“Leave him be,” the old woman ordered stepping around Colin to place a protective arm over Thomas’s shoulders. “Your petty concerns of this world are of no consequence. Can you not see he’s exhausted and ill?”
“All the more reason I must speak to him now, before it’s too late.” This might be his last chance to learn what the future held.
“I order you to leave him be,” the woman stubbornly insisted.
“Away with you!” Colin yelled, surprising even himself with his outburst. Whoever she was, she had no right to give him such orders. He wouldn’t be denied the knowledge he sought. Not now. Not after all he’d gone through to find True Thomas. “I must know my destiny. I’d hear it from his lips!”
In front of him, the air around the old woman glowed green and her form shimmered as he watched. He rubbed his eyes, unable to believe what he saw as her shape shifted from old woman to child to maiden.
“Neither crone nor maiden, young upstart, but a queen who confronts you now.”
Colin leaped away, grabbing for the sword on his back as he did so. To his amazement, he found himself unable to move, as if his hand had frozen to his weapon, his feet firmly stuck to the floor. He could not move any part of his body. He could, in fact, do nothing but watch the shimmering beauty draw close, her anger pulsing around her like a living rainbow.
“It’s your destiny you’d have, is it?” Her eyes flashed as her hand slammed down on the table beside them. “So self-important you are, you’d not even take care for the feelings and health of an old man? So self-important, you’d be rude to a helpless old woman. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
She didn’t understand. It wasn’t really like that. He wasn’t really like that. He’d explain it all if only he could make his tongue work.
Her eyes widened as if in surprise when she came close and placed her fingertips against his chest, directly over his heart.
“And you, with the blood of the Fae coursing through your veins. Your behavior would be bad enough from a Mortal, but from one of my own?” She shook her head in disgust. “Well, pup, you’ll receive more this day than you bargained for. If it’s destiny you want, then by all means, it’s destiny you shall have.”
The air he breathed went cold, his nose stinging like he’d stumbled into the glen on a snowy day. Around him, the room shimmered and wavered and his eyes tinted over with a green film as if he were trapped within a colored, pulsing sphere of light. He heard the woman’s words reverberating from somewhere outside that sphere.
“You ask after the destiny of Scotland, but that’s not what you truly want, boy. No Fae’s destiny can ever be complete without finding his one true love, his other half, his Soulmate. Surely you’ve learned that much of your own people.”
She was wrong! He was a warrior by nature and training. A warrior by choice. All he’d ever dreamed of was defending Scotland. By sheer force of will, Colin fought the Magic binding him, managing at last to move his lips.
“No!” His voice was little more than a whisper. “Dinna need love.” Love was for women, gathering like hens in a warm solar, not for warriors like him. He had a much higher calling.
“Oh, you think so, do you, my rash child?” The Faerie Queen’s laughter tinkled around him, bouncing off the green sphere and echoing inside. “Well, we’ll just see about that higher calling of yours. Seems to me you’re but a youngling Fae in need of a lesson. And a lesson you shall have, a history lesson of your people. In the long ago, in the battle that split Wyddecol from the Mortal plain, Soul pairings were ripped asunder, leaving each soul a jagged half, crying out for its missing piece until it could once again find its own match. Only when the two halves are once again joined will a Fae feel complete. That finding is the true destiny of all Fae. A destiny you’d deny as you stand here before me.”
Lifting her arms, she placed one hand on either side of his head. “I call on the Magic lying dormant in your blood to rise up and I give you this gift, young Fae: from this day forward, you’ll feel all those Souls, each and every one. You’ll feel their sharp, jagged edges, seeingtheir anguish in your mind’s eye. You’ll feel their pain as they blindly call out for one another, even as your own need calls out, the need you deny exists. You’ll see the Souls that fit together. All of them. All except your own, that is, since you claim your own need is of no importance to you.”
“I ken yer anger, my love, but such a burden as you put upon the lad will drive him mad.” Thomas’s voice floated through the haze. “Can you no see yer way clear to provide an escape from the millstone with which you weigh him down?”
“Very well, love, for you.” The Queen’s tone, caressing and warm, chilled as she turned her attention back to Colin, the green of her eyes swirling like a boiling cauldron. “Only by joining with your own Soulmate will you cease to feel the horror and pain of the great wanting.”
The Faerie Queen’s voice seemed to pierce his body, as if her words dived through his skin and into his very bloodstream. When at last she stopped speaking, the silence echoed in his head, beating against the inside of his closed eyes as loudly as the anxious pounding of his heart.
She released him then and he fell limply to the floor, lying there weak as a newborn babe when she walked away.
“Come, my beloved,” he heard her say over the scraping of a chair against the floor. “I’ve indulged your desire to stay in this world long enough. It’s time we returned to Wyddecol where your youth and vigor will be restored.”
Just as he thought himself alone, he felt her close, whispering in his ear. “I granted you an escape onlyto please my Thomas, and though you’ve angered me greatly with your impudence, I feel the need to tell you the whole of it, youngling. Since you swear you’ve no need for your own missing half, it should come as no serious disappointment to learn she’ll not be found in this lifetime. Perhaps my gift will allow you to learn the true importance of your destiny before your paths cross again.”
And then she was gone, the sound of his own shallow panting his only company in the stillness of the room.
How long he lay there, unable to lift even a finger, he had no idea. Perhaps he slept, but he couldn’t be sure. At last, his eyes flickered open and he pushed himself up to sit.
The room around him was dark and dank, smelling of animal dung and wet hide. The table and chair he’d seen earlier had disappeared, a roughly hewn wooden bench setting in their place.
He rose to his feet and stumbled outside into the light of afternoon to find his horse exactly as he’d left him, his reins still draped over the low branch.
With one last glance back at the little hut, he hefted himself up onto his mount and turned his horse away, back toward the village. Disappointment in his failure to find the answers he’d sought closed in on him, shrouding his thoughts.
Whether he’d really found Thomas of Ercledoune or only imagined the entire incident, he might never know. For the moment, he wanted to believe it had all been some bizarre nightmare brought on by sleepless nights and lack of food.
He had almost convinced himself that was the case.
