Lady Changeling

by Ken Altabef

  Redthorne slapped his hand away. “What future? There is no future. Arrgh, but you’re right. What does it matter now? Let it come. Let them all die. We should let it kill every last one of them for what they did to us.”

  “It won’t be just them.”

  “Wont it? How do we know? Those stories, those threats, they come down to us through long ages. How do we trust the source? Do we trust Moon Dancer? This thing gave birth to us, didn’t it? Maybe it won’t destroy everything. Maybe it will just turn everyone into faeries. That’s what its touch is supposed to do, right? Wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we should be helping it instead of trying to kill it.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “Moon Dancer said—”

  “Moon Dancer! I don’t want to hear that name ever again. Moon Dancer is dead! She’s gone. We need a new leader. Someone who won’t be pushed around.”

  “Gone?”

  “She passed into the beyond a few nights ago.”

  Theodora was struck by this news even though she’d long been expecting it. Redthorne’s disrespect stung even worse, now that she knew her mother was gone. “Moon Dancer’s counsel was always sound. The Chrysalid said it would destroy everything. It said that. It won’t just be the people. It’s faeries too. It’s everyone. You want innocents to die? Children? We have to coexist with the humans. That’s the only way.”

  “All this talk of the future is nothing but a silly piddle,” said Meadowlark. “And quite a bore as well. I think we can get through one last night on this earth without a new leader. We don’t need a leader to die. That’s easy enough.”

  “He’s right. We’ve nothing left. Mother Moon is covered by dark clouds.”

  They all looked up. It was true. The source of their power was all but hidden.

  “We are eclipsed!” Meadowlark shouted. He went down on one knee and then came up again in a half caper. The two house servants looked suspiciously over at them.

  Meadowlark took Theodora’s elbow, desperation writ across his features. “We’ve lost. We’ve lost. We find ourselves ‘tween woe and greater woe. We may not see tomorrow’s sun, but this night’s passion may burn still as bright. If we are to die, let’s go out with a bang. Let us spend the parting hour together, you and I.”

  Theodora had no ready rebuke. Despite his silly sing-song delivery Meadowlark seemed to be making a genuinely sensitive appeal to her. Was he speaking of love?

  “Spend the last hour with me,” he said. “‘Twere far better we spend it together, than die apart. Let my fair hope be made to fairer joy. One more moment in your arms and I die happy.”

  She wondered if he really meant it?

  Theodora shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “You can! Surely you can! I’ll take the form of Eric if that make it easier. I’ll be anyone you want.”

  She pushed him away. He knew nothing of love. “Keep looking for the lens.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Theodora shot Redthorne a nasty look. “One thing you’ve said tonight makes a little sense at least. There’s a conversation I need to have with my children.” She spun on her heel and headed for the house.

  Meadowlark turned toward Redthorne. “That just leaves thee and me. Two passionate souls alone in the midnight hour.”

  Redthorne sneered at him.

  Meadowlark pressed on. “Say nothing, my love. Why waste precious time with fair lips’ speech where tender caress might do? Take me. Take me now!”

  She stomped on his foot.

  Chapter 41

  By the time Eric and Draven Ketch reached the eastern edge of his estates the sun had already set. Eric thought it just as well. He welcomed the darkness. They didn’t dare cross the open meadow in daylight for fear of anyone Theodora might’ve set to watching the borders of the estate. Most patrols would be concentrated near the shore and not suspect a return from the inland route. That was his hope, anyway.

  Ketch kept up a low humming as they travelled the woods, rendering a variety of melancholy field-working songs in his deep basso tones. Eric found himself mildly disappointed. He’d expected to hear a few salty sea chanteys at least.

  The pirate’s rough voice grated on Eric’s nerves as Ketch droned on and on, but Eric hadn’t bothered to ask him to stop. He was certain such a request would only encourage the pirate to sing louder. Ketch had a nasty attitude that way.

  “Before we go any further,” Eric said, “Let me ask you something.”

  Ketch showed no inclination to play along, but Eric decided to go ahead anyway. “Draven Ketch retiring to the island of Martinique. Some farm out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t believe it. I need to know why.”

  “Why squire? Let’s just say I found religion.”

  Eric scoffed. “Now I really don’t believe it.”

  “She found me. In the middle of the Atlantic, she found me. You don’t know, squire. You just don’t know.”

  “She?”

  “She. I’ve seen the evil men do. All of it. You ever see a young girl beaten so bad she didn’t even have anythin’ you could call a nose anymore? No? You ever see a man stretched out between two masts and skinned alive? I didn’t think so.

  “I thought I’d seen it all. Bu that thing—that bitch in the sky—she showed me things, horrible things, that make anything a man could do seem like a sunny day at the races. Horrible things. Brrrr!” He shook his shaggy head to cast off the memory but Eric realized that Ketch was not joking. He was actually afraid.

  “She still wants me. I don’t know if it’s possible to hide from her. I don’t really think I can. But my piratin’ days are over. I can’t go back out there. On the open sea she will find me. She will. Martinique’s my only chance. And if not, well, if I’m gonna die, I reckon that’s the place for it.”

  Eric did not doubt him. Despite all the wild tales the pirate had told so far, Eric was dead certain this was the truth. He didn’t dare tell Ketch that that thing was coming back for them all.

  Ketch fell into a new, deepened melancholy which was the perfect mood to return to his slave songs. But as they approached civilization he became perfectly silent, moving through the underbrush with a casual ease that spoke of experience in the woods. He passed without disturbing so much as a twig. All was quiet. Dark clouds covered the moon.

  Eric led him down a gentle slope of land to the edge of the dairy farm. As slippery as he is, he still needs me to help him escape. I hate to do it, but I need him, too. As long as no one gets hurt.

  They tore across the open stretch, moving swiftly and keeping low to the ground. The soles of Eric’s feet stabbed pain at every step as if they were splitting apart like overripe fruit. His feet had long ago shed their protective covering of kelp and were cut and bleeding in a hundred places. He stuck his hand in his mouth and bit down on the pad of flesh between thumb and forefinger. It was all he could do to keep from crying out as they ran.

  They rested for a moment behind a work shed, then crept around a larger building. Eric studied the main house on the hill. Candlelight flickered in some of the windows. A darkly silhouetted figure patrolled the balcony, but Eric was confident they had kept out of sight.

  A few yards away, the granary was a two-story barn that had seen better days. The paint had peeled away leaving bare wood, gray and worm-eaten in several places. Eric had not passed this way since last year. A lot of things had fallen by the wayside in recent years. The dairy farm’s state of neglect bothered him. He made a mental note of its desperate need for upkeep as if he were still in charge, doling out work assignments as if nothing had happened.

  An armed man stood out front of the granary guarding the stores. This confirmed what Eric had already suspected. The entire estate was set on high alert, probably fearing a faery invasion that had not only already occurred, but was directing the movements of these very men who were trying to prevent it. The granary was a natural target as it contained stockpiles of gunpowde
r and coal-oil, and other critical supplies.

  Ketch signaled for Eric to wait. He mimed a plan of attack in which he would sneak up behind the man and do him some harm, possibly involving the breaking of a neck.

  Eric yanked him back by the wrist. He shook his head, making a chopping gesture with one hand that said the guard was off-limits. He knew another way.

  The two men stepped back carefully, hugging the corner of the building. A rope and pulley system was attached to the north side of the granary, used for hoisting heavy supply crates to the upper level. The hoist swung through a large square window that had no glass. Eric rearranged the pull wires and both men climbed up and into the window.

  The inside of the loft smelled of wheat and barley flour mixed with the acrid taint of gunpowder. Eric knew his way around in the darkness and led Ketch down a rickety ladder. The old wood creaked at their weight and Eric took each step very slowly, hoping the guard outside wouldn’t hear.

  The granary’s main floor was a large single room, with a central corridor lined on either side by a series of tall storage shelves built against the walls. Hogsheads of wheat flour, wine, ale and cider were arranged in neat rows. Eric moved down the line until he found the pallet he was looking for.

  In the days of his youth Eric and his brother Hake had enjoyed many adventures in the granary. They built a tiny fort under this pallet using spare bits of lumber and burlap scavenged from around the estate. Their ramshackle stronghold variously held forth against a bloodthirsty mob of savage Indians, Turks or Frenchmen. On other occasions it just as easily became a three-masted brigantine on its way to far Cathay or the West Indies. Eric remembered one occasion when he had been six, his brother Hake ten. That day it had been the Turks. The boys imagined a horde of magnificently mustached warriors in turbans and long white robes with crimson cummerbunds. These barbarous adversaries were arrayed before them in jagged battle lines, wielding jeweled scimitars and long-barreled Indian hunting rifles. He heard the beat of exotic drums.

  “Damn! We’ve gotten ourselves pinned down, Lieutenant,” said Hake. Young Eric was always a lieutenant. Hake was always a major. “There’s only one thing left to do. We’ll have to try what they’d least expect. A full frontal charge. Let’s go.”

  Wielding a long stick meant to represent a sabre in one hand and a short stick for a dragoon pistol in the other, Hake surged forth.

  “Into the breach, my boy!” he cried, little stick blasting away. He didn’t ever stop to reload. Eric hesitated. Even though their foes weren’t real and certainly couldn’t harm them, it seemed ridiculous to run at them like that.

  Hake turned around and shouted, “Come on!” He mimed taking a musket ball to the shoulder, frowning at Eric as if it had been his fault for diverting the Major’s attention.

  By the time Eric emerged, his short stick at full cock, Hake had finished off the Turks or Frenchmen or whoever they were. Panting and cradling his ‘wounded’ shoulder, his elder brother admonished him for hesitating. “Never do that,” he said. “Always go for the throat.”

  Eric remembered how much he had loved and admired his brother.

  Then he remembered Hake standing atop the chapel roof, driven mad by a faery curse, stark naked except for a smattering of the chambermaid’s blood. His mind fled back to the situation at hand.

  The fort had been dismantled long ago but their hiding place, a secret cache hollowed out within one leg of the pallet, was still there. Eric brushed away a cobweb and reached into the niche. He drew out a tin whistle and two small chunks of fool’s gold. When he found a rough flint arrowhead Hake had made, Eric felt a tiny thrill of nostalgia.

  But nostalgia was not what he wanted today. His life had been turned into a shambles. Disgraced, barefoot and in tattered clothes, run off his lands by his own wife, allied with murderers. He found no joy rummaging amid these few relics of his past. There was only one thing he wanted now.

  He swept aside a few scraps of black velvet and there it was. Griffin’s lens.

  “Got it!” he whispered.

  Eric had never seen the device before. It felt surprisingly light in his hand. The front held a scarlet circle of glass, faceted like a precious stone. The casing was some type of precious metal he didn’t recognize and thought perhaps might be white gold. He was surprised to find that, aside from runic carvings all around the edges, the lens had no moving parts or mechanism he could detect.

  Running through the lens was a streak of silver that branched away from the center, looking somewhat like a tree. The silver reflected Eric’s face back at him in the silhouette of the tree, his eyes gaping, his mouth tight. Those weren’t his eyes; it wasn’t his face. It was Griffin Grayson.

  “That’s it?” whispered Ketch.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty little bauble. Doesn’t look like much of a weapon. Although a woman in Milan once tried to stick me in the eye with a brooch looked somethin’ like that.”

  “It’s not a brooch.”

  Ketch cocked an eyebrow. “How’s it work?”

  Eric really didn’t know. The lens focused moonlight or so he’d been told. It felt cold and dead in his hands. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all. Maybe it’s just another fantasy, he thought, passed down over the years. More madness from my family’s past.

  No, that couldn’t be. Griffin had used this weapon to devastate the faeries during the Purge. There could be no doubt of that.

  “It burns them,” was all that he need say.

  The pirate smiled. “Aw, but I do so love the smell of roast faery…”

  Eric glanced back down at the lens. The face reflected in the silver thread wasn’t Griffin Grayson’s. It was his own.

  “Now listen, Ketch. It won’t do for me to be seen with you. You understand? The men won’t stand for that. Alone, I can reason with them, talk my way back into their good graces. Wielding this, they will follow me. Once the faeries are exposed, this will all be over very quickly, I promise. Then you’ll get what you want.”

  “What d’you expect me to do? Stay here?”

  “Just lay low. No one will come here looking. That’s for sure. When it’s all done, I’ll come back for you. You’ll have your sloop and your money. We’ll have to do all of that in secret. No one must know.”

  “Just wait here?”

  “Trust me. I give you my word.”

  Ketch sighed and shook his head. “All right, squire. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Just stay right here,” reiterated Eric. “I’ll come get you at dawn, after I’ve killed them all.”

  “Go to it.”

  Eric hoped he wasn’t making a mistake trusting Ketch but there seemed nothing else he could do at the moment. His main priority had to be reestablishing control over the estate as quickly as possible. He eased the front door of the granary open a sliver and peeked through. The guard had his back turned, puffing stolidly on a pipe to stay warm.

  Eric glanced down at the lens again. Now there was a little moonlight between the clouds and he began to feel its power. When the time came, he felt confident the lens would prove as deadly as legend foretold. He remembered Hake’s last words to him, a directive to use the lens, to begin a new Purge and wipe out the faery folk for once and all. Despite what he’d just told Ketch, Eric couldn’t really imagine using this or any weapon to destroy hordes of innocent faeries. He’d never had any inclination to follow Hake’s directive. In fact, he’d never given much thought to using the lens at all. He associated the lens with murder and bloodshed. He associated it with his grandfather Griffin.

  He had no taste for a murderous rampage. He didn’t want to be Griffin.

  He’d taken a turn away from violence just like his father. Henry Grayson had never wanted anything other than peaceful coexistence with the faeries. He’d paid for that dream with his life, but that outcome did not mean that the idea was a wrong one. Eric was his father’s son. He was no murderer. He wanted to continue his father’s legacy, not re-establish
his grandfather’s reign of terror.

  But he must first rid himself of Redthorne and the others. Keeping out of sight, he set out toward the main house.

  Peering through the crack in the front door, Draven Ketch watched the young lord slip away into the night. He took the Englishman at his word. If he was successful in retaking control, Lord Eric Grayson would make good on all his promises. The man’s blue-blooded backbone was so damn stiff, he couldn’t even buckle his own shoes. There would be money and a ship and safe passage back to Martinique. All of that if Grayson was successful.

  But Ketch had not survived as long as he had by trusting to other men’s success. There was no situation in which he was willing to sit idle, awaiting rescue by other men, if he had no shackles on his own limbs.

  Not when there was a man only ten paces away, puffing obliviously at his pipe, his back turned. Not when there was a sabre at the man’s belt, catching the moonlight as he fidgeted.

  Like a silent shadow in the night, Ketch stepped forth from the door of the granary.

  Chapter 42

  “She’s scaring me, Mum,” Nora complained in a playful tone. She tried her best to frown but the creeping smile on her lips told the opposite tale.

  “Oh?” said Theodora.

  “It’s all about Black Annis,” said James, who loved a scary bedtime story as much as anyone.

  “Oh,” said Theodora.

  Lucinda sat between the two beds, a fresh pile of knitting bunched on her lap.

  “Oh, they do so love to hear the old stories,” said the nurse, “even if it does give them a little scare. Serves its purpose too. They won’t stray out late at night, no ma’am. Not with Black Annis abroad in the dark.”

  “She has a blue face,” said Nora, wrinkling her nose with distaste.