Chapter Seventeen
Two nights later, when I step through the tapestry in my room, I find Lachlan’s castle camp lit by candlelight and song. On the damp stones, with the sky gray velvet above, I wait and watch, trying to understand what I’m seeing.
The fae are moving through the ruins in twisting lines, their heads bowed and hooded, their hands carrying slender black candles.
They all sing, their voices strangely fragile and sweet, like the voices of children.
If it is words they sing, I do not understand them; I hear only sighing notes which rise and fall like the chants of the priestesses in the chapels back home. It’s beautiful.
Then, splintering the solemn mood of the scene, one of the faeries suddenly lunges at me, his hood falling and his pointed teeth bared. He grabs me by the throat and slams me against the ancient stone wall of the castle. I gasp but cannot speak for the fingers locked around my throat.
“You,” he hisses, his eyes glowing with rage. “You filthy, usurping mortals, poisoning all that was once good and pure in this land! You did this!”
I beat at him in vain with my fists. He squeezes tighter, until spots dance in my eyes and I strain for breath that does not come. None of the other fae come to my aid, though some stop and watch with luminous beetle eyes.
Panicking, I feel my head swimming into darkness, my lungs squeezing for lack of air. Then my hand closes on the iron snuffer I tied under my skirt, and I wrench it out. I smash it into the faerie’s face, and he screams and jerks back, releasing my throat.
Gasping and coughing, I drop to my knees, but when he starts toward me again, I raise the snuffer.
“Clugh!” snaps a voice.
The furious faerie snarls, his hands raised to grab me again.
But then a hand seizes him by the neck and hurls him backward.
Clugh soars twenty paces before smashing into a stone wall and collapsing to the grass, his expression glassy.
I gape at Lachlan, who stands over me like a snarling wolf.
For a moment, past and present pull together like fabric gathered in the Fates’ hands, and I am a child again, quivering as Lachlan punishes my aunt.
My heart pounds with a bewildering combination of terror and relief.
With gratitude to my monstrous savior . . . and horror at his searing cruelty.
Clugh coughs and feebly clutches at the grass. His wheezing, pained breaths dispel the ghosts of my past, and I shudder.
“Away, Clugh.” The calm civility in Lachlan’s voice is jarringly at odds with the violence he just enacted, and it sends a chill down my spine. “Leave the girl alone.”
The faerie grovels and slinks away, dragging an injured leg. The others retreat at the dangerous light in Lachlan’s sweeping gaze, but a few spare me some final venomous glances.
Baffled and furious, I ignore Lachlan’s proffered hand and push myself to my feet. His eyes fall onto the snuffer I’m still clutching. His lips thin.
“Cast that away,” he says.
I squeeze it tighter, my voice a harsh rasp. “I think I’ll keep it.”
He looks at me, weariness dragging at the corners of his eyes. “Then keep it hidden, at least. They are all on edge tonight, and if a group decided to lynch you, there would be little I could do to stop them.”
“What’s going on?”
Lachlan watches the lines of fae; their candles make their eyes glint beneath their hoods. They continue singing, their voices rising and mingling in the air.
“Lorellan has died,” he says. “They sing the long lament for her.”
I rub my throat, my anger fading only slightly.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” But I keep a hand on my pocket, where the snuffer is safely within reach should I need it again.
“Walk with me,” he says, noting the placement of my hand with a frown.
We follow the last of the fae out of the castle and up a gentle slope. The moors rush and sigh, and the candles bob like will-o’-the-wisps in the gloaming, their berry scent sweetening the air. Off to the west drift wisps of honey-colored clouds, where the afterglow of sunset lights the horizon.
Lachlan inclines his head. “It is a hard thing, the death of an immortal. We are so few, and to lose even one . . . if we do not return home soon, we will lose many more.”
At the highest point of land for leagues around, the fae gather around a pyre limned by the light of a hundred flickering candles stuck in among the mounds of flowers they’ve piled over Lorellan’s body.
I wonder where they found the blooms this time of year, black callas, white lilies, deep-purple dahlias, and velvet roses of every shade.
Lorellan is still and white as marble, her hair flowing around her shoulders, decorated with little white flowers. Her eyes are open, glassy blue and unseeing.
There are more fae here than there were last time I came to the castle; I lose count of their dark hoods, and then they seem to vanish entirely when, all together, they snuff out their candles.
At the same moment, they cease their singing.
Lorellan floats above us all on a cloud of blossoms and candles and silence.
Only the wind may be heard, rushing over the grass and heather, stirring the faes’ dark cloaks.
The moors rustle like an unquiet sea, the hills in the distance darkening to deep purple and blue.
Then another light flickers to life—a thread glowing in the hands of the fae nearest to me and Lachlan.
Then the light travels to the next faerie and the next, chasing a single thread that passes through the hands of each one.
It moves in a great loop around the pyre, then spirals around again.
They’re all channeling into it, feeding energy into a great, collective spell.
All at once, the hilltop flares with light, as a great spellknot woven beneath the pyre floods with magic fueled into it by the long thread. I don’t recognize the pattern, but I see its purpose soon enough.
The pyre, the body, and all the flowers begin to disintegrate; before my astonished eyes, they break apart with a sound like whispering leaves, transformed into many-colored sparks which swirl up into the air.
In moments, Lorellan is gone entirely. The dazzling motes of light twist and wind their way up, up, up into the darkening sky, beautiful, strange, and terrible.
“A spell of unmaking,” says Lachlan, taking in my expression of wonder with a sidelong look. “Few mortals have laid eyes upon such magic.”
I breathe out a long, slow breath that mists the air before me. The hilltop is wrapped in silence, and then the fae begin to drift off, some back to the castle, others into the moors. They move solemnly, faces grim. The funeral is over.
Soon, Lachlan and I stand alone beneath the stars, and it’s as if the fae had never been here at all.
“We are running out of time,” Lachlan murmurs, after a long silence. “The humans are constructing a railroad from London to Edinburgh, did you know? All that iron strapped to the ground, poisoning the earth. I already feel it in my bones, like a disease sapping my strength.”
My hand falls away from the iron in my pocket. I look at him, at the moonlight silvering the planes of his ageless face, while his eyes remain masked in shadow. His hood has slipped, and his loose mane of hair shines like nacre.
“Your world is changing fast,” he says. “You would not see it, in your heartbeat of a lifespan, but I have walked the World Above for many decades, and I have seen the great change slowly coming, the scales tipping. And it seems that all at once the balance has shifted, and a new age dawns like an iron landslide, and the old ways are buried beneath it and crushed into myth. Magic will fade from the world.”
“Magic is not affected by iron,” I point out.
“Not directly.” He looks up at the sky, his eyes angry and sad and terribly ancient.
“But my kind are not the only casualties of your race’s insatiable appetite for progress, my dear.
You will feel it too. In a century, magic will be gone.
You will see. Humans will find faster, cheaper, more efficient tools.
And then your threads will turn to iron, your needles to guns, and humans will forget, as they have forgotten so much already.
And then, Rose Pryor, it is you who will become a faerie tale. ”
“And what of your World Below? How long can you hide there?”
“Who ever said I wished to hide?” His tone frosts over.
“Did you know, long before your kind came to these islands, it was my folk who ruled them? And before us, it was a realm of monsters, the Fomor, primeval things you could not imagine. We won this land from them and carved out a place for ourselves, the mighty Tuath Dé, but how merciless your race is. The old peoples, the ones like us, the creators and crafters of magic, have waned all across the earth. Do you think I have spent all these centuries in England?”
He laughs, the sound harsh as the bark of a wild fox.
“No; I’ve crossed the globe in search of my kin, the demons and angels and djinn and all our cousins, the old ones, the forgotten ones, the ones you’ve reduced to talismans and put into your pockets.
Even your beloved Fates you have cut down and reshaped to serve your petty purposes, while their true names have been forgotten.
We lasted longer than most, up here in the corner of the world, but the mortals found us still.
How curiously cruel you humans are, that you must first kill your gods before you worship them. ”
As he speaks, I slowly realize what drives Lachlan. It is the thing I have been trying to put my finger on since he appeared to me in that cold alley.
Vengeance.