Trust nothing you see even with your own eyes.

In faedom, all is glamour and illusion;

the fae will spell you to believe what they want, and no more.

They made their way down into the valley together, the girl and the beast. It was slow going. The forest was tight around them, though in gaps and gashes between trees here and there Eire still caught glimpses of the beauty she’d been shown at the top: thin threads of creek-lining undergrowth, emerald verdure, and in the distance those impossibly rising mist-blue giants of trees each as great as a whole city itself.

Luckily the beast had been patient enough to let her claw her way back onto his back instead of being dragged shamefully in his mouth. Now they walked in silence, and the shushing of the wind and the movement of him beneath her was like a ship on a gentle sea, steady and even and nearly soothing.

She was half-lulled into dreams when the beast beneath her stopped suddenly, jolting her awake.

“Ah. You,” he was saying in that deep, earth-shaking voice of his. She strained to peer around the mountain of his fur; he was too big; she couldn’t even glimpse the ground. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

Was he speaking to himself? She heard nothing in answer but the rustle of leaves in the wind.

“No,” he said, with a sharpness that made her flinch, even if it wasn’t aimed at her. “You’re absurd.” Then: “Enough already. Are you my lord or am I yours? I told you: I’m busy. Haven’t you seen your wife lately, boy? What do you think she’s up to right now with you away?”

She thought the cadence of the breeze changed then - skipped a beat, maybe, fell silent for a heartbeat: gasped. But that was silly. Wind could not gasp (after all, she, huntress, ever prowling the wind-bitten woods, knew it like an old friend).

“I don’t know,” said the beast, huffing (a chuckle? A growl?). “I thought you would. You’re married, after all.” His flanks rippled in a shrug. “Go on then. Be off.”

But the sound of leaves grew louder and louder until it was a roar all around them, somehow both hushed and loud at once, and there was a prickling in her leg, where Eire still dared not look, where she feared she’d hate whatever had become of her own flesh if she did look.

The beast, too, heard it. He drew himself up - Eire hadn’t known he was slouching in the first place, he was so huge - and towered now over the saplings that bent and huddled around them under the force of the wind, and perhaps fear, too. He was a shadow cast by the brightest of suns when he said, “No. You don’t get to ask about the girl.”

Quieter, lower, more frighteningly, he added: “She’s mine.”

Eire felt that deep in her bones: it was no mere desire he spoke of. It was a truth - as true as the light of day and as unyielding as stone and as unthinking too. It was not something he meant; it simply was. It was the shrugging of the earth in a quake and the changing of seasons and the swell of the sea. Eire shuddered, and she felt his words settle somewhere in her gut and rest.

“Lower your hackles,” the beast was saying evenly, as if he was nothing, as if he were an old friend. “I won’t eat you, you know. Run along and go home to your wife, won’t you?”

All around them the trees stopped flailing and the roar became a whisper, and then it was again only an ordinary breeze, and even the saplings fell still. The beast sighed - a deep trembling noise like a rockfall, a breath Eire hadn’t known he’d been holding - and then they were walking again, or he was, and Eire was helplessly astride him (still better than the other, worse way of being brought along, with drool down her neck and stinking breath in her ear).

If he had felt her rouse or if he cared that she’d heard all of it, if he knew she wondered about what he’d said, he didn’t let on. He walked as steadily and silently as he had before, and around them the saplings rustled but did not reach, the undergrowth quivered and bruised beneath the weight of his passage, and the wind itself was quiet and meek.

At least she wasn’t dozing any longer. Grudgingly she shifted herself a little and smudged crusted spit from her cheek. (Her leg she did not think of; she did not feel it; it was forbidden.)

It was then that something became utterly clear to her, with the sudden coldness of the way the beast had spoken his truth about her. She knew why this forest felt wrong, for all its beauty. There was only the wind and the sound of leaves. There was no birdsong.

As if he had felt her stiffen, the beast said underneath her, “You’re afraid.”

“No! No.” Eire was at once bolt upright, quivering. “No,” she said, now ashamed to see that she really was afraid, not in the raw mortal way she’d been when he’d stood over her in all his vastness before but in the way you’re afraid of the dark, creeping up on you little by little. “No, never. You’re - “ She’d never been the silver-tongued sister anyway. “You’re disgusting. You reek.”

“What you contempt you cannot fear,” said the beast slowly. “Is that it? Is that what you think?”

Was it? Eire had contempted things before, though few and far between. There was not much room for contempt when you dealt in dirty and dying and dead things as she often did: knee deep in blood and guts, hands gloved in slime and fluid, skinning knife between her teeth, the taste of copper never far from her gut. She’d stopped throwing up over it the first month she’d hunted, and she’d learned to lift her chin and turn a blind eye to her eldest sister’s shrieks of disgust and outrage after another season of it. If any girl in the village had a strong stomach for the strange and awful, surely it was Eire.

But this - this was different. It was not quite that she hated faeries the way the rest of Avon did, those who really believed in them at all, anyway. It was not that he was a beast, either. Many times Eire - stalking prey in the trees - had seen wolves far off and watched them silently as they too prowled through the snow, quieter and deadlier than even she. And she had not been afraid of their grinning red mouths or their sharp teeth and lolling tongues. No, she had watched with a kind of awe, nearly pride, and sometimes she’d even wished - secretly, fiercely - to be one of them instead.

But this, this haughty beast with one amber eye and one blue, whose face was of a bear or wolf or worse and whose haunches rose higher than her own roof but who spoke with the timbre of nearly a prince, if a prince lost to time and brambles - this was the work of the devil, if ever she’d known it. And Eire was not Old Mag; she did not shape the Finnsword over her face each time the devil’s name was spoken. She had never cared for that sort of faith, nor for the vicious, mocking way Old Mag spoke of disbelievers behind their backs. But now she might have believed it, for all that he was deeply, impossibly wrong to behold, if her fear had not been even greater than her disgust.

She said, “I’m not afraid of you.”

“They do say mortals can lie,” replied the beast. “Is that true?”

She said nothing, and he flicked an ear (as broad around as a harvestman’s scythe), which was worse than if he’d laughed.

“Tell me,” he said after a long moment. “What is it like there?”

Was he mocking her? She flinched, but he said, with surprising gentleness, “My brother says it’s cold in your kingdom. Water becomes like glass and creatures walk upon it, and the sky is white and not blue.”

“Of course,” said Eire. “That’s how winter is.”

“Winter?”

How was she meant to answer that? Surely he was mocking her now, but Niamh had taught her how to read all the colors in voices long ago, and his was only light and clear.

She said, “Don’t you have seasons too?”

He chuffed - not quite laughter, again. “In my court,” he said, “but the one. You would call it summer, I think. But why would I change what is here already?” He reared his great head up toward the canopy of sea-green leaves, through which Eire saw again the impossibly rich blue of the sky. “Everything blooms here. It is good to be warm and soaked with light.”

“Of course,” said Eire bitterly. “You stole it from us.”

At this he fell still wholly, and she was jolted nearly from her seat. “What do you mean?” His voice was rough, sharp.

Her heart raced. She didn’t let her voice tremble as she said, “My sister taught me about the Treaty. I’m not stupid.”

He reared back to look at her, those two terrible eyes (the one gold as the sun, the other the blue of the sky) fixing her with a sudden finality, the vast curling horns like dead trees, the wide powerful jaws nearly hidden in his storm-dark thorn-thick mane. It was only because she fisted her hands in his fur and held on with all her little might that she was not shaken free wholly. But he was as quiet and clear as any mortal man when he said, “What do you mean, the Treaty?”

Eire froze.

“Ah,” he said abruptly. “I’m scaring you.”

He swung back down on both his paws and Eire fell against him with something like relief, and not a little pain.

“The Treaty,” he said with surprising gentleness, “is very old, little morsel - as old as ten and twenty and a hundred of these trees laid end to end, and older still. My own heartwood was green and lithe when I last walked the flagstones of your kings’ and queens’ halls to hammer out the terms of it with them. Do they truly still teach you of it, as it says your kind were meant to, as part of upholding their end?”

“Yes,” said Eire fiercely, her heart still thundering. “Of course.”

“Then you have forgotten what it says, or your sister lied to you.” The beast pronounced this in a deep, heavy way, nearly the same as he’d said, She’s mine , and it jarred again in her bones and teeth. “We stole nothing from you.”

“That isn’t true!” She was shouting now, for all that he could have snapped her up in half a bite. “You took half of our spring away and traded back winter in its place! My sister never lies!”

“Your sister is no faerie!” - this halfway to a roar. “Do you trust her over one who can never lie?”

“I trust her more than a drooling monster who wants to eat me,” shrieked Eire, and then, in a sudden blazing flash of fury, she dug one hand nail-deep into his fur and, with the other, struck him with all her might.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Enough!” Suddenly she was on the ground, the wind knocked out of her; he loomed over her, blue eye filling her sight like a wrong sky, bloodshot and stinking. His bellow shook the trees. “I won’t have this kind of talk from you. I am a lord, and you are my ward, willingly or not.” His muzzle was inches from her face, so big she couldn’t have fit both arms around it if she’d tried. She couldn’t breathe. “Settle down,” he commanded, a low, rippling snarl like distant thunder, “before I make you.”

Knowing she was staring death in the eye, Eire still said, “And how are you going to make me, Lord of Earth and Leaves?”

He growled. It was a deep rattling noise that shook her to her very bone, and under her the ground seemed briefly to become water, and the wind whistled sharply in the trees.

Then it was over. He drew back and turned his head away. He said, “We have a long way yet to go. Save your breath. It won’t last long. You’re weak.”

“I’m not weak,” Eire protested, but he had taken her up in his jaws (wet, stinking) and tosses her on his back, and then he was already moving with a jerking, shambling gait she felt sure was meant to make her jostle and nearly lose her grip with every step, for she did, and it took all she had in her not to fall off again.

Her fingers went to her leg, where she should have been blooming with pain and was not. There she felt it: the telltale knobble and scale of bark, woody stems where they should not have been, and around it the puckering of her own skin.

With a shiver she drew back.

For a long time she’d hoped - and almost believed - it was only a bad dream. Amidst all the other waking nightmares it might have gone unnoticed. But no, here it was: a briar growing right out of her own flesh and bone, crawling up and down her leg. In her heart she knew it was also why she couldn’t stand on her legs, why they wouldn’t carry her own weight any longer. It was a curse or an illness or a wound, or all of those things together, and the fact that it did not hurt - that she felt well, in fact, not fevered or dizzy at all - made it all the more wrong.

He, this terrible beast beneath her, had called it the dris. That meant nothing to her. It was a lovely word for an ugly thing and she hated it no less for having a name for it, if it was really a name at all. She wanted it out. She wanted it out.

She had no knife, and the ruined ash-and-iron arrow was thrust through the waist of her trousers, but she didn’t really think it would help in anything but hurting him , the fae monster who somehow hadn’t yet killed her. It was too blunt and ragged to work anything as delicate as roots out of her own flesh without hurting her more than she could fix. And she was tired and afraid and her hands would shake too much even if the arrow were good for it. Of that she was sure. But she wanted it out - she needed it out - she needed it out.

This struck her with an instant raw clarity that she hadn’t felt even when she’d faced down the wolf, when in those moments with Isaac, when she’d first woken up to the horned beast. She needed it out. All of a sudden it was not an itch but a burning, a white fire that began at her ruined thigh and spread up and out from there, her ribcage the crucible in which her rage and hatred and grief mixed and grew hungry: it was loud, this fury, as loud as she was quiet, for her throat had closed up and she didn’t think she could scream if she wanted to, and she had to scream. But she was silent, and the fury was all the greater for that. She was taut as a bowstring, white and quivering. She hated it: the briars in her flesh, the beast, this accursed creatureless place, this wrong forest. She hated it all.

It was an instinct and not a thought, then, that brought her hands to the briars. And then she was tearing at them, hard and fast, the pain thundering in her ears with every movement, and the bark was rough and covered in thorns that bit into her palms and even the callused tips of her fingers and drew hot thick blood. She kept going. It wasn’t enough; the woody stems were so tough, there were buds that rose up and unfurled and fell to petals around her fingers even as she tore them away, and new ones bloomed in their place. They had been snow white, she saw, now looking without shame, only unbridled rage, and now they were blotted red.

Through the rushing in her ears she heard the wind rise; the trees around her were a flickering whispering thicket of grasping arms and legs and eyes, and all of a sudden it was malevolent, this forest, this dark and sharp and wild place. She didn’t care. She was white hot, she was a desire and an itch and an urge, burning and shameful and rigid. She pulled and pulled and her flesh protested and gave away, but the briars did not.

It hurt, and the hurting was good. The pain made her want to dig harder. Like a loose tooth - like a peeling scab. The more she pulled the more it burned, the more her skin tore and the wet rotten stuff beneath came forth. Her fingernails were caked with it, with the grime of her own dying muscle. It hurt, and she gritted her teeth and did not make a sound.

In the woods in winter there was the corpse of a wolf somewhere, dead and black, covered in white flowers, and the wolf stirred and quivered, not from breath or blood or bone but the wakening briars beneath -

Suddenly she was on her back on the ground, and the forest was holding her down.

The beast loomed over her, red-black, gold eye wide, blue eye hidden by a wild shock of fur. The great dark muzzle was wrinkled back in a snarl, and he was heaving, and she realized it was with the effort of holding her, keeping her back and away, and she couldn’t see her own flesh under the storm of gnarled and twisted and matted brambles that had erupted from it, writhing and seething, as big around as her leg in places. Those white flowers splotched with red crowded over it and around him like a sea of scarlet foam. And over them spread the trees, now as long and seeking as talons, like a cage of ribs, pinning her and the wolf’s cursed gift in place.

He was speaking, but in no language she knew, or maybe she just didn’t have the wits then to know what he was saying. His jaw misted spittle with every word, wet and red, and the forest listened, she thought wildly, the branches slithered further over her and around the many white flowers, pierced their red mouths, tore petal from petal and slowly, slowly, quelled the thicket that surged out of her leg, out of the wound the wolf had left in her.

She tasted blood; she tasted iron. She twisted, but the overgrowth of the trees held fast. She wasn’t thinking - she was animal, desperate, panicked and stubborn. She was bloody all over, and she was no longer sure if the blood was her own or the beast’s.

Aislin, do you think I’d have let her keep killing herself if I’d’ve been there? Do you think I’d have stood and watched and laughed? Do you think I would have said it was her own fault for consorting with beasts - for flirting with the likes of the miller’s boy, unshod and dirty and shamelessly red-faced? Do you think I wanted her to die, wrong cuckoo-child that she was, fae-forsaken and graceless? Do you think I’d have been glad to be free of her stain upon our family?

The beast thrust his face into hers and roared, “Stop!”

That stunned her out of her frenzy. She was still for a heartbeat. She looked back at him, her mortal gray against his unearthly gold and blue. He was panting, but still.

“Stop,” he said again, heaving with every breath. “You’re destroying yourself. You’re destroying it all.”

She made a noise in her throat, part sob, part howl. She strained against the roots he’d woven over her (they chafed and bled ichor and scarlet where they held fast, both her blood and theirs). Her leg was hot and wet and pulsing pain and pus.

“Stop.” This was in the earth-shaking way he’d said She’s mine, and again it rattled through her bones and into her rebelling heart, but she gritted her teeth and writhed more, and the brambles around her trembled in answer.

“Enough!” He was angry now, truly angry, and it should have made her still the way he snarled wild-eyed at her from a breath away: “I won’t have you destroy this place. Maybe yourself, but not this. This is mine. You will treat it well, or not at all.”

She made to grip the briars at her throat - the mass of roots whose heart was her leg-flesh shook and squalled in answer - but he said, “You will obey,” and she couldn’t resist it this time, for the words gripped her very heart and vised, and it was as if he’d stunned her; she couldn’t help but fall still.

“Because I’m yours - is that it?” she wheezed, and at that he stopped for a moment and stared, abjectly stunned.

“What do you mean?” he snapped.

“You said it,” she said. “I’m yours, so I obey you - so you get to order me and shackle me and drag me around as you like. That’s how you see me and my people, isn’t it? Cattle? Pigs for the slaughter?” He flinched. “Bleeding hares in a trap, rats scuttling around the borders of your - ”

“Enough!” he roared, and this time her fear overcame her anger and caught her words in her throat.

“You are mine.” He was pacing now, a steady even movement that set the crimson-tipped mountain of his fur rolling in waves. The forest around him seethed quietly but did not erupt. “You are mine because you killed one of my own,” and this Eire thought he might have uttered with the barest hint of pain, of grief, but she shook her head. Surely not him, not this slavering storming beast. “You are paying the price, as was agreed between me and mine and your forefathers many ages ago. That is your punishment.”

She watched him, but found she had nothing to say, no defiant insistence or hateful retort, not this time. For he raised his head, and in his blue eye she saw not rage or despair but something cold and impenetrable and utterly final. She was convinced then that he would not kill her if she enraged him again, no, perhaps because of the Treaty or perhaps because it simply wasn’t his way, however that had come to be - but he wouldn’t think twice about leaving her behind, either, alone in a forest that was alive and that hated her, with no knife and no legs and no way home.

He raised his head. “So,” he said, “I see now that you are able to call your dris after all. That is good. Will you tell it to lie still or will you keep misbehaving and suffer the consequences?”

She didn’t answer. They stared into each other’s eyes for a long, heated moment, her quivering and taut-jawed, him still panting, the coral edge of his tongue painting the side of his mouth wetly.

She said, “You should have killed me.”

“I won’t.” He said it quietly, evenly, not the way he’d told her to stop, not the way he’d said she was his: almost pleading, almost sorry. “That is too much mercy for the likes of you.”

She made a noise in the back of her throat.

He jerked his head. “Up,” he said. “Will the dris to do it for you. Or I will carry you again.”

“Get your stupid plants off me first.”

He said nothing and made no movement, but something flickered in his eyes - a flash of sun in the gold one, or a shiver of frost in the blue one - and suddenly the pain and the weight of all the bark and greenery was off of her, the verdure slinking back and away into the ground as she watched, shriveling and not so much wilting as folding in on itself, gone.

“Up,” he said again. “I won’t tell you twice.”

How was she to do that? He’d said she’d called it, the dris, this cursed wound of roots and flowers, but she was nothing but ill when she thought of it now. In the moment it had been only rage that she’d felt, and that had been quenched by his outburst, by the sheer weakness of being held back by the forest, his forest.

He was still looking at her, waiting. She clawed herself gracelessly to a sit and reached out to tug her unanswering legs under her, feeling somehow naked, and then, when she found him staring at the wound, she spat. “I don’t want your dris,” she said. “Get it out of me or I’ll keep fighting you, and that’s a promise.”

“It isn’t my dris,” he said. “It’s yours. It springs from your heart-root.”

“My - ?”

“It came from beyond my court,” he cut in. “You had it when I brought you here, and it is not of my land. It is not my dris, and I cannot call it. I can do nothing for you, daughter of worms and teeth.”

She shook her head, disbelieving.

“Then tear it out of me,” she said. “You have claws, don’t you? You have teeth. I’ve seen them. What do you use them for if not hurting?”

Something rippled across his terrible foam-flecked face then, but she did not know quite what it was.

She thought then that he would bark again at her. Instead he said, “I won’t.” And then, “Up. On your own terms or on mine. Your choice.”

“Why do you care?” She hadn’t got the spirit in her to give those words any bite, she knew; she bared her teeth still and said, “Leave me here. I’ll hurt you again if you stay. I swear that.”

“Why are you so hateful?” His wide horse-nostrils flared. “Are all your kind like that?”

“Yes. We all hate you. All,” she sneered. “Of course we do! You took our spring from us. You made winter the way it is.”

“I told you already,” he said heavily, the words strangely soft from such a wicked, twisted mouth, “your sister lied or was lied to. We - ”

“You are monsters!” She was hot again, hot and damp and itching to sink teeth into him, into his vast terrible pelt. “You cursed us! It’s your curse that’s made a mess of my leg, isn’t it?”

“You killed him,” he snarled, “my kin, and you dare call what is left of him, his gift, a curse? Do you blame all your murdered prey so, little hunter, killer-child?”

“He would have killed me first!”

At that he fell still, so terribly still she could not even see him breathe for a long moment.

“Fine,” he said at last. “It is your gift or your curse - yours, however you wish to see it. Master it or do not. I don’t care.”

He rose to his haunches and turned away, and then he took a step - and another - and even though he was vast, she heard nothing of him as he left. He was as silent as the air itself. Behind him, as Eire watched, the forest slowly closed in, the branches and leaves rising up like snakes from the leaf-bedded floor, undergrowth twining around undergrowth and broad leaves erupting from their slender reaching twigs until a green wall had formed behind him, concealing him entirely, and then there was nothing at all but the noiseless, still trees.

Would it have been better if he’d killed her there and then? Aislin, it is not my place to judge what is merciful nor to speak of unfulfilled fates, for the Tree of All Things does not deal in chance. That is the difference between Eire and you and I, and why she was always the one among us three who courted danger most. Prudence was your domain, cunning mine. But Eire? She was brave.

(Or reckless. But what difference is there than whether it works out?)