He can feel the mountain.
Deeper.
He can feel the mountain tremble.
Ascia speaks. It’s an echoing, weightless noise. Down a crack in the earth, he sees a great cavern. White pillars like great bones rise to greet them, and he forgets the unrest in the earth.
“Look what I can do!” Ascia slips down first. Shadows move about her, nudging the space wider at her call. Iohmar follows. Darkness is a safe, warm beast.
This is a new talent; Ascia is learning her magic. It’s wonderful. He believes it’s very apt a fae born of his woods has a magic so similar to his yet so unique. Playing brother and sister is a very good thing indeed.
Ascia slides down a pillar. Iohmar balances atop one and wonders if he can make the jump to the next. Only the faintest flicker of the mountains and woods above reaches him. They must be very deep in the earth.
The mountain trembles.
Ascia looks up at him, a pinprick of light below where her skin casts off the darkness around her as Iohmar’s gathers the light, and cocks her head. She does this often, her ear resting on her shoulder when she’s curious.
Iohmar feels older for a moment—centuries upon centuries older—and can’t understand why.
He looks up, and the mountain trembles around him.
He lies on the floor. His bed is behind him, ground carpeted with leaves brittle and dead. It is not his room, not truly. His parents’ chambers should be his own. No. He doesn’t want them. He shouldn’t be in their chambers. It is their room and shouldn’t yet be his.
Perhaps he should rise and lie on the blankets. Certainly, he should tend to his people. Make an appearance if not speak to them. Be their king beneath the earth. After all, his body now bears the wounds of protecting them and their home.
But he’s been crying for hours. What a terror he’ll look. Galen is seated on the ground beside him. Somehow, at some point, Iohmar’s head came to rest on the caretaker’s lap. The old fae is petting his hair, touching fingers along his back and torso, sending soothing warmth along the healing skin. Iohmar cannot move away.
He’s reacting as a child.
But Galen wept when Iohmar did. He supposes, then, it can’t be too shameful a thing. He allowed the old creature to tend to his wounds after a time.
I must rise. He knows he should. He is king beneath the earth.
His body will not leave the floor, neither does Galen move him, and they remain as such through the darkest hours of midnight.
Iohmar observes the human child through the window. The mother he found far in the woods and deep beneath the earth. Crows surround him, swarm before his eyes and land atop his head and shoulders and feet. Their beaks peck his hands. Their cries are soft and curious. Beady eyes turn upon the human babe.
The king’s own eyes flicker to the man in the corner unknowing of his sunlight presence. A human matter was hardly worth him leaving the mountain. He should’ve wandered home the moment he met the men on the path. They spoke to him of their troubles. Their human lives are so short, so insignificant and small. Is this truly worth my magic and concern?
A coo reaches his ears. The human thing grins at him. He sees Iohmar. Even in the sunlight. Children must react differently to his magic.
Quietly, the babe gurgles, reaching for him with infinitely small grasping fingers.
Iohmar leans his horns in the cracked window frame.
His daidí kisses his forehead and speaks. Iohmar cannot hear the words. His head is full of down. Words drift over him like heavy water, like floating in Rúnda’s sea.
How can I have such memories? He is a little thing, a child with a mountain collapsed upon him.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” his daidí tells him, because it has been days and days since the earth collapsed, and no one ever found her.
Iohmar likes to step through sunbeams. Ascia called shadows to her, didn’t she? Or was it the earth itself? What were the last words she spoke to me?
She must have slipped away from him forever. One day, will he slip into a sunbeam and never return to his body? Will he never be anything other than dust motes and warm light, nowhere and everywhere at once? Covering his mountains and his woods and his people, his daidí and mhamaí. He will circle the sun and the moon and her stars.
He will be something other than this strange thing he is.
The king beneath the earth leaves a bundle of twigs in place of the babe. Handling such a delicate thing is odd. Fae children are not so breakable, so soft. The babe is small, fitting within his palm and fingers.
He tests his magic against the child’s, for all humans have at least a scrap of it, a shred of light and warmth to fuel their life. What he finds is as small and weak as the child itself. It’s concerning, but it further assuages his uncertainty at taking the boy. The child will be safe in Látwill until he finds a suitable home.
Round human eyes gaze at him, a fawn lost in the evening light, a wisp of weight in his palm. The boy smiles, and Iohmar’s lips twitch.
He tucks the creature into the crook of his left elbow with care. There are no more tears, nothing in the silence but the existence of the woods, the flapping of his crows, and the harsh movements from the vile thing within the shack that has the gall to call itself human.
He thinks of the bundle of twigs and the child it will mirror while the real babe lies safe in his arms. A terrifying death. A fitting end to a creature which committed so horrible a murder. Iohmar need not monitor the magic or think on it for it to take effect.
With a rustle and sweep of his robes, he leaves the cursed bundle in the makeshift crib fit for no loved thing. He melts into the woods, followed by a shaft of sunlight and a flock of gossiping crows.
26
