a consort, a king, or one the queen loves.”
“I know!” Hunger gnawed at me, clawing at my insides, roaring through my head. I promised Jamie would come to no harm. I will not be forsworn. No fit ruler of Faery would I be else.
Some part of my heart was still flesh. Some part ignored the compulsion to feast, only wanted the boy back in my palace, and back in my arms.