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Through The Harvest Way

T he scythes were quiet now, but their sweeping was burned into Maewyn’s mind.

Memory of the sound echoed back from the field of wheat she stood before, the Harvest Way cut through like a corridor to nowhere.

So like a sun with its tawny glow, the moon hung low and full, but its brilliance didn’t touch the path she was to take, a blackened passage running through the field’s center that would lead to the Limindhwer.

When this was done, harvests all across the land would be made heartier and last for the long length of a cruel and unforgiving winter, a gift to the humans in return for their sacrifice.

But if it were as easy as it was said, if the fae could gift something so precious as an afterthought, then why did they need a sacrifice at all?

Why did they need her ?

A poke at Maewyn’s back was the grim reminder that her questions would, as ever, go unanswered, but then all her inquiries had ever earned her were dread and doom.

She stumbled but stayed upright, glaring over her shoulder with the last of her ire.

The shadowed faces of her village, her kin, her mother, stared back, silent and drawn into unfeeling iron.

Maewyn’s fingers clenched around nothing as she struggled to keep from checking her pocket one last time. Don’t touch it, they’ll know. Gods know how, but they will, and you will be defenseless .

So, what? She was to just…go? They had no words to recite? No instructions to give? Not even a prayer?

No, no more questions—that’s why she was in this mess to begin with. She’d always been a nosy girl with a mind sharper than a sickle and a tongue begging to be severed—that was what her mother said anyway. And for all she asked, she never learned, so it wasn’t a surprise that the gods chose her.

The gods, of course, had not lowered themselves to pick out the specific woman who would be sent across the Limindhwer.

That was the job of a priest acting on a command from the aristocracy in the country’s capital.

The fae king of the Autumn Court demanded a bride, and the search trickled away from anyone of noble birth or social significance and out to a nothing village where it landed on a nothing girl all under the guise of the goddess Cerewin’s predilection.

But Maewyn was not stupid—she knew that Cerewin didn’t favor her. No one did.

A breeze finally came, unexpectedly cool for the warmth the day had wrought.

Maewyn had approved of the heat burning down on the backs that cut the Harvest Way under the noonday sun, at least one of which belonged to a man who should have been protecting her instead of laying the path to hand her over.

She felt every stalk of wheat that fell while watching, but tears never came.

Dominick wasn’t worth it. None of them were.

Maewyn turned away from the hollow stares of people she was always on the outside of anyway. Fine, she would go without a word, not even a whisper. It wasn’t how she’d imagined leaving Goulmead, but it was perhaps fitting in the end.

The singing crickets and shivering leaves went all out of her ears as she stepped between the high-walled wheat, and the harvest moon’s glow was swallowed away.

Maewyn looked back only once more to see their eyes catching the last of the light, fear for an eternal season if they did not send her—if she did not go—and then that too was gone.

Roan stood beneath the ignus ash just as he was meant to.

Well, leaned against it more like, but he was in the place he was deigned to be by centuries-old, absurd law, and that was probably good enough.

He stared into the Limindhwer, vision going fuzzy with the magic of the threshold.

Waiting was boring work, and he couldn’t be expected to remain entirely vigilant the whole time, could he?

He gave the orange he held another disinterested toss.

It fell right back into his hand as expected, but Roan grunted as if it might have stayed up in the fiery leaves overhead, ridding him miraculously of this burden.

The peel was thick, as bright as a setting sun, and once it would have oozed copious syrupy juices, but now?

After his spell, it would be bitter, stringy, and dry.

His meticulous search for the perfect fruit to be gifted as a welcome had been a waste, but he needed to put on a show of it for his father. Everything was a show with that fae.

The forest was also showing off. It was always awash in passionate reds and brilliant yellows, but this evening it had primped and preened.

Leaves fell in feathery mounds like piles of gold, and the white-barked branches held more, brighter than the fruit he carried.

Even with a darkened sky, the colors were on full display, illuminating themselves with an enchanted, coppery glow, determined to impress.

Rude , he thought with a chuckle: the orange was meant to look like the most delectable thing this side of the Limindhwer—well, after him, of course.

A shift in the shadows drew him upright, the thinning of the barrier between realms pricking at his skin. A figure formed at the end of the Harvest Way, as the humans called it, and he neatened his brocade coat because he just couldn’t help himself.

She was dressed in white, but of course she was, a simple linen shift that fell to her knees, belted at the waist with a leather tie, gauzy sleeves the only embellishment.

By gods, that would not do, but, oh, it really shouldn’t matter.

Her hair was left loose, which was at least a nice touch, falling to her waist in coils, dark like the husk of the trees she emerged between.

Head down and hands clasped, she hesitated when the Limindhwer thickened behind her, but there was nowhere to go with the denseness of the forest on either side, and so she proceeded dutifully right up to him and dipped into a wobbly curtsy.

Timid, docile, meek, just like his father foretold.

Standard human woman. Roan’s throat tightened on a dissatisfied groan.

He looked down on dark lashes and brows as she straightened, her lips drawn down, and he could see it then, the grief blossoming all over her bronzy skin before tragedy was even seeded.

Roan’s insides got up and switched places, but his disgust was aimed elsewhere this time.

Misery was perhaps a good master of compliance, at the very least, but how much worse was he intending to make it?

She slowly lifted her eyes to meet his. They were a bright and angular surprise sown into her soft face, and the brief vision of a fox darting through the wood flashed in his mind. Gold flecks in her irises echoed the enkindled landscape, and something else burned even deeper. Something curious.

Roan cocked his head, squeamishness chased away. He hadn’t met many humans. Most were frightened things, boring and beneath him, but he’d been told whispers of their hidden treachery, and this one was—

“Fuck!”

This one was stabbing him.

The color was sucked from the world, plunging Maewyn into darkness just as she plunged her sliver of iron into the fae’s heart.

Aim true and intention truer, she felt the metal sink into flesh as real as her own, heard the sickening squelch of broken skin, and hung on through the fae’s howling curse.

And then, nothing. His skin didn’t burn away, his bones didn’t turn to dust, he didn’t even fall.

Well, damn.

In the enchanted dark that had descended upon them, Maewyn stared into a face that should have been twisted in moribund pain.

Fae were purported to be beautiful, and this one was no exception, but he was terrifying too.

Pale skin caught what little light had been left in the fae realm’s fury with her deed, and hair as crimson as blood fell into his face.

Eyes green like the scales of a viper burned down on her, and rage flashed over features that had been admittedly pleasant seconds before, no inkling that he was about to keel over.

Double damn.

Iron was meant to reveal the truth of a fae , whatever that meant, and kill them, a much more useful and clear meaning, yet this one stood unchanged.

Her instinct was to flee, but it came a second too late as hands fell onto Maewyn’s waist. There again in his stalwart grip was another indication that he was no nearer to death than before she’d stabbed him.

Damnedest of all the damns!

“What are you doing?”

Her heart faltered at the rasping rumble of his voice and how it vibrated up through the metal she had buried in his chest.

Her own voice shook as it so often didn’t. “Uh…killing you?”

“You thought this would kill me?” His jaw ticked, grip tightening. There was regrettably very little blood. “Are you really so stupid?”

Maewyn came back into herself all at once. Of course she wasn’t stupid. “Well, it’s iron!” She thrust the entirety of her weight behind the sliver then, but it didn’t budge. “The books say…this is how…it’s done!”

“Awful books you’ve got then. I’m fae , not one of the old ones,” he droned as if she were truly too dull to understand and worse, as if she weren’t struggling with every ounce of strength she had to bury metal into his heart.

“If you want to kill me with iron, it needs to have been blessed with starlight. And you’ve got to mean it. ”

Maewyn’s eyes flicked skyward to the twinkling dots in the velvety blackness above. Starlight? How on this or any other earth would she work starlight into her sharpened bit of castoff iron? “Well, I do mean it,” she growled, but gave up. “Is this the only way you can die?”

“Of course not. There are plenty of ways to kill a fae, though you’ll forgive me for not sharing them, considering.” He pushed her backward, and she staggered out of his grip.