by Karen Chance
I nodded.
“They can also add to it during life, as their souls are still connected to the world soul on some level, and thereby to each other. In any case, their experiences are remembered by Faerie itself, the knowledge carried by earth and sky, wind and sea. It burns in the fires of a thousand campsites, it trills in the songs the birds sing, it lives in every blade of grass and gently blowing leaf. It is . . . in all of us.
“Except for those who leave, and do not return.”
And, suddenly, I saw what I should have before: a graceful slant to an ear, not to a point, but headed that way. Like the sheen to her hair, which took on a purple tint when the light hit it just right. I’d assumed it was a reflection from her clothing, like I’d put down the iridescence along a cheekbone to expensive cosmetics.
I’d been wrong.
“You’re fey.”
“Partly,” she agreed. “My grandparents fled Faerie, almost two centuries ago. They had a farm once, on the border of the Alorestri lands. It wasn’t particularly good soil, but my grandfather had a gift, and it bloomed for him as it would for no other. They made it work . . .
“Until the invaders came. The Svarestri needed new farms to support their armies, and took them from the Green Fey, who then took replacements from my family. It didn’t matter that the soil was rocky and hard, and would return them little. They took it because they could, and drove my grandparents out, along with a host of others.”
“So, your family came to Earth.”
She nodded. “And built a life—of a sort. My grandfather died, some would say of a broken heart, a few years later. He tried farming here, but he didn’t like Earth’s soil; it didn’t sing to him, he said. They cremated him afterwards, and the family still has the ashes. They were afraid to bury him, as his body might break down and join this world, and be lost, as so many have.”
She turned on me suddenly, her eyes wet and furious. “Do you understand? Lost—utterly and irretrievably. Everything they knew, everything they were, gone as if they had never lived at all!”
I had a sudden flash of Billy Joe, but pushed it away. Because that hadn’t been his fate. He had come back, and had visited me on Samhain, when the veil between worlds was thinnest. He’d successfully transitioned to . . . wherever we go after death. I might be missing him, a constant ache, but he had been happy.
I doubted the same was true for the fey.
“You’re saying that your grandfather’s knowledge won’t go into the Common, if he is buried outside of your world?” I asked.
“How could it? From a universe away? We fled here to save our bodies, but in doing so, we lost our souls. That is what the wars have cost, not just death and pain, although there’s been plenty of that. But a loss so great that we do not speak of it.”
No, I didn’t guess they would. I felt honored that she was speaking to me now. And then I wondered what it would be like, to have history at your fingertips, a long, unbroken chain of knowledge about your forebears, stretching back . . . basically forever. To taste food a seven times great grandmother had made, and maybe even watch her make it. To smell a flower that didn’t exist anymore, from a species that didn’t exist anymore. To walk through cities long crumbled to dust as if you belonged there, because part of you did.
It made even the Pythian power pale by comparison. I could travel to other places, and see things and people long gone. But I didn’t have a connection with them. Other than for Gertie and her court, I didn’t have a connection with much of anything from the past.
But the fey . . . it was both wonderful and terrible, what they could do. Wonderful when it worked the way it was intended. Terrible when they lost . . . so much. More than humans would ever know or understand.
More than I could understand.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, while realizing the complete inadequacy of the phrase.
“It is the way things are,” she said, with a deliberately casual shrug. “Are you ready to proceed?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I finally got up from the bench and moved a little closer to the still-frozen group across the terrace.
A recent gust of wind had sent the king’s long, silver hair flying. It partly obscured his face, but I’d know that haughty chin anywhere. And when I got closer still, I could see storm-colored eyes gleaming at me through the blowing strands. I knew he couldn’t see me; that I wasn’t really here, but it made a shiver go up my back, nonetheless.
It was easy to joke about Aeslinn when he wasn’t around, to laugh and wonder how life was treating him without a hand. Or to act calm and cool with Gertie, when he was so far away. It was different when standing right in front of him.
Some villains like to pose as avuncular types, like Zeus, playing the charming All Father, even though he hadn’t needed to with me. We’d both known the score, but his attitude was like an old sweater he’d worn for so long that he’d forgotten he had it on. He was charming because he was always charming.
But not Aeslinn.
There was no artifice in him, no polite mask. He looked like what he was: a predator, a tiger who would go for your jugular as soon as he saw you, and the only regret he’d feel was that there wasn’t more meat on your bones. I was standing there, in a memory, hundreds of years removed from the scene, and yet I felt the same menace that I had on the Thames.
But this close, it was impossible not to notice that he was looking . . . a little downmarket. His cloak was a plain gray that was just slightly darker than his equally ordinary tunic and leggings. They had the knobby look of homespun, and were no nicer than what his guards had on. I couldn’t help contrasting this outfit with one I’d seen him wear at a banquet in the sixth century, which I’d attended after chasing Pritkin’s soul back in time.
Aeslinn’s element was earth and all that came from it, and he had worn his riches blatantly. There had been so many diamonds on his shoulders and dripping down his midnight robes that they had reminded me of icicles in the dead of winter, crusted thickly. A gleaming circlet on his brow had held more diamonds, some as big as my thumb, and the whole had sparkled so brightly in the candlelight that I had barely been able to look at him.
It had been a memorable outfit, even more so because I’d learned to pay attention to clothes. They were a whole separate language in vamp circles, with people wearing everything from their history and status to their family affiliation on their backs. They didn’t need to—they had auras for that—but it didn’t stop them, and almost nothing they wore was meaningless.
Every piece of jewelry told a story; every color was carefully chosen. A coiled serpent on a bracelet one week, winking at the world with tiny, obsidian eyes, had ruby ones the next. A slight change, and yet it meant something. You might not know what, but if you were smart, you were watching, you were listening, and you were trying to figure out if it was a good sign or a bad one for you and your house.
Other times, you knew exactly what it meant. Zheng-zi, a newly minted senator, had been unaffiliated, a wild card, for his first few months on the North American Senate. No one had known which way he and Senator Cheung, his close associate, would fall. The jury was still out on Cheung, but Zheng-zi had recently started wearing the red and black of House Basarab, proclaiming his alliance without saying a word.
So, I couldn’t help but wonder, what did Aeslinn’s clothes say?
He’d obviously just come from a hunt, so maybe it made sense that he would be dressed down. Except that he was a king, and they rarely cared if they splattered their velvets or soiled their fine leathers. There were always more where those came from, and ruining an outfit or two was better than failing to keep up the image. A king needed to look strong, powerful, and wealthy. He needed to stand out from other men . . .
But what about a god?
The thought came out of nowhere, but I didn’t immediately dismiss it, because it felt right somehow. What about the gods? Had they dressed to impress, or was that for us mere mortals?<
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I thought back to my early training, and the endless books on Greek mythology that my governess had pushed on me. A classical education demanded reading the classics, but I’d been a less than attentive student, so in desperation, she’d brought in picture books. As a result, I had a mental Rolodex of hundreds of murals, wall friezes and marble depictions of the ancient pantheon to draw on.
And, yeah, the Roman artists had put some gods in togas, their version of a business suit, especially Jupiter Best and Greatest—their name for Zeus. They’d liked dressing him up because he was a symbol of the state, so if he looked good, they looked good. But they were pretty far removed from anyone who’d ever seen the real thing.
The Greeks were closer, and indeed their early history overlapped the godly era somewhat, so they should be more reliable. And as far as I could recall, their gods usually weren’t wearing much of anything. The Greek artists had loved showing off the divine form, and had lovingly depicted Aphrodite headed to the bath or Hercules lounging around the gym and letting it all hang out, because I guessed athletic cups weren’t yet a thing.
But when they did put them in clothes . . .
It was often homespun and sandals.
Because they were comfy, and when you’re a god, do you give a damn what anyone thinks?
Clearly Aeslinn didn’t. There were no embroidered birds here, or brilliant jewels, or ornamentation of any kind, unless you counted the mud splattering the hem of his cloak. More mud freckled the high, gray leather boots he wore, although not nearly as thickly as it did those of his guards, which looked like they’d been wading through a bog.
And they probably had. Because the captive slumped between them was also covered in mud, about an acre of it. It dripped off the medium length hair that was hanging in his face, clung to his clothes in sludgy clumps, and slicked his entire body. He looked less like a man and more like something an artist had made by jamming a bunch of wet clay together, without bothering to give it too much of a form. Like a half-finished statue . . .
I stopped dead.
“I didn’t know how to explain this,” the telepath said, coming up behind me. “I thought you should see—and hear—it for yourself—”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“Are you not yet adjusted?” She seemed a little impatient.
“It’s not that.”
“Then what—”
“Like a demon once told me, I’m wrestling with a concept.”
The woman didn’t seem to know what to do with that, but she didn’t say anything else as I slowly circled the little grouping. The bowed head of the prisoner didn’t make identification easy, and since this was only a memory, I couldn’t pull his head up and wipe off the mud. But without that, the features were almost completely obscured, except for the nose, poking out from the dripping, clay covered strands.
But sometimes, a nose is enough.
Son of a bitch.
“Can you start things up again—slowly?” I asked the telepath.
“Yes, of course,” she said, but nothing happened.
I turned around to see her biting her lip, and looking fairly wild-eyed. Well, crap. “Are you about to lose control again?” I asked, because I wanted to hear what they were saying, now more than ever.
“I didn’t lose control the first time!” she said, her eyes flashing. “I don’t lose control!”
I thought that would have been more convincing, if she wasn’t doing it right now.
“All right—”
“No, it is not all right; nothing about this is!” She looked past me, and her pretty face flushed puce. “That’s Aeslinn, isn’t it? The Svarestri king?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but she didn’t give me the chance. She suddenly whirled around and started inside the building behind us. And I realized that I hadn’t been sitting by a freestanding wall earlier; I’d been sitting by the side of what, from this angle, looked suspiciously like a certain mobile castle.
“Come inside,” she told me from a doorway. “Come now!”
She really should have been a nanny, I thought, as my feet automatically obeyed. I followed her past a thick, pointed archway into a gloomy inner room, which was lit only by sunlight slanting in through a series of tall, narrow windows. It was large, maybe meant for an audience hall or a ballroom, although it was hard to tell as there was no furniture.
There was no party going on right now, either.
Instead, groups of miserable looking people sat huddled together on the hard stone floor, leaking mud and dirty water everywhere. They weren’t much cleaner than the guy outside, and stunk to high heaven. The frozen nature of the scene, with no air circulating, should have minimized the stench. But it had collected within the walls, to the point that I wondered where the fey had found them, exactly?
Because this was less of a bog pit than a sewer.
Which probably explained why the guards were on the peripheries, maybe thirty in total, hugging the walls. There were at least twice as many captives, huddled in the middle, some of them children. And that seemed to be the final straw for the telepath.
She’d been standing there, looking at a small child of maybe four, who was peering out from inside an older woman’s shawl. The captives were skinny, dressed in rags, and some of them were barefoot despite the cold. The child wasn’t one of them; somebody had wrapped strips of cloth around his feet in lieu of socks, and he had a tattered tunic on, under the coating of mud.
But he didn’t look healthy, and the old woman was worse. I wondered what happened to him if she died? I wondered what happened to any of them, now that the Svarestri had them? Although what they wanted from them was beyond me.
They obviously had nothing left to take.
“Aeslinn is hunting people,” the telepath said, rounding on me. “My kind of people—”
“They’re fey?” I asked, glancing back at the group, because they didn’t look it. I could have passed any of them on a street and never blinked, and I doubted that was because they were using a glamourie. They didn’t look like they could afford a glamourie, and if they’d had any magic to spare to craft one of their own, I thought they might have been using it to escape.
“They’re like me,” she said. “Mixed blood, but it hasn’t saved them, any more than it did my grandmother—”
“Your grandmother?”
“The fey one,” the telepath confirmed. “After grandfather died, she moved in with one of my aunts. Grandmother had a club foot and was all but lame; she could sew and do other domestic things, but she couldn’t walk for any distance at all. She hardly left the house except to hobble around the garden. Yet she disappeared one night, while my aunt slept—”
“Disappeared?”
She nodded fiercely. “No one saw anything, and no one ever heard from her again—and none of us understood why. Who would take her? She was merely an old woman! She had no magic; the only thing her fey blood ever did for her was to extend her life—”
“Until someone took it,” I said, thinking of those other fey, the demigod ones, who’d been butchered like meat. But these people didn’t have any talents surely? At least, none worth Aeslinn’s time. So, what was he doing with them? Or with an old woman too weak even to live alone?
And then I realized what I’d said. “Oh, God—I’m sorry—”
But the telepath waved it off. It looked like she was already at maximum rage, and didn’t have room for anything else. “Until someone hunted her,” she hissed, gesturing around. “Do you understand what is happening here? People have been disappearing for years, but nobody knew why. Some thought it was old enemies who had followed them from Faerie; others that dark mages were draining us to steal our magic, although most of us don’t have that much to take—”
“I get it,” I said, trying to calm her down, both because I felt bad for her, and because I didn’t know how much high emotion might affect the stability of the reading.
“Do you? Then you’d be one of
the first! Everyone hates us, is suspicious of us, or tries to take advantage—” she suddenly grasped my shoulders. “And now he’s hunting us!”
“Yes, he is.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I need you to help me find out.”
She stared at me blankly for a moment, as if she hadn’t understood the stakes until now. Then I abruptly found myself being dragged back out onto the terrace. Where the frozen tableau wasn’t so frozen anymore.
And it looked like the vampire’s expression had been a snarl, after all, because he’d just turned it on Aeslinn. “Do you know who that is?” he demanded, gesturing at Pritkin, who was still in the same spot.
Everybody else had sped up, but he remained slumped between the two fey, as if they were the only reason that he was on his feet at all. The guards had twin expressions of disgust on their faces, possibly because he was leaking a widening puddle of bog juice that was threatening their footwear. Or possibly because the stench had suddenly ramped up to new levels.
The people inside had been odorous enough to make my eyes water, but for some reason Pritkin was giving off a reek that could almost count as a weapon. It actually caused me to take a step back, and the guards looked like they were right there with me. They had subtlety moved as far away as they could while still supporting their rancid captive.
The smell did not appear to bother Aeslinn, however, who was smiling.
“Yes, Nimue’s great-grandson.” There was satisfaction in the gaze that he sent over his prisoner. “I’ve been chasing him for some time—”
“And making a spectacle of yourself all over Ireland in the process,” the vamp snapped. “Do you know what they’re calling your people these days? The Wild Hunt!”
Aeslinn laughed. “Fair enough, in this case. You would not believe the trouble he gave me.”
“He’s going back.” It was implacable.
