Page 5 of Wicked Things

“Wait, please! I have questions! Are you the ones who have been following me? Have you harmed my uncle Leofric? Tell me, please, I beg you. Why are you doing this?”

I was still struggling, but the night I’d had so far was finally catching up to me, and my head throbbed where I’d taken an elbow to the back of it during the fight earlier outside Leofric’s house. When I was sure I couldn’t take much more, I decided I was probably going to faint, because I found it hard to breathe and darkness was creeping around the edges of my consciousness. I was suddenly so tired. My last thought was that this could be the last night of my life, so perhaps I should try to stay awake to enjoy it. I glanced up once more at the man in bed, who was still solemnly staring right back at me, his face devoid of any pity or human emotion. Without another word, however, he lifted a hand and made a strange pass in the air. Everything went dark and I gave up at last, closing my eyes and falling back down by the fire. I slipped into a deep, uneasy sleep.

****

Fionn, King of Murias

I lay awake a long while after talking to the boy, considering the sleeping face of the young man, the face that kept flickering back and forth between pretty and plain in the unsteady firelight. He had been made to look extremely ordinary by someone who had a good deal of power, though it had happened long ago and the glamour was definitely cracking around the edges, ready to fall away at the slightest provocation.

When I had first seen him on the streets of this mortal town called Jorvik, I’d thought he was totally unremarkable, with his pale-yellow hair, muddy hazel eyes, and features so ordinary that they actually overshot the mark and aroused suspicion. No one could be so absurdly dull and without appeal. It strained belief. His skin bore no freckles or moles or scars, either, which was almost unheard of in mortals. All of them had at least some scars or slight blemishes as a rule and not this nearly perfect expanse of tawny skin.

The boy was snoring softly on the floor of the small, crowded room beside me, the only one the innkeeper claimed he had available on this miserably cold night in this pedestrian city packed full of mortals. It had been late when we took him the night before and the bad weather had rolled in off the sea in clouds of icy mist and snow. I decided it would be easier to avoid travel until morning, when the snow would be deep on the ground, but not actively blowing in our faces to hinder our progress. We had been traveling all day as well, and my men were tired.

We could have taken any bed or as many as we liked, of course, including the innkeeper’s. But I was trying to keep a low profile, and a dozen or more unexplained mortal corpses in a local tavern might cause some undue talk and excitement in the morning. I decided we’d stay in one of the large common rooms upstairs —all of us together—to avoid the human stench if we could. One night in close quarters wouldn’t kill us. We could rest properly and the fire would keep us warm through the cold night with little effort on our part.

I drew in a breath, tasting the air the boy was exhaling—the stew he’d eaten for supper had a disagreeable odor of fish. My people ate no flesh of any living thing—not beast, nor fish, nor fowl. I picked up the goblet beside me and took a long sip of the terrible wine to wash away the taste of the fish from my mouth.

I’d also noticed a slight odor of lye soap in the air that probably was coming from Braden Wanderer’s clothing, indicating that his clothes had been washed recently. Another oddity in the vast unwashed mortal world. I’d picked up a slight tang of sweat, too, that wasn’t as unpleasant an odor as most mortals carried with them. In fact, there was a hint of something around the boy that smelled of purple sea aster, a coastal flower that thrived in the saltwater marshes and the sea cliffs of Ireland. It would probably be from his Faery blood.

I inhaled again, looking for any hint of his mother and the faintly musky odor of cauldrons, black cats, and old magic that clung to witches and enchantresses, but I found none of that, except for the slightest hint of woodsmoke and ashes that clung to him. I thought for a moment that I caught a hint of madness and brimstone, too, but it was so slight and fleeting that I might have imagined it.

The only charm of any kind the boy was wearing was a mother’s kiss still lingering like a faint blessing on his forehead, but no others I could discern. No priests had been at work on him with their own brand of fervent, ecclesiastical magic, so there was no smell of incense either, even though he wore their so-called Christian symbol around his neck. The violent, avaricious and ignorant priests of that religion didn’t follow the true teachings of “Hælend Crist,” or Savior Christ, as they called him. They were much crueler and more unforgiving. However, I suspected Braden Wanderer was what these priests of the Saxon world might unironically call an apostate.

The glamour on him, put there, he’d said, when he was a very young child, was still holding, though it was nearly twenty years old and was about to crack wide open. I didn’t know mortal witches could be that powerful. However, if his story were true, the old lady who had put the disguise on him could have had demon blood—or perhaps he did. Either one would make a difference. There was, however, the slightest suggestion of brimstone in the air around him, which I suspected was coming from the fading glamour, but it could have been coming from his own essence.

I didn’t understand why King Callum would have taken a mortal woman to live with him in the first place and then been so careless as to sire a child on her. But then members of the Gorias tribe of the Sidhe Faeries were known to be rash and even foolhardy. I’d heard that he had thought he’d be able to have many more children later on during his long, mostly immortal life. Legitimate ones, with a more suitable mate, but it was not to be. He’d had three subsequent wives, none of whom had given him a child, and his last wife had died trying to have his seventh attempt at one. None of his children had lived more than a few hours past birth. He said he often wondered if the mortal woman, who had called herself an enchantress, had cursed him in some way.

To lay such a curse, however, would mean she wasn’t completely mortal at all. The specter of demon blood raised again in my mind. Demons could be inhumanly beautiful, even more so than my own people, as Callum’s woman was said to have been. She also often appeared to be unhinged with her wild and unpredictable behavior. As demons were said to be.

This woman—this Braden Wanderer’s mother—had thrown herself into a river after she returned to the mortal world, and it was said that she was “moonstruck.” If I decided to go through with this plan of King Callum’s, I’d have to be wary of the boy and watch him carefully for signs of demonic behavior and his mother’s madness.

Demons were common enough in Otherworld. Often their inhuman beauty allowed them to blend in with the Faeries and pass among us unnoticed. There were whole tribes of ogres living in Otherworld, and vampires were often seen as well. As long as they kept their distance, we allowed it.

Callum, king of the Gorias tribe, had been grievously wounded in an attempted coup two weeks ago. When the healers had admitted there was nothing more they could do for him, and he faced a long and lingering death, the king had asked me to come and see him, saying he had a proposition for me.

I went primarily out of curiosity to see what he had to say.

We were both kings of the Tuatha Dé Danann, meaning tribes or people of the Aos Sídhe. The term was used to refer to the tribes that were the last to invade before they were driven away by the Milisians, an indigenous people of Ireland, and retreated into the Hollow Hills. They had burned their ships once they reached the district of Corcu Belgatan (near Connemara), so that they should not think of retreating to them. The smoke and the mist that came from the vessels filled the neighboring land and air, and therefore, it was conceived by the locals that the Aos Sídhe people, as we were called, had arrived in clouds of mist.

With their combined magic, the Aos Sídhe established four cities, entirely separate from each other inside Otherworld. Murias, Finias, Gorias, and Falias were their names and they battled other indigenous inhabitants for dominion over the land for many years. When they were finally victorious, the tribes each established their own separate sovereign kingdom, and each of them had their own king.

I was a descendant of the first king of the Murias tribe, an unbroken line down the intervening last three centuries. King Callum could say the same with his own Gorias kingdom, and it turned out that now, in his final, dying days, he had an interesting proposition for me. He had only a short time left to live, and he looked it. His face was gaunt and pale, and the blood had soaked through his bandages and was oozing down the back of his neck in thin lines. I fancied that I could see the bones of his skull inside his head through his pale skin. I’d heard that his attackers had cracked that skull like an egg.

“I’ve been destroyed by the bastards, and I won’t get over this, no matter how much magic the healers apply. Yet I have no wish for the murdering gobshites who did this to me to prosper and take over the governing of my people.”

“Do you think it was the Finians or the Falians who did this to you, then? Which one of the tribes? Because I can assure you it was not the Murians.”

“It was both of the diabhal bastards,” he shouted, “The Finians and the Falians were working together!” Red flecks of blood flew from his lips and splattered the white sheet tucked below his chin. “I intend to make sure they never prosper from it. I have no legitimate child to pass my kingdom on to, so in order to keep my bloodline on the Gorian throne, it will have to be the only child of my poor moonstruck enchantress, Niamh. I kept her with me once for over a year and the child is mine. I have no doubt of that. I’ve had my men track my illegitimate son to where he is now in the mortal world. He lives and works in a place called Jorvik in the mortal kingdom of Northumbria, on a street called Shambles. At least he was there three days ago. You must find him for me.”

“What is it you want me to do about it? No one with mortal blood would ever be accepted by the people.”

“I want you to fetch him anyway!” he shouted, making the veins pop out on his forehead. He reached out a shaking hand to me, so what could I do but take it? His skin was clammy and cold, more than half-dead already. “Do this for me, Fionn. Bring him here to his home and then make him your royal consort. If you will, I’ll give you my kingdom for it. My armies and all the gold and riches in my coffers. Since he’s only half-Sidhe, he can’t sit on the throne by our ancient and established laws, but the old gods and my ancestors will be satisfied. The people will like having him as their Royal Consort with you as their king. At least my blood runs in his veins and the old gods will perhaps be appeased and look favorably on me when I meet them. They can rest easy then and allow me to do the same. If you’ll do this for me, you can claim Gorias for your own and then with my armies and the gods’ help seize the other two—Finias and Falias. You’re the only true warrior-king left anyway. It’s up to you to make this right for Otherworld and our descendants.”

I wasn’t fooled by all his talk of the old gods resting easy and being satisfied. The old gods were capricious at best and not inclined to do much that we Faeries asked of them. Or anyone else for that matter.

(Reader, this was the time of the old gods in Otherworld, though they’re long since gone now. Maybe they left us or maybe they’re sleeping. No one knows. Most of Britain at that time had moved on, but not the Fae. They had adopted the old ways and the old religion while they were fighting the indigenous people here and had more or less kept up the tradition. The Viking descendants and most locals of Jorvik now worshipped Hælend Crist, but in the old Romano-Briton religion, circa the first century, their beliefs didn’t have a specific, formal name like modern ones do, necessarily. Historians later described it using terms like Romano-Briton polytheism or paganism. In other words, a mixture of the old Roman gods, along with others—like Mithras, Sulis, Cocidus and many more. It was a simpler time in a way, and the gods were less jealous.)

As for King Callum, he was a bitter, angry man, having been cheated out of a long life by avarice and treachery and wishing nothing but utter disaster on those he considered his enemies. He was not called Callum the Vengeful for nothing, after all. The only reason I was still here listening and agreeing with him was that the idea of becoming High King over all the others was appealing to me. It had been the dream of my grandfathers’ once, and one I could fulfill in my lifetime. It was an intriguing idea.