by LK Rigel
“Sharon was at the Tragic Fall long enough,” Marion said. “And she was a hard worker. They’ve really made a go of this place. Ah, here comes the groom.”
Cade sure cleaned up nicely, gorgeous in a white tuxedo. He’d insisted on a white satin bell crown topper, but it didn’t keep all his hair in good order. His green eyes had made Lilith think of dangerous sex the first time she saw them, and she’d learned from experience that her first impression wasn’t wrong.
“Wonderful!” he said. “My favorite people all gathered in one place.”
Lilith leaned against him and put her arm around his waist, and he kissed her forehead and whispered love you in her ear. She’d be glad when they were home in bed together. No matter who—or what—she was, she was happy. She’d always be safe and loved by Cade.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Let them think she was going to the powder room. She had to find out who was on the roof.
“Lady Dumnos.”
She cringed. She’d made it to the stairs’ first tread.
“My lady.”
The French girls surrounded her with congratulations and best wishes.
“Bella, you don’t congratulate the woman,” Cammy simpered. “No matter how fortunate the match.”
“It’s so sad Lord Dumnos didn’t live to see this day,” Bella said. “But how wonderful that he and Lady Dumnos were reconciled after their long estrangement.”
“Thirty years!” Cammy said. “I thought The Dowager Countess would be a lot older.”
“She was very young when they married,” Lilith said, “from what Cade—Lord Dumnos has told me.”
“Of course, Lady Dumnos,” Cammy said.
“Yes, your ladyship,” Bella said. “The Dowager Countess must have been quite young.”
Were they mocking her? Lilith was still learning the rules of proper address. Cade was no longer Lord Tintagos, but Lord Dumnos. She was Lady Dumnos. Beverly was also Lady Dumnos, but more properly Dowager Lady Dumnos or The Dowager Countess.
“Please call me Lilith.” Oh, drat. Was that wrong? Likely, from their reaction. “Surely after what we’ve been through…” But how much did Bella and Cammy remember?
“You’re very gracious,” Bella said.
“Very gracious,” Cammy said. “Lilith.”
“Well, then. Please excuse me.”
Lilith found no one on roof deck. She walked over to the rail and searched the grounds for him. Clear skies and stars tried to poke through the clouds, but the air smelled of rain. It was a risk, having the band in the garden, though the tent was supposedly waterproof and could be extended from the stage.
The scene below reminded her of her that night at Tintagos Village six months ago, when tourists crammed the street outside her window at the Tragic Fall Inn. When she believed the Handover was a promotional invention to boost the local economy.
That’s exactly how people remembered it.
When she and Cade woke up beside Igdrasil with Galen and Diantha gone, it was like waking up from a vivid dream, the kind that takes a long time to fade. Lilith had still had possession of Elyse’s and Diantha’s memories of a thousand years, and Elyse’s wyrding knowledge too.
She had used Elyse’s power to wyrd the false tradition of the Handover into the collective memory of Tintagos Village. She’d left Cade and Beverly out of the spell. It seemed they needed to remember if they were to find a way back to each other.
In a few weeks Diantha’s memories had evaporated into the ether. Elyse’s had taken a few months. Lilith remembered them both, but only from her own experience. She knew that she had done the wyrding, but she couldn’t remember how.
Cade spotted her from below and doffed his hat with a grin. She laughed and waved back. She still hadn’t told him that she was…what she was. Outlandish. But it was easier to believe she was part fairy than that she was a countess. Great gods. Now that was crazy.
“Best wishes on your nuptials, Lily.”
She whirled around. The man stepped out of the shadow of the jasmine at the far end of the deck. As he came close, she saw he had yellow hair the color of straw and glittering purple eyes.
“Who are you?” Her heart was in her throat. She should have asked what, not who.
“My name is Aubrey.”
She knew that name. She knew it! Sun and moon, who was he?
“I’ve brought a wedding gift for you—for you alone; not Bausiney—from Idris.”
Idris? That name was familiar too, but its significance slipped away like quicksilver when she tried to focus on it.
Aubrey handed her a bundle of gossamer fabric, lovely, magical.
“Put this cloth under your pillow at night,” he said. “If you care to.”
He said if you care to like a challenge. Creepy. As if he knew about the dreams that had brought her here.
“What is this?”
Inside the cloth was a rectangular sheet of glass. As she touched it she gasped. An image appeared, a man with brown skin and flame-red hair and green eyes. He was shirtless and wore a crown of sticks and leaves—and a necklace oddly similar to her mother’s. “Idris,” she whispered. The fae king her mother had been so afraid of. And where else had she seen him? He looked at her and smiled as if he’d just found a lost treasure.
She covered the glass with the gossamer cloth.
“The glimmer glass shows what the glimmer glass knows,” Aubrey said in a sing-song. “And where the Lily grows.”
“Why do you call me that?”
But he was gone. Her heart pounded as she looked all around, but she knew she wouldn’t find him. Glimmer glass, Audrey had called the rectangle. She would add it to her collection of artifacts.
One day after the Handover, she’d gone to Igdrasil alone. It took but a few minutes to find the gold and silver ring sitting in a crevice in one of Igdrasil’s roots. As if it had been waiting for her. She’d been afraid to put it on and terrified to leave it for others to find, so she’d taken it home and tucked it away in her dresser drawer with her mother’s necklace. The glimmer glass would join them.
Another clue to her past.
The clouds parted, and the stars blazed in the clear night sky, like the night she and Cade dined on his roof and looked for fae in these woods. She heard a voice on the wind, a message from Igdrasil.
All will be well, all will be right.
So true. The world was beautiful, and this was her home, and she was happy. She wasn’t certain who she was. She didn’t know the full import of what she was. But she knew where she was and that she loved and was loved in return.
What was she waiting for? A grin as big as Cade’s spread over her face, and she flew down to the garden to join him in the dancing.
THE END
About...
About the Author
LK Rigel lives in California with her television-watching cat, Coleridge. (His favorite show is Castle, but he was enthralled by Game of Thrones.) Rigel wrote songs for the 90’s band The Elements, scored the independent science fantasy karate movie Lucid Dreams, and was a reporter for the Sacramento Rock ‘N Roll News. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama and Tattoo Highway.
Rigel writes the “postapocapunk” Apocalypto series which includes Space Junque, Spiderwork, Firebird (formerly titled Bleeder), and Copperhead (coming in 2012).
Her short story “Slurp” about an author with muse problems is included in Deadly Treats, Anne Frasier’s Halloween anthology published by Nodin Press.
Give Me – A Tale of Wyrd and Fae is the first book in the Tethers series.
She loves to hear from her readers. You can reach her via email at [email protected] with any comments. And visit www.lkrigel.com for more information.
You can see other books available from Rigel here.
Acknowledgements:
Debra L. Martin brought her sharp eye and romantic sensibility to editing this book. I thank KC May for her insightful beta read and excellent suggestion
s. David Voss’s thorough beta read from a United Kingdom point of view saved me errors and provided some meat to the bones.
And of course Phatpuppy has created yet another fantastic cover which TERyvisions brought to life with wonderful fonts and effects.
Turn the page for an excerpt of the second book in the TETHERS series,
Bride of Fae
A Preview of
Bride of Fae
Book 2 of the TETHERS series
Mischief Night
1876
Donall James Utros Cade Bausiney, Lord Tintagos, sat bolt upright, awakened by prankish laughter. What was that sod Sarumen up to now? In the dying fire an ember crackled and fell. Donall recognized the fireplace. The mantle clock read a quarter hour before midnight. He’d been asleep less than two hours. He let out a relieved breath. He wasn’t at Shrewsbury. He was in his room at Faeview, home from his final term at school. He never had to see his dorm’s obnoxious head boy again.
Faint noises sounded somewhere outside, and Donall held his breath to listen—for what? A rustling of wings. An echo of fairy song. Tonight was Mischief Night when the Dumnos fae, according to legend, left their woodland home and trooped en masse to play in the human world. Not that he believed the superstitions of country villagers.
In these times everything could be explained by science and mechanics, not wyrding spells and fairy curses. Magic had no place in this age of progress and invention, of telegraphs and telephones and trains that crossed continents in fewer than four days. Donall wasn’t a mystic, and he was certainly no ghost romancer like his father, the earl. Donall read Trollope, not Coleridge.
And yet…he would always prefer the mists of Dumnos to the Shrewsbury sun.
The floor was cold on his feet as he crossed the room to open the curtains. Moonlight streamed in through the window, and for a moment he really thought he might see one of the wyrders or ghosts or fae of his childhood imagination. The moon was bright enough to go abroad without a lantern, but the locals would be safely indoors, not wanting to meet a fairy on the road.
No surprise there. In Tintagos Village, the vicar’s Sunday sermons were well-attended, but on every other day the people still talked to Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Everyone knew somebody who had heard of someone who’d once seen a fairy or had been touched by the Dumnos ghosts, or whose grandfather or great great aunt had received a service from a wyrding woman. Tonight those stories were told in every Dumnos household.
Donall, you choker. Nanny’s got you boggled.
The stories were told at Faeview as well. Earlier he’d visited the nursery to eat holy cakes with his little sisters and to hear Nanny’s Mischief Night story. Now that he was eighteen, he ought to beg off the ritual. Perhaps next year, or perhaps not until he married. It was Bausiney tradition, after all. Someday he’d be the earl, and his children’s hearts would delight to the annual recital of the tale of the Dumnos war between the wyrders and the fae.
Modernity found purchase everywhere but in Dumnos, where mind had no power over heart.
There it was again. Coarse laughter, faint, but definitely not imaginary. And pipes and drums. His pulse quickened. He was positive he’d heard music, but still nothing moved outside his window. His feet were freezing, and he returned for his slippers under his bed.
“Admit it, Aubrey.” A man’s disembodied voice sounded in the fire, over the embers. “I’ve won.”
“Not so fast,” said another. “You didn’t drink the full measure.”
Donall half leapt and half stumbled backwards, his heart pounding. It couldn’t be the Dumnos ghosts. These voices were both male.
“And you haven’t danced three circles,” said a third voice, a woman.
Donall slapped his forehead and laughed at himself. The voices were not emanating from mystical creatures. They were being funneled down the chimney and amplified in the fireplace. The servants were on the roof.
“And you haven’t said the words!” the female said.
Recklessly loud. And drinking. On clear nights this time of year, the Faeview servants liked to go up on the roof. They believed a glimpse of the northern lights would bring them good luck through the winter. Donall had once asked why this was tolerated. “Let them be, so long as they’re quiet,” the earl had said. “It does no harm and feeds their souls.”
Donall had never thought of the spiritual life as requiring attention and nurture—submission to the vicar’s weekly sermons generally left him more depleted than enriched—but the romance of servants creeping up the back stairs for a glimpse of the heavens’ mystical show had instantly secured a fond corner in his heart. He sighed and put on his robe. He had better warn them to take care. If the earl and countess were disturbed, this would not end well.
In the robe pocket his hand brushed against Nanny’s last holy cake, a dry lump of flour and water with salt crossed over the top—guaranteed to thwart the very devil and his disciples on this most dangerous of nights. So armed, he made way up the back stairs.
In the stairwell, the music was loud. They must be drunk. Donall opened the rooftop door to the clear night, the moon a bright disk and the stars blazing. His lungs filled with cold air, and he jammed his hands into his pockets for warmth. The revelers at the north corner didn’t notice him, but he saw them clearly.
His heart leapt into his throat, and he dove behind a half wall that jutted from the parapet, clenching his fists and crushing the poor little holy cake.
Fairies!
At least a dozen of them, cross-legged in a circle playing flutes and pennywhistles and drums. In the air above them, two spun around each other. Their gossamer wings glittered in the moonlight, and their bodies shimmered under skin-tight gauzy material that made no mystery of their female features.
“Aubrey, dance with us!” one cried. Donall recognized her voice from the fireplace. Her white-blond hair was short and ragged, and she wore a collar-like necklace of woven white cord and beads.
“My pleasure, Cissa.” A lean, bare-chested fairy stood at the edge of the circle. His hair as yellow as straw stuck out at all angles. Golden wings sprouted on his back, and he flew up join Cissa. He wore a similar chocker, the color of rope, and more ornate. “And you, Glory.” He held out a gentlemanly hand to the other female fairy.
Glory’s golden hair fell gently over her shoulders and around her breasts. Her nipples were clearly visible through the filmy material she wore—as was the dark patch between her legs. She had large eyes and thick lips painted garish red, yet she seemed shy. She was the most beautiful creature Donall had ever seen.
“Take care.” The warning came from first voice in the fireplace, the one who’d claimed some sort of victory. Its owner rose to his feet within the circle. He was tall and muscular, of aristocratic bearing, with sleek dark hair pulled off his face like an American Indian and secured by two silver sticks. “I don’t want to disturb Lord Dumnos.”
He wore a skin-tight waistcoat and no shirt. His necklace was different than the others. A simple black collar with a bright-cut stone at its center that caught and reflected moonlight like a diamond.
They all wore collar-like necklaces of different designs. Straw-haired Aubrey’s was the most elaborate, extending over his bare chest and loaded with beads of glass and stone. An expression of his self-opinion, Donall supposed.
“You’re not yet our king, Dandelion,” Aubrey said to the dark-haired fairy. “You haven’t completed the dare. Perhaps it’s as I feared.” He sighed without sincerity. “You don’t have what it takes to challenge Idris.”
Dandelion glared at Aubrey and emptied the liquid contents of a leather bag into a magnificent glass cup. The others stopped dancing, stopped piping, stopped drumming. Donall would lay bets the clear liquid wasn’t water.
“Say the words.” Cissa circled Dandelion and kissed his cheek fondly then flew back up to Glory. They linked arms, a deli
ghtful picture floating in the air, silhouetted against the moon.
“Say the words. Say the words.” The fairies chanted, quieting as Dandelion made eye contact with them one by one. When they were silent, he tossed the bag aside and raised the cup. Moonlight illuminated its embedded jewels of blue, green and red and shone on Dandelion’s long hair—which wasn’t brown or black but very dark chestnut red.
“By the fae cup I swear,
And by dandelion wine,
To claim the fae crown
Ever meant to be mine.”
He drank, and the stillness was like a sacred silence. Aubrey watched intently. His lips curled with satisfaction as Dandelion finished the draught.
With the last swallow Cissa cried, “Hurray!” She and Glory flew above Dandelion and threw dust over him in a sparkling shower. Donall couldn’t see where they got the stuff. It seemed to shoot like magic from their fingers. The music started up again. “Come, dance!” Cissa and Glory circled three times, tossing more fairy dust that exploded like tiny fireworks over the players.
Dandelion’s wings sprouted, huge and dark. They unfolded with masculine vigor, and he lifted off the roof. Donall expected the fairy to make a grand sweep over the heads of the others, a victory lap or some hubristic demonstration. Instead, Dandelion lurched and bumped against Glory’s wings. She cried out in surprise—and in pain.
“Slurry, Gloweye—I mean I’m sorry, Glory.” Dandelion’s face paled. He teetered in the air, unbalanced, and shot an accusing glance at Aubrey. The smirking fairy didn’t seem at all surprised by Dandelion’s awkwardness. In fact, his smirk had turned to jubilation.
Donall leaned forward for a better view and lost his own balance. He cried out as he smashed his knee against the wall’s edge.
“Someone’s here.” Glory’s gaze met Donall’s, and a jolt of desire whipped through him. “Fly away!”
“No!” Donall cried. He couldn’t bear the thought of her flying away. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. He had to know her. Touch her. Kiss her.
