Page 32 of The Fae Queen's Captive
I lower my hands, keeping my eyes on hers. Her gaze feels reassuring in its possession, as if she’s used the ribbons on her arms to tie me tight to her, like she’s already slipped a leash around my neck.
“I want things too much,” I say simply. “So I had to stop. If not the wanting, then the wanting where everyone could see. It exhausted people, but it exhausted me too, you know? I hated feeling so needy, so gross, like some kind of vampire that couldn’t quench her thirst no matter how much she drained from the world around her.”
“You should never be less than yourself.”
I sigh. It sounds like something a therapist would say, something that feels true inside a cozy, quiet room, only to ring hollow when you’re hopelessly in love after only a single date or when you’re making your friends wince because you’re so sloppy at the club. When you’re the person who wants to go outagain, wants just one more drink, one more kiss, one more dizzy moment to sew up the night. It was why I kept burying myself in archaeology, despite the way it narrowed my world, because at least it would welcome my relentlessness, my restlessness. Another long night in the library? Another email pestering the grant coordinator about delivery of funds? Another several hours in the lab refitting pots? Archaeology would take it all, and it would never tell me I wanted too much from it.
So what if it killed the last of my fantasies, the last of my dreaminess? It had as much for me as I could ever wish for: a bottomless well of work to do and problems to solve.
“I don’t say that as a platitude or a vacant reassurance, nor”—a smile tips the corner of her mouth—“would I say it to just anyone. Sholto, for example, would endear himself to me more if he were quite less himself. But for you, Janneth Carter, what does the world gain by you folding your hungers into the smallest possible square? When your hungers are so very lovely and have led you to dig into the earth for answers to questions most mortals have forgotten to ask?”
“I don’t know,” I say, a little absently. I think of the friends I’ve made in the past year or so, Alfie and François and a few others, friends whom I’ve been careful only to let see the most curated version of myself. Because even good people—even very cool, very smart good people—have their limits of patience, empathy, and good taste, and I’m done testing limits.
Or at least so I thought. Because here in Faerie, the limits seem as wide as the moors. Where else could I be a royal consort, eat a raw heart, fuck in the forest? Where else could I feel like I’m exactly the right amount and never too much?
“I’ve built a good life by folding myself into small squares,” I say finally. “I’ll graduate into a field that already has people waiting for me. I have friends who like me well enough.”
“But who do not really know you,” the queen points out. “Nor do you have lovers who know you longer than a night. Or even longer than a few hours, since you slip home before dawn.”
My lips part. “I—I haven’t told you any of that. How do you know?”
Her gaze is steady. “Do you want the truth?”
“Of course!”
“I’ve been watching you for a long time. Since you called for me.”
“Called for you?” I echo. I literally have no idea what she’s talking about.
Her hand finds my foot, and she strokes along the edge of its silk slipper. It’s a firm enough touch to feel more possessive than ticklish, like she’s petting me for her pleasure instead of my own. It makes me want to purr.
“Last Samhain, do you not remember?” she says, still with that idle stroking of my foot. “You called for me.”
I think back to last year, sitting in my tiny flat in Edinburgh, loneliness heavy in my chest. Since my final year of undergrad, I’d been determinedlyeasy, and it had netted me all the results I’d hoped it would. I had a mentor who liked me in Dr. Siska, I had a few friends who weren’t close but not too distant either. I had decent sex often enough to keep me from deleting my hookup apps.
But I’d been miserable, tired, uninspired. Nothing felt stirring anymore, nothing felt fun. And then I looked out my window and saw the torches moving through the narrow Old Town street.
I knew immediately I wanted to be down there. I shoved on shoes, grabbed a coat, and ran down to join the procession before I could change my mind. There were people painted woad blue and scarlet red, dancers dancing, singers singing, and all over shouting, chanting, drums, drums. The cold air felt crisp with a feeling I hadn’t felt in so very long, and I’d closed my eyes in the crush of the crowd, one speck of grad student in the great scheme of nothing, and I surrendered myself one last time to the hope for magic. I begged magic to stay, to take me, to claim me, and when I opened my eyes to see the Summer King and Winter King facing off among fire and dancers and drums, I knew I wanted to be wherever that was real and not at all pretend.
I knew I’d offer up my heart whole for it to be real.
“Please,” I whispered. I remember how the word was swallowed immediately by the drums. “Please take me. Take me and I’ll go. I’ll give you anything.”
I hadn’t been whispering it to anyone, had barely even whispered it to myself. The last gasp of a hope I had to smother and bury in the backyard of my mind so I wouldn’t be haunted by it any longer.
“You heardthat?” I ask now, still utterly confused.
Morgana nods, like of course, she heard a hushed plea over the clamor of drums and the trilling of half-naked neopagans. “Edinburgh may be at the very edge of the court’s lands, but it’s still my land. I hear every bargain offered by a mortal—which is a far smaller number than it used to be. Yours was the only bargain that intrigued me. So I watched you. I watched you through mirrors and puddles and the shine on the face of your watch and the glass of your phone. I watched you and I…” She pauses, looks down at my foot. Her hand now curls over the place where my metatarsals anchor to the rest of my foot. “I grew fascinated by you. I have wanted you for a very long time, Janneth.”
A year. She’s been watching me—wanting me—for a year. And while it’s been a mortal year for me, it’s been a Faerie year for her, at least twice as long. And then I remember the cairn, how Maynard knew my name when he found me, that they werelookingfor me.
For whatever opaque reason she has, it must be you. No one else.
Because she had been watching me. Because she’d chosen me, because I’d already made some kind of bargain with her without even knowing it. That’s why I was taken. I’m not sure what to do with this information, because I should feel angry or scared or violated. I should not love that she watched me, chose me, took me for her own.
I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.
“So this is why you kidnapped me,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral. Kidnapping is bad. I am wholesale, unambivalently against kidnapping and against being kidnapped.
