by Jocelyn Fox
I opened my eyes just in time to sit back in the saddle, saving my face a hard bruising: Kaleth reared his head back, still galloping, a sound of surprise somewhere between a snort and a whinny escaping him. And for a moment time seemed to slow as I looked back at the surging storm, the horrific black clouds blotting out the horizon. Then Wisp wrapped his hands in my hair and shouted, “Hold on!”
Kaleth’s ears pricked forward as he felt the power of the taebramh. He gave a challenging bugle, as if daring Mab’s storm-clouds to race him. I had barely enough time to get a better grip, tucking my elbows close to my body and leaning forward in the saddle.
And then Kaleth flew.
The change in speed was so sudden that my stomach lurched. I heard Flora scream in wild delight, glimpsed her looking out from the top of my boot, her aura streaming out behind her like the tail of a comet. Forsythe was yelling something from behind me, a poem or a chant in the Glasidhe tongue, which sounded much like the Sidhe language, but more musical, with softer shorter words. His voice rose fiercely, loud and powerful despite his small frame and the rushing wind. Gooseflesh rose on my arms at the sound of his defiant voice, and I realized that I, too, wore an expression of passionate defiance and triumph, my lips stretched in a humorless smile as I watched the storm-clouds cease to gain ground.
“Catch me if you can, Mab!” I shouted on wild impulse. Kaleth and I were one being, the road falling away beneath our fleet hooves, our hearts swelling with the feeling of pure unnatural speed. Kaleth knew that what I had given him was temporary, but he exulted in it. I exulted in it. I threw one fist wildly into the air, feeling my hair ripped loose from its braid, streaming out behind me like a golden banner. I looked behind us, and the storm-clouds were a fraction farther back toward the horizon. I let loose another wild yell, my voice heavy with triumph, and then I settled down along Kaleth’s neck, my sore muscles forgotten as we rode the swell of the taebramh-given speed over the beaten-dirt road.
Kaleth ran for a long time, and I had to close my eyes after a while against the cold whipping wind. My fingers went numb, so that I opened my eyes for a few seconds every so often to make sure my grip was still secure, though I knew that Kaleth wouldn’t let me fall. When Kaleth slowed, I looked behind us and saw that the storm-clouds were still on the horizon, but they lacked the dreadful sickly tones of color that had denoted Mab’s influence.
“The Dark Queen has let go of the storm,” Wisp said. “’Tis a storm, still, but just a storm.”
Kaleth switched from a trot to a walk, his ears swiveling animatedly and his step jaunty as if we had just left Darkhill a quarter hour ago. I laughed a little and he shook his head, stamping and snorting like a colt.
“That was a ride,” Flora said, slipping from my boot and pirouetting giddily.
“Not bad, for an untaught mortal,” commented Forsythe, emerging from his perch on my cloak to fly beside Kaleth again.
“I could take offense to that,” I told him, “but I won’t.” And I didn’t, because the cold dread at the roiling storm-clouds had receded, leaving an empty space in my belly that filled now with a happy satisfaction. But then I sobered a bit. “I’ve escaped her twice now,” I mused. “I guess that’s going to make her very angry when she does eventually catch up to me.”
“But by then, we will have done something that even the Dark Lady will not scoff at!” said Wisp with a gallant air, springing from my shoulder with a flourish.
Forsythe tensed and shot Wisp a look that would have melted the smile from my face, if it had been directed at me, and I heard Flora say something sharply in the Glasidhe tongue. I would have paid more attention, but the rush of triumph at outrunning Mab’s storm had ebbed away, leaving me decidedly sore, and more than a little tired. I thought bemusedly that giving away such a slim strand of taebramh had cost me much more energy that I would’ve guessed. I flexed my fingers, watching the tendons in my hands as they moved, oddly fascinated in the way of the deeply exhausted. I wondered how much taebramh my soul made per day, if I had a quota that couldn’t be breached…and what would happen if I just emptied myself of it? I had the nasty feeling that the consequences of completely using my stores of taebramh would have a very permanent, cold and lifeless theme.
“It would be really nice if we could find someplace to sleep,” I said.
“You’re tired,” Wisp said with an air of wisdom.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I said dryly, rubbing my hands together.
Wisp chuckled a little in delight at my sarcasm.
“I don’t understand,” Flora said, perplexed. “Wisp is not a captain, since we have no formal militia anymore, and even if he was a captain, he would still have his own name. He would not be called Captain Obvious.”
“It is a mortal reference,” Wisp said proudly. “Tess was commenting on my tendency to state that which is already known, you see.”
“Ah,” said Flora, “so she was mocking you.”
Wisp looked slightly put out. “Well, yes, if you put it that way…”
Flora laughed. “In that case, I approve.”
“You spent too much time at Court anyway,” Wisp told her. “If you would’ve gotten out into the mortal world more, you would understand such references.” And with that, he settled on my shoulder again. I thought for a moment he was being sullen, but his irrepressible voice piped out again: “You know, Tess, you are very different than Gwyneth. Or what I’ve heard about her, anyway.”
“How so?” I said, trying to stifle a yawn. My exhaustion was quickly getting the better of me, and I hoped we found a place to stay the night soon.
“There are rules that are supposed to be followed, with the taebramh. Every mortal that has had the taebramh in their blood, they have had to learn words to unlock it, and symbols to draw, and even then sometimes it did not work.”
Through the haze of tiredness, comprehension dawned on me. “Like…spells?”
“Yes. I think that’s the word for them. But we don’t call it that here…it’s just as we do not have a word for sorcery, because in Faortalam it is. It is nothing strange. It is strange for a mortal to possess the power, in these times,” he clarified.
“Maybe that’s why I’m so tired after using so little of it,” I said. The rumble of thunder in the distance overshadowed my words.
“Come on then, over here,” Flora said, flying back to Kaleth after scouting.
I blinked blearily and looked up as Kaleth stepped off the path into the long grasses. The forest still crouched on the horizon, at least a few hours’ ride away. I didn’t think I would last that long, and the Glasidhe seemed to know that too. Kaleth headed toward a stand of trees. The center of the cluster was a tree that looked a little bit like a gingko tree, with low-spreading branches; but its leaves were a deep lustrous blue that I knew I would never see in the mortal world. Smaller, younger trees surrounded the large blue-leafed tree, creating a dense copse. A faint scent reached me on the breeze; it smelled like the coolness of rushing water, blended with the aroma of a darkly sweet flower, like jasmine.
“It is a river tree,” said Flora. “It smells like a river, and its leaves are blue, and its roots run deep into the earth to find the hidden waters, so it can survive far away from streams and such.”
The sweet smell of the river tree grew stronger as we neared the copse, but never became overpowering. I slid off Kaleth’s back gratefully, tugging at my cloak until it came free. Swells and dips indented the ground beneath the river tree’s spreading branches—from the roots of the tree, I supposed. I spread my cloak over a hollow that looked to be the perfect size for my body. Then I turned to Kaleth, but to my surprise Flora and Forsythe were in the midst of unbuckling his saddle already, their small fingers working on the buckles adroitly.
“Go to sleep,” Flora told me.
I saw the dista
nt flash of lightning, and glanced up at the tightly woven foliage of the river tree. I might get a little wet, but it was good cover. I settled down into my little hollow, pulling off my boots and setting them in another root-niche. After another glance at the approaching storm, I laid my head down and slept, the sweet smell of the river tree surrounding me like a lullaby.
I dreamed the vivid peculiar dreams of deeply exhausted sleep. Finnead roared up to the river tree on his motorcycle, wearing his black t-shirt and deliciously snug dark jeans. He invited me to ride with him, one eyebrow arched enigmatically over his magnetic gaze. When I looked down, I was dressed in a deep blue silk gown that matched his eyes. I knew that if I rode the motorcycle, I would tear the gown, so I demurely declined. Then it started to rain—I think raindrops fell on my sleeping body, blending dream and reality—and I could feel the silk of the gown clinging to my breasts, the contours of my hips and the long lines of my legs. The rain wet Finnead’s hair, plastering it against his forehead in dark curls. I wanted to trace the curls with my fingertips, and press a kiss where the rain slipped over his lips. He left his motorcycle on the road and walked toward me, striding gracefully through the long grass, reminding me of a cat. His eyes remained fixed on me and in my dream my breath caught in my throat, my face burning as I watched his eyes trace the outline of my body, the silk pressing wetly against my skin in the pouring rain.
It was a dream without words. We needed no words, the air between us stretching so tightly with tension that I thought I would be cut when it broke, cut by a flash of cold air against my skin. Finnead walked slowly. It took him an age to reach me. His eyes traveled down my body again, and the blue gown was gone, leaving only the thin white slip between his gaze and my naked skin. I shivered a little in the rain and he peeled off his black shirt. I reached for him, my heart beating hard with a rush of want, but he caught my wrist gently, shaking his head. And then he turned away from me, showing me his bare back, patterned with a latticework of thick white scars. He looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes carrying a terrible pain. I reached out again, to touch his scars, my chest aching with sorrow for him. He shook his head again, and then he was gone.
I stood alone in my white shift, in the rain. After a while I picked a few flowers, and made a crown for myself, and then took Finnead’s motorcycle and rode away from the river-tree.
I had other dreams after that, but when I awoke all I remembered was the web of scars across Finnead’s back. I blinked and shifted from where I had curled in the hollow, dislodging a sleepy Flora from the crook of my knee. Water drizzled down onto me through the leaves of the river-tree, and while my cloak had kept me relatively dry, my hair was hopelessly bedraggled, tangled and windblown after the wild ride yesterday, now sopping wet with the rain. I grumbled in frustration as I tried to finger-comb the mess, wincing as I worked through a particularly nasty knot.
“Tess,” said Forsythe, his light shining through the interwoven branches of the smaller trees, “there is someone coming to see you. A rider, from the direction of the forest.”
I sat up a little straighter, a surge of hope burning away the vestiges of sleep. Maybe it was Ramel or Finnead, or one of the other men. My heart leapt at the thought.
“It is a woman,” Forsythe reported, “and she is riding a mount from the Dark Queen’s stables. And there is…another animal with her. I think it is a dog of some sort.”
Giving up on untangling my hair, I twisted it into the semblance of a bun and secured it with a few hair-pins. I located my boots and shook the water out of them, taking a deep breath to combat the rush of disappointment. I heard Kaleth neigh a greeting to the stranger’s mount. So it was an Unseelie rider; it just wasn’t anyone that I knew. I had pulled on my boots and gathered up my cloak when I heard the slight sound of branches moving aside.
A Sidhe woman slipped gracefully into the space below the river tree’s branches. To my surprise, she was just as tall as me, a rare feat among the Fae women. If Forsythe hadn’t told me she was female, I would have mistaken her for a boy at first glance, and even as it was my mind worked hard to reconcile the tall, slim Sidhe before me with the image of a woman like Guinna, small and delicate and feminine. The stranger wore her dark hair pulled tightly back from her face, pinned in a practical braid. Then I saw she wore a sword at her waist, and I knew she was probably a Guard or a Knight. We looked at each other for a moment, with the stranger plainly sizing me up just as I had quickly evaluated her.
“Well, you look like a drowned cat,” she said, breaking the silence. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I replied in the same dry tone. We stared at each other for a moment more, and I marveled at her strangely colored eyes: they were the closest to golden I had ever seen, a marvelous honey color that gave the unsettling impression that she saw right through your skin with her gaze. Her face, while not stunningly beautiful, had a strong handsomeness to it—another reason why I mistook her for a boy, at first. Her features—pert nose, broad cheekbones and sharp chin, along with her large golden eyes—possessed a strangely alluring, androgynous charm.
After a long moment, she looked away, examining the grove of trees. Flora, Forsythe and Wisp hovered up near the boughs of the river tree, surprisingly silent. “You are a friend of the Glasidhe?”
“You could say that,” I said cautiously.
“And you are a Walker,” continued the stranger nonchalantly, taking a blue leaf and rubbing it between two fingers.
I felt my shoulders tense. “I don’t discuss personal matters with strangers,” I said smoothly, trying to match her tone.
She chuckled a little, a small smile on her lips as she looked back at me. “They did say you had a bit of sass.” She had a bit of an accent, I noticed, a broadening of the vowels and a tendency to cut off the ends of words, softening her hard consonants. I wondered if she had been born in a far-flung part of the Unseelie lands.
I cleared my throat a little. “Well. I’m Tess.”
“Yes. I assumed that much already. In any case…Vell. Veliandra, really, but that’s a mouthful to shout in the middle of a dust-up.” Vell grinned briefly.
“I guess it would be,” I said musingly.
Vell fixed me with her strange golden eyes. “Do you prefer dogs or cats?”
I frowned, feeling like it was a trick question. “Dogs, I guess.”
The Sidhe woman grinned briefly. “Good.” She tilted her head a little, her voice dropping subtly. “Are you afraid of wolves, Tess?”
Now that was an even stranger question. I stood up a little straighter. “Why do you ask?” I said, a hint of suspicion in my tone.
“Because you’ll probably have to get over that fear very quickly,” replied Vell enigmatically. “Come on, then.” She turned and began slipping back through the branches of the river tree.
“Hold on just a minute,” I said. “You need to explain what’s going on before I go anywhere with you.”
“I don’t need to do any such thing,” Vell said, suddenly only a step away from me. My skin prickled as I looked into her golden eyes. “But I’ll humor you, because Ramel and Finnead thought you important enough to send me after you. Somehow they felt you were coming.”
“Are they all right? Were you attacked?” I asked quickly.
Vell grinned. “Come on. They’re going to think I’m not capable if I don’t get you back soon. And yes, we were attacked after we reached the first patrol, but no, no one was hurt then.” Her grin faded. “It was strange. It was like…the creatures attacked, feeling out our defenses. They outnumbered us…” She shook her head. “They outnumbered us at least two to one. But they didn’t press. They didn’t come after us.”
“That is strange,” I said, tucking my rolled cloak under my arm and trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach.
“Yes. I
t is.” Vell fixed me with her golden gaze. “It was like they were looking for something. Or someone.” She turned and began walking back toward the path. “And after seeing your little fireworks display, I think I know who they were looking for.”
I pursed my lips as we emerged from the shade of the tree-stand. “It was that obvious?”
Vell turned to me and shook her head. “You were lit up like a torch. I was still pretty far away, tracking your scent, but then I didn’t need to track you anymore because I just followed the damn flash.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” I muttered. Kaleth lifted his head and walked over to me. Beside him was a gray horse, significantly smaller and slimmer than Kaleth. I realized again my luck in having such a large, strong mount. The Glasidhe followed behind us, hovering well above our heads. I wondered why they were being so cautious, and then I saw the wolf sitting by the gray horse’s feet. My feet tried hard to stop but I gritted my teeth and continued to follow Vell.
