Gossamyr

“I will not neglect my duties to Glamoursiège, but…I want this, Shinn. It is such an opportunity!” She hurried up beside him. Where did he go in such a hurry?

“Convince me it wise to send my daughter on such a singular and dangerous quest.”

Ah, there, he had not given an unequivocal no. This gave Gossamyr hope.

“Your fée warriors will not survive the Red Lady’s seductive allure. As you’ve told me, she seduces Disenchanted fée into her clutches. They have not the fortitude to resist!”

Any fée who left Faery for the Otherside risked Disenchantment. Necessary trips to the mortal realm were swift, coached in the knowledge that glamour dissipates quickly and Time could not be trusted. A risky venture for a fée warrior.

A risk chosen by some.

There were those rogue fée, who, seduced by the lure of the mortal, and that intricate city called Paris, chose to remain on the Otherside. To stay meant sure Disenchantment; a condition that saw the fée completely drained of glamour, and often they lost their wings to a shriveling malady attributed to the baneful touch from a mortal. Enchantment gone, they became nothing more than a shell that survived as any mortal. Return to Faery was difficult but not impossible. But never again could the Disenchanted regain Enchantment whole.

Of course, one did not have to be fée to fall under the seductive spell of the Otherside. Gossamyr had lost her mother to the mortal passion ten midsummers earlier. The lure of the unknown was ever beguiling, but Veridienne de Wintershinn had always known the Otherside, for she had been mortal complete.

Shinn stopped abruptly, causing his daughter to collide against his back. Savoring the faintest scent of hyacinth that marked her father, Gossamyr stepped back.

The south tower overlooked a riot of white roses and speckled foxglove in the gardens below. Overhead, the carved marble openwork cast a lattice of shadows across Shinn’s tightened jaw. His blazon, an iridescent tribal marking, curled down his chin and neck and across his upper chest, and shimmered in the blocked patches of sunlight. Glamoursiège blazons showed on neck and upper extremities; placement varied from tribe to tribe.

For all his stern posture and commanding demeanor—even the recent announcement that his marshal at arms should marry Gossamyr—Shinn would ever occupy a soft place in Gossamyr’s heart. All planes and hard slopes his face, only in his eyes could she ever find compassion. And such a find was a rarity to be hoarded. Shinn’s manner switched from cool to disinterested, and then suddenly to genuine concern with such ease. One moment he was gentle and attentive, the next, the battle commander wore a fierce mien. Gossamyr had not known him to be any other way. Attribute to his trying history, she could only assume. They had both loved and lost. Love being one of those mutable words the fée toyed with in exchange for lust, hunger or envy.

“I listened last night to the council’s discussion,” she said. Shinn required she sit as a silent member at council, for her future demanded she take an active role in Glamoursiège matters. “The revenants’ presence in Faery increases. But I was surprised to learn about the rift.” She bent to meet Shinn’s straying gaze. “It has never before been discussed by council. Why did you not tell me of it sooner?”

“It is just something that is…known. The rift has existed since before your birth.”

“That long? And all this time you haven’t once thought to—”

“It has never been in my mind, Gossamyr. Until recently. There are none who can name the reason for the rift cleaved between Faery and the Otherside; only we know it exists. Such a tear in the fabric that separates our worlds allows the revenants to return with ease. I am sure I mentioned it when I explained the revenants to you.”

“You did not.” Hand to her hip, she paced in short turns, pointing the floor with the tip of her staff. Shinn had explained the revenants two midsummers earlier when she had witnessed a natural fée death. Normally the fée essence leaves the body and experiences the final twinclian. But there are those fée—those of darker natures—who do not twinclian to the Celestial. Instead, their essence merely pops, and the revenant follows, its destination—the Infernal. It is a rarity.

The sudden appearance of revenants in Faery—not newly emerged from a natural fée death—had given clue someone on the Otherside was stealing the essences. And so was discovered the Red Lady.

As frustrated as Gossamyr was to just now learn something she should have known about, she took it all in. Knowledge was required for a successful mission. “Still, I do not understand why, or how, those skeleton creatures return to Faery. Are they not dead?”

“Did that creature look dead?”

Actually, yes. However, not if death implied stillness. “So it was alive, yet…I don’t understand.”

“That thing I killed—”

“We killed.”

“Yes. We.” A nod verified her participation in the event. But too brief, Shinn’s reassuring smile. “The Red Lady stole its essence, leaving the revenant in limbo. Somehow she can feed off the essence of another—the essence holds the former body’s glamour—delaying her Disenchantment interminably. The revenant is a shade of the fée that cannot find final rest without the essence, so it returns to Faery in seek of a new essence.”

“But why Faery? Can it not locate a fée on the Otherside?”

“It is compelled back to Faery. The rift literally sucks them back home. I don’t believe it could remain in the Otherside if it wished.”

“This essence…” Gossamyr leaned against a blue machicolation, tapping the cool marble with a thumb. “When I witnessed the fée death something blue rose from the body. Is it something the Red Lady can draw out and…possess?”

“Yes and no. Inside the body it is our very being. Outside the body, well, it either twinclians or it pops.” The elegant fée lord tilted his head to look upon his daughter. A sigh hung in the air between them, a resolute pause. “The essence is akin to…a mortal soul.”

“Ah.”

There was so little Gossamyr understood about mortals. About that part of herself.

Her mother had been mortal, but Veridienne’s sickness—the mortal passion—had kept her focus from her family and eventually lured her home to the Otherside, leaving Gossamyr alone to comfort her heartbroken fée father. And to ever wonder. Why had not her mother taken her daughter with her? Surely she might have wished to raise her own child? Had it been so easy to leave her family behind for the mortal world? She had once begged to stay in Faery—but that desire hadn’t lasted long.

Of course, in terms of emotional distance, Veridienne had much over Shinn. Likely, she had not seen beyond her own self-satisfying desires.

Following her mother’s abrupt departure, Gossamyr had vowed not to become mired in her own selfish wants. And what better way to prove it than to track the Red Lady and protect Faery from further torment?

So this sought-after essence was like a mortal soul. What did it mean to have a soul? And mortal, at that. Gossamyr had known no other way but of the fée. Fathered by Shinn, would she possess both a soul and an essence?

“There are things I would have liked to give you,” Shinn said, looking off into the sky, avoiding her gaze. “Truths.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There is no time for confessions. The revenant is single-minded,” Shinn said, “focused on obtaining that which was stolen from it. So much so, it will kill to obtain the final twinclian.” He focused briefly on her cut cheek, but gave her injury no verbal regard. The fée were not so emotionally delicate as mere mortals. “They are becoming more frequent, the encounters. Streklwood was attacked last eve.”

“The cook?”

Shinn nodded.

A lump the size of an uncooked goose egg formed in Gossamyr’s throat at memory of this morning’s still-shelled offering. She’d thought to complain, to send her maid, Mince, marching down to the kitchen…

“The revenant must be reduced to a fine glimmer,” Shinn continued. “For to leave a single bone intact will not defeat the creature’s quest for wholeness. They are difficult to kill.”

“I noticed. But it felt good, the challenge.”

Avoiding his daughter’s enthusiastic declaration Shinn strode the curve of the tower, hands akimbo, his raven-feather cape flitting gently above the length of his folded wings.

This demesne of Faery was not so much ruled by Shinn as protected and guided—a position Gossamyr knew she would one day fill. Descended from a long line of trooping fée, Shinn had once commanded the Glamoursiège musters. He’d become lord over Glamoursiège following his father’s death. And he’d trained his only daughter to follow in his footsteps, should he cease to stand upon the Glamoursiège throne.

Much as she did not like to consider that fate, Gossamyr realized it would happen some day. And she was prepared to take Shinn’s place, physically. Mentally, she wondered if her lack of battle experience would make her a weaker ruler. She could sit council and talk politics with the best. But would they respect one without time spent in the musters?

Pressing her palms to a cool marble crenel cut into the tower, Gossamyr leaned forward. A swirl of white cottonwood kites billowed out from the dense forest spiraling the castle. Laughter smaller than a bird’s tweedle glittered in the air like sunshine upon purling waters—a few skyclad piskies clung to the tails of the seed-kites, stealing a ride.

Despite the fées’ frustrating lack of regard for Time, she did know it governed the Otherside. Veridienne had been the one to explain to her how the mortal realm used Time to measure everything. During that conversation, she’d told Gossamyr she was eight years in measurement, and that a year could be marked once every mortal midsummer. Which meant Gossamyr was twenty-one mortal years now. It filled her with pride to know that one mortal measurement, but she did not mention it to Shinn. The fée did not measure a lifetime with tangible numbers of years. Once on the Otherside, the fée struggled against Time, Veridienne had said. Time stole Enchantment.

To race against Time would afford a challenge.

Faery needed a champion to defeat this vicious succubus.

A thump to her chest thudded against the arachnagoss-stuffed pourpoint Gossamyr wore when practicing—which was more often than not. “You know I am fit for this mission,” she said with conviction.

She had absorbed Shinn’s lessons on the martial arts until he had declared her more skilled than he. Since childhood her father had honed her skills to counter the true glamour birth had denied. (She had a bit; her blazon shimmered as bright as any other.) But she knew he would balk. Always Shinn had forbidden her from visiting the Otherside. (Forbid was a favorite word of Shinn’s.) Forbidden to journey beyond the marsh roots, forbidden to take the sinister curve to market, forbidden to court a Rougethorn, forbidden to even suggest a visit to the Otherside.