Give Me (Wyrd and Fae #1)(38)

And maybe one had. She rode toward Tintagos Castle, but well before she got there she knew she’d been gone longer than a few days. Inside the castle keep, she dismounted and made herself visible again.

“Fairy!” She’d appeared beside the smithy, a new forge but in the same place. An apprentice close to Elyse’s age pulled a handful of salt from a bag on his workbench and threw it at her.

“Ow!” She grabbed his hand. “That just makes me mad, boy.”

His eyes grew wide. “I thought you were a fairy. You were—you were invisible.”

“What year is this? Tell me, boy!” He wasn’t really a boy, and both of them were suddenly aware of that fact. She had to get away from people before Galen came out again. “What year?”

“One thousand ninety-seven, my lady.”

She dropped his hand, and he backed off as she mounted the horse again. A hundred years!

“If you’re not a fairy,” the apprentice asked as she turned away, “what are you?”

Good question. She called out over her shoulder, “I’m the wyrding woman of Glimmer Cottage.” And she rode home to make it so.

She’d been gone a hundred years. There was no one to explain things to. No one to accuse her of what she’d done, to hate her for it.

It didn’t help.

Guilt and regret lasted as long as Idris had predicted, and Elyse’s half human—“faeling”—body lasted nearly as long, but the fairy king had been wrong about one thing. She didn’t go insane. Over eight hundred more years passed. She set a boundary around Glimmer Cottage and lived apart from the world, avoiding the war between fae and wyrd that ravaged Dumnos. She didn’t know what it was about, and she didn’t want to know.

She had other problems, in constant awareness of Galen bound in the gold band and Diantha bound in the silver, entwined around each other and forever separated from each other.

Elyse couldn’t visit Igdrasil. It was too painful to think of Lourdes trapped inside—whether in stasis or with full consciousness, Elyse couldn’t know. Couldn’t stand to know.

She would have lasted longer if it hadn’t all been so draining. She had to wyrd the entire village and surrounds every time it occurred to someone that the wyrding woman of Glimmer Cottage had been there longer than humanly possible.

For five hundred years, the hardest part was to keep Galen and Diantha in check. Every so often the boundary around Glimmer Cottage failed and someone slipped through.

One day, a woodcutter came to the door looking for work. He had kind brown eyes, just like Galen’s. He caressed Elyse’s cheek, and she remembered how good it had felt to be kissed. Why not indulge herself, just this once? She lifted her lips to the woodcutter and said, “Galen.”

Diantha streamed out of her silver band into Elyse’s mind and said it again, “Galen!”

“Diantha, I found you!” The woodcutter’s arms were so strong, his need so desperate. Elyse regained control just before Diantha could spread her legs.

In all the time of her life, Elyse had never made love. She should have slept with Idris when she had the chance. More than once, she’d been tempted to remove the ring and end it all. But if she died, Galen and Diantha—and Lourdes—would be trapped in their hells for eternity. Or she could bring another woodcutter to her door and let Galen and Diantha have their way. But then she’d have to add a woodcutter’s soul to her guilt list—and if all she had wanted was physical pleasure, she would have stayed in fae.

In the end, time won. In 1933, her resilient faeling body wore out. The teeth were long gone, the hair a few wispy colorless strands. Skin amassed with age spots. Odd lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. Hair in her nose. Sun and moon, the indignities.

But her magics had not weakened. She would do what had to be done. She got the idea from Galen and Diantha, actually. She’d find another body.

It was easy. She let down the boundary, and soon enough someone came to the door, a seventeen-year-old girl—seventeen!—who was starving. Mary. Perfect name for a martyr. Too skinny, but that could be remedied.

Like a wicked witch in a fairytale, Elyse invited Mary in and fed her tea and biscuits.

She’d been walking the countryside for weeks, begging a meal where it looked safe, sleeping under hedgerows.

“The country is in a bad way these days,” Elyse sympathized. “Much good it’s done Dumnos to join whatever Sarumos is calling itself now. The British Empire.” Mary frowned, and Elyse wondered if she’d said something amiss. She hadn’t been keeping up, that was true. “Have you no family, Mary, nowhere to go?”

“No family.” She blushed and looked a bit miserable. Perhaps she’d gotten into some trouble and been disowned by her family.

“How would you like…well, this may sound strange, Mary, but would you like to stay here at Glimmer Cottage for a time?”

“Oh, ma’am. I…I don’t know.”

What was there to wonder about? The little fool was starving. She’d have food and a safe roof over her head.

“I’m getting old, you see, and I could use a…” what were they calling it these days? “A companion.” Elyse put a wyrd on the biscuits to sweeten the deal, make Mary think it was the best food she’d ever eaten.

“I suppose I could stay for just a little while.”