There was a storm coming. Sorcha, daughter of Mab, Queen of Fairies, stood out on the wide, sweeping Plain of Gates, what the mortals called Carrowmore, and considered the clouds that massed at its horizon. The wind worried at the assembled faerie gathering, tugging at dresses and hair, fanning gossamer wings and sending shadows skimming across the grass like dark birds.
The day was warm, but Sorcha shivered. She wasn’t the kind of fairy who saw portents in everything. That was the job of young Kieran, the seer for the clan of the Tuatha de Dannan. But there was portent in this wind, and it was ill. For the first time in centuries, the fairy clans were at war and it was partly her fault.
“Well, now, my young Sorcha,” the queen said, turning to her. “What say you?”
It all came down to this. If only her older sister Nuala were still here to save her from it. But Nuala had escaped, although the queen called it exile, forfeiting her throne and immortality for the mortal she loved, leaving Sorcha behind to pick up her mantle.
“I am honored, my queen,” she said, doing her best to stand strong before the majesty of her mother, “but my answer remains the same.”
The queen stood at the crest of the long slope, so that the great central stone tumulus framed her and, beyond it, the turbulent sky. Her hair, that fey, otherworldly yellow that inspired poetry, swirled in the fretful air like a battle pennant. Her white robes gleamed in the half-light and the gems on her hands glittered. Her head was bare this day and it shamed Sorcha. The crown of the Tuatha de Dannan was empty of its great bloodred Coilin Stone, for it had been stolen. Sorcha had been its guardian.
Mab needed no crown to display her power, though. The assembled ranks of faerie trembled before her. From the grave marching fairies, with their gray robes and shadow-woven hair, to the sprites, who hovered in anxious rainbow-hued clouds, and all in between, the earth fairies of the Tuatha waited in hushed silence for the pronouncement of their queen, and none more anxiously than Sorcha herself.
“But I’ve said it, little Sorcha,” Mab said, her voice a hum on the wind that made even the distant trees tremble. “You are to be queen.”
Sorcha, so much smaller than her mother and standing down the hill from her, as was right, bowed her head. “I am not worthy, my queen, and we both know it.”
“You would have Orla be queen?” her mother asked, and Sorcha didn’t know whether her mother was furious or amused. “My same daughter who brought our own enemy to rob us of the great Coilin Stone?”
Well, Sorcha had to admit, the queen had her there. She took a quick peek over to where her younger sister stood ramrod straight beside her and wondered what was going through Orla’s mind.
“I fought bravely, my queen,” Orla protested, her voice yet proud, even for her crimes, her cat eyes hot and her head unbowed.
“And so you did, Orla,” the queen acknowledged. “Even though you wouldn’t have had to fight at all if you hadn’t invited the Dubhlainn Sidhe to pillage your own house, now, would you?”
“I didn’t—”
The queen lifted a languid hand, and her daughter froze. Sorcha, standing next to her, felt her sister’s indignation like a blast of heat. Oh, would Orla never learn? They would both pay for this disaster, Sorcha for not protecting what was hers to protect, and Orla for handing it away in the hope of gaining power. They might as well face it like the daughters of royalty they were.
“And how is it you’d do penance for the loss of my Coilin Stone, Orla?” the queen asked, her voice slyly sweet.
For a moment Orla stood silent, her heavy raven hair lifting in the wind. “What would you have me do?” she finally asked.
The queen tilted her head and smiled, and all knew the smile was not kind. “Foolish girl. I will have you reclaim it.”
Even Orla grew pale. “From the land of the Dubhlainn Sidhe?”
“Do the Dubhlainn Sidhe not now possess our great Stone?”
Sorcha saw her sister swallow. “Aye, lady.”
The queen nodded. “Then it is there you must go. But not, I think, quite yet. Is my seer here?”
From two steps behind Sorcha, a young boy stepped forward. Kieran himself, with his wise eyes and impish smile and shock of bright red hair. “I am here, a bhantiarna,” he said without fear, for only the seer could tell the truth to the queen and not suffer for it.
“Remind my daughters, seer,” the queen said, “just what is at stake.”
For a moment the boy considered his queen, as if counting the cost of their loss. Sorcha could count it already, in the faces she missed in the throng that filled the plain. Warriors lost in the effort to beat back the armies of the Dubhlainn Sidhe. Friends and mentors laid out for the funeral pyre and then internment atop Knock-narea, where the old queen’s cairn challenged the sky: light, air and peace. There was keening in the wind for those brave ones, and Sorcha felt it in her soul. Already the lack of their precious Coilin Stone had cost them the sun. She couldn’t bear to think what else would be forfeit.
“This you know, my queen,” Kieran called out in the singsong cadence of the bard, his small body perfectly erect, his hands folded in front of him. “Three stones rule us, formed by the ancients and set in our crowns. Donelle the Ruler, he of magnificent blue who resides in the Land of the West, where the temptation of him cannot entice us to destruction. Coilin Ruadh the Virile, who resides in the crown of Mab, queen of the matriarchal Tuatha de Dannan. And crystal clear Dearann the Fruitful, to balance the patriarchal power of the Dubhlainn Sidhe, the faerie of the air.”
Like the assembled races, Sorcha listened, rapt at the age-old telling, knowing the words by heart, but sustained by their acquaintance.
“It has been years on years since tragedy befell the Dubhlainn Sidhe and their Dearann Stone was lost to them.”
“The Dubhlainn Sidhe were careless, seer,” the queen reminded him tartly.
“No more careless than we, my queen,” he responded, his voice calm. “For we allowed the loss of the Lady Dearann without comment or help in her recovery, and the male Dubhlainn Sidhe grew dark and resentful for loss of their power, for want of the balance of their feminine stone. We grew lax, not anticipating that the Dubhlainn Sidhe would seek recompense. Now they have the great Coilin Stone, which will gain them not just power, but masculine ferocity. There is no female power left to balance them, my queen.”
“And if the balance is not restored?”
The child thought a moment, then sighed. “The Dubhlainn Sidhe grow stronger. They have already lost the gentling influence of the Dearann Stone. Now they gather the masculine power from the Coilin Stone, and it gives them no restraint.”
“And what of the Tuatha?”
“Our power will wane, and with it all feminine power. And without that, how will there be rebirth?”
Even the queen became perfectly still at Kieran’s words.
“If we cannot reclaim the stones and restore the world’s balance,” he finished, lifting his hands in helplessness, “there will be no spring.”
Sorcha had known the truth of the seer’s prediction long before he stated it. Even so, the gravity of his high, young voice struck her heart. No spring. No lambs or bluebells or sweet green grass. The birds gone. The earth herself, their dear mother, dying for want of a soft hand.
She couldn’t bear it. She wanted to hide, to weep, to keen like the bean sidhe in grief. But she was a princess of the blood, so she stood still before her people and waited.
“And what would you do, my Sorcha?” the queen asked, turning her gimlet eyes on Sorcha, “to save our mother earth?”
“What would you have me do, a bhantiarna?” Sorcha asked, as her mother knew she would. Her heart clamored in her chest and her belly hurt.
“I would have you be queen.”
Sorcha had no courage. It was why she should not be queen. She knew it. Her mother knew it. Her gifts were small and private, not terrible and great, such as a queen would need. An eye for the stone and weave a fairy should wear to display her power. A way with words to tell the stories to teach the young. A love of every plant and flower that grew. Not a taste for power, nor the stomach for ruthlessness.
She shook with the silence that stretched across the great plain, even the wind suddenly dying, as if waiting for her answer.
“You would desert your people at this time?” Sorcha asked her mother.
It was the bravest thing she’d done in her life. And the most foolhardy. The queen reared back as if struck. The throngs of faerie shuddered and stared. Arwen, the queen’s consort, stepped forward to give physical support to his queen, but Mab held him off. She stood alone on the crest of the hill and faced down her daughter.
“Sure, I think I’d be careful about accusing the queen of cowardice, little girl,” Mab whispered.
Sorcha felt it in her chest, where dread lived. “A great queen is needed at this time, lady. Not an insignificant teacher of infants.”
There was a stirring in the ranks. The queen quelled them with a look. Then, for a long moment, she considered her daughters.
“I had three daughters,” she said. “Shouldn’t that have been enough to satisfy any queen she would have an heir? And yet here I stand disappointed, and my people without a future. Isn’t this a time when there must be testing?”
There was no answer.
“Aye,” Mab answered herself, and smiled. “If you can’t be heirs, you can at least be sacrifices. For we know that when the earth is upended, the only thing that will suffice is a good sacrifice.”
Sorcha wondered, did her mother know that her daughter was shaking? That she was so afraid, she couldn’t even gain the muscle power to run? Did it please her mother to terrify her so?
“You’ve already taken my power as the leannansidhe,” Orla objected, her voice quavering just a bit. “What else do I have to give?”
The queen lifted an eyebrow. “Why, your freedom, my Orla. Your very life, if I so choose. You think that losing the power to seduce mortals is the worst that can befall you?”
“What would you have me do, my queen?” Sorcha interrupted, proud that her voice sounded calm. It was better to draw her mother’s fire than let her incinerate Orla on the spot for her defiance.
“You, Sorcha? What sacrifice can a teacher of infants offer?”
Sorcha had no answer.
“Do you love your land of faerie?” her mother asked.
“With the very breath in my body.”
The queen nodded. “Then you shall leave it.”
Sorcha stopped breathing altogether.
“The least you can do for me is to reclaim the Dearann Stone,” her mother said. “To do that you must travel through the great gate into a place so inhospitable your faerie soul shall shrivel.”
There wasn’t a whisper of breeze on the plane. Every fairy to the far horizon held still, stricken.
“You know where the Stone is?” Sorcha asked.
The queen shrugged. “I might have a suspicion.”
“Send me,” Orla insisted.
The queen turned to her youngest. “Ah, no, Orla. I have much better plans for you. Sorcha shall go. She will search for our stone where it lies lost amid the mortals and bring it back so it can be traded for the Coilin Stone. And when she comes back, she can again tell me how she will not be queen.”
“And if I fail?” Sorcha had to ask.
“Then none of us will be left here to accuse you, will we, little Sorcha? For the earth will have died.”
Sorcha was not even allowed to return to her home to pack anything to help her. The queen assured her that nothing she owned would help anyway. The bean tighe, healer for the fairies, sneaked a small pouch of herbs into Sorcha’s pocket when her mother wasn’t looking. The elven warrior Xender, who protected the queen herself, slipped Sorcha a delicate elven blade forged in mystical fires. And Orla, still deathly pale with waiting to know what her sacrifice would be, passed on some of the oil she rubbed on her own sleek body to attract the mortals she had once so enthusiastically seduced.
With her small cache and her trembling heart, Sorcha walked to the Plain of Gates, thirteen different portals into worlds not her own. Whether the queen saw the gifts or not, Sorcha didn’t know. Mab said nothing as she walked to the head of the faerie horde and paused. The silence stretched out across the plain, across the suddenly still sky. Finally she stepped before the gate that would take Sorcha into the land of mortals.
At least, Sorcha thought with relief, a world she would recognize. A world on her earth, in her time. She stepped up next to her mother and waited for the command to go.
“Take this with you,” her mother instructed, handing over a soft leather pouch. “Inside you will find a crystal. If necessary, leave it for the Dearann Stone. No mortal will be able to tell the difference. And no mortal will see it unless you so will it.”
The queen laid her hand on Sorcha’s forehead, in the age-old blessing of a mother to her child. “Look for the one who is us,” she said.
Nothing more. She turned Sorcha toward the gate into the other world and stepped back.
Sorcha saw Kieran standing to the side. “Will I see you on the other side?”
The little boy shook his head, his eyes grave. “I cannot help you.”
He didn’t say why. Sorcha was afraid she knew, though. Kieran was a changeling, a human child with a fairy heart who divided his time between the two worlds. But his mortal place was in Ireland, at a place called Rathkeale, where his parents awaited him in the Castle Matrix. The queen had said the place Sorcha was to go would be inhospitable. There was no place in Ireland inhospitable to fairies. She would be going beyond safety. Beyond belief. And she would go alone.
“Slan,” she said. Farewell. And then, before she had the chance to reconsider, she stepped through the gate.
The change was cataclysmic. The gentle sun vanished. The warm verdant grass froze. The hills she’d left disintegrated into a wasteland.
Sorcha almost stumbled to her knees, her head spinning from the crossing, her ears ringing with the pressure change that always happened when moving from her world to another. But worse this time. Devastating.
It was cold. Sorcha didn’t know what to do with cold. It was wet. She’d never been wet in all her days. The wind, a sharp knife of misery, carried rain on it and soaked her in her slight fairy attire. It howled and keened and moaned, a living thing bent on tormenting her, and she saw nowhere to escape it.
She was standing out on another hill, a long, sloping expanse that rose and fell like the sea, but a gray sea. A gray ocean without color or warmth or comfort. There were a few trees, but they were leafless, sere, scratchy sticks that stretched toward a hostile sky.
She took a wild look around her, terrified, upended, alone. Her heart thundered in her ears and her breath rasped in her throat. Her skin, which had never suffered more than the gentle cool of the gloaming, shrank against the elements. Her heart, her great fairy heart, shrank within her.
“To me!” she cried in a long, ululating wail. “All faerie folk and free, to me!”
The call of battle, the call of the clan. The desperate cry for a familiar voice.
Her answer was the wind. The cold north wind, with no faerie voice on it, no faerie warmth in it, no faerie taste to it.
This wasn’t just another world. It was an alien world, without fairy comfort, without magic. With only the bitter wind and empty hills.
She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know where to go. Surely she would be dead before she could find another life, much less the Dearann Stone. Surely her mother, that cruel queen, had simply meant to offer her up to an indifferent earth.
This earth that would remain cold and empty when the spring refused to come.
“Forgive me,” she moaned, sinking to her knees, there on the bare earth. “Oh, forgive me, mathair.”
But the earth, that verdant comfort that had never failed her, refused to answer. From toe to knee there was silence beneath her. Even when she lay down, full onto the ground, her face to the earth, her fingers spread wide to encompass it, she felt nothing. No whisper of life, no hint of warmth. All about her was dead and she grieved for it.
She didn’t even hear the stranger approach.
“Here! What are you doing? Get up!”
Startled, Sorcha looked up to see long legs in front of her. Thick boots, sturdy pants, long, sleek limbs. Tall limbs. She kept looking up and then up and still he went on.
A man.
A mortal, dark and fierce and glowering at her.
Sorcha stumbled to her feet, her instinct that of flight. This man was her enemy, surely, in this terrifying place.
“I—I…Forgive me…” she gasped, and stumbled. Her feet were too numb from the cold to hold her up, her senses still in too much upheaval.
She reached out for balance and ended up crashing into the mortal’s chest. He grunted, struggling to stay upright. He reached for her, but it was too late. In a tangle of limbs, the two of them tumbled over and their momentum carried them rolling all the way down the long hill into the rocks at the bottom.
“Ooomph!” he grunted again, coming to a halt right on top of her.
Sorcha couldn’t breathe. Her poor body felt as if it had been flayed, and her brain was still spinning. And that lump of a great mortal was lying on top of her, as if she were a feather mattress.
“Please…” She shoved at him, but it was like trying to move granite. “I…can’t…breathe….”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He lurched up, a hand on either side of her head, until he balanced himself over her, lifting his weight but not his control. “I…”
But then he stopped, staring. Sorcha couldn’t help it. She stared back. A mortal he might be, but he was magnificent. Taller than even the Tuatha, stronger than the elven guards, fiercer than the Dubhlainn Sidhe. Dark and sharp-edged, with high cheeks and a taut jaw and a rapier of a nose. A face on which even a scowl was a thing of beauty. And Sorcha revered beauty.
But that wasn’t what silenced her. It was his eyes. Dark-fringed, wide, crystal-bright. And green.
Fairy green.
Sorcha’s heart leapt in her breast. She felt joy bubble up in her, the relief of a saved life, the delight of finding that she’d been wrong. There was another familiar face in this alien place.
A warmth flooded her such as she’d never known, in heart and in head and deep in her belly, where his met hers. A current of something hot and primal sparked, there on the inhospitable hill, darkening his eyes and crackling through her limbs.
She opened her mouth to say something. What, she didn’t know. She never got it said. Instead, he kissed her. Warm lips and hard, scratchy jaw and sleek hands in her hair, pouring his life into her, waking her, warming her, welcoming her with the most primal force in all the world. She greeted his kiss with an open mouth, welcomed the invasion of his tongue, feasted on his heat and his strength and his hard, heavy ferocity. She stopped breathing or thinking or questioning. She simply wrapped herself around him and welcomed herself home.
When he pulled away, his face still perilously close, they simply stared at each other, both panting for air. He seemed stunned. Sorcha didn’t know why.
“Ah, how lovely,” she said, lifting her hand to his face. “You’re the one I’m to be looking for, then.”
“The one you’re looking for?” he asked, his voice oddly hushed, his eyes still deep and dark.
She smiled. She laughed. “Of course. Didn’t the queen herself tell me to look for the one who is us? And who would be quicker to recognize the mark of a fairy than I? Your sister thanks you for her welcome, mo dearthair.”’
“What?”
She gave him an even larger smile. “Ah, pardon. I forget it’s the mortal tongue I need. I merely called you my brother. I thank you, my brother, for my welcome.”
For a second the stranger stared at her. Then, shaking his head, he dragged her to her feet. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m calling the police.”