Samhain
“I killed my mortal self to pay the Teind.”
I let it land heavily on Janet and Tam Lin’s ears, even as I banish my fearsome seeming, let myself become the crimson-haired queen yet again.
I make them feel the weight of it, the pain yet liberation of giving up who I was for so long to become the person I must. Until you lose the very essence of who you have been, you will never become the queen you were meant to be. Amadan would be so proud.
Bess Grieve is no more. Surely, by now I have become the queen I am meant to be.
So why can I not get this mortal woman to give up her lover’s life?
I have shown her Faery. She knows the Teind must be paid, or else we pay the price. Does she truly not care?
Janet’s eyes narrow, as she considers my true inhuman form. “Your mortal self—the seeming you just shed like a snake its skin?”
I nod. “Bess’s was the last killing I mourned, the last regret I will ever have.
I have given up sentiment for expedience, my personal wants for the greater need.
There is no kindness in me, none of your mortal weakness any longer, no shame, no hesitation, no guilt.
I would sacrifice Tam Lin in a moment to pay the Teind, had you, fair Janet, not stolen him away. ”
My cupbearer, my ward, and fairest knight in all my company, and she has stolen him away. Woe betide her ill-fared face indeed.
Janet presses her lips together in thought, cocking her head to look at me.
“Ever since then, I have controlled every part of the Teind, choosing the victim like I choose the lovers who fill my bed. They are often one and the same. A consort is a most delicious sacrifice.”
“There is no king, and no one the queen loves,” says Tam Lin.
That had better not be a hint of pity in those handsome grey eyes.
Janet is still quiet, thoughtful. Still looking for the humanity in me, I suppose. Good luck.
“With due respect, Your Majesty,” she finally says. “You did not kill your mortal self. The Dark Fool was right; she was only a semblance, a shell you wore for a brief moment is all.”
She is still so bold. I do not want to admire it, but perhaps I do. Janet’s face is scratched, from Tam Lin’s bear claws; her hands burnt from the iron brand. Unlike her partner, she wears clothes, but they are not warm, and she goes great with child.
Yet she is not cowed. How is this girl not cowed?
“You ended her suffering. Put her out of her misery.” Janet steps forward, and while I might deny it with Tam Lin, it is impossible not to recognize the pity in her face. “It is all so sad.”
Sad? She thinks the Queen of Faery is sad? I want to laugh at the very thought.
She takes my hand, and I feel all the whorls of her fingertips, the warm blood beneath her skin. Janet is young and pretty, but one tooth sticks out slightly in front of the others, her pores are large on her nose and chin. The ends of her yellow hair are paler than the rest of it.
Mortal beauty, so perfect in its imperfection, so quick to fade.
Why does her touching me make me think of holding Glenna’s child, only half-mortal but red and wet with the stain of iron in her blood? I think of Thomas Shepherd sleeping beside me of a morning, rough stubble coating his cheeks, sour breath stirring my hair.
Why is their very mortality so irresistible? I am so nearly undone.
Nearly.
I yank my hand out of Janet’s, letting my nails grow to thorns. I am the queen gone cold; I need no mortal sympathy. I despise it with every breath of my being.
It is Faery that I hold most dear. I was wrong to think, once I killed Thomas, I was incapable of love. For I love Faery still.
There is naught I would not do to preserve Her life. And that includes revealing Her to these mortals here. Faery, not as She is, but as She might be. Will be, if the Teind is not paid.
I do not know if another human has ever seen it before. I wonder if Janet and Tam Lin will appreciate that fact.
Humans always find their way into our lands. The curious ones fed by stories, such as Mairi Grieve and Janet’s nursemaid Isabel once told. Such tales cannot hope to capture the magnificence of Faery, but even a speck of it wakes a hunger of the soul, that no ordinary mortal lands can sate.
“Oak and ivy,” I chant, holding my long fingers out before me. “Straw and stone. Show me lovely Faery when no sacrifice is done.” I close my eyes and part the Veil.
Again, Faery is revealed in all Her beauty.
Grass soft as velvet, dryads twittering in the trees.
Lights dance above the canopy of the forest, tiny gems in the sky of velvety blue, close enough to outshine the stars.
In the distance stands my palace, majestic yet ethereal with its undulating curves and graceful spears.
In the courtyard stands a figure glistening in silvery armor, his yellow hair a radiant banner in the breeze. Seneschal, I think, with a smile.
Almost I regret what I am about to do next.
Janet stares in wonder, as if I have not already shown her this very sight. I can use that wonder, twist it into something not unlike regret.
I pull. I do not know how to describe it any better than that.
I reach deep into the heart of Faery, which is after all my own.
I pull and leech and suck, like bone from a marrow.
Like the Leannan Sith does her lover victim, like a cruel lord taxing his bondsmen, like squeezing water from a stone.
I make my hands into fists, and I steal from Faery.
Every drop of mortal blood within the land fills me, staining my lips, my fingernails, my hair.
Every soul lost to pay the Teind joins to my spirit, cries with a singular voice inside me.
I become engorged, bloated, enormous, like one of the ticks who feasted on Thomas’s flock.
All that feeds Faery, saves Her, fills Her, I have temporarily channeled into myself.
Tam Lin cries out in alarm. No, I am not lovely now.
I am everything fae.
Janet does not look at me. She stares at the sky of Faery, dust-filled, dry, and red.
At the ground filled with cracks and craters, but no life.
Far off, my seneschal still stands, but his armor falls off in pieces.
No, wait. His bones are falling apart, that is why the armor cannot hold.
His yellow hair thins over a skull-like visage, not unlike the Horned One.
And speaking of the Hunt, the sound of hoofbeats fills the air.
Hoofbeats and the baying of unearthly hounds.
But only for a moment before the sound dies off, drowned out by carrion birds.
Then they drop from the sky, brittle skeletons.
For though they feast on the dead, there is no longer anything to eat.
The opposite of life is not death, it is this.
Nothing.
Janet cries out, from the loss of so much beauty, I think. The very rocks turn to dust, then fly away. The sky turns black, or at least that is all I can comprehend it as. For across the Veil now, there is no life, no land, nothing.
Janet is weeping, from the loss of something that was never hers.
As for me, I cannot contain this much life any longer.
Flowers bloom out of my wrists, with my veins their stems, curling like decadent sleeves over the backs of my hands.
My lips are ripe as fruit, almost bursting with juice; they part and vines spill out of my mouth, leafy, thick, and tasting of dirt.
Around my crown the leaves wrap, dancing around the branches.
My hair moves, gorgon-like, on its own. So much life is in me now, there is scarce room for my own thoughts. I dislike how helpless I feel.
I let it go.
Flowering vines slither down my arms and drop to the ground, crawling back across the Veil. I cough and hack up the vines in my mouth, like a cat with a furball. They choke me like the lies I cannot speak.
The excess of life flows out of me back into the land that is also me. A reapportionment, if you will. I am more comfortable now. And Faery?
She is alive again, the sky a radiant twilight, the ground—yes, there is a ground again—lush with grass. The flowers bloom, the trees both blossom and fruit, as is so often the Faery way. Only the leaves are a little crisper now, like the trees of the mortal realm this time of year.
Faery still needs to feed.
“But this is a glamour, surely,” Janet says, echoing her previous plaint. Her mortal faculties cannot encompass all she has seen.
“Not exactly,” I tell her. “It is a temporary truth; the dry parched land of skeletons is what will happen to Faery if the Teind is not paid. If She is not fed by the sacrifice of souls.”
If Faery loses Her essence, as I have my own.
Tam Lin puts his hands on Janet’s shoulders, turning her to face him. “Do not believe her,” he says. “The fae are masters of deceit, even if they do not lie. And it is nothing to do with us.”
Nothing to do with them. He does not understand the connection between the mortal and faery realms. We quicken their spring with our own fertility. Our hobs work the farmland; our brownies clean their homes; the banshees warn noble families of coming death.
All that humanity dreams or creates or wonders stems from our fair land.
I should have left Tam Lin’s broken body in Carterhaugh. Should not have taken him into the Underhill. Should have let him die and rot, his decaying flesh to feed the earth. All of this is no more than he deserves.
Janet turns away from him, brows beetling. “So, Faery can die?”
I throw my hands in the air. “Is this not what I have been telling you?” Sweet Mother Mab, I thought she was more intelligent than this.
“And you are Faery and Faery is you?”
“So I have said.” Impatience sets in. The vision I showed her took much of my strength: it gets harder to hold back the dawn.
“Then Faery is mortal, and so are you.”
I am robbed of speech, nearly of breath. What is this nonsense she speaks?