Page 11 of The Fae Queen's Captive
“My leaving would be…complicated,” he says, but doesn’t seem inclined to offer any more information than that.
I try again, still in Latin. Fuck, I wish I’d joined that Latin club at my university now, they have their meetings at a wine bar and everything. “If the queen doesn’tallowus to leave, then the only way to leave is by escaping. So…can you help me escape?”
“I’ve sworn to the antlered crown never to help a fellow mortal do any act that would displease a monarch of Elphame,” he tells me, utterly seriously.
I stare at him. “Well, can you…unswear…it?”
To his credit, he does look very regretful when he says, “I cannot. A vow to a crown of Elphame can only be forsworn at great cost.”
I close my eyes and sigh. “Maybe this is still a dream and it doesn’t matter.”
I feel him take my hand, and I open my eyes. The regret hasn’t left his face when he says, “This isn’t a dream, child.”
“This has to be a dream. A castle like this—fairies—” I don’t know the actual Latin word for fairies, so I settle fordaemones. “It can’t be real.”
He pinches the top of my hand, and I yelp, yanking it out of his grip. “I promise you, this place is real, and you are awake,” he says. “You will be able to feel, taste…read…things we cannot do properly in dreams.”
I rub the skin on the top of my hand, bothered more than I can say.
“Please believe me,” the man says. “Please accept this. Your life will depend on it.”
“My life?What? Why?” I ask.
The leaves stir again at my feet, like an alarm going off to remind me I’m supposed to be moving.
“We must go down to the banquet,” the man says, offering me his arm. “It will not be good if you are missed.”
I don’t move to take his arm.
“I promise to answer any questions you might have—questions I am permitted to answer—on the way to the banquet. But please, we must go there now, or else we risk the queen’s anger.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” I grumble, but I take the man’s arm. The leaves around our feet give a hopeful flutter.
“It is worse than you can imagine,” the man says grimly.
The leaves skate along the floor in front of us as we begin walking, but the man doesn’t seem to need them. Much. There is a time early on when he and the leaves seem to disagree about which set of stairs to take; after wandering down an unlit corridor lined with brambles for a few moments, it becomes clear we should have listened to the leaves.
The leaves seem to know this too, because there’s something almost smug about the way they find us and lead us back to the right set of stairs.
“Okay,” I say and then remember my Latin. “So why will my life depend on my knowing this is real?”
The man seems to be thinking about what to say, and I recall the way he phrased his earlier offer.Questions I am permitted to answer.“The Court of Stags is one of the oldest courts in Elphame, and perhaps the proudest. They do not think much of mortals, and they do not think of violence and death the same way we do. You must be careful, watchful, and clever. You must not drift from pleasure to pleasure or from pain to pain. Youmusthave intention with everything you do.”
“Or?”
“Or they will hurt you or hunt you or kill you. Death is very much like life to them, and the reverse is also true.”
This fairy abduction experience isn’t shaping up to be very awesome for me. “And you will not help me escape?”
“Icannot,” he corrects.
“And your advice is what then? To be…wary?”
“Wariness can get you far,” he says. “I’ve been in at the Stag Court for over four hundred years, and I’m yet alive.”
I look over at him. His style of clothing certainly speaks to a long-ago time, but then again, so does the clothing of everyone else here. And I’ve been in archaeology long enough to know thatfour hundred years olddoesn’t typically express as a carefully groomed beard and a few wrinkles in the forehead.Four hundred years oldlooks like dry bones with some bits of hair and clothing left.
“You said I was a fellow mortal earlier,” I say. We turn the corner into a large, empty hall, and the leaves dance farther and farther ahead of us, as if impatient. At the end of the hall, I see a set of large double doors, made of wood but covered in the pale beams and tines of antlers. They are closed, but light glows from underneath. “Meaning you are mortal too?”
