“Your Majesty,” said the corpselike Amadan, as much horrified as horror. “The land must feed, and soon. The changelings are our surety to pay the Teind.”
The changelings.Mere children. I wouldnotallow them to be sacrificed to pay the Teind.
I had done right by Bess Grieve. That was all that mattered.
A warm body thudded into me, grabbing me around the hips. Wee Jamie, the last changeling left.
All at once, the grass returned, the trees grew straight and leafy, the sky was a brilliant blue. Amadan was handsome again, wickedly handsome, save for the dread shading his eyes.
I feared greatly what that might mean.
Thirty-Nine
The changelings were gone.
Their minders wept, tears without substance leaving trails along their diaphanous green skin. They tore their hair, and their sobs were more painful to my ears than the banshees’ cry, for their lingering mortality rendered it so. But I had no responsibility to these wretched creatures. I did not bring them to Faery, I had not stolen away their children or ruined their lives. I turned from them and steered my mount away from where the changelings had dwelt, riding behind the Dark Fool, with Jamie seated before me on my saddle.
I would not leave him behind to be raised by ghosts. Let him stay in my palace; it was too large for just Lileas and myself, and the garden wanted for children to laugh and play.
“You can sleep under a sky glinting of starlight,” I whispered to him, “or in a chamber like the depths of the sea. Wouldn’t you like that, my love?”
He nodded, at first, I believed in agreement—but no, he was nodding over, lulled by the rhythm of the horses’ hoofbeats into a fitful sleep.
Heavily I felt the Dark Fool’s silence and disapproval at my back. “I suppose you think freeing the changelings was wrong—”
“Wrong?” Amadan cut me off with laugh. “You are queen here. Nothing you do is ever wrong, and nothing we fae do is ever sin. Banish such notions from your mind.”
I began to, I hoped. “There is no shame in Faery. Understood.”
“Recklessness is another matter,” he continued. “Did it not occur to your mortal-stained mind we weren’t done with the changelings yet?”
Done with the changelings.My skin went cold. Amadan had said the changelings were our surety against the Teind. We seduced mortals. Danced them to death. Brought them to the Underhill as slaves, or entertainment, and returned them only when everyone they ever knew had died. It was unthinking, or it was deliberately cruel.
It was nothing mortal children should ever have to endure.
I glanced at the slumbering Jamie, cooed to him, ran my fingers across his ruddy curls.
The Dark Fool clucked his tongue softly. “Perhaps you were wise to keep one mortal pet. ’Tis convenient to have a minion who can touch the rountree and tolerate iron.”
I stared at him, my gaze tracing the outline of the scar on his cheek. “You know that from experience, do you?”
Amadan did not reply, and I was too exhausted to press.
As the Fool and I rode on, we found ourselves in a stretch of forest where the trees had all gone bare, and a crust of greyish snow covered the ground. The chill did not bother me; however, Jamie shivered and nestled in close.
I thought warmth at him, softness, and safety as I pulled him closer, then turned to look at the Dark Fool. “Winter, still?” I whispered. “Is this another glamour?” But the barren, wintry forest did not seem like glamour, not like the changelings’ winter. That had been idyllic: a carpet of powdery snow, the trees evergreen and robed in glistening white. This was a lived-in cold, the snow yellowed and soiled, crunching beneath the hooves of our mounts. The bare trees seemed pitiful, possessing not even the dignified threat of those in my visions of the world gone bare and dead. A clump of wet snow fell off the naked branches down the back of my cloak.
It smelled all wrong. Like mud and old leaves. The air was icy and uncomfortable and pulled at me the way late winter does, when you have had enough of the chill and staying indoors and are ready for spring to finally appear, but she will not. The grass slumbered beneath the mantle of hoary grey, as if the thaw would never come.
Amadan pulled his steed to a halt. “Do you not recognize it, Your Majesty?”
I shook my head.
“This place is the opposite of glamour, and you have wrought it yourself.”
His words made no sense. “The opposite of glamour”? What could that be? And surely, I would recognize magic I had wrought myself.
I pictured my magic radiating outwards, like feelers on an insect or tendrils on a tree. Did I taste mortality? Not in the sense of death, exactly, more impermanence and the ordinary, life without that extra layer of magic Faery held.
