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.
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."
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."
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
Well, let’s see how many little things eighteen years have picked up and put in Adam’s pockets, shall we?
She came for him when the last of the sun's light faded from the sullen sky. Adam and Dane had settled under the eaves of the far end of the stables, eating warm pasties and drinking mulled cider by the light of a single golden lamp. "Mortal prince, my prince."
Dane saw Adam twitch, not so much at the voice, a whisper of fog and wind, but at the words. Nine years; the young man Dane followed had spent nine years fighting against those words, and the instinct to do so still was very strong.
"Ah, well. I was wondering if anyone was coming at all," Adam said mildly, putting aside his wooden cup and brushing his hands carefully.
"You challenged us, mortal prince," her tone turned arch.
"A great deal of graves around the realm beg to differ as to who started this fight," Adam replied without missing a beat. He moved to his feet; Dane already had his leather jacket on hand, and while Adam worked the clasps he picked up the bow and quiver to give to his prince.
"Do you really think your weapons will help you?" she mocked.
Adam had learned to explode into action from a redcap. He'd never beaten either Linden or Needlemaw when it came to speed, but the only fairy faster than either of them actually had wings. Before either Dane or the Sidhe maid knew what had happened he'd snatched his bow, and an arrow was quivering on the ground by her feet. "I think a great many things not related to the challenge might make me feel a little better," he replied calmly. "I'm just choosing not to do them."
She hissed at him, but she could feel the black burn of the iron arrow-head a scarce breath from her dainty, fog-slippered foot, and she said nothing as Dane helped Adam with bow, quiver, and weapons. She was still and silent as Adam drew in a deep breath and turned to the young man who'd been by him for so long. "Dane -"
"I could follow you to the edge," Dane rushed to say. "I wouldn't go in, but -"
"Dane." Adam put gloved hands on the big man's shoulders, and grinned just a little. "No."
"But -"
"I don't trust them not to do something to you, just for being my friend," Adam explained, and watched Dane's ghost of hope collapse. "Go back. Go find your lady, and thank her for bringing us our meals."
Dane walked away with the lamp, clad in priest-blessed weapons and armor of steel and leather and iron, and Adam turned. Apparently having realized that she wouldn't be able to play her usual games, the Sidhe maid had abandoned her usual, wispy glamour. She was a very dainty creature, shorter than Adam by nearly a foot, leached of all color; her flesh, her exquisite gown, the long curtain of her hair, everything was white or the palest of grays. Only her eyes were black, like pools of tar. Adam could feel the pull of them, trying to steal his will and his awareness away, but there was nothing in him for the hooks of her power to catch. Her gaze could never compare to the beauty of a pair of many-colored, shattered eyes.
He gestured for her to lead, and she did. For a long time they walked in silence until she spoke at last. "Is it truly so terrible?"
Adam, who was watching and waiting for her to lead him into an ambush, realized that her voice was simply like that, a sigh and a whisper. "What is?"
"Death," she replied simply.
He nearly stopped walking. "I very nearly let you find out, back there."
"No, you meant to hurt me," she replied simply. "And I have been hurt before. But no one has ever killed me."
"Some of your people must have died that you could see."
"No." She shrugged. "None that I know."
Adam didn't even know how to take that in. "Do you have things you enjoy?"
"Yes," she admitted, and then swung into a pout, "but you won't like me speaking of them."
"I suppose that's true. Death would mean that you cannot do them anymore."
She shrugged. "Then I will find something else."
"No, you can't do that, either."
She scowled delicately at him. "Well, then -"
"No, not that either. Not even the choosing, not even the thinking."
She stopped and stomped her dainty foot. "But if I want to -!"
"You don't want, either. Death is a void, an absence of choice and will."
"But then I am not," she frowned. "Without those there is nothing, there is no me."
"Yes," he said mildly. "Without them, the world goes on. It just goes on without you, and it doesn't care."
She went silent, turning to begin walking again.
"Is there nothing else you need to tell me about the test?" he prompted her after a moment.
"Not yet. I was told it would be best if I didn't speak to you at all outside it." Slowly, she added. "I think perhaps my Queen was right about that."
"Is there something I should or shouldn't do to be proper?"
She cocked her head at him. "Proper? You would still be proper, after this morning?"
"My hatred doesn't impede my good manners," Adam replied wryly.
"Oh." He saw faint gray creep over the too-sharp line of her cheekbones. "Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. Do you truly hate us all?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so. Because any one of you could have told Canemore, 'Don't do this'."
"He would have never listened."
"No. But it would have been said. Sometimes you have to fight not because you know you'll win, but just because you know it must be done. Else a part of yourself is cut away, and it's very hard to get it back."
"You say such strange things," she frowned again. "Most of the time when mortals speak it's all nonsense, but your words are both strange and true. If I had said it, you would not hate me. Is it magic?"
"No," Adam nearly smiled. "I just know that I'm talking to a fairy. I can't speak to you of mortal things, they won't make sense to you. If I want you to listen, to hear me, then I have to speak of things that would matter to you. Just as if you were talking to a mortal about fairy things, they'd never understand you. They're not fairies."
Her frown didn't go away. "That is... sensible." They walked on, past the Royal Gardens, closer to the woods. "We like stories. Every test is a story." Instead of heading for the woods, she detoured into the Gardens.
"Ah. Am I to tell a good story, then?"
"All stories are good. If you want our favor, you should make it long. All the others have been so brief."
"Death will do that."
"Well, it's no fun when a story ends, 'and then he died'."
"I'll do my best not to die."
"Good." She turned to look at him. They had reached an elegant little plaza, cobbled in an artful spiral, with a decorative well at the center and stone benches surrounding it. The decorative planters had not yet bloomed, and the stones were slick with damp.
On one of the benches sat Prince Canemore. Adam's escort moved to kneel before the Prince Beyond the Woods. "I have brought him."
"That I see, that I know, that I thank you for, Baen." He reached out to put his hand on her head as if bestowing a blessing.
She looked up at him. "Do not do this."
Canemore froze. For that matter, so did Adam.
"You spoke with him," the Prince hissed.
"I am not a creature of silence," she shrugged gracefully.
"Go," he commanded through gritted teeth, drawing his hand away.
She rose and walked away.
"Lady Baen," Adam called out. When she turned to look at him, he held up a gloved hand, index and thumb far apart. He drew them a little closer to one another and watched her empty, bottomless eyes widen minutely in surprise before she left them.
They faced one another, the near-powers of two very disparate worlds that sat so close to one another. "So many times in your life you could have done us all the courtesy of dying," Canemore said at last.
"I was a very contrary child, I'm told," Adam replied evenly, swallowing a hint of bile. "For that matter, it occurs to me that we might not have ended up here tonight if at some point you'd said 'hello'."
Canemore smiled at that. "Oh, no. No, no. You see, Prince Adam, I have spent too much time watching your kind. I know you for the deadliest of plagues. You change everything you touch."
"Change isn't bad, though, it simply is."
"Change is a poison," Canemore snapped at him, rising to his feet. "We are unchanging, immortal, forever. We have no need of your kind, we never have, and if I could erase the lot of you from existence I gladly would." The Sidhe Prince smiled. "And yet, you know, something you once said has stuck with me for a little while now. 'Heed your friends. No one's worth spit on hot cobbles without them, least of all a king."
Adam felt the faint taste of bile in his mouth become all the stronger. "I stand by those words."
"I thought you might." A woman's scream trailed up from the well, full of terror. Canemore leaned lazily against it.
Adam rushed to the edge, leaning on the stones and peering down into the darkness, even though he knew he'd never be able to see anything. "What did you do," he demanded, strangled by fear. He knew that voice.
"Friends are such a dangerous noose around one's neck," the Sidhe Prince replied. "Anyone can come by, grab that rope, and pull it tight."
"My friends are my strength."
"Are you theirs? You knew exactly what you were doing today, or so you thought. Catch us unprepared, find an easy challenge. We are not children, Prince Adam, though this is, and has always been, a game -"
"To you."
Canemore shrugged. "You could have left. You could have forsworn the crown."
"You could have kept your hands off Linden." Canemore's glamour slipped and he snarled at Adam, a thing of shadow and glass and deadly darkness. A moment later the point of Adam's sword was at his throat. Somewhere deep in the darkness, the woman's voice sobbed. "That better not be Culli-maid."
Canemore's smile was a wolf's. "Here is your test, Prince Adam of the realm. You left your house this morning thinking yourself quite clever. You must return to it before a full day has passed; it must be exactly as you left it, barring the passing of a day. How lucky for you that you kept your man-at-arms with you the whole day. Or is it caution that he carries so much iron on his person, all of it blessed by your priests?" The Sidhe Prince shrugged. "Your housekeeper keeps your keys, so a key you'll need to free her. Your wise advisor needs his eyes to gather wisdom -"
"Did you hurt Beli?!"
"Oh, please, it's just his eyes. We can put those back and he'll never remember he was missing them. Provided, of course, you prevail."
Adam was having a hard time convincing himself not to shove the sword forward a few inches.
"Put your house to rights if you would be King, Prince Adam. Return to it every inch its lord, horse and tiercel by your sides. Be King before your household’s eyes, and we will abide your crowning."
"Where are they?" Adam asked through teeth gritted so tight they were hurting him.
Canemore stepped back, smiling still, arms spread open as if to welcome Adam's sword.
He could try, the young prince realized. He could really try. And Canemore would let him, and they might spend the entire night doing absolutely nothing except feeding Adam's rage, and he would lose. He slammed the sword back in its sheath, put a boot on the rim of the well, and murmured, "Hold on tight, Trout."
He leapt into the well.
***
Adam fell into darkness for far longer than he should.
It was deathly silent, completely empty. All he could hear was the rushing of his blood, the thrum of his heart. He couldn't even feel the rushing wind that should have been passing him by, he couldn't hear the thunder of it. He couldn't smell any of the damp and stone of the well. He tried to cry out, and heard nothing. He simply fell, and fell, and at some point he had to wonder if he was indeed falling. Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps he was trapped in madness, and something of the Court would put on his skin and trample out of the woods and all his hatred would be for nothing in the end.
The beating of his heart saved him in the end. He knew his heart. He'd listened to it many times at night. Nearly every winter night of the last nine years he'd spent going to sleep lulled by no other sound. During the day the everyday noises of his mortal friends had kept him, but at night there had been only that measured beat, reminding him that spring was coming closer, no matter how endless the cold season might seem.
He clutched his hand over his chest, and suddenly the wind was roaring all around him. He was falling. He was alive. He was real, and that seemed far more precious than he'd ever thought it to be. He came to that realization a split second before he crashed down into the dark, still waters of the royal aquifer with an almighty splash, and a different sort of deadly darkness closed a bitterly cold grip all around him. Adam swam up to the surface and broke through it with a gasp and a cough. Screeching like a vexed starling, Trout scrabbled out of its pocket and onto the prince's shoulder, its golden glow breaking the cavernous darkness all around them. "It mightn't have helped the test," the pixie declared, brushing water off its signet shield and fussing over a tiny scrap of leather that secured a lacquered, sharpened pair of hairpins to its back, between its wings, "but it would've been a nice bit of a start to run him through before you went jumping into wet dark places."
"I was tempted," Adam admitted. "But then I'd have had blood on my sword, and it would have got us killed." He drew in a deep breath and whistled a long, steady note until he ran out of breath.
"I do," Adam closed his eyes and used everything Boul had taught him about stones and caves and darkness, until he found the nearest shore of the aquifer; he began to swim for it. "I suppose Canemore's trick is to get them to eat me."
"They're always hungry."
"Yes," Adam agreed. "But it's hard to eat someone whose name you know."
"Who brought you gifts of dandelion crowns and sweet surface fruit," another voice, a rasp of scales on stone and fang against fang, suddenly came into the conversation.
"Who listened to you sing and loved it without falling thrall to it. Who thought you beautiful," a second voice sighed, "even after an eternity away from the light."
"I'm sorry to come disturbing your waters," Adam offered politely.
"You never disturb us, Adam." They were staying just out of reach of the pixie's light, pale white eel bodies rippling through the dark waters. "You were always kind. You were always generous. And we have been quite disturbed already."
"Prince Canemore," Adam said. He was still carefully, oh so casually, swimming for the shore.
"Yes."
"He came to hide something in the aquifer?"
"And to steal from us," a third voice declared, a male's, some anger seeping into it. "What little we had, most of it your gifts, he took. He will not give it back unless we give him your bones, licked clean."
"We have not eaten in so long."
"But it is hard to eat someone whom you know."
"Someone who has been kind."
"Someone who brought us the memory of what we were."
Adam felt Trout cling very tightly to his ear, growling low. Dealing with the Cave Singers had always been tricky, as was dealing with any predator, and he'd always been on solid ground when he did. "I am eighteen today," he admitted to them. "And I mean to claim my crown from Canemore."
The slide of the white bodies under the dark water paused; the only ripples on the surface were suddenly those of his own movements.
"I will be King," he told them. "And a King can do many things that a child and a prince cannot do. I never asked you, because I thought it would be rude and unkind, but today I will ask, with apologies: do you want to go back to your home?"
"Is it unkind of him?" one of the voices asked uncertainly.
"No," the one male replied, but he sounded unsure.
"Yes," the two older females countered, and then one corrected, "but only because we remember. We remember sun-warm rocks, we remember tides. We remember storms and vast broken ice. We remember light and vast green and blue forests full of food. We remember. You do not."
"You are too young," the male added. "You were born here in this darkness, long after the stone had stolen all flavor from the water."
"Oh," the one voice accepted that thoughtfully. "Do we want to? I know the stories and the songs you've taught me of the Place Before, with its tides and its currents, with its light. Where there is no hunger."
"Do you want to?" the male asked.
The silence hung immense in the darkness beyond the pixie's golden light. Adam all but felt the older merfolk hold their breath.
"I don't know. I've never known light."
"You've seen my torches, my candles," Adam countered. "The caves are full of mushrooms and moss, mold and slime that all glows with its own light. Trout here has light of its own."
"But that's not the same thing as in the songs, is it?"
"No," Adam admitted, and caught his breath. "But I can show you sunlight, true sunlight. I can give you the taste of the waters that your people left behind when chance trapped them here, underground. If I show you these things, if I give them to you, will you help me, help us? Help me find what Canemore hid here, and take us safely to shore after I have it?"
"Yes," one of the females agreed.
"But only if it's true," the other warned.
Adam stopped swimming and reached into his pocket. "You'll have to come closer, though. You'll have to come into the light."
"How will I see this light, if I'm already in it?"
"No offense to Trout," Adam smiled wryly at the pixie, who buzzed its wings, "but there is no comparison."
She slid closer, a white and deadly ghost underwater. Her hair was a blue mantle running down the back of her eel-like body, turning into a long dorsal fin. Her head tried to be beautiful, but it was hard when darkness had bleached it of all color and most substance, leaving it so pale that the delicate web of veins was visible under the pale violet-tinged whiteness of her skin. Her eyes were small and copper-ringed; she had no ears or nose, only a perfect smoothness down to the lovely rosebud of her mouth, which didn't move at all. Directly beneath it, a thin and nearly imperceptible line along her chin hid her true mouth, and the forest of peg-like fangs in it. Her neck was far too long and far too boneless, and black and pink ripples covered her torso, fluttering in the water.
Adam reached out an arm, and she clung to it, the boneless tendrils of her fingers spiraling around it. "Close your eyes," he told her, "until you can just peek at me. Otherwise it will hurt you until you're used to it."
She obeyed. Rare as it had been that the children would come so deep into the caves as to reach the aquifer, still they'd met the merfolk trapped in those waters every now and again, and they had no reason to distrust Adam. He had never given them one.
He fumbled in his pocket and closed a fist around the sun that was his last memento from Linden; he brought it out, holding it just over the surface. "Ready?"
"Yes," she breathed out.
He slid his fingers open, and sunlight, true and rich and warm, spilled into the darkness of the cave, revealing the beautiful work of water on stone, immense and deceptively delicate columns, pale lace-like lattices, vast shelves of limestone festooned with minerals. She cried out in shock, and then spun all around, eyes narrowed but struggling to take it all in. "Oh! Oh, there are colors everywhere!"
Adam lifted his hand and, finger by finger, opened his grip until the golden glow of that summer-caught sunlight filled the space.
"It's so warm!" She laughed in delight, her tail thrashing beneath the surface. "It's so beautiful! Can I touch it?"
"You can have it," Adam offered, "if you help us. But I offered you something else, didn't I? Two trades for two favors."
"Yes." She beamed at him. "To help you find what the Prince hid. What's the second one?"
"Take this then," he offered her the bit of sunlight, and she took it in her free hand, throwing the aquifer into dancing chiaroscuro shadows, "and open your mouth," he instructed her, and she did. Adam found himself facing several rows of fangs, curved slightly inward. Reaching again into his pocket he found the round salt stone that Boul had given him that morning; water had made no dent on it. With great care to avoid those teeth, he touched it to her tongue and slid it down carefully along it. "There."
She smacked and clacked her lips, then sank under the water and did so again. Adam saw the black dot at the center of each copper-colored eye suddenly grow immense. "It's like food, but not bitter. And it lingers!"
"It's not afraid. Fear is bitter," one of the females replied, drawing close. She was twice the size of the one Adam was speaking to. "I have nothing to offer, Adam, but could I taste your sea-stone? I will promise you anything."
"I will promise you myself if I can taste the stone," the male was smaller than the older female, but larger than Adam.
"It lingers because it does not die," the third female replied, matched in size to the male. "I do have something I can offer, Adam. I will sing for you the Deathless song, for as long as you want me to. For as long as I can."
Everything in him wanted to simply give this to them, if only because it was the kind thing to do, and ever he'd wanted to be kind. He could scarcely imagine what it had to be like to be trapped away from the light and the sea for so long that even the taste of home was forever erased from the water in which you lived. "I will give it to you, though it's a gift from a very dear friend. But I will not keep you here to sing anything for me, not if you choose to go home. A child couldn't help you, and a prince is scarcely any better. But a King, a King can do many things. I want you to think on your answer to my question. The salt-stone I will give you as a trade, to take me and Trout safely to shore once I find what Prince Canemore hid."
"Yes," they chorused at him. He put out the stone, and someone yanked it from his grip.
Suddenly they were moving so swiftly over the water that Trout nearly went flying off his shoulder with a yelp. They flew in flashes of light, blazing out of the water when the mermaid who carried it leapt over it, dimly lighting their way when it was only Trout's glow. They raced on forever, it seemed, until Adam could hear the stone overhead, but only barely so. They were at the deepest part of the immense aquifer.
If they betrayed him then, there would be nothing he could do.
"The pixie cannot come with you," the oldest of the females told him. "He would never make it."
Trout huffed in vexation, and rose to hover. "You'd best be taking good care of him, then."
She moved closer and caught Adam's hand. "You'll need the iron you have brought. The thing that guards your treasure has no mind or heart you can appeal to."
"Does it bleed?" Adam drew his sword.
"Yes," she admitted. "And I will try to remember that we have made a bargain with you, Adam. But you must find what you are seeking quickly, and we must leave swiftly. It will matter very little, how sorry we might be to break our agreement, if we've eaten you already."
"Fair," the prince could only say, squirming out of his bow and quiver and handing them over to the male to hold. "I can't breathe water as you do, remember that. I can only hold my breath so long."
"I will sing breath for you," the other female assured him. "Stay close. If you can hear me, you will be fine."
They dove. The darkness was profound, until the youngest joined them, carrying the little bit of captive sunlight with her. They dove endlessly, the cold and the pressure becoming nearly painful until one of them began to sing, a high and steady note that curled up and down like a gust of wind over foaming waves, like a warm breeze along a golden beach. Adam found he could breathe, though the cold only grew even more brutal.
They reached the bottom before a low cave. Even the sunlight could not pierce the darkness inside it, and Adam realized why when a phantom green glow began to spread over it in a perceivable pattern. Two bright, empty eyes shone like a cat's for a brief moment, and Adam went very still.
So did the rows of gleaming color.
He lifted his sword. The immense creature surged slightly forward, and the prince froze once again, before he started moving with immense, careful slowness. The eyes moved in the light as the creature turned this way and that, trying to hunt down those minute vibrations, and it surged briefly out of the cave, but aimed at no particular target.
It's blind, Adam thought. Like most everything that lives in these caves, it's blind. It doesn't need eyes. Only the Singers kept them because they're fairies, and fairies don't change unless they're made to change.
It was an immense catfish, made huge by age and pale gray by darkness. Skin had grown over its eyes and whorls of color that only showed in the dark adorned its scarred flank. Adam eyed those scars and turned to look at the hands of the older mermaid, floating still in the water by his side. This, then, was why they only had the one child. The fish was easily three times the size of the largest of them. A single fishing hook, absurdly small for its size, was embedded on the catfish's lower jaw. From it hung an even tinier pearl set on a silver pendant in the shape of a key.
Adam lifted a hand, catching their eye. Pointed at the oldest one and gestured to a spot behind him. The catfish pivoted toward him, but she'd gotten the gist of what he wanted, and let herself float away sedately. He turned to point at the youngest, pointed at himself, and gestured up. She nodded.
Now it only left the actual killing of the damn thing. Adam hung onto his sword and waited.
Somewhere directly behind him, something struck the stone of the ground with immense force.
The catfish surged forward. Adam thrust his sword up and nearly had it ripped from his hand. A fin slapped his face with punishing force and he clung to it with his free hand, trying to not lose his wits, holding onto his breath. For a moment it was all darkness and cold and a crushing, deadly pressure, until either the catfish turned back towards the cave or the singing mermaid caught up with them.
The damned thing's belly, after so long resting in the aquifer, had become embedded full of stones. It might as well be armored on what should have been its most vulnerable spot. The catfish writhed and twisted, all too aware that something was clinging to it, dragging it down and throwing it off-balance. As it turned, jaws snapping blindly, Adam shoved the sword into the soft fleshy bit of its mouth. It didn't stop it, didn't seem to even slow it down, but the prince hadn't meant for it to do so; instead, when it came looking to bite at him again, he snatched for the fishing hook and the pendant, and yanked it through the soft flesh there.
A tiny rivulet of blood, darker than the darkness, spilled into the water.
"Sunlight!" Adam cried out in the language of the cistern fish.
The youngest mermaid was suddenly there, slamming into him and rushing him up, up towards the distant glow of the pixie's light, up towards life and breath and warmth. But behind them came the catfish like a raging dragon, even though the other two mermaids were clinging to it, mouths sunk into its flesh. It was too big to care. It snapped upwards and caught Adam's foot between its jaws and the prince screamed the last of its breath underwater.
He hooked the foot that the catfish had captured on the hilt of the sword he'd left in the monster's mouth, and kicked it as hard as it could. The giant heaved; from outside Adam could hardly reach anything of importance, let alone anything that bled. But from inside, he'd shoved the blade straight into the catfish's head. The point peeked out of one eye.
Blood spilled like a cloud on the water. The fish heaved and spat him out, like any fish will when it feels it has bit into a hook, and the youngest mermaid raced him up, up and away, even as her mother and her aunt went into a frenzy, tearing and gouging and biting at the catfish, their song an eerie, maddened shriek. They burst out on the surface and Adam choked on his first breath, coughing until he felt as if he might catch on fire.
"What happened!" the male demanded.
"Swim!" was all the youngest was saying, and then they were flying through the water, outrunning the spill of death and blood and madness.
Or, at least, that was what Adam hoped, but he was too dizzy to know. Or to put up a fight.
***
"Adam."
There was a cool hand on his forehead, brushing away damp hair, and a rough surface under him, which he could feel even through the heavy quilting of his jacket. Had he been sick? Was he hurt? He couldn't remember anything. He'd had a terrible nightmare.
"Mortal prince, do I need to bite you again?"
Ah, so it hadn't been a nightmare.
"Trout, everything with you is an excuse to bite," he croaked out and sat up with an effort, coughing and spitting out a few more lungfuls of water. "Is everyone alright?"
"Yes," the oldest of the mermaids replied. "And well fed, and unafraid. It has been very long since we had any of those." She was an immense white body coiled around him in the shallows of the aquifer, on a beach he knew from happier times, when they'd visited with food and trinkets just to hear the merfolk sing. He'd been saved by those visits, Adam realized. By his familiarity not just with the Singers, but with their song. He'd grown used to the deadly beauty of it. Even if they wanted to, could they have driven him mad with it? Because that would have satisfied Canemore as well, Adam suspected.
"Well, something good came out of that. I don't think I have a right to ask more, since I didn't even know what I was doing, or what to expect."
"Will you face all your trials like this?"
"I hope not. I'm tired of putting friends at risk."
She was silent for a long moment. "That is not what I asked, for all that the answer fits. But that is a very mortal way to look at it."
"I am very mortal," Adam agreed wearily, working his foot on its boot. It hurt, horribly, but nothing felt broken. "I don't know. I thought there would be more magic to it, less violence. I forget that both can get me killed."
"I don't believe you forgot, Adam," she said gently. "I believe you do not care. I know what that is like. We stopped caring, too, a long time ago."
"But you care for her."
"And only for her. You named her, you know."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to presume -"
"You did not. You offered the name, and she accepted it. But we don't know how to repay you for that gift."
Adam ground his hand against his head. "Well, I can't ask you for my sword, you can't touch it."
"No."
He looked at his hands, uncurled his fists. The pearl-key sat on one. "Then help me. When Canemore came, did he have a mortal with him? A woman, young."
"No. She, he brought in later, and took her much farther into the caves, along with a blind man. He was bleeding."
Adam closed his eyes. "I am," he said very calmly, "going to be King. And I am going to wage war on the Court. It's very possible they'll come to ask you to join them, because the trolls and the redcaps have already abandoned them."
She nodded. "We will not fight. We have a reason to care now. I offer you this third trade, Adam. We will not join your enemies. We will keep the aquifer safe. And when you are King, you will bring Sunlight to the sea."
"But what about you?"
"Perhaps we will come with her," she shrugged, the blue dorsal fin shifting from one side to another. "I don't know how you could do this thing. I will not ask it for all of us, because I do not know if it can be done for all of us. But for Sunlight, it must happen."
"If it happens for Sunlight, it will happen for all of you." He offered his hand. "Hang onto hope. One of us should."
She took his hand and shook it, and retreated into the water.
"Trout," Adam said, moving to his feet and looking about until he found his bow and quiver. "Beli came by here, and he was bleeding. Can you sniff out his trail?"
"Oh, that's easy!" The pixie took off, looking about for the familiar scent.
"I'm glad one of us thinks so," Adam muttered wearily.
***
Magic had been laid in traps all along his route, but the dizzying, maddening spirals of it had no more effect on Adam than the frenzy-song of the merfolk had. He could have been lost in the caves forever, he realized. He should have been, thrown off the path, his mind slowly fracturing. But even down here he had unexpected allies; in many places he saw the smallfolk, in their mushroom hats and mole coats, trundling by and taking away the magic of the traps, piece by tiny piece, in their tiny ribcage sleds. He paused to share with them a scarce handful of dry cherries, misplaced in one of his pockets and gone soggy after his dive in the aquifer, and they were exceptionally appreciative.
Following the golden light of the tiny, ruthless predator keeping him company, Adam wandered past the caves he knew and found himself looking at an immense stone arch of light and magic. Squinting showed him the same thing; so did holding onto the hilt of his dagger. "Trout, what am I looking at?"
The pixie perched on his shoulder. "It's a Many-Steps. Big magic for those without wings. Step in and step out and step somewhere else far away."
"And get stranded and lose by default." Adam examined the beautiful stonework, illuminated by its pale silvery magic. "Or half of me gets left here and half gods know where."
"Many-Steps don't stop just like that," Trout chided him tartly. "They only close if there's nobody using them. What sort of cheap worthless magic have you been taught, mortal prince?"
"I beg a thousand pardons." Adam considered that; then he bent down, took off his soggy boots, and put them directly in the middle of the archway before stepping forward over them, holding his breath. The glow of the archway remained steady.
They were in a stone-lined hallway, dry and dark and empty. A constant, steady hissing sound filled the air, broken occasionally by stray wisps of distant, heart-broken sobbing.
"I can't smell Beli anymore," Trout warned, returning to its perch on the prince's shoulder.
"That's fine," Adam replied, hurrying along the hallway until he came to a crossroads. Pulling his dagger and about to notch a mark into the stone, he paused and instead dropped to his hands and knees and rapped the hilt lightly against the stones at the bottom of the wall until the low, growly and muttering language of the smallfolk answered him. One of the smaller stones pivoted open and they peered up at him, stout and small and shy, but all familiar with him and his generosity of dry cherries, of bacon rinds, of charcoal and sunflower seeds.
They lit their lamps for him.
Adam ran into the vast maze to which the Many-Steps archway had transported him. They couldn't guide him, of course, and he absolutely refused to allow them to help. It would have meant choosing his side, and he couldn't stomach the thought of what Canemore might do to them for it. Life would be hard enough for them all soon enough. But wherever he went , the lamps on either side of the hallway would come to life, tiny wicks burning on floating chestnuts, pet fireflies, potted mushrooms, all of them at near-ground level. Twice he found himself at a dead end, and as he raced back to pick another path the lights changed for him as well.
The weeping led him to the ruins of a great, round room with a vast cupola overhead and moonlight pouring in through elegant windows bereft of glass panes and framed by the ruins of exquisite gilded velvet curtains. The entire room gleamed with far more than starlight, the elegant marble floors polished until a near-perfect mirror of the room gazed back at Adam from the depths of its abstract design. The walls and columns supported the cupola looked like something out of a fantastic mausoleum.
Adam froze at the doors. Two, perhaps three dozen Culli-maids sat in a double circle in the room, each one attending to their own spinning wheel and quietly sobbing. They all wore the same simple dress, a woolen overgown over a sensible linen blouse and a warm woolen skirt, with tidy leather house slippers and a knit shawl on surprisingly bright grays and greens. The wheels were the source of the constant, steady hissing, thread coming to life along their endless circle and then shooting upward, coming together by twos and by threes until a slender, silver cord ran out of the room through the marble of the cupola, away. Even from a distance Adam could feel the seething magic of it, and he suspected he knew where it went. He also believed he knew this game; the Folk Beyond the Woods, he'd realized from all the stories he'd been told, weren't able to come up with ideas of their own, and their tricks, while many, tended to repeat themselves.
He closed his eyes and squinted at the crowd of Cullis, but his head almost immediately began to pound. There was too much magic in the room. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes, and stared instead at the windows, nodding minutely when he realized the view through each gracious arch was different. "Trout, stay away from the windows, they're a trap."
"Are there enemies?" The pixie reached back for its sharp little hairpins.
"No," Adam took a step forward. "They're a trap for you." He took a second step forward, soundless without his boots, and called out, "Culli-maid."
And he listened very closely.
They all turned to him and cried out. "Highness!" some of them screamed.
"Adam!" others wept.
Adam nodded with a grim little smile. He did know this game. "Well. That takes half of you out of the running very neatly, doesn't it? The real Culli fought me nine years on it." He pointed out those he knew for sure had called him 'Adam'. "Keep spinning, but turn your wheels around."
"But Adam -" One of them began.
"No," he said coolly. "I don't know what you're spinning yet. Until I do, none of you stop. And if you've turned your chair around, don't talk to me. Don't talk to one another. Don't speak at all."
He walked along the circles. They were flawlessly identical, each and every one of them, exactly as Culli-maid had been when he'd seen her last, just that morning. Some sobbed even as their hands turned wool into thread and into magic. Others struggled to be brave for him. A few looked stricken, lost and haunted. If fear could possibly have a face, all of the possible variables of it were to be found there, in that circle of spinning wheels.
Adam crouched down. A beautiful pearl and gold chain and cuff secured each Culli's leg to the chair where they sat. He suspected his key would only work the once.
"I could bite them," Trout suggested dubiously. "Maybe the real Culli-maid will taste of real blood."
"And maybe she's a troll under the glamour and squashes you flat for the daring. No, Trout, I'm not willing to risk you. I know the Culli-maid. If I don't know her well enough to beat this game, I don't deserve her loyalty." He straightened up. "I can only take one of you, can I?"
"Yes," they all chorused.
"Can I ask as many questions as I like?"
"Yes," they repeated.
Adam stepped back nearly to the door, where he could see them all clearly. "What's your real name, Culli-maid?"
"Sophronia," they all replied in nearly perfect synchronicity.
Nearly.
Adam grinned wryly. "It's embarrassing, really. But Culli, it's so useful that you don't say your own name the way the rest of the world reads it and speaks it." He drew seven of the replicas forward, to a third circle. "Keep spinning," he told the rest. "Turn around. Don't make a sou- ah!" He gestured sharply to one of the false Cullis, who'd tried to bare very un-Culli-like fangs at him. "I have neither chosen nor rejected you. Keep. Spinning."
She obeyed, snarling. "To free the wrong one is your death, mortal prince. To free the right one is to free us all, and still your death. What do I care what you command?"
"You care enough to obey and that's good enough for me," Adam replied distractedly, staring at the seven Culli-maids. "Don't run. When I free you, Culli, don't run, and don't stop spinning. Because I'm pretty sure the windows are enchanted to take you places, but not to bring you back. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Highness," they agreed tearfully.
Adam breathed out slowly. So far he'd been counting on the fact that a fairy replica would want to get every little detail right; the problem with that was, of course, that he'd asked questions meant to have flawed answers. And the fakes left along with the real Culli were the ones that knew that to fail a little could mean victory all the same. He also couldn't ask questions with complex answers - he'd never hear the right one over the chaos of too many words spoken too quickly at him. He ran his hands through his hair in exasperation. "Damn it, Culli, you actually know too many of my secrets, I don't trust any of them to be safe from this lot," he laughed ruefully. "Guess it'll have to be yours, and I'm sorry for that."
He looked into all those red-rimmed, frightened, soft brown gazes, and remembered the brightest smile he'd ever seen from the maid, the only time he'd seen her truly charmed. He remembered being sick, but having his friends there - all of them, even the one who couldn't climb. All because someone had found a way. "You never wed, Culli. You never even entertained a suitor. Every boy and every man who came calling, none of them touched you. None of them charmed you. Why is that? Who were you waiting for, Culli? Name him for me."
Every Culli had stopped weeping. Some had gone very red. Some had gone deeply pale. The only sound in the room was the spinning of the wheels.
They couldn't answer, Adam realized. This was a secret Culli-maid had never surrendered. One that Adam had guessed at, but which had never been spoken out loud. In a way it was his fault; the moment he'd suspected it had happened he should've asked the priests to make sure it was real, and not simply Culli getting elf-touched by accident. At that point, in that elegant room full of magic, it didn't matter anymore: it had grown into something real and powerful in silence and in secret.
"Adam," one of the Cullis whispered.
"You," another breathed. "I was waiting for you."
"Oh, Adam..."
He gave them time to answer. Some secrets are hard to surrender. In the end, only two refused to answer, and Adam suddenly realized why: the real Culli knew he knew the answer; the false one was waiting to steal it from her mouth.
He gestured the others back to their places. "You know how it goes. I'll repeat it a third time, but at that point you'll be magic-bound and I'll be more than a little angr- don't. Hiss at me," he warned one of the false Cullis. "You played a cruel game and lost. What you pay for failing is not my problem. Culli," he urged the last two gently, "go ahead. Whatever you answer, I'll take it from there."
The wheels spun and the magic cord gleamed.
They both opened their mouths, like perfect mirrors of one another, and Adam couldn't have said which one spoke first. "Boulders..."
"... for Brains," they both finished. Quiet tears slipped down their pale cheeks.
"A troll?!" someone hissed in disbelief from somewhere in the room.
"If you don't understand why, you would have never won this game anyway," Adam replied casually, coming to stand before the two Cullis. "Boul is a creature of loyalty, Culli. We both know that. In his silence, everything is said without words. He might not have known of your love," he admitted, reaching under his shirt and pulling on the leather cord there until the opalized shell peeked out, "but he knew you a true friend, didn't he?"
Two hands went to two necks. One of them tugged a shell the match of Adam's out from the severe linen shirt Culli wore when the weather was chilly. The other, of course, had nothing to find.
Adam caught that questing, empty, panicking hand in his, and guided it back to the wheel. "Don't stop, Culli. I still don't know what you're weaving, but I have a nasty suspicion."
"You lied!" the false Culli-maid squealed at him like an angry ferret, even as Culli-maid, sobbing, worked her spinning wheel.
"I didn't." Adam tucked the shell back under his shirt. "This was one of Boul's gifts to me, when we were young. And all of my friends know Culli-maid is true, and honest, and kind. And I would cut down every last one of you for the terror you've caused her," he snarled at the entire room of them. "But getting her to safety comes first, always. Those with me, those I call friend, those who have given me their loyalty, I owe them in equal measure. Pity your Prince and your Queen haven't taught you that."
"I will be there when Canemore rips your beating heart from your foolish chest, mortal prince," the false Culli hissed. "And I will forget you a moment after."
"Busy night for you," Adam replied. "I'll forget you the moment I leave this room. Culli, can you walk?"
"Yes, Highness." She scrubbed fiercely at her tears with one hand, the other tending to the wheel.
"Good, because we might have to run." It had finally occurred to Adam that there was only one work of magic that would require constant attention in the maze where Culli had been imprisoned. "I won't ask that. I just need to know if I have to carry you."
She flushed very pink. "To get out of this place and away from this folk, I will run."
"Do you discount our hospitality, maid?" one of the replicas asked, her voice silky soft.
"Begging the lady's pardon, this place's very nice, if a bit chilly," Culli-maid replied, her hands going white as they worked the wheel. "But I was tricked out of my rooms and tranced out of the palace and given no choice about the coming or the going to whatever this place might be. It sours a person some, that."
Adam waited for the Folk Beyond the Woods to reply to that, but none did. He leaned down and caught the cuff in one hand, slipping the pearl key into it. The chain went to pieces, and he was left holding a pearl-and-gold lock along with the pearl pendant-key.
The windows slammed shut, the glow of moon and stars coming from them vanishing as if shutters and curtains both had been closed over them. Every other fairy in the room vanished, as did their spinning wheels. The vivid light of the magic they'd been weaving threatened to gutter out like a candle in a storm, alive only by the last languishing thread coming out of Culli's wheel. The entire room shook, dust falling from the high cupola.
"Bad time to be right," Adam muttered. He offered a hand to Culli and yanked her out of her chair, and then they were running, Trout just ahead of them, following the tiny path of lights the smallfolk had created for him as the entire maze rumbled.
"The Many-Steps!" Trout cried out. "Adam, it's failing!"
"I know!" Adam all but shouted back. Before them the gleaming stone-and-magic portal was struggling to close, reduced to the thickness of a thread and collapsing down on itself, held back from fully closing off only by the soggy pair of boots planted firmly in the middle of it. He scooped Culli up in his arms and threw himself across; they landed in a heap with a tiny squeal of dismay from her to find herself so indecorously close to a young man, even if she more or less counted him her son.
"Trout!" Adam called out, felt the light impact of the pixie against the side of his face. He snatched up his boots before they were either crushed or sliced in half, and the portal collapsed immediately into darkness, broken only by the golden glow of the pixie.
They stayed there, breathing hard, staring at the raw rock of the caves, letting the chill of the damp air cool them down from their frantic sprint. "Well," Adam wheezed at last, "that's a lot more like what I expected." But then Culli-maid was clinging to him, sobbing in belated terror, and he picked her up and rocked her in his arms until the storm of her emotions had settled. "I'm sorry," he told her at last when she would hear him.
"Ugh." She swatted him lightly. "Don't be. Don't you dare be sorry. We all knew it would come to this. You're worth fighting for, Highness. I'm just being a right twit, is all."
He sighed deeply, and kissed her forehead. "But I'm sorry all the same. As much of a fight as I know life is going to be for us all, this was not the violence I expected to bring to your doorstep." He let her go and set about putting his boots back on.
"You didn't bring anything, they did," Culli-maid replied, brushing at herself and moving to her feet.
Adam tested his foot. It had finally settled down as he walked the maze, but it was stinging once again after their rush to escape. He switched the obsidian dagger so there'd be something solid to give his leg some support, and looked up at Culli. "I should have asked," he told her very quietly.
She hugged the shawl to herself. "It was nice to have love,"she replied, staring into the dark. "Even if it wasn't real. I could have gone to the priests, but it was nice, and it was safe, because I knew nothing would come of it. And then, eventually, it simply was nice to have."
"I won't ask you to give it up, Culli. If you can prove to me it's not hurting you."
She smiled weakly at him as he stood up. "Oh, I should. Who knows what it's done to my head, if my thoughts are really my own after all these years." She blew out a long, low breath. "Well, what are we to do now? How can I help you, Highness?"
"You go home," he told her. "I'll take you out of the caves and to the edge of the woods. Get back to the palace and wait for me there, because you have to be there for me to win." He offered her the gold lock and the pearl key. "And if anyone stops them, you show them this, and tell them your part in the test is done. They're yours now." Adam smiled wryly. "A key to open any door, and a lock to close it. Fitting gifts for a King's housekeeper, I think."
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
You didn’t think I’d forget there’s two sides to this story, did ya?
Boul took Needlemaw far into the woods, far beyond any place where they'd gone on their own or as a group; they moved through vast cathedrals of young green, the bare branches of incredibly old trees an immense canopy far above their heads. Yet again, the redcap was reminded of how unlike his people Boul was. Trolls were happy to find a cave or a tunnel or a grotto and stay there, content, but Boul had learned curiosity and wanderlust from his small, motley family. More, he'd met and befriended Linden nearly as long as Adam had. With him Linden had shared parts of themselves that no one else had had the opportunity to find.
The ancient trees all around them greeted the troll with groans and creaks, and Needlemaw could feel their anger at the absence of one of their own.
Boul took her deeper still, and in the darkest part of the woods they found an Old Place.
The hunter in Needlemaw suddenly understood. To them, Linden had been a friend, family; Boul and Adam had never seen them as anything unique. The redcap was the oldest of them all, and she had known Linden was not just an incredibly rare creature, but an immensely powerful one. If someone had magically searched for them, disbelieving their destruction as Boul have, Linden's power would have marked them like a torch in a world of candles.
Unless they were hidden within an even brighter light.
The Old Place was a tiny, spring-fed pond, shallow and clear. Five immense monoliths of rough black stone made a rough circle in the pure water around a sixth, which sat low and nearly perfectly horizontal on boulders wrought of the same dark stone. They were covered in vines full of vivid flowers, just as the pond sported a crown of water lilies. Off to one side an incredibly ancient, gnarled and tiny rowan tree tipped slightly towards the pond; the water had carved a hollow under its roots, and she could hear it splashing down over rocks and into darkness, away and away. The sense of old magic, beyond such definitions as redcap or troll or pixie or mortal, was embedded in the very ground, in every blade of grass, in every petal of that ever-summer place.
Someone had wrapped a glamour of fear around the Old Place like a garish, ugly snare around a beautiful spray of flowers. Boul could scarcely look at it, let alone approach it, but Needlemaw was fear, vast and overriding. She scoffed lightly and waded up to the roots of the rowan tree.
And, disappointingly, found that it wasn't real, either. It was the broken remains of a dead alder tree. The roots tangled up before her, barring her way. She growled. "Let me pass, or I will tear you apart with my teeth and my talons."
Who are you? What are you? None may pass.
"I am Needlemaw. I am a redcap. I am a daughter of my burrow, a sister of my clan, a mother of slaughter. I am leader of my people. Let me pass!"
Who are you? What are you? None may pass.
She snarled, gripping the roots. They felt real enough in her hand, but there was no life to them. She would tear them to pieces if that's what it took, but destroying the glamour would warn whoever had created it.
Adam, the ground whispered.
Needlemaw drew a deep breath. "I am Needlemaw. I am a redcap. I am the Danu-child's guardian. I am sworn to protect them, I have leave to eat all who would harm them, to rend limb from limb all who would threaten them. I am their friend, I am their sister, I am their teeth and their talons, and you will let me pass."
The glamour was silent, and the roots parted like a curtain before her.
Needlemaw descended into darkness, following the path of the waterfall. It didn't bother her any. In the eternal gloom of the underground, her eyes gleamed like lamps, the bright yellow of a large cat's springing leisurely from ambush. She found a stairwell but didn't touch it, fearing to trigger a trap or a telltale.
Past an exquisitely delicate bridge arching over the water from the waterfall, she found herself in an empty, vast palace, polished marble and exquisite glass, wrought silver, pixies carved into the crenelations, each tapestry and painting, every statue and archway a work of art. Her quiet steps echoed like thunder in the immense spaces. She startled with a hiss when she tripped over the remnants of the first glamour, which filled an immense ballroom with music and joyous dancers glittering with satin and jewels. It faltered and faded, like mist before a sharp wind.
She knew then where she was, and ground her teeth restlessly.
She passed the glimmering ghosts of made-believe servants. Sometimes, along windows that opened onto nothing at all, sunlight would blaze for a moment, as if peeking through dark storm clouds, and fade again with ephemeral snatches of bird song and rustling trees. She found paw-prints on the dust, and when she licked them she found they tasted a little of madness and a lot of cat. She smiled faintly; of course, the people who loved secrets and hated the Court Beyond The Woods. They would absolutely love strutting unchallenged through these hidden halls. But it was not grimalkin she was looking for, and she moved on.
The redcap paused in the main hall. A tremendous painting overlooked the space, which would have surely glittered like a jewel among jewels if there had been light. She stared up at the canvas: the young woman, sitting in her embroidered white and red gown was unfamiliar, but she had Adam's curling black hair and deep blue eyes. The man standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder was Prince Canemore. He looked profoundly smug; she looked... sad.
Needle reached up, to touch the hand of the young woman. "Did he get his muchness from ye?" she murmured. "Because he's needing it now, more than ever."
Perched atop the curling staircase at the heart of that hidden palace, she drew in deep, slow breaths. Dust and time overwhelmed her senses; normally it wouldn't have bothered her, but time was not on her side. Adam was facing off Canemore's fury, and Linden was at the mercy of the Sidhe who'd made everyone believe he'd killed them. She couldn't spend uncounted time exploring the building top to bottom. "Linden!" she shouted into the darkness, but only her echo answered her.
Wishing she'd listened with more than no ear at all to the many songs and stories about Canemore and his mortal lover, she launched herself into the dark. There had to be more to the keep; certainly it was beautiful, a place of immense magic, Canemore's augmented by the power of the Old Place above. But she didn't know if it had also been meant to be a trap, a gilded cage that the Prince Beyond The Woods was simply re-using.
She started working her way down, and down, and down. At some point she saw the faint glow of a portal and recoiled, teeth clenched and eyes tightly closed, hoping she was not about to run herself into Canemore himself. For however long it took she waited, until the time felt right to dash past that glow, and made a mental note to avoid that hallway altogether.
It took her a very long time to get to the dungeons, and she nearly swore out loud when she met the first real occupant of the empty palace.
The Hunting Hound was nearly as large as Boul. It was shaggy and long-legged like the typical coursing hound, but it was so black that the darkness all around it looked almost luminous by comparison. It was sprawled before the heavy door that led into that place of punishment and oblivion, chin on its forepaws, hind legs sprawled to one side, toes covered by the banner of its tail. It wore a heavy collar where the studs were made of blackened bone; on it hung a key.
A single red eye peeked momentarily from the void-black shape of its head, and then closed again. It huffed minutely.
Needlemaw sighed. The Hounds of the Wild Hunt were one of the few creatures both willing to face a redcap, and potentially able to defeat one. "I greet my brother of the chase and the hunt," she called out from around a corner.
The darkness turned the barest shade of red as the Hound opened his eyes again. "I greet my sister of the kill and the feast," he replied politely enough. "This place is not for you."
"Having made it through the door, I dispute that it is."
There was a shuffle of movement, and a moment later the sound of a mighty dog yawn. "How did you make it through the door?" The Hound shook himself sharply, and then flopped once again.
"I asked politely," Needle replied. "Is this your hunting ground, am I trespassing? I don't have much on me, but I'll make reparations if I must."
There was a long silence. "Not necessary," the Hound admitted, well aware that he was giving away more information than he wanted, but bound by courtesy to do so. There was a faint growl on his voice. "I will be content with your departure."
Needlemaw licked her nose thoughtfully.
"Now, redcap."
She hissed and retreated. If she'd learned anything from all those books and primers and maps, or from the made-up war she'd just fought, was that to face an enemy on ground of his choosing, where he's familiar with the terrain and you're not, made a fight a hundred times harder to win. She was back to the cold and empty kitchens when laughter came to her from the darkness, and she realized there was one way in which such a fight could be won. "I greet my siblings of the ambush and the pounce."
There was profound silence, but she waited. She was all too familiar with how shocking it could be to be given respect after a lifetime of having none.
"We greet our sister of the fang and the talon," a voice that was more meow than word said from the dark. Like small green moons, eyes filled the darkness. "It is not often we are treated the equals of a Hunting Hound."
"It is not often our paths cross, my sister." Needlemaw dropped to a crouch. "I have been taught to give courtesy first. If I don't receive in return, well, then my cap gets a fresh soak."
The grimalkin yowled in laughter all around her, and moved closer. "What brings a redcap clan-mother to this forgotten place?"
"Is it truly forgotten?"
The queen that approached her was the size of a lamb, gray-furred, wild-eyed. She looked like something between a lynx and a house-cat, with all the most feral features of both, lean and scarred. She was to a cat as Needle was to a mortal. The full moon shone in her eyes, and the crescent blade of it lurked in her smile. "Perhaps. What will you give us for that secret?"
"Another. Do ye know what the Hunting Hound guards?"
"No. We tried to find out. He killed my sister and three of our children."
"If I tell ye, will ye fight him with me?"
"Fight a Hound of the Wild Hunt!" The grimalkin burst out. "We would die, all of us."
"Not if I fight with ye."
"Will you?"
"For this secret, yes." Needle put a hand up over her head. "I swear it on my cap."
There was silence once again, until a young tom's voice farther back said, "I bet it's a really good secret."
The queen sighed in exasperation. "Do you ever despair of one of your kits learning what 'negotiation' means?" She turned to glare into the dark. "This would be a cruel fight. We would have to leave to recover, to hunt. Anyone might take this place from us then."
"Not if ye have a whole Hound to eat."
"You would leave us the kill?"
"Yes." Needlemaw shrugged. "The kill, the place, and the secret. If ye fight with me."
The queen's tail lashed thoughtfully. "Have we leave to come with you after?"
The redcap paused. "I'm nae sure that'll be safe, seems a bit of a shite reward. But aye, ye can come with me if ye want."
The grimalkin raked her paw over her chest and offered it, blood gleaming tinily on the daggers of her claws.
Needlemaw's mouth curled and split and grew into a deadly, malevolent grin, and she raked her own black talons over her chest.
***
Numbers made the fight even, not easy. Needlemaw hadn't expected it to be; neither had the grimalkin. They paid for their victory in blood and loss, but it was a victory all the same.
The key on the Hunting Hound's collar opened the heavy door, and the redcap fought it open just enough for them to slip in. Much to their surprise, they found light inside, stone sconces shining with golden lights. Needle cautiously reached out to touch one. "This isnae fire."
The grimalkin queen leapt up to her shoulder and leaned closer. In the light the maddening spirals in her green eyes seemed to disappear, and she almost looked like a normal, oversize cat. "This is sunlight. Caught in a wee jar like a mortal captures fireflies."
The redcap scoffed. "Well, at least he didnae forget what he keeps."
They moved quietly through the golden spaces of stone and timber and oblivion, and discovered Canemore must have kept using the keep at some point. One cell was full of blown-glass flowers, another of old and worn leather shoes. Another was a library, shelves full to bursting with scrolls and books of lore long lost and yearned for. At least three chambers were full of gold and silver and jewels, wealth enough to create or destroy a realm five times over. Another was full of mice skulls, weathered by age, and Needlemaw gave the grimalkin a sideways look.
"Skulls are the best part, redcap!" The queen protested. "Don't give me such a look. This is wasted wealth as far as I'm concerned."
Half-grinning, Needle led the way. It felt a little like a hunt with his people, though she dare no forget that madness as well as ferocity walked by her side and behind her. The hallway opened onto a vast well with a spiral staircase going around it; the waterfall she had followed in found her again, falling through the center of the well and misting everything around them, sunlight gleaming through that artificial fog. The air was charged with old magic.
Adam, the waterfall whispered.
They rushed down the spiral and came to a dead stop at the bottom. The stairwell ended at the feet of a stone-lined pool that spun itself away into darkness. A single thread of water went on to pass under a stone archway. Flowering vines outlined it, stone petals closed around barely visible amethyst blossoms. Tiny rubies glittered among the foliage, and when Needlemaw drew closer, squinting in curiosity, a ruby-eye stone spider raised its forelegs in warning. She jerked back. "Oh, butter and burrs."
The grimalkin settled down all around her, some lapping at the water, some grooming blood out of their fur. She stared at the riddle before her. The water was too shallow to hide her from what she suspected was a portal, and the grimalkin wouldn't want to wade into it anyway.
"It's a pity the spiders aren't real," the grimalkin said. "We could eat them and be done with it."
A cascade of tiny red eyes flashed open all over the portal, and such a spew of furious chittering flew out that the cat-kin scurried behind Needlemaw.
"I am sorry!" Needlemaw pressed her hands together. "I am so, so sorry. 'Tis good and clear yui're doing a fine and fair job as it were given out to ye. Anyone can see that, absolutely," she bobbed her head as the stone spiders chattered indignantly on. "'Tis just a wee bit vexing to come this far and be balked by such powerful, frightful guardians, is all."
The portal was silent. A sulking click came from it, not quite as wrathful as before.
"I am Needlemaw," she replied. "I am a redcap. I am leader of my people. I am troll-friend. The truth of stone has brought me here."
Every tiny jeweled eye turned to her, and a chittering question followed. Needlemaw told them of the statue of the dancing lady, and in the silence that followed only the waterfall spoke.
"I knew that statue," the grimalkin queen said softly. "She came across the sea as gift of peace and joy. She saw the mortal palace grow from a kitten of rough stone and mud and timber to the great prowling beast it is today. She danced for joy through every season and storm. She would always offer us a dry spot under her veils to sleep safe when the rain and the fog came."
"She didnae regret her destruction," Needlemaw crouched down, wrapping her long, spindly arms around her. "She was grateful to have a voice at the end, to be able to speak her truth. And I am a redcap. But 'twill not be the same, seeing the fountain and the bench and the empty plinth. I will ken all is not as it should be. And I'll ken why." She looked up to find that even the closed stone blossoms had turned to face her. "He who gave ye this duty did that, because she were at hand and he didnae care what became of her. What matters the slow, seeping life of stone to one such as he? But I am troll-friend. And so is the one he keeps prisoner. We ken the difference."
There was silence.
A single pair of eyes winked out.
Like a slow, measured tide, every amethyst blossom drew up tightly closed, every pair of ruby eyes disappeared, until the golden, captive sunlight was once again the only light all around them. Needlemaw blew out a low breath and touched the portal gingerly, felt no give of magic to it. "Maybe we can get ye out if'n he comes back and gets in a huff," she murmured. "There's been enough death that I'm beginning to feel bloated of it."
"What an astonishing thing to hear from a redcap," the grimalkin queen replied, leaping onto her shoulder. "And not reassuring, even for the mad."
They stepped across the dormant archway, into an exquisite summer clearing. Needlemaw paused, unsure. To capture sunlight in a jar was one thing, and simple enough to do. But the woodland that surrounded her was real, full of the warmth and the rich scents of summer. The dappled light coming through the leaves was real.
"No breeze, no birds, no bugs." The queen pointed out. "This place has frozen still."
"Adam!"
The scream launched Needlemaw into a run before even she knew she'd surged forward, the grimalkin queen digging her claws in just to stay in place and the rest of the grimalkin racing soundless and deadly behind the redcap. They startled no rabbits, no squirrels. They passed the bones of a deer, long gone brittle and yellow with age. Needlemaw ran, dropping to all fours, teeth bared and hands curled to rend, the wind of her passage baring her narrow, bony face and the terrifying yellow lanterns of her eyes.
She skid to a halt at the edge of a beautiful, perfectly round meadow ringed with a riot of flowers. The water ran in a clear, tiny brook through the center of it, splashing and whispering over white, silvery stones, and at last Needle realized who had carried Linden's shout out of their prison and to the surface. "Linden!"
"Needle!" Linden wept, and the redcap would have murdered for them on the spot. Canemore had trapped them like a bird, in an exquisite golden birdcage that hung from nothing but a shimmering of magic in the rich summer air. It was just big enough that Linden could stand up, but only just. At the moment the young fey was a heap on the cushion-lined bottom, but they threw their arms out, hands outstretched, and bars or not the redcap swept them up into a tight hug.
"There ye are, ye wee green thing!" she gasped, leaning her forehead to Linden's crown as much as the bars allowed. "There ye are, finally, finally. Och." She merely held Linden as they sobbed terror and fury and impotence, brushing back the fine white hair.
"Needle, he's not coming, he won't come."
"Linden, he cannae hear ye -"
"He always hears me!"
"- because this isnae real."
Linden went still and Needlemaw gestured. "'Tis the place he wrought to woo and trick the mortal queen. This garden, these woods, 'tis all underground, deep and deep under an Old Place. 'Tis all borrowed sunlight and froze-forever green. I'll wager me cap 'tis why he'll nae let ye touch it, or ye'd have known it for the false bit it is."
Linden frowned. "You heard me."
"Nay." From her shoulder, the grimalkin queen leapt onto Linden's lap. "Boul heard ye. He heard the water whispering; 'tis the water that brought yuir voice to him, and he who brought the tale to me. And 'tis been a touch of a fight getting to ye, until I found worthy allies."
Linden looked down at the grimalkin. The grimalkin looked up at her, and dipped her head. "To know you alive is a secret both powerful and glad, Danu child," she said. In spite of themselves, Linden smiled a little, and reached out to rub the queen's head, who began to purr.
"Now, how -" Needlemaw leaned back, pulling on the bars. There was no visible lock that she could see, or she'd have charmed it open, but then if it had been that easy she was pretty certain Linden would have been free already. She rattled the cage and bit the bars, snarling. The grimalkin leapt and clung, trying to use their meager weight to budge it. Nothing worked.
"There's no lock, I looked. I wasn't awake when he brought me here, but I've tried everything to get out." Linden frowned. "He mucks with time, too. It's been summer forever in this place, and my heart knows that's wrong..." When they saw the shock in what little was visible of Needlemaw's features, Linden's voice went to a strangled whisper. "Needlemaw."
"I -" Needlemaw felt choked.
"Needle, how long?"
The redcap's mouth worked and worked until she could speak. "'Tis Adam's eighteenth birthday today."
Linden stared, aghast. "A year?! A year! How could you all search and not find me for a year -!"
"Linden, we've thought ye dead a year."
Linden went so pale the last of their childhood freckles showed on the rich brown of their skin. "A year. A year. Needle, did they -"
"They didnae. Adam did. He marched up to the woods this morning and called on them for his test." Needlemaw saw Linden's fingers go white on the bars. "He means war. He means their destruction for yuir death."
Linden screamed, high and broken like a hawk, and rattled the bars as hopelessly, as angrily, as the redcap. "Get me out!" They struggled for a few more minutes until fury gave way to despair and Linden wept, sprawled on the cushions of their cage, Needlemaw brushing their hair and the grimalkin pressed tight against their body. "Do you know the secret of opening my cage?" Linden rubbed angrily at their face. "I don't have much I can offer, but I can find something, if you do."
"We would give it freely, Danu-child. We hate cages and captors far more than we love secrets." The grimalkin queen licked Linden's face clean with a harsh, pink tongue. "But we do not have this one."
Linden sighed, and buried their face in the dark gray fur. "Needlemaw, are you still my guardian?"
"Aye, he never took that oath from me."
"Are you still my friend?"
"Until my teeth crack and my talons dull."
"Alright." Linden sat up straight and looked at the grimalkin. "I won't ask you to be mine. I won't ask you to be my friends. I will ask for your help in exchange for a secret that is mine alone. The secret of iron."
Every ear perked up.
Linden told them what they needed done, took their suggestions, added to a plan they were shaping up on the fly. The grimalkin raced off to do their bidding, and Needlemaw, kneeling by the cage, ached to see the yearning in those more-fey-than-fey features. "It won't be fast enough," she admitted, "and I'm sorry for that."
"Fast enough for... what? For Adam's test?" Linden smiled a little. "I've never worried about his test. I've always known he'd make it, if he wanted to. But I can't let him go to war. I can't let him get swallowed up by hatred." They sighed. "I need one more thing from you, Needlemaw."
"Name it."
"I need the knife I gave you." Linden blew out a low breath. "I can't fight him like the stoat or the hawk or the eel. It's not enough. So I will fight him like a mortal. He won't catch me unawares again."
Needle nodded, and drew the iron knife Adam had given Linden, and Linden her, back when news of the war had first come. It was little more than a letter opener, decorative and slim and tiny, and it had bought her more victories than she'd ever thought she'd ever claim. "Dinnae hurt yuirself with it."
Linden smiled, and took the sea-ivory handle in a bark-covered palm. "Never that. I'll be safe as trees with it."
The Fairy And The Prince #61 & #62 & #63 & #64 & #65
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
Originally posted 2/15/2023
The grimalkin found it where Linden had told them it would be. A pounce and a tiny shriek later, and the last of the blue pixies was dropped before them in the cage, unharmed but for the spit on its wings and the panicked hummingbird beating of its heart.
It had not gone well for it. It was barely bigger than Linden's smallest finger, its wings tattered and worn, its light dim. The grimalkin had found it by the keening sounds of its mourning, like a dove crying out for the death of summer. With the green flock gone to the woods and under Linden's protection, with the golden flock all but gone and the last one a savage knight beholden to the mortal prince, there had been no one to distract the much more numerous violet flock from preying on their weaker kin. It was alone, and afraid.
Linden scooped it gently up from the heap where it had fallen, uncaring and unwilling to pick itself up, and cradled it close to their chest, humming the songs the summer wind had taught them. Slowly, the pixie drew itself up, wings slicked down. "Eat me, then," it said wearily.
"No," Linden offered the tips of their bark-covered fingers. "I am no pixie, little blue light. I will not hunt you, I will not kill you, I will not eat you. Nothing and no one will harm you, not here, not with me." It occurred to Linden that this might be how Needlemaw felt, except the redcap would have appreciated the invitation. They'd sent her away to tend to her people, and how she'd fussed and grumbled. But it really did mean no one there was terribly interested in eating a tiny starveling of a pixie.
The pixie straightened up, clinging to those sharp wooden talons. "What do you want, then? I'm not yours. I'm not anyone's anymore."
"Would you like to be?"
The pixie sighed hugely, hands and feet tangling up in a cat's cradle of fingers and toes. "No one wants pixies. That's the only reason they let us be, after the Big Fight. The others all think we won and they had to give us our freedom. We know - I know it's because they never wanted us to begin with."
"I took your kin in. I named them mine. I could take you, name you mine as well."
"But I wouldn't be me!" The pixie protested. "I would be of the forest, today, tomorrow, some day. Eventually my light would be green and I would be of the woods and the leaves of summer and I wouldn't be me anymore. I wouldn't be of the hidden places, of the secret roads, of the deep caves and the lightless depths."
"True," Linden agreed. "What if I told you there's someone who would take you as you are, name you theirs. Guard you and protect you, be fair to you. Someone who would value your knowledge of the hidden places and the secret roads."
"There's no one like that," the pixie declared, but its light had grown to a deep, rich indigo glow, tinged in places with violet and yellow and white, like a wild iris.
"There is one. If I tell you who it is, if I tell you how to reach her, would you go to her? The way will be dangerous, and you've already been through so much."
"I would too! I can fly any path, I can learn any way." The pixie's tattered wings rose in answer to the challenge. "What do you want for this way? Where does it end, who holds the other end?"
"All I want is for you to tell the tale of how you found out when you arrive. Tell the tale, and give this to her." Linden gave the pixie a small linden flower, plucked from their head. "I am giving you a most important secret, pixie. You alone. Not the grimalkin, not anyone else. That's how important this is. Do you understand?"
The pixie nodded its featureless head enthusiastically, holding tight onto the little white flower, too small to crush it but strong enough to cling to it. Linden leaned close, and whispered to it, and after a moment the bright blue light arrowed away.
"You've learned already the true nature of secrets," the grimalkin queen, sprawled under Linden's cage, sounded amused as she licked her belly.
Linden slowly fell face-down on the cushions, feeling so very tired of it all. After a moment they reached out and wiggled their fingers at the queen, who batted lazily at them. "I have been a mortal's ill-kept secret so long," they replied at last. "It's funny, really; he would have shouted me from the rooftops but that he wanted me safe as trees, wild and free, no matter what it cost him. The first time, they locked him up, and still he never told." As if talk of Adam had given them energy, they sat up; a tiny, ruby-eyed stone spider had found their fingertips and was running up Linden's arm. Beneath the cage and through the forever green grass of that frozen summer place, its kin were laboring, dragging along the buds from the stone archway, stone petals closed tightly over amethyst hearts. The shadow the cage cast was littered with such blossoms; it had never occurred to Linden, until Needlemaw had told them of their search, that the instrument of their freedom was as close as the door to their prison.
Linden lifted their hand and spread their bark-covered fingers to give the spider a jungle where it dangled and wove, fiercely defending its haphazard weaving in mock combat against two more of its kin. "A secret's only a secret if you want what someone else already knows and won't tell you." The spiders chittered something in their own language, and Linden looked somewhat stricken. "Is it wrong of me, that I wish he would stay away until I'm free?"
"No." The grimalkin leapt up and slipped into Linden's lap, purring for comfort. The spiders climbed down and leapt fearlessly away. "Yours is not a way of pointless violence, Danu-child. Yours is not the whim to play with your prey. Yours is the way of the wolf and the stoat, who kill quickly. The way of the oak and the linden tree, who feed on the dead and give them life again. It is not wrong that you don't want this fight."
Linden seemed to think on that, and then reached down through the bars of their gilded cage, as close to the grass-covered ground as they could. "Grow," they whispered.
Scattered everywhere under the cage, the stone blossoms opened; vines began to writhe away from them, thin as hair, delicate as young pea tendrils. They rose up as if Linden were the sun every plant ever strives to reach; Linden let them catch onto their fingertips and drew them up, up until they just brushed the bottom of their cage.
A gossamer stalk reached the bottom of a golden bar and twined around it.
Linden rocked back on their heels, watching. They had known patience all of their life. In the eternal dance of the seasons, in the slow-seeping life that opened blossoms and grew leaves, that crowned oak and linden with green, they had learned the graceful, immense, unhurried power of the green, of the root that slips into a crack and shatters stone, of the bark that grows over an iron ring and renders harmless what is deadly to all things fey.
The vine wasn't just green, it was stone. And from Boulders-for-Brains, her littlest brother, Linden had learned that stone, moving with a world's heartbeat, living in currents that might span a hundred, a thousand turns of the seasons, was just as patient, just as implacable, and just as infinitely strong.
They sat cross-legged, and watched the vine creep.
***
Sluagh offered to take Adam with them as well, but Adam had a very deep suspicion as to where he was, and half a plan as to how he might find his way to Canemore. He was fairly certain he'd have to brave the Prince Beyond the Woods himself to see Beli restored, because no one else he could think of was as likely to say 'no' out of hand. Canemore had to know that Adam had reasoned or paid his way through most of the trials by that point. He had to know the trap with Sluagh had failed. He would be waiting for a chance to step in and make Adam's trial a little more novel by meddling.
Adam meant to meddle first. Beli insisted on giving him back his jacket, and he brought with him one of the lamps from the library as he roamed the vast hallways of that immense keep. The more he saw of it, the more he grew certain this was the place Canemore had used to try and woo the Dowager; everywhere he turned he saw mirror-images of the palace made more grandiose, more beautiful, more outlandishly astonishing. Canemore had taken the Queen's home, which she loved, and made it perfect, like something from a fairy tale.
He wanted to find the then-Princess' rooms. He would have bet anything, and he was indeed betting everything, that there would be a Many-Steps there, a portal between the keep and some place, unseen, unknown, discreet and close to the palace. If everything went well, he was hoping he could use it to get himself back to the palace before the deadline to his trial caught up with him, because he was also fairly certain he was very, very far into the woods and would never make it in time otherwise.
But he also wanted to find whatever Canemore might have claimed were his quarters, because Adam suspected that would be the real entrance and exit to the keep. No true royal rooms beyond, but a direct line to wherever the Sidhe Prince might call home.
He went up, and up, and wondered at the scenes he saw from every window, each one different in season and light and landscape. In the end, far more curious than cautious, he reached out to one, and his gloved fingers found stone, cold and unyielding, underneath. Was the entire keep underground? How far down could it possibly reach, given the tower he was supposedly climbing? Thinking of possibilities, trying to dredge up every tale and bedtime story and bit of gossip he'd ever heard about the other Princes' trials, kept him busy; he forced himself to keep busy, because otherwise he was going to sit down to mourn his losses and he was not likely to get back up again.
Trout, earning its freedom.
Boul and Needle, home safe from one war only to find their friend, their brother, calling for another.
Linden. Oh, Linden.
Adam reached the end of a vast spiraling stairwell where the windows all looked out to vast forests and horizons full of dark oceans, and had to stop because he suddenly couldn't catch his breath. It occurred to him that he'd not really breathed, not once, since the moment when Canemore had shattered his world. He wrapped his fingers around the tiny signet-shield in his pocket until the edges bit into his flesh through the leather, and forced himself to focus. He closed his eyes, sharpened his hatred, and moved forward.
He found Canemore's room first. Before the immense double door, Adam paused; did he want to face the Sidhe Prince without even a possible escape route?
Did he have time, or the strength, to go looking up and down more towers, if the then-Princess' room happened to be in a different tower? His legs ached just to think about it; the ankle that the catfish and the will o' the wisp had bit didn't like him one bit already, and it was making dire threats that got louder the more the prince thought about all that potential climbing.
"Fine, then," he muttered into the dusty silence. He opened the lamp wide and held it up.
The door was the darkest oak. There was a thick, plush runner before it, depicting scenes full of wolves and ravens and black coiling serpents surrounding a deep green ivy with flowers so blue they shone like jewels in the weaving. The same scenes repeated all over both sides of the door, carved with such exquisite skill and beauty that they looked alive.
Adam leaned back and stared more closely.
One of the ravens on the door blinked. The tongue of one of the snakes tipped out. The leaves and flowers stirred in a breeze. He squinted, trying to pierce through the glamour, but there was none: the door was alive in some way. When his lamp grew too close one of the snakes reared up and struck it, hissing, and only quick reflexes saved Adam from being left lost in the darkness. "I beg your pardon," he offered politely, drawing the lamp away. "I meant no threat. I was admiring your beauty."
"Admire from afar," a sibilant voice replied. The entire door was coming alive. "Who are you? What are you? You may not pass."
"I seek an audience with Prince Canemore. You, his most loyal guard, surely know where he is. Barring that, where is the Many-Steps that leads to him?"
"He is not here. Who are you? What are you? You may not pass."
Adam popped his lips thoughtfully. Unlike a fairy he was not bound to answer, whether he liked it or not, if the door asked a third time. He also didn't have to be truthful. But being honest and being polite had availed him by far better than anything else, barring old friendships. "I am Prince Adam of the Realm," he admitted. One of the serpents' heads had detached from the wood and was staring at him while the rest of the door moved through its own unknown cycle of life. "I am a visitor here. I seek Prince Canemore. Barring that, I will cross the portal that leads to him, and seek him on the other side."
The ravens fluttered from one side of the door to the other. The serpent spoke. "The portal lies beyond. But you may not pass, Prince Adam of the Realm."
"May I ask you why?"
"You are not welcomed here. You do not belong."
"I beg your pardon, I do." Adam switched the lamp from one hand to another and, with his teeth, pulled off his glove, holding his hand up. In the golden flame of the lamp, his signet ring gleamed with the tiny sapphire and the coat of arms of the Dowager Queen. "I am kin to your mistress, her niece's son. I may not claim the name of my family, but I cannot wash their blood off my veins. And I respectfully ask that you let me pass."
Every wood-carved eye met another as the door suddenly found itself faced with this unexpected development. "Prove it," the resonant baritone of a wolf challenged.
Adam made a fist of his hand until he felt the wounds the will o' the wisp's teeth had left behind crack open. Without hesitation, holding the lamp behind him, he reached up and slapped that hand over the wolf's carved muzzled and lolling tongue. Every creature on the wood startled away, and he'd already taken a step back when the wolf's fangs snapped shut.
"Fool of a beast," the snake hissed at it.
"Is he?" one of the ravens asked. "Is he then?"
The wolf licked its chops a few times.
The double oak doors swung open with the creaking sounds of too much time being shut. "We welcome back our mistress in her kin's blood," it whispered in many voices. "We have long waited for her to return."
"I'm sorry that you have waited so long. You have been so faithful to your duty as guardians, and I thank you."
The door swung open fully, and Adam lifted his lamp onto a room that glittered. He took a step in and cold slammed into him like an unexpected attack. Everything, every piece of furniture, the curtains, every book in the shelves, every knick-knack on the tables, everything was covered in glittering ice. The immense windows had been bereft of their glamour or had never had it, the bare stone covered in jagged ice. Moving closer, Adam saw where gouges had been taken out of the ice, as if fangs or talons had bitten into it, desperate to get to whatever was beneath it. "This is not how this room is meant to look," he dared to guess.
"No," the door agreed. "Our master grew angry once, long ago, and threatened to destroy it. His sister, the Queen, forbid it. When he would not listen, she simply made it impossible for him to disobey."
"Ah," Adam said simply. He put the lamp down for a moment so he could get his glove back on, and when he picked it back up the light of it was nearly guttering, and the cold of the metal radiated from it even through the leather of his battered glove. He couldn't forgive Canemore. Never that. But he'd also been speaking the truth when he'd faced off against the twins, back at the woods: rage would have blinded him; sorrow would have made him deaf. Hatred could agree that the Sidhe Prince had been treated so very, very wrongly by his sister, and still wish him and everything he'd ever touched erased forever from history and memory.
The ice made the portal entirely too easy to find; it was the only thing in the room not encased in magical ice. It was an immense mirror, a single polished piece taller than Adam, a refined oval set on a black marble frame carved in the likeness of thorns. Adam reached out to touch the surface and it rippled.
The thorns lashed out faster than the snake and the wolf, and he pulled back his arm with a jerk and a hiss, fabric ripping.
Who are you? What are you? You may not pass.
"I am Prince Adam of the Realm. I am kin to the mistress of this keep." Adam examined the rip in his clothing. The leather of his hunting jacket had not stopped the thorns, but they had snagged on the woolen just beneath, and missed his fine linen shirt, taking a thread but nothing else. Barely. The edges of both layers looked brittle and blackened. If that had been his other arm, where the linen sleeve was missing, the thorns would have reached his skin. "I seek Prince Canemore on the other side, and I would ask that you please let me pass."
Like the doors, the portal seemed to pause at the unexpected information that, in some fashion or another, the young princess they had been made to serve had returned to demand that service from them. But then the thorns resumed their slow, creeping motion around the mirror. Who are you? What are you? You may not pass.
Adam popped his mouth thoughtfully; he wasn't surprised, though disappointment did color his mood briefly. He hadn't expected it to be easy, obviously, but he'd hoped all the same. "If I may ask, other than Canemore, who is it that may pass through you?"
The Prince may pass. The Queen may pass. The friends of the Courts may pass, the mirror replied. Who are you? What are you? You may not pass.
Adam laughed dryly. Of course Canemore would phrase it so, knowing no mortal was likely to ever meet such terms. "I am Adam," he said simply. "I have sung to stone and listened to its whispers with a troll. I have shared fire and food and drink with the chieftain of the redcaps. I have known the kindness of the Smallfolk. I held, for a little while, the fierce loyalty of a pixie. I am a friend of the Courts, and I ask that you let me pass."
The thorns went still and a vast ripple went through the mirror, as if someone had dropped a stone in the middle of a still pond. Like the door, it had not expected to be met on its own terms and, like it, it offered the same challenge. Prove it.
The young Prince dragged the leather cord with the opalized shell from around his neck, and pulled it over his head. From a pocket he drew another leather cord, brittle with age, where a single blackened knucklebone hung. From his other pocket he drew the tiny, scarred signet-shield and the gold-and-ruby button in its bit of greasy gray horse hair. He held them out in one hand, palm open, and lifted the lamp. The mirror caught their reflection, for all that it refused to show Adam's at all. "Gifts of friendship, of the heart, freely given, freely taken."
The pixie's should be with the pixie.
"The pixie is free. No one owns a pixie, no one should. It owed me a debt, and paid it fully. I don't think it ever planned to become my friend," he admitted, and something tried to well up inside him, strangling him, threatening to shatter the vast black field of his hatred. "But my friend it was. And friends do not hold each other imprisoned. Do you... Would you know if it's alright?"
The thorns went very still once again. When they started moving again, it was to draw away from the silvery surface. We are a mirror of passage, not of seeing. We cannot speak of what we do not know. Tiny golden blooms, like luminous wild roses, began to sprout all over the black marble thorns. Enter, friend of the Courts, and be welcomed.
"Thank you," Adam replied, taking the time it took to put everything back to also master himself once more. He drew the black ice of his hate like armor all around him, and stepped into the silver.
***
He came out onto an exquisite night garden, the path pristine white sand flanked by perfect layers of glowing plants, each artfully arranged so that their glowing light highlighted the darkness with beauty, from the lowest layer of deep and tiny violets to rising sprigs of yellow and orange amaranth. Even the trees were spaced at regular intervals, mushrooms growing and glowing precisely so on the trees. To Adam, used to the wild and messy beauty of Linden's woods, the arrangement seemed so painfully artificial that he winced.
Somewhere in the dark beautiful voices laughed in careless merriment. Adam sighed wearily and followed the sound.
There were less of them than he'd expected, or perhaps some were missing. In a lovely, equally precise, artfully and artificially wild clearing, on benches and elegant chairs, lounged nine of the Sidhe. The Queen sat on a throne she likely thought very plain and cozy, a thing of wind-carved driftwood draped in vines with tiny, gleaming silver leaves and sprays of white flowers. Next to her, on a low stool, sat Baen, whispering something to the Queen that was making Conemara giggle. On the Queen's other side, on a chair of darkest wood carved just as the oak doors had been, sat her twin, perfectly like her and perfectly her opposite, from their mismatched eyes to the colors that defined them. He was taking a drink from a beautiful young woman almost identical to the lady Baen but wrought in blues, from the nearly gray pallor of her skin to the perfect indigo of her tumbling, curling hair.
An immense bronze brazier burned at the center of the clearing. Small brown creatures covered here and there with shaggy black hair were struggling to load wood into it, though the flames very obviously frightened them greatly. How very like them, Adam thought, to make others do work they could have done with the slightest fraction of their power, just on the off-chance that something terrible would happen.
"Toadfeet, how lazy are your people!" Canemore cried out, to peals of beautiful, cruel laughter. "Come, come, come already. More wood! How are we to see our lovely prince's demise without flames to gaze into!"
"You could ask him," Adam said calmly, walking into the clearing.
His voice cut through the joy like an executioner's blade falling. Canemore surged to his feet. "You!"
"Me," Adam agreed mildly.
"Prince Adam," Conemara said, motionless in her throne. "You look weary. You look worn. Perhaps you should rest. Refresh yourself."
Adam felt the tremendous pull of the Queen's power in those words, and took a moment to figure out what she was doing. He smiled humorlessly when he realized she was being exactingly honest, simply because it served her to be: all she had to do was making him rest until just a little past mid-morning, and he'd lose by default. "I thank her Majesty for her concern," he replied. "Fortunately, I have my hatred to keep me warm and keep me going. It's doing a grand job of it so far."
"So I see," she clipped out.
"How dare you come to this place," Canemore snarled.
"I didn't have much of a choice, actually. Your fault," Adam pointed out casually. Canemore jerked back, and his twin gave him a venomous glare. Adam held up three fingers. "Three steps, always. Culli-maid, Beli and Beli's eyes, before I can make my way home. Except you never told me what to do to restore my friend's eyes on his head, only that you could and would. I'm sure it simply slipped your mind. I'm sure you did not mean to sabotage the test on your favor. An honest mistake," Adam gritted out. He'd moved forward as he spoke, and he saw the nearest Sidhe recoil from him, from the absolute force of a mortal emotion they couldn't understand bleeding out of him in a jagged, deadly cloud. He was a predator whose attention none of them wanted to draw. "Nothing more. But it does require me to seek... clarity."
"Canemore," Conemara hissed.
"He had a sword to my throat. I may have... become distracted. You were supposed to have ice-bound everything in that room."
She merely pouted at her twin to be called out so openly before her Court, and looked away.
"What do you want, what is your price?" Canemore asked through gritted teeth.
Adam sighed in exasperation.
"There is no price," another voice said, the lady Baen rising from her spot next to the Queen, examining Adam closely. "He means exactly what he has said."
"Baen -" Conemara chided.
"He's not of the Court, my Queen." The fairy maid shrugged daintily. "When he speaks, he does not speak as a mortal. He speaks to you. To him. To me. To us. He means exactly what he has said."
The twins stared at her, and then at each other for a long moment before they turned the matched attention of their mismatched gaze onto Adam. "You were meant to make your way to the keep's hunter's den," Conemara suddenly rose from her throne and moved sedately to stand by her brother. "There you would have found... someone to challenge. Perhaps my brother. Perhaps someone else. For you must return to your home a lord, mortal prince. Your horse must carry you to your doorstep, your tiercel must shriek your triumphant return to the eaves."
"Ah, so his Highness meant to make me lose before I even started," Adam said mildly.
"You dare -!"
Conemara checked her twin's wild rush forward with a delicate hand on his shoulder. "The test is fair."
"It is not. It never was. I don't doubt that I could have found your brother as I found Culli-maid among so many others. But Majesty, my horse is sitting in a stall in the Royal stables, clear across the woods. Were you going to account for me fetching and saddling it? And if you did, were you going to account for me riding a weary mount against your brother's fresh one?" Adam spread his hands. "The test was never fair. Not from its inception. I begin to wonder if your brother left this part of his plan out on purpose after all."
Conemara cocked a delicate brow at her twin in question. "I did not!" he hissed at her.
She seemed to think. "And how would you have known my brother from any others?"
"Him? Easier than Culli-maid, Majesty. He left something behind to help me with Beli." Adam rifled through his pocket. "Would you like to see? Here, catch." Without giving anyone a chance to catch on to what he was doing, he threw something at Conemara through the air in an easy arc.
The Queen's hands were only halfway up to do exactly that when her brother stepped forward between her and Adam, and swatted the iron key aside. It clattered onto the perfectly dewy grass. Canemore grabbed his hand and curled over it, panting in agony.
"I don't even know how you put it where you did without hurting yourself," Adam admitted.
"It did hurt," Canemore gritted out.
Adam spread his hands and stared at the shocked Queen. "His test, his plan, his making, his tools. No one else would have known the key was iron. No one but him." His smile was hard. "Without you there, he would have been the only one to flinch." He turned to look at the circle of stunned fairies all around him. "I have been honest. I have made this story interesting, haven't I? I have used cleverness and manners, and I have been honest. I would hate to think that the story isn't what it is not because of me, but because of... someone else."
"You will have your test." Canemore drew himself up proudly straight, his voice the wolf's snarl from the door. "You will have a horse, a steed the equal of mine. You will have your chance. You don't even have to win the race, Prince Adam." The Sidhe Prince smiled, and his rage shone in his mismatched eyes. "All you have to do is finish it, and I will restore your friend's eyes. He will never remember the pain -"
"Ah!" Adam lifted a hand. "His memories are not mine to give or yours to take. "Put his eyes back. Nothing else unless he asks, and the gods know I hope he knows better by now. Just so I know I'm understanding this. I ride the horse you give me from here to -"
"The edge of the woods, where you met us in challenge."
"And you restore Beli. And after that, I ride up to the palace, horse and tiercel, and if everyone of my household is as I left them -"
"You are fit for crown and throne," Conemara whispered.
"And I'm sure this horse is perfectly safe to ride, and not a wild deer or something equally unaware of saddle and bridle, as like to toss me off and trample me as one."
"It is a horse," Canemore replied. "Broken to bit and bridle, servant to stirrup and saddle." His tone turned mockingly polite. "Would it help if it should seem like the mortal prince's charger?"
"The more the better," Adam agreed blandly. "One is always more comfortable with one's own tools."
"Then so it shall," Canemore assured him with a thin, malevolent smile. "My sister, if I may?"
"Go," Conemara replied. The Prince threw his arms up and most of the Court rose with gleeful exclamations to follow him. She waited until Canemore had vanished, her eyes never leaving Adam. "My offers stand."
"So do my answers, Majesty," he replied in the same calm tone, brushing at the utter mess he'd ended up so far.
"You cannot mean war. What does one as young as you even know of it?"
"Only what I've read," Adam admitted, "and that is cruel enough. War is a plague, Majesty. War taints a land, it taints the people upon it. Children will be born who will have never fought it and still resent it, resent what it will take from them, parents and homes and comfortable, content lives. If you had fought with your people you would know that one must do everything, anything, to avoid war. And yet, thanks to your brother and you, here we are."
"There must be another price," she protested, her voice faint.
"Offer it," he invited.
The Queen was silent. She moved back to sit on her throne, and her handmaid was left lingering, staring at the mortal prince with her fathomlessly black eyes.
"Lady Baen," Adam greeted her.
"Prince Adam," she sighed at him. "I had not felt this thing inside you before. Your anger, I tasted that. Your courage, your fear. But this, this is different and new, and I don't know it." She pursed her pale mouth. "I don't like it."
"Neither do I, to be fair," he admitted.
"But it's inside you. It's yours. Cast it from you if you don't care for it."
"Lady Baen, if I did that with every part of me I don't care for, pretty soon I'd be the most terrible thing I can think of." He smiled thinly at her. "I'd be like all of you." Adam drew a deep breath. "Have you cast away many parts of yourself?"
"Yes. They did not please me at the time."
"You took a stone from a river. And the course below changed forever. Even if you put it back, the water will never be the same. When you and your kin offer to undo something so it can't be remembered, so it's as if it never happened, that's what you're really offering: to put the stone back. And it might look like everything's back to normal, but that's only because no one outside it can see what the river used to be, before you took the stone out at all. Do you believe the river truly forgets?"
She frowned at him, looking between him and the Queen. Her head cocked minutely. Her frown suddenly deepened. "It was not offered as an insult," she suddenly said.
"I know," Adam replied. "And that is why I have not taken it as one. But my hatred, lady." He couldn't help a small, rueful sound of bitter amusement. "That stone can't be put back. I'd take that. But there's no stone to put back, and with it gone my river's nothing but hatred. Your prince shattered the dam upon it, and even I didn't know how great the press of water was behind it."
"Baen, do not speak to him," the Queen suddenly commanded, and she rushed to Conemara's side.
The riding party returned with raucous, gleeful shouts. Some of them were already mounted, dressed in fine hunting finery. The horses were exquisite, palfreys all, dappled in brown and gray, roans in blue and strawberry. Their eyes, Adam marked, were full of a black, black light that tried to tug at all the hidden, buried fears inside the prince's mind, teasing them out like daydreams and idle fancies. He resisted the urge to truly look at them.
Among those flawless, elegant mounts, his elderly bay charger looked as out of place as a goose in a mew. It was brought to him by a creature made of glowing flowers and leaves and Canemore's magic, something that was no more real, Adam guessed, than the horse's seeming itself. "That's not my horse," he said at once.
Canemore, atop an exquisite black mare, laughed indulgently. "Of course not, Prince Adam. I thought that was clear."
"I misspoke, I apologize," Adam corrected himself. "His Highness asked if it would help to give me the seeming of my charger, a familiar sight, a trusted companion. It would. To give me something I can so readily see it's not my horse doesn't help at all. If anything, it hinders."
Canemore looked down at the young mortal, his expression caught somewhere between irritation and disbelief. He looked at his companions and scoffed. "Ah, I beg your indulgence, Highness. Perhaps I rushed my work. Is that better?"
In the brief moment when Adam had looked away from the charger to Canemore and back, subtle, ineffable details had changed. "Close," Adam admitted. "But that's not my horse."
A couple of voices tittered. Mirroring the rising impatience the Sidhe Prince refused to betray, Canemore's mare stamped sharply. "There's only so much one can do in a hurry," Canemore said tightly.
"I ask too much of the Prince," Adam said with utmost courtesy. "How callous of me, forgive me."
Canemore hissed. The false charger suddenly reared, screaming in a voice belonging to no horse, but when the attendant fought it back down it landed with a whinny and a snort and the immense solidity of a real horse. "Does it satisfy now?"
Adam drew a deep breath and held it, moving closer and taking off his glove. At first sight it was his charger, down to the nick on its hoof where it was forever rubbing at its halter, to the wicked scar over its shoulder where a young and inexperienced princeling had dented its hide, if only barely, with a shield. Adam brushed the velvety, dark nose, ran the palm of his hand over lips and bit, felt the fit of the bridle around jaws and ears. He checked the mane, free of elflocks, and ran his fingers along the powerful muscles of neck and shoulders and chest. The charger's eyes were rimmed in white, and its heart beat like a smithy's hammer. Adam checked the girth, the saddle, and ran his hand down every leg, feeling the swell at every joint of immense age. His charger was an elderly creature he should have retired that year, or the year before; affection had kept him from doing so.
And in rising to Adam's unspoken challenge, whatever mount Canemore had given him now shared in those thing that immortals didn't understand, the aches and vagaries of old age. The horse he was being given was old. It was blind in one eye and nearly blind on the other, painfully arthritic, spoiled on an abundance of food and a lack of true work. It would never win a race against a work pony, let alone the fairy mounts.
How long that illusion might hold back the true creature hiding behind the glamour, Adam didn't know. But he had a chance to at least get on the saddle and not immediately be killed, and he'd take it. "By his Highness' leave, my own charger stands before me," he admitted graciously, cementing the illusion; he already knew it was powerful enough to have changed something in the real creature that it had not wanted changed to begin with; thus the rearing and screaming.
Canemore bowed on his saddle, and the Court cheered him as Adam put his glove back on, swung onto the saddle and picked up the reins, tugging lightly on them. He'd always been velvet-handed with his horse; the charger jerked at the tug, silk-mouthed as the real thing.
"To the woods!" Canemore shouted, throwing his head back and howling, his mare rearing up and shrieking a challenge. She leapt forward, and every horse raced after her with the same terrible scream.
Adam tried to hold the charger back, but there was immense power in the mare's voice, and the gelding fought him, clamping down on the bit and yanking on the reins, crow-hopping forward. This was a fight Adam knew he'd lose eventually, and he'd rather delay the losing as long as he could. He let go of the reins, bent down low against the false charger's neck, and let it run.
***
It didn't take long for the charger to tire. Other than the mandatory classes and some occasional longing, Adam had let the original horse enjoy its unspoken retirement. The copy, perforce, was just as out of shape. When he pulled on the reins once again, it willingly wound down to a heavy trot, and then a walk, blowing hard, sides heaving.
Adam looked around. He was in a part of the woods he didn't recognize, but that was not surprising. The Court Beyond the Woods they were, and beyond the woods they'd been. To be back in them to begin with was a small gift he'd willingly take. He closed his eyes; he trusted no stars, and he had no one he could ask for directions, not even his battered heart. After the trip with Sluagh he was so turned around he couldn't tell which way to the palace, his true home.
But there was a lodestone that had never failed him, not even in Hunting Nights.
Stay, the linden tree had whispered to him once, the only tree that Adam had ever heard. The one tree he knew alive in a way no other tree in the woods had ever been.
Help me, Adam called out to it with his mind and his heart and his memories of better, golden times.
A sudden breeze stirred along the unfamiliar canopy above him, making the false charger snort. The wind danced this way and that, touching branches and leaves, carrying away the last dregs left from autumn and winter.
I’m here, came the whisper, familiar as the touch of sun-warm bark on bare feet, the scent of sweet lemon in white flowers, the shade of spring-green leaves.
He tugged the charger toward that distant whisper and spurred it on with a kick and a cry, and his mount surged forward with unexpectedly fresh speed. Adam knew then: the faster he ran, the closer he'd be to destruction.
They leapt over creeks and gullies, over fallen trees and immense, slithering roots. They slid down a muddy, slight slope and the charger suddenly bit down on the bit and cocked its head down, yanking on the reins; if Adam hadn't wrapped them on the pommel of the saddle, it would have ripped them from his hands, and likely ripped him from the saddle.
He yanked hard on the reins, and the silk-mouthed horse it was meant to look like betrayed the horse he was actually riding, neck arched painfully and mouth opened wide at what had to be very unexpected pain. "Run, damn you!" Adam kicked hard, and his mount surged forward with a furious scream, half whinny and half something else. He grabbed for a handful of mane.
It slipped from his gloves and left a greasy smear on the leather, and Adam knew what he was riding then. He half-suspected Canemore had known, as well, that Adam's own ability to defeat glamour would wear away at the enchantment on the nightmare sooner rather than later. Had that been the Sidhe Prince's plan all along?
The nightmare tried to buck him, but stumbled instead and screeched in fury. Old joints would do that to a horse, though, and she was still mostly bound in the charger's glamour, the magic that made her into an arthritic, blind gelding. And with every mistake, every time she tripped up on that glamour, Adam was there to saw on the reins and kick at her sides, to shout that one command, the whisper of the linden tree a lodestone in his mind "Run!"
She nearly peeled him off when she went under a young birch tree, the low branches scraping at his scalp and back, and he cursed her freely. She tried to dash aside and he pulled on the reins as hard as he could, heard a sound of gleeful, vicious triumph come from her: she knew. She knew he wanted them to go one way. She knew all she had to do was go any way but that one. They were running so fast the woods were a blur, the wind a storm roar in his ears. He couldn't hear the linden tree, he couldn't see where they were going.
Suddenly there was a tiny golden light far ahead and to one side, and the high, fierce battle-call of a shrike cut through the roar of her speed. Adam fought the nightmare until she turned toward the light, which blurred away, always ahead of them, always barely visible. Suddenly, he realized he knew the tree he'd just passed: a gracious, older willow growing next to a beautiful, green, grassy beach next to a very still pond.
The nightmare crashed through a wall of rose briars, thorns and vines biting and dragging at Adam, their speed abruptly arrested. She whipped around to try and bite at his legs, and he punched her in the nose. She bucked, and he kicked her. There was still enough of the gelding in her to make her surge forward for a moment at that urging, but suddenly they were before an immense tree, mostly rotted, a true giant of the forest, dead for far longer than Adam had been alive. The immense oak was a mound of mushrooms and young plants, nearly impossible to see.
She gathered herself for the leap; Adam clamped his legs around her barrel and tried to grab onto some part of her, anything. But she was impossibly slick; she could not be held, any more than a dream can when the dreamer awakens. She leapt like a deer and landed like a cat, and Adam went flying over her head, tumbling through the grass and fetching up between the roots of a gnarled young sycamore. All the breath went out of him, and still his wits clamored for him to get up, get his dagger, get his bow, get a weapon, any weapon. This was not a chance-met enemy; this was a foe of the Court Beyond, and she would be his death if he didn't. get. up.
But Adam couldn't breathe, and his legs were shaking from all the strain he'd put on them to keep him on the saddle of the fairy horse. He looked up.
By the fallen, rotting oak, she stared at him, and there was such murder in the cold blackness of her eyes. She was still mostly the charger, the bay with the mismatched socks, but the colors were beginning to bleed out of her, like paint being washed away by rain. She stepped toward him and it was almost as if she were stepping out of the charger, a deadly moth leaving her cocoon behind. Adam scrabbled for his dagger, and she took another step -
Something vast and powerful and so very, very fast slammed into the nightmare from the side and bowled her over. She screamed, and this time there was fear in the sound, and pain a moment later, desperate agony. Adam blinked, frozen, trying to comprehend what had just happened.
The nightmare's shrieks cut off with a sickening gurgle and dreadful finality.
Adam swallowed hard. His questing hand found, out of nowhere, a branch close enough to grip, and he managed a thank you he barely heard himself, coming out of a throat dry and dusty like a croak. The sycamore helped the young prince to his feet, where he wobbled, staring wide-eyed at the darkness in the woods.
It poured out of the darkness like a part of it given shape and purpose and hunger. The mold-splotched white hide no longer sagged; it was fuller, though the ribs showed still and Adam suspected they always would. The eyes were poisonous, vitriolic green in a horse's skull where the jaws were held in place by a few rotting sinews, full of teeth as sharp and broad as daggers.
The kelpie's jaws were clamped around the nightmare's broken neck. Her head hung by a last few shreds of skin and flesh, bouncing against the kelpie's chest. The water-horse was spattered in blood that here and there was a lusterless, dull gray, but for the most part it was the rich crimson of mortal life. The kelpie had caught her while she'd been too much the charger and not enough herself.
The bright green eyes stared. The kelpie, Adam suddenly realized, knew him. It remembered him.
It bowed its head, neck arched. The motion finished tearing the nightmare's head off, and it tumbled to the ground, rolling away.
Adam put his hand in one pocket and bowed back, never taking his eyes off the predator. His fingers found the tiny gold-and-ruby button. Would it serve? Would it help? Would he even know how to use it?
The kelpie eyed the head, ears perking forward. It bent down, got a better grip on the mare's neck, and walked sedately on, making its way back to its pond and dragging its meal effortlessly with it.
Adam slithered down to sit at the base of the sycamore, his knees gone to jelly. "Trout," he rasped. "I got your shield." He'd hardly got the words out when the pixie slammed into his chest, clinging hard to him, its light a blessing in the dark night. "Oh, Trout."
"You said I could!" the pixie twittered, its fluting voice a mix of panic, fury and indignation. "You did-did-did! You did say it! You did! You said I could choose to come back if I did the choosing! You did say it, and I remembered it, I did!"
"You did," Adam agreed. He drew in a deep breath, and the newness of it staggered him, as if until that moment he'd not realized how much his hatred had strangled him. He lifted a hand and Trout rubbed against it like a cat.
"I did!" the pixie declared once again. It had taken it half the night, spent in sorrow and anger and uncertainty, and Trout itself couldn't believe it had remembered something that had happened so many forevers ago, but it had been important. The weight of its importance had felt like ice around its wings. "You're all cut up!" it cried out. "Can't you be left alone for even this long?"
Adam laughed, rusty and heartfelt. "I'm not to be trusted with my own upkeep, Trout, you know that. What sort of prince looks after himself?" He rooted in his pockets until he found it, and rubbed it carefully before he offered it to the pixie. "Will you serve my crown, Trout? What's coming, it's war. I would wish you safe, you know I would. But I will not choose for you. I respect you too much for that."
"I fought a war before. It's not so hard," the pixie scoffed, but it didn't snatch for the signet-shield. Its long, bird-like fingers traced the scrapes on the enameled surface. "You won't send me away again?"
"I can't," Adam assured him. "This time, the only one that can choose if you go or stay is you."
The pixie turned its featureless head up at Adam, then at the shield again, and snatched it up, chewing the rim lightly. "Mine! Mine always."
"Yours," Adam agreed, and fought himself to his feet. "Well, I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable this close to a kelpie's pond, no matter how well fed it might be."
Trout scrabbled up to the familiar perch of Adam's shoulder, wings flicking. "It would be hard to fight the water-horse with just your dagger and my pointy sticks," it agreed.
"A touch." Adam felt himself smiling as he moved toward the oak. Starlight and moonlight and Trout's golden light showed him the way. "I'm hoping the fighting's done for right now. I just need one more thing."
***
Adam found them again by the sound of their merriment; once he drew close enough he saw the gleam of many lights around a circle in the woods, and paused once again just inside the darkness to watch them.
Conemara had joined the rest of the Court at some point, and was bestowing her favor along with her smiles on all of them. Her brother was dancing with a laughing maid with vivid jewels standing out like tiny stars against the pale gray whiteness of her skin, the music of fiddles and flutes coming from seemingly nowhere and everywhere. The lady Baen was sitting, still and watchful, next to her Queen. There were spindly green creatures holding the lamps while they perched on branches and clung to trunks, and more of the small, squat brown creatures carrying around drinks in glass-and-obsidian goblets.
"Watch my back, Trout," Adam said very quietly, and stepped into the light.
A sharp gusting breeze from the woods silenced the music abruptly and nearly blew out the lights. The entire gathering froze. Conemara rose from her throne like a forest adder. "Prince Adam."
"Majesty," Adam replied. She was flawless, exquisite, a perfect and icy vision in silver and white and palest blue. By contrast, Adam was one solid bruise from crown to toes. The walk to that small gathering had left him limping from the ankle that had taken so much abuse. The briars had left every inch of exposed skin covered in tiny, shallow slashes. He was muddy, dusty, covered in grime and crushed vegetation. His hair was windswept and stuck out at odd angles; he ran his gloved fingers through to restore it to some measure of dignity, and offered the Sidhe Queen a bow. "Not late morning, yet, is it?" he asked casually.
He knew it wasn't. He'd walked through false dawn, and fog or not he could see that true sunlight was just beginning to color the world beyond the woods in delicate pinks and oranges.
"How." Canemore looked just as stunned as his twin.
"Well," Adam replied wearily, "I suppose the cobbles weren't hot enough." He looked into those mismatched eyes and smiled a hard, deadly smile. "Nine years can make someone so many friends if you simply go up to them and say 'hello', Highness."
"Where is your horse?" Conemara asked in the brittle silence. "The terms of the trial -"
"Right, those." Adam's other hand was holding onto a thick handful of creeping, flowering vines over one shoulder. "Yes, I'll be going out of the woods now, with my horse." He crossed through the gathering and they jerked away from him with shocked gasps and one bird-like, startled little scream. "What's left of it, anyway."
Behind him dragged the head of the nightmare, bound in the sturdy vines, leaving the occasional spattering of blood, sometimes gray and sometimes red.
"You did not do this," Canemore looked truly shaken for the first time since Adam had met him.
"Me? No, of course not." Adam kept walking. "I was hoping to end this night with as little bloodshed as possible. There's going to be enough of that in both our futures, Canemore." He paused for just a moment to look at both the twins. "I didn't choose the path through the woods, you did. I would’ve warned you to stay away from that pond." Conemara gasped minutely.
Canemore bared his teeth and took one step forward. He froze when a gleaming shard of silver-tipped lacquered wood and a tiny growl answered him in a flash. "What -"
"Oh, that?" Adam grinned. "Well you did say horse and tiercel. Mine's got talons of priest-blessed silver, what does yours have?"
"Pixies answer to no one," Conemara breathed out, her perfect facade cracking under the weight of too many surprises in a single night.
"Trout chose me," Adam stopped moving, breathing hard. He was a fit young man in his prime, but he'd been through rather a great deal through the night, and he'd spent most of the last few hours dragging the almighty heavy head of the nightmare through the darkness. "I merely try to live up to the honor." Measuredly, he turned and faced the gathering, spreading his arms, wordlessly inviting their questions, their challenges, or anything else they could throw at him.
When he turned around again, Baen stood before him. "Highness," she sighed, and bowed before him.
Adam sighed wearily. "Lady Baen."
"Do not do this," she said simply. Adam, his own shock aside, heard the Court behind him gasp. She seemed to measure the words, and found them lacking in only one manner. "Please."
He had to smile. "I thank the lady Baen for asking," he said to even more twittering disbelief behind him. "A King should be questioned by those around him; sometimes it's the only way for him to know he's wrong." He offered a gloved hand to Baen, who took it; her touch through the leather was cool and ephemeral, as if she truly were made of nothing but fog. He drew her up from her curtsy. "The problem, my lady, is that I already knew I'm wrong. I know I'm doing a terrible thing."
"You won't stop."
"No. But I will remember that you were brave enough to ask me to."
She stood aside; Adam picked up the slack on the vines and resumed dragging the wretchedly heavy nightmare's head. With everything that had happened, with all that had been said and done through that brutal and endless night, he almost didn't notice he was done until he realized his steps had gone from crunching softly on last autumn's leaves to moving soundlessly on dew-heavy grass.
He paused and looked up. Morning had broken while he'd been talking to the Court Beyond the Woods in the shade of the woods. Golden sunlight, new to the world, gilded the distant palace like a treasure. Adam closed his eyes and straightened up, basking in the fitful morning breeze, in the day's growing warmth. "Three trials, met," he murmured, dropping the vines on the grass. "I do claim my crown and throne."
"We bear witness to your claim," Queen Conemara replied, her voice as icy and elegant as falling snowflakes. "And find it fair." He felt, though he could not see, the brush of her lips against his forehead.
"Go you home with steed and tiercel," Prince Canemore's voice added, so like and unlike his twin's, night and shadow. "And be as those who know you greet you."
Adam blew out a long breath. "Want to know the worst part, Trout?" When the pixie chirped a question, the young prince gave him a very worn smile. "I still have to saddle my horse."
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
Originally posted 1/25/2023
She came for him when the last of the sun's light faded from the sullen sky. Adam and Dane had settled under the eaves of the far end of the stables, eating warm pasties and drinking mulled cider by the light of a single golden lamp. "Mortal prince, my prince."
Dane saw Adam twitch, not so much at the voice, a whisper of fog and wind, but at the words. Nine years; the young man Dane followed had spent nine years fighting against those words, and the instinct to do so still was very strong.
"Ah, well. I was wondering if anyone was coming at all," Adam said mildly, putting aside his wooden cup and brushing his hands carefully.
"You challenged us, mortal prince," her tone turned arch.
"A great deal of graves around the realm beg to differ as to who started this fight," Adam replied without missing a beat. He moved to his feet; Dane already had his leather jacket on hand, and while Adam worked the clasps he picked up the bow and quiver to give to his prince.
"Do you really think your weapons will help you?" she mocked.
Adam had learned to explode into action from a redcap. He'd never beaten either Linden or Needlemaw when it came to speed, but the only fairy faster than either of them actually had wings. Before either Dane or the Sidhe maid knew what had happened he'd snatched his bow, and an arrow was quivering on the ground by her feet. "I think a great many things not related to the challenge might make me feel a little better," he replied calmly. "I'm just choosing not to do them."
She hissed at him, but she could feel the black burn of the iron arrow-head a scarce breath from her dainty, fog-slippered foot, and she said nothing as Dane helped Adam with bow, quiver, and weapons. She was still and silent as Adam drew in a deep breath and turned to the young man who'd been by him for so long. "Dane -"
"I could follow you to the edge," Dane rushed to say. "I wouldn't go in, but -"
"Dane." Adam put gloved hands on the big man's shoulders, and grinned just a little. "No."
"But -"
"I don't trust them not to do something to you, just for being my friend," Adam explained, and watched Dane's ghost of hope collapse. "Go back. Go find your lady, and thank her for bringing us our meals."
Dane walked away with the lamp, clad in priest-blessed weapons and armor of steel and leather and iron, and Adam turned. Apparently having realized that she wouldn't be able to play her usual games, the Sidhe maid had abandoned her usual, wispy glamour. She was a very dainty creature, shorter than Adam by nearly a foot, leached of all color; her flesh, her exquisite gown, the long curtain of her hair, everything was white or the palest of grays. Only her eyes were black, like pools of tar. Adam could feel the pull of them, trying to steal his will and his awareness away, but there was nothing in him for the hooks of her power to catch. Her gaze could never compare to the beauty of a pair of many-colored, shattered eyes.
He gestured for her to lead, and she did. For a long time they walked in silence until she spoke at last. "Is it truly so terrible?"
Adam, who was watching and waiting for her to lead him into an ambush, realized that her voice was simply like that, a sigh and a whisper. "What is?"
"Death," she replied simply.
He nearly stopped walking. "I very nearly let you find out, back there."
"No, you meant to hurt me," she replied simply. "And I have been hurt before. But no one has ever killed me."
"Some of your people must have died that you could see."
"No." She shrugged. "None that I know."
Adam didn't even know how to take that in. "Do you have things you enjoy?"
"Yes," she admitted, and then swung into a pout, "but you won't like me speaking of them."
"I suppose that's true. Death would mean that you cannot do them anymore."
She shrugged. "Then I will find something else."
"No, you can't do that, either."
She scowled delicately at him. "Well, then -"
"No, not that either. Not even the choosing, not even the thinking."
She stopped and stomped her dainty foot. "But if I want to -!"
"You don't want, either. Death is a void, an absence of choice and will."
"But then I am not," she frowned. "Without those there is nothing, there is no me."
"Yes," he said mildly. "Without them, the world goes on. It just goes on without you, and it doesn't care."
She went silent, turning to begin walking again.
"Is there nothing else you need to tell me about the test?" he prompted her after a moment.
"Not yet. I was told it would be best if I didn't speak to you at all outside it." Slowly, she added. "I think perhaps my Queen was right about that."
"Is there something I should or shouldn't do to be proper?"
She cocked her head at him. "Proper? You would still be proper, after this morning?"
"My hatred doesn't impede my good manners," Adam replied wryly.
"Oh." He saw faint gray creep over the too-sharp line of her cheekbones. "Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. Do you truly hate us all?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so. Because any one of you could have told Canemore, 'Don't do this'."
"He would have never listened."
"No. But it would have been said. Sometimes you have to fight not because you know you'll win, but just because you know it must be done. Else a part of yourself is cut away, and it's very hard to get it back."
"You say such strange things," she frowned again. "Most of the time when mortals speak it's all nonsense, but your words are both strange and true. If I had said it, you would not hate me. Is it magic?"
"No," Adam nearly smiled. "I just know that I'm talking to a fairy. I can't speak to you of mortal things, they won't make sense to you. If I want you to listen, to hear me, then I have to speak of things that would matter to you. Just as if you were talking to a mortal about fairy things, they'd never understand you. They're not fairies."
Her frown didn't go away. "That is... sensible." They walked on, past the Royal Gardens, closer to the woods. "We like stories. Every test is a story." Instead of heading for the woods, she detoured into the Gardens.
"Ah. Am I to tell a good story, then?"
"All stories are good. If you want our favor, you should make it long. All the others have been so brief."
"Death will do that."
"Well, it's no fun when a story ends, 'and then he died'."
"I'll do my best not to die."
"Good." She turned to look at him. They had reached an elegant little plaza, cobbled in an artful spiral, with a decorative well at the center and stone benches surrounding it. The decorative planters had not yet bloomed, and the stones were slick with damp.
On one of the benches sat Prince Canemore. Adam's escort moved to kneel before the Prince Beyond the Woods. "I have brought him."
"That I see, that I know, that I thank you for, Baen." He reached out to put his hand on her head as if bestowing a blessing.
She looked up at him. "Do not do this."
Canemore froze. For that matter, so did Adam.
"You spoke with him," the Prince hissed.
"I am not a creature of silence," she shrugged gracefully.
"Go," he commanded through gritted teeth, drawing his hand away.
She rose and walked away.
"Lady Baen," Adam called out. When she turned to look at him, he held up a gloved hand, index and thumb far apart. He drew them a little closer to one another and watched her empty, bottomless eyes widen minutely in surprise before she left them.
They faced one another, the near-powers of two very disparate worlds that sat so close to one another. "So many times in your life you could have done us all the courtesy of dying," Canemore said at last.
"I was a very contrary child, I'm told," Adam replied evenly, swallowing a hint of bile. "For that matter, it occurs to me that we might not have ended up here tonight if at some point you'd said 'hello'."
Canemore smiled at that. "Oh, no. No, no. You see, Prince Adam, I have spent too much time watching your kind. I know you for the deadliest of plagues. You change everything you touch."
"Change isn't bad, though, it simply is."
"Change is a poison," Canemore snapped at him, rising to his feet. "We are unchanging, immortal, forever. We have no need of your kind, we never have, and if I could erase the lot of you from existence I gladly would." The Sidhe Prince smiled. "And yet, you know, something you once said has stuck with me for a little while now. 'Heed your friends. No one's worth spit on hot cobbles without them, least of all a king."
Adam felt the faint taste of bile in his mouth become all the stronger. "I stand by those words."
"I thought you might." A woman's scream trailed up from the well, full of terror. Canemore leaned lazily against it.
Adam rushed to the edge, leaning on the stones and peering down into the darkness, even though he knew he'd never be able to see anything. "What did you do," he demanded, strangled by fear. He knew that voice.
"Friends are such a dangerous noose around one's neck," the Sidhe Prince replied. "Anyone can come by, grab that rope, and pull it tight."
"My friends are my strength."
"Are you theirs? You knew exactly what you were doing today, or so you thought. Catch us unprepared, find an easy challenge. We are not children, Prince Adam, though this is, and has always been, a game -"
"To you."
Canemore shrugged. "You could have left. You could have forsworn the crown."
"You could have kept your hands off Linden." Canemore's glamour slipped and he snarled at Adam, a thing of shadow and glass and deadly darkness. A moment later the point of Adam's sword was at his throat. Somewhere deep in the darkness, the woman's voice sobbed. "That better not be Culli-maid."
Canemore's smile was a wolf's. "Here is your test, Prince Adam of the realm. You left your house this morning thinking yourself quite clever. You must return to it before a full day has passed; it must be exactly as you left it, barring the passing of a day. How lucky for you that you kept your man-at-arms with you the whole day. Or is it caution that he carries so much iron on his person, all of it blessed by your priests?" The Sidhe Prince shrugged. "Your housekeeper keeps your keys, so a key you'll need to free her. Your wise advisor needs his eyes to gather wisdom -"
"Did you hurt Beli?!"
"Oh, please, it's just his eyes. We can put those back and he'll never remember he was missing them. Provided, of course, you prevail."
Adam was having a hard time convincing himself not to shove the sword forward a few inches.
"Put your house to rights if you would be King, Prince Adam. Return to it every inch its lord, horse and tiercel by your sides. Be King before your household’s eyes, and we will abide your crowning."
"Where are they?" Adam asked through teeth gritted so tight they were hurting him.
Canemore stepped back, smiling still, arms spread open as if to welcome Adam's sword.
He could try, the young prince realized. He could really try. And Canemore would let him, and they might spend the entire night doing absolutely nothing except feeding Adam's rage, and he would lose. He slammed the sword back in its sheath, put a boot on the rim of the well, and murmured, "Hold on tight, Trout."
He leapt into the well.
***
Adam fell into darkness for far longer than he should.
It was deathly silent, completely empty. All he could hear was the rushing of his blood, the thrum of his heart. He couldn't even feel the rushing wind that should have been passing him by, he couldn't hear the thunder of it. He couldn't smell any of the damp and stone of the well. He tried to cry out, and heard nothing. He simply fell, and fell, and at some point he had to wonder if he was indeed falling. Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps he was trapped in madness, and something of the Court would put on his skin and trample out of the woods and all his hatred would be for nothing in the end.
The beating of his heart saved him in the end. He knew his heart. He'd listened to it many times at night. Nearly every winter night of the last nine years he'd spent going to sleep lulled by no other sound. During the day the everyday noises of his mortal friends had kept him, but at night there had been only that measured beat, reminding him that spring was coming closer, no matter how endless the cold season might seem.
He clutched his hand over his chest, and suddenly the wind was roaring all around him. He was falling. He was alive. He was real, and that seemed far more precious than he'd ever thought it to be. He came to that realization a split second before he crashed down into the dark, still waters of the royal aquifer with an almighty splash, and a different sort of deadly darkness closed a bitterly cold grip all around him. Adam swam up to the surface and broke through it with a gasp and a cough. Screeching like a vexed starling, Trout scrabbled out of its pocket and onto the prince's shoulder, its golden glow breaking the cavernous darkness all around them. "It mightn't have helped the test," the pixie declared, brushing water off its signet shield and fussing over a tiny scrap of leather that secured a lacquered, sharpened pair of hairpins to its back, between its wings, "but it would've been a nice bit of a start to run him through before you went jumping into wet dark places."
"I was tempted," Adam admitted. "But then I'd have had blood on my sword, and it would have got us killed." He drew in a deep breath and whistled a long, steady note until he ran out of breath.
"I do," Adam closed his eyes and used everything Boul had taught him about stones and caves and darkness, until he found the nearest shore of the aquifer; he began to swim for it. "I suppose Canemore's trick is to get them to eat me."
"They're always hungry."
"Yes," Adam agreed. "But it's hard to eat someone whose name you know."
"Who brought you gifts of dandelion crowns and sweet surface fruit," another voice, a rasp of scales on stone and fang against fang, suddenly came into the conversation.
"Who listened to you sing and loved it without falling thrall to it. Who thought you beautiful," a second voice sighed, "even after an eternity away from the light."
"I'm sorry to come disturbing your waters," Adam offered politely.
"You never disturb us, Adam." They were staying just out of reach of the pixie's light, pale white eel bodies rippling through the dark waters. "You were always kind. You were always generous. And we have been quite disturbed already."
"Prince Canemore," Adam said. He was still carefully, oh so casually, swimming for the shore.
"Yes."
"He came to hide something in the aquifer?"
"And to steal from us," a third voice declared, a male's, some anger seeping into it. "What little we had, most of it your gifts, he took. He will not give it back unless we give him your bones, licked clean."
"We have not eaten in so long."
"But it is hard to eat someone whom you know."
"Someone who has been kind."
"Someone who brought us the memory of what we were."
Adam felt Trout cling very tightly to his ear, growling low. Dealing with the Cave Singers had always been tricky, as was dealing with any predator, and he'd always been on solid ground when he did. "I am eighteen today," he admitted to them. "And I mean to claim my crown from Canemore."
The slide of the white bodies under the dark water paused; the only ripples on the surface were suddenly those of his own movements.
"I will be King," he told them. "And a King can do many things that a child and a prince cannot do. I never asked you, because I thought it would be rude and unkind, but today I will ask, with apologies: do you want to go back to your home?"
"Is it unkind of him?" one of the voices asked uncertainly.
"No," the one male replied, but he sounded unsure.
"Yes," the two older females countered, and then one corrected, "but only because we remember. We remember sun-warm rocks, we remember tides. We remember storms and vast broken ice. We remember light and vast green and blue forests full of food. We remember. You do not."
"You are too young," the male added. "You were born here in this darkness, long after the stone had stolen all flavor from the water."
"Oh," the one voice accepted that thoughtfully. "Do we want to? I know the stories and the songs you've taught me of the Place Before, with its tides and its currents, with its light. Where there is no hunger."
"Do you want to?" the male asked.
The silence hung immense in the darkness beyond the pixie's golden light. Adam all but felt the older merfolk hold their breath.
"I don't know. I've never known light."
"You've seen my torches, my candles," Adam countered. "The caves are full of mushrooms and moss, mold and slime that all glows with its own light. Trout here has light of its own."
"But that's not the same thing as in the songs, is it?"
"No," Adam admitted, and caught his breath. "But I can show you sunlight, true sunlight. I can give you the taste of the waters that your people left behind when chance trapped them here, underground. If I show you these things, if I give them to you, will you help me, help us? Help me find what Canemore hid here, and take us safely to shore after I have it?"
"Yes," one of the females agreed.
"But only if it's true," the other warned.
Adam stopped swimming and reached into his pocket. "You'll have to come closer, though. You'll have to come into the light."
"How will I see this light, if I'm already in it?"
"No offense to Trout," Adam smiled wryly at the pixie, who buzzed its wings, "but there is no comparison."
She slid closer, a white and deadly ghost underwater. Her hair was a blue mantle running down the back of her eel-like body, turning into a long dorsal fin. Her head tried to be beautiful, but it was hard when darkness had bleached it of all color and most substance, leaving it so pale that the delicate web of veins was visible under the pale violet-tinged whiteness of her skin. Her eyes were small and copper-ringed; she had no ears or nose, only a perfect smoothness down to the lovely rosebud of her mouth, which didn't move at all. Directly beneath it, a thin and nearly imperceptible line along her chin hid her true mouth, and the forest of peg-like fangs in it. Her neck was far too long and far too boneless, and black and pink ripples covered her torso, fluttering in the water.
Adam reached out an arm, and she clung to it, the boneless tendrils of her fingers spiraling around it. "Close your eyes," he told her, "until you can just peek at me. Otherwise it will hurt you until you're used to it."
She obeyed. Rare as it had been that the children would come so deep into the caves as to reach the aquifer, still they'd met the merfolk trapped in those waters every now and again, and they had no reason to distrust Adam. He had never given them one. He fumbled in his pocket and closed a fist around the sun that was his last memento from Linden; he brought it out, holding it just over the surface. "Ready?"
"Yes," she breathed out.
He slid his fingers open, and sunlight, true and rich and warm, spilled into the darkness of the cave, revealing the beautiful work of water on stone, immense and deceptively delicate columns, pale lace-like lattices, vast shelves of limestone festooned with minerals. She cried out in shock, and then spun all around, eyes narrowed but struggling to take it all in. "Oh! Oh, there are colors everywhere!"
Adam lifted his hand and, finger by finger, opened his grip until the golden glow of that summer-caught sunlight filled the space.
"It's so warm!" She laughed in delight, her tail thrashing beneath the surface. "It's so beautiful! Can I touch it?"
"You can have it," Adam offered, "if you help us. But I offered you something else, didn't I? Two trades for two favors."
"Yes." She beamed at him. "To help you find what the Prince hid. What's the second one?"
"Take this then," he offered her the bit of sunlight, and she took it in her free hand, throwing the aquifer into dancing chiaroscuro shadows, "and open your mouth," he instructed her, and she did. Adam found himself facing several rows of fangs, curved slightly inward. Reaching again into his pocket he found the round salt stone that Boul had given him that morning; water had made no dent on it. With great care to avoid those teeth, he touched it to her tongue and slid it down carefully along it. "There."
She smacked and clacked her lips, then sank under the water and did so again. Adam saw the black dot at the center of each copper-colored eye suddenly grow immense. "It's like food, but not bitter. And it lingers!"
"It's not afraid. Fear is bitter," one of the females replied, drawing close. She was twice the size of the one Adam was speaking to. "I have nothing to offer, Adam, but could I taste your sea-stone? I will promise you anything."
"I will promise you myself if I can taste the stone," the male was smaller than the older female, but larger than Adam.
"It lingers because it does not die," the third female replied, matched in size to the male. "I do have something I can offer, Adam. I will sing for you the Deathless song, for as long as you want me to. For as long as I can."
Everything in him wanted to simply give this to them, if only because it was the kind thing to do, and ever he'd wanted to be kind. He could scarcely imagine what it had to be like to be trapped away from the light and the sea for so long that even the taste of home was forever erased from the water in which you lived. "I will give it to you, though it's a gift from a very dear friend. But I will not keep you here to sing anything for me, not if you choose to go home. A child couldn't help you, and a prince is scarcely any better. But a King, a King can do many things. I want you to think on your answer to my question. The salt-stone I will give you as a trade, to take me and Trout safely to shore once I find what Prince Canemore hid."
"Yes," they chorused at him. He put out the stone, and someone yanked it from his grip.
Suddenly they were moving so swiftly over the water that Trout nearly went flying off his shoulder with a yelp. They flew in flashes of light, blazing out of the water when the mermaid who carried it leapt over it, dimly lighting their way when it was only Trout's glow. They raced on forever, it seemed, until Adam could hear the stone overhead, but only barely so. They were at the deepest part of the immense aquifer.
If they betrayed him then, there would be nothing he could do.
"The pixie cannot come with you," the oldest of the females told him. "He would never make it."
Trout huffed in vexation, and rose to hover. "You'd best be taking good care of him, then."
She moved closer and caught Adam's hand. "You'll need the iron you have brought. The thing that guards your treasure has no mind or heart you can appeal to."
"Does it bleed?" Adam drew his sword.
"Yes," she admitted. "And I will try to remember that we have made a bargain with you, Adam. But you must find what you are seeking quickly, and we must leave swiftly. It will matter very little, how sorry we might be to break our agreement, if we've eaten you already."
"Fair," the prince could only say, squirming out of his bow and quiver and handing them over to the male to hold. "I can't breathe water as you do, remember that. I can only hold my breath so long."
"I will sing breath for you," the other female assured him. "Stay close. If you can hear me, you will be fine."
They dove. The darkness was profound, until the youngest joined them, carrying the little bit of captive sunlight with her. They dove endlessly, the cold and the pressure becoming nearly painful until one of them began to sing, a high and steady note that curled up and down like a gust of wind over foaming waves, like a warm breeze along a golden beach. Adam found he could breathe, though the cold only grew even more brutal.
They reached the bottom before a low cave. Even the sunlight could not pierce the darkness inside it, and Adam realized why when a phantom green glow began to spread over it in a perceivable pattern. Two bright, empty eyes shone like a cat's for a brief moment, and Adam went very still.
So did the rows of gleaming color.
He lifted his sword. The immense creature surged slightly forward, and the prince froze once again, before he started moving with immense, careful slowness. The eyes moved in the light as the creature turned this way and that, trying to hunt down those minute vibrations, and it surged briefly out of the cave, but aimed at no particular target.
It's blind, Adam thought. Like most everything that lives in these caves, it's blind. It doesn't need eyes. Only the Singers kept them because they're fairies, and fairies don't change unless they're made to change.
It was an immense catfish, made huge by age and pale gray by darkness. Skin had grown over its eyes and whorls of color that only showed in the dark adorned its scarred flank. Adam eyed those scars and turned to look at the hands of the older mermaid, floating still in the water by his side. This, then, was why they only had the one child. The fish was easily three times the size of the largest of them. A single fishing hook, absurdly small for its size, was embedded on the catfish's lower jaw. From it hung an even tinier pearl set on a silver pendant in the shape of a key.
Adam lifted a hand, catching their eye. Pointed at the oldest one and gestured to a spot behind him. The catfish pivoted toward him, but she'd gotten the gist of what he wanted, and let herself float away sedately. He turned to point at the youngest, pointed at himself, and gestured up. She nodded.
Now it only left the actual killing of the damn thing. Adam hung onto his sword and waited.
Somewhere directly behind him, something struck the stone of the ground with immense force.
The catfish surged forward. Adam thrust his sword up and nearly had it ripped from his hand. A fin slapped his face with punishing force and he clung to it with his free hand, trying to not lose his wits, holding onto his breath. For a moment it was all darkness and cold and a crushing, deadly pressure, until either the catfish turned back towards the cave or the singing mermaid caught up with them.
The damned thing's belly, after so long resting in the aquifer, had become embedded full of stones. It might as well be armored on what should have been its most vulnerable spot. The catfish writhed and twisted, all too aware that something was clinging to it, dragging it down and throwing it off-balance. As it turned, jaws snapping blindly, Adam shoved the sword into the soft fleshy bit of its mouth. It didn't stop it, didn't seem to even slow it down, but the prince hadn't meant for it to do so; instead, when it came looking to bite at him again, he snatched for the fishing hook and the pendant, and yanked it through the soft flesh there.
A tiny rivulet of blood, darker than the darkness, spilled into the water.
"Sunlight!" Adam cried out in the language of the cistern fish.
The youngest mermaid was suddenly there, slamming into him and rushing him up, up towards the distant glow of the pixie's light, up towards life and breath and warmth. But behind them came the catfish like a raging dragon, even though the other two mermaids were clinging to it, mouths sunk into its flesh. It was too big to care. It snapped upwards and caught Adam's foot between its jaws and the prince screamed the last of its breath underwater.
He hooked the foot that the catfish had captured on the hilt of the sword he'd left in the monster's mouth, and kicked it as hard as it could. The giant heaved; from outside Adam could hardly reach anything of importance, let alone anything that bled. But from inside, he'd shoved the blade straight into the catfish's head. The point peeked out of one eye.
Blood spilled like a cloud on the water. The fish heaved and spat him out, like any fish will when it feels it has bit into a hook, and the youngest mermaid raced him up, up and away, even as her mother and her aunt went into a frenzy, tearing and gouging and biting at the catfish, their song an eerie, maddened shriek. They burst out on the surface and Adam choked on his first breath, coughing until he felt as if he might catch on fire.
"What happened!" the male demanded.
"Swim!" was all the youngest was saying, and then they were flying through the water, outrunning the spill of death and blood and madness.
Or, at least, that was what Adam hoped, but he was too dizzy to know. Or to put up a fight.
***
"Adam."
There was a cool hand on his forehead, brushing away damp hair, and a rough surface under him, which he could feel even through the heavy quilting of his jacket. Had he been sick? Was he hurt? He couldn't remember anything. He'd had a terrible nightmare.
"Mortal prince, do I need to bite you again?"
Ah, so it hadn't been a nightmare.
"Trout, everything with you is an excuse to bite," he croaked out and sat up with an effort, coughing and spitting out a few more lungfuls of water. "Is everyone alright?"
"Yes," the oldest of the mermaids replied. "And well fed, and unafraid. It has been very long since we had any of those." She was an immense white body coiled around him in the shallows of the aquifer, on a beach he knew from happier times, when they'd visited with food and trinkets just to hear the merfolk sing. He'd been saved by those visits, Adam realized. By his familiarity not just with the Singers, but with their song. He'd grown used to the deadly beauty of it. Even if they wanted to, could they have driven him mad with it? Because that would have satisfied Canemore as well, Adam suspected.
"Well, something good came out of that. I don't think I have a right to ask more, since I didn't even know what I was doing, or what to expect."
"Will you face all your trials like this?"
"I hope not. I'm tired of putting friends at risk."
She was silent for a long moment. "That is not what I asked, for all that the answer fits. But that is a very mortal way to look at it."
"I am very mortal," Adam agreed wearily, working his foot on its boot. It hurt, horribly, but nothing felt broken. "I don't know. I thought there would be more magic to it, less violence. I forget that both can get me killed."
"I don't believe you forgot, Adam," she said gently. "I believe you do not care. I know what that is like. We stopped caring, too, a long time ago."
"But you care for her."
"And only for her. You named her, you know."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to presume -"
"You did not. You offered the name, and she accepted it. But we don't know how to repay you for that gift."
Adam ground his hand against his head. "Well, I can't ask you for my sword, you can't touch it."
"No."
He looked at his hands, uncurled his fists. The pearl-key sat on one. "Then help me. When Canemore came, did he have a mortal with him? A woman, young."
"No. She, he brought in later, and took her much farther into the caves, along with a blind man. He was bleeding."
Adam closed his eyes. "I am," he said very calmly, "going to be King. And I am going to wage war on the Court. It's very possible they'll come to ask you to join them, because the trolls and the redcaps have already abandoned them."
She nodded. "We will not fight. We have a reason to care now. I offer you this third trade, Adam. We will not join your enemies. We will keep the aquifer safe. And when you are King, you will bring Sunlight to the sea."
"But what about you?"
"Perhaps we will come with her," she shrugged, the blue dorsal fin shifting from one side to another. "I don't know how you could do this thing. I will not ask it for all of us, because I do not know if it can be done for all of us. But for Sunlight, it must happen."
"If it happens for Sunlight, it will happen for all of you." He offered his hand. "Hang onto hope. One of us should."
She took his hand and shook it, and retreated into the water.
"Trout," Adam said, moving to his feet and looking about until he found his bow and quiver. "Beli came by here, and he was bleeding. Can you sniff out his trail?"
"Oh, that's easy!" The pixie took off, looking about for the familiar scent.
"I'm glad one of us thinks so," Adam muttered wearily.
***
Magic had been laid in traps all along his route, but the dizzying, maddening spirals of it had no more effect on Adam than the frenzy-song of the merfolk had. He could have been lost in the caves forever, he realized. He should have been, thrown off the path, his mind slowly fracturing. But even down here he had unexpected allies; in many places he saw the smallfolk, in their mushroom hats and mole coats, trundling by and taking away the magic of the traps, piece by tiny piece, in their tiny ribcage sleds. He paused to share with them a scarce handful of dry cherries, misplaced in one of his pockets and gone soggy after his dive in the aquifer, and they were exceptionally appreciative.
Following the golden light of the tiny, ruthless predator keeping him company, Adam wandered past the caves he knew and found himself looking at an immense stone arch of light and magic. Squinting showed him the same thing; so did holding onto the hilt of his dagger. "Trout, what am I looking at?"
The pixie perched on his shoulder. "It's a Many-Steps. Big magic for those without wings. Step in and step out and step somewhere else far away."
"And get stranded and lose by default." Adam examined the beautiful stonework, illuminated by its pale silvery magic. "Or half of me gets left here and half gods know where."
"Many-Steps don't stop just like that," Trout chided him tartly. "They only close if there's nobody using them. What sort of cheap worthless magic have you been taught, mortal prince?"
"I beg a thousand pardons." Adam considered that; then he bent down, took off his soggy boots, and put them directly in the middle of the archway before stepping forward over them, holding his breath. The glow of the archway remained steady.
They were in a stone-lined hallway, dry and dark and empty. A constant, steady hissing sound filled the air, broken occasionally by stray wisps of distant, heart-broken sobbing.
"I can't smell Beli anymore," Trout warned, returning to its perch on the prince's shoulder.
"That's fine," Adam replied, hurrying along the hallway until he came to a crossroads. Pulling his dagger and about to notch a mark into the stone, he paused and instead dropped to his hands and knees and rapped the hilt lightly against the stones at the bottom of the wall until the low, growly and muttering language of the smallfolk answered him. One of the smaller stones pivoted open and they peered up at him, stout and small and shy, but all familiar with him and his generosity of dry cherries, of bacon rinds, of charcoal and sunflower seeds.
They lit their lamps for him.
Adam ran into the vast maze to which the Many-Steps archway had transported him. They couldn't guide him, of course, and he absolutely refused to allow them to help. It would have meant choosing his side, and he couldn't stomach the thought of what Canemore might do to them for it. Life would be hard enough for them all soon enough. But wherever he went , the lamps on either side of the hallway would come to life, tiny wicks burning on floating chestnuts, pet fireflies, potted mushrooms, all of them at near-ground level. Twice he found himself at a dead end, and as he raced back to pick another path the lights changed for him as well.
The weeping led him to the ruins of a great, round room with a vast cupola overhead and moonlight pouring in through elegant windows bereft of glass panes and framed by the ruins of exquisite gilded velvet curtains. The entire room gleamed with far more than starlight, the elegant marble floors polished until a near-perfect mirror of the room gazed back at Adam from the depths of its abstract design. The walls and columns supported the cupola looked like something out of a fantastic mausoleum.
Adam froze at the doors. Two, perhaps three dozen Culli-maids sat in a double circle in the room, each one attending to their own spinning wheel and quietly sobbing. They all wore the same simple dress, a woolen overgown over a sensible linen blouse and a warm woolen skirt, with tidy leather house slippers and a knit shawl on surprisingly bright grays and greens. The wheels were the source of the constant, steady hissing, thread coming to life along their endless circle and then shooting upward, coming together by twos and by threes until a slender, silver cord ran out of the room through the marble of the cupola, away. Even from a distance Adam could feel the seething magic of it, and he suspected he knew where it went. He also believed he knew this game; the Folk Beyond the Woods, he'd realized from all the stories he'd been told, weren't able to come up with ideas of their own, and their tricks, while many, tended to repeat themselves.
He closed his eyes and squinted at the crowd of Cullis, but his head almost immediately began to pound. There was too much magic in the room. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes, and stared instead at the windows, nodding minutely when he realized the view through each gracious arch was different. "Trout, stay away from the windows, they're a trap."
"Are there enemies?" The pixie reached back for its sharp little hairpins.
"No," Adam took a step forward. "They're a trap for you." He took a second step forward, soundless without his boots, and called out, "Culli-maid."
And he listened very closely.
They all turned to him and cried out. "Highness!" some of them screamed.
"Adam!" others wept.
Adam nodded with a grim little smile. He did know this game. "Well. That takes half of you out of the running very neatly, doesn't it? The real Culli fought me nine years on it." He pointed out those he knew for sure had called him 'Adam'. "Keep spinning, but turn your wheels around."
"But Adam -" One of them began.
"No," he said coolly. "I don't know what you're spinning yet. Until I do, none of you stop. And if you've turned your chair around, don't talk to me. Don't talk to one another. Don't speak at all."
He walked along the circles. They were flawlessly identical, each and every one of them, exactly as Culli-maid had been when he'd seen her last, just that morning. Some sobbed even as their hands turned wool into thread and into magic. Others struggled to be brave for him. A few looked stricken, lost and haunted. If fear could possibly have a face, all of the possible variables of it were to be found there, in that circle of spinning wheels.
Adam crouched down. A beautiful pearl and gold chain and cuff secured each Culli's leg to the chair where they sat. He suspected his key would only work the once.
"I could bite them," Trout suggested dubiously. "Maybe the real Culli-maid will taste of real blood."
"And maybe she's a troll under the glamour and squashes you flat for the daring. No, Trout, I'm not willing to risk you. I know the Culli-maid. If I don't know her well enough to beat this game, I don't deserve her loyalty." He straightened up. "I can only take one of you, can I?"
"Yes," they all chorused.
"Can I ask as many questions as I like?"
"Yes," they repeated.
Adam stepped back nearly to the door, where he could see them all clearly. "What's your real name, Culli-maid?"
"Sophronia," they all replied in nearly perfect synchronicity.
Nearly.
Adam grinned wryly. "It's embarrassing, really. But Culli, it's so useful that you don't say your own name the way the rest of the world reads it and speaks it." He drew seven of the replicas forward, to a third circle. "Keep spinning," he told the rest. "Turn around. Don't make a sou- ah!" He gestured sharply to one of the false Cullis, who'd tried to bare very un-Culli-like fangs at him. "I have neither chosen nor rejected you. Keep. Spinning."
She obeyed, snarling. "To free the wrong one is your death, mortal prince. To free the right one is to free us all, and still your death. What do I care what you command?"
"You care enough to obey and that's good enough for me," Adam replied distractedly, staring at the seven Culli-maids. "Don't run. When I free you, Culli, don't run, and don't stop spinning. Because I'm pretty sure the windows are enchanted to take you places, but not to bring you back. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Highness," they agreed tearfully.
Adam breathed out slowly. So far he'd been counting on the fact that a fairy replica would want to get every little detail right; the problem with that was, of course, that he'd asked questions meant to have flawed answers. And the fakes left along with the real Culli were the ones that knew that to fail a little could mean victory all the same. He also couldn't ask questions with complex answers - he'd never hear the right one over the chaos of too many words spoken too quickly at him. He ran his hands through his hair in exasperation. "Damn it, Culli, you actually know too many of my secrets, I don't trust any of them to be safe from this lot," he laughed ruefully. "Guess it'll have to be yours, and I'm sorry for that."
He looked into all those red-rimmed, frightened, soft brown gazes, and remembered the brightest smile he'd ever seen from the maid, the only time he'd seen her truly charmed. He remembered being sick, but having his friends there - all of them, even the one who couldn't climb. All because someone had found a way. "You never wed, Culli. You never even entertained a suitor. Every boy and every man who came calling, none of them touched you. None of them charmed you. Why is that? Who were you waiting for, Culli? Name him for me."
Every Culli had stopped weeping. Some had gone very red. Some had gone deeply pale. The only sound in the room was the spinning of the wheels.
They couldn't answer, Adam realized. This was a secret Culli-maid had never surrendered. One that Adam had guessed at, but which had never been spoken out loud. In a way it was his fault; the moment he'd suspected it had happened he should've asked the priests to make sure it was real, and not simply Culli getting elf-touched by accident. At that point, in that elegant room full of magic, it didn't matter anymore: it had grown into something real and powerful in silence and in secret.
"Adam," one of the Cullis whispered.
"You," another breathed. "I was waiting for you."
"Oh, Adam..."
He gave them time to answer. Some secrets are hard to surrender. In the end, only two refused to answer, and Adam suddenly realized why: the real Culli knew he knew the answer; the false one was waiting to steal it from her mouth.
He gestured the others back to their places. "You know how it goes. I'll repeat it a third time, but at that point you'll be magic-bound and I'll be more than a little angr- don't. hiss at me," he warned one of the false Cullis. "You played a cruel game and lost. What you pay for failing is not my problem. Culli," he urged the last two gently, "go ahead. Whatever you answer, I'll take it from there."
The wheels spun and the magic cord gleamed.
They both opened their mouths, like perfect mirrors of one another, and Adam couldn't have said which one spoke first. "Boulders..."
"... for Brains," they both finished. Quiet tears slipped down their pale cheeks.
"A troll?!" someone hissed in disbelief from somewhere in the room.
"If you don't understand why, you would have never won this game anyway," Adam replied casually, coming to stand before the two Cullis. "Boul is a creature of loyalty, Culli. We both know that. In his silence, everything is said without words. He might not have known of your love," he admitted, reaching under his shirt and pulling on the leather cord there until the opalized shell peeked out, "but he knew you a true friend, didn't he?"
Two hands went to two necks. One of them tugged a shell the match of Adam's out from the severe linen shirt Culli wore when the weather was chilly. The other, of course, had nothing to find.
Adam caught that questing, empty, panicking hand in his, and guided it back to the wheel. "Don't stop, Culli. I still don't know what you're weaving, but I have a nasty suspicion."
"You lied!" the false Culli-maid squealed at him like an angry ferret, even as Culli-maid, sobbing, worked her spinning wheel.
"I didn't." Adam tucked the shell back under his shirt. "This was one of Boul's gifts to me, when we were young. And all of my friends know Culli-maid is true, and honest, and kind. And I would cut down every last one of you for the terror you've caused her," he snarled at the entire room of them. "But getting her to safety comes first, always. Those with me, those I call friend, those who have given me their loyalty, I owe them in equal measure. Pity your Prince and your Queen haven't taught you that."
"I will be there when Canemore rips your beating heart from your foolish chest, mortal prince," the false Culli hissed. "And I will forget you a moment after."
"Busy night for you," Adam replied. "I'll forget you the moment I leave this room. Culli, can you walk?"
"Yes, Highness." She scrubbed fiercely at her tears with one hand, the other tending to the wheel.
"Good, because we might have to run." It had finally occurred to Adam that there was only one work of magic that would require constant attention in the maze where Culli had been imprisoned. "I won't ask that. I just need to know if I have to carry you."
She flushed very pink. "To get out of this place and away from this folk, I will run."
"Do you discount our hospitality, maid?" one of the replicas asked, her voice silky soft.
"Begging the lady's pardon, this place's very nice, if a bit chilly," Culli-maid replied, her hands going white as they worked the wheel. "But I was tricked out of my rooms and tranced out of the palace and given no choice about the coming or the going to whatever this place might be. It sours a person some, that."
Adam waited for the Folk Beyond the Woods to reply to that, but none did. He leaned down and caught the cuff in one hand, slipping the pearl key into it. The chain went to pieces, and he was left holding a pearl-and-gold lock along with the pearl pendant-key.
The windows slammed shut, the glow of moon and stars coming from them vanishing as if shutters and curtains both had been closed over them. Every other fairy in the room vanished, as did their spinning wheels. The vivid light of the magic they'd been weaving threatened to gutter out like a candle in a storm, alive only by the last languishing thread coming out of Culli's wheel. The entire room shook, dust falling from the high cupola.
"Bad time to be right," Adam muttered. He offered a hand to Culli and yanked her out of her chair, and then they were running, Trout just ahead of them, following the tiny path of lights the smallfolk had created for him as the entire maze rumbled.
"The Many-Steps!" Trout cried out. "Adam, it's failing!"
"I know!" Adam all but shouted back. Before them the gleaming stone-and-magic portal was struggling to close, reduced to the thickness of a thread and collapsing down on itself, held back from fully closing off only by the soggy pair of boots planted firmly in the middle of it. He scooped Culli up in his arms and threw himself across; they landed in a heap with a tiny squeal of dismay from her to find herself so indecorously close to a young man, even if she more or less counted him her son.
"Trout!" Adam called out, felt the light impact of the pixie against the side of his face. He snatched up his boots before they were either crushed or sliced in half, and the portal collapsed immediately into darkness, broken only by the golden glow of the pixie.
They stayed there, breathing hard, staring at the raw rock of the caves, letting the chill of the damp air cool them down from their frantic sprint. "Well," Adam wheezed at last, "that's a lot more like what I expected." But then Culli-maid was clinging to him, sobbing in belated terror, and he picked her up and rocked her in his arms until the storm of her emotions had settled. "I'm sorry," he told her at last when she would hear him.
"Ugh." She swatted him lightly. "Don't be. Don't you dare be sorry. We all knew it would come to this. You're worth fighting for, Highness. I'm just being a right twit, is all."
He sighed deeply, and kissed her forehead. "But I'm sorry all the same. As much of a fight as I know life is going to be for us all, this was not the violence I expected to bring to your doorstep." He let her go and set about putting his boots back on.
"You didn't bring anything, they did," Culli-maid replied, brushing at herself and moving to her feet.
Adam tested his foot. It had finally settled down as he walked the maze, but it was stinging once again after their rush to escape. He switched the obsidian dagger so there'd be something solid to give his leg some support, and looked up at Culli. "I should have asked," he told her very quietly.
She hugged the shawl to herself. "It was nice to have love,"she replied, staring into the dark. "Even if it wasn't real. I could have gone to the priests, but it was nice, and it was safe, because I knew nothing would come of it. And then, eventually, it simply was nice to have."
"I won't ask you to give it up, Culli. If you can prove to me it's not hurting you."
She smiled weakly at him as he stood up. "Oh, I should. Who knows what it's done to my head, if my thoughts are really my own after all these years." She blew out a long, low breath. "Well, what are we to do now? How can I help you, Highness?"
"You go home," he told her. "I'll take you out of the caves and to the edge of the woods. Get back to the palace and wait for me there, because you have to be there for me to win." He offered her the gold lock and the pearl key. "And if anyone stops them, you show them this, and tell them your part in the test is done. They're yours now." Adam smiled wryly. "A key to open any door, and a lock to close it. Fitting gifts for a King's housekeeper, I think."
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
Originally posted 1/18/2023
Adam learned much that year that even his teachers had not thought to include in his lessons. He asked, and they gave, though he could see in the grim, dubious looks they sometimes gave him when they thought he wasn't looking, that they didn't like having to teach him what he wanted to learn. He sat with the green pixies and with Trout and questioned them, and though they couldn't be terribly useful, every now and again they had glimpsed the princes as they went through their trials in the woods. Sharing with the pixies a whole roast duck, or a heavy piece of mutton, he urged them to speak to him of all they had seen and heard and experienced.
From them he heard that the kelpie had taken his pond back from the last flock of pixies, which was dwindling. He didn't need to send anyone eavesdropping for news of the end of the war. On a very early spring day a storm exploded over the palace and the woods and the lands beyond, violent and unexplainable, taking new growth and heavy branches from the trees, ripping off roof tiles, shattering windows and scattering flocks for two days. Like a child throwing a tantrum and flinging toys everywhere, he thought, unkindly. Trout brought him the green pixies, and Adam and Culli sheltered them in a hamper, cheeping and frightened but much appeased with honey bread, cheese rinds and warm broth. He brought them back to the woods himself, when the weather at last broke and the sun was allowed its freedom.
The trees whispered to him. There was a white she-fox waiting for him in the clearing.
"Prince Adam," she greeted him, and her voice was beautiful enough to hurt.
Adam was beyond hurting. He looked at her and saw the ghost of the fox, and the truth of her beneath it, so like Canemore that his hands tightened to fists.
Not yet, the cold black ice that everything inside him had become whispered. "Queen Conemara," he replied calmly, opening the basket and letting the pixies scatter to their nests and hollows.
The vixen's ears flattened; she was not pleased to be so obviously recognized and even less so that she was not worthy of his immediate and complete attention. "Ah, so Canemore was right. You've not been taught to show proper respect to your betters."
"I can bow, I can curtsy, and I can recite the whole litany of greetings used at a formal court, Majesty," Adam replied coolly. "It seems we're only missing one thing in this meeting. Again."
Her glamour fell from her and she stood in the clearing, a creature of pure and brittle light as much as her brother was shadow. Adam could only look at her from the corner of his eye, the brightness of her as painful as the sun over an ice field. She was inhuman, features too sharp, mismatched eyes reversed, clothes the same silver of her long hair, mouth the same pale gold and red of her crown. Her human seeming wore an exquisite satin gown that gleamed like hoarfrost under a thick white fur ruff. Under it she was like her brother, lithe and narrow and shimmering with power. "You presume, human."
"Not once," he replied. "Not once have I presumed to be anything but what I am. You and your court keep expecting otherwise, but that's neither my fault nor my problem."
She was silent, and he all but felt the questing fingers of her power probing him, looking for the lie, the trick, the deception. She couldn't accept there wasn't one, as long as she'd lived steeped in such things. A harsh gusting breeze blew through the trees, laden with fresh new spring growth, making the branches creak. Conemara's attention faltered and she drew slightly back, looking all around herself.
"I would suggest if you have something you wish to tell me, that it's said quickly, Majesty. I think the woods like you a little less than I do."
"Do you presume to command the woods? My woods -"
"Linden's," he snarled at her, and the silence in the clearing was immense. "Linden's woods. They never gave them to you, to him, to anyone of the Court. I believe your brother knows what I think of people who claim what is not theirs." He stared at her. He glamour was exquisite, beautiful; it was meant to enthrall and torture, but there was nothing left in Adam that cared.
She stared back. "I came to see you. The prince that balked my brother. He rages and froths and entertains the court. But I am Queen. I am his sister. I am his twin. I know the difference between a tantrum and true fury. One is a pleasant diversion. The other is something to be... carefully exorcised."
Adam shrugged. "You'll have your chance soon enough."
"I?" She arched a fine brow at him.
"My pardon, Majesty. Your brother will have his chance soon enough. I'm sure he lives to please you with our creative destruction."
"I don't want him to kill you."
That did bring Adam up short, but the stark, uncaring gaze she'd leveled on him told him this was not a charity. As ever before he had, he put his mind to the problem and almost instantly came up with the answer. "I'm the only one left. You'll have to wait... I think Connor's fifteen, sixteen in summer, so two years, nearly three, before you can have any sport with us. How boring that must seem, looming upon you."
"It wouldn't be, if you'd not spoiled our fun."
"War is not fun, Majesty, " he retorted. "War is what you do when you have no other way to be heard. And anyone worth a crown should be as willing to bleed for a war as those they send off to die fighting it."
They stared at each other across the clearing, and for the first time a frisson of uncertainty passed over her deceptively delicate features. Then she drew herself up proudly. "I don't want him to kill you, but he's angry enough that he might anyway. I have come to offer you the sanctuary of the Court."
"Ah, so you can have me for sport while the rest of the princes grow of age? So you can break my mind and my soul for two years running for fun?"
"Well, it's not like you'd know what was happening. I could make you forget. I could make it not matter. I could make it so it never happened."
"Majesty, only one of your kind would think any of that is a good thing."
"You forswore the crown," she hissed.
"I was fourteen, and no one offered witness," he replied. "Or do you also count the oath of the cow herder that swears he'll marry you if he can catch you in those willow-withe snares he keeps putting out during the full moon?"
"Do you want to die so badly, Prince Adam? I could do so, right here, right now."
"And you would break the Compact between you and my Queen, and not in your favor, either. Besides," he offered her a flinty little smile, lifting the empty basket to his shoulder, "I'm eighteen in less than two weeks, Majesty. Why don't you come to the woods that day and find out for yourself?"
She did falter visibly at that. "What do you mean to do?"
Adam walked away.
***
His birthday dawned with dark gray skies and a constant, steady wind full of winter's last gasp. There was no celebration, no gifts from home. He'd accepted no more letters from his father, though several had come after the Royal envoy had gone to Lestrelle and informed them their son counted them blood no longer.
He dressed in hunting clothing, warm breeches meant to keep chill and damp at bay, good boots, a vest full of pockets over a plain white shirt, a heavy fitted jacket that could, in a pinch, double as light armor. His hand only hesitated when he reached for his belt, with the matching dagger and a plain soldier's sword on it, and his eyes strayed to Trout.
The pixie's wings buzzed. "I'm not about to go grabbing them, mortal prince," it said tartly. "I've some sense."
Adam couldn't help but smile. "So you do." He put on the belt, secured under a boot Boul's obsidian dagger, shouldered his bow and a quiver full of uncured iron broadheads. Culli was watching him and trying desperately not to cry, and Adam hugged her and walked away quickly, willing to give her privacy for her sorrow. Around his neck he had a shell that had gone to opal with the ages of the world, though he'd long ago replaced the brittle woven grass cord of it with leather. In one of his pockets he had a very small piece of sunlight; in another, Trout. The night before he'd snuck back into William's old quarters; there, dusty and undiscovered, he'd found the dead prince's old keepsake box and reclaimed from it the knucklebone threaded into its sinew cord.
He walked out of the palace as if he were marching to war, silencing anyone he passed. Dane walked behind him, armed like a true man-at-arms. He'd refused to stay behind, but Adam had made him promise he wouldn't follow him into the woods. He passed close enough to the fountain to catch a glimpse of the plinth, of the dancing lady forever wrapped in her pale granite veils. She seemed to weep to see him go. The closer they got to the woods the bleaker the day seemed to get.
"Fog's rising," Dane commented.
"Calling up a Hunting Night just for me," Adam said with icy cheer. "And in broad daylight, too."
The woods were a black mass when they drew up to the edge of them, where everything seemed a thorn or a strangling vine. Adam closed his eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath, cocking his head.
Adam. So far away, the linden tree whispered in the breeze.
He opened his eyes. The shadows were moving with slow grace. "I am Prince Adam, son of the realm. Today is my eighteenth birthday."
"We know who you are, mortal," Prince Canemore seemed to resolve himself from the shadows, nothing but bone and polished black glass. "And we both know this is a formality."
"Is it?"
"Yes. You said it before, when you were too young to take your oath seriously, and even then, if I'd known what a nuisance you'd make of yourself, I would have borne you witness."
"What a pity that you didn't." Adam's voice was very quiet. "I am here to abide by the Compact between the Queen Dowager and the Prince Beyond the Woods."
Canemore faltered. Half a dozen shapes nearly revealed themselves in the dark. "Excuse me?"
"Was I unclear? I apologize. I am here to claim the right to the crown and the throne. Give me your test."
"You forswore the crown!"
"Present your witnesses," Adam shrugged politely. "None acknowledged me them. How easy it is to say now that you want to abide by the words of a fourteen-year-old boy, when it's convenient for you. My oath wasn't good enough then; you don't get it now. Now you get me. I'm here. You would test, so test me."
They were slowly seeping out of the gloom and the fog. Adam couldn't see them all, but he was suddenly aware that there weren't many of them: a dozen, at most. Behind them, however, were a great deal of creatures he knew only on passing. The smallfolk, the commonfolk. Canemore had brought them to have them bear witness to Adam forswearing the crown; instead they were there to see the mortal prince demand his challenge.
When Canemore, seething with fury at the unexpected, would have charged out of the woods, a delicate white hand caught his shoulder. "Yours is a test requiring much thought and preparation, Prince Adam," Queen Conemara said. "We would not dream of insulting you by offering less than our best."
"I am touched by the respect her Majesty offers me," Adam told her calmly. "But I am eighteen today, and I am here today."
"We don't ask for much, only a little time," she pleaded with coy, elegant charm. "We are powerful, but you catch us unprepared."
"I am mortal, Majesty. I am a reckless sort of creature, which is both failing and triumph, I suppose." Adam pretended to think. "It's true that I'm eighteen today, and I'm here today, and that demand I will not yield, but," he added, "today it is my birthday, until the bells of Mother-Night's tower ring for midnight. That seems like a sensible sort of wait, don't you think?"
"It's a little harried," Conemara's tone was just a touch tight, "but I'm sure it will serve."
"Good." Adam's tone went as cold and black as what Canemore had left of his heart. "Because if the bells finish ringing and I have not been summoned to my challenge, I will count you in default of your Compact, and I will claim my crown and my throne."
Every fairy in the Court gasped.
"You cannot," she hissed.
"Can't I? I've come to you willingly. I'm of age. I invite your challenge. You're the ones trying to put it off. Isn't this what you wanted? The right to test every candidate to the throne? Well, then test!"
There was silence at that third demand. The twins stood side by side, staring unblinking at him. Behind them, the woods seethed with whispers of magic and power.
"Would giving you my brother's head make you go away?" Conemara asked bluntly all at once, and the Court went deathly silent.
"No."
"Is it truly the crown you want?"
"No."
"What will it take for you to forswear the throne? Gold, magic, blood, knowledge?"
Adam smiled. They'd gotten to the negotiations much faster than he'd expected. "I will answer her Majesty's question, if she will answer mine first."
Conemara pursed her lips. Next to her, Canemore didn't know who to glare at, his sister or his counterpart. "Ask."
"Why are you so determined to have me walk away rather than take the test? Why are you so worried? You have a whole day to come up with whatever it might take to either destroy me or kill me. Why don't you think that's enough?"
Conemara went very still.
"My sister -"
"Be still," she snarled at her brother. "This is your fault. He would have walked away if you had not meddled."
Adam waited. The silence stretched on and on. Conemara was a pale, beautiful, brittle piece of ice and moonlight.
"You know I can win," he told her, his smile as cold as the rest of him. "You know I have a chance."
"Yes," she admitted in a single, vicious whisper.
"I will go away if you give me Linden back."
Conemara jerked as if he'd struck her. "Name another price."
"There isn't one."
"The Danu child is gone."
"I'm aware," Adam's voice was suddenly a snarl to match theirs. "I'm well aware that you took half my heart and shattered it before me because your games went awry and you didn't like it. And like children throwing a tantrum, you decided to break your toys and never mind that they were living beings. Do you seriously think his head can make up for it?! Do you think if you let me kill him once a day for the rest of my life, that it would make a bloody difference?!"
"Have a care, mortal," Canemore's voice was the growl of a wolf. "Do not pit your piddling passions to my hatred -"
"Hatred?" The one word was a bitter laugh. "Hatred? You have spent forty-some years nursing one moment of embarrassment over a trick gone wrong, and blind greed over a crown neither of you know how to carry, Canemore. You don't know hatred."
"You dare!" Conemara hissed.
"I do," Adam snarled back. "You think war is fun. You think war is entertaining. You think hatred is a thing you indulge once a week for sport. Hatred is pure. Hatred is clean. Hatred is everything; beyond it there is no love, no loss, no anger, no sorrow. In hatred there is no shame; you’ll do anything, ask anyone and damn shame and pride. In hatred there is no greed. In hatred there is nothing but the goal to see that which you hate destroyed. Obliterated. Forgotten. I spent half my life trying to keep the hatred of others off you. But your brother, Majesty, has made sure I hate nothing so much as I hate you, him, and your entire court. And I will take my crown and my throne, just so I can erase you." Adam's smiled cracked to something broken and terrible. "And even that will not end my hatred. Because the only thing that would, you cannot give me."
The shadows had recoiled. The fog had sunk to the ground. The day blustered, and the woods hissed in the rising wind.
"You mean war," Even as brightly luminous as she was in her glamour, Conemara couldn't hide that she'd gone visibly pale.
"I do," Adam confirmed mildly. "But not the sort you play at. Because in this war, I assure you, Majesty, you will be doing the fighting just as I will. Well." He clapped his gloved hands. "I'll see you before midnight, won't I. A good morning to you all," he sketched an elegant little bow, turned and walked away, leaving the two stunned siblings surrounded by their whispering, panicking Court.
Conemara whirled around and slammed her twin against a tree with one hand. Everyone scattered out of her way. "What have you done," she demanded of Canemore.
"My sister, he's nothing, he's -"
"He's human! He is iron and salt, he is silver and sun-blessed gold, he is fire and numbers, he is legion!" Her voice rose to a shriek and she had to visibly struggle to control herself. "Never. Never in all of our twenty-thousand years among them have we won a war against them. That is why we are forbidden to provoke one."
"We already have massed armies!" Canemore protested. "Even if he somehow managed to take the throne, we have armies now. We could overwhelm him with just the troops we have here. The redcaps alone -"
"Will not fight this fight for you," the low growl of a redcap preempted the Sidhe prince, and the twins whirled to face her. Tried and tested in war, Needlemaw found it ironic at that moment that peace had given her leadership of her people. Hers was the largest surviving clan. Hers were the bones of the champions of their enemies. Hers, the tactics that had won the redcaps so many battles with such little sacrifice. Her cap was the dark, rich red of fresh spilled blood, clicking and clacking with more than two dozen knucklebones. But it was news of the Queen's betrayal and the alliance that had ended the war that had the other Redcap clan chiefs looking at her for guidance. Needlemaw had given them both. Adam had given her all of it.
She could have wept for Adam, but at the moment she felt only rage at what the twins had done to her little brother.
"Do you dare defy us, redcap?" Canemore demanded haughtily.
"Defy you?" Needlemaw shrugged. "There's as much point in defying the dead as there is in taking orders from them. And make no mistake, Highness, yui're dead. The mortal prince can, and will, take his crown. And he can, and will, kill ye."
"Whatever might befall my brother, I am still your Queen," Conemara snarled.
"A Queen what's killed her people for a good show," the redcap countered mildly. "We swore our service in exchange for yuir protection. Instead ye made up a war to kill my people. We'll fight for ye if'n we feel protected again, but I dinnae think that'll be happening, with a real war creeping close." Needlemaw turned and whistled sharply, and all those redcaps who'd been present, clan chiefs and burrow mothers and fathers, fell in behind her and disappeared into the woods.
All around them, beyond the scarce few Sidhe, the rest of the Court began to melt away.
"Wait," Conemara commanded, but was not heeded. "Wait! I can win this war! He's only a boy, he's untried, he's blind and lost. If you stand with me, I will win this war, and I will remember those who stand with me."
An immense shadow rose before the Queen Beyond the Woods, and then ponderously leaned down to examine her with tiny, soulful brown eyes.
"I can do this, Stoneheart," she assured the immense troll.
He blinked, then turned a little, rumbling. "My grandson."
From behind him, absolutely tiny by comparison, Boul peeked out.
"Can she defeat the mortal boy-king?"
Boul thrummed miserably. Everything in him wanted to race after his older brother, the second one after Linden who'd ever treated him with kindness and love, who'd taken him for what he was. He wanted to mourn with Adam, to sing with him the low songs of grief that would engrave Linden's memory forever in stone and jewel. But he knew what was expected of him; he was a warrior tested and blooded. He carried shards of quartz and obsidian that hummed with the songs of those he'd felled. He had scars on the stone of his hide that would take centuries to fade. He had a single black knucklebone hanging on a sinew cord around his neck, and the flint arrow-head between his knuckles gleamed with a fresh new edge. He stared for a long time after Adam before turning to face his grandfather. "No."
"Stoneheart!" Conemara cried out.
The troll was already turning away. He pause to look at her over one shoulder. "We have fought one losing war in your name already. We will not fight another." Without further words he walked away.
Unnoticed already, Boul slipped away into the fog.
Conemara stood very still in the clearing as the fog and the shadows faded. "I have bought you time, Canemore," she said with deadly calm. "Make good use of it, because he cannot survive your test. Do you understand me? If he does, I will send you to her Court with news of the war."
Canemore blanched and bowed low. "As my sister commands."
***
"Needlemaw."
The redcap paused at the sound of that gentle bullfrog croak, looking to one side. She turned to face her people. "Go home. Lick your wounds, clean the burrows. We'll sort ourselves out before we have a good feeding hunt."
"And the Queen? The Prince?" It was a hunched, long-limbed male probably twice her size, and all of it at long, narrow angles.
"They're not our Queen or our Prince until they win this fight."
Those around her nodded in approval and scuttled away, and she stepped aside from the tide of her people to look up at the littlest, and biggest, brother that fate had given her. Standing on her tiptoes she bumped her chest against Boul's, and then touched her forehead to his. "Oh, Boul..."
"Adam," was all he said, worry immense in his voice.
"I know. I saw it too." The Prince-That-Wasn't was truly a prince at last, but his golden crown had gone to darkness, to ice and blood. Needlemaw knew what hatred was; her people were often accused of it, though in truth they couldn't feel it. Like most fey and immortal creatures, they could rage but not hate, just as they could grieve but not regret. While they'd been away fighting to entertain the Court, hatred had devoured their brother. Needlemaw suspected it had only managed the job because grief had eaten Adam empty, and left too many hollow spaces that needed filling.
"We should help him."
"We can't, Boul. This is his to face, it always has been."
"No." The young troll shook his head sharply. "Not the tests. We should help him."
"Boul, we can't. You heard him, and he spoke true. He wrung the truth out of the twins with his own. The only thing that would fix this..." She trailed off, and rubbed angrily at her face under the wild crimson curls. "They're gone."
"But they whisper."
"Boul, that's the woods, that's the wind."
"But they whisper!"
"Boul -"
The troll growled at her in profound irritation, turned, and patted his shoulder.
"Boul, I have to go tend to my people -"
"We have to help him!" Boul nearly bellowed, and pointed again.
"Do you have a plan, an idea, a means to actually help?"
"Yes!"
The answer took Needlemaw very much aback. Trolls didn't plot, didn't plan; trolls counted time by the ages of the world, and it was too difficult for them to count the tiny measure of days or hours. It made it hard for them to live in any other way than moment to moment. But Boul, she knew, had learned many ways to be far more than just a runty troll, just as she'd learned much about being more than a redcap. She scrabbled up to his shoulders and hung onto his head. When he took off at a run, she yowled in surprise.
Running on his stumpy legs, and sometimes on all fours like an immense ape, Boul raced through the woods and out of them. Rain had begun to fall, chill and faint and dispirited. "Where are we going?" she cried out.
Boul merely ran. The palace rose before them, and she shrunk low against the troll. "Boul, what are you doing, where are you taking us?"
They raced past the vast pond and the elegant fountain, spraying pointlessly into the rainy day. The troll came to a halt before the plinth with the statue of the dancing lady, scowled, and put his hands on it. "Tell us," he rumbled. "Tell us what happened. What did you see with your stone eyes. Tell us quickly. Tell us the truth of stone."
"Boul -" Needlemaw began.
"I had hoped," the statue whispered, the breath of her words moving the granite of her veils, "that someone would come and ask." Fragments of stone rolled off her and tumbled to the ground.
Needlemaw stared in disbelief; she would have never believed that troll-magic could bring mortal stonework to life if she had not been there to bear witness. "Boul, we know what happened from the pixie," she strangled out. Distractedly she realized that there was a small ring of broken pieces all around the plinth. "I don't think I can hear this again."
"Pixie, like Adam, is flesh. Flesh can be lied to. You and I know this."
Needle pressed her lips very tightly closed. "That we do."
"Cannot lie to stone," Boul told her, before looking up at the statue again. "Tell us of the Danu child."
"I could not help," the statue sighed. "All these centuries have taught me my nature too well. I wanted to move, but stone does not move." A larger piece broke off from her and they both had to step back.
"Boul, you're killing her."
"This is not me," he replied, wary. "I gave her a voice, nothing else." Quickly, he bent down to pick up a handful of the shale around the statue, and frowned. "This is old. This has seen seasons."
"Yes," the statue confirmed. "I have no heart, of course. But I think that the Prince Beyond the Woods wanted to hurt the Danu child's choice. And he had nothing to hurt him with except the Danu child themselves. But he would not give them up either."
Needlemaw's eyes went very wide. A stone arm fell and broke apart. "It was you."
"Yes," the statue wept quietly. "He took me from my plinth and dressed me in flesh, and I knew warmth for just one moment before he shattered me. I could not tell the mortal that I was not his heart in pieces on the ground. I could only watch him be destroyed as I had been." She began to collapse. "I am so glad someone has come to ask. I do not think I could have waited very much longer."
"Where is Linden?" Boul cried out.
"I do not know. I only know what I have seen and felt. I only know the truth of stone." The statue went to pieces, and her voice faded away.
"Boul," Needlemaw swallowed against a mixture of emotions so violent inside her that she could only compare it to what she'd felt when Adam had revealed to her William's betrayal. "Boul, how did you know?"
"Didn't." The troll crouched down to run his hands through the statue's rubble. "But they whisper."
"Who whispers?"
"Linden."
"Linden is - wait. You're hearing them? Now? Here?"
"No, not here. But they whisper. I thought she would know. I didn't mean her death." The troll's face was filled with sorrow.
"Boul, you gave her a voice. She wanted that more anything, and you gave it to her. Where," she asked with tight, deadly calm, "are you hearing these whispers?"
***
Adam and Dane whiled away the hours in the archery range. No one would go near them; though they'd been the only mortals at that meeting, it was entirely too easy for those at the palace to know what the prince had done. They were afraid to approach, as if Adam's hanging doom were catching. They were alone when Dane caught sight of the immense figure lurking behind the target storage building. "Adam."
Adam turned to Dane, and then to where Dane gestured. He dropped his bow and broke into a sprint. "Boul!"
"Adam!"
He slammed into the troll's arms, even though it felt very much like crashing full-force into a wall. "You're alright," was all he could say, "you're alright!"
A rumble shook the young troll's entire body, and he leaned down, so carefully, to press his forehead to Adam's. "Sad," he replied. "Missed you." He reached up to brush back the curly black crown of Adam's hair. "Got tall," he teased.
Adam couldn't help but laugh. It was brief and rusty, entirely out of practice, but it was real, and it made both Dane and Boul ache, because even without having been there the troll knew as well as the mortal that it was a sound Adam had very much forgotten how to make. "Look at you, Boul," he leaned back to examine his little brother proudly. "What are these, armor?" He touched lightly the outcroppings of quartz and obsidian embedded in the troll's skin.
"Memories," Boul replied. "They will sing the songs of my victories. Stone does not lie. Look." He lifted his hand and showed Adam the stone arrow-head the prince had given him, so long ago. Chips had flaked off the flint edge, and it gleamed fresh and deadly even in the dull drizzle that the day had become. "I remember."
Adam's heart tried to turn in his chest, but there was no room past the black coldness that filled him. Even so, it twitched, and no amount of hatred could completely quell it. "So do I," Adam admitted, reaching under his shirt for the opalized shell in its cord.
Boul thrummed, catching the shell between two fingertips, and for a moment astonishment showed in his craggy features to see how tiny it looked against his fingers. "We will not fight against you. They will fight alone." His expression turned to sorrow. "But I cannot help you."
"I know. Boul, I know, it's alright. Don't be sad. It's better this way, without you picking sides. I already nearly went sick with worry thinking about you in the middle of a war. I'd rather know you're safe." He drew a deep breath. "Is Needlemaw alright?"
"Yes. But she leads her people now. And she is hunting for whispers. She could not come. And she cannot help you, either."
"No, of course not. But leader of her people!" Adam smiled somewhat at Boul. "She's come a long way for someone afraid of heights," he teased.
Boul rumbled a quiet little laugh, his relief that Adam had taken the news well obvious.
"But she's alright? And your people and hers, they're alright?"
"Yes. Her people will not fight you, either. No one in the Court wants to fight you."
"If only they'd thought of that before -" Adam stared at the range,where Dane was shooting at targets.
"Adam." The prince blinked, yanked back to reality, and saw that Boul was offering him an outstretched hand, palm up. "Coming-back, and staying-and-waiting."
"Oh, Boul, I have nothing for you, I'm sorry!" On the troll's hand rested a round pebble, one half pink and the other white, the size of a cherry. Next to it was an exquisite ruby-and-gold button, very small, made visible by a braid of what looked like gray horse-hair threaded through it.
"You can give when you come back. We will have no staying-and-waiting gifts, so it will be even," the troll grinned, and Adam had to grin back at the neatest fairy trap Boul had ever come up with, and the implacable faith it implied.
"That sounds more than fair," he agreed, taking the gifts and examining them closely. "Well, I know the button, but what's it on? This doesn't feel like any horse hair I've known, it's almost oily."
"Dream-mare," Boul replied. "Court mount. Hard to kill, very clever. Eats flesh. Queens of all horsekind."
"So, horse and rider," Adam murmured, his smile wry. "Needlemaw, giving me poetry. And this?" When Boul pointed at his own mouth, Adam licked cautiously at the pebble. It detonated into a familiar taste in his mouth. "This is salt! A stone made of salt." He rolled it between his fingers. "It's not crumbling or anything, it really is a stone." For just a fleeting moment he was himself, full of wonder at a troll's gift, unadorned and honest, and Boul puffed up with pride. "Thank you, Boul. Thank you for the gifts, and the news. And thank you for letting me know you're both safe."
"You made us safe," the troll pointed out. "Adam, do you wish for war?"
"No one ever wishes for war, Boul," Adam admitted quietly. "But I have nothing else to wish for, and I know who did that to me. It's not a wise combination."
The troll leaned forward to touch his forehead to Adam's. "We were not young long enough, I think."
"No, we weren't. But then, we could have been young forever and I don't think it would have been enough, Boul." He paused to think and blew out a low breath. "It was good while we were young, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Be safe, Adam. Be strong, be clever. Be all the things you already are."
"I will be all that and more, Boul. You have my word."
