How would she know? I speak of one who died long before Tam Lin was born.
“Nor was Thomas Shepherd like his kin, not at first,” I tell her. “Or, excuse me, you would know him as the baron, Thomas de Lyne.”
Tam Lin makes a strangled noise deep in his throat. I wave my hand and free his lips, but throw him such a dark look he stays silent in any case.
“Let us go home, Your Majesty,” Janet pleads. “It must be close to dawn.” Her teeth chatter, with cold or with fear, it is impossible to say.
“Oh, I shall let you go home,” I tell her, though I give no specifics as to when. “And I shall give him his freedom, assuming you still want it for him after I have told my tale.”
Janet opens her mouth to protest; she does not wish to listen to what I would say.
Anger bubbles inside me, threatens to break to the surface. I could silence her as well, at least until I have said my piece. I do not. Instead, I wrap myself in a familiar glamour, let the proud queen soften into someone humbler, plainer, and closer to Janet in age. My body both shrinks and grows broader, rounder; my hair pales to ruddy gold, and a rose-shaped birthmark forms on the left side of my throat.
This time, the rose has thorns.
I wave my hand, and the forest itself softens around me; the sky, once dark of moon and ominously mirky, now gentles into a sweet summer twilight. The air becomes more temperate and the breeze stills. Carterhaugh has one foot in the realm of the fae, after all, and I?
I am Faery itself.
“I will not keep you long,” I tell Janet. “Certainly not until dawn.”
All Saints’ Day it will be on the morrow. I must be off before then—withmy prize. But it is still Samhain, All Hallows’ Eve, and as I rule Faery, I hold command here as well.
It will be All Hallows as long as I say it is.
I smile gently at the lass. “As I was saying, I knew Tam Lin’s forebear. My shepherd king, I called him once.”
I do not add,He was the only man I ever loved.
Two
My life slowed to ahalt while I looked after the only mother I knew. Eamon could have afforded a servant, were he not so miserly, but there was no one else I would have trusted with Mairi’s care.
No dowry had there been for Bess Grieve, the youngest of eight bairns, most of them already out of the house. No apprenticeship either, save for the lessons I had learned at Mairi’s side. Those I now used tending her. I would feed her rosemary for clarity and willow bark for the pain. I tried to walk her around the room we had curtained off downstairs, because the light hurt her eyes and she could not climb the ladder to the loft. Even while I helped her, I could tell she leaned on me too much, that her good side worked too hard, and her stricken side worked not at all.
Mairi had her good moments and her bad ones. Days when she called me her cuckoo, though only when no one else might hear, for it was a secret shared between the two of us. She squeezed my hand, and I delighted in the warmth of her skin, but despaired over the weakness of her grip. Other days, she did not recognize me, nor the members of her own family. She screamed that she was surrounded by strangers, imps, and even demons, foul invaders who had made their way into her home.
I did wonder then if she saw the shadow fae on the walls.
Oh, how I wished to say to her: “On your Bess, too, this birthmark blooms like a rose at the side of her throat. This is her red-gold hair, her eyes the color of marshland, her figure so plump and full. There is nothing in me, of me, that has not come from your daughter.” Or perhaps I could have said, “Bess lives. She is safe in a world where there is no hunger or cold and hardly any time.” But how could I be certain? I left Faery as an infant and had no recollection of it. All I knew of Faery came from what the brownie said.
At the very least, I wished I had told Mairi, “You have imagined nothing. I am not your Bess, but an imposter wearing her skin.” Would this have given her comfort, kept her from doubting what her eyes told her was true? I cannot say, for as a proper changeling, I held my tongue.
Faery-struck, Mairi had been. Faery-healed, she never would be. At least, not by my hands.
Eamon was too miserly to pay for a doctor to look in on Mairi, and the nearest cunning folk were in Peebles, half a day’s walk away. But her grateful customers came by with gifts for Mairi and the household, as well as remedies they hoped might help.
Our neighbor Ailsa brought over a small pouch filled with rich soil. “From me father’s grave,” she said to my puzzled face. “You do put it over the elf-shot wound, and she will be good as new.”
I tried to conceal my scowl. “She was not elf-shot.”Iwould most certainly have seen.
Ailsa ignored me. “Why, I remember how she set my Robert’s leg. Can hardly see the limp anymore, and ’twas thought he’d never walk again. God bless her, Mairi Grieve.”
Bile curled in my throat, as it always did at the mention of the Christians’ lord. Too close to kirks and bells and crosses, that subject was, and we fae have no part of any of it.
“Have ye considered a pilgrimage to Saint Triduana’s Aisle?” asked Duncan Smith, whose broken thumb Mairi had once treated, so it bent nearly as well as it had before.
I raised my eyebrows. Mairi could barely make it around the room, and he expected us to go to all the way to Restalrig?
