I remember the stench of decay in the hot soupy air. The dysentery and the malaria. The screams and the moans and the horror of weaponized death.
And I remember how a fae responded.
Self-sustaining magicals—elves, fae, kami, any of the other groups—they’re all basically the same species. Of all the subspecies out there, the elves are the most homogeneous—and the most human. They’re Norse gifted power by their gods.
But the fae, they vary. Some are like Ellie and her mother—more homo sapiens than homo mageía. Some are closer to the wolf part of the World Wolf, or the stag part of the World Stag. Some are as much manifestation as they are conscious creatures.
The American Civil War mortally wounded not only men, but also the land. The magic where battles were fought was now bloated and bruised. To this day, many places still suffer a form of gangrene.
And that one fae, that one Tennessee night, manifested out of the fog. He stood on his stag legs under the bitter moon and he swung razor-sharp antlers. He cut out the infection as best he could.
My best guess was that he’d come to America with the Scots-Irish who inhabited Appalachia. Or perhaps the French. Or perhaps he was as old as the forest itself—all forests everywhere—and had come through from a fae realm to do the regiments damage. I did not know. I know only that he wasn’t a Native spirit. He was one-hundred-percent-antigen fae.
Four-toed undulate feet scraped through the rich soil. Deep stag calls rolled through the fog. The night went cold and men died in ways mundanes could not fathom. Ways that would the next day be attributed to cannons and bayonets. To war and pestilence.
So I understood what fae were capable of. What a kami or a loa or a spirit could render. What elves could inflict, if they chose to do so. How a barrier could be ripped asunder as a warning. How things that should not come through, can.
Or things that should not be allowed in, are.
As magic snatched not only me, but also Sal, Ellie, Titania, and the elves, I felt the barrier’s agony. Not the suffering of what crosses, but the white-hot screaming of the magic itself.
The agony of Ellie’s cottage when it moves. The sweltering sting caused when a pocketland is cut off from the world and made a realm. The strained fibers, both the real and the magical, that hold the universe together.
What came of this? Rage burning outward from a gushing wound. The need to ride, and to break, and to inflict as a way to spend that pain.
Crossing into The Great Hall never hurt like this. Neither did crossing into The Land of the Dead. This magic, this elemental truth of the fae, set every living part of my body on fire.
Then it all froze.
I still stood in the snow, in the pasture, under the knoll and away from Magnus’s barns, but this place was different.
I was in the world, but not the real world. I was pretty sure that whatever Hrokr had done, whatever extra call he’d pushed out with his additions to his father’s magic, had shunted me at least—all of us, maybe—into a reflection.
Nothing made sense, though everything did. Left was right, and right was left, except I was not flipped, and my dominant hand still wanted to do the throwing and the hitting. Nothing looked mirrored, but I knew my senses were not operating correctly.
Time was not working correctly.
Titania’s ropes of magic coiled around Ellie and Hrokr. They also coiled up her arms and over her shoulders, where they coiled around her neck, face, and up under her antlered helmet. The ropes pulsed and rippled like water, or gel, but Titania, Hrokr, and Ellie stood frozen as if between film frames.
“Ellie?” My voice echoed as if someone had added reverb, or as if I called from a long way off and my words bounced off Magnus’s barns.
That reverb hit the hole left behind after Titania’s magic sucked away my mate magic.
Resonance isn’t a term usually associated with the chaos of anger. The thing is, anger and rage aren’t as chaotic as humans would like to believe. Chaos gives cover. “I was so angry I couldn’t foresee the outcomes of my actions” type of cover.
But that’s a lie. Anger and rage aren’t chaos. They’re a rupture. They represent a living thing’s cataclysmic response to what it sees as overwhelming opposition. It’s a raccoon backed against a shed, or me roaring promised vengeance at my father.
The outcome of such episodes is always, always predictable.
And here I was, fully aware that this place was not right, that time here was not right, that I was in an illusion and facing the loss of the first woman in my more-than-two-hundred-year life who loved me unconditionally.
I could wait for all the conditions that might possibly cause her to walk away, but they weren’t there. They never would be.
Unless the rage took me again.
The rage.
It’s not chaos. It’s not. It’s resonance inside a hole, and whatever this place was rang that stupid, still-there, always-there, bell.
And I had to fight back. I had to rupture what attacked so I could escape through the rip. I had no choice.
I had to swing my razor-sharp antlers and cut out the infection.
The sigils between the elves and Titania pulsed and wiggled as much as the ropes of fae magic. Arne and Magnus, also frozen, gleamed so brightly behind their glamours they looked to be in the first nanosecond of an explosion.
But not Sal. She was here with me in this bubble of time, and she, too, felt the resonance.
Battle roared from her in a breathtaking wave as resonant as my own echoes.
I dodged the ropes.
