But hold me fast, and fear me not,
I’ll do to you no harm.
At last they’ll turn me in your arms
Into a naked knight,
Then cloak me in your mantle green,
And cover me from sight.’
Gloomy, gloomy was the night,
And eerie was the way,
As fair Janet in her mantle green
To Miles Cross she did go.
About the middle of the night
She heard the bridles ring;
This lady was as glad at that
As any earthly thing.
First she let the black pass by,
And then she let the brown;
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed,
And pulled the rider down.
So well she minded what he did say,
And young Tam Lin did win;
Then covered him with her mantle green,
As blithe’s a bird in spring.
Out then spoke the Queen o Fairies,
Out of a bush of broom;
‘She that has gotten young Tam Lin
Has got a stately groom.’
Out then spoke the Queen o Fairies,
Out of a bush of rye:
‘She that has gotten young Tam Lin
Has the best knight in my company.
Had I but known, Tam Lin,’ she says,
‘Before I came from home,
I’d taken out that heart of flesh,
Put in a heart of stone.’
Collected by Francis James Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads
Thank you for reading FEYLAND: THE DARK REALM! If you enjoyed it, please consider helping other readers find this book:
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Thank you to the many people who made this book possible: the encouragement of my terrific CP Peggy, fabulous proof and beta-readers Colin, Sean (aka Captain Grammar Pants), Chassily, Marissa, Nicole, Kaitlynn, and Brynn. My patient and supportive in-house editor, Lawson, and keen-eyed reader Ginger. Thanks also to Annette Nishimoto for copy-editing.
For great design work, Kim Killion, and for the inspiration to move forward, gratitude to Kris, Dean, and PG.
Finally, for all the adventures in-game, epic thanks to Sylven, Dom, and Fates Legion that was.
For other wonderful YA retellings of the ballad of Tam Lin, Anthea recommends Elizabeth Pope’s The Perilous Gard and Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Growing up, Anthea Sharp spent most of her summers raiding the library shelves and reading, especially fantasy. She now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes, plays the fiddle, and spends time with her small-but-good family. Contact her at [email protected] or visit her website – www.antheasharp.com
Anthea also writes historical romance under the pen name Anthea Lawson. Find out about her acclaimed Victorian romantic adventures at www.anthealawson.com.
OTHER WORKS BY ANTHEA SHARP
Discover all of Anthea’s USA Today bestselling fantasy at http://antheasharp.com/
THE FEYLAND BOOKS:
FEYLAND: The First Adventure – prequel novella, FREE in ebook format at all online retailers.
FEYLAND: THE DARK REALM (Book 1)
FEYLAND: THE BRIGHT COURT (Book 2)
FEYLAND: THE TWILIGHT KINGDOM (Book 3)
FEYLAND: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY (omnibus collection, available in ebook format at all online retailers)
SPARK: FEYGUARD Book 1 – Spinoff series featuring continuing characters
ROYAL: FEYGUARD Book 2
MARNY: FEYGUARD Book 3 (Coming Summer 2015)
TRINKET: A Feyland Tale – Short story set in the world of Feyland
BENEATH the KNOWE – Short story set in historical Ireland and the Bright Court.
Chapter 1
Witches didn’t follow the same holiday rules as their human kin. They never attended the same gatherings or spoke of the same rituals in excited tones. Even though they walked the same streets, ate at the same tables, and learned at the same schools, they couldn’t be more different. As such, winter’s eve and Christmas were wholly separate functions, serving two disparate groups but bringing together both in joyous festivities. The humans had their evergreen trees with strands of tinsel that a fat man would inevitably trip over as he waddled out of an impossibly small chimney before dawn claimed the skies, and the witches had their candle-lit ceremonies with blood and darkness on the moon’s rise. And the fae? Well, the fae had their own rituals, secret and separate even from the witches themselves. It was just as well, because the witches didn’t consider the fae kin at all anyway and as such were glad to be excluded. Bonding over the use of magic only went so far to create networks of fraternity and unity between the two primary species on Earth, after all. Nevertheless, the one thing that the fae and witch species did have in common, magical power, kept them together on a semi-unified front. At least for last hundred years or so.
Magic came in multiple forms, natural and unnatural, elemental and cosmic, but at its core it was power. Power that the fae and coven shared, however distastefully. So watching this co-mingled gathering of snooty witches sipping on rum and cider while were-creatures knocked back six-packs and centaurs got high on fermented oats in a mixture that smelled from three feet away made Katherine highly amused.
Not because they had all been awkwardly sidling around each other up until about two hours ago, when the mixture of alcohol and opiates had finally managed to lower the inhibitions of everyone present, but because it was darned funny watching Ms. Carmichael, an elderly witch, get down and do the jig with a fully transformed phoenix as a her partner. A phoenix, who, despite his best efforts to dampen his flames, had managed to light a sidelined Ms. Brewster’s floor-length floor monstrosity of a dress on fire with the little embers that were drifting down from his flapping feathers as he shook his behind to music that bore a passing resemblance to early rock and roll.
Katherine took a sip of her purloined drink and watched the festivities with an interested air about her. Because it was interesting. Where else could you possibly so many drunk fae and witches in one setting?
“Nowhere else but a cross-species funeral,” Katherine said in satisfaction with a small grin. The whole night was taking on a decidedly festive air for her.
Better festive than dour, she thought to herself.
The party was off to a roaring start and she knew it precisely because it lacked the most vulnerable population around—the humans—which suited Katherine just fine at the moment. She felt warmth rise up from her belly, warmth at the laughter and joy but also the distinct lack of rage and fear. Two emotions that were seemingly unavoidable when dealing with the strictly human population.
She couldn’t help but flash back to her encounters with her human peers recently, and they hadn’t been pleasant. For her or them.
She’d just started her freshman year in high school and it sucked beyond belief. For two reasons: human jerks and warlock idiots. Men, in other words. Being here took away from the petty trivialities of being a witch in a high school that was eighty percent human. That was a problem in itself since the majority human population resented—hated—being ruled by witches and the fae. But add on top of that simmering resentment at her presence in school, was the fact that not only was she in the top ten percent of individuals on the planet by birth, but she also happened to be a child of the ruling family in the small town and things had quickly turned from bad to worse. It wasn’t that the townspeople hated her mother. In fact, she was pretty
much beloved as a pillar of the community and a good queen, which was harder than it sounds. But it was the fact that most human nightmares centered on the witch population. Katherine couldn’t say she blamed them for it, either. Her witch ancestors had done some pretty distasteful things to the human community, including convening mass trials to purge certain sectors in the Old World when the population grew too large and running prison ships to unpopulated territories for new colonies, voluntarily or not. So hate was something Katherine knew to expect, but she wouldn’t be herself if she didn’t try to at least challenge some of those banal assumptions about her based on her entire kind. Unfortunately, fighting the status quo was kind of hard to do when your sister was going to be in charge of the town you lived in by default as soon your mother died. To make matters even more complicated, said sister also hadn’t minded using that status to get whatever she wanted and humiliating whomever she wanted for the past three years as she ran the high school like her own personal kingdom.
Enter Katherine, little sister extraordinaire, spindly, unpopular, ominous, and way too weird, even by a witch’s standards, who hadn’t stood a chance. Because said sister, queen bee of Sandersville, ignored her youngest sister while at home and had no problems with humiliating her at school like a one hundred-percent bitch. It had taken Katherine the entirety of her first semester to find a refuge from Rose’s cliques, the stares and the distrust.
The students were right to distrust her, Katherine knew, not because of whose daughter she was but because of the magic she couldn’t control. Katherine didn’t like to think about the tangible dark aura that followed her around like a shroud of death. Her magic wasn’t natural like her mother’s and her sister’s. It was dark, it was different, and it wasn’t something she really understood. She didn’t think anyone did—not the faith healer specialists her mother had brought in to chant over her at ten, not the concerned psychologists who thought her magic was blocked by repressed memories, nor the therapy instructors who used everything from yoga to horseback riding to get her to get in ‘touch’ with her inner magic. It had gotten so bad that Katherine had just shut it down over the summer. Begging her mother for a reprieve during the first year of high school. Katherine remembered telling the queen that if she couldn’t be considered a witch, then she should at least let her be normal. Unfortunately her human classmates rejected her as thoroughly as her coven brethren pitied her inept attempts at controlling her gifts. It wasn’t just pity, Katherine knew. It was fear. They didn’t talk about what she saw or what happened around her, but they knew and her family knew.
Katherine swallowed and banished those memories. Instead, she decided to crowd-watch by taking in the mingling people and thinking about false assumptions. Assumptions about her and assumptions about the similarities of coven and human societies. It was a fact that no matter how alike witches and humans looked, they were very different. If one was neither witch nor fae, Katherine supposed it would be fairly easy to assume a witch was human. Without their magical gifts, they looked no different from poor souls, after all. But it was humans and not fae who were excluded from this gathering. Because no matter the fact that one species had smooth skin and another was known for everything from flaming feathers to scaly knobs, one thing united both witch and fae in a way no human could ever understand—magic. So tonight the coven of Sandersville and its queen had called together a celebration of traditional winter rights. And it was the fae that stood by their side. The fae that drank wine at their tables. The fae that danced to the woefully inept, in Katherine’s opinion, music.
As the night had gone in and more people had relaxed Katherine couldn’t help but begin to enjoy herself. It wasn’t often you saw the two groups of witches and fae together, and until three-quarters of a century ago it would have been all but unthinkable. The grudges between witches and fae had lasted that long and both sides had remarkable memories for injustices done to them. But for tonight they celebrated their traditional Winterfest a full month before the traditional Christmas pageantry that took hold of the town in late December.
It was past midnight, and the local bar was packed with all kinds of fae and coven elite. It was one of the few gatherings during the year where fae and witches co-mingled to the exclusion of their human brethren and did so without bloodshed. Nine brutal years of intense battles, assassinations, and interference from old-world empires in the new world that fae, witches, and humans called home. It was only a new world in a sense that up until three centuries ago no one in the citadels of Europe or the castles of North Africa had truly believed an entire continent could exist. Independent of their fractious conflicts, unspoiled by overpopulation, and ripe for magical conquest. When true wealth of the new world’s magic had been revealed, veritable gold mines of untouched power in nature for queens to tap, well, a horse race would be the politest term for old-world witch queens’ eagerness to claim new territories. But they were not the only magical beings to realize the potential that could be unlocked in a new land, where land connections had not been locked down by centuries of blood ties to individual families and the use of their natural gifts wasn’t heavily regulated by the queens’ courts.
The fae. The fae in their numerous species and hordes of eager settlers had centered on one thing. Freedom. Migration to the new world represented freedom from the old-world contracts that bound them to the land like serfs, freedom from tyrannical and immortal witch queens who owned them body and soul, and the change to start anew with power of their own. The fae were usually a disparate bunch of races that couldn’t agree on much of anything. But when faeries, unicorns, kobolds, dragons, trolls, sylphs, and dozens more agreed in dark pacts to do whatever it took to claim this new land for their own, the queens of Europe knew they were in trouble. They had agreed then and there to cease plundering each other’s ships on the way to the new world and refocusing on settling and binding the land to their own bloodlines immediately. An easy truce lay between the queens as they claimed territory after territory in the thirteen colonies and later…in the prime central valley territories that lay east of the river the native peoples called the Mississippi and west of the Appalachian mountain trails.
What had happened next was inevitable. War. Fae against witch queens with humans stuck in the middle. Old imperial witch blood against old imperial fae blood. As it had been for centuries. The witch queens of the new world were sure of their certain victory. How could they lose, after all? Since the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Dark Ages they had ruled Europe, the Maghreb Alliance, and the Ottoman territories with iron fists. Nothing would change for them. Nothing ever changed. Until it did.
The humans who came over the cross-ocean voyage with their coven mistresses and masters realized something amazing. An idea so fundamental to who they were now, but Katherine knew was a profound change of direction from what they had previously thought.
They realized they had a chance to no longer be indentured vassals of their witch queens. Never able to rise above the rank of servant and chattel because magic didn’t flow in their veins. So they had risen up and sided with the fae peoples as well as convinced the native peoples—shaman and human to join in their cause as well. The shamans, though witches themselves, were not pleased with the European witches domination of their ancestral lands. They also didn’t feel the witch queens respected the land so much as drained it dry for her own intents and purposes. The native humans had nothing to lose and much to gain. They didn’t like the European fae, but they detested the witch settlers even more.
Together the fae, the humans, and the shamans had stood against the witch queens. For eight long years they had pushed the queens back in territory after territory. Until the witches were forced to accede their land and plead for truce or face being run into the sea in a battle they could not win. The concord of the Fae-Coven Wars acceded the thirteen original colonies to the witch queens to do with as they pleased, and everything west of those pre-established boundaries to a joint rul
ership between the native peoples and the fae.
Katherine shivered just thinking about it. It was said that in the centuries since, the territories west of the coven boundaries had descended into darkness.
“It’s also said that the territories west of coven rule have lands so bountiful that an ocean stretches to meet their shores and fields so rich that crops rise from their folds unbidden by witch spells,” she whispered to herself, careful not to let anyone overhear.
It was blasphemy to say such things where a witch could hear them. Katherine was a witch herself and she knew her mother didn’t care. Tall tales such as that would probably amuse her, a mid-level witch queen who only ruled a county and had no dealings with the boundaries or the court machinations of high queens. But for other witches, even poor ones with only a farm to their name, such talk was forbidden. Old habits die hard and old prejudices were even harder to eradicate. To this day, some witches would look the other way before dealing with a fae. And others wouldn’t even speak the name of native peoples who had taken up against the witch cause. It was true…there had been peace between the witches, fae peoples, and humans in the coven territories for some time. But peace and friendship were two different things. The witches had forced out any lingering natives who would not swear allegiance to them, although they were very careful not to kill those displaced people in order to assuage the wrath of the fae-native alliance that watched them mistrustfully from across the border. But they also had gone to war with themselves, new world witch queens against old world witch queens, and that was another story entirely.
Dark Roses: Eight Paranormal Romance Novels Page 131