Only to pick it up again and run my finger along the blade until I raised a drop of blood. Then I tucked it into my jeweled girdle for later.
Returning to my own bedchamber, I shook my finger out over the scrying bowl, and as the blood swirled out across the water, Jamie appeared.
He stood in front of a small cottage, upon which the sun shone alarmingly bright. Very young children were scattered around him, crawling infants and toddling bairns, children just old enough to speak in complete sentences. I no longer tried to stop the taking of mortal changelings; if their parents cared enough about them, they would find the way to get their children back. Like his aunt before him, Jamie stood the oldest among the changelings; by now, he must be nearly ten years old. But in my eyes, he was still the wee poppet whose finger I had healed so many years before.
“Come back to me, my love,” I thought at the image of the bowl. “Who will take care of you now?”
Then, though I knew the scrying bowl was one way only, and Jamie could not know I watched him, the figure in the bowl seemed to stare directly out at me, a dangerous twinkle in his eye. His mouth was too wide, his limbs too long, and it was not merely that Jamie had grown more than I was aware. This boy movedwrong,too stiff, too rigid, without a child’s joy and life. Then he shuddered, like a tremor in the earth, and his Jamie flesh began to shake off him, blowing away in the breeze like dust. What remained was no more than a manikin of leaves and twigs.
“The changeling.” I remembered encountering him walking home from the market, so many years ago. I swallowed hard, an ache filling the pit of my belly. I did not need the scrying pool to tell me where Jamie had gone. If his changeling had returned to Faery, Jamie must be in the mortal realm.How did he even get through the Veil?
I did not need to wonder for long. The heaviness of this room continued to press down upon me, and I knew it was not only my emotions that made it so. What I felt was the weight of the seven-year, the hunger which came when the Teind was due. The Veil was thin, and Samhain was nigh.
I must find Jamie before it arrived.
Fifty
Jamie was gone and Iknew not how to find him to bring him back.
Faery is dangerous for mortals, but the human world can be just as bad. Jamie had been seven years or more out of it, long enough perhaps to forget the cruelty done him by his true parents when he was only three. Better I believe he had forgotten; else I must admit I had become so fearsome he would rather return to their cruel embrace than spend another moment in my own.
It was the Dark Fool’s doing. He poisoned the boy against me, made Jamie think I intended him harm. But my throat thickened, and guilt rode like a hag on my back.He could not have done so, had I not been so distant these past days. Months. Years.
I clenched a fist in the skirt of my gown.Jamiemustreturn to me. Hemust.
The world of man was a wide, wide place. Jamie need not have returned to the home of his birth, even if the changeling who lived there had returned to Faery. How would Jamie even remember where it was, after such a long time? No, the Veil thins most at Carterhaugh, the woods between our worlds. Jamie must have come through there instead.
This eased my worries not at all. What if he fell into a hunter’s trap? What if reavers wandered the woods, hoping to steal from the Douglases’ herd? What would they do if they stumbled upon the boy, mute, disoriented, and with little recollection of that world at all?
I pressed my lips together, remembering the mother who turned a rountree branch upon Jamie to “beat the faery” out of him. The human world is so cruel to those with any difference at all.
I stood firm, squared my shoulders, set my jaw. I would find the boy by whatever means I could. Once we returned to Faery, I could repair the rift between us, become again the false but doting aunt who healed his finger, who took him away from the cruel world of his birth into a land of pleasure and delight. Iwouldmake it again such a place for him. I would sweep him into my embrace and never let him go.
I would never be abandoned again.
First, I must find Jamie. After so many years away from the mortal world, I could not do that alone.
I must summon the Wild Hunt.
I rode a horse black as my eyes to the forest at the edge of Faery. Where the Veil separates us from the realm of man, I had once claimed my title to save Thomas Shepherd’s life. How the wonders of Faery greeted me then, and how they yet ripped me away from the life I had built and the man I loved.Forget that loss, even as the heart grows to stone within your breast. Thomas has fed the land, and you have saved your folk. Nothing means more than that.
I traveled alone, crimson hair whipping wildly across my face, needing neither my knight nor my chatelaine with me for this deed. I must reach into the darkest parts of me for what I was about to do, and I wished to cause neither of them distress or dismay.
Nothing you do is ever wrong, and nothing we fae do is ever sin.Amadan’s words washed over me. A bitter resentment rose that I worried so over Lileas and Lyel’s reaction. Who were they to judge? I would whip the disapproval out of them with a rountree branch if I must.
They have been your loyal servants, and your friends.
The turmoil inside me made the sky open with rain. Thunder rolled in the distance, and a chill I was only mildly aware of reached down into my bones. I closed my eyes and summoned the self I had been in the Unseelie lands, dark vines growing around my limbs, black ooze pouring down my hair. The branched crown I wore turned to bone, entwined with thorn.
From the distance came the thunder of ghostly hoofbeats, a howling wind, and the baying of unearthly hounds. The scent of carrion and rot filled the air, and my belly turned over from the stench. My heart pounded, and it was all I could do to remain the queen composed, not to revert to the child fearful of the wolf at my door.
They are at your command,I thought, as the hoofbeats came closer. Be not afraid.
When at last the Hunt arrived, the Horned One knelt before me, and his men followed suit, in a creaking of armor that echoed the sound of ancient bones.I rule these,as surely as I did the Aos Sith and the gruagach, the brollachan and the redcaps. All of Faery was mine to control.
“At ease,” I said, never allowing my sense of command to dim.
The Horned One stood, and a cold so deep it made my bones ache rose off his flesh, along with the scent of decaying, rotting meat. Memories returned of when I was a scared child cowering in my bed, while the storm raged outside, and Mairi Grieve faced down a foe I could not name.How much more frightened of them must Jamie be! He has no Mairi Grieve.
