Page 66 of The Moorwitch

In the shadows ’neath your bed,

She spins her spells with spider’s thread,

Her hair is black, her eyes are red,

If she sees you, you are dead.

I swallow hard and draw up my knees, feeling itchy all over. Spiders are everywhere, in the curtains around the bed, in the corners, swinging from chandelier to chandelier. It is their silken strands which form the translucent canopy overhead.

“Do my pets unsettle you?” asks a voice.

I jump, then spot her—sitting so still in the far corner that I’d completely missed her at first.

She is dressed in a thin silvery gown, cobwebs in her black hair, and watches me with eyes as green as polished emeralds—not red at all—smiling as if she knows a terrible secret. I do not have to ask to know at once, with dreadful certainty, who she is.

I sit absolutely still and watch the faerie queen watching me.

Her face is pale as milk, her features all slightly more elongated than a human’s would be, her cheekbones thin and swooping like filigree to ears that arch to graceful points. Blue shadows pool beneath her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks and throat.

I remember her in the cursed wood, banishing my nightmares with a flare of white light. But I cannot believe she did it to save me. She must want me for something else.

If she catches you in her realm,Lachlan’s warning sounds in my mind once more,she will make your death painful and slow.

Her head cocks. “Little witch, little witch, do you know what laws you’ve broken, coming here?”

“W-what?”

In a singsong voice she recites, “Saucy mortals must not view what the queen of stars is doing, nor pry into our faerie wooing.”

She rises, smooth as silk, and glides toward me, her fingers wrapping around the bedpost. They are gray tipped in black, as if she’s been dipping them in ink. Her eyes are larger than a human’s, more pupil than whites, and her teeth and ears are as sharp as a cat’s. And for all her strangeness, she is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. I find myself staring half out of terror, half out of awe. Is it some spellknotwhich makes her seem so alluring? Or is it an older, stranger magic, something beyond my mortal ken?

“Yet here you are, saucy mortal,” she murmurs. “Insatiable and bold and so very, very stupid. Why are you here, in Morgaine’s realm?”

Morgaine.

It is a name which stirs at the bottommost depths of memory; a name whispered in a storybook, glimpsed between the lines of myth.Morgaine, Morgana, Morrigan, Mag ...

I open my mouth, remembering suddenly why I came here and intending to demand to see the Dwirra Tree. But my voice fails, and I can only gape like a fish.

Her fingers close on my jaw, shutting my gaping mouth for me. Then they linger, tracing my cheeks, my brow. She studies my face as if she is about to either kiss it or devour it.

“How frightened of me you are,” she says. She smiles, displaying each of her pearly teeth. “Like a butterfly caught in a web.”

“Please,” I whisper, but I cannot seem to summon more than that.

“Don’t you meanthank you? I could have let you wander the Wenderwood until you were old and gray, but I did not. I could have turned you into a spider on the spot, but I did not.”

I nod wordlessly, sensing the best course now is to play along, to show her I am no threat. Which is, of course, the utter truth. She perches on the bed and tilts her chin, her inhuman eyes studying me.

“Little witch,” the queen says again. “Why have you come here? What do you seek? Who sent you, or are you merely a witless lamb lost in the dark?”

I want to ask her what her connection is to Conrad North, and why he is Weaving wards around her doorstep. I want to demand that she show me this Dwirra Tree Lachlan craves. But I lack the courage for any of these queries. I feel like I am dreaming; the surfaces around me are all slightly blurred and indistinct, nothing quite real, as if thecurtains or the mirrors or the chairs might turn to mist if I reached out to touch them.

“Are you—” I whisper, then pause to collect my voice. “Are you enchanting me?”

“Why?” she asks breathily. “Do you feel enchanted?” She pulls back with a soft laugh. “It is easy to forget how young you humans are. Your passions run right beneath your skin.”

She rises and goes to a gilded sideboard, where she pours something from a crystal pitcher into a burnished brass goblet. This she hands to me, and I take it but do not drink. The liquid is coppery gold and smells of acrid smoke. I stare at it, wondering if it’s poisoned, if I will transform into a goblin if I taste it.