Bourn’s Edge (8 page)

“And as far as she is concerned, it is void.” Garan cocked her head and waited for Tarian to make her next move.

“I don’t care.” She began to pace. “Mab knew my reasons for leaving. Those haven’t changed. I haven’t changed.”

It was Garan’s turn to drum her fingers on the table. “After the bloody events of last night, the Queen takes a different view.”

Tarian stopped pacing. “Last night?”
That crow has been spying on me again
.

“Even though those you killed were mere mortals,” Garan sniffed, “it is evident you still take pleasure in the fight.”

Tarian didn’t deny the charge. In the heat of the moment she had enjoyed the violence, the race to strike her opponent first and avoid serious injury herself. It was only afterwards, when Cassie was regarding her with horror, she remembered that for mortals a fatal blow was indeed fatal. Once she would have thought that fact of little relevance or value, but having lived among mortals for two years . . .

But they would have killed Cassie
. “I was defending a mortal.”

“Your reasons are irrelevant.”

Tarian slammed her hands down on the kitchen table, and leaned forward. “I will
not
go back.” Garan blinked at her. “My life is here. And Mab is no longer part of it.”

“That is your reply?”

Tarian nodded.

Garan got to her feet. “Very well. I will convey it to the Queen.” She crossed to the back door, then stopped and looked back. The formal messenger’s mask had gone and now she spoke as one Fae to another. “She won’t like it.”

Tarian sighed. “I know.”

“YOU’RE QUIET THIS morning, dear. Everything all right?”

The landlady was studying her, Cassie realised. She forced a smile. “I’m fine, thanks. Just tired. I didn’t sleep very well.” She didn’t mention why sleep had been elusive, the images of death and carnage that kept surfacing.

“She fed you all right, then?” Liz began to clear away the breakfast dishes. Cassie had only picked at her bacon and eggs.

Fed me?
Cassie gathered her scattered wits. “Oh. Yes. Boar casserole. It was very nice.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “She showed me round her studio too.”
Before it became a crime scene
.

Tarian had said forensics would find no trace, but that wasn’t possible, surely.
Not for a human
.

Cassie climbed the stairs to her bedroom in a daze and gazed at her reflection as she brushed her teeth. Her face was pale, her eyes dull and panicked.

An image of the heavy spear protruding from the man’s chest surfaced, and she shoved it aside.
Maybe I’m going crazy. Maybe nothing happened the way I remember. Maybe . . . Who the hell knows?

She put the wet toothbrush back in the beaker and wiped her mouth on the towel. The best thing to do was to confront her fear. She should go back to Tarian’s house and see for herself. If something really had happened last night, if it hadn’t all been some weird nightmare brought on by a dose of food poisoning, there’d be evidence. But what would she do if there
was
?

She felt the urge to surround herself with the mundane. She would go shopping. But a chime of church bells put paid to that idea—in Bourn’s Edge the shops weren’t open on Sunday.

She went to her bedroom window and peered out. Several of the villagers dressed in their Sunday bests, among them Cath the postmistress and Dr. Reynolds, were hurrying up the road. On impulse, she shrugged her jacket on and hurried downstairs to join them.

“Going out?” called Liz, as she passed the open kitchen door.

“Thought I’d go to church.” Then Cassie was out the front door, through the garden gate, and following the worshippers streaming by ones and twos towards the shabby spire.

It was years since she had been to church, and it had been a different denomination. But she needn’t have worried about not knowing the ropes. As she ventured into the cool of the interior, Dr. Reynolds in his role as usher handed her a hymnbook and pointed to an empty pew. She nodded her thanks and sank onto it. No sooner had she sat down, though, than everyone else in the congregation stood up.

Simon Wright took his place in the pulpit. And after a brief prayer, the service got underway. Afterwards, Cassie didn’t remember much about it, except that she hadn’t disgraced herself. It was a matter of doing what everyone else did, standing then sitting, murmuring the required responses, singing the vaguely familiar hymns as best she could. But all the time her mind was engaged elsewhere.

Oh Lord, don’t let me be mad
, she prayed.
And please don’t let Tarian be some kind of demon
. For some reason this last point was important to her. Her instincts had told her the artist was a friend. And hadn’t Tarian saved her life?
But she was so savage about it, so primitive
.

Shut up
, she told herself. When the bald man sitting next to her in the pew turned to her in surprise, she realised she must have spoken aloud. “Sorry,” she whispered, embarrassed.

The ritual of the service did help to calm her, though, and by its end she had plucked up courage to walk to Tarian’s house and ask her for the truth.

She shook hands with the vicar, who said how pleased he was to see her, and stepped outside, then stopped in surprise. Just outside the porch stood a tall stranger in a russet-coloured tunic and breeches and a cloak of forest green. A scabbarded sword hung at his right hip. Stranger than his quasi-medieval clothing was the fact that no one else seemed aware of him or the horses whose reins he held.

Cassie turned to ask Reverend Wright who the man was, but he was stroking his beard, deep in conversation with a parishioner.

“Only you can see or hear me,” came the stranger’s voice, deep and full of amusement. He gestured, his hand tracing some symbol in the air.

She couldn’t move. “Help!” she cried out, or tried to; no sound emerged.

“Hush.” He led the two horses to her side. “Be easy.” He brushed her cheek with slender fingers. “Don’t be afraid. You’re the Queen’s prisoner now, and none dare hurt you for fear of retribution.”

The Queen?

Gripping Cassie around the waist, and with no apparent sign of effort, he lifted her into one of the saddles. After arranging her limbs, hair, and clothing to his satisfaction, he tied her wrists to the saddle’s pommel and stood back to assess the result. Then he mounted the other horse and reached for her horse’s reins. And all the while, members of the congregation came and went, oblivious to what was happening right under their noses.

Unable to do anything else, Cassie committed the stranger’s details to memory. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a pale, clean-shaven face. The blackness of his hair and the slight tilt to his eyes reminded her of Tarian. In fact, now she came to think of it, he could have stepped straight out of one of Tarian’s paintings.

A click of his tongue urged his horse into motion. Her mount followed his, and they trotted up the High Street, past the garage. Two trainer-clad feet poked out from under Cassie’s car, which now sported a new bumper.
Mike must work on Sundays
. She tried to shout out to the mechanic, but as before no sound emerged.

Whatever her abductor had done to paralyse her was selective. She could still breathe and blink her eyelids, for example, and her heart was beating steadily. Which was odd, come to think of it. She should be terrified out of her wits, yet she felt calm.

He looked back at Cassie, before facing front once more. They rode past Tarian’s house up the hill towards the forest. When the stile came into view, he dug his heels in and headed straight for it. Her mount picked up speed too and she was thankful her hands were bound to the pommel or she would have fallen off. Then she was airborne, and if she could have she would have held her breath. It seemed to take forever before her horse’s hooves had cleared the battered wooden stile, but it was probably mere seconds before the jarring landing. Once more he checked that she was all right before proceeding on at a trot.

They had gone only a little way along the public footpath when he slowed the horses to a walk and branched off, taking the game trail she had taken previously. Gloom descended as the trees closed in on either side and the sounds of the forest faded. Twigs tried to scratch her face and branches threatened to sweep her from her saddle, but she was unable to hunch down to avoid them. He gestured and muttered something, and after that it was almost as though the branches were bending away from her to allow her free passage.

A loud caw from the forest canopy above startled her. The man with the ponytail shaded his eyes and looked up then waved a gloved hand at a large crow, as if in greeting.

One more impossibility
, thought Cassie.

At last, they emerged into a sun-dappled clearing. A massive oak tree took pride of place on one side, and eight feet from it stood an imposing ash tree. He guided his horse towards the gap between the trees, and a strange sensation like the buzzing of bees or the prickle of electricity crawled over her, growing stronger the closer they got. As her horse passed between the trees, the sensation vanished. So did Bourn Forest.

Oh, it was still forest, that much was plain, Cassie thought, as she took in her surroundings as best she could, but it was . . . “Different” was the best word she could come up with. The rough clearing had become a glade full of woodland flowers where bees buzzed. And the trees here, wherever “here” was, were taller, thinner, and in leaf. The air was balmy too, warm as midsummer and with a honeysuckle tang to it. The birds sang louder and more tunefully.

The game trail had become a bridle track and no longer sloped uphill. As they rode along it, Cassie puzzled over her growing feeling of déjà vu. Then it came to her.
Tarian’s paintings
.

She was thinking about that when crashing noises and the waving of branches drew her attention to the undergrowth ten yards ahead. Both horses became skittish, and the man reined in at once. He was just in time, for several animals, two large followed by three small, crossed the trail in front of them. Cassie had time to register the large heads and small hindquarters, the thick, bristly red-brown coats and wicked-looking tusks, then the family of wild boar disappeared into the undergrowth.

The crashing sounds were already fading into the distance when he urged his horse into motion. A few minutes later, they emerged into the open, into daylight softer and more muted than she was used to. She heard the unmistakeable cry of a hawk and spied it circling high above.

Her abductor turned in his saddle and grinned. “Behold.” He gestured with one gloved hand. “Mab’s domain.”

Cassie blinked at the lush parkland and sparkling lakes, and the imposing structure standing in their midst. No squat ugly castle with thick walls and a drawbridge for this Mab person, it seemed. White pennants fluttered from six impossibly tall and delicate turrets, and light glittered off the countless windows that peppered a palace made of white marble and glass.

Pleased with the impression her surroundings had made on her, he urged his horse into motion again. They rode through pastures dotted with clover and buttercup, past herds of red deer that looked at them before tamely resuming their grazing. Up to the arched gates they went, then through them into a spacious courtyard, where two stable boys stopped what they were doing and hurried forward to take their horses.

“Lord Einion.” The first boy bowed and held Cassie’s horse steady while Einion dismounted, freed her hands from the pommel, and lifted her down.

He carried her up the steps and into the palace. Inability to move thwarted Cassie’s attempts to look about her, but she caught glimpses of a high ceiling, tall windows of stained glass, richly decorated wall hangings, and furniture carved with leaf patterns and stylised representations of woodland animals. He halted in an inner chamber and placed her on herb- and rush-strewn flagstones.

An elderly wolfhound came to investigate but a woman’s autocratic voice called, “Olwydd,” and he stopped nosing her and padded away.

“This puny creature is the one?” continued the voice. “She is plain. Much too short. Her skin too brown, her hair too fair.”

“Yet she is the one, your majesty,” said Einion.

Cassie wished she could see who was insulting her—from that “your majesty,” it must be the Queen. What had he called her—Mab? Then her paralysis disappeared and the terror that had been held at bay surged through her and she began to tremble.

“And weak. See how the mortal trembles. How could any self-respecting Fae feel anything but pity or disdain? Are you sure there is no mistake?”

Fae?
Cassie pounced on the word.
Does that mean this is Faerie?
Suddenly everything began to make sense.
Tarian isn’t a demon
, she realised with a rush of relief.
She’s one of the Fae
.

At last she managed to regain control of herself, enough to roll over onto her side and prop herself up on one arm.

At the far end of the room, in front of a flickering fire, was an outsize throne. In it sat a regal-looking woman in a silk gown of the deepest violet that clung to her in all the right places. Her hair was raven black, and she wore it long and flowing, held in place by a simple silver circlet. The milk white face beneath the circlet was proud and very beautiful. One long-fingered hand rested on the throne’s arm, the other fondled the ears of the wolfhound. To one side, on a wooden perch, sat a large crow observing proceedings.

Dark eyes as keen as a hawk’s raked Cassie from head to toe. “Tarian would defy me for
this
?”

Mab was clearly furious, and Cassie braced herself for the worst. But instead of blasting her to smithereens, the woman let out a peal of laughter. The abrupt change of mood made the hairs on the back of Cassie’s neck stand up.

“Good,” said Mab. “Let us see if we can convince her to return.”