Winter Solstice - Chapter Four (Patreon)

I asked yesterday in the poll what you'd like to see first, and you told me that Winter Solstice Chapter Four was what you wanted, so here it is!! 

In these trying, isolating, and honestly frightening times, I try to offer you a little gateway into a fantasy world, and I hope that it continues to be a safe and inviting place to lose yourself for a little while. Don't forget that our Discord server is also there for all patrons - current and past (I don't kick you out if you decide not to be a patron any more!) - and if your Patreon isn't linked to Discord, just drop me a message and I'll create an invite for you. We've got folks from all over the world on there, and there's no obligation to be talktative or take part, but it might feel nice to have a relatively small group of people just... there, you know? We've got a channel for most things from pets to plants to problems, and a general chat for whatever's going on that you feel like sharing. I clogged it up this morning with talk about my car's flat tyre on the way to the supermarket (which is why this didn't go up this morning!), so it doesn't have to be high brow conversation!!

Anyway, enough waffling. I just wanted to say we're all here for each other. Now, back to the Fae realm, where our still (deliberately) nameless heroine continues to adjust after being taken through the veil to the Court of Winter. Catch up on previous chapters here:  One, Two, Three  (link updated and should work now! Thanks!)

Content: the human still feels utterly out of place, a courtier threatens her, and we meet a flurry of very tiny allies... We see more of Raeth too.Wordcount: 3953

She immediately recognised figure who stood beside the expansive, circular table in the centre of her suite of rooms as Raeth. Clad in heavy, shimmering, silver-white silk that fitted his slim body like a second skin, he really was everything she’d ever expected the Fae to be: ethereal, breathtakingly beautiful, and… strange. His beauty was definitely ‘other’, and the bird-like way in which he moved his head to regard her had her skin crawling. There was no mistaking these folk for humans, even without the pointed ears. 

The slender Fae had already turned to face her when she entered her suite of rooms, and she ground to a halt and stared flatly at him. “What are you doing in here?” she demanded without taking another step.

The fact that these people seemed to think it perfectly acceptable to come and go into rooms that had been assigned to her was disconcerting and disorientating. She had nowhere that was hers in this strange world; no retreat; nowhere to sit and process the whole situation properly. It still felt like she was falling from the creature’s venomous jaws into the snow somehow. 

Thinking about safe havens brought back the dusty library gallery that she’d just left behind, and she almost smiled. That had felt safe enough until she’d pissed off Ahrin by staring too long at his ruined wing. Whatever had happened to him had been brutal, but she hadn’t meant to stare like that. With a sigh, she recalled her wandering mind to the current Fae and continued to look him in the eye. 

Raeth fixed her with a steady, cool glare of his own and said, “I brought you… food.” The word ‘food’ might have been exchanged for ‘a slug’ from the way he articulated it. 

“Take it you’re not a fan of human cuisine then,” she quipped with feigned confidence, moving into the room and crossing to the table to examine the simple, pale wooden tray of hard-boiled eggs, soft bread, ham, salted fish, hard cheeses, and grapes, the food spread out over a number of plates. There was a glass carafe of wine, another of water, and two cut glass goblets on the tray as well. 

Raeth surprised her by murmuring, “You’re not afraid of us…”

“Of course I’m afraid of you,” she snapped, rounding on him, feeling cornered and hissing like an angry vixen. She took half a step towards him and he actually recoiled, though it was probably in disgust. “I want to go home. I want to get back to my life before. I want to go back to shoeing horses and helping my brothers with their education! I don’t want to be stuck in some prissy castle with a bunch of stuck up Fae who want to keep me around, for what? For their own amusement? For some sick game? As a pawn in a larger scheme? You think I want to be cooped up here on the whims of your precious prince?”

Raeth’s face immediately set into a hard expression of immovable porcelain, eyes flashing, lips pursing together. “If you knew half of what was at stake here…”

“Yeah, well, I don’t,” she sighed, turning away, her appetite evaporating. “No one wants to tell the little human anything.”

The Fae took a deep breath and schooled his features back into something more polite. “I understand that this must be unsettling for you,” he began, and she had to bite her lips together to keep from snapping something else at him. “You are not here for our amusement. You may recall some of our discussion from the Great Hall. Prince Círdan has permitted me to tell you this much: there is a sickness spreading in the Fae lands. You witnessed that creature first hand,” he said, and she found her fingertips trailing the marks on her neck where its foul jaws had clamped around her. Her touch found raised bumps on the skin, and she shuddered. 

Crossing to the mirror, she tipped her head to one side and drew aside her shoulder-length, brown hair. There, stark against her natural colouring, she could see where the skin was puckered and scarred from the puncture wounds of its four-fold mouth. The sight of it shocked her more deeply than she’d expected it to, and she released her hair and allowed it to swing back like a heavy theatre curtain to cover it, tugging the collar of her simple shirt up a little higher. “How could I forget something like that?” she rasped. 

“Tainted Fae like that have been reported all over the realm, particularly in the darkest parts of the Court of Shadows; corrupted creatures turned rabid and mad by something. The fact that it had strength enough to break through the veil, and that it survived the transition between the realms is disturbing enough. That its fellow tainted beings could perhaps follow it, either to here to the Court of Winter or to your own world, is… well… it doesn’t bear thinking about. And yet we must address it.”

“So your prince wants to keep me here to protect…? You? Me?” she snorted and added, “The humans?” The very idea seemed preposterous. Fae hated humans. If anything, she would have expected them to funnel all of their problems out into the Human Realm and shut the veil behind them like a stable hand swilling old horse-muck out of a stall with a bucket of water. She almost laughed.

“Until we know what we’re dealing with, yes. All of those.” He drew in a deep breath through his sharp nose, and looked back at the tray of food. “For now, you should eat. The combined healing of the Prince and Vitha took a lot from your body.” 

“Tell me something?” she asked. 

Inclining his head curiously, he made no commitment either way.  

“Are you related to the prince?”

Raeth’s sharp, pale face softened ever so slightly and he nodded. “I am his elder cousin.”

“His parents are dead?”

“Mn.”

“How does the structure work here? He’s a ‘prince’ and yet he’s in charge? There are no kings?”

Raeth sighed and trailed a fingertip along the curved rim of the polished table next to him. “We have kings. The Seelie and Unseelie Courts rule over all of the Twelve Lesser Courts. So long as we do not threaten the safety of the realm itself, they largely leave us to our ‘petty quarrels’.”

The bitterness in his harsh voice almost left a nasty taste in her own mouth, and she looked away. “Why don’t they help with this ‘sickness’ thing?” 

“It is not of significant enough concern to them yet, I suppose. I do not pretend to know the machinations of the two Royal Courts, however.”

If she’d felt out of her depth in the ballroom with Mirana, that was nothing to now. Inhaling deeply herself, she asked, “So you’re, what, Prince Círdan’s adviser?”

“Of sorts,” he said. “Ahrin is his official bodyguard, and the Lady Mirana and I help to run his Court. The Court of Winter is one of the largest in terms of sheer territory, and we have resources that many other courts covet.”

“Stellarite,” she mused aloud, and he nodded. 

If he was surprised at her knowledge, he hid it completely. “Indeed.” Changing the subject, he said, “I must leave you now, but I swear upon my True Name that this food comes from the Mortal Realm, and is safe and fit for you to eat without repercussion or obligation.”

Her eyes drifted over to it and her stomach growled softly. “What time is it?”

“Late afternoon,” he said. 

With a nod, she accepted and her stomach growled audibly. “Ahrin told me he’d been to the Mortal Realm to get this for me,” she said, picking up one of the delicate side plates that had a subtle pattern in the porcelain like early morning frost. “If you see him, will you thank him for me? I know it’s not supposed to be polite, but I am grateful nonetheless and I don’t know how else to behave here.”

For the first time since meeting him, she spotted a slight melting of Raeth’s harsh expression. The Prince’s adviser nodded curtly, and then left the room without another word, leaving silence and stillness in his wake.  

For the remainder of the day, she didn’t leave her chambers, and no one came to bother her. There was a bathroom adjacent to her bedroom, which held a massive stone bath that was more reminiscent of a hot spring pool, with a copper spout that had been worked and chased into the shape of some kind of sea monster’s maw that spewed a torrent of hot water out onto the stone basin at the twist of a handle. Whether it was heated by magic or mechanics, she didn’t care, and it felt truly wonderful to let the searingly hot water prickle her skin to almost painful sensitivity as she washed out her hair. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but her skin felt different here, as if covered in a fine layer of dust, and it felt wonderful to scrub until her body felt raw and new again. 

On one wall of her bedroom was a set of glass doors that opened out onto a balcony and, with her hair wrapped in a towel and her body swathed in a thick bathrobe, she stepped out onto the stone platform. 

After the heat of the bath, the cold hit her like a physical blow to the face, stealing the air from her lungs and making her cough. Her breath fogged in front of her face, and her eyelashes began to prickle and thicken as ice formed on them already. The wind seemed to claw at her skin, and she backed away, retreating instantly towards the safety and warmth of her rooms, cursing softly. If she’d ever harboured even half a thought about escaping and attempting to return home on her own, they were quashed instantly by the temperature and the landscape outside. 

Having little else to do that evening, she went to bed early, praying that no one would come knocking on her door. 

No one did. 

The next morning she made the unnerving discovery that someone had obviously been in her rooms while she slept, because a fresh tray of food had been left on the large round table in the sitting room of her quarters, and the fire had been lit for her. A silver dome covered the food, enchanted she assumed, because everything beneath it remained piping hot. A tendril of steam coiled lazily upwards as she lifted the lid and discovered eggs, bacon, sausages, toast, with butter sitting in a little silver dish, and diced fresh fruit cut and arranged artfully on another platter to look like a basket of summer flowers. A kettle of hot water sat beside a silver teapot, with a porcelain jug of milk too, and she tucked in ravenously, heedless as to where it might have come from. It tasted like the best kind of food from home, and she had to assume - perhaps foolishly - that they wouldn't feed her Fae food in case they needed to send her home again. She didn’t even know what the truth was behind the warnings about eating the Fae food, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to test it and find out. 

By mid morning she was bored and pacing like a caged animal. 

A closer examination of her wardrobe revealed clothes clearly intended for outdoor use, and so she donned the thicker, fur-lined boots that came up to her knees, fitting as snugly as if they’d been tailored for her - which was something else she didn’t want to dwell on - over the hide leggings. She found a plain shirt, a thick, soft jumper that felt like it was made of rabbit fur, and finally a cloak lined with equally soft, downy-white fur. When she ran her work-roughened fingers over the fine, silvery hairs, she could barely feel them. A cloak like this would have cost a couple of years’ worth of their entire family’s earnings for sure, perhaps more. Her stomach churned at the thought but she kept it on all the same.

Dressed and ready for the cold, she left her chambers and headed down the main staircase, and eventually found herself in the cavernous entrance hall. Once or twice she thought she heard footsteps echoing behind her, but each time she paused, she heard nothing but the sound of her own breath. 

Regarding the carved doors of the entrance to the castle, subtle warmth of satisfaction kindled in her as she realised she’d remembered more from Mirana’s tour the previous day than she’d thought. She’d barely  put a foot wrong to get this far. Feeling a little more buoyed up, she headed for the main doors, but she faltered as they opened silently at her approach. No one was there to pull them back for her. As if some barrier kept the flurrying flakes at bay, none of the inclement weather outside dared to flutter in over the threshold, and it was a shock as she moved out onto the top step and felt the temperature change hit her again. 

Remembering not to breathe too deeply this time, she looked around at the scene in front of her.

She had been unconscious when they’d first brought her here, and now that she had the opportunity to look around, an intense pang of regret and fear surged through her again at the unfamiliarity of it all. Desolate, covered in impassably deep banks of snow in places, the landscape of the gardens surrounding the palace was bleak and forbidding, unwelcoming to say the least. The harshness of that bitter, biting wind was the most demoralising thing about all of it. It was endless. The bitterness of winter clung to every stone of the mountainside, crystallising as it hit the castle walls and turning the whole place to a sparkling confection of glass and spun sugar. If she weren’t a prisoner here, it might have been breathtakingly beautiful. But at the end of the day, it was still a prison, and she was still caged.

Still, she had stepped outside now, and she was damned if she was going to give up before she’d gone a mere two steps into the snow. 

Her only other option was to return to the library with its creepy Librarian, and while there were certain aspects of that which appealed to her - namely the warmth and familiar comfort of lilting words and parchment, leather, paper, and vellum - she was determined to explore the immediate surroundings of the castle. Her vague hope was that it would help her to feel less like she was drifting and bobbing out of control like an acorn in a sweeping current if she knew the layout of the grounds and how the castle related to them, and to the mountains around it.

Threading her way through silent, deserted walkways of the formal gardens closer to the castle, her boots squeaking and crunching in the snow, she walked all the way around the front of the building and then paused at one corner to gaze up at it. The castle stretched upwards in a series of glittering spires and balconies towards the silver-grey sky above, and not a soul moved in any of the windows or on any of the parapets. It seemed to her like a forgotten dream or a fairytale castle, but when she thought of the Prince and his strange entourage - only a fraction of whom she’d actually met - she shuddered and drew her cloak more tightly around her. 

“What are you even doing?” she asked herself in a hoarse whisper, shivering as her breath clouded around her. 

Ploughing on through the snow, she found herself at a secluded clifftop garden with a stone balustrade that protected its visitors from a gut-twisting plunge into the rocky, snowy gorge hundreds of feet below. It took a moment to muster up the courage to approach. A fountain stood at the centre of the small, surprisingly sheltered courtyard, backed by the castle itself which acted as a bulwark against the winds raging over the mountain and down towards the sea. The water from the top was frozen in an elegant arch, and the basins were full of snow, making the whole thing look like a fancy wedding cake. Only the slightest of breezes dared ruffle the snow here, and the icicles which hung from the rim of the complicated fountain dripped occasionally, sparkling almost playfully in the intermittent sunlight and shifting cloud. It was almost pleasant. 

A little flurry of snowflakes danced upwards in a corner like a pile of leaves caught in a breath of wind. They moved counter to the direction of the wind, however, and she frowned. If she concentrated, it almost seemed as though she could make out a form amid the swirling flakes, but the more she concentrated on it, the less convinced she was. 

With her fur collar drawn up tight around her neck, she stood watching the sunlight sweep up the valley in short, strobing bands. Clouds scudded past, swept down towards the glittering sea on high winds that had no time to pause at the castle’s courtyard garden. How long she stood there she wasn’t sure, but time seemed to stretch on longer around her than perhaps it really did while she remained mesmerised by the shifting patterns of sunlight on the drifting snow below. 

A footstep on the stone path behind startled her into whirling around, and she found herself facing a figure she didn’t recognise. 

Clad in blood red robes, in stark contrast to the pale grey, blue, and white of the palace’s palette, the man surveyed her intensely. “So,” he said, and continued in a heavily accented baritone. “You are the human who has caused so much unease in the Court of late.”

Not knowing what to say, she kept her mouth shut, heart pounding. The iron pendant still hanging at her collarbones beneath her clothes seemed to pulse hot suddenly but she resisted the urge to raise her hand and check. 

He smiled, and the thin, dark line of his beard which surrounded his sharp mouth like a brush-stroke twitched with the unfriendly gesture. “I spoke with His Highness yesterday. I think we should rid ourselves of you.”

His dark eyes flashed and she stepped back, the backs of her legs connecting with the frozen stone of the balustrade behind her, serving only to remind her of the endless plummet that lay behind. “And yet the Prince declared that I’m not to be harmed,” she said, cursing the way her voice sounded like little more than a reed whispering in the wind.

The strange Fae tilted his head sharply, like a bird of prey, and licked his flushed lips. A strand of his black hair whipped across his aquiline nose before he tucked it back behind his pointed ear. “One little accident, and we would be rid of you forever,” he chuckled, gaze flickering to the abyss behind her. 

Fear flooded her lungs and her heart beat so furiously and so fast that she thought it might burst right out of her chest. “You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed. 

“Wouldn't I?” 

“Gods, you wouldn’t…”

His laugh was like a whip crack against her ears, and all she could think of was plunging backwards, and how much more the fall would hurt than the impact… But before he could reach out and push her over that perilous edge, the air filled with a rush of glittering snowflakes, fluttering like moths, battering against his face, and he stepped back, more in surprise than anything else. The snowflakes turned to shards of prismatic ice, and began to needle at his face, drawing blood and sending him reeling backwards, swatting and flailing and almost tripping over his scarlet and black cloak. 

Voices, tiny and harsh, carried on the wind, but she couldn’t hear their words, either through her own terror or because of the suddenly gusting wind. 

Whatever was going on, her aggressor snarled and whirled away from the garden, leaving her alone amid the swirling mass of snowflakes. 

Her knuckles turned white as she clung to the balustrade behind her, shaking and panting and sick with terror. With her breathing ragged and hear heartbeat pattering out a wild rhythm in her ribs, she barely had the presence of mind to notice that the snowflakes were in fact not snowflakes at all. It was only when one hovered right in front of her nose that she realised it was a tiny person with wings that glittered like ice crystals. A tinkling noise filled the air like a thousand tiny bells ringing from a distance, and she tried to focus on the minuscule face in front of her. 

As she did, she picked out a single voice, as thin and distant as the sparkling, silver outline of the summit of the mountains itself. “He’s an ass,” the tiny creature grinned gleefully. “Are you alright?”

She nodded. “I thought I was supposed to be safe here…?” she said, still feeling shaky and a little weak. 

All the snowflake creatures coalesced then into a slender, twisting column, and a hundred voices chorused together, “The prince will hear of Guranhin’s actions. Return inside for now. You’re half frozen.”

Without the presence of mind to question them, she nodded, fleeing along the path and praying that the Fae called Guranhin would not be lurking in wait somewhere along the way to finish off what he’d started in the courtyard. 

The path was deserted, the snow scuffed only by her bootprints, with no sign of the threatening courtier at all. Back inside the castle, she again found no one. No courtiers hurried this way and that, no music echoed down the halls, no servants whispered in the alcoves; only the painfully obvious echoing of her own boots ricocheted back to her as she forced herself not to run. It made her think of the silence of a sepulchre, and her stomach roiled. 

In the relative safety of her rooms, she dumped the cloak over the back of an upholstered chair and stood beside the still-burning fire. Arms clamped tightly to her torso, it took a long time for the shaking to die down. The sickening feeling of standing on that precipice with nothing but empty air and snowflakes between her and a messy death on the rocks below crowded in on her mind and bile rose in her throat again, hot and acrid. The magnitude of the last few days rushed in and swamped her until she felt as though she were being torn in all directions; stretched until she would surely shatter under the strain of it; flying apart in all directions like snowflakes in the wind until there was nothing left of her but tatters.

Still trembling, she ran herself a hot bath and lost herself and all sense of time in the lapping water and smooth stone of the enormous basin. 

Hours later, she sat in a soft, upholstered chair by the fire, her hair loose and drying into soft waves, when a polite knock at the door startled her out of her thoughts. 

“Who is it?” she asked, her voice catching slightly.

“It’s Raeth, lady,” he said with surprising reverence. “Prince Círdan wishes you to attend him in his study.”

She looked down at her simple linen blouse and dark trousers, eyes drifting to her boots which she’d set near the fire to dry out a little after the snow. Plain and simple in a world of extravagance and luxury; she had never felt so small and so unprepared to meet a Fae Prince alone in his study, let alone worthy of being addressed as ‘lady’. 

Sniffing, and scrubbing a hand over her face - realising that, unlike Mirana, she wore no makeup, and must have looked even more plain and boring to them because of it - she snorted. “I’ll be right out. I don’t know the way though.”

“I’ll take you,” Raeth’s scraping voice announced quietly. 

A minute later, she opened the door to find him standing in the corridor at a polite distance from her room, left arm folded neatly behind his back, his other resting at his side. His hair was tied back off his sharp face with a large, silver cuff adorning the root of the long horsetail at the nape of his neck. If anything, it made him look even sterner and more severe than ever, the harsh, unwelcoming plains of his face standing out in bold relief. Raeth’s silver-blue eyes blinked once and he stared at her. 

“Let’s go,” she said, affecting a smile she didn’t feel. 

With one more slight bow of his head, he ushered her down the corridor, falling into silent step beside her. 

 ___

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