My eyes catch again on her scratches and wounds, caused by her efforts to save Tam Lin. Apart from those, Janet had to give up nothing for his sake.
“Once you sought an herb in Carterhaugh, the very one I meant to give Glenna Baker,” I tell her. “You did not wish to bear his child.”
“That was before,” Janet says.
Before she found out Tam Lin was de Lyne’s get, Roxburgh’s grandsire. She could have her pretty love and retain her noble status all at once.
Most of us do not get that chance.
Janet means to show me sympathy, but she only shows me her own selfishness in the end.
“If to save Tam Lin’s life means your father’s crops would fail, your very house fall into ruin, your fortune dry up like a well without the rain, would you still hold him so tight?” I demand.
If Samhain sang in her blood, and the land hungered, would she keep him in her grasp? If the Wild Hunt brought him to her like the lamb to the slaughter, and she had nowhere else to turn?
She might choose otherwise if she were Faery and Faery were her. Then the blood the land lapped up and the souls it consumed would become part of her. And though he lost his mortal body, part of Tam Lin would live with her always, as his corpse fed the hungry ground.
Death and life are part of the same cycle. There is naught and no one who does not, at some level, die so that others may live.
“That is not how it works for us.” Janet’s eyes narrow, almost as if she follows my inner thoughts. But what she says next has naught to do with me, or the Faery frame of mind. “You look to me for absolution I cannot grant.”
No. I look to her for sacrifice, for blood and loss and losing her fleshy heart to save my home.
I regret the transformations I caused Tam Lin to undergo. I should never have threatened Janet’s body, to make her give him up.
I should have threatened her very world.
Forty-Nine
Though I took the DarkFool as my lover, he would never earn my trust. It was still his long fingers I pictured stroking the side of Mairi Grieve’s face, causing her disease and eventual demise. Never would I forget how her face seemed to collapse beneath his touch.
But in Faery, we take our pleasures where we will. Trust is no requirement for that. Let me sleep with Amadan in my bed and a knife underneath. Would it be sex or death tonight? The question gave our coupling the sweetest bite.
Amadan took me to greater heights of ecstasy than I had ever known, even with my beloved shepherd king. Thomas was fully mortal, after all. There was no tenderness when Amadan and I made love, any more than there is tenderness to a thunderstorm, a raging fire, or the pounding of the sea. If some part of me found his attentions lacking, it was only a small part I hardly needed after all.
So much of myself I had closed off to become queen. Physical pleasure seemed to be all that remained.
Icould live with that.
The others were less accepting of my choice of bedfellow.
When Amadan was in the palace, the usually docile Jamie became irritable and moody. He threw his toys on the floor and pouted, or pretended not to like his dinner, though ’twas brought specially from the mortal realm and tailored to his preferences. He would run out to the garden to play, and I would not be able to find him until long after his bedtime.
The Dark Fool did make overtures, or so I thought. He presented Jamie with a large, delicious looking plum that made the boy’s eyes grow wide with hunger. Jamie was just about to take a bite when the glint of glamour alerted me, and my faery sight revealed the maggots crawling within.
I dashed the fruit out of Jamie’s hands.
He blinked at me, flinched back, eyes round with hurt. My lips parted with apology; I raised my hand to touch him, but he dashed out of the room.
The Dark Fool could not keep the smirk from his lips.
My hand lowered as I hid my disappointment. “Amadan, you leave the boy alone, if you two cannot become friends.”
“Friends, eh?”
“I am serious. You will not harm the boy.”
His head inclined, a false seeming of humbleness. “No, Your Majesty. I will not harm the boy.” Still, I did not like that glint of mischief in his eyes.
