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Faenir stepped in behind me and I immediately relaxed into his warmth. I did not protest for space, because that was not what I longed for. His arms came around me, each hand gripping the smooth-stone wall of the balcony as we both watched the swell of the crowds below.
“I cannot express my discomfort at knowing they all dwell in my home.”
“Because you long for your own space, or because you are frightened of what might happen?” I asked.
“All my life I have kept a distance from the living. Each one of them burn with the glow of life and sometimes it makes looking upon them hard. Uncomfortable. I imagine it is what it would feel like to stare at the sun for a time.”
It made sense. When I had seen Faenir pass the huddles of serving staff dusting long-forgotten frames and sideboards, he always kept his gaze on the floor.
“Give it time. It will become easier.”
Faenir’s arms closed in on me. His breath joined the winds and played with the hair across my ear. “I hope it does. However, time will not stop my touch with doing the very same as it had with that pomegranate. What is to say I touch one servant by mistake? All it would take is a glance of a hand, a brush of skin, and I would kill them without that ever being my intention.”
I took that moment to reach a hand and place it upon his. Mine was deathly cold in comparison. “Faenir, you are far too conscious to act in such a way. Do you see them running from you? Hiding when you pass? I may not be able to speak on behalf of them all, but I am confident they are not scared of you. Take that as you will. Find comfort in knowing that the elves you have allowed into your home understand the risk and still continue as though it is normal because it is. It is your normal and there is nothing wrong with that.”
Faenir rested his chin on the top of my head. I could hear his smile as he expelled a laboured breath. “There is power in the way you speak. I am grateful for it.”
For it.I longed for him to repeat himself and change his last word toyou.
The light burst of laughter reached us from the grounds that stretched out beneath us. Three children ran and danced, playing games with one another without a single care in the world. Faenir grunted at their presence but held back any comments.
“Those children,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “Are they the halflings you told me about?”
“No,” he said. “Not in the sense you are thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look closer at them. Tell me what you see.”
As I narrowed my gaze on their heads, I thought it was a trick question. I did not know what, in fact, I searched for. “If you wish to provide a clue, I would be ever so grateful, Your Highness.”
Faenir lowered his mouth to my ear and placed a kiss upon it, soft lips brushing the rounded tip and pulling away as he whispered, “Look again.”
It took a moment to distract myself from his kiss to truly understand the hint he had provided. Then I saw it. The children, hidden beneath hair that bounced as they ran from one another, were ears—as there should have been, of course—but they weren’t elongated and pointed like Faenir’s. No. They were rounded and… mundane, like mine.
“They are humans…” I muttered.
“It is common for the less noble members of Evelina’s community to be burdened with the human babies that are swapped out when a halfling is taken and left in your realm. Although the halflings look human, their blood is far from it; that is the only noticeable difference—so slight, in fact, that the humans would never notice when their blood child was swapped out.”
“That,” I said, looking at the children in a new light, “is cruel.”
“I agree,” Faenir replied. “My ancestors had abolished the practice for thousands of years, all until the vampire spread his curse across the world. My grandmother plans to aid the humans’ survival by reinstating magic in your realm. Doing so would take years… but it was an investment she was willing to make.”
“At the cost of families who bring up children that do not belong to them?”
Faenir stiffened, his stomach hardened like a wall behind me. “Only time will determine if that sacrifice will become beneficial.”
“Would you have sanctioned such a thing if you were King?” I asked.
Faenir took a moment to ponder my question. “Claria wants an army to defeat the vampires with the very same being that created the first. Although I understand her efforts, mine would have been different, not that it matters.”
I wanted to tell him it did, in fact, matter. All of it did.“I am still trying to wrap my head around all this. Is it possible that I have come across a halfling? If Claria has been swapping children out for years, then surely there is enough of them in Darkmourn to fight back?”
“Not every halfling can become what you know to be a witch. It is magic that lays dormant within them all, but it takes something great and unknown to make it bloom into pure power. The witches that caused the damage to your realm are products of hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of practice, religion and focus. Intervention from our kind helped them along. The halflings in Darkmourn are still young, an army who are yet to understand what they are required for, but an army nonetheless.”
Queen Claria had focused her energy on creating an army, years wasted allowing the vampires to devour our kind and keeping us in pens, just for the potential of restoring balance. She played the long game. Not the right game.
My head throbbed at the knowledge Faenir had bestowed upon me. I began racing through my mind, picking out names of people I had known and trying to remember anything that might’ve suggested that they may have been halflings themselves.
