Chapter Two #2
The Fae leaned forward, his long, thick ink-black hair falling across his face. I could have sworn that I saw tiny silver flames dancing in his green eyes as he leaned closer.
“Stop wasting my time,” he snapped. “You know what I mean. Are you a witch like your mother was?”
“My mother? What do you know about my mother?”
“Answer the fucking question,” he said in a loud, harsh voice.
“My mother was no fucking witch.” I snapped back at him, and I didn’t know where I found the courage to give him such a hateful reply. It wasn’t even true, because she claimed to have been an enchantress and people called her a witch. The Faery lord looked surprised and gave me a considering look.
“Oh? Then who, pray tell, glamoured you to look mortal?”
“What-what do you mean?”
“I don’t know what you are exactly, but you’re not at all mortal, though a little mortal blood does perhaps run weakly in your veins.
Someone has glamoured you long ago to hide what you truly are.
It’s beginning to crack now around the edges, and your true nature is beginning to shine through.
You actually remind me of a demon I used to know.
Twice dead Pierre, who was killed a couple of times and went to hell for a while but was too pig-headed to stay dead.
He was angry about what happened, and the shriveled morsel that passed for his soul needed revenge.
Are you looking for revenge of some kind too, Braden Wanderer?
And isn’t it true that you’re the bastard son of King Callum, the Vengeful? ”
“King who? No, I-I…where in the world did you hear that? I did think about going to Otherworld to the Elves to see if I could someday trade with them. That’s if I could find a portal and if they’d let me in, but I have no real plans.
And my mother said I did have a Faery father, but I never knew his name. Why would I need or want revenge?”
He lifted one shoulder negligently, as if he had no idea what someone like me might take it in my head to do.
“What witch has glamoured you then, if not your mother?”
“I-I don’t… Look, my mother has passed.”
“Passed?” He looked sharply over at the man who’d kicked me in the ribs. “What is this ‘passed?’”
I spoke up before any of the others could respond.
“It means she died when I was a child.”
“Then why not say so?”
“I thought I did.”
He sighed. “This was a bad idea.”
“What? Taking me? Yes, I agree. Please take me home then. Or I can go, and I’ll walk back myself.”
“No. Answer my question. Who put this disguise on you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
I sighed heavily. He wasn’t going to let me go unless I answered his questions.
“I remember once when I was little my grandmother taking me to an old woman who lived near the marshes. My grandmother said too many people were noticing I looked different. She told me later, when I asked, that the old woman might have been a witch. I was given a potion to drink, and she lit a fire and said things over me. Could that have been it?”
“Perhaps,” he said with a shrug. “If you’re telling me the truth.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I have no idea. Maybe to irritate me. You’ve done a good job of doing that so far.
Lie down and go back to sleep if you can.
We can talk more in the morning. It’s a long time until then, but we have far to go tomorrow, so you’ll need the rest.” The man still kneeling beside me tried to push me back down, but I shrank away from his touch and tried to shrug him off.
“No, wait—what happens in the morning? What do you mean, we have far to go? Where are we going? Where are you taking me? You can’t say things like that and expect me to accept them and go to sleep. Please tell me.”
He ignored my words and simply watched as the other one kept trying to shove me back down on the floor.
“Wait, please! I have questions! Are you the ones who have been following me? Have you harmed my uncle Leofric? Tell me, please, I beg you. Why are you doing this?”
I was still struggling, but the night I’d had so far was finally catching up to me, and my head throbbed where I’d taken an elbow to the back of it during the fight earlier outside Leofric’s house.
When I was sure I couldn’t take much more, I decided I was probably going to faint, because I found it hard to breathe and darkness was creeping around the edges of my consciousness.
I was suddenly so tired. My last thought was that this could be the last night of my life, so perhaps I should try to stay awake to enjoy it.
I glanced up once more at the man in bed, who was still solemnly staring right back at me, his face devoid of any pity or human emotion.
Without another word, however, he lifted a hand and made a strange pass in the air.
Everything went dark and I gave up at last, closing my eyes and falling back down by the fire. I slipped into a deep, uneasy sleep.
****
Fionn, King of Murias
I lay awake a long while after talking to the boy, considering the sleeping face of the young man, the face that kept flickering back and forth between pretty and plain in the unsteady firelight.
He had been made to look extremely ordinary by someone who had a good deal of power, though it had happened long ago and the glamour was definitely cracking around the edges, ready to fall away at the slightest provocation.
When I had first seen him on the streets of this mortal town called Jorvik, I’d thought he was totally unremarkable, with his pale-yellow hair, muddy hazel eyes, and features so ordinary that they actually overshot the mark and aroused suspicion.
No one could be so absurdly dull and without appeal.
It strained belief. His skin bore no freckles or moles or scars, either, which was almost unheard of in mortals.
All of them had at least some scars or slight blemishes as a rule and not this nearly perfect expanse of tawny skin.
The boy was snoring softly on the floor of the small, crowded room beside me, the only one the innkeeper claimed he had available on this miserably cold night in this pedestrian city packed full of mortals.
It had been late when we took him the night before and the bad weather had rolled in off the sea in clouds of icy mist and snow.
I decided it would be easier to avoid travel until morning, when the snow would be deep on the ground, but not actively blowing in our faces to hinder our progress.
We had been traveling all day as well, and my men were tired.
We could have taken any bed or as many as we liked, of course, including the innkeeper’s.
But I was trying to keep a low profile, and a dozen or more unexplained mortal corpses in a local tavern might cause some undue talk and excitement in the morning.
I decided we’d stay in one of the large common rooms upstairs —all of us together—to avoid the human stench if we could.
One night in close quarters wouldn’t kill us.
We could rest properly and the fire would keep us warm through the cold night with little effort on our part.
I drew in a breath, tasting the air the boy was exhaling—the stew he’d eaten for supper had a disagreeable odor of fish.
My people ate no flesh of any living thing—not beast, nor fish, nor fowl.
I picked up the goblet beside me and took a long sip of the terrible wine to wash away the taste of the fish from my mouth.
I’d also noticed a slight odor of lye soap in the air that probably was coming from Braden Wanderer’s clothing, indicating that his clothes had been washed recently.
Another oddity in the vast unwashed mortal world.
I’d picked up a slight tang of sweat, too, that wasn’t as unpleasant an odor as most mortals carried with them.
In fact, there was a hint of something around the boy that smelled of purple sea aster, a coastal flower that thrived in the saltwater marshes and the sea cliffs of Ireland.
It would probably be from his Faery blood.
I inhaled again, looking for any hint of his mother and the faintly musky odor of cauldrons, black cats, and old magic that clung to witches and enchantresses, but I found none of that, except for the slightest hint of woodsmoke and ashes that clung to him.
I thought for a moment that I caught a hint of madness and brimstone, too, but it was so slight and fleeting that I might have imagined it.
The only charm of any kind the boy was wearing was a mother’s kiss still lingering like a faint blessing on his forehead, but no others I could discern.
No priests had been at work on him with their own brand of fervent, ecclesiastical magic, so there was no smell of incense either, even though he wore their so-called Christian symbol around his neck.
The violent, avaricious and ignorant priests of that religion didn’t follow the true teachings of “Haelend Crist,” or Savior Christ, as they called him.
They were much crueler and more unforgiving.
However, I suspected Braden Wanderer was what these priests of the Saxon world might unironically call an apostate.
The glamour on him, put there, he’d said, when he was a very young child, was still holding, though it was nearly twenty years old and was about to crack wide open.
I didn’t know mortal witches could be that powerful.
However, if his story were true, the old lady who had put the disguise on him could have had demon blood—or perhaps he did.
Either one would make a difference. There was, however, the slightest suggestion of brimstone in the air around him, which I suspected was coming from the fading glamour, but it could have been coming from his own essence.