Page 2 of Wicked Things

If, however, what she said had even a grain of truth, then I needed to find out if I could visit the fabled Svartálfheim and the busy trade markets of the Dark Elves who lived in Otherworld. It was a famous and prosperous market, said to be bustling and welcome to all Fae creatures—except of course, for the Light Elves of the Quendi Forest. They were perennial enemies of the Dark Elves, and the frequent truces between the two never seemed to last too long.

If there was even a chance my mother had been telling the truth about my bloodline, however, and my grandmother had certainly believed she was, then I wanted to explore the possibility one day and try to find a portal to go there and perhaps, after learning more about that world, I could make my fortune there with my trade goods.

The main drawback was that as far as I’d been told, none of the Fae could be completely trusted. They were capricious creatures.

They weren’t the only ones. My mother, who had called herself an “enchantress,” told anyone who would listen that she was descended from Morgen le Fey, a healer and priestess from the Isle of Avalon. My mother’s name, according to her, was really Niamh, and she would answer to no other. Of course, most of that was lies and the rest was madness.

Her real family said her name was Wulfhild, or Hild for short, and she was not descended from anyone in particular, despite her claims. Her mother, my beloved grandmother, who would certainly be in a position to know about her birth, was a little cagey about it.

My grandmother told me that my mother’s madness and wild, reckless behavior probably stemmed from her father. My grandmother had promised me over and over through the years that she would tell me one day who my mother’s father, my grandfather, had really been. It was always “someday,” for my grandmother though. It wasn’t until I was fifteen, and my grandmother was near death from the “white plague” or consumption, that she finally confessed it all.

My mother’s story about my own ancestry had been no less far-fetched and wild. She had told me often that my father was not just a Faery, which would have strained belief enough. No, she had gone further and proclaimed that my father was one of the “Kings of the Faeries.” She had even named me Braden, an old Irish name that she’d heard somewhere and greatly admired. She said it seemed “noble” to her and sent that message to my father.

The name traditionally meant something like “prince,” from what my mother said, but then she said a lot of things, most of them nonsense. There was no word for “prince” then, but the idea of me actually being any kind of heir to a throne was highly unlikely, like her claim about me being half-Faery, seeing how plain and ordinary I was, with nothing at all exceptional about me in those days. My hair was a sort of washed-out, straw color, with some even brassier yellow hair mixed in—an ugly color, I’d always thought. And I had green eyes in certain lights, like the Faeries were supposed to have, though mine were more hazel to be honest. In short, I was a long way from having any beauty, and I never knew why she had decided to stick to her story about my “Faery father” so vehemently.

The truth about my mother was that she was “moonstruck,” a term coined from the popular belief in those days that a person's erratic behavior was dictated by the phases of the moon. The word “lunatic,” from a similar source, also comes to mind.

According to her wild stories, she had strayed into Otherworld as a young woman, while she’d been gleaning herbs and picking berries and flowers for her potions she claimed to use for healings. Once inside this deepest, darkest part of the forest, she said she had been lured into a Faery Ring and then stolen away by those Faeries to the home of the Faeries’ Lord, a man she called King Callum. My grandmother told me she had gone missing for over an entire year around then, though the family had searched for her everywhere. My mother had never been able to reliably account for that missing time.

This Faery king had kept her with him for a while, or so she told me later, intrigued by her wild, extravagant beauty and amused and enchanted by her strangeness, (again, according to her) and her fantastical and implausible stories of being an enchantress and a healer.

Her fair skin, long, vibrant red hair, along with eyes that were a dazzling and unusual shade of summer-grass green probably hadn’t hurt her chances of the king keeping her one bit. But her “Faery lord” had predictably cast her aside once she’d been reckless enough to get pregnant and then had the audacity to actually carry his illegitimate child to full term. One of her serving women had taken uncharacteristic (for a Faery) pity on her. She had taken my mother back to the portal that would take her home to her world again, after the king angrily abandoned her and cast her and her baby aside. Thus, she was able to make it back home and find her family again. That was her story, anyway.

The family had indeed taken her in when she turned back up and tried to care for her, but she had tragically died a few years after her return, having decided one day to string flower garlands around the tree trunks of the willows by the Ouse River. To mark the scene? To memorialize the spot for some arcane reason known only to herself? It was hard to say what her motives had been.

She and I had often lain beneath those trees, their uncut branches waving gently in the breeze, like her long, luxurious hair. There she would dream and sing softly to herself, curling long strands of her hair around her fingers, while I chased the dragonflies and damselflies, rarely catching any of them.

My mother had been found floating face down in that same river—and whether she had fallen in accidentally or had jumped in to take her own life, no one could say.

(Dear reader, that’s not strictly accurate. I could have said, and I did try to tell them that she had spread her arms and fallen in deliberately. But public opinion was that I was only five years old, and far too traumatized and young to know what I was saying. Too ill, as well, because of what she’d done to me before she’d taken her dive into the river. She had first tried to take me with her by attempting to carve my heart from my chest. Because she loved me, or because she wanted to get back at her “Faery lord?” by killing his son? Or perhaps she meant to take my heart as a sacrifice to the Dark Lord, as the woodsman who saved me claimed. He’d said she was chanting to some devil the entire time. It was hard to say. I remember her shouts and screams about how I deserved to die. How I needed to because of how “evil” I was, but not much else about that awful day. Still, I’d somehow survived the entire thing and could assert that her death had absolutely been a deliberate choice on her part after the woodsman thwarted her plans. It’s surprising, though, how very few people believed a traumatized, half-dead five-year-old.)

As for the woodsman, he disappeared shortly thereafter and was never seen again. My grandmother suspected foul play was involved in his disappearance, but I thought it far more likely that he wasn’t prepared to be mixed up in all my mother’s craziness. I remember him making the sign against evil with his crossed fingers over and over after he wrestled the athame from her hands and then picked me up to run with me. My last sight of her was over his shoulder, as she stood with her arms outstretched and her back to the river, my heart’s blood staining the front of her dress.

I was sent to live with my grandmother, who had eventually told me my mother’s entire story. She said that when she first saw me again, she suspected my mother’s wild tales about the Faeries might actually be at least partially true because of the extraordinary beauty of my face and form, and she strongly suspected I indeed had Otherworldly blood. It was a hard story to believe because of how ordinary I looked now. After all, grandmothers often thought their grandchildren were prettier than they really were.

My grandmother claimed to have taken me to an old wise woman who lived in the woods. Most people called the woman a witch. This person, whoever she was, gave me a bitter tasting potion to drink. I remember trying to spit it out, but the old woman put her hand over my mouth and nose and almost choked me half to death to get me to swallow it. It burned my tongue and my throat, and it had made me terribly ill. That was about the extent of my memories of that experience, but again, I’d been very young at the time.

And so, I grew up, and if I had any kind of Faery magic, it never made itself known to me or anyone else. I was certainly not beautiful in any kind of way, as Faeries were said to be, but my grandmother said it was because of the potion I’d been deliberately given “to protect me,” she said. She had, by this time, also invented a soldier husband for her daughter, and a father for me, who had also “died tragically,” in some battle or other, leaving my grandmother to raise me. I doubt the other villagers ever truly believed her, but they did leave me mostly alone, which was how I liked it.

I heard a scratching noise at the door, startling me out of my dream by the fire and ran over to fling it wide, thinking that Leofric had come home at last, so I wouldn’t have to venture out in the freezing cold to look for him after all.

However, there was no one there at all, and I wondered if I’d dreamed the noise as I dozed there by the fire. I leaned out to look up and down the lane, feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck, as if something was watching me, awaiting its chance to spring at me out of the shadows. I know now that it must have been an atavistic response, a vestigial reflex or inheritance from my ancestors. One that had perhaps been triggered by a fear for their lives so abject and traumatizing that it had somehow been passed down in their blood and their bones to their offspring.

It had been the Faeries, of course.

A cold breeze brought me the smell of them floating on the air, something oddly floral that I didn’t recognize, though it probably wasn’t anything good. A feeling of dread and despair came over me, along with a prickling down my spine. I literally braced for impact, but when I whirled around to look behind me, there was nothing there at all—just shadows like the ones lining the road now. Or were there perhaps even more of them there now than there had been before?

I touched the dagger I wore in a sheath on my belt and clutched the beaded rosary that I’d hung around my neck, pulling it out from under my wool shirt. I wasn’t a Christian, or at least I’d never been baptized, though my other relatives had tried to convince my grandmother that I should be.

She had refused because every time I entered the church, I became deathly ill. As a result, I was appallingly ignorant about the Christian religion, and its symbols held little meaning for me. I still wore the rosary around my neck when I was traveling, because my grandmother insisted that was the right way to ensure protection, and because at the time I believed the legend that said holy Christian objects were the best weapons against supernatural creatures. Back in those days, I was very superstitious.

It was as I turned to go back inside that I saw the long shadows suddenly detaching themselves from the walls and stepping out from the alley. They seemed to be the forms of tall men, and there were a lot of them, but I couldn’t make out their faces. I took a quick step back through the doorway, but before I could slam the door and lock it behind me, they were on me with alarming speed, shoving their way in, taking hold of me and pulling me outside in the frigid air to push me roughly to my knees. The one who had taken me shoved a rag in my mouth to quiet me, as someone else pulled my hands behind me to tie them securely. I was pulled to my feet and had a hemp sack that smelled of onions shoved down over my head. All the while, I was struggling wildly, trying to shout through the gag in my mouth, when suddenly I felt a sickening crash on the back of my head, and my legs gave out, making me sink back to the ground.

I’d barely hit my knees, though, when rough hands took hold of me again, and I was pulled up and thrown over someone’s shoulder like a sack of grain. Blood rushed to my head, and this finally proved to be the final insult, as I fainted dead away.

Chapter Two

I came to slowly, aware of lying on the floor next to a huge fireplace, though the room was dark and I could see very little. There were others in the room with me—I could hear their soft snores and heavy breathing, and I felt the pointed tip of a heavy boot give my ribs a couple of hard nudges. My eyes flew open and a harsh voice next to me said, “He’s awake, Your Grace.”