The Hunter's Prey (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 5) (4 page)

I glanced at him. His gaze held me.

I swallowed and made myself stare at the edge of the horizon, where the world went flat and lost all detail.

“Well then, you see… I don’t know how to do this,” he said, so quietly I could have ignored the words.

“By this do you mean wooing me?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I would never claim to woo you, Morgan. Such words are much too small to hold the…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know how to do this. Give me a complicated spell that a dozen other wizards have given up on and I will create something sublime. But I have been a busy man, Morgan. I have spent my days serving your brother. Fighting you. Being the Merlin that so many in Wales wish me to be, there has been little room for—”

“Women?” I asked.

He sighed. “That was not what I was going to say. Though that’s just the problem, isn’t it? One does not plainly state with words what is in one’s heart. One must prove it by acts of valor, and yet I scarcely know how to hold a sword much less hold it without cutting myself to pieces.”

It was my turn to chuckle.

“The thought of me being brave amuses you?” He set his plate aside.

I leaned toward him. “The thought that such a man could grab hold of me and transform me and fill me as you do,” I said and then closed my mouth, lest more words would run out and into the world. It felt heady and strange to be this honest with him, and I wondered if he could hold my words. If he was big enough to hold me.

He pierced me with his blue eyes, leveling his wizardly gaze that was ever used to studying things and discovering their underlying truth. I stared back, trying to figure him out just as intensely.

“Are you trying to tell me, Morgan le Fay, free child of the isle of apples, that you love me?” He spoke with a teasing lilt in his voice.

I swallowed. “Do not put words into my mouth.” In all my days, I had never told a man or woman that. Witches must be ever careful about revealing their powers, especially around a crafty wizard. Only this wasn’t magic, not precisely, or it was, but of a strange and subtle variety. The dangers weren’t the same, but they were still real.

“I ask if you love me, because I have been wondering the proper way to tell you that I love you, fully and deeply, and that you are, quite simply, the best thing that has ever happened to me.” His cheeks pinked as he spoke. He reached toward my face and tucked some errant hairs behind my ear. His hand shook.

Minute after minute passed, and I kept thinking of things to say and then not saying them, and then thinking of more words and then discarding those. I looked toward Castle Tintagel, toward the ocean, and at the nothingness of the wind.

Finally, Merlin growled, “Damn the man who falls for a woman like you. I can’t tell if you are toying with me like a cat with a bleeding mouse, or just trying to find the gentle way to let me down.”

“Neither,” I managed to say. My voice cracked. I took a swig of water to steady my voice. I couldn’t say it. I had to say it. “My dear wizard, I love you too.”

“Off we go, Master Tintagel,” I replied as I slipped my arm through Merlin’s, banishing the sweet thoughts of that far off day. We had called each other Master and Mistress Tintagel many times in our past, every time we’d needed to hide our true identities. The names had always been a sweet joke between us, echoing back to the day when we’d first become, well, us. “We haven't done this in a while,” I added, letting an aristocratic Welsh accent slide into my voice.

“Eleven hundred and twelve years hence,” he said. “Let us both look sharp in there, lass.”

“Razored steel,” I promised.

“Embedded with sharpened glass,” he added.

We straightened our backs, raised our chins, and walked forward with long strides that said we belonged here regardless of our stained clothing, our unwashed hair, and our haggard looks. We clearly deserved our place at this regal palace and hunt.

Grunting sounds came from behind us. We turned to see another pair of unders of some sort enter the dome. Merlin's doorway had disappeared after we’d come through, and these two were grunting and breathing heavily. I guessed that they'd pushed their way through with their gnarled horns that pulsed with black magic. They were huge: half again as large as trolls.

“Any idea?” Merlin asked under his breath.

“No idea,” I whispered back. It was rare to see a creature one or the both of us didn’t know about.

We watched this pair, clad in dusty leather, as they walked down the garden path. They stomped on rows of tulips and broke the branches off some primroses as they neared. The air filled with a musky animal scent along with a gasoline stench.

“Afternoon,” one said.

“Has it started?” the other grumbled.

“Not sure, mates,” Merlin said.

They lumbered by, knocking over a reedy cherry tree and crushing a rosemary hedge with their thick feet.

We followed in their footsteps, hoping if any guarded the door they would assume we were with the rhino-unders.

But there was no one at the door, so we walked through the golden doorway and moved down a long hallway laid with a patterned tile floor that led to an open room at the end of it. With every step closer, a heady scent of conflicting magics filled the air. It made me hum and filled my mouth with the taste of sour metal. The sounds of excited talking and laughter flowed out of the room.

Merlin grabbed my elbow when we were still two dozen steps away and pulled me to the side of the hallway. We stood between two potted palm trees that stretched up toward the ceiling.

“Unders in Seattle gathering for some kind of hunt,” he said. “And you, the self-appointed protector of Seattle's unders. You might not be able to let their mischief stand once you know what they are truly up to.”

“I know.” I stared at his strangely-aligned face. The visage should fool others, but I would always see and know him, whatever he looked like. Perhaps it was the memories of Tintagel, but I found myself leaning toward him and getting lost in his scent. I swallowed and stepped back. “Thank you, Master Tintagel, for your concern. But for whatever reason, I feel I must go in there. Call it a witch’s intuition.”

He nodded. Our fingers twined together as we walked down the rest of the hallway and into the large room full of hundreds of unders of every persuasion.

5

The Eyes of the Manticore

At first there was so much to take in, on every level of my senses, that it was difficult to parse. The room was large: larger than the exterior of the palace implied. It lay full of crystal and silver chandeliers lit with candles and a high ceiling that let in swathes of brilliant sunshine. Tables peppered the room, all of them set with a feast full of skewered and roasted meats. The smell was mouth-watering.

Milling everywhere were the oddest assortment of unders I had ever seen. Some of them were solo, others stood among their clansmen. I watched five were-wolverines that smelled of fresh blood. I saw a tall man made of… I would guess many parts of many bodies. Not a chimeric creature, but more of a Frankenstein. He glanced at me, and the instinct to flee kicked me hard in the belly. Near him stood three… my eyes could not stand to gaze upon their awkward and many-jointed legs and their gaping mouths. I knew not what they were, and I knew not to judge a book by its cover, but they were….

Monstrous. The word came to me, and once I thought it, the truth of this room came into focus.

Although the mundane world will always uniformly see us as monsters, that is not how we unders see each other. Monster means unders of a species or type that is reflexively wicked. That is naturally so. A pixy or a leprechaun is not a monster, but a basilisk is.

Reformed is another term we use, and I believe reform is always possible, regardless of the species. So many of us were born to rage and have a violent purpose, and then have found that as the years pass, wisdom and time tempers the soul and one's nature of, for example, eating children, lessens until the very thought of it turns one's stomach, even if the baser instinct remains.

So in this room, they were all monsters, which was to say, they all had the natural capabilities to be wicked and cruel. But whether they actually were monsters? That question could only be answered by the truth of their deeds and not by the bodies they wore. Even so, it was chilling that there was nary a gentle species in sight.

A trio of succubi stood in the shadows. They had plates piled high with meat and their eyes shone eerily red. Near them stood a short and hairy Tikoloshe that emanated black strands of fear. And next to him, stood a slight, plain-faced woman wearing a peasant’s dress. There was nothing outwardly monstrous about her, and yet my breath hissed out of me as I saw Agnes Stonehouse.

I first saw what I assumed was Agnes Stonehouse’s body turning in the wind. She hung from a hempen rope as a rotting lesson to any and every woman who knew a bit about herbs and healing.

She had been one of many who stood trial for witchcraft in England during the burning times, and I had traveled to the small and backward courthouse in Hatfield in the hopes that I could find this persecuted witch and steal her away in the black of night. But word and travel were slow back then, and by the time I arrived she was already hanging.

I turned and began to walk back to my horse, unwilling to stay even one night in this hateful town, no matter that I had not slept in two days. Before I had taken five steps, a soft and mean laughter came out of the shadows, and a witch stepped forward to face me.

“You are not welcome in this town. Leave my domain now, while you I let you,” she said.

“Sister witch,” I called back softly, “these are treacherous times and none of us are safe. I come in peace, to help my own.”

She laughed again. An ugly and wet sound. “I am letting you leave. Take my offer while it stands. See what I do to any who think to stand against the great Agnes Stonehouse?” She gestured up at the woman’s body hanging nearby. “That’s my neighbor who went to the magistrates complaining I had cursed her family’s well to fill with salt.” The witch laughed. “Which of course I had. The magistrates came for me and I bewitched and befuddled them to take her instead. To take her and hang her. All of Hatfield feels proud they hung the wretched witch. So I say to you, sister witch, flee while you can. For I am the witch of Hatfield who can spell the entire town to do as I wish.”

I should have turned and left. I threw punching spells at her face instead, furious that she would attempt such witchcraft when so many others were burning. I threw spells at her for being a true practitioner of the craft, and having no morality to temper those skills.

My spells fell to the ground like rocks and didn’t come close to hitting her. Agnes Stonehouse swayed from side to side as a great spell rose up from the cobblestone beneath my feet. I stood in her place of power. I could not fight her here. I fled, for I had no other choice. Our paths never crossed again.

“I know that one. A bad witch, as bad as any of the monsters here,” I murmured to Merlin and pointed at Agnes.

He stared at her, oddly intense and focused. “No need to worry, lass. She’s no match for you.”

I shook my head. “True, but it’s not just her, is it? It’s all of these creatures. Did you see there’s a Lamia and a Lilith over there? To say nothing of the night lich.”

A slim creature walked past us with an elongated neck and sharp teeth. It had been many years since I'd seen one of her kind: a kelpie river faerie, renowned for luring the gullible to a watery death.

“Greetings, warrior of the Unseelie Court,” I called out to her. I needed to talk to someone. To understand more of what was going on here.

She turned to study me with the large eyes all fae folk shared.

“Salutations, witch,” she said with a voice that sounded like she was underwater still. She glided toward me. “I have not seen you at any of the hunts before.” Her eyes glinted silver and water.

There had been other hunts? “The last one was when?”

She smirked. “How little you know. It was… thirty years hence? Yes. They always occur that far apart. Your question, answered. And you, tell me, what is it you seek from the witch’s true boon? What is it you need above all else, that she can give you?” The kelpie stepped nearer and flared her wide nostrils.

“There are many ways I might use a true boon,” I answered.

She laughed. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t win.” She moved away from me gracefully.

A voice spoke from right behind me, so close that I flinched. “They're all trying not to stare at you two. They’re all curious about the new human couple: an unknown witch and wizard.”

Merlin and I turned to see a man dressed in green from head to foot. He had green eyes to match and a green magic surrounded him. He stood too close to us, and held out bubbly flutes of champagne for both of us to take.

I took the slender glass, but was not fool enough to take a sip.

“And you, forestling? What do you make of us?” I asked in old Welsh, even though I did not know for sure that he would know the dialect.

My guess was correct. He answered back in my mother tongue. “Let me see. Yes, hmm. You both are old and thick with magic. Clever, you must be, to be so old. And desperate, because you are here, in this most desperate place, but also because you wear such sadness on your sleeves.”