Thomas raked his fingers through his hair. “There are no shepherd kings, nor wood nymphs. There is only you and I, doing what we must.”
I felt the flowers dying at my ankles, woodbine uncurling from the arbor, drying out and falling away. Trees went bare of leaf, winter with no autumn preceding, and I felt unsteady on my feet.
Thomas did not seem to notice. A wan version of that old familiar smile curled upon his lips. “Still, I am glad to have seen you one last time. Even if it does make it harder in the end.”
I nodded. There was something so sweet in this meeting, for all it was sorrowful as well.
“It is near suppertime and Margaret will be waiting for me.” He shifted his weight, and added quickly, as if it were a shameful truth. “For she loves me as well.”
It broke me. A crack ran through my heart, yet still a string wrapped around it, a bond between us that could not seem to break.
I would hold Thomas forever, did he bite and claw me, drip venom and burst into flame. Keep him in my grasp, though he transformed into beast and brute and someone I recognized no more, keep him so close we might be separate entities no longer, and there was nothing that might pull us apart.
But this was not my job anymore. I had given myself over to the care of Faery, not of him.
And Faery needed me to take Elidor’s life, as reluctant as I might be.
For we all did things we wished we had no need to, simply because we must.
Forty-Four
“Do you not feel it,my liege? Samhain is pressing on.”
Lileas and I reclined in the courtyard on couches of red velvet beneath a canopy of drooping vines. Whatever fruit we wished grew from it; we need only reach up, and the sweet bounty tumbled into our hands.
Here in Faery, it might yet have been spring. The leaves were new and green, the blossoms newly sprung, yet the fruit happened to also be ripe. Faery makes Her own rules about such things.
Yet the seasonlessness of Faery does not change how bound we are to the circle of the mortal year. As Samhain approached, I felt my senses quickening, hair pricking up along my arms, the air as filled with energy as during a lightning storm.
I reached up to the vine, plucking deep-purple grapes that seemed to be dusted in gold. “Of course I feel it.” I bit into the fruit, and it tasted sweet as ambrosia, but it left me aching to be filled.
Neither Faery fruit nor a lover could sufficiently sate me now.
The Veil parted but four times a year. I felt as though I were sundering as well. Looked at my fingers and saw cadaverous claws. Glanced at my chatelaine, and her face was a skull, adorned only with a few strands of dry yellow hair.
I blinked, and she was again a lovely maiden, diaphanous gown threatening to slide off her shoulders. She took a bite of a peach and closed her eyes at joy in the taste. Patting her lips with a silken kerchief, she opened her eyes again. “Have you given some thought as to who will pay the Teind this year?”
The Teind, which we pay every seven years, had not been paid since Una’s time.
Yet I had that well under my control. “I had thought Lord Elidor, seeing as I need him put to death in any case.”
Lileas’s eyes grew wide. “Lord Elidor? Your prisoner? But Your Majesty—”
“Chatelaine.”
It was Amadan who cut her off, suddenly standing there in a golden-green tunic shading at the prodigious sleeves to orange and rust. His hair, too, was tipped in shades of autumn; every bit of him flamboyant as the jewel-toned season, though his expression was as sober as a priest.
“Dark Fool,” Lileas said, inclining her head. “Was there something we could help you with?”
Amadan turned his attention to me. “Your Majesty, I am afraid the mortal bairn has fallen into the fishpond again.”
I leapt to my feet. Did Jamie even know how to swim? “The fishpond? But I do not have a fishpond!”
Amadan waved his hand. “Well, you did not until just now. Thought I would update the garden a bit.”
“Update the garden? And you did not think to tell me, or keep an eye on Jamie?”
Amadan threw his hands open and shrugged.
