by Ryan Graudin
My thoughts are swimming, full of mirage and possibilities as I tuck the letter into my skirts and bow out of the chamber. Breena . . . not one iota inside me clings to the belief that Breena betrayed the humans she so fiercely guards. But the younglings . . . any one of them could be privy to the plot to bring down the mortals. To end Richard’s life.
Richard. The thought of him is a tattoo inked against my heart, pained and always there, even when I’m not looking. I wonder what he’s doing right now, apart from me. What the younglings around him are doing. Protecting or plotting . . .
“Richard will be fine.” I say the thought aloud, but it doesn’t help. I’m strung tighter than a harp, ready to get back to him.
I don’t stay under the earth. Unlike Queen Mab, I’ve never been a creature of closed, tight spaces. What feeds me, makes my soul sing, is wide plains. The soaring openness of the sky and the lunge of mountains rolling up to meet it. There’s plenty of this spreading out from Mab’s stronghold. Miles and miles of rugged land, cradled in mist and ribbons of mostly melted snow. In the full daylight, when the lochs and their streams echo the blueness of sky and the black of their depths, it’s possible to see past the ruins of castles and defiant, layered hillsides, all the way to the sea.
It’s in one of these far-forgotten fortresses that I claim sanctuary. I spend my evening among its bald relic stones, taking in the ever-clear song of the stars through a roof collapsed by long-melted blizzards. Just feet away, the tar-dark waters of a loch swish and hum with the movement of Kelpies and oh-so-shy Sprites coming up for air. There are mortal creatures too: deer and hare grazing the unkempt grass.
In such a place, I should feel whole, complete. Lacking nothing. It’s where I was knit and made, where I am alive.
The sickness is gone. Nothing in my body feels the stabbing zing of current and gears. I’m at the height of my bound, incarnate power, ready to take on an army of soul feeders.
But something is unmistakably missing. A hole has been sawed through my chest. A piece of myself I lost without consent.
I can’t not think of him. Even under such a dazzling sight as these silver-dusted heavens.
And I hate myself for being so weak—like so many of the other girls who bemused me over the years, the ones feverish with daydreams and first kisses, mooning over romanticized versions of men whose lips they touched. I’m a Fae. I’m supposed to be above all that.
But the thoughts spin regardless, over and over, picking apart Richard’s every expression. All the words he’s ever said to me. Especially the last ones: I was wondering if there might be another reason.
And all at once, I know.
There was nothing wrong with my magic. The fault wasn’t in the veiling spell or the sickness. I showed myself to Richard, dropped the enchantments, because, in the most mysterious, unreachable places of me, I wanted to. Some part of myself, the piece that’s gone now, wouldn’t let me hide from him.
At one time, I could count on the world. Winter’s hard freeze, the bitter howls of gray wolves, the colors and laughter of May Day, and the bonfires of Samhain, the twines of magic holding me together . . . Things once constant, now suddenly not. Nothing, not even the immortal, is safe from decay.
How much of ourselves have we lost? I’m not the Fae who dwelled among these ghost-filled barrows and emerald hillsides so many years ago. I’m not the Fae who tumbled into Saint James’s Park and watched Breena feed the pigeons. I don’t know what—who—I am.
But I do know that Richard has something to do with it.
Fifteen
In the end, I can’t stay the night. Whips of worry spur me south, under the moonrise, back toward Richard’s London and all of its machines.
The heavens are still black as I wait for Herne on the borders of his forest, a nervous, unwilling messenger. I’m eager to be done with this particular errand—encounters with powerful free spirits like Herne aren’t something I relish. Their magic is too unrestrained, above any law or crown.
A whistle leaves my lips, forlorn and low, infused with pieces of Herne’s ancient name. Leaves rustle against the force of the summons, their edges curling in response to such close magic. The ground grows uncertain beneath my feet, trembling with the shake of horse’s hooves. A magnificent stallion, its coat lusty with dark and starlight, bursts through the trees, a flash of rolling eyes and gaping teeth. Wild magic sears off its flank, although I don’t need an aura to know that the creature isn’t mortal. Its rider is proof enough for that. A being, perhaps as tall as the horse itself, sits proud in the saddle. Though most of him resembles a man, his flare for the dramatic emerges in the twin antlers wreathing out of his skull. They twist all the way into the shivering branches, their sharp points even impaling a few unfortunate leaves.
“Who summons me?” Herne halts on the border of the trees. His horse stamps the ground, ready to be off again.
“I bring a message from Queen Mab.” I wave the envelope like a banner of surrender above my head.
Herne stays motionless in his saddle. Something of a flame flickers behind his shadowed gaze, sending sheaths of frost down my spine. I struggle not to shudder. It’s better not to show fear around creatures like Herne.
“I will not cross the borders of my forest,” the spirit finally says. “Bring the letter to me, youngling.”
I step out, wary as prey, holding the envelope as an offering.
“Hurry up,” Herne snaps. “I don’t have all night. There are things to hunt.”
My stride jolts to life with the fear of his words. I stop just before the borders of his forest. Only the envelope breaches the invisible boundary. Herne snatches it up like a magpie gleaning silver things. He tears—careless— into the seal and glances through the lines of Mab’s spidery script.
“So—Mab wants me to allow large numbers of immortals into my forest. Wants Windsor to be a safe haven, I expect. Can’t blame her, with what’s stirring up north.” He looks up, eyes boring full force into my body. Their effect is similar to nausea. “Does your queen require a response?”
“I’m on my way back to London. You should send a sparrow.”
“One of the Guard, eh? Perhaps I’ll see you here at Windsor—I always welcome the company of a pretty young Fae.”
I back away, my smile weak. “Yes, perhaps.”
The roar of Herne’s laughter rattles the air even after he gallops away, far into the reaches of his forest.
Morning’s early hours greet the world with an eerie, thistle-blossom glow as I land outside the palace gates. This time the sickness is only an aftershock, weak and secondary. I ignore it; push down the pain as I step past the bars of solid iron and pause for the two younglings who sidle up to me.
“State your name and rank!” The first of the new security is harsh, excited with her words.
“I’m Lady Emrys Léoflic—Prince Richard’s Frithemaeg.” Richard’s Frithemaeg—these words feel sinful, their hidden meaning threatening to explode like fireworks in my aura, my face. Startling spark and neon. Showing all.
But the younglings aren’t really listening. What I couldn’t hide from Mab is easier to conjure out of their attentions.
“We need to see your signature,” the other Fae says, her voice calmer.
I hold up my right hand. Magic seeps like nectar, sweet and gold, from my fingertips. Light stretches out, ebbing and molding into the form of a regal bird as it glides around the guards’ heads. It’s a mark of who I am, a piece of my essence no other can imitate. Satisfied that I’m no soul feeder in disguise, the younglings step back.
Although Mab’s direct order was to spend these three days in surveillance, I have to visit Richard first. Worries of treason and assassins in corners shadowed and sharp have taken over me. Grown like mold, ruining everything. Only seeing Richard, taking him in with my own two eyes, will put this to rest.
I cross the courtyard’s brick-red gravel in the calmest manner I can manage. The entire border Guard is watchi
ng me, fixed on my every move. I can’t betray my true eagerness at seeing the prince, or my new distrust in his Guards. If the corruption’s as widespread as Mab implies, then no one should even suspect an investigation.
I peer into Richard’s window, but the glare of breaking morning beats off the glass—all yellow and amber—hindering my sight. It takes nearly a minute for me to make out the shapes of his bedroom. Ghastly wads of T-shirts and slacks flung upon chairs appear alongside the stretched, pale faces of some eclectic band on the opposite wall. A lamp lies sideways on a marble-topped table; a hairline crack snakes through one of the windowpanes. Signs of a struggle?
A sharp jolt twists my stomach as I study the bed’s hovel of sheets and blankets. Richard isn’t there.
Panic, pure and throaty, shatters all my years of disciplined training. I don’t even bother opening the window, my hands burst through like hurled stones. Diamond glass rains across the outside sill, piercing my palms and knees as I push myself into the jagged hole.
“Lady Emrys? What are you doing?” It’s Helene. Her hair is askew, the edges of her eyes puffed pink. Something isn’t right.
“Where is he? Where’s Richard?”
There’s a faint groan from the other side of the room. Richard’s groan. My neck snaps back at the sound. He’s slouched in a corner chair, wearing the same clothes I left him in. His shaggy head rests on a small writing table. On the desk’s edge, nested in the papery carcasses of his new speech, is a decanter for whiskey. Clear and very empty.
Richard’s moan grows louder; he begins to twitch. An eye, its specks of cool gray green and gold shot with crimson, cracks open before I can pull away.
“Embers?” My nickname is mumbled along with an incoherent string of vowels.
“Slæpe,” I whisper at him. The spell slips, light and silvery, into his temple.
The sleepy gibberish fades from his lips as my magic drags him back into dreams. I study his rumpled features: the hot, tangled mess of his hair, that half-unbuttoned shirt, and the jarring sting of his breath. Alcohol.
I turn back and face the other Fae. Their faces are pale with confusion, as if they aren’t certain whether or not to blame me for this mess of glass and spells.
“What happened last night?” I hear my voice rising, but I can’t stop it. My anger swells like dough riddled with too much yeast.
“Some of his Eton buddies came over for a couple of drinks. . . .”
Edmund. I should have known the drought of his calls and pub invites wouldn’t last. He must consider Richard’s mourning period over.
Helene’s dark, liquid eyes don’t flinch from mine. “I thought you weren’t due back for three more days. What are you doing here?”
I buy time with my response by fixing the shattered window. Tiny shards of glass fly back into their puzzle parts, glinting rainbow light across the younglings’ faces. They’re both staring.
“I received a warning that there might be an attack. I came back to check, and when I didn’t see the prince in his bed I broke the window,” I explain, as if it had been the most rational reaction in the world. “Anything to keep Richard safe, yes?”
“Everything’s been quiet,” Gwyn tells me with a frown. “The soul feeders are lying low.”
I clear my throat and gather what’s left of my dignity. “Well, I guess there’s no need for me to stay. I’ll be back in three days.”
This time I leave through the doorway. I try not to look back at Richard’s crumpled slumber as I walk out of the room. A foot, angled and odd, pokes into my vision, igniting a new wave of anger.
After all the warnings . . . everything I’ve told him, showed him, Richard still decided to put himself in danger. He laid himself out like a lamb for slaughter, drunk and open throated. An assassin would barely have to try.
Something dangerous, lethal, writhes inside me. It’s beyond anger, although there’s plenty of that shooting through every vein. It’s myself as I was in the beginning: spirit unsoiled by the sugarcoated trappings of humanity, unbound by Mab’s laws. Snarling, carnivorous magic. Magic that, with the right trigger, is meant to destroy.
I stop walking, lean against the hallway’s art-smothered wall. It takes more than a few drawn-out breaths to clear my head, silence the rage inside. With great will, I force the creature I once was back to where she’s long slept, beneath years of civilization.
I shut my eyes, imagining Richard’s face behind the darkness of my lids. My insides are a mess, puddles of anger and sorrow swirling together, making me sick. I hate that it hurts so much. That I let him get to me.
Sixteen
I spend the next three days in surveillance, watching the other Fae, noting their every move. But even after so much watching, I have nothing to report back to Mab. If the Old One has an agent, they’re craftier than a few days of observation can uncover.
At twilight on the third day, I return to Richard.
He isn’t in Buckingham Palace. The unmistakable gravity of his aura pulls me to a pub two blocks off of Regent Street. The prince is in a private back room, crouching eye level with the forest-green felt of a pool table.
The old crew is here, in this room of delicate smoke, dewy pints, and pool cues. Edmund tosses his stick back and forth between his hands as he crows about his last victory. Eyeliner leans against the edge of the table, her cleavage thrust unsubtly in Richard’s direction. Mousy Hair and her boyfriend stand to the side, watching as the prince tries to sink the last of the colored balls.
Helene and Gwyn are eager to be off. Their report is brief, made only of snippets before they vanish through the door’s treated wood. I glower in the corner, burning hotter every second, like a coal fanned completely orange.
The other Fae are long gone when I snap, the agony of my anger sparking against dry tender. They don’t feel my magic work. They have no idea when I drop the veiling spell.
Edmund is the first to see me. His hands grow stiff, forget to catch the pool stick that’s sailing into them. It clatters to the floor, forgotten.
“Whoa. Hey, Ginge,” he manages.
All at once the others find me, heads whipping about like a murmuration of starlings, perfectly synchronized. Eyeliner’s face withers into a scowl.
“Embers!” Richard lays his pool stick on the table and straightens up.
Edmund, clearly more than a beer or two into the evening, takes my nickname in with a snicker.
“All of you leave. Now.” The poison of my anger drives into Edmund’s face with a single stare. I don’t dare use magic to make them leave. There’s too much emotion venting up; I’m a volcano on the verge of eruption.
“And just who do you think you are? Ordering us about.” Eyeliner pushes off the pool table. “Where the hell did you come from?”
Richard swallows when I look at him—his Adam’s apple bobbing with the sudden knowledge that I’m angry. That he messed up.
“Go,” he tells his friends.
Edmund doesn’t hesitate. Instead he’s the leader of the pack, snatching his still-frosted pint from a nearby table before he heads toward the door. “Good luck with that, mate.”
I have eyes only for Richard as the others shuffle past, though I can feel Eyeliner’s snarky pout behind my back. It lasts long after the door closes.
I stare and stare and stare. Richard swallows twice more before he attempts to speak, “You’re back.”
“You thought I wouldn’t be?” My voice is sharp, armed.
“You were gone, Emrys. Just gone.” His eyes drop from mine, focus on the eight ball, so starkly black and white in the middle of the table. “No good-bye or anything. I thought you’d come back, but you didn’t. Not that day or the next—I thought maybe you’d left for good. Then I—I began to think you might have been a dream. When I saw you in my sleep, I thought for sure you were inside my head.”
“It wasn’t a dream.” My lips purse. Any effort to stay calm, too keep myself in check, slides back like a viper coiling to s
trike. There’s too much emotion roiling through me, ready to be spit out like venom through fangs. “I broke through a window because I thought you’d been kidnapped. You were passed out in a corner.”
My accusation needles and digs under Richard’s skin, making him squirm.
“So as soon as I disappear you decide to get drunk?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s not like that.”
I walk to the opposite end of the pool table and grab the closest ball. It’s striped, one of Edmund’s. My knuckles bleach white around it, the color of bone. “No?”
“Okay, so Ed called. He wanted to go out to the pubs, but I didn’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Right.” I roll my eyes, wheeling them pointedly about the room. “Look where you ended up.”
“I can’t just hide for the rest of my life behind all that wallpaper and iron!” Richard’s arm flails in the vague direction of the palace. “Anyway, that first night we didn’t go out. I was going to say no, but I was worried about you and feeling lonely, and I hadn’t seen them since Dad died. So I let them come over. We had a few drinks. . . .”
“It takes more than a few drinks to make a man pass out. Do you really not understand how much danger you’re in? You bloated yourself with so much alcohol it would make a horse stumble! What if you’d been attacked? You’d be dead.” I let the pool ball roll off my hand. It drops onto the table with a muffled crack, rolls over to the corner pouch, and disappears.
“Yeah?” The prince’s eyes cloud dark with sudden anger. His voice swells. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing! Then you’ll be free and you won’t have to babysit me and wipe my ass every second of the damn day!”
My breath turns sharp. I hadn’t expected Richard to fight back. My jaw clenches as I struggle to keep my frustration under control. One slip, one spell accidentally brought into being by my wrath, and the prince could die.