It had seemed so amusing, all that time ago, to watch kine like these kindle their little magics in seaside knap-houses and play Erl-King with the ones who got bravest.
Dionaea remembers moving herself through the mycorrhizal mat of the wood they came to call Rendlesham, her consciousness flowing from one root to the next, keeping herself right under the judder of their heart. She could coax the grass to grow back over the path they’d used to enter; she could pull the trees together where they might have hoped to find an exit; and when their eyes went entirely wild, she would rise in a sigh of leaves like the whispering of skirts to deliver their fate.
The entire forest screamed with delight when the first one tried to cast a spell on her.
(A horse-faced young woman with a swaddling child bound against her chest. Her pale eyes shone like moons when she stretched out her hand. Her spell, intended to halt the queen’s pursuit, amounted to no more than a gentle shove.)
The queen was so busy laughing she let the little thing go — a human who could use magic was far too much of a novelty to destroy. Like a dog that can put its paws on the piano.
What a delight it had been, then, to slowly learn there were others and that each one knew a slightly different trick. To catch them, play with them, exchange them, share stories among the lords and ladies.
Now she wishes she had killed the first one.
If she had killed the first one, and every one after that, perhaps she could have culled their whole breed and kept humans the way they were meant to be.
The hooded one wouldn’t be looking at her now with the same loathsome shining eyes, wielding a power to which he none like him had a right, breaking her wave into a ripple. She whips a thorn-studded branch toward him and feels it turn to dust as it enters the corona of healing magic rolling off of Nobuhiko’s body.
She doesn’t breathe in the traditional sense, which means she also doesn’t gasp, but you feel a snatch of sound like it. A sudden intake of something.
The worst part is that she feels nothing as it happens. Nobu is a healer. Even at his most defiant, he is gentle. And so the vine crumbles apart and blows away, painless and quiet as sleep. His magic and his spirit refuse to dignify her with anything like grand obliteration.
This is probably the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen to a faerie monarch, except for the next thing that happens, which is that a smug little sawtoothed goblin says EAT FUCK and launches a torrent of misery at her.
She’s done misery. Four hundred-odd years of it at the end of the world, betrayed, alone-alone-alone in a way nothing else could ever understand. She believed that the other fae monarchs were her peers until they began to quail, one by one, away from their vaunted histories and the rights to which they were entitled as lords of the Earth. Fear of iron made them forswear their own natures, rewrite their stories.
(Would she have been permitted to?
The clemency granted to her brethren had depended on an example being made of someone. She had been a natural choice. They scorned her for games they had all played together, weighted her down with their crimes, and they joined hands with that powder-faced kinslaying queen of England and used their own shame to cast her from the land that had been her body.)
What could she do but remain herself? Find her amusements where she could? What could she do but take clippings off her own branches and try to grow them into new courtiers that would replace the ones slain by the kin-killers?
She had to exert her power over each person who wandered or was dragged in, twisting them until everything inside snapped and the final drop of amusement had been extracted.
There was never anything else to be done.
And the one-two strike of Fumie’s warm memories against Amon’s terror makes her see, for the first time, the slow suffocation she was always destined to endure.
There was never anything else to be.
Never anywhere else to go.
Never an end for her that wasn’t this.
Disgraced, alone, eating fuck.
Like all royals, she has the power to do everything but save herself from ruin.
“B E A S T S,” her limbs creak as the darkness clears.
“We have known pains — and insults — and indignities that would rend thee stitch from stitch.”
Petrel is talking. She hears him. She talks over him, gaining volume.
(There is a song in his blood that she has only ever heard from the shore. King Carcharodon used to gift her selkie skulls and say you could still hear them singing if you listened hard enough, but she never could. She still cannot make it out.)
“Thou cannot harm us in a way that matters. We have endured fire, flood and plague.”
Dragom’s wind tears her remaining petals off the bloom, rendering her a creature of thorns and stems and branches only.
(Another unhuman thing lowering itself to the level of human. She is forced to assume he is enslaved by fear of obliteration or loneliness; she cannot consider the thing steering him is love.)
“This world belonged to us before thy first crawling kindred were but a speck. All of the world’s first dreams were dreamt by us.”
The thorns sharpen and lengthen to the size of dragonteeth. She is a living briar patch.
And Mizu is likely to hurt himself as he strikes, because there is no part of her safe to be this close to, but he strikes true. The sword breaks the tangle of plants forming the center of her body like cutting tendons, sending her reeling for a moment as the branches regenerate.
Unfortunately, the abundant water that’s just been sent her way helps with that.
And she sighs in rapture as her branches bud again. Her flytrap mouths regain their green. She puts none of the moisture into flowers and spends a large portion of it regrowing her bark, knotting her branches, sharpening her thorns. A hanging tree.
(Roots that clutch. Branches that grow out of stony rubbish. The dead tree gives no shelter and the cricket no relief.)
Reinvigorated by water and rage, she darts forward to smash her head against Mizu’s and send him stumbling.
“Thou chooseth nothing! What right hast thou to choose? To deny the will of one who is owed so much as we are? Dost thou believe thou knowest deprivation, pretender-princeling? Dost thou believe thou hast any right to power over thine flesh? All flesh is grass. Thou art entitled to nothing but gratitude toward thy elders and betters.”
Miyuki Jones’s ball punches through her sternum at this moment, and she whirls on the spot only to get hit again — and again — and again — and — from every angle, at impossible speed, with force as strong as Miyuki’s quietly indomitable will —
She has enough water to recover from it. But it’s a narrow and ugly thing. She stands hunched as she does it. Her splinters litter the floor; her bark, although healed, is scarred and lumpy.
Woundwood, this is called.
Another gasp-like noise. Movement is becoming difficult at some of her joints where the woundwood is thickest.
“ — the last pure and honest thing in this world. All of thee, liars. Cowards. Artless, ugly things. Destroying a world to which thee have only just arrived. Our home. From which we were banished for nothing except living in the true and ancient way.”
You know this is not true, of course. You’ve read the things faeries do. You can see the venus flytrap blossom that sprouted out of Adelaide Carter’s eye when she displeased the queen.
But you know as she says it that it is true for her. All of it.
She turns to look at Heliotrope when he speaks, having only a few eyes left. All located in her head.
“We pity thee,” she tells him. “Boasting about thy fitness for a transformation that reduced thee beyond measure.”
(hairallover, her bark groans. painallover. fearforever. death. andthoseshoes.)
She holds still as Xueman’s spikes penetrate with the thunk-thunk-thunk of arrows hitting a wooden target.
“Water again, mereswine? Envious of the princeling? Or merely incapable of learning from his errors?”
Dionaea begins to soak it up, channeling it through her body in preparation to heal again.
No word can be made to stretch over the pain that lances through her.
The scream that accompanies it would burst your eardrums if you weren’t protected.
Trees burn from the inside, sometimes, when struck by lightning; she burns, now, flameless, inextinguishable, stumbling around and scraping at her bark with her own thorns in an attempt to get the iron out. It doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
And as she realizes it, the scream of pain fades into something like a laugh. You only recognize it because she was laughing when she got here. Hard to believe they’re the same sound.
She falls to her knees under the power of it.
“They will grow tiiiiired of thee,” she says. She’s not looking at any of the class anymore, but Xueman will likely know Dionaea is addressing her. “Merling. Bonefish. Whiteflesh thing. They will indulge thee and whisper secrets until the day when thy use is exhausted, and they take up whispers about thee, and cast thee out to die in shame. Everything they have ever loved in thee is an illusion or a thing they will come to despise. Even now. Killing us only affords thee more time before they set to it.”
She tries to force herself back to her feet and finds she can’t. The most she can do is take one knee and breathe in a rattle of branches.
“And we will live forever. Here, in the earth, we will die and grow again until the world entire rests in the cradle of our mouth. Thou hast done — nothing. We have watched thy kind grow into magic and we will watch it destroy thee. We are eternal. We have survived wizards a hundred-hundred times.”
