The Raven Lady

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

  Alfakonung lashed Finvara’s line again, and men screamed and fell away burning.

  “Call them now!” urged Finvara. “It will be like the stones, except I’ll feed my magic to you.”

  My lips parted, and I murmured a prayer to Loki, the father of my people—and the god of earth magic. If any god could forgive me for turning against my own kin, it was him.

  Then I spoke the first words of a summoning spell.

  Finvara

  The Elf King had struck down more than half the line of infantrymen. With each strike, the men behind the fallen moved up to repair the line. The soldiers fought with bayonets and daggers, the elves with long-knives and shields, and both sides had bowmen. Isolde’s men were skilled fighters, as the warriors of Ireland had always been, and so were the firglas that had chosen to fight with us. But we were now badly outnumbered. If we couldn’t stop the Elf King, we wouldn’t last.

  I had finally glimpsed my own father in the melee, acting every inch the commander he was.

  “Mayo!” I shouted. It was what everyone except his sons called him, and the only sure way I could get his attention. He heard me and looked up. “Keep driving forward!” I said. “We’ll deal with the king.”

  My father was born a gentleman, but the O’Malleys had been warriors all the way back to the Fianna, the fighting men of the Tuatha De Danaan. Our ancestor Finvara, too, had been a warrior before he became the fairy king. The former earl of Mayo, my grandfather, had kept a fighting force that my father had taken over, and my father had served the queen at the Battle of Ben Bulben.

  As he began shouting orders to my men, I thought I saw the beginnings of a smile on his weathered old face. He was in his element, I supposed. Or maybe I’d finally done something to make him proud of me.

  I turned back to Koli and found her watching her father with a distant expression. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear her voice over the fighting. I closed my eyes and tried feeling for her magic.

  It didn’t take long to find it—she was swimming in it. Earth magic. Earth spells were as ancient as blood magic, and they could be extremely powerful. The Elf King had shown himself partial to the fire of his homeland, yet I had sensed the earth magic in him. He would have had to use it to get free of the rubble. I wondered whether Koli understood how much power was building in her now.

  I began a conjuring spell, but I couldn’t make it link with hers—it was like trying to use the wrong knot to join two lines. Then I realized she wasn’t conjuring at all—she was summoning. A conjuring spell called upon the elements to create something. A summoning spell made an opening and called something through it.

  There was a reason her furies often felt real—they were trying to be. Whether she knew it or not, she had been suppressing her power—summoning and blocking at the same time. No longer.

  I had very little experience with summoning—perhaps because the original Finvara had thought of it as “woman’s magic”—but I reached for her hand, threading our fingers together, and I copied her spell.

  When the ravens poured out of her, it nearly knocked us to the ground. Their wings blackened the air around us, shutting out the light. Their huge and very real bodies swept forward onto the bridge and formed a living net around the Elf King. I could hear him bellowing counter-spells, but to no avail. Koli’s spell—our spell—was stronger.

  It had almost become too strong for me to hold—I tried softening my grip and allowing her to control it. As soon as I did, the swooping creatures tightened their net and pulled the Elf King toward the gatehouse. He stumbled, shuffling to keep from being dragged, swinging his sword into the angry mass. He felled them by the dozen, but their beaks and claws raked into his flesh as well.

  He staggered from the bridge onto the forest path. I hoped Koli would force him to our side of the line. When our magic was spent, our men would at least have a few precious seconds to set on him with mortal weaponry.

  I had no chance to suggest it—suddenly our spell was finished. I could feel it shorn clean through as if with a knife. Koli let out a cry of surprise and lost her footing. She fell against me and then we were both on the ground—the expenditure of power had weakened us.

  The vengeful flock dissipated, and fresh shouts of fear went up from the battleground. I saw that that the Elf King had raised his weapon again. He was clawed and bloodied, yet it hardly seemed to have slowed him, and I began to despair.

  He took up a position in front of an ancient oak tree that might very well have been the only living thing that could make him look small. As I wondered whether he would kill us all or whether there would be an opportunity to negotiate, I noticed something—odd.

  Someone was standing high up in the tree. I was almost sure it was Mr. Yeats.

  The still winter-bare boughs of the tree began to move. Not like they were caught in the wind, blowing one direction or the other, but inward toward each other, until they made contact with the Elf King’s body.

  Startled, the king shook himself free and hacked off a bough with his sword. A deep groan came out of the tree, and the king tripped, dropping the weapon, as a root ripped itself from the ground in front of him. Another root snaked toward him, coiling around an ankle, and the king let out a furious roar. He uttered a line in Elvish, and a fireball began forming above him.

  A wind rose, snuffing the fireball and stirring the tree branches more in the way I was accustomed to—except now I began to hear voices.

  Northman, you should not have come, should not have come. Northman, you should not have come.

  Next came raking and scratching noises. These grew loud, and louder still, until the men around us covered their ears—even the Elf King stopped fighting and covered his.

  Then all of it stopped—the breeze, the creaking, the groaning—and a half-relieved, half-dreading silence descended. I glanced up at Will, still perched like a lookout in the crow’s nest. He had curled each arm around a thick bough.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered to Koli.

  “The trees,” she hissed back.

  A chorus of deep groans rose from the forest, vibrating branches and twigs, seeming to come from the very bones of the trees. The giant oak was growing taller, I thought, until I noticed that in fact its roots were pushing it up out of the ground. Huge clods of dirt fell from the great woody snakes as the trunk continued rising, until the base of it stood a full six feet off the ground.

  The warriors of both sides uttered fearful cries as the oak’s roots wound up and around the Elf King’s arms and legs. He shouted at his men to aid him, but those who weren’t frozen in terror were watching the trees around them wide-eyed, while inching the opposite direction.

  Our men, too, appeared frozen, watching the horrifying spectacle unfold—even my father.

  “Look alive, Mayo!” I shouted, startling him out of his trance. “The line is breaking!”

  Seeing now that the elves were falling back on his position, he rallied the queen’s men to begin their attack.

  The Elf King continued to bellow, but his deep voice cut off suddenly. Looking back I saw that a thick root had twisted across his face. The smaller roots snaked around him too—tightening, strangling—and his body was slowly dragged under the trunk as it lowered. The root ends began digging into the soil, returning to place, pulling the trunk down until once again it rested snug against the earth.

  THE BEGINNING

  Finvara

  Some of the elves fled toward the outer edges of the forest. Others fled toward the relative safety of the castle and were rounded up by my men. The rest surrendered. What else could they do? The Elf King had been defeated by his daughter, who was mistress of the castle they had stolen. They were terrified she would feed them to the trees.

  My father, my bride, both her bodyguards, the time-traveling poet, and myself—the king of this ruin of a castle—all gather
ed at the gatehouse to survey the damage. One of four towers remained standing. The walls were in shambles. The keep was half-collapsed, and the stables had burned to the ground.

  And somehow it was fitting. I had not been ready for this responsibility. Maybe I was now. My father was right that I had needed a partner. This was my chance to start again.

  I reached for Koli, pulling her close to my side. I wanted to ask how she was feeling about the death of her father. About suddenly being a queen in two countries, as well as a powerful sorceress. And especially—selfishly—how she was feeling about me. Instead, I had to figure out how to conjure food and shelter for ourselves and the men who had survived.

  There were many firglas moving about the grounds, and some of the less earthy fairy creatures were already cavorting in the rubble of the castle. The redcaps, who had joined the battle on the side of the elves but switched when they saw the tide turning, were sullenly foraging for abandoned weapons—I had ordered them to leave the fallen soldiers alone. When the light was gone, which wouldn’t be long now, there would be banshee keens for the dead.

  It was a kingdom not many would claim, but it was growing on me.

  “What has happened to my wife and Elinor?” asked my brother as he joined us.

  I sighed. “My steward took them to Faery and then got himself killed by the Morrigan.” My father and brother stared at me, alarmed. “Right,” I said. “I’ll find them.”

  I glanced at Koli, hoping she would want to come—she had slipped into a whispered conversation with Ulf and was making a noise that if I had not known my wife better, I would have called giggling.

  A jaunt in Faery was the very last thing I wanted right now. Or ever, really. I hadn’t gone there since before Ben Bulben, when I was still under the control of my ancestor. At the time, Knock Ma castle had only existed there, while it was hardly more than a pile of stones in Ireland. Would the merging of worlds mean it had been destroyed there too? Was there even a “there” there anymore? It was something I should have looked into—another responsibility I had shirked. I was done with all that now.

  “All right, then,” I said, feeling rather sorry for myself. Then came a deafening grinding noise.

  Bollocks, what now?

  The ground began to quake. Everything left standing within the fragments of castle wall, along with the fragments themselves, tumbled into the moat.

  “Into the forest!” I shouted.

  My relations looked at me like I’d gone mad, but I could think of no better place to go.

  They did as I’d ordered, and we watched from a safer distance as what was left of the castle collapsed. Yet it was only getting started. The ground beneath the castle began to give way, or so I assumed, because the stone heap was sinking. The earth around us quaked more violently and we grabbed at the trunks of the trees for support, praying they felt more friendly toward us than they had toward the elves.

  When the rubble had gone, there was nothing left—only a massive well in the top of the hill. We had just a few moments’ respite before stones began sprouting from the ground. Not single stones, but oddly neat groups of them, popping up and arranging themselves like puzzle pieces.

  Koli exclaimed something in Elvish. I slipped my arm around her waist, and I kissed her forehead. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s happened before.” Not two days after the Battle of Ben Bulben in fact, when the seal between Faery and Ireland had been no more and Knock Ma had pushed up from the ground, whole again.

  By the time the sun had set, a new castle stood on the grounds of Knock Ma—a new castle that was exactly like the old castle, except its towers were all standing and nothing had been blackened by fire.

  “We won’t have to sleep out of doors after all,” I said.

  No one found this as funny as I did, except maybe Koli, who was eyeing me in a way I very much hoped boded good things for the evening to come.

  “Is it safe, son?” asked my father.

  “As safe as it ever was,” I said. “Doro, at least, is gone. There won’t be monsters in the lily pond. Or so I hope.”

  Koli was laughing quietly now—we were in very real danger of frightening off the mortals. At that moment two figures passed through the new castle gate and made their way toward the drawbridge.

  “Here’s your wife, brother,” I said.

  “What?” said Owen.

  The two women were running now, and my brother and father hurried to meet them.

  I turned to look for Mr. Yeats, who’d been unusually quiet since the ordeal in the forest—even for him. He hung back a little, his arm around the trunk of a tree. He looked more boyish than ever with dirt smudges on his face and twigs in his hair.

  “Are you whole and well, Mr. Yeats?” I said.

  He straightened and cleared his throat. “I am, Your Majesty.”

  “And how’s the ticking?” Koli had told me what happened to him in the Gap gate, and how he’d developed some kind of rapport with the trees. Still I could hardly understand it.

  “Diminished,” he said, “I thank you.”

  “Excellent. I need to thank you for your valiant service, and for taking good care of my wife.”

  He gave a short bow. “I think it was she who took care of me, sire.”

  I nodded. “As she does of us all. Can I make one more request of you?”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.”

  “Look after the others? Help make them comfortable? The queen and I are passing the night . . .” I looked at her, and she gave me a puzzled smile. Ulf, on the opposite side of her, was frowning. “Elsewhere,” I continued. “We’ll return in the morning. Ulf and Treig will help you. Are you up to it?”

  I could feel Ulf’s glare, but Treig gave her lady a knowing smile.

  “I am, Your Majesty,” said Yeats.

  Koli

  Just outside the new guardhouse, a group of soldiers had been rounding up the horses that had fled the burning castle. After claiming one of them, Finvara fashioned a halter and reins from a long coil of rope.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, though I had already guessed.

  He climbed onto the horse and then gave me a hand up. “You will see,” he whispered into my ear.

  With night coming on, our journey was not leisurely. Yet I was content to relax against my husband’s chest, as I had on our first ride to the cottage. How much had changed, and in such a short time. The despair I’d felt then had been replaced by an alien emotion—joy. Along with a fuller sense of who and what I was. The loss of my father—I had yet to really feel it, beyond my new sense of freedom. There was a legacy that I must think of, but that could wait.

  Though it was too late for hunting by the time we reached the cottage, the clouds had cleared, and Finvara declared there was enough moonlight to travel to a nearby farmhouse. “I’m sure they’ve food to spare,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  When he’d gone, I went around to the stream in back of the cottage. Kneeling on the moss, I splashed cold water over my face and neck, and I combed out my hair with my fingers. Then I sat on the bank, listening to the small night creatures and the gurgling of the stream.

  I am home.

  It was a strange realization. I knew I could never forsake my own country, but because of Finvara, there was room in my heart for this one. And I was eager to know it better.

  I got up and went inside, where I cast a tiny fire spell to light a candle. Then I used it to light the others, and by the time I got a fire going in the hearth, Finvara had returned.

  “Unfortunately they weren’t expecting a night visit from the fairy king, and I frightened them half to death.” He unloaded a feast—a round of yellow cheese, fresh bread, a pastry of some kind, and a bottle of spirits.

  “It was worth it,” I said, and he laughed.

  When the table was set, he came over
to me.

  “How are you, wife?” he asked tenderly, tucking my hair behind my ear. Running his finger up and over the backward-curving point that we did not have in common.

  “Very well, husband.”

  He frowned. “I am sorry about your father. I know that you weren’t close to him, but it can’t have been easy.”

  I nodded, resting my forehead against his cheek. “I wish . . .”

  Finvara waited patiently, and finally I looked at him. “I wish it could have been different. My mother was soft. She cared for me.” Moisture stung my eyes. “He saw no value in those things.”

  “Aye.”

  After a moment, he cleared his throat. “You had Ulf, at least. He cared for you, and you for him.”

  I studied him. I had seen that Ulf’s change of heart had made him uneasy.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “I’m glad about that,” he said. “Glad that someone was there for you in that cold, hard place. How is it between you now?”

  He watched me closely, and I began to tremble. “Ulf has changed,” I said, and I thought I saw something in his face shift. “We fought. We almost killed each other. I don’t know that you can understand it, but after that, we were different—he was different. My father tortured him because of me.”

  Finvara took a step back, and my belly went cold. “I do understand,” he said, “or at least I think I do. I don’t know if it has dawned on you yet—your life is really just beginning. You don’t have to be queen here. You can be queen in Iceland. You and Ulf—you can rule together. Or you can rule alone. You have choices.”

  I hesitated, unsure what to make of this speech.

  He let out a sigh, and he ran a hand over his head. “I don’t mean to confuse you. I only mean to say I wish you to be happy.”

  He was right about all of it. My father’s people—they would accept me. Things were different with the elves. I had killed their king, or so they would understand it, and that would make me strong in their eyes, not a traitor.