by D. D. Chance
She spoke with clear dismay, but I shook my head. “No Fae lie here. That’s not the way we handle our dead,” I assured her. But as we took another step forward, I stiffened, glancing back into the forest.
“What is it?” She turned to search my face “What’s wrong?”
“Niall,” I said. My eyes went wide as I scanned the far tree line, not seeing the newly budding trees anymore, but the other image that had haunted me in the dragon queen’s slippery words.
Rivers of black blood racing across the open fields of the Fae realm.
I knew those fields, though I hadn’t set foot upon them since I was a boy. And in my mind’s eye, I could see a line of Fae warriors rushing toward the gushing stream—led by Niall, though he was supposed to be at McGeary Point. How had he gotten to the valley realm, and where was Alaric?
“The Fomorians have breached our borders from below,” I growled. “They’re attacking the valley Fae. Those Fae are artisans, farmers, and wine makers, they don’t fight—at least not well. They need us.”
“They need you,” Belle agreed. She reached out to take my hand, her grip fierce as I met her gaze. Was it relief I saw in her expression, or simple resolve? “You’ve got to fight for them. We’ve found—something here, you’re right. I feel it too. But the Hogan contract can keep its secrets long enough for you to secure the valley Fae. Then we’ll come back?”
“Then we’ll come back,” I promised.
“Then I only need to do this.”
She stepped away from me, flipping her cloak over one arm and bending down to pull up several of the tiny white flowers. She faced the barrow mounds, holding up her offering.
“May the sunshine stay upon you,” she said, her voice catching on a soft sob. “May you never fear the icy touch of night.”
She scattered the flowers in a wide spray. They caught the sun’s rays as they settled, and the clouds rolled back, the sunlight pouring down. Somewhere in the forest, a bird sang, and Belle’s lips parted in a smile, even as a tear rolled down her cheek.
“What’s that?” I asked. “A spell?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. It was something my mother used to say to the rogue witches as she helped them out of the In Between into their new lives. We never knew where the saying came from but, well…maybe it came from here.”
“We’ll return—” I began, but she flashed me a yet brighter smile, even as she dismissed my words with a satisfied nod.
“I know we will. Let’s go.”
27
Belle
I had never encountered a monster quite like the Fomorian, especially not in liquid form. I didn’t even know such a manifestation of a creature was possible.
We burst out onto the battlefield of what I suspected was usually a flower-strewn valley, verdant grass dappled by sunlight. We raced past a tiny pocket of wildflowers still protected from the onslaught, and I caught sight of small hanging cowbells shivering up against shady trees. It looked so much like a larger version of the delicate fairy gardens so popular back home that I jerked in surprise, but I didn’t have time to reflect on it too much, as Aiden hit the main field with a roar.
“Report!” he shouted. The command carried over the open meadow as well as sounding in my ears. Niall’s voice came back, steady and sure and also in my mind, though I couldn’t see him. It appeared I’d been given access to Fae airways, at least in times of severe need.
“They’re mainly here to burn,” Niall announced with chilling directness. “You step into any of the muck, they form into creatures and rise up to fight. You leave them alone, they sink into the ground, killing everything with their leaching poison. The valley Fae—these are the older farmers here, not able to fight with any skill, but the younger crew is coming, and they’d sooner burn the Fomorians out than let them destroy the ground for the Light only knows how long. Magnus alerted us to the attack, found a portal to get us here. Then I sent him and Alaric back to the castle.”
Aiden nodded, but his focus was on the Fomorians. “That’s what kills them in this form? Fire?”
“Not so much kills them as spreads them out, makes them weaker. They eventually stop, and that means they’ll cover less ground. You see what I’m saying?”
No, I thought. No, that wasn’t quite right. I jerked my head around, trying to understand, and caught sight of a bubbling pool of black goo hidden in the shadow of a stone. In the sunshine, the Fomorians’ oily slick seemed to thin out, to reach, almost grasping like claws across the ground, but in the shadow, their noxious form bubbled and festered, able to take its time, but it only stretched partway into that rock alley. When it slipped into the shadows, the ooze stopped completely. It didn’t thin out, it also didn’t advance. Was it the darkness? This was full daylight, and the Fomorians were familiar with the deepest depths, moving through the cool waters of the ocean. Where water moved, they could move, and fire only spread their reach—more thinly, but farther. I stooped down toward the pool and extended my hand, still unnaturally chilled from the frigid mounds of the mountain Fae, and the gore seemed to fall away from me, retreating from my fingers.
“Ice,” I said abruptly, breaking into Aiden’s thought stream.
I didn’t wait for him to acknowledge me. I knew I was right. The Fomorians could move in the night, through water and even through fire, though not well. They couldn’t move through ice. I thought about the mountain Fae and their perpetual winter. That was the group that killed the Fomorians the first time, who’d finally pushed them out of the human realm. Maybe they had some way of bringing their winter to the battle?
Aiden stared at me. “Ice. I know no spells to change the season,” he said. “And if we caused snow to fall upon the valleys, everything would die. Even their off-season is gentle. Their plants go dormant, but they don’t burn out from frost.”
A scream sounded at the far end of the battlefield, trees giving way as a deluge of black liquid poured through it from some unseen aquifer. It looked like oil, and everything it touched withered. I had no spell of frostiness either. It was never something I’d needed in Boston, which did a good job of staying cold on its own, and with refrigeration, I’d never had a need to keep the chilled alcohol flowing.
“A portal?” Niall asked suddenly. “To the mountain realm—could you open it back up?”
Aiden barked a sharp laugh, then stepped away from me and sketched a dozen different portals, each to a landscape more bitter than the last. Those that roared with the heaviest storms won the beauty competition, and the ocean Fae at once went to work at his command, flashing back and forth and bringing great cloakfuls of snow and ice to dump onto the rivers of black oil.
It wasn’t enough, though, even as the valley Fae warriors emerged from the trees, their faces pale and drawn, but their eyes blazing with fury. There were never going to be enough hands, even though we stopped the immediate onward flow of the Fomorian scourge.
“Wind,” I shouted. “Can you bring the wind?”
Aiden turned to me, his smile slightly wild. “I don’t know. Can we?”
In that moment, he took my breath away—not simply strong or fierce, though he was both those things. But because he looked at me with total trust, with complete confidence that if he didn’t know the answer, I would. That if he couldn’t bring magic to bear to save his people, I could conjure it up. He believed in me, and in his eyes, I saw the woman he thought I was. Powerful, enduring, filled with the Light he so revered.
I wanted to be that woman, I decided. I wanted to be his witch. His witch and his wife and however else he would take me, for however long it lasted.
I grinned back at him, filled with a joy so unreasonable, I knew it couldn’t last. But for this moment, I didn’t give a shit about anything else but him. “What’s your word for storm?” I asked.
Aiden spoke it, and I gestured him to the portals.
“Open them as far as you can,” I said, not really knowing what I was asking. Not really unders
tanding portal magic at all, but I couldn’t focus on that. Instead, I stood in the face of the storm on the other side of the portal and called the storm by name.
For one long, impossible moment, nothing happened.
Then, with a raging rush, the storm crashed through the portals, blanketing the valley, blasting a jolt of frozen air across the plane—a sudden burst of a freezing gale. The oil froze in place, calcified, and turned to rock. It didn’t even flow backward the way it had when I had approached it with my own chilled hands. It simply stopped. The warriors froze too, though not from the cold. Instead, they stood awestruck at the sudden silence after the blast of wind.
One of Niall’s warriors strode forward, swinging her blade at a frozen wave of oil. It shattered, its pieces exploding across the grassy meadow. The wind hadn’t stayed long enough to freeze the grass, which sprang back up almost cheerfully, riddled through with shining black fingers.
“It’s glass,” one of the valley Fae warriors announced, poking at a shard.
“It’s an abomination,” another said, kicking a pile across the grass. “What do we do with it?”
Aiden breathed out a long breath, and I made a face as I stared out at the black glass. This was worse than a field full of bodies. If it warmed up, when it warmed up, would it reanimate into a nightmare? He looked at me, and I gave him an uncertain shrug. Once again, this was beyond my magic.
“I think we all need more time in the academy,” I said ruefully. Then I tilted my head. “Maybe Jorgen would know? Magnus?”
“This is nothing we’ve seen in my time.” The older warrior djinn stepped out from a line of warriors, making me blink. Why was he here? When had Aiden conscripted him into battle?
Either way, it seemed to agree with him. Magnus appeared taller to me, robust in his fighting gear, his lined face bright, his eyes sharp, and even his salt-and-pepper hair a bit thicker than I recalled. He grimaced with clear interest as he fisted his large hands on his hips and kicked at a thick piece of the frozen black oil.
“Transporting this will take too long by hand, Mistress Belle, and the Fae are right, we can’t leave it here. The first battle of the Fomorians wasn’t fought only by the Fae—witches helped too. I don’t know how, but it’s a spell you’ve got access to. We should be able to find it. It’s well possible Jorgen already has.”
“Agreed.” Aiden swung around toward the young warrior who stood at the front of the line of valley Fae, tall and lithe, with white-blond hair and eyes the color of new leaves. Despite the fairness of his hair, his skin was burnished gold, as if he’d spent his whole life in the sun. I was pretty sure the Fae suffered from no sickness or disease whatsoever, but I couldn’t help wanting to slather the guy in sunscreen. “You lead here?” Aiden asked him.
“Not well, clearly,” the Fae said, sounding disgusted. “There was no reason for this to get as bad as it did. We first saw the black oil two days ago. It bubbled up in a witch’s boil, and we’ve been dealing with that for decades. We should have acted to contain it more quickly.”
“Light and stone,” Aiden mumbled wearily, lifting his hand to rub across his forehead. He kept it there a second longer, as if he could shield himself from this newest fuckery. “Exactly what is a witch’s boil? And how is it I don’t know this term?”
The Fae frowned at him. “Since your father decreed that we solve our own problems,” he said as if Aiden was slow. “And we have. Witches been trying for some time now to get a foothold in the valley, thinking, and rightly so, that we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves. But we held our own.”
“Witches?” I asked, affronted for my kind. “Are you sure about that?”
Meanwhile, Aiden’s scowl grew deeper. “How is it I know so little about my own people,” he muttered.
The valley Fae looked at him in genuine surprise. “We’re not your people, King Aiden. Your clan is the ocean Fae. They are your primary responsibility.”
“I am the High King of all the Fae,” Aiden said, his tone resolved but also grim. “And I have my work cut out for me to undo the damage my own family has wrought.”
He shook off his glower and pushed on. “So this witch’s boil, as you call it. What is it?”
“The way the human witches try to enter the valley.” He spared me a somewhat sheepish glance. “Begging your pardon, but it’s the truth as we know it. Their attacks have usually been tied to the phases of the human moon, magic we don’t really understand and don’t really care about, though we keep the schedules and stay alert. But this past week, there was nothing in the old books to give us warning.”
“Old books?” I asked. “Given to you by the Hogan witch?”
The warrior frowned. “That I don’t know, honestly. But it would almost have to be a witch of your line, yes? No one else has come through to aid the Fae. Though it’s been a hundred years and more since we’ve gotten the last. But they hold close enough. There was no warning for this one, though. It appeared and we weren’t fast enough to pour it into a stone quarry and set it to fire until it burned itself out. A pool showed up, then a river, then another and another, and then we were nearly drowning in it, when your warriors came through. By that point, we were surrounded.”
Aiden turned to me. “Why would witches be trying to get to the Fae?”
“They wouldn’t, ordinarily,” I said, finally understanding what was going on here. “Could they be working with the Fomorians for some reason?”
“No,” Aiden said, with a grim certainty that surprised me. He looked at me with newly worried eyes. “They may think they are, but that’s not how the Fomorians operate. This…this isn’t good.”
28
Aiden
Belle looked supremely unconvinced by my assertion that the Fomorians wouldn’t work with anyone, which interested me for several reasons.
One, she was wrong, which meant that she knew less about our ancient foes than even I did. That could be a liability as we prepared to fight them, so she was right, she too needed to return to the academy and learn whatever she could. But the second revelation interested me just as much. She was convinced that witches were capable of such secret treachery…and from the set of her jaw, she’d picked out a cabal of likely transgressors. Her one-time coven, the avenging witches who’d set her tavern ablaze? It had to be.
Worse, I realized now that I had not once picked up on her fear of that coven or her knowledge of them—could not even now, no matter how closely we’d bonded. She remained stronger than me, even in my own realm. Beyond that, it was not right for bonded mates to have any secrets between them, which brought up a third issue. She still did not consider me her mate.
None of these revelations solved the immediate concern, though they weighed heavily on my heart. I refocused on the valley Fae warrior and bowed to him, not missing his expression of alarm.
“A new day has come to the realm, one that is long overdue. But it comes on the wings of war. We will need to know what you have learned to keep the Fomorian—or this witch’s boil— from your door, all these long years without outside support. And we’ll need whatever warriors you can spare to fight. We need to rid the realm of the Fomorians once and for all. Again.”
“We’ll join that fight,” the valley Fae warrior said, flashing a grim smile that belied his youth and obvious inexperience. This was a Fae who knew he had to fight, never mind that he didn’t know how. This was the reason we would take on this battle with the Fomorian, and why we would win. “We’re ready for it. We don’t much deal in war, but sometimes war comes for you even when you’re determined to look the other way. These witch’s boils feel like nothing more than doorways in the making, and we don’t extend those invitations to our lands lightly.”
“Agreed.” I turned to Niall. “How good are you at shoveling Fomorian glass? Take everything you can of it to the stone wells and set it on fire. The rest, you and Magnus will have to work out how to eliminate, using whatever spells you can unearth back at the academy.”
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Niall grinned, and his warrior troop brightened. “Three groups of four,” he commanded. “Under the order of the young commander here. Let’s see who carries the day!”
The warriors lit up with a cheer, to the bemusement, but also interest, of the valley Fae. Once again, they seemed up for the challenge—any challenge—if it would help their clan. My father had been wrong in his assessment of the valley Fae, as he had been in so many things. It was not that the fight had been bred out of this clan, it was that the fight had been taken from them. They were still Fae, after all, born not only to revel in beauty, but to fight—and to rule. They could have easily ascended to the role of High Kings if the Light had fallen differently across this land. My duty was to protect all my people, and they would stand with me in that effort. I knew it now more surely than I ever had.
The plans assigned to rid the valley of the Fomorians’ remains, I held a hand out to Belle, which she took willingly enough, and sketched a portal opening back to the academy. When we stepped through, however, we didn’t return directly in front of the academy. That lay far behind us, across the wide lawn. Instead we stood at the opening to the small wooded copse that led to her great-grandmother’s cabin.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, her tone genuinely warming despite her surprise. “How did you know?”
I kept my face steady, because of course I had no idea what she was talking about. I hadn’t intended for us to land here, but only to learn what we needed to learn as quickly as we could…much the way I had felt in the dragon queen’s lair, desperate to reach the hiding place of the Hogan contract. Bemused, I gestured her forward, covering my own confusion with a deliberately cocky grin.
“You doubt the strategy of the High King of the Fae?” I asked her, and she laughed.