The King's Leash (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 7) (5 page)

The kelpie stopped swimming suddenly and threw me off her, neatly and succinctly. I landed, shivering, on the river’s muddy edge.

All of me shook and clenched, aching for warmth and safety.

The faerie turned slowly in the water, her body submerged in the depths, her nose, eyes and nostrils the only thing showing, until she faced me.

I tried to stop sobbing but the effort only racked me further.

“Tears of a child,” she said, with her voice hissing over the 's' sounds. “Why?”

“S-s-sorry. I just m-m-miss my mom and it’s my birthday. I wanted to prove myself to her, but whatever I do she won't know. At all. She'll never know and I miss her and it hurts and I’m sorry.”

“Hush,” she said and surged out of the water. She bumped her massive horse nose against my chest, pushing me backward. “Hush, child. For we all have mother-love. We all have mother-miss.” She pushed me again, and I stumbled backward and away from the river. “Go now, child of man. Come again and we will ride, whenever you have need.”

“Thank you.”

Her horse form shifted and she turned into a woman, curvaceous and naked, beautiful except for her uncanny yellow eyes. She gave me an oddly comforting smile. “When you call for me again, call me Seren.”

For the rest of my youth, on my worst days, I visited her and we raged through the waters. I rode her until she pushed me out of her river, and I re-emerged exhausted and able to face the castle. I rode her and she helped me survive the hundred cruelties that came with being the bastard daughter of a terrible king.

As I stood there trying to come up with a plan, ever more cute and angry faeries gathered around us, in every shape and form. They ringed us forty layers deep.

I took in a deep breath and said, “I am Morgan le Fay. Friend and protected of the great kelpie, Seren.”

It was a gamble. Not all faeries knew each other. Not all faeries liked each other, and the ways of faerie politics were legendarily twisted and opaque to humans.

“Seren, you say?” said a high and squeaky voice. It was a lín'aoél mouse faerie, brandishing a sword no longer than a needle. He stepped forward, and all eyes turned toward him. Their leader, I guessed.

I knelt on the soft grass littered with paste jewels and glitter so he would not have to look up quite so high. “Indeed,” I said.

“Seren’s long dead,” he told me.

I blinked. The kelpie had been ancient when I met her, but faeries were exceedingly long-lived. “Dead?” I repeated. The word burned my lips.

Thousands of sparkling eyes watched me.

The mouse nodded and took a step closer. “A coal mine dirtied her river. She retaliated. They brought in a mage to slay her.” His tiny mouth scowled and his whiskers sharpened. “A dirty mage like the both of you.”

“Not like me,” I said quickly. It would not do to show weakness among them, but a tear dropped from my eye. For an old friend who’d meant much to me in a cold land. For an old friend I had lost touch with, who could have used my help had I been there, but instead she was dead. I breathed in deeply and sat up straighter. “Not like us, for we are not here hired by hungry capitalists. We come because I heard tell there is a creature here who threatens all of the hill.”

The mouse watched me for a long moment. Then he raised his needle sword and declared, “The witch doesn’t lie.”

Something changed in the crowd of fae folk that ringed us. Something softened.

“We all know why our human left,” a wood nymph, dressed in strips of artfully placed bark, said. She stepped up beside the mouse fae. “He’s not a betrayer, he’s not. We all know he was trying to help us. He wasn’t wrong, seeking help.”

“We don’t need it.”

“Make them go away.”

“Or let them try to destroy it, why not?”

High voices called out and squabbled with each other all around us.

The faerie mouse twitched his long tail, and they all silenced. “We do not need help. Go and do not ever shadow our doorway again. Leave while we offer you that grace.” The mouse stood tall.

“Oh please,” said the wood nymph. “Even you, brave and noble Bombadrood, know that is not true. We haven’t been fine. Not since it came here.”

The mouse raised his small blade, and then sighed and sheathed it at his side. “We have been battling it and dying. We have tried leaving it alone, but its rot spreads across our hill. Should you wish to try to kill the beast, have at it.”

“Have at it,” a thousand other tiny voices whispered. And just as quickly as they had assembled, they left the area.

The wood nymph and the mouse remained. The king and queen of this realm, I knew, though it would not do to name them so. Faerie hills kept such things secret from outsiders.

“We will be your champions, wee ones,” Merlin said with a tender smile.

Gods, when we got out of here I would have to school him on the most basic of faerie etiquette.

“What can you tell us of this thing?” I asked.

“We call it the Gray,” the nymph said.

“We call it the Gray, and know nothing of what it is or why it is here,” Bombadrood added.

The nymph and the mouse fae turned and walked away from us, expecting us to follow.

We did.

Chapter 5

Thin Green Skin

The space and time of a faerie land does not follow the same logics and rules of a human landscape, and so in two steps we crossed a great meadow, and then we plodded down a short path that seemed to last for hours. I kept hold of Merlin’s hand and whispered to him that I would do the talking from here on out.

“Was I really as bad as all that?” he whispered.

“Yes. Now before we find this thing, tell me what you suspect it might be.”

“I know nothing.” He walked faster.

“Think, man. Is your secret worth keeping me in the dark? Is your secret worth my safety? For if I am attacked by something I don’t understand and am hurt….”

We walked through a stand of fir trees. The boughs were strewn with rolls of brightly-colored toilet paper.

“It is worth it,” he mumbled, and I heard the finality that threaded through his voice. No amount of pressing would change his mind.

We came to a placid pond with mirror smooth water. A slender leaf boat, delicate but of a size that would have held a hundred faeries. It glided up to the shore. The mouse and nymph held it steady while we stepped into its thin frame that surely would not hold us, but hold us it did. The faeries pushed us off from the sun-dappled shore and rowed across the wide pond using long seed pods as oars. It was slow-going, to say the least.

“A lovely spot, easy to imagine how one could get lost here for a day or a lifetime,” Merlins said. He ran a finger through the glassy water. Swirling eddies spun out from it.

I nodded. “I have often wondered if faeries make their homes so lovely as a kind of trap for us.”

Bombadrood, without turning to look at us, said, “Of course we do. We are hunters, you are prey.”

Merlin smiled indulgently at the mouse’s back.

“You are so ignorant,” I whispered to the wizard.

Merlin’s eyes widened. His jaw clenched. “You say that to get some sort of rise out of me? You think you can manipulate me and get me to what, open the door? The realm is mine and it stays closed.” His voice shook with barely contained rage.

I put a hand over his and leaned close. I breathed deeply and caught his gaze. I held it until his eyes focused and he saw me. Until he was back from Hell.

“They are relentless, Morgan,” Merlin whispered. “All the demons. All the damned. They don’t like me living elsewhere.”

“Good. I would not want you to please them.”

Merlin bit his lip and nodded.

We seemed to drift across that pond for the longest of afternoons, moving within the lull of buoyancy and sunshine. Merlin and I trailed our fingers through the water and soaked in the golden faerie light. The air was likely laced with faerie dust. I knew that in an academic sort of way, and knew that I should tie cloth across my mouth and nose. I took no such action.

Finally, the leaf boat butted up against the far shore.

“Down there,” the wood nymph muttered, jumping up to the edge of the boat and pointing down the hill full of trees.

“I can feel the wrongness from here,” the mouse added.

Merlin and I got out of the boat, careful not to damage its thin green skin.

The mouse and the nymph stayed where they were.

“We will go no further,” the wood nymph said. “We wish you well in destroying the Gray, fair Morgan and her consort. Try not to touch it. And if you die, we will sing about you for a full year. Blessings.”

“Blessings,” grumbled the mouse. “And stick the Gray with the sharp end of things, good and well.”

Merlin and I turned from them and walked down the hill.

I silently listed the spells I had upon my person that I could use in a battle. I went over the different ways my spells could be combined and activated for different outcomes.

Merlin must have been making similar calculations, for he knelt and pulled a long staff from his bag. It was gnarled, made of red wood, and thrummed with powerful destruction magic.

“The Gray sounds like one of those depressed bands Lila enjoys so much,” I said lightly as we started walking down the hill.

“Or some ridiculously expensive cocktail at one of the bars that caters to the suited,” Merlin added.

We began to move slower as a tickling and bitter sense seeped into the sweet faerie air. The woods around us became increasingly withered, with dulled bark and pocked leaves. The forest path led us around a bend, and then we saw it.

It was a thing made of shadows and cobwebs. It was hard to look at, for it fluttered in and out of reality or perhaps operated on some other plane. It stood in a clearing full of mold and mushrooms that spread out in a wide circle from where it stood. The Gray undulated strangely from where it seemed stuck to the forest floor. It stretched forward and back again, like it was trapped and struggling to break free. It seemed to be raging against itself.

I instinctively took a step back from it. I stepped into a puddle of the gray muck. It made a squelching sound.

The Gray seemed to sense us and grew stiller and more solid.

It was easier to look at now, and I noted it was roughly human-sized and shaped. I could also make out that across its surface there were… mouths and hands beneath a skin-like surface. All of them reached and grasped outward. Seeking something.

The Gray was made of nightmares, and it reminded me of something. My mind skipped erratically backward, searching for whatever I had seen that was similar.

“Let’s be done with this,” Merlin said, and hit his staff against the ground. I nodded and pulled my strongest spells into my hand.

Chapter 6

Mouths and Hands

Merlin threw exploding magic at the Gray, and I quickly followed with disruption, chaos, and beheading spells.

Our bright magic flew straight and true toward the Gray.

It didn’t make any motion against the spells, but instead let itself be hit, in four quick successions. Our magic seemed to do it no harm.

Magic leaves trails, and our spells left a trail between us and the Gray. The creature pulled on the connection between us. It tugged hard. Merlin and I stumbled forward.

“Gods and monsters,” I swore under my breath.

I tried to sever the strands of magic the Gray somehow used to drag us closer. Merlin blasted a steady stream of spells out of his staff. They all hit the Gray.

None of the magic slowed it down. The Gray pulled our kicking and writhing forms over the mucky ground, closer and closer. I fought tooth and nail, sending out half a dozen breaking spells. Nothing worked.

The Gray gave another strong tug, and then it engulfed me.

It surrounded me, enveloping and cocooning me on all sides with a sticky cobweb. Through the strange membrane I felt mouths clamp down on my arms and legs. Teeth bit me. Fumbling fingers tried to tear off my clothes. I opened my mouth to scream a word of power: to activate a spell that would set this thing on fire.

But the moment my mouth opened, fingers grabbed my tongue and pulled at my lips. They tasted of coal and ash with a hint of iron: of stagnant blood. I tried to spit the fingers out. I tried to rear back and away, but the fingers held tight. A mouth bit my cheek. The gauzy barrier between those teeth and me kept it from tearing into me. Fingers wound through my long hair and yanked it backward. A dozen mouths sucked and bit at my throat. They moved with the nauseating motion of chewing, of eating.

I tried to bite back. I tried to punch and kick the thing away, but there was no getting away. It was on all sides. Above and below.

I convulsed frantically as teeth gnawed at the back of my knees. Tongues wriggled between my toes. Mouths and hands tried to tear through the thankful thickness of my heavy skirt. They reached for my most private parts. I needed to scream, but choked on fingers instead.

I had to focus. I had to be able to draw from the magic stored within me, for I could not grab onto any of my spells.

A tongue wriggled into one ear. Fingers dug into my eyes, working to pluck them out. Hands pulled my fingers backward, pushing them so far they felt close to snapping.

Focus.

I drew up skeins of rage and dread magic. I forced my body to go limp and slack as I sought to ignore every assault. I made a quick and simple two-strand weave.

Fingers dug into my armpits. Teeth bit into my back.

I dropped the magic and tried to kick and punch the thing away. I couldn’t move an inch.

Focus.

I breathed in, past the fingers, so many, crammed into my mouth, past the mouth that bit into my nose and it was all too terrible. I had to get away. I had to run. I couldn’t do this.