Chapter 2

Chapter2

The farmhouse where the grad students have been bunking is set higher in the valley, and the eternal Scottish wind fusses at my coat and hair as I walk down to the site. I like the wind, though, and the way it pulls at me, like it’s pleading with me to come play. There’s a bounce in my step as I step onto the narrow lane that winds down to the valley’s bottom.

Above me, the sky is a litter of stars, a glittering waste of them, and on the other side of the hill, I can see the lights of the fair, promising popcorn and cheap souvenirs and fun. Maybe Alfie and Fran?ois have finally realized their Great French Love Affair awaits; maybe some of the others have paired off too.

The idea makes me happy. As a girl, I used to line up my Barbies and matchmake them until every doll was joined with another, endowing them with backstories long enough to justify entire seasons of a TV show, rewarding them with outrageous weddings and lavish honeymoons in my backyard. In high school, I spent a not insignificant amount of time helping my friends get within kissing range of the people they wanted to kiss—rivaled only by the amount of time I spent trying to get myself within kissing range of the people I wanted to kiss.

I craved romance and sex, yes, but more than that, I craved happenings. Novelty. I wanted everyone to be looking for love or falling in love or having their heart broken…I wanted everyone to be poised on the edge of some new cliff, ready to tumble into the next pool of excitement or pain.

My undergraduate years were when I learned that my appetite for—well, for anything—food, drinks, sex, parties—only grew deeper with the slaking. Insatiable is a word we throw around lightly, but it’s more than a word for me. It’s the very signature of my being, my mind, my belly.

Janneth Carter: insatiable.

And it’s why despite many valiant forays into kink, polyamory, and hookup apps, I’m the one tramping alone through wet heather while everyone else is up at a fair stealing kisses and having fun.

Okay, that’s not really true. I’m here because our work matters too much to let kids drunk on Buckfast stumble through uncovered dig pits…but it still feels true emotionally. I’ve learned the hard way that insatiable girls don’t get happily ever afters. They eat their way through lovers and friends too heartily—and that they also want to be eaten alive, their blood drunk and their bones cracked open, is irrelevant.

Insatiable girls stay alone. Insatiable girls settle for living by proxy, for craving and wanting and shoving those wants down where they won’t scare anyone away.

At least I have archaeology, an even hungrier lover than I am, beckoning with its long hours, its endless questions, its byzantine politics of publishing and funding and permissions.

And you know what? I have more than that. I have amazing friends and the plucking night wind and the stars and now the slow mist creeping over the dig site from the loch, wreathing the bent trees nearby and whispering at the base of the tomb. A pretty Halloween picture, just for me.

When I finally pick my way to the mouth of the cairn, theHalloween picture completes itself, because the lights are fire—torches stuck right into the soft earth around the turf-covered mound that makes up the ancient grave. The torches are as tall as I am and spaced so regularly that whoever planted them must’ve measured the gaps down to the half inch.

But there is no one here, no one at all.

No youths, no superstitious locals, no neopagans or tripod-toting influencers. Someone came to the middle of nowhere, made a ring of burning torches, and then just…left.

No. No, that can’t be right. I don’t even bother flicking on the bathroom light when I brush my teeth at night—who would go to all the trouble of carrying, planting, and then lighting torches just to leave?

They must still be here.

Squaring my shoulders and practicing my best teaching assistant voice in my head, I raise my phone flashlight and start circling the tomb. The word tomb or cairn gives a sense of smallness, maybe, a sense of containment relating to its purpose of holding one or a handful of bodies, but this cairn is nearly a hill all on its own on the valley floor, connected only at the very back to the hill that walls off the south side of the valley. The mound is taller than I am by several orders and wide enough that it takes me the better part of several minutes to check around its perimeter.

I’m still alone after I do.

Baffled, I return to the dig site itself, which is chiefly arrayed on the flat strip of land in front of the cairn and crenelated with plastic totes and heaped bags of sand. Tarps waiting to cover the pits ruffle a little, but the breeze down here is so gentle and still that it’s nothing more than a sporadic flutter. Even the mist continues with its slow, unbothered swirls, following its own laws of physics as it moves between my legs and fills the low stone doorway of the cairn.

My headlamp’s beam moves over the mist-veiled shore of the loch and over the dark water beyond, but there’s nothing. No movement, no sound.

There really is no one here.

On the bright side, this means I can go to the fair now, which has me humming as I turn back to douse the torches before I leave, and then I see a shape standing directly in front of the tomb’s entrance.

I bite off a yelp and drop my phone. My headlamp battery dies at the same moment.

The figure—illuminated now only by torchlight and moonlight—steps forward. Boots, jeans, peacoat, stylish wool beanie. Their gloves have reflective stitching on the forefingers and thumbs. The kind of gloves you wear so you can still use your phone while you’re wearing them. Sensible, forethought-requiring gloves.

My pounding heart slows a little. It’s just a person. Just a non–serial killer person.

Probably.

“It’s dangerous to be out when the lights are lit,” the stranger says, his voice deep and burred, although something about the cadence of his voice doesn’t sound entirely Scottish to me. “Especially on this night, of all nights.”

I squat and start patting for my phone. The lack of headlamp and the picturesque-but-inconvenient mist makes it hard to see exactly where it fell—there is only the sight of my hands, pale in the darkness, sinking into the mist and then disappearing.

“Yes,” I say, palpating the ground like I’m Aragorn looking for hobbit tracks. “Um. About that. See, this is actually an ongoing excavation—” My fingers brush against the sleek shape of my phone, and relieved, I grab it and stand. Which is when I realize the stranger has moved even closer—silently. He’s now only a few paces away, and I can make out his pale, carved features and his eyes shining in the dark. They almost look like they reflect the moonlight, like a cat’s, but then he looks back toward the cairn and the illusion vanishes. It must have been my imagination.

I clear my throat and start again. “You see, we’re not finished securing the site for winter, and so it’s not really ready for visitors—”

“Are you telling me to leave?” the stranger asks, amusement plain in his voice. “I must leave here?”

When I’m not on a dig site, I’m teaching moody undergraduates, so I’m used to batting away defiance and unearned condescension.

“That’s right,” I say firmly. “In the interest of conservation, we need to keep the site as clear as—”

“Oh, how adorable,” comes a purring voice from behind the man. A woman with deep umber skin and hair the color of steel is approaching us—from the tomb, maybe?—and like the stranger, she is also wearing very normal clothes. Boots, jeans, coat. A scarf embroidered with silver butterfly-like shapes wound around her long neck. Despite her iron-colored hair, she looks to be my age. Maybe even younger. “She’s perfect, Maynard.”

I like being called perfect by a pretty woman as much as the next person, and I don’t even mind being called adorable, since I’ve made something of a sexual career out of being short and curvy and dimple-cheeked.

But. Being pretty doesn’t mean one floats over the ground when they walk; these people still can’t be traipsing all over as-yet-unstabilized Bronze and Iron Age ruins.

I try a different tack. “I know you’ve probably come a long way to be here tonight, and I really am sorry to ask you to leave.”

“We came from forever and a daydream away,” the woman says, smiling.

The man—Maynard—shakes his head. “We came from only a whisper away. From a thought away.”

“Both things are true,” says the woman, stepping even closer. “All things are true.”

“One thing isn’t true,” I say, the first tendrils of real exasperation strangling my good mood, “and it’s that you can walk on an active dig site.”

“Aren’t you going to ask us which ones?” Maynard asks, ignoring me.

I stare. Firelight flickers behind him, and I see a new shadow. So now there are three people I have to shoo off. Fantastic.

“Which ones?” I echo distractedly. I’m following the movements of the new person and trying to think of what I can say to make them leave. They don’t seem drunk, but maybe that’s worse…

“Aren’t you going to ask which whisper?” Maynard says in a silky murmur. “Which thought?”

His words from just a moment ago come back to me.

We came from only a whisper away. From only a thought away.

Maybe they are drunk, or he is, at least, and the thought is almost comforting. Drunkenness I can work with.

“I’ll ask you which whisper if you walk me up to the fair over the hill,” I say in my best let’s go have an adventure voice. “They’ve got drinks and food up there and everything.”

“A bargain!” says the woman delightedly. “She wants to make a bargain!”

“As if she could,” the third stranger says. His voice is sneering, cold, and what I can see of his face in the torchlight is beautiful and severe. “She has nothing we want.”

“She has something the queen wants,” Maynard says, not taking his eyes from me.

My mind is filled with corgis and boxy handbags for a moment. “The queen?”

“It was fortunate we came upon you here,” Maynard says as if I hadn’t spoken. “We thought we might have to go to the Shadow Marketto find you, but here you are, right at the mouth of hell. You would have wandered in all on your own, wouldn’t you?”

“Just take her, Maynard,” the woman says. Her face is pitying as she looks at me. “If she’s not brought in tonight, the tithe might fail, and if the tithe fails, we will all pay the price.”

“Speak for yourself, Idalia,” the cold stranger says.

“I only ever do, Your Highness,” Idalia rejoins, her voice on the furthest edge of what could be called polite.

I am still stuck on just take her.

“Okay, wait,” I say, shoving my phone in my coat pocket so I can have both hands free. I hear the crinkle of a paper wrapper as I do—one of those eco-friendly bamboo cutlery sets that came with some long-ago takeaway lunch, crammed into my pocket and promptly forgotten.

I lift both my hands in front of me, like I’m talking to a drunk girl in a club bathroom who’s just puked all over her dress. It’s my okay, okay, we can figure this out stance. “You don’t need to take anyone anywhere.”

“And yet we do,” the cold one says.

Idalia makes a regretful noise. “He’s right, poppet.”

“And for whatever opaque reason she has, it must be you,” the cold one says. “No one else.”

“S-she?”

No one else?

“He means the queen,” Maynard says, and how his deep purr can sound both helpful and ominous, I have no idea. But I do know he’s close enough to touch me now, and that abruptly feels too close, far too close.

I try to step back and end up stumbling over part of a tarp as I do. It’s what gets me in the end, that fucking tarp, because in my windmilling efforts to catch my balance, its layers slide over one another, and I’m falling back—

Maynard catches me. Hard hands on my biceps, effortless strength.

“The bard is gallant tonight,” the cold one says, and this must be some joke at Maynard’s expense, because Maynard’s mouth—dramatically full in the middle, even more dramatically thin at the corners—flattens into a line. But his eyes remain on my face.

“Come with us, Janneth, and you will have every wish fulfilled. Come, and you’ll know not hunger nor cold nor the stale kiss of death. I will sing to you of your own whispers and your own thoughts; I will croon to you of secrets untold for lifetimes. And you will know the taste of your own longing only as a garnish, not as its own meal, for in our world, there is only ever surfeit, never any lack.”

I blink up at him. His grip on my arms isn’t painful, but its close enough to it that adrenaline still doses my blood. I realize the metallic taste in my mouth is fear.

“How do you know my name?” I ask shakily.

“That question will be answered, and many others, if you come with me now.”

I feel like I can’t keep hold of my own thoughts. “Come with you where?”

“To the court of the queen,” Maynard responds, as if there’s no other place.

And that’s when I decide to cut my losses. The site will just have to be trampled and god knows what else because these people aren’t going to leave on my account, and I have no interest in going anywhere with them that’s not a bright public place like the fair to lure them away. In fact, they sound an awful lot like they’re the ones doing the luring, and yes, I’ve done some dicey shit in my life in the name of having a good time, but this really feels like a line not to cross.

Even I have lines, apparently! That’s kind of reassuring because sometimes I worry I don’t. But following three strangers to the court of the queen in the fullness of night screams BAD IDEA, even to me.

“No, thank you?” I offer.

Idalia clucks sympathetically, like she’s just watched a bird fly into a window.

“A shame,” Maynard says. “Then you have my apologies.”

“Apologies for what—”

It’s too late. Idalia and the cold one are close, on top of me—and a blindfold is wrapped around my head from behind—and I’m fighting—and then the blindfold is tied tight, and my wrists are bound. I struggle and push, but it doesn’t matter because these strangers are the kind of strong that defies human biology. It’s like trying to ram my shoulder against a rock, like trying to unpin myself from a fallen tree.

I’m trapped and I’m theirs, and now they will take me wherever they want.

I scream, and my scream pierces the valley. Faintly, over the sound of the waves lapping at the loch’s shore, I hear a rising trill of screams coming from the far side of the hill, chased by the sound of calliope music, frenetic and bright. My scream dies away as it sinks in: no one is at the farmhouse, and no one at the fair will hear me over their own shrieks of delight, over the music that promises big smiles and light pockets.

“There now, poppet,” Idalia says. “Save some of your screams for the queen, there’s a good girl.”

And then I’m slung over a shoulder and carried away from the shore and the dig site and any sliver of safety I might have had.