Chapter 10

Chapter10

The whole court, it seems, is out for the hunt, including Felipe, Morven, Idalia, and Maynard, but not Sholto. I don’t know if this is because Sholto is cranky about me being near the queen, or if he’s not really the outdoorsy type. He does give off big “reading spy reports by candlelight”energy, so maybe it’s the latter.

But it’s hard to worry about Sholto when the day is like something out of a story—misty and moody, bright orange and yellow leaves dripping, the gray sky so low that the hills scrape against it, carding away scraps of cloud like wool. And the queen is upright and magnetic on her white horse, her braid bouncing on her shoulder as she leads the party from the castle at a trot.

Though she made sure I’m atop a horse (that I sort of know how to ride, thanks to a few weekends at Alfie’s country pile in Buckinghamshire) and that I’m equipped with a crossbow (that I have no idea how to shoot), she’s been whisked away by one person or another since the hunting party began to gather, to the point where the entire crowd now separates us.

I hate it. I feel like I’m in high school again. I want to be next to her, and at the same time, I’m terrified of being close to her, and it’s not the terror of knowing she can make rose petals flutter from thin air or knowing she’ll happily watch someone bleed at her feet. It’s the terror of wanting someone so much that it feels like my bones are about to punch their way out of my skin.

I stay at the back of the party, riding slowly down the sloping lane to the forest, where the real action will happen. I scan the terrain as I go, a distant voice reminding me that if I were to escape, this would be the ideal situation. If I hang back at the next twist in the road, if I wait until we’re scattered in the trees…

But then what? I somehow make it back to the mortal world without any help? I mean, I’m pretty sure we came through the tomb last night, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how Maynard could use the tomb as a way into Faerie when I’ve been inside it hundreds and hundreds of times and never saw anything but dirt and stone and darkness.

And that’s assuming I can find the tomb at all. The shape of the hills around the castle vaguely matches with what I know from my world, but everything is more here. Taller, steeper, craggier. The valleys and lowlands aren’t the nearly bare grasslands and fields they are back home but are covered in old-growth forest burning in the colors of autumn. From the castle, I thought I’d seen a loch and the silver line of the sea, but I’m almost certain we’re headed east, away from the water, and now that I’m down in the trees, the strangeness and largeness of Faerie is disorienting.

Only the narrow, half-sunken way through the forest provides any sort of clue where we’re going—and as the lane grows twistier and the trees arching overhead hide more and more of the sky, those clues evaporate.

Even if I managed to get away, I’d be lost. Lost in a place where I still don’t know all the rules, lost in a place where I can’t trust someone not to haul me right back to the Stag Court.

But I could stay. Stay here, with the queen.

It’s only one more day after today, I reassure myself. A long-ass fairy day, maybe, but still. If I hang out here until tomorrow night, then I have the queen’s promise she’ll let me go, and I’ll be back in my world and none the worse for wear. Better for wear, really, if I consider all the good sex I’ve had, all the beautiful and curious things I’ve seen, including getting to see one of de Segovia’s companions in the flesh and solving the mystery of the missing castle.

And if the idea of leaving and never seeing the queen again makes something knot tight in my chest, then that doesn’t matter. It’s not like it changes anything. It’s a good bargain, and that’s that.

“I wouldn’t, if you’re thinking about it,” someone says in Latin from beside me, and I turn to see Felipe. He’s hung back too, riding next to me at my beginner’s pace.

“Wouldn’t what? Escape into a mysterious forest that’s maybe full of monsters?” I say, sliding him a smile.

He seems a little startled by my easiness, and then he frowns. “I take it you tasted fruit last night.”

I flush a little to remember that he probably saw me in full Janneth panoply last night. I’ve done some brazen things before but usually among other brazen people. Not in front of solemn-eyed, should-be-dead Spanish gentry.

He must see my expression, because he says, almost gently, “This is an unchaste place. I do not think less of anyone for what they do here. But at any rate, I do not mean what you did in the court. I’m thinking you went to someone’s bed afterward.”

Ahead of us, I can make out the form of the queen, only visible now and again as the riders in front of me move and shift. She’s riding next to Morven—predictably all in black—and he seems to be saying something she’s not thrilled with, judging by her tense posture.

The glimpses I catch of her thighs on either side of her saddle arrest me.

“Ah,” Felipe says, following my gaze. “The queen. Heady fruit indeed, then.”

It takes its time becoming clear, but once it does, the truth feels as obvious as a standing stone in the middle of a moor.

Fruit. Tasting. The salt this morning.

“The fruit isn’t fruit,” I say. I feel suddenly very, very human and dumb.

“No.” It’s his turn to flush, looking down at his reins for a moment. “It’s everything of a fairy’s body—sweat, tears, the taste of their mouths. But in some…versions…it’s more potent.”

“Sex,” I state, remembering sucking my fingers clean next to the queen’s bath.

“Yes.”

I wonder how fairies aren’t stoned all the fucking time, then. Kissing? Orgies? They have to be “eating” fairy fruit constantly.

Felipe seems to know what I’m thinking, because he adds, “It doesn’t affect the fairies nearly as much as it affects mortals. It’s more like wine to them. Only in its most concentrated form does it approach what mortals feel after lying in a fairy’s bed.”

“Wait. Sex isn’t the most concentrated?”

“Blood is the most potent,” Felipe says with a flat kind of finality, and I remember the revelers dragging their fingers through the Thistle courtier’s blood last night. I shiver.

Ahead of us, I see Morven turned fully toward the queen, as if trying to convince her of something, and I see her shake her head. The short, curt shake of someone saying no.

Morven jerks his reins and wheels away, thundering back down the line of riders with his face set in a murderous expression. When he passes me and Felipe, he gives me a look like he’d happily throw me into a pit of alligators, and then he’s gone.

“He hates her,” Felipe says quietly, after Morven is long past us.

“Why?” I look ahead at the queen, who’s still riding with a proud, impeccable seat. She’s imperious, yes, with a streak of cruelty that can’t be denied, but it doesn’t seem out of place here in Faerie. Not to the point where it would earn a sibling’s hatred.

“There’s a prophecy about the Nightglass twins,” Felipe says. “Morven and her. That since they were born under the same stars, to the same powerful queen, great rulers they both could grow to be, but the throne of the Stag Court will only know a single Nightglass. She took the crown upon her mother’s death, which means Morven will never be ruler here. And he’s never forgiven anyone for it, though he is more blessed than he thinks. Following in his mother’s footsteps in no small feat, as his mother was strong, feared, and cruel. Deeply cruel by Seelie standards, I suppose, but her cruelty kept the Stag Court first among the courts of the folk. The new queen is struggling, I think, to hold the other courts at bay.”

“Like the Thistle Court?” I ask.

Felipe nods. “Their lady is also a great queen, but as an Unseelie queen, she has no limit to what she’ll do for chaos or for power. I think…” He pauses for a moment. “I think our new queen is finding she does have limits. But they are not limits permitted to true rulers of Elphame, not if they want to keep their people safe.”

“You called her and Morven the Nightglass twins,” I say. “Is that their name? Like a family name?”

“It is a name. They were born partly glassed,” Felipe says, as if that’s a thing I should know about. “I’m sure you saw when you were, ah, with the queen last night.”

I think of her clear back, the red and pink of her muscles and lungs and bone. Delicate and hale, all at once. And there for the entire world to see, something that’s the most private of things. The living insides of her.

Glassed.

“Morven has to be more careful of his glass,” Felipe tells me. “If he is unclothed, you can see straight to his heart.”

No wonder he’s careful to always wear black—no gauzy, ruffly shirts for Morven. For him, guarding his heart might be more literal than any mortal can ever imagine.

I think of his bitter laugh in the hall earlier. “What were you talking about?” I ask Felipe as I dodge a branch hanging low over the road. “In the hall when I came in.”

Felipe gives me a small smile, but his answer is blunt. “You,” he says.

“Me?” I’d guessed as much given Sholto’s a hundred mortals remark, but I don’t like the sound of this at all.

“There is a tradition of keeping mortals here in Faerie,” he explains. “Against their will. It’s a very old thing, that kind of keeping. Mortals are beloved in Faerie, and treated well, as you can see from me and my long life. But not every mortal is ready for it—only the bravest and most creative, I think.”

My pride prickles a little at that, as if he’s just issued a challenge. “Were you ready for it?” I ask. “Were you willing?”

“I was,” he says. And there’s a certainty in his voice that pokes a quick hole in my umbrage. I can’t deny I’m quickly becoming infatuated with the queen, and I can’t deny Faerie is the only place I’ve been that seems like a match for my appetites—not just carnal but intellectual too. A world that can meet my curiosity with layer after layer of magic.

But it’s dangerous too, and alien, and no matter how sexy the queen is when she’s calling me her pet, I don’t think I could stay forever. Right?

That would be bananas. I have a whole life back home. With eye-watering amounts of student loan debt. With a love life that’s at turns nonexistent and depressing. With friends I keep at arm’s length and a vocation that seems ready to disillusion me at a moment’s notice.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, convincing myself as much as him. “The queen promised I’d be able to go home tomorrow.”

“Well, then,” Felipe says, “the matter is settled anyway.”

“Right,” I say, and then we ride along in relative silence, with only the breeze rippling through the forest and the chatter of the fairies to break it.