“The Teind must be paid!” My words are sharp and hideous, like the cry of carrion birds. My heart is stone, it cannot feel. How then is there so much rage inside me, boiling beneath the surface? Such rage that I reach out and grab one of the rose bushes, bare hands tearing at the stems even as I bleed from the thorns.
The rosebush bleeds as well. I feel its wound like a slice into my own skin.
I am become victim and assailant, all at once.
A wordless gasp emerges from Tam Lin, and even brave Janet backs away. She feared not the lion and the serpent, the monstrous face I let her see. But the sight of a queen losing her mind frightens the girl at last.
There is nothing human in me any longer. To become this queen, I sacrificed the woman I was, surely as if I dug her grave myself. It wasn’t killing Thomas, or the death of Bess Grieve, that took away my very essence, allowing me to become the queen I always must be. It is these remnants of my flesh, which remained here in Carterhaugh, in the rosebushes blooming all around, the last vestiges of my mortal self. Why else does it hurt even to pluck one of these roses? Why is their fragrance slightly sweat-tinged, why are they warm as skin, why do they taste of salt?
My mortal self had become roses. But locking it away is not the same as destroying it completely. And at last, this one time only, I know how the Teind will be paid.
I hold my blade before my face, the dagger I grew from my own flesh long ago, that was meant to slay Tam Lin. “Become a greater thorn,” I whisper to it, “to take down those which remain and taunt me. Purifying flame, death as destruction, let me hold you in my hands.”
When I open my eyes, I hold a gleaming sword. Not merely gleaming, but on fire.
With a matching fire inside me, igniting like coals in the heat of my gaze, I turn upon Janet. She cowers like a child beneath the storm.
“Understand this,” I say. “I kill no semblance of myself this time. I shall pay the Teind with my own soul. A queen no longer mortal in any respect shall reign in Faery. Expect no mercy evermore.” I will have sold my compassion, any fellow-feeling I had for this girl, any kindness towards the Christians among whom I was raised.
And, if my mortality is gone, so is my pity. What good is pity to one who will never die?
My blade flashes, so brilliant the lovers hide their eyes.
I turn to Tam Lin next. “Had I known, Tam Lin, what I this night did see. I would have taken both your eyes and put in eyes of tree.”
And with the sword I turn, not on either of the lovers, but upon the blooming rosebushes. I slice the first, and it feels like severing a limb. I cry out, and my voice is no less terrifying than the carrion birds shrieking through Faery’s blood-red sky. Something pulls from me, the shadow self I never saw departing from Mairi Grieve as I watched her dead body, some shimmering essence like the ghosts that haunt the changelings’ cottage, mourning for the children they have lost. For a split moment, I think somethingmightcome after death, as the mortals believe, but if it does, I have sold my part of it, and whether there is Heaven or Hell, ghosts or rebirth or something else entirely that comes when we pass on, I have sold my part of that, too. I burn and am purified as I slice away the memory of the shepherd, of Mairi Grieve, of my mortal home. The friendship once I had with Morven, and with Glenna Baker.
All that ever was a daughter of my unknown father, a girl trying to be Bess Grieve or at least the heir to Mairi, lies dead at my feet.
Around me, the roses that have fed on my mortal essence, my very soul, begin to die. Yet Faery Herself continues to live, and that is the important part. I am consumed, but I also consume, and when it is over, I am sated at last.
When nothing remains but a carnage of petals carpeting the forest floor, I watch the lovers departing—brave Janet, who dared to love the Faery Queen’s captive, and Tam Lin, whom I hope forever will continue to remember how lucky he is. They leave behind a heartless queen, half-mortal no longer, standing alone beneath the pitiless sun.
Neither one dares to look back.
