Then I saw them, cast upon the wall by the dim candlelight. Strange, shadowy figures, pointed of ear and nose, twisted of fingers and limbs.
My shadow fae.
Somehow, despite the crosses, the iron hinges and doorknobs, they had made it here to me.
If I can perform no miracles, magic will have to do.
“I am glad to see you, my friends.” For I took them as a sign. The self inside me who might cure Malcolm’s illness was not the cunning woman, or not the cunning woman alone.
He must be saved by a woman of the fae.
I placed a hand upon the lad’s chest, trying to summon the rich greenness I had felt in Carterhaugh, the stirring of life beneath my fingers as it enveloped the Dark Fool’s flesh. I felt only the cloth of Malcolm’s tunic, his halting breaths. There was no magic there.
“Of course not,” I muttered aloud. That would have been far too easy. And what good would it have done anyway? The boy might as easily die in spring as in the autumn. Turning the season would change very little about his fate.
The shadow fae watched me soundlessly, as if they sensed the answer lingered right on the tip of my tongue.
It did. What I needed was not to manipulate time, but to stop it completely.
Almost I felt I had done so before. When I let my seeming slip, the day I first met Thomas. When I faced down the wolf. Maybe time had not really stopped, but it felt like it had. If I could recall that sensation, I could do it again, on purpose.
Only in this room, and only to stop the progress of Malcolm’s illness. I could reverse nothing, I did not know how, yet some ancestral memory told me I could stop everything. And if I stopped everything, then my inner cunning woman could appear. I would brew a truly potent theriac, such as need years to mature. The one I had made was fine for his mother, who was not nearly so far gone. Malcolm needed a much stronger treatment. More than merely mortal healing. He needed the magic of the fae.
And so, I did not reach then for Mairi Grieve’s knowledge, but pulled back into my own fae gifts. The lightning ran beneath my skin as I recalled the slipping of my mortal guise, how the world around me grew utterly still, if only for a moment. This time, I needed it to last longer than that. I gathered thyme from the garden, wild celery, and rue. I cut a lock from my own hair, braided it together with my gathered herbs, and made a little poppet. An ugly thing, but it would do.
“By oak and ash, by the spirits of forest and garden, by the blood of Mab inside me, I conjure you,” I whispered, and the shadow fae danced upon the walls. “A pocket of Faery I summon, in the bowels of this human keep. In this room alone, time shall have no dominion. By my will and the powers of nature, so shall it be.”
The spell caught in an instant. The room grew brighter than the candles alone would have made it, and the shadow fae left the wall, scurrying madly across the floor and up Malcolm’s bedposts. The hairs rose on my arms and legs, a shiver running across my skin like the feet of the shadow fae themselves. Familiar scents teased my nose, though I could not name them. Something of flowers, something of ancient moonlit rites and holy blood. My spirits lifted, as though a thousand iron scales had fallen from my body. As if, at last, I had finally come home.
Is this what it would be like,I wondered,if I should give up on my shepherd king and go back to Faery? This is the power that would spread from my fingers, trail behind me when I walked.The lightness alone was intoxicating and made me quite giddy. If this was how even a tiny pocket of Faery felt to all who went there, no wonder mortals got trapped there, long beyond their expected lifetimes. It would take much to remove me even from this one room.
I looked to Malcolm’s bed frame, the wood so cruelly cut down and carved up for mortal comfort. A tiny sprout had grown from the bedposts and curled towards the sleeping lad.
It heartened me and brought forth a prickle of fear as well.What if someone should see?
I would order that none disturb the boy. He needed his rest. De Lyne had said I was to have everything I asked for.
Malcolm did not move. Did not stir. Did not even breathe. Yet I had clearly caught him mid-exhalation, for his body arched upwards in an aborted cough, and a curl on his forehead sprang up, as though from his exhaled breath.
I had done it. Stopped time.
There was a knock upon the door.
My heart seized in my breast. “A moment only,” I called out, my voice too high as I tossed the little poppet beneath the bed. I had not thought this through. What would anyone think if they came in to see Malcolm thus? Gently I pushed down on his shoulders, trying to get the lad into a more relaxed position. He would not budge, and I did not wish to break him. I pulled the blankets up to his chin to conceal his painfully disturbed flesh. “Sorry I am, lad,” I whispered.
“There is someone to see you, mistress,” a servant called from the other side of the door. “At the front. He will not pass the iron gates.”
Someone of Faery, it must be. I glanced at the shadow fae, but they scurried under the covers and into the corners of the room, blending back into the shadows. They had not needed to cross the threshold, nor even pass the door to this room, so I believed.
Who else of Faery knew I was here?
Amadan Dubh.
Overlong fingers, meddlesome and threatening. A voice curving around me like a serpent entwining round its prey. My nostrils filling with scents of moss and loam and profane desire.
A heaviness fell upon me, the weight of the words I had given him. A promise I had made.
Around me I felt a pressure, like shards of glass touching but not yet pressing into my flesh. One wrong move and I would bleed.
