She knew Arawn would send his Hunters after her.
Blundering about in her wake, Gogmagot and Corenius weren’t particularly adept at stealth. She’d been aware of them for some considerable time now, lurking, trying to build up the courage to face her. She even caught snatches of their conversation; each trying to goad the other into taking her down. They sounded like children with their borrowed voices, but then Arawn had always believed so firmly in youth, in the vitality and innocence it represented, whereas she had preferred the wisdom of age.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” she called, knowing they would hear her.
The May Queen decided to make it easy for them, and followed the steps down into an underpass. The tunnel beneath the roads was dark, with barely any light at the end because of the way the steps doubled back on themselves to create a roof. It stank of piss and shit and all of those mortal stenches. The walls had been painted with crude graffiti—not words or gang tags this time, but offerings to her kind, as the children answered the call to rise up. She recognized attempts to paint the antlers of the Horned God in broad brushstrokes of black behind the silhouette of a faceless man, and so many garishly colored flowers around him it could have been the heart of summer. She liked it. If the meadow was her palace, this dank piss-stinking tunnel was her chapel. She could work with it.
She plucked a flower from the painting on the wall, willing it into substance in her hand. It was a beautifully simple daisy; one of her favorites.
She raised it to her nose and savored the sweet scent, then whispered a word to draw down the first bee into the tunnel. It came, along with a second and a third, answering her call. Soon a dozen buzzed around the delicate flower in her hand, and still more came down into the darkness to taste its pollen. Fifty. Hundred. The buzzing intensified, amplified by the cramped confines of the tunnel, growing louder and louder by the second as more of London’s bees freshly woken for the season, came down to draw pollen from the daisy. Within a minute there were easily ten thousand bees crawling all over every inch of her skin, tangled in her hair, and climbing on top of each other and burrowing beneath to taste the skin of the May Queen.
Their tiny wings vibrated against her eyes and cheeks as she watched the two fools enter the tunnel. Their silhouettes transformed them into brutish shapes, closer to their natural form as she remembered it.
In this aspect, they were no match for her. The old woman they could have hurt, possibly even ended, bludgeoning her with their crude blows, but renewed, they didn’t stand a prayer. They had no inkling what they were going up against, and but for the fact they had murdered five children before coming for her, she would have pitied them. Now, with the blood of the Sleepers on their hands, they deserved everything she was about to do to them. And more.
She let her fingers trail over the petals of the flower in her hand, ignoring the bees as they swarmed around her, and plucked them one at a time, as though playing a game of he loves me, he loves me not. She didn’t need the petals to tell her how he felt. He had come back to save her in his own sweet, twisted way. For all their differences, they wanted the same thing: to protect the land, though where she chose to nurture and nourish the soil with little acts of love, he chose blood.
“We can smell you,” Gogmagot said, his voice carrying down the tunnel. “Your heat.”
“Ripe for the plucking,” his chalk giant brother, lumbering menacingly toward her, mocked.
She didn’t move: not toward them, not away from them. She let the stem of the denuded flower fall from her fingers, and the bees gathered close enough so that they became a living glove.
“Did he send you?”
“You know he did,” Gogmagot said.
“True, I just wondered if you’d try and lie.”
“Why would I do that? I don’t have anything against you in this form.”
“And yet here you are, intending to kill me.”
“It’s not personal,” Corenius said.
She saw the crown of leaves the giant wore, and even from this distance could identify bean, broom, burdock, chestnut, hawthorn, meadowsweet, nettle, oak, and primrose.
“You brought me an offering? How kind of you,” Macha said, holding out her bee-gloved hand.
“Oh, it’s not for you, only to help us find you.”
“And here you are, and I’m telling you it is mine,” she said sweetly. “Give it to me, or I shall have my little friends take it. I don’t think you want that to happen.”
The chalk giants didn’t move, and she had no interest in drawing things out, so with a whisper sent the bees swarming. They filled the air between them, swelling to fill every inch of the tunnel. Ten thousand must surely have been closer to thirty thousand and more by the time the first settled on Gogmagot’s bare arm. The chalk giant crushed it beneath his hand.
“That was a mistake,” she said, as the smell of death drove the other bees wild.
“I don’t care what you think,” Gogmagot sneered.
“And that’s your final mistake, my old friend. They will willingly die for me, like all creatures great and small. They understand that there needs to be sacrifice. And there are a lot more of them than there are of you.” The giant in a boy’s skin laughed, his voice booming out to drown out the humming of the bees.
“Do your worst, woman,” his brother said. “See if you can do your magic tricks after I’ve snapped your neck.”
“Sometimes strength has nothing to do with muscles,” she said, opening her mouth and letting a single bee settle on her tongue. She swallowed it whole. “Sometimes it comes from being able to ask for help, and now I am asking,” and with that whatever had been holding the bees back lost its hold on them, and as they swarmed around the chalk giant they began to sting. At first it was only one at a time, but in the few seconds it took her to walk to where the brothers lay on the piss-stained paving slabs, writhing around in agony, hundreds upon hundreds of her hive had descended to sink their stingers into the two Hunters.
They slapped at their arms and faces, turning and turning on the spot, losing their balance even as more stingers sank into their skin. They fell up against the tunnel wall and slumped down against it, clawing at their faces, their eyes, mouths open to scream, but instead of desperate cries going out, bees swarmed over their lips and teeth, filling them.
Their deaths weren’t pretty, but then death shouldn’t be.
She watched impassively, as their skin reddened and as more and more venom poured into their bodies; anaphylactic shock took them one after the other. It was an agonizing death that she wouldn’t have wished upon her worst enemies, but some good could come of it, she thought, as she recovered her crown from the fallen giant. As soon as it settled on her brow, the leaves and buds blossomed into glorious life.
He would feel it, she knew, just as she felt his growing strength; such was the bond between them. She and he might not be lovers in this lifetime, but they were joined in ways that went beyond mortal comprehension. They were part of the endless knot of life, indivisible, inseparable, unending. It was only a matter of time before her ancient betrayal demanded a reckoning in his mind and the dance would begin all over again, the knot consuming itself like a serpent eating its own tail.
Would it be her turn this time, or his again? It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that though their methods and means differed so vastly, they both essentially wanted to bring the magic back into the world so that it might survive the coming days.
Crouching down beside the fallen brothers, she ran her fingers across the damp corners where the ground and tunnel wall met, digging out a few inches of mossy fungus, that she then sprinkled into the open mouths of the dead Hunters. Her touch brought new life to the moss, causing it to flourish in the dampness of their throats, and in moments all manner of mushrooms and toadstools had begun to sprout out of every orifice as the brothers became a breeding ground for the slugs and snails, worms and flies.
She stood and turned her back on the Hunters. She had taken two of his pieces out of the great game, even as her most potent player had returned. In this moment, she was winning. She could feel the magic bristling in the ground beneath her feet with an urgency that had been missing for centuries. It was flooding back into the realm, and that was his doing. At dawn, all of the birds in the sky had cried out as one, their song announcing the return of Manannan’s blade, the Godslayer. With Freagarthach in his hand, she had a hero to stand against her lover in the endless conflict between the Aos Shee and the Bain Shee.
They were the same, and yet so different. It was more than just light and dark, they were counterparts; together they made up the whole. They were chaos and order. The Aos Shee were the ancestors of the forest, of nature and the land, who had retreated into the Otherworld. They were staggeringly beautiful, godlike in their perfection. They still lingered in our understanding with the faces more commonly thought of as angels. While the Bain Shee had taken refuge in the lands of the dead, they were the rot that riddled the landscape and the decay that ate away at Mother’s natural beauty. They were the foul stench that came with putrescence, and unlike their kin theirs was a terrible beauty—hideous and deep rooted—bearing the masks of demons in our more basic mythologies. But one could not exist without the other. And no matter what aspect of their kind they represented, they had abandoned our world. They did not belong here.
She could sense their presence, pushing at the veil. It was only a matter of time; the one thing the Bain Shee had an abundance of. Their exile could not and would not last. And when they finally broke through, the world—her world—would need every shred of magic spilling back into it now to resist its ancient enemy.
She had never been afraid of loss. That was for her aspect as a mother. In this skin, she was full of that same youth and beauty Arawn so cherished, and because he was so predictable, she had always been able to manipulate her love.
She dismissed her bees, sending them out into the world to cross-pollinate the miraculous seeds she had conjured into existence, knowing that each bud and blossom they brought forth would enrich Mother.
She took the stairs, emerging from the underpass. The fresh air was heady in her lungs. She felt like her body must surely rupture, spilling out all of its richness, so intense was the fragrance of the newly grown forest all around her. Everywhere she looked she saw fresh signs of beauty returning, replacing the sickness of man.
She would prevail. She had no alternative. She must. For all of their sakes. She was willing to give everything—even the deity she had loved body and soul for her entire existence—for this place. That was the fundamental difference between her and Arawn. He always thought there was another way to go about things, and clung stubbornly to that need, even when it was as guileless as drawing a sword and bellowing “Charge!” Even so, she knew that her time here was growing shorter by the hour; the maiden aspect could not live forever. In all things there is a season, and summer must come. It would not be held back. Not now. All she could do was take some small comfort in the fact that so much had already been accomplished. She just had to look around her to see the burned-out shell of all of those temples of avarice, gutted by the cleansing fires of Arawn’s army of children. Across the avenue newly blessed with fresh woodland, she saw the endless row of chapels dedicated to greed with their gaudy displays of wealth overturned. This place wasn’t what it had been, but they were moving in the right direction at least, back toward a simpler time when the land was all anyone needed and they were content to dedicate their lives to serving Mother.
There was still so much left to be done; but this was a beginning.
In the distance she heard dogs barking. Above, the sky was filled with starlings.
Arawn had called out to the creatures.