His Halls are home. No matter how Rúnda teases him to stay, she understands his pull to them as he understands her ties to these dunes and seas. It is his soul’s anchor, and despite the safety and contentment he finds in his tower chambers, or in sitting in the gardens, or in wandering the forests and deserts, his heart is turning for home. His people know. A large last feast is thrown by unspoken agreement. No matter how little time passes between visits, Rúnda’s and Iohmar’s folk feast as if they are sending the other to another land for eternity.
That night, Iohmar lies on his stomach under furs, watching Lor sleep in the crib of branches he called forth from the wall. Rúnda lies along his back, skin to skin, her toes wriggling against the soles of his feet. In the dark of the room, he enjoys how she turns her skin an azure blue where she touches him.
She presses her lips between his shoulder blades. “You smell of stone.”
“Stone?”
“Mmm. River stones. It’s quite lovely.”
Iohmar thinks of the sweet, calm cool of water over river rock and smiles into the darkness.
“How do I smell to you?” she asks. Iohmar can’t think of a more ridiculous line of conversation.
“Pine. Sand. Warm sand.”
“Is that pleasant to you?”
“Yes.”
She hums, fingers running along the base of his horns. It’s gentle, intimate enough he relaxes into the touch. The small withered horn along the top of his head—he lost it to injury so long ago he can’t remember its occurrence—is rather sensitive. Her warm fingers massage with a moth wing’s touch. He sighs and reaches back for the slender top of her long ear. She hasn’t worn gems in them since he arrived—she grows bored with them every few decades.
“When will you come to my Halls?” he asks.
“Hmm . . . It is warm now. It’ll be warm for a time longer. When the chill starts in the air again.”
Iohmar knows seasons exist. He has visited Rúnda—and the human world—enough to know most places grow warmer and colder between seasons. His Fair Halls have no such change; they’re always balmy and warm, and one is never in need of a hearth or too many blankets. It cools in the darkest hours of the night and is warmest in the brightest hours of the day—never uncomfortable. Seasons are a smell to the air, a sensation along his skin, rather than a change in weather.
“It’ll give you time to miss me,” she says, her mouth moving above his ear.
He will miss her as soon as he steps foot outside her tower. He is beginning to miss her already, but such words stick in his throat, as they often do, and so he hums as she does when happy and content with him. She presses a kiss to the back of his neck, and he rolls over to catch her in his arms one last time before the seasons change.
12
A Beam of Sunlight
Before returning to his mountain, Iohmar visits the human world.
He sees his people to the edge of their trees, taking time to breathe the smell of home and become lost in its magic. When they’ve wandered through the front gates or into the safety of the trees, he melts into the woods before Galen can figure out his plan and worry. Lor asleep in his arm, he steps into sunlight and skips the thin gradual path between the mountains. Between breaths, he is beside his Halls, then the footpath where he encountered the ragged hunting party. It is overgrown, and spring—or perhaps summer—grasses intrude upon the walking space. Time runs different here, and Iohmar isn’t surprised to see undergrowth and be unsure of the seasons.
Lor doesn’t so much as stir.
A nearby village draws him. He walks its outer borders in the same way he maneuvered his head into the dilapidated window of the hovel where he first found Lor—a trick of light human eyes peer straight past. It isn’t much of a village. A dozen or so cottages are packed close in a clearer section of the woods, the path cutting the center and emerging the opposite end. There is civilization should Iohmar follow it, but this is not a trip for the curiosity of mankind’s progression.
Tasting the village on his tongue—a great deal of sweat, salt, mud, animal, water, bread, and other flavors of food—he searches for a familiar thread. It draws him from the cluster of homes and down the human side of the path. Shrines litter the border of the village, knee-high wooden structures stuffed with eggshells, candles, mossy stones, and strips of ink-dipped paper—offerings of friendship to the fae living along the village’s borders. Iohmar draws sunlight into his palm until the nearest candles flicker to life. A dog follows him from the marketplace, tail wagging, tongue trying to lick his hand. Lor’s large eyes open and follow the creature, and the pup is called away by a woman’s voice.
Here in the human bit of the woods, it is peaceful, open between the trees, dull with a lack of wild magic. Pine needles carpet the ground, not so overgrown as the mountains. Another cottage rests a short ways down, others scattered on either side of the path as far as his eyes follow it, and Iohmar drifts to the closest one. A familiar presence gathers here, as familiar as one could be for an insignificant human Iohmar met once for mere minutes.
A child plays with dolls of straw and cloth before the cottage. It is wooden and thatched as the rest of those nearby, unremarkable as the humans dwelling in it, not much to look at after the grandeur of Rúnda’s court and the presence of his mountain. Steps away, another shrine, smaller than the rest, is decorated with colorful streams of fabric. A jar of fresh honey nests in the center, and Iohmar dips his finger in to taste and offer Lor.
“Fae,” the girl says, and Iohmar’s eyes are drawn to her.
She grins at him, dolls forgotten on the pile of straw she’s burrowed in. Several teeth are missing, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Iohmar recalls human children lose their teeth before growing new ones. How gruesome. It isn’t a phenomenon his kind suffer.
He smiles at her, the disarming gesture meaning a blessing to his own folk. He’s noticed the daze it causes humans. Most anything he does is taken as threatening, but he means for the girl to see him, so he tries his best not to appear a terror drawn from her darkest bedtime stories.
Her smile grows larger. Scrambling from the hay, she scuttles up to present him with one of her dolls. Bemused, Iohmar bends to take the ragged thing and watches the girl sprint back to her cottage door. Lor giggles, reaching for the toy, and Iohmar lets him take it.
An old woman shuffles to the porch—her skin crinkled and aged in a way even the oldest of his kin do not experience—and her mouth falls open. It would be comical if the awe were not deserved. Her back is still straight and strong, her hands tanned from sunlight and work, and she does not strike Iohmar as one easily rattled. It is endearing. He nods in respect to the elder, even if he is millennia upon millennia older than she.
Immediately, she stoops in a bow, hands held up as if in offering, mumbling something akin to a prayer.
“Please, calm yourself,” Iohmar says before the poor woman can work herself up. She glances up and calls to someone behind her, the name so tense and hissed he doesn’t catch it.
A young man appears, confusion in his features. He carries a small hammer in one hand and a wooden box in the other, shirt absent in the heat. He does not, at first, appear to notice Iohmar.
“Grandmother, I—oh!”
The box of tools crashes. Iohmar considers the terror at finding a tall horned creature visiting one’s child. And doubly so to have his appearance changed from the last time they came into contact. He smiles. It doesn’t have the same effect. Silence stretches, and the man who spoke to him on the path does not gather his courage this time.
Remembering the tales humans spread of his folk, he says, “I’ve not come to rot your eggs or sour your milk, and your children are of no interest to me. You need not worry yourself so.”
The grandmother has the bravery to narrow her eyes, and he does not fault her suspicion. Her eyes find the girl, then the babe in Iohmar’s arms, then her grandson, and she straightens from her submissive position.
“My own grandmother told me tales of you,” she says slowly, choosing her words, and Iohmar has no doubt the stories could’ve been of him specifically. “But I’m afraid I do not know the proper words for a conversation with a fae.”
Humans have many suspicions of his kin, few near truth save for the warning never to give a fae your name lest they steal you away.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he assures her. “I wish to speak to your grandson. I have no interest in stealing him away or tossing about curses. Just a conversation.”