Chapter Three #2
A flush creeps up my neck, a mingling of pleasure and shame. If he knew how I struggle to complete even a basic summoning charm these days, I doubt he would speak so flatteringly. I doubt he would be here at all. I look down at the table and say nothing.
“I confess,” he adds, “I’d thought to find you in some place of high esteem.
Weaving in your little queen’s court. Why are you not in some rich appointment, crafting glamours for the aristocracy with silken threads?
When I discovered you had spent these years in a slum school, teaching unwanted waifs how to sew paltry healing spells, I thought perhaps my investment had been ill made. ”
I sit up straighter, my hands curling into fists on my lap. What pleasure I’d felt at his earlier flattery now turns cold.
“I am not eight years old anymore, Sir Faerie. Perhaps my work is low, but my skill is not. Perhaps I prefer the company of the desperate children you’d call unwanted, to all the high courts of Europe.
” I can practically hear my old schoolteacher’s rasping voice in my ear: Pride, Rose Pryor. That’s your first fault.
“Or perhaps,” he says slyly, “you have a certain reputation, a souvenir of that night to go along with that scar.”
My stomach turns over as I put my fingers to my neck and the burn scar left by my aunt’s pipe. Of course the faerie knows all about me. He probably had ways of spying on me for the last twelve years, keeping watch over his little investment.
Mad, they call me. I know it well enough. More than a few have said it to my face. Mad and fae touched. It’s astonishing how close people can get to the truth without ever knowing the details.
My aunt was well known in certain circles, or at least her fortune was.
So her sudden mental break twelve years ago was inevitably noted.
The famously sharp-tongued Dame Lenore’s mind snapped in the course of a night?
Suspicion had bred in the papers, theories coupling with theories, spiraling around me wherever I went.
They said that I, her only relation, had to be involved.
That wretched niece of poor Arthur, whom Dame Lenore kindly took in though they were no blood kin.
The niece without a penny to her name, but with a flair for magic.
But I did not hurt my aunt. At least, not directly. I didn’t Weave the spells to steal her mind and turn her wits, leaving her unable to even feed herself.
He did.
It had all happened so quickly, a blur in my memory: the faerie’s appearance, silver and shining and terrible against the crimson walls of my uncle’s study; my garbled plea for aid; the threads of the vowknot winding around my fingers as I accepted his terms. He had freed me at a cost: a favor to be performed by my twenty-first birthday, I had vowed in my child’s voice, thinking such a day an eternity away, while my aunt’s torments were daily.
I would have sold my soul to be free of her.
Perhaps that’s exactly what I did.
“What do you want?” I whisper.
The corner of his cruel mouth quirks. “I want to go home.”
It was not the answer I had expected. Ten virgins sacrificed by a full moon, maybe, or some equally horrible thing. But to go . . . home? It sounds so ordinary.
“You want to go to . . . faerie land?”
Amusement arches in his brows. “Faerie land? A child may call it that, I suppose. To my folk, it is the World Below, or Elfhame.”
“Why can’t you just go? Isn’t that where you belong?”
“It isn’t as simple as snapping my fingers, child.
I have not been there for many centuries.
Most of the doors to Elfhame were shut long ago, when it was made apparent that my people and yours could not dwell together in peace.
Time among your mortals has taken its toll on me.
You forge so much iron these days . . .” His eyes slip away, his voice fading, and for a moment he seems a thousand leagues distant.
“There are those Below who may . . . challenge my return. So I must return at full power or not at all, and to do that, I need your assistance.”
His expression is serious as it shifts to me, his age apparent in his eyes. It is like being held in the gaze of a mountain or a ruin or some other ancient, unknowable thing.
I lean back, wishing Emma would reappear, but she—and every other serving girl and boy—seems to have vanished entirely.
“In Elfhame,” the faerie says slowly, “there is a tree. I require but a piece of it. You, little bird, will flit into the realm of the fae, pluck a branch from this tree, and bring it to me.”
I stare at him, feeling the strangest urge to laugh.
Slip into Elfhame? A world full of monsters like him? Steal a piece of some sacred faerie tree and sneak out again?
I want to tell him how impossible it is. That I won’t be beholden to the oath of a child, however skilled a Weaver I might have been. I want to tell him to go stuff himself with iron.
But then he says, “Do this for me, and your heart will be whole again.”
I inhale sharply. “I have no idea what you—”
“Do not act the witless fool with me. We know one another better than that.” He leans toward me, tapping one long nail on the tabletop.
“I can guess at the pain you’ve been feeling when you channel.
We draw near your twenty-first birthday, do we not?
And still your vow is unfulfilled. Or did you think the vowknot you tied was merely ceremonial? ”
I press a shaking hand to my chest. Of course I knew. I’d known from the moment the pain had begun what the true cause of it was, though I’d never let myself fully believe it.
“You can deny me this favor,” he adds. “I cannot compel you. But it will cost you your magic. For it was your heart you swore upon when you tied the vowknot to seal our bargain.”
Yes, I remember.
Vowknots are specific things, requiring clear collateral. And I had made my vow with the one thing I held dear, the only thing in my life that had ever—and still only—brought me joy.
“I swear on my heart,” my eight-year-old voice echoes back to me. The heart. The precious catalyst wherein a Weaver spins energy into magic. I offered up as collateral the very crux of my fledgling power.
The idea of refusing him is alluring. I could walk away right now. I could prove I am beholden to no one. I could hold my chin high.
And I would lose my magic entirely.
My lungs tighten, my skin going clammy, the way it does when I realize a spell is going to fail.
In that moment, I feel the crushing sum of all that panic and fear and, most of all, overwhelming helplessness.
I’d become less than nothing. A ghost in my own skin.
A quivering mouse. Dependent on others, forever crushed in a world that despises poor, plain women with murky reputations. I simply cannot survive without it.
Picturing life without magic is like falling, plunging from heights unfathomable through dark and empty air. It is a feeling worse than death, to have all control and strength wrenched from my hands.
It is the same feeling I found at the end of my aunt’s pipe, when she pressed it into my skin.
But beyond fearing life without it, the deeper truth is that I love magic.
Everything about it—the thread forming arcane patterns between my hands, the immediate connection I have to the things living and growing around me, the rush of energy through my body, and the smoky burn of magic at my fingertips.
All those hours as a child, lit by sterling beams of moonlight, buried in stolen spellbooks and spools of thread.
Even knowing my aunt would beat me when she caught me at it, I could not resist magic’s lure, my need overpowering my fear.
And even more precious to me now are my students and my classroom. I treasure our quiet lessons bent over embroidery hoops, as I teach them how to Weave their way free of an uncaring world. To claim their freedom as I’d claimed my own. Without my magic, I can never return to my classroom.
Long before I wove the spell to summon the faerie, magic was my freedom. Magic was my hope. Magic told me that if I studied hard and practiced often, one day I might Weave for myself whatever life I wished.
And I would sacrifice all that for . . . what? Pride? Stubbornness? A life of destitution on the streets, now that even a desperate charity school will not employ me?
For magic, I would sacrifice anything.
I lift my teacup and drain the lukewarm contents and wish it were something more bracing.
Then, setting down the cup, I meet the faerie’s eyes and say, “You want me to break into the world of the fae, steal a magic branch from a sacred tree, and get away whole again? And in return, my debt to you will be paid in full?”
His eyes spark like blue fire. “When you have delivered to me a branch from the Dwirra Tree, Rose Pryor, your debt to me will be paid in full.”
“Will you tell me nothing more? How dangerous is this? How do I enter Elfhame? How do I escape again?”
“We’ve a journey ahead of us. There will be time for all that.”
“Well,” I cast about, feeling as if I’ve stepped into a rushing current and lost my footing. “Can I know your name?”
The faerie draws his hand to his chin, his lips curling into a dangerous smile. “My name?”
“If I am to undertake this impossible and deadly favor, I’d like, at the very least, to know the name of the creature pulling my strings.”
He laughs, and every head in the room turns his way as that rolling, lovely laughter shatters his glamour spells and reveals his true form, from his too-long fingers to his pointed ears to the unnatural sharpness of his teeth. I look around in alarm, expecting someone to cry out “Demon!”
Instead I find myself staring at dozens of pointed ears and sharpened teeth, as the creatures I’d been fooled into taking for other patrons now shed their glamours as well.
Even the fiddler leers at me, his face gleaming with scales.
I am surrounded by a host of fae, and their laughter is like the chittering of beetles, their eyes bulbous and black.
There is no sign of Emma or any other human.
Chills crawl over my scalp. I half rise from my chair, breathless and shocked, as they cackle at my expression.
The entire inn is populated with their kind, a veritable hive of immortals, all elongated limbs and silken, ageless skin.
And the one seated before me, I sense with sudden certainty, is their leader.
“Very well,” says the faerie, his cool eyes never leaving my face. “You may call me Lachlan.”