Silver's Bane. Anne Kelleher

of the world. “Stop that!” cried Vinaver. “You’re doing it—stop it—”

      The Hag jerked around, the hairs on the end of her nose twitching, as if she smelled Vinaver’s desperation. “Round about the circle goes, dark to light and back it flows,” she chanted, as if Vinaver had not spoken. “She that dares to stop my spin, had better put a tidbit in. Feed my cauldron, pay the price, lest all be lost when light turns dark and dark turns light.”

      Vinaver’s stomach clenched and her gut heaved at the thought that that creature might touch her. But she had come all this way, and what need had she of a womb, after all? She’d borne a son in her appointed time, such as it was. What did it matter whether or not she gave up her womb? “But—but if I give you my womb,” she whispered, “will it not mean I can never be Queen?” The Hag threw back her head and howled as if at some unwitting joke, but Vinaver would not be dissuaded. “Tell me—tell me what I shall become—if I give you this—this part of me. If I shall not be Queen, what then?”

      “She who comes with bitter need, had better then my cauldron feed.”

      But suddenly, Vinaver understood something that had eluded her for a long time. She had never understood why the god had come to her that Beltane night when Finuviel was conceived. No one had believed her. But the Hag knew. Her womb had served its purpose. “All right,” she shrugged. “Done.”

      The Hag cackled. Vinaver’s mouth dried up like a desert, and she thought she might faint as nausea flopped in her gut like a dying fish. The Hag’s claws closed around her wrist, drawing her closer, and the Hag’s face seemed to fill her entire field of vision. The Hag’s eyes glittered red, then green in the leaping blue flames, and her craggy face dissolved into unrecognizable chaos. Vinaver collapsed, crying out as she felt the scratch of the Hag’s cold fingers, pulling at her clothing, kneading at her flesh, creeping between her legs, probing for the opening to the very center of her self, seeking, separating, pushing in with sharp, grasping claws.

      Vinaver cried out at the first stab of blinding pain, and she pushed away, but the Hag held her hard. She shut her eyes as the pain flamed through her, and a kaleidoscope of voices and faces exploded in her mind, uncurling like ribbons, in long slow swirls of scarlet agony. She heard the wet, sucking rent, as her flesh ripped, but she didn’t care, because she understood at last that it was in the pain that the Hag imparted her knowledge. As her body broke and bled, her mind opened, and a torrent of images cascaded in. She saw her mother, Timias and the mortal by whose hand the Caul was forged. She saw the moment of its making, when the three called down the magic and bound the two worlds—Shadow and Faerie—inextricably together, tightening the normal bonds between them tight as a noose.

      In some detached corner of her mind, she felt the Hag tear away her womb, felt the hot gush of blood between her thighs, and she lay flat, legs thrown open, dazed and helpless as a newborn child. The pictures shuddered, swirled, spun and split into a double set of likenesses—somehow at once both that which was, and that which should have been. She saw herself born the sole daughter of Gloriana, Faerie’s great Queen, named her Heir, and made Queen when Gloriana went into the West. She saw a Faerie green and flourishing, Finuviel born in the fullness of time, welcomed as the new King of Faerie, even while, running concurrently, like the overlay of the Shadowlands on Faerie, she saw what had really happened since the forging of the Caul. And then, as the pain settled into a slow throb, she saw faint and pale the images of what might be. She lay back, eyes open, staring into the vaulted ceiling as the ghostly outlines formed and reformed, and the world slowly dissolved into nothingness.

      When next she opened her eyes, she was lying flat on her back still, staring up at what she first thought to be pinpoints of twinkling lichen. Then a warm wind rustled through the branches of the trees above her, and she realized that the soft grass beneath her was slick with morning dew. And as she watched through eyes suddenly flooded with tears, the black sky above her brightened to gray as the first light of a Faerie dawn broke the horizon at last.

      1

      The gremlin’s howls filled the forest. Like an avalanche, like a tidal wave, the sounds of rage and anguish and despair too long checked, exploded through the silent Samhain night, unleashed in earsplitting shrieks that continued unabated far beyond the physical capacity of such a small being to sustain such unbroken cacophony. Delphinea crumpled to her knees, crumbling like a dam against a sudden thaw, and pressed her head against the horse’s side, trying to stifle the wails that wrapped themselves around her, first like water, then like wool, nearly choking her, crushing her with their weight of unadulterated sorrow, anger and need. The moon was hidden and the still sky was only illuminated by silver starlight. The night condensed into nothing but the blood-wrenching screams and the slick salt smell of the horse’s coarse hair beneath her cheek. She felt subtle tremors beneath the surface of the leaf-strewn ground as if the great trees all around them shuddered to their roots. The horse trembled and shook, and Delphinea wrapped her arms as best she could around the animal’s neck, murmuring a gentle croon more felt than heard, trying to create a subtle vibration to act as the only shield she could think of under such an onslaught of sound. But there was nothing, ultimately, that could stand against it, and finally, she collapsed against the horse’s side, the mare’s great beating heart her only anchor.

      It was thus, curled and quivering, that Vinaver’s house guards found her shortly before dawn, palms plastered against her ears, the horse only semi-aware, its eyes rolled back, its ears flattened against its head. Petri’s cries showed no signs of diminishing. The orange torchlight revealed the gremlin flopping on the forest floor like a fish caught in a net. As he is, mused Delphinea, within a net of Samhain madness. Every Samhain the gremlins all went mad, and usually they were confined. But nothing seemed to be happening quite the way it usually did.

      It took all six guards to overpower him, despite the fact that he was less than half the size of Delphinea. Even the thick gag they improvised from a strip of hastily cutoff doublet sleeve barely stifled Petri’s cries. When at last Petri was subdued, his howling reduced to smothered moans, they turned their attention to Delphinea, sitting quiet and disheveled beside the near-insensible horse.

      “My lady?” The dark-haired sidhe who bent over her wore a gold breastplate emblazoned with the Queen’s crest, and for a moment, Delphinea was afraid the soldiers had been sent out by the Queen and Timias to drag both of them back to the palace under arrest. She scrambled backward, as the flickering torchlight gleamed on the officer’s insignia embroidered on his sleeves. But his next words made her nearly weep with relief. “The Lady Vinaver sent us out to find you. I am Ethoniel, a captain in the Third Company of Her Majesty’s Knights. If you would be so kind as to come with us, we will escort you to her Forest House.”

      “How’d that thing get out?” asked one of the other soldiers, with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder in Petri’s direction.

      “Petri is not a thing,” she sputtered, even as the captain extended his hand and helped her to stand. Two of the others coaxed her mare onto her feet.

      “We’ll take you both.” The captain spoke firmly. “It doesn’t look as if it’ll give us any trouble now. We can’t leave it here.” Indeed, Petri lay in a forlorn little heap, his arms bound to his sides, one leathery little cheek pressed to the pine needles and leaves that carpeted the forest floor, eyes closed, breathing hard, but every other muscle relaxed. “Forgive me for taking the time to ask you, lady, but how did this happen? Did it follow you, my lady? How did it get past the gates?”

      She knew that for any other sidhe, the presence of a gremlin leagues away from the palace of the Queen of Faerie, the one place to which they were forever bound, at least according to all the lore, was surprising to the point of shocking. But how to explain to them that despite his incipient madness, it was Petri who’d guided her through the maze of the ancient forest, close enough to Vinaver’s house that they could be rescued? Surely Vinaver, herself outcast by the Court, would understand that Delphinea could not leave the loyal little gremlin behind, for it was abundantly clear that Timias and the Queen intended to lay at least part of the responsibility for the missing Caul on the entire gremlin population. But now was not the time to explain how or why the gremlin was with