Swan on the Moor

Chapter 23

Jessie wasn't sure what she felt about the dark figure by their sides. He emitted a silence so thorough she couldn't penetrate it with mere words, and when he had spoken of his swords, she had looked at him and felt,yes, there's something missing, as if he had been speaking of missing limbs. He looked...incomplete. He was gaining strength, though, with every step into the light and the song that they took. The magic of the Sithen was beginning to seep back into him again, and he walked with more confidence, more vigour, implacable, immoveable, and very, very inhuman. His eyes were completely dead. Not even Badb Catha's eyes had been like that – even as Jessie had stared into them there had been life there, emotion. The Dusk Lord's eyes were simply...empty.

What scared her more had been the rather abortive fight and her reaction to Badb Catha's powers. The moment the crow woman had got near her, it was as if her brain had simply shut off and there was nothing but a flow ofhate rage death – she had lunged without thought or reason at the faerie, every nerve screaming to tear her flesh with fists and teeth. Jessie had never imagined she could ever feel that way – anything other than analytical, calm, collected, thoughtful. There had been no thought, no logic, just madness, and if one faerie could overwhelm her reason so utterly, a host of them would surely end her. It was like the Dusk Lord's silence, although that was, thankfully, not an affecting aura, just his own power manifesting. It wasn't meant to silence her, although if he turned it upon her, if that was an ability of his, she knew she would sink into a blackness from which she would never want to return, watch the night fall in her

soul and accept it. She had never been so aware of her own weakness, her own humanity.

Aine touched her arm, gently, and she pulled herself out of her thoughts.

"Are you alright? Does it hurt?" the half-fae whispered, and Jessie shook her head.

"Just thinking...anyway, surely I should be asking you the same thing?" She looked pointedly at Aine's arm, still cradled across her chest. Aine grimaced.

"It's alright. Shock more than anything, I think..." her expression became curious. "Badb Catha never is 'out of practise'. It would be impossible. It's part of her nature, to fight and create battle lust, like it would be part of mother's nature to fly. It just is. She wasn't really trying. I wonder why?"

"Maybe she was surprised, or she underestimated...one of us..." said Jessie, remembering through the red haze that clouded her memory how it felt to be avoided and flung away with such ease. Aine was right; the scald-crow faerie could have killed them all if she'd really wanted. She hadn't been analysing at the time, hadn't been able to, but it was obvious she was better than two completely untrained women and...well, as for the Dusk Lord, perhaps he might have been a match for her armed and well, but part of Jessie wondered if that was so. Badb Catha was the spirit of war itself.

"Not a creature like her," Aine said. "That's the nature of fae. They are...what they are, for good or ill. She stopped herself. Why?"

The dark helmet of the Dusk Lord turned back to them for a moment. "In this time...Faerie isn't a place of being one's self. It is a place of being what the King feels one should be." He turned away again. "I suspect even Badb Catha and loyal supporters will wear of it in time."

"Why don't they rebel?" Jessie asked. "If a human government tried to impress that kind of lack of liberty on somewhere..." She ground her teeth, thinking of the permanent state of war in her own world. "Well, something would happen," she finished, a little lamely.

The Dusk Lord said, toneless, "The King's power is absolute. He can control the Sithen itself. If your human leaders could control the very earth under your feet, if their beauty was so total that it hurt to look upon them even as you could not tear your eyes away, until you would resort to clawing them out to be free again, would you rebel?"