I stood and restrained him with a gentle hand on his collar. “Easy, lad. Your master slumbers yet.” And I ushered him out into the yard, returning to peer into the corner myself.
A tiny, brown creature huddled there. Auberon knew what I’d do if it proved to be a rat.
She came out of the shadows, standing upright in the center of the room. “Took you long enough,” said Morven.
Had we been humans, I would have embraced her. I did reach my arms out, thought better of it, and let them fall to my sides. But I drank her in fully, from her thatch of ragged brown hair to her frowning face and tiny little feet. Such a gladsome sight she was.
“Oh, Morven,” I whispered. “I missed you so.” I dropped my chin, ashamed of the sentiment that had poured out of me, so very human it was.
“Humph,” said Morven, pulling her little stick broom out of her hair. “And well you showed it, I must say. Did you make any attempt to tidy old Eamon Grieve’s house before ye left? It was in a right state.” She leapt up onto the table, brushing off the crumbs with her little broom. “Well, ye’re better off out of that wretched place—though your young man isna such a tidy one either, is he?”
My young man.Warmth kindled in my breast. I didn’t have a family anymore, but I did have Thomas.
And Morven.Foul-spirited brownie, again, I have you.
“Mortal-lover,” Morven snorted, but there was something almost affectionate in the way she said it. Like she was glad to be back with me, too.
I ought to have defended the shepherd better, I suppose. But his cottage had an untidiness despite how small and bare it was: the house of a man who never slept at home. At least, he never had until I came along. It was not in me to worry about the women who came before.
Not so long as Thomas remembered he was mine.
“He is in need of a good brownie,” I said, to distract from the color now warming my cheeks. “That was why you came, then? Because of how untidy he is?”
Morven shook her head. “Well, and I am not here to be his brownie, remember. I belong to Mairi’s household, as did yerself, once. And if ever your shepherd sees me or tries to leave me some piece of clothing, then out I go. Them’s the brownie rules.” She’d oft repeated them to me.
I cocked my head. “You came for me, then? Though I am not Mairi’s true daughter.”
“In spirit, ye are closer to it than any of those ingrates she raised. While she were alive, I might clean their house, but now she’s gone, it’s you I mean to look after.Shewould have wanted it that way.”
But the way Morven emphasized the word “She,” I was not certain it was Mairi she meant.
I pressed my lips together, uncertain whether I dared ask the question that occurred to me then. But it spilled out of me, all but unbidden. “Did she—Was she—Did Mairi Grieve serve as midwife to the Faery Queen?”
Morven did not answer but applied herself with greater industriousness to her cleaning. Presently she crouched down before the hearth, her rump sagging behind her. She poked around in the soot and ashes, finally pulling out something flat and cream-colored, save where it was stained with soot or ink.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Summat yer man did try to burn, seems like.” With a great many creaks and groans, at least half of them feigned, she straightened and shook the ashes off. “Can ye read it?”
I took the parchment from her, shaking my head. “Correspondence of some sort?” I guessed, then frowned. “But why should he burn it?”
I stared at Thomas, whose sleeping form gave me no answers. When at last I crawled into bed beside him, it was a troubled sleep I had.
I worried about the secrets I kept from the shepherd. It never occurred to me he might keep secrets from me.
Fifteen
The shepherd drowsed beside me,cupping my body with his own. His arm draped across me and held me close. To lay curled in his arms almost took away the loneliness I had felt since Mairi Grieve’s death, or even before.
Only almost. It could not change the fact I was half-faery in this mortal realm.
I had no wish to move. To interrupt the peculiar perfection of sleeping curled in the shepherd’s arms. Thomas’s breath was morning sour, his cheeks rough when they brushed against my own; his dark curls lay damp with sweat and matted against his forehead. Mortal sweat, mortal breath, mortal stubble. Imperfect and beautiful in a way the fae could not touch.
This is why they fascinate us so.Why we can be surrounded by the stench of wool, weighed down by mortality, and pricked by the hay poking up through the mattress, yet feel as though we were touched by the divine.The shepherd king and I shared a holy union, though I was one for whom holiness should not exist.
Fae and mankind do need one another, however much we wound each other, too.
Someone barked, and the spell was broken.
