Anne Bishop - The Pillars of the World

“Why do I have to go with them?” Neall asked. Tears filled his eyes, despite his efforts not to cry, as he watched Ashk calmly fill the trunk with his clothes and the wooden toys his father had made for him. “I don’t know them.” His young voice rose to a wail.

Ashk turned to look at him, her woodland eyes filled with dry grief. “Your father was a good man. If he had lived, he would have taught you what you need to know about the world. But he is gone, so you need to learn those things from his people, his family.”

“But I don’t know them! Why can’t I learn those things from you? Why can’t I stay with you?”

She knelt before him, brushed her fingers through his hair. “First you must learn what your father’s people can teach you. Then, when you are grown and return here, I will teach you other things about the world.”

Neall sniffed, studied the eyes of his mother’s closest friend — eyes that reminded him of his mother’s. “I can come back ?”

“This house and land will be waiting for you. That much I can promise.” She hesitated. “But you mustn’t tell your father’s people about the land. It belongs to the daughters, and no one else has any say here.”

So he’d kept the secret about the land from Baron Felston for all these years. One of the many secrets he’d thought he’d kept well since he was brought to the baron’s house as a young boy grieving the loss of both parents.

Now that he was grown, and no longer legally Felston’s ward, there was only one thing that stopped him from saddling his horse and riding to the western part of Sylvalan: Ari. He wanted her to go with him, but he didn’t think she would ever leave Brightwood. And he knew, despite his daydreams of being her lover and husband, that being with her here would be no good for either of them. Even if they married, he would always be considered Baron Felston’s poor relation as long as he stayed around Ridgeley. And Felston, claiming a “family” connection, would look with already-greedy eyes on the bounty Brightwood held and expect to make use of it.

Ari was still young, barely more than a girl. Now that her mother and grandmother were gone, maybe she would be willing to leave Brightwood, and the cruelty she faced every time she went to Ridgeley, and start a new life somewhere else . . . with him.

He would give it another year . . . and spend another year working from sunup to sunset as the baron’s unofficial steward, wearing Royce’s castoff clothes while Royce, Odella, and the baron and baroness spent all the profits that could be squeezed from the estate, bitterly complaining all the while that he wasn’t trying harder to wring a little bit more out of the land already wrung dry.

He would give it another year. Then, with her or without her, he was going to go home and put his heart and his sweat into his own land.

Placing his hands under his head, Neall stared at the ceiling.

If Ashk had understood what it meant to be a poor relation in a gentry family, would she have still sent him away to live with his father’s people? Would she have considered the lessons she’d wanted him to learn worth the misery of knowing he was unwanted and unloved?

It had been made clear to him over the past fifteen years that his father had been an . . . embarrassment. . . a blot on the baron’s family tree—one the whole family had been happy to forget as soon as he was old enough to strike out on his own. He had been a child conceived during the Summer Moon, and his mother, Neall’s grandmother, had calmly refused to name one of the men in their village as the father, insisting that a Fae Lord had fathered her child. It was a common enough claim that was used if a young woman found herself with child after the Summer Moon and either didn’t want to marry the man who had sired it or found herself in the position of having the man deny any responsibility.

Sometimes it was even true.

Thinking about what the small man had said, he wondered if Ari would think of him differently if she knew the truth about him: that his paternal grandfather really had been a Fae Lord . . . and that his mother had been a witch.

“Be warned,” Lyrra said, pouring another cup of tea when Dianna joined her at the table that held the fruit and cakes. “The mood is rather sour this morning.” She glanced toward the windows where Lucian stood, his back to the room. “Or brooding.”

Dianna casually looked around the large room. There were several of these gathering places within the Clan house. The women looked bored, but Dianna suspected it was a mask to hide their resentment over the lack of available lovers last night. The men seemed . . . disappointed . . . and were nodding as they listened to Falco. Aiden quietly played his harp, not a song as much as notes flowing together—something he’d been doing lately whenever his thoughts troubled him. And Lucian . . .

“What about you?” Lyrra asked. “Did you enjoy the Wild Hunt?”

“What’s Falco puffed up about today?” Dianna asked, abruptly changing the subject. She didn’t want to talk about last night, or the cottage with its broken door, or that strange-yet-familiar magic she had sensed at the edge of the woods.

Lyrra gave her a long look, sipped her tea, then shrugged. “Listen for yourself.”

Dianna moved until she stood at the edge of the cushioned benches where the Fae sat listening to the Lord of the Hawks.

“What you say is true, Falco,” one of the other men said, shaking his head sadly. “I remember the tales about succulent women who gave joy to a man. I saw nothing succulent about the females roaming around last night.”

“Predators, that’s what they are,” Falco said. “Like those female insects that devour the male while he’s mating with her.” He shuddered. “No wonder the males have taken to hiding.”

“Not all the males hide,” Aiden said with a smile. He plucked a chord, and sang, “When springtime comes, the maidens bloom. They ripen for the Summer Moon.” He pressed his hands against the harp strings to quiet them. “The Summer Moon has been the climax”—he grinned at the word—“for the Courting Moon for generations in Sylvalan. It’s a night when the female expresses the power of her sex freely. Often, she is choosing a mate that night. Sometimes it’s only for that night. Sometimes it’s the man who will be her husband. For many, the mating that night just seals a bargain their hearts have already made, and the pledge made at Midsummer is the formal agreement before witnesses.”

“If the men were as willing as you say, they wouldn’t call it the Ensnarer’s Moon,” Falco argued.

The humor cooled in Aiden’s blue eyes. “A man has the right to say yay or nay. If he says yay, he takes his chances. If nothing more than a mating comes from that night, they can both walk away and simply remember whatever pleasure they’d given each other. If there’s a child, then the man has made his choice of wife. That, too, is part of their tradition.”

“Unless the man is Fae,” another man said a bit maliciously.

“That’s another thing,” Falco said. “Any time there’s a child and a marriage doesn’t take place, we get blamed for the child.”

“Of course, the blaming is unjust, isn’t it?” Lyrra said, the sweetness in her voice warring with the sharpness in her eyes. “After all, it couldn’t be true, could it?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dianna noticed Lucian stiffen, then watched his shoulders sag. She knew he hadn’t filled a human woman with his child. She knew it. So why had he reacted that way?

“I think,” Aiden said, carefully setting his harp aside, “that it’s the custom of gifting that has taken the . . . charm . . . out of these encounters.”