Prologue #2
A crop of tragically messy copper curls framed his clever-fox face and pointed ears.
But it was his eyes that caught my attention first: one warm and golden-brown, like the richest honey from the Abbey’s beehives; the other a pale, crystalline blue, cold as winter’s first frost. The only thing they had in common was that they seemed too old for his young face.
He bowed, extending a long-fingered hand, and I spied a strange mottling across his skin.
Spider-web-thin, white—nearly iridescent—scars, or perhaps tattoos, in the pattern of snake scales.
They crawled up both his hands and arms, beneath his sleeves, then reappeared above the high collar of his green tunic before vanishing behind his ears.
I suddenly realized who I had stumbled upon. A child, and a snake, and a mismatched conglomeration of stolen human flesh. All the stories were true all at once.
“You are him, aren’t you?” I murmured. “The Devil of Arden…”
“That is what some call me, yes,” he answered, voice no longer echoing around the trees, “but you may call me whatever you like…mothling.” He reached out to toy with the edge of my half-cloak.
Sissi had patterned it after the green wings of the enormous Huntress moths that liked to visit my bedroom window, complete with two delicate tails and a hood lined in white rabbit fur.
It was my prized possession, and I spun around to jerk it out of the Devil’s grasp.
“I will call you nothing but ‘Devil’, since that is what you are,” I said warily. “I am only here to make a bargain anyway. With you, if you are willing.” I tried to draw myself up and appear nonchalant, as if I struck deals with monsters every day.
“I might be,” he replied with a smirk. “If it sounds worth my time. What is it you want?”
I put my hands out, palms up. “I need a gift…a magyk gift, to heal someone.”
“Hmm,” the Devil mused, continuing to circle me like a buzzard. “That is a tall order indeed, and one I am reluctant to fulfill. The fewer humans living near my woods, the better. Who do you need to heal so badly?”
“My…Sissi…” I bit back the word ‘mother’, even though she was the closest thing I had. “Sister Superior, the heart of Locksley Abbey. She’s ill, and has been for weeks, and the doctors say there’s nothing more they can do.”
“No power can bring back those who have already paid the Boatman,” said the Devil quietly.
“She isn’t that far gone yet!” I snarled. “The doctors are just lazy or incompetent or both! They see no value in her life.”
“And why should I?” As he came around to stand in front of me again, I noticed how the fireflies danced about him, brushing against his pale skin and simple clothes, then spinning away like whirligigs at a summer festival.
The idea that they might be his friends too filled me with an inexplicable dread.
“I suppose you shouldn’t…” I muttered, “and I have little to give in return, but I will do anything to save her. I need her, the Abbey needs her, and Nottingham needs the Abbey. We care for the sick or injured, and we teach children. The poor depend on us, especially when the Prince presses his boot down harder on their necks each year. Without Sissi…many people will suffer.”
“Does your Holy Church of Martyrs not also teach hatred for my kind?” the Devil asked casually.
My head shot up and my eyes widened. “No! No, I swear it! People are naturally suspicious of faerie magyk because it is said to be used for trickery.” If he knew how much I twisted the truth, he did not show it.
The Fair Folk could not lie, that was well known, but I wondered how much dishonesty they could sense in others.
The Church, and certainly the Sisters, did not preach hatred or violence toward the fay themselves, but they would never condone the use of magyk.
Even if I returned to Locksley without making a faerie bargain, I could be accused of heresy simply for seeking one.
But if I had to lie to this monster in order to save Sissi and the Abbey, then I would.
“I see,” the boy mused with a crooked grin.
“And what is it you do at this very important Abbey? You cannot be older than nine. Far too young to have taken vows, surely.” He continued his prowling, moving closer with each pass.
I remained as still as I possibly could, like a rabbit trying to survive a hawk.
“I’m twelve!” I huffed, well aware of the way my face burned when his strange eyes met mine.
“And I am an orphan, fortunate enough to be raised in the care of the Sisters. I earn my keep by tending the Abbey gardens, and I help in the infirmary too, although…I have no skill for it, which is why I am here.”
“Better with plants than with people, hmm?”
Growing impatient, I crossed my arms. “Will you help me or not?”
Before I could even think, he was facing me. His hand shot up to touch the thin, white braid that hung over my shoulder, separated from the rest of my dark curls and decorated with a green glass bead on the end.
“What is this?” he asked, breath tickling my cheek.
“Do not touch me, Devil!” I hissed, holding my iron medallion out and taking a step back. The boy merely smiled his feral smile, firefly-glow glinting off pointed canine fangs.
“You threaten me with your holy iron, and still think I’ll make a deal with you?”
I cleared my throat and dropped the medallion. “You ought to know better than to approach a young girl that way, or do the Fair Folk have no care for manners?”
“Modesty is such a…human concept, isn’t it?” he drawled. “Very well, then, mothling. I will take your bargain.”
“What would you ask of me in return?”
“First, you must understand what it is you ask.” His face hovered mere inches from mine and I found that I could not tear my gaze away from his haunting eyes. “I can give you the healing gift, but it comes with both limits and a cost.”
“I told you, I will give whatever—”
“Not my cost,” the Devil said. “My price is set, finite, but magyk gifts are bestowed by the Arden. I am merely a vessel. The power will take its own toll, and I cannot say what it might be. Your sanity, your health…your beauty…” He ran his thumb along my braid again, eyes boring into mine as I tried to control the trembling in my limbs.
“I will gladly pay it,” I said, finding that my voice had faded to a whisper. In the blink of an eye, he was perched on a flat rock beneath an oak tree several feet away.
“I’m certain you will. Now, my price is simple.
I require three things from you. The first is a promise.
” He raised his hand, a large gold coin clasped between his first two fingers.
“This coin bears an image on either side, designs that might shift according to your mood. But the day you find both faces empty, your debt is due, and I will come for you. You must keep it close at all times. Do you understand?”
I walked forward and took the coin from him, sweeping my thumb over the embossed image of a Huntress moth. The opposite side was stamped with the image of a coiled snake. They both seemed alive, as if they might leap off the face of the gold surface at any moment.
I pocketed it and looked back at the Devil. “How long do I have?”
“That, I cannot say. The Arden will decide.”
“And what will I owe?” I asked, slightly irritated at having to pull the answers from him.
“Your gift. A single use of your healing gift. When all is well again, you shall be on your way.”
My eyes narrowed with suspicion. He said it so simply that I’d nearly agreed on the spot, but for all my youth and naivete, I at least knew that fay bargains were never entirely what they seemed.
“Who would I need to heal? And what is the illness?”
“Someone of great importance,” he said with a shrug, “rather like your Sister Superior. I cannot reveal the illness, but it will be within your power to fix. Now, do we have a bargain or not? I am growing weary of these incessant questions.”
“And I am growing weary of your litany of conditions, Devil,” I snapped, then chose my words carefully as I continued.
“I agree…to carry your coin, until the day I find it blank, and then to come with you. I agree to use the magyk gift you give me to heal one person ‘of great importance’. Now, what is your third requirement?”
He took yet another step closer, until we were all but nose-to-nose, and his presence felt so human for a moment that I very nearly forgot what he was—a Devil.
A creature born from sin and shadow.
Nothing less than malice given breath and form and voice.
He might be a devil, I told myself, but he is a devil who is going to give me what I need.
“Your name, girl,” he whispered.
“Names…have power,” I murmured. “People say never to give your name to one of the Fair Folk, because that’s how they control you.”
“If I wanted control, I’d have spirited you away by now,” the boy chirped, his mismatched eyes darting around my face. “A name, if you please.”
Perhaps, I reasoned with myself, giving him a name that was rarely used might lessen his power over me.
To the Sisters, and the rest of Nottingham, I was known simply as ‘May’.
Hardly anyone used the name that Friar Tuck had chosen when he found me on the steps of the Abbey, only days old and wrapped in green swaddling.
“Marina,” I said quickly. “My name is Marina…of Locksley.”
“Marina,” hummed the strange boy, giving me a little space to breathe again. “Meaning ‘from the sea’.”
I snorted. “A poor choice by the man who named me. The color of my eyes reminded him of a storm-tossed sea, but people say I only inherited the ocean’s changeable temperament, not its beauty or power.”
“Were I capable of untruths, I might agree,” said the Devil, extending his hand. It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but then a hot flush crept up my chest. “I believe we have struck our bargain, Marina of Locksley.”
I took his hand and squeezed, his long, pale fingers enveloping my dark, calloused ones.
Before I could get a closer look at the snakeskin pattern on his arm, a blinding flash of light burst from the point where our hands met.
I staggered backwards and hit the trunk of a tree, then became tangled in its roots and fell hard.
When my vision cleared, the Devil was gone, and the side of my calf was bleeding.
I hissed in pain and attempted to staunch the blood with my stocking, but the fireflies returned quickly, performing an intricate, wriggling dance up and down my arm.
I let out a low gasp of understanding and covered the gash with both hands.
I had no idea how to call up the power, or if he’d even given it to me at all, but I closed my eyes and imagined healing.
I pictured each stage, just as I witnessed them in the infirmary every day: bleeding, clotting, scabbing, the itch and burn of forming scar tissue, then the healing.
A strange sensation entered my arms, as if a string was being pulled through them too fast, burning on its way out.
It raced through my wrists, then spread through my hands and fingers, which I left in place until I could no longer bear it.
When I lifted them up, I froze, unable to even breath for shock.
The wound was already scabbed over. Something that should have taken hours or even days, I had done in only seconds.
I looked up, searching for the Devil, but the only sign he had ever existed at all was a small swarm of fireflies, bobbing away between the trees.
Sensing that they wanted me to follow, I stood and felt in my pocket for the magyk coin, which would eventually call me to my fate.
When I pulled it out, the image of the Huntress moth fluttered its wings ever so slightly, and the snake’s tongue flickered from its mouth, then went still.
“Thank you, Devil,” I whispered into the pressing darkness of the Arden.