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Who knows for sure…
All I know is that the haunted woods of the Silver Mirror Lake are right ahead and that’s where I’m heading. Keeping my head low, my hood drawn low over my face, I fly down the road, glad there’s no cart or carriage around to stop and ask me where I’m going or who I am.
I should have taken a footman with me, I think, my bottines hitting pure dirt as I leave the old road and deviate into the tree line. I had considered it, for safety reasons—anyone taking a good look at my clothes or my face might recognize me or at least guess I come from a rich place and rob me, or worse. I’ve heard tales of girls being ravished off the road by lawless men and bandits.
But my mission is a sensitive one and servants like to gossip. Here I’m trying to retrieve the pendant my suitor gave me, not add fuel the any fire by having everyone know I’ve been to the haunted woods.
Not only will I be considered stupid but also amoral and looking for trouble. The Fae are known for their wiles and sexual appetite. It is said they like to lure any maiden or young man crossing their path deep in the woods, bespell them and arouse an unnatural lust in them. Many a girl has found herself with child after such an encounter, though to be fair, the tales often don’t quite clarify whether the man was Fae or human.
One shouldn’t listen to all the tales, but how to tell truth and lie apart? After all, Mina got sick.
I still feel bad for not believing it could happen until I saw her wilt with my own two eyes. But by then it was too late to undo the harm. Can’t reverse time and its outcome.
The trees are few and far between at first, the outliers, guards of the darkness lurking ahead. I brush by them, throwing my hood back as I venture under the canopy where the light hardly penetrates. Whispers follow me, birds flutter somewhere out of sight. My bottines thump dully on mossy stones and squelch in muddy earth.
The lake is close. The Silver Mirror, they call it. In the past, it was feared that it was a gate to Faerie, but since the King of Kyrene ordered a net of iron to be laid on the bottom of the lake two years ago, the appearances of the Fae have lessened and it is said the gate is now closed.
Still, I tread carefully and quietly, glancing around as I move toward the lake. There may be fewer Faeries but they are still here. I have my undergarments on inside out, for extra protection, and an iron bracelet on my wrist. I hope it will be enough to keep them away.
That day with my cousins we saw them. Small, dark sprites with long ears and tails, some of them with goat legs and fur. Lesser Faeries. Just as likely to give a human a disease and a curse as any Greater Fae. They seem to infest our world. It’s as if they reproduce like bunnies, these Lesser Fae, five sprouting where one was spotted.
But no sinister laughter sounds behind me. No songs or strange melodies. So far nothing. It all looks quiet.
The lake lies just ahead. That’s where I’d bent to pick a blue flower deep inside some brambles and had felt the tug on my pendant. Somewhere nearby, I’m sure. The cluster of weeping willows I can see seems familiar. I can almost hear Mina’s laughter, Lily’s hushed words. I can see us running from the cackling creatures that had leaped after us, chasing us away, trying to grab us.
One of them had leaped on Mina’s back. I’m not even sure she saw or felt it. He’d wrapped his hands around her neck.
But we’d escaped.
Ihad escaped. It looks like Mina’s life stayed in the woods. Later she said that she had returned and danced with the Faeries. Maybe that had been the catalyst? I don’t know.
What I do know is that I miss her. My vision blurs as I stop on the lakeshore, my hand resting on the trunk of a pin oak. One has to keep moving forward, right? Not remain still, caught in the past.
Which is why I need to find my pendant and go. Prince Iason, my suitor, seems like a nice young man. He’s coming to visit with his family soon and I have to be seen wearing his pendant when he does.
I can’t mess this up, too. Finding a nice and suitable noble isn’t easy, and as a princess, I have few goals other than finding the right prince to marry. Reading romances about dashing knights and damsels in distress hardly counts as an activity befitting a princess, neither is gardening and flower arrangement. Acceptable activities, perhaps, once one is married off, though the organization of balls and parties is more the norm, as is raising children.
Though I don’t care much for balls and parties, and as for children…
Could I imagine myself having Prince Iason’s children? The thought creeps me out a little. I mean, he’s… all right. Handsome, I suppose, with his blond hair and tall figure. Quiet. He seems quiet.
I can’t think of child-making with him and not feel a little sick.
Just nerves, I tell myself. All women probably feel the same at first, when they think of lying with a man.
Now, where are those brambles where I’d bent to pick the blue flower? Best to move and get this over with. I walk along the lakeshore, a hand pressed to my chest, trying to calm my thumping heart. The iron bracelet is heavy on my wrist, the weight reassuring, as if indicating it’s working hard to protect me. If it’s all in my mind, I’ll still take it, draw courage from it.
Who knows how charms work anyway? I only know that the Fae abhor iron. That has to be good enough. It has to—
Someone is there, on the shore. A man. He’s sitting on a fallen trunk that’s half-submerged in the water, and I stare at his bare, muscular back and arms. As I watch, too stunned to take another step, he lifts a hand to brush his fingers through his hair—hair that is the lightest blue, I realize. Blue like the summer sky when the sun shines bright at high noon. Blue like a robin’s egg. Blue like the pale sapphires in my favorite tiara.
Blue.
Surely, it’s a trick of the light slanting through the trees, reflecting off the water. Nobody has blue hair, surely. Most importantly, what is he doing here, and why is he bare-chested? In my experience, the only men going about without their shirts are workers in the fields in the heat of summer. I’d also seen my cousins splashing around in lakes when we were younger, their white shirts gone transparent, but I’d never seen a man, a grown man without his shirt on from up close.
Never been with a man alone in the woods.
This is so wrong on every level. If anyone finds out, I’ll be disgraced. Without a chaperone, my honor would be tarnished irreversibly. The best course of action is to walk away.
