*|MC:SUBJECT|*

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Clive stood in the silence of the battlefield where so many of the Fae had fallen in the war between Oberon, the Bright Court King, and his former consort, Titania, the Shadow Queen. In the months since Lydia had glamoured the monarchs into trees that towered over the scarred ground, decay had come to Faerie.

Moss browned at Clive’s feet. Day by day, color leached from the landscape everywhere except where Lydia chose to spend her power. The oak and elm that had once been the warring rulers glowed against the gloom of their surroundings. Except for them, there was no living green anywhere else in the grove: only winter-dormant trees, their presence a reminder of the ephemeral nature of Mortal existence. A reminder of what Lydia had lost when Clive had persuaded her to join him in Faerie.

The oak rustled in the absence of any breeze. Clive bowed to his former lord. “I tried to warn you. She was not the biddable child you thought you’d hidden away for your convenience.” Acorns thudded down at Clive’s feet. He picked one up and crushed it in his hand. “Even you will not survive if she lets Faerie wither.”

He had wasted enough time here. Lydia was elsewhere, and he needed to find her and make her understand. Unless she chose to rule or broke her compact with Faerie so another could take her place, the realm would fade. And without glamour to sustain the Fae, they, too, would learn what it meant to be ephemeral.

Turning his back on the trapped rulers, Clive stepped from the grove toward the maze once cared for by Aeon, Oberon’s twisted gardener. Both the gardener and the garden at the heart of the maze were casualties of the war that had nearly killed Clive as well as so many others.

He had survived because of Lydia. And he had to repay her sacrifice with a harsh truth.

It should have been the work of a single stride to shift from one place to another. But the entrance to the maze wavered in Clive’s mind. The image of thick walls twined with flowering vines kept slipping away. When he opened his eyes, there was only a featureless gray haze.

He struggled to draw a breath. Nothingness deadened his senses. His heart thudded in his chest, a dull, hollow sound he could feel more than hear. Was this how Mortals drowned? Was this death? “Lydia!” The shout emerged thin and frayed, like his connection to Faerie.

A thin tendril looped around his wrist. Clive tried to jerk away. It brightened into the green of a living vine, vivid and lurid against the gray and as unbreakable as a vow thrice sworn. Something pulled, hard, and Clive hit the ground, rolling to a stop against a wall of bracken, the sound of cracking wood like breaking bones.

He stood, panting, pulling dead twigs and dried thorns from his hair and clothes. Where the vine had circled his wrist, a red welt faded into a thin, white scar.

“I heard you call,” Lydia said.

She appeared in front of him, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, as he had first seen her at her school in the Mortal world. But the clothes shimmered with Fae glamour. Each thread glowed with the magic that permeated all of Faerie. Like her clothes, Lydia was and wasn’t the same as the changeling Oberon had tasked him to retrieve. Her outward looks hadn’t transformed. She still wore her long, dark hair in a neat tail down the middle of her back and her hazel eyes still shone with the gold that betrayed her Bright Court bloodline. It was the expression in them that had changed.

Something of Titania’s anguish and loss looked out from those eyes and Clive shivered, wondering if the Shadow Queen’s madness had touched Lydia as well.

He no longer knew how to reach her. She was no longer the girl he’d befriended, sworn himself to aid, and nearly died for in the battle that deposed the monarchs. And Clive was no longer Oberon’s errand boy. Rubbing the scar circling his wrist, he struggled to find the right words, a kind of glamour that would make her listen, make her understand.

A rustling in the maze startled him and he glanced up. A trail of fresh green ended at Lydia’s feet. Dark moss thickened the ground and large trumpet-shaped flowers bloomed in the brown hedge walls.

“Why do you waste your power so?” he asked. Faerie was dying, just as the maze had died. She had to know. Even had she merely been an unexceptional Mortal stumbling across a thin place in the barrier, Lydia had been in Faerie long enough to feel its anguish. But she was a Trueborn, and even though she’d been raised as an ephemeral, she was as Fae as Clive was.

“Aeon was my friend.”

More than once, Oberon’s mad gardener had risked his safety to protect her. Clive didn’t understand why, but he knew enough about Aeon to know he never planted a seed without knowing what would take root. Until his path tangled with Lydia’s. “Don’t spend glamour on a dead garden. Even he would chide you for it.”

Lydia shook off Clive’s warning and gestured to the parched ground. In the hedges that ringed them, new shoots of tender green pushed out from dry branches. Faerie drank her in eagerly.

“This isn’t what the realm needs. Let the dead rest, Lydia. Please.”

She plucked a ruffled pink rose from a blooming bush, wincing as the thorn bit into her finger. “I don’t know how.”

You can read more in the attached pdf, which contains the first three chapters of TIME AND TITHE.

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Blue Musings

from LJCohen & Once in a Blue Muse

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