#boul

[purplekittybanan]

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Fairy and the Prince #44 + #45

Part 1 - Part 2 - Parts 3 & 4 - Part 5 - Part 6, 7 & 8 - Part 9 & 10 - Part 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16 - Part 17, 18, & 19 - Part 20, 21 & 22 - Part 23, 24, 25 & 26 - Part 27, 28, 29 & 30 - Part 31, 32, 33 & 34 - Part 35, 36 & 37 - Part 38, 39, 40 & 41 - Part 42 & 43 - Part 44 & 45 - Part 46 & 47 - Part 48, 49, 50 & 51 - Part, 52, 53 & 54 - Part 55 & 56 - Part 57, 58, 59 & 60 - Part 61, 62, 63, 64 & 65 - Part 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 & 72

Welp, a little more violence. Tags have been added appropriately, and bear in mind from here on out it’s probably going to stay violent for a while. Edit: It’s complete! The queue runs until February 22, at which point it will be done! At a little over 103K words, so much for a speed-writing exercise XD

He lived, of course.

He went through his classes and his studies and his practices like one of the clever clockworks that were brought to entertain the Court. He went through the motions, and presumably pretended to them well enough, as no one complained of his inattention. Dane and Beli tried to get him to go out on the grounds, to at least visit the Royal Gardens, but Adam refused to go that far, refused to so much as look at the woods. He wouldn't climb so much as a tree. Rumors began to go around that he'd been elf-touched and rejected, that he would soon wither away and die, pining after a fairy-maid that had enthralled him for a lark and abandoned him directly after. As rumors went, it didn't go very far; the visit of the priests ensured that.

Adam didn't cry, he hardly spoke, he ate only because Culli-maid and Trout would harass him into it. Spring rushed headlong toward summer and he didn't even notice. Master Leminy assigned him nearly permanently to clean the stables and the training rooms if only to get him to leave his rooms. Adam suspected the teachers there had been instructed to keep him busy, with whatever kind of sparring they could think of if nothing else presented itself. Yet again, they could only report that the prince did his duties with admirable skill. This time they could also add that he did them with little heart.

The first true days of summer found him sweeping one of the long, narrow storage rooms that abutted the elegant hall where the princes were trained in fencing and dagger-work, sweating. His coat had been hung on one of the pegs and Trout dozed lazily in a pocket, wings twitching occasionally; the pixie could fly short bursts, but could not yet maintain altitude.

A class had just ended, and it occurred to Adam as the princes came and went that they were all younger than him. Camlen had given up his claim to the crown at some point, when his family had shown up to beg him to do so. That left only Sean and himself of the Dowager's first attempt at a King. The thought came and went, impossible to hold onto through the fog of his grief. Dimly he was aware that some of the princes had remained behind, likely the older boys sparring with one another. He was aware of the low give-and-take of their voices, of the clash of their swords. Knowledge, rising from unknown depths, told him they were using true blades, and laughing about it. He had to wonder if Rickard's first lesson would linger on with this new set of princes.

He opened a door and the words hit him when he'd thought he could never be wounded again.

" - would just burn down the woods."

He went so still he forgot to breath.

"You can't just burn down the woods, Liam. The people need those for eating and for firewood and whatnot."

"I'm supposed to put their lives above mine?" Liam's voice was both angry and elegantly disbelieving. "There's the river, right there, let them eat fish. They grow grain, they can eat that. Haven't you heard a thing we've been taught? The Folk in the Woods, they're called."

Adam shuddered violently. Trout suddenly snapped from its drowse when it heard the wood of the broom's handle creak. The prince's hands were closed so tightly on it that his knuckles were the color of ash.

"No one's going to let you burn down the woods, Liam," the second boy's voice scoffed.

"When I'm King, who will stop me?"

"They're the Folk In The Woods, Herringmere. I'm pretty certain they would, if no one else."

I think they wouldn’t, Adam thought. I think they very much wouldn’t, because they aren't really in the Woods, are they.

"I wouldn't give them a choice. Arm a few dozen men with blessed rowan-wood shields and iron-tipped spears, and what are they going to do then?" Liam snorted. "They picked this fight. They started this curse. Do you expect I'd negotiate with them? No, burn it all, I say. No more fairies, no more curse."

No more gracious linden tree. No more wild irises nodding against the still waters of the kelpie's old pond. No more elegant willow, fronds always ready to lift someone to their branches. No more generous cherry trees, sharing their bounty of tart little red fruits. No more songbirds bringing gossip, no more nesting pixies, no more stalking bees back to their hollows to steal a single bite from their hard-earned combs, no more, no more, no more...

Adam had thrown the two halves of the broom aside and was stalking across the exquisite marble floor before he knew what he was doing. He felt so cold that everything, skin and flesh and bone, burned him. He made a beeline for the princes. There were four of them, the three he'd heard and one that had yet to speak. They were all young reeds, grown into their lanky teenage years and quickly becoming refined by their education in the Dowager Queen's court.

"No one," he said, startled to find his voice scratching as if he hadn't used it in days, "is burning down the woods."

They stared at him as if he'd grown two heads, until the second boy spoke. "You're Lestrelle, aren't you?"

Adam turned to stare at him. "I'm sorry I don't know you," he said politely, his manners an instinct that refused to die. "But no one is burning down the woods."

"Oh, come off it, Lestrelle." Prince Liam was a rapier of a young man, lean, as elegant as his voice, blond and pale and sharing the deep blue eyes that said his bloodline was as true as Adam's. He was wearing simple training armor and was swinging lightly an elegant rapier. "Look at you. One would think if anyone, you'd be glad to see that place and the Folk inside it gone."

"I would not," Adam said plainly.

Liam's brows went up. "Well, alright," he replied with a lopsided smile. "I'm afraid only the people interested in the crown get a say on this one, Lestrelle." He moved forward.

So did Adam. His hand shot forward and his palm came to rest on Liam's chest. "No one," he repeated tonelessly, "is burning down the woods."

Liam looked down. He was of a height with Adam, not quite two years younger. "You want to take your hands from me, Lestrelle."

"Liam, don't," the boy who'd warned about the commonfolk needing the woods said nervously.

"Herringmere, leave it. You know he's not well." The other boy was solid, wrought of darker colors; perhaps if the future allowed him to live he'd grow to be somewhat a match to Dane, but on that day he barely managed to be the tallest of those there by a wisp of brown hair.

"I wasn't speaking to you, Macallan," Liam snapped.

"You should listen to your friends." Adam said very calmly. "No one's worth spit on hot cobbles without them, least of all a king."

"What would you know of either friends or kingship, Lestrelle? Last I checked, you're only waiting for your birthday so you can go to the woods and forswear the crown." Liam gave him a mocking, indulgent smile. "They won't burn before then, you don't have to worry."

"Herringmere -"

"No one is burning down the woods," Adam repeated.

"You're not the one to stop me, Lestrelle. Look at you. You're a ghost. Have you even bathed recently? Eaten? Changed clothes? You walk the palace like a shadow. Some fairy-maid bespelled you and sucked you dry and you think -"

Liam didn't get to finish that very dangerous accusation. Adam punched him and sent him crashing to the ground with both the suddenness of the attack and the sheer force behind it. For nearly all his time in the palace he'd been sparring with larger, heavier partners. He'd hardened his hands on a troll. He'd taught a boy twice his size to be fast or regret it. Liam was lucky to still have all his teeth when he hit the marble floor.

The two younger boys scrabbled back. The older prince stepped forward. "Mother-Night, Lestrelle, don't -"

"Give him your steel, Macallan."

"Herringmere -"

"Give him your bloody sword, Connor!" Liam scrabbled to his feet and spat blood to one side, his mouth a crimson bruise, his eyes a storm. "Or I swear to all of you I'll run him through unarmed!"

Prince Connor Macallan swallowed visibly, his hand going to the rapier on his belt.

Adam stared at Liam in distant, absent disbelief. He wasn't asking for anything outlandish. He wasn't asking for the impossible. Everything the other boys had said was true; the woods were needed and more, the woods were not the real problem. But in Liam's eyes Adam saw that this was someone who would never tolerate being told 'no', and everything he'd felt against the Prince Beyond The Woods rose in him like a black, deadly tide. "Prince Macallan," he said mildly. "Not your sword, but I thank you for the thought. May I have your dagger?"

"Against a sword?" The prince sounded aghast.

"It's a rapier," Adam told him simply. "I'm sure you're all very good with yours. They're worthless in a real fight. If I may?"

"You can have mine," the last of the boys, who'd said nothing until that point, stepped forward and drew his dagger, offering it to Adam hilt-first. It was very simple, but a faltering hand had stitched leaping fish on the hilt, a tiny gesture of such love that Adam had to forcibly tear his eyes from the sight of it. It wasn't hard; all he had to do was stare at Liam.

Almost before they squared off, Liam came at him in a classic fencing surge. Adam, apparently the only one who remembered this wasn't a fencing match, merely stepped aside, swatted the rapier aside with the dagger, and punched Liam again, sending him staggering into the ground a second time. Against all his fury, all the immensity of his loss turning into fire inside him, he still didn't want to be cornered into a choice that would be far too costly. If Liam could show any sense, any at all -

The young prince yelled in wordless fury and launched himself at Adam.

Adam ducked and twisted around the rapier. A rapier is a fine weapon, but one of precision and elegance. The blade dances nearly as much as the hand that holds it, and not always in the same direction. Liam was exceptional with it, but Adam, once again, had learned speed from two someones who moved like the boughs of a willow in the breeze, like the branches of a linden tree in the wind, like blood spilling from an unexpected wound or the flood of shadow and death that overtakes a fortress with a blood-hungry howl. To him, Liam was moving as slowly as molasses.

To the other princes Adam was a blur.

Liam fought him first with fury, and then with desperation, but he wouldn't yield. He was the sort, Adam realized, that couldn't give up, that had to be always right, that wouldn't abide defeat or challenge or shame. The older prince slashed the laces open on one side of the younger prince's armor, accepted a long, shallow gash to one arm, latched his fingers on the other set of laces and kicked Liam. The prince went down a third time, too winded at that point to do more than grunt in pain, and found himself hopelessly tangled up in his leather armor.

Adam stood before him, breathing a little hard, and patiently waited for his opponent to disentangle himself and get up. "No one is burning down the woods."

Liam cast aside his rapier, drew his dagger and lunged at him.

Adam caught that wild lunge, twisted the young prince's dagger arm away, and sank his borrowed blade all the way to the hilt past Liam's ribs. Those blue eyes, his own for all intents and purposes, widened in shock and disbelief, pain not yet having caught up with their owner. The younger prince shoved himself away, staggering; Adam hung onto the dagger, which came away bloody, and Liam lifted a hand to catch his side, staring without understanding at the blood that filled his palm. His dagger clattered from a grip gone nerveless.

He crashed to the ground, staring at Adam, unable to understand what had just happened.

At some point the training hall had filled with people, teachers and students both; they'd closed in a circle around the princes, but no one had intervened. The Dowager Queen had made it very clear what sort of life, and death, her princes were to expect.

Adam drew a deep breath. He didn't think Liam would understand, not even at that moment, but there were many around them that might take heed of the younger prince's death. "No one," he said very calmly to those deep blue eyes quickly glazing over in death, "is burning down the woods."

***

Dane found Adam sitting on the stands of the jousting yard, his coat on his lap. He sat quietly by his prince, his hands laced in his lap, and they were silent for a very long time in the golden summer afternoon. "He died quick," the young man said at last. "But then I think that's what you meant."

"I meant for him to listen," Adam explained, feeling weary to his bones. He wanted to regret what he'd done, he wanted to mourn the dead prince, but the cold and black rage that had come over him, that had wanted him to see Canemore in Liam, pulsed like a heart inside him, and he almost couldn't feel his grief anymore past it. It was too sweet a relief and he wouldn't be pried from it. "He had... a dangerous idea."

"Was it a bad one?"

Adam closed his eyes. "No. And yes. Everyone calls them the Folk In The Woods, Dane, but they aren't. They never were. They come through the woods, they come from beyond them. The woods were -" His breath ran out abruptly at the very thought of saying the name and he ducked his head, willingly calling up his rage, allowing himself to wallow in it. "Linden's. The woods were Linden's."

Dane popped his mouth thoughtfully. He was the source from which Adam had picked up the habit. "That's not the sort of thing that's easy to explain to people."

"I know. I tried. But it's like he didn't see me, like I didn't matter. Only what he wanted and what he'd chosen did."

Dane sighed. "It's new to you," he explained slowly, "because you don't do that. You've always seen us, Adam. Me, Culli, Beli, we aren't there like your coat and your bed. We're people to you, we're friends." He shook his head. "That's not how it is for nearly anyone else in the staff of the palace. And you've been saying for nigh on nine years that you don't want the crown, so what's that make you? Not a prince, for sure. Just sort of... staff-in-waiting."

Adam thought on that. It would have been foolish of him to pretend that Dane wasn't speaking the truth. Even so recently as Liam's callous disregard of the immense difficulties the commonfolk would face if the woods were burned, he'd always been aware of a deep divide. He'd just never worried about it because he'd grown used to fording it effortlessly.

He buried his face in his hands and groaned low. "They're only going to listen to me one way, aren't they. They're only ever going to listen to me the one way."

Dane blew out a low breath. "Or you could... leave. Go elsewhere. Forget. It might take years and years, but you're bound to find some peace somewhere. You deserve that much."

Adam smiled wearily at the desperate little wish Dane was making for him. "Dane, that girl better snatch you up, there's not a better man than you in this place, and I'm glad you're my friend," he said, even though he knew that not all the years in his life, nor ten times as many, would ever let him forget what he'd lost. "I can't. Today it was Liam. Tomorrow it'll be someone else." He stared at the beautiful summer world without seeing at all. "This is not what I wanted, Dane."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"So am I." Adam rattled out a sigh. "And it might get bloody."

Dane shrugged. "It's been a relief that it wasn't until now, I won't say it hasn't," he admitted. "But a fight is what we signed up for, back when we got hired on to be your friends."

Adam nodded. Together they went back to the palace. He washed up, dressed neatly, and sent word to the Dowager for a brief inquiry. She received him with tea being cleared away, an oddity from all their meetings before, when the cups and saucers were just being set down as a maid showed him into the elegant sun-room. "Adam."

"Majesty." Adam bowed and sat when given leave. "How does one go about cutting off someone from his sphere of power and influence?"

Her delicate brows rose up. "Not even Eleanor?" she asked mildly.

"I would, if I didn't think my father would take advantage of even that slender thread."

"True," she agreed. "Unfortunately so. And you're certain?"

"That I mean to be King?" he asked, consciously misinterpreting her question. "Yes. I think you've done a good thing, stalling them, the Folk Beyond The Woods. I think you did it at a terrible price, a price that you know no one will ever forgive, least of all you. And I think," he looked at her directly, "I think it's not enough anymore. Not for me."

"Didn't you just kill a boy today for threatening them?"

"No. I killed Liam because he wanted to burn down the woods. No one is burning down the woods. My enemies aren't there. That's what I tried to tell you once before. They are the Folk Beyond The Woods. The Folk In The Woods -" For all that he'd planned so carefully every step of this conversation, Adam found himself faltering, strangled by sorrow that kept on trying to rise above the black flood of his rage. He smothered it savagely. "They wanted to be free of them just as much as we do."

She stared keenly at him for a long moment before reaching for a bell and instructing the maid who answered her to fetch the Court Genealogist.

[stumbleimg]

beautiful waterfalls, wentworth falls, blue mountains, australia

[thebestinphotography]

Autumn at the Riverside

[itslandscapess]

The way to the Caves

[pellinni-photo]

rocky peaks and rocks on hillside in Tatras-171805 - composite image of rocky peaks and rocks on hillside in High Tatras. Beautiful mountain landscape in summer

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Fairy And The Prince #66 + #67 + #68 + #69 + #70 + #71 + #72

Part 1 - Part 2 - Parts 3 & 4 - Part 5 - Part 6, 7 & 8 - Part 9 & 10 - Part 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16 - Part 17, 18, & 19 - Part 20, 21 & 22 - Part 23, 24, 25 & 26 - Part 27, 28, 29 & 30 - Part 31, 32, 33 & 34 - Part 35, 36 & 37 - Part 38, 39, 40 & 41 - Part 42 & 43 - Part 44 & 45 - Part 46 & 47 - Part 48, 49, 50 & 51 - Part, 52, 53 & 54 - Part 55 & 56 - Part 57, 58, 59 & 60 - Part 61, 62, 63, 64 & 65 - Part 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 & 72

THIS IS IT. 103K words and I don’t even know how many months later, and it’s done. If you stuck it out with me, THANK YOU. Thank you from the bottom of my soul. If you enjoyed it, just a little, and would like to let me know, I’d appreciate it. If you hated it, I would like to know as well. When I first started writing this, I meant to go back and forth between it and Ser Lyrian’s story. I also thought it’d be a short story, a speed writing. It... is not. The size of it boggles my mind somewhat, and I’m the one who wrote it. If you came this far with me, and would like to do me a kindness, there are five questions I always ask of people who read my writing and express a willingness to go the extra mile.

1. Favorite Character? 2. Least Favorite Character? I’m interested in the character you love to hate, but if you have a character that’s just boring, I want to know about that, too. 3. Favorite Scene? 4. Least Favorite Scene? Meaning a scene that plodded on or was poorly written. 5. Anything else you liked/hated?

Adam managed. He even found the time and the energy, somehow, to scrub at his battered clothing, and to replace his missing sword with the traveling blade kept with his saddle. The peeping, chirping sparrows that made their homes in the vastness of the stables came to greet him; to them he'd always been Adam, and he always would be. They didn't care about crowns or Compacts or trials, lucky them.

He didn't meet any of the stable-hands he heard working in other parts of the vast building. He did meet some few people on the worn path going down to the stables, but sleepy and elderly and blind his horse was still a very large creature, and they scrabbled out of his way, staring in disbelief. Someone ran back up to the palace, and Adam kicked the charger into a light trot; even the jarring gait of its arthritic limbs felt good, felt real and solid against the Prince's own aches. "Trout, would you go tell them I'm coming?"

The pixie took off like a bird. He could hear the ruckus slowly growing somewhere in the depths of the castle as he rode up to the gate, frowning minutely when he realized the closer he drew, the more exhausted he felt, as if he were dragging miles of chains all unseen behind him. Had they snuck up another test on him? Were they truly cheating at the very last possible moment? He'd ride the horse to his bed if he had to, the charger seemed to have no problem carrying him.

His concerns scattered when he reached the palace gates, and a smile as sunny as the dawn broke over his face when he saw Dane standing there, tall and broad and wrapped in priest-blessed armor.

Trout flew back to Adam's shoulder and perched there. Dane caught the reins of the gelding and looked up.

"Dane," Adam greeted.

"Highness," Dane replied.

With a muffled groan Adam slid off the saddle. His ankle tried to give out on him; Dane's hand snapped out to steady him, and Adam caught onto his shoulder. They traded a very small smile, and Adam felt suddenly lighter, as if he were young again, at a time where such things as crown and loss hadn't mattered.

No one stopped them as they made their way through the palace, coming back much as they'd gone the day before, even if Adam was a little poorer in fairy gifts in his pockets, and infinitely wealthier in grime. Somewhere behind him a ruckus was growing where the impromptu messenger who'd caught sight of him on the path to the stables delivered his news.

Adam didn't care. He opened the door to his rooms.

He paused, and after a moment he had to laugh.

The same breakfast on the table, laid out exactly the same to the last plate and spoon. The same books on the desk, quill trimmings on a small bowl. A fire in the hearth. The wash basin ready, steaming faintly. Even Culli-maid's and Beli's clothing were the same, a miracle he would have never believed after seeing the state of Culli's house slippers the night before. He had the feeling that his bed would be rumpled down the same to the last wrinkle on the sheets.

Beli had been pacing restlessly, and Culli had been sitting by the fire, her basket of mending on her lap. It went flying when she sprang up to her feet. That, at least, they didn't have to change; they'd been just as anxious the day before.

"Hello, Culli," Adam greeted her.

Tears spilled down her round cheeks, and she couldn't speak for a moment. "Good morning, Highness," she managed at last.

He swept her into a hug that dislodged Trout off his shoulder, and she sobbed. "Has it killed you, not to make the bed?"

"Oh, it needs changing anyways, Highness," she protested, laughing through her tears.

Adam held her a moment longer before stalking up to Beli. "Look at me," he demanded.

"I can," Beli told him.

"Look at me!"

"I can!" Beli's smile was the brightest Adam had ever seen in the solemn young man. The pale brown of his eyes was bright through tears he refused to cry until Adam caught his face and stared at him; he caught his Prince's shoulders. "I can. I can see you. I can see you just fine."

"Beli." Adam dragged him into a hug as well.

"Don't think this will save you from doing the books with me," Beli warned him in a choked whisper. "Welcome back, Highness."

Adam stared all around them, at this tiny Court of his, his friends, half his world that he'd come so close to losing. He still felt exhausted, crushed, as if he were carrying a millstone on his back, but even that couldn't crush the simple joy of being home, being among friends, being safe.

"Adam," Dane called in warning, and the young Prince turned. There, on the doorway to his rooms, stood the Queen Dowager. She was wearing an exquisite quilted robe over her sleeping clothes, and a long, elegant shawl over it all. Her silver hair hung in a long braid at her back. Without the pomp of her rank she looked tiny and fragile, like a porcelain figurine. There was a single maid with her, likely the only one who'd been dressed and present at that early hour.

Adam left Beli and nodded to Culli, who moved over to further push the door open. The Dowager and the young Prince met by the hearth, and Adam bowed very low before her. "Majesty, good morning."

There were tears caught in the deep blue of her eyes, Adam suddenly realized, but she drew herself up proudly. "Good morning, my Heir."

Something immense snapped so loudly that Adam flinched, instinctively whirling around to cover the Queen, hand going for his sword. The Dowager cried out and staggered, and both Culli and her maid rushed over to catch her. Dane and Beli were instantly by Adam. "What's wrong, what's happened?!"

Adam tried to step back and nearly fell into the hearth. He felt light as air, light as a feather in a stiff breeze. The world, beautiful though it was, shone to his eyes with nearly blinding new colors, with light and life he'd never seen before. "Didn't you hear that, can't you see that?"

"He can't. They can't." It was the Dowager who replied, leaning on the young maid and drawing herself up carefully straight. "The Compact is fulfilled, and the seal in our bloodline's magic is broken. Now, now we are as we were always meant to be." She gestured lightly, and power gathered and spiraled around her fingertips; the smile she gave Adam was radiant. "Thank you, my Heir."

***

Life turned into a whirlwind after that.

Adam insisted on making one last visit alone. He hadn't known what to expect, but after seeing how hard it had been for everyone he'd left behind, he'd wanted to give his oldest nemesis the grace of discretion. Everidge Leminy had wept like a child at the news.

The priests of the Night-Mother and the Tree-Father had come, and before two vast audiences of worried, hand-wringing nobility, Adam had gone through all the tests. He'd been pulled this way and that, brought to far too many meetings, asked a deluge of questions though no one seemed to be listening to his answers, introduced to endless rows of people. Adam smiled and nodded and did as he was told.

He bid his time.

He still found the chance, on the early morning of the first true day of summer, to sneak out of his room and the palace altogether. He ran into the woods and to the clearing where the green pixies nested. Barefoot, in nothing but pants and a light shirt, he climbed up the linden tree and nestled in the familiar crook of a strong branch, watching the vast green sea of the woods ripple in the morning breeze. "I heard you," he murmured. "When I was lost, and I had nothing else, and I called out, I heard you. What a nanny you've been," he teased wryly. "There's not a time I can name when danger came looking for me in these woods that you weren't there to ward it off."

The tree swayed lightly in the breeze, a green, sweetly scented cloud all around him.

"Thank you," he said simply.

Stay, the tree begged in the song of the breeze.

"I can't," he replied, caught off-guard and strangled breathless by the endless well of the tree's heart, that even then would ask him to forgive. To heal.

He stayed there as long as he could, but in the end he had to go back. He was dressed in rich royal finery, fussed over, fawned over.

On that first true day of summer, Prince Adam of the Realm was named Crown Prince and Heir before the worthies of the realm. A great celebration was thrown. He smiled and greeted people and let them fuss over him and make much conversation about their daughters and nieces and sisters and cousins.

He bid his time still.

The next day, for the first time, he made his way to the Chamber of Council. During those two months between his birthday and his coronation, Adam had spent every moment he could spare with the Queen Dowager, with Master Leminy, with the Genealogist and with teachers who'd seen very little of him before. Nine years of education had taught him the theory of the laws and politics of the realm, but in truth none of the princes had any actual practice with the ruling bit of, well, ruling. None of them were firstborns, none of them were heirs to their own family holdings; Adam, himself, was the youngest of several children.

Though neither the Dowager nor the Master of Scions approved of what Adam wished to do, neither would oppose him. They had made very careful plans for that first meeting. Adam walked in to find most of the seats empty, as expected. He'd taken the throne at the vast horseshoe table and been mostly ignored, as expected. The fact he'd ousted the Earl and Duchess sitting at both his sides to allow both the Queen Dowager and Master Leminy to take their places had made them grumble, but there were so many empty seats that it seemed a non-issue.

The first issue, on fisheries and taxation, came up. It was, the Dowager had told him, an old issue. The coastal lords didn't want to pay taxes; they wanted the fisherfolk to pay them instead, leaving their coffers untouched. Adam remembered the kind, warm welcome of the folk who worked the gull-winged ships of the realm. He refused the tax. The lords threatened to override him.

He snapped his fingers and the very long and seal-laden scroll burst into flames.

The chamber went breath-takingly quiet.

"All this time," he said into the silence. "All this time you've known the price the Crown paid to keep the rest of you safe, and still into the grindstone you sent your children, just for a shot at it. And in the meantime, you schemed for power and acted as if the only reason you'd given your loyalty was fear. Fear of magic. Fear of power. If you want to be ruled by fear, I can absolutely do that. I've learned a little about fear from the Court Beyond the Woods. I'm happy to put those lessons to use with you."

"How dare you speak to us so!" One of the nobles shouted, surging to his feet and gesturing sharply at the Dowager. "Do something!"

"The Duke of Cherst misunderstands, perhaps," the Dowager replied mildly, "who answers to whom here."

"Perhaps the Duke is not aware," Adam examined some of the documents before him idly, "that people can burn just as well as parchment, provided the right amount of power is applied." He leveled a hard, dark stare on the man, who didn't need to know it had taken Adam two weeks to be able to pull off that bit of showy magic without setting on fire everything else in the vicinity. "Sit down."

When the ashen-faced Duke obeyed, he threw the list aside. "Fear is a poor way to rule," he said into the silence. "I want to rule with you, but make no mistake, mine is the crown. Mine is the right. I have bled for it, I have faced madness and darkness and death for it. I will hear your voices, and I will take your words into account, as long as you speak sense to me. But you would do well to remember that the power of our armies is meant to be used against our enemies abroad. In here, within our lands, the power is magic and the magic is mine." He stared at them all. "We're not taxing the common folk. If that's your business here today, it's concluded. The answer's 'no'."

"But, Majesty -" A woman protested.

"Your reasons better be exceptional, Duchess, because I have a full day planned ahead for us and you're already costing us lunch. Let's hear them."

She went quiet.

"Hm." Adam gestured. Leminy's secretaries began passing around scrolls. "These are the new taxes and levies; you'll find there's also -" The chamber had gone to chaos at the sound of that dreaded word, and Adam sprang up on his feet with a shout. "Enough!"

Every goblet, pitcher and inkpot shattered. Cracks appeared on several of the glass panes in the windows.

"Levies, yes. You'll find they're generous. There are also exemptions for the provinces that meet the quotas included."

"Majesty," a younger man pointed out hesitantly. "These are quotas for uncured iron and rowan wood army lengths."

"They are." Adam dipped his head politely. "There are thirteen graves behind the palace temples. There are just as many if not more scattered across the realm. That doesn't include the common folk that had the miserable luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crown is done with the Court Beyond the Woods. We go to war." Before they could get into too much of a fit over those news, Adam pitched his voice to carry. "And because I know first-hand how fragile a matter royal inheritance can be, I will be wed before we march." He gave them all that hard, heartlessly level look. "Consider the choice of my queen a further potential exemption."

"Majesty," a stately woman with far too much make-up smiled graciously at him. "Surely this is a course of action best discussed with all of your ruling lords, not just us measly few?"

Adam popped his lips thoughtfully, as if the meeting weren't going exactly as the Queen Dowager had predicted. Well, barring the glass shattering. At least he hadn't had to escalate to kicking a chair; they were bloody solid and he wasn't sure he wouldn't have broken his foot in the doing, no matter what she said. "Exceptional wisdom, Baroness. On second thought, meeting adjourned. We meet again in one week's time. Enough time for those who wish to travel to do so."

And with that, he swept out of the chamber and left them to their panic.

***

Prince Canemore made one last trip into the hidden keep beneath the Old Place. He made it wearing traveling clothes, his very best; he had very far to go, on a trip he didn't wish to undertake, to a goal he didn't wish to reach.

He found the gateway leading into his secret garden empty, cold and dark. Rubble covered the space beneath it; though he didn't know it, it had been painstakingly carried, one piece at a time, from beneath the empty plinth where the dancing lady had once stood.

Beyond, the frozen summer garden had gone to autumn, against all his power, matched at last to the seasons above. At the center of it, in the perfect clearing, the golden, gilded cage stood, twisted and broken, bars pried apart by the force of the wild growth of the amethyst vine.

Of Linden there was no trace.

He threw the garden into winter and darkness as he left, and stalked away, never to return.

***

His books had been absolutely right, Adam found out: war is not a quick affair. He found his time full from dawn to midnight, accounting for meetings and supplies, oversight of troops and manufacturing. He never faltered when he spoke, and neither did those around him: their enemy was the Court Beyond The Woods, not the woods themselves. The Courts could be powerful allies just as they could be dire enemies; he would point at the winged, golden creature perched on his shoulder whenever the question came up. Trout had already bit someone's fingers off when they'd waggled them too angrily in Adam's face, and no one cared to find out how well it could wield those silver-tipped lacquered hair-pins.

Before he knew what had happened, autumn and winter had come and gone, and spring loomed again. His birthday, the celebration of the Compact being fulfilled, was planned to be a massive celebration, a masquerade to dwarf all others before. The entirety of the realm, it seemed, wanted to attend.

"They're dusting off every relation they can find, as long as they're young and female," Adam protested vaguely as he suffered through one more fitting. "There's girls pouring out of every cellar and cupboard."

"You can't blame them, Adam." The Dowager was directing the seamstresses and examining the Heir's costume with a stern look. "You're the one who opened that door."

"It seemed the thing to do," he admitted.

"Oh." She shooed the seamstresses away so she could speak to him so very, very quietly. "You could try for friendship, Adam. Even a broken heart can have friends."

He managed a wry smile at that. "It can. But it wouldn't be fair to her. She'd expect love. No, it's better like this. She gets a crown, I get iron. Beli, any new contenders on the guest list?"

The Dowager gestured the seamstresses back to work. From his desk in the Prince's rooms, his Seneschal answered. "Not really. It's hard to compete with the fact that Lord Bagley has both the mines and the foundries. There's just one. Their counteroffer is... clever."

He brought a set of papers for Adam to examine, and the Heir looked very surprised. "You're joking!"

"I thought it might be an issue -"

"No, no." Adam found what the letters were telling him, at the very least, amusing in the extreme. There was light and animation to him that had been missing for months. "At least I'll be able to tell her apart from the others. How goes my personal project?"

"The engineers are working the axles and wheels. Water's heavy, Adam, I didn't realize how heavy until they told me. Carrying that much water, and a person to boot? That's hard. They're thinking of sleds at this point."

"As long as they think of something," Adam winced when a pin stabbed him, and looked up swiftly when the door opened, suddenly hopeful.

Dane, just coming in, shook his head as he'd done every morning for nearly a year, and wilted to once again see hope fade from his Prince. Every morning he went into the woods to wait. Every morning he came back having met no one, not even the pixies. They'd abandoned the clearing of the linden tree, and no one could find them.

No Needlemaw.

No Boul.

Adam turned, expression gone to stone. "Well, now I just have to meet the ladies and we'll see what we'll see."

He was eventually allowed to escape the fittings, only to be snared into a few more last-minute meetings. Then it was Culli who rescued him, only to shove him into a bath, though she did manage to sneak in a meal, the first of his day, for all that it came at the price of his dignity, having to subject himself to the ignominy of being scrubbed like a toddler just so he could use his hands to eat.

Clad in his costume, the circlet on his head, an incredibly itchy domino tied to his face, he took his place at the entrance to the palace's grandest ballroom, to greet the mass of people pouring in and be introduced to all their marriageable relations. He wouldn't, couldn't, leave the party without a betrothed; a number of concessions had been granted to the Council of Nobles in exchange for that promise. No one wanted war, and no one could budge the Crown Prince from it, so they were all working as best they could to minimize any potential fallout from it.

Trout, on his shoulder, solved half the itchy part within five minutes, by biting off the domino's feathers and gleefully flailing around with them. Adam couldn't very well be stern at the pixie when the Queen Dowager herself, standing just behind him, could barely keep from laughing aloud at the fierce creature's antics.

He was introduced to the young lady Bagley, grand-daughter of the Earl of Bagley, who stammered through half her greeting and forgot the other half, overwhelmed. She winced openly when Trout spit out a feather. Adam sighed.

Behind her came the first familiar face in that sea of strangers, and the young Heir couldn't help but smile. "Prince Rickard."

Rickard flushed under his elaborate mask, all the more so when the Crown Prince offered his hand, preempting a bow. He took it, and couldn't help a little smile. "Prince Adam."

Adam grinned, the first honest gesture to cross his face since the gala had started.  Rickard was costumed as a bull, in violets and reds, and the silver and gold that his family boasted were stitched on every velvet and satin seam. He'd grown into a young bull, too, though he couldn't match Dane in either height or breadth of shoulder. The hand gripping Adam's was powerful, but the callouses Rickard had earned from his years spent at the palace were fading. Still, it was the sight of the man that gladdened him. "Prince Bully," he murmured.

Rickard's discomfort vanished under a very inelegant snort of laughter. "Prince Twerp," he retaliated. "Where are the others? I know there's a few that... made it."

Adam gave him a disbelieving look. "As far away from the palace as they can be," he replied. When his one-time torturer gave him an uncomprehending look, Adam gestured all around. "Every girl of marriageable age in the realm is here, Rickard, prowling for blood. Until you got here, I was the only available bachelor." He watched understanding, horror, and panic flicker over what he could see of the young man's features and jerked him suddenly close. "No running. We die as men," he whispered, and let him go.

"Oh, gods," Rickard squeaked. In all of the ruthlessness and machinations he'd once wielded and devised, this apparently was a trap he'd not seen coming.

He was none too gently elbowed by his companion, and the Crown Prince's mouth twitched. "Duke Lagrace, won't you introduce me to your companion?"

Rickard cleared his throat and gestured to the elegant white, silver and gold doe next to him. "My sister, the lady Elizabeth Lagrace, Majesty."

Elizabeth Lagrace curtsied with great grace. "Majesty," she murmured. She was, astonishingly, built along the same powerful lines as her brother, softened by the fact she'd not spent her formative years trying to survive in a cutthroat court, or learning to fight with every weapon and tactic created by man. Adam could only see that she had her brother's eyes, but her hair was lighter, a riot of golden curls artfully oiled and pinned over her head with an exquisite silver clip.

Silver, gold and priests. The Lagraces would back the Crown Prince's war without hesitation for a shot at the crown. Adam expected nothing less than the lethal predator that her brother had once been behind the dainty doe's mask. Elizabeth Lagrace was one year older than Adam, but they'd been so sure of their offer that they'd sent none of their younger ladies.

"The lady's costume is radiant as a star." Adam took her hand and kissed the lace of her gloves. "I wager it pales before what it hides."

"The Heir's costume seems to have grown lopsided," she replied evenly. "Shall I make a note to stay only to one side of you if I wish my hair to stay of even lengths, Majesty?"

Adam barked a laugh. "They grow them merciless in Lagrace," he noted in amusement at the siblings. "I should like a dance with the lady, if I can find her in the chaos later?"

"I will be found, Majesty," she assured him, lacing her arm through her brother, who was scowling in an entirely brotherly fashion at the Crown Prince. She all but dragged him off.

"Better than Bagley," the Queen Dowager murmured.

"Perhaps a little too much," Adam agreed.

"Adam, what are you looking for? Bread in milk?"

"A queen that won't resent my absence from her life. That one has her brother's wits. If she also has his drive, she absolutely would."

But then who would be coming up to him but Arditty, and he swept her off her feet and spun her around, her lace butterfly wings fluttering with the wind of his delight. She introduced him to her flustered husband and their son, who was young enough to be shy of the firebird stranger, but old enough to do his bow without aid. Adam made her promise him one dance before the endless cavalcade resumed once again.

The first dance, however, went to the Queen Dowager. It was the one move Adam knew couldn't be ascribed to politics or diplomacy. Likely they thought it was an invitation made out of family love, but love was the one thing they knew would never grow between them; they had both done things too terrible, lost too much, to be willing to offer more than affection and loyalty and friendship. But they could indeed be friends, and hers was the wealth of knowledge and courtly savagery Adam knew he would need in the days to come. He would have asked the same of Master Leminy, but the Master of Scions had begged leave to retire, and he'd looked so worn and fragile when at last he'd known himself free of his terrible duty that Adam hadn't had the heart to refuse him.

They moved sedately to the music, the swan and the firebird, and Adam was surprised to find out he'd put on a few inches on her. When had that happened?

He danced a merry jig with Arditty, bringing her back to her husband breathless and laughing, and taking the time to tell him wicked tales of her besting the higher authorities of the palace when they'd been younger. He left them in each other's arms and went on to dance and dance and dance some more, until he found himself wishing for more conversations on supply trains and iron forging just so he could sit at a table and rest his feet. Trout brought him a handful of grapes and Adam didn't ask where the pixie had got them. A special pocket had been stitched into the costume because Adam would not have worn it without, and Trout dove into it, safely away from the noise and crowds. Adam envied him.

He danced with the lady Bagley, and managed to get a timid smile out of her. Rickard was under siege when he went to request a dance from the lady Lagrace. She took his hand with a little curtsy; the music began, and they danced in silence for a few moments before she spoke. "You really aren't here at all, are you, Majesty?"

"I beg your pardon?" Adam jerked himself sharply back to the present.

"Here, at the party," she specified, then added. "You're as far away as if you'd flown to another land."

"I am here now. The Lady Lagrace has my undivided attention."

She scoffed. "I know better, Majesty. Don't insult my intelligence and I shan't insult yours."

"Noted," Adam replied, his curiosity roused. "Is this how the lady means to draw my interest? Veiled insults?"

"Nothing I said would be new to you, Majesty. I asked Rickard to tell me all he could of your time in the palace. I wrote to any of my friends who had family here during that time. No, I shall simply be honest."

"Honest."

"Yes. And share with you my observations."

"Do." The dance spun them momentarily away from one another, then brought her back into his arms.

"You're never going to love your queen."

Adam's jaw tightened until a muscle twitched along his cheek. "The lady Lagrace is correct. 'Correct' and 'bethroted' are quickly becoming mutually exclusive."

She smiled. "Would it help if I admitted I've been mistaken for a while now, and didn't realize it until I met you?"

"Do I truly wear my heart on my sleeve like that?"

"Gods, no. You're one of the hardest men to read I've ever met."

Adam hesitated as he spun her. "Thank you?"

"You're welcome. No, you see, I thought at first you wanted a queen that would love you, even if you don't love her. But I was wrong. You know how cruel that would be -"

"Dangerous."

Her head cocked minutely.

"Cruel and dangerous. I don't need a wife that'll stray. Thrones have fallen for less."

"Ah. Cruel and dangerous, then. And you are many things, Majesty, but you're not cruel. You're simply not here at all. Whatever wife you choose will have to live with that absence. It would break Miriana's heart, you know. Lady Bagley. She might agree to a loveless marriage, but your absence would destroy her. She'd die thinking she failed in some way she can never understand."

"So I should choose you?"

"Lagrace has the best offer to your future military endeavors," she replied coyly.

"You don't strike me as the sort that would abide my not being there."

"Oh, I'm sure it would drive me mad every now and again. But I would have the crown to keep me warm in that empty bed. See, marking your absence and letting you know I do are two different things, Majesty. I'm quite sure you'd never find out how I felt about it. Until I met you I was also fairly certain I could make you happy, but now I know no one can."

The dance ended; Adam held onto her. "And why would that be?"

"Because it's not that you can't love, which is what everyone believes, what I believed until I met you. But that you already love someone, and can never have them." She shrugged gracefully in his grip. "I come into this fight knowing I'm already beat, Majesty. And I'm alright with that. How many girls here can say the same thing?"

She stepped back and Adam let her go. He danced, again and again, but it all came to him in a blur where he didn't register faces or names or music, his feet moving out of training as Elizabeth's words careened through his mind.

You already love someone, and can never have them.

For a while, caught in the whirlwind storm of preparing for war, Adam had forgotten.

Suddenly there was no hiding, and the pain was there, like a fist around his throat, like a dagger through his heart.

Linden.

"Mortal prince?"

"Adam?"

He was sitting, and there was a cup being pressed into his hands. The storm of sound and color of the party came back to him, painfully overwhelming in ways the world hadn't been since he'd learned to master his perceptions of it with his magic unchained. Trout was a warm press against his cheek, and Dane was crouched before him, splendid in the official armor of the Captain-of-the-Guard he was still years from becoming.

"What happened?" he asked hoarsely, dragging off the mask and rubbing at his face. He was sitting on the stone bench that ran along the railing of an oval balcony, one curtain drawn, the other open, and he felt cold to his soul.

"You stopped. Like a clockity-clockwork toy," Trout told him. "You said not to bite you so I called Dane."

"Ugh." Adam buried a hand in his gold-dusted hair. "Did anyone notice?"

"Only that you're tired. The Dowager is making your excuses."

Adam buried his face in his hands. "I really thought I could do this, Dane."

"You're doing fine, Adam. What happened? Trout said you were just talking, no one's come at you with a weapon. And Culli's got the kitchen locked tighter than Beli's purse-strings. It can't have been poison."

"It was words, Dane. It was just words, and suddenly I just remembered everything I'll never have anymore, and I couldn't breathe. I remembered that I miss my other friends. That I never said goodbye to Boul, that I never even saw Needle. That Linden..." He swallowed thickly and threw his head back, eyes closed and hands gone to fists.

"I'll get you out if you want, Adam. Just give the word."

"I never wanted this," Adam whispered.

"I know."

"Well, gods help me if Lady Lagrace figures it out." Adam downed the cup in one gulp. "Trout, thank you for not biting me." The pixie's wings buzzed and its slender chest puffed up proudly. "I need a favor from each of you."

"Name it," Dane said simply.

"I need you to find an alcove, close the curtains and douse the candles. Trout -"

"I'll go find them!" The pixie arrowed away.

"Adam, what are you doing?"

"Making sure I've done one thing right since I came out of the damn woods," the Crown Prince replied, rolling to his feet and tying on the domino with a gusting, weary sigh. "Go on. I suppose I can get in one more dance while you get it all set up."

He was halfway through a dance with a young girl who was giggling so hard out of nerves that Adam had yet to get her name out of her, when he caught sight of Dane waiting for him. The dance ended and she curtsied and fled, leaving him free to meet his friend. "I wonder if their parents told them I eat young marriageable girls for breakfast or something. I know I'm not that terrifying to look at."

"You aren't. The crown you're wearing is." Dane led the way.

"Ugh." Adam followed. "You'll want to wait outside, Dane."

"Adam -"

"This is stranger than Needlemaw."

Dane's jaws worked a great deal around words he would have never told Adam, but was seriously considering telling his Prince. In the end he stepped back and closed the curtains, leaving the Heir in nearly perfect darkness.

"Sluagh?" Adam asked quietly of the dark.

"Oh." Several sets of eyes suddenly filled the dark with their pale, blight-haunted light. "You did ask after us. We did not know what to think, when the pixie told us."

Adam had to laugh a little. "I did. I wanted to know... that you're alright. That you're finding the scraps and the bones left for you."

"Yes." The pairs of eyes moved through the dark. One drew close and suddenly stood up, towering over Adam. He could just make out, in the light of Sluagh's eyes, the faint upper outline of its muzzle, neither human nor animal but something more and something else. "Hunger is less now, because of you."

"You can never not be hungry, can you?"

"No," Sluagh admitted. "We are hungry to the marrow of our hollow bones, to the knots in our empty muscles. We can eat until we gorge, and gorge we have, thanks to you. But there will always be hunger to us."

"Then I'll ask something else. Are you content?"

Sluagh stared down at the Crown Prince. "This is important to you, this answer. Not because you will use it against us, not because it brings you power. But because we... matter to you."

"Yes. You've been watching people, Sluagh, you're learning how they think."

"It seemed important. You were... new to us. There have not been many new things in our lives. And you were neither enemy nor food. It is important to learn, when someone is not either of those things."

"How old are you?"

"We don't count time as you do. We have been since before the War. There was no palace. We are not certain there were any of your people on this land. There were more of us then."

"What happened to them?"

"We ate them."

"I don't know why I even asked," Adam admitted sheepishly. "And no one's tried anything against you?"

"No. The Court Beyond the Woods is quiet. Waiting. They will see what you do, first. Perhaps they will leave, and things will be as they were before. Peaceful. Small. Better."

"I would accept that," Adam said. "I would count it a victory if they left and never came back."

"Ah, there is the shadow that follows you," Sluagh breathed. "Your crown of blood and sorrow and black ice. Until now it was hard to see."

"Hatred."

Sluagh nodded. "We do not feel hatred. We see it, know it, but do not feel it. We do not think it would be a good thing, to feel it, for all its power. It wounds you in ways no one can help." They paused. "And we would help, if we could."

"To know that is almost as good as the help itself, Sluagh. Thank you. I'm sorry if I called you away from something important. This is the first time I've had time to think on all that I should have done and didn't."

"It is fine, bones do not run," Sluagh replied blithely, their head cocking. "Here comes your pixie. Let us give you a gift on this, the day of so many of your births, when you are finally many. Truly a first among your kind." The fairy threw out their spindly, long arms, and bowed with unearthly grace. "We are Sluagh. We greet the mortal king, crowned in loss and wit and heart. We pledge him our service." Sluagh straightened up and crossed their arms. "Be he fair to us, we will always be fair to him." And then the dark fairy was no longer there.

The sound of Trout's wings came, muffled, past the curtains, pausing after a moment. Adam opened the curtains to find the pixie perched on Dane's gauntleted fist.

"It's tin and paste," Dane explained at the Heir's look of disbelief. He rapped his knuckles on the shiny, shiny gauntlet.

"It's gross." Trout was rubbing its hummingbird tongue against the tiny tabard Culli had made for it.

"Trout, please don't lick Dane's armor. Words I never thought I'd say, but here we are." Adam went out to dance and converse and occasionally sneak away to scarf down whatever food and drink Trout and Dane managed to sneak him. He found himself dancing with the Dowager once again at some point close to midnight.

"Any luck?" she asked him.

"I think it might have to be Lagrace," he replied. "Bagley is apparently the sort to get attached, and hurt later from it."

"And Lagrace?"

"She's the sort to not give a damn."

"A dangerous game, Adam. If you should grow to love -"

"I won't."

"If you should grow to love Bagley," she persisted, her tone clipped, "she would at least love you back. Lagrace never will."

"If I were capable of it, I would have never survived the trials," Adam said simply, and she could give him no answer to that.

"I will speak to her father," she said resignedly at last.

The dance ended and everyone clapped. The bells of the temple, the heavy brass of the Night-Mother's and the smaller copper ones of the Tree-Father's, called out midnight.

Conversations and music and the general hum of the party petered out under that double onslaught, until there was a rare moment of silence when the bells at last stopped ringing. In it, the thump of the Seneschal's staff on the marble floor seemed as loud as if he'd cracked the stone with it. "Queen of the Courts of Spring and Summer, her Majesty, Titania."

The entire immense ballroom might as well have been a painting. Even the servants ferrying food and drink had frozen in place. No one could believe what they'd just heard.

Adam closed his eyes and felt inexplicable laughter bubbling up inside him. The year's worth of training in remaining unreadable and stone-faced was the only reason he could turn around and look towards the entrance of the ballroom without looking like a madman before the elite of the realm, drawing in a deep breath through gritted teeth. "Well." He laced his hands at his back and waited to see the shape of this new trick against him.

He faltered almost immediately. He could remember, in vivid detail, Queen Conemara. He had drawn her a few times in his journal, and though he knew he was no artist, he was also certain he'd been faithful to the blinding, painful light and brittle, icy beauty of the Queen Beyond the Woods. Conemara would have been like a clay cup before the gilded chalice that was the Sidhe woman moving through the parting crowd.

She was nearly as petite as the Queen Dowager, of a height with her and even more delicate-seeming, as if she were made of the finest gossamer. Her skin was the pale, soft color of a quail's eggshell, her features sharp and inhuman but without any of the painful starkness that made it hard to look at any of the members of the Court Beyond the Woods. There was a subtle, gentle softness to her, detracting nothing from her inhumanity but making her a flawless, enthralling beauty. Her eyes were green and violet behind the merest hint of a domino. She was dressed in a gown that put to shame the richest costumes the wealthiest nobility in the realm had been able to conjure, all the more absurd because she was a humble spring meadow, a hundred shades of green dotted freely with violets and daisies and bluebells, with larkspur and clover, with fluttering butterflies and bumbling bees. Her hair was a rich crown of vivid crimson braided in a stern, motherly fashion. Her crown was gold, and on it winked a gem of every color known to mortals, and a few they had yet to find. Her wings were a summer sky, the finest spun clouds, sunlight dappling through the trees.

She moved with gracious surety through the crowd, never hesitating as she approached Adam. Dimly the Heir noticed that Dane had rushed to his side, that the Dowager was hurrying to him. Trout clambered up on his shoulder and shifted restlessly, wings slicked flat against its body.

There were three more fairies with the Queen - no, four, Adam realized. A tiny blue pixie perched on Titania's shoulder as Trout perched on his, wings flicking idly as it peered with great interest at everything and everyone around them. He tried to look at those escorting the Sidhe Queen, but his head shied away from them; they looked human enough, and that was enough for Adam to know that they weren't, but even his magic couldn't penetrate the Queen's glamour.

"The throne of Faerie greets the Crown Prince, the Heir to the Throne of this mortal Realm," Titania's voice was a song in the stunned silence. She curtsied with grace that made the heart glad to behold.

Adam bowed with as much formality as he knew. "I am beyond honored to welcome the Queen to the palace, to this party. She honors us with her presence, and even more with her greeting. I'm not sure we can do justice to her visit, but we will surely try." She smiled at him, and Adam felt his heart trying to swell with pride, as if she were a doting mother and he a child who'd done well at a difficult task. He gritted his teeth until they ached.

Linden.

"Your welcome is gracious and warm, Prince Adam. More, because we know it's offered under dire circumstances."

"My moods do not affect my manners, Majesty. I'd be a poor excuse of a future king if I allowed them to do so."

"Ah, one could hope to find such poise and sense of station among our own," she murmured. The Dowager reached them then and, astonishingly, a sunny little smile broke across the Sidhe Queen's flawless beauty. "Charlotte."

"Titania," the Dowager replied, trying not to sound breathless.

Adam blinked at her, and all at once he felt like a fool. All those years and it had never occurred to him that 'Dowager' was her title, not her name. He felt color creeping over his face.

"It has been brought to our attention," Titania's voice suddenly rang clear and sure like a silver bell over the gathering, "that the Crowned Heir of the Realm feels Faerie has deeply slighted him." She pinned those green and violet eyes on him. "Deeply enough that he feels war is the only solution."

Adam saw the question in her eyes, felt it in her power as it reached for him, but unlike Conemara, she didn't force her way in. She waited, as courteously as a guest at the gate. Before her he set the broken half of his heart, the other half shattered and gone. "Majesty, I do," he said simply.

Her eyes went soft and bright. "Oh, your heart," she whispered. "Is peace not an option?"

"I sued for peace," he admitted. "I sued for peace twice. Before the Court Beyond the Woods, before Queen Conemara and Prince Canemore I sued for peace. I asked for one thing. They could not, or would not, give it. I will, if need be, sue for peace a third time before the Highest Queen of Faerie. But that would be a third, and I fear it might be... discourteous."

The Faerie Queen smiled wryly. "It would. Particularly when the fault for this terrible situation lies completely with the Court Beyond the Woods."

Adam recoiled minutely. The entire gathering gasped; no one had expected to hear one of the Fair Folk, particularly their Highest Queen, admit to being wrong.

"When we sent the twins here, it was our hope that being alone, forsaking the joys and merriment of the Highest Court, would teach them the... poise and sense of station that they lacked at the time. Instead it would seem their character flaws have grown into unforgivable behaviors and abhorrent mannerisms." Titania pursed her lips. "The Court Beyond the Woods is no more. They are Queen and Prince no more. They are simply Conemara and Canemore." She looked at Adam. "Would that make peace an option?"

Ah, so that was the trick, then. Adam's smile was brief, thin and bereft of humor. "Majesty, it would not."

The nobles caught their breath. Next to Adam, Dane shifted nervously.

"Hm." Titania looked unsurprised. She tapped long, shimmering nails against the rosebud of her mouth. She had better offers in mind, Adam was sure of it; she hadn't got to them yet, that was all. "Our daughter offered you her brother's life, and you refused it. We will not repeat that mistake. Does the Crowned Heir remember what else she offered? It would help us greatly."

"Knowledge, wealth, power. Majesty, I hardly know what to do with the power I already have. I want no wealth but what keeps my people and their homes safe. I want nothing that she offered."

"Well, we would offer a palace greater than this one by a hundredfold, hidden in the woods," Titania mused, and the Dowager gasped tinily. "But it is not ours to give."

"It does miss its mistress, though," Adam murmured.

"It doesn't!" The Dowager hissed.

"It does," he persisted. "I didn't tell you?"

"I didn't think to ask," she admitted.

"For twenty thousand years we have watched you mortals." The Sidhe Queen's voice filled the immense hall. "We have laughed with you and cried with you. We have raged against you, taught you, learned from you. We have shared so much with you. What we have never done, not once, is win a war against you." Her green and violet eyes passed from spring to summer and back again, spiraling slightly, and for a moment it was nearly impossible for Adam to stare at them, they were so like those many-colored, shattered eyes. His hatred, his sorrow, his rage all rose up inside him until only the force of will that had brought him to that moment kept him from screaming until he lost his voice.

"Adam." Her voice was suddenly very gentle, like rain against the black ice of his hatred. She had reached out to touch his cheek with the tips of three fingers, warm like summer sunlight.

"Please don't do that." He stepped back minutely, his voice strangled. "It hurts too much."

"Ah, it must be a family thing, to give away your heart the once, and never again," she murmured, pulling away her hand and looking knowingly at the Dowager. "Tonight, on this day of celebration for your birthday, you are seeking a consort, I'm told."

"I am." Adam shrugged minutely. "A throne without an heir makes people nervous, and wars have a habit of killing without much care as to who dies, peasant or king. It's better for the realm to have that matter settled."

"And if such a consort asked you for peace?" Titania asked, and stepped gracefully aside.

Adam felt the world tilt out from under his feet. Dimly he was aware that Dane had caught him, was holding him upright, but he couldn't understand anything beyond that.

Behind the Queen of Spring and Summer, shining like the first true kiss of dawn on a night-dark land, was Linden, his friend, his love, his heart, willowy and slender, a willow's grace, an oak's strength, a linden tree's beauty. They were wearing a gown that shimmered through every color of their shattered eyes; Titania was a spring meadow, but Linden was the summer woods, where flowers hid amidst a sea of green, where the sky shone blue and perfect, where sunsets were fire and dawn was golden treasure. They had put on a slender domino made of bark, dotted with bejeweled insects picked out with fantastic accuracy in emeralds, sapphires, rubies, obsidian.

But they were Linden. His Linden, the white fuzz of their hair very short on their head so early in the season, faint green freckles on their sharp brown cheekbones. Adam's Linden, all that was kind and joyous and fierce in the woods, perfect down to the one bark-covered hand. Linden, surrounded by a flock of green pixies, crowned with a circlet of living vines with a single stone blossom nestled between the green leaves, an amethyst heart just peeking through the gray.

"Linden," Adam heard himself say, and the black vastness of icy hatred inside him cracked, his heart struggling in a darkness that had swallowed it for far too long.

"Adam," Linden said, and there were tears ruining the elegant glitter someone had sprinkled so very carefully on their cheekbones.

Titania lifted her hand, and blew lightly, scattering a stirring of dust like golden motes in the air. The Dowager gasped. Adam wheezed for breath.

Needlemaw, the illusion that had hidden her broken, was suddenly on Adam's other side, holding him up when he would have slipped from Dane's grip and fallen. "Come, now," she urged him, "where's that muchness of ye gone that yuir knees go to jelly for naught but a wee bit of glamour!"

"Needle," Adam gasped.

"Aye."

"Needle!" Adam cried out and dragged her close, close enough to bump their foreheads together, so close that he could smell her charnel-and-soil scent, and he felt as if he could not breathe, as if he were drowning in the blackness with which he'd armored himself. He clawed at nothing, trying to escape it -

A gentle, rough hand the size of his chest caught the front of his costume and lifted him effortlessly back onto his feet. "Adam."

Dane, for whom the Queen's glamour still persisted, swore under his breath at the all-too familiar voice, the abrupt pong of a bullfrog's croak, both coarse and gentle. Adam had to laugh. "Hello, Boul," he managed, and realized he was crying. "I'm sorry. I'm being a baby and can't even greet you properly after missing you like someone cut off a limb."

"You always greet me before," the young troll said. "Now, I greet you." He offered his hand in the human fashion. "Like the first time."

Adam, surrounded by his friend both mortal and fae, fought himself to his feet and then collapsed again. "I can't breathe."

"Breathe with me." Suddenly Linden was there, and it really was Linden, kissing their prince, their Adam, sweet and sure and patient, with a love that had known itself so clearly, so certainly, that it had never doubted its time would come. Under the taste of that kiss, lemon and honey, sunlight and summer, wind and laughter, the ice of Adam's hatred didn't stand a chance. It was gone as if it had never existed, and Adam gasped in a huge breath, as if he'd been drowning for the past three years and had only reached the surface there, in that place and moment.

Linden caught Adam's face between their hands, both sun-browned, one smooth, one rough. Adam clung to those hands and brought himself to his feet. Linden laced the fingers of one hand with his, and the young Heir turned to face the Sidhe Queen. There was one more person with her, but Titania had not broken the glamour on them.

"Majesty."

"Crowned Heir," she nodded graciously.

"You asked me a question." Adam found his voice rough, and swallowed to try and keep it from breaking. "I have been asked for peace before. I would not grant it to a friend." He looked at Dane, but his childhood friend looked so profoundly happy for him that Adam knew the prospect of war was not even a thought in Dane's head. "Nor would not I grant it to family." He glanced at the Dowager, who gave him the tiniest nod, her eyes once again filled with tears she refused to shed.

He looked at Linden, who squeezed his hand, and turned to face those green and violet eyes. "But if the right consort asks for peace, I will grant it."

"I ask," Linden whispered.

"It's yours," Adam answered, and they fell in each other's arms.

***

The gala continued. No one had a single solitary clue as to how to handle what had happened, but they also knew that the Queen of the Spring and Summer Court had come expecting a party, not for all the guests to stampede in a panic at her arrival. And so the party carried on.

"Charlotte."

The Queen Dowager had retreated to a seat behind an elegant floral sculpture, where she was nursing a goblet of mulled wine. She looked up into the unchanging face of an old and dear friend, and smiled. "Larkspur," she greeted, offering her hand.

The Sidhe Queen caught that hand in both of hers and crouched before her mortal friend. "Oh, Charlie, why didn't you say something? Why didn't you call for help?"

"I honestly don't know, Larkspur," the Dowager admitted, finally allowing her tears to fall. "Pride? Grief? By the time I realized what he'd done, it was done. I couldn't figure out how to fix it on my own, and then I was too ashamed to admit to it, and you'd gone back home -"

"I would have come back for you. I would have come back for the sister of my heart, you know that."

"I know. Look, I was young, I was in love, I was heartbroken. Common sense was nowhere near my first priority."

They both laughed, sheepish and quiet. "I want to give you something, Charlie, but I won't if it will hurt you."

"What is it?"

"It's something you were promised," Titania said. "Promised, and never given. Your people taught mine the importance of keeping one's word." Without actually reaching into purse or pocket, there was suddenly a small velvet box, black and gilt in gold, in the Sidhe Queen's hand. She opened it.

The Queen Dowager went very still. After a long, long moment she drew in a deep, shaky breath, and reached out to brush her fingertips delicately against the ruby. It was a brooch, without adornment or addition, a single ruby the size and shape of a man's heart. Under her fingers it beat, harried and steady. "It's -"

"Yes," Titania confirmed. "He promised it to you, and lied. And so now he must keep his promise, whether he wants to or not. It is yours. And yours it will remain, until you feel he has earned it back."

"Is it wrong of me," the Dowager asked in a very small voice, "to be a little pleased at the shape of your justice?"

Titania laughed. "Never."

***

They sat, all of them, in an open balcony. Adam debated waking Beli, or trying to pry Culli from the kitchens, but decided against it in the end. Plenty of time in the morrow for them to gather once again and come together, at last, the two halves of his world. They shared their stories, the harrowing trials Adam had faced, the infinite patience of Linden's own escape and race to the High Court, only to be met halfway on the Winding Road by Titania. As Linden had predicted, the Queen had been more than glad to welcome the blue pixie back into her Court. She knew its worth. And its news had spurred her to action at last, to correct the unforgivable infraction her children had tendered against a Danu-child.

Boul and Needle were, in theory, there to escort the Queen, and so they'd had to leave when Titania chose to mingle, disconcerting greatly the massed nobles. But the third person stayed with Linden. She was an older woman with very dark skin and very green eyes, bundled up in simple peasant's clothing that was more cozy than elegant. She allowed them to kiss, but when the kiss lingered she cleared her throat pointedly.

Adam squinted at her. "Do I know you?"

Linden laughed. "Adam, how can you not? She didn't come here for me!"

Adam gave Linden a puzzled look, and then turned to face the stranger once more. The woman gave him a look of such profound and utter affection that the Heir found himself flushing faintly, and the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. He rushed over to hug her, and in those powerful arms he found himself made safe once again, as always he had. "Silly me," he said, feeling near tears once again at that most poignant show of loyalty. "You are wearing a costume, you're disguised as a human!"

The linden tree smiled proudly at him, and brushed back his hair. They hugged again, and when he was at last willing to let go, she turned and walked away through the crowd.

"It's hard for her to be away from her place," Linden explained. "But she really did want to come see you, make sure it was all set to rights. She wanted to know you weren't hurting anymore." When Adam looked down, they bumped him lightly. "She said you heard her."

"I did. She's the only one I hear. But if that's all I ever get, that's more than good enough." Linden beamed at him, then leaned on his shoulder with a grimace. "What, what's wrong?"

"These shoes are very pinchy."

"Kick them off? The skirt's so big, no one's going to notice."

Linden did so, and Adam shoved the delicate green slippers under a bench. "Ah!" Linden sighed in relief. "So much better."

"You still look like your head is full of plans."

"Well, not plans. I've done all the planning I can stomach already. You're the one who's good at planning, I just asked myself 'what would Adam do'. That's how I fixed everything. It's just..."

"What?"

"I don't care for the dress. It's lovely, but it's all over the place. I can't walk without crashing into someone, or something. And do I have to be a Queen? That's what Canemore called me."

"Oh, that!" Adam laughed in relief and stood up. "That's why you see all the women go around with their hands plastered down. Shoves the skirts right back out of your way."

"But what if I need my hands?"

Adam popped his mouth thoughtfully, and Linden swatted him for it, and the sheer familiarity of the gesture made him feel as if his heart might burst with joy. "You don't have to be anything you don't want to be Linden. Consort's just what you call someone who marries a King, so, yes, if we marry, you're a Consort. But that won't take away from you being Linden. It's just a thing people call you."

Linden's expression brightened up like a sunny day. "Oh, it's like having all those princes running around. Prince is just something you call them. Consort... I could be that, I suppose, as long as I can still be Linden."

"You will always be Linden." Adam leaned close, and they rested against each other.

"There's lines on your forehead that weren't there before," Linden brushed the fingers of their smooth hand over those lines. "Can't I fix that?"

"I don't know. The whole point of this mess," Adam waved a hand at the vastness of the hall and the ongoing masquerade, "was to make sure there'd be an heir. A baby, at some point. I guess." He sounded about as sure of the goal as he did the process, and even less thrilled about it.

Linden brightened up. "Oh, I can do that!"

"You can?"

"Yes, of course, it's easy." Linden seemed to think. "Though we're going to need a few cabbages."

8/29/2022 7:55 PM X 1/3/2023 3:48 AM

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Fairy and The Prince #57 + #58 + #59 + #60

Part 1 - Part 2 - Parts 3 & 4 - Part 5 - Part 6, 7 & 8 - Part 9 & 10 - Part 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16 - Part 17, 18, & 19 - Part 20, 21 & 22 - Part 23, 24, 25 & 26 - Part 27, 28, 29 & 30 - Part 31, 32, 33 & 34 - Part 35, 36 & 37 - Part 38, 39, 40 & 41 - Part 42 & 43 - Part 44 & 45 - Part 46 & 47 - Part 48, 49, 50 & 51 - Part, 52, 53 & 54 - Part 55 & 56 - Part 57, 58, 59 & 60 - Part 61, 62, 63, 64 & 65 - Part 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 & 72

Trials always seem to come with loss.

Adam spared a few minutes to watch Culli-maid go, her back rigidly straight, her shoes muddy beyond recovery. He could hear the church's bells calling, but in the fog that seemed to have devoured everything, they sounded distant and dull, and he didn't wait to hear what time they called.

He turned to head back to the caves, meaning for Trout to catch the scent of Beli's blood there, and something growled, deep and hungry, in the darkness. The pixie pressed close to his neck, growling back.

"I am Prince Adam -," he began calmly.

"Knowing your name will not keep us from eating you," the growl replied. "We are always hungry, and we have been given leave to name you prey."

"Ah," Adam smiled a little. He'd been expecting something like this. "Then I will not use my name. I will use the truth. You are trespassing on the woods on a Hunting Night, and it means your life."

The growl stopped abruptly. "We have been given leave."

"I did not give it. Neither did my Queen." Adam rubbed fastidiously at the despairing amounts of grime on his clothes. "But I'm betting they didn't tell you the truth, and you didn't know to ask."

A circle of shadows slipped out of the brush. They were wolves, or perhaps dogs, but sometimes they were something else, long-legged and lanky, ears too big and sharp. Sometimes there was only one, sometimes there were nearly a dozen. Their eyes burned with a hunger that could never be sated, with wretched lights that spoke of starvation neverending and the bottomless despair that comes with it. "Would you like me to help you escape this trap?"

"There is no trap," the shadow-creature replied, but they didn't sound sure anymore. They looked at one another, sniffed at the ground and at each other, merged into one another and split once again. "We are listening."

"The Compact between my people and the Court Beyond the Woods is very specific. None may interfere with a Hunting Night. The only ones allowed to participate are my people, and theirs. Even the Folk In The Woods can't fight."

"The pixie goes with you."

"The pixie is of my court, because I have made it so. Trout, show them." Proudly, the pixie brought forth its signet shield. "But you, you aren't of the Court Beyond. And you certainly aren't of my court. And they didn't tell you, did they? They just told you what great fun it would be to hunt me down and eat me, they drove you to a froth with words and pretend-promises that they won't have to keep, because if you do kill me, you've broken the Compact, and they will be free to hunt you down for their entertainment."

The shadow-creatures' ears flattened back.

"Would you like me," Adam asked again, "to help you escape this trap?"

"We have nothing to offer for your help," the creature replied after a very, very long time.

"You have your service. Your ears and your nose and your hunter's instincts. Pledge me your service, this one night. I will not ask you to kill for me. I will not ask you to fight for me. I will not ask you to break the Compact at all. I only want your help to find two things."

"Name those things and we will give you an answer."

"I have a friend. He is being held prisoner somewhere in the woods. He is wounded, might be bleeding. Other than me he is the only mortal in the woods. I need you to find him for me. And I need you to find his eyes."

There was another long silence. "That's it? That's all?" The shadow-creatures sounded surprised and disbelieving. Little by little their numbers were diminishing.

"That's it. You don't even have to guide me there, as long as you tell me exactly where they both are, in a way that I can understand and follow. Though once we're done with one another I would suggest you find somewhere to hide until this is all done with. Strongly."

"Hunger is too great a press in an empty belly, and night the only time we can sate it."

"I'm getting to be sick of hearing how many of the Folk go hungry with a Queen and Prince that ought to be looking after them," Adam muttered. "What, exactly, do you eat? Just people?"

"No. Anything that is real and mortal and valuable to someone will do."

Adam frowned. "By that definition you could eat the wheat and barley on the field."

"We have, a few years." A too white smile in the dark.

"Ah," Adam realized grimly, staring into the eyes of failed crops and droughts. "Does it have to be alive?"

"Alive is a thing that matters only to mortals."

"Well, then, why don't you eat the bones and scraps of meat at the butcher's?"

"I bet he can't smell them," Trout whispered. "I bet he's never gone into the city. It smells too much of stone and iron, it has too many lights."

To his surprise, he saw the shadow-creature nod; there was only one anymore. Adam shook his head. "If we have a first bargain?"

"We do. Give me your hand."

Adam pulled off his glove and offered his hand, palm up.

An immense maw closed on it. He saw fangs gleam in Trout's light, felt the touch of a feverishly hot tongue, the immense power of a bite that would have ended his life in a moment, that could too readily take his hand. But though the bite pressed down until it stung, it didn't draw blood, and when the shadow-creature pulled away, there were only a few marks on his skin.

"Pixie, hold onto me. Your light will follow me, and he can follow your light."

"Wait," Adam said. "I will be King, and war is coming."

"War is good. There is no hunger if there is war."

"Perhaps, but war won't happen right away, and hunger is a thing of now. If I give you food, if I find a way for you not to go so completely hungry, will you offer me something in exchange? Will you give me your word that you will not fight for the Court Beyond the Woods?"

"What are you offering?"

"Bones and meat."

"Bones! Bones with their marrow-heart still?" There was hope in their voice that promptly crashed down to suspicion. "Burnt and dead?"

"Uh, no? Fresh. I will tell the palace butchers to set them out for you. I will tell the city butchers to do the same. They'll be put out in a lightless place, with no iron. They'll be put out for you."

"You offer much for a promise that would come to nothing if you die tonight."

"You offer just as much for a war that might not come to pass if I die tonight."

The darkness was silent, and then began to hiss in low, strange laugh. "A second bargain, then, mortal thing." And then, very carefully, "Adam."

"What may I call you?"

"We have too many names, given all by our prey or our enemies."

"But those are the names of people who are afraid, or angry, or who don't care about you. I want a good name to call you."

"... a good name." The shadow creature stood up suddenly from its four-legged gait, a willowy thing of thin limbs and eyes like sickly stars. "We have only one of those. Perhaps you are the one to trust with it. We are Sluagh."

"I am Trout," the pixie replied before Adam could.

"Trout," the shadow paused, and then dipped his head politely. "Follow, then."

***

Each of his friends had taught Adam to travel in one way or another. From Beli he'd learned to sleep on his saddle, from Dane to ride with boneless grace so he wouldn't hurt after a whole day atop a horse. From Linden he'd learned to slip from the hands of one tree to another, fording short distances without actually walking over them. From Boul he'd learned to ask stone to yield him passage, though it was a trick he'd never managed to successfully pull. From Needlemaw he'd learned to stalk and prowl and climb.

Sluagh was faster than any of them in the dark.

They moved in hiccups. When the shadow-creature realized Adam could not follow when the pixie's light suddenly moved twenty steps forward in any one direction, they offered Adam their hand, skeletal, covered by skin thin and cool and slick like a salamander's. Walking with them felt like dipping into an immense river the prince couldn't see, only feel. Every step dragged him forward against that terrible current, and after a little while he was panting, but he didn't protest. He caught occasional glimpses as they traveled, whenever there was enough time for Trout's glow to illuminate their surroundings. That faint gold light didn't touch Sluagh, showed little more than a thin, gaunt profile caught between human and beast and unreal beyond either. But the woods around them were illuminated perfectly, and Adam saw trees so ancient they'd made of their canopies a vast cathedral's roof. They were walking into depths of the woods he'd never visited, not even with Linden.

"The mortal." Sluagh's voice startled him. "He matters to you, beyond the Prince's test."

"Yes." Adam measured his words very carefully against what he'd seen of his strange guide. "If he were gone it would be like a limb that I can never regrow, that I can never get back. It would hurt for all the rest of my life, long or brief."

"Ah," Sluagh mused, and Adam realized they were walking normally. "And yet your people ever stand alone. Your minds never touch, your hearts beat alone. There is only one of you, here and now."

"You've watched my people, then."

"Sometimes." Trout rose and fell in the dark as Sluagh shrugged. "You are prey neither easy nor filling. But we like watching, even though something shatters inside your kind if they chance to see us. You, though. You did not shatter. Adam."

The prince popped his mouth thoughtfully. "Fear can shatter people. Pain, too, and ignorance. But I have been friends with the Folk In The Woods for so long, Sluagh. Even back there, when you came at me to eat me, I still saw you. I might not have known your name, but I still knew that you were you, not a monster or a beast, or a nightmare. Just you, being you."

Sluagh moved them forward, and Adam realized he'd been shifted to walk partially behind the shadow-creature, where the swelling current didn't crash quite so violently against him. "So we cannot shatter you, and we cannot eat you," they mused. "It truly was a trap for us, wasn't it."

"Yes. I don't know why they care so little for everyone else, Sluagh, I really don't. But I'm still sorry that they do."

"I find that I value your empathy. Adam." It almost seemed as if Sluagh couldn't remember to address Adam by name, unless belatedly, but also as if they didn't trust the prince to know that it was him they spoke to. "We are here. Hold on tight." The shadow-creature stepped forward once more...

Adam jerked in surprise. Under Trout's glow he could see they were in an immense, fantastically elegant room, the equal if not the better of any in the Dowager Queen's palace. Sluagh pointed to a gilded double door at the very edge of the pixie's light, one side  open. "Walk through the door, follow the hallway. Your friend is bleeding somewhere beyond. If you cannot smell the trail, the pixie will." The shadow-creature began to split up, heads thrown up, sniffing in the dark. "Come back here, and we will find his eyes for you. Right now the tracks are confusing; we cannot tell which is his and which his eyes."

"How many tracks are there?"

"One," Trout said.

"Two," Sluagh corrected. "But they run closely together."

Adam rubbed at his face. "At least they're all in the same place. Hopefully. Will you be safe if we leave you here, Sluagh?"

A dozen eyes like pale, guttering stars turned to stare at Adam in profound silence at the question. "Yes," Sluagh said simply at last.

Adam nodded; Trout leapt onto his shoulder and he headed off into the dark.

The keep, if that's what it was, and not some patchwork figment, sprawled immense all around him. Dust covered everything within range of Trout's light, the gracious furnishings, the paintings and tapestries on the walls, the delicate flowers and vines creeping in plaster along the dark heights of the walls. Cobwebs ruled in the darkness, and every now and again Adam found tracks on the marble floors, like filigree carved into the dust. He peeked briefly into empty, elegant drawing rooms, and found a vast spiraling stairwell, following it down to a heavy, reinforced door.

The door peeked open, and faint golden light filled the air. The smell of blood and violence lingered in the still air. A skeleton, as large as a horse, sprawled before the door.

Adam crouched before the immense skull. Size aside, it was a dog's skull, long and lean and fanged, terrible to behold in death. The Prince couldn't imagine what it would have been like to face the creature in life. The tatters of its black, furred hide were scattered all around it, still pliable.

Trout, leaning forward on Adam's shoulder, growled. "Hunting Hound."

Adam pulled off a glove with his teeth and brushed his fingers over the skull; the bone was raw under his touch. "Trout, go get Sluagh, if they'll come. Tell them what we found." The pixie launched itself off, the whirr of its wings loud in the still darkness. Adam waited patiently until he saw the golden light coming back, until the empty spaces off to one side grew a sickly pair of eyes.

"A Hunting Hound," Sluagh's voice was even more of a whisper than usual, as if the presence of the skeleton hushed them. "Not so many things can kill one of the King's own pack."

"I think this was meant to be a guardian set on my path," Adam said mildly as Trout returned to its perch. "And I don't mean the bones."

"Are you certain?" Sluagh asked, a weight of meaning unspoken in those three words.

Adam popped his lips thoughtfully. It made sense, of course, to put between him and Beli an enemy that he could scarce defeat, by reason or by force. "Does the trail go beyond it, past the door?"

"Yes," both Sluagh and Trout replied.

But to admit that someone else had killed the Hound might be taken as cheating on his part, and Adam was keenly aware of it. If someone else had faced and beaten his challenge, it could render the whole soul-sucking exercise moot. But if someone had simply taken exception to the Hunting Hound being what it was, when and where it had been...

"I am not at all certain of it," Adam admitted. "And it's not like we can ask, is it." Trout had fluttered down to perch on the skull, then squirmed its way into it, peeking through the empty eye sockets in a fit of purely pixie glee, making the prince snort a little in amusement. "Well, if this is the way I must go, then it is what it is."

"Adam," Sluagh asked suddenly, and the prince realized there were eyes everywhere in a broad ring around him, some up high, most low to the ground. "Have you a use for the bones?"

"Me? No. Trout?"

"It would make a fine helm!" The pixie declared enthusiastically before wriggling out from between the fangs. "But it's much-much too big."

"If they are no one's, then they are yours, Sluagh." Adam straightened up. "I think whatever killed the Hound would have eaten them if they could."

***

After examining the door and taking the tiny iron key on the lock, Adam and Trout moved on, into the hallway beyond the door the Hound had been guarding, and found it brightly lit with golden, magical lights. Adam touched one curiously, and found it warm, but not painful. "This isn't glamour. How odd, to keep a dungeon so well lit."

Nothing and no one challenged him as he followed Trout through the simple maze of the keep's dungeons. He peeked into dark chambers, and into others filled with a wealth of oddities; in one chamber, lit by an exquisite hanging chandelier, he found a meadow of blown-glass flowers, perfect to the dew drops on their petals, to the tiny ladybugs and bees seemingly asleep on the occasional blossom. He felt a vague twinge, as if he were meant to want them, but it couldn't root in him. In another room he found rows and rows of shoes, neatly set on shelves and boxes, his skin itching just by looking at them through the tiny barred window on the door. And so it went, magical treasure after magical treasure, temptations of every kind laid out before him.

He nearly missed the Many-Steps. It was hidden in the golden light of two lamps, and it was only their presence, where before one had sufficed at every junction, that made Adam pause long enough to examine their surroundings a little more closely. "Trout, wait!"

The pixie froze in mid-air.

"There's a portal here. Do you still smell Beli?"

Trout returned to its perch on Adam's shoulder, nodding stoutly. "The smell is mostly water, but yes. He's hurt. I can smell the pain, I can smell the blood." It sneezed mightily, growling a little, wings buzzing. "I smell cat, too. But mostly Beli. And mostly-most, water."

Adam had to admit to himself that he'd lost track of where, exactly, they were while traveling with Sluagh. For all he knew they were back at the aquifer caves. The smell of cat puzzled him, but he couldn't fully spare the time for that riddle, not with Beli hurt. "Is the cat smell going to be a problem, Trout? Will it keep us from our hunt?"

The pixie's wings moved restlessly. It wasn't the first time Adam had asked it questions that the Prince knew reached far beyond the tiny creature's nature. But Trout always did try, and Adam didn't want it to think, ever, that its opinion didn't matter. "No. The grimalkin cannot hunt me while I'm with you. They're of no court."

"Then we move on to the obvious problem." Gingerly, Adam slipped past the portal. Nothing much seemed to change, and he found himself immediately dubious. "Can you smell Sluagh, Trout?"

"No. They have no scent."

"What about the Hound?"

Trout tipped its head back. "No. It's too far."

"Of course it is." Adam blew out a weary, resigned sigh. "Half their trick seems to be having me waste time coming and going." On a hunch, they drew in a deep breath and shouted. "Beliwick!"

Swift as lightning came the answer, full of pain and anger, fear and hope. "Adam!"

Adam raced forward until he found a door barring his way. Unlike all the others he'd found, this one was locked, and he clung to the bars of the tiny window. "Beli!"

Hands caught onto his. Beli was shivering, his lips pale, slashes of false color on his cheeks. He'd torn off one of his shirt's sleeves and bound it over his eyes; the linen was bloodstained, and there were crimson smears over his face and his hands. "Oh, Mother bless you, Adam, you found me! You found me. He said you never would. Not here, wherever here is."

"Well, he did make it hard." Adam peeled off his hunting jacket, emptying the pockets as he went, and forced it through the bars; Beli, by the looks of him, had been taken from Adam's own rooms without benefit of so much as a coat. "You've been stashed away far off the beaten path, my friend. Do you know how to open this door?"

"No. All he said was that if you could open the door that led here, you could open this door as well."

Adam looked puzzled for all of a moment before the answer clicked, and he patted himself hurriedly until he found the tiny iron key. "I should be angry at the arrogance of it all," he mused, "but the way he laid it out that key might as well have been on the moon if circumstances hadn't conspired." The lock clicked open and he shouldered the door to Beli's dungeon cell open.

And found himself instead in a vast library.

It wasn't a match to the Royal library, but it was better than most private libraries Adam had ever seen. The shelves rose twice his height and a little more. There was dust and cobwebs everywhere, an empty hearth, a vast map-reading table and the accompanying shelf full of cylindrical leather cases. There were reading plinths and windows that, he guessed, had once pretended to the same magic that had adorned the ones where Culli-maid had been held. These windows looked into nothing but more bleak stone. The lamps were guttering and dying, and the heavy rugs on the cobbled floor were damp enough to draw in more chill, rather than minimize it.

Adam helped Beli into the hunting jacket, rubbing at his friend's hands, which were numb with the cold. "Beli," he asked very gently. "Where are your eyes?"

The young man's breath blew out of him as if Adam had struck him, and suddenly he was weeping in great shuddering and silent sobs. The prince held onto him, saying nothing, offering only the comfort of his presence and the silence of his guilt. Adam held Beli until the storm of his terror passed, until all that was left was pain and cold and exhaustion.

"I'm sorry, Beli. I'm sorry."

"Oh, be quiet, Adam. We all signed up for this, we all knew it. It's only because of you I'm miles above a collier's son. I can read, I can write, I can do numbers in ways even you can't." Beli steadied himself on Adam's shoulder. "Everyone who comes to service in the Palace knows it might end up in blood. It's not just the princes that die, they're just the ones everyone notices." He sighed, and though it shook he still drew himself up straight. "You're fighting for me. You don't know how rare it is to have that. Even my parents never did."

"What a poor prince, what a lousy friend I'd be if that's how I repaid you for all these years," Adam protested. "But we still have to find... them."

"I know. Trust me, Adam, I would dearly like them back. My hands have told me exactly where I am." Beli sighed in exasperation. "And I can read none of them."

"I have a way to find them, but we'll have to douse every light in here."

"Well, they're not doing me any good," Beli replied dryly, and Adam bit back a laugh in spite of himself.

"Mortal prince, you cannot," Trout said suddenly. "You cannot douse the lights."

Both young men went silent. "Why, Trout?"

The pixie had been fluttering between the shelves, but at the question it flew back to Adam's shoulder. "They're the only thing keeping the prickle-bogs at bay."

"The what?" It was rare for Adam to find a fairy he'd never heard mentioned before. It was even more surprising when he saw Beli make the moon-and-tree sign of protection.

"The prickle-bogs!" Trout replied impatiently. "Can't you hear them?"

Adam lifted a hand to beg for silence from the pixie, and closed his eyes. For a long moment all he heard were the sounds he already knew, the wind mournfully sliding along the dungeon's passageways, Beli's ragged breathing, the faint dying crackle of the lamps in the enchanted library. He focused further, on his own breathing, on the beating of his heart, on the thrumming of his blood.

There, beneath it all, scales rasped against scales as something moved restlessly in the dark. "Beli, you know what he means."

"A wisp-snake, a will o' the wisp," his friend replied. "Their eyes glow in the dark and entrance the lost, draw them away to a bad death in the woods. Then they eat them."

Adam blew out a long breath. "Trout, do they speak?"

"No. They just hunger."

Like the kelpie, or the catfish, Adam realized. An enemy with whom he could not negotiate. "Can you tell how many there are?" Trout, perched on the prince's shoulder, shook its head. "We need Sluagh. Without them I don't like our odds of finding... what Beli's missing." Adam suddenly smiled thinly. "Can they enthrall you, Trout?"

The pixie scoffed. "I do the guiding and the losing in the woods and the falling into swamps, mortal prince. It's not done to me."

"Alright. Beli, come here. Hold onto my shoulder and come this way." Adam let the young man to the empty hearth. "Stay there," he directed as he bid Beli sit in the empty stones, dragging a heavy table and tipping it before the hearth.

"Adam, what are you doing?"

"Learning from you," his prince told him cheerfully. "Don't move, don't make a sound until I tell you it's alright." Adam passed Beli one of the lamps and then crossed the library, climbing up one of the book ladders and settling himself comfortably on the top rung. He tore off the sleeve from his shirt and blindfolded himself, then took from his back the bow, and nocked an arrow. "Trout," he said calmly, "I am trusting you to be faster than my arrows. If you're not, come back to me and stay with me, no matter what. For now, blow out the lights. All but Beli's. And draw blood as you see fit."

The pixie let out a high, shrill sound of ferocious delight, and whirred away. Beyond Adam's blindfold, the light began to fade as Trout came to every lamp and laboriously doused them.

It began as the quietest of slithering sounds, barely a whisper of scales on stone, muted further when it became scales on a rug. Adam cocked his head, trying to figure out how many enemies there were by sound alone, but so far underground echoes rebounded weirdly. When the buzzing of the pixie's wings suddenly filled the still air it seemed as loud as a storm. Something hissed, nearly a whistle, in pain and fury.

Adam drew and fired the arrow in between the beats of his harried, broken, frozen heart. Something screamed in the dark, and he heard a heavy body trashing wildly against the stone floor. He drew another bead by that sound and fired a second time, and the sounds stilled with terrible finality.

One, Adam thought, drawing and knocking another arrow as silently as possible.

They rattled at one another. Again came the sharp, deadly sound of the pixie's wings. This time, jaws snapped sharply, and Trout cried out.

Adam's arrow flew and something shrieked in terrible agony. The sounds drew abruptly muffled.

"Bite someone with that between your nasty ugly prickle teeth!" Trout shouted defiantly. "Give it back!"

Adam put another two arrows in the general direction of those sounds until they stopped. Two.

The ladder he was perched on shuddered. Without missing a beat he drew, aimed down and fired. The arrow bounced off the wooden steps with a loud spanging sound, and beneath him something growled, low and deadly and sure. Adam cursed to himself, scrambling for another arrow when something latched onto his foot, then his leg, and finally his waist, and he went tumbling off the ladder along with his attacker. He felt a blast of breath against his face, reeking of bog water and carrion, dropped the bow and grabbed blind. His gloved hands caught onto a broad, flat set of jaws, the finely cured leather slicing open on teeth as sharp as knives. The creature pushed with tremendous force, but it had no leverage; it merely caused them both to slide along the ground, Adam clinging to his grip even as those teeth sliced into his fingers. He kicked, but he could find no body to strike.

The will o' the wisp slammed him head-first into a set of shelves. Books rained all around them like blows; the predatory fairy didn't seem to care, but Adam had hit the wood hard enough to see starbursts behind his closed eyelids, and for a crucial moment he forgot where he was, what he was doing, who he was meant to be. His grip slackened dangerously, and the will o' the wisp lunged forward.

Trout landed on the prince's face with a snarl and shoved a sharpened hairpin into the creature's mouth with a furious yell. The silver tip went right through, into the softness at the back of its mouth, through its skull and out. It threw itself back, thrashing and choking.

Unseen to Adam, a long and spindly hand picked up the will o' the wisp as it writhed, and snapped its spine in half, silencing it abruptly.

Adam panted for breath in the shocking silence, yanking off his blindfold. "Sluagh," he declared hoarsely, "please don't eat Trout's spears."

"I can wait. Adam," the fairy assured him calmly, dropping the last of the will o' the wisps to the ground with a thud.

***

Adam sat on the floor of the dark library, his hands scrubbing at his hair, his breath and his heartbeat rattling in his chest like a rabbit's. No one spoke, no one harried him. Trout clung to his ear, and nearby the prince could hear the quiet steps of Sluagh as the fairy moved about; by the sound of it, they were pulling out books, examining them, and putting them back.

"Trout," Adam sat up straight when he trusted his voice to sound not so raw, even though his heart was breaking a little. "You should get your spears back, and then we should talk."

"And my shield," the pixie groused. "It bit it!" It took off toward the nearest carcass.

"Sluagh, can you find them?"

"I know what we promised," Sluagh sounded wary, "but we find our promise exceeds our hunting skill. Adam. Your friend has been over every inch of this room. It all smells of him. We know they are here, we just... cannot pinpoint where."

A long silence, broken only by Trout's grunts of effort as it struggled to free its signet shield from the jaws of one of the dead will o' the wisps. "Sorry," Beli offered meekly from the hearth.

Adam sighed. "You tried," he told Sluagh. "You tried fairly, and you tried honestly. I wouldn't ask of you more than I would ask of myself." He brushed his hair back; he didn't know if it was the almighty knock to the head or if he was just tired of having death show up at every corner of this venture, but he felt tired and thin and unaccountably lonely. "Trout," he murmured, rolling to his feet and moving over to the carcass. He yanked free his obsidian dagger and shoved it between its jaws, prying it open just enough for the pixie to rescue its signet shield at last.

Under the light of the pixie’s light the will o' the wisps were ugly. There was no arguing with that fact. They had long, serpentine bodies, covered in irregular scales in brown and gray and green, the colors of a sickly swamp. Their heads were disproportionately large, and their jaws stretched out along their bodies nearly a third of the way. Their teeth were black and very narrow, like the thorns of a poisonous tree. They only had one eye, sitting dead center of their skull, still faintly luminous even in death. Adam stared at the eye of the nearest creature, trying to figure out if it could still mesmerize him, so that he would feel his current loss a little less. "Trout, do you realize what you've done?"

"Got my shield all slimed up, is what I've done," the pixie grumbled, rubbing the signet shield against the rug under their feet.

"Trout, you saved my life."

Even Sluagh went still.

"No I didn't," Trout protested, and there was something very like panic in its voice.

"You did. The prickle-bog had me, it had me dead to rights. It would have taken my face, and then the rest of me, if you hadn't stopped it." For the first time in so very long, Adam felt the bite of tears behind his eyes. "Trout, you're free. You can go. You don't have to fight my fight anymore. You’ll be safe from the war."

Trout's golden light blazed so brightly that Adam had to throw an arm up to protect his eyes. He saw Sluagh flinch and flee for the farthest corner of the room. With an unintelligible screech, Trout threw the signet shield as hard as it could at the prince, and arrowed out of the library.

Adam felt as if he couldn't breathe. He picked up the signet shield and brushed his gloved fingers carefully over it, over the nicks and scars of it.

"You did not have to free the pixie. Adam," Sluagh said.

"I didn't have to," he agreed, "but it was the right thing to do."

"You could have used its help, its service."

"It isn't mine to claim. Trout's not a thing to be owned, not a book or an inkpot, not a weapon. I've no more right to its life than I did when it gave it to me."

"I begin to see why the Twins Beyond the Woods fear you," Sluagh said after a long moment.

Adam rubbed angrily at his face, and then examined some more the dead will o' the wisp. "Sluagh, are you familiar with these creatures, the prickle-bogs?"

"Some. They do not share prey, and they are difficult to hunt."

"Aren't they supposed to enthrall?" Adam picked up the carcass and stared at the creature's single eye.

"They are. Alive or dead. Their magic, their nature, their being is all in the light of their eye. Are you not entranced?"

Adam popped his mouth. It helped, in the moment, to have something else to focus on than the loss of yet another friend. "Why won't it work on me?" he murmured. He closed his eyes to a squint, just barely. At the corner of his eye, Sluagh was a mass of slowly creeping tentacles and vines, something shapeless, one and many.  The will o' the wisp was still the ugly, eel-like thing.

Beli's eye stared back at him from the dead creature's skull, and Adam had to laugh, bitter and humorless. "Sluagh."

"Yes. Adam."

"The carcasses are yours. All three, all of them, except the eyes, if you will take Beli to the edge of the woods as quickly as he can make the trip without harm, and make sure he steps out of them safely. Once he's on his way to the palace, that'll be fine." With his obsidian dagger, he cut the eye out of the skull, and as it dropped into his hand it changed into its familiar, human truth.

Sluagh moved swiftly, splitting off two more creatures, all of which bent down low to sniff at the dead predators. "Ah. No wonder the trail kept moving no matter where your friend went. This is agreeable. But what about you. Adam?"

"I have to go pick one last fight. I may have Beli's eyes, but I still have to see them restored in his head." Adam rose wearily to his feet and stepped over to the heart to free Beli. In his makeshift blindfold the prince dropped the first eye, and then two more, pressing them gently into Beli's hands. "Go with Sluagh, Beli. I'll do everything I can to see you restored, I promise. Your eyes, and one more, so you'll miss nothing when you're a King's Seneschal."

"I don't want to leave you, Adam." Beli chewed on his lip. "Everyone's always leaving you, I don't want it to be me, too!"

Adam couldn't help but feel a little better at those words, embracing the loyal young man his childhood's forced friend had become. "You're not. When I go back everything has to be as I left it. You, Culli, Dane, it all has to be the same. So make sure it is, alright?"

"It will be," Beli assured him with all the force of an unspoken vow. "It will be."