(Continued)

I considered that as I returned to the court, where one of the few patient fae would be playing the Hunt-song for us. We would run the Wild Hunt tomorrow night, when the moon failed to light the sky and the world belonged wholly to the fae once more. Perhaps it was Tam’s. How much finer his music would sound on our instruments. No matter how skilled his fingers, there was still something slightly human in his songs, for nothing could change the human build of the violin and flute.

I smiled to myself. It was a fine idea. The trees closed over my head, hiding the night sky from my sight, and I began to run as only the fae can run. I had a violin to find.

***

The night would have been described by a bard as deathly quiet, although that wasn’t true. Softly muttering birds shifted in their sleep, small mammals crept about on the forest floor and the trees whispered in the gentle wind. The larger creatures, though, both the hunters and hunted, were wary tonight. None wanted to be the target of a Wild Hunt.

There was no way to describe a Wild Hunt, and I had given up after trying to describe it to my sister centuries ago, I being the older sibling. There was an intoxicating sense of power flowing through my veins, a giddy certainty that anything could be done and a feeling of connectedness with the wildness that surrounded me. It was what made us so impatient, I’d thought long ago. The urge to run as far and fast as possible, the sheer desire for the thrill of the chase and the craving for the knowledge that it was speed and instinct and nothing so tame as logic and planning that made us so dangerous. It was what made us fae.

Fae and fierce and wild, a human minstrel had once said of us. My brother had said that it was redundant. What else would we be? Fae and calm and tame?

I leaned against the large stone that my Queen sometimes used as a throne as I attempted to get the skirt to sit properly. It was centuries old, and of human make, for no faerie was patient enough to work a loom and build the clothing. A relic from the long-ago time when we’d human minstrels playing for our dances and humans had left offerings out that we might leave them alone when we ran our Wild Hunts, patched and repaired countless times. My brother nodded knowingly at me when he saw me, and I scowled at him.

Faeries out to seduce a human wore their clothing for one reason. Glamour was a simple magic that even the least patient faerie could manage to learn, but it had a few weaknesses. Tactile illusions were incredibly difficult, and even something as simple as the wind blowing in one direction and clothing wafting in the other was enough for a perceptive human to break the glamour. So the clothing. I would find my fiddler, my Tam, and I would bring him back to the court to play for us.

The skirt finally straightened into a shape that wouldn’t twist around my legs as I ran and reinforced with a touch of magic, only a step above glamour, I tucked the copper and bronze patterned flute into my belt. I had been unable to find a violin, although I was certain that I would be able to find one in time for the next Wild Hunt. In the mean time, well, Tam’s skills with his flute were hardly equal to his talent with his human violin. He was in far more need of a fae flute.

A horn blew at one end of the clearing, and I felt my blood pounding through my veins. It was blown again, and a large cluster of faeries broke off to follow after the sound, starting at an easy lope, although by the end of the night they would have reached a pace to rival the wind itself. Impatient with waiting and finally released when my Queen led her own group out into the night, I began to run.

Wind in my short hair, feet pounding down on the earth, lightning-quick reflexes letting me land on the most precarious of perches for half a second before I moved on to the next, I didn’t fight the urge to laugh. The Wild Hunt made every bit of impatience that made me hurl my current project away in despair worthwhile, every heartbeat of frustration a passing observation rather than the defining characteristic of my life. I whooped with delight as I hurled myself across a river that even the fleet footed deer of my home had trouble with, a jump that I wouldn’t have been able to make if it weren’t for the Hunt. I paused when my feet hit the ground once more, my nostrils flaring as I looked around me. Blood. I could smell blood. And then I was running once more, mouth watering slightly as I recalled the tang of fresh blood.

Stronger and stronger, the smell finally led me to the source, a broken-winged partridge that flailed feebly in my grip when I picked it up. Smiling, I snapped the bird’s neck with a brisk twist and then began licking my bloody fingers like a child with a bit of salt. With two quick yanks, I pulled the wings from the partridge, uninterested in the feathers or the sparse bits of meat that hid between the bones and gristle and focused my attention on the body. The short bronze knife that I carried flashed in the dim light, and I winced and grabbed for a bit of breast meat that had slid between my fingers. Slippery with blood and fat, I peeled off the latter, savouring the former as I chewed the slightly stringy meat. Birds had drier meat than other animals, and I suddenly wished that I had joined one of the other Hunts. But I had a fiddler to find. I continued at a slightly slower pace, determined not to drop a single morsel of my snack.

When I reached the border of the forest, I realized I had a problem: I couldn’t remember which house Tam lived in. They all looked almost exactly the same as the one I remembered, and there was no one to lead me to his home. None of them wanted to attract the attention of the Wild Hunt.

Pacing around the edge of the forest, certain that it had been one of the nearer homes that the fiddler had walked into, I continued to cut small pieces of meat off to munch. The urge to run made me itch, and my speed increased. Back and forward. This house? I approached one that seemed a likely match and rested my hands, long fingered even for a faerie, against the wall, only to recoil. There was iron in that home. I snarled at it and hurled the partridge’s lungs at the building, only to regret it. Lungs were always a bloody and enjoyable treat. At least I hadn’t done something ridiculously foolish, such as throwing the liver or heart.

As I muttered, annoyed with myself, I passed several other homes, none of them with iron in them, but none of them with a fiddler’s music coming from them. Fifty homes, I thought. Forty-nine, actually, as he wasn’t in the home with the iron in it. Still...