by Blake, Laila
Her eyes sparkled again and he gently brushed the fleshy part of his thumb under her lower eyelid. “I can’t call you milady anymore. My name for you, Momo. Beautiful, strong, brave little Momo.”
He could feel her heart beating a wild rhythm in her chest, could smell the blood pooling under her heating cheeks, her neck, and swelling the petals of the flower between her legs. It was intoxicating, so strong, he had to physically hold the wolf back from taking control and pushing her to the ground to tear her clothes away. Not like that, though. Not his Momo.
“I don’t ever want to go back,” she exhaled, unfiltered what came to her head and both of their faces fell just a little before he cupped her cheeks in his hands.
“We’ll go together.”
“And if tomorrow … ”
“If tomorrow gets too bad, you find me.”
Moira nodded, only once but she did. What else could she say? What pretense did she have left to uphold? If the next day would get too bad, she would find him and he would kiss her again. And maybe, maybe she could never get married and he would stay with her and her life would be one next day after the other, one kiss after the other; a life with Owain. The thought was both startling and cleansing; it made her breathe in deeper and gave her a reason to smile.
“I will find you,” she exhaled, and happily sucked her bottom lip between teeth until it was bright red and shiny.
“That’s right, Momo,” Owain answered, eyes utterly captured by the view. Heart and mind by her eyes and her smile and the sound of her voice.
He took her hand and brought it to his lips. Kissing her palm, he breathed her scent in deeply, memorizing, filling up on her to the brim. It was the hand she’d had between her legs all those long days ago and somewhere under her skin, in the smallest crevasses, lines and pores, her essence still lingered. All he had to do was breathe her in deep enough and he could get drunk on her, like a man dying of thirst. Drunk and high and happy until he could lead her back home.
Chapter Fourteen
With most of the men away on a long planned hunt, the castle was more quiet than usual. The maids and servants were readying meals and cleaning mess halls and hallways, some singing, some chatting but most of the hustle and bustle in the courtyard was missing from the soundscape.
Iris, in a wide, woolen gown, her hair demurely held back in the nape of her neck, was standing in the garden, overlooking the herb patch. It was part interest, part ruse, even though she had no way of knowing how closely she was being watched. Her years of hiding and being careful had taught her to expect the worst, however; and so she patted the little leather sack, bound to the string that held her dress together around her waist and opened it. Then she pulled out a small silver-bladed knife and cut a few leaves of mint and thyme to put into the bag.
The fragrant herbs left their essence on her fingers and she brought them to her nose for a moment before closing the little leather satchel and looking around with a dissatisfied look on her face. It really was a small patch, filled with cooking ingredients rather than those the so-inclined might use for potions and draughts, for charms or readings.
Just to be safe, she took another look through the small, well-groomed garden and then walked through the broad hallways into the entrance lobby and outside into the courtyard that led to the drawbridge. Where usually guardsmen were jousting or training, there was only one man stationed at the bridge, who never so much as asked her where she wanted to go. She had never been questioned before, but her heart beat rapidly anyway when she nodded a greeting and then walked down under the dangerous spikes of the portcullis. The wood of the bridge creaked under her feet and she only really dared to breathe when she reached the other end and felt earth under the thin soles of her shoes.
It was quite a walk down to the village; at least she felt it in her bones and her aging muscles. Down the serpentine way off the rock upon which the Keep was built was the easiest part and she followed a long, winding street past harvested fields and fragrant orchards. A horse-drawn cart passed her now and again, and in the end, one took pity on the old woman and halted offering her a ride. A stick to lean heavily on had done the trick and Iris smiled to herself when the young farm hand even helped her on the back of his onion cart. Perched there, the street looked friendlier and she watched the famed Bramble Keep very slowly shrink in size the further they left it behind.
Finally in the village, her legs and chest thoroughly shaken on the bumpy road, she looked around and breathed in the different air. It was more populated, less clean than up the Keep, human waste in open little runlets at the side of the streets, stables and animal droppings on the large market street. But it was also more lively. It was barely afternoon, and she already heard music coming from various pubs and establishments, the fishwives were singing their song whenever they weren’t crying out their wares. Dogs were barking, children yelling and running around. It wasn’t Lauryl, but the atmosphere was oddly more wholesome, more natural than the quiet, more reserved castle on the rock.
She doubted that she was still being watched. Just to be safe, though, she stopped by the market and found a stall that sold herbs and imported spices. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she bought a small satchel of bright orange saffron and tugged it away after taking a deep whiff of its aroma. She still had a little of it back in her things, but she liked it as an ingredient and if anybody asked upon her return, she would have something to show for her trip. Besides, she could always gather more naturally growing ingredients on the long way back. She had seen a hawthorn bush not far off the trail, and somewhere in the forest, she would find the varieties of mushrooms she would need. Those would be hard to find on the market, though, for most of those she used for her magic weren’t the edible variety.
Finally, she mimed a tourist and looked around. There was the path down to the harbor where they had arrived almost a moon ago, there the famous Lake-side Inn with the Fae War murals she had been told about more times than she had cared to. She didn’t pay it a visit. Instead, she followed down a smaller side street; just an old woman getting lost in a village she didn’t know until she chanced upon an inn. This one was smaller, less expensive. The Clearing. Over its door hung a wooden sign of three trees standing in a triangle but it was so old that the once-green treetops were mere grey and the wood was weatherworn and laced with deep gashes in its veins.
Iris pressed down the handle; the door creaked loudly but she entered anyway. Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside until she spied the innkeeper. A small man, balding and gray. He was sniveling from a cold that made his nose bright red and his eyes swollen. Iris could have helped him but she was in a hurry.
“It’s five shillings a night. Breakfast’s three shillings.” The innkeeper rattled off in the dull, heady sound of a stuffy nose. “Payment up front.”
“I’m here to visit someone.” Iris informed him, and ignored the obvious disappointment on his face. “Flynn Martin?”
The innkeeper eyed her for a long time as though that request was a puzzle rather than part of his job. He narrowed his eyes then.
“Are ye his mother?” he asked finally and Iris raised her brows. She didn’t like being questioned in general but the whole venture had gotten so much more dangerous than they had ever imagined at the start.
“Aunt,” she said finally, and nodded impatiently to the stairs. “Room?”
“Three, up the stairs to the left.”
She walked ahead, shivering as she felt the man’s eyes drilling into her back until she was out of sight. Up here, the inn was even darker and she kept one hand on the grimy wallpaper until she found the door with the number three carved haphazardly into the wood.
Before Iris could reach for the door, however, it was pulled open fast enough to create the soft sound of swishing air. Still blinking in surprise, a strong hand wrapped itself
around her wrist and pulled her into the room.
“Where were you? I’ve been waiting for you for days and days! You know I can’t go up to the castle!” Maeve, in the shape of a young man that day, took little time greeting Iris. The old woman had never liked it when she switched genders for a disguise; the constant changes were confusing enough without adding this dimension to the problem. Her mask this time was a strapping lad of maybe five and twenty years. He had the healthy color of a long summer in the fields on his face and neck, and his muscles attested to farm work. He, like all of Maeve’s disguises, might have been a little bit too handsome to blend in perfectly but nobody could claim that he looked out of place in Rochmond. At least it explained the innkeeper’s strange look, if nothing else. Still, the impatient verbal assault was alien from his mouth and had Iris take a step back.
“It was difficult to get away. I couldn’t get close to her at first and then … ” She knew it sounded but even now, days later, she didn’t know quite how to put it into words, as though the old Fae had blocked her mind against phrasing sentences about him.
She also didn’t like being caught in the defensive, especially not to the annoyingly handsome face of a man who could have been her grandson if she had ever been able to conceive children. Just once, she wished she could turn the tables on Maeve and see if she would be able to take her varying disguises as seriously as she did a real person with their real face. Finally, she added, not without a note of bitterness, “How someone who is over four hundred years old can be so impatient will always be a mystery to me.”
The young man Maeve cocked his head, unimpressed for a moment. “Important things are afoot,” he said gravely and then raised his brows challengingly when Iris narrowed her eyes and regarded him from the lower position of her tilted head.
“What?”
“I’m trying, Maeve; but would you mind?” Iris made a vague gesture at the muscle-packed chest. For a moment, Maeve looked amused as she gazed down at herself, letting her fingers wander over the foreign chest.
“You don’t like it? I think it’s quite fun.”
“I thought important things are afoot,” Iris deadpanned. How Fae ever got anything done was a mystery to her. Of course Maeve, for the longest time, had been the only one she knew, and she loved her; but there were days where a longer conversation with her mother proved utterly frustrating. It only got worse, the older Iris got, and now she had met another of her kind — and he seemed quite a lot more focused and dangerous.
Maeve sighed and the little pout looked utterly out of place on the young man. It would have been comical if Iris weren’t as tense and scared as she was making her even less patient with Maeve’s shenanigans. Picking up on that, the man’s appearance started to glow a little and then started to become softer, as though enveloped in a sudden gust of fog. Iris felt the familiar and uncontrollable urge to blink and rub her eyes and when she looked up again, the young man was gone and in its place stood a woman of medium height and a graceful build. Her long red hair tumbled down to her waist and there was the familiar mischievous smile on her elfin features.
Over the years, Iris had tried many times to give the appearance a reckoning in human age but it was impossible. With a turn of her eyes, Maeve could look like a child and in the next moment with a frown, she was a mature and wise woman with a fitting face. All in all, she looked not very different from a human, but it was difficulties like this that betrayed her otherworldly nature. It was also not easy to look at her for any length of time, as it made the eyes itch a little. The effect wasn’t as strong on Iris as it was on full-blooded humans, but she could feel it too. It was a little bit like looking at the sun or the center of a flame; there came a point where it felt like you couldn’t keep staring without going temporarily blind.
In a way, she could see the resemblance to the young woman at the castle, except the fresh and mysterious glow and beauty had been stripped away, leaving a ghostly shell, a sullen little puppet who looked utterly human. For a moment, she tried to recall how she herself had looked at that age but she couldn’t remember comparing all that favorably. She, too, had had reason to look hollow. It wasn’t easy, even now, to call Moira her sister when she was young enough to be her granddaughter, not even in the privacy of her own head, but Maeve’s true form eased the mental exercise a little.
“I’m growing ever more suspicious of this consort he has brought with him from Lauryl,” Maeve said finally, allowing Iris that moment of getting used to her true form as she turned away from her to double-lock the door of her room in the quiet inn.
Iris frowned, momentarily distracted from her own news at the sound of Maeve’s voice. There was nothing left of the mischievous creature and as always, the transformation made her head reel a little.
“She seems to be keeping him … calm,” Iris suggested with a frown. “However … distasteful … it might be. He has a temper.”
It was one of those situations where Maeve looked at her elderly daughter with the utter lack of understanding for human customs. She had lived among them for long enough to get over it fast, but the immediate impulse was the same as it had been when she’d first set foot Lakeside. She waved it off and quickly shook her head.
“She’s been Across.”
Iris twitched at the mention. The sanctuary of the surviving Fae held memories for both of them. She knew Devali in passing — a sweet girl, helpful and a little adventurous. As far as she knew, she had started as Sir Fairester’s maid and quickly risen in the young nobleman’s esteem until he took her to his bed. None of that was surprising — Fairester was well known for his exploits. Iris did not approve of it personally, but her sense of distaste was soothed by the fact that he had kept her around for so long.
“Are you sure?” she finally asked. It sounded so terrifically unlikely.
Maeve nodded and then swayed her head in an unsure motion that seemed oddly more graceful than indecision should have.
“I can’t get too close, in case she senses me but there is more to her than what she seems to be. She’s young and definitely human, but … ” Maeve shook her head and brushing her long hair back in a worried frown. “I think she might be a young Halla.”
The unfamiliar term made Iris frown. She raised her brows with the unimpressed air of someone who would really rather not know about any of it. She was here because Maeve had asked her to be. But with every step, she seemed to get embroiled more deeply into Fae affairs. It wasn’t a place she ever wanted to be in again.
“A what?” she asked then, almost despite herself, inwardly marveling at the fact that Maeve had been wondering why she hadn’t come sooner. Every conversation with her mother landed her in more trouble than she had signed up for.
“A Halla. They were popular hundreds of years ago, before the wars, even before the Blaidyn were created. I haven’t seen a young one in centuries.” At Iris’s bemused expression, Maeve went on with a note of impatience; “They are a Fae’s human companion. If a Fae loves a pet so much they want to make the connection lasting, they can perform a ritual and it makes the human immortal and ties them together. I don’t know what it entails, I didn’t even know they still did it, but it is supposed to be quite harrowing. As Halla age, the differences between us and them start to disappear. After many years, they glow; they even have some magic. The Halla ritual simply transforms a human into a vessel or a sponge that slowly soaks up more and more of our culture, our very essence.”
About halfway through the explanation, Iris started to rub her forehead with a worried sigh.
“Does she know about you?”
Maeve shrugged. “I hope so.”
“ … excuse me?”
“There are two reasons she could be here; Moira or me.”
Iris took a deep breath and looked down at the floor. It had felt for a moment as though it had been vanishing unde
r her feet like mist escaping between her fingers; but it was right there, the grimy wood as steady as ever.
“There is one more reason,” she corrected her mother quietly and when Maeve raised her brows, Iris rubbed her face. “There is a Fae at the castle. Male by the looks of it, goes by the name of Brock.”
The silence hung heavy in the air. For the first time she could remember, Iris thought she saw the signs of true fear flit across her mother’s features. Maeve swallowed, her fingers moved subtly in the air as though trying to play an invisible flute or to read a secret language in the veining of wood.
“Explain,” she demanded simply with the absolute authority not only of a parent, but of a superior and immortal being. Iris shuddered again and suddenly the difference between the two Fae — her mother and the one up in the Keep’s tower room — didn’t seem as great as she had originally thought.
“It started the night I tried to get close to her. She’s never really alone except when she’s asleep in her room and I thought I could slip in and … try to get a feel for her. Her Fae side.”
Maeve nodded impatiently but didn’t interrupt.
“I looked but she wasn’t there,” Iris continued and started to relate the evening’s events but when she came to Moira’s sudden glow when she returned late at night, Maeve exhaled a low curse.
“He sensed it,” she guessed, looking whiter and more shocked than Iris had ever seen her. Maeve had never really been a mother figure to Iris, who from the very beginning had had to fight for herself. Over the years, her desire for maternal love had faded into the background, only to be awakened at the sight of happy families and mothers hugging and kissing and playing with their little ones. It was wide-awake now, the desire to find a place to hide, a safe set of arms or a comforting word. She wanted to run from this region and never set foot anywhere near it again.
“He thought it was me,” Iris explained at length, and at Maeve’s confused expression added; “I believe it was the first time; or at least the first time in the confines of the castle and under his observation. He was shocked, really; I think he has to have been here for a long time, else he would have known that I can’t … I am not capable of that.”
