And away from Malcolm’s bedside.
The Dark Fool held out his eerie hand.
I could not go with him. The baron’s son hung on a precipice between life and death. Yes, I had stopped the disease from taking him, but for how long?
“Release me from the promise,” I demanded, my voice low and rumbly as the air around us. “Find Glenna some other midwife.” Cold it sounded, and I hated myself for it, just a little. Yet I felt a tide pulled at me, great waves which I could not resist, however I dug my heels in the sand. “I have work here to finish. The baron’s son—”
“Slumbers safely in the bower you have made of Faery stuff,” Amadan finished.
My jaw dropped in amazement.
He rolled his eyes. “What? Did you suppose the shadow fae came to the manor only to wish you well?”
Spies, they were. And I no longer had any faith they might guard the baron’s child.
“Glenna Baker is your friend,” Amadan continued. “Would you have her child face the horrors of baptism? Mortals oft throw faery changelings into the fire.”
I knew this already: ’twas a fate I had narrowly avoided, due to the kindness of Mairi Grieve. Clearly, I did not wish this same fate to befall my friend’s bairn.
The pang of guilt and worry was twinned by the invisible sharpness around me, the tight bonds that pulled upon me, the shards that dared to pierce my skin.
It was cruel, this game Amadan played, cruel the choice I must now make. The fate of Glenna’s child or the fate of the baron’s; to break a promise or to sever a bond. My insides grew as fragile as threadbare cloth.
“Come.” He held out an arm, more like an elfin gallant than a lad who barely reached my shoulder. “I know paths to reduce the journey to the blink of an eye.”
I wished to resist. To plant my boots in the mud, and let it turn to stone around them. But I would only leave my boots behind, and if my feet were glued, I must leave them behind as well. Such is the power of a faery’s vow.
And in a moment, I found myself, panting and heaving, outside the house of Eamon Grieve.
The journey had not been smooth. To travel as the Fool does, from shadow to shadow, between the mortal realm and the fae, it is not easy. The world blurred around me; my head ached with it, and I felt thinned to the barest wisp and turned inside out. By the time we arrived, it was all I could do to remain upright, and not collapse into the slippery mud.
Amadan, once more a handsome swain, not even wet from the downpour, thumped heavily upon my back. “Ill-accustomed to the Faery ways, you are. ’Tis what becomes of raising a fae creature so far from her home.”
“Oh... be... off,” I heaved, my hair hanging in sodden clumps, my elegant new kirtle clinging to me with the wet and cold. I straightened, scraped the hair from my face, glanced around myself in dismay.
The Grieve house.
“What trickery is this?” I sputtered. “Dark Fool, why have you brought me here? This is not the Baker house.”
The Fool’s laughter rang out then, melodious yet wicked. Recollections came to me: the gossipy beldames mentioning Glenna had a suitor. The Douglases’ servant saying Eamon Grieve remarried in haste.
The Dark Fool had said he would bring me to Glenna Baker, and those of Faery do not lie.
“No,” I murmured aloud. Eamon was Bess’s father. Glenna, Bess’s peer. That the two of them should wed seemed inconceivable.
For only a moment, Amadan stood there, a smile of pure wickedness contorting his face. “Remember your promise, Bess-you-seem.” Then, in an instant he vanished, and I was left to enter the Grieve household alone.
The grounds were wretched, Mairi’s herbs choked and dying on the vine. I must wend my way through weeds and briars even to make it to the front door.
And there were no beasts. No chickens pecking about the garden, no cow munching on the dead grass. Had I not known Glenna Baker and presumably Eamon Grieve lived here, I would have thought the home abandoned for years.
What has become of you, false father? You had the means for a loft, and nearly your own oven before I left. Your father served as reeve, and you supported eight children. You may not have been a kind father, but none of us starved. Now we have grown, and the house falls apart.The thatching smelled of rot; the door appeared to hang off its hinges when I pushed it aside to enter.
Such a decline hardly seemed of natural means.
To cross the threshold was an eerie sensation, like pushing against the wind. Yet I had been in and out of this house many times before without resistance. The house, filled with good Christians, had not then seen me as a foe.
It was less sure of me now.
