by Anna Sheehan
The thread was once a briar. Briar fed and strengthened by blood. Royal blood. The more it got, the more it wanted. But the piece of the thread that Will held was connected to her heart. How much more blood could it possibly have?
And then she knew. The Zarmeroth Cycle had taught her how to guide her will. If she used that skill as well as the sympathetic magic in her royal blood, it might just work. But she needed help.
There were two choices. Ferdinand knelt straight and tall at her left hand, noble and severe in his mourning black. He was beautiful, handsome and brave and honourable, a true prince charming, perfect in every aspect. And Will didn’t even look at him.
‘Kiss me,’ she said to Reynard.
The skulking Nameless stared at her, his face pale and bloodstained beneath his shadows. ‘What?’
‘Just kiss me!’ she said, and she took hold of his face and pressed her lips against his.
As before, he stiffened for a moment, hesitating, and then the hunger Will knew burned inside him surged to the fore. His arms wrapped around her and he groaned. He tasted of blood and harvest and autumn fires. His teeth were sharp, but caressed her lip gently. He gripped her very tightly, drawing her to him, making her a part of him. As if it were the last time for either of them – which it might have been. Her heart, as she had known it would, beat wildly against her chest. The blood surged in her ears, and there was nothing but Reynard’s dark kiss. Will felt ferociously alive.
Some part of her knew something was going on apart from the two of them, but it was very hard to concentrate on that. Particularly since letting herself get caught up in the moment was essential to her plan. Her heart had to beat, and she had to feel every pulse.
Finally someone’s scream broke their kiss, and a hand grabbed Will’s arm. A large hand. A desperate hand.
King Lesli stood beside them, threads of red gold creeping over his face and hands, growing from the snarl of golden thread in his grip. As her heart had raced, the thread had been charged. Golden briars, alloyed by Will’s own blood, and Reynard’s magic. They pricked and pierced him, growing stronger with each drop of his blood they consumed. Royal blood, oh, so sweet. Whenever the red gold thread touched the golden threads on his coat, the embroidered vines twisted too, constricting about him, as hungry for his blood as the briars they had been spun from. ‘You … witch!’ he spat at Will, but the briars crept into his open mouth, and blood dripped from his lips. He screamed, more of a gurgle, really, and his hand let go of her. Will and Reynard scrambled backwards, as far from the reaching branches as they could get.
Most of the spectators had fled. The room was mostly empty. Only Captain Warren, Ferdinand, Reynard and his sister remained. And Ginith was screaming herself into hysterics in the corner.
Will glanced at Reynard’s sister, the most hale of her little band of followers. ‘Can you do something about her?’ she asked her.
The girl gave a smile easily as wicked as her brother’s, and sidled up to the woman. She slapped her hand across Ginith’s mouth and pulled it away. The waiting woman’s mouth was gone, sealed into a solid line. She was screaming through her nose now, which was at least quieter than her previous hysterics. Will hoped it was a temporary spell, but she wasn’t going to say anything just then.
King Lesli was almost gone, now. What pieces of his skin they could see had sprouted golden briars, and he was barely swaying. His screams had ceased, and the gold briars were slowing their growth. Will put her hand to her heart and took a deep sigh of relief.
Captain Warren looked down on her. ‘I’m afraid this does not look good for you, Princess,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to be inclined to believe that Lesli has been undermining this country, but there’s still no proof that you are innocent of this Sleep, or that Lesli has actually done any wrong whatsoever.’ He looked Reynard up and down. ‘Consorting with the Nameless is still an offence.’
Will glared at him. ‘Why? What’s he done? You don’t know. Why condemn them based solely on what they are?’
‘They’ve already been convicted of something.’
‘Yes, but you don’t know what it was, or what the circumstances were. If they have done something bad, who’s to say they mean to do so again?’ she asked. ‘It’s like the laws on magic. Wait until he commits a crime before you condemn him. Or me.’
Reynard touched her hand. ‘But you know I have,’ he whispered, too low for anyone else to hear.
‘Yes, but he doesn’t,’ Will hissed back.
The golden bush in the centre of the room shivered once and then went still. Forever. Captain Warren looked at it. ‘I’m not sure that was legal either, Your Highness.’
Will shook her head. ‘There’s no one left to order you to arrest me,’ she said. ‘Go and watch the populous. Perhaps we should prepare to evacuate Lyndaron, before the Sleep takes absolutely everyone. Mother wouldn’t hear of it, but she was under Lesli’s influence. Prepare a council of my mother’s advisers: yourself, the highest ranking nobles, the guild leaders, the elected members of the town council, and anyone else you think should have a say. We’ll hold a meeting. All of us can decide what would be best to do. If that includes arresting or executing me, I’ll abide by the council’s decision.’
‘And in the meantime?’ Captain Warren asked.
‘You have no orders in the meantime,’ Will said. ‘So leave us.’
Captain Warren regarded her for a moment, and then nodded. ‘As you wish, Your Highness.’ He collected Ginith from the floor, where she had collapsed in muffled sobs. ‘What about her?’ he asked.
‘She’ll be better by midnight,’ Reynard’s sister called out. ‘Unless you want to take a knife and cut her open.’
Captain Warren looked at the red-faced lady. ‘I think I’ll trust you until then, miss,’ he said. He led Ginith tenderly from the throne room.
This left only Will, Reynard, his sister, and Prince Ferdinand, gathered by the golden briar which was once King Lesli of Hiedelen. Reynard looked at Will. ‘Leaving won’t work,’ he said. ‘The spell is spread by hatred, not by distance.’
Will looked him over. ‘Meaning you’d have to stop hating?’
He looked down. He didn’t say it, but he was sorry. ‘It wasn’t meant to pierce her flesh,’ he murmured.
‘Just give me nightmares,’ Will said. ‘I know.’
He didn’t apologize. Instead he turned to his sister. ‘You should go,’ he told her.
‘Not without you,’ she said. ‘Our ma’s going to kill herself with worry.’
‘I’ll be along soon,’ he said. He turned to Will. ‘There’s something Will promised me.’
Will frowned. Something very strange was going on here. Why in all the green earth would Reynard have any interest in her sister? She had to work this out, but he was right. She had promised him. Maybe she would offer herself up for arrest, after all.
Before they left, Reynard paused and spoke a word to Ferdinand. Will couldn’t hear what he said, but Ferdinand nodded gravely and said, ‘You have my word.’
Both Reynard and Will were exhausted. At least Will had had a chance to clean up – Reynard looked something like a walking corpse. He followed her into the antechamber and Will took one last look at Ferdinand. His ice-blue eyes watched her as she closed the door.
The room seemed dark, despite the bright windows and the winter sun shining in. A beam of golden light pierced the gloom and bathed the sleeping princess in its glow. Reynard stood very far away from Will.
‘Here she is,’ Will said. She gestured to her beautiful sister, her flower-petal skin and her autumn hair and her full, full red lips. ‘She is beautiful. And I did promise.’ Reynard stared at her, his face as dark and unreadable as ever. ‘So this is what you wanted all along,’ Will said.
Reynard did not answer at first. Finally he croaked, ‘Yes.’
Something he’d once said nagged at Will. I don’t lie very well, he’d said. Faeries were supposed to be honest; this was why they were a
ble to impart that gift to others, such as Queen Amaranth. Lying made Will feel ill. She wondered if it did the same to him. She pressed for another lie. ‘It must make you happy, achieving your goal.’
He swallowed. ‘Yes.’
She frowned. ‘What were you saying to Ferdinand? Were you telling him he should give up on Lavender, because she’d been promised to you?’
‘Yes,’ he croaked. He glared at her. ‘Can I take my prize and go?’
‘I think you’re lying,’ she said. ‘I think you asked him to look out for me.’ He blushed, and Will knew she was right. Damn it, she knew what he was doing. It was sheer madness, but she knew. She smiled in wonder. ‘If it was Lavender you wanted, why go through me? If it was only the princess you cared for, why was it only when I was hurt that you could break away from Lesli?’ Will took a step towards him. ‘Why keep coming to save me? Why agree to look for Mistress Cait, if you were the one who cast the Sleep all along? Why risk your life to save mine?’ She took another step. ‘No answer?’
‘Too many questions,’ he whispered. His eyes were closed, and he refused to look at her.
‘I’m no fool,’ Will said gently. ‘I was born with the gifts of Bravery, Honesty, Wit, Wisdom and Mercy. I can see clearer than most.’ She stepped toward him again. ‘You don’t want Lavender at all. You’ve never even met her.’ Tears of sympathy were brewing somewhere behind her eyes. ‘You’re doing this for me. Somewhere along the line you started to care. You’re only offering to take her because you think that’s what I want. You think if you take her then I can have Ferdinand and live happily ever after.’
He refused to look at her. He reached back and pulled up his hood, shrouding his face in deeper shadows. ‘I never said any of that.’
‘No. You didn’t have to.’ Will reached out into the shadows to touch his cheek. ‘I don’t want Ferdinand,’ she told him. ‘She can keep him and his mad love.’ He looked up at her, and his eyes were painfully deep. Something strange had happened to Will. She felt a deep warmth inside, a fondness. Not the rushing, heart-quickening distraction of perfection that Prince Ferdinand caused. Not the burning delicious ache that had hurt her every second of every day. This feeling was … unfathomable. It almost felt like amusement. The feeling glowed inside her, warm and precious. It didn’t hurt at all.
‘You hate yourself so much,’ she told him. ‘So much more than you think you hate anyone else. You’re so full of hatred for yourself that it spills out into everything. And it grates against you, pulling you in ways you’d never have gone, in any other life.’ She shook her head. ‘You poor Nameless faerie. You aren’t anywhere near as bad as you want to be, are you?’ She wrapped her arms around his skinny shoulders. ‘Reynard. My rumpled Stiltskin.’ And with all the tenderness of that warm, inner glow, she kissed his shadowed cheek.
Reynard
How to describe the indescribable? How to encompass the miracle, as the name bound to me, engulfed me, became me? I cried out in pain, as if she’d stabbed me. But it wasn’t pain. It was wonderful and terrible and powerful, drowning me in something I didn’t know how to contain. It was such a sudden and enveloping cessation of a pain I hadn’t even known was there that I reeled with it. I pulled away from her and sank to my knees, unable to hold this wonderful Light that seeped through me, from the deepest corner of my soul to the tips of my very fingers. I was warm and cool and burning and soothed and powerful and vulnerable and a thousand other feelings and sensations and beings that I had never even considered.
Will stepped back from me with a gasp. ‘Reynard?’ she asked, and I flinched with delicious pain at the wonderful sound of it. ‘Reynard, what—’
I cried out as she said it again, and gasped, panting with the feeling of it. My heart was broken in that moment, broken more thoroughly than any slight or any attack had ever managed. In comparison, Lynelle had barely bruised me. I was pierced through by the Light, and all the pain and darkness flowed out of me until they pooled in a circle around me. My hands clenched into fists and I ground my knuckles into the floor. My hatred was raw now, unmuffled by shadows, and it was for myself more than for anyone else. Will had been so right. She knew me, knew me better than I knew myself.
That unveiled hatred was countered at the same time by a love I couldn’t begin to fathom, a love I could only hear the echo of before. Now the shroud had been lifted, and the love was a powerful surge, a waterfall that threatened to pull me away. Love for Will, for the kit, even for my poor, broken mother. Love for life, and magic, and the world itself, and all the people in it I’d thought I hated. The people I kept trying to save, against my will and my better judgement.
It was as if I’d been deafened all my life, with wool stopping my ears, and Will had pulled that wool away and the sounds I heard were so beautiful and powerful and clear that they hurt. The Light spilled from me, glowing steady and strong, and the shadows faded away.
And as the shadows faded from me, another miracle happened.
The sleeping princess gasped, opened her eyes, and sat up. ‘Willow?’ Crown Princess Lavender Lyndal tossed her head, looking about herself in confusion. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, pointing at me.
The Nameless spell I had cast, the shadow spell of hatred and horror, had fled from the new Light that engulfed me. Lavender was the first to stir, but soon there were shouts from all around the palace. As my hatred for everyone died, my spell of hatred died too.
Queen Amaranth sat up and gasped at finding her husband asleep beside her, but soon King Ragi was stirring too, and a horrid little yappy dog that had been sleeping beside Lavender began barking up a storm. The door burst open, and in came Prince Ferdinand, his eyes alight with hope. ‘Lavi!’ he shouted, and fell to his knees at her feet. Lavender slid off the bed and into his arms, and Queen Amaranth leapt up and embraced Will, rightly suspecting (she was Wise, after all) that Will had found out how to break the spell.
Will started laughing and turned to each of them in turn, trying to explain everything at once. She wasn’t getting very far, as everyone kept interrupting. Her winter-thunderstorm eyes sparked with joyous lightning, and her complexion, flawed and sallow, shone rosy in her happiness. She was tall and strong and brilliant as the sun, the single most beautiful, amazing and wondrous creature in the whole of creation. My Will.
I wanted to go to Will. I wanted to thank her. I frankly wanted to fall at her feet and offer her my heart to break, but instead I shrank out of view and slunk out the door. Everything seemed brighter and more beautiful, and I wanted to weep at the wonder of it. There was nothing – not the evening sun shining through the palace windows, not the winter scent of roses that permeated the tapestries, not the glitter of snow on the lawns – that did not hold a new and tangible joy. I yearned to go back to Will. I longed to show her what she had done. But she could never know. I could never tell her. I couldn’t stay. One shadow still remained from all the ones my beloved Will had just cast from my soul. I was still a criminal.
I didn’t deserve her.
Will
And he was never heard from again.
Chapter 21
Will and Reynard
Or that’s what would have happened, if Princess Will wasn’t stubborn as an ox.
It took her seven long months to find him. She went at first to his burrow, but it was deserted. She thought that, maybe, he might come back, so she waited. She had not been gifted with Patience, so it was difficult for her. She waited while the roses bloomed into a riot of colour, and Lavender arranged her marriage to Ferdinand – a state affair, with rose petals cast underfoot. It was a beautiful ceremony, and the seamstresses even contrived to make Will look presentable, despite her being forced into a lavender dress that washed out her eyes and felt as if it had been made to fit a seven-year-old.
Will thought Mistress Cait might come to the wedding, but all she did was send a message – a fortune, really – for Lavender. It came on a plain card pinned to a pillow in a baby’s cradle made from w
hat looked like a massive living lavender, woven together. The message promised the princess a daughter before the year was out.
Will looked at the note, and looked at her husband-to-be. With Lesli out of the way, and Will’s still-dubious reputation, her betrothal to Narvi had been postponed until a more politically advantageous time. She looked back at the note. A daughter, the heir’s firstborn, a mere ten years younger than Narvi. Will smiled. A wife at eighteen and a husband at twenty-eight was considerably less strained a union than the alternative. She directed her mother’s attention to the note, tousled Narvi’s hair with a solemn and formal farewell, and retreated to her chambers alone.
A few minutes later, sans the lavender bridesmaid’s dress, she snuck out her secret door dressed for hard traveling. She marched right from there into Mistress Caital’s enchanted forest. It spat her out a few times, but she kept plunging back in until Cait’s wolf came and led her to the tower. Will was not polite as she demanded assistance in finding Reynard.
She and Cait had a long conversation, at the end of which, Faerie Caital finally presented Will with three walnut shells. Faerie gifts. ‘Open them when you need them,’ she said.
Will realized she was in her own story. Her happy ending, should she have one, was going to take work.
She supposed they all did, in the end.
She opened the first walnut shell, and out jumped a smallish red fox. Her very own questing beast. He led her over moors and fields and ditches. She walked for long days, sleeping at inns and in barns and even, once or twice, under the stars. It was a summer journey, and she could travel lightly. When she came to the river, the next shell revealed a little cherry wood boat that took her steadily downstream, and finally to the other bank, and then politely folded itself back into the walnut shell for easy transporting. Following her fox she came, after many months, to a tiny village in a distant country.
