Bitter of Tongue Read Free Page A

George that he did not take into consideration his mount, now terrified and fleeing and urged to speed.
    Until the white dazzling light filled Simon’s vision. He remembered suddenly the feeling of falling away into Faerie, soaked to the skin, in a pool filled with water: remembered Jace being kind to him, and how much he had resented that, how he’d thought: Don’t show me up any further , and his chest had burned with resentment.
    Now he was tumbling into Faerie with the scream of a terrified horse in his ears, leaves blinding him and twigs scraping at his face and his arms. He tried to shield his eyes and found himself thrown on rock and bones, with darkness rushing at him. He would have been very grateful if Jace had been there.
    *   *   *
    Simon woke in Faerieland. His whole skull was throbbing, in the way your thumb did when you hit it with a hammer. He hoped nobody had hit his head with a hammer.
    He woke in a gently swaying bed, slightly prickly under his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw that he was not exactly in a bed, but lying amid twigs and moss, scattered across a swaying surface constructed of wooden laths. There were strange stripes of darkness in front of his vision, obscuring his view of the vista beyond.
    Faerieland almost looked like the moors in Devon, yet it was entirely different. The mists in the distance were faintly purple, like storm clouds clinging to the earth, and there was movement in the cloud suggesting odd and menacing shapes. The leaves on the trees were green and yellow and red like the trees of the mundane world, but they shone too brightly, like jewels, and when the wind rustled through them Simon could almost make out words, as if they were whispering together. This was nature run riot, alchemized into magic and strangeness.
    And Simon was, he realized, in a cage. A big wooden cage. The stripes of darkness across his vision were his cage bars.
    The thing that outraged him most was how familiar it felt. He remembered being trapped like this before. More than once.
    “Shadowhunters, vampires, and now faeries, all longing to throw me in prison,” Simon said aloud. “Why exactly was I so anxious to get back all these memories? Why is it always me? Why am I always the chump in the cage?”
    His own voice made his aching head hurt.
    “You are in my cage now,” said a voice.
    Simon sat up hastily, though it made his head throb fiercely and all of Faerieland reel drunkenly around him. He saw, on the other side of his cage, the hooded and cloaked figure whom George had tried so desperately to capture on the moors. Simon swallowed. He could not see the face beneath the hood.
    There was a whirl in the air, like a shadow whipping over the sun. A new faerie dropped out of the clear blue sky, the leaves of the forest floor crunching under his bare feet. Sunlight washed his fair hair into radiance, and a long knife glittered in his hand.
    The hooded and cloaked faerie dropped his hood and bowed his head in sudden deference. Unhooded, Simon saw, he had large ears, tinted purple, as if he had an eggplant stuck to each side of his face, and wisps of long white hair that curled over his eggplant ear like cloud.
    “What has happened, and why are your tricks interfering with the work of your betters, Hefeydd? A horse from the mundane world ran into the path of the Wild Hunt,” the new faerie said. “I do hope the steed was not of immense emotional significance, because the hounds have it now.”
    Simon’s heart bled for that poor horse. He wondered if he too was about to be fed to the hounds.
    “I am so sorry to have disturbed the Wild Hunt,” the cloaked faerie said, bowing his white head even further.
    “You should be,” answered the faerie of the Wild Hunt. “Those who cross the path of the Hunt always regret it.”
    “This is a Shadowhunter,” continued the other anxiously. “Or at least one of the children they hope to change. They were lying in wait for me in the mortal world,