by Ryan Graudin
Richard’s only response is a long, leaden sigh. Like the sound of a sleeping bear poked into drowsiness.
“I think you should apologize to Dad.”
“What?” The prince starts. “Belle, I didn’t do anything! I told you, it was a blackout!”
“Maybe not, but you still put yourself in that position. The only way Dad is ever going to trust you is if you take the first step and show some initiative.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Richard’s cheeks mottle red and peach. “I was just having some fun with my friends like anyone else!”
“But we aren’t just anyone else,” the princess insists. “We have responsibilities.”
Richard breaks in. “Who made you such a guiding light anyway? You don’t have to pretend to be Mum. She does her own job well enough.”
“I—I’m just trying to help,” Anabelle says, the hurt clear in her earth-shaded eyes.
“I don’t need your help right now, Belle. I need to be alone. I have to work this out myself.” The prince rakes his hands through his hair and tugs at the back of his neck. As if the motions will rid him of his sister’s words. “Go. Please.”
“Fine,” she says, all terseness. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Things have to change soon, Richard. You can’t keep doing this to Dad and Mum.”
Richard stares at the gravel. His eyes stay locked on the small, sharp rocks. When his sister is completely out of sight he kicks at the path, sending a rattling spray of stones into the opposite flower bed. They rain on innocent petals, fast and spitting, like shrapnel.
“What’s wrong with me?” He looks down at his knuckles, at the hand he bruised protecting me. The edges of his dark lashes glisten, brimming with too much emotion.
I should be sitting by the flower bed, dodging those pebbles. I should just accept my blame in this and move on. I should wait for the next Fae to relieve my shift, so I can go ride the Underground and clear my head.
Instead I touch him.
It’s nothing significant, just the barest trace of my finger on his shoulder. The act is so sudden, so impulsive and not me, that I don’t realize what I’ve done until the prince reacts. He jerks back like a man burned, eyes darting faster than a spooked horse until they focus on where I’m sitting.
“Who—who are you?” he asks, his stare vague. “How’d you get in here?”
He sees me. It’s not possible. The veiling spell . . . somehow, my magic has failed.
I’m like a hare, frozen by the headlamps of an approaching vehicle. My mind dashes in hundreds of directions, but I can’t seem to make myself actually move.
“Where did you come from?” Richard’s eyebrows dive together. His thoughts are churning, playing out on every corner of his face, trying their best to reconcile my sudden appearance.
I should wipe his memory, cause another blackout. The spell is simple, one I’ve formed thousands of times. It should be little more than a reflex to take the past minute out of his head.
But I can’t make myself say the word.
“I—I have to go,” I mutter as I stand.
“What? Wait!” The prince reaches out his hand. His fingers brush mine—warm, tingling.
I turn and run.
High Street Kensington station swarms with humanity. Women whose arms are loaded with shopping bags, hooded teenagers talking into their mobiles, and men with briefcases all rush past. They’re unaware of the world around them, focused on getting home.
I get on the first train that rushes to the platform. The car is nearly full—I fight to wedge myself through the steel doors. More than a few times I feel like gagging. The train is all metal, sweat, and body heat. Grinding wheels on a track. . . . Everything the magic inside me hates. Writhes against.
But the train is underground, a grace that is more than saving. The countless meters of earth above and around us feed my spirit. It doesn’t matter that I’m sitting in a metal tube, barreling through the tunnels. As long as I’m here, my magic will replenish.
I don’t remember which Fae first thought to ride the trains. More than likely it was one of the younglings—the ones whose stomachs were closer to steel themselves. The ones who weren’t horrified when engineers started carving out tunnels in our precious earth for the trains to burrow through. We all use it now.
The train is far from central London by the time I finally get a seat. I pay little attention to the names of each stop as we plow farther into the city’s outskirts. I let my head rest against the rattling window. Wind through the cracks and the lullaby hush of the tracks help calm my stomach.
But the thought, the full weight of what I’ve just done, still makes me want to retch.
I revealed myself to a mortal—to Britain’s prince—and instead of wiping his memory, I ran. I broke the barrier between magic and mortal. And I didn’t fix it.
Richard isn’t what I’d expected. Not at all. I went into my first shift ready to wrangle an uncontrollable party animal. Instead I found a young man who, despite his better judgment, was brave enough to defend me. Someone who wasn’t afraid of me or the power I displayed.
Something about Richard is different from the others I’ve guarded. Something connects us: something dangerous and electric.
And I don’t know why.
Urgent needles dig into the back of my neck, and all of these baffling thoughts flee my mind’s center stage. The aura is both unsettling and hard to find. The train car is still crammed tight with bodies, wedged side by side in their seats or clutching the bright blue hand poles. All of the mortals are swallowed in their own little electronic worlds: music players, screens with words and moving pictures, conversations with people who are miles away. Not one of them sees the huntress.
Like me, the Green Woman is very visible—we have to be in such cramped, crowded places or we’d be stampeded. She creeps as slowly as she can down the train’s wobbling aisle. Her dress clings to her like emerald plastic wrap, flaunting a bursting bosom and sculpted thighs. Those lips are quirked into a permanent coy grin as she goes down the line, eyeing men like baskets of fish and chips.
She’s hungry. She has to be if she’s being so obvious about her prowl: during daylight hours, in a crowded area, alone. Her aura is weaker than most, which explains why it took me so long to notice her presence. It also explains why none of the men are looking up. Her powers of persuasion are as watered-down as her magic.
Looking at the way she skirts down the car, so desperate for more power, so starving, I almost feel sorry for her. But she chose this life. She chose to prey on mortals just as I chose to protect them.
The lurch in my stomach reminds me that I’m not much better off.
The Green Woman is so focused on catching someone’s, anyone’s attention, that she almost passes me by. Her smile, false as it is, can’t stand my presence. Up close it’s easier to tell that she hasn’t killed in a very long time. There are cracks in the magic of her face, patches where her beauty isn’t so dazzling.
“Sister,” she says after we first lock eyes.
The way this word leaves her makes me wonder if I know this spirit, if our paths have crossed before. Long ago, in the days before King Arthur’s alliance, the Green Women, Banshees, Black Dogs, and all of the other soul feeders weren’t so different from us Frithemaeg. In the beginning of things, we’re all the same substance: pure spirit, power drawn up from the earth. It’s only when our lives become physical—when bodies are selected, choices made, and oaths sworn—that we diverge.
I look at this huntress long and hard. Behind the hollow sheen of her eyes, I see the lives of all the men she’s devoured. All the souls she’s fed on to make her own stronger.
And I’m sure we’ve never met.
“You should be moving on now,” I tell her.
The huntress keeps walking; her stilettos stamp hard on the faux tile. Every step is a gunshot to my ears.
By the time the train pulls into Tower Hill, my entire car is abandoned.
The feminine voice from the loudspeakers informs me that the train will terminate here. I stand, noting how much steadier my legs are after hours underground.
The streets outside are heavy with dark; only a few flickering streetlamps fight the shadows. Most of London is safely nestled behind locked doors, unaware that Black Dogs and other soul feeders are prowling, searching for easy prey in poor drunk souls.
Something twinges inside me. There’s another immortal nearby. I tense, my stare roving across sidewalks cast star-set blue by streetlamps.
“It’s just me.” I turn at the familiar voice to find her outline, lean and unmistakable: Breena.
Dread joins my ever-present nausea. I know why she’s tracked me down. She wants an account for what I’ve done: why I abandoned Richard so suddenly without requesting a replacement.
“Is there something you’d like to explain to me?” Breena approaches with selective steps, the same way a cat uses grass and slowness to snag a songbird. And as much as I want to, I can’t fly away. The older Fae would only follow.
There was a time when I would’ve told Breena everything. We’ve endured much together: the fall of Camelot; watching the Black Death wash over the kingdom, luring soul feeders to every doorway in Britain. Those three days when London was alight, a living hell of fire and ash. Handling monarchs like John Lackland and Mary I with tendencies bloodier than uncooked beef. And wars: the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, the War to End all Wars . . . so many wars.
Throughout all of this and against all the customs of our kind, Breena has treated me as an equal. Despite her one hundred years of seniority, she both advises and respects me. I trust her with my life and beyond.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggests. “I haven’t been to the Tower of London in a while.”
Breena’s energy seems boundless as she strides ahead. There’s no rust or corrosion in her aura. No weariness to her magic. As if all these modern metals and electric currents swirling around us don’t exist.
“How do you do it?” I strive to keep up the pace, hoping that my question will distract her from the reprimand I know is coming.
“What?” She looks back, and seeing my distance, immediately slows.
“London. The sickness. All of it. You haven’t been to the Highlands in twenty years. How do you keep going for so long?”
We approach the dreary, aging prison. I brush my hand against its cool lichen-covered stones, and a chill shoots through me. Death and pain lie in these walls, stained with so much royal blood.
“Love, I think,” Breena says as we pass through the iron portcullis.
I blink, allowing the word to simmer for a moment. Love. A word most Fae never even think to utter. There was duty, magic, power, honor—but never love. That was for humans, to fill the gaps in their lives. To make the shortness of their years bearable.
“A man?” I choke out the possibility. Only a few of our kind got tangled up in the emotions of mortal men—we never spoke of them again.
“Oh no.” She shakes her head, blonde curls bouncing. “No man. I mean all of them, the mortals. Their songs, their emotions, their creations, their stories. If you embrace this city and crawl under its skin . . . there’s something here. Much of the Guard has seen that. That’s why the younger ones have stayed here so long. Most of the older Fae are just too aloof to find it. They stay in the Highlands and dictate things from afar.”
“But the sickness. It’s been eating away at me for days.” I wrap my arms around my stomach, where the nausea burns always, like acid.
“I don’t even notice it anymore. For the most part,” Breena admits. “It balances out after a few years.”
“Will you ever go back to the Highlands?”
“Nothing but Mab’s direct order can drag me away from here.”
We walk into the center of the old fortress, coming to one of the few benches scattered across the Tower of London’s grassy squares. Breena sighs as she rests against the hard wooden slats.
“Now, you must have an excellent explanation for what happened this morning, because, try as I might, I can’t think of a reason why you would abandon your post like that.”
I stare at the patch of lush, manicured grass. Beyond us, in the shadows of cannons and trees, sets of beady eyes stare back. They belong to the Tower ravens, gifted with speech and intelligence—prophets clad in black feathers. To call them “birds” would be an insult.
Though the Tower ravens can form words with their sharp tongues, it’s only after receiving their visions that they use this gift. The last time they spoke to our kind was many decades ago, when a blitz of fire and smoke nearly razed the entire city. Their vision foretold that doom.
For now, they’re silent. They lurk in the shadows, watching as I struggle for an excuse Breena might accept.
“It—it was too much. I got tired. I needed to go underground,” I say.
“Why not call for a replacement? One of the younglings would have been there in minutes.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight. I haven’t been in London for over a decade, Breena! Don’t you remember how intense the sickness is at first? I could barely cast a summoning spell. I needed to get underground.”
The older Fae’s eyes narrow, their arctic blue refusing to leave my face. “We both know that you’re stronger than that,” she says. “The prince got to you, didn’t he?”
I look over at my friend, trying to quell my panic. Does she know about the failed veiling spell? About how, instead of murmuring the spell to steal Richard’s memory, I turned and ran? I don’t see how—none but the prince and I were there to witness it.
“He’s different. . . .” I don’t know how to go on. Many things, like the strange jolts that seized me when our eyes met and my careless touch, should be kept secret.
“Richard’s made all of us emotional. There’s not one Fae in the Guard who hasn’t been frustrated after a few shifts with him,” Breena assures me. “It’s nothing to worry about. You just have to push past it.”
Frustrated. Breena thinks I’m frustrated. She doesn’t know what happened in the garden.
But what about the draw between us? The connection? Had any of the other Fae felt that?
“Why, though?” I ask. “What makes him so different? None of the other royals have ever caused such trouble. . . .”
Something of a smile plays across Breena’s face. It’s times like these—all blonde and knowing—that she reminds me of the angels in the illuminations which monks used to paint into their scriptures. They spent hours bent over their manuscripts, brushes poised at just the right angle to capture the etherealness of their scenes.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and asked that very question. I think,” she pauses, allowing her thoughts to fall in order, “some mortals have spirits that are stronger than others. Souls they haven’t yet grown into. They have potential, great potential . . . but until they learn how to harness it, they’re all chaos. Richard is one of those: a strong spirit who doesn’t yet know his place.”
Strong spirit. Just the words King Edward used to describe his son. Perhaps Breena’s on to something.
“I don’t feel like I’m in control,” I tell her. “I can’t guard him like this.”
“Emrys, you’re one of the best Fae in my Guard.” Breena is all severity. “You just need to deal with it. I know you can.”
There’s a loud, nail-biting screech and a flurry of black feathers bursts from the shadows. Everything inside me starts dropping, torn down and down by untold weight. The bird has come to speak to us.
The raven lands close to our feet, its head cocked just so. Minuscule versions of Breena and me glare out of its sharp, bright eyes as it studies us. A razor beak opens; hoarse, rough words roll off its tongue.
“Trouble. Trouble, we see. Shadows grow in Albion. Danger to the blood.”
Breena’s body is all rigid, poured full of molten iron. My own lungs are frozen; the chilled night air
refuses to enter my flaring nostrils.
“Trouble we see,” the bird croaks. “Fae must be ready.”
After almost a minute of gaping at the feathery messenger, Breena finds her voice. “What—what’s going to happen?”
The bird gives another mournful cry and stretches its flightless wings. “Only shadows we see, not shapes. Be on your guard, sisters.”
The raven’s stringy black feet carry him back into the darkness, leaving Breena and me in silence. We sit, staring at the dewdrops forming on the yard’s immaculate grass.
“So the ravens have seen something. . . .” My voice is jagged after so much quiet.
Breena stands; her heather-gray dress falls like water over her knees.
“What are you doing?”
“The only thing I can,” she says. All the weariness I couldn’t see before is soaked into those five words. “I’m going to send a sparrow to Mab. Then I’m going to go back and check on the royals.”
She’s right. Against the vagueness of such words, there’s little more we can do except tell Queen Mab and wait.
“And you, you will go back and finish your shift with Richard. The Guard needs you, Emrys. I need you.”
Back to the prince. Back to that failed spell, that connection. Back to those things I can’t explain.
I don’t argue. Instead I follow Breena out of the Tower’s walls, casting one more anxious glance back at the courtyards. The moon’s skeleton glow calls out the ravens’ huddled shapes. Several are gathered at the base of an acacia tree. Another pair lurks beneath a cannon. All of them stare after us, their tiny black eyes glued to our every step.
And I remember how they’re never wrong.
A shiver coils around my bones as I retreat through the Tower gate.
Four
The prince is just getting back from a night out with his Eton chums when I return to the palace. The youngling I replace is all odd looks and cold shoulders in my direction before she leaves. My abrupt departure from the garden must be common knowledge among the Guard. In any other circumstances, this knowledge would press me down, give root to several years’ worth of embarrassment. But there’s no room for this feeling with the raven’s words threading through all corners of my mind.
