by AJ Lancaster
“No, they merely burn to the touch.”
She shivered.
“That is Faerie: beautiful, deceptive, dangerous.” Hetta had never fully understood the nature of Faerie, not in her bones. Was she coming to understand it now? Did it give her second thoughts?
She swivelled and brushed his cheek. “Kind. Loyal. Insufferably arrogant, on occasion.”
His heart swelled. “I prefer understandably arrogant, when required.” But he couldn’t let her deceive herself. “But Faerie is not known for kindness.”
“You’re fae, Wyn, just as much as those nightwraiths. You can’t keep pretending you’re not. I don’t want you to keep pretending you’re not.”
“The magic here—” He trailed off under the accusing weight of her gaze. He sighed. It was an excuse, and they both knew it. “I am afraid.” He gestured towards the nightwraiths. “What if I am becoming something like my father, something like Queen Tayarenn?”
“Then we shall need to investigate how fae divorces work,” Hetta said without hesitation. “Honestly, Wyn, we have quite sufficient trouble to be getting on with without you borrowing more. And how am I ever to grow accustomed to you if you refuse to grow accustomed to you? Besides, this is the sort of place where it seems foolish to give up any advantage, and I know you can draw more magic in your fae form.”
“I also have less control,” he pointed out.
“Yes, such as when you electrocuted an entire field of butterflies without affecting me, even though I was holding your hand at the time. You’ve never shocked me, not once. And I have this, besides.” She shook the heartstone in front of him.
“Yes, and we don’t know how long that will last without my adding to its burden.” Was its colour a shade darker even than a few hours ago? He stood, pulling out the tracking spell again. “We should keep moving.”
25
The Wild Hunt
The forest at dusk transformed into rolling hills at midnight in a way that was patently impossible, and Hetta drew to a halt to glare at the landscape in sheer outrage. She took a step back and found herself standing where they’d been just a few seconds previously, in not only an entirely different landscape but a different time of day. The sun’s last dying rays slipped through the dappled canopy of the forest. Trees in strange hues of purple and blue stretched in all directions. There was no sign of Wyn.
She stepped forward into night. Wyn was once more beside her, and they stood together in a sea of rippling grass spread beneath a sky of deep indigo. The enormous full moon cast a coldly silver light across the dips and hollows of the endless plain. Turning on the spot, there was nothing except open sky and grass in all directions, with the exception of the single solitary tree behind them. She couldn’t help it; she stepped back under its branches. Even anticipating it, it was still disorienting to find herself alone in the vast, quiet forest, with the sun still edging towards the horizon.
Wonder rose in her, and she felt a bit like a child examining a new toy, stepping backwards and forwards several more times. Still—
“The geography doesn’t make sense!” she complained. “Is the tree a portal of some sort?”
“It’s a natural border. This is mosaic land,” Wyn said absently, as if the landscape’s impossibility weren’t of that much note.
Instead, he seemed preoccupied with gazing up at the moon, the starlight caressing his skin. Despite being in his human form, he didn’t look human. He looked otherworldly, strangely natural in this unnatural place, his hair curling in the gentle breeze, glinting like silver. His fingertips brushed the long grasses, and there was something yearning in his expression as he drank in the moonlight. Her chest twisted uncertainly.
“Wyn?” She touched his shoulder.
His eyes were dreamy when he turned back to her, the russet rich as blood, and he drew her into a kiss that tasted of thunder. It was very—well. Yes. But it also reminded her a little too strongly of a previous time he’d been swept away by strong magic, and when they came up for air, she gave him a shake, rattling the silver clasps on his robes.
“Wyn!”
“Yes, my love?” He cupped her cheek and brushed the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip. It was most unfair, the way he was looking at her, in the silvery light of the moon, and she couldn’t really be blamed for leaning in willingly when he bent to kiss her again. Her bones went liquid.
She made another attempt to recover herself. “Hallowyn.”
He drew back with a long sigh of regret. “Ah. I did say I was finding the magic distracting.” He didn’t sound very sorry for it, but as she wasn’t either, she couldn’t really complain. His eyes were still impossibly deep, impossibly richly coloured.
Instead, she pointed at the stone feather he was holding. “How far away are we from Irokoi?”
He touched the stone and lost a bit of his dreaminess. “Close. This way.” He reached for her hand, hesitated, his attention going to the heartstone. It had fallen out of her shirt, and when she went to tuck it back in, she saw that the colour had deepened, the change obvious even by moonlight.
She’d been trying not to think about it, since there wasn’t currently anything she could do and so many other distractions going on besides. Not that she could forget that she was pregnant, exactly, but it also wasn’t always at the top of her mind, and she still hadn’t quite rearranged the pieces of her identity around the concept.
“It’s draining faster,” Wyn said grimly.
She tugged him back into motion. “Maybe it’s because we’re in Faerie. If it’s affecting you, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine it might have some effect on your baby as well.”
Wyn got a peculiar expression that made Hetta squeeze his hand fondly—a sort of awed panic, as if he too had managed to forget about the existence of their baby. For a moment he looked, ironically, entirely human.
Their baby. Their baby that might feel the tides of fae magic like its father. Hetta mused on that as they walked away from the tree, down a gentle slope and then up again. The long grass rippled like the fur of a great beast. How far had they come? How long had they been walking already? She felt bone-tired, but it was hard to know how much that related to the passage of time and how much to the babe.
“Do you think about what they’ll be like?” she asked him.
Wyn was still looking up at the sky as they walked, and she thought he hadn’t heard her at all. His hair fell away from his ears, which were almost pointed, and his skin glimmered faintly. “Who?”
“I’m having serious second thoughts about broaching the subject now, with you so distracted. I’m talking about our child—do you think about what they might be like?”
That brought him back to her again, some of the otherworldliness draining from him. “I’m trying not to think of it, in case…” He trailed off. The emotion in his eyes knocked the breath out of her. “But yes, I do. I like to think they will have your eyes. And fierceness.”
“Let’s hope they don’t inherit my pyromancy,” she said. “Or don’t you remember me accidentally setting the drapes on fire?” It had been when her magic was first coming in—and before she’d realised the link between her emotions and pyromancy. Illusion worked differently.
“I do, yes.”
She gave him an accusing look. “Now I think about it, that fire extinguished remarkably easily.” Almost as if someone with air magic had been present at the time. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”
A teasing light came into his eyes, a relief to see him so present and not distracted by the scenery. “Think how useful I will be if they have inherited fire magic.”
“Well, if he or she inherits the ability to accidentally start hurricanes, I’m going to blame you.”
What would their child be like? On a superficial level, Hetta found she rather hoped they would inherit Wyn’s deep russet eyes and mild temper, now that the idea had been put into her head. How strange, to think of a person-to-be, a combinati
on of both her and Wyn. Or maybe they’d be entirely different to their parents. She let herself spread a hand over her still-flat stomach, feeling simultaneously a bit soppy and a bit ridiculous. It still didn’t quite seem real.
And yet, the thought of losing this undefined child, however abstract… She swallowed, her fingers curling into a fist.
The grassy plains were interrupted by a series of rock formations. The transition wasn’t as abrupt as the previous one. Though the rocks had risen out of the grass between one step and the next, she could still see the grassy plains stretching behind them when she looked, and at least they were still under the same starlit sky. They drew up before a great cairn of stones, piled several storeys high. There was no path up its steep, reddish sides; they’d have to go around it.
That was when the horde arrived.
It ought to have been impossible for anyone to sneak up on them in this landscape, but there was scarcely any warning. One moment, the rush of hoofbeats and heavy bodies and the crushing of grass stems thundered; the next, riders were rushing down the hill towards them. Hetta suspected Faerie geography was at work again. Of course.
Wyn reacted faster than she did, changing to his fae form, his wings spreading in a combination of shield and challenge, and the air grew thick with storms and spice. His feathers shouldn’t have been so bright in the moonlight, nor his skin so vivid a brown, but it was as if power had lit him up from the inside, painting him with his own personal daylight.
The charge of bodies split and flowed around them, hemming them in against the cairn. Hetta summoned a fireball, which gave the horde pause, their horses pulling up restlessly.
‘Horde’ had been the first word that had sprung to mind, and it continued to be an apt enough descriptor even on closer inspection. The riders were as many and varied as the fae she’d seen at the DuskRose ball, but there was a wilder, sharper edge to them. Possibly because they were all clearly armed.
They were all mounted, apart from those that were their own mounts. Centaurs, she thought in amazement, taking in one huge equine woman, bare-breasted, her hair a long, free-flowing mane down her back. A dark-skinned man—fae—rode what seemed to be an ordinary horse until it snorted, showing sharp fangs. The man bared his own fangs in concert with his mount. Enormous black hounds with glowing red eyes crept forward between the horses.
The temperature—which had been that of a mild summer evening—plummeted, and steam curled visibly in the air as the hounds panted and the horses pawed at the ground. Hetta shivered, and a woman who seemed to be the leader approached. She rode a great stag-like creature with glowing red eyes. The woman had startlingly pale skin, branching horns, and red hair that streamed out around her, the colour of blood. Her eyes burned like coals.
“Trespassers,” she said. She smiled. Her teeth gleamed bone white. The wind had picked up at some point in the last thirty seconds, howling like a pack of wolves, and sending the woman’s bloody hair whipping dramatically about her. Surely that sort of perfectly timed weather couldn’t be natural? Did Faerie weather respond to melodrama? Heavens forfend.
“These are unclaimed lands; we do not trespass,” Wyn said, and he blazed bright and tall as his wings spread further. The smell of his magic swirled thickly around them. The horde broke into raucous laughter at that, led by the red-haired woman.
Hetta swallowed and put a bit more power into her hovering fireball.
“We’re not looking for trouble,” she said, and her voice came out thinner than she’d like. “We’re just passing through. Let us go on our way and we won’t interfere with you either.”
The woman’s smile only grew wider, and the hounds crept closer. Their teeth seemed to get even larger and more prominent. The stars dimmed, the night growing darker, the wind fanning her hair out like a crimson halo.
“Look—this is madness. You might be able to hurt us, but not without some of you getting hurt yourselves. Surely we can—” Hetta babbled, but she could feel it was too late, that it had been too late from the moment the horde had found them, that there were no words in the world that would’ve checked them because that was what they were: wildness and bloodthirst given form.
“Yes,” said the woman, and the horde attacked.
Hetta called fire. Wyn acted in concert, taking control of the air currents without hesitation, and her fire fanned out to form a tall, flickering wall between them and the horde. Hetta had expected the horde to leap back, but instead the raucous laughter rose to a crescendo full of metal and cruelty, and their eyes glowed a fiercer red. And then the horde were on fire too—flames not of Hetta’s making but a glow of their own red malevolence.
The woman kneed her stag through Hetta’s wall of flames. The fires caressed her lovingly, her hair a torrent of burning crimson that kept burning even after she had passed through.
They were fireproof. How was that fair?
“Let’s fly,” Wyn said, his voice tight as he pulled her against him. But before he could take off, the world was moving—wait, no, not the world, the cairn, up and up and up, with a sound like metal scratching glass.
The thing that wasn’t a cairn uncurled, higher than a castle, filling the sky with golden scales. Two slits opened, revealing enormous blue eyes, and the dragon spread vast wings with a roar that shook the earth.
Hetta wasn’t really one for hysteria, but she screamed when the dragon’s neck snapped down and snatched one of the hounds in its jaws, which had time only for one cut-off squeal before the dragon swallowed it whole.
“Hold on,” Wyn said, and then they were airborne in a rush of cardamom and storms. Hetta clung to his neck, her stomach lurching.
The dragon looked up.
Was it going to follow them? But instead it did something only slightly less alarming: it spoke, in a voice like gravel.
“The youngest prince.” It made a sound like an avalanche, and she flinched until she realised it was chuckling. “Dragons make excellent godparents, stormchild. Give my regards to your mother.”
The dragon turned back to the horde, who were trying to flee, and roared. There was another squeal, and a crunch of bone. Hetta buried her face against Wyn’s neck. They flew higher.
26
Unexpected Dukes
Jack was saddling his cob, determined to be out and away from too many people asking too many daft questions when he heard the stableboy call out in surprise: “Mr Gregory!”
Frowning, he put down the saddle and peered out into the stableyard. The hive of activity had temporarily paused in the wake of the stableboy’s words, except for the horses, who continued to stamp and whicker as his young cousin came into view, lugging a trunk with both hands. Gregory had a sheepish air about him, which was bloody appropriate since as far as Jack knew he ought to be miles south of here in Knoxbridge.
“Greg!”
Gregory turned towards him and flushed. “Oh. Jack.”
“What in blazes are you doing here?”
Gregory rocked back and forth on his heels and then said in a rush, “I’ve been rusticated. I hitched a lift from the station with Mr Brown.” Mr Brown was the local home farmer, who gossiped like a fishwife. Gregory’s expression said he was well aware of this and not especially pleased to think every inhabitant of the estate would soon know of his unplanned return.
“Rusticated,” Jack repeated. He pushed out of the stall and re-latched it behind him.
“Only till the end of term!” His shoulders came up. “But maybe I won’t go back.” He looked like he expected Jack to argue with him, or at least disapprove loudly, but Jack wasn’t his father or brother, dammit. And Lady Phoebe would fuss fine enough for anyone.
“You see anything at the station?” Jack glanced reflexively at the sky, but there was no sign of a winged figure.
At Gregory’s blank look he added, “Didn’t Marius tell you Aroset was on the loose?”
Gregory frowned. “Rakken seemed to think she’d show in Knoxbridge rather than here.”
“Maybe Marius ought to come back too then.”
“He can’t; he has classes to teach. Plus he has to go see the earl.” Gregory looked at him hopefully, as if Jack had anything at all to add on that subject. Jack hadn’t the foggiest why the earl would want to talk to Marius specifically, though Hetta had said something vaguely about an interview.
“Marius all right though?”
Gregory blinked. “Yes?” he said uncertainly, as if it hadn’t occurred to him to consider his older brother’s mental state. “Same as ever. He doesn’t like Rakken much.”
“No one likes Rakken much.”
Gregory gave him a jaded look that made him wonder exactly what mischief the fae prince had gotten into in the past week and a half. “Yes, they do. They don’t know he’s fae though. He’s passing himself off as visiting royalty from the continent.” He looked up at the face of the house. “Hetta’s still not back?”
“No.” Why did everyone keep asking Jack this, as if he had her hiding under his other coat?
Greg fidgeted with the handle of his trunk, looking up at the face of the house with trepidation. “Is, um, my mother home?”
Jack shrugged. “No idea. I’ve not been inside since breakfast. But no reason she shouldn’t be.”
“Right.” Gregory paused, as if hoping Jack might offer to accompany him. Jack would rather be dragged by wild horses.
He grinned and made a shooing motion. “Good luck breaking the news, pup.”
Gregory glared at him and, to Jack’s surprise, made a vulgar gesture before hitching his trunk up again. Jack was half-impressed with his boldness and half-irritated that his young cousin wasn’t quite as respectful as he’d been before leaving home.