“Stupid snot-licking, hatred-vomiting, kitten-killing, ass on backwards OATHS!” Memory roared, cursing the sky and kicking at the dirt.
Tears blurred her vision and that time she could not stop them from falling. Warm wetness spilled down her cheeks, ran across the bridge of her nose, down her neck.
Shonae’s voice was soft. “Keeping our oaths is what keeps the peace.”
“Do you think this is peace?” Memory bellowed. “Everyone is fighting! People are dying, fae are dying! Finvarra is a raging lunatic and I saw my friends get Branded and dragged away!”
She turned on the faun, bearing down on her as the fae backed skittishly away. “And you, you KNEW about the vines, didn’t you? I trusted you!”
The faun squealed. “I am not allowed to tell humans of such things. It is forbidden. I tried to keep my part of the oath. I did not lead you into the vines, into the danger. I am here because I am still trying…”
“They were BRANDED!” Memory screamed. “Do you know what that means?”
Shonae’s dark eyes flared with warning and her floppy goat ears stood straight up. “Yes, I do. Do you?”
“Yes!”
“Then why do you just stand there screaming?”
Memory’s jaw dropped. “Because I… am venting and… totally freaking out… Because this is all my fault.” She took a step back from the cowering white faun. “And I don’t know if I can fix it.”
Shonae said nothing. From the distance came the sickly rustling and whimpers of the vines, as though they were still trying to reach them. Memory wiped her eyes and took a long breath. Her whole body ached and her spirit was crushed, but not gone.
I’m going to save them all.
She dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Let’s go, the clock is ticking.”
Still holding her shoulders up defensively around her neck, Shonae asked softly, “Where would you have me take you first?”
It was a hard decision. Who did she love more? Was that the question? Would answering cost any of them their lives?
They were at the briar pathway. Beyond it would be the Seelie Court.
Will was there. Memory could get him back first, and then together they would be able to save Eloryn, Roen and Erec.
“Same as before. To get Will from the Seelie Court. I will need his help to save the others, and… and I need him.” Tears pricked her eyes again and she swiped them away with the back of her hand, angry at her inability to control her emotions.
She turned her sodden eyes to the path before her. The briar path.
Having just battled through the disgusting tangle of black whipping vines, travelling into another pathway of sticks and thorns seemed greatly unappealing. But at least the briar path was actually shaped like a path. Thick trunk-like vines that looked eons old, dry and lifeless, wrapped in spirals, forming a tunnel just wide enough for two to walk side by side. Dry silver sticks were layered and woven, twirling like fractals into a misty infinity. A smooth sandy floor shimmered like diamonds in the low light.
With a small nod from Shonae, Memory followed the faun into the briars.
Chapter Eighteen
How long have I been here?
Will shook his head, trying to clear his eyes and thoughts. Both were blurry, drunk with the bitter-sweet passion of fairy foods. In his years knowing Mina, she mostly left him in the forests of Avall, the neglected pet she came to toy with on a whim, but she had brought him to Tearnan Ogh on occasions, mostly to show off her human to the other fae. He was a status symbol to her. Few fae had their own humans anymore. He was Mina’s, Lugh was Aine’s, and he knew of only one other. Mina would bring Will here, flaunt him around the Seelie Court, and then banish him back to solitude in Avall when he seemed too needy. It wasn’t his fault humans needed to eat regularly.
In all that time, he never worked out where fairy food came from. He never saw anything growing in the fae world, no real trees to grow those incredible fruits. The fae themselves didn’t really eat, or if they did it was purely for pleasure, not for sustenance. He suspected the food Mina used to lure him as a boy, the food she now kept him drunk on, was created from pure magic. Maybe created from a fae’s life force itself. Maybe that was why if you ate it you became bonded to them.
He didn’t really care. He just wanted the strength to fight it.
He barely had the strength to sit up. He lay on his back in the softest of downs. Something white and so fluffy it was barely there under his fingers, cushioned around him like a cloud. Overhead was a ceiling of branches with silver and gold leaves woven into seven-pointed star shapes. Colors shifted and flashed, reflecting off the metallic screen like living rainbows. He couldn’t see anything else. His eyelids fluttered, falling closed.
He tried to gather his thoughts one at a time, lining them up, creating a wall of lucidity to protect himself.
I am Will.
I will find Memory again.
Worlds can’t keep us apart.
Something tickled his lips.
“My sweet pet. You seem hungry.”
Will could feel Mina snuggle in beside him. He growled, trying to push her away.
“Aw,” Mina simpered, her voice sickly sweet. “Don’t be like that.”
Will forced his eyes open. Mina’s face was right beside his, her amber eyes flickering with sparks of gold, lighting them from within as she smiled.
“Let me go back. Send me back to Avall,” he said, as it felt he had done a hundred times.
“No,” she said simply. “I don’t think we’ll ever go back there again.”
Mina ran a fingertip around Will’s lips. He lifted a leaden arm and brushed her away.
Mina pounced, landing across Will’s chest. He could feel the skin of her thighs pressing into his bare stomach, and she dangled a blue cherry-like fruit over his mouth.
He tried to turn his face away, but she turned it back.
Mina hissed. “Behave, boy! Or I will cage you!”
As weak as he felt now, Mina was easily stronger. Her fingernails dug into his cheeks as she clawed at his jaw, pulling his mouth open, and the fruit dropped in.
Will roared, summoning every scrap of resistance he had. The fruit already melted into his mouth like chocolate in the sun. He wrenched himself up, throwing Mina off him.
She shrieked, cursing him.
He tried to find a way out, but his vision grew milky, fading.
He landed on the floor, and everything he knew fell away.
The tears helped Memory keep going. Some of her anger and fear ran out of her along with the salty wetness, splashing on the powdery path. All the emotions she had not dealt with came to the surface and she let them run.
Inside the briar pathway, the darkness was lit by giant webs strung across the floors and walls, shining gold with their own luminescence.
Shonae reached out with her downy fingers, and tugged at one long thread. It twanged softly as it pulled free of the rest and she began winding it around her narrow waist.
Memory watched, curiosity overriding her sadness. “What are you doing?”
“The web of Rump of Steel-skin spiders is valuable. I can trade this well, if I live through my obligation to you.” Shonae flicked a look at Memory and flicked her tail at the same time.
“Rump of Steel-” Rumpelstiltskin, spinning hay into gold… Everything is so connected. Memory examined the webbing, spotted like glowing nightlights through the gloomy tunnel. “Is it actually real gold?”
Shonae snorted. “Not human gold. This is what fairy gold is made from.”
Shonae tugged the webbing again, and a spider the size of Memory’s face fell free of the tangled twigs, slipping down the thread into Shonae’s hands. Memory gasped, but Shonae just gently brushed the iridescent gold arachnid away. It fell on its back onto the sandy ground, spindly legs twitching, until it righted itself and disappeared again into the briars.
Memory watched the thorny walls around her with a new level of paranoia.
/> Overhead, the branches looked dangerous and thick with thorns, safely just out of reach. Shonae warned Memory that would not always be the case. Neutral territory or not, the pathway demanded its price from those who travelled it.
“Everything has a price,” Memory said. She’d learned that long ago, a world away. There, the prices were different and the rules were too but everything cost something.
Shonae eyed her for a moment. “I have an obligation to you and I will fulfill it. You want to save your friends? Yes? Then let go of all that anger and that greed because that will be what gets them killed, and me too.”
“Greed? I don’t want anything for myself!”
Shonae huffed. “Then why are you here?”
The question was a good one. It cut to the very heart of Memory’s anger. They were there because she had wanted Will back by her side and her friends were all suffering because of her actions, because of her greedy determination to have what was hers.
But was Will hers? She loved him. She knew it deep down in the bottom of her soul. But Will, he belonged to no one. He was a human being, not an object.
From that moment on, I was yours.
She knew that Will had given himself to her, as the greatest gift she could ever desire, but a gift she could not keep. She may have come here for the wrong reasons, but she would make them right. “I’m here to free my friend, not to take him for myself. Any claim I have to Will when I take on firefly-face Mina, I will give up to give him his freedom.”
And when he is truly free, would Will still choose me?
“Hmm.” Shonae snuffled, still winding thin strands of web, creating a neat spool like a belt around her middle. “I’ve only known humans to be greedy.”
Memory barked a sharp laugh. Talking with Shonae, as odd as it was, had improved her mood. She wondered why the creature was giving her breath to the conversation. She was under no obligation to talk to Memory. That was not part of their deal. Although the faun had been challenging with her words, they were never spoken unkindly.
“And I’ve only known unseelie fae to be evil monsters,” Memory shot back.
Shonae tilted her head. “Would you call a snake or spider evil? They are creatures of nature, same as the unseelie, same as all fae, same as humans. We are as we are and all have our place in the balance.”
Memory eyed the skittering shapes of elongated legs creeping above her through the briars. “Snakes and spiders generally only bite when threatened, and only some of them are outright aggressive. Most of the time they are more scared of us than we are of them.”
Shonae tilted her head back the other way.
Oh… Memory frowned.
Shonae’s furred lips seemed to have the smallest of smiles on them.
Memory knew that she was right on some levels. She thought she hated all the unseelie fae, but what did she really know about them? She hated them based on her own limited experience, but were her reasons all personal and did they have any truth to them? And what about her experiences with the seelie fae? With Mina, or Aine?
A Rump of Steel-skin spider skittered across the ground beneath Memory’s feet and with a clenched jaw she made an effort not to stamp down and squish it. It seemed to hesitate, angling its many eyes toward her, before rushing off again.
Memory watched Shonae walk in front of her for a while, the slight sparkle to her wild mane of wooly white hair, the long, black claws protruding from her furry paws. “What is the difference? Between seelie and unseelie fae, I mean. Both courts have all different kinds, and as far as I’ve seen you’re all just as tricksy as each other.”
Shonae lifted one shoulder. “Unseelie fae, we were born of the night, which gives us the shadows in our eyes. Seelie were born of day.”
“So you don’t get to choose?”
“Choose what?”
“Whether you are seelie or unseelie.”
“No.”
“So you are born good or evil and you get no say in the matter?”
Shonae’s lips split, showing her teeth as she nickered loudly. “Would being born on one day or the other force a man to behave a certain way? Humans are just as capable of dark and light, of choosing their own way. We are not as different as you would like to think. The night gave me black eyes. That is all.”
That is all. The cold nausea of confusion and uncertainty had started to spread in Memory’s stomach. It was so much easier to hate the unseelie fae, to hate all of them, to think of them as monsters. But she’d hate even more to do so and be wrong. “That is really the only difference between seelie and unseelie fae? Your eye color?”
Shonae’s grin vanished. The web she’d been winding came to an end, and she snapped it from where it was anchored to the curling tunnel. “I know your kind find the seelie fae more fitting to your ideas of beauty.”
Memory paused. Was it really that simple? Did humans make the unseelie into monsters with just their thoughts and imagination, a prejudice that made the unseelie fight back and become the monsters they were perceived to be? Could it be as simple as visual bias?
Memory hopped forward a few steps so she was within Shonae’s field of vision. “What do I look like to you?”
“Like a human.”
“Do we all look different?”
Shonae wrinkled her nose as she often did when Memory came close. “Of course, but none of you is very pretty.”
“Thanks a lot.” Memory chuckled. “You look like a white deer-girl to me. Not as scary as some other unseelie I’ve seen.”
“I am still young.”
“Yikes.” Memory’s first reaction was to imagine the hideous transformations this deer-girl’s body could take as she aged. But she had to stop and think- even if Shonae changed, if she looked like a troll or a banshee or some other monstrous fae she’d seen before, inside, wouldn’t she still be the same being who spoke with her so thoughtfully now? It was only appearance. That was all.
“I’m sorry,” Memory said. “For trapping you like we did. I realized then that you were young. You were just as scared to die as I am.”
Shonae’s black eyes opened wide. “I did not know you were afraid to die.”
“Of course I am. Most people are. I think it’s why we’re so stupid all the time.”
“I never knew humans feared death. You always seem to court it.”
“Court it?”
Shonae rolled her hands in the air, as though that would help her explanation. “You always do things to put yourselves near death. Things that make no sense. Like jumping off the castle walls with just the gust of your skirts to protect you from a fall to the earth.”
“You… saw that?” Mem said. The recollection of the deep sadness she’d felt in that moment, when she was ready to give everything up, filled her eyes with tears again. “That was… that was something else. I get what you mean though. In the other world people jump out of airplanes—big flying machines that go across the sky.”
“That is a myth.”
Memory wanted to laugh but she could see by Shonae’s face that she believed that something like an airplane was simply a myth. “In that world fairies and magic are myths.”
“We will be a myth in this world too, soon enough.”
Just that morning, Memory might have said good riddance. She wasn’t so sure now.
A loop of thin, dry wood hung low, spotted with thorns. Engaged in the conversation with Shonae, Memory ducked away too slow and a small sting flared on Memory’s cheek. She covered the cut with her palm. The tunnel walls felt closer than they did before, and again she had to dodge away from a branch extending close to her face.
“The path is getting smaller,” she said.
“And it will get smaller again,” Shonae nodded.
“And, why?”
“To start a journey is always easier than to finish one.”
Memory shot a glare at Shonae. When did fairy riddles start making so much sense?
“Frotz,” Memory swore as a thorny
stick caught on her sleeve, pricking through to her skin beneath. “Is all the plant-life in Tearnan Ogh this bloodthirsty?”
“There is no plant-life in Tearnan Ogh. It is enchanted to move like it still lives, but it is all dead. The briar pathway is but a ghost. A ghost who takes payment in life to sustain itself.” Shonae folded her hands across her waist, protecting her Rump of Steel-skin web, but made no other attempt to protect herself from the thorns closing in on them. “It will take what it demands. Don’t fight it, and don’t use your iron to cut through. This is the price we pay.”
“No wonder this highway is so bare,” Memory grumbled.
“It once was full of life. Fae would travel the briar pathway all across our world and others. Now those who are left remain in Avall and their own courts only. All others have turned to dust.” Shonae kicked at the diamond sand on which they walked.
Memory’s stomach turned. Please be speaking metaphorically, pretty please.
The tunnel had closed in until Memory and Shonae had to walk in single file. With every step, hooked thorns caught in Memory’s hair and clothes, ripping thin razor cuts where it met flesh.
Memory stopped trying to avoid them. There was no way to. This was the price she would pay.
The briars rustled, a mix of dry wood crackling and a low slurping, licking sound that Memory was sure was going to drive her crazy.
The briars dipped lower, closing in completely. Shonae pushed through, grabbing onto Memory’s wrist and dragging her behind. Scratches covered Memory’s face and hands, her red blood dripping into the ground. She thought she heard a contented sigh coming from the briars.
With a final push, Shonae and Memory broke through the thicket. Memory turned back to see the mess they had just fought through and saw instead a wide tunnel, looking just like the open mouth of the briar pathway they had entered on the other side.
“Typical,” she muttered. “Still, we made it.”
Memory's Wake Omnibus: The Complete Illustrated YA Fantasy Series Page 67