With enormous difficulty, like wading through a thick bog, I took a step away from him, turning my back. “I have always needed a friend,” I said. “When I was a changeling, with little idea of my true nature, belonging neither in this world nor the one above, I needed a friend. When I lived as a peasant girl, ignored and mistreated by the only family I knew, when Mairi Grieve was dying and recognized me not, when the man I called father cast me out of my home, with no place for me to go, all those times I needed a friend.” I spun on my heels to face him.“Where were you then?”
Piping in the forest, seducing young maidens. This was where Amadan had been. He as much as told me I was useless. Well, now I had no need of him. I stared, unspeaking, allowing my eyes, deep as garnets and sharp as knives, to reprimand him for me.
“I deserve that, I suppose.” Amadan ran his teeth over his lower lip like a nervous youth, tucked a curl behind his pointed ear. “Your Majesty, allow me to atone for my past behavior.”
A rare earnestness colored his tone.Resist it. Resist him.Though he looked like a boy now, no older than Bess-I-had-seemed, nervous and shy, he was not.Trickster,I had named him.Seducer. Fool.
He remained all those things. None of it had changed.
I snorted. “Why should I give you another chance?”
He swallowed, still appearing mortally awkward, no doubt aware I found that hard to resist. “Because you are our most magnanimous and gracious queen.” His hand cupped my cheek, and heat radiated off his body, pulling me closer. “You are Una’s blood, Fia. You have powers beyond your ken.”
He took my hand, and I stared at our joined fingers. His were still too long. His scent overwhelmed me, which I had first smelled when Mairi Grieve caught the affliction that took her life.You killed her, Amadan. I know she was naught but a mortal mayfly to you, but Mairi was as everything to me. How can I possibly trust you after that?
Yet I did not move away.
“I saw what you were capable of, even untrained and in the mortal realm,” Amadan oozed. “You can do more here, with me as your guide. Think of all you can achieve.”
I recalled Thomas’s leg, the baroness’s plague, and the delivery of Glenna Baker’s child. Of young Jamie, whom I had sent away from his malicious parents, into this land of marvels where no one would hurt him again. The tinkling laughter of a child came from the garden outside. My eyes flew to the windows.
Amadan could not be trusted, but he could be used.
Like a seed newly planted in the springtime, beginning to send forth shoots, an idea popped into my head.
“My queen.” The Fool’s lips parted, and I wondered what sweet intoxication one might taste upon them. “There is no limit to what you and I can do.”
I moved closer, and his head lowered, so our lips were only inches apart. “I want to believe in you,” I whispered against the side of his face. “I want to work together. But you must prove yourself first.”
Thirty-Seven
“You think this endeavor folly.”I sat mounted on my white steed in the courtyard and glanced over at Amadan as he mounted his own.
My words were a challenge, and they were not. I was queen, and not to be argued with or criticized in any way. Amadan, however, was my Fool, and permitted liberties no one else might enjoy. This could prove to be an interesting discussion indeed.
He sat rigidly straight, his face placid, but a storm brewing in his eyes. “Well, and I am the Dark Fool. Should I not be master of your folly?”
So, in other words, yes.
I had asked him to take me to the changelings.
Since I first arrived in Faery, the curiosity had eaten at me, this wondering about the girl whose place I took. Whose mother I had known and loved, while she herself lived deprived of family, away from the mortal realm. Guilt sat warm beneath my skin and heavy in my belly, made all the worse because I knew it was a mortal, not faery, thing.
A rain of questions spilled forth inside me as we rode out together.How do the mortal children fare, away from their kin, apart even from their own kind?Jamie’s kin had been atrocious, and I did not for a moment regret sending him out of the mortal realm. But to what sort of life had I condemned Bess Grieve?
Whether I was truly ready to find out, I cannot say.
The Fool made a whickering noise, and his steed moved apace with mine. A peculiar iridescence glinted off its sleek coat, and for a moment, its eyes shone green as its master’s. I stroked my mount’s mane and whispered to her, “I would stay clear of him if I were you.”
Amadan pretended not to hear me. “Your Majesty, if I may be so bold?”
“I would be astonished if you were otherwise.”
He did not smile. “We have never had a queen who lived as a changeling before. ’Tis usually reserved for the old and infirm, or for infants whose mothers cannot produce enough milk. Faery does not look kindly upon, or even know what to do with, those reared in the mortal world.”
As I was.I sat taller in my saddle, making every effort to look not merely unperturbed, but unperturbable. “And your point is?”
“Until you lose the very essence of who you have been, you will never become the queen you were meant to be.”
