The Broken Court by Cari Lyn Jones

Author:Cari Lyn Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Romance/Fantasy, Fiction/Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, Found family, Later in Life Love
Publisher: Lapis Moon Publishing
Published: 2022-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Iv

Lost Ones

Summer flowers wreathed around Winter’s head while the angry moon looked down from above. Contagious fogs crept across the land, their cold tendrils slipping through windows and under doors. Thom stood, dry-eyed, before the door to Underhill while the trees around him cried, their leaves falling like tears. The mournful ringing of the hedge bells grew louder and louder…

It was the sound of ringing that pulled her from her dreams. She woke to a cold house and a wide-open front door. The bedding beside her was empty of the hound who had been curled up there when she had fallen asleep. And for some reason she could not fathom, that fact made her angry.

As it turned out, the insistent sound she heard was not coming from the hedge bells at all, but rather from the clapperless ones encircling her wrist. She got to her feet stiffly and made her way to the open door. In its shadow she found the hound, his glowing eyes hooded as he stared out into the icy fog that crept over the ground. She could see Thom beyond him, standing at the garden gate. The breath in her throat froze when she saw the creature waiting just on the other side of him.

The hind’s coat, as white as a budding hawthorn, shone bright beneath the veiled moon. She stood there, a dream made flesh, her unearthly beauty shattered by the very human despair in her wide eyes. The mist, in its kindness, rose up to envelope the exiled queen, hiding her from mortal sight and the eld woman’s pitying gaze.

She left the doorway and made her way out towards where Thom still stood at the gate, unwrapping the shawl from around herself as she went. There was a quiet rustle of feathers before a familiar weight settled on her shoulder.

“So the Fairy Queen haunts him still,” Hoax observed, preening back a strand of her hair. “I’m sorry to leave you, my prickly witch, but I feel that this is something He must know about.” And she knew that the ‘He’ the phooka spoke of was the Goblin King.

“Of course,” she said, wrapping her shawl around Thom’s shoulders. The raven hopped from her shoulder to the gate, then set off, winging his way through the trees and out over the moors.

Turning Thom gently around, she guided him back towards the house.

When the morning sun finally rose, it was greeted by a world garbed in icy splendor. The red roses growing at her window were edged in frost, as was the rest of the garden, each leaf and petal laced in sparkling white. The fog from the night before still gathered in the hollows of the ground, little clouds come down to earth. It was beautiful but boded ill for the year to come.

Thom sat amidst the frigid beauty, barefooted and without a coat, singing to the wind and laughing at jokes only he could hear. There was nothing that she could do about it short of dragging him inside by his collar.

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