Chapter One
The Court of the Silver Wheel
The Fae Realms
Autumnal Equinox
The crisp wind howled across the tourney field, scattering scarlet leaves. Their hue matched the blood trickling from the wounds of the fallen, who lay in a haphazard pattern as if the wind had scattered them as well. Some struggled upright and limped towards the boundary of themêlée, where their squires and servants waited amidst the roaring crowd to staunch their wounds. Some crawled. Some could do little more than groan as they waited out the battle’s end. A few would never rise again.
Two combatants remained on their feet, their sword hilts locked together in a contest of brute strength, their snarling faces inches apart.
Shrike, who had slain several of the corpses on the field, stared unblinking into the mercurial eyes of his opponent. These eyes belonged to a knight whom the court considered quite beautiful, and it was said those eyes altered their colour with his moods. To Shrike, they had appeared gleaming green when the battle commenced. Now they’d faded to an icy blue and paled with every passing second. The knight’s lips had taken on a blue tinge as well, twisted in a lupine snarl to reveal doubled canines as sharp as his longsword. The blood-slicked blade crossed against Shrike’s own to form a shining scarlet X between their close-pressed chests. The well-honed edges—Shrike’s with more nicks and notches—scraped against the ringed mail beneath the knight’s tabard and scored the leather armour over Shrike’s tunic.
“Yield!” the knight hissed between clenched teeth.
Some scant moments before, an errant shield-bash had split Shrike’s lip open. Shrike had cut down the shield’s wielder, who now lay groaning into the dirt a stone’s throw away. Still, Shrike’s lip bled. He licked the blood from his chin now and darted his head forward between the crossed blades to crush the knight’s mouth beneath his kiss.
The knight jerked his head back—or attempted to, at least, before Shrike bit his tongue.
And in that instant of shock and outrage, Shrike sank his dagger into the hollow beneath the knight’s flailing left arm.
Blood poured forth. Each successive wave came weaker than the last, the blade having pierced the knight’s heart. The hot torrent soaked through Shrike’s tunic sleeve. The copper stench of fresh-spilt blood joined with the miasma of gore that hung over the tourney field.
Shrike stared into the knight’s eyes as their ice-blue faded to silver-white. Then they rolled back, and the knight collapsed in Shrike’s arms. His sword scraped against Shrike’s cheek as it fell to the ground. Blood for blood, Shrike supposed, and dropped him.
The victory horn resounded over the tourney field. The rising cheer of the crowd swallowed up its echo.
Few of the fae scattered around him were dead. Fae did not perish so easily. Even a knife to the heart could heal with time. The mercurial-eyed knight, like most of his rank lying broken over the tourney field, had a squire, a page, and very likely a gentle lover to tend his wounds and mend his armour so he might fight another day. Shrike, as a mere knave, had none. He would not have been permitted to stride out on the tourney field at all if the queen had not called for a generalmêléein which fae of all rank could compete for her favour.
And as the pages and squires and gentle friends swarmed the battlefield to rescue the wounded, Shrike stumbled through alone, a single minnow swimming against their overwhelming current, towards his queen.
The Queen of the Court of the Silver Wheel sat at the northernmost end of the tourney field. Her servants had erected a temporary bower, coaxing a copse of hemlock trees to grow into a shelter for their queen. Their scaly trunks twisted together like a nest of snakes for a floor, and their flat needles of brightest green came together overhead to filter rays of the setting sun like stained glass. Stout lower branches forked into stools for handmaidens and courtiers. Thrust forth from the centre like the bow of a ship, a balcony emerged with two thrones. On the tallest and centre-most throne sat the queen herself, perched on the edge of her seat, her delicate white hands laid on the braid of branches that formed the balcony’s rail. In the lower throne at her left hand, set back from the balcony’s edge, sat the Holly King; her champion until Yule. A ring of knights, those whose service the queen deemed too important to permit their participation in the tournament, surrounded the base of the bower. Each wore her livery—a silver wheel on a cobalt blue field—and stood ready to defend her person and her honour.
At her nod, her knights withdrew to let him pass, and he climbed up into her bower.
The splendour without proved nothing compared to the splendour within. Paper lanterns filled with blue fireflies augmented the green sunshine. Handmaidens and courtiers garbed in feathers and silks twittered together like so many songbirds, yet all with at least one of their eyes on their queen, lest she should require their prompt service. Her servants, human and fae alike, had piled a feast on a raised dais in the centre of the bower. A whole roast boar formed the centrepiece, large enough for a half-dozen warriors to ride on. Its tusks now speared apples instead of flesh. A peacock, skinned for cooking and then meticulously re-dressed in its own brilliant plumage, spewed from the boar’s propped-open mouth. Several swans had received the same treatment, flanking the boar with their spread wings. The boar’s mortal blow, an enormous gash in its left side, gaped open to hold a fountain of wine, with bunches of grapes spilling from the lips of the wound. Amidst these showier pieces lay scattered piles of strawberries, apples, pears, citruses, bird tongues, whole roasted mice, and tiny knights and horses made of pastry and marzipan fighting all over the feast.
Shrike spurned it all.
The queen and her Holly King had turned their respective thrones—the living hemlock branches bending to their whims—to face into the bower where Shrike now stood.
The Holly King wore a crown of sharp green leaves that befit his title. The blood-red berries bejewelling it matched his crimson eyes, which burned into Shrike. As the Holly King turned this same gaze on everyone, however—and furthermore he wasn’t by far the first fae to have turned such a gaze on Shrike in particular—Shrike paid it little heed. This day, halfway between Midsummer and Midwinter, marked the point at which the Holly King’s power would begin to wane. As Shrike glanced over the Holly King now, he saw little proof of this; the Holly King’s high cheeks had not hollowed, nor had his well-muscled limbs wasted away. His skin had a blueish tinge, but then again it always had, and the frost in his silvery hair glistened bright as ever.
Shrike had only ever glimpsed the queen from afar. Now, as he drew nearer to her than he had ever dared before, the radiance of her beauty proved no mere poetical affectation.
The autumnal winds blowing across the tourney field lost all their chill as he drew closer, the cold blood dripping from his wounds warmed, and the sunlight filtering down from gold to green through the hemlock needles brightened. Her hair shone the same strawberry gold shade as the sunset. It spilled forth from beneath her delicate diadem of heather and starlight and flowed down to pool at the trailing hem of her emerald-green gown which precisely matched the shade of her sparkling eyes. The rosebuds of her cheeks and lips provided all the colour in her otherwise milk-white flesh.
“Kneel, Butcher of Blackthorn,” said the queen.
Shrike dropped to one knee and bowed his head. Pointed crimson leaves blew across the knotted branches beneath his boot-heels.
By this time the wounded and their attendants had withdrawn from the field. The remaining spectators, some thousand strong, regathered beneath the queen’s bower. Shrike glimpsed them through the braided branches of the balcony rail, all staring upward to see what boon their queen would grant to the tournament’s victor.
The queen’s sword sang out as it left its sheath, the sweet ring of metal against metal. The slender blade, wielded with all the gentle precision of a moth’s wing, came to its rest first on Shrike’s left shoulder, then his right.
“And arise,” the queen continued.
Shrike held his breath in anticipation of the title she would grant him. With it would come the loss of many freedoms, yes, but he’d tallied up the exchange long before he made the first move that brought him to this moment and considered the ensuing security worth the forfeit. If he laboured in her service and under her protection, he needn’t suffer any knight-errant’s raid. Furthermore, with a title from the queen, he could force all contenders to look him in the eye and acknowledge his skill and craft were worthy of his ambition. As to the form the title took, he cared not. More than likely he would be declared Knight of Blackthorn, as his minor freehold would become hers once she took him into her service. Or perhaps she would grant him a more creative sobriquet.
