Huntress (20 page)
K
aede did not know what to do. She went to Taisin’s room and stood outside the door, but she could not bring herself to knock. She could barely believe what had just happened—it was all so surreal, this place with its impossibly smooth walls and intoxicating lights. Perhaps they hadn’t really kissed at all; perhaps it was all just an illusion. But she could still feel Taisin’s mouth against hers, the bones of her spine beneath her fingers. Kaede’s entire body burned at the memory. But Taisin had fled from her. Kaede remembered their whispered conversation in the middle of the night after leaving Mona’s cottage. Taisin was promised elsewhere. What had made Kaede think Taisin had changed her mind? Kaede’s heart sank. She turned away from the closed door and went back to her own room.
She spent a restless night in bed, dreaming of walking down the corridor between her room and Taisin’s. Each time she knocked on the door, and each time she woke up just before it opened, every muscle tense.
When dawn came, she dressed and went into the sitting room. No one was there, but the table was already laden with fresh fruit and warm bread. There was even a strange object that she eventually recognized as a teapot, and when she lifted the hinged lid, a rich aroma was released. She poured a small amount into one of the delicate porcelain cups and sipped it cautiously. It had an unusual, roasted flavor that she immediately liked.
She finished two cups of it before Taisin appeared. Though she made no sound, Kaede noticed her immediately, standing hesitantly in the doorway. When their eyes met, Taisin blushed, and the sight of her flaming cheeks gave Kaede some courage. She would have gone to her at once, but then Con brushed past Taisin, entering the room with a yawn.
“Are you sure we’re not all dreaming?” Con said in a voice still laced with sleep. He picked up an orange fruit and began to peel it, revealing a light pink interior. He pulled off a segment and sighed with pleasure. “This is much better than camping.”
Kaede choked on a laugh, and he smiled at her. She wondered if he had said that on purpose, for she felt the tension in the room dissipate—at least a little.
Taisin sat down and took a piece of bread, stealing a glance at Kaede as she said, “I have to agree with you.” Kaede caught the end of her look, and all of her came alive with awareness. She thought: Maybe she has changed her mind after all.
That morning, they each made use of the bathing chamber adjacent to the sitting room; they each dressed in the cleanest of their clothes; and then there was nothing to do but pace the stone floor and wait for the Huntsman to arrive.
After so many weeks on the road, the last hour was the hardest to bear. Kaede surreptitiously watched Taisin, who had braided her wet hair and fixed it with a black comb on her head. Her neck was exposed, scrubbed clean and pink, and every time Kaede glanced at her, the pink crept a little farther up until Taisin turned away and went, trembling, to stand by the window, her back to the room. Kaede sat in a chair and looked down at her hands; she could still feel the small of Taisin’s back beneath them. Her heart fluttered in her throat. She didn’t know how long she could stand this queer pretense that nothing had happened between them. But when she thought of what she might say to Taisin, the words would not come. Her mouth was dry; her palms were clammy. It was like an illness, she thought, or an enchantment: these feelings that cloaked everything in a fog of desire. Here she was in the Fairy Queen’s palace at last, after a journey that had killed two men who did not deserve to die; after her hands had been bloodied more than once; and she could barely even remember why she was here. All she wanted was to kiss Taisin again.
Con, who normally would have been sensitive to the strained silence that gripped Kaede and Taisin, was consumed by his own anxieties. Before leaving Cathair, he had discussed the Kingdom’s position on the Borderlands Treaty with his father and Lord Raiden, but now that he was here in Taninli, he realized that all the advice they had given him was worthless. King Cai and Lord Raiden knew every detail of the political machinations that were about to erupt in civil war in the southern provinces, but they had no idea what was going on in the Wood. He wondered if they even truly believed that the Fairy Queen existed. She was a figure lost to the mists of history, and though the Council of Sages took her invitation seriously, Con knew that his father only submitted to the Council because of tradition. His father was a man of action; he did his best to ignore the unseen world that the sages worked in. If the Council ever made a demand on him that challenged his power, Con was sure that his father would deny it.
King Cai had told him to play the diplomat; to flatter the Queen yet promise nothing. Con knew that he would not be able to do this. He had seen too much on the way to Taninli to doubt the significance of the Queen’s invitation. This was no mere social call, and he was almost sick from nerves. He had visited governors of distant provinces before; he had attended state banquets and done his best to charm those his father asked him to charm. But he was certain that those experiences had been nothing compared to this. He suspected that the Queen had more in mind than a simple renewal of that ancient treaty, and he did not know if he had the power to give it to her—or the judgment to decide if he could.
When the Huntsman came to the door at last, Con sprang up, agitation vying with relief on his face. “Finally,” he said. “It’s been a long morning.”
The Huntsman gave him a sympathetic look. “Shall we go?”
He led them down long corridors of gray-veined marble, past banks of sunny windows, and through a rotunda in which a statue of a unicorn lifted its head toward the arched ceiling. At its feet a stone phoenix spread its wings. They passed Xi dressed in every shade between white and pale blue, who seemed to melt out of sight as soon as Kaede noticed them. The effect was disquieting; it made her wonder if the whole palace was just an extraordinary illusion.
The throne room was reached by climbing one last wide flight of stairs that culminated in grand redwood doors. They reminded Kaede of the doors to the Council chambers; they even had similar handles set in the very center. They opened into a long, broad hall; windows along one wall overlooked a garden sculpted into a perfect wilderness. At the far end of the room, a low dais supported a crystal throne cushioned in green silk. Seated there was the Fairy Queen. When she saw them enter, she leaned forward slightly, laying her right hand on the armrest.
It was a long walk to the dais, and their footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged room. The Huntsman reached the Queen first and bowed deeply before introducing the humans. He spoke in his own language, but Con recognized their names, and when the Queen’s eyes flicked over him, he shivered. The Queen’s face was glowing, ageless; her eyes were the color of gold. She was beautiful, but it was a fearsome kind of beauty, like the mirrored edge of a finely crafted blade.
Con swallowed; his mouth was so dry. He stepped forward and bowed to the Queen. “Your Majesty,” he said formally, “I come as a representative of my father, King Cai Simin Tan. He regrets that he is personally unable to respond to your invitation.”
The Queen spoke in his language: “Why have you come in his place?”
“Our kingdom is suffering through a difficult time, and my father could not be spared.”
“Tell me about this difficulty,” the Queen said. She studied him intently, and Con had to look away to avoid her eyes. He realized that there was no furniture in the entire room except for her throne; all visitors had to either stand or kneel before her. It was an old trick; his father employed the same strategy. The thought galvanized him. But he allowed himself to look slightly past the Queen as he spoke, so that he would not have to withstand the full force of her gaze.
“For the last several years, Your Majesty, our winters have been… extremely hard. Many of our provinces have experienced storms that have been extraordinarily fierce. Livestock have died; food stores have been destroyed unexpectedly. We have survived these winters, but each summer the harvests have been increasingly poor. This year, summer has not come. My people are starving. Several of the provinces are on the verge of insurrection. This is why my father could not be here.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “And there have been other things. There have been sightings of strange creatures near the border of the Wood. Creatures that are not human. We have encountered them ourselves on our journey here.”
“What have you seen?”
He told her about the reports his father had received about creatures, possibly fay, entering the Kingdom in the north. He told her about the creature in Ento, and the body that had been found outside of Jilin. The Queen’s face remained impassive as he spoke, and when he finished she asked, “Is that all?”
Con bristled. She sounded as if she thought what he had told her was of no consequence. “No, that is not all, Your Majesty. We came here at your invitation, but along the way we lost two of our party. One—Tali, who was a guard to me since I was a boy—he was killed by whatever tortured spirits are haunting the Great Wood that separates your land from mine. And another guard, Pol, was mauled to death by wolves who attacked our entire party. A third, Shae—” Here his voice almost broke, but he continued on with a fresh burst of anger. “Shae was nearly killed as well, and we were forced to leave her behind to make sure we arrived here as you asked, because my people have heard nothing from your kind in generations, and to receive such an invitation during a time of catastrophe—it—” He broke off, trying to compose himself. He looked straight at the Queen. “It could not be a coincidence. We are here, Your Majesty. Why have you asked us to come?”
The Queen swept her eyes over him from head to toe; he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Finally she said, “I am sorry to hear about your companions. And you are correct. My invitation to your king was not a coincidence. But the answer to your question is somewhat… involved.” She settled back in her throne and turned her eyes to the long windows.
“Our ties with your people have been mostly severed, but once, it was different. Once, our lands were more closely entwined. Once, our people mingled with each other. But it was not an entirely peaceful commingling. We live so many generations longer than your people do. Some things that we remember, you forget. We could not coexist without misunderstanding each other.
“So, in time, there was war. A long, bloody war. It destroyed countless numbers of my people as well as yours. At the end of it, the survivors on both sides drew up a treaty to prevent such destruction from ever happening again. Afterward, the remaining fay scattered. The Xi remained here in Taninli, but the lesser fay retreated to their own hollows and mountains and forests. And gradually, your people forgot about us. We both kept to our sides of the bargain. Even if there has been isolation, there has also been peace.
“All this happened before I was born. Few of my people were alive when the treaty was signed. And in the intervening years, some of my people have become curious about your kind. You live such short lives compared to ours; we wonder what makes them worth living.”
The Queen looked at Con with a trace of regret on her face, and for the first time that day, the glamour she wore cracked. She did not look old in a human sense, but there were centuries in her, and there had been pain.
She continued: “One Xi woman lived near the border between our land and yours. She encountered a human man one summer, and she took him as a lover. She became pregnant. She was terrified, for she knew her halfling child might not be welcome in either of our lands. She came to Taninli and begged for my mercy. I gave her shelter here while she labored, but she did not survive childbirth. The halfling did survive. It was a girl. I raised her as my own daughter.”
The Queen’s face hardened, and once again she gazed out the windows. “She was given everything, this girl—every delicacy, every bauble, every privilege I could give her—but she always wanted more. She was stubborn. She would never acknowledge that she was not truly Xi. She demanded to be named my heir, but it was impossible. The time has not yet come for me to name an heir, and when it does, I will not choose a halfling.”
The words were spoken coldly, but it seemed as if the Queen were holding her emotions tightly in check. A blue vein in her right temple throbbed. Taisin began to tense up; she had a dreadful fear that she knew what the Queen was about to say.
“When she realized I would not change my mind—that she would never rule the fay as she desired—she left Taninli. It has been a dozen years since she walked out of this city’s gates. In that time, I have sensed her power growing. I believe she is drinking up the energies of the fay and discarding them when they become too weak to benefit her. The ones who survive have come to me seeking help, but I can do nothing for them. She takes their lives; she becomes stronger with each fairy who dies.”
Taisin felt sick. All the cages she had seen in her visions; the glimpses of the fay trapped within them—she knew now that they had been imprisoned there by this woman.