Bride of Fae (Tethers)

by Rigel, LK

  “If this cup does shatter or crack,

  Bausiney’s line will meet its lack.”

  With a pop and flash, the fairy was gone.

  The Yew on the Ring

  1972. Tintagos Village

  THE ENGINE WAS running, and Beverly was last to the car. She tossed her handbag onto the back seat next to her little sister Marion and jumped in. Her dad put the ancient Rambler in gear and backed away from the tiny two-story cottage.

  The wisteria over the front porch was a jumble of bare woody sticks. Knowing she’d miss its sprouting new green growth in a few months gave Beverly a twinge of nostalgia, but she was more than ready to get back to London. Tintagos Village was great—if you were over forty or under ten. Castle ruins and legends of ghosts and wyrding women hadn’t been interesting since she was Marion’s age.

  She’d miss Mum’s flowers. Even in winter her roses thrived. She said they loved the Dumnos mist. The garden was a riot of red and white climbers and pink and yellow hybrid teas. On January 15th Mum would take out her shears and prune without mercy, crying all the while and mumbling that it had to be done for a healthy bloom in the new season.

  Beverly wouldn’t be there. She hadn’t yet told her parents, but she wouldn’t be coming home again.

  “We’re off to the circus!” Marion said in her nine-year-old, sing-song voice.

  “For the millionth time, Piccadilly Circus isn’t a real circus,” Beverly said. Everybody laughed. She eyed her little sister’s unfastened seatbelt. “Buckle up, kid.” They were all in a cheerful mood, looking forward to this trip to take Beverly back to UCL for the second term.

  At twenty-one, Beverly was old for a first-year university student. She’d had to work a few years to save money for school. It seemed she’d waited forever for her life to begin, but it had been worth it.

  Her first term was a blast. The theater and music scene in London was beyond fantastic. She’d seen The Who in concert at the Rainbow in November, and she couldn’t wait to get back to the city for more music and plays and fun.

  And her coursework, of course.

  She smiled at the back of Dad’s head. He sat so straight and proper, but in the rearview mirror she’d caught the twinkle in his eye. It would have been easier to take the train from Tintagos Halt to Paddington Station and then the tube to Bloomsbury, but this was better. The family would stop in London a few days to see some sights. Piccadilly Circus and the Tower of London were at the top of Marion’s list. She was determined to make a Beefeater crack a smile.

  Beverly’s heart squeezed in her her chest. She loved her family. She just didn’t want to live with them anymore.

  Her dad turned left onto the road that circled Tintagos Village. If they stayed on the Ring they’d drive by Igdrasil, the ancient oak at the cliffs of the Severn Sea. The world tree was said to be a conduit between the chthonic gods who ruled the underworld and the high gods, Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Beverly wasn’t religious, but there was something undeniably mysterious about Igdrasil.

  When she was Marion’s age, she climbed the tree and crawled out on a thick branch that extended past the cliff wall out over the rocks and waves. It was thrilling and terrifying. She lost her grip and fell, but a gust of wind blew her back against Igdrasil’s trunk where she grabbed onto a secure hold and scrambled down to the ground.

  She never told anybody what happened, but in her heart she knew she’d been saved by something beyond human reason, something even more mysterious than the golden man, her guardian angel. Perhaps it was Aeolios, the wind god. Or the spirit of the tree—or the high gods themselves.

  After that, being near Igdrasil made her feel as if she belonged in the world and a power greater than her took notice and cared for her welfare. She liked to go out to the cliffs and lean against Igdrasil’s trunk and watch the clouds change shapes above the bay. That she would miss.

  “Say Marion,” Dad said. “What’s Beverly’s fruitiest class?”

  Beverly and Marion rolled their eyes and groaned. He was about to tell one of his silly jokes.

  “What is it, dear?” their mum said indulgently.

  “History, of course.” Dad chuckled wickedly. “Because it’s full of dates!”

  “Groan!” Beverly said.

  “Yeah,” Marion chimed in. “Groan, Dad!”

  Dad must have told a million stupid jokes like that over the years, but Mum smiled at him adoringly. After all this time they were still in love. At their age.

  “Hello!” Marion waved through her window to a middle-aged man walking through tall grass near the Ring road. The Earl of Dumnos. They were passing through Faeview, the earl’s estate.

  “Blimey!” Beverly’s dad yelled in surprise at something ahead on the road.

  He slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched, and Beverly flew forward and struck her forehead on the driver’s headrest. Marion screamed, “Stop! Stop!” The Rambler careened across the carriageway and off the Ring altogether. The car dipped into a rut and jolted upward toward the trees. They passed the earl, his face pale with shock. Then bam!

  Beverly’s temple throbbed with pain, pulsating harsher each time her sister screamed. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t tell if Marion was hurt or just scared. Then the cries stopped, and that was worse.

  The car door opened, and a man with golden hair and bronze skin leaned over her with a quizzical expression. Her guardian angel. She’d never seen him so close. His eyes sparkled green. He was so beautiful.

  “You were right.” His voice made her think of wildflowers and morning dew.

  What did he mean? Right about what?

  “Marion,” she said—or hoped she said. She glanced toward her sister’s motionless body.

  The golden man nodded and reached across the seat, floating over Beverly. Marion’s seatbelt unlatched like magic, and he extracted her from the car. She moaned. She’s alive! The golden man murmured something reassuring. A tear of relief rolled out the corner of Beverly’s eye.

  The golden man returned and lifted Beverly as if she weighed nothing. He was real. All through her childhood, she’d occasionally caught him watching her. It should have felt creepy, and she should have told her mother. But it never did, and she never did.

  She always felt as though she were an actress in a film he was watching.

  Once she’d tried to speak to him, and he disappeared. She never saw him after that, and over the years she convinced herself he’d been a creature of her imagination. And now this. He must be her guardian angel.

  As he laid her on the damp grass, he avoided her gaze. His coldness made her sad. Wouldn’t a guardian angel at least smile? He passed his hand over her face, and her headache vanished.

  “The girls are unharmed,” the golden man said to the earl. His voice was as beautiful as his face. More tears slid out of Beverly’s eyes and down her cheeks. So beautiful.

  The earl answered. “But poor Mr. Bratton and his wife.” His voice shook, barely above a whisper, and Beverly understood his meaning.

  Her parents were gone.

  Open to Persuasion

  Four years later. Tintagos Village.

  IN THE KITCHEN AT the Tragic Fall Inn, Beverly wrapped an order of fish and chips to take away. She grabbed her handbag from behind the front desk and stopped by the pub to tell Ian she was leaving.

  Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic faded out and Joan Armatrading’s new hit, Love and Affection, came on the sound system.

  Beverly sang along about being open to persuasion. So very open. Sadly, in her twenty-five years no man had been all that persuasive.

  “Promises, promises.” The bartender gave her his usual wistful smile. Ian was one of the few single men in Tintagos Village under thirty-five, and he was a great guy, but he set off no spark in her. No magic.

  “You’re too young for me, Ian.”

  “And I thought you were a liberated woman,” he said. “Four years is nothing.”

  “Not that liberated.” Beverly
agreed with women’s lib, but she couldn’t shake the drilled-in principle that the man should be older than the woman. “You’re a mere babe.”

  Ian lowered his voice suggestively. “I’m wiser than my years, love.”

  She laughed and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll see you at eight.” Ian was never going to be her lover, but he was a great pal. “Or earlier. They’re collecting Marion at five.”

  Her sister was spending the holiday weekend with a school chum. Beverly didn’t usually work Friday evenings, but the Inn would be packed tonight, the beginning of Mischief Night weekend, and she had nothing better to do. Now that was pitiful.

  Ian poured out four pints for the tourists in the center of the pub. The only other customers were two regulars, Clyde and Jasper at their usual spot by the window. Every day they drank tea and played checkers and watched the people go by in the village square. After “beer o’clock,” as Jasper put it, they moved to bar stools and drank pints.

  “Tell your sister I said to have fun.” Ian set the pints on a tray. “But not to make too much mischief.”

  “Ha-ha, very clever.” Beverly dropped a bottle of beer into her handbag with the fish and chips.

  “I’ll amend that to: No more than a fourteen-year-old girl should.”

  Halloween was called Mischief Night in Dumnos where it was a big deal. Monday was a school holiday, and Marion would be gone the entire three days. They hadn’t been apart that long since their parents died.

  “You okay here, Ian?”

  “Sure. It’s just the one table and Clyde and Jasper with their game.”

  “Clyde must be keen for Sunday,” Beverly said.

  Clyde told the best Mischief Night story in the village. The Tragic Fall pub would be packed with locals and tourists, all primed to hear about that terrible night years ago when he walked home alone from this very pub.

  I was young then and full of beans, Clyde would say. Cutting through the woods shaves twenty minutes off the journey home, so I left the Ring road.

  At this point, those who knew the story—or knew about the fae—would laugh at Clyde’s folly, the irony of wanting to save twenty minutes.

  The vicar’s first bell rang through the black night, and I knew midnight had caught me. A chill raced up my spine, and terror gripped my heart.

  The chill racing and the terror gripping Clyde’s heart entered his story last year. It was a big hit, and Beverly expected he’d keep that detail.

  But then my fear faded away as strange and beautiful music floated out from somewhere deep in the trees. Tears of joy streamed down my face, and I followed the enchanting song deep into the woods and deeper still.

  Dawn was breaking when I reached my cottage. I know not where the time went. My soul was filled with happiness a man like me has no expectation of in this life. But my wife was not at my door to greet me. Strangers were living in my house, and quite comfortably. I could see their furniture past the threshold.

  I’d been gone but a few hours, but they said it was seven years.

  Poor Clyde. While he was missing his wife sold their cottage and moved to Manchester to live with her sister. It must not have been true love. She didn’t want him back. Clyde’s old friend Jasper helped get him rehired at the sweater factory, and he settled into a routine of checkers and storytelling.

  Beverly had decided to believe Clyde’s story. One had to believe something. Why not the romantic version? Strange things happened all the time in Dumnos. As she well knew.

  “Did you see?” Ian nodded toward the cash register. “There’s a letter for you. His lordship’s driver left it while you were in the kitchen.”

  A square linen envelope leaned against the register. Lord Dumnos’s stationery, pale blue bordered with embossed gold stars and a silver crescent moon in the upper corner. It was addressed simply Miss Beverly Bratton.

  “Looks like an invitation,” Ian said, failing to sound nonchalant.

  “Very well, Mr. Curious.” Beverly broke the seal and scanned the note. “Goodness. You’re right.” She read aloud:

  My Dear Miss Bratton,

  Would you do me the honor of paying a call this evening at Bausiney’s End? There is an important matter I wish to discuss with you about your future.

  I’ve arranged coverage for your duties tonight at the Tragic Fall. Unless I receive your regrets, my driver will arrive at your home at seven o’clock.

  Yours &tc.

  Dumnos

  “Blimey, aren’t you his lordship’s pet,” Ian said. “I wonder what he means about your future.”

  “Lord Dumnos has been kind to us,” Beverly said, but she had no idea what the letter could mean. “I think the accident traumatized him.”

  She’d left school after the crash. It was impossible to think of shipping Marion off to relatives in Scotland they’d never met. The earl intervened on their behalf to ensure Beverly was named Marion’s guardian, and he’d arranged for this job at the Inn.

  By all reports Lord Dumnos was the only witness on the scene. Dad had run the car off the Ring and driven head-on into a yew tree. He and Mum were killed on impact.

  According to the accident report, his lordship pulled Beverly and Marion from the wreckage. According to the therapist, the Beverly’s golden man was a hallucination, a childhood imaginary friend brought back by the shock.

  But why did he seem so real, even in her memory now four years later?

  “He’s a man,” Ian said.

  “The golden man?” Beverly looked up from the note, confused.

  “What? I wouldn’t go that far. His lordship takes an interest in you girls to compensate for not saving your parents.”

  “So now you’re a psychiatrist,” Beverly said.

  “It’s all part of the service.” Ian picked up the tray. “I’d better get these over there.”

  At the table of tourists, a girl held up her empty glass for Ian’s benefit.

  “That one fancies herself an expert on all things Tintagos,” he said. “She’s been going on about Igdrasil and the ghosts like she was a don. Except she’s got every bit wrong.”

  “Oh, bugger. I know that girl,” Beverly said. “She was in my dorm at university. What’s she doing here?”

  “Bevs!”

  Bugger, bugger.

  “Beverly! Ooh-hoo! Over here, love. It’s me, Felicia!”

  Beverly relieved Ian of the tray. “Might as well let me.”

  As she set a pint down on the table, one of the customers brushed his fingers over her wrist. “Thanks, Bevs. Long time, no see.”

  Triple bugger. George Sarumen. He was an Oxford man, a friend of Felicia’s. When she and Beverly were in the dorm together at UCL, Felicia was always going on that he looked like George Harrison. Now he’d grown a mustache and wore his hair long like the former Beatle. He looked silly.

  “Beverly Bratton.” Felicia rested her hand possessively on George’s forearm. “I never thought I’d find you working as a barmaid in the middle of nowhere—oh.” She wrinkled her nose at the handbag hanging from Beverly’s shoulder.

  “Hello, Felicia.” Beverly felt her face redden, acutely aware of the smell of fish emanating from the bag and the bottle poking out of the top. She wasn’t a barmaid. She was the concierge. She was being groomed to manage the entire Tragic Fall Inn, but she wasn’t about to explain herself. She finished handing out the round. “Hello, George.”

  His eyes were as blue as she remembered, but were they always so cold? Not when they saw each other last. He’d chased her—to Felicia’s displeasure—the entire first term. His clever words and endearing attentions wore Beverly down, and she was in his bed by Christmas.

  It all came back in a rush. His lips hard on hers, his tongue pushing greedily into her mouth. The way he groped and pinched and sucked. Sucked everything out of her and gave nothing back. A gorgeous man and an ugly bonk.

  He promised to call, but he never did. When she didn’t return to school after the accident, he
r London friends sent flowers and condolence cards, but there was nothing from George. Weeks passed, months. She found she didn’t mind. She felt well away from him.

  “You’re local then.” The other girl at the table shared a mean grin with Felicia. “Tell me. Is it true the fairies can’t get you if you stand in a circle of salt?”

  Felicia said, “Mona’s making a study of Dumnos folklore.”

  “Dumnos is a land of mist and rain,” George sneered, quoting the flyer on the wall. “That much is obvious.”

  “How about if you eat an apple and light a candle on Halloween then look in a mirror,” Mona said. “You see your true love over your left shoulder, right?”

  “I’m sure that’s right.” Beverly groaned inside. “Mischief Night is Sunday. You should try it.”

  “Don’t forget the oak tree at the cliffs,” Felicia said. “They say when the wind blows you can hear a woman crying inside the trunk.”

  “It’s the sea breezes in the branches,” George said with a sneer. “But tourists love the story, I’m sure.”

  “Actually, it’s the wind god Aeolios blowing,” Beverly said. “A woman’s spirit is captured inside Igdrasil, and he wants to set her free.”

  “Igdrasil?” Mona said.

  “The name of the tree,” Beverly said. “The woman’s spirit inside cries when the wind blows.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one.” The guy who wasn’t George nodded kindly. “It’s lovely, and sad.”

  “If the spirit of the tree likes you, she’ll grant your wish,” Beverly said. “But there’s a risk. Aeolios is in love with the spirit, jealous of anyone who speaks to her.” She looked directly at George. “He might blow you over the cliff.”

  “What about the bleeding ballerinas?” Mona said. “I’ve heard fairies will enthrall people with music and force them to dance until stumps are left where their feet used to be.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Beverly said. “I really must go. I’m having dinner with Lord Dumnos tonight, and I have so much to do.”

  George’s eyes widened in surprise, and Beverly grinned listening to their conversation as she walked away.