Page 20 of The Fae Queen's Captive
Iam given cool rags to clean up with, and then I’m perched at the head of a long table and fed extravagant foods—venison pies topped with elaborate shiny crusts, seared larks, and roasted swans with outstretched wings and eyes made of sloe. Hippocras jellies and rosewater tarts, wines and meads and confections of spun sugar so delicate they melt on my tongue. The raw fruit I forbear to eat for now, until I can make sure I’m not going to enchant myself with an apple slice or something, and I sprinkle a little mortal salt on everything I eat, even on the sweet things and in the wine.
Felipe was right earlier, and at every table, I see vessels for holding salt—ornate containers made of gold and glass and gems, in the shapes of great ships and singing mermaids. I also see I’m not the only one making use of them, although out of the entire hall, there are only two or three of us. But still, I draw some comfort from the fact I’m not the only mortal here. Not counting Felipe, who seems to be in a four-hundred-year-old category of his own.
I ask the fairies eating with me about the hunt tomorrow, and I’m told it will not matter that I’ve never hunted before and I’m not exactly an equestrian.It’s primarily the queen’s hunt, really, they explain.A private Samhain tradition.
I’m not the one being hunted, am I?I ask them, entirely serious, and they laugh and laugh like I’ve told the world’s funniest joke.
What a waste of you that would be!
Which isn’t exactly reassuring, but I still extract from one of them that I’ll be unhunted tomorrow, which allows me some measure of relief.
The revel seems unending. The fucking goes on and so does the dancing and feasting, and at some point, I find my eyes sliding closed and my head slumping against Idalia’s shoulder.
“Go to bed, little mortal,” she chides.
“I don’t know if I can find my way back to my room,” I admit. Felipe is no longer in the hall, and I’d feel like a child asking Idalia or Maynard for help finding my way back.
“The leaves are waiting outside the door for you, are they not?” Idalia says, the same way someone might explain how sidewalks work. The moth bobbing next to her face seems equally bewildered by my ignorance, because it flaps in place for a long minute, antennae moving in my direction, before finally drifting toward the more educated banquet guests.
I grab my coat from the dais and stumble, tipsy and full, to the doors of the hall and open them to find the orange and ruby leaves waiting for me. I follow them through even more unfamiliar spaces—galleries and grand staircases I’m certain I haven’t seen before—and then past a shadowed opening that looks like it leads to some sort of large chamber.
“Have fun?” a voice calls from the darkness.
I stop—the leaves sighing as they too stop and sift backward in my direction—and I peer into the murk. A few solitary candles flicker at the front of the space, illuminating pews and a carved rood screen. There are statues and painted panels and a gleaming font at the front. It is almost like a chapel, like a church, although I don’t see anything recognizably Christian about it—or recognizably mortal, for that matter.
Morven steps forward, still wearing his outfit of all black, his cape swaying around him as he stops.
“I did,” I say.
“It’s good that you enjoyed yourself tonight,” he says. The shadows seem to hang off his eyelashes and cling to the underside of his lush mouth. “It will not last long.”
“Yeah, because I’m leaving as soon as I can,” I say. The wine sharpens both my attraction and my irritation. “You can stop being so grumpy with me, by the way. I didn’t ask to get kidnapped.”
“And I didn’t ask to kidnap you,” Morven says. “But it is my sister who wears the crown, and so I’m hers to command until my oath of fealty has ended. However long that might take,” he adds, and then he strides out of the chapel and into the daedal knot of the castle. Even his stride is brooding, unhappy.
I wonder if the queen knows how much her brother dislikes serving her. I wonder if treason is ever on his mind.
When I get to my room, the leaves sag to the floor in apparent relief, and I open the door to find a steaming bath waiting for me in the middle of the room. Rose petals—a red so dark they’re nearly black—swirl on the surface of the water, and on a table next to the enormous copper tub are various soaps and oils as well as a large linen towel.
I strip, throw my bloodstained dress over a nearby chair, and climb naked into the bath before washing and soaking until I’m clean and limp-limbed. Between the feast and the orgasms and now the hot scented bath, I must admit Faerie has charms to counterbalance its bloody horrors.
Also its penchant for kidnapping.
After a long time soaking and staring at the moon outside my window, I climb out of the bath and dry off. In the wardrobe, I find a long robe made of a soft ivory fabric, thin enough to show the shadow of my navel underneath, and I walk over to the bed. It’s a four-poster, etched with roses and spiral motifs, the head of it carved with the same antler-headed man from the door of the room. The curtains are a plush green velvet, embroidered with raven-colored rose petals, and the sheets are a silk so white and crisp that they remind me of freshly fallen snow.
I don’t lie down. I stand with one hand on the curtains, my fingers moving idly over the sable blooms—blooms that are so close to the color of the queen’s eyes.
This is my consort, a mortal worthy of a stag’s heart and a stag’s kiss.
I don’t know what I feel right now. The night went about as well as a night in fairyland could go—I’m not enchanted or dead, and I’ve struck a bargain that will help me get back, safely, to my own world. Plus I had great sex.
So why am I suddenly so restless that I can’t stand it?
Is it greediness? Loneliness? Fear?
I walk to the door and open it, unsurprised to see the leaves shivering on the floor.
“I don’t know where I want to go,” I say, which is a lie and I’m not supposed to lie here…although maybe lying to the leaves doesn’t count. They continue to tremble in place, but there’s something judgmental about it now.
