Swan on the Moor

Chapter Two

In a small, cramped flat in a dingily modern town, a woman awoke sharply. The open window was making her curtains flutter, giving the early morning air a chill she was not yet ready to face. Shuddering, she groped blindly for her dressing gown, and rolled reluctantly from the warm haven of her duvet, tugging at the curtains to close the window. Her sleep-addled eyes caught just a glimpse of the sky, and her hands paused on the curtains to stare at the blood-red heavens, curdled with clouds. Maybe she was just never up early enough to see such skies but the bleeding wound air above the treeline made something deep inside her tremble; an old, half-remembered pain of which she had no real comprehension. It was a sky that spoke more eloquently than any human invention of death; someone had died for that sky.

She pulled the curtains closed and dropped back into her bed, but found herself too strangely disturbed to sleep again.

In the blood sky, a burning ray of sunlight seeped through the wounded clouds.

-

Weylin sighed as he dropped the axe to the ground, thick with blood.

"It is done," he said, quietly, although there wasn't a being in the Sithen that didn't hear those words and shake.

The dead king's eyes stared glassily up at the executioner.

"Forgive me," he whispered to the corpse, and turned away to stare into the mocking eyes of Avelbane, the Dread Beauty.

"Blood makes the world anew," he smiled, his voice sibilant, the serpent in Eden, and the unwilling executioner inclined his head a fraction of an inch.

"As you say, Majesty," Weylin said, fighting the urge to tear his eyes from that perfect, terrible face, but that was the trick: you would never want to look away. To look at Avalbane's face was to see heaven. His skin shone like the very faintest gold peeking through a coal vein, and his fragrance was the rich scent of sunlight on spring leaves, but Weylin the executioner had grown up every day of a thousand years with Avalbane and knew his tricks, his elegant torments, his grace as he broke you. And he was now to be king. He was the Golden Lord, beloved of mad mortals who he deigned to visit in dreams and on lonely moors, and so many fae...Those poor fools would love him, for his beauty, and he would destroy them, little by little, day by day, taking away a little more until there was nothing but a hollow corpse. For the executioner was one of very few nobles of the Otherworld who knew Avelbane for what he truly was: a beautiful monster, and now a regicide, in truth if not in the eyes of the masses or even the late king himself.

Yet it was true: blood magic was the oldest of all powers, and the hand that shed the blood of the unworthy king could take his throne in his place. Blood made the world rise from the death of winter into the new spring, the new life, and the circle would begin again.

King Adalardo – the late King Adalardo, the sight of the impassive corpse reminded him – had not been unworthy, however. He had been the perpetrator of no further crime than being in the path of Avalbane's ambitions. Adalardo had watched the shining boy grow to an adult, doted on him and his beauty, raised him to the standard to which all his subjects should aim, and in return, Avalbane had for long decades poured poison and doubt into his ears, whispered his weaknesses back at him, and led him to believe he should die for his country to give them back their strength.

"See how the humans multiply and grow so strong?" the beautiful one had sighed, sipping wine at the feet of the troubled king, staring through a mirror into the Upperworld at the mechanics and fires of humanity. "I fear for our race, Majesty. There must be a canker in the heart of our world, that they grow so powerful and we do not. Why, I recall when they worshipped us, begged and called for our help in their lives, and we, the Fair Ones, held rightful lordship over their earth-bound animal souls." Weylin imagined him tilting his glorious face up to the king. "What could have gone wrong? You, the heart of our Sithen, have done nothing but the best for us. I cannot imagine..."

When the king had announced, with tears in his ivy eyes, that his strength was fading and the only way to restore glory to the fae was to spread his own blood over the fields and sky, perhaps only Weylin and a handful of others had understood the true reason. Indeed, amid the shock and weeping, it was Avalbane who had stood, thrown his shining self to the leaf carpet beneath the throne and begged him to reconsider, cried that he was so reasonable, so brave. When Adalardo had with his final proclamation pronounced him heir, there had been applause, from the house-brownies to even the eldest and the strongest, creatures that had seen a millennium of treachery and wickedness. Perhaps, like mortals, even the Elder Races welcomed their downfall when it was more beautiful than anything even they could conceive. Weylin did not believe they could have missed the way Avalbane's sunlight eyes caressed the flowers curling around the brow of the king, envied the leaves that stroked his cheek now as if in pain at his fate.

"Well, Wolf-Lord?" Avelbane murmured, turning his eyes, shot through with sunlight, up to the Weylin's own, tired ones. He knew how to flatter and touch the sore spots in a soul, right enough; Weylin had once been a wolf shifter, with a pack of spectral wolves to run at his side. Like so many of the ancient powers, though, in the twenty-first century, it had faded, left nothing but the feeling of amputation and bereft confusion as to how something so innate could just vanish one day. "May I trust you to give our King's body the final rites, to return him to our land from whence he came?" There was just the faintest intimation of threat under the words, somewhere, just enough to make a chill run through Weylin's veins.

"Of course, Majesty. At once," he replied, hating himself, hating his weakness. He had at his feet an iron axe; he could have swept it up and ended everything here...but he knew he never could and knew he would never be able to make that happen, anyhow. Not against something like Avalbane.

"I have one more visit to make," the Golden Lord smiled, sharply, a knife edge hidden in silk. Only when he had gone did Weylin feel safe to collapse down with the corpse with a hopeless sigh.