She smiles, fully exposing her sharp teeth. “Very good, mayfly. I will soon transition with child for the very first time. But don’t worry, we do not expect you to share in raising them, though you will survive here long enough to see them mature. Perhaps long enough for them to get a child off you, too.”
He glances at the unconscious Ađalbrandr. Is that why he came after me?
“It’s humiliating to him. Ađalbrandr is so many things, as I’ve said before. Passionate, overweening, jealous. But sterile, most of all.” Her strange eyes fix upon his. “Perhaps why he hates you most of all. A jealous consort—I wonder how long I will tolerate that.”
She dismisses him with a look, then glances around at her entourage.
“All of you,” proclaims Nicnevin, “the Royal Hunt is ended here, fittingly where trolls once lived. Time for us all to return to our city.”
She signals the remaining knight, who takes hold of Thomas, while the others drag Ađalbrandr to the bone-white mount. The skeletal thing lowers itself that they might throw the Yvag upon its back.
“Ah,” she adds, as if a thought has just occurred to her. “And we wish to see all the beaters when we return. I’m curious that you directed this novice to these troll ruins. I fear some of you have not upheld the standards of our court today. This shall be addressed.” Looks of fear are traded among the changelings in blue and green.
She waves a hand to direct them back up the slope. Then she leans down nearer Thomas. “It is our race’s affliction, sterility. It’s the reason for changelings. We tell you this because we have enjoyed your passion, your terror and revulsion, mayfly, more than any human we can recall taking, and we have tried a few. If you do prove viable—and we’ll have to wait for the chrysalis to crack to be absolutely certain—well, then, we will have a far more, ah, extended use for you among a greater part of the populace. We’ll pass you around like a tasty bit of dinner.”
She touches his face tenderly. For once this does not infuse him with lust of any sort.
“Goodbye for now, Thomas Rimor.”
Something stings the back of his neck: the jewel. He slaps at it, but even in that moment feels himself twisting up, falling away from the scene and into a darkness that’s been awaiting him all along. He thinks, I’m in Hel, and tries to claw his way back out, but there’s nothing to grab onto, no sides, nothing but the void that will pull him apart. He calls out to Janet, but in the void makes not a sound.
He is tossed like a sack of grain across the nearest beast’s withers in front of one of the Yvag knights, who, climbing up, as if by accident, hammers a spiny elbow into his face.
XXV. Taliesin
Thomas wakes to someone calling, “Helo, art ti present? ’Tis my belief I do hear ti.”
He doesn’t answer directly, instead staring at the dark domed ceiling overhead, how it smoothly curves into polished walls of a small cell. It’s all seemingly as shot with stars as the strangely quilted sky, but these stars, jewels, whatever they are, flicker like candlelight, providing what illumination there is in this space, as dim as the daylight outside. The cell has been scooped out of some substance he can’t identify. He brushes his hand over it—neither stone nor wood but hard, smooth.
He’s lying on a pallet. Perhaps it’s the same one as in the Queen’s summer house. Is that where he is, a new chamber in that chaotic spiral of an enclosure? Beside the pallet stands a stone seat like a hollow toadstool grown right out of the floor; its shape suggests its function—another garderobe of some kind. The multitude of flickering spots throw conflicting shadows everywhere. He wonders why they didn’t toss him into that all-devouring well, then recalls the Queen’s suggestion of how they will put him to use if he has truly succeeded in getting her with child.
After a minute comes the “Helo?” again. The voice is harsh, an old voice, and it draws his attention away from brooding.
Thomas sits up, finds that he’s still dressed in the torn gray clothes of the hunt. His hygiene ceased being of concern to the elves awhile ago, but now they aren’t even concerned with the shreds of his costume, which says everything about his situation. So then . . .
He touches his throat. The jewels have been removed, front and back.
He jumps up. Approaches the doorway of his cell, another open arch, the same basic form that repeated everywhere in the Queen’s summer house. There is no door, no bars, nothing obvious, just . . . a hand reaching around the edge, waggling fingers that end in thick horny nails.
He reaches tentatively out, expecting he doesn’t know what—a stabbing pain, a shock, some sort of crippling punishment. There’s nothing.
The reaching hand latches onto his arm. Untrimmed fingernails dig into his skin.
“Ah!” he cries, throat raw. Pulls his arm free while he begins coughing. He spoke. He can speak again!
The sound of nervous laughter. “Oh, so ti art not my imagination?”
“Should”—he clears his throat loudly—“should I be?”
A long pause. Then the voice, as if talking to someone else, says, “Do we tell him he might still be? That seems unnecessary if he is.”
Still expecting to find himself in some other part of the Queen’s house, Thomas wanders into the central space. It’s another large circle, one ringed with seven identical arches counting his cell. An old man stands in the one beside him, but he ducks into each of the five others. Surely one must provide an exit, a way out.
The cells, however, prove to be identical right down to the garderobe seat in each, as if the elves anticipate five more human prisoners soon. Embedded stars light up and glitter as he enters each, but the spaces offer nothing in the way of hope. There’s not another doorway or chamber or hall branching off any of them.
He returns to the center circle, and looks up expecting to find a trapdoor in the ceiling, something. There is no door, and not even a line in the ceiling. It’s not an oubliette, either.
All the while the old man just stands there, at the front of his own cell, a sympathetic smile on his tilted face. He slowly shakes his shaggy head. “Na way out, yes, he’ll see.”
He is shorter than Thomas, bearded and covered with hair so thick it’s almost a pelt. He looks like a woodwose, and up close he stinks like a wild man of the woods, too. His head has turned, tracking Thomas’s movements around the ring of cells, but his eyes don’t track anything, looking nowhere and everywhere.
The stinking old man is blind.
He argues, “No way out, but they did put us in here. I didn’t just float in.”
“I cannot say, for I did not hear ti arrive. As likely a way as any, floating.” His words taper off into soft muttering.
Now he understands why they’ve removed the jewels. Where can he possibly go but around and around in a circle? He cannot pretend anymore, the way Waldroup’s ghost has urged, that this is temporary, that he will seize upon an opportunity to escape. He’s been removed from her court, her presence, permanently. She took what she wanted from him, and judging by the condition of his sole companion, he is as of now not even an afterthought. Mayfly.
While he frets, the old man reaches, pats his hand, then feels along his arm with both hands, more carefully this time, and continues patting at him, his chest, neck, face.
“Young,” he says, “strong, younger than was I when she took me. Still likes her pleasures then. Wrth gwrs, she does. Too strong the thrum and quiver for her ever to leave lust behind.” He chews on a finger, seems from his expression to be lost in fond recollection that all at once encounters a memory not so sweet. His expression blanches. After a moment, he recovers and asks, “What shall I call ti?”
“Thomas. Thomas Rimor de Ercildoun, sir.”
The old man cups his hands over his mouth, and excitedly breathes, “Yes!” as if the name has great meaning for him. Then, trembling, he lowers them. “Ercildoun, is it? Ffydd, I think I know not the place. Na, na. Prolly came after my time.”
