Page 11 of The Moorwitch
Emma, looking scandalized, starts back to the kitchen. I feel a sudden urge to grab her apron and pull her back, to beg her not to leaveme alone with him. It feels jarring to see him here, in so common and familiar a place, as though he shouldn’t be capable of existing outside shadowy corners or snowy forests or the pages of a faerie tale book. Some foolish part of me had thought I would be forever safe from him, if I only kept to the light and the densely packed streets of London. There is no place less like a faerie tale than this, and yet there he sits, his slender dark eyebrows drawn together as he studies me.
“You have hardly blinked for the last ten minutes,” murmurs the faerie, his head tilting to the side. The motion causes his fine white hairs to shift, revealing the pointed tip of his ear and the blue gemstone dangling from his lobe like an icicle. “Are you feverish? You do seem alarmingly pale, but I’m no great judge of these things. You mortals are such fragile creatures. And howthinyou are. You ought to eat better.”
I cannot quite convince myself he is there. I am still holding out hope that he is a trick of my frostbitten imagination.
“Why do you look at me that way?” He waves a hand; on every finger glints a band of silver. “Did you think I would not return? Did you think I had forgotten our bargain?”
“Twelve years,” I murmur.
Twelve years of jumping at shadows and hearing his whispers in the back of my mind. Twelve years of wondering if I’d dreamed the entire thing and if perhaps I was mad. Twelve years ... and yes, I had begun to hope he might have forgotten. After all, what is one petrified eight-year-old girl to an immortal faerie?
More than I had wanted to believe, apparently.
“My aunt cannot speak,” I say. “She cannot even feed herself. They keep her in an institution, caged like an animal.”
He rubs his forefinger over his bottom lip as he considers me. “And does that not bring you comfort? She will never hurt you again. Is that not what you asked of me?”
“I never asked you to ...” I swallow hard. “I was eight years old. I didn’t understand—”
“You understood how to Weave the summoning spell.” His voice loses a bit of its polished ease, deepening and betraying his age. “You knew the powers you called upon. I saw into your heart when you made your bargain with me, and I knew what youreallywanted. You wanted her to suffer as she had made you suffer.”
“I was achild, and I felt as children feel, in untempered extremes. I was hurt and terrified, and I wanted to be free of her. I couldn’t think beyond that!”
“Indeed, but do not paradeignorancebefore me as if it could cleanse your conscience. You called for me, and I came. I offered you a bargain, and you accepted. You tied the vowknot yourself, and I gave you what you wanted.” He leans forward, hands splayed on the table. Whether it is a slip of his glamour or a trick of my eyes, it seems for a moment that each of his fingers has one too many knuckles. “And now there is something thatIwant, and you will help me get it.”
I open my mouth to reply, then shut it as Emma returns, setting before me a plate heaped with steaming pork, roasted potatoes, and soft bread. Before the faerie she places, with an expression of bewilderment, a plate of fresh strawberries dusted with sugar.
“I ...” She stares at the plate, then gives her head a shake, as if it were filled with fog. “Can I get you anything else?”
“This will do,” the faerie says. “Away now, my flower, and don’t bother us again.”
She floats off, still with that dazed look in her eyes, and vanishes into the kitchen.
The sight of the food only turns my stomach. I sit back in my chair and summon the courage to look him in the eyes as he delicately cuts a strawberry and slides it into his mouth on the flat of his knife.
“Why now?” I ask. “Why did you wait all these years to demand your payment?”
“I have many otherinvestmentsto keep track of, not just you. Though, dear Rose,” he sighs, as he cuts another strawberry, “you’ve always held a special place in my thoughts. The little girl with thecleverness to Weave a spell few masters would dare. Oh, yes.” He pauses to point his knife at me. “You hold a special place indeed.”
A flush creeps up my neck, a mingling of pleasure and shame. If he knew how I struggle to complete even a basic summoning charm these days, I doubt he would speak so flatteringly. I doubt he would be here at all. I look down at the table and say nothing.
“I confess,” he adds, “I’d thought to find you in some place of high esteem. Weaving in your little queen’s court. Why are you not in some rich appointment, crafting glamours for the aristocracy with silken threads? When I discovered you had spent these years in a slum school, teaching unwanted waifs how to sew paltry healing spells, I thought perhaps my investment had been ill made.”
I sit up straighter, my hands curling into fists on my lap. What pleasure I’d felt at his earlier flattery now turns cold.
“I am not eight years old anymore, SirFaerie. Perhaps my work is low, but my skill is not. Perhaps I prefer the company of the desperate children you’d callunwanted, to all the high courts of Europe.” I can practically hear my old schoolteacher’s rasping voice in my ear:Pride, Rose Pryor. That’s your first fault.
“Or perhaps,” he says slyly, “you have a certain reputation, a souvenir of that night to go along with that scar.”
My stomach turns over as I put my fingers to my neck and the burn scar left by my aunt’s pipe. Of course the faerie knows all about me. He probably had ways of spying on me for the last twelve years, keeping watch over his littleinvestment.
Mad,they call me. I know it well enough. More than a few have said it to my face.Mad and fae touched.It’s astonishing how close people can get to the truth without ever knowing the details.
My aunt was well known in certain circles, or at least her fortune was. So her sudden mental break twelve years ago was inevitably noted. The famously sharp-tongued Dame Lenore’s mind snapped in the course of a night? Suspicion had bred in the papers, theories coupling with theories, spiraling around me wherever I went. They said thatI, her only relation, had to be involved. That wretched niece of poor Arthur, whom Dame Lenore kindly took in though they were no blood kin. The niece without a penny to her name, but with a flair for magic.
But I did not hurt my aunt. At least, not directly. I didn’t Weave the spells to steal her mind and turn her wits, leaving her unable to even feed herself.
Hedid.