Chapter 6

Chapter6

Idon’t have long to digest this, however, because the scene in front of me is a tangle of wild indulgence, and I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to make my way through it.

The hall is lofty, although its recesses doesn’t disappear into darkness like so many ceilings do here. Instead, I can see it high above us, ribbed with hammer beams, rafters, braces. Each hammer beam is carved with the figure of a running stag so that it looks as if the entire roof of the castle rests on their cobwebbed backs. Just as in the library, threads of mycelium twist around the rafters and the chains of the chandeliers, glowing a pale silver in the gloom.

The walls are made of dark wood but are covered in living heather and gorse, the gorse blown butter yellow with red and orange leaves caught among its thorns. Moss clings to corners, and a low fog swirls just above the flagged floor, which is mostly covered in rush mats and strewn with fresh herbs.

The hall is filled with revelers feasting, toasting, and dancing, and I see immediately that they are not mortal, that they are impossible, that they are figures from children’s stories and art prints purchased at renaissance festivals. They are at turns horned, winged, hoofed—some have hair the color of jewels and flowers—some have extra joints, others have too-long limbs—some have eyes that are too large and teeth that are too sharp. Some look almost mortal, like Morven and Maynard and Idalia, but they are so beautiful that a feeling of inhumanity lingers about them nonetheless.

And at any rate, this is no human banquet, at least not one I’ve ever seen or studied the likes of, because there is a real, honest-to-god orgy happening in front of the queen.

My pulse kicks up as we approach, and I get a good look at the array before us. Seven or eight fairies are knotted into a skein of spread limbs and arched necks, and the music of their fucking rivals the eerie music of the musicians. One fairy’s wings shiver in pleasure as she sits atop another fairy’s face. Something shimmering falls from her wings as she does, dusting her partner and the people fucking behind her too.

I shiver along with those wings. I want to be her, with her, under her. I want to see if an insatiable girl could get enough on that platform with them all.

The queen for her part seems unmoved by the display of hedonism in front of her or by any of the ancillary displays happening at the long tables and in the fog-bathed corners of the room. Her posture is gracefully erect, and her hands rest without either stiffness or restlessness on the arms of her throne, but she’s as still as the rest of the room is not, and her gaze is remote and cool, as if her mind is on other things. I don’t see how it could be—I’ve only been in this hall for ten seconds, and already I want to plonk down and watch everyone cavort and play for the next hundred years—but perhaps she’s used to it. Or perhaps she expects it. It is her court to hold after all.

Bright but haunting music plays from a corner—played by instruments I’ve seen more often in manuscripts than I have in real life: lutes and crumhorns and tabors.

I never imagined I would see them in real life next to a flipping fairy orgy, but there you are.

“Tonight begins the feast of Samhain,” Felipe says in a low voice as he escorts me deeper into the hall. We pass a table with a horned fairy bent over its surface, his partner’s hand on the back of his head to hold him down. His horns scratch the glossy wood as he’s rutted into from behind, but when he catches me looking at him with concern, he gives me a feral smile. My heart kicks up another beat.

“Magic is stronger at Samhain,” Felipe continues as we keep walking toward the throne. “And so are they. More dangerous too. More”—he seems to search for the right word—“avid. Take care.”

Avid.

I glance around at the drinking and eating and dancing and fucking. Especially the fucking. It’s as present as the smell of delicious food, as persistent as the music filling the hall.

I don’t think I’ll mind avid so much. It seems a lot like insatiable, and hell, if I have to be an abductee in fairyland, maybe I’ll at least get to indulge myself a little. Or a lot.

My eyes slide back to the platform and then to the horned fairy being taken from behind.

Yes, a lot sounds very good at the moment.

“And I forgot to mention,” Felipe says, and his voice is quicker now, more urgent, “that the fairy fruit that’s written of in our world—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I say. “Don’t eat the fruit.”

Although when I glance around the hall again, it’s hard to see what fruit the stories are talking about. There are piles of apples, bright red and shiny, and heaps of sloe berries, blackberries, raspberries, and plums. There are currants and hazelnuts and roasted chestnuts, and wines and meads in clear pitchers, all in familiar shades of red and pink and pale gold. It all looks delicious, fruits and fruit drinks perfect for a harvest festival, but none of it looks remotely magical. Definitely not like the fairy-MDMA the stories make fairy fruit out to be.

“If only it were that simple,” Felipe says, his voice getting even lower as we skirt the platform currently occupied with a fairy sex fest. But he sounds no less urgent. “The fairy fruit is not…”

But he stops, and when I glance over at him, I find the ancient Spaniard is blushing.

“Salt,” he manages after a moment. “Mortal salt will fix almost anything.”

I sense that he wants to say more but can’t or won’t find the words, and it doesn’t matter now, because we’re almost to the edge of the sex platform and to the dais where the queen sits.

Her throne is made of the same dark wood as the walls of the hall and is carved into the likeness of two stags standing amidst waving ferns, their proud wooden heads studded with real antlers, which twist and stretch into a web of bone above the queen’s head. The queen’s crown too is made of antlers, although they are far slenderer than the ones mounted on the throne. They twist once above her brow, and there are only a few thin branches spraying off from the main circle of the crown. I notice the tines are sharp enough to promise blood.

“Your Majesty,” Felipe says as we finally clear the orgy and come to the foot of the throne. Letting go of my hand, he sinks to one knee with his hand over his heart, just as Maynard and the others did earlier in the library. A second too late, I follow, not nearly as practiced, but the long gown I’m wearing hiding the worst of it, I think.

“I hope you are having a good Samhain,” the Spaniard continues. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his gaze is cast politely to the ground. “I found your guest and have brought her to you.”

“My many thanks,” the queen says in Latin. “And you may rise.”

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to keep my eyes on the ground even after coming to my feet, but American that I am, my instinct is to make eye contact. Although when I do, I wish I were kneeling again.

The queen’s eyes, although still cool as ever, are like the dark water under a new moon, promising eternity, promising endless, endless forever. And when they meet mine, I suddenly feel like that eternity already knows me, already sees me—sees too much of me.

I think it’s fear that doses my blood then, but there are so many things like fear that speed the heart, and I don’t want her to see that I’m breathing faster, shallower. Not if I’m supposed to take care, stay clever. To hide, I drop my gaze to her dramatic mouth and then to the rest of her. She’s wearing a different dress now, a long-sleeved gown made of a black silk the same endless color as her eyes, its bodice dropping in a sharp V to just above her navel. I can see the contour of her clavicle, the inner curves of her breasts before they disappear behind the raw silk edge of the bodice. I can see the faint undulation of her breastbone, only visible as a suggestion in the fickle light of the chandeliers.

Aside from a gold signet ring on her smallest finger, she is otherwise free of jewels and gems, which seems strange for a queen, but I also can’t imagine a necklace more finely wrought than the delicate berm of her collarbone, a pendant more exquisitely shaped than the stretch of her exposed sternum.

“Janneth,” the queen says. “Sit next to me, please. Felipe, you may leave us.”

I look over at Felipe, who gives me a look that suddenly reminds me very much of how Dr. Siska looks at students who plan on closing down a pub for a night. Like he’s trying to beam the words please be careful right into my mind.

I can’t imagine he ended up trapped here at the Stag Court for four hundred years because he was careful.

Still, I’m a little—okay, a lot—unnerved when he bows and takes his leave and I’m up on the dais alone with the queen. She indicates the undecorated chair next to her, which is made of the same wood as hers but carved only with the antler motifs, not in the likeness of the stags themselves. I sit, my heart pounding, trying to remember everything Felipe told me.

Fairies can’t lie. Mortals need to eat salt. Bargain for my safety for the duration of my stay…I suppose with the queen, but as I steal a glance over at her, I have no idea what I could possibly offer her that she doesn’t already have. She’s a queen of a magic and seemingly immortal realm, with an entire court of orgy enthusiasts. Unless she needs a horny archaeologist at her disposal, I’m useless.

“So, Janneth Carter,” the queen says in English, not looking at me. Her gaze is on the court, and from this angle, I can see the minute flicker of her stare. Far from being uninterested, she’s absorbing everything, marking every laugh and moan. “I see you have met Felipe. I presume you no longer believe this to be a dream?”

“It seems safer to act as if everything is real and that everything matters. But I still find it all hard to believe,” I answer honestly.

The queen keeps her eyes on the courtiers in front of us, but I see the small lift of her eyebrow. “You, who sift through mud and rocks hoping to find treasure, find this hard to believe? I should think you would be constructed entirely of belief, given your vocation.”

I used to be, and I almost tell her that. I almost tell her that there used to be a Janneth who believed in everything. But I can’t find the words.

It’s bad enough to be insatiable, but to have been naive too? Gullible? I wouldn’t want to admit that eagerness to anyone, much less a person as coldly regal as the queen.

“What do you want with me?” I ask instead. It might not be polite to do so, and it’s certainly not strategic, but if I’m going to make it back home after my kidnapping sentence is over, I should probably get a sense of why I was taken in the first place.

My abruptness doesn’t seem to bother the queen. Her tone of voice is the same as it was before when she says, “What do you think we want with you?”

“Morven said—” Even though I’m looking at countless people fucking in front of me right now, the words are still strange to say. “I’m to be a toy. That mortal toys are more fun.”

The strange feeling is shame, I realize, but not humiliation at the prospect of being a toy. No, it’s shame at how much the idea quickens heat inside me. Even the word toy has my thighs pressing together under the star-stitched skirt of my gown.

“Morven said that, did he?” the queen says, not seeming to expect an answer. “Interesting.”

“It isn’t true, then?” I ask. I can’t tell if I sound hopeful or disappointed.

“Nothing is true until it is,” the queen responds. The fairies really don’t like giving straight answers. “But there is a tradition in Faerie, of mortals being taken at times when the veil is thin. Many are taken to be consorts to a lord or lady of Faerie. For a time.”

“Is that why I was taken?”

The queen turns to look at me, her long, thick hair sliding over her shoulder as she does. She doesn’t speak, but her eyes burn their way up my body, seeking out the corset-plumped curves of my breasts and the exposed flesh of my throat.

They stay the longest on my lips, and the longer she stares at my mouth, the hotter and hotter I feel, like a fever is burning inside me.

“Your Majesty,” someone says from the floor below the dais, tearing us away from the moment. The queen and I both turn to look, and even though I shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore, I am shocked at the sight of him. He is impossibly slender, with pink-purple hair and green skin. He wears a collar of spiked leaves over a gold velvet jacket and hose.

When he sees he has our attention, he gives a bow.

“You flatter this servant to grace him with your attention. I come bearing a gift from the Queen of the Thistle Court, and I would have your permission to give it to you as a symbol of her friendship.”

“Is that so?” the queen asks. Her hair shimmers as she leans forward on the throne. “Let’s see it, then.”

With a smile sharper than the leaves of his collar, the man from the Thistle Court pulls a small, silk-covered bundle from his pocket. He unwraps the bundle to reveal a delicate bracelet made of silver-set gems. They wink pink and purple and green in the light of the hall.

“My lady gives this to you as a token of her feelings,” the servant says, stepping forward and giving another bow. He holds out both hands, the bracelet cradled in the silk it came in. “It is yours.”

“The Court of Stags and the Court of Thistles used to be united, did they not?” the queen says. She doesn’t move to take the bracelet, but she’s still leaning forward, as if very interested in the servant and his gift.

“Yes, Your Majesty. A very long time ago, I believe.”

“More than centuries,” says the queen. “More than ages, if the stories are to be believed. My great-grandmother had not yet been born, and the mortals outside our veil had not yet had their Christ.”

The servant, while perhaps not expecting this digression, pivots smoothly. “And yet the Thistle Court will always and with great feeling remember the time our courts were as one.”

“Oh,” says the queen mildly, “I believe it. Put on the bracelet, please. I should like to see my gift on display.”

For the first time, I see uncertainty hiccup through the servant. “Your Majesty, it would not be becoming for a lowly one such as myself to think of wearing such a—”

“Put on the bracelet,” says the queen again, her voice still mild. But from nowhere, I see several fairies in russet-and-gold livery step forward. They have swords at their hips and pikes in their hands. The pikes are currently pointed straight at the ceiling, but the message is clear. The queen is not making a request.

The man from the Thistle Court swallows a final time. “Your Majesty,” he whispers, but he seems to know his protests will get him nowhere but poked full of pike holes.

For my part, I’m not sure why he’s so hesitant. Maybe it’s some baroque court etiquette thing to not wear someone else’s gift? But it’s a simple enough choice: put on some jewelry, or get run through by a bunch of guards with very mean faces. Not that I understand why the queen is threatening him with pikes at all.

I shift uneasily on my seat, remembering once again Felipe’s warnings about bargaining for safety.

With a shaking hand, the servant lifts the bracelet out of the silk and drapes it over his wrist. He’s trembling so hard that the bracelet shivers over his skin, and then when he finally clasps the bracelet shut, he stumbles to the ground. At first I think it’s because he’s lost his balance or that he’s perhaps thrown himself to the ground as a plea for mercy, but then a low tearing noise claws its way out of his throat, and I see he’s gone taut with some kind of wordless agony.

The noise turns into a scream as thorns slowly push through his flesh, not big curved ones that grow on the stems of roses but thin ones growing as close together as barbs on a feather. Green liquid runs in narrow rivulets down his face, stains the white shirt pulled through the slashed silk of his jacket sleeves, drips off the long leaves of his collar.

It’s his blood, I realize, far too late. He’s bleeding all over from thousands of these thorn wounds, and it’s because of—

The bracelet. The bracelet somehow did this.

I stand to—well, I don’t know what I’m going to do—but a guard steps in front of me and gives me a forbidding look. I am not allowed to help. To interfere.

Shocked, I turn to stare at the queen. For her part, she seems completely unmoved, her expression unchanged by the man writhing in unimaginable pain before her feet. She watches him scream and bleed with almost nothing on her face, nothing at all, and there’s no compassion at all in the slow, deliberate way she raises her hand.

One of her court guards goes to the servant and removes the bracelet from the servant. The thorns retreat, leaving so, so much viridian blood behind. It pools beneath him.

“Take the bracelet away from here,” says the queen, voice as even as ever. “And take him to the dungeons.”

The guards obey, expressions neutral as they heave the now-whimpering man from the floor and grab him by the wrists and ankles. The bracelet is carefully collected and carried behind the man it nearly killed. His blood is left there, shining slick and green.

The court—which had paused to watch the show—now returns to feasting with gusto, the music striking up even louder, the dancers laughing, the lovers moaning. It’s not as if it hasn’t happened. It’s as if it happening energized them. It’s as if it happening was exciting and good.

And that’s when the fear comes back, a wave of it so heavy that I think I might drown. I sit, stunned and sick.

“You knew something was wrong with it,” I say numbly to the queen, who’s now settled back on the throne. A small smile haunts her lips—the first smile I’ve seen from her.

It’s beautiful. And terrifying.

“Of course, I knew,” replies the queen, looking out at her reveling court, reveling all the harder with blood spilled on the floor. Some even come forward and drag their fingertips through it before sucking their hands clean with relish or offering their fingers to lovers to lick clean. Green smears their mouths and drips down their chins.

The fear is a thousand tiny bugs crawling on the inside of my skin now.

“But how? He said—” I think back to the servant’s words, trying to filter through exactly what he said and how he phrased it. “He spoke of friendship. And Felipe told me fairies can’t lie.”

“The friendship between my court and the Court of Thistles is one marked by cairns and crow-circled battlefields. A token of their lady’s feelings would only be something meant to make me suffer. You look surprised, Janneth, but I suppose it’s good that you see this now: there are more ways to lie than just with words.”

I can’t believe she’s talking to me so calmly, so levelly, after watching that fairy screaming and punctured on the floor. I can’t believe I’m talking back to her.

And that’s not the worst of it, actually. The worst is that I’m not sure how I feel about watching that fairy bleed, because if the queen had not asked him to put on that bracelet—if she had not seen through the trick—then it would have been her bleeding. Her screaming.

And I do not like that thought either.

I like it even less.

“I’m sorry,” I say, still numb. “I’m sorry they tried to hurt you.”

“Do not be,” says the queen dismissively. “I’m yet unafraid of the Thistle Court and its lady. Although I am insulted that she thought I wouldn’t see through that little trick of hers. But perhaps returning the bracelet to her with her servant’s severed hand inside it will remind her to try harder to kill me.”

The remark about the servant’s severed hand is so casually, effortlessly cruel that I have a moment where I don’t fully understand it, where I think I must have misheard.

But I know I didn’t.

And I know I’m not imagining that the queen is in a slightly better mood now. Her mouth is softer, as if her smile might return, and I see her long fingers move in time with the music. She’s happy. There’s blood on the floor and on the mouths of her people, and she’s happy.

I take a deep breath and look down at my own hands. They are attached to my body, and they aren’t covered in thorns or blood. For now. It’s becoming very clear to me that I don’t have any way to predict the caprice and cruelty of this place. Of the fairies here. Of her. It could be me screaming on the floor next, and as I look around the room at the banquet, I feel the creeping sense that any one of these people could be the ones to do it, to make me scream. Even if they didn’t hurt me, they would watch. They would do nothing to help.

You should not feel safe.Message received, Felipe. Loud and clear.

The folk here love a bargain above all else; they love price.

You might be able to buy some safety that way.

I see the necessity of it even more now. If a bargain is what it takes to keep me safe until I figure out how to escape or Samhain ends and I’m sent back home, then a bargain is what I shall strike.

Although, fuck me, what can I offer? Sex? I’m not averse in the least to bargaining with sex—I like to have it, and being in the queen’s bed sounds amazing. But the orgy platform in front of me is full of fairies flexible enough to put circus performers to shame, and sex is free for the taking everywhere else in the room. I can’t see how sex with me would be a very tempting offer. Like offering a nickel to a billionaire.

Think, Janneth. Think.

I could talk to her about excavation strategies, I guess. Demonstrate how to make tea on a dig site with nothing but a camping stove and a willingness to get burned. What a fairy queen would want with that information, I don’t know, but it’s all I’ve got. I don’t know how to fight or enchant bracelets; I don’t know how to do anything other than like history and sex and crave more from life than life can possibly give me. I’m just a mortal girl in fairyland, with nothing but myself to offer.

But maybe that’s it? Morven had said mortal toys were more fun, after all, and the way the queen had looked at me when we were talking of consorts…

Well, I will never know if I don’t try, and if I don’t try, I might end up bleeding on the floor. So.

“Your Majesty,” I say, knowing I sound a little clumsy saying the courtly words but forging ahead anyway, “I want to make a bargain with you.”

This catches her attention, because for the first time at the banquet, she truly looks at me. “A bargain, Janneth Carter?”

Her voice is soft, dangerous even, but I continue, “Surely better than a stolen mortal consort is a mortal happy to be one. Guarantee me that you will add my safety to the promise you made in the library, and in return, I’ll promise my willingness to you. To be your companion, your consort. To be whatever you wish until Samhain is over.”

“Even if what I wish for is not a companion or consort?” Her voice is silky. “Even if I wish for a toy or a pet instead?”

I have the sudden image of being curled naked at her feet, her long fingers stroking my hair. I swallow.

“Then I will be your pet.”

“And remind me of this promise I made in the library?”

“That I will stay here for two nights, and then on the third, you’ll let me leave Faerie. All I’m asking for is that you promise my safety too.”

The queen gives me an appraising look, as if sifting through my words. Then she turns and gestures at her court, at the sex and excess, at the glinting jewels and sweat-shimmered skin. “And what, Janneth Carter, can you give me that I do not already have at a wave of my hand? You say you will offer me your willingness, but that is not in short supply here. Do you think the people at my court would be unwilling to come to my bed?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

“So again, I ask: What can you truly offer me for this additional promise?”

I know that it’s important that I do not lie, so I can’t make up an answer for her. I can’t invent something out of thin air. It needs to be the truth, but now I’m right back where I started, because the truth is that I have nothing at all to offer a queen like this one—

My eyes land on the orgy in front of me, on the twisting, moving bodies. But now I’m looking past the moving hands and hips, past the spread thighs and braced knees. I see the fairies’ faces: their glazed eyes, their bored expressions. And with that in mind, the slow caresses and even slower kisses take on a new meaning. Not savoring slow but desultory slow. Not lingering but uninterested.

Maybe an immortal lifetime filled with every kind of pleasure does that to someone; maybe it’s possibly to eventually become blasé about what some people crave beyond all reason.

But I think I’m personally a very, very long way from that maybe. So long that it might take an eternity for me to be sated.

“I will always want more,” I say, turning back to look at her. “That’s what I can offer. I will always, always want more.”

Her attention is wholly on me now. “Oh?”

She doesn’t believe me, I think. There’s a slight arch to her brow, a skeptical tilt of her head. I imagine she’s seen enough people grow bored with indulgence to think I’m spinning tales, childishly asserting things I cannot possibly know about what always will mean to me.

And in one way, she might be right to doubt, because I can’t know what always will mean to me. But I do know me—I know who Janneth Carter, horny archaeologist, is.

And if there was ever a time for insatiability to be a superpower, then this is it.

I stand and meet the queen’s stare, pretending I know exactly what the fuck I’m doing.

“I’ll prove it,” I say lightly and step off the dais.