The Witch King

by H. E. Edgmon

  Books by H.E. Edgmon

  available from Inkyard Press

  The Witch King

  THE WITCH KING

  H.E. EDGMON

  For every trans kid scared to embrace their magic. A new world is waiting. We need you in it.

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  DEAR READER,

  My debut novel, THE WITCH KING, is not the first book I ever wrote. For years before sitting down with this story, I fretted away at other manuscripts. I’d always known I wanted to be a writer. It was obvious, from a very young age, tromping through southern swamplands and talking to the creatures my imagination concocted, I only ever half-existed in this world. The rest of me was elsewhere, in places of my own creation, and writing allowed me to craft a doorway through which others could join me.

  The problem was fear. I was terrified. See, the stories I wrote before this were not bad. They were interesting and heartfelt and each one made me a little better at what I do. But they were not honest. I wanted so desperately to share my inner world with other people, but I didn’t believe I could show the truth of it. For as far back as I can remember, there have been parts of me I’ve been made to feel ashamed of. And I truly believed, if I put all of those parts onto paper, no one would ever want to read about them. How could I expect you, Reader, to embrace the pieces of me I was struggling to come to terms with myself?

  THE WITCH KING is what happened when I finally confronted that fear head-on. Wyatt Croft is the closest thing to a piece of my own heart I’ve ever written. Into him, I poured so much of myself. All the parts of me I’d been taught to hide, I handed him. His transness, his gayness, his trauma and anger—all of them he inherited from me. And as such, he also inherited my shame. But as I finally allowed myself to deal with these things on paper, coming to terms with them in the real world became easier and easier. If I could love Wyatt, if I could recognize he was just a boy doing his best to handle impossible situations, if I could accept he was flawed but no less deserving of a happy ending, I could extend myself the same compassion.

  And in that way, this book became about embracing ourselves for precisely who we are. Wyatt’s struggles as a witch mirror many of the struggles queer people, especially trans people, face in the real world. He deals with losing those who are supposed to love him and the guilt of that loss. He’s treated like a pariah by a regime that does not want to understand him. And he feels as if his future is not his own, being forced to simply play a role he knows he doesn’t actually belong in.

  Unfortunately, because of the exploration of trauma I finally allowed myself to write, there is content in these pages that has the potential to trigger you. Specifically, I would like to issue warnings for: violence, child abuse, childhood sexual harassment and assault, allusions to pedophilia, suicidal ideation and mentions of suicide, misgendering, drug use, and mentions of infertility and miscarriage. I want you to go into this book prepared for what you may find.

  But I also want to be clear that this is not a queer pain narrative. It is a story about queer hope. Because Wyatt is also capable of incredible humor in the face of terror. He’s powerful in ways he doesn’t even realize yet. He’s wanted. And he is so loved. For every person he’s lost because of who he is, there is someone who truly loves the most authentic version of him. This, too, mirrors the experiences of our community. We are not defined only by the worst things that happen to us.

  Writing this book was a healing experience for me. And I’ll admit, I’m still a little afraid. It is a vulnerable act to take a piece of my heart and hand it off to a stranger. But I’m also hopeful. I’m hopeful this story will land in the hands of those who need it most. Hopeful Wyatt’s journey will resonate with you, and maybe offer you a bit of the same healing it gave me.

  Now, come on. Let’s step through the doorway together.

  —H.E. EDGMON

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEATH, REVERSED

  I open the back door to let the dogs out, and Nadua’s got her gardening shears buried like a knife in one of my fiancé’s wings.

  Today turning out to be a shitshow isn’t a huge surprise. Every morning, I pull a card from my tarot deck to get an idea of what the day stretched out in front of me might hold. It’s the one piece of magic I let myself dabble in, the one reminder of my old life, besides the scars. This morning, I pulled Death, reversed.

  Resistance to change. Refusal to let go. Bitterness. Transformation.

  I’d known right then and there something unfortunate was about to go down, but I hadn’t expected him.

  Emyr North. Prince of the North American fae.

  The first sight of him in years doesn’t put me on my ass the way I always worried it might, though the feral animal of my heart threatens to claw its way out of my rib cage.

  Down, boy.

  He looks like he did three years ago, but also not. Every part of him is bigger than the lanky pubescent boy I remember. His body has stretched from boyhood to manhood, gangly limbs giving way to chiseled muscle and a frame that has to be a foot taller than my own. All the pieces might be bigger than they used to be, but it doesn’t matter. I would know the pieces of him anywhere.

  Massive brown wings—thin, veined, and leathery—stretch out on either side of him, tipped with golden claws. His horns have curled into two spirals of soft brown atop his forehead, glinting gold in the light of the afternoon Texas sun. His fangs, long and lethal, peek over his lower lip.

  The last time I saw him, he was just a boy. Now he’s a monster.

  The fae are all monsters.

  But so am I.

  He’s more put-together than I remember, too. No more dirt stains on his knees or leaves tangled in his hair from romping around in the woods. His nearly obsidian skin is flawless, the sides of his head shaved to expose the dramatic points of his ears but left long down the center of his skull.

  He’s dressed in a pink suit so dark it could be red, patterned with gold flowers, subtle enough that they almost blend into the pink fabric. A chain is hooked into his septum ring and stretches up to connect to a gold cuff on the tip of his ear, and an assortment of bejeweled rings decorate his long fingers, necklaces dangling around his neck. His lids are painted with black eyeliner and a shimmery golden powder.

  The softness I remember from our youth has been carved away to reveal the regal warrior underneath. Even with blood spilling from the wound in his wing, he looks like he’s the one in control.

  One thing hasn’t changed. The golden glow of his energy sweeps around him like a halo, framing the sharp angles of his face, draping down over his shoulders. A consta
nt emanation of light, like he’s some kind of wicked angel.

  Of course he’s beautiful. But he was beautiful the last time I saw him. It doesn’t change anything.

  I still don’t want him here. I never wanted him to find me.

  The dogs rush him, losing their ever-loving minds, barking like they do whenever a rabbit hangs out just past the fence line. He doesn’t seem to notice them. Some of those mutts are near a hundred pounds, and he’s got six of them banging up against his legs, but he doesn’t sway an inch. Neither do Nadua’s fingers around the shears.

  There are three types of fae magic: Feeling, Influencing, and Healing. Emyr is a Healer, able to use his magic like medicine on wounds. Not just the kind that come from weapons, either. Healers have been known to transform barren fields to lush gardens. Some, the most powerful of their kind, can even raise the dead.

  I don’t know how powerful Emyr is these days, but a stab wound wouldn’t be much for even the most mediocre of their kind. Still, it’s gotta hurt.

  Emyr’s dark eyes find my face and I think, for the splittest of seconds, I see his confidence waver.

  I am not beautiful. I might’ve been, the last time he saw me, but I’m not now. The person he’s been looking for all this time doesn’t exist anymore.

  But whatever look I thought I saw is gone, replaced by a calm, guarded expression. And then he opens his mouth and says a name. It’s not my name, though he’s clearly addressing me. I don’t have it in me to react to my deadname, ’cause the sound of his voice threatens to take a baseball bat to my kneecaps. It’s deeper than I remember it, a rolling baritone, crisp on the consonants and honeyed on the vowels.

  I would like to die.

  He found me. Three years trying to escape where I came from, finding a new family, finding a new self, pushing my magic away and blending into the human world until I was practically a ghost, and somehow he still found me. I don’t know why I ever thought I could be free of the fae. I don’t know why I let myself get comfortable.

  “Wyatt,” Nadua drawls, voice raspy from thirty years of smoking and barking orders. “This a friend of yours?”

  I guess there goes any plan I might’ve concocted about feigning ignorance.

  That she seems relatively calm despite the presence of a behorned creature of unknown origin in her backyard should probably concern me more than it does. She doesn’t know anything about what I am. The only one in the world who does is her daughter, my best and only friend, Briar. Nadua should be freaking out more than this. But in the two years I’ve known her, I’ve never actually known Nadua to freak out about anything.

  Still, if there were ever an appropriate time, this would be it.

  “Uh.” Oh, as it turns out, I can still speak. Kinda.

  Emyr asks, “Wyatt?”

  I’m not sure if he’s looking for clarification on the name or asking me to tell her he is, in fact, my friend, but I can’t seem to do either. I open my mouth a couple times. Close it just as many. Finally, I throw my hands up and what comes tumbling out of me is, “Briar and Sunny are making a huge mess in the kitchen.”

  Sunny is Nadua’s husband, Briar’s dad. As I passed the two of them on the way to let the dogs out, they were in the middle of carving up the deer carcass Sunny brought back in the bed of his pickup the night before. Playing with roadkill isn’t unheard of in the Begay-Brown household, but Sunny and Briar never properly mop up the blood.

  Nadua turns her head just enough to meet my stare and hold it, brown gaze splitting me open like the buck knife her husband is using right now on the dead animal inside. She has this way about her, this inexplicable knowing that makes me feel uncomfortably seen. It’s been this way since she found me, fifteen and alone, hungry and anxious and hiding in the back of the San Antonio library just before close, hoping not to be discovered and thrown out before morning. She picked me up, draped her cardigan over my shoulders, and clucked her tongue, then took me home to Laredo like a stray collected from the side of the road. I’ve belonged to this family ever since.

  Whatever she sees, she must come to some decision. She yanks the shears free from Emyr’s wing and, with one last withering look, turns her back on him and stalks away. Her energy, deep red like the clay dirt she comes from, lingers near him until it can’t any longer, until it snaps back to her spine like a rubber band. She pauses at my side, thick dark eyebrows tight over a tense expression.

  I don’t know what I expect her to say. But it is definitely not what she actually says, which is, “Take him behind the shed before Doli sees.”

  Doli, Briar’s eight-year-old sister, was inside watching PBS in her grandmother’s lap the last time I saw her. But, uh, yeah. No. Nadua might be uncomfortably calm, but Emyr would probably be nightmare fodder for that kid. She doesn’t even trust Santa Claus. Sunny had to explain he wasn’t real after Doli spent last holiday season wailing about not wanting some strange old apparently omnipotent man to break into her house.

  Silence hangs between us. Emyr raises his hand to his still-bleeding wound and, with a pulse of golden light, it disappears. The fae can’t actually fly—not anymore, anyway, though I’ve heard they could once, in Faery—so it’s not like the injury would’ve hindered that. Still, it’s probably best he doesn’t keep bleeding all over the backyard.

  Not once does he move his gaze from my face.

  I wish I could read his mind. I’ve never been particularly good at understanding other people, though there was a time when reading Emyr was as easy as breathing for me. That time is long past.

  It’s a cool day for mid-May in this part of Texas, hovering somewhere in the eighties, but the direct sunlight beating down makes it feel hotter. Or else it’s the fault of the black hoodie I’ve got on. Or maybe I’m sweating for an entirely unrelated reason.

  “You couldn’t put a glamour on before you showed up?” I finally demand, flicking my wrist at him demonstratively. Seriously. Fae travel all the time, in and out of their hidden kingdoms. They usually put the wings away before they do.

  He frowns, glancing down at himself as if only just now realizing what he looks like. “The glamour wore off...but I was so close to finding you, I didn’t realize until it was too late.”

  The idea of him so wrapped up in a desperate attempt to get to me that he couldn’t pay attention to anything else...definitely does not make me feel anything. Nope. Not at all.

  Emyr shrugs one shoulder, nonchalant. “It doesn’t matter. No one but the woman saw me. The Guard will send someone to deal with her memories.”

  The Guard are the officers in Asalin, the fae kingdom over which Emyr’s parents rule.

  “I think the fuck they won’t,” I snap back, flashing fang. “Keep your pigs away from here.”

  Emyr’s gaze settles on my mouth. Witches’ fangs are smaller than those of the fae. They’re usually indiscernible from human canine teeth. But three years ago, in a gas station bathroom in the middle of nowhere Midwest, I took a nail file to mine. I carved them from useless accessories into weapons. I wonder if that’s what he’s looking at now.

  The girl you used to love is dead, Emyr.

  A shadow moves in my periphery, in the window of the house, and I remember Nadua’s warning to hide. With a quiet growl, I shove my hands in the front pocket of my hoodie and stomp toward the shed. Emyr follows at a distance.

  Most of the dogs have lost interest in him, all except Bella, a pit mix of questionable origin. She trots alongside us, fat brindle body swaying, tongue lolling around in the heat. When we finally settle behind the shed, I turn to face Emyr again. Bella sniffs his hand, and he cocks his head at her before turning his fingers over and offering her his upturned talons. Bella gives his palm a considerate lick before dropping down into the shade of the shed and closing her eyes at his feet.

  Emyr looks at me again.

  We’re closer now than we were
a moment ago. From this distance, I can actually smell him, musk and smoke and just a hint of something feminine, floral and sweet like candied rose petals. He smells like Asalin. Or maybe it’s not that exactly. Maybe it’s that he smells like home.

  I’m not doing this right now.

  His golden energy bobs in the air near mine, as if testing the limits. But the blackness that surrounds me, the ever-present darkness that clings to my skin, practically snaps its jaws at him. Emyr’s energy slinks back around his shoulders, rejected.

  Everyone has this energy—fae, witches, humans. The humans can’t see it, but even they feel it sometimes. They call it different things than we do. Like an aura. And everyone’s color is different.

  I used to think Emyr was golden like the sun, and my blackness was like the shadow he cast. I still think that’s true, but it holds a different meaning now.

  “Wyatt?” Emyr asks again, quieter this time.

  He’s staring at me with a look I can’t quite place. Some hybrid creature bred from concern and confusion and something else, something I’ve never been able to name, something that sometimes crosses the faces of the fae when they look at their mates.

  Mates. It’s been a long time since I’ve considered myself anyone’s mate. I used to wear the title with a bit of smug pride. One of the rare few witches ever to be mated to a fae, and certainly the first ever to belong to their prince. Always under the protection of the Throne. Un-fuck-with-able. Now I think the term reeks of some weird bio-essentialism I want nothing to do with.

  That look, though. One part concern, one part confusion, one part something that makes my fingers clench.

  I wonder what he’s seeing as he looks at me. I mean, I know what he’s seeing, technically. Like, I own a mirror. That growth spurt I kept hoping might hit one day never did; I still barely hit the five-two mark. I’ve put on a little weight since moving off the streets and into this house, because Sunny’s cooking and fast food are too good to not eat too much of. I shaved my head last year and have kept it that way since. My black hoodie covers the scars and any hints at cleavage my binder doesn’t properly squash down.