Last Ditch Attempts

The light in the human realm lacked brilliance. Colours were muted, the air hazy, and the warding glow of earth and trees was near invisible. Back home, where every tree or rock could anchor a doorway, she didn’t need to seek the places where the elder folk had wrought their magic. Nor sacrifice to gods that weren’t hers.

Roisin wiped sweat from her brow. She wanted to swear, speak every foul word she knew and invent a bunch of new ones, but she didn’t dare do so in this sacred place. She swallowed and found—for the first time ever—that desperation had a taste. A mix of grave rot and ashes, it coated her tongue and made her stomach churn.

Passing between the realms used to be as easy as moving through a gap in a curtain. Not anymore. She’d tried for hours to open a gateway and had only bone-deep exhaustion to show for her efforts.

Roisin pushed to her feet. She staggered out of the stone circle to the rowan tree where she had left her pack, sliding down the trunk to sit cross-legged at its base. She’d brought bread and cheese, a meat pie, and a flask of wine. She scarfed down her food, desperate to replenish all the energy she’d used.

“I should’ve stuck a knife in yer heart the moment I laid eyes on ye, ye feckin’ bastard,” she muttered.

The man who’d caught her eye at the fair had been a visiting lord’s retainer. Broad shoulders, muscular arms, and shapely legs had drawn her gaze, and a beaming smile had reeled her in. When she’d agreed to a tumble between the sheets, she hadn’t been looking for everlasting love. Fae didn’t fall in love and besides, the man had been human. She’d wanted to spend a few pleasurable hours and hadn’t minded finding him gone when she woke.

Until she realised that he’d taken her amulet.

To him, it was a coin like all the others in the purse he’d stolen from her pack. To her, it was the key that opened the door between the here and there.

Growing up, she’d heard stories of fae trapped on the wrong side of the veil, unable to open a gateway. She’d scoffed at the warnings, thinking them nothing but her teachers’ attempts to limit her fun. Now she wasn’t so sure.

She didn’t want to be stuck here, an immortal fae amongst mortal humans, moving from place to place to hide the fact she wasn’t ageing. Humans weren’t like fae, accepting of all they met as long as they didn’t interfere with the fae’s entertainment. Humans distrusted strangers. They preferred order and routine to change and excitement, while Roisin had come to the human realm searching for thrills.

Fate was a fickle bitch.

At least she’d remembered her lessons when she’d most needed them. She’d found one place where the two realms were close, a stone circle that reeked of ancient magic. She’d curbed her impatience and waited for the day of the spring equinox, when the veil was thinnest, and passage could be sought more easily.

All morning she’d tried to open a gateway, using the many ways taught to all growing fae. One by one, her attempts had failed, leaving her exhausted. Soon, night and day would be of equal length, the world in perfect balance. At that point, she had one last chance to part the veil, but using the quicksilver would have consequences.

She wondered whether it was worth the risk. If she failed, half her life would be forfeit. She would sleep for six months out of every twelve, buried beneath the rowan guarding the site, giving her life force to the tree. Was she desperate enough to pay that price?

Her fingers played with the ties of the pouch hanging from her belt, loosening and tightening them by turns. Her heartbeat quickened as the sun and the moon pulled on her blood while inching ever closer to alignment.

The plain’s ancient magic hummed around her, forcing a decision. The trees warding the site would do so only once without demanding payment. She couldn’t come back at the solstice and try again. If she walked away without making this last attempt, she’d have to find another sacred place.

It had taken her six years to find this one.

Roisin climbed to her feet and shook out her skirts. She touched her palm to the rowan’s bark, murmuring her thanks for its protection, before she plucked three leaves from the nearest branch and tucked them into her pouch.

Time grew short. The magic of earth and sky rose all around her, and Roisin cut a switch of hawthorn, feeling its power tingle in her fingertips.

Her fear urged her to turn her back and walk away.

She wouldn’t. Not after she’d gathered salt, thorn, and quicksilver to shape a doorway, and her life force to turn them into a key.

Roisin breathed through the fear and returned to the circle of stones. She used the salt to draw a threshold and laid the hawthorn on top for protection. Then she waited, heart beating like a drum, and hands sweat-slick on the vial of quicksilver.

She felt the approaching equinox as a pull in her innermost core growing and growing like a rope stretched taut and then…it stopped.

She smashed the vial of quicksilver against the stones, nearly blinded by the flash of bright white light.

Squinting in the afterglow, Roisin saw the outline of a doorway shimmer into view and took a step forward, hands outstretched.

The outline vanished.

She took another step and touched cold stone, leaned against it. Her last attempt to open a gateway had failed, her strength insufficient. She’d traded half her life and she wouldn’t go home.

Weariness crept over her like tar spilled from a barrel and she staggered from the circle, afraid to be caught unprotected in the sacred space now she had no business to be there.

Setting one foot in front of the other took greater and greater effort, the short distance to the rowan tree appearing like a trek across a vastness. Roisin gritted her teeth and kept walking. The rowan welcomed her with a rustle of its tiny leaves, and Roisin settled against the trunk and closed her eyes, too exhausted to be afraid of death.

***

1200 years later

Roisin had gone to sleep while the smell of budding green filled her nose and the days were growing longer. Now she woke in darkness to the scents of damp and mist, and the chill in the air raised goosebumps on her skin. She pushed herself upright, brushing moss and bracken off her form. No light came through the canopy of trees, not yet thinned by the onset of winter.

Roisin was thirsty and—even though she’d slept for six months—exhaustion weighed on her like a leaden cloak. Her energy would return when the sun rose, but the bone-deep exhaustion wouldn’t leave. It was the price she paid for her failure, and until she returned home, she was locked into this cycle of sleep and searching, sleep and searching, with no end or relief in sight.

The mist weaving through the trees condensed into drizzle. Roisin turned her face up to the spray, grateful for the touch of moisture after a long, hot summer.

The rain brought memories of stuffy rooms and dusty books penned by humans. Roisin had never given up hunting for her amulet, but only in the last three hundred years had she begun to research human writing. Most of the books dealing with fae lore were pure imagination. Some held tiny kernels of truth. And one book, rescued from a private collection in Westmoreland, had reminded her of a long-forgotten lesson.

Ye will need copper and gold to find the silver. That was the lore she’d been taught. She’d gone to sleep trying to recall reasons and means, but six months underground hadn’t produced a solution to the riddle.

Back in the spring, before she’d gone to sleep, her search had led her to a house on Richmond High Street. Half store, half dwelling, the house had stood empty since the death of its last owner at the beginning of the year. It might hold her salvation if only she could enter it.

She climbed to her feet and clothed herself with a thought.

She needed to search this house for one piece of silver. For that, she needed copper and gold.

The sun rose and her exhaustion receded. In twelve hundred years, she’d never been that close to her amulet. She would not lose that chance now.

“Copper and gold,” she told herself. “I need copper and gold to find the silver.”

She laid a hand on the rowan tree under which she had slept. “Thank you for your shelter and protection,” she said, before she turned and started walking.

***

Roisin leaned on sun-warmed stone and dangled her fingers in the fountain. Six months of sleep left her disoriented, short-tempered, and prone to take offence, but she’d learned that the quickest remedy was to be amongst people. Market Day in Richmond, bustling and cheerful, was an excellent cure for what ailed her.

She’d returned to her home the previous night, finding everything as she had left it. After drinking almost two gallons of water and spending half the night in the bath tub, she no longer felt like the dried-out husk she’d woken as.

Roisin had spent the morning wandering the town centre and the market, taking breakfast at a bakery, and lunch at a pub with outdoor seating. She poked her head into her favourite gallery and visited a few DIY and home décor shops, but even the latest interior design trends couldn’t hold her interest. The house at the end of the High Street called to her with an urgency she’d not felt before.

She’d seen the house built at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign. Back then, the store had been a haberdashery. Later, it had become a gentlemen’s outfitter. Roisin remembered a family of shop owners and a posse of hazel-eyed, brown-haired children. She’d been inside the shop many times, yet nothing had ever drawn her to the place.

Did that mean she was close to finding the copper and the gold she needed when—in all the years—she’d never unravelled the lore’s meaning?

She pushed away from the fountain and returned to wandering the market stalls, gaze drifting over artisan cheeses, bottles of sloe gin, and wooden chopping boards.

Magic brushed her nape.

Roisin didn’t dare move. She kept her eyes open, scanning the market, trying to find what had sparked her senses.

The cheesemaker in her green apron.

A fruit seller shouting about apples.

Customers queueing to buy spices.

Roisin’s gaze moved along the stalls until it alighted on a young man ringing up a sale, his hair a shimmering golden halo in a beam of sunlight. A little farther down the same row stood another young man with hair as bright as a copper pot.

Ye will need copper and gold to find the silver.

If she’d been younger, newer to this hidden life, Roisin would have screamed.

Instead, she said nothing. She memorised the sign over the market stall where the golden-haired young man sold ice cream before she followed the copper-headed human to find out who he was.