by Melissa Marr
Most fey were afraid, terrified of the shadows that crept and sent secrets back to the palace. Everything had become so incredibly wrong, but if a faery the size of Ivy’s hand could risk everything, the mad queen’s daughter could do no less.
Ivy stepped closer to the tree and asked, "Do you think the queen is getting any better?”
Jonquil stepped off the edge of the branch, hovering in a sliver of moonlight, wings glimmering and peered into one of Ivy's eyes. "Do you?"
"I don't know . . . If she is, why does the Queen refuse to talk to me? " Ivy stopped, her words barely audible under the belling of the hounds. They echoed through the night, terrible long, low calls coming closer. That sound was only a moment’s warning before the terror followed.
Jonquil paled.
"Run," Ivy said.
The tiny faery’s feet touched down on the mossy soil at the base of a nearby tree. Her hand pushed on the knotty wood where a wee door was hidden before darting through a miniature door to the faery realm, leaving Ivy alone in the face of the oncoming horror of the Huntsmen and their beasts.
Ivy’s feet barely touched the soil as she leapt over branch and bramble
The earth shook as the Huntsmen's horses came into range. Like a nightmare come to life, the skeletal steeds trampled everything in their path. At this distance, only the eerie green glow of their eyes and the sulfurous clouds of their breath were clear.
Even that scant look was enough. Terror surged into the very air around her.
Ivy scrambled into a tree. I shall not fear them. I cannot . . . do not fear. I am not the quarry. She bit down on her lip to keep from whimpering; her knuckles whitened as she clenched a limb.
A crashing rose from the ground, too frantic to be the hounds.
Ivy glanced down, hoping that whatever it was hadn't led the Hunt to her hiding spot.
A mortal man and woman ran into sight, the woman's skirt in tatters, the man's cheek bleeding. The man watched over his shoulder while the woman hoisted a bundle midway up the tree into a hollow, frantically packing leaves and soil in after it.
"Hurry," the man whispered. He tugged the woman's hand so hard she stumbled.
And they were off. Their feet stirred clouds of dust as they ran down the path leading to the nearby mortal village. Without the shadows and the scents of the forest to mask their humanness, they had little chance of escaping the Hunt.
What fool reason would send them into the open like that? Ivy shook her head; mortals seldom made sense.
The Hunt came into view. The hounds were like a black wave under the horse's hooves. Sparks of red flashed in that rolling darkness as the hounds' eyes became visible. Above that awful vision were the Huntsmen themselves, some bare-chested, some armored. They were a strange mix of folk and mortal, plucked from their rightful times to join the Hunt. Sometimes, their armor revealed their era; often, though, trying to focus on any one when they were in motion was like watching a tongue of flame in a roaring fire. Each one was too quickly lost in the mass that surrounded it.
Had things become so bad that the Queen would let loose the Hunt aboveground without sending warning?
They were hers to command, a fierce weapon, but not one released lightly.
Then as swiftly as they'd approached, the Huntsmen shifted course, their thundering hooves veering away from the copse of trees where she hid, following the path the mortals had taken.
Still trembling, Ivy dropped to the forest floor. Even though the Hunt had raced away, dragging their waves of terror with them, she no longer wanted to be Above-Ground. She could pretend they were no more than nursery boggles--harmless to her now that she was older --but her heart hammered still.
The Hunt rides.
Pretending didn't make the terror abate, didn't make the nightmares any less real.
She turned to flee, but then she heard it: an unmistakable cry from the hollow in the tree.
Go. Go before they turn back.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Maybe it's just an animal. Go.
The cry rose louder.
It's not my responsibility.
As daughter to the queen, Ivy had shouldered more than enough responsibility in her fourteen years. She didn’t need this one, too.
I could still run.
With shaking hands, Ivy removed the handful of twigs and moss the woman had packed in.
Why are they after this?
Ivy lifted the dirty length of cloth and the mortal babe it was wrapped around.
If the queen sent the hounds after him, he mattered to Ivy. The queen of faery might be mad, but she didn’t bother with mortals—not unless they were special.
Coming in 2020 . . .
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Cold Iron Heart: A Wicked Lovely prequel
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"Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy."-- Goblin Market
* * *
NewOrleans
1898
* * *
Outside the shop, a man watched her. He was beautiful: close-cropped hair, perfect features, blue-black eyes, and Creole skin. He was wearing fine trousers and a crisp shirt. He had no jacket, but he had completed his attire with a sharp vest. The very shadows on the grounds seemed to crawl toward him, as if they were alive and needing his touch. He very might be the most handsome man in the whole of New Orleans.
He also wasn’t visible to anyone but Tam.
She stepped inside the shop, admiring the gleaming wood and glass display cases. They filled the space in a way that said that the wares inside were worth attention. It was not crowded. Each piece was nestled in its own place. It was exactly the sort of space where Tam would love to see her own work.
As it was, several of her pieces were spread out in front of the shop owner.
“Did you steal these?” The shop owner stared at her, his gaze taking in Tam’s sewn and re-sewn dress and her worn boots. Her hands, calloused and stained from hours handling metals, were held at her side. She wore none of her work. Doing so was—to quote her Gran—like lipstick on a pig. Not that Tam was ugly by any stretch, but she was plain of hair and clothes. Sparkling jewelry stood out, and thieves saw no reason not to steal what they so often assumed had already been stolen.
“I made them,” she told the jeweler, just as she had told the others.
The man, a well-heeled businessman in a finely cut suit, stared at her in silence. He didn’t laugh outright. Instead his lips pressed together like her Aunt Ethelreda had so often done. Distasteful. Unpleasant. He held his mouth as if lemon slice was suddenly slipped under his tongue.
With such a look, Tam wasn’t surprised to hear him say, “Women don’t make jewelry.”
It wasn’t true, of course. She knew several women who did so, but their work was credited to a father, brother, husband, or in one case, a son. Behind the scenes, there were others like her. She knew it.
“We do,” Tam argued quietly, her voice held far more level than her emotions were. “Look at these. Please.”
She gestured at the pieces on the worn bit of cloth that she had wrapped them in to carry them here: A ring, perfectly formed and polished with a cairngorm set levelly; a brooch, twisted vines of silver holding a polished thistle blossom; and a locket with such polish that she could see the lights glinting in it.
“They’re fine pieces.” The man looked again at the cairngorm ring. “I’ll buy that one from you, and if your father or brother wants to sell more wares, we can do business.”
This was it: walk away or accept the lie he was willing to offer to justify his willingness to buy a piece.
“They are all for sale,” Tam said. This was the best outcome she ever had when she tried to find her way into the jewelry business.
She’d hoped it would be different in New Orleans. Chicago had been a land of strangers, even after years there. It wasn’t home. She’d held hopes that a city where women were educated, where they owned business, would be better.
The je
weler offered her a lower price than the piece was worth, but it was that or nothing. And Tam couldn’t afford to refuse. She had no ability to refuse—or to demand more.
“If you doubled that, I’ll give you a second piece,” she gestured at the brooch.
“Double for all three.”
Reluctantly, Tam nodded. Selling a few pieces here and there meant she had enough to afford rent and food. These would allow her a full four months if she was careful. Three if she bought more supplies to create more pieces and try yet again with another jeweler. It wasn’t reliable work. Not for a woman.
When she needed to do so, there was always wash she could help one of her neighbors do. They paid her part of what they earned, took on a little more that week, and it let Tam make ends meet. That work was easy to find, and if she could see her way to giving up her dreams, she could be sure of where she’d be from month to month.
But dreams were what kept a body alive, what made a person wake and try again, and she wasn’t going to give up today. She lifted her gaze and saw the faery outside in the street. He stared at her still, and Tam’s mind filled with her dream of independence, of an iron-draped home of her own, of freedom from worry that only money could bring.
“What about an apprenticeship?” Tam asked, sounding a bit desperate now. “Mayhaps I could learn and then carry the information to my Dad. He’s not well enough to leave the house, you see. It would be as if you were teaching him, but—”
The jeweler patted her hand, and then he went to fetch the money to buy her ring. “Women are gifted in many ways, but in learning such a skill? I think not. I’ll take the three pieces though. Tell your father I’ll need him to come himself next time—or I’ll come to him.”
“I’ll tell him,” she said. She would, too. She’d speak it into the air. There wasn’t a more likely way to reach him—if he was even alive.
Her father had vanished forever ago, no letters or visits. Her mother stayed in Chicago, hoping upon hope that he might return. She didn’t call herself a widow most days. But in truth, they’d been a family of only two for many years, just Thelma and her mother. There was no brother, no cousin, no male relation at all. If there were maybe she’d let them claim to have created the pieces she did. Maybe the trick to succeeding in this world was just that: let a man take the credit. Maybe it really was impossible to have any security without a father, a brother—or God save her—a husband.
Tam stepped out of the shop, the third one this week. There would be no forth one. She’d sold the only thing she had to use to convince a jeweler to work with her. The sale was good, better than nothing, but it meant she had to begin again and hope that in a few weeks or months she’d have better luck.
Someday, her luck had to change.
She swiped at the tears on her cheeks, not quite able to stop them from falling today but not letting them run free either. The faery glared at the shop front, looking angry as if he was as affronted as she was.
“Fool,” the faery said.
Even if the passersby could hear the creature, his voice would be nothing but one of hundreds of sounds. In the street, the peculiar scents and sounds of the Crescent City rose up like they’d support her, reminding her that while she hadn’t achieved what she’d hoped, she was still an independent woman in a glorious city.
Chicory coffee, magnolia blossoms, and the scents folks wore to cover up the smell of sweat-damp bodies seemed to twine and dance in air so thick a knife might not cut it. New Orleans on the cusp summer was fragrant, not yet offering the pregnant air that spoke of hurricanes rolling into the city, no longer bursting into blossoms that tried to drown the next rich scent that wafted in on spring rains. It was a city in that glorious slice of time that had begun to warm but not yet swelter.
Nature would have her way with the city and its inhabitants, but in a strange twist that Tam treasured, the number of fey creatures in the city was lower than anywhere she’d seen. New Orleans had fallen in love with wrought iron. Fences, ornaments, light posts, it was everywhere. Elegant scrolls of iron marked the city, and faeries were allergic to the stuff.
She could see some of them, the strongest of the fey, lingering at the edge of the river. In the gentle waves of the Mississippi itself, she could see a kelpie lifting out of the murky water. It was a gleaming, glorious beast. To mortal eyes, it might seem to be a horse. In common words, she suspected that they were best described as “water horses.” But a kelpie—like any fey thing—wasn’t so easily defined. It was as if a horse type creature had been carved of water, hooves that looked like shards of ice. Those hooves churned waters, creating white-tipped waves that rocked the boats in the Mississippi River.
She walked along the edge of the river, feeling the breeze stir her skirt and hair. There were other fey creature in the water, and here on the banks. Despite stories that the fey weren’t able to cross moving water, they did. In fact they’d crossed far wider waters than these. Tam heard them, listened to the lift and fall of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh accents. They weren’t born on American soil.
And Tam knew better than to walk among them.
But moving to New Orleans made Tam bold. It might be a city of sinners and drunks, but it was also a city with more faiths than she'd ever seen. The Catholics seemed to be everywhere, but the Creole were as like to be Voodoo or Santeria practitioners as to pray in the church. Nothing she believed seemed too peculiar here. It was a city filled with conflicting beliefs, yet somehow, they all seemed to be acceptable.
Her beliefs weren’t any odder than the rest.
Before she was old enough to be out and about, Tam had learned of the fey folk from her Aunt Rose: The fey couldn't lie, couldn't cross moving water, couldn't abide being Seen; they loved sweets, good whisky, and tormenting mortals. Most importantly of all, Aunt Rose said that iron would injure them surer than anything else.
These were truths, facts that Tam and her family had embraced to keep themselves safe, but if they were in America, they'd clearly crossed the water to reach these shores. So, Tam a had no way to test the rest of the facts unless she asked the faeries, and that seemed like a terrible idea. There were plenty of tales of mortals being blinded for glimpsing the sidhe.
Only the rare few like Tam and her mother--those who were touched with the Sight--could see the fey when they didn't want to be seen. They were also taught not to reveal it. Women who admitted to seeing the fey never met with good ends.
“Are you lost, miss?” a man asked.
“No.”
He stepped closer though, too close for safety and tried to wrest her bag from her hands. It in was all the money she’d made for selling her jewelry. It was the difference between disaster and more time to try her luck again.
“No!” she repeated, trying to hold onto her bag.
Then the man toppled as if by a strong wind. He let go of her bag, and Tam scrambled after it. While she was on the ground, the would-be thief went sailing over the bank and splashed into the muddy Mississippi. If Tam didn’t have the Sight, she’d be stunned that a wind could be so focused. She did have it, though, and she knew exactly why the man had gone flying.
Invisible to every mortal eye but her own was Tam’s own personal monster. Irial, a Dark Court faery, was everywhere. He wasn’t the first she’d seen in the city, of course, but he seemed impossible to escape. She’d heard his name, seen him watching her, but she wasn’t so foolish as to admit that.
“Curious,” she murmured, looking around as if confused.
Her eyes met Irial’s briefly, a flicker of a moment before she pulled her gaze away from the grinning faery. As she came to her feet, clutching her bag in her hand again, she whispered, “I swear I have a guardian angel sometimes.”
Tam pointedly stared at the ground, slid her foot forward as if looking for loose stone. There wasn’t any. She knew it. Irial knew it.
What he didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that she saw him. He might be acting as if he was her guardian angel, but T
am feared that his fascination with her would lead to horrible things if he found that she saw him as he watched over her. Nothing she read explained why a faery might study a mortal, so she had no idea why he was doing so.
She couldn’t even thank him for all the times it seemed like he was there when she needed him.
As she tucked her hands in her pockets, Tam felt a slip of metal. It was a crude ring, one she could finish but hadn’t. In her exhaustion, she’d tarnished and fire-scaled it so it looked nearly black with streaks of purple. There was an odd charm to it that had stopped her from correcting it. Now, as she stood at the edge of the river, she fingered the ring. Her day hadn’t been as bad as it could have been—thanks to her monstrous guardian angel.
Without looking at Irial again, Tam placed the ring on a rock. “I don’t know if you’re truly out there, angel, but if you are, I offer this as a token of my thanks.”
* * *
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About the Author
Melissa Marr is a former university literature instructor who writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have been bestsellers internationally (Germany, France, Sweden, Australia, et. al.) as well as domestically. She is best known for the Wicked Lovely series for teens, Graveminder for adults, and her debut picture book Bunny Roo, I Love You.
In her free time, she has been teaching medieval swordfighting, kayaking, hiking, and raising a plethora of kids and pets in Arizona.
Also by Melissa Marr
Young Adult with HarperTeen
Wicked Lovely
Ink Exchange
Fragile Eternity
Radiant Shadows
Darkest Mercy
Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales