Chapter One
The silver chain around her right ankle tinkled like a strand of tiny bells as she drew the layers of wool tighter around her shivering form.
The walls of the shallow cave dripped with condensation. Despite the nest of blankets, Caitlin worried about what would happen when winter came in earnest. Would she freeze to death?
“If I even make it to winter…” she muttered into the eerie, blue-tinged darkness.
The blue light came from two orbs that danced and flickered in silver cages mounted to either side of the cave walls. Blue, her only companion.
Blue, and the lizard that scuttled around the cave, seeking out insects, surviving on the water running down the walls.
Caitlin missed the green of grass. The turning gold and umber of the leaves. She missed her classes and her friends.
Caitlin shouldn’t have had that tea. It tasted weird, like bitter earth. But she’d come to college to have experiences, right? Some mild hallucinogenic drugs seemed like a good start.
Mushrooms. Natural. Innocent. No big deal.
No big deal, except that no one told her she might end up shackled in a cave at the end of an otherwise pleasant trip.
She wished she knew why she was here, with the cardboard box of food, the plastic gallon water jug, and the toilet pit in the far back corner.
She also wished she still had her knife. A trusty folding knife that had belonged to her dad. That was the first thing she checked for when she woke up, head pounding, tongue covered with the rank fur of dehydration.
If she had her knife, maybe she could get this damn chain off. A chain too slender to hold her, and yet it did.
If she had her knife, perhaps she could get free.
And then maybe, just maybe, she could gut whoever it was who’d dragged her to this place….
Chapter Two
When you’ve tasted the extraordinary, the commonplace becomes more precious still.
I loved the ordinary patterns of autumn days. Leaves turning color. Air grown crisp. The bright, slightly blurry shapes of students hurrying across outside the ancient, mullioned panes of the casement windows.
“Come on, Tomasina!”
My best friend, Bethany, tapped her pointy black boot on the scuffed wood floor as she leaned against the wood frame of my office door. Her reddish-burgundy-pink curls practically vibrated around the round, dark apples of her cheeks. Always in a hurry, that one.
Her brown eyes looked past me, though, and not at the orange and yellow ash trees that waved in the autumn sun outside. Those glorious, ordinary trees.
I sat behind the battered wood desk I’d paid four student athletes to wrestle up the stairs and through my office door. Bethany was likely staring at what she called my “Walker.” She was convinced I had some entity, or lost part of my soul, or some sort of muse behind me at all times.
I was skeptical. Despite the strange things I’d experienced in my lifetime, I sensed nothing like whatever this so-called Walker was.
Bethany was a talented psychic and witch, but wasn’t always clear on the exact details. Like the fact that my friends called me Tom. No one but Bethany had called me by my birth name since my mother died.
The Sainted Anne, as her neighbors called her, had died long ago, though sometimes it felt like yesterday. Too much in my life felt like yesterday. Only the date on the calendar gave lie to that feeling. And the fact that my heart was filled with losses too bewildering to dwell upon, though I did so anyway, late at night and all alone.
I clicked the final student essay on class distinctions in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice closed and sighed. Though I’d been reading and marking papers on a pixelated screen for years, I still missed the feel of red pen on paper.
This was probably why I still wrote the first drafts of my poems longhand in a bound leather journal and a fountain pen.
The fountain pen that was the only keepsake I had from Before. The only thing I was able to carry, slipped inside a pocket as I moved from place to place.
But mostly? I had resigned myself to computers.
The twenty-first century had decreed that using paper was wasteful, which made sense to me, for sure. But I always returned to the untold damage done by seemingly faceless corporations around the globe. Those billionaire-makers were the real problem, not a few hundred students using chopped-down trees in a frenzied bid to get an A from their slightly old-fashioned professor who was always told ey looked younger than eir years.
What can I say? Coming back from the Before was better than the most expensive face cream. And my slim, boyish body seemed to only compound this. At least here, in the After, there were more words available to describe me.
I was clocked as agender all the time, and was slowly coming to accept it, though that designation was yet another thing to get used to in this day and age. A person no longer had to declare they were woman or man but could simply live fully as who they were.
Back in the 1980s, we called that genderqueer turn androgyny. Prince. Annie Lennox. Grace Jones. Boy George… But none of them said they were anything other than the gender their family of origin named them to be.
Pronouns don’t much bother me, though I loathe the rare times someone “ma’am”s” or “lady”s” me. But lately, I’ve been trying on the pronouns ey, em, eir, eirs, basically they conjugations with a dropped th sound.
“Done,” I said to my impatient friend, putting the whole machine to sleep. Done enough for now, at any rate. A professor’s work is never done, after all.
I shoved a few books in my brown leather satchel, along with my journal. The marbled green fountain pen I tucked into the special narrow pocket beneath the flap, where it would nestle, safe and sound, until the Muse came to visit yet again.
I might not know what a Walker was, but I did have a relationship with the Muse, despite the fact that my poetry was mostly the product of discipline. As I always told my students, one couldn’t wait for the Muse to strike. One had to invite her in.
Besides, sometimes the Muse was in a spiteful mood. Best not to count on her, long term.
Bethany fluffed those unnaturally hued curls until her hair set just right around her face. Fuchsia, she called the color, and it was indeed a pretty good match to the hanging baskets of flowers on her front porch.
We’re a study in contrasts, my best friend and I. She’s lush and curvy, a Black woman with dark skin and a bright personality that every human within a five-mile radius is drawn to like a beacon draws a sinking ship. Bethany has certainly saved me from a metaphorical drowning more than once.
But back to those contrasts. Me? I’m white and thin, with muscles trained by my thrice-weekly rapier practice and the occasional jog around the campus track. My skin is pale as fresh milk, my short hair a floppy, brooding mess of dark brown that flashes red in the sun. Or so I’m told. And my personality? Hah! As brooding as my hair. So I am also told.
Mostly by Bethany when she’s trying to get me to go out and do something fun. What can I say? I became a professor so I could sit around and read all day and nurse my perpetually morose heart. At least, that’s the dream. The reality is too many faculty meetings, too many papers to grade, and dealing with the life problems of nineteen-year-olds.
Pulling on a lightweight black jacket, I smiled at the witch who examined the ceramic skull that took pride of place in the center of my sagging bookshelves. Every writer needs a memento mori, don’t we?
Just like the Muse, Death waits for no one.
“Okay, impatient one. Let’s scram.”
She threw me an it’s about time look and clicked down the hall on her black boots before I could even sling the satchel over my left shoulder and lock my office door.
I followed the long sweep of her black and burgundy coat that topped black jeans, tugging my own jacket down around my much narrower hips. While Bethany always looked like some video game hero, I was lucky if I looked like a teenager who at least scrubbed behind the ears on a daily basis.
I was interested in clothing once but seemed to have left my taste for sartorial splendor behind. With Her. The one I’d rather forget about but who wouldn’t let me.
The one who had fancied Herself my flesh-and-blood Muse. Not the real one. Oh, she inspired me, all right. Before I crashed and burned on the shores of Her petulance and anger.
Stepping out of the blond façade of the square, four-story, Renaissance Revival style building, I blinked at the light. The autumn air was chilly, and the sun was bright, framed by evergreens and ash trees rising toward blue sky dotted with puffy sheeplike clouds.
The university was nestled into the mountains, and I would never tire of this air, no matter how many years I was blessed to live here.
Ash Grove, Oregon, was home to wandering artists, traveling musicians, and theater folk, some who moved on after the late spring through early autumn Shakespeare festival season, while others stayed on, taking odd jobs to tide them through the dark and rainy winters.
I hosted the Wintertide Poetry sessions during the dark months, which were coming soon, every Wednesday evening at the Brick and Mortar restaurant. We took over the bar lounge area in the old brick loft space. The restaurant was glad for the midweek, off-season customers, and happy to let us drown our sorrows if the poetry was especially emotionally devastating. Or simply bad.
Life in the After was pretty good, overall.
Bethany’s coat continued its dramatic, sweeping dance as she rushed down the paved campus pathways, expertly dodging students heading off to class, laden with backpacks and coffee to go. Harder to navigate were the late risers. Those shuffling, pajama-clad students were neither nimble nor very aware of their surroundings as they scuffed their way to the cafeteria or one of the kiosks set up to dispense caffeine and juice in the morning and caffeine and snacks throughout the day.
Without caffeine, I was convinced the whole university would crumble to its foundations, never to be seen again.
My friend was finally stopped in her tracks by a traffic light and steady stream of cars, but she practically vibrated with the effort to remain still, her reddish-pink curls moving as if of their own accord.
Witches. They’re almost as odd as poets. And Bethany was certainly not the kind of witch I’d known in the Before.
I stepped next to her, and her big dark eyes flicked my way.
“That Walker of yours is feeling mighty restless, Rhymer.”
“Sure that’s not just you, Witch?”
She snorted in response just as the little sign person flashed green, signaling that we were good to go.
Soon enough, we were ensconced in one of the high-backed wood booths of our favorite breakfast joint, though, like today, we usually ended up here in the lull between breakfast and lunch, after the early birds cleared out.
Morning Dew had clearly been here since the mid 1970s, and, while improvements had been made in the intervening decades, what Bethany called the crunchy granola aesthetic remained.
Pothos spread their green leaves on shelves up high, weaving around stained glass and whimsical tchotchkes, mostly mugs fashioned in the shape of Beatrix-Potter-like animals. I spied a frog, a toad, and my favorite, a round hedgehog.
The server was our usual, Seamus. A white man in his late thirties, Seamus had blackwork tattoos snaking up and down his pale arms, prematurely greying hair in a tidy bun, and small, frameless glasses that slid down his narrow nose. He plunked Bethany’s coffee and my tea onto the sturdy wood table, causing the swirling bark on one of the trees on his left arm to move over his corded muscles.
Bethany’s mug was painted with a fat speckled hen, and mine with purple morning glories.
“Savory crepe special?” he asked us both.
“Of course, Seamus,” Bethany replied. “Gluten free for my delicate friend, here.”
This was a ritual by now, including Bethany nudging my turquoise Chuck Taylors beneath the table. I scowled and she gave me an innocent smile, as if she didn’t know I’d poke her back if she smudged my favorite sneakers. And as if she didn’t know I was seconds away from bursting into flames every time Seamus turned his peachy skin and blue eyes my way.
I’m an equal opportunity crush holder. Men. Women. Nonbinary people. Agender people. Trans people. Didn’t matter, I’d get a crush. The thing I didn’t do—ever—was ask anyone out, despite Bethany’s prodding. While I was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, the thing that took me time to get to was sexual attraction. And few people had the patience to put up with the getting-to-know-you phases of a relationship. So I’d learned to keep my cool—outside, at least, though I may have written a poem or three about the tilt of a nose or tenor of a laugh—and never say a word.
Besides, I was still hung up on Her. The second love of my life, after my partner who had the ill grace to succumb to a quick moving cancer back in the twentieth century, when I was still too young to have made a friend of Death.
Yeah, even though I still look and feel like I’m in my early thirties, technically I’m middle aged. Or not. It’s hard to tell, and even harder to explain.
Time is tricky and doesn’t always make a lot of sense, though I sometimes wondered whether Bethany had a mathematical equation that would figure it out for me.
I might even ask her one day, if the whole story ever came out.
But it was too bright and beautiful a day to linger on thoughts of Death, and the ache my former partner left behind was mostly memory by now.
Once Seamus raced off to place our order with the kitchen, Bethany busied herself with adding precise amounts of raw sugar and fresh cream to her coffee.
“Save me some of that,” I growled. Bethany stopped short of pouring out every last bit of cream from the tiny metal jug. She knew I didn’t take much in my tea, but I still had to remind her, every time.
She didn’t understand that tea needed a proper steep before adding any sort of milk, the coffee-drinking heathen.
Bethany took her first sip as I doctored my own brew, then plunked her spoon on the table and leaned toward me.
“All right,” she said. “Spill.”
Chapter Three
“Spill?” I paused, teaspoon stationary in my flower-festooned mug. “Spill what? And don’t tell me you had another psychic hit about some dramatic thing. I just want to enjoy my brunch.”
A tiny twitch flashed across her face, gone in less than a second before she raised an eyebrow in mock disdain.
Interesting. Had I hurt the witch? It can be hard for me to tell sometimes, and not just because we humans are strange, varied creatures who too often do not say what we mean. No. It was Bethany herself. The witch who was covered in glamourie and exuded a force field of self-confidence that almost no one dared cross.
Despite having known her for a few years, I was still sometimes caught off guard by her delicate heart.
“Moi?” She sniffed. “Dramatic?”
She swept a hand beneath her perfectly made-up face and her dramatic curly hair, as if challenging me to deny that yes, she was not only the most even-tempered human I’d ever met, but the most beautiful and modest as well.
I huffed in mock annoyance, which earned me a grin. Bethany loves to wind me up, and I gladly march along with it, partially because, despite being a poet, I tend to be straightforward and take people at face value, even when they’re teasing me. The other reason, though?
Those cat-quick grins of hers, that turn her full lips up at the corners, as if a wild secret might burst forth at any moment. I love earning one of those smiles, even if it comes at my expense.
“Spill about what, though?” I said, finally taking a sip of my brew. Irish Breakfast. Perfection. And yes, it did remind me of Before, and Her, but bittersweet memories are food for a poet, don’t you know?
Besides, this tea had been my favorite even in the Before. I wasn’t going to give up my small pleasures just to spare myself a moment’s pang.
Bethany leaned toward me, as if about to impart a secret of great import.
“Spill about the visiting folklore professor who's been making moon eyes at you in the faculty meetings.”
I almost aspirated my tea.
“What?” I coughed, pressing a rough paper napkin to my mouth. “You don’t even go to meetings in my department!”
Bethany rolled her eyes. “Davina Bell. Wide hips. Green eyes. Pert little nose. Skin almost as pasty white as yours. Femme to your soft masc. I may not go to your meetings, but I hear things, and have eyes. Plus, I saw her at the general faculty Welcome Back Mixer last month. She was def making moon eyes.”
Fucking faculty events at a school small enough to hold interdepartmental events. We were all forced into them, as if giving up a night off to schmooze with pedants and bores while sipping subpar wine and eating bulk cheese and wilted celery was a rare treat instead of a chore.
Seamus plunked a plate in front of each of us, on each a carefully folded crepe with just the right amount of brown to crisp the edges, filled with mushrooms, cheese, spinach, and other savory goodies. Irregular stripes of crème fraiche zebraed across the top of the wedge, topped with a perfect arc of creamy green avocado slices.
Now that’s what I’m talking about. Food worth eating.
“Tell Daze and Jeff they’re artists, Seamus,” I said with a smile.
Bethany was already cutting a slice from her crepe. Now it was my turn to kick her under the table.
She startled, almost dropping her knife.
“Oh. Yes! Thanks, Seamus. Smells delicious as per ushe.”
Seamus rapped his knuckles on the table thrice. “Fall to!” He quipped.
He always said that, and I never knew exactly why. Bethany said it was some magic-with-a-k-related thing, but I figured it was just his way. Bethany thinks everything has a hidden meaning. When she first swooped in at a party three years ago and decided I needed adopting, I thought she was a theater professor. Turns out, she’s a theoretical mathematician.
Some months later, she disclosed she’s also a witch. I asked how she could square a belief in magic with the dry science of mathematics.
She had snorted, loudly, before dissolving into a fit of uncharacteristic giggles. “Oh, you sweet summer child. You don’t know a thing about theoretical maths, do you?”
I had to admit I didn’t. The thing that surprised her in turn was that I did have a passing knowledge of magic. Eventually, as if I were an injured squirrel she was plying with peanuts, she had coaxed that out of me. As far as I knew, Bethany was the only person who knew anything about the Before, even if she didn’t know most of it.
Mostly, my revelations had consisted of vague mentions of lost love and a woman who was into magic and the Faerie realms, some traditional poet’s time spent on a mound at night…coupled with a lot of hand waving and misdirection.
It wasn’t that I didn’t itch to tell her the whole damn story, I just always figured it was my secret to bear. And, poet or not, I wasn’t comfortable sharing such an outlandish tale. That said, I’d also learned that witches have a way of uncovering the most deeply buried information, no matter how hard a person tries to hide it.
Damn witch. I wouldn’t trade her for anyone else.
“She has not been making moon eyes at me, whatever those are,” I grumbled, shoving a bite of cheesy crepe between my lips. Maybe if I kept my mouth full, she’d drop it.
Bethany shrugged. “You’re the poet. You should know exactly what moon eyes are. And I think you do.”
Ugh. Not going to drop it then.
“You see love around every corner, witch,” I hissed. “First Seamus, now Davina.”
She sat back, a satisfied smirk tilting the edges of her lush mouth.
“I know what I know. I say what I see. And you feel what…”
She sounded like the chorus of an old Paul Simon song, though I doubted she knew it, since she’d been alive mostly during the twenty-first century, and all.
“Stop. Just stop. Can we please talk about anything else?”
We ate in silence for all of two minutes before she cleared her throat.
“How’s the new collection going?”
That made me groan again. “Hit a person while they’re down, why don’t you?”
My forthcoming poetry collection, the one I was supposed to have finished last spring, was now four months overdue, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
She nudged my sneaker again. “Come on, Tomasina, your poetry is gorgeous and people love it. Look how full your classes are! You’re the envy of every prof in your department.”
That was so not true, and she knew it. I knew this was her way of A, softening the rude blow of talking about my current failure and B, prodding me about it because she was worried.
“Can’t I just eat my crepe in peace?” I muttered, after I’d chewed enough of my current bite to swallow.
“Publish or perish, my friend. Even mathematicians are subject to the rules of academia. To walk the hallowed halls, one must get one’s scribbles between the covers of obscure journals or be shoved shivering outside the gates.”
As if I didn’t know that. But, discipline or no, the Muse had well and truly fled. It wasn’t that I wasn’t writing. I was. It’s just that none of it was any good. Don’t tell my students I said that. I passed on what I was taught: writers are their own worst critics. But I couldn’t help the feeling that, despite my youthful looks, my best work was in the past.
But I didn’t say any of that. It was too revealing. Too much.
“Sure you’re not the poet, here?” I said instead, hoping she’d drop it. Again.
“I wish you’d let me read it.” Bethany said, as if she’d heard all the words I hadn’t said. And she probably had, the psychic minx.
“It’s not ready.” I picked up my tea and took a sip. It’s funny, younger me would have been thrilled to be in my position. Three collections out, one an award winner, and a contract for a fourth. Poems in some of the most prestigious journals, and not just in the US. And a cushy teaching gig in an idyllic old campus ripped straight out of a nerd’s fondest academic wet dreams.
Instead, I was complaining that my poems weren’t good enough. And I had a feeling I knew why. I just didn’t want to admit it yet. Not even to myself, let alone my prescient best friend.
“I’ll get it out of you, sooner or later,” she replied.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
In the harsh delight of Bethany’s responding laugh, I heard a jarring note. A note that something was about to change.
And change wasn’t always a good thing. I’d learned that the hard way, too many times.
Chapter Four
For three days, after office hours and grading were done, I’d spent an hour in the library and an hour walking around campus, hoping to jar something loose in my brain. But no matter what I tried, the poem I was working on still wouldn’t gel.
I was never going to finish this collection, and then I would lose my chance at tenure next year and have to get a job serving crepes at Morning Dew. Life as I knew it would be over.
Yes. I allow myself to get dramatic sometimes. It’s my right as a tortured artist.
In a Mood, I walked home from campus, barely noticing the leaves crunching beneath my turquoise sneakers or the family of deer nibbling grass on a verge.
When I finally shuffled up the walk toward my house, she was waiting, sitting on the gleaming wood porch swing on the broad porch of the small Victorian era home I rented.
My heart leapt into my throat, my mouth grew dry, and it took every bit of power I had left to not bolt down the sidewalk, head to the Brick and Mortar, and request the strongest, most disgusting cocktail they could make me.
Yeah. It was Her. The twister of heart strings. The stealer of time. The face that launched one hundred poems.
The one I hadn’t seen in seven years, and had hoped and prayed to any God or Goddess who might listen, that I never would again.
The sole of one rich brown boot was propped on the porch railing, pushing the swing in a gentle back and forth motion. A soft, sage-green sweater topped a flowing, dark green skirt. Her hair was a mass of fiery orange-red waves that matched the autumn leaves.
Ashes to ash trees. I could taste it in my mouth.
The smile on Her face looked as if she sat on my front porch every day, just waiting for me to get home from work. As if we were still lovers, or old friends.
Reality was, I hadn’t seen Her in…well. Yes, seven years is just the easy way to put it. But as I always have to remind myself when I look in the mirror, counting those years is tricky. It could have been forty years or forty weeks, depending on how you reckoned time, and depending on how time flowed where you live.
And by where you live, I don’t mean a global time zone, like Lagos, Luxembourg, or Auckland, not that I’ve been to any of those places. I’m talking what realm you live in.
Yeah. We’re getting to the crux of the matter now, aren’t we? The reason why I look and feel so young. The reason why I don’t trust easily. The reason why Truth and Prophecy both knock around my heart and head, demanding that I pay attention. I tried to shut those two up, though. I never asked for those Gifts and did not want them.
She was also the reason why I guard my heart more now than I ever did.
It used to be, the only thing I guarded was my body. My heart was as open as dawn on a clear day. But that was Before.
“You’re here,” I said, in the understatement of the year, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter, when it really did. It really fucking mattered that Her presence spilled all over my homey, comfortable porch.
Bracing myself, I mounted the steps, satchel smacking against my thigh, keys jingling in my right hand.
What I wanted to say was “What in the nine worlds and every version of Hel are you doing here?” Or “Please leave and never remind me of your existence again.” but, even though she had once protested that she would never harm me, reality was, she had as much power in Her pinky finger as I did in my whole body. It was wise to take care around creatures such as Her.
Though I guess I should use Her name, now that fine, firm butt was on my porch swing.
“I am!” she said, clearly delighted at the prospect. “I missed you.”
I plopped on the other end of the swing, settling my bag on my lap and leaving a good two lengths between our bodies, as if that would protect me somehow.
“You missed me, or you have a project for me?”
She turned her head, fixing me with one green eye, like a raven focused on a tasty bug.
“Why can’t it be both?” Her tone was light, but there was a bite beneath the words. A bite that was always there, skimming just below the surface, even on Her sunniest days. A tone reminding me to take care if I wanted to live.
“It can always be both, my Queen.”
She tsked, waving a hand. “Still so formal, Tomasina? After all we’ve been through?”
All we’d been through. As if kidnapping and holding me captive in her bower as decades passed outside was a consensual lark. A thing we had both agreed upon.
Oh, I had agreed, at first, but that was before I understood the bargain. Back when I was a young fool, heart broken by the death of my young love. Back when I thought poetry would save me, even though it couldn’t save Elle from the disease marching through her cells.
The Queen had offered to make me a poet and prophet of great renown. She’d made good on that promise. Mostly. I was as well known as any twenty-first-century poet could be, which wasn’t saying much. But I did okay. The prophet thing? As I said, I’d rather not. That felt like too heavy a burden to bear.
But she never disclosed what my end of the bargain would be, not before I signed the Underhill equivalent of an NDA.
“My name is Tom,” I replied. “I prefer that now.”
Just as I preferred my indeterminate gender and my life here, in this quaint college town.
Far from Her.
Bethany was the only person who called me Tomasina these days, and she did it with affection, not the brand of ownership Her tone conveyed. It still rankled a bit, even so.
“Your name is Tomasina the Rhymer, and you are my Rhymer!”
Ah, yes. There we went. Again. The teeth were fully bared now. No more masking intentions beneath honey.
“I am my own Rhymer. That is what you promised when you released me.”
The words tumbled like ice from my mouth, but inside, I quaked with a fever no human means could quench.
“Yes. I released you. Do not forget that, Rhymer. With one snap—” long, brittle fingers clicked together in a sharp retort “—I can have you back under my thrall. You are nothing, mortal human. Nothing. You were a worm before me. Look at all my favor has wrought!”
I stood from the swing, sending it rocking wildly. She stopped it with one foot.
“I was poet Before and poet After. I shall be poet until the end of my days. No one, not even you, can take that from me.”
My voice rang with an authority I barely recognized. Rhymer magic, so long buried I had almost forgotten it was there. The stuff that had fueled my poetry until I did my best to sunder myself from its power.
Her smile was feral, turning her beautiful, moon-pale face to stone.
“I can take anything I like, Tomasina Rhymer. And right now, I do not like you very much. So I think I shall take your Muse….”
She reached her right hand up, fingers extended as if to pluck the magic directly from my head.
“Hello there!” A voice called from the sidewalk.
I stifled a groan.
Bethany. Riding to the rescue. The one person I really wanted to keep from Gloriana. The one person I cared about enough to even try.
I held up one futile hand, as if I could stop the force of nature striding up the walk between the autumn marigolds.
The witch just shook those outlandishly colored curls, full lips pursed in a dangerous frown.
Gloriana clapped her hands and laughed, a brittle sound, as sharp as breaking glass.
“How delightful! What have you brought me, Tomasina? A new toy?”
Bethany just kept coming, coat moving like a black and burgundy wind around her hips, until those pointy-toed black boots were mounting the steps, with nothing I could do to stop her. She was a juggernaut, my friend. But I still wished desperately for something, anything, I could do to keep her safe, my mind whirring with the effort, about to short out.
The Queen sniffed at the air and grew still. Too still.
I stared at Bethany, eyes boring into hers, trying to tell her how much danger she was in. She flicked her fingers and ignored me, turning her attention back to Gloriana.
“Are you a witch?” the Queen asked. “You taste…not quite human. You have a magic. Not a poet’s magic. Not a healer’s magic. I sense…numbers?”
Gloriana’s pale brow wrinkled slightly before smoothing out again.
“Are you a maths witch?” Her sudden smile was seductive and terrifying in equal measure. “I have never encountered such a thing before.”
I spared another glance at my friend, who looked gobsmacked, brown eyes wide, before she remembered who she was and wiped that expression clean, replacing it with a shrewd and sassy look, one hip shot out as if she was about to challenge the Queen of Elfland to a dance off.
“I have some facility with numbers, yes.” Bethany’s voice rolled across the early evening air, tinged with the smoked honey taste of her magic. A taste I rarely got a chance to sample. It was delicious, and I had to will my feet to stay put on the porch boards instead of running to Bethany and rubbing myself against her like a cat.
“Interesting,” Gloriana purred. “Perhaps we could use a maths witch…”
“No.” The word snapped from between my lips before I could call it back, luring Gloriana’s green gaze back toward me. Which was a mistake. A big mistake.
She looked at me, eyes narrowed, but I could feel her attention encompassing both Bethany and me. Gloriana was boa constrictor, considering whether or not we would both fit inside Her belly.
Likely not. I was the easy prey here, but Bethany was a treat she had yet to savor.
“No?” Gloriana’s voice was bright, but again with that sharp-as-glass undertone that made me want to piss my pants or run.
I called upon every scrap of my Rhymer’s glamour, straightened my spine, and turned just enough to face the Queen head on.
“She is of no use to you. Besides—” I smiled, though I didn’t really mean it “—she’s a pain in the ass.”
Gloriana’s laugh was a set of the finest Spanish daggers, flying through the air. Her head tilted back, exposing a creamy stretch of neck, fine muscles canting Her chin back as the sound poured forth.
Just as suddenly as it had started, the laughter stopped, Her head snapped down, and those green eyes speared me once again.
“All right, Rhymer. You can keep your toy. For now.”
She flicked Her fingers at me, much as Bethany had done. But where Bethany’s was a motion of friendship and bravado. Gloriana’s finger flick was a reminder of the exact insignificance of my entire being. And just like that, the part of my soul still tethered beneath Elfland was back under Her thrall.
Gloriana smiled, stepped off the porch, green skirt swirling, walking surely down the pathway, the marigolds tilting their sunny heads toward Her leather-shod ankles as if they could follow Her home.
That sliver of soul felt the same tugging. But these days? I had two secret weapons against Her pull.
The Queen of Elfland might still hold one sliver of it, but I’d gotten the rest of my soul back.
And my best friend was a witch. That had to mean something.
Right?
The Winding Road: The Rhymer of Ash Grove Book One
Available only on Kickstarter, starting May 20th, 2025 Click Here
