unaccountably shy. I’d been making love to this man in my dreams for weeks now—I’d made love to his incarnations for longer than that—but I didn’t know him. He looked at me as if he knew me, but that was because he thought I was the first Cailleach. He’d never met me—and he wouldn’t, I suddenly realized. I’d saved him before he became the incubus, so he would never come to me as Liam or Bill. I felt a sort of hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, but perhaps that was an aftereffect from emptying myself out to become the door. Certainly I should feel glad that I’d rescued William Duffy before he could become the incubus, but I didn’t. The man I’d fallen in love with—whatever combination of Bill and Liam that had been—had never existed. I’d rescued a total stranger.
A hungry and cold stranger.
I searched the cupboards for food. I found a number of glass jars full of dried herbs and a covered earthenware canister half full of oatmeal and another with hard biscuits—the bannocks William had spoken of, no doubt, although they didn’t resemble the warm, flaky biscuits my father used to make. Either seventeenth-century fare was spare or Mordag had planned to be away for a while and hadn’t stocked her kitchen before leaving— although I noticed that there was a bowl on the table half full of dried oatmeal, a wooden spoon congealing beside it. It looked as if Mordag had been having her morning porridge when she’d been interrupted and left suddenly.
I hadn’t come across any indoor plumbing on my exploration, so I went out back to relieve myself, squatting behind a lilac bush. In the moonlight I could see a pump, a neat garden sheltered in the lee of a stone wall, and an apple tree, all well tended and trimmed back for winter. Mordag hadn’t been gone for long.
I washed my hands at the pump and filled a tin bucket that hung beside it with water. The water was ice cold and tasted like snow, which I noticed was covering the tops of the moonlit mountains surrounding the cottage. There hadn’t been any snow in the Catskills when I left Fairwick. It gave me a hollow feeling that time was moving on, even though I knew that was absurd. The gulf of time separating me from my friends in Fairwick was far wider than a few weeks.
Shivering, as if I’d felt that wide gulf of time opening up under my feet, I hurried back into the cottage, which felt toasty warm now. William had arranged the sheepskins and blankets into a sort of couch in front of the fire and was reclining lazily, his bare legs ruddy in the firelight. I brought the water and bannocks over and busied myself filling a cast-iron kettle.
“I thought ye might’ve run away, lass,” he said when I finally sat down beside him. “Ye seem more scairt of me now than when I turned into a lion.”
“You remember that?” I asked, avoiding the question of me being afraid of him. He was right—I was. But why?
“Aye,” he said, his eyes glowing with mirth and reflected firelight. “I didn’t have any choice about it, mind, no more than I had these last seven years, but I knew how brave ye were—and how kind. To risk your own neck for a man ye’d only met that once, although …” He drew his legs under him and knelt in front of me, studying my face. “It was a
I swallowed, feeling the pressure of his strong fingers on my skin. My voice sounded hoarse when I spoke. “There’s something I have to explain to you …” I began, before his lips touched mine. He leaned back on his heels and looked at me, a line creasing his brow. I resisted the urge to smooth it away.
“I’m not that girl,” I said, “the one you met in the Greenwood—Cailleach. I have the same name—although I go by Callie more often—but I’m not her. I’m … her descendant. I’ve come back through time.”
“What happened to her, then? The other Cailleach?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she had to leave Ballydoon because the witch hunters came and she tried to get back to Faerie, but it wasn’t the right time. I’ve dreamed about her. I think she saw you and tried to come through the door, but then she faded …”
A pained look crossed his face. “Aye, I half-remember that, but I thought it was a dream—I’ve had some awful dreams in the time I’ve spent in Faerie. If she didn’t come for me, then what happened to me?”
“You became an incubus,” I said. “You came to me twice as that creature, each time in a different guise.”
“Did I hurt ye, lass, when I came to ye as a demon?”
“No—or at least not physically. You rather broke my heart as Liam, but then when you came back as Bill you tried to make it up to me.”
“As if there were any way to make up for treating a lady badly!” He jerked away and flung himself back against the piled blankets and stared into the fire. “There were things I did when I was in Faerie … things I remember … I don’t know if they were real or no’. There were great feasts at which we ate and drank like kings for days and nights on end, only there wasn’t any difference betwixt night and day, so no telling how long our debaucheries went on—or where they might lead. I remember riding through the woods, horns calling the hounds to the hunt, chasing a white deer, only the deer became a girl … a frightened human girl.”
He turned to me, his eyes glowing blood red in the firelight, his face pale as ash. “I don’t like to think of what became of that girl, or the others. The queen brought them to me. She said I must learn to feed on their life or I’d no’ be any good to her.” He looked back at the fire, his profile white against the shadows. He was no longer cold, but he was trembling. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I was afraid that when he looked at me he would see one of those girls he’d hurt. I remembered that after I’d banished Liam to the Borderlands, he spent his time there trying to help creatures across safely, to make amends for the souls he’d drained of life. And when Bill showed up at my door to fix my roof, he constantly told me that he was sorry. I saw now that it wasn’t just for the hurt he’d caused me. He’d been trying to atone for the things he was forced to do to survive in Faerie.
“I didn’t know what she meant,” William went on. “I … I lay with those girls, but I never meant them any harm. Still, they would grow paler and weaker and thinner … and then they would be gone. I told myself they had been released back into the world, but when I asked, the queen would only laugh and take me into her bed again—” He broke off and lowered his head. “Ye must think me a monster,” he said in a low, desperate voice.
I started to speak, but my throat was so dry I gagged. I reached for the water and took a long drink, wishing the clean cold of it would wash away the images of William in the Fairy Queen’s bed. I remembered that before I knew that Liam was the incubus, he told me a story about a lover who had led him into debauchery, with whom he had done things he didn’t like to remember. That, I saw now, had been his way of telling me what had happened with the Fairy Queen. But that story hadn’t come close to the raw details of this tale. Soheila had first told me the story of how a mortal became an incubus because he lived so long in Faerie that he had lost his humanity and then had to feed off the life force of human women, but I had not imagined exactly what that process entailed. I had not pictured the Fairy Queen feeding live girls to him, as one might feed a pet snake live mice. Nor had I pictured her taking that pet—replete with the strength he’d sucked out of those girls—back into her bed. I knew I should say something reassuring to him, but I couldn’t think what.
William looked up again and helped me hold the pail to my lips, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He took a sip of the water himself, put the pail aside, and looked back at the fire. “Aye, I don’t blame ye. I became a monster in my own eyes. The worst of it was, I began to hunger for those girls. I looked forward to the hunt. When I saw ye standing on the road tonight, I thought you were tonight’s prey, and …” He turned to me, his eyes wide and staring. “I cannot lie to ye—I wanted you. I want ye now, but I’m afraid of what I might do to ye.” His hands twisted around my arms as the serpent had coiled around me. His hair, dry now, waved around his face like a lion’s mane; his eyes burned like a fiery brand.
I shook one arm from his grip. I saw the pain in his eyes as I broke away, but he didn’t try to restrain me. He let my other arm go and sat back on his heels. My arms free, I stroked his hair and wrapped my arm around his trembling shoulders. I coaxed his head down to my shoulder, stroking his hair and kneading the knotted muscles along his back. His whole body began to shake, but I held on to him fast as I had at the well, only this time I wasn’t so sure what I’d be holding in the end.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
