“What is to come—oof!” All at once, one of the urchins broke away from the crowd and came barreling into me. I nearly lost my balance, and Amadan made as if to pull the child away, but I held up my hand. I gathered the curly-headed tyke in my arms.
“Wee Jamie!” I exclaimed.
He raised his finger, the one I had bandaged for him many months before.
“Oh, aye,” I said, as Bess-I’d-seemed would have, “your finger is all better now.”
He knew me. With nary a word spoken, that became obvious. Jamieknewme. Even in this unfamiliar skin, this tall, slender body and blood-red hair, Jamie recognized who I was. Warmth kindled in my breast, and I had to blink my eyes to keep from weeping. I squeezed Jamie tight and kissed his forehead.
“You appear to be acquainted,” Amadan said dryly.
I nodded. “He is my neph—” I could not finish it. Jamie was no nephew of mine. “We are old friends, Jamie and I.” To the boy, I asked, “Are you happy here then, little man?”
I had never meant to send him away to be raised by ghosts.
Jamie grinned and nodded, growing heavy in my arms.How much time has passed?I wondered.How much has he grown?Mayhap it did not matter. What mattered was, this one changeling at least we had not deprived of a loving home. And maybe among the others were children who were happier here as well.
I set Jamie down, and he ran off to play.
“Well, now,” said the Dark Fool. “You have seen to the changelings’ welfare, and we may go. It is clear they are subject to no harm—”
Before he could finish this thought, a little girl playing nearby caught a flying snowball smack in her face.
The child stood motionless with her mouth open, too stunned to cry. Her nose bled; it dripped down her face and onto the snowy ground... but where it fell was snowy no longer. The artificial winter lifted, the snow vanished as though it had never been, and the grass became lush and green.
And hungry.
The minders froze in place, flesh fading but their eyes burning bright.
“Mine,” one of them whispered, and began to approach the spilled blood.
I cried out, but Amadan held me back with an arm.
“They think it will restore their flesh,” he said. “But the blood was spilled in Faery, and it is Hers.”
The ghost maiden had been too late. The blades of grass lapped up the blood like a thousand tiny tongues. I should have been repulsed. Instead, this seemed natural, and I stared in abject fascination.
How the ground had hungered for this, how much did Faery thirst.
My pulse quickened and my belly fluttered. Hunger, thirst, and desire pressed upon me, and an appetite far darker, more demanding. It frightened me in its intensity, yet at the same time, I’d never felt more alive.
I am Faery, and Faery is me.And if my emotions governed her weather, her seasons, whether it was day or night, I was also subject to her hungers and needs.
Where the blood had spilled, a snowdrop sprang, luminous and perfect as the dawn.
The minders retreated into silence, eyes dimming, flesh becoming more diffuse, expressions growing placid again.
The injured child began to cry. Children clustered around her, asking what was wrong, didn’t her nose look big now, cor it was disgusting, wasn’t it, though?
My disgust was for the devouring ground beneath me, and the hunger we had briefly shared.
“Blood is easily come by,” said the Fool. “But Faery starves for want of souls.”
And this is the lot I have thrown myself in with.Shame washed over me, burning in my cheeks, and thickening in my throat. I pushed the other children gently away and pulled the child’s hands away from her injured nose. “’Tis all right, sweeting. I do not believe it is broken, though it may be swollen for a bit.” It mattered not that I was the queen and would be getting blood on my gown. Someone was wounded, and she needed my help.
I was wrenched away by a hand on my shoulder.
“I will take care of that, thank you very much,” said a strangely familiar voice, one I had heard many times before, but never from this vantage.
