prologue


After All is Said and Done

The wedding was done and the night now lay in soft folds around them. The eld woman watched the newly joined couple across from her, finding great joy in seeing two of her dearest friends whole and happy.

She looked down from the smiling faces of the Goblin King and his new bride to the young boy who lay sleeping in her lap. The boy who had been stolen away to faerie, now returned. The one whom she had agreed to take in and care for. She gently stroked her hand over his soft golden hair.

“His life will not be easy, standing between two worlds as he does,” she said, a niggle of doubt worming its way into her heart. “And I am an old woman. It has been a long time since I cared for a child. I hope I remember how.” She felt the truth of those words now more than she ever had, or at least more than she had in a very long time.

“Pfft!”

She turned her head and looked over at the phooka stretched out on the ground next to her.

“You are not so old. And it has not been that long...” Hoax said, smiling winsomely up at her. “A few centuries at the most.”

She sighed with fond exasperation. “Only you would say such a ridiculous thing.”

Lumina surprised her then, asking about the life she had lived before she had come to stay in the house at the wood’s edge, when she had still lived among mortals. It was odd to think of those times. Just how old had she been when they had chased her from her village? She found that she wasn’t sure of her answer.

“It was so long ago, I am not sure I remember,” she admitted. “Forty, perhaps, not yet fifty, surely. At that time, it was quite a venerable age, though certainly nothing compared to the age I am now.”

“Which is nothing to the age I am, since mine even rivals Lorne’s by a goodly amount,” the still grinning phooka quipped, the mischief in his eyes daring her to refute his statement.

“As great as all that,” she said. “Then perhaps I should not trouble you to carry us home. I am not sure such ancient bones could hold us.”

He was up on his feet in a thrice.

“Then allow me to disprove your theory,” he said, sweeping her a mocking bow, “and prove to you once again that such things mean nothing at all.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. After all, what would he know about ‘such things’, having not a mortal bone in his body? Taking her leave of the happy couple, she allowed him to carry her away into the night, the boy tucked safely in front of her.

He took them straight home to the house at the wood’s edge, with nary a stray from the path. A mighty feat for the phooka, she was sure. Right up to the garden gate he went, and before she could think to slide down, he was standing there in front of her, on two legs now instead of the four he had been on just a heartbeat ago. His strong arms held the boy’s legs securely around his waist, while the boy’s head rested quietly on his shoulder. She found herself on her own two feet as well, pressed up close to the goblin’s back with the boy sleeping between them. The pony ears sticking up from the phooka’s black hair twitched as he turned one green eye back over his shoulder to look at her.

“When you have a mind, could you open the gate? It seems my hands are a touch full.”

She walked around him and did as he asked, casting a scowl in his direction, which he met with a smile.

Hoax brought the sleeping boy all the way through the house, past the cold hearth, to the bedroom just beyond where she had him put the boy into her own bed. She tucked the child in and stood there watching as he drifted off into true sleep.

The wind outside seemed filled with soft lamentations as it blew past. Whispered portents that sent a shiver down her back and made her wonder if even now the washer women were at the water’s edge, washing her burial shroud. Or was that merely a flight of fancy brought on by her returned mortality?

The boy whimpered a little, and she reached down to stroke his hair. It was such a sad sound, one much like another she had heard recently. A picture of the cursed queen as a white hind flashed through her mind. The graceful doe, white as a hawthorn in flower, leaping away as she tried to flee from the mortal heart that now beat in her chest. The eld woman shivered again, remembering the sound the white hind had made, a cry filled with infinite hopelessness and despair. And despite their old enmity, the eld woman felt a moment’s pity for the creature who was once the Fairy Queen.

A warm hand settled on her shoulder chasing the cold away. The forgotten phooka’s green, green eyes shone bright as they smiled at her from the darkness. “Why yes of course, I would love some tea.”