Good,I said to myself.Let it distract him. Let him comfort you, instead of wondering what he just saw.
There was nothing feigned in the tears that fell from my eyes.
Thomas reached up to wipe them away. “His own child. This is no way for a father to behave.”
I nodded, sniffled, barely kept myself from becoming a weeping mess in his arms.
Thomas’s fingers wandered down my cheeks, curled against the rosebud at the side of my throat. “You can stay here,” he said softly. “With me. If you’ve no kin to go to, I mean.”
My eyes stung. I did not have kin this side of the Veil, unless perhaps you counted Morven and possibly that wandering Fool. I knew not what kin I might have, or might once have had, elsewhere. “I cannot,” I replied.I must be away to Faery this very night.
To find answers. To learn my true nature, whether the wolf addressed me true.
Thomas misread my hesitation. “’Tis not charity,” he insisted. “You could tend my leg. Make me feel better?” He waggled his brows suggestively. Then his face sobered. “I would not sully your reputation, lass. Forget the offer if your fear over your virtue is too great. I will not take offense.”
“It is not that.” A rough laugh caught in my throat. What was “virtue” but another human lie? “Your offer is most generous.”
“It is the least I could do. You faced down that Hell beast for me. You saved my life.”
His soft eyes, the tenderness in his expression, and the emotion filling his voice were more than I could endure. That Hell beast, as he called it, the creature who imperiled him so, was of my folk, my kind.
My... subjects?Oh, I could not allow myself to believe it.
And I could not ever allow the shepherd to know.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the lingering Beltane magic. Opening them again, I placed my hand over his forehead, letting my fingers brush against his curls. “I want you to forget,” I told him. “Never to remember the call of the forest and the wolf’s seductive song. Forget the shape of what we faced together tonight. ’Twas only an ordinary wolf. We were lucky, nothing more.”
Fae magic flowed from my fingertips, awakened in my words. Magic, I thought, far greater than a half-mortal changeling should possess. But a queen? I did not know.
His lips moved in protest, and my finger traced its way down to meet them.
“I found you in the forest,” I told him. “You had fallen and hurt your leg. I tended your injury and helped you find your way home. Remember that only. By the ash and oak and yarrow tree, may it be so.”
He smiled sweetly, like an innocent bairn. To see him thus, so unknowing and empty, sent a chill across my skin. I was no better than Amadan, who had so bewitched Glenna with his charm. But my faery nature could not be revealed. Not before I understood it myself. And Thomas must be protected from Faery, I felt it in my bones. The best way to protect him was to leave him in complete ignorance, remembering me fondly, but as a human, nothing more.
I leaned forward and placed a kiss on his forehead. “Sleep now, and let your flesh heal. Do you think the rest of it naught but a dream.” Slowly I rose from his bedside, keeping my eyes upon him as I made my way towards the door. ’Twas the last I would see of Thomas, and it seemed right he be the last person I saw this side of the Veil.
I opened the cottage door.
Larks sang, and the mourning dove. The sky outside hung a deep blue, striped with lavender, rose, and flame. The sun peaked over the horizon, and a sharp cry rang out of me, unbidden.
It was the dawn. Beltane Eve had ended.
The Veil had closed, and I remained behind.
Samhain
“You saved my life aswell,” says the boy. He stands shivering in Janet’s cloak, dark hair clinging to his cheeks and shoulders, lips trembling. He is a pretty one. I always choose the pretty ones, because for so many years the pretty ones did not choose—did not even see—me.
I try not to meet those damned grey eyes.
“Don’t you recall?” he persists. “Five of us hunting, a dark winter day in Carterhaugh?”
Of course I recall. Not just any dark winter day, but Imbolc, in fact. The Veil between the worlds lay open, and all sorts of Unseelie nastiness could get out. Including Faery’s own queen.
“Five idiots,” I agree. They had more wealth than sense, those five little noblemen, none of them more than sixteen years old. There were reavers about Carterhaugh, as there often are, and rumors of an ungodly boar who was raging about the forest, which is probably why none of their elders had gone with them. I smile with no small amount of pride; that boar was one of ours. “No one should have let you out of your cozy manor houses alone.”
He does not deny it, old enough now to realize how foolhardy he was then. “We were full of drink and high spirits and had obviously caught nothing. Probably scared off the prey.” He ducks his head. “Then suddenly the hair rose on my arms and prickled at the back of my neck. We heard unearthly grunts and squeals, and the horses were spooked, all the horses. None of us could control them.”
