‘Oh.’
Neither of them said anything more for a moment.
‘I’ll make up the spare room for you,’ she murmured as her own eyes closed. She’d just close her eyes for minute, she thought. But they were both so exhausted that they slept in the old, sagging chairs until the early hours when Faye woke up cold, the fire having gone out.
41
It was odd having Gabriel there, but Faye realised that she was grateful for the company.
She reopened the shop, closing a little earlier than she used to, to make sure she didn’t get tired. She talked to her customers about all the little familiar things – candles, incense, spellbooks. She read their cards and recommended places to visit – stone circles, natural springs, holy wells. She pottered in her herb garden, and slowly the spring came and the days started to stretch again. Faye made a little altar for Aisha in the shop; it was the least she could do, and somehow, it made her feel a little better. She put a photo of Aisha in a silver frame on the mantelpiece and burned a candle in front of it, arranging crystals and fresh flowers on either side. She would never be able to make it right, but she could remember.
She wrote to Annie, telling her about her pregnancy, but swearing her to secrecy. Annie wrote and called, at first incensed she hadn’t known about the baby, but gradually accepting the reasons why. Faye wrote honestly about Gabriel: the night terrors, the sleepwalking and the sorrow he held inside him, like a blunt knife that dug into his heart, but one that he wasn’tready to part with yet. There were good days too, when Gabriel returned whistling from a day walking the coastal path with seashells in his pockets and the spring sun in his eyes.
Gradually, he began putting on weight, and sometimes he helped her in the shop, charming the customers with an occasional flash of the old Gabriel. Yet, Faye knew that the faerie road lay on Black Sands Beach, and one day, she suspected that the temptation would prove too much for him. She couldn’t keep him from it: he was a grown man. Faye just hoped that the strength that Abercolme was slowly returning to him would be enough to make him resist. Faerie was never far away for either of them, and both Faye and Gabriel knew how to find it if they wanted to.
The power of Murias is too dark for Gabriel, Faye wrote to Annie.His soul seeks the dark, but it’s not strong enough to bear the weight of faerie. I’m afraid for him, but there’s nothing I can do. He has to learn to live with it. So do I.
Faye would always feel responsible for taking Gabriel into Murias, though it had been an accident on her part and intentional on his. At the same time, she understood what he felt better than anyone.
At the same time, it was a relief to have someone with her. She was seeing a midwife for all the ordinary check-ups, and the villagers popped in now and again to check she was all right. Despite his suffering, having Gabriel there made Faye feel less alone, and caring for him distracted her from the cloud that grew steadily closer.
Faye had hardly left the shop for months. When they needed food, she ordered it online from a supermarket three villages away and had it delivered. She worked in the shop and spent the evenings with Gabriel playing old board games when he was feeling up to it, or when he wasn’t, reading in bed alone. She wanted nothing taxing; all she wanted was to be home and towait for the baby, but she didn’t have that luxury. She knew that the queens watched her, and so she prepared for them with magic.
She might not be a faerie queen, but she was a witch, and that meant something.
First, Faye had consulted Grandmother’s grimoire for protection spells, and particularly protection against faeries. The hag stone charm was effective for keeping the fae outside one’s house, but Faye also made four protection bottles – filling old whisky bottles with offcuts of thread and ribbon and cloth from her spell-making, closing the tops with wax and placing them around the house. The closely packed thread and ribbon would, the book said, distract the lower faerie beings, and act as a faerie catcher.
She also made a number of witch bottles, which were similar, but less gentle. All witches knew how to make them: put rusty nails in a bottle, cover them with your own urine, seal the lid on with wax and then hide the bottles, ideally up a chimney. A witch bottle was a very clear magical deterrent.All bad things, all bad energies, all curses, keep away.
She also sprinkled salt around the boundary of the shop, outside in the garden as well as around the doors, and hung a small perfume bottle on a necklace, filled with bay leaves, rue and rosemary in water, as protection for herself.
Faye was reading the book Gabriel had given her:Faeries in Their Elementsby Reverend R.W.Smith. It was a fascinating story of a Scottish reverend who had been abducted into the faerie realm and returned to tell the tale. Faye flipped through it, scanning for anything useful.
She frowned as she came across something that might have been written in Grandmother’s grimoire. The reverend had, after his abduction, always kept a powder of burnt bay leaves, garlic skins and ground clove with him in a small bag, readyto sprinkle on the ground or to dispelmalign faerie spirits, alongside a short chant:
Break the spell, truth to tell,
Faeries, heed my magic spell!
Dark thy magic, dark thy throne,
I banish thee from hearth and home,
I banish thee from body, mind,
Heart and organs, shadow-kind,
Dark thy magic, dark thy throne,
I bid you leave my heart alone
Break the spell, truth to tell,
Faeries, heed my magic spell!
Worth a try, she thought. She had prepared the herbal mixture and put a jar of it in her coat pocket.
Yet, folk charms didn’t seem like enough to battle the faerie queens, both of whom were powerful beings of pure elemental force. What chance did a bottle of pee and a herbal blend have against the all-consuming power of an earthquake or a tidal wave?
