‘Wait, what happened tonight? Did someone hurt you?’ Rav sat next to her, cautiously. ‘If anyone laid a finger on you, I’ll end them,’ he muttered. Faye rolled her eyes.
‘Spare me the macho crap, Rav. It’s not like you’d ever do anything.’
She thought guiltily of Finn. Being a faerie king’s lover had once given her protected, special status: Finn had almost killed Rav for pursuing Faye. She knew it wasn’t fair to compare them: Finn was a spoilt, sulky and tempestuous faerie king, compared to Rav, a man that loved her, who made her laugh, who listened to her and wanted a life with her. But everything felt shaky right now; everything was off balance. Right now she needed to feel safe and Rav, who had been the stability she needed these last months, was suddenly showing himself to be… what? Unreliable? A liar? Her throat tightened and the feeling of drowning returned.
‘Thanks a lot.’ He got up and walked out; in the lounge, she heard voices, then the front door opening and closing again. Faye finished undressing and put on her bathrobe before following him into the lounge.
‘She’s gone. Said she didn’t feel comfortable staying since we were obviously having a row. Happy now?’ He drained his bottle of beer.
Yes, actually, she thought, but didn’t say it. She hates me. ‘No.’
‘Seems there’s a lot you’re not happy about,’ he said, turning off the TV and facing her.
Faye sat on the edge of the sofa, her head in her hands. ‘My father turned up in the circle. Lyr, High King of Falias,’ she said, not meeting his gaze. ‘It was an intense kind of night.’
‘Your father?’
‘That’s right. Remember, I told you? When you were recovering. About Moddie falling for him. She never saw him again after I was born. Apparently, he’s famous for it. Siring half-human babies.’ Half-human babies. She wanted to tell him what she’d promised Glitonea, but even thinking about it caused her throat to close up again, threatening to choke her. She coughed hard until the sensation passed. What would happen if she ever did fall pregnant? If she and Rav had a child together, how would it be, knowing that it could be taken from her at any time? And what would he say, how horrified would he be if that happened and he found out she’d known it would? That she was unable to stop it? Faye felt sick.
‘I do remember, it’s just that… it’s all a bit fuzzy, you know? Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.’
Faye peered through her fingers at Rav’s expression; it was one she saw all too much of: a haunted blankness she’d tried to erase with kindness. He didn’t want to remember; he was trying to bury what had happened to him.
He wanted a normal life and so did she. Sadness welled up in her. She didn’t want to argue, and she didn’t want to see that expression on his face.
Faye reached for Rav’s hand.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just been…. quite a night,’ she said, squeezing his fingers. ‘I know you weren’t doing anything wrong. I was just… jealous, I guess.’
‘You don’t need to be jealous. Ever.’ Rav squeezed her hand back, and his eyes were full of tears. ‘I’d never do anything to hurt you, Faye. I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ she replied, but there was also a sadness in her that she closed away beyond a door, along with everything she’d wanted to tell Rav: about her fear of who she was; the power that she felt within her, and the curse that had been cast on her. He didn’t want to be told – and she couldn’t tell him – so she stayed quiet.
But in doing so, a part of her was lost, just like when she’d been in the faerie realm too long. Yet this was a part of her that was lost to the mundane human world: it was another little sacrifice, a shallow cut that she sliced from herself as an offering to the normal life that Rav wanted. And it hurt.
Fourteen
Regent’s Park was striped by the golden morning sun like a tiger’s back; the trees threw frosty shadows onto the grass where the sun hadn’t yet managed to warm the ground. As Faye walked, the sun and chill alternated on her skin and she pulled her thick tartan shawl around her shoulders.
She’d left the flat with Rav and said goodbye at the tube station; Rav was going to the office, and she needed to get out. In Abercolme, Faye had walked in the fields or along the coast path most days, either before opening the shop or after closing. She wasn’t used to the city, and that day she’d woken up needing to feel her feet on grass or sand. It was a deep, physical need: to feel the power that coursed through the earth, to draw it up into herself, to renew herself in sunlight and rain and under the quiet solace of ancient trees. The argument with Rav wouldn’t stop going around and around in her mind. We came here for a fresh start. I don’t want this in my life. Faye felt betrayed, cut loose on a roiling sea with no anchor.
She hated the tube, but she’d taken the bus for a few stops until Regent’s Park came into view. As she walked in, she caught her breath: it was far more beautiful than she’d expected. Hampstead Heath was wonderful, but it was wild and unkempt compared to the manicured lawns, carved fountains and exotic trees that drew her steps here.
It was still early, but, like anywhere in London, there were people about. West End workers power-walked to their offices, carrying takeaway coffees and frowning at their phones. Faye passed a group of elderly, coiffed and manicured ladies in velour tracksuits who were walking equally manicured dogs on jewelled leads. An early group of Japanese tourists photographed swans on a tranquil pond.
However, as Faye followed the paths further into the park, she left them behind. Pushing last night’s argument to the back of her mind, she took off her ballet pumps and held them in one hand, walking on the close-cut grass instead of the delicately gravelled pathway. She half-closed her eyes and attuned herself to the energy of the place. It had an old majesty about it, a queenly, regal feeling, like the gold-bedecked hotel where she and Rav had enjoyed afternoon tea. And yet, as well as that, the park had a different, less genteel energy. Faye breathed in the power of the earth through her bare feet as she walked, meditatively, seeing its green and black and gold power twisting up through the ground, through her soles, into her legs and coiling into her sacrum like a serpent. She’d a sudden vision of the faerie forest as she’d seen it at the Mabon ceremony; thick, green-black pines that grew out of a shining black crystal ground.
Connecting with the spirit of the place in this way, she knew, intuitively, that this was ancient forest land and always had been, even though it was now a playground for the rich. Faye had a sense of the land before a city had ever been here; of deep forest stretching up to the river; of a people that lived under the trees and worshipped the muddy Thames as life-giving goddess. So many years, so many layers of city that had been built over that faraway London. But the bones of those ancient people lay somewhere under her feet, as did the echoes and shadows of the tree roots that once grew wild around her. It gave Faye a sense of belonging, even though Abercolme was her land; there was a connection to the past here, and it was good to make it. It gave her something to hang onto in a city that felt alien: at last, below the surface, there was a London that spoke to her.
She walked further, breathing in the quiet, feeling it echo and fill her body with a peace she longed for. Magpies flitted from tree to tree, calling to each other, breaking the quiet with their throaty cackles. Faye smiled, and thought of the old rhyme. One for sorrow, two for joy; three for a girl, four for a boy. There was more than one, so there would be no sorrow for her today, and she was grateful for it.
She walked on, past a coffee stall, then, putting her shoes back on, thought better of it and went back.
‘Lovely morning.’ The girl inside the powder-blue painted refreshment shack looked up from her magazine. Faye nodded and asked for a mocha.
‘What’s the best bit of the park? I don’t want to miss anything I should definitely see.’ Faye looked around her; the sun was getting stronger now and reaching into the corners it hadn’t earlier.
‘Rose garden?’ The girl wrapped a napkin
around the paper cup and handed it to Faye. ‘Past its best, this time of year, but there are still some in flower. I love it in there, anyway. Follow the path when it forks to the right, you can’t miss it.’
‘Thanks.’ Faye sipped her drink and walked on, delighting in the peace in the park and the sweetness of the chocolate mixed with the strong coffee in her veins. She breathed out a sigh of happiness; finally, she was feeling like herself, probably for the first time since being in London. And, after the Mabon ritual, she needed some peace. She needed some time to return to herself, to evaluate and sit with what had happened. Seeing a long-lost father for the first time, unexpectedly, was difficult. Your long-lost faerie king father appearing to you during a ritual with virtual strangers – and disappearing back into his faerie realm – took it to the next level.
There was no-one else in the circular rose garden when Faye stepped into the first of its concentric circles and took a sharp gasp of surprise. For a moment, she saw a vision of it in full bloom: thick, velvet-petalled yellow roses, blowsy with their rich summer scent; small, perfect blood-red rosebuds atop stiff, thorny stalks; perfect pink roses with their outer petals a little browned by the heat. Yet, as she blinked again, it returned to the way it was – there were few roses left apart from some late-blooming white ones that shone against the glossy dark green leaves of the bushes.
Faye walked the outer circle and followed it inwards, reminiscent of the spiral walk she sometimes did as part of ritual; a spiral inwards to raise and focus the power, a spiral outwards to let it go. She could still smell roses on the air, but when she sniffed the white flower, it had little perfume. She shivered involuntarily. It’s my imagination, she told herself. Nothing more. The roses were gone for the autumn, and their blooms would wait until next summer to return.
No, it’s a faerie place, she suddenly realised with a degree of shock. Not that all nature wasn’t part of the realms of faerie – Grandmother had taught her that the four elemental faerie kingdoms were the high thrones of power for the four elements of the ordinary world – air, fire, earth and water. But the rose garden itself had the same sense of enchantment that she’d felt before. The rose perfume returned, intensified, and Faye closed her eyes, starting to be pulled under by its scent. With her eyes closed, she could see a rich golden light rising upwards from the rose bushes, like rain in reverse, and heard faerie voices singing sweetly. Faye stood at the centre of the circles of rose bushes and spread out her arms, turning her face up to the sun with pleasure. The suffuse, sweet scent of roses bathed her senses in its luxury and she breathed it in.
Something like fur brushed her hand and something sank its teeth into her palm.
She screamed and opened her eyes, but she was alone in the garden.
‘Leave me alone!’ she cried, and ran out of the circled rose bushes, their thorns catching at her skirts like fingers.
Fifteen
Faye ran out of the park and onto the road that bordered it, weaving her way through the businesspeople, mothers in running gear, pushing their babies in sports buggies and the ever-present packs of wandering tourists. Leave me alone, no, no! she thought, not knowing if she was muttering under her breath, and not caring.
Eventually, her run slowed to a walk and she began to feel more normal again. The crowds were a balm of ordinariness she lost herself in, and instead of seeking the side streets, she let herself be swept along the wide, busy pavement alongside shops and cafés, next to the slow-moving traffic. Why can’t it leave me alone? she thought. I don’t want faerie. Not now.
She walked and walked, not intending to go anywhere in particular, just following the crowds. Dully, she looked at the shop windows; some of the department stores featured Halloween displays with grinning orange pumpkins, pillowy ghosts and cartoon witches with green faces. The sight made her angry. She was a witch: was she a green-faced caricature? Was she a cartoon, a stock image, something that was an equivalent of a ghoul or a vampire? Faye would readily admit that she had a sense of humour failure about caricatured representations of witches like these. It was as if everyone had forgotten that the warty old women on the Halloween face masks represented real women that had once been tortured and killed for having a small degree of wisdom. How was it still all right for shops and books and magazines and TV adverts to roll out this same stereotype about a group of people that had been murdered en masse in actual history? How had the world not moved past this hatred of women? And why did the world believe that witches – real witches, people who made it their life’s work to reconnect to their own natural power – were as fictional as monsters?
She had wanted to reconnect to nature and now, here she was, trudging along the grimy London roads, breathing in car exhaust and being deafened by people: their shouting, laughing, catcalling; the discordant sounds of street buskers and unidentifiable music blaring from shops.
Instinctively, Faye turned off the busy street and followed a side street that led into a Georgian terrace bordering a quiet green square. She drew in a deep breath and exhaled loudly a few times, letting her anger and dismay go. It wasn’t the Halloween witches as much as the strange experience in the rose garden that had put her on edge. Wasn’t it possible for her to connect to the land in the slightest way without an echo, a touch from faerie reminding her of her parentage, and of her half-faerie nature? Lyr was still trying to make contact with her, she knew. But she wasn’t ready to face the father that had abandoned her. Not yet. She worried again about the impression she must have made at the ritual. The others – what had they thought of her? That she was mad, possessed, damaged in some way? Her stomach clenched with anxiety. She wanted to explain, but she wouldn’t know where to start. Even for witches, Faye’s story seemed unbelievable.
Faye walked across the quiet square. Three casually-dressed young men came out of one of the smart blue-painted doors to her right; they passed her, carrying folders of documents, talking about something she couldn’t catch. Faye noticed the name of a well-known book publisher on the brass plaque next to the door, whose books she stocked in her shop.
She followed the men, taking the recognition of the publisher as a sign. She didn’t know where she was, and the street names meant nothing to her. Faye didn’t feel particularly lost, as such, because she knew she could hail a cab to take her home at any time. It was more that she had a feeling that her day’s exploring wasn’t over, and that there was still something she was supposed to do.
The young men walked around a corner onto a busy, narrow street, and a huge building, colonnaded by pillars, appeared in front of her. Awed by its size, Faye followed the line of people snaking through the black gate in the cast iron railings and found herself in a wide courtyard.
Facing the building, she gazed up, through the eight central pillars to branded posters featuring a new exhibition: The Celts. She smiled, thinking I’m a Celt, here I am, home. This was the British Museum; she remembered leafing through a book about Egyptian mythology Annie had got out of the village library, sitting at the kitchen table at Annie’s house. Annie’s mother had wrinkled her nose in distaste at the mummified bodies and the canopic jars, where Egyptian embalmers had stored the organs of the dead king or queen, ready for their voyage to the underworld. But Faye and Annie had been rapt, reading out their favourite bits of the text to each other.
Faye wandered in to the vast museum. She knew better than to think chance had led her here; this was a magical place and the home of so many cultures’ magical items: their gods, their goddesses and holy treasures lived here. She gazed up in wonder at the high glass roof inside, glazed in a geometric pattern that seemed to elevate the museum into the clouds. At least, if the coven wasn’t going to invite her back, she’d found a place she could come to feel connected to magic. It was a different kind of magic, in some ways, to the traditions Grandmother had taught her. But it was a page in the same book, and Faye was grateful for that.
Faye followed the signs to the Celts exhibition: it was housed
in a long, wide gallery and at first she marvelled at the gold and silver torcs, jewellery that had belonged to queens and warrior chieftains. She herself had worn something similar in Murias; instinctively, she put her hand to her throat, but the choking sensation didn’t come.
Faye walked reverently among the exhibits, noticing a group of people surrounding one area in particular. She waited for the crowd to abate a little and stepped forward.
On a raised dais behind strengthened glass sat a wide, deep silver cauldron, over half a metre wide and a couple of feet deep. Faye gasped as her eyes took in its detail: the bulls, stags, dogs and snakes engraved on the fine silver on a number of panels, depicting Celtic gods and goddesses driving chariots and soldiers fighting ancient wars. It was deeply beautiful, intricate work, and it reminded her of the golden cup of Murias she’d often seen in her dreams; a cup big enough to stand inside.
Faye’s vision blurred for a moment, and it was as if she half-dreamed the cauldron in front of her at the centre of a great hall, where a queen stood with it at her feet in the midst of a great ceremony. Hundreds of men and women lined the hall, singing; there was a burst of light and smoke, and a great cheer.
Faye blinked open her eyes, returning to normal awareness. She took a deep breath and felt the smile fill her face. Somehow, this artefact had connected her to her ancestors for a brief moment. Again, she had the sense of familiarity, of home, that she’d lacked since arriving in the city. Standing near to this ancient cauldron felt right, felt like something which was hers. The power of the silver cauldron soaked the gallery in its magic. Faye closed her eyes and let the energy fill her, bowing her head in reverence.
Lend me your strength and grace, glorious ancestors, Faye prayed. Protect me in this city. I’m thankful to have found you.
Queen of Sea and Stars Page 9
