Part of me, the wild part in control, understood none of this, but was instead only disappointed they weren’t still moving so I could chase them. The deeper part of me, the part that was riding behind the madness as a helpless passenger, was shocked to hear such open antagonism. The Puck was the Erlking’s right hand. To speak of Robin Goodfellow was to speak of Oberon.
He was a prisoner?
Robin’s golden eyes were glowing with ill-concealed anger, and the beginnings of what I knew instantly to be hatred. My heart began to knock against my ribs, and despite the reason I’d come, despite the knowledge that my safety might depend on staying silent, staying hidden, I almost came out of the madness and threw myself forward to warn Oberon.
But with a savage, silent snarl, the Fae-maddened part of me ripped that urge in half and disposed of it. This was the man who ruled a fantastical kingdom beyond the edge of human understanding, a man who couldn’t lift a finger without a hundred creatures of several savage races coming to ask what they could do to serve him. The idea that he would need help from me, now or ever, was laughable.
A version of the same thought seemed to go through Robin’s mind as well. That flicker of hatred hidden amidst the blaze of anger dimmed. A veil seemed to pass over his face, and in the next instant his expression was back to the normal mask of amused contempt.
“Another time then,” he said, nonchalant.
Oberon did not respond, only continued forward silently. Robin fell into step with him and I followed them both, trying as I did to quell the sudden swell of sickness that had settled in my stomach. The fever of the madness had turned from light to dark in a way I couldn’t understand. I started to come back to myself as the joy faded, and I realized something as my thoughts resurfaced:
I was far away from the Bower in the middle of a forest I couldn’t navigate, and the only way back was to follow the two Fae that were quickly distancing themselves from me. I scrabbled mentally for the madness and caught the edge of it just as it was about to fall back into my subconscious. I shivered as the fever was replaced by chills and then once again by heat, but this time subdued. Stifling a gasp of relief, I hurried after them, desperately muffling my steps as Ite’Ilyn had taught me.
I moved as quickly as I dared and as silently as I could. I was using every scrap of the madness I could harness and still it wasn’t enough.
They were moving faster now, so fast in fact that I began to suspect that they were almost running. I was walking in such long strides that I was practically lunging across the forest floor, but I felt somehow certain that if I broke into a run to follow them I wouldn’t be able to continue concealing myself.
I looked up and realized I could barely make them out, and panic started to take me over, drowning out the good-will mania of the madness. There were too many trees between us – flashes of green in a hundred different shades, and brown and black and gray mottled in between it all – the distant impressions of Robin’s black hair and Oberon’s shadowed cloak only distinguishable because of the movement they made –
I was silently gasping for breath and moving with all the speed I could muster, trying with all my might to stay within distance. My whole world narrowed in on that – dodging trees, jumping cracked and bending branches, stepping between strewn sheets of fallen leaves.
I broke into a run, bearing down on my back teeth in anxiety, every ounce of willpower going into finding ways to force the madness to keep up with me, to keep me as silent as possible, but as my first foot fell to the ground the madness shook and quaked in my mind. The sound of leaves crunching beneath me crackled and stirred and broke through the madness, and I almost cried out in dismay. My next step snapped a branch, so loud to my ears it was like a boulder rolling down hill or a spike of lightning spearing the sky with an echoing cry of thunder.
But I ran faster, and the madness, shaking and morphing inside me, began to expand too. I rushed noiselessly over leaves that should have crackled, then broke a branch that fell to the ground loudly. I crashed into a tree as I slipped on the muddy side of a small hill, and almost sobbed in happiness as the sound of it was taken by the madness.
I looked up and saw them ahead of me, and hoped desperately I was too far away to be heard. I wrapped myself in the madness and the shadows as much as I could and dashed across a flat piece of grass, caught a glimpse of them –
They had pulled up short and stopped.
I crashed to a halt, purposefully flinging myself into the side of a tree to halt my momentum, and threw everything I had into the madness to stop the sound of it carrying to them through what remained of the forest.
Silence echoed through the trees but for a single twitch of a falling leaf that glided silently, slowly, to touch the ground with the barest whisper of sound.
Oberon turned.
I dropped to the floor the instant before his burning eyes raked across my exposed face, and held my breath with the fevered anxiety of a hunted refugee. The thought of what they would do if they caught me crossed my mind, and I couldn’t help scenes of beating, torture, even death, flashing through my mind. Running away was one thing – but who knew what they were out here to do?
I was a fool to have followed them.
Silence still rang through the clearing, and I readied myself to run, so wrapped up in my certainty that he had seen me that I didn’t even think to notice where I was or in which direction I should go.
“She is near,” Robin whispered.
I almost sobbed in fear, but stopped at the last second, stuffing a fist in my mouth to stifle the sound even as something about the way he’d spoken caught at a hole in my fear-riddled mind.
He wasn’t talking about me. The way he had said the word, the way he had referenced “she,” told me that I was the farthest thing from his mind. He had spoken the single syllable with as close to reverence and fear as Robin Goodfellow could come. He would never speak about me that way – he would never speak of a changeling with anything but scorn.
“And as late as ever,” Robin continued. I could see him smiling in just the sound of his voice, and the image of his wolfish grin forced itself into my mind. “Is that part of what drove you away? Would annoy the hell out of me, too.”
Oberon, to my complete surprise, chuckled.
It was this more than anything else that convinced me they had no idea I was present, despite the horrible risks I’d taken as I followed them, crashing through the wood. The chuckle was full of indulgence, and it was an acknowledgement of a strange bond I hadn’t known existed between the two of them. It was something soft and yielding, two things I had never known the king could be; two things that he would never willingly reveal to anyone.
Anyone besides Robin, it seemed.
But what did it say about their earlier conversation?
I shifted my stance and craned my neck around the side of the tree trunk that had become my refuge. I knew, even as I did, that this was the epitome of stupid risks. I was much too close to them now, much too revealed if they happened to turn and look. But I had to see them – I had to know what he looked like when he laughed like that.
The tableau that greeted me was something out of a painting by a grand master of a classic age. The taller man, his crown of silver leaves high upon the flowing waterfall of his chestnut hair, clothed in swaths of forest green and pitch black, was smiling down on the smaller, slighter form of Robin, clad in his simple leathers, his black hair shorter and free of the older man’s dignified silver streaks, the planes of his square chin and face hit by rays of moonlight as he grinned like a wolf up at the King. It was a perfect picture.
“Well,” Robin said, still grinning like an oft-indulged child, “shall we?”
Oberon whispered something in response, and they disappeared.
Shock was the first thing that I remember feeling, and then panic. I had become so used to the power that the madness brought me, the certainty and the knowledge that came with being a changeling, that the possib
ility of being shrugged off like a child had never occurred to me. Why had I never imagined that they had powers I simply couldn’t grasp or even fathom?
And somehow, as soon as they disappeared from sight, I knew that I was truly alone. They weren’t circling through the forest, they weren’t going to sneak up and find me hidden behind this tree. They were waiting for whoever was coming.
I stumbled away from the tree, and by some miracle made no sound. The madness was gone, just as quickly as it had come, and I was on my own. I picked my way through the trees as quickly as I could, but my pace was nothing more than a shambling walk. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing, I just knew I had to leave. A sense of foreboding had gripped me, and it was so strong that my stomach roiled and my eyes unfocused, sliding and spilling over the shadow-darkened world around me.
I don’t know how far I went, or when I stopped, but I can only guess now that somehow I circled the small clearing where Oberon and Robin had stopped. I remember thinking that the world looked somehow strange, like something out of a memory I couldn’t place. I felt warmth on my face, and a prickling along the edges of my hairline and under my arms. The light was off – it was different, and it hurt. The bark of trees, gray and tan, ruddy brown and sandy, dappled white, popped out at me, and the turquoise leaves turned to emerald green and were outlined with sharp borders.
I stepped forward into sunlight.
The understanding penetrated my mind with a sharp, cutting jab, and I pulled up short, stunned. All those years in a world of moonlight and shadows, of cool, damp softness that gleamed and shone with care and danger, seemed to collapse inward and disappear as golden radiance warmed my skin.
The light seemed to come from all around, but mostly from the sky, where I knew, in some forgotten corner of my mind, that the sun should be. My eyes were narrowed into squinted slits against the terrible brightness of it, and my head began to pound. I felt suddenly desiccated, my lips chapped and skin parched. When my eyes had adjusted enough to make of the world something other than a long, smeared blur of gold, I began to see that some of the shapes among the forest were not trees at all. They moved, like people do, and as I focused on them I realized that they were creatures completely unlike those found in the Bower.
Their faces were thin and smiling, and they all shown with an inner light of beauty and radiance. They came in many shapes and sizes, some short and thin, others tall and thickly muscled. But all of them, down to the smallest member of her train, were clearly otherworldly.
And She led them.
I don’t know how to describe her, except to say that I think all of us have seen her in a dream. She exists as an embodiment of tranquil, peaceful beauty the way Oberon exists as an embodiment of harsh, unruly freedom.
Long red hair fell about her head as soft as down, the color of fire and sunlight seen through skin. Her eyes were beautiful green gems, sunk in a perfect white face that was utterly flawless. Her body was clothed in a thin white gown, so sheer that every contour of her figure was clearly visible in its perfect slope and curve. She towered over me, slight as I was, and when she approached I felt as though I should kneel.
That same thought led to Oberon, and the dazzling spell her appearance had cast on me broke. I came back to myself with a snap, as everything happening in strange, slow motion now went at normal speed. The sunlight still hurt my eyes, and my whole body was on edge with tension, but my critical faculties returned.
I took a step back, away from the sunny faces, and that alone felt as though I were attempting a feat of super-human strength. I tried to turn away, but before I could, she spoke:
“Stop.”
That single word echoed through the forest around me, in direct counterpoint to how I knew Oberon’s voice would have rung. I was so used to hearing him now, even though he never spoke to me directly, that this was like hearing birdsong sung backwards. The power behind that word was so great that all in her train ceased all movement, and even the small breeze that stirred the leaves at our feet and the lock of hair pulled free of the dazzling diadem that crowned her seemed to ebb away.
But I found myself free. The strange incongruity of hearing that word come out wrong, come out in essence backwards, was enough that I managed to escape it. I turned completely, raking my eyes along the trees behind me, already trying to find the best route to run, when the madness came upon me again.
The world sped up as the fever rushed over me, and I ran before I could give the situation another thought. I heard gasps from behind me echoing through the sudden silence, and also the sound of leather creaking, but I paid it no mind. If I could reach the shadow of that tree, I could –
“STOP!”
This time the strangeness of the word did not help me avoid its power. Even with the madness holding me tightly in its grip, I staggered and pulled up short.
I heard sound behind me, a simple light tread, and then hands were pulling at my clothing, lifting me off the ground, turning me. I was moved some distance, and then I fell to the forest floor, deposited at her feet.
Unable to help myself, I looked up into her beautiful face. Her emerald eyes cored me. Everything that I was dropped away beneath the fire of her stare.
“You don’t belong with him,” she said quietly, and I knew immediately of whom she spoke. Who else could there be? He was the moon to her sun; she was the day to his night.
“You deserve to be part of the world,” she said, her eyes full of such compassion that the constant cold reserve He has instilled in me began to thaw, leaving me defenseless. “You are not cursed, you are gifted. Come with me and I can bring you back to your life. You will have freedom with me – you will be able to live the life you wish to live! You can escape his rules and his mindless discipline – you deserve compassion and love.”
She held out her hand, but I did not reach out to it. She stood looking down on me: benevolent, kind, full of compassion and warmth, a symbol of everything that I had once ever wanted from a caregiver – from a mother.
“What life?” I hissed out, surprising even myself with my vehemence. “What world? There was nothing good in my life until He came to take me in, until He sheltered me. He brought me to a place that I could call my home.”
There were gasps, a chorus of them from the figures standing by, all of them with their high cheekbones and vulpine faces regarding me with shock. But she did not falter, did not change her tone.
“There is sunlight in my realm – there is beauty and trust. You do not belong in the darkness, under the unfeeling eyes of the moon. None of you do!”
The madness swelled up higher within me, burning, and I saw behind her kindness something else, something that sent daggers of fear slicing through my stomach. I had the sense of something rushing toward me that I couldn’t escape, something that I was too reckless to see or understand fully.
“Stand away from my child – now.”
His voice broke through the spell her eyes had cast, and the circle that had formed around me broke as her followers fell back, hissing like … Ilyn.
Slowly, deliberately slowly, she turned her head up and away from me, allowing her auburn flow of hair to fall over her shoulder carelessly. She smiled seductively, the way a woman does to a man, but with a mocking twist that showed deep disdain.
“Hello, lover.”
I felt hands on me, and then I was moving, being dragged back through the grass. I realized it was Robin a second later, at the same time that she turned to look down. A look of surprise crossed her face during the brief second before her haughty mask returned. She made to come after us, but his words rang out before she could.
“Do not move another step toward the child or my Puck,” Oberon said calmly. “Or I shall call the Urden to escort you back to your edge of Arden.”
Her green eyes widened and blazed with anger.
“Escort me? Have you lost your mind?”
“No,” he said, full of calm composition, “but you h
ave clearly lost yours. This is the edge of my realm, and not only were you arrogant enough to bring sunlight and a hundred companions with you, but you attempted to take one of my changelings for your own. Have we not had an accord, ever since that first boy so many years ago? Apparently you think it no longer applies.”
The Queen’s companions tensed, and more than a few unsheathed bows from cases on their backs. The Queen shifted, but made no motion to attack.
“Do you not remember how many of your children I was able to take from you when you thought you could rule this world by yourself?” Oberon snarled at her. I stared at him, almost uncomprehending. Gone was the cool composure of only moments before, the calm, kingly poise that he had held himself with ever since that first night I had met him. His gray-green eyes were blazing out of all control, and even Robin was looking at him in surprise and alarm.
“They belong with me,” she hissed at him, shining with the golden light of day.
“They belong with the one who can raise them.”
“I am their mother, they belong with me!”
“You are no more a woman than I am a man.”
“That changes nothing.”
“You cannot care for them – you have never been able to care for them!”
“I am the Queen of the Fae, and it is my right –”
“You are the Queen of daylight and elves, Queen of the land of milk and honey. But you are no Queen of the Fae.”
“Then you are no King!”
“I am the protector of my children – I have never claimed to be anything more.”
“You torment them! You have them beaten and punished!”
“I SAVE THEIR LIVES!”
The viciousness in his voice forced her back a step, and now he was glowing too, silver rays of moonlight shining from the leaves of his crown, shadows rippling from his feet.
“I save so many that those in my Bower outnumber yours ten to one when all are called to account. I do what I do because they need to come out the other side alive. What has your coddling bought them? How many in your realm die when the madness hits them, unprepared as they are? Unprepared as you have left them?”
“Do not test me,” she snarled.
“I have tested you many times, and every time found you wanting.”
She looked as though she’d been slapped, and the blood drained for her already-pale face, only to come rushing back as she flushed with rage. She shouted out a word I could not understand, and sunlight blazed down from the heavens, knifing through the trees. I threw myself back away from it, knowing it meant to do me harm.
Silver light and billowing shadows exploded outward, and I was thrown on my back, the wind knocked out of me. Gasping, feeling as though a thousand knives had pierced my chest and drained every last bit of breath from my lungs, I looked up and saw that Oberon had thrown his hands out to either side and that his fingers were curled into claw-like cups from which issued moonlight in wave after wave. The bright golden sunlight broke against him and was rebuffed, sending the Queen staggering back. I saw an expression of shock open her mouth in a wide “o” and saw her eyes wide and staring, but then a figure blocked my sight.
Robin’s rough hands and strong fingers bruised my arms as he pulled me away. I looked over my shoulder and saw the vulpine faces of those in the queen’s train snarling at Oberon, their bows strung and arrows nocked, and then I was in a grove of thick-grown trees.
“Grab the madness,” he hissed to me, breathing quickly. “The Erlking is alone and cannot stand so long – he needs me – grab the madness so you’ll be safe, and run!”
I did as he told me.
The world burst into light as I saw through the shadows, and I pushed myself out of Robin’s arms. He dropped me as soon as I did so, then went down on one knee, turned to the nearest tree, and slapped his hand against the bark.
A pulse emanated from him and rippled through the forest, rushing through and past me like a wind. I stumbled as I was buffeted by it, and then I was running as Robin had told me. I heard sounds from the direction I was heading, shouting and bellowing, and I saw trees moving.
I blinked and realized I’d been wrong – they were Urden, not trees. They’d been here waiting all along. I threw myself to the side and hid in the shelter of a thick, low-set oak, as the Urden crashed past me in the direction of Robin and the Erlking. My breathing ripped through my chest like fire, and I staggered back to my feet and kept running, moving through the forest.
There was more sound, and then an explosion of light that sent a percussive wave through the forest and knocked me to the ground, where my face slammed into dirt and my ribs cracked against a thick root.
Pain exploded in my chest and the air was pushed out of me in a rush. I tried to stand again, but with no air in me my mind reeled and I lost control of the madness and myself. My legs gave out and I crashed down once more, this time at the foot of a tree. I crawled into the nest of thick roots the ancient oak had grown, and curled into a ball, gasping for breath and hanging onto consciousness with the bare fingernails of my will.
I stayed there, unable to think, unable to move, as ringing filled my head. The blast of sound had knocked out my hearing, and as it slowly returned I could make out distant rumbling, and then shouts, and then finally silence punctuated only by the wild winging beats of my own heart.
I saw figures move in the forest in front of me and scrambled back against the roots, trying to grab for the madness and wrap the shadows around me as I had done before, but failing, my mind too scattered.
The looming figures appeared, coming from the shadows, and revealed themselves as Urden. I felt the tension drain out of me, but not entirely, and then I saw Oberon striding behind them. I thought they all might walk by me, not seeing where I’d chosen to hide, but this time the Erlking scanned the trees and saw me immediately. He strode toward me and my anxiety peaked again.
He stopped, knelt down on one knee, and looked through the roots and shadows to where I hid.
“Here,” he said calmly, gesturing to me that I should come to him. I did, unable to stop myself from shaking. I clenched my fists tight to try and hide my fear, but I knew he saw it. He didn’t mention it, though – perhaps he thought well of me for trying to control it.
“Where is Robin?”
“I don’t know – he wasn’t here – he went back for you –”
I realized a second too late that I had forgotten to address him as the Erlking, but he didn’t seem to care. His eyes were scanning the forest around us with a measured intensity, and I realized that I was not his main concern.
I looked around too, turning in place, but I saw no sign of him. I tried half-heartedly to grab the madness again, but knew even before I did that I wouldn’t be able to grasp it. I was too spent.
There was a sound to my left, toward where She had been, and I turned around to peer through the shadows of the trees.
“Robin,” Oberon said; I thought I almost caught a hint of relief in his voice. He brushed past me and I quickly followed him.
The Puck was stumbling toward us with none of his usual grace, and I saw an Urden at his side, helping him along.
“This Urden thinks he is well,” said the hulking figure, bowing his head slightly as he addressed Oberon. “He was dazed – this Urden did not see a blow, but he was on his back. There were Sun creatures near him, but they ran when this Urden came after them.”
Robin pushed himself away from the hulking Fae and shook his head. Oberon went to his side, and to my shock he reached out and grabbed Robin by the shoulders, placing one hand gently beside his head.
“My gentle Puck,” he said softly. “You are not free to leave me yet.”
Robin shook off the King’s hands with a grimace of pain, but also a wry chuckle. Oberon turned to the Urden and spoke to it, telling it to gather the others and giving it details of where to patrol, so that he didn’t see what happened next.
Robin looked up at the Erlking and his
eyes flashed a deeper gold; in their depths I saw a spark of hatred light a flame that roared across his face. The strength of it, the power and vehemence, was so intense that it was like a flash of lightning. It was tenfold what I had seen before, and equally more dangerous, as if the hatred he had held coming into the forest had been distilled and fortified.
And then it was gone, seamlessly tucked away as if it had never been. Robin’s eyes continued their journey past the King’s face and came to land on me, where they froze, and I froze with them. In that instant an understanding passed between us: we both knew that I had seen that look, and we both knew that if I ever spoke of it, I would not live to see another day.
He looked away, engaging with the Erlking, and I had to stop my knees from buckling. What was happening? Into what had I been thrust? Why did Robin now hate Oberon more than he had before? Who was She?
“Go,” Oberon said to the Urden, dismissing them. His voice brought me out of my stupor and I looked up to see him looking down. For a long moment he simply held my gaze, and I realized he must be deciding what to do with me. The forest’s temporarily imposed silence was over now, and the chirping of insects and the distant cry of an owl passed between us and filled the air.
“Follow me,” he said finally, and left in a swirl of his dark cloak.
I did as commanded, falling into step behind him, Robin at his right shoulder and I at his left. I was so close that I could have reached out and touched his cloak if I had wanted to. My fingers itched to do it.
“You’re … not going to punish me?”
“How could he?” Robin smirked, his usual demeanor returned. It was as if nothing had happened – as if he’d always been the cheerful, jovial fool that Oberon seemed to expect him to be. “You just accomplished for him what he’s been trying to do for ages – provoked her to breach the Treaty. It isn’t broken, but now Gwyn will have to side with us and she’ll be the odd one out.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Oberon said. “And no – I will not punish you for curiosity. You’re a changeling – it’s in your blood.”
“Besides,” Robin said with a grin, “the Ilyn will tan your hide as it is for shirking your responsibilities. Whatever chore you left undone so you could follow us will come back to haunt you in the end.”
“I don’t have chores anymore,” I said haughtily, resenting the implication that I was a lackluster member of the Bower. “Otherwise I would not have come.”
Both men stopped and turned to look down at me. I had grown, but I would never be a tall woman, and though Robin was only of moderate height, both men still loomed over me. A long moment passed as they regarded me with incredulity and amusement; I tried not to blush with embarrassment under their scrutiny, but instead stood there looking back at them with square shoulders and a set jaw.
“She’s changed,” the Puck said, his voice neutral but his expression dark. What could he be thinking?
“Robin,” Oberon said abruptly. “Go on ahead.”
“Certainly, shadowy king of shadowiness. Come along, changeling.”
“Leave the girl with me.”
Both Robin and I looked at the Erlking in surprise, neither of us quite believing he had said what we thought he’d said. A moment passed that way, with all of us frozen in place, and then Robin and I looked at each other. Once again the understanding passed between us: His eyes held my death in them if I spoke of what I’d seen, and that was enough reason for me to stay quiet.
“As the King of Shadows commands,” he said abruptly, sweeping a mock-bow to Oberon and then blowing a raspberry when he was in the depths of it. The Erlking smiled indulgently, and then the Puck was gone, disappearing into the shadows.
I swallowed, unable to understand why I had been asked to stay behind.
“As I said,” Oberon spoke, his voice calm and solemn, all fire gone out of it, “your curiosity is what makes you mine. Speak – you have until we return to the Bower to ask whatever questions you have. You have done me a great service today – unintentional though your involvement may have been – and the fact you withstood her pull shows me that not only are you strong, but that you truly wish to be part of my world and not a part of hers. Ask. You have little time.”
I swallowed again, my throat dry. Was this really happening? Was I in the middle of a fever dream and didn’t realize it? What would I ask? What was most important? Where this place was, who that woman was, who he was, what the changelings were, what the madness was or where it came from, how he’d brought me here to begin with – No. More important than how –
“Why? Why did you bring me here?”
A ghost of a smile crossed the moonlit skin of his face and pulled at the corners of his dark lips. He turned his head slightly in his high-collared finery and looked down at me.
“You belong with us,” was his only reply.
His gaze was steady and open, and I was drawn to continue.
“One of my parents…?”
He didn’t nod, didn’t say a thing. But his smile deepened the smallest fraction it could, and that was all the confirmation I needed. A thousand more questions blossomed in my mind, everything from who my parents might have been to why they hadn’t kept me, but I knew that there was only so much time left before this font of knowledge was closed to me again. I had to order my thoughts; I had to ask the questions that needed to be answered.
“Why did I come to you and not to … her?”
I didn’t need to specify of whom I spoke. I think that if I ever have the chance to speak to him again, if I ever remember all of this and the way it ends and how to return to the Bower, he would still know who it was I meant if I said that word alone. She existed in the trees around us as we walked like a phantasmal specter, and I don’t doubt that we both felt her presence. Looking back, I think maybe it was always like that for him. She was part of what defined him – she was his antithesis. They together formed a whole, their opposition giving weight and purpose each to other, and how he kept separate and away from her I will never know. Maybe that’s why he rules the Bower – he has a strength of mind that none but he can understand.
He didn’t respond at first, besides to look up and away. I thought maybe he would revoke his offer of answers, and I cursed myself for not asking more innocuous questions first. Having seen him lose control in that clearing should have been enough for me to realize that where she was concerned there were no guarantees that he would remain who he was.
I looked away and down at the path beneath my feet, trying to conceal my disappointment. The leaves crackled beneath me as we walked, and I realized that some of them were orange and red. I glanced up and saw that some of the leaves in the trees above us had turned color as if struck by sudden autumn. It hadn’t been so when we’d come this way before. I thought of what Ai’Ilyn had said – that the forests changed beyond the clearing of the Bower.
“There are many creatures that exist along the fringes of the world. And there are others, not like us.”
When he spoke I barely even heard the words enough to make sense of them, but was instead simply overwhelmed with a rushing sense of relief. When I focused on the words, I realized he was hardly speaking to me at all, and was caught in something akin to a private soliloquy, trapped in the box of his own thoughts and trying to give me what pieces I might understand.
“We were here at the same time everything else was. We’re part of the world, but we were forced out of it. Now all that is left are realms that we made, realms that we control. Realms that others cannot enter.”s
His gray-green eyes were far distant, and his pace had slowed. I could hardly breathe, barely dared to even try lest I disrupt him and bring him back to reality where he might realize what he was saying so openly.
“When men came, they took the land with iron and fire. Some of us fought, and when we did we were called demons and monsters and forced off our land into the deep forests. We fought back from the shadows, and they were force
d to leave us be – I was young then. I was one of many, one of the pure Fae who had yet to intermingle with humanity.”
His eyes were far away, but slowly he was coming back.
“Others did not fight. Others pretended to capitulate, and they joined to drive us deeper into the shadows, embracing the light instead, before they began to prey on the men when least suspected. It became a threefold war … one that was never finished.”
He blinked and shook his head.
“Those that you saw tonight are the others, the ones who did not fight with me,” he said simply. He increased his speed to what it had been as we finished the final leg of the journey back to the Bower. The comforting starlight washed my skin and made me breathe easier, but my heart still thrummed a sharp staccato beat as I contemplated the question that he had left open, the one I had truly wanted to ask ever since I’d seen her. I took a shaky breath to steady myself, and imagined I even saw him tense as if waiting for a blow he had seen coming a long ways off, a blow he could deflect but one he allowed to land.
“But who is she?”
My voice came out squeaky and so small that I knew he could read my fear in the spaces between the words, and, more than that, could hear my ardent and anxious interest. I have never been good at concealing my emotions, and he missed none of them.
“She is the other half of my soul.”
The answer, so simple and honest, at first made no sense to me. Surely a man like this, king of an otherworldly realm, would never say such a thing about someone he so obviously loathed and who hated him in return. But then I saw a flicker of pain cross his face, and the whole story came to me in solid outline:
He had loved her … and he still loved her.
“Is?”
The single word question was out of my mouth before I could think through the implications of asking it, but when it was out there was nothing I could do but let it stand, cold and naked in the moonlight.
He stopped moving, and I tensed, sucking a quick rush of air into my lungs, every nerve on fire as I waited. But he didn’t look at me at all, only stared out ahead of him.
I followed his gaze and saw that we had returned to the Bower. The moon was rising in the sky on the horizon, hanging full and heavy like a ripe melon. The enormous tree and all its strange inhabitants were gathering in the Hollowed Hall, the night’s work about to begin. Children would soon be filing out of their rooms and moving about the Bower as the Ilyn and other Fae went about their business. A small breeze blew and stirred the edges of the scene to give it life and light, like a painting made to breathe. He was staring out at all of this with unwavering intensity, and his normally impassive face was changed. A line had creased his forehead, a vertical line that went between his brows and made the smooth, unwrinkled skin pucker. It wasn’t worry, nor fear, I am certain of that: it was the burning gaze of an ardent father who has been shown the face of the one who threatens his child, a father who had been made to remember that those he has raised and cared for are not safe – shown that wolves circle the pastures and bandits line the roads.
That was the first time I wondered if he himself had children, or if all that this was, all that the Bower had been created as, was a substitute for what his misguided love had never given him.
“Is.”
The word came out like a hiss, but with rounded tones beneath that told me it was not anger that had narrowed his lips but a return to stoicism, a return to the closed nature of the Erlking, almost as much a symbol of his office as the crown of silver leaves that rested on his brow.
I had one more question, and having come this far, I knew I had to ask it.
“What is she called?”
An even longer silence extended between us, and this time I truly thought I would get no response. It was almost as if he hadn’t even heard me – he just continued to stare at the Bower, silent and brooding.
I took an awkward step forward, shuffling far around him to the side, and began to make my way toward the Hollowed Hall.
“She calls herself Titania.”
I froze.
“And if she had her way, most of you would be dead.”
I turned back to look at him, and his eyes found mine, burning me where I stood.
“You and all that set foot here are hunted creatures. The Bower is a sanctuary – it is our temple to who we are, and rebellion against the rule of those who think that the sun and daylight should be the only powers in the world.”
I didn’t know what he meant then, but I understand it now. And even then, the way he said it, the sound of the words rolling off his tongue made me shiver, though the night was balmy and the brief breeze had died away; the skin all over my body dimpled with goose bumps, and I shivered against my will.
“All who seek refuge here are my children,” he continued, each word warming me, holding me. “And I keep them here, for their own protection, until they are prepared to confront her on their own: to fight her if they can; to flee her if they must.”
He knelt down, bringing his eyes level with mine.
“You are mine. Your curiosity is your power; the madness is your strength. Do not let thoughts of the sun drown out your love of the night, and do not let anyone convince you that gold is somehow purer than silver. You belong in the moonlight – all who come here do – and so long as you stay, I will protect you with my dying breath.”
He rose up and walked away, leaving me where I was. He didn’t even look back to see if I would follow him. There was no need – he knew I would.
I belonged in the moonlight.
I belonged in the darkness.
I belonged with him.