“Come away from her,” my host begs. “Come away from her, please, please my lord.”
I lift the second eyebrow and play idly with the point of one of my ears. When I touch the end of it lightly the tiny tuft of fur at the end tickles and when I’m bored or irritated, I find myself doing that.
“And what shall you give me so that I do not spoil your little pet?” I ask.
“She’s not a pet,” the man gasps. “We gave a daughter – one of our own – thirty years ago. We gave her to the sea and the sea gave her back like this – once a year for just one day. And she will answer for you just one question. Only one. Always. And if we don’t break the spell – don’t leave anything or take anything – then she will be back again next year.”
“And your followers?” I ask, gesturing casually at the men weeping and muttering on their bellies. Some of them have bleeding noses or eyes as well.
“The visions take some of us hard. It is the payment. Please, ask for your apple back and come away,” he pleads.
“I will bargain with you to leave her be,” I agree, “but the apple remains with her. We faeries may be calculating and cruel, but never let it be said that we take back a gift.”
“It is said that by your food you steal mortal souls.”
I smile wickedly. “It is said that you mortals like it.”
He shakes his head, clearly realizing he must find a way to fix what has gone so wrong for him. “I will give you my prize horse if you will just come away from here now. I’ll add to the offer my sister.”
“Stars above, is he trying to ruin the bargain before it has begun?” Precatore asks. He hasn’t moved from the lashing post, content to have his entertainment from afar. Or perhaps he doesn’t want a glimpse into his future. He has a nervous look in the lines around his eyes.
I roll my eyes at them both. I do not want the mortal’s sister. Twice she’s come around a corner and tried to kiss me in the five days I’ve spent in the hovel they call a kingdom. She thinks to make herself a fae lady and live a life of luxury and no matter that I do not feel the same. I’d rather take his best sow as my wife than her.
Precatore set a geas on her the first day. He bargained for her one kiss for a memory, and she thought it was a fine bargain, but what he didn’t tell her was that the memory he took was any remembrance of him. Her eyes slide right over him now – unable to remember for even a moment that he exists. It leaves him free to pull faces behind her back.
“I shall make a bargain with you, mortal,” I say. “I will go to your boat right now in exchange for this – your best horse, as you say, and your assurance that I need never lay eyes on your sister again, nor hear her voice, nor be in her presence.” Best to cover all the ways he might foist her on me anyway. I have no wish to marry and if I did, I would not choose a mortal.
“Done,” he says, and his relief is palpable, but though we drink the wine he has brought and eat the bread and though we play merrels over and over as we wait for his men to slowly wake, my thoughts are constantly on the mayfly seer and my eyes seek her across the water and the mist.
Did she see my memories, too? Does she know what I keep so carefully hidden? She watches me like an eagle from a nest and it makes me feel more exposed – more vulnerable – than I have in a long time. This is not amusing. I feel as if I have opened a door I cannot shut again and I want it to shut. This is why I don’t have friends except for possibly Precatore. This is why I keep my conversation light and my drinks flowing and my games fast and hard. I don’t want anyone to see what’s left of the sorry thing I call a soul.
The men return, one after another, shaken, silent, brooding as the long night progresses. If I was capable of sympathy I would sympathize. As it is, I do not lure them into bargains that would leave them desolate. It’s the closest to kindness I can manage.
They eat and find a place in the boat to curl up and sleep and wait. And the mayflies slowly die, falling from the cage into the water or onto the rocks – suddenly less real now that they are nothing but empty husks.
At long last, the sun rises, and before the last of the mortals returns, my lady vanishes. I see her go. I feel the loss. But a tiny piece of me is pleased that the apple vanishes with her.
She has not said a word.
My host goes to check on the last man, left on the steps. He shakes his head sorrowfully and they wrap him in sailcloth and tie him up with burial cords.
I do not help. Precatore trims his nails to points with the help of a silver dagger.
Mortals and their mayfly lives are of no more concern to us than the last of the insects as it falls into the water and is pulled away by the swell in a mass of other fallen corpses. They live for but a moment, taste what they can, and then fall to the earth and another takes their place. And what is that to me?
