Fear Me Not (Folk Stories #1: Tam Lin)

Hold Me Tight, Fear Me Not

"Is that so?" The fairy queen looks down on the two of us with that painful beauty, and smiles. The hand I grip so tightly seems to squirm in my hand. I grab blindly at Morag, clutching her to me like a child's doll, and feel the softness of her skin and clothes give way into something slippery and scaly. Whatever I'm gripping, be it a snake or something worse, it isn't my sister.

Whatever happens don't let go. "You won't trick me like that," I say.

The snake is gone. It's a lion that I'm holding, claws digging into my back where Morag's small hands should have been, teeth and foul breath in my face. I resist the urge to flinch and bury my hands in the creature's fur, gripping it tighter. "Do you still want her?" says the queen. "Even now?"

"She's my sister," I say. "She's my sister and I'm taking her home."

"Mortals are tedious about that kind of thing." The queen's poisonous lips curl in what I assume is distaste. "I killed my sister. One would think after all these years, your kind would have learned to place less emphasis on such arbitrary bonds. It will never make sense to me."

"I don't care if you understand it," I say. "Change her back."

The lion presses down on me. My back squelches into mud that cocoons me, ready to bury me alive. And then it's a wolf that slobbers all over me, teeth sharp and inches from my throat. Then a bear, heavy enough to crush me.

"Are you afraid yet, girl?" asks the queen. "I could change you too, if I wanted to. I could change the both of you so that your own families would hunt you down and display your heads on their walls."

The bear's fur is stiff and tangles in my fingers. "No," I lie. "I'm not afraid. She's my sister."

Her face twists with anger, and suddenly the bear is gone and I'm holding Morag, battered and dirty and naked but unmistakably herself. Still fourteen. Still bruised. But alive. "One day you'll learn when to be afraid," says the queen.

"Maybe I will," I say, wrapping Morag in my cloak. "But it won't be today. And it won't be because of my sister."

"No," she agrees. "It will be because of me. I'll ensure that whatever death comes upon the both of you is an unpleasant one. I suppose your sister was the one to tell you how to save her, too."

"Who else?" I've begged everyone for solutions ever since she was taken, even going so far as to brave the ire of the priests. The old women gave me muddled stories about kissing, apparently under the impression it was a lover I lost and not a sister. The priests gave me prayers and exorcisms. Nothing worked, until now.

"Of course. Samain. She always crept away to visit you." She regards the two of us. "Had I known what would happen, I'd have turned her into a tree before you ever set eyes on her."

"I've heard a great many stories," I say; somehow my victory so far has made me bold, and with Morag shivering in my arms it's hard to be afraid of this woman. "But none of them implied you'd take much pleasure from a tree. How would that benefit you, really?"

The queen's eyes flash with anger. Maybe I've made a misstep. She's from the Otherworld, and it's possible she has magics and glamours to drive me mad. But nothing happens, and neither of us change shape. "Better for both of us to lose her than for you to steal her," she says.

"Then change her now. And me too, while you're about it. What's stopping you?" She turned Morag back for a reason. Maybe it wasn't even deliberate. There are any number of terrifying creatures she could have inflicted upon us, but she didn't. Why?

One of her knights comes to our side, looking down at us and then at the queen. "She isn't afraid," he says. Oh. So there's my answer.

"No," agrees the queen. "She isn't."

And with one sharp movement, she spurs her horse into action, turning back to rejoin the hunt.

A laugh bubbles up in my throat -- we've won, we're safe, we've won -- but Morag shudders and curls up against me. She's always been a little shorter than me, though I've not grown since before she was taken. Now she seems even younger, her fear robbing her of years. "She'll come back," she says.

"No," I say. "I don't think she will."

"You didn't let go."

"You told me I shouldn't."

"But I was -- I was a monster."

"If you think that's news to me, you clearly don't remember much about your childhood." I tweak her cheek as though she's still my mischievous little sister who used to kick and throw the mud at me and Eoghan when she didn't get her way. "You're my sister, Morag. And I could never be afraid of you." 

We remain there until the last of the hunt is out of sight and earshot, and then I wrap the cloak more tightly about her shoulders and help her to her feet. "Come on," I say. "Let's go home."