On the stage, Finn was opening his arms wide as the rest of the band piped and drummed. Faye hadn’t been listening to the tune as she’d been in such a panic to get to Aisha, but now she realised that it was familiar.
‘You… and Finn?’ Faye’s heart felt like it stopped beating as she stared at her friend. She was dimly aware that the crowd had formed a huge circle and was dancing, running around it in exactly the same way as the dancers at the faerie ball in Murias. She stared out at their contorted faces and a dawning horror made her mute.
‘Yes. Me and Finn.’ Aisha turned her wide brown eyes to Finn, metres away, and he held his hand out to her. Below him, the crowd were no longer dancing; now it had turned into something else, something darker and more savage. They reeled and trampled each other; there was screaming, but Aisha couldn’t hear it, Faye could tell: her face was beatific as she caught and returned Finn’s gaze. ‘It was the spell, Faye. It brought him to me,’ she sighed and then, without warning, ran on to the stage towards the faerie king’s open arms.
‘Aisha! No!’ Faye grabbed for her friend’s hand, but Aisha’s fingers slipped through hers. Faye ran after her, but it was too late. Finn Beatha picked Aisha up, and glared victoriously at Faye.
‘You didn’t want me, sidhe-leth. Don’t blame me if someone else did,’ his voice cut through the music as if there was a direct channel between them.
‘You can’t take her!’ Faye shouted, but Finn cradled Aisha in one arm and thrust his other palm out towards her. Faye felt an invisible barrier rise in the space between them.
‘You can’t stop me,’ he replied, smiling, and swept Aisha into his arms so that she lay in them like a child, bewitched. ‘I will have my lovers, human or half-human; it is no matter to me. We need human blood to keep us strong. Worry not, Faye. I will keep your friend safe in my bed.’ He cast a wry glance over the half-naked, cavorting crowd. ‘Perhaps with some of these others, too. A faerie king does not like to be bored. And I need half-human heirs, and women ripe to nurse them when I am done with their mothers…’
Finn was no longer singing and so the drumming reached fever pitch; everyone in the crowd was leaping and screaming. Their faces were masks, and the sheen of humanity was slipping from them; they became more and more bestial with every second.
Faye felt horrified that she had ever desired Finn so deeply. She took out the hagstone charm from her pocket and tried to push through the energy barrier towards him. ‘You will not take her!’ Faye screamed, holding it up like a lamp in the darkness, but his power was too great and the barrier, whatever it was made of, choked her as if she was drowning.
In desperation, she threw it at him, but he caught it and jumped into the middle of the crowd, which ran to him like rivulets into a stream.
‘Your charm cannot stop me,’ he called as he jumped. ‘It protects you from my kind like it always has, sidhe-leth. But none of these others are so protected.’ Aisha clung to him, her arms around his neck, burying her face into his chest, kissing him. Finn threw the hagstone charm away to the far side of the stage.
‘Aisha! Don’t go!’ Faye screamed, but she could see the enchantment in her friend’s eyes; Aisha didn’t even hear Faye. She knew what Aisha was feeling, and she felt a stab of shame at her own hypocrisy; no-one would have been able to call her back from Finn’s arms when she had been the one in his favour. But Aisha was at Finn’s mercy now; if she displeased him, she would have no defence against his power; she didn’t have the magic that Glitonea had taught Faye; she was not half-faerie. Aisha might not survive the faerie reel if she was thrust into it by a faerie king who had grown tired of her. She scrabbled at the dirty stage floor for the charm, where it had landed among wires and electrical leads.
Faye watched as others in the crowd grabbed him and went to him willingly, for they all wanted him; they had all been enchanted in exactly the same way as she had.
‘Farewell, sidhe-leth,’ Finn’s stormy eyes met hers and she felt grief pass through her: she still wanted him, even now; her heart and the deep passion he inspired didn’t want him to take Aisha. She knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t help it. She steeled herself against the power in his gaze. ‘Until our lips meet again.’
‘You will never have me again!’ she screamed, making her eyes meet his with as much power in them as she could muster. Resist him, resist, she told herself, but his power was strong. If she had not had the hagstones’ burning heat in her palm, anchoring her to the ordinary world, she felt that she would have followed him. But Rav needs me, she thought, desperately: she made herself repeat his name. Rav. The man who loves you. Who you could love, if this madness was removed from your life…
Finn laughed, and she knew that he was reading her thoughts.
‘As you will. Go back to your mortal man. But you will always yearn for me,’ he smiled, and there was no kindness in his expression, but instead the calculating look of an eagle weighing up its prey. ‘And since you have betrayed me three times now: by loving the mortal, by rescuing him from my realm, and for trying to thwart me tonight, I will bar you from entering Murias by any means from now on.’
‘I am half-faerie. It’s my right to be there if I choose,’ Faye retorted, but dread twisted her stomach. Murias was Finn’s world, and she knew he could do whatever he wanted. He could keep her out. There was no way to stop him, no way she could help Aisha if he took her there.
Finn called out something in Gaelic to the band, still playing onstage; as if following an order, they finished the song, dropped their instruments and jumped into the crowd, grabbing people at random.
‘Please! I’m begging you. Please.’ Faye fell to her knees as an unnatural golden witchlight flashed in the crowd for a moment, on and off. The sudden darkness interspersed with light caught the jerking and flailing movements of the crowd in strange, monstrous angles and shadows. Faye blinked, shielding her eyes as bodies writhed and thrusted.
‘Take me! Take me instead of them and I’ll be loyal to you. Forever!’ Perhaps it wasn’t too late to trick him into taking her instead? As half-faerie, she would survive and perhaps be able to find a way back. If he took the villagers, they would most likely end up in the faerie reel when Finn and the rest of the fae tired of them: a slow and horrible death.
‘Too late, Faye Morgan,’ Finn smiled.
The golden light lit the whole crowd for one brief moment. A many-voiced scream, a chorus of the crowd’s violent, insane lust ripped through Abercolme, and then, just as suddenly, a dark and dead hush followed it, which was far, far worse.
Chapter Forty-One
Faye ran down the steps of the stage into the crowd. The villagers who were left looked around them as if they were waking up from a dream. She had to try to re-enter the faerie realm and rescue whoever had been taken.
She started to try and push her way through the crowd, but they were confused and disoriented; in many cases they were hurt: people sat on the ground, holding arms that might be broken and with cuts and grazes to their faces, legs, anywhere with exposed skin.
Faye had some basic first-aid knowledge; she’d taken a course years ago when she took over the running of the shop. You never know when someone might faint on the premises, or worse, Moddie had warned, it’s smart to be prepared. She wished Annie was with her; Annie would shoulder her way through the crowd and lead Faye through; or, she would put her hand on Faye’s shoulder, look into her eyes and say sweetheart, let it go for now. These people need you. Let’s focus on the wounded first.
She looked around in desperation. Every second that Finn was gone it felt like it would be harder to go after them – to save the ones they had taken with them. She had to get down to the beach and find the faerie road; it was the only way into Murias that she knew... Feeling that she was doing the wrong thing, she started making her way out, but there was nowhere she could get through easily now, and the confusion was starting to turn into alarm. People were running around, screaming.
Faye saw the sam
e group of women she had tried to push past on her way in wandering around, looking for a friend they’d lost; Faye suspected they wouldn’t take it well if she explained to them that their friend was most likely on her way to the realm of faerie, or already there, naked and willingly pleasuring Finn and his faerie court. Or, unwillingly, but enchanted, Faye thought grimly.
But then, Grandmother’s voice spoke in her ear, as if she was suddenly next to her. Don’t judge them for the things they don’t understand, Faye, she said. Faye felt that if she turned around she’d see Grandmother there, short and round with her hair still long and twined up in a grey bun and the ghosts of a life of wisdom and kindness etched into her face. It is your job to help the people, Faye. Never forget that, Grandmother’s voice said.
‘But I have to help them. The ones that were taken by Finn,’ she protested.
Aye, and ye will. Grandmother’s voice seemed to come from all around her; she was in the wind, in the night, in the moonlight that bathed the chaos around her. But first things first.
Grandmother was always right; Faye had known better than to question her when she was alive, and she certainly wasn’t going to argue with Grandmother in spirit. For a moment, she closed her eyes and breathed in; in a half-second she felt Grandmother’s hand in hers, like Annie’s that first day at school.
Faye cast one last desperate gaze at the beach below and turned back to the people that needed her.
There were burns. After Finn and the rest of Dal Riada had jumped off the stage into the throng, the burning haystacks had hit tents and stands, falling on people who were too dazed to get out of the way. Without any useful equipment or medicines, she made do with what she had.
She managed to herd most people away from the fires and persuade some of them to help her find the worst wounded; even if they did nothing other than sit with them, it was something. She kept listening for sirens over the shouting and the crying, but there was nothing.
What use is it being half-fae if I can’t help these people somehow? she berated herself.
In her mind’s eye, she was taken back for a brief second to her immersion in the golden chalice. She remembered all her ancestors merging with her; giving her their gifts. She had what they had, now; she contained all the power of the Morgans. Their knowledge, their skills with herbs and magic; their loves and losses. It was like possessing a vast library she had not yet read. I might have all that within me now, she thought, opening her eyes in desperation, but I don’t know how to wield it.
And yet the memory was persistent. She let the faces come, until one face smiled at her, up through the water. Without having ever seen her face, she knew it was Grainne Morgan. And in a sudden rush of knowledge, Grainne spoke to her and told her what to do.
Faye left the woman she had just propped up against a stone wall and asked a nearby man to keep an eye on her. Then she made her way back through the chaos and onto the stage.
She picked up the microphone stand that had fallen over when Finn had jumped off the stage and adjusted it to her height.
The words were alien to her, but she sang them anyway. She knew they made up the song that Grainne had sung to the faeries in her last hour; the song that had brought her familiars, the water fae, to take her home.
Faye felt self-conscious, but she persevered, pronouncing the strange words and following the simple lilting melody which was at once familiar, like a half-remembered lullaby, and as strange as the realm of Murias itself. The PA system was still on, and she heard her voice echoed back to her over the noise of the people below.
And as she sang, she saw them coming; the host of water, surging over the black sea.
And they covered the crowd, the servants of Murias; the servants of the high queen, who Faye had promised her first-born child. Faye sang, knowing the horror of the debt that she deepened with Glitonea, but unable to stop; had Grainne Morgan made a similar bargain? Was that why the fae had rescued her? Faye felt as though reality turned back like a tide and she saw the bare ocean floor, littered with wrecks and bones. There is knowledge in you now, said Grainne’s voice in her ear. But it comes at a price.
And as Faye continued singing, the water faeries, in all their strange and unknown forms – many-legged, gilled, scaled, wraith-like – healed the wounded, brushing their burns and cuts away as if they had never been. They swam over the fires and extinguished them, babbling to each other like mobile streams. She watched as the crowd quieted; as they came back to consciousness, as their pain left them and a flat calm covered the castle grounds.
There was no sense of time; Faye only knew that she must keep singing until the fae had finished their work, for it was Grainne’s song that kept them with her. But it was Faye’s power that amplified it, and called them so quickly. She felt it deep within her; a waterfall, a depth of flowing, pounding water that couldn’t – and shouldn’t – be stopped. It was Faye’s bargain with the faerie queen that meant these people could be saved. One small life for so many. But as the song spilled out of her, as she felt the power come, she cried at what she had to sacrifice for it.
Finally Faye stopped singing, and felt the power that had filled her quieten.
For one moment, Glitonea appeared before her on a sleigh of water, pulled by two black kelpies.
‘I have helped you again, Daughter of Light and Shadows,’ she smiled coldly. ‘Remember our bargain.’ The faerie queen clapped her hands, and she and the faerie host disappeared.
In the distance, Faye heard sirens approaching.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was a few weeks later and Faye and Rav lay in Faye’s bed, their legs entwined.
‘If you go, I’ll make you a cup of tea every day for a week,’ Faye offered.
‘Make me one today then.’ Rav snuggled next to her. ‘I don’t want to get up. It’s too nice in here.’
‘If you make it, I’ll bring you cake with your tea every day for a week,’ she counter-offered. ‘Please, Rav. Go on.’ She pulled the duvet off his side of the bed. ‘See, you’re cold now anyway. Might as well get up.’
‘Oh, fine.’ Rav got up and pulled on a hoodie over his boxers. ‘Only because you might turn me into some reptile or something.’
‘Shut up,’ she said, then, after a second, called after him. ‘An otter. I could turn you into an otter, that would be a sufficiently cute replacement.’
Faye’s smile faded as she stared out through the window at her late summer herb garden. She hadn’t had the time to tend it much. Soon it would be time to harvest and dry everything for the winter; the rose hips dried for incenses, made into a vitamin-rich syrup for coughs and colds. The lavender had to be dried, the nettles dried for tea or made into healing tinctures. The apples would be made into apple jam, apple chutney; for a few weeks in the late summer she would fill boxes of the sweet, red fruit and put them outside the shop for anyone to take. The irony of witches giving away free apples wasn’t lost on her, but otherwise they would waste.
Rav was recovering slowly. After the concert they’d shut themselves away in Faye’s house. She’d closed the shop – not permanently, but until she felt ready to reopen it. She didn’t care that news of what happened at the concert – the mysterious disappearances of eight people – had made Abercolme into a media circus. She could have opened the shop and talked to all the journalists that had, initially, waited on her doorstep, like they had all the local businesses, wanting a scoop, an insight, some secret that the people of Abercolme were keeping to themselves. She could have made a fortune, selling to all the curious that streamed into the village, determined to uncover the truth behind the rumours. That aliens had abducted the men and women. That they had been kidnapped for ransom by a secret sect within the village. Worst of all, that Abercolme was the centre of a black magic community that had sacrificed all eight to the Devil. Faye wondered how the minister felt about that; she doubted he was pleased about the village being associated with devil worship. Perhaps now he would – they all would
– understand how Grainne Morgan felt, all those years ago.
But Faye kept her mouth shut. Nobody talked to the press; not Muriel in the bakery, not Mrs Kennedy, not the minister or anyone else. They kept themselves to themselves, and, slowly, the press began to leave.
Rav had been left weakened by his abduction into faerie; Faye was shocked at how little energy he had for weeks afterwards, and the deep burns on his legs and arms that were only now starting to subside with her repeated treatment of comfrey salve. Faye could only imagine that the burns came from being lashed to the black kelpie that had taken him to Murias. He had hardly any appetite for the first week, and had gone in and out of consciousness for days until she brought him round, finally, by making him eat some soup.
Faye couldn’t heal him with the faerie magic as she had done to the crowd at the concert; she couldn’t ask any more of Glitonea. Despite the terrible exchange Glitonea demanded, the water fae that had swarmed over the sea had taken away every injury from the people that were left, confused and hurt, after Dal Riada had disappeared, taking their sacrifices with them. Midsummer sacrifices. Finn had spoken of it; Grandmother had warned her, in her way.
A familiar stab of guilt wrenched Faye’s stomach; ever since the concert, after she had limped home in exhaustion, unable to do anything more than slump into her bed, beside Rav, she had felt it. Had she known what was going to happen, would she have been Finn’s willing sacrifice? Should she have gone, so that he didn’t have to look elsewhere, and find Aisha and the rest of them? At least Faye could survive in Murias and, perhaps, have time to plot her escape as she had done before…
She had been back to Black Sands, but the faerie road had vanished. At least, it had for her. She knew that Finn had revoked her access to Murias, and Aisha and the others would eventually die if they stayed there. She doubted she had anything left that she could offer Glitonea in exchange for Aisha’s release, and a dungeon awaited Faye if she managed to find her way back.
Daughter of Light and Shadows Page 26
