“Hold him, will you?” I say, my voice like thunder in the silent forest. Lightning burns beneath my skin, and I hold my arm aloft, pointing. “Let us see how you enjoythisembrace.”
Tam Lin stretches and grows, taller, wider, heavier. Thick fur sprouts across his body; his ears grow round, hands become paws, his nails thick claws. He roars, in pain, in horror, or simply to release the beast within.
Tam Lin has become a bear.
He claws at Janet’s back, tearing through her kirtle and marking the skin. Drooling and frothing at the mouth, he holds her so tight he might squeeze the life out of her. Still, she holds him, heedless of the noise he makes, how he claws at her, and the blood he spills.
From the distance, far across the expanse of the Veil, comes the crack of a dead tree, falling into dust.
Rage is a maelstrom inside me.
I will not give up.
“Viper!” I scream, and so Tam Lin becomes, larger than any natural serpent I have seen, squeezing out Janet’s life in his coils. His fangs are sharp and deadly; venom drips off them onto the lady’s flesh, where it burns.
She cringes, she grimaces, her face goes green as grass. Yet she does not let him go. She will not let him go.
I do not wish to like this girl. Her courage is worse than useless; it is inconvenient, threatening to rob Faery,myFaery, of what it needs.
What we call the Teind.
I reach deep inside myself for a part of me I thought long banished. What is most toxic to the fae, what is most common among the mortals. I pull this vile substance from Tam Lin himself, the metal flowing through the blood in his veins, from every door hinge and lock he has ever passed, every knife and sword he has held, from armor and buckles and the shoes his horses wear.
Iron. I make Tam Lin into what I despise the most, what I most fear, even more than church bells and crosses, holy water, and prayer, for those harm us only so far as the belief in them. Iron is eternal, and so Tam Lin becomes.
Then I set him on fire.
Janet screams, and her cries rend the silent air of the forest around us. In her hands now is that which is too hot to hold, a burning brand. She cannot keep it too long in either hand; she’s blistered and burned enough as it is.
Yet, she never completely lets go.
Instead, she breaks into a run.
A galumphing run, with how unbalanced the state of her body has left her. I am startled, if only for a moment.
I cry out to the procession of trooping fae: “After her!”
“Your Majesty,” my pretty seneschal says, to keep me within the rules of our game. He does not need to finish. I know what he would say.
We are not to intervene.
“After her—slowly,” I grit out. As if so many fae, of all shapes, natures, and sizes, acting in accord, could move with any great speed. The brownies are short of leg; the lamiae must slither along as snakes do, and the fachan, for one, has only the single foot.
The Teind is getting away.I will not call it panic, the sensation rising now in my breast, but it is as close as the Queen of Faery can come.
What part of our land is now becoming desert? Where does the Underhill now recede further away from mortal realms? We need that connection to survive.
We need sacrifice, the gift of a soul, to survive.
At the moment, it does not appear Tam Lin will provide it.
I will not let him go.
We follow Janet to the well, the very place she must have met her young man, for it has long been a popular trysting place for the fae and the fae-they-seem. Among the ferns and gorse, the well is now grown about with roses that bloom the dark crimson of my hair. Janet trips over them; they catch at her skirts and the thorns tear at her ankles. I smile, for the roses are an extension of me.
Janet does not stop until she throws the burning brand into the well.
A sizzling rises from within, and I feel it in my flesh, as though some deep and treasured part of me has burnt to ash.
