He slips closer, towering three full heads and more above the tall young human. “These woods are my own. I am their protector. Any justice is mine.”
For a moment, there is a swell of pity in the young man’s heart for the man in the shack. Only for a moment. He dips his head.
“What is your name?” the king asks, for amusement rather than expectation of an answer.
“What is yours?”
The king flicks his fingers over his shoulder as he turns, dismissing the young man. “Iohmar.”
A tongue of sunlight swallows him up, and the men are left blinking like kittens. The young man wonders at the fae name he’s heard in ancient war stories and tales told by grandparents many generations removed.
Iohmar finds not a man but a squalling babe.
Hidden in a crate, the infant is butted against the farthest wall from the door, small and plump and strange to the fae king. Few children are born or dwell within his Fair Halls. Several in the last centuries were born before the great war, small and quick and immediate upon their feet, quiet save for the music of their laughter.
Cries from the little human grow loud and harsh as a wounded animal’s when Iohmar fits his head through the open window space. Long horns and talons do not make for a comforting sight—he learned long ago.
No grown human appears. Iohmar smells the man, senses him in his woods. Stagnant and foul, the scent of him drifts from the discarded clothes and from a barrel in the corner filled with soiling snow water.
It’s troubling he’s here, close to Iohmar’s borders, reeking of hate and human flesh. He must not believe in the fae to venture so close to the mountains with ill intent in his heart. There was a time Iohmar’s kin were a constant presence in the thoughts of humans, but they have long since faded into myth, alive but hardly real, in great part due to Iohmar’s own actions. He no longer allows them to steal humans away to the twilight lands, and so they play mischief rather than cause harm. Those men along the path believed, and Iohmar saw their fear bright as sunlight.
Rot hangs in the air, far into the trees, a trail of invisible unkindness. It ruffles him, disturbing in its large presence in a wood so vast.
Maneuvering his head from the window, he drifts into the trees, avoiding mushrooms and squirrels and lizards bothering his bare feet. These woods are not close enough to his own to be filled with his trees’ magic, but the branches still shiver as he passes. Here and there, a vine reaches out, and he trails his fingers between leaves and moss and notches of bark. Heavy moisture and the scent of loam fill the air. Still, the smell of rot cuts.
Crows hop about, clicking their displeasure at his lack of attention. They brought him news of the party of men and wish a reward for their concern. He scatters seeds from his palm, and heavy beaks peck between his fingers.
Here the rot is strongest. Iohmar toes at the loose soil, flipping a catch of decaying leaves. The scent is far deeper. Unnatural. Cruel. A body bent. A grave dug in haste. What creature could commit such an act? It is unthinkable among Iohmar’s folk. His skin crawls with chill for the unknown woman beneath the earth. He brushes his footprints from the soil, smoothing them into the woods. His crows peck the disturbed ground, and he calls them away with a brush of his hand.
Along his return to the shack, he pulls a thistle bud from a near patch of sunlight. Winter is losing her vigor, and the plant doesn’t bloom early in spring, but few things will not grow at his bidding.
The babe still cries, more so when Iohmar cracks the windowsill against the tip of his horn. None of his Fair Halls are so small and confining, but he doesn’t wish to enter the door. Rolling the leaves between his fingers, he murmurs and presses the pad of his thumb to the child’s lips, careful not to touch sharp nails to breakable skin. The little thing blinks but suckles the dripping milk.
Quiet fills the wood, the babe’s cries replaced by animal song and the sighs of trees.
The young man from the path mentioned no child. Though rumors of changelings and cursed children still make their way from door to door, Iohmar has not allowed his folk to play such cruel tricks for several centuries, and this one is human as they come, plain and lacking in any magic.
What to do with the child? He cannot leave it.
The babe’s mother now lies beneath the earth. Iohmar does not mourn humans, as insignificant as their lives are, but to lose one’s kin is a terrible thing. Iohmar knows such pain, and by the hand of another who should be cherished. He has no interest in the child, weak and bland as it is—has never had interest in any child presented to him past fondness for his folk—but pity tightens his chest, a swell of protectiveness. It would be unsafe in his Halls with their wildness and strange magic. Even a king cannot break his own decree.
Heavy footsteps. A human’s gruff breath declares its presence before the vile creature appears at the broken-down door.
The babe’s father does not see Iohmar at the window, large horns pushed through the small space, a looming monster over a human child. He is nothing but shadow, shade cast from a tree, the slant of sunlight along the wall. Iohmar does not exist in the minds of men he does not wish to. It is only this babe who sees him, suckling milk from his clawed finger.
An unremarkable human, Iohmar thinks, no uniqueness to his soul to spare him from horrid death. How could a creature kill something he promised to love so dear? Fae do not marry, do not partake in the strange customs of men, but they know love, perhaps much deeper.
As the spell runs dry, Iohmar drops his fingers, watching the human scrub at his hands in the washing barrel already stinking of filth. There is blood beneath his fingernails.
The child wails, round face pinching, and Iohmar sorts his memories for how a newborn human should appear. They take time not to exist as round grubs struggling to stand. Fae children are not grown for centuries upon centuries, but they are not fat wriggling worms for months and months. Shouldn’t this one be plumper? More colorful in its flesh? The milk was of assistance, but not much. Unbeknownst to the human muttering along the opposite wall, Iohmar drags the back of his clawed finger down the rags wrapping the little body, searching for signs of discontent. He finds no outward wound, nothing to mend, the faintest strings of magic humans contain weak but existent, so he considers the neglect of the parent across the room that should not be blessed to call itself so.
Round eyes blink up at him, and Iohmar is struck by the color—brown as the rich soils of his mountains stretching to the sky, browner than a fawn’s coat and just as warm. He calls to his magic and lets wisps of light dance across the infant’s skin, shapeless and warm. A smile crinkles the tiny face, and Iohmar’s lips twitch to return the gesture.
Little of his childhood remains in his memories, far past in millennium upon millennium. What he remembers is given to him in dreams and emotions, sensations of warmth in his chest rather than true details. But he remembers the faces of his own father and mother. How did it appear to them when I gazed into their eyes?
When his horn cracks the window frame on the way out, the man’s gaze finds the space Iohmar occupies. His eyes drift straight past, a hunter trying to catch sight of an animal through a beam of light. His eyebrows pull together, but he returns to his scrubbing without a glance at the babe. There is a curl to his lip. Iohmar touches his magic to the human’s heart, hoping for a better explanation, and recoils at what memories he encounters. Swallowing the sour taste rising on his tongue, he is certain of his decision as he gathers twigs and handfuls of fresh sprouted grass from between the trees.
Crows have gathered in greater numbers, hopping about the house and its roots. The man cannot see them. If he could, he would panic. Humans have strange superstitions about birds. Perhaps for fair reason, Iohmar considers, tearing a strip from his woven robe to bind the debris. He has not employed such magic in many centuries, this kind taking on a form not its own and consuming the life it is left to take. Iohmar rolls the bundle between his palms and murmurs.
The fair lands are not safe for the boy, but neither is this awful place. Iohmar will find someone suitable to take the infant, but he cannot leave it here in the meantime.
Carefuller and softer than he’s accustomed to, he extracts the child from the window. All tears and screams are gone. Those round brown eyes blink at him, a fawn lost in the evening light, a wisp of weight in his palm.
With a rustle and sweep of his robes, he leaves the cursed bundle in the makeshift crib fit for no loved thing and melts into the woods, followed by a shaft of sunlight and a flock of gossiping crows.
2
The Halls beneath the Earth
Dawn breaks warm with purple twilight as Iohmar passes the human grave.
An overgrown path humans avoid returns him home. Before the crack in the mountains offers him a way to return to Látwill— the lands of Iohmar’s people and his Fair Halls—by foot. A mess of gray stones marks the pass, a recent addition in Iohmar’s lifetime, less recent in the memories of humans. Vines embrace the crude shrine, mosses of green and orange clinging to the rough surface. Moths living in the thick damp heat of the place where the human and fae world meet bumble about, long tongues finding spring flowers no larger than pebbles.
Iohmar passes the shrine without stopping, running fingers across the nearest stone. He remembers the human in a misty sort of way, gone mad when returning to the human world after dwelling too long in Iohmar’s, and remembers acutely the time he discovered the grave, a warning for others to never stray close to the mountains and the twilight lands beyond.
It was soon later Iohmar forbade his kind from bringing the fragile creatures to Látwill. A few days is no worry, but years take too great a toll on the human mind.
