Page 1 of The Fae Queen's Captive
Chapter1
There are lights around the grave.
I press my face closer to the old farmhouse window and squint through its waves and ripples, willing the lights to resolve into something that makes sense. The lights flicker and jump like fire would, but it must be the distance playing tricks, because theycan’tbe fire. It’s an archaeological site, for one thing, all damp earth and plastic totes waiting to be filled with the last of the season’s finds tomorrow, and for another thing, I was just there twenty minutes ago. It was utterly deserted then, empty of students and site managers and everything but the wind and the gaping mouth of the chambered cairn.
So. There should not be lights around the grave.
“What the bally hell are you doing?” says a voice from behind me. I turn to see one of my fellow grad students, Alfie, winding a thin caramel-colored scarf around his neck. It looks like it was sold by a company with a royal scarf warrant.
“There are lights by the cairn,” I say, turning back to the window. The lights hover off the ground, surrounding the massive turf-covered mound of the grave and only leaving a gap where its entrance beckons.
“It’s probably the fair, darling,” Alfie says blithely. “Casting reflections or something.”
“It’s not the fair,” I say without looking at him or in the direction of the carnival that appeared on the other side of the hill today.
Two of the other students went to investigate during our lunch break and found the place utterly devoid of people. Only the tattered booths and time-faded tents were there, lights already blinking and music already playing from somewhere unseen. The carousel of horses, peacocks, and rabbits turning in slow, riderless circles.
It looked abandoned and very murdery,one of the students said when they got back. And then they’d promptly enlisted as many of us as they could to return tonight.
“They could be fairy lights,” Alfie says after a minute, looking out the window with me.
“Fairy lights?”
“My grandmother is Scottish,” Alfie explains. “Always sticking silver in a baby’s hand or planting rowan trees in her garden. And she says sometimes you can still see fairy lights at night. If you’re in the right place, of course. Teine-sith.”
Teine-sith.
The words sound familiar—or more so the sound of them.Tyen-uh shee.
Teine for fire. Sith for fairies.
“Gaelic, you know,” Alfie says, with a toss of his floppy hair and the air of someone confiding a great secret. Then he seems to notice my lack of coat. “Are you not coming with us?”
I shift on my feet, torn. I love fairs—and people—and Halloween especially. But tomorrow is the very last day of the dig, and if someone is trampling all over our things, poking where they shouldn’t, it could screw with our chances of keeping our permit for the next digging season.
And we have to come back next season because we still haven’t found what we’re looking for in this narrow, loch-floored valley.
“I think I should go check on the site,” I say finally. And then I sigh a little, looking at the far hill with its ridges outlined by the carnival lights glowing behind it. I can already taste the popcorn, hear the pling of the high-striker bell. There’s even supposed to be a haunted house…
“Look, it’s probably some youths making Halloween mischief at the tomb, like their grandparents before them, andtheirgrandparents before them,” Alfie says, taking my hand and sayingyouthslike we aren’t twenty-three ourselves. “Don’t be a bore. Who else is going to convince François that I’m his soul mate and he needs to whisk me away to Provence for a sun-soaked movie montage? This is my time of need!”
“It pains me,” I say as I hold his gloved hand with both of my own, “since I’ve been needing you two to move past the Longing Glances Across the Dig Site phase for months now. But if itislocals down at the cairn, then you know I really dohave to go check it out.”
“Can’t we call Dr. Siska and have her come instead?” Alfie whines.
“She and the site managers are staying twenty minutes away, and that’s by car. I’m a short walk away. I’ll just nip down there, shoo everyone off the site, and then I’ll come to the fair after that and find you all. Deal?”
Alfie pouts. “Fine. But if I’m denied my great French love affair because you care more about some long-dead Spaniard’s missing castle than you do your very best friend, I shall never forgive you.”
I kiss his suntanned forehead through his wavy hair. “I’ll only be a moment. Tell everyone to go on without me.”
“As you wish. And don’t eat the fairy fruit,” Alfie says, cheerful again as he pulls away.
“What?”
“You know, if you’re taken by the fairies,” he explains patiently, straightening his gloves. “You’re not supposed to eat the fairy fruit. It drives us mortals wild with desire. Or did you not read any Victorian poetry at school?”
“I know about fairy fruit!” I say, wounded. I’m practically a fairy pomologist. Or at least I should be, after all the fan fiction I read as a teenager. “But I don’t think it’s going to be a problem tonight. Or any night, given that fairies aren’t real.”
