Sea Fae Trilogy

by C. N. Crawford

  She turned away from me, her feet crunching in the snow as she trudged toward the trees. My heart sank as I watched her walk away. We had to go somewhere?

  She stopped and turned to look at me again, that frozen smile on her face. Another purple fingernail, beckoning me to follow. She wanted me to join her in the skeletal forest.

  I clenched my teeth, scanning the sparse trees. When I looked behind me, I could see only a vast white expanse. I’d thought this would all be over fast…

  I wanted to get back to Gina, to Salem. I wanted to know that everyone would be okay. But it seemed I had another trial to pass.

  I followed after the Winter Witch.

  Between the thin, dark trunks, something moved within the snow. Vortexes of flakes, hair whirling within them. As they spun closer, I started to recognize what they were—the women with snow-white skin and blood-red eyes, twisting between the trees. They wore crowns of dark twigs, and they whirled silently like snow squalls, pale hair whipping around them.

  I shivered at how eerily silent they were despite so much movement. Lyr had called them leanhaum-shee, and I remembered the feel of one of their venomous tongues, the painful poison that had shot through my thigh.

  I cast a glance back at the portal, its surface crowded with chunks of ice. Then I trudged on after Beira.

  All this hinged on the fact that I trusted Lyr. Was my instinct wrong?

  I wiped some of the falling snow from my eyes, and as my vision cleared, I spotted a structure between the trees. It didn’t look like much more than a crooked pile of rocks, just barely tall enough for Beira to enter, but that was what we were heading for. As we approached, I saw that there was a crude doorway in the front. Snow blanketed the jagged roof, thorny sticks jutting from its surface.

  Grinning, Beira turned to me. Keep me warm for a spell. Her words whispered inside my skull, the voice rising in my own mind.

  I nodded, but dread was starting to creep over my skin like winter frost. I glanced at the sky, finding only whiteness and falling snow.

  Beira beckoned me again. She wanted me to follow her into that house, to keep her warm. The only thing I knew about her was that she was desperately lonely, starving for company. Her lack of love made her wither like a blighted plant.

  The darkness at the opening of her house yawned like a great void, and I didn’t want to go in. But Gina needed me to get on with it.

  Beira beckoned me again, and I took another step closer, my heart thrumming. If something went wrong here, would Lyr come for me?

  She bent down and crossed into the darkness of her house.

  I lingered outside for a moment, scanning the snowy forest around me. Now, the leanhaum-shee were spinning closer, hair whipping wildly through the air. Their spiked crowns spiraled. The threat of their poisonous tongues drove me inside, into the darkness.

  I’d expected a bit of warmth in here. A hearth, maybe. Instead, I found only darkness and the sound of my own breathing.

  “Beira?” I whispered.

  With my arms wrapped around myself, I took a deep breath and suddenly realized what the most uncomfortable thing about this place was. It didn’t smell like anything. As a fae, I relied on my sense of smell more than humans. In here? It felt like being dead.

  I wanted to turn and head out of the house again, but there was no light coming in through the doorway. And when I took a step, I bumped into a stone wall, glacially cold.

  “Beira? Lyr said—” I stopped myself. How stupid I sounded. How monumentally stupid.

  Lyr said you’d help me.

  I hated being helpless.

  I took another step, but my fingers brushed against another wall. Had she trapped me in here?

  That wretched hag had set a trap for me.

  The icy air was moving through my muscles, freezing me to the marrow. Breathing hard, I started to feel the walls around me, looking for an opening.

  But as I did, ropes of ice twisted around my wrists, tightening roughly. The bindings jerked my arms behind my back with a ferocity that felt like it might snap my joints. The ice curled around my ankles, tightening. I fell to my knees, arms wrenched behind me, tied to my ankles. I leaned against the wall to stop myself from falling over, my heart in my throat.

  I was hog-tied on the frozen dirt, barely staying upright. The only thing I could hear now was my heart beating, so loud it was like a war drum. Frozen in here, it was hard to breathe.

  Fingertips of ice stroked the side of my face, brushing my hair off my cheek.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  Another stroke of her fingers on my cheek, and dread slid down along with them. Her voice rang in my mind once more. I want a keepsake from you. A treasure. To keep me warm.

  “What keepsake?”

  We’d done this before, hadn’t we? I’d given her my ring—a little gift from Gina. She’d seemed so lonely, so desperately lonely, and a ring from a friend had seemed to make her happy. She lacked love, and had somehow known that the ring was imbued with love. It had been enough for her.

  What did I have this time? A comb in my satchel, and that was it.

  I heard her exhale loudly, and a bubble of pale gray light floated from her mouth above my head.

  I was shivering hard on my knees, bent backward in an awkward position. I leaned against a wall. Still, with the new light, I could survey the room. I found myself only about a foot from a wall with little alcoves inset in the stone. The alcoves were decorated with bones, children’s teeth, and trinkets. A chipped porcelain clown grinned at me—a child’s toy. I grimaced at it, wondering where she’d gotten it from.

  My ring gleamed from one of the little alcoves, a relic of my last visit.

  These were her keepsakes.

  “Do you want my comb?” I asked in desperation. “A tooth? What?”

  Gods, this was insane. Anger was surging in me—at Beira, and at Lyr for sending me here.

  The bubble of light floated closer. Awkwardly, I shifted on my knees, taking in a few more of her keepsakes: a snuffed candle, a doll’s head with no eyes, a frozen bird frosted in a bell jar. An old, rusted knife that I desperately wanted in my hands. A key, dangling on a ribbon.

  The frozen ground bit into my knees. I wondered if this was a trial or an execution.

  Beira kicked me with one of her large feet, nearly knocking me over, but I steadied myself on the wall again. Her toenails were the purplish hue of a drowned, bloated corpse. I looked up at her, at how her back hunched under her ceiling. That wide grin split her face.

  Then her voice whispered in my mind again: A keepsake. A treasure from you.

  What a miserable existence this was.

  Made sense, I guess. One of her names was Queen of Misery.

  But what was it that made her so sad? I remembered the old story Mama used to tell to scare me at night. I hadn’t even thought she was real at all, hadn’t spent much time thinking about it.

  Mama would sit on the edge of my bed, a glass of wine in her hand. She would tell me to be careful, to listen to her orders, or Beira would get me. The Queen of Misery would drag me into her hell.

  Mama’s eyes had gleamed as she looked down on me in my bed.

  Beira was a princess in a fae kingdom, until her cruel husband threw her in an ice dungeon. There, her mind became twisted and warped over time, turning her into the Winter Witch. And now? She steals bones and hearts as prizes. That is what happens if you trust men, Aenor. And that’s why you must listen to me, always.

  The husband who threw her in an ice dungeon…

  The sphere of light beamed dully in front of her face. And now, at last, I was starting to piece it together.

  I looked up at her, breathing fast. “Tell me what keepsake you want.”

  Something that belongs to me.

  Her smile faded abruptly, and she bent down, shoving her furious face in mine.

  Then, she spoke in her croaking voice, and it rumbled over my skin. “My husband, King Salem.”
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br />   Aenor

  The words made my heart skip a beat. Her bloodshot eye blinked, her mouth contorted in fury.

  Lyr had sent me here to my death. How could I have been so wrong about his intentions?

  “I don’t know where Salem is,” I said.

  Her terrible laughter rang off the stone walls, and her icy breath misted my face. She spoke in my mind. He’s here. You die together. Your pain will keep me warm, forever. It will heat me.

  Here?

  The puff of light moved through the air, and I shifted on my knees, inching my position slowly to the right. I nearly toppled over, but then I leaned against the wall as I managed to turn—

  My heart was ready to leap from my chest when I saw him. He knelt in front of the far wall, arms chained behind his back. His head lolled forward like he was dead, and his gaze was on the ground, body completely stiff.

  The ice was an inch thick over his body. Worst of all, thin iron spikes pierced his chest, jutting out from under his collarbones. A metal collar encircled his throat, chaining him to the wall.

  Time seemed to stand still. No life, no movement. No flicker of recognition in his eyes. I felt like the world stopped, like the sun had been snuffed out.

  “Is he dead?” My voice was barely a whisper. He couldn’t die, could he?

  Beira’s loud reply was like the ragged squawking of a bird. The sound was so terrible that I wanted to clamp my hands to my ears. “That would ruin the fun.”

  “Did Lyr know?” I asked. Through the icy fog of fear, I couldn’t quite figure out why this seemed so important. But it was.

  In response, she only hummed… high pitched, off-tune, the noise maddening.

  My mind screamed. Frozen there, Salem looked so wrong. He was so still, silent. A frozen, broken god.

  But no—she’d said killing him would ruin the fun. He was still alive, right?

  What was the threat the other witches had issued? They had said they’d break his body into pieces, scattering the bits over the earth. It would be a living death, one that would never end.

  On my knees, I tried to inch closer to him. I could melt the ice with the heat of my body. I wasn’t sure what the rest of my plan was, only that I wanted to be near him. I was moving just one millimeter at a time, propelled slowly forward by an overpowering instinct to be close to my mate. My knees slid and scraped against the frozen earth.

  The sphere of light swooped around him, and I noticed it again—the iron key on a silver ribbon. Now, I realized was different than the other trinkets in this room—the only one not tucked into a little alcove.

  My heart sped up. Was that the key to his shackles?

  You see it, she said in my mind. Set him free.

  Was this a game? She wanted me to see the key, to shuffle and scramble over to it like a worm in the dirt. It wasn’t as though I could get it with my hands and legs tied.

  And yet… I had to try. Maybe I could use my teeth.

  I faltered, falling against the rocks, and Beira’s laughter pealed through the room like a broken bell.

  I clenched my jaw, leaning against the wall to try to inch closer to him. Did he know I was here? I didn’t think so. His eyes were looking down at the dirt, head bent like a penitent.

  Beira kept laughing, the sound like ice under my skin. And underneath it, her voice was whispering in my mind, Failure. You lost your kingdom, your crown. You let your human die. You let your mate die. Failure…

  But it wasn’t Beira’s voice anymore. It sounded kind of like… kind of like Mama.

  The skin of my knees stuck to the icy earth, freezing as I tried to shuffle closer to Salem. Her words were eating through my veins like a poison.

  Failure. Your mate let his kingdom rot. Mag Mell remains as cursed as he is. A true fae king has the power of life and death over his kingdom. It’s why you could never rule Ys. Mama knew… you were never good enough.

  I gritted my teeth, lurching forward another inch along the wall. “Shut the fuck up, Beira, you miserable cow.”

  You will die here, together.

  Somehow, her words were infecting my mind like venom, and I saw myself like she did—crawling along the floor. Defeated and corrupted.

  Never good enough… The words circled my mind like vultures.

  He always planned to leave you, Aenor. This is a blessing. Now he dies, and you can save yourself the humiliation of that rejection.

  I slumped against the wall, trying to catch my breath. I felt like all the fight had drained out of me, and he was still a few feet away. Pieces of skin had peeled off my knees with the ice, and my mind was starting to go dark.

  He always planned to leave you, because you were never good enough.

  Salem

  Frozen solid, I was no longer entirely sure where I was. Pain ripped through my chest in two distinct points where I thought I had been pierced. Apart from that, I couldn’t see much of anything. I couldn’t smell, and it seemed like world around me had died.

  For an instant, I thought Aenor might be here, and real fear shot through me. Aenor couldn’t be anywhere near Beira. But no… I couldn’t smell her or see her, so I had no real reason to think that.

  How much it had killed me to keep silent about this. Every time someone had said Beira’s name, dread had sunk into my chest. But her wretched curse had stopped me from speaking about it.

  Here, trapped in ice, I was losing my mind a little—because slowly, in the darkness of my mind, smoky cave walls were taking shape around me. They solidified, the color of sand streaked in smoke, until I was no longer in Beira’s lair. I found myself standing tall in my old, scorched cave.

  Night had fallen, and flames from a bonfire wavered over the walls. I heard delicate footfalls, and I turned to find Beira standing behind me. It was Beira as she’d once looked, all those years ago. Her hair gleamed white, and dark eyelashes framed her large blue eyes. “Husband.”

  Nausea was rising within me. I couldn’t quite remember where I was supposed to be, but it wasn’t here.

  I leaned against the wall and pulled out my flask of cognac, feigning confidence. I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but I never liked to let on when that was the case.

  “Husband?” I repeated. “I don’t think so.”

  She cocked a hip. “We married, didn’t we?”

  Now, this part I remembered. At least, I remembered the aftermath. I took a sip of the cognac and rolled it over my tongue. “Did we? The night we married, you poisoned me with wormwood. Don’t you remember? You and your father had filled my wine with it—and something else, making me intoxicated. Our alleged marriage happened on a night I can’t even remember.”

  She shrugged. “You were always drunk in those days. I don’t see what difference it made.”

  “Not like that. I remember nothing of our wedding night. Only the morning, and waking to find you with a crown on your head, proclaiming yourself Queen of Mag Mell. Amazing that you thought I’d just go along with it.”

  Her lip curled. “You made a vow.”

  “So you say. Tell me, did I verbally make a vow?”

  “Your head nodded. We made sure of that much. It is enough to make it legal, so said the priest.”

  “I figured as much. The priest, was he also your father?”

  She seemed to grow larger before me. “Do you know how humiliating it was to be publicly rejected after my father announced our marriage?” She took another step closer. “Do you know how alone I felt? And then you ran off with a little nymph from the Court of Silks. I wasn’t good enough for you, was I? Not pretty enough? Not rich enough? What, exactly, was so lacking in me?”

  I stared at her. “Beira, those were not the problems. The problem was, quite clearly, that you were, and are, a terrible person.” I brought the flask to my lips, then thought better of it, considering who I was with. “Really just revolting on the inside; rotten like an old fruit. You drugged me to marry me. You don’t see an issue with that? Why I might object?”


  She gritted her teeth. “I was good enough to be queen. But when you left me, I became a laughingstock. And I wasn’t the only one who loathed you. You fucked everyone’s wife, didn’t you? It wasn’t hard to banish you. Everyone wanted you gone.” She crossed her arms, taking another step closer. “And it wasn’t hard to curse you, because I scarcely had to change a thing. You were already evil and broken. You know that, don’t you?”

  I felt her words like claws around my heart. “Yes, I do. The fall from the heavens corrupted me.”

  She pinched her fingers before her eyes. “It was like squeezing the head off a mouse with a broken neck. Nearly dead anyway, and all it takes is a final little pop to make it official. That’s what it was like to curse you.”

  I stared at her. “The fact that you would consider that a good metaphor is an example of why you’re a terrible person.”

  “But as I rip your body into tiny pieces and scatter the bits over my home, I want you to understand that. You were already twisted. You were already standing on the ledge, ready to fall. I just gave you the teeniest, tiniest of pushes—”

  Her words, rip your body into pieces, sent shock waves of realization through me, and I stopped listening to the rest.

  My mate, Aenor. I remembered her now. Where was she? Where was I? I couldn’t be in my cave with Beira, because none of this made sense. She wanted Aenor dead, didn’t she? And how would I protect Aenor when Beira trampled my particles into the earth?

  Fury slid through my bones. “You need to leave Aenor alone.”

  Beira cackled, and the sound skittered up my spine. “But that’s the whole point.” She was hysterical with mirth, tears streaming down her pink cheeks as she doubled over. She could hardly speak. “When you watch each other die, knowing you both failed—” The laughter cut off her sentence, and she waved a hand, crying. “Oh, it’s just so amazing. She came right to me. Lyr sent me for help! It was just what I wanted.” Another fit of laughter, and she wiped the tears off her cheeks.

  I thought of killing her, of course, but I knew we weren’t really here. This was all playing out in my mind.