Chapter 22: The Tragedy

Aine crooned after Lark, fearful. Sasha quieted her. Fairies were complex: they were not enemies, friends, nor anything to contend with. Interrupting would complicate matters further. Let the encounter run its course.

From the bushes, they watched the laundress glide across the water towards Lark. Her long, blue toes scraped the surface as she went, sending out incandescent ripples. Spine now straight, she must have been eight feet tall. 

Lark didn’t flinch. Probably unable to. The laundress rested her webbed hands on either side of his face. Her fingers were so stretched that her pinkies curved around the back of his head, touching his ears.

Sasha tensed. He kept hidden, but did instinctively reach for his mace. No mace—that was always going to bite. He reached for the dagger instead.

The laundress took in a deep, lengthening breath that seemed to suck all the air out of the clearing. She held it a moment, then released it in the form of a drawn-out, mournful sigh. It whipped Lark’s hair about his head.  

Immediately, the temperature in the patch plummeted by about forty degrees. The lake crystallized; the clovers went hard. Frost collected on the dagger’s handle, searing Sasha’s hand. He let go with a hiss.  

Up ahead, Lark was shivering, paler than the white stripe of light hanging in the sky. The laundress’s eye sockets curved at the harsh clatter of his teeth. Her emaciated arms languidly moved to wrap about his shoulders.

Contrary to the stories, she did not break his bones, suffocate him with her breasts, or even make him do laundry. Instead, she drew him close to her skeletal chest and pressed a pair of chapped indigo lips to his forehead. His shivering ceased. 

Sasha had no mother, that he knew of at least, but the sight of Lark and the laundress allowed him to imagine how one’s embrace might feel. Warmth radiated from them in shimmery waves, reining in the chill.  

With the rapid shifts in temperature came a smothering blanket of mist. It first pooled at Lark’s ankles, then his waist. When it started to thicken about his shoulders, his head, Sasha decided the course had been run. 

Holding Aine in the crook of his elbow, low at his side, he emerged from the bushes. The mist cleared in an instant. The laundresses, all of them, were gone. The laundry too.

Lark was alone, sitting cross-legged by the water. On the bright side, his laces were no longer in a hundred knots.

“Sasha,” he whispered, “why did she have this?” 

The cloak in question, folded neatly in his lap, was all they left behind. Sopping wet but otherwise intact, it bore a striking resemblance to the one he lost in the swamp. 

Sasha stopped at his side, reached out, hesitated. “Are you sure it’s yours?” he asked.

“I’d know it anywhere. Tamsin bought it for me. I was sad when…” Lark looked up, lost. “Why did the beignet have it, Sasha?” 

“Bean-nighe,” Sasha halfheartedly corrected. “I don’t know.” 

What he kept to himself was that the bean-nighe were similar to banshees in that they foretold danger, doom. By all literary accounts, they only ever washed the shrouds of those about to die violent deaths.

There was no reason to frighten Lark or the child with ghost stories, Sasha decided. So much about the fae was unknown; most lore as humans knew it was just conjecture.  

Besides, the bean-nighe gave the cloak back. That had to count for something. 

༻❁༺

They found another darkish patch and made camp after that. Such a chilling experience warranted a crackly fire. Didn’t take long for Aine to fall asleep, or for Lark’s flask to come out.

His cloak had been dried and laid flat. It was large enough to accommodate one jester, one runt, and half a half-mutant.

Sasha didn’t mind being the odd one out. He liked the way the clovers felt under his legs.

He liked not having steel legs. Not having grey legs. Though his left arm had now fully reverted to its Abominable state, the rest of him still looked red-blooded.

He knew it wouldn’t last, so he was trying not to think about it. He was trying not to think about a lot of things. Easier said than done, especially when they were right—

“Why aren’t we starving yet?” Lark piped up. Then he scrutinized Aine, curled around her bunny in the cloak’s hood. “And—does she look greener to you? Sort of longer?”

When Sasha first met the girl, she had been a sickly color. Her waxy skin did appear to be deepening to a more verdant green, but it might have been the warmth of the firelight.

Longer? He couldn’t confirm that either. If she had somehow grown in the last two days, it certainly wasn’t enough to be on his radar.

“Think she’s a changeling?” he asked.

Lark let out an airy pft. “Not a clue.”

“She was in the western tower?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Maeve’s trail brought me there. She and Nathair had been…tampered with. Their minds.”

“You mean—you think it was Aine?”

“Perhaps.”

Lark reached over to brush back the girl’s hair; fast asleep, she tucked into his touch. His tone became placating. “Petite âme. What awful things did they make you do?”

Sasha frowned. ‘From the North’ had been added to the list he kept of Lark’s qualities after the talk he overheard with Tamsin. ‘Good with children’ was another new addition, though it contradicted almost every other item.

Loud. Impulsive. Reckless. A little murderous. Self-indulgent. Womanizing—

Shona. Biscuits.

The intrusion soured Sasha’s frown exponentially. In the past, his frown would have gone unnoticed, but there was no helmet to hide behind.

Lark sat up, squinty-eyed. “What’s fluttered up your arse?”

A bird, Sasha wanted to say, and it’s driving me mad.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” he asked instead.

“Tell you what?”

“Where you’re from.”

Lark worried at his lip, then pursed them both. “To be clear, I never said I was from here,” he countered. “I mean, what language did you think I was speaking?”

“Cat,” Sasha answered, all seriousness.

“Cat? What—” Lark cut off, cheeks puffing. “Because I spoke it to the—oh, bloody hell, Sasha. It’s Enoreate. Cat? I can’t—”

“You’re laughing.”

“How would they keep track? I’m just imagining a system of—ha—cat linguists—”

“It’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

Sasha cursed the involuntary twitch of his lips. Such a headache, being around Lark these last forty-eight hours; one minute he was giddy, the next shy, angry, biscuits.

His smirk flatlined. “Tamsin knows everything about you,” he said.

Lark sighed, still giggly. “After two decades, I should hope so.”

“And Shona.”

His giggly-ness flatlined too. “What about Shona?”

Sasha didn’t know, so he made something up. “Does she know?”

“Of course not. Is this—what is this?”

Again, he didn’t know. Why had it hurt his feelings to learn Lark’s secrets secondhand? Why could he still hear the infernal stool rocking?

“I don’t like…” he trailed off. “I want…”

Why, above all else—the cell, the bleeding, his blood being used to create a drooling army—was this the shit he continuously dwelt on?

The suspense was irritating Lark. “Good gods. Want what?”

What did Sasha want?

It was a bit sudden, but he shifted across the cloak simply because he had a gut feeling the answer might present itself if there was less cloak.

To be fair, closeness had helped in the past. The night with the wine. The morning on the balcony. That was how he learned he liked being around Lark, close enough to touch.

So, it felt like the answer was there, right on the other side of the cloak, but Lark went all red-faced and fluster-y. “S-Sasha?” he squawked. 

His heart was beating in rapid pitter-patters, pitter-patters Sasha could feel even without supernatural senses. Very little cloak, little space, remained.

Sasha paused. He was being too much again. 

He didn’t want to be too much for Lark. He wanted… 

He sounded like a bell tolling the same note over and over, but he didn’t know.

It was fine. They were in, as Lark had so lovingly coined, ‘the middle of bumblefae.’ Plenty of time to figure it out. Later.

Sasha slipped the flask from Lark’s lax hand and drew back to start, far across the cloak. 

“…a drink,” he finished, tabling whatever this was.

༻❁༺

Sasha didn’t care to analyze his dreams. For him, they were incoherent things, collections of memories, images, fragmented thoughts. Blondish halos. Green eyes.

This dream was different. He could feel the damp, spongy moss under his feet. No greaves. The cool, heavy condensation in the air thickened his every breath.

He was in the forest, a patch neither light nor dark but stuck in eternal twilight. The trees he could see through the fog looked older, wrapped in more moss and twisting vines.

The fog was thickest directly ahead, forming a dense, curling wall. This wasn’t the kind of dream he could walk in; he tried to step forward, but it only disoriented him.

He watched the fog wall ripple, affording glimpses of the silhouette beyond. At first, it looked like a fantastically large tree. Each glimpse that followed gave him more.

The tree had been hollowed out. An equally fantastical hut was built into it, around it, jutting out at impossible angles. Pieces dangled in mid-air, supported by thick, gnarly roots. Small windows flickered with soft, ethereal light.

This hut. This hut was where they needed to be.

Something was jostling his hand. The perspective distorted when he looked down. The compass. It was vibrating madly, painted black letters lifting off its copper face.

The bottommost W, fully peeled, flipped itself upside-down and became an M.

‘Moss’ was supplemented for him. The moss underfoot, purposefully grown. Circular blobs. A path.

The back of his neck prickled, a violent chill crawling along his spine. He spun on his heel. The world took a moment to spin with him.

He was facing down another foggy silhouette, large, humanoid, and horned. No—antlers, a sharp, jagged crown of them.

Mist billowed around it, concealing all but its shape. The moss under its hooves shriveled. The leaves overhead withered and fell in clumps.

It lowered its head, antlers pointed straight at him, sickle-like. It dragged its hooves in the dead earth a few times, then charged.

༻❁༺

Sasha woke the next morning (left side now all grey, spreading to his neck, still not thinking about it) with one objective: follow the moss.

Well, two objectives. Follow the moss and try not to run into the fae beast. As he had been unable to walk or run properly in the dream, it had gored him. Graphically.

The message was clear—avoid at all costs.

“So, you have a dream,” Lark said some hours in—to follow the moss, they had to find it, “and now we’re suddenly on the lookout for a rabid deer—”

“Not a deer,” Sasha asserted.

“—and some moss?”

“The moss will bring us to the hut.”

“The hut, right. And why do we want to go to the creepy hut again?”

“The hut is where we need to be.”

Lark peered up at Aine. She was sitting high on his shoulders, trying to grab the leaves as they went. “Does any of this make sense to you?” he asked her.

“Moss,” she stopped grabbing to clarify. “Hut. Be.”

“Ooh! Well done!” Lark glared ahead. “Ahem?”

“Good,” Sasha grunted from where he was taking the lead.

It had been like this since they started walking. According to Lark, positive reinforcement helped build a child’s confidence, encouraged them to speak more.

He knew so much about raising kids. Must’ve had good parents.

And Sasha must’ve forgotten that he wasn’t thinking about Lark right now. Doing so last night, the encounter with the flask, made things even more abysmally awkward. Lark had resorted to using Aine as a buffer.

With a sigh, Sasha focused on the trees ahead, the compass in his hand. He was following that bottommost W, though the needle was constantly on the move.

Was it possible the hut was also on the move?

This would be easier if he had his senses back. He willed the glamour to fade faster, at least enough to give him one functioning ear or nostril.

After some more wandering, they stumbled upon one of the brightest patches yet. A vast, green clearing. The sky was cloudless, robin’s egg.

The clearing was void of fae as far as Sasha could tell. It was home to a small orchard and some nice, neat rows of flowers. Too organized to be wild-grown. A garden—

There, on the trunk of a tree at the other end. Moss.

He surged towards it, stopping only when Lark removed his cloak and spread it out like a blanket in front of the flowers.

“What are you doing?” Sasha asked.

“Picnic,” Lark replied, like it was obvious.

“Picc-ic,” Aine parroted, tone and all.

“Very good!”

“Vary goot!”

“Lark, we shouldn’t stop—”

“Dearest Sasha,” Lark bit in, teeth clenched, “the child hasn’t eaten in days. Now, sit your bottom,” he patted the cloak, “and mind her while I find us something yummy.”

Sasha hesitated, staring at the moss on the other side. Did they have time?

Time, yes. They did have that. Otherwise, he’d have to do more thinking.

He grudgingly plopped down on the cloak beside Aine while Lark went to check out the orchard and garden situation. Crabapples, yuck.

“Frit,” Aine said after a few minutes. “Collar?”

Sasha frowned down at her. She was asking him a question. Was he supposed to answer? How did Lark do this?

Pointless ask. Lark could hold a conversation with a brick wall.

“Frit,” Aine repeated, persistently tapping Sasha’s grey arm while pointing at the flowers. Lark was crouched among them, picking some berries. “Collar. Loch. Pur-pul.” 

Finally recognizing the words, Sasha couldn’t help a (singular) huff of amusement. Her pronunciation of ‘purple’ had improved.

“Lark likes purple,” he confirmed.

“Sha,” she sighed. As if she was the one expending patience.

“Sasha,” he corrected.

“Frit collar?” 

“Favorite color.”

Her eyes narrowed, challenging. “Sha, frit?”

His narrowed back. Tragically, he was invested now. “Favorite,” he corrected again.

They went back and forth like that until Sasha sounded out the word more slowly. Aine realized she wouldn’t get what she wanted until she did the same.

To her credit, she inched closer with each try. It only took a few more minutes for them to go from frit, to fay-it, to,

“Fay-fa-rit,” she said.

“Favorite,” Sasha repeated.

“Faforite.”

That one was close. If only because Lark had spent so much of the last two days encouraging her, Sasha caved. “Good,” he said. “You want mine.”

Aine went quiet, peering up at him. He wasn’t looking at her, though. His eyes, one brown and one starting to go white, had been drawn to the flowers. They softened.

“Sasha likes green,” he leaned in to say, a secret between the two of them.

“Sa-sha,” she whispered back. “Reen.”

What? He could always deny it later. Besides, with so much time, later was far away.

Two consecutive sneezes, loud and little, snapped his attention back to the flowers in time to see Lark tumble on his ass. All the berries he’d collected flew from his hands.

“Lark?” Sasha called, a temperature check.

“Fine—I’m fine,” Lark spluttered, violently rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. His face was covered in what appeared to be soot. “Are hallucinogenic berries a thing? Because—hear me out—that flower just sneezed back at me.”

Sasha eyed the flower in question, unassuming between Lark’s boots. A daylily, but its petals were thick. Pale. Purplish. Probably why Lark approached.

What Sasha saw next, what Lark was too busy transporting himself to another galaxy with his knuckles to see, was the earth sucking the flower up with a soft pop.

Sasha shot to his feet. “Lark,” he said again, more demanding.

“What? I told you I’m—”

The flower patch rumbled, cutting Lark off. He scampered to safety, sniffling and leaky and tripping over himself. Sasha ran to meet him, pulling him to his feet.

“Okay?” Sasha asked once they were back on the cloak.

Lark continued scrubbing his face. “First time a flower’s been allergic to—”

The patch rumbled again, drowning him out. They both stood paralyzed as the dirt at the center, where the flower had been, started to churn and separate.

The flower unearthed, attached to the top of an antlered head wrapped in a tight membrane; next a neck, shoulders, waist, hips. All ashen, bark-plating. The exposed ‘musculature’ and ‘veins’ were just a network of diseased vines.

“Sasha?” Lark gulped. “What the f—what is that?”

The thing—beast emerging from the ground was the size of the crabapple trees in the orchard. The membrane sealing its slender, humanoid shape was mucousy. Thin. Transparent.

With unopened eyes and standing fetal posture, it resembled an oversized embryo.

Just then, Sasha got a nostril back, the left one. He was immediately assaulted by the unmistakable whiff of infection, rot and decay.

The beast was no mere fae. Black blood coursed through those veins.

“Infected,” Sasha warned.

Lark balked. “Is it a fairy? I thought they couldn’t—”

On his cloak-turned-picnic blanket, Aine started to cry. The beast winced, eyes snapping open. Filmy, colorless white. 

Lark dropped to Aine’s side before her cries could turn sharp. “Hey, hey—it’s okay,” he soothed. “Sasha, we should—” 

Sasha held up a hand. The beast had shuddered at the sound of Lark’s voice. The membrane stretched with its wooden limbs as they flexed and bent.

In a circle around it and working outwards, the uprooted flowers started to blacken. The clovers, too. Lark picked Aine up, quickly shuffling back. Sasha drew his dagger.

Lark’s eyes, still bloodshot, went wide. “Are you serious? You can’t—”

“Take Aine,” Sasha said flatly. Smelled like elves, like hatred. Somehow, he knew this was Hellebore’s beast. What he couldn’t do was let it live. “Follow the moss.”

“Sasha, please—”

“Go.”

The membrane snapped. The beast shook it off and lowered its antlered head as it had in Sasha’s dream. It dragged its hooves in the withered mess of petals and rotten soil.

Lark’s gaze flicked from it to Sasha to Aine; with a bitter curse, he ran before it could charge.

༻❁༺

Follow the moss, Lark thought darkly, doing just that. Of all the stupid last words.

Stupid, self-sacrificing, self-righteous—

He paused as he had a few times already to brace on his legs. He was no longer carrying Aine, now holding her hand. She stopped with him, intoning inquisitively. He messed her hair, straightened, continued on.

The moss was easy to follow, splotchy and dark against the wood’s bright greenery, but they hadn’t made it very far. He shouldn’t have sniffed so many flowers. They were wreaking havoc on his sinuses.

That one had been so pretty, though; the same purplish grey of Sasha’s skin. He’d planned on picking it and offering it as a ‘sorry you’re turning back, but this is what you look like to me’ gift.

Stupid. Watching the accursed flower sneeze a load of pollen in his face like he was the one who didn’t sit right with it had been bad enough. Had he pulled it out of the ground and found a head attached, he would have—

He stopped again. Braced again. It was getting harder to catch his breath. Harder to think straight. Was he rambling out loud? When did he let go of Aine’s hand?

She watched the color leave his cheeks with worried puppy eyes. “Loch?” she asked. 

His hunch deepened. Breath heavy, middle sore—a budding cramp. The berries he ate?

What’s happening to me? he thought, squinting down at Aine as she tugged on his sleeve. She doubled and tripled, her edges going wibbly. 

“Loch,” all three of her repeated. Her voice bounced off the trees and multiplied. 

“It’s all right, my dear…dears?” He shook his head. The echoing stopped. Aine returned to one. “Just the sniffles. Shall we press on?” 

She whined. She kept glancing over her shoulder, either looking for Sasha or listening to something Lark couldn’t hear.

He could hear very little, actually. His ears were all stuffed.

He rested a hand on her shoulder to comfort her and stabilize himself. She was definitely longer, almost past his knee now. He wondered how tall she’d be in a week’s—

They only made it two more steps before a coughing fit seized him.

The fit started shallow, dusty. Gradually, it reached deeper, bringing up some wetness, some rust. His back went taut. He sank until his legs folded.

Once the fit subsided, he smacked his lips with a frown. Gross. He looked to his open hand. 

Staining the creases of his palm was a shiny smear, too dark to be blood. Dozens upon dozens of flecks were mixed in.

Sooty flecks. Sooty flecks of sooty pollen.

“Shit,” he said, stunned. 

“Shet,” a babyish voice breathed near his ear.    

He turned to Aine, blinking once, twice, thrice to clear his vision. No matter how many times, she kept blurring. 

You’re done, he was in the process of realizing. Done in by a sneezing flower. 

How foolish.

“Aine, love…” he started. The throbbing in his stomach worsened. He cringed, wrapping an arm around his middle. It wasn’t the berries.

Pollen was new, but after surviving years of the plague, he knew its stages. In cases of ingestion, however small, it corroded the stomach lining. Cramps were the calm before the storm.

Their blunt pain prowled around his insides like a panther waiting to strike. Following that, he’d have precious minutes before the virus reached his heart, killed him, and turned him on the girl. 

He swallowed the lump in his throat, forced a calm smile, and started dragging himself away from her one-handed. 

“Remember fox and bunnies?” he asked.

She nodded, eagerly tottering after him.  

That damn blur. He blinked it away again, shaking his head. “No, Aine—” 

She didn’t understand why he kept putting space between them. She understood less when he placed a hand flat on her chest to hold her off.

She reached for him with both arms. He gently nudged her back. 

“See, I’m not a bunny anymore,” he said. He flicked the ear of the stuffed one sticking out of her pocket. “I’m the fox now, and you…you need to run. As fast and as far as you can, before—” 

True to form, the panther pounced when least expected, dropkicking him in the small intestine. He pitched sideways and vomited.

What came up was thicker, hotter, darker than before. Larger flecks.

The pollen appeared to be blooming. Blooming inside him. 

Aine’s little hands were there, clumsily sweeping the sweat-damp hair from his eyes. Less gentle, he shoved her away. He couldn’t think about the soft thump of her falling. 

“N-no,” he insisted. “You need to—” 

Another surge of pain. It wasn’t radiating and dull anymore. It stabbed and dragged along his organs with such brutality it fragmented the flow of time. 

He didn’t know how, or how long it took, but he ended up on all fours, curved like a retching cat. His fingers were fisted in the clovers, tearing them out at the roots.

Aine made an alarmed sound. More searing liquid gushed from his lips, scorching his nose, his throat, the earth. His stomach seethed and bellowed.  

Tearing out the clovers provided no relief. Engulfed by the pain, losing control, he crawled to the nearest tree trunk and locked on with both hands. 

Hurts, he warbled, either out loud or in his head. Impossible to tell. Make it stop, makeitstop, makeitstopmake— 

He drew back and smashed his face into the tree. Drew back, again. Over and over, harder, harder. Anything to feel anything other than the black lava roiling in his gut.

Something cracked. He collapsed, keening high, coiled tightly. Seeing the fresh blood that spurted from his nose, Aine burst into tears and fled from the wretched sight of him.  

She fled right into Sasha, who caught her shoulder and turned her face into his ragged pant leg. Red drenched the shredded right side of his shirt.

Keeping Aine behind, he took a cautious step forward. He took in the vomit, the sludge, the putrid stench, the boiling insides, the agony. 

“How?” he asked. His voice was small.

“Pollen,” Lark’s splintered on a sob. “M-make—make—makesureitisntonher.” 

Sasha got down to check Aine. He felt strangely cold as he brushed the soot off her hands and nose. Had she inhaled any?

“Loch,” she cried, snot mingling with her tears. Seeing flecks in both, Sasha wiped them too. “Loch!”  

Lark rolled onto his back. His hands were no longer tearing out clovers but digging laboriously into the lowest part of his belly. His knuckles were white.

Sasha knelt beside him and nudged his hands away because it looked like it hurt.

Only then did he realize how familiar that was.

“Sasha,” Lark gasped. “You have to—” 

Sasha’s chest constricted. “No.” 

“D-do it—before…”  Fluid was building faster than Lark could swallow. Black. Gargling. Boiling. Burning. “I-I don’t—don’t want…” 

Sasha couldn’t move. He could only watch as Lark’s arm jolted around his waist and ripped the dagger from its sheath. It was still coated in the beast’s dark blood.

Sasha weakly tried taking it back. Lark trapped his fingers around the hilt.

They were having a picnic. They had time.

“Kill me,” Lark begged. 

Sasha’s favorite color, it was green. 

“No,” Sasha chided, less assertive.

Fat tears spilled from the corners of Lark’s eyes. His other hand pressed into Sasha’s thigh, holding the locket Sasha had tried opening a lifetime ago.

Lark’s fingernails were going dark around it. Gone was the fluid, leaking out elsewhere. He sounded paper thin. “Opens with—my name.” 

“Lark—” 

“Felix,” he amended. “It’s—Felix.” 

The dagger quivered. Like a bat out of hell, Aine screeched and batted at Sasha’s belt, trying to pry him off. He couldn’t feel her tiny fists. He could feel nothing at all.

No time.

He had to do it, didn’t he? He failed the woman in the mill, denied her peace.

He wouldn’t fail again, not at the expense of… 

“Felix,” he said, appreciating the way the ‘x’ scratched his tongue. The name itself left a salty tang in the back of his throat. “I’m glad to have known you, Felix.”

Lark’s features un-pinched. The hand holding the dagger went limp, passing off the full burden of responsibility. 

Sasha secured both hand and claw around the hilt. Aine’s efforts to stop him had become desperate: screaming, hitting, biting, scratching.

He stilled his weaker half. His aim had to be true, merciful. One strike, through the heart. 

One strike. Through the heart.

He had to do it. Do it. 

Do it now. 

His eyes wanted to close. He forced them to remain open. 

He memorized Lark: every wayward hair on his head, every clover framing his face, every droplet trapped in his lashes. More dripped on his cheeks from above. 

Committing the scene to memory, Sasha brought the dagger down.  

Aine’s nails tore open the pouch hanging on his belt. Something came to a rolling stop in the grass. 

The scene changed. Lark made a noise of protest as, rather than run him through, Sasha cradled his neck and brought the half-full vial of shimmering blue to his lips. 

“Drink,” Sasha commanded.