The Drowned Woods (25)
For a moment, they both peered into the darkness.
Without waiting to see if he would follow, Mer put one foot on the first step. It was old wood, groaning under her weight as she descended into the dark cellar.
The air was close and still. The tang of wine tickled her nose, and she pressed a hand to it to keep from sneezing. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the shape of racks of bottles and barrels. Rounds of cheese and jars of preserves were on shelves, and Mer’s fingers itched to grab at them, to shove the provisions under her cloak and make off with them. But if this was indeed Renfrew’s contact, then stealing from her host probably wouldn’t be the best first impression.
There came a creak overhead; someone was walking across the floor. Then the squeal of a door being pulled open.
Mer went utterly still. She held her breath and waited. “—no one’s servant,” someone was saying. A man’s voice, with the accent of the southern port cities. He thudded down the stairs, calling something over his shoulder.
Then the man caught sight of Mer and Fane. He froze on the stairs.
For a long moment, no one moved.
The man snatched up a bottle of wine and flung it at Fane’s head.
CHAPTER 7
IT HAD TAKEN Fane five years to understand the bargain he’d made.
He had been sixteen. His days were spent patrolling the Annwvyn forest, using his magicked senses to slip between the enchantments meant to snare other humans. If Fane wandered near a piece of iron, he would hear its song. Sometimes it was a scrap, sometimes it was a lone traveler. No matter the source, Fane would haul it from the forest.
As part of their service, the fetches were given food and shelter. At night, Fane would sit beside a warm hearth with the other human fetches, eating bowls of hare broth flavored with nettles and wild mushrooms.
And he thought about his revenge.
Seven years of service for seven human lives.
He would kill them—all of them—one by one. Those murderers who’d burned his family. Fane had taken care to remember their faces, to recall everything he could.
The otherfolk had given him magic, that much he knew. Not just the iron-sense, but magic that would help him fight. He’d never tested it; there was no one to test it on besides the foxes and the squirrels. There were the other fetches, but Fane liked them. They were friends, smiling at him in the evenings and making quiet conversation.
All the ironfetches were given a few days off every year. They were given leave to visit nearby villages, to purchase clothing and new boots before returning to the forest. Fane saved those days until he was sixteen. By then, he was tall as a man and strong enough to fight. So he took his leave of the forest, traveled by foot along paths he knew only by faintest memory.
He returned to his village.
Fane wandered through the streets. The constant hum of iron set his teeth on edge. He understood why the folk would never come here. To the otherfolk, iron’s rust could poison rivers and leech into the soil to sicken them. It was why he scoffed to hear mothers’ rhymes about the folk taking children from cities. No immortal being would have set foot in a human city.
He strode down the dirt-packed streets until he came upon the right house.
It had never been rebuilt. It had been left to rust and molder, to sink into the ground. Fane picked his way through the fallen stones and rotted wood, to the hearth and home he’d grown up in. He knelt, his bare fingers sliding through the ash and dirt until he found what he sought.
A shard of metal. Traces of iron—and blood. It had broken off a sword. A sword carried by one of the people who had killed his family.
Fane curled his hand around that small bit of metal and closed his eyes. The folk had imbued their fetches with the ability to find iron, to trace its source. He knew at once in which part of the isles this sword had been forged. But more importantly, he sensed from whom the blood came. He had only to follow the faint song.
The journey took him two days.
He traversed fields and forest, crossed small streams and muddied roads. He slept in his cloak, eating dried meats and old berries, never stopping for more than a few hours. And then he found the man.
Fane strode into a village not unlike his own. He followed his iron-sense to the right house, crept through the hedges and across a patch of well-tended garden, then peered through an open window. He would find one of the men who had slain his family. He would use his newfound magic to finally avenge them. But as Fane looked into the house, his stomach lurched in surprise.
The man wasn’t alone. A babe bounced on his knee, chubby arms waving in the air. A second child, a daughter perhaps five years old, was playing with a wooden horse on the floor. And a woman was working on a square of embroidery in a rocking chair.
The man was singing. A quiet, crooning lullaby—and Fane recognized it. His mam had sung it to all her children when they had nightmares.
The killer had a family. Of all the possibilities Fane had imagined, this one never entered his mind. He had thought of ambushing the mercenary on the road, demanding to know if he remembered Fane’s family. Fane had thought to use the magic he’d been gifted—that glorious, untested magic—to fight like a hero from the old tales.
Fane gazed through the window, his gut squirming with hot fury and something like—
Longing.
It was longing and shame. He remembered his mother telling him to fight when there was more than pride at stake—and there were no stakes here. No battles, nothing to be won but Fane’s own satisfaction. Hurting that man would not change his past, wouldn’t bring back those lost. All it would do was create more orphans.