Time becomes like a lake and he like the stone skipped across it. Whatever’s being done to him, he strains to reach the numbness that lets him miss most of it.
Then one day he wakes in his small cell, and grief has less pull on him. He half accepts what’s happened—it has all been done to him, out of his control—and with that acceptance comes a moment of clarity, of reassurance: Janet is alive somewhere. His child is alive somewhere. He has saved them, though Sìleas paid the price. The fault for that belongs to the pilgrims and the elven, not to him. More than that, it’s a reminder that these monsters do make mistakes.
He’s still alive. Doesn’t his survival indicate that Nicnevin doesn’t intend to kill him—at least not immediately, otherwise why not use him up completely?
So, when next the jewels lead him to her massive chamber and her bed, before she begins, he signals a desire to speak. She considers him indulgently. “Something different, mayfly? Have you come to your senses enough to have questions?” She draws her robe around her and gestures for him to proceed.
He tries to speak, begins to cough instead. His inability seems to amuse her. Finally, in a raspy voice, he says, “You turn me to Yvag, yourself to human. Why?”
“Are my whims insufficient reason?”
He shakes his head. “I know—” He clears his throat. “It exhausts you.”
“You know that, do you? I must not be using you sufficiently if you have time to consider my exhaustion. What can you possibly understand of my capabilities?”
He doesn’t answer. It’s only happened a few times, and only for a second. The first time was when she transformed him back from a ram; she didn’t realize he saw the effort it took. The other two times, here, he has been at the point of collapsing himself. He can’t be certain what strain he actually saw.
“You ponder the imponderable, I think. But you have asked politely, so I will tell you, though whether you can comprehend remains to be seen. As I’ve told you once before, the Yvag race is sempiternal. Effectively to you, we are immortals. Do you recall I asked if you appreciated the cruelty you inflict upon us when you kill us? Yes, yes, your brother, our teind, I know your perspective, and you’re hardly the first to express it. But let me ask you, do you think about the life of a rabbit before you skin it for dinner? It lived to be your meal. You don’t think about it at all. You—that is, your kind—exist to be a tithe we must pay. We choose not to pay with our own kind, because our numbers are insufficient. If we had remained the teind, there would already be none of us left. The price paid for immortality turned out to be our fecundity. Now only a small number of us have sufficient . . . well, you don’t have a word for it. We call it astralis. It is the stuff of stars within us all, the spark that ignites life. When you slaughter our kind, you’re not snuffing out a life, you’re obliterating a memory that’s existed since before your solar system even swirled together. Of course you don’t know what that even means. The crime of killing one of us is unspeakable, and you don’t take one, you take three and four at one go. If I listened to the likes of Ađalbrandr, you would already be flung into the well of worlds. But you see . . .”
She brushes his chin, pricks him with a talon. He is instantly burning with lust for her again. Watching it take over his expression, she grins. White, needlelike teeth fill his view.
She leans close to him and whispers, “The Queen wants an heir.”
He seizes up. The pressure swells and lightning crackles in his head again, but she clamps down upon the seizure like the pincers of a lewis.
“Ah, ah, I told you, no fits, no riddles. You will give me a child, mayfly. We are not compatible species, but that I will fix. Either as a human, your sap mixing in me while I’m transformed, or else as an Yvag with such potency that your own rich astralis will roar through me like an ocean wave. You serve a far greater cause than my pleasure, though you serve that, too. Think on this—should your seed take in me, your offspring, our offspring, will expand our diversity, will outlive your own universe.” She bites his throat then, a dozen tiny pinpricks, and sucks his blood. It trickles from beneath her lips, down his chest. She pulls back, grinning, licking her bloody lips. While sucking his blood, she has made herself human once more—made herself into a demonic Janet again.
She casts off the black-and-gold robe. “Now,” she says, “again,” and the word resounds as if chasing him down the plaza well.
The last thing he remembers is the glowing ribs of the arches overhead, toward which he, released from his body at last, seems to float. But try as he might, he cannot pierce the veil, cannot reach heaven. The Queen of Elves reels him back in.
“Welcome back, little brother,” the voice in his head whispers.
He opens his crusted eyes. He has been returned to his cell. Food has been left upon another paten—smoking meat, some cheese, and a toasted barley bannock—and although it rouses his appetite, he makes no move. Just stares at it.
Alpin? Alpin, get me from here.
No answer comes. It might have been a voice in a dream, but it’s set his thoughts awhirl with impossible possibilities: of tearing off the jewels of obedience, of escaping from this labyrinth and finding his way home again, even though for all he knows the Þagalwood, hidden on the far side of a portal, might be on the other side of the world. Unbowed by these obstacles, he conjures up a joyous return to Janet, and their flight to some other country, somewhere safe from skinwalkers, far from Ercildoun and Roxburgh, Yvagddu, and changelings. Surely, there must be some place where the eldritch creatures haven’t intruded.
Eventually, he crawls to the end of his pallet and eats his meal with the eagerness of a man with renewed purpose. They have not killed him. They will not kill him. The Queen wants a child by him, as ridiculous as that seems. He’s not done in, not yet. Sooner or later, there will be opportunity for escape. There must be.
It is as he’s drifting off, surfeited, that he vaguely senses a presence in his room. He opens his eyes but otherwise doesn’t move. A tall, darkly robed figure is picking up the round paten, the remains of his meal, its hands revealed to be huge and bone white. The fingers are long, weirdly segmented.
He raises his head. “Wait,” he tries to say, forgetting that the stones have taken his voice again.
The figure pauses. From the depths of its cowl, two dull violet eyes glow. As though it’s heard his thought and now considers him. Then it turns and rises all in one swift movement, and in turning away seems to melt into the shadows of his doorway—so quick and silent that he’s not sure it was there in the first place. But the hands . . . they were like the overhead branches and twigs of the Þagalwood.
He drifts off again, dreams of a skeleton companion mocking him with Waldroup’s voice.
He wakes while being dragged to the pond again, doused and scrubbed to death, then hauled back through the labyrinth. Try as he might, he can’t memorize the route, almost as if the way transforms each time, as if the building is alive and altering itself. Then he’s deposited with the Queen; she immediately alters him so that he drowns in pain, then infects him and her desire consumes him, blasting away his last mote of consciousness.
The routine of captivity defines his entire existence now.
He has never done anything else; it’s as if that precious life he remembers scraps of is pure fantasy, concocted perhaps by the voice in his head that he calls Alpin. He can barely recall who that might be—random images of battles and skirmishes, of slicing stones. Has the Queen’s plan worked? Is there something growing in her? Astralis. She told him what it was but he’s lost track as he’s lost track of how many times she’s disjointed his body into an Yvag shape. Will she use him up or cast him aside? Clearly, she’s unconcerned that he might try to escape. The choker never comes off, and probably won’t for as long as he endures here. But in those few moments of solitude she affords him, he can barely walk across his small chamber without collapsing. The only escape he’s planning now is to die, and it seems Nicnevin’s in no hurry to allow it; she’ll wear him to a husk first.
How many years will have passed outside? How many winters is he missing under the furs and skins with his sweet, warm Janet? Janet, whose memory has all but been replaced by the distorted, leering face the Queen has given her. So, too, Innes, with her sunken eyes and cracked lips, and Sìleas, grinning like a ravenous demon. These are the faces he sees each time the Queen takes him. Now there lurks a subterranean need for the feel of Nicnevin against his palms. Her lust is like a love-philter, and he’s twinned and turned and helpless in its all-consuming sorcery. Thoughts of Janet as she was are like a sprinkle of rain after an ocean has dashed him against rocks over and over.
If his fate lies in the hands of the Queen, there’s one matter that gnaws at him still. Lying upon his pallet, he keeps turning it over. Eventually, as if the ghost in his head has been watching and listening, Waldroup quietly intrudes.
“What difference will it make, Tom? Even if you learn the answer, it’s not as if you’ll be allowed to tell Innes.”
“I know. It makes no difference, other than that I won’t stare into the eyes of every one of these elves and wonder if that’s the one.”
“You want an answer, even at the risk of her spleen? If this is her kindness, her venom will split you wide.”
“I know.”
The next time he manages to gather his wits in bed with the Queen, in sweaty postcoital emptiness, he signals to her that he wants to speak again. After a moment, she flicks her hand as if it’s a trivial matter, and releases his voice. “What now?” she asks.
He massages his throat, then in a raspy voice announces, “I would like to see my nephew.”
Her pinpoint pupils widen into rings. “Your what?”
“My sister’s child. Your . . . skinwalker, Elgadorn, swapped him for a pile of twigs, a glamoured forest thing. According to you, you took him to make a new one of your kind, which means he’s here somewhere in your world.”
“Undoubtedly to replace someone you murdered. Such as Elgadorn.”
He closes his eyes so she won’t see the simmering rage in them. “This was well before I put an arrow through any of your undercroft sleepers, so think again.” Opening his eyes again he can see that her patience is running out. He goes on quickly: “Once upon a time this Elgadorn inhabited a drowned body named Balthair MacGillean, slew his entire family to place himself in charge, then married my sister and fathered a child off her. Afterward, he left her to rot away in her madness with a little horror fashioned out of sticks to suckle. Do you even know of the events that happen in your kingdom?”
