Samhain, Carterhaugh
I should have taken away thelordling’s heart.
With my nails sharp as talons, I should have pierced his breast, carved out a cavity inside him, and ripped out the pulsing organ with one hand. Let the soil of Faery feast upon his essence, as he and I once had on honey and nectar. There was a time I could have done so, and he would have thanked me for the pain.
Instead, I garbed him as any other of my knights, and hid him among our company.
Tonight, we make our Samhain rade.
His steed is white as milk, and he rides closest to the town, the sole acknowledgment that he, among all these riders, Aos Sith and Sluagh, pixies and elfin knights, does not belong. He alone is mortal, and the time of his death is nigh.
It must come at my hands, though once he was my lover. Our history makes no difference at all.
From out of the hedges creeps a mortal woman, scarce more than a girl. Her plaited hair is yellow, her skirts kilted above her knees.
And she goes great with child.
My heart seems to still within my breast.I did not see her there.How did I, queen of all the canny fae, fail to notice this mortal girl? For now, the scent of her mortality surrounds me, blood and bone turning to dust, flesh eaten by worms and decaying into the loam to feed the earth. Sharp sweat rises from her, more than such a mirk and chilly night should warrant. I sense she is nervous.Good.Mortalsshouldbe nervous when caught out on All Hallows’ Eve, while faery folk do ride.
Yet somehow, those nerves failed to stop her. I could almost be impressed.
The girl is hard to look at, even while she stumbles into our path and lumbers alongside the procession of trooping fae.
Then I see it. Her mantle—she has turned it inside out.
Clever girl, knowing how to beguile the senses of the fae.
I am not impressed for long.
The girl is not graceful, heavily as she carries the child within her, and she walks with determination, rather than speed. But we too do not rush; this is a somber ritual, full of pomp and ceremony, and there has never been any need to before.
No mortal would dare interrupt the faery rade.
She has caught up to the white steed and, ungainly as the girl is, grips its rider. With an enormous grunt of effort, she pulls Tam Lin off his horse. He falls, dazed, to the forest floor.
The rade stops by instinct, not at my command. The horses still, by no order from their riders. The nighttime forest around us goes unearthly quiet.
My breath catches, and I sit rigid, clutching tight to my horse’s reins.
“My queen.” My seneschal Lyel, riding beside me on a horse of dapple grey, tersely shakes his head. “This is not the time for intervention. Wait.”
This is a game we play, with rules we invented and never deigned to share. This girl, though; somehow, she knows exactly what to do.
On the other side of the Veil, something withers and dies. I can sense it in my bones. Mayhap a single flower, a cowslip from my garden, or the eglantine that blooms against my palace walls. It does not bode well. My skin grows tight, and a hunger pierces my belly, one that willnotbe sated by food. I am immortal, ageless, but I feel the heaviness of my years upon me, as if I were a mortal woman, with all the fragility and weakness that entails.
No.Iam no mortal. I have left behind all that is not powerful, fae, and pure.
Sheis mortal. The girl who now would claim Tam Lin.
She helps him to his feet. He stumbles and murmurs her name—Janet—before falling into her arms. She catches him, though he towers over her and, while lanky, is heavier than he appears. I have known the weight of Tam Lin atop me, beneath and beside me: this baron’s boy is a fit specimen indeed.
He trembles like a blade of grass in the wind.
His Janet holds him up and she holds on, clinging as if she loves him. Needs him. No doubt even thinks she needs him more than we do.
She thinks wrong.
My belly roils and my mouth tastes of wormwood. I cannot stomach this blatant theft of what was mine alone, what I claimed years ago when Tam Lin fell from his horse while hunting. I saved his life then. Ever since, he has been living on borrowed time.
