An Enchantment of Ravens(5)
My first thought was that it was a stag. A tremendously big one, but it was the right shape, more or less: four legs, two antlers. Then it turned to look in my direction, and right away I understood it wasn’t.
Just like that the wrongness spread. The breeze dropped away, and the air grew still and oppressively hot. The birds stopped singing, the grasshoppers stopped buzzing, and even the wheat drooped in the stagnant air. The stench of decay grew overwhelming. I dropped down to my hands and knees, but it was too late.
The not-a-stag stood watching me.
Despite the heat, a fever chill shivered over my skin and crystallized in my stomach. I knew what it was, this not-a-stag. I also knew I was dead. No one could run or hide from a fairy beast. This creature had risen from a barrow mound, a grotesque union of fairy magic and ancient human remains. Some acted as servants and guards to their masters. Others crept from the earth unbidden. One such monster killed my mother and father when I was a little girl, so terribly Emma hadn’t let me see their bodies, and I was going to die the same way. I don’t think my mind could quite process this, because my next thought was that I shouldn’t have wasted money buying pigments; I was never going to use them now.
The fairy beast lowered its head and bellowed across the field, a deep, rousing, and putrid sound, as though someone had blown into an ancient, once-exquisite hunting horn stuffed full of rotting moss. It swung its heavy body around, antlers first, and sprang down the hill.
I lunged from my crouch and ran. Not toward the safety of my house half a mile in the distance, but away from it, into the field. If I was going to do anything of value in my last moments alive, I might as well try to lead the thing as far away from my family as I could manage.
The wheat parted around my hiked-up skirts. Stems crunched beneath my boots, and prickly seed heads scratched welts across my bare arms as they whipped past. My satchel bounced against the backs of my thighs, cumbersome, slowing me down. Grasshoppers shot out of the way as if flicked from the field by an invisible hand. At first I heard nothing but the rasping of my own breath. None of it felt real. I might as well have been running through a field for the fun of it, on a lovely day beneath a flawless blue sky.
Then a shadow’s coolness touched my sweaty back, and darkness enveloped me. The wheat thrashed like waves in a storm-tossed ocean. A hoof slammed down beside me, burying itself deep in the soil. I threw myself backward, stumbled, and fell, floundering among the shafts. The fairy beast loomed over me.
A proud stag’s guise rippled over it like the reflection of sun on water. In the dark spaces between the illusion lay a skeletal form of decomposing bark held together by vines that shifted like tendons, a hollowed skull-like face, antlers that were not truly antlers but instead a pair of crooked branches wound tight with thorny briars, each one as long as a man was tall. A sickness lay over it; as it snorted and raised a quivering leg, bark sloughed away and tumbled across the ground. Shiny beetles swarmed out of the pieces, skittering over my stockings as they fled in every direction. I retched at the taste of rot coating the inside of my mouth.
The fairy beast reared up, blocking out the sun. I thought my last sight on earth was going to be the constellation of maggots weaving in and out of its belly. Therefore I wasn’t certain how to react when the monster simply collapsed in front of me into a soft, tumbling heap of worm-eaten wood. Centipedes longer than my hand spooled out into the grass. Two huge, spotted moths took wing. The grasshoppers began buzzing again right away as though nothing had happened, but still I lay clammy and trembling on the ground, blood pounding in my ears. With a repulsed cry, I kicked at the pile. Bone fragments scattered along with the bark. The human corpse that gave it life had been destroyed.
“I’ve been tracking that beast for two days, and I might not have caught up to it if you hadn’t drawn its attention,” said a warm, lively voice. “It’s called a thane, in case you’re interested.”
My gaze snapped up from the fairy beast’s remains. A man stood before me, so eclipsed by the sun I couldn’t make out his features, only that he was tall and slender and in the process of sheathing a sword.
“Drawn its—” I stopped, baffled and more than a little offended. He spoke as if this were sport, as though my life mattered not at all; which of course told me everything I needed to know. This figure might look like a man, but he wasn’t one.
“Thank you,” I backtracked, choking down my protests. “You’ve saved my life.”
“Have I? From the thane? I suppose I have. In that case, you’re most welcome—oh. I don’t know your name.”
A frisson of unease rattled me like a thunderclap in the dead of night. He didn’t recognize me, which meant he didn’t visit Whimsy often, if at all. Whoever he was, he was bound to be more dangerous than the fair folk I normally dealt with. And like all of his species he couldn’t resist seeking my true name. I paused, evaluating my mind and senses, and came to the relieved conclusion that he hadn’t put me under a malicious charm, one that might make me speak more freely or reveal secrets I ought not. Because no one used their birth name in Whimsy. To do so would be to expose oneself to ensorcellment, by which a fair one could control a mortal in body and soul, forever, without their ever knowing—merely through the power of that single, secret word. It was the most wicked form of fairy magic, and the most feared.
“Isobel,” I supplied, scrambling to my feet. I dropped him a curtsy.