Except the Queen Read Free Page A

under the trees, the green light covering my legs and belly and the aureoles of my nipples, all green.
    I was dallying with a favorite lover, a hob with soft hands and a slow manner. We sought one another out once a decade or so when neither of us wanted hard sport or a fleeting wild plundering. His love-name was Will Under the Feather and he had just gotten under my feathers indeed. And with a will.
    We were speaking together of the green light, of the night’s party to come, and laughing. I remember most the laughing. It made little motes of light spark around the nest. Not enough to set the nest on fire, of course, but enough to remind us of the danger. We were hazy in the afterglow of lovemaking, and hazy with the glowworm evening. His fur-covered foot touched mine, and his hand trailed down my throat.
    “Berry-eyes,” he murmured. “So delicious. I could eat you up forever.”
    I responded with a kind of throaty purr that made him laugh, but in that satisfying way that turned me warm all over. My left hand played with Will, while my right stroked the bits of feathers and silk, colored yarns and shiny stones that were stuffed into the crooks and crevices of my nest. My precious things taken down from the branches of trees where humans had tied them, offerings to the fey.
    Without warning, the Queen appeared, looming over me, her golden hair blazing around her shoulders. “Out! Out! Out!” she cried, her face a harridan’s mask. “Gossip’s cup and sneak thief, spreading lies and calumny. Out! Out! Out! I command.”
    I gaped at her, rising before me in a column of flame and I knew with a terrifying coldness that Meteora had spoken aloud the words that were meant to disappear. And she must have included my name, which the Queen now screeched into the boiling air.
    I had no chance to be angry at Meteora. Putting my hands to my ears, I prepared for the worst. Blood rushed around inside my head, hot rivers of it threatening to overrun the sides. I could feel my right hand wet with something as the eardrum burst. But I was not dead.
    Not yet.
    Then courage and instinct took me by the left hand and threw me over the side of the nest. I heeded neither the scratching of the dried grasses on my legs nor the
thwack
I received from Will’s heels as he bailed out the other side.
    As I fell away from the nest, I glanced over my shoulder. The Queen was holding up a rosewood wand, the bumps that would one day be thorns as red and pulsing as pustules. Not her oaken staff. Not her silver mace. Not her rowan switch. So it was to be a punishment, and not death this day.
I can live with that
, I thought.
    I ran full out with scarcely a strip of cloth coveringme, remembering only too late that one does not turn one’s back to the Queen, whatever the hurry.
    The rosewood wand hit me high up on the right shoulder, breaking the skin, and my arm was all at once red, looking more like a sleeve made of holly berries than a naked arm covered with blood.
    There must have been a spell. The wand should not have extended that far. But if there had been a spell, I never heard it spoken; or if I did, it did not register. All that registered was pain. Pain, fear, and darkness. And then the Queen’s voice calling after me:
    Should Sister meet Sister in Light again,
    Then falls the iron rain.
    I tumbled in the air and was somehow transported over the hill and away from home. Away from the body I knew, away from the world I was fond of, away from the sister I loved. I did not know if Meteora, too, had run, leaping over the side of her nest, leaving her lover as fast as I had left mine. And to be truthful—which is not always a mark of fairy—I did not at that moment care. All I cared about was my own pain, my own fear, and the darkness around me that was every color intermixed but green.
    As I fell through the cold, unknown air, I fell out of magic, too, felt it being stripped away from me as if I’d been skinned. As if a hunter had taken a