As she walked away from the shop, something shifted. It was like a cloud moved over the blazing sun overhead and shielded her eyes from a glare she’d been squinting in all this time – only, it was inside her head rather than outside. Faye stopped dead, the beach visible in front of her.
A sudden clenching sensation made her hold her back. She took a deep breath, and it passed. She waited for another, but nothing came, and so she resumed walking slowly to the beach. She supposed it was a contraction; it wasn’t too far to get home from where she was if she needed to turn around.
The sand at the edge of the deserted beach was dry; the grasses that grew at the sandy boundary had turned to straw in the heatwave. Scotland without rain for this long was almost unheard of.
She hadn’t visited the beach because she was afraid of being near the faerie road; at least now, she’d come armed with protection. The bay, rue and rosemary charm hung around her neck, and she’d put pouches of the reverend’s suggested powder of burnt bay leaves, garlic skins and ground clove in all her coat pockets. Lastly, she still had the black obsidian crystal Lyr had given her as protection tucked into her bra.
She slipped off her sandals, letting the tide cool her hot feet.
Faye took a few more steps into the sea. She didn’t care that it wet the hem of her dress. She shaded her eyes from the sun as it glinted on the water, glittering like jewels.
Another contraction came, and she instinctively crouched down as the dull squeezing ache came and went. As it faded, the tide swept away back to the sea, leaving her feet exposed in the wet sand. Next to her foot sat a hag stone: a medium-sized pebble with a hole all the way through the middle.
She picked it up, and it sat comfortably in her hand. A good omen.
She looked for Gabriel, but he was nowhere to be seen.
‘Gabriel?’ Faye cried out, looking around for her friend, but there was still no sign of him, and her voice was consumed by a wind that blew it back to her. She felt another contraction coming and realised their frequency was increasing. She’d left her phone back at the house. She cursed herself for her stupidity.
‘Gabriel!’ she shouted before the pain could hit her. She breathed into it, the way the midwife had taught her. Gradually, the feeling abated again, but it left her legs weak.I need to sit down, she thought.
Clouds appeared on the horizon. Faye was sure they hadn’t been there a moment ago. Suddenly, lightning flashed, and the wind that had pushed at her the moment before grew in power, raising the waves around her knees. She turned and staggered out of the water. The villagers had been saying a storm wascoming for days, and the atmosphere had that hot closeness, the stillness before thunder rolled in.
Sure enough, in the same second that she thought it, there was a rumble of atmospheric pressure in the distance off the shore.Home. I need to go home, she thought. Her body was insistent, and she needed to listen to it.I was stupid to come here. Why did I come at all?
The pressure in the air made her ears pop. The clouds had rolled in towards land faster than she thought they could, and lightning forked down into the sea from the charcoal-grey clouds that formed above her head. Faye took a deep breath as an intense contraction came, making her fall to her knees and groan in pain as the storm gathered above her.
But when she looked up, it wasn’t Gabriel she saw in front of her, but Levantiana, the High Queen of Murias, who faced Moronoe, the High Queen of Falias, on Faye’s opposite side.
Both regarded her with the glittering, cold stares of queens that always got what they wanted.
44
Faye cried out, trying to get to her feet. ‘Please. The baby’s coming.’
‘I will help you,sidhe-leth.’ Levantiana’s eyes never left Moronoe’s, and the tone of her voice was icy. ‘Yet, I hoped you would call on me before now, when it is almost too late. Tell the Queen of Falias that she may leave us. She has no business here.’
Faye managed to get to her feet and backed away from the tide that was sweeping in. At the edge, it carried branches, bottles, rusted cans and other wrack, which it never usually did – the shore of Abercolme was a clean one as a rule. Yet suddenly, the sea seemed to be attacking the shore with anything it could find. Levantiana stood in the tide, and Moronoe on the sand. Both queens were taller than humans, and Moronoe’s heft and girth was at odds with a kind of translucence that emanated from the faerie queen of water. Lightning crackled between them, and the day had darkened to a kind of twilight.
‘Niece. I asked you to call on me when the baby was coming, and you have not. Will you ask me now to take you to my realm, where I will help your labour and protect the child from thisvulture?’ Moronoe boomed over the storm. ‘You do not have long before the baby comes. Take my hand and all will be well.’
‘No,’ Faye cried out, clutching her belly as another contraction came. This time, the pain left her breathless. ‘Please. Leave me alone. I won’t give you the baby. Either of you,’ she panted. She reached for the obsidian crystal she always carried inside her bra and held it aloft as if to fend them off.
Levantiana laughed. Her eyes glowed under the cowled blue hood of her robe, and she flicked her hand. The crystal flew from Faye’s grip and landed on the sand several metres away.
‘You have already given him to me. We have struck a bargain. I do not need any further permission,’ she said, reaching out her hand. ‘All I have to do is touch you, and he will be mine. Do not worry,sidhe-leth. You will not be harmed. You will be free to make as many more babies as you like with your human lovers after this. But this one is mine.’ Levantiana’s tone was dismissive.
‘There is no way that I’m letting you take my child!’ Faye screamed. ‘I banish you! Both of you! Back to the realms from which you came!’ The contractions were coming fast now, and her mind was focused on the pain.Breathe through it, breathe through the pain, she told herself, her hands clutching at the wet sand in panic. She knew, with a sudden flash of inspiration, that she’d have to give birth here on the beach. There was no time to get away now.
Faye held up the hag stone to her right eye and looked through it at Levantiana.
‘Break the spell; truth to tell!’ she cried out, and Levantiana took a step backwards. Faye repeated it with Moronoe. She pulled her strength together as hard as she could and recited the faerie protection spell from the book Gabriel had given her. Reaching into her pocket, she opened the felt bag. Fayesprinkled its contents around herself in a circle, as wide as she could make it.
Break the spell, truth to tell,
Faeries, heed my magic spell!
Dark thy magic, dark thy throne,
