Page 112 of The Changeling

The singing of a ballad outside a palace, and a queen that had longed to be loved. A vision of a son who would be king of all, the cooking of my own desire into a little mayblossom cake that the queen had eaten and swallowed, so that she must be wedded and bedded no matter the cost.

Mortal life is short, Rue, you should seize love whenever you can, my mother had said to me. Knowing that every time she called me Rue, I must do as she commanded. She had wanted me to know love and she had wanted me to lose it. She had wanted me to suffer; she had wanted me to truly know what it is to sorrow. And she had wanted me to bewitch the queen.

A prince that died, and a prince that lived to be king. A secret revenge that had taken more than seven hundred years to bring to fruition.

Then I had turned her magic against her and flown as an owl. I had learned her secret name and used it to banish her from my life.

Carefully I cut the shape of an owl from elder-green cloth and sewed it to the backing cloth, a twig in one claw. I gave it great dark eyes like mine. I sewed all my favourite flowers around it. Elderflowers, foxgloves, wild roses, and then a circlet of leaves from seven sacred trees.

Nan’s death by drowning, Mam’s death by burning. Had that always been their fate? Or had the faery queen spun her silken web about them and led them to their deaths, just so her prophecy could be fulfilled? I remembered her anger, her desperation. She had been afraid. Afraid that all her plots might fail, and that all her sacrifices would be in vain. She was still afraid.

And the curse on Sorcha? Had I not been told how to break it? Incantation, intention, belief. Had it not been so easy, when I had feared it would be so hard?

The light faded and night crept in, cold and blue. The fire sank low.

I had run away from home all those years ago because I had thought I could escape whatever fate the faery queen had in store for me. I had thought I could hide from her, reinvent myself as somebody else, pretend I was human and not faery. But I had been wrong.

Tonight, the blade would fall.

Tonight, someone would die.

I did not want it to be Robbie.

He slept on, his fiery curls the only sign of vitality. I finished my square, tied off my thread and tucked my needle through the fabric, folded it and laid it aside. I needed to rest. I took off my stockings and kirtle and laid them neatly over the chair, my boots set side-by-side below. Dressed only in my chemise, I slipped into bed beside Robbie. Carefully I bound our wrists together with the tiny bell on its red cord.

‘I swear to love you,’ I whispered, ‘to be true to you, to never betray you, come what may.’

I did not know how not to love him. He was the weft to my warp.

I laid my cheek in the hollow of his shoulder, and closed my eyes.

Sleep claimed me quickly. I dreamed I was a little girl, spinning, spinning, around and about. No great expanse of bright sky above me, only fangs of stone. No meadows and forests about me, only walls of stone. No soft grass below my feet, only floors of hard stone.

When I fell, I bruised myself.

An old woman sat on a towering throne of twisted wood. Her white hair rippled down under a crown of twigs. Her eyes were black and unfathomable. ‘You are the seventh daughter,’ she told me. ‘We have waited for you a very long time. We have come close so many times, only to fail in the end. Do you know what you must do?’

‘I must have seven daughters,’ I chanted.

‘Why?’

‘The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is the only one who can stop the slaughter.’

‘Why?’

‘Only she can break the curse and pay the price.’

‘What must she learn?’

‘First she must know laughter, love, and sorrow.’

‘Laughter,’ the old woman said bitterly. ‘How can she ever learn to laugh, trapped down here?’ She waved one thin hand at the enclosing cave walls. ‘How can she ever learn to love?’

I did not know the answer.

The old woman leaned forward. ‘You must find the way! For more than seven hundred years, our people have suffered, trapped here, only able to ride out when the veils are thin. Even then we may only go at dawn or at dusk, or when the world is dark and all are sleeping. For they hate what they fear, and they kill what they hate. The price is too high! You must break the curse.’

But I was only a little girl. I did not know how.