Her Knight in Tarnished Armor: A Medieval Romance Collection

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “Fig trees.” He veered left and climbed a dark hill.

  “I don’t… I don’t know what you mean.” She levitated herself up the hill. “Is that a euphemism for something?”

  They crested the hill and he gestured toward a neat row of short, exotic trees silhouetted against the glowing night sky nestled at the opposite base. “I chanced upon a Grecian apothecary’s apprentice some forty years ago who was exploring the Highlands as bade by his master for a certain strain of Meadowsweet herb. I was in possession of a large quantity of the stuff as I’d used it for inflammation caused by a broken foot. The apprentice traded me these saplings not just for the fruit, but for what else it contains.”

  Reaching the trees, Daroch circled them and pointed to taps set into shallow bark. Beneath them, wooden bowls caught the sticky leavings.

  “What is it?” Kylah bent over a bowl, inspecting the sap-like content with her usual all encompassing curiosity.

  “I call it Arborlatix which, in Latin, roughly translates to tree milk.” He picked up a bowl. “This is the first year I’ve really been able to cultivate enough of it to be useful.”

  “What’s it for?”

  Daroch took a tightly worked leather bag from his robes and a smooth wooden scoop, and began to patiently transfer the contents from bowl to bag. “Look,” he murmured, holding up the substance that ran from the scoop a touch slower than honey. “It’s a rather complex polymer emulsion that’s made of the tree’s sugars, proteins, starches, tannins, and resin. Mixed with other elements, it can do a vast number of things, not the least of which is protecting other substances from water and erosion.” He moved to the next bowl where she crouched. “It could be of great use to me.”

  Bending toward her, he reached for the bowl, bringing their faces dangerously close.

  Kylah stumbled backward, as though to avoid the contact and the bowl beneath the tree behind her tipped over, the contents spilling onto the ground. She snatched her hand away and hissed, cradling it to her body.

  Their gazes collided. She began to tremble.

  “What just happened?” he asked very slowly, his heart rate flaring along with the fear in her eyes.

  “I-It burned me,” she whispered, very slowly extending the quivering hand out to him. “It burns still.”

  Daroch barely heard her for all the roaring in his ears. He knelt beside her and reached for her injured hand. He turned it over in his palm studying the effects of the substance. The soft blue glow was nearly indistinguishable now and the pink, irritated flesh of her dainty hand was as corporeal as his own. It seemed as though she’d immersed the entire thing in the Arborlatix. On any other matter, the substance would have stuck like a glove, but not Kylah. When she’d snatched it away, none of the stuff adhered to her hand, but the result was extraordinary.

  He could feel her skin. It was as soft as he imagined it to be. He ran a thumb across her palm and, though it was cold, it was real.

  She gasped and tried to jerk it away.

  “How bad does it pain ye, lass?” he asked.

  “I-It’s not like fire, but it burns and stings fiercely… and itches.” She flexed her palm and affixed her worried gaze on him. “What will it do to me?”

  Daroch had no idea, and he tried to keep the concern from his features. “Is it getting worse or better?”

  She waited, wiggling her fingers. “Better, I think.” Her mouth was touched by a tremulous smile. “You touched me.” Kneeling closer to him, she lifted her hand to his face, brushing her feather-light fingers over that tattoos on his cheek. “I can touch you.”

  Daroch closed his eyes. He’d thought any touch from Kylah MacKay would go straight to his cock, but it didn’t. It settled in the empty chamber of his chest and lodged there.

  “Do you know what this means?” she whispered.

  He knew what he wished it meant. “But wouldn’t dipping ye in the entire lot be exquisitely painful? I very much doubt ye’d like—”

  “Nay, Daroch.” Her eyes glimmered with bleak sadness and unshed tears. Her chin quivered and her breath caught on a silent sob. Not one of wonder, but of dread.

  The knowledge knifed through his lungs, rendering them useless. This discovery changed everything.

  “It means that now you can kill me.” Her trembling intensified. “You may claim your vengeance.”

  “Stay here,” he gently commanded. “I’m going to get ye something that might soothe yer skin.” Daroch’s mind raced through the possibilities and his blood thrummed with excitement as he turned and followed the line of the hill to the mossy swamp where he would find what he needed.

  After all these years.

  Kylah wasn’t exactly a full blown Fae creature yet, only a specter of their magic. If the Arborlatix had this strong of an effect on her, then he could only imagine what it would do to an actual Faerie. If contact with the stuff created such a reaction, then a weapon coated in it could do incredible damage. It would cut through them like their weapons sliced through humans during the great hunts millennia ago, before the pact had been struck.

  His lip curled. One hundred years. He’d thought of nothing but revenge and justice. He’d been close to despair when the wee Banshee had startled him with her invasive wail only a few short days ago.

  It was because of her that he would be granted his vengeance.

  Plunging his hands into the marshes, he gathered mud and herbs to soothe and coat her skin. If the sensation was, indeed, improving, he hypothesized that the ghostly part of her, the part that was still human, protected her from long-lasting complications with the Arborlatix. The thought of her in any pain or discomfort displeased him greatly and a part of him still strove to reject the soft feelings that any thought of her produced.

  Now you can kill me.

  Daroch very much doubted it. She was still technically dead. He probably couldn’t truly kill her until she’d been turned into a Fae. He froze. Kylah was frightened of him now. She’d trembled while she touched him. At first, he’d assumed it was because she realized the scope of the meaning of their discovery to him… but she couldn’t, could she? He’d never shared with her his reason for hating the Fae so intensely. Not in its entirety.

  From the beginning, he’d never posed a threat to her. He could not touch her and therefore could not do her violence. But all that had just changed hadn’t it? In three short months, she’d become a true Banshee. Not just a creature of finite power for reaping their own personal vengeance, but a soldier of the Banshee Queen. An assassin.

  Daroch closed his eyes, a peculiar desolation settling in his gut. He couldn’t let that happen. If he could release her from her curse, even by exacting a final death, would that be a killing or a kindness? Could he look at her face, so intensely lovely and so inquisitive, and plunge a weapon into her flesh? This one would burn. It would penetrate her delicate skin and likely kill her.

  He’d be no better in her eyes than Angus MacKay.

  Daroch growled. Faeries used Banshees to exact harsh and excruciating punishments on those deemed worthy by them and the gods. Innocents would suffer at her hand, and she’d have no say in whom she killed. In who lived or died. She would merely be a creature of death and blood and torment. Her innate curiosity would be warped and twisted into something perverse and lethal.

  Daroch stood, a grim despondency settling into his chest, smothering the light and warmth her touch had ignited there.

  He had a decision to make.

  Turning back with the poultice he’d made, he trudged out of the swamp and climbed the hill toward his tiny fig orchard. The witching hour had fallen upon the night. New and devilish shadows writhed in the light cast by the north. All traces of laughter and softness vanished.

  And, he discovered as he crested the rise, so had she.

  12

  Kylah floated in the ether of the witching hour. Upon first becoming a Banshee, she’d been frightened and confused by the daily ritual of spending every hour prior to midnig
ht in a grey nothingness. No sound permeated the eerie, absolute stillness. No light, and yet, no darkness. She had no body but pure consciousness. There was no pain here. Her hand didn’t exist, though it had been greatly improving before she’d left the copse of deadly trees.

  After a while, she’d come to yearn for this place night after night. She and her sisters all existed in a similar plane, but never had a trace of each other whilst trapped here. She never had to hide her thoughts and emotions. Or lack thereof. She could hover in this present absence and simply exist. Or not. She wasn’t sure.

  Tonight she took sanctuary in this place for a different reason altogether. Not because she blended with the stark nothingness, but because she pulsed with so many different emotions, fears, and desires she could barely contain them all.

  Cliodnah appeared in front of her. Kylah would have gasped, had she a voice to produce the sound. She’d only ever laid eyes on the Banshee Queen in her own world. There, the Fae was frigid and resplendent in arctic silver-white, often turning the moisture in the air around her into glimmering crystals of frost, no matter the season.

  Here in this plane, she was a being of so much color, that if Kylah had been in possession of her eyes, she didn’t believe they would have contained or comprehended the spectrum. The flawless symmetry of her features was unnatural in its exactness and lent her beauty an unfinished quality which she hid behind layers of glimmering color and riotous translucent robes. She didn’t walk so much as glide through the nether until she filled the same space that contained Kylah.

  Behind the Queen, a smaller, more delicate Fae hovered unobtrusively. She often had accompanied Cliodnah to their meetings and Kylah had the impression she was some kind of attendant or Faerie lady-in-waiting. Her robes were more substantial than the one’s draping the Queen’s seductive body, and the spectrum was limited to indescribable, uncommon shades of blue.

  “Your Majesty.” Kylah didn’t so much speak as reverberate with the intention to do so. “I’ve never seen you here before. How lovely you are.”

  “Banshee.” Cliodhah’s voice was at once atypical and familiar. The infinitely slow, methodically annunciated immortal lack of inflection was at once chilling and strangely melodic. “I’ve come to discuss our pact.”

  Fear speared through Kylah. “I understood I had three months more, my lady.”

  Pupils twice the size of a human’s slid to pin her with a disdainful glare. “My consort, Ly Erg, tells me you are oft in the company of the Druid of Cape Wrath.”

  Kylah was suddenly glad she didn’t require breathing for survival. “Yes, majesty.” She decided not to elaborate.

  “I believe you have captivated him,” The Queen remarked with an infinitesimal level of amusement.

  “The Druid?”

  “Ly Erg.” The Queen’s lip lifted in the terrifying ghost of a smile, but didn’t leave Kylah a chance to contemplate the horror of her announcement. “For a hundred years, the Druid has hidden himself in the earth somewhere, away from our notice. Only recently have we felt his powers stir. This, we think, is largely your doing.”

  Did she mean the royal “we”, or that Kylah had garnered the notice of the entirety of the Fae? The possibilities frightened her beyond her wits.

  Cliodnah waved her hand, disturbing the swirling grey until it congealed with a foreign sound like vines snapping in a heavy storm. There appeared in front of them a vision of Daroch crouched naked and bathing in the grotto. The lower half of his body remained concealed by the dark water, but his tattooed torso was burnished blue and gold by a fire he’d kept dark while Kylah had been with him.

  He’d done that in deference to her, she realized. Regardless of his many verbal dismissals, he’d never once lit a flame in her presence, knowing she feared them.

  Perhaps he cared, in his own way.

  Kylah, the Queen, and her lovely blue attendant silently played voyeur to Daroch’s private bath. He scrubbed his slick body and long hair with a sort of spongy, colored salt that bubbled and then dissolved in the water. When his skin glowed raw, he took a wicked-looking dirk and gripped the string of shells that hung close to his right eye. Kylah felt like wincing as he took three preparatory breaths before shearing it off.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  “’Tis how the ancient Druids prepared for war,” Cliodnah didn’t look away from him and Kylah noted the uncloaked lust dripping from her voice. She resented it. She wanted to hide Daroch from the Queen’s view. He didn’t want to be watched, this she understood absolutely. “He left the Faerie realm promising retribution for his bondage. I fear he has finally found the means to turn his threat into reality.”

  “It was you,” Kylah gaped, horrified. “You kept him prisoner in Faerie.”

  The Queen made a foreign gesture that would have been the human equivalent of a shrug. “Look at him. He’s a paragon of masculinity. One of the most perfectly crafted human beings I’ve seen in millennia. As a youth, he was an especially gifted and powerful Druid. I had to claim him before another Faerie Queen did.”

  There were more of them? Kylah’s fear spiked.

  “There are more castes of the Fae than there are different races of you humans.” Cliodnah seemed to read Kylah’s mind without tearing her hungry eyes from Daroch, which added to her disquiet. “I am Queen of the Banshees, alone, and only answer to Elphame, or Maeve, as your myths call her. She is chief among the Council of Queens.”

  Kylah watched the water embrace Daroch, watched his lips move in silent incantations. He’d sheared his hair to above his shoulders and away from his eyes. He looked more brutal somehow. More stark and ancient and feral. Reaching for a sharp needle and a bowl of blue ink, the muscles in his magnificent body flexed and strained with his fluid movements. He dipped the needle in the ink, and let the wooden bowl float nearby as he reached across his chest to the one empty space on the entire left side of his body.

  The one above his heart.

  With a series of deep punctures, he painstakingly stabbed the needle into his flesh again and again, all the while his lips whispered magical things in a language no longer spoken. He’d whispered those words into her ear as she’d come apart.

  Kylah could hardly bear them now. “What did you mean when you said you’d claimed him?” She already suspected, already knew, but wanted to hear her Faerie liege say the words.

  The Queen turned to look at her then, but her attendant first caught Kylah’s eye. It was the look of disapproval on the blue Faerie’s face that drew Kylah’s notice. Not directed at Kylah, but at her Queen.

  “Things have not always been as they are now between the Fae, your Gods, and humans.” Cliodnah could have been called wistful, if such a thing were possible for the Fae. “Untold thousands of years ago we, the Fae, and your deities united in war against an ancient evil for supremacy of this world. After we conquered, we tried to share this plane but ultimately began to war amongst ourselves. The Gods had already created many different kinds of warriors to fight evil, and we had blessed many humans with our own Fae gifts. We used these humans as our pawns and as our fodder. As the spoils of war and as slaves.”

  Kylah felt as though she might be sick, but knew it was impossible, so she suffered through the Queen’s horrible, dispassionate tale.

  “Boredom is an unpleasant side effect of immortality. There are many pleasures that humans afforded us that angered your Gods. There were hunts and experiments and magical debauchery that your mind couldn’t even envisage.” The Queen’s eyes were wide and held an exhilaration that terrified Kylah beyond comprehension. Cliodhah wasn’t glad these times were over. She yearned for them.

  She was bored, now.

  “I claimed the Druid at the end of these times, when I knew a pact would be decided upon by a court of your Gods and our Queen.” She turned her attention back to Daroch, who precisely punctured his flesh and paused every so often to clear the blood with sea water.

  He never even flinched.


  “Faeries love consorting with human men. They fuck like savages. Like they have no time left because their lives are so brittle and finite. Their fear smells delicious and tastes even better.”

  Kylah didn’t even want to consider what the Queen meant by that last statement so she, too, kept her eyes locked on Daroch.

  “A long and complicated pact was decided upon by your Gods and our Queen that took hundreds of years to write. But the gist of it is that we can no longer meddle among you humans, not without your consent or that of the Gods. The consequences are very— detailed.”

  The drop of blood running down Daroch’s chest was the tear of regret Kylah could not produce. She traced it as she addressed the Queen. “Why are you telling me this?” she whispered, horrified.

  Cliodnah reached her hand out to Daroch’s specter and made a wanton sound so inhuman that Kylah’s very essence shrank from it. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned the Arborlatix and vowed never to do so. It was the only advantage he had over the Fae and now she hoped he had opportunity to use it.

  “Times were different when the Druid was my—guest,” the Queen murmured.

  “When he was your prisoner, you mean.” Kylah knew she was being bold, but it didn’t matter. This Banshee Queen ruthlessly stole Daroch’s life from him. Plucked him from his home, his time, and…

  “I will not argue semantics with a human.” The Queen’s lip curled in a very human gesture of distaste. “I’m here to offer you more than that. I’m here to give you the chance to save not only your existence, but that of your sister Kamdyn as well.”

  The Queen was silent for a moment to allow her offer to sink in.

  “How?” Kylah whispered, though she had a sinking fear she knew.

  “I want you to kill Daroch McLeod.”

  13

  “You know I will not do this.” Kylah refused to entertain the idea. No matter the danger Daroch posed to her and the Fae, perhaps they deserved what retribution he was about to exact.