A Veil of Truth and Trickery by Analeigh Ford

Chapter Five

I’d thoughtCaldamir was tall before, when he loomed above me in the dark of the study. Out here astride a fae horse, a creature so magnificent in its own right that it put human horses to shame, he was positively massive. He rode head and shoulders above the top of the carriage, his face fixed stoically forward as if he didn’t see the faces of the humans peering up at him from either side of the road.

Further up, the music of the Midsommar festival had ground to a halt. Word had spread fast, and for good reason.

A fae was here. And more than that, he was here in broad daylight—or what was left of it. Fae didn’t just ride horses through the middle of town. Not now. Not in hundreds of years. Maybe not ever.

“But that can’t be …” Ixora whispered, ignoring her mother’s tugging at her hand as she stared in horror at the gorgeous creature looking on as Lord Otto appeared, red-faced as ever, in the open carriage doors. She tore her eyes away from him for only a second to scrutinize me. “You look nothing like him.”

“Maybe,” I said, through teeth gritted so hard I’d already started to get a headache, “it’s because I’m not fae-marked at all. Like I’ve been trying to tell everyone my whole life.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re not cursed,” she snapped back. “After all, why else would he be here?”

That, there, I couldn’t argue with.

Why else would he be here?

I saw the looks of recognition on other faces as they realized what Ixora had. He wasn’t the fae from their storybooks—those human-looking creatures with white hair and black eyes, their skin so pale the very paper the images were inked onto appeared almost translucent—but he was fae.

Unmistakably so.

“What’ve you done?” Nerys whispered, her face going pale as she finally managed to usher Ixora and Draigh into the house. Lavinia followed despite at first trying to slip away, only to find Draigh was now holding onto her.

Sol, however, Nerys was having more trouble with. He wouldn’t budge from his spot perched up in the tree branches. She eventually gave up when Lord Otto’s feet finally kicked up dust from where he landed, choosing instead to throw the remaining candy she’d gathered up to Sol with whispered threats to follow the bribe to stay in place.

I, meanwhile, glanced over my shoulder toward the door Ixora was quickly wedging behind her.

“Shouldn’t I hide too?” I asked, hesitantly.

My father took a moment to answer, and when he did, it was him I turned slowly toward instead of the door. “Why would you?”

The way he said it, so resigned and without remorse, made me want to vomit. He stared forward, eyes locked on Caldamir as he and Lord Otto followed the curving garden path up to stand before us.

How my father made me feel in that moment was nothing compared to what rose up in me when I saw the way Lord Otto wouldn’t look at me when we’d finally risen from greeting him. The horses pawed the ground in the street, shaking their manes as their eyes rolled in their sockets as if they were trying to keep the fae’s horse in sight.

The fae’s horse, in turn, snorted and lifted back its lips to reveal long, pointed fangs. I don’t know if the horses saw with their blinders, but they stirred and jostled together as if they had.

Lord Otto’s eyes reminded me of the horses’, the way the whites of them flashed in the encroaching dark as he avoided looking me in the eye. As if I didn’t already have an idea of why the fae was here.

Fae might come marching through the middle of streets on horseback instead of slipping through the trees of the forest like a shadow, but they still only came for one thing. They came to make a deal.

Or to collect on one.

There was an awkward moment where Lord Otto and his guest stood before us, no one speaking. It took me that moment to understand why, that it was because no one stood beside the Lord to introduce him. With all but the butler away for the festival, that duty would have fallen to Raful… but he was conspicuously absent.

Outside the gate, the villagers continued to step ever closer, one shuffling footstep at a time, to get a better look at this fae.

To see what he’d come for.

As if we didn’t already know.

Finally, the lord did manage to speak, but it wasn’t an introduction. It was an apology.

“I’m so sorry, Delph.” His watery, red, eyes met mine, and with those few words he crushed my heart to dust.

“Please, Lord Otto, tell me you didn’t,” I said, throat barely croaking out the words.

The lord’s hands reached out to clasp mine, but I drew back. He looked like he’d been slapped.

Annoyance crossed the fae, Caldamir’s, face before he spoke, his voice sounding almost as bored as it did powerful.

“No need to look so disappointed,” he said. “This is your own doing. Now, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not stand here until Midsommar has already come and passed.”

All this fae had to do was speak above a whisper and the villagers once creeping closer paused. Not one of them dared to step foot inside the garden gate. For all their years harassing me, they see a real fae and suddenly they’re not so anxious to come pick a fight.

I should’ve been focused on the fae, on fearing and hating him, but instead… it was them that sprang to mind. The cowards.

My disgust with them was second only, I learned a moment later, to that I felt for my stepmother. Nerys had spotted the villagers too. With each flicker between the crowd and the fae, her nails dug a little deeper into my father’s arm at her side.

“I completely agree. No need to stand out here on the stoop for the whole village to gawk at,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Should we take this inside?

She tried to make a gracious gesture toward the door, but it fell flat when Caldamir tilted his head back to look over the outside of the cottage and he made no attempt to hide the way his face twisted up in distaste.

“No need for that. I’d rather not waste any more time—I already have what I came for.”

“And that is?” I asked, breathless.

“You.”

I’d known the answer, of course, but that didn’t stop it from causing my heart to still.

“You see, girl,” he continued, “the lord here and I made a deal. He’s no longer able to fulfill his end of the bargain, so in exchange, he’s offered me you.”

The already splintered world shattered around me. It left me speechless, drowning as if suddenly pulled beneath the surface of water I hadn’t realized I was barely treading.

When I didn’t reply, Caldamir leaned ever so slightly closer, his brows knitting together slightly.

“That means I’m taking you to faerie.”

I wasn’t given the chance to respond this time either, not before my stepmother did for me.

“Then do it already.” Nerys moved slightly, shielding her body behind my father’s shoulder. “You didn’t have to come here and make a spectacle of it.”

Of course, that was what she was worried about.

Her stepdaughter was about to be kidnapped to the fae realm, and all she was worried about was how it’d look to the rest of the village. She might’ve been ready to be done with me, to throw me to the wolves she’d always been looking out for, but I was not.

I wasn’t the only one annoyed by her response, however.

“I’d hardly call this a spectacle,” Caldamir said. “The girl’s been called fae-marked, has she not? From what I’ve been told, this is hardly unexpected.”

He straightened up slightly, eyes scanning over my parents now with the same disdain he’d shown for our cottage earlier. “From where I’m looking at it, I’m doing you all a favor.” He turned to look at me again. “You, the most of all.”

“Doing me a favor?” I squared my shoulders and pretended my knees didn’t want to collapse beneath me at any given moment. If this was the curse, then maybe there still was a way to get out of it. That was the way of the fae, was it not? Their deals were wordy, specific, ambiguous. If I didn’t want to be spirited away so close to the birthday that was supposed to free me, then I was going to have to fight for it.

“What right do you have over me?” I asked. “I’m not livestock to be bargained with.”

Caldamir tilted his head, considering me. “Are you not, though?” The slightest look of amusement, or some sort of annoyance close to it, flickered across his features. For a second, his dark eyes seemed to alight a bit, as if lit from some tiny spark within. “The lord, he owns all who work his lands… no?”

I gritted my teeth together, but he still understood the meaning of my words when they were forced between them.

“Only by technicality.”

“Well, that’s it then.” Caldamir straightened back up—as if he should be able to straighten up at all, given his height. His eyes took on a disinterested look, as if he was already planning how he’d cook me for supper as soon as he’d gotten me out of Alderia. “A bargain was made, and it has to be fulfilled.”

“But it isn’t my bargain,” I pressed. “And why does it have to be me? Can’t you just choose someone else?”

“Why would I do that when fate already so graciously chose for me?”

Caldamir’s hand reached out to me then, and I froze, unable to shrink back from him. But he didn’t touch me, he instead twisted a finger around one of my silver locks, the look on his face almost mesmerized by it.

“I’ve never heard of a fae-marked before,” Caldamir said, finally drawing his hand back. “But I’d be a fool not to recognize fae work when I see it.”

He leaned down to me then, his eyes settling on me so close I could see the markings in his iris. From further back, I’d thought they were dark like mine—pools of black that would threaten to suck me into them. But they weren’t. They were dark, sure, but flecked with gold the same color as his hair. I’d thought I’d imagined their glow before, but once again, the color from within seemed to burn a little brighter as he looked the rest of me over. “You’ll soon learn that none of us are true masters of our own fate. Our lives were decided for us long before we were born. Human or fae, that’s where we’re the same.”

“We’re all victims to fate,” Caldamir said, finally straightening up. “I’m as bound to the magic of the deal as you are. But you’re right. There is an alternative. There always is, with these deals. You can choose not to come with me. I’ll only take a willing victim.”

Before hope could so much as spark within me, Lord Otto crushed that, too.

“If you don’t do this, then we lose everything,” he burst out, fear making his words stumble over one another. “Not just the estate. The lands. The fields. The village.”

He shook his head.

“It’s either you, or all of them.”

I stared at him in growing horror. “All of them …?”

“Your village, in its entirety, will be enslaved to the kingdom of the Woodland Fae,” Caldamir said, calmly.

Murmurs erupted through the crowd pressed closest to the garden gate. They shared terrified looks, some of them, others just glanced at me with renewed hatred.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father draw Nerys in a bit closer. At least he was trying to keep the slight flicker of hope off of his face. My stepmother, on the other hand, made no effort to hide the emotions crossing her own.

Not that I’d need to ask her where she stood on the matter. Not that I’d have to ask any of them. I knew that if this decision were up to anyone else in the village, they’d give me up in a heartbeat. To them, I was fae-marked, after all.

To them, this was what I was born for.

And maybe they were right.

“If you’re trying to find a way to justify your own selfishness, then know that at least if the whole village gets enslaved they’ll just be enslaved here,” Caldamir said, stopping for a second as a slight shiver wracked his body, as if the idea of so many humans crossing over into faerie was unthinkable. “Think of it this way. I’ve seen the way the humans here treat you. You’re less-than to them. You’re not considered fae yet you’re not human to them, either. This way, at least, you get to be remembered as a hero.”

I’ve never laughed so hard at anything in my life.

All the rest of the faces around me looked on in horror, their eyes wide as they glanced between myself and the fae to see how he’d react as I doubled over, one hand pressed to my midsection as I tried to gather myself together to find words again.

“You really think you can trick me so easily?” I asked, finally. “First you offer me a choice that isn’t really a choice, and then you try to make me grateful for it?”

Finally, the last of the humor dripped from my tongue, melted away from the heat now rising in my face flushed with rage. “At least have the decency to be honest with me … if that’s possible for your kind.”

“Fine then,” Caldamir said, any remaining trace of kindness disappearing from his face. He straightened up again, once again somehow surprising me with his overwhelming height. It was easy to forget in moments, exactly what he was. He had this way of subtly shifting his weight and posture to fit in with us. To disarm us.

Though there was no attempt to disarm me when he spoke next. The same subtle shift had seeped into his voice. It’d taken on a more direct tone. Sharp. Cutting.

“I didn’t have to ask for you. Lord Otto didn’t hesitate to give you up, and neither would any one of the villagers here,” he said, towering over me as the words rolled over us with terrifying candor. “In the few hours that I’ve been here, your own peoples’ disdain for you is disgustingly obvious. They’ll be glad to see you gone. If I were you, I’d choose the village and let all of them rot right alongside you. But you humans never seem to choose that option. When faced with an impossible choice, you always choose to sacrifice yourselves. So, unless you want to surprise me—and trust me, I would be surprised—then you might as well accept your fate.”

His breath came out all at once then, as if it was a relief even to him not to have to glamour his own words. “So, what will it be? We’re all slaves to the old magic, eventually. The sooner you learn it, the better.”

I could feel the entire village holding its breath.

No one spoke up for me. Not Ascilla, not Leofwin—their faces peering back from the front of the crowd they’d pressed their way through. Not even my own father.

But it wasn’t their faces I sought out, wasn’t their fear or terror that caused me to make up my mind. It was the only face among them who didn’t understand, the one with rosy cheeks and sugared syrup glistening on his chin, that peered down at me from above.

It was the only person here who wouldn’t want me to choose faerie that made me choose it.

I chose it for Sol.