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Praise for Seraphim by Michele Hauf

“A rich medieval tapestry woven of fantastic tales of revenge, women warriors, faeries and demon fire. Michele Hauf captures your attention with vivid, powerful, sexy characters. What I wouldn’t do for a man like Dominique San Juste!”

—Award-winning author Lyda Morehouse

“From her first word to her last, Hauf weaves a magic spell. You’ll root for Seraphim and sigh over Dominique as they risk heaven and hell in this heart-stopping adventure.”

—Emma Holly, author of Hunting Midnight

“This book kicks butt—in a lush and lyrical way.”

—Susan Sizemore, author of the “Laws of the Blood” series

“Michele Hauf has taken the ‘Fallen Angels’ myth and embellished it with many a dark and inventive twist, and created Seraphim, a riveting story of a young woman’s quest for revenge and a destiny chosen for her long before her birth. Seraphim is also brimming with intriguing and very strong characters, along with a rich and satisfying blend of medieval history and fantasy. Fine writing only adds more elegance to the story and I look forward to book two of Michele Hauf’s ‘Changeling’ series, due out in 2005.”

—Bookloons

“Seraphim is stunning, an utterly gripping, compelling read that plunged me into fantasies of long ago and far away. Michele Hauf is a consummate pro at the top of her game. If this is any indication, LUNA Books is off to an industry-rocking start!”

—Maggie Shayne, author of Edge of Twilight

Gossamyr
Michele Hauf

For all who Believe

Enchantment is Faery’s raison d’être.

Many moons ago—during a blue moon’s reign—a rift was

cleaved between Faery and the Otherside.

No one-man, beast, or fée—can say how or why,

Only, the act decimated a great source of Enchantment.

The curtain between Faery and the Otherside has become transparent;

fée travel back and forth with ease;

mortals, once banned from Faery after one visit, find return less difficult.

It is a challenge to keep that which should not be in Faery out. And vice versa.

Time wends forward, widdershins, and thus.

Such conditions shall remain until a champion

can restore the Enchantment complete.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

PROLOGUE

Faery—betwixt and between

The revenant swooped down from out of nowhere. Wide gaping maws, fanged and stretched to maul, loosed a shrill cry, shaking Gossamyr de Wintershinn from her petrified stance. She stumbled backward and landed atop the blue marble floor of the circular castle tower. Eyes fixed to the danger, Gossamyr groped blindly at her side, slapping the stone, in seek of her fighting staff.

The very flesh had been stripped from her attacker’s bones. Swathes of tattered muscle clung to the skeleton. Red glowed within the skull’s eyes, molten and dripping, as if blood. The pellicle wings, void of lustrous color, were but a ghostly mesh of flight flapping madly between the shoulder bones. It looked like a winged one—a fée—but it could not possibly be. Never before had she seen the like.

Be this one of the relentless creatures that had been tormenting Faery for a summer of moons?

Tattered wings siphoned the air in foul hisses. The wraithlike thing lunged. A skeletal arm slashed out. Claws cut the air—and flesh.

Gossamyr stroked a finger across her cheek; slippery blood flowed from the cut.

Whence came this creature? ’Twas full sun. She had been tending her own pleasures, looking over the muster of peacocks trampling the wild rose garden below that hugged the inner curtain wall. Why did it attack her?

Shuffling backward, her hand slapped upon something—her fighting staff.

With a hue and cry to strip the senses, the creature again struck. Gossamyr dived to the right. Gripping the applewood staff and, facing down, she kicked back and up. Her bare toes connected with bone. The creature shrieked as it spun into the crystal-white sky.

Pushing up and landing a ready stance, Gossamyr swung the longstaff to mark her periphery—the applewood sang a battle cry—then prepared for a return attack. Keenly, she marked her surroundings for additional threat.

Skeletal arms slashed the air. Bone fingers curled into claws as the creature rushed her. She swung hard, using the force of the staff and counterweighting her body into the defense. The end of her weapon cracked skull. Bits of the creature’s head scattered like a harvest gourd cleaved by elf-shot.

Landing the swing, she steadied her bearing. No time to think, only react. Deft twists of her fingers spun the weapon in a hissing figure of eight as she turned to challenge the opponent. Now headless, the creature hung before her, arms spread—yet the wings flapped. Still alive. If bones could harbor life.

“Remarkable.” Gossamyr stepped back. How to defeat the thing? “Can I kill it?”

“Either that or be killed!” came the unbidden answer.

The stiff barbs of a feathered cape stroked her cheek. The shing of an obsidian blade drawn from a hip sheath sliced the air. One slash of the fire-forged sabre sectioned the creature at the waist, dropping the leg bones to the tower floor in a clatter.

“Shinn—”

“Stand back!” Shinn swung and hacked through the rib cage of the creature. “These things don’t know how to die!”

Frayed wings—severed from the skeletal body—furiously beat the air above Shinn, her father. The dauntless fée lifted his blade up under the left wing, cleaving it asunder, and brought the blade down through the right wing. He spun toward Gossamyr and shouted, “There!”

Pulled from her awestruck stare, Gossamyr jumped as a foot trimmed with muscle shreds stamped her toes. Together, the legs of the creature attacked. Sweeping her staff low, she dashed it across the anklebones, sending them crashing against the marble embrasures. Reduced to dust on impact, the shattered bone glinted as it floated to the tower floor.

“What in all of Faery is it?” Gossamyr called as she swung and caught a disembodied arm with the tip. Fingers clenched the end of her staff. Shake as she might, the evil fist clung. “Shinn?”

Residue from the crushed creature glimmered in a mist about Shinn as his sabre obliterated the wings. “A revenant!” the implacable fée called.

Ill clad for battle, Shinn’s everyday vestments of flowing arachnagoss tunic and elaborately stitched hosen would not protect him from injury. But he did not waver, instead standing proud and defying the thing with a swing of his sabre. He dived to avoid the other arm as it sailed toward him, fingers fisted.

“Let me to it!” Gossamyr cried. An audacious smile crooked her mouth. She had trained for this sort of challenge. Opportunity had finally fallen to her. “I’ve been craving some fight.”

She rushed the attacking arm and connected wood to bone in a hollow crack. “Yes!”

The return swing of her staff proved the attack had not jarred the creepy passenger. Gossamyr slammed the carved applewood upon the tower floor. Finger bones gave loose, but as quickly, scrambled across her toes and gripped her ankle, shaking her off balance. She landed the marble floor with a jaw-loosening dumpf. A skeletal hand scurried up her leg and over her hip moving farther.

Wheezing breaths gasped from her mouth. Dropping her staff, Gossamyr clutched the hand that squeezed about her throat. Probing fingertips threatened to pierce her flesh. She struggled to wrestle the thing off, but it possessed strength immeasurable. It was futile to fight, to kick at the air and pray she connected with some part of an attacker that just wasn’t there.

A murky blackness muddied her thoughts. Shinn—where was he? Needles of numbness loosened her grip on the hand. Her shoulders dropped. She could see nothing, smell not the scent of fresh morning dew and lush rose oil, nor sense the smooth polish of the marble beneath her fingers. An angry peacock mewl echoed Gossamyr’s longing to cry out.

As death crept closer one final sound summoned her audacious smile. The shrill of finely honed obsidian cutting through bone.

ONE

High above the lush cypress and laburnum treetops that encircled the curtain wall Gossamyr followed her father through the carved marble loggia. The castle she had lived in all her life nested at the peak of the Spiral forest as if a bloom upon a verdant bouquet. Pendulous yellow flowers hung heavily on the laburnum that grew only at the top of the forest, contrasting marvelously with the castle. The blue marble was deeply veined with streaks of midnight and palest sky; it mimicked both day and night and shimmered with a fée dust of the ages.

The village of Glamoursiège fit like a twist about the marble screw of the Spiral. Blue marble segued to granite and finally to sand at its lowest where it met the grounds in a mire of marsh and reticulated tree roots. For the entirety was laced with the roots of cypress, ash and hornbeam. The Edge—very few places where the trees did not grow—was ever to be avoided, at least by the un-winged ones.

“I can do this, Shinn! You cannot deny I am the only one able.”

Shinn moved swiftly toward the south tower, speaking his impatience with his strides. “Many are capable,” he called back to Gossamyr.

“Capable, yes,” Gossamyr had to agree.

Faery worked counter to the Otherside, and a war of almost one hundred mortal years had been keeping the mortals to blood and wrath, while Faery enjoyed fellowship and peace. Tribe Glamoursiège had been formed of trooping warriors before the great Peace, a Peace that had existed since long before Gossamyr’s birth.

How long? Time indeterminable, Shinn often answered when Gossamyr would question, for Time was of no concern to the fée.

Though Faery claimed Peace there were still the occasional rises amongst the various tribes. Shinn’s troops were indeed capable and, with the recent arrival of the revenants, increasingly vigilant.

Gossamyr picked up her pace, as well her confidence. “If not for this very challenge, what then has all my training been for? Naught? I am as skilled as any in your troop, male or female.”

“Child of mine, you know well you have been groomed to sit the Glamoursiège throne,” Shinn said over his shoulder. “It is not an idle, benevolent woman who can rule in my absence, but one who possesses all the martial skills I have taught you, and the mind for diplomacy, honor and valor.”

“I will not neglect my duties to Glamoursiège, but…I want this, Shinn. It is such an opportunity!” She hurried up beside him. Where did he go in such a hurry?

“Convince me it wise to send my daughter on such a singular and dangerous quest.”

Ah, there, he had not given an unequivocal no. This gave Gossamyr hope.

“Your fée warriors will not survive the Red Lady’s seductive allure. As you’ve told me, she seduces Disenchanted fée into her clutches. They have not the fortitude to resist!”

Any fée who left Faery for the Otherside risked Disenchantment. Necessary trips to the mortal realm were swift, coached in the knowledge that glamour dissipates quickly and Time could not be trusted. A risky venture for a fée warrior.

A risk chosen by some.

There were those rogue fée, who, seduced by the lure of the mortal, and that intricate city called Paris, chose to remain on the Otherside. To stay meant sure Disenchantment; a condition that saw the fée completely drained of glamour, and often they lost their wings to a shriveling malady attributed to the baneful touch from a mortal. Enchantment gone, they became nothing more than a shell that survived as any mortal. Return to Faery was difficult but not impossible. But never again could the Disenchanted regain Enchantment whole.

Of course, one did not have to be fée to fall under the seductive spell of the Otherside. Gossamyr had lost her mother to the mortal passion ten midsummers earlier. The lure of the unknown was ever beguiling, but Veridienne de Wintershinn had always known the Otherside, for she had been mortal complete.

Shinn stopped abruptly, causing his daughter to collide against his back. Savoring the faintest scent of hyacinth that marked her father, Gossamyr stepped back.

The south tower overlooked a riot of white roses and speckled foxglove in the gardens below. Overhead, the carved marble openwork cast a lattice of shadows across Shinn’s tightened jaw. His blazon, an iridescent tribal marking, curled down his chin and neck and across his upper chest, and shimmered in the blocked patches of sunlight. Glamoursiège blazons showed on neck and upper extremities; placement varied from tribe to tribe.

For all his stern posture and commanding demeanor—even the recent announcement that his marshal at arms should marry Gossamyr—Shinn would ever occupy a soft place in Gossamyr’s heart. All planes and hard slopes his face, only in his eyes could she ever find compassion. And such a find was a rarity to be hoarded. Shinn’s manner switched from cool to disinterested, and then suddenly to genuine concern with such ease. One moment he was gentle and attentive, the next, the battle commander wore a fierce mien. Gossamyr had not known him to be any other way. Attribute to his trying history, she could only assume. They had both loved and lost. Love being one of those mutable words the fée toyed with in exchange for lust, hunger or envy.

“I listened last night to the council’s discussion,” she said. Shinn required she sit as a silent member at council, for her future demanded she take an active role in Glamoursiège matters. “The revenants’ presence in Faery increases. But I was surprised to learn about the rift.” She bent to meet Shinn’s straying gaze. “It has never before been discussed by council. Why did you not tell me of it sooner?”

“It is just something that is…known. The rift has existed since before your birth.”

“That long? And all this time you haven’t once thought to—”

“It has never been in my mind, Gossamyr. Until recently. There are none who can name the reason for the rift cleaved between Faery and the Otherside; only we know it exists. Such a tear in the fabric that separates our worlds allows the revenants to return with ease. I am sure I mentioned it when I explained the revenants to you.”

“You did not.” Hand to her hip, she paced in short turns, pointing the floor with the tip of her staff. Shinn had explained the revenants two midsummers earlier when she had witnessed a natural fée death. Normally the fée essence leaves the body and experiences the final twinclian. But there are those fée—those of darker natures—who do not twinclian to the Celestial. Instead, their essence merely pops, and the revenant follows, its destination—the Infernal. It is a rarity.

The sudden appearance of revenants in Faery—not newly emerged from a natural fée death—had given clue someone on the Otherside was stealing the essences. And so was discovered the Red Lady.

As frustrated as Gossamyr was to just now learn something she should have known about, she took it all in. Knowledge was required for a successful mission. “Still, I do not understand why, or how, those skeleton creatures return to Faery. Are they not dead?”

“Did that creature look dead?”

Actually, yes. However, not if death implied stillness. “So it was alive, yet…I don’t understand.”

“That thing I killed—”

“We killed.”

“Yes. We.” A nod verified her participation in the event. But too brief, Shinn’s reassuring smile. “The Red Lady stole its essence, leaving the revenant in limbo. Somehow she can feed off the essence of another—the essence holds the former body’s glamour—delaying her Disenchantment interminably. The revenant is a shade of the fée that cannot find final rest without the essence, so it returns to Faery in seek of a new essence.”

“But why Faery? Can it not locate a fée on the Otherside?”

“It is compelled back to Faery. The rift literally sucks them back home. I don’t believe it could remain in the Otherside if it wished.”

“This essence…” Gossamyr leaned against a blue machicolation, tapping the cool marble with a thumb. “When I witnessed the fée death something blue rose from the body. Is it something the Red Lady can draw out and…possess?”

“Yes and no. Inside the body it is our very being. Outside the body, well, it either twinclians or it pops.” The elegant fée lord tilted his head to look upon his daughter. A sigh hung in the air between them, a resolute pause. “The essence is akin to…a mortal soul.”

“Ah.”

There was so little Gossamyr understood about mortals. About that part of herself.

Her mother had been mortal, but Veridienne’s sickness—the mortal passion—had kept her focus from her family and eventually lured her home to the Otherside, leaving Gossamyr alone to comfort her heartbroken fée father. And to ever wonder. Why had not her mother taken her daughter with her? Surely she might have wished to raise her own child? Had it been so easy to leave her family behind for the mortal world? She had once begged to stay in Faery—but that desire hadn’t lasted long.

Of course, in terms of emotional distance, Veridienne had much over Shinn. Likely, she had not seen beyond her own self-satisfying desires.

Following her mother’s abrupt departure, Gossamyr had vowed not to become mired in her own selfish wants. And what better way to prove it than to track the Red Lady and protect Faery from further torment?

So this sought-after essence was like a mortal soul. What did it mean to have a soul? And mortal, at that. Gossamyr had known no other way but of the fée. Fathered by Shinn, would she possess both a soul and an essence?

“There are things I would have liked to give you,” Shinn said, looking off into the sky, avoiding her gaze. “Truths.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There is no time for confessions. The revenant is single-minded,” Shinn said, “focused on obtaining that which was stolen from it. So much so, it will kill to obtain the final twinclian.” He focused briefly on her cut cheek, but gave her injury no verbal regard. The fée were not so emotionally delicate as mere mortals. “They are becoming more frequent, the encounters. Streklwood was attacked last eve.”

“The cook?”

Shinn nodded.

A lump the size of an uncooked goose egg formed in Gossamyr’s throat at memory of this morning’s still-shelled offering. She’d thought to complain, to send her maid, Mince, marching down to the kitchen…

“The revenant must be reduced to a fine glimmer,” Shinn continued. “For to leave a single bone intact will not defeat the creature’s quest for wholeness. They are difficult to kill.”

“I noticed. But it felt good, the challenge.”

Avoiding his daughter’s enthusiastic declaration Shinn strode the curve of the tower, hands akimbo, his raven-feather cape flitting gently above the length of his folded wings.

This demesne of Faery was not so much ruled by Shinn as protected and guided—a position Gossamyr knew she would one day fill. Descended from a long line of trooping fée, Shinn had once commanded the Glamoursiège musters. He’d become lord over Glamoursiège following his father’s death. And he’d trained his only daughter to follow in his footsteps, should he cease to stand upon the Glamoursiège throne.

Much as she did not like to consider that fate, Gossamyr realized it would happen some day. And she was prepared to take Shinn’s place, physically. Mentally, she wondered if her lack of battle experience would make her a weaker ruler. She could sit council and talk politics with the best. But would they respect one without time spent in the musters?

Pressing her palms to a cool marble crenel cut into the tower, Gossamyr leaned forward. A swirl of white cottonwood kites billowed out from the dense forest spiraling the castle. Laughter smaller than a bird’s tweedle glittered in the air like sunshine upon purling waters—a few skyclad piskies clung to the tails of the seed-kites, stealing a ride.

Despite the fées’ frustrating lack of regard for Time, she did know it governed the Otherside. Veridienne had been the one to explain to her how the mortal realm used Time to measure everything. During that conversation, she’d told Gossamyr she was eight years in measurement, and that a year could be marked once every mortal midsummer. Which meant Gossamyr was twenty-one mortal years now. It filled her with pride to know that one mortal measurement, but she did not mention it to Shinn. The fée did not measure a lifetime with tangible numbers of years. Once on the Otherside, the fée struggled against Time, Veridienne had said. Time stole Enchantment.

To race against Time would afford a challenge.

Faery needed a champion to defeat this vicious succubus.

A thump to her chest thudded against the arachnagoss-stuffed pourpoint Gossamyr wore when practicing—which was more often than not. “You know I am fit for this mission,” she said with conviction.

She had absorbed Shinn’s lessons on the martial arts until he had declared her more skilled than he. Since childhood her father had honed her skills to counter the true glamour birth had denied. (She had a bit; her blazon shimmered as bright as any other.) But she knew he would balk. Always Shinn had forbidden her from visiting the Otherside. (Forbid was a favorite word of Shinn’s.) Forbidden to journey beyond the marsh roots, forbidden to take the sinister curve to market, forbidden to court a Rougethorn, forbidden to even suggest a visit to the Otherside.

Mortals who left Faery could return, but their swift loss of Enchantment—and the fact they could never again regain such Enchantment—made their return visit to Faery dangerous and unthinkably fleeting.

Time, Gossamyr thought, the true evil.

But Gossamyr was only half mortal. Might she risk a trip to the Otherside and then return without fear of never regaining her Enchantment? Shinn twinclianed there often.

“And if you look beyond my skills,” she said, “there is the obvious—my mortal blood. The Red Lady is not interested in mortals, or females, for that matter.”

“But—”

“I am not a man. I can easily—”

“Gossamyr.”

“—gain her lair and take her out!”

Gossamyr twisted her neck to find the glint in Shinn’s vivid violet eyes. The trace of a grin bracketed his pale mouth. Always his emotion manifested in small measure.

Reaching for the applewood staff—her vade mecum—she turned from Shinn, spun the weapon in her fingers, then swung it out before her, spanning a full circle before she snapped it back to rest against her shoulder. She may not be able to shape-change or twinclian at sign of danger, but Shinn had made sure his half-blood daughter could stand and fight. Much as he forbade her to participate in the Glamoursiège tournaments, she had managed a few on the sly.

Gossamyr had developed a penchant for adventure. Danger even. Unfortunately danger had eluded her. Until now.

The thought of this mission verily sizzled inside her. She wanted this! For many reasons. But fore, she wanted to protect her homeland from the threat of the revenants.

“It is the mortal passion, be that so?” Shinn’s quiet words made Gossamyr wince. “It blinds you to the real danger.”

“But I crave danger!”

He caught the end of her staff as she swung it in declaration. The tension strumming from end to end of the staff—Gossamyr’s grip to Shinn’s—felt palpable. Unwilling to concede, she lifted her chin defiantly.

“You have not experienced real danger.” Her father’s stern tone curtailed her swagger a bit. “Bogies and hobs—”

“And that core worm a few days earlier! The thing spat dirt balls the size of a spriggan’s head.”

Shinn turned a wry smirk upon her. “Gossamyr, core worms do not spit.”

“It was spitting at me.”

“Think about it, daughter. How is it a worm exudes dirt from its body?”

“Well, it—” Throws up casts. Oh. She hadn’t thought of that. So the thing had been—Ah. “Don’t you trust I’ve the ability? You have trained me for this opportunity.”

Her father released the end of her staff with a gentle shove. “You are skilled, this I know.”

“Then I am ready. I will return to you—”

“Will you?” So much unspoken in those two words. And the sigh that followed.

“Yes. Of…of course I will return.”

Did he worry that her mortal blood would prevent her safe return? Gossamyr had ever coached herself to resist the mortal passion. If it had seduced her mother, she, as well, risked such temptation, for Veridienne’s blood coursed through her veins instead of Shinn’s ichor.

Or was it that he could not abide her to leave him? The pain of losing Veridienne had changed Shinn, closed his heart. Emotion was difficult to mine from the stalwart fée. Gossamyr would not bring further heartache to her father.

And yet, Shinn had bruised her heart with his own cruel indifference. The memory of a Rougethorn’s kiss would for ever live in Gossamyr’s being, and for evermore close her heart to the mutable love faeries feared.

But it was all for naught. Love was not to be hers. Shinn had already announced her engagement to a most frustrating man, his marshal at arms, Desideriel Raine. Frustrating to Gossamyr’s heart, but certainly deserving where skill and knowledge of the Glamoursiège musters were concerned. When Shinn had first suggested such over a meal the diffident fée had suppressed a sneer as he’d looked across the table to Gossamyr. She had read the young warrior’s look—she is not true fée. The humiliation had prompted her to excuse herself before the final flower course.

She was perfectly capable of ruling Glamoursiège on her own, but tradition required marriage—marriage being reserved for royalty and the upper-caste lords and ladies. And, Gossamyr suspected, Desideriel would represent true fée blood when all in Glamoursiège merely tolerated Gossamyr’s half blood.

“Truth,” Shinn said.

Drawn from her troubling thoughts, Gossamyr approached Shinn.

Truth? Studying the sun-laced tower floor, the blue veins purling through the marble like cold blood, Gossamyr vacillated on admitting the truth. A truth that sat in her heart like the pulses of mortal Time that fascinated her so. How to do it gently?

“Truth,” she murmured. An exhale released reluctance. “I do long to visit the Otherside. You know that.” She met Shinn’s gaze, half-concealed by a fall of his long raven hair. He sought the truth of her, and yet he would hide behind his own hard emotions. “I want to understand that part of my heritage most alien to me. I want to…experience.”

She followed Shinn’s pace to the tower’s edge. The evening primrose that grew in the roots attracted night moths, which then attracted frogs. He nodded. “And find.”

Frustration, muted and held back far too long, oozed throughout her. He would not close out her desires. Not this time. Even more, Gossamyr would have her father know her heart. She whispered, “Love never dies, Shinn.”

“You think to know love?”

“I…yes.” And not the fickle love faeries know. “I know the fée cannot truly—”

Too fragile, the memory of Veridienne, to speak of it. And so Gossamyr would not. But what of her lover? The one her father had banished from her very arms? Then, he had claimed she could not begin to know love. Did they both fool the other with their secret longings for fulfillment?

To continue would gain her no ground.

“Here is my home, Shinn.”

“Yes, because you believe.”

Yes, yes. Always he repeated the mantra to her: Believe and you Belong. She believed. She belonged! Nothing could change that.

“Faery is your home,” he said. “Should you venture away…you must then return.”

To marry Desideriel was the unspoken part.

“Indeed. And my home is no longer safe unless someone stops the Red Lady. I want to help Faery. How will I ever stand in your place if there is naught a place to stand?”

The summer breeze lifted Shinn’s jet hair over his shoulders and twisted fine strands around the horns at his temples. Gossamyr read the pain in his tightened jaw. His own memories haunted. It had been much simpler for her to place aside the memories of an always-distant mother.

“Grant me this opportunity, Shinn. I will return to you.”

“You vow to me?”

A father’s fear: violet eyes unwilling to focus upon hers; hyacinth, heady and oozing with an expectant pulse.

“You won’t lose me, Shinn. I vow it upon my fée essence.”

Gossamyr noted the twitch at the corner of her father’s mouth. Suppression always tightened his features. “This mission is deadly. Time cannot be tricked or defeated.”

A stab of her staff rang against the marble. “I am skilled.”

“A—” Shinn looked to the summer-pale sky “—champion is needed.”

A champion. “Oh.” Her bravado mellowed, Gossamyr bowed her head.

Indeed, a champion.

When had she ever proven herself in battle? Fighting dirt-casting core worms and drunken bogies? Night-creeping spriggans rarely offered more than a few moments’ struggle before scampering away from challenge. Werefrogs were vicious but stupid. Tournaments offered her but display of singular combat skills. There had not been opportunity for real challenge here in Glamoursiège. And she’d never been off the Spiral, not even a near fall from the Edge.