Chapter Fifteen: Faolan
When I returned to my room in the Bower tree, I sat down slowly and looked out the window. From this vantage point, I could see over the tops of the trees of the forest – of Arden – to the distant skies, to mountains that rose up, also covered with trees, and hills that seemed to roll on forever, fading away into the shadowy darkness that cloaked them. I knew now, with the undeniable certainty, that we weren’t treated the way we were without reason.
Ionmar and Ai’Ilyn had given me the first glimpses of the answer, but I knew now that the true answer was one that we were supposed to discover for ourselves. That was why some left: they couldn’t come to grips with knowing that we’d been saved from ourselves, knowing that without the Bower and our time as nestlings we never would have survived the madness.
It explained why Tristan had been consumed by it.
It explained why I’d survived.
For days after, I reveled in the knowledge that I belonged in the darkness. It was strange to think that anyone would want to live in the light, would want to live exposed and blinded. The shadows were comforting, and now clung to me like old familiar friends. Part of me had always been ashamed of that – the part of me that had grown up with the peasant families that shuffled me around. Crude and downtrodden as they had been, they had always spoke of light as good and darkness as evil, and I had always felt a wrenching in my stomach when I wanted to speak back but didn’t.
I began to speak to the other Fae with none of the reticence that I’d first exhibited and was greeted with smiles and fierce congratulations. Some still handled me cautiously, mostly older Ilyn who had no doubt seen many like me leave when the deciding year was up, but even they watched me with growing approval.
I started to talk to others outside my group. The Urden were hard to speak with, and generally remained silent, but some of the Ilyn were talkative during meals. I asked them about what I might be able to do if I stayed in the Bower – and they gave me the answers readily, with eager excitement.
Some of them helped maintain and protect the forests, and others searched the world beyond for other changelings who might have been lost. Many helped run the Bower – organizing the Fae, repairing damage, training changelings. Some worked on the highest levels, the ones to which I’d never been, and though they were the most close-lipped about their experiences, they told me in broad terms that they explored the madness and of what it, and we, were capable.
Still more trained as warriors in the caverns below the Hall, and it was these that drew me most. They said they use staves and short wooden clubs, and one of them showed me a huge purple bruise forming along his upper arm. The only point when they grew silent was when I asked what it was they fought. One of them looked up over my shoulder, and I followed the gaze.
Ai’Ilyn stood behind me, and I felt the familiar cringe of fear in my stomach; but it was less than it had been, and I realized that it was quickly fading away entirely.
“What do we fight?” she asked, eyeing me sternly. She reached out a hand and I flinched back, but she was too quick. She caught me in a headlock and held me tightly. I fought back, reaching out to the madness, trying desperately to bring it to me –
“We fight nosy little changelings like you!”
She knuckled her fist against my head and made my hair stand up on end, then let me go with a playful push. I fell back against the table, shocked and breathing heavily, to the laughter of the older Ilyn. She winked at me and turned to go, and I saw her moving back toward the kitchens, where I knew Faolan and Aelyn must be eating.
Those changelings who had stayed, those children who we’d thought had disappeared, had of course not disappeared at all, and I met a handful of them. Some had left, that was true – some had been unable to accept the reality of the world into which they’d been born, and they’d left cursing their parents or cursing Oberon, or sometimes both; but others had left intentionally, left to guard against those who would intrude against the Bower, who intended to do it harm. When they told me about that, I could hear the name of the Queen in the background behind the words, but I never let on that I knew that she existed. It seemed that this was something I was still not to know, and for once I was content to let it lie.
Some had gone to join Gwyn ap Nudd and the Wild Hunt; others had gone far abroad, travelling wherever the madness took them and returning to taste the moonlight when they’d done so. I met one of these, a Fae who had the blood of a sylph, one of the insubstantial wind sprites from which Durst and others came. His name was Alon, and he faded constantly in and out of sight as we spoke, his words like wind playing over reeds. He told me that the forests of the whole world were connected, like a single living being, and that the Erlking ruled the deeper parts, the parts where shadow and moonlight reigned, and that other parts were covered in sunlight, and still others in pitch-black darkness.
I became engrossed with the Bower itself.
Something about the madness put me and all the other Fae in tune with the giant tree. When the fever was on me, or when I had summoned it up, I could place my hand against the wood and feel a deep, steady throbbing like a pulsing heartbeat. I ran through the corridors sometimes, seeking out unused passages when the moonlight ceremony was happening, or sneaking away from the Calling ceremony while everyone was engaged, so that I could race from top to bottom with no obstruction, my heart pounding and chest tight. The wood was thick and steady beneath my bare feet, and the air made my skin feel smooth and tight.
I started going to sleep at night grinning uncontrollably, imagining the future, imagining the possibilities of my life. It was strange, thinking back to how I’d felt only several months before, thinking back to how angry I’d been at Ai’Ilyn when she’d first told me the truth. I thought myself very mature for getting over all of that nonsense.
I was somewhere on the far side of thirteen by that point, possibly even fourteen already – I don’t know exactly when I was born. Each of us who’d gone through the madness had matured – the boys growing taller and wider about the shoulders, girls about the hips and chest – and I was no exception. There were times when I’d find myself wandering around unable to understand what was missing, why I felt like I’d forgotten something when I left my room, why it felt like I was missing an arm or a leg when I was walking through the upper pathways of the Bower, exploring where I’d never been allowed to go before.
I think a part of me always knew it was Faolan, but until then I’d forced the idea to the back of my mind and left it there to gather dust. When we’d first arrived we’d been ten years old and worried for our lives – I doubt either of us had ever thought of anything but the day in front of us.
But now I knew my future. Now I knew that I would live here in the Bower – I knew the answers to the questions that had so long plagued me, about where I would go, about what I would grow up into, about where I belonged in a world that seemed to have no place carved out for me.
And I wanted him to know those answers too. I wanted to share all of that with him and talk about what we were going to do.
But I couldn’t.
Aelyn went through the madness a few days after my trip through Arden with the Erlking and Robin, but despite all speculation that Faolan would come soon after, weeks later he remained by far the oldest nestling. As time stretched out and he continued as he was, there was talk that made my skin itch from the inside.
Nothing overt was said. Even though the new changelings were all accepted among the Ilyn and other Fae now, we were still kept in the dark about certain things. It was made quite clear that should we stay after our year was up – one year, no more no less – and our decision to stay was made official, we would be privy to all the knowledge the others had. There was no menace to them now, besides the natural annoyances that come with different personalities, and no animosity.
But still, the sense of uneasiness about Faolan prevailed.
Every time he was brought up in conversa
tion between Gwen, Brandel, and me, some of the Ilyn would look at each other and pass between them a glance they thought we couldn’t see. I became an expert at catching such looks from the corner of my eye, and soon Gwen and Brandel were seeing them too. They both seemed less and less certain with each passing day that everything was going to be fine with him, but neither of them wanted to discuss it openly.
“We have to trust them,” Gwen said stubbornly.
“Brandel, you don’t think that way too, right?”
“Well … I think I do.”
“That’s ridiculous! You’re curious about everything –”
“Mol, stop it!”
I fell silent and drew back into myself, realizing that I’d been speaking far too loudly. Brandel grimaced and looked to Gwen, then looked back at me, his long blonde hair pulled back behind his head so that his clear blue eyes could better protrude from their wide sockets.
“There’s nothing to do,” he said quietly, much more intensely than he usually spoke. “Think about what would have happened if we’d tried to do something before we went through the madness. We would have ruined everything, right? What happens if we do something like go tell him and it turns out that’s the reason he doesn’t change? Maybe the secrecy really is all part of it, and maybe it’s a really important part of it.”
I felt a cold fist of dread settle in the pit of my stomach but I swallowed hard and shook my head, banishing the feeling.
“That can’t be it.”
“I know, it sounds stupid,” he admitted, looking a little guilty for coming up with something even he didn’t think was really plausible. “The point is the same – we need to trust them.”
“But if we could just –”
“Are you sure you don’t just want to see him?”
I froze in mid-sentence as Igrin’s voice came from behind me. Gwen’s eyes went very wide and Brandel choked on the grape he was eating. I turned slowly to see that she was eating at the table behind us with Aelyn and a number of older Ilyn I didn’t know yet. She looked amused, but not in the way she would have been if Tristan were still around.
“You have a big thing for him, and we all know it. I bet even he knows. He should unless he’s totally blind.”
Total mortification washed over me.
“That’s not it at all,” I protested immediately, my cheeks warming with a different kind of fever. “He’s my friend and I want him to be all right.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Just don’t be stupid. You know everything they do is for a reason – you always told us that and you were right, so … yeah.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I did the only thing that seemed logical: I walked away. She was right; I knew she was. But it was Igrin. I wouldn’t admit she was right if my life depended on it.
The year I’d been given to make my decision was almost up by then – I had two months and a few days left. Faolan was the only one still unchanged. I started watching him when I could, trying to find evidence that the madness would come soon. At least, that’s what I told myself. I think I even believed it. The best excuses are the ones we give ourselves.
He was beautiful. Boys aren’t supposed to be beautiful, but he was. I don’t know why it took distance for me to see it. The other girls talked about it too, and the boys made fun of them, but it wasn’t just our group. The other changelings saw him too, and soon he was known almost universally. I don’t know if he ever knew that he was talked about that way. He was all alone, completely isolated, and Ai’Ilyn devoted her whole being to him. Knowing what I knew, I could see that she was getting desperate as well. She worked him harder, pushed him to gather more moonlight, corrected his smallest mistakes. He took it all with a stoicism that even I might not have managed, and still he didn’t change.
I knew that I could see him again. I’d been to the old room once, and now that Aelyn was changed he was alone at night. The thought of it made me flush, and I made sure not to let it happen when I was around others. I was scared of the possibility too, because I knew if I found a night when Ai’Ilyn was away and I snuck in, there would be nothing to make me leave again. I thought about it over and over again, alternately consumed and repelled by the idea, thinking it was so far beneath me to do something like that, thinking that he may not even have the same thoughts …
Thinking that he was running out of time.
No one spoke clearly to us about what would happen if he didn’t go through the madness, but there seemed to be a consensus that if he didn’t, he would disappear. The more dire of the rumors I dismissed – those that said he was to be killed or taken with Gwyn ap Nudd to the realm of the dead – but the idea that he might be taken back to the human realm and released there seemed like a very real possibility to me.
I felt as though two versions of me were fighting a battle inside my head, to the point where I’d lay awake at night, stand up and go to the door, turn back, go to the window, walk out the door, turn back and get into bed, get up and a punch a wall, go back to bed, sit up and think some more. I remembered the feel of his breath on my neck as I whispered into his ear that we would see each other again soon, the way we’d been so close, the way he’d look at me with his hazel eyes. I would feel so warm I’d have to push the blankets off of me and lay in the cold air, burning like a furnace. I analyzed every moment we’d spent together with a kind of feverish intensity, like an alchemist trying to find the way to turn lead into gold; I was hopelessly unable to decipher his silent looks and his quiet smiles. I could read him like a book in every way but this.
I was out of my bed and at the door before I’d realized I’d made a decision. The air was cold enough that I shivered in my thin silk clothing, feeling it pull against my chest and press against my skin. I tried to ignore the steady ache that seemed to have encompassed me.
I turned back half a dozen times. I knew my plan was terribly half-baked. If I was caught I might be punished, changeling or no changeling; but every time I turned back, I couldn’t take more than two steps before I was once more on my way.
With every step my heart beat harder. My lips felt cold and tight and my bare feet were numb against the Bower floor, even as my head felt far too hot.
I reached the long hallway I remembered so well and paused only once more. There was no one there; Ai’Ilyn had gone off wherever she went at night. She might return the next minute, or she might be several hours.
A lot could happen in several hours.
I blinked and was in front of the curved doorway. I stopped only long enough to take a deep breath. I dropped the Ilyn illusion that covered me, letting the flaky white skin with the blue-black patches fade away, and stepped through the passageway, turned into the room.
He was sitting up, staring at me.
I froze. All thought blanked out and I was left with only sensations. There was just enough light coming through the high window that we could make out the vague impression of each other’s faces. His eyes widened when he saw me enter, but otherwise he remained still.
“Why are you awake?” was what finally came out of my mouth.
“I was thinking about you.”
Coils of white-hot energy shot through my body, racing around the curves of my fingertips and lancing straight back into the hot center of my chest, catching my heart off guard and forcing it to skip a beat. I swayed slightly, knowing now that if I stepped toward him what I wanted to happen would happen.
He took the choice away from me. He came forward as silent as a shadow, not even hesitating. His eyes were gathering the starlight and I saw a flash of deep gold-green before he was too close and my eyes had to unfocus.
When he reached for me I didn’t protest. One hand went to my cheek and I almost melted at the touch, heat rushing through me from his fingers. All I saw were his eyes burning in the dying light. His other hand touched the bare skin my changeling clothing revealed, his fingers trailing to the top of my hips.
I grabbed a handful of his hair as he
kissed me.
His lips burned against mine and the breath was pulled from my lungs. I pressed myself against him, feeling the rough pads of his fingers stroking the curve of my neck and his other hand moving down my back, over my waist, and down again, clutching me to him with a desperation that I returned with equal intensity. His shoulders were hard beneath his silk clothing and I clung to them, clutching at his back as I pulled his lips against my mine.
Noise.
I broke away from him immediately, pushing his hands down and away. He stepped away from me, looking wildly at the door. I reached out for the madness and the Ilyn disguise snapped into place around me.
Faolan stumbled back, shocked, and I felt cold dread settle over me. I dove into the corner of the room and did what I’d only done once before, when following Oberon and Puck: I wrapped myself in the dark shadows that cloaked the room, and disappeared from sight completely.
A figure came through the door, and my heart almost stopped.
“Ai’Ilyn,” Faolan said, bowing his head to her in deference.
“Nestling,” she said, watching him. She paused, confused, and I realized that if I didn’t leave that instant, she was sure to find me. She would search every corner, I knew she would.
“What are you doing?”
“I … I’m not sure, Ilyn. I … think I was sleeping.”
She was far enough away from the door that I slipped past her, my heart pounding in my throat. I heard her speaking more to him, and him saying something back, but then I was too far away and trying to calm my thoughts.
I slept not at all that night. Alternating waves of horror at what I’d revealed and intense desire to return and finish what I’d started warred inside me. I thought of what Brandel had said and tried to dismiss it. It couldn’t hurt him that I’d revealed I was one of the Ilyn. It couldn’t – the madness was in his blood. It had to come out.
The next day I went to see Ite’Ilyn as usual and could barely concentrate. I was utterly exhausted, and Ite’Ilyn told me to leave early, clearly disappointed in my progress. I didn’t particularly care, though – he seemed to have nothing new to teach me. He only kept repeating the same lessons over and over again, insisting I could do them better.
I made my way down to the Hall in a haze of exhaustion that was not helped by the lightheaded feeling that came every time I thought of Faolan. I went to the refectory to gather my bowl of food and glass of water. None of the others were out of their own lessons yet, so I found a table on the far side of the Hall beneath the overhanging ledges of the hidden rooms that lined the walls and ate absently.
He entered from the cavern.
Ai’Ilyn was in front of him, and he was carrying a heavy basket strapped to his back. His face was grimy and dirty from the work of carrying the load up the long dirt inclines of the caverns below, but the exertion had brought a flush to his cheeks and the muscles of his arms stood out in sharp lines under the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.
“Faolan,” I whispered to myself.
I felt fever break over me, and the madness swirled out past my lips, taking the word. I broke the connection immediately, shocked and breathing heavily. He staggered suddenly under the weight of the load he carried, and his head turned toward me as if drawn by a magnet.
A pulse went through me as his eyes touched mine, and I knew that he recognized me, even with the Ilyn disguise in place. His nostrils flared and his eyes widened, but then Ai’Ilyn was calling him to hurry up and follow, and he was gone, disappearing into the kitchen.
I stood before I even thought about what I was doing.
I walked as casually as I could back toward the refectory, my finished bowl hanging in one hand. Every movement I made was awkward, and I thought everyone who looked at me knew exactly what I was thinking, though of course no one paid me so much as a second glance.
I moved through the door of the kitchen and handed my bowl to a nestling who passed me and called me “Ilyn.” I moved toward the door to the eating place the children used, and saw that Ai’Ilyn wasn’t outside. I looked over to the long rows of storage burrows and saw she was getting food there.
I moved as if in a dream. I was at the door of the room, and I looked in.
He looked up at me with no surprise at all.
My heart began to hammer inside my chest, and heat rushed through my body.
“Tonight after the Calling ceremony,” I said quickly. “Come to the field. The spot we cleared that first night, back in the roots, the alcove. You remember?”
He nodded, a sharp jab of his head, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Meet me there.”
I turned and left without a second look.
I watched the Calling ceremony that night with less than disinterest. I couldn’t seem to hold a single coherent thought in my mind, but just slipped from one moment to the next. I stood with the changelings in my group, Brandel and Gwen and all the others, and we watched and listened as the Fae sang and danced. We still did not join – we still couldn’t understand the words, though they hovered on the edge of understanding, and every month they became clearer and clearer. I knew that if we chose to stay, we would be one with it, and we’d make the music as well.
I know that Oberon called the children; I know that he asked the questions; I remember none of it. All that comes back are flashes: the singing, the raised sound of his voice, the singing again, and then the Fae splintering away into the night.
The next of what I remember, I was in the field, moving through the grass.
It had begun to rain. It happened sometimes in the Bower, often when the heat and humidity gathered and built and became so unbearable that something had to break. The water droplets hissed down from the sky, cloudy with moonlight, looking like falling stars. The trees stirred in a slight breeze, and the moon broke through the clouds now and again, the hot, sparkling shafts of light so intense on the night of the full moon that I could barely stand to look at them.
I moved around the side of the tree toward the place I had told Faolan about. The first night we’d been brought out to the field by Ai’Ilyn, the two of us had stumbled on a natural alcove that had been formed from the giant roots cascading over each other in beautiful symmetry. A mound of grass and dirt hid the entrance, but beyond them was a small, secluded spot overhung with roots that dripped moss and latticed overhead in a kind of roof.
I reached into my pocket and brought out the moonstone I carried with me. I touched the madness and ran my thumb over the stone’s smooth surface, lighting it. The silver light cast stark shadows that moved with me.
I reached the turn and moved toward it, climbing the small mound and ducking beneath the arching root. I wondered if he’d even come – I wondered if he was already there – I wondered if I would wait in the rain and darkness and never hear from him again. I was almost sick with the anticipation, and I knew that this time we wouldn’t stop, that this time there was no one to stop us, even though this whole scheme was madness.
But we were Fae. Madness was in our blood.
I ducked the final root, rose up into the clearing, and raised my moonstone high.
The silver light fell on Robin Goodfellow.
There is a hole in my memory here, full only with the deepest sense of loss that I can remember feeling. I still remember it, like a knife severing a major artery, the pooling sensation of something filling my body, drowning me as my own lungs rebelled and refused to fill with air. I remember the sensation of falling, though I was still standing. I remember the sight of his blood, black in the night but red where the moonlight from the stone touched it.
Robin was standing over a figure draped in the off-white clothing of a nestling. Black hair fell over the figure’s head, and the legs and arms were splayed out in an unnatural way. In the light of the moonstone I held I could see dark stains on the body – stains that glistened red and matched the dark smears on Robin’s clothing and hands.
Robin moved first, grabbing Faola
n’s body.
“Leave him! PUT HIM DOWN!”
The madness consumed me body and soul. It roared up and into my head and burnt away any last barrier I had that might keep it back. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the words took on a life of their own and leapt from my mouth, rushing across the cloistered corner of the field; Robin was picked up and thrown backward into the heavy root-wall behind him. I heard him utter a muffled oath, more of surprise than anything else, and then I was running to the body.
I grabbed him in my arms. The blood was still warm. I looked up.
“Stay back,” I hissed at Robin.
I saw him flinch, as if the words had actually struck him, but he kept his eyes on me and came forward again anyway.
“You need to leave,” Robin said to me, savagely, “you need to leave now.”
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything. All throughout me the same thought just kept repeating itself over and over again.
He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
Rough hands grabbed my chin and lifted it so that I was staring into Robin’s golden eyes. Something about the motion or the eyes pulled me out of my trance and I could hear what he was saying, could hear the words that he was repeating yet again.
“You need to leave. You weren’t supposed to see this – I don’t know what he’ll make me do if he knows you saw. You need to go – you need to run as quickly as you can.”
“DON’T TOUCH ME! YOU KILLED HIM!”
Golden light flashed in his eyes, and he snarled at me and threw his hands up over his head. A force rushed through me and crashed into him, but he spun and sliced through it, sending it rocketing past to crash against the sides of the alcove, and then the Puck was rushing at me and screaming right back, his face filling my vision.
“I would never have killed him – HE made me do it!”
“Faolan – Faolan would never –!”
“Not Faolan, you idiot, the KING!”
For the second time, my mind couldn’t seem to absorb what was happening, and the next few seconds are lost to me. I don’t remember seeing anything, don’t remember feeling the rain that continued to fall on us through the latticed canopy though I knew later that all these things had happened because I was soaking wet and covered in blood.
“You need to go,” Robin hissed again.
I remember saying something back, but the details are lost on me. All I really remember after that was Robin’s voice, telling me over and over again to go, that I wasn’t supposed to see this, that I shouldn’t be here.
His fingers pried my hands away from the body, and I let Faolan fall to the grass. The moonlight that had illuminated his face not so long ago was gone; there was no luminescence to him now, no sign that he had meant something once. I pulled back. My hands made whispering noises as they ruffled his clothing, and the soft syllables mingled with the patter of the rain. My fingers missed his warmth immediately, but I did not stop the smooth motion of withdrawing from his empty body. He would cool soon, anyway. I stepped back, my bare feet squishing in the dirt that had turned to mud.
Robin stepped between me and the body and forced me out of the alcove.
I listened to the rain. There was no other noise.