Work Text:
The October morning is crisp and cold like a fresh-picked apple. On just such a morning he rode out and was lost while hunting or fell off his horse or was ensorcelled by a wintry wind. The memories become burdensome. Sometimes he believes he was just a babe, beset by a wicked stepmother, so he wandered off to pick apples and fell asleep under the biggest tree in his father’s orchard. A pair of slender arms caught him as he fell, a soft hand ruffled his hair and woke him. He was enchanted, bespelled, lost for good.
“Such a hero, yet such a babe in the woods,” she murmurs in his ear, a soughing wind in the still stable yard. “You left the hunt and struck off on your own, you were drunk and fell off your horse, you left some weeping maiden in a meadow and hid yourself in the orchard. I found you, I scooped you up on my steed, I drew you forth like a ripe root. You came willingly enough.”
I did not know how it would be. That defense has never helped anyone since Eve cowered behind green leaves.
He says nothing as he saddles his horse, preferring to do it himself than have the servants linger close to him. It is enough they know him for a fey one, they needn’t gossip about the laird speaking to someone who is not there, cannot be there. His hands shake a little, the bridle clinks and rattles. Blue veins stand out on the backs of his hands, turned bony and claw-like with time.
“Not so fair and full of flesh now, Tam Lin. You are old. Had you stayed and whiled away the time with me, I would not have loved you as you are now.”
“You would have made a tithe of me,” he whispers in spite of his decision not to speak, always too weak in her presence.
“Yes, while you were golden-haired and limber, with skin like milk and poppies. What good are your creaking limbs now, in your long life?”
She was the golden-haired one, not he, swarthy as a Gypsy in his youth, turning ashen now with age. She talks so he often cannot tell which one of them she is speaking of. He knows that if he turns and looks at her, she will be as small and pale and gilded as ever she was, though she is not there. All he would be looking at would be empty air and a patch of worn, muddy cobblestones. Sometimes he wonders whether she did not give him eyes of wood after all, as unreliably as his eyes serve him since his return.
There is no wind, the air is still in the foggy morning beyond the stonewalled yard, yet Tam Lin feels cold. It is always cold when she is near. He is always cold.
His wife once said she would walk barefoot all the long winter’s night through for him, let alone challenge Faerie. She would not say that any more, not for a long time now.
“An ill wind blew when you were born, Tam Lin. The same wind which would have blown you to that place to which you condemned me in your stead. That is the wind which chills you. You carry it with you, in your hair, the folds of your cloak, the creases of your jerkin.”
He watches her, unmoving and unspeaking. Her feet are bare, she is clad in green, her voice is low and sweet. She shrieked when last he saw her earthly form as Janet covered his shivering naked flesh with her kirtle and took him away, waddling under her pregnancy and the exertion of her struggle with Tam in the shape of an adder, a wolf, a burning coal.
His horse does not react to the queen’s presence, though it paws the cobblestones, unsettled by Tam’s proximity. Dogs and cats avoid him as well.
“Or did I change your destiny when I stole you from your father’s garden, an innocent slumbering babe?” She smiles, her small teeth sharp. “You can’t remember. You don’t even know what you are now, too fey for the mortals, too mortal for any other realm, your paint all chipped, your bones turned brittle...”
He first noticed her soon after his eldest son’s birth, barely a moon’s turn after Janet saved his soul and his flesh from hellfire. The queen was a wisp of fog then, a brief glimpse of green kirtle, a single footprint left in dew when he pursued her to the spot where she vanished from his sight. She has drawn closer ever since, till now, three times seven years since his escape, she comes to him at all hours, speaks to him whether he is awake or asleep or in his cups and like to hurl dishes and chairs at her.
Her voice is a rowan berry, bright for sorrow, tart for loss. “I miss the taste of our food. Primroses and nettles...”
“Sod and worms,” he replies harshly, his words like stones shaken out of a sack.
“The taste was sweet, what does it matter?”
“It wasn’t real.”
“You know this? Your children despise you, your wife scorns your touch, servants sneer and horses neigh around you, and your knights think you a fey fool in need of a good ducking. Yet you tell yourself you are a good man. Which is the truth, False Tam?”
She never used to sound like this. Living with her under the green hill was to live in darkness, only glowworms and ruby night fruits for light, but no stars or moon or sun except in the bottom of cups of yellow wine they quaffed and never got drunk. When sometimes Tam Lin spoke of his home, the Queen of Elfland would look at him with her wild eyes, laugh like silver bells, and talk of other things, things he grasped but could never hold, there in her court under the hill. A small hell which they staved off with their tithe.
She never used to talk sense, nor sound so human.
Her voice is still mournful, her face when he glances at her over his shoulder is the moon behind clouds. “I would have paid the tithe seven times over, to keep you with me.”
“You would have consigned me to hell!” he snaps, no longer caring what the stable hands loitering nearby might hear. “You cannot love, always after the next bright passing, so you made me cold like you.”
“I loved you well for seven years. You barely noticed the passing of the first six. Only when your time drew near did you grow restless and go lying in wait for silly girls, oh yes.”
Janet was not the first he’d called his one true love. One girl, hair like spun gold, had swallowed poison to try and kill Tam’s babe in her belly. Another, raven-haired, driven out by her family in disgrace, had been torn apart by wolves. Yet a third, hair like autumn leaves, the Church had burnt her at the stake for claiming she’d lain with an elf, that a faery was her child’s father.
Only Janet remained steadfast, though she too meant to kill their babe with bitter-tasting herbs. Only Janet waited for him on All Hallows’ Eve and dragged him from his horse and held him true till he turned back into himself. Janet, who can barely stand the sight of him after these many years. The queen cursed her that night to die an early death, but the curses of those swallowed up by hell did not carry far, it seems. Janet is like to outlive him out of sheer spite.
“And what of you?” Tam demands, his face heated, his hands cold. “There were others, you had four and twenty mortal knights. Why choose me?”
For a moment he believes she will touch his cheek, and he thrills and quakes at the prospect.
Her hand is close but she does not reach out to him: a wraith cannot touch. “You were my favorite,” she says sadly. “A tithe is not a tithe unless paying it costs something. Something precious, Tam, you know this. You were my heart’s delight.”
He will not weep. Stolen or gone willingly, won or borrowed, he was to her like unto a gingerbread man, much coveted, greedily taken, quickly polished off and forgotten. “You have a heart of stone.”
“Stone endures, False Tam. Stone can be trusted to remain steadfast. When stone cracks, it cannot heal. But you... you have a heart of clay, a hare’s stomach, and feet of mist. You always have.”
Tam turns away from her, checks the horse’s tack one more unneeded time. His lands are vast and he inspects his boundary stones himself, unlike other lairds. He accomplishes most tasks which keep a man solitary for hours on end himself.
The queen’s voice remains quiet, but she speaks right into his ear: feather-soft reproach. “You did not have to get her with child.”
“I had to be certain.” He doesn’t even pause for breath before he answers.
“Certain of what? Her shame? Her pride? You traded a queen’s affection for a laird’s daughter’s grudging toleration? You could have trusted her to love you. Love would have stung and burned her as badly as the adder and the fire, but she would have found it sweeter. For a time.”
“My son will inherit her father’s lands.” Tam’s own inheritance is long lost, no court in the land willing to countenance the rights of a man stolen and won back from the fairies.
“And he will curse your name, which he passes on to children of his own.”
Tam bows his head, tightens the bridle. The horse whickers, shakes its head, the rein brushes his cheek like a whip. The horse is dun: Tam Lin refuses to ride white horses or even any with white patches around the hocks or nose.
His voice remains mild as milk as he repeats the words, an incantation, a prayer. “My son will inherit.”
He braces himself and turns his head to look at her. She always twists between taunting and interrogating him. Pale and frail as a snowflake, she is the pebble in his shoe, the bone caught in his throat, the icy fist around his heart.
“What would you have me say? I am already dead and no less cursed than you. I died that All Hallows’ Eve, the morn I took Janet to wife, the chill twilight I woke to behold your face leaning over me under the laden branches. This is hell I inhabit.”
She almost smiles, almost laughs, almost strokes his cheek after all. She cocks her head at him like a hawk, turns away from him like an ice floe breaking away in spring.
“Selfish. Still and always selfish. There is but one hell, Tam Lin. It gapes beneath your feet, and once it takes you at last, you will know. You will be alone there, not even I will visit you. At least horses and your wife will shy away from you no more.”
The air smells of winter. Tam Lin knows he is alone in the courtyard but for a yawning servant hanging out the washing and the stable hands who’ve lost interest in their laird talking to himself. In a tree stripped bare of leaves and whipped by the wind, a crow caws.
Tam Lin shivers as he pulls his cloak close and mounts his horse. Old women say the crow is a harbinger of death, but it is only a hungry bird. Still he hopes tales told around the hearth on winter nights are true, truer than the tale they tell of him, which does not speak of his life after Janet stole him back. He hopes the crow calling to him means he may never hear the queen whisper in his chilled ear again or glimpse her golden hair and ivory skin from the corner of his eye or smell her scent of primroses and apples when he blows out the candle which lights him to his cold bed in the dark.