Vidar
It is thirty years later that I find myself wandering again to the land of mortals. Thirty years in which I have been safe. The King of Iceheim dares not lift a finger against me – not as the Court of Madness continues to swell like a slug eating every green thing in its path. Our neighbors have been swallowed and are no more, but we remain, kept safe by the geas I have on their queen.
Even the stink of treachery is washing away from me. I have been invited again to revels, to the sharing of mead and the temptation of mortals. I have celebrated the dancing lights of the north with the Court of Iceheim, bathing naked in the water beneath the ice and then walking over steaming coals set out for that purpose. The public humiliations are gone now, replaced by more specific commands.
I work side by side with my old friend Precatore.
I am the king’s sinister hand. He is the king’s right hand.
I am the one that Rohan King of Iceheim sends into the most precarious of situations. The one he spends for his kingdom without thought to whether there is anything within me to spend. Precatore is dressed in silver armor and a helm shaped like a bird and given charge of the guard and armies of Iceheim.
I am crisscrossed with the scars from these adventures. There’s a new knot of scar tissue in the flesh between my shoulder and chest on my left side and a matching knot in the back. I have a bubbling red scar on my right thigh that never seems to fully heal – magical wounds will do that. The tip of one ear is gone forever. Precatore has married two fae ladies of the court and has a palace made of ice within walking distance of the Halls of Iceheim and his beauty has only increased with the years. There is a popular song among our people about his glory in defending our land and his great prowess among the women.
I pay for the chance to survive. I pay with my body as I did with my heart long ago. The king gives any glory I have won to Precatore.
Twice, I have nearly gone back to the Mayfly Seer. I stay away for many reasons and one is Precatore. I fear he will again remember she is there and what will he do then? He has never challenged me directly. He always appears to be my friend. And yet, when I was carefully disposing of an unwanted magical brooch for the King of Iceheim, Precatore was whispering in his ear. And when I returned, my mother’s estate had been given to Precatore’s father and I was without a place to call my own.
“You’ll stay with my father of course,” Precatore had said. “It’s better this way. Your old castle was a ruin and his servants have cleared away the crumbling furnishings and cleaned it until it sparkles. I don’t know how you lived like that. It’s not for immortals to crumble and fade. Let my father’s servants serve you, too.”
There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing, but I fear that anything I have, he will want to take from me.
And yet, every time I see a lady’s face, I compare it to the Mayfly Seer’s. Every time I look into watching eyes, I wonder what she is seeing. Perhaps I also stay away because I do not want to waste her gifts. Perhaps, I do not want to trivialize what she offers or to tip my hand to my enemies?
Or perhaps it is because I finally understand the meaning behind the bird. That instead of offering her a way out of her cage, I gave her another prisoner. Or perhaps it is because I don’t think I can ever free her. Not just because I do not know how, but because I need her. I need this one secret source of prediction as my safety in case I can’t solve a problem myself.
Or perhaps – worst of all – it is because I cannot shake the memory of her – that I wake up in the night from dreams of her embrace shaking with pain at the emptiness in my breast when her dream-self is snatched away again and again. I dare not be so vulnerable. With what the Icheheim has done to me – the scars it has rendered on my body and mind – what would it do to someone more vulnerable yet if it discovered I am weak for her?
A cage is far gentler than the tortures it would offer.
I would do her no favors if I laid my heart at her feet.
She haunts not only my dreams now. She haunts my nightmares, too, and the things my kin do to her in them leave me shaking and howling in the night.
But now, thirty years since I last saw her, when a new impossible task has been thrust upon me, I must go and seek her counsel. I have no other choice.
I have thought long on what to bring to her. It must be yellow, for all my gifts so far have been such. A daffodil perhaps. A tourmaline sparkling on a gold chain. A blowsy yellow rose in full bloom. I have considered all these things but none of them seems like enough. If I could gather for her the golden sun, that might be gift enough for such as she gives me. Or perhaps if I could capture happiness in a jar – I am certain that feeling must be as yellow as the yolk of an egg – then perhaps that might do. But though I have the trickery magic of the fae – the magic of bargains and geases, I have not the powerful world-making magic that might bring me a fine enough gift. That is reserved for those beyond our kind.
Nothing else seems worthy. Not after the canary – a living thing. So, I settle once again on life. I thought of a fish, but no yellow fish swim in the waters near her cage and I fear that were I to give her one she would only try to set it free as she did with the bird, and then it would die in the cold water of her homeland. Yellow fish like warm water where the Court of Summer and the merfolk dwell.
What gift is fit for such a seer? I think I have found one – a tiny serpent only the length of my hand, but I have placed a geas on it that has put it to sleep for a century – asleep and rigid, biting its own tail. Its small eyes are closed, but its body is not the cold hardness of metal, it is soft, and warm, and vibrant, and its sleek, bright skin is flush with life. I am very pleased with this gift. Surely, no one else has thought to gift her this. Surely no one else has trekked deep into the heart of the Frond Forest and risked the many pitfalls of that magic-bound place to pull out a single resurrection snake and sing it to sleep.
It is with pride mixed with fear that I set out to her island – this time in a boat I have had readied for me, rather than a craft I’ve stolen. I feel a little ashamed of stealing that last boat and I do not know why. To steal is to be fae. To regret it is mortal. But mortal conscience has slipped into my heart over these past three decades. Perhaps it is these dreams I have of being side by side with my mortal friend – the Mayfly Seer.
In our dreams, she speaks to me of what she sees in her visions and tells me what she thinks of it. Mostly we speak of idle things – places we have seen, what she would do were she no longer a prisoner. She has a surprising love of catching fish I would be interested to see. But many of the details of what we speak are lost to me – all but one story I found myself contemplating for days.
“The King of Rojinga was given cause to hide his neighbor’s wealth within his vaults for safekeeping while the Fronferrel were being raided,” she told me in one dream. “And when the raids were over, the King of Fronferrel came looking for his gold and it was not there, so the King of Rojinga, aghast and fearing retribution came to me to find out where the gold had gone and how he could recover it for his good friend, Fronferrel.”
“And what happened? I had asked, intrigued.
“Fronferrel had left a man behind to care for their wealth. What I saw was him slipping into the storeroom and leaving with a little bag of gold every day, until all the wealth was plundered.”
“Then he was clever indeed to secure a future for himself,” I’d said.
“Do you think so?” she raised a brow playfully. “Because it turned out, he was stealing it for his king so that his nation would have pretext to attack their neighbor.”
I had nodded gravely. What better way to provoke a war and tell everyone you are justified? It seemed reasonable to me.
“All those little babies and children who will starve and die because war is at their gates for no reason but greed,” she said when I was silent. And her face is lovely when she is angry, even though it is still wreathed in mayflies in my dreams. “All those women, desperate to keep their little ones and elderly safe, only to see them stave, or put to the sword, or taken by fever while the men fight. All those homes that will never see a father or son or brother again and for what? For what?”
And I’d stayed silent because I didn’t understand. All I’ve known these last decades are battles and wars. The clever survive. The foolish pay for their folly.
But her story stuck with me and I found myself thinking on it often and seeing our own battles and wars through her eyes and for the first time, I started to wonder about little children and whether they were eating and who might have a fever or an empty spot in their home and I don’t know if this new knowing has made me stronger or weaker for knowledge always strengthens, and yet it has carved a piece of me away and I can’t get that piece back.
I have lost my will to wage war for the sheer joy of victory. And that is not fae at all.
