Margaret of Roxburgh was nowhere in sight. There was no one to save Thomas.
From me.
I backed up against a tree, as if I could shrink away from the decision that faced me now. Flowers and sprigs grew along the branches and tumbled down into my wild red hair.
At my waist was the dagger that took Lord Elidor’s life.
I wished I could put an end to this. Stop it all. Unspool the past until we’d retreated beyond Thomas’s betrayal, past our lovemaking and even our meeting.Undo it all!However far back it took for us never to have met, for him not to ride on to his doom.
But I am not one of the Fates, merely the Queen of Faery. The past would stay in the past.
I surveyed my people, radiant in the moonlight, their faces stately and glorious, or wondrous and wild, gracious yet cruel.
As I must be myself.
Thomas frowned and cocked his head. “Wood nymph,” he breathed. “My Bess?”
It almost broke me then.
I must become unbreakable.
“Nay, Thomas. Do not name me thus.” Let him think dead the Bess he loved once—for I knew he had. Let not this last, cruelest fate appear to be at her hands. “Your Bess is gone. There is only me. Faery’s queen.”
Thomas stared, reached out a hand towards the left side of my throat, where a rosebud birthmark had once bloomed. He dropped it to his side, shaking his head. “You were ever both, my wood nymph. I always saw you as both.” He smiled, a little sadly. “Love sees more than you credit it, my queen.”
Does it forgive more as well?But no, I was Faery now, and forgiveness an entirely human need.
Thomas held no weapon, but his words cut me, stabbed me, made me cry out in pain. I was locked in his gaze, like a deer against a wolf, but who was predator and who the prey?
Minewas the hand holding the knife.
A chuckle emitted from him, dry and bitter, ill-befitting the occasion. “I always said I owed you my life. Never did I think the debt would come due.”
At once, he seemed to possess the strength of a thousand blessed heroes, shrugging his way out of the hands that gripped him on either side. I opened my arms and he fell right into them, lips pressing against my own. I had forgotten how sweet his tasted, how it felt to have him warm and firm against me. Desire puddled inside me, the need to hold him and be held, the craving for contact, skin against skin.
If I wished to save my people, this could not be.
With one hand, I weaved my fingers into his curls.
With the other, I drove my knife into his back.
Skin parted easily, flesh resisted but tore; the blade found its way between his ribs.
And into his heart. Such a pain shot through my breast, it might have been my own.
Thomas’s weight sagged against me, and his head fell into the crook of my shoulder.
“Shepherd King,” I cried out.
His body dragged me down the trunk of the tree, until I was seated at its base. I arranged his limbs comfortably, brushed the curls off his forehead, cradled his head in my lap. His grey eyes stared wide, but his face was peaceful, brow unfurrowed, jaw slack, lips almost curved in a smile. How was he at peace when every part of me waged an inner war? His blood kept coming, soaking my skirts, and wetting the ground. The soil feasted; anemones and poppies grew up from where he bled. Vines of ivy and bittersweet crept over his legs, twisting around him as they pierced his skin and entered his veins. His flesh did not rot, but foliage sprung up from his wound and spread to cover the rest of his body. The shepherd king went from dying man to living vegetation without ever having been a corpse in between.
And I was reborn.
Blood roared in my veins like the thundering cataracts of the rivers of Faery; my heart thumped in my chest. My senses came to life, like a waterfall tumbling down the mountains, newly full of the snow melt and the spring rains. Like lambs that leap forth, stumbling and playing in the spring. I was autumn, winter, spring, and summer, the ploughing and the sowing and the reaping of the grain.
I was at once life and death, joy and sorrow, and if my tears fell like rain, they also nourished the land.
Samhain
