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Never before had Madoc prepared for a battle he did not want to fight.
Wanting, of course, was an imperfect word. He felt still the speeding of his pulse, the steadying of his hands in readiness, the sharpening of the appetite which came with the anticipation of bloodshed. His rage, too, was itself a kind of wanting. Madoc had thought he had known rage before, in all its many flavors and manifestations, but this kind of rage was different. It lived in his belly like poisonous iron, as though the agony of his grief was turned inside out.
She had known how to hurt him, his Eva. And she had left him, the general, the strategist of Elfhame, wounded nigh to death, and not even knowing her to be his enemy. What a foe to have. What a sweet adder of an adversary.
There was a part of Madoc which crept like a vine in the back of head and loved her all the more for the audacity of her betrayal, for being among the only ones who had ever bested him. And she had done this despite her own mortality, despite her soft hands which had never held a sword, with only her sharp wit and her fierce boldness as weapons. Such a wife she was, so fitting to him. What children, the creeping voice whispered in his ear, they could have had.
And this it was that jolted him from his reverie, the thought of that child, the child who still lived, if cruelly mocking Balekin spoke aright, his child, his own and hers, the child he had longed for so long. Alive and not with him, alive and raised by another. And the rage bit him again, the hunger for her to suffer as he had. The ugliness of her betrayal gnawed at him; it was ill-suited to his nature, and to the codes by which he lived his life. It must be blotted out.
And yet - he thought as he buckled on his sword, dressed himself in the coat stitched with darkness, took the stiff fabric of his cap between his palms - if she doesn’t run - if she stands before me as my wife with courage and dignity - if she offers me honesty - if she takes my child by the hand and leads them to me - then perhaps -
-
The first time he met her, Eva did not run.
He had crossed into the human world in search of an enemy, a spy from the Court of Teeth who had taken refuge where he thought Madoc would not think to look. He had sent out a charm on a beetle’s wing to seek out any sign of faerie magic, and waited alone for the charm to return to him.
She was in the forest. She would tell him later, with the laughing indulgence with which she corrected all his misconceptions about the human world, that she had been hiking, but Madoc crossed out of Elfhame only rarely, and could not often keep track of the current customs. He had thought her perhaps to be a witch gathering herbs and mushrooms, or summoning a dryad.
Most of the humans he had met were Faerie captives. Their eyes as often as not were glassy with glamour, and even when they were permitted to keep their perception and their will they were so overawed by the Folk that they themselves were almost impossible to see. Eva was not like that as she stood before him, her booted feet planted firmly and her gaze steady as his own. Madoc had not thought to glamor himself, and her eyes (brown as the new-turned earth) widened as she took him in, but she did not run. She only crossed her arms in front of her and said, “So. Are you going to introduce yourself?”
Madoc was used to making swift decisions. This was the nature of Redcaps, to follow instinct into action. They did not hesitate, not once the decision had been made.This woman drew him, bright as the autumn sun, vibrant as the red leaves around them. He wanted her with a hunger which was the mirror-twin of his bloodlust, a type of hunger which he had never felt during his previous love affairs. And so he swept into a bow, told her who he was, and offered to bring her back to Elfhame with him.
She would tell him later (in bed, her head nuzzled against his shoulder, her knees curled in towards him) that it had been like a dream, like a girlhood fantasy of what romance could be (“Although you’re not quite David Bowie,” she said, and he didn’t ask what she meant). She had been chafing against the narrowness of her human life, she told him, but this way out had been nothing she ever dreamed. “Of course I thought it might all be some sort of tasteless joke or weird performance art piece,” she told him, “but only for an instant, somehow. You felt real. You felt realer than anyone I’d ever met.”
During their first meeting, though, he knew none of this, for when he made his proposal a strange thing happened: Eva began to laugh. Not with the laughter of cynicism or mockery, as was so common at court, but with a laughter that came from deep in the abdomen, laughter filled with wonder and overwhelm and newness. She laughed and laughed until the laughter turned to tears and she began sobbing, body wracked with it, her face blotched, barely able to catch her breath. This was the first time, Madoc would reflect, that he saw human emotion so raw, not shaped by glamour or faerie fruit. It was strange to him, discomfiting. And it made him want to be closer to this strange creature from whom the sobs issued.
He took her hand and led her to a moss-covered rock, sat beside her. “I’m no one special,” she said, “I work as a waitress. My mother is dead and my father is an asshole. A boring story. Why are you appearing to me?”
He didn’t have an answer, and found himself enjoying the unfamiliarity of that feeling. “Will you come with me,” he asked her again, “and perhaps we can find out?”
She was brisk then, in her manner, as if jolted out of some kind of reverie. “Tell me the rules. Can I come back, if I don’t like it? Will a dozen years have passed for every night I spend there or something crazy? Will you turn me into an ice statue or a rat or a porcelain figurine?”
(He didn’t know where she had come up with the last, but it had been the mania of a goblin of his acquaintance some years ago. Perhaps the mortal world did get news after all.)
“I ask that you come with me and let me court you,” he said, “when I seek your oath and promise, you will know it.”
And so she came with him to Elfhame, and there she flourished as if born for his world. He courted her as one would court a wife and not a mistress, dancing with her at balls and offering worthy gifts, even though his fellow Redcaps looked at him askance.
“Beget children on her, certainly,” a man he had counted a friend told him, “that’s what humans are best at. But don’t marry her, Madoc.”
He didn’t listen, and he did not trust the man again. He watched Eva’s careful smile at court, the way her sharp eyes took in all that was around her, and he thought of her laughing and crying in the wood, and he knew he loved her. He loved at once the vulnerability of the human woman who had thought him her own fantasy, and the strength, the cleverness of the lady who navigated the Faerie court with deft surety, who was learning sharpness even though her fingertips did not end in claws as did his own.
He loved her more as she pushed him against the wall in a back hallway of the palace and kissed him with her teeth, her gown of cobweb and moth wings tickling against his chest. He loved her, and he married her, and they made their oaths to each other before the high king, their brows crowned with silver and thorn. He had thought he would never know a happiness so rich as the savor of battle, but there she was and there was his joy.
Madoc did not expect Justin Duarte to take that joy from him. He knew of course, when Justin and Eva began to make eyes at one another, but he did not mind, and could not imagine the man a threat to him.
Justin’s story was different from Eva’s, for, as he told them both while they sat together in Madoc’s walled garden, he had sought out Faerie. He had read folktales and fantasy novels and refused to believe that there was nothing beyond the world he knew. And so he prepared for it - he joined an SCA branch where he could learn blacksmithing and leather-working, and where he could pretend as though he lived within the world where he felt that he belonged. And at the same time he spent his evenings trying to practice magic, trying to learn how to spot the Folk. And then, eventually, he talked his way in.
He was a good talker, Madoc did agree, with a smooth, rich voice that turned his stories into art, just as he could turn raw metal into sparkling jewelry and gleaming weapons. He had apprenticed himself one of the great smiths of Elfhame (though he would never speak, at least to Madoc, of the bargain he had made for the apprenticeship, what dear thing he had given up for his knowledge), and Madoc felt the instinctive respect for him that he always felt for hard work and skill. He noticed the man’s beauty too, and his friendliness, and the deference he always offered to Madoc, which was within the appropriate parameters of what a skilled artisan should offer to a lord. An entertainment for Eva, he thought, during his long absences on campaign. A gift, and an indulgence.
He invited Justin to stay in his home, and set himself as the man’s patron. He watched Eva watch Justin at the forge, all soot and muscle, and he felt no jealousy, for she was his, his wife, his own, and for her to desire the man who he had brought to please her was only pleasure in his gift. She knew the oaths they had made to each other, and the weight of her obligations. She would always be his wife. Any child she bore would be his own. They drank honey mead in the summer sun and Madoc and Eva agreed to invite Justin into their bed. He was respectful and clever and full of wonder. Eva kissed Madoc sweetly and thanked him for giving her a friend to keep her from loneliness when he was gone. Justin knelt before Madoc and offered him Nightfell, a princely gift indeed to a liege lord.
And so Madoc’s life was joy, and he went to battle with gladness in his heart at the heir his wife would soon give to him, and, like a fool, he saw nothing of a cataclysm that lay ahead.
-
He stood before the house. A normal human house, paint peeling at the window frames, children’s toys scattered on the lawn. He had glamoured himself this time, as he had not during his last sojourn into the human realm. No one turned to look at him; no one noticed his green skin, his teeth, his claws.
He stood before the door, and instinct warred in him. In his blood was ice and fire at once, rage and grief, desire and repulsion.
He hesitated.