Chapter 4

Chapter4

Even without the thin circle of gold set in her hair, there is something about her bearing, something about her expression…It reminds me of the way cats sit and stags stand. It reminds me of the unhurried way the moon skims across the sky. There is a completeness about her, a certainty, and a well of power that isn’t interested in proving itself, since such a thing would be unnecessary. Redundant. It speaks for itself.

She speaks for herself.

The queen is not beautiful in the usual way, but she is beautiful, of that there is no doubt. High cheekbones, brows in dark arches. Her eyes, blacker than the spaces between stars. A mouth with a full lower lip and then a sharply peaked upper lip. Those lips are painted a dark red, but they seem to be the only ornamented part of her face, for the lashes fanning thickly from her eyes need no assistance, and neither does her skin, which is smooth, save for two faint lines bracketing her mouth. I could call them smile lines, but I won’t, because it is hard to imagine her smiling often enough to cause them.

The queen’s jaw is squared and precise, and her nose is long and bumped at the bridge, and when it’s all put together, the strong, dramatic features and the coal-black eyes, she’s impossible to look at and impossible to look away from.

I am suddenly very grateful to Maynard for forcing me to my knees.

“Welcome to my castle,” the queen says finally. “Have you seen anything like it?”

I’ve never been in a room lit by mushrooms and walled with chained books, nor have I been in a castle carved entirely from earth and bedrock, nor I have I ever been kidnapped on Halloween night. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone like her, whose face I could look at for the rest of my life and still need to look at longer.

“This is a dream,” I say, sounding more dazed than certain.

“All things are dreams,” the queen says, voice as cool and impersonal as the walls made of falling water outside this room.

“How can I wake up?”

“You cannot,” the queen says. “There is no waking from this. There is only this and the dream you came from, nothing else.”

I swallow, dropping my eyes back to the hem of her dress. I want to wake up. I want to be at the fair with Alfie and the others; I want to be in my bed at the farmhouse, counting the hours until I’m back in Edinburgh and my hookup apps pull up more than the no results in search radius message I get out in these parts.

“Why am I here?” I whisper.

“Do you even know where here is?” the queen asks.

“I guess not.” Maybe if it isn’t a dream…maybe if I’m still awake and this is real, then here matters. Because if this is truly the castle de Segovia stumbled upon, then I need to know how I got here and how to get back. How to bring others here, maybe.

How to bring others to the castle made of mist and mushrooms? Yeah, right, Janneth. This place can’t be real.

“This is the Court of Stags,” the queen says. “In Elphame, which is called Faerie by most.”

Elphame is a word I know plenty well, between a fun semester gamboling with Thomas the Rhymer and several weeks’ worth of late nights poring over records of the Scottish witch trials for a paper. And even though my focus is on the medieval archaeological record, I’m enough of a former fairy stan that I soaked up every fairy mention I found in my research. And you know what? Okay, between Elphame and the castle, I think I’ve got to be dreaming. I just listened to a great audiobook about mushrooms and fungus last week, and I was rereading de Segovia’s journal, and maybe I fell asleep on the bed. And I’m so tired and rumpled and chronically sex deprived that I’m having a weird, super-active dream about Elphame and mushrooms and a hot, scary queen.

The queen’s fingers find my chin, and she tilts my face up to hers. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Faerie isn’t real,” I tell the fairy queen. “So I know this must be a dream.”

She lifts a silk-clad shoulder in a shrug. What Janneth Carter considers to be reality and unreality doesn’t seem very important to her.

“What happens now?” I ask. Even in a dream, it feels important to know.

“You are a guest here,” she says. “And as such, you are permitted any freedom you’d like, save for one.”

I’d be a fool not to ask. “And what is that?”

Her fingers tighten on my jaw. “The freedom to leave.”

I blink up at her. Her expression betrays nothing, gives me nothing, save for this: she means it.

I am not to leave here. Or her.

There’s a strange curl in my chest at the thought.

“And how long must I stay?” I ask.

“Two nights,” the queen pronounces. One finger traces along my jaw, and then she releases me. “And on the third, you can leave Faerie.”

She does not elaborate on the last part.

“Two nights,” I echo.

“And now there will be a feast in your honor,” she says. “You will sit by my side, and drink from my cup, and together we will see what revels Faerie has to offer on Samhain night.”

“And I’ll be able to leave Faerie on the third night?” I ask to confirm. This is how they always get the unsuspecting high school heroines in the fan fictions—a twist of language, a trick of words.

“You will,” allows the queen.

“And it won’t be like a hundred years have passed or something? I won’t go back and find out all my friends and family are dead?”

“Three days will feel different passed here than in your lands, but not that much different. One day here is longer than a day in yours.”

A new fear takes hold. “Wait. Promise I won’t be like a million years old when I go back.”

There is a slight lift to her eyebrow now. “You’re very preoccupied with this.”

“You would be too if you were mortal,” I mutter, and the eyebrow goes higher. I suppose I’m not being very respectful right now.

“You will leave Faerie the same age you entered it, plus only a handful of hours more. This I swear.”

“If you say so,” I say, and she runs her fingers across my jaw again. Her touch is warm and lingering. Her fingers move to my lips, and that curl in my chest twists lower.

“I do say so,” she says, one fingertip making a slow line over my lower lip, dragging over the place where the skin of my lip becomes smooth and damp.

I think it would be charming to claim that what happens next happens out of some resonant instinct, that I do it because I sense it would please her and I want to be pleasing—but the truth is more immediate than that, and much more selfish. I do it because I am greedy, and my greed very rarely listens to common sense or exigent circumstances like abduction.

I part my lips as she touches me. I open my mouth enough for her to see the pink of my tongue and the edges of my teeth. To show her she could push her fingers into my mouth if she’d like.

Because I’d like her to. Because even though I was kidnapped by someone named Maynard and carried to a mushroom castle, even though I’m so very certain this is a dream, it would be a very good mushroom castle dream if she put her fingers in my mouth.

Something moves in the queen’s eyes then, but I can’t say what it is—only that for an instant, the black irises seem darker than ever, less the spaces between stars and more whatever came before the stars kindled into being. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think I could sink into the inky well of her gaze and never resurface.

And then, as quickly as it came, it is gone, and her stare is as cool and remote as before.

“You will go with Morven,” she says, her hand dropping from my face, “to make ready for the meal. He’ll show you where you’ll sleep as well.”

She snaps her fingers, and the doors to the library swing open. Morven stands in the doorway, looking faintly pissed off. She doesn’t speak to him, but he seems to know what she wants all the same. He jerks his head toward the hallway.

“Come, mortal girl,” he says shortly. “We don’t have much time.”

* * *

The castle is most definitely madeand not formed—the floors are flat, the corners squared, and the spaces as lofty as any medieval hall—some maybe more so, although with ceilings that often vanish into darkness, it is impossible to tell. That said, the layout of the castle resists a feeling of architecture, or if it is architecture, it is meant to be an intricate tangle of it, a knot of passages, galleries, halls, and stairs. It feels more like the warren of a cave system than a palace, and I feel the hopeless crush of getting lost stealing over me, like I can’t make sense of this place’s shape or size or relationship with itself. And having cut my archaeological teeth on the cramped clutter of three medieval monasteries built on top of each other, that is saying something.

Morven, either oblivious to my disorientation, or more likely not giving a shit about it, walks quickly in front of me, his black cloak fluttering around his thighs as he does. Despite our so-fast-I-almost-need-to-jog pace, I’m able to study his features more closely than before and observe something that makes Morven’s barely there deference to the queen make more sense. He also has a long nose, slightly bumped in the middle, and a sharp jaw, and even though he has moon-white hair instead of black, he has the same coal-dark eyes as the queen. Judging from his similarly unlined face, they must be around the same age: older than me but young enough to make that a guess rather than a certainty.

If they aren’t brother and sister, then they’re the kind of cousins who look like it.

“Here,” Morven says as we come to a stop before another ornately carved door. This one is carved with stags instead of ivy and, in the middle, the carved shape of a naked man with antlers twining from his head. “This is where you will sleep, if you sleep at all.”

He opens the door and leads the way inside.

Though the walls are made from stone, there’s something almost airy about the room. The ceiling is high and elaborately corbelled, the walls curve generously—perhaps even fondly—around the bed and furniture inside, and a window of leaded glass opens into the night. Outside, the moon hangs, red and ripe looking.

I walk over to the window and look out—and then down. I’m high up in a tower. A real castle tower, like for a damsel in a fairy tale.

This has to be a dream.

“You’ll find clothes in the wardrobe,” Morven says, still standing at the door. “Anything in there will be an improvement on what you’re wearing now.”

I look down at my clothes. Stained leather boots, ripstop pants, and a waterproof coat. Dig clothes, because I hadn’t yet changed for going to the fair with the others. A little rough and ready maybe, but that’s excavation life. Normally, I prefer to look very tweedy and academic, but I can’t afford to dry-clean my Mona Lisa Smile cosplay every day on a dig, not on a grad student’s income.

“I was working today,” I say in my defense, but Morven doesn’t seem to care.

“When you are ready to come down to the hall, follow the leaves on the floor.” He turns to leave, and I’m suddenly gripped with a kind of panic.

“Do I have to go to this feast?” I plead. “Can’t I just stay here?”

“You cannot stay in your room,” he replies. “You—as am I—are bound to the queen’s whims.”

“She said I was a guest,” I say. “That I was permitted freedoms. Any freedoms.”

He steps forward, his eyes flashing. “Oh, did she tell you that? Did she tell you that you could do anything you liked except leave? You are her doll to pick up and throw down at will. You are a toy to be broken and then traded away when the time comes.”

Those are very scary and very pretty words. Dream words. “But why?” I press.

He comes even closer, his strides long and graceful, and stops only a few paces away. His voice is quiet and silky when he speaks. “Are you asking why someone might want to have a toy, Janneth Carter? You who so like to be one?”

There’s no way he can know that about me, no possible way. It’s a wild guess—or he knows it because this is a dream and he is an extension of myself inside it.

“Why does she need a new toy, then?” I ask, refusing to let him intimidate me. “We’re in a castle, and she’s a queen. Surely she has an entire court of people to play with already.”

He takes a step closer, and then another. The fire crackling in the stone fireplace limns his features in scarlet and turns his eyes the color of the sunrise. He reaches toward me, fingers long and elegant, and despite his hostility, despite his contempt, he is too beautiful to resist. I let him trace along my jaw and then drop his hand to the zipper of my coat.

Over the waterproof material, I feel his fingertips find the zipper tab, and then I feel as he slowly, deliberately, pulls it down. One plastic tooth, and then another, and then another, monstrously slow.

His mouth is a little fuller even than the queen’s, and his eyes burn, and he is so gorgeous, so tall, and being tall shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does, especially if the tall person has their hand on your zipper, and I’m breathing harder than I should, my lips already parted, as if ready for a kiss.

He drops his hand abruptly, moving back, and I realize I’ve been leaning forward enough to nearly lose my balance. I step forward to catch myself, and he gives me a smile nearly dazzling in its cruelty.

“Because mortal toys are more fun,” he says. “And more beloved. And when beloved things bleed, the land sings.”

And with that final cryptic remark, he leaves me alone.