Shadow's Bane

by Karen Chance

  That was the problem with boarding two adolescent trolls: food disappeared as fast as it was brought in. They were like teenage boys, aka bottomless pits, only with stomachs many times as large. Even with a sizeable backyard garden to draw from, the cupboards were always empty.

  That was true even today, when we’d had a second harvest inside. I’d been too preoccupied to wonder where the troll twins had been during all the excitement, but I guess that term is relative, isn’t it? So while we were yelling and fighting and facing a sudden dragon problem in the backyard, the twins had been busy gathering up all the apples and carting them off to the basement. Where there was some grand project going on to turn them into cider, or possibly brandy if they could figure out how to work Claire’s uncle’s old still.

  I just hoped they didn’t blow up the house.

  Anyway, as a result, there wasn’t a single whole piece of fruit left in the place. Or any pizza, most of which had gotten crushed under a giant-sized heel. There was soup, but by the time I’d tried to talk to Claire, who was sobbing in her room and wouldn’t open the door; and called up the pizza place, to make sure they had been paid and we wouldn’t get blackballed from yet another delivery service; and got hung up on because too late; and rescued Stinky from the trolls, because he was trying to fight them; and watched them leave in a huff before they were thrown out bodily; and made up the spare room for Olga, who’d decided to stay the night; and checked on Claire again, who still wasn’t talking; and took a phone call from Louis-Cesare, reassuring him that, yep, I’d just been hanging around the house all day, no problems here, I discovered that it was all gone. And my cooking skills mostly involve making grilled cheese, only I didn’t have any cheese.

  That was okay; I didn’t have any bread, either.

  But then I found out that somebody, probably the damned guards, had drunk all the beer, and that was the last straw. So I was hermiting inside my tent with an attitude and the last piece of food in the place. Because there are certain things even a troll won’t eat.

  I saw a shadow approach from outside, and then pause, before a familiar blond head stuck through the flap where the blankets overlapped. And eyed my dinner. I snatched it away quickly, the little cellophane wrapper reflecting the light from the lantern Caedmon was holding. There may have also been some growling involved.

  This did not appear to deter him. “May I come in?”

  “No.” I shoved the last of the so-called pastry in my mouth, because I wasn’t taking chances.

  He came in anyway.

  I’d have had something to say about that, once the chalky mess cleared my throat. Only a scent hit my nostrils before then, a rich, decadent, meaty aroma emanating from something in the hand that wasn’t holding the lantern. Something that wasn’t terrible pastry with inadequate filling. Something that looked a lot like—

  “Izzatme’?” I asked, hopefully.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I swallowed, and it was tough, because some asshole had drunk all my beer.

  “Is that meat?” I repeated, and snatched the plate he was holding out.

  Caedmon said some word I didn’t know, and then smiled at my expression. “Yes,” he said simply. “It’s something of a specialty of mine. I think you’ll like it.”

  I liked it.

  It tasted like duck: dark, sweet, and tender, with an acid undertone that probably came from the wine. The same kind he handed me a skin of while he tried to find a comfortable position. He ended up cross-legged, hunched over, and fidgety. Then said to hell with it and reclined, golden head propped up on one fine-fingered hand, silken hair cascading onto my last blanket, long legs protruding out onto the damp boards.

  It was raining, hence the tent. Of course, we were under shelter, but the sky kept throwing handfuls of water at me through the sides of the porch, because it was that kind of day. But Caedmon didn’t look like he minded. In fact, he looked entirely too happy altogether, which probably boded badly for me. But right then, I didn’t care.

  “Good?” he asked unnecessarily, considering that I was all but inhaling it.

  “Never had swan,” I said. The park down the road boasted eight or nine of the ill-tempered things—or it had. The old people were going to get a surprise when they showed up to feed their pets tomorrow.

  “These were fine, fat cygnets,” Caedmon agreed, looking pleased.

  I didn’t say anything.

  I was kind of complicit at this point.

  “I’m not talking to Claire for you,” I told him, in between bites.

  “I thought you’d already talked to her. Else why were you banished?” He gestured around the little tent.

  “I’m not banished.”

  A golden eyebrow went up.

  “I’m out here to get some sleep.”

  “And you cannot do that inside?”

  I rolled my eyes and ate swan. “Listen.”

  He cocked his head to the side, and the fine lips pursed. “Is that—what is that?”

  “Olga. She’s sleeping over.”

  “It’s . . . astonishing.” He listened some more, to what sounded like a cross between a wounded buffalo and a dying rhino, with a little elephant trumpet there at the end sometimes. “Can you imagine,” he asked, after a moment, “an entire cave or village, hundreds of them, all sleeping at once? It must be deafening.”

  I thought one was pretty deafening.

  Dhampir hearing is a bitch.

  “And yet, they can be so silent when they want,” he continued, “so stealthy, that even my men have missed them at times.”

  “The slavers didn’t seem to have any trouble,” I pointed out, thinking of the little one.

  The smile on Caedmon’s face faded. “He was likely never trained. Even my people do not move as they do without practice.”

  “Maybe he’ll get some now.”

  Caedmon shook his head. “I did what I could, but the damage was too severe. He’ll limp for the rest of his life, if he walks at all. It will make him of little use to his people, who rank someone’s value by their fighting prowess. If he goes home, he will always be considered mótgørð.”

  I looked a question.

  “A nuisance.”

  I scowled, but didn’t say anything. I hadn’t lived in unceasing warfare for centuries. I had no room to talk. “You understand their language?”

  “Well enough.”

  “What did he say in there, right before you helped him?” Olga was usually pretty good at getting her point across, but her English was a little . . . rudimentary. And “fish, tracks, door” didn’t make a lot of sense.

  “He asked her to rescue his bones.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  Caedmon switched to his back, looking up at the lamplight playing on the roof of the tent. I didn’t know why he’d brought it. He gave off enough light of his own, and for a darker night than this, if he wasn’t drawing it down like he was at the moment. I wondered why he bothered. To seem more normal, more relatable? To make it easier to talk me into something?

  Maybe. Or maybe he just didn’t want the neighbors to ask any questions. Of course, other than the commune across the road, who were high half the time and didn’t trust their eyes anyway, most of our neighbors were about a hundred and wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual if he’d been standing in front of them. Except to remark on how tall he was.

  At least, that had been old Mrs. Epstein’s comment when she accidentally came through our gate instead of her own one day, and had a group of “such nice young men” take her back to her front door. She’d never know that she’d had an escort of royal fey guards, and they’d never know that I’d seen them, several times since, hopping the fence to help her take in her weekly groceries.

  It was strange how . . . human . . . people could be, given a chance.

 
“It is my people’s belief that Faerie is a living thing,” Caedmon said, “an organism with a soul of its own. And that each of its children are parts of that soul, experiencing life in different ways: as a tree, a breath of wind, a person. When one of us dies, our soul rejoins the soul of Faerie, and will one day live again.”

  “So reincarnation, then.”

  “In a way. Although, from what I understand of your Earth religions, they view the cycle of rebirth negatively, as something to be escaped. They long for the peace of nonexistence, or at least for an end to the cycle, something that would make very little sense to my people. We look forward to experiencing everything life has to offer, in all its many . . . permutations.”

  He smiled suggestively at me.

  I shot him a look. “Then why do your people hate the Dark Fey, and vice versa? If you’re all part of one soul—”

  “I, for one, do not hate them,” Caedmon demurred. “And I did not say that everyone believes so; indeed, many do not. But the little troll does, which is why he asked to have his bones returned to our soil.”

  I waved a swan leg at him. “How would a bunch of bones help with that?”

  “The fey view the soul and body as inseparable. The idea that our bodies could be one place and our souls another, separated after death as some of your people believe, is quite . . . disturbing.” He actually did look disturbed for a moment, before his good humor returned. “It is thought that the soul bonds particularly well with the bones, which are so much sturdier than the fleshy bits—”

  I removed his hand from one of my fleshy bits.

  “—and thus the íviðja swore to help him live again, by returning his bones to Faerie, to be reabsorbed. The fist to the chest gesture you saw is a solemn vow among her people. She would have to do as she swore, or die trying.”

  “But she didn’t know him,” I pointed out. “She’d risk her life going back there for someone she doesn’t even know?”

  “She is probably one of those who believe that if Faerie’s children do not return, they cannot be reborn. That their souls will remain trapped here, where their bodies lie, and be forever lost. Both to their people and to Faerie.”

  “So the fey who die here . . . they’re all sent back?”

  “That has always been the practice among my people, certainly.” He thought about it. “Well, most of the time.”

  “Most of the time?”

  “There is the story of the dastardly Princess Alfhild Ambhǫfði—a cautionary tale of greed and pride still told to children.”

  I put on my interested face, and Caedmon laughed. “Do you know, I haven’t told a bedtime story in some years?”

  “Then you can use the practice. For Aiden.”

  He sighed. “I need to spend more time with the boy. Claire is right about that.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Things have been . . . tense lately.”

  “Want to tell me why?”

  “Yes, in fact,” Caedmon said, surprising me. “But I don’t know that I should.”

  “Why not?”

  He picked up my greasy hand and kissed it. And then mouthed away a little swan grease that had fallen into the well between my thumb and forefinger. It was . . . surprisingly erotic. I pulled my hand back, and he looked pleased.

  “Because, my dear Dory, I do not know if I am talking to you or your father.”

  “My father isn’t here.”

  “Isn’t he?” He scanned my eyes for a long moment, and then he sighed. “Perhaps not. I should certainly like to think so.”

  I decided not to ask why.

  “Still, I think I would do better telling you about Alfhild,” he continued. “She lived what you would call once upon a time, in a kingdom at the foot of a great mountain. There were hundreds of petty kingdoms then, some barely larger than the castle walls of the main keep, others with vast lands under their control. Alfhild’s was neither particularly small nor overly large, but she—did I mention that women could rule then?”

  “Must have forgotten it.”

  “Well, they could. Until Alfhild. She serves as a cautionary tale for that, too.”

  I considered smacking him, but I was feeling mellow and was busy gnawing some bones. I settled for a look. “I take it she was a bad ruler?”

  “Oh, no, quite the contrary. One had to be skilled to survive then. The petty kingdoms were always squabbling among themselves, making treaties and breaking them, and going to war every spring as soon as the new buds flowered on the trees.”

  “Did you ever fight her?”

  Caedmon feigned shock. “Just how old do you think me, Dorina?”

  “Pretty damned old.”

  He grinned. “What is it they say? Age is but a number? But my number does not go that high.”

  I frowned. “How old is this story?”

  “It goes back a bit, even for us. For you . . . let’s just say, when the need arose, there were no scribes yet among you to write it down.”

  I frowned some more. “‘When the need arose’?”

  He patted my leg. “Alfhild was ambitious and, despite having a prosperous land, was dissatisfied with her lot. She therefore used her beauty to seduce her neighboring kingdoms into a coalition. One she planned to use to attack the large, peaceful, and prosperous land belonging to one of my ancestors. It was in the mountains then, too, but had several verdant valleys under its control that Alfhild coveted.”

  “I assume she lost the war?” Otherwise, I guessed, Caedmon wouldn’t be here.

  “There was no war. Her coalition members realized that, instead of attacking a well-equipped and, of course, very valorous kingdom—”

  “Of course.”

  “—they could attack her instead. Thus taking a smaller but more certain reward, instead of risking a war they weren’t sure they would win. And that, even if they did, might see the spoils end up more under Alfhild’s control than theirs, allowing her to pick them off, one by one.”

  “So they picked her off first.”

  “No, but they should have,” Caedmon said, suddenly grim. “Instead, they exiled her to an island in the middle of a large lake, and ringed the small fortress there with spells. They thought it would hold her, at least long enough for them to have the victory feast!”

  “It didn’t.” It wasn’t a question. His expression was eloquent.

  “No, it didn’t. The legend says that she somehow escaped, gathered her most loyal supporters, and while the five dastardly kings who had betrayed her feasted well into the night, she struck—”

  “And killed them all!” That was a story I could get behind.

  Caedmon nodded gravely. “Yes, she killed them all. And then she killed their families, down to the last child, still in the cradle. And then she killed their generals and their families, their nobles and their families, the leading townsmen who had supported their war efforts by taxation, the merchants who had sold them arms, and even the cooks who had fed them. A bloody great slaughter of virtually everyone who had had anything to do with their treachery.”

  I blinked at him. “Damn.”

  “Oh no.” Caedmon looked at me, his eyes gleaming. “We’re not to ‘damn’ yet.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Do I want to hear this?” I asked him.

  He cocked a head. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  I debated it. But I’d polished off the bird, and I’d come this far. “Yes. Finish it.”

  Caedmon obliged. “After the slaughter, it is said that Alfhild had a great caldron made, out of the basin of the large fountain in front of her castle. In it, she cooked up the flesh of the perfidious, boiling them whole, and then served them to those she’d seen fit to spare. They were forced to continue the feast well into the next day, until every scrap was consumed, and they had utterly devoured the bodies of thei
r relatives and friends.”

  Okay, I thought sickly. Really glad I’d already finished that bird.

  I drank wine.

  “I’m guessing there was some payback?” I said.

  “Not at first. Having thoroughly cowed what was left of her old ‘allies,’ she absorbed their lands into her own, and turned the entire production capacity of her new realm to war. She had one enemy left, you see.”

  “Your ancestor.”

  He nodded. “My great-uncle, in fact. Who she believed had bribed her supporters to turn on her, in order to prevent the cost and loss of a war.”

  “Had he?”

  Caedmon shrugged. “Probably. War is expensive and he had a great reputation for parsimony, and such things are commonly done. But Alfhild was apparently not one to understand subtlety, or perhaps she simply wanted to continue her expansion, now that she had the means. In any case, it was her undoing.”

  “Because your uncle was so clever,” I guessed, only half joking.

  Caedmon was no slouch.

  “Well, of course.” He smiled. “But it was also a factor that Alfhild didn’t stop to consider that she had just killed most of the coalition’s experienced generals, and that many of the ones remaining secretly despised her. Their troops surrounded her as she took her place on the battlefield, and when my uncle gave the signal, everyone turned on her at once. His troops watched her own people take her down.”

  “And Alfhild?” I leaned forward. “What on earth did they devise for her?”

  “What on earth indeed.” Caedmon’s voice had taken on a slightly vicious edge. “For her crimes, it was determined that killing her would be poor justice. She would simply reincarnate, and where would we be then?”

  I frowned. “Nowhere. I mean, assuming all that . . . stuff . . . is even true, she wouldn’t remember anything, right?”

  A blond eyebrow lifted. “Ah, but there’s the rub, as your Shakespeare would say. For some of our people claim to experience flashes of past lives. I myself once had an incredibly vivid dream of what it feels like to be a tree, shivering in the wind. It was quite . . . sublime.”