By the Horns

by Jeanette Lynn

  The particular stone I was looking for should be right about... “Here,” I murmured, a small smile twisting my lips. Glancing over my shoulder, I held my hand out. “Here.”

  Thessen’s hand slid into mine, warm, calloused, thick, inviting. I’d been enamored with Thess since we were children, thought myself in love with him at one point in our youth. Such folly, utter whimsy. I should’ve known better. Now I did.

  My stomach twisted at the thought of what I had to do, but it had to be done.

  “This one,” I told him.

  Thessen’s other hand came forward, his arm going around my waist with the action. “Press or pull?”

  Mead. He must’ve had himself a bit of it, the barely detectable smell of it and the signature, though light, stink of tavern pipe smoke from the Scraudge & Iktche Inn clinging to him.

  Even as he was, I found him appealing, honeyed drink on his breath. Must be off my head.

  “I, uh, well,” I muttered, my brow furrowing. Licking my lips as unease suddenly slithered through me, I gave a half shrug. “Well, I dunno.”

  Thessen made a noise in his throat. “You don’t know?” The incredulity in his voice was not helping to calm my frazzled nerves.

  Right. Fine. Screw you then, and the tavern stink you came to me with! It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him just that.

  “Press? Uh... then pull,” I muttered instead. Now was not the time for my pettiness. It was time to set everything aside and get things done.

  Thess cursed, a grumble rumbling his throat. He wasn’t particularly happy I’d dissolved our... arrangement, I knew, but there was no carrying on as we were, I didn’t care how much he insisted calling out her name was an accident, or how many times he apologized, the damage had been done. In a way, guess I couldn’t blame him for being curt in his own right.

  The man was willing to be with you, honor the commitment he fully intended to keep to you, while obviously in love with your sister.

  Why, yes, thank you, like I really need to think about that right now, I snarled as I answered my own self-mocking castigations.

  A two way conversation in a single mind.

  Eh, what the fuck’s normal anyway?

  Thess sighed, taking my sudden silence as a reaction relating to something more along his current train of thought. “Ri,” he began, to be cut off.

  “Later,” I barked out sharply, shaking my head, knowing there wouldn’t be one, not for us. My hands gripped the stone horns, just below his.

  I’ll do it my damned self, tug my arms loose in the process if it got the job done. It was bullshit. I could no more tug these arms loose than pick up one of those oversized stones. Boxy, I was built like a man, yet lacked the muscle strength to follow through. There was also the added benefit of the cumbersome burden I bore around my middle, backside, and these thick thighs. I’m weak.

  “On three,” I mumbled under my breath, bracing myself, feet firmly planted far enough apart. The jagged edges of the handle-like stones, they felt like they were stuck out more. Had the wiggling helped?

  Poppycock, I’m being fanciful. How would they pull from the stone? They were stone, a single piece.

  “You can’t do it,” Thessen informed me primly, a note of superiority in his condescending tone I didn’t much care for.

  Of course I couldn’t, which was why I was technically holding my breath waiting for him to jump in. Mission accomplished.

  “Fine.” Tossing my hands up, I ducked, sliding beneath his muscled arm to plop next to the stone piece. His hands still held it, a grunt leaving the air making me think he’d already gotten to work on it. Good. We were wasting enough moonlight as it was.

  My arms folded over my chest and I waited. I was glad of the darkness, his face barely visible, even as my eyes, wider than their normal, naturally doe-eyed largeness, feeling anxious, fearful, adjusted.

  A man’s hands and doll-like eyes, Mother always said, claiming I should have been a farmer’s wife. I was pretty enough and my hands could handle the chores, yet no man, let alone a lonely farmer, would have taken me. It was a hint at my lack of married state, her comments, my parents both well aware of my unwillingness to be sold off to some man sight unseen. Married to a stranger? I’d have dragged him to sea and drown him at his first slight. I wasn’t about to get into what her marriage to Father had lacked, her small but rough hands, softer temperament, and much prettier eyes her finest asset, she liked to say, aside.

  The sound of something—hands—smoothing over stone reached my ears. “You know,” Thessen said on a laugh, “you never make anything easy.”

  The double meaning behind his comment wasn’t lost on me. I wasn’t the kind of woman who wanted to be cared for, not the way Thessen wanted. He needed to be needed, and I needed space. No, I didn’t truly know what I wanted, needed, and wasn’t that the crux of it all. Wrong kind of rescue, Thess, the kind I wouldn’t welcome.

  You’ll find someone to love you the way you need, someone to love you back proper, Thessen. One day. Maybe sooner than you think…

  “You goin’ to press and pull, Thess?” My voice cracked a little, choked with emotions I didn’t have time to deal with. I had to clear my throat before I could continue. “Or should I-”

  “I’ve got it,” my co-conspirator replied softly. If he’d caught the crack in my tough act he didn’t comment. I appreciated that about him—just get shit done.

  Thess grunted as he pressed, huffing out a breath to stop and pull.

  Nothing happened.

  Peering around in the dark, I swallowed thickly. “Try it again.” This had to work.

  Thess shifted, the sound of his boots slipping and sliding loud in the quiet of the night. No bugs, no owls hooting, or coyotes howling, it was eerily... silent. Not a good sign. This was the devil’s night, two full blood moons up there lighting the sky, alongside that tiny purple moon and much larger gold and green looking ones. The sky was full up there. The sight was rare, something to behold.

  When I was a small child I used to tell anyone who’d listen the moons spoke to me. Fearing I’d incite my own witch hunt, Papa’d beat that habit right out of me real quick. I was so terrified of another belt whoopin’ I’d plumb stopped looking at them, forget uttering a word about them. I’d lived in fear of even contemplating the night sky after that. Until tonight.

  They really did call to me on some unspoken level, though not the way my nine year old self had quite made it sound. The two big ones were known as the King and Queen, the tiny one the Trickster, I assumed because the small purple moon more often than not looked hidden, hiding just off to the side, almost as if peeking around from behind the Queen.

  That antsy feeling riding me intensified.

  “If it would just- I can’t... Argggh.” Stepping back, Thess stepped off to my side, flopping beside me, his back pressing into stone as he settled himself to my right. Our heads turned left at the same time and we eyed the stone piece.

  “Magicked?” My dark-haired companion mused.

  “By Titania herself and all the little fae and faerie people alike? Just dancing around, doing a jig as they weave their magicks and such, fluttering all about?” Snorting, I stood. Faeries and magicks... rubbish. If they’d roamed these plains at some point they’d certainly abandoned us long before now.

  Gods and fae, fae and gods, royalty this and curses that, bandied about until the terms felt interchangeable, one myth blending into a mix of another. Nothing but fairytales.

  The woods they’d supposedly traversed, these faerie of the isles, they felt hollow, living death. Living death for anyone stupid enough to go stomping around in there, thinking they had something to prove. Oh, The Hollows would show them, for certain.

  And that thing had come from there.

  I knew their name, what they were actually called, and yet beast, as the horned being snarled and roared, was so much better a fit. Not that I couldn’t blame it for being angry.

  No fae, I said, but my ton
gue and my brain felt the disconnect. Just too many unanswered things, too much that didn’t make a lick of sense. Was magick at hand?

  “Then how do you explain the hauntings in The Hollows? The sightings? The stories? Hmm? And how did this get here?” Thess thumped one of the thick rocks behind him with a meaty fist.

  “People? Like the creature held within.” My eyes strayed to the horned stone, an unnatural occurrence in and of itself, as unnatural as the mad labyrinth cave and the man-beast trapped inside. “Villagers built it,” I blurted, scrambling for an explanation, one that suited my convoluted stance. Overzealous, self-righteous villagers, my stubborn arse insisted, playing into it. For their supposed gods. To trap creatures and find an excuse to throw their own people at them? Because they had chicken droppings for brains. Yes, good enough for me.

  “This is hopeless. What are we doing?” Thess confessed with no small amount of worry.

  Enough of this. Surely they didn’t mean to actually seal Vetra in? Not with the angry beast bellowing wild animal noises like that from his prison’s cavernous bowels. Or, mayhap there was another way in?

  Gah.

  If Durmad had once been known for anything, Nana Ari used to say, it wasn’t thinkers. Someone more thoughtful would’ve, erm, thunk up a backup plan, an alternate means of entry—multiple—should the need arise. Like right damn now!

  I would admit, up until this moment, all of the information she’d imparted to me—posing the tales as stories fit for a child, bringing me up on them until she could, as she’d said, reveal the truth of it all to me—had up until this point been thus far accurate. And I’d memorized just about all of them. Which was why those beastly bellows issuing from the maze of mazes gave me pause.

  My sensible side has always struggled with this, even more so now, trying to bring the two halves together—common sense and realism versus supposed fable, magical fae, gifted watchmen and, well, you know, mythical beasts!

  There was so much I could no longer shove to the recesses of my mind and pretend I was never told.

  Everything just kept flooding back, long ago left but never forgotten. I’d loved Nan’s tales as much as I’d silently questioned them. Still did, certain things.

  Yes, beasts. Okay. Beasts did not equal magick. It just meant there were things out there living among us that were… unique?

  Yes, Riadne, keep telling yourself that.

  Direct descendants of the labyrinth used to be marked, Chosen, part of an elite guard blessed by the Queen they worshipped like a living deity—a creature of great magical powers—making it possible for them to not only pass their purpose down from generation to generation, but allow the labyrinth’s chosen the ability to understand these creature beasts—these Tauran, as Nan had briefly called them.

  Was it because I was female, in a long line of females? Was that why I never held the mark or developed one? Why I couldn’t understand? Because I was considered merely a daughter when a son was required? Was that why Nan never held the mark? Or Mother, or Vetra, for that matter?

  How would I bloody communicate with it?

  If all of this queen, fae hubbub was to be believed—not that I was questioning the presence of Minotaurs a wink but, truly, magick? Magick!—then why didn’t any of us have the ability to speak and understand the Queen’s tongue—her rumored lyrical, lilting native language—or the strange, snorted, grunt filled words favored by these beasts of legend? One would think someone would be graced with this ability, or a new line chosen. But, no, no mark has presented since the last of the Keldepin males held it, and that was over forty years ago by my Nan’s measure.

  I could’ve learned, perhaps, had I a teacher with the knowledge of the Queen’s words? And would that have helped, hmm, with a beast and not a queen in residence, Adne?

  Too many questions, not enough answers.

  Reaching out blindly, I went to grip a horn to pull myself up. My hand missed and something shifted beneath my fingers, swiping the meat of my palm across one of the fat tips of a sharp, thick stone horn. If I’d have pushed, pressed, any harder, I’d have accidently impaled myself on the blasted thing.

  “Ow.” Pulling my hand back, I cradled it to my chest. A trickle of warmth pooled in my palm, too much considering the lack of pain I felt, prompting me to untuck the end of the long-sleeved shirt I was wearing to press the material to my wound. Was I to silently bleed out this night?

  “Get yourself, then?” Thess went to take my hand and have a look, ridiculous as the idea was in the dark, but I jerked it back.

  “Tis but a scratch,” I muttered hastily. I didn’t need him fawning over me like a mother hen. I could take care of myself. Or so I tried to keep telling myself.

  The journey before me, merely contemplating what lie ahead—or might not, as it were—had my insides cramping. In all honesty, I wanted to turn around and make a run for it, but that meant leaving Vetra behind. And ultimately, Thess.

  Never. Never. Not in a million years.

  I can do this.

  Heroes aren’t made of cowards. No, they weren’t, but this bumbling excuse for one right here, an admitted chicken shit, was going to take a stab at this savior thing.

  Shaking myself from my thoughts as a small bit of material was thrust in front of my face, I jerked, jumpy, and blinked. A square—a soft, fabric square. Thess’ handkerchief, one of the ones his mother had made him.

  “Here, take it.” That bit of thin material waved, bringing with it the scent of pine and the ocean. Thess always kept one in his pocket. Always.

  Bordering along the sea, Thess’ tiny little cottage just there before the beach, where I’d have imagined he should smell like a gob of seaweed, he always smelled briny, of salt and the sea. The pine, he kept a small bit of pine needles in his pockets, collected from the edge of the Hollows, something his father had shown him all those years ago when they’d first settled here.

  “A bit of home in your pocket and you’ll never long for it,” Marius would murmur in his typically jovial way. When Thess had run out of pine from his home to put in his pockets, his father had decided one pine was as good as the other, when it counted. He’d collected small bundles and brought them to his son all those years—it’d meant the world to Thess.

  Marius’d passed seven winters ago, along with Helene, Thess’ mother. The fever from the black spots, a sickness no one could really explain, had taken them, Moira, the town crone’d declared. Doc Gable’d said the same.

  My pockets, remnants of Thess’ pine bits of home, clinging to the corners, had a clump of sand, crumbled and seeping down my pant legs by now, probably, in each.

  I didn’t question Marius’ logic, though, as I peered down at two pointed tips gleaming in the minuscule light offered, I missed what I’d thought of as home all these years, what it should’ve been, already. No pocket of terra or leaves would sustain me. Thess was desperately holding on to his home, one pine and sand clumped pocketful at a time. And now, wearing his borrowed breeches, I could carry with me a bit of him where I went, always.

  Gods, I was going to fucking miss him. My chest gave a small, tight squeeze, until I had to take a deep breath to get my lungs working again. He was a friend more than anything, even after our fallout, one not afraid to disagree and argue with you and still pick up right where we left off, not some mindless, agreeable lemming trying to tell you all the right things. How the Elders could stand kowtowing, actually seeming to enjoy it, I’d never understand.

  With a swift nod of my head he couldn’t make out, I took what my accomplice offered gingerly. He didn’t know it, but the gesture, the meaning behind it, meant everything to me. “Ah, thank you.”

  I hoped he had the same sentimentality, upon later reflection—when he wasn’t mad at me, that is—after he realizes what I’m about to do is the best choice. The only choice.

  He’d see, eventually, I prayed.

  My palm was moist, wetness trickling, sticky with more than sweat. The shirt wasn’t cutti
ng it.

  With a reluctant sigh and a grimace, I carefully unfolded the cloth I knew to be cream with his initial embroidered in gold in the corner, and, pressing the middle to my cut, wrapped the other ends around it, tying them into a knot at the back of my hand.

  Clearing my throat, I forced a smile I was trying to feel yet failing miserably at. Maybe if I kept it up there was the small chance I might buy into my own falsities.

  Here I go, came my silent attempt at bravado.

  Standing in front of the only thing keeping me from furthering my plan, I brought my hands to the wall. Cool and gritty, a finite sheen of dust covering the stone slab, my hands slid up to the base of each thick shaft, fingers curling around them. I felt it then, a strange throbbing that started at my injured palm, traveling higher, until my shoulder burned with the strange, sudden, tingling stings.

  “Ah… uh-erm. Wow,” I muttered, frowning. Had something gotten into the wound? And so fast? Releasing the stone horns in my hands, frowning, trying to ignore the sudden vibrations it felt like were starting to rumble the somehow irremovable piece, I eyed the stone piece. With a shake of my head I reached out to touch it with the opposite hand, poking at it with the tip of my finger. I felt it then, a small but obvious, telltale spot of moisture.

  Blood. Damnation. I must be bleeding clean through Thessen’s handkerchief. No matter, I’d tend to it once I was inside and Thess handed over my pack, but this couldn’t be good, making it that much harder to get a good grip on the damned odd stone work. Bending, feet digging in, I gripped the horns anew and gave them a sharp yank. My hands slid, blood smeared. Damnation. That weird hum was still prevalent, a small yet significant, thrumming rumble, but nothing more.

  Huh.

  Putting my hands back to their original positions, a better angle for my task at hand, my fingers slowly slid up to the middle of the horns, rolling the material covering my cut until I felt the coolness of the stone upon it, and that’s when it hit me. Right, left, that shocking buzz vibrated right up my arms. It stung, but the sting lessened, like the force of it was being split between the two limbs instead of a single arm taking the brunt of it.