For Your Heart (Hill Dweller Retellings) (29 page)

    
The other woman clears her throat.  “I think such things may not appeal to one so young.”

    
The temptress touches her chin in thought.  “Oh, right.  Well, whatever little brave men want.  Sweets?  Toys?”

    
Yup, strangers offering candy.  These are definitely the bad people Mom and Dad warned me about.  I shake my head.  “No.  I’m okay.”  I turn to escape, but the temptress lady grabs hold of my shoulder.  Her fingers bite into my muscles, making me yelp and drop my hobby horse cowboy prop.  Pulling away, I stagger backward, losing my balance and thumping onto my butt.  She’s too strong for someone so frail looking.

    
Fear floods my veins, making my breath come hard.  For a long moment, I sit staring at the hobby horse in sudden mortification.  These people are not going to let me go.

    
Temptress lady crouches in front of me.  “Do not be ungracious, boy.  When a queen requests you in court, you don’t deny her.”

    
I scowl at her.  She’s crazy.  I roll onto my knees and try scrambling to my feet, but invisible hands grab my leg and haul me into the air where I twirl like a pinwheel.

    
Temptress fake laughs again.  “Naughty, naughty.  I shall have to give you a spanking.”

    
A pair of massive paw-like hands pluck me out of the air and plant me hard against beaten silver and hard leather.  Resorting to a method that’s none-too-brave but works, I cry out for help. 

    
No one hears me.  No one listens. 

    
“Do shut him up, I don’t want the humans hearing us,” Temptress says.

    
A fist smashes my cheek.  Pain splits my head making tears ooze from my eyes and blood seep from my nose.  All goes dark.

Time passes.  Days, weeks, months.  I don’t know how long.  I remain strong, but it’s hard.  I miss my parents, and I miss Jean.  Not knowing what happened to her eats at me every moment.  I left her.  I left her hurt and alone.  Granted, I wasn’t given a choice, but I keep thinking I should have done or said something differently.

    
“You’re not concentrating, Tamrin,” Kirithos, the man who knocked me unconscious back in Carver Hall Park, growls at me.

    
Annoyed, I throw down my practice sword.  I’ve been here long enough to learn where I am and what’s expected of me.  I’ve tried to escape numerous times, but it’s no use.  Roxel wants me here – insists I belong here.  She has changed me, made it so I wouldn’t fit in with normal people again if I tried.  I see and do things I never could do back home.  She tries to appeal to my eagerness to learn and be strong by sending me to school and providing me with mentors like Kirithos.  She’s trying to win me over.  It’s not working.  I want to go home.

    
“Pick it up, boy.”

    
I cross my arms.  “I’m done.”

    
Kirithos comes at me, looking intent as any seven-foot-tall-three-hundred-pounds-of-muscle-man set on beating the snot out of a bratty little boy can.

    
“Oh, Kiri, let him be,” Roxel calls, sitting and weaving with Twyla.  “Go elsewhere, you smell of swine.”  She waves a hand in dismissal.

    
Kirithos, fuming, leaves the practice yard.  When he’s gone, Roxel calls to me.  “Come, love, sit and bide by me.”  She pats the cushion beside her.

    
Rolling my eyes, I collect my practice sword and go to my captor.  I slump on the cushion, making a point to slouch and look rude.  I swipe at the pixies swarming in the drooping limbs of the plants hanging from the curving arms of the pergola.

    
Twyla makes a hissing noise of disapproval, but I don’t care.

    
Roxel doesn’t look up from the loom.  It thwacks and rattles, colors sliding up and over, up and over as the arms rock back and forth.  “You’re very strong of heart, Tamrin.”

    
I lift my chin and look away.  Roxel has lots of pretty words.  Pretty words, pretty favors, pretty aspirations.  I don’t understand it.  She kidnapped me just to have someone to spoil like a son.

    
She continues, not looking at me.  “You’ll be a great knight one day.  Tall, strong, handsome, brave, and noble.  These seeds grow within you, but your heart is unfocused.”

    
I stare at the meadow beyond the practice yard.  “I want to go home.”

    
“You are homesick.”  She says it like the truth it is.  “Homesick and heartsick, I think.”

    
I bite my cheek.  Heartsick?  I touch my chest.  Is that the dull, heavy ache?  The longing?  I close my eyes and think of Jean.  Am I ever gonna see her again?  Is she okay?  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad if I knew I hadn’t left her there to die.  How could I do that to her?

    
“Tamrin.”  Roxel’s voice draws me back.  She’s staring at me, expression stern.  “Without focus, you won’t excel as I want you to – not like this.  Your heart isn’t in it.”

    
I swallow.  “I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

    
She smiles prettily, the false smile I hate.  “You needn’t worry, my love.  I’ll solve your problems for you.”

    
I don’t like that tone.  Grimacing, I say, “How?”

    
She shrugs and goes back to her loom.  “You’re mine, Tamrin.  Your heart should be mine as well, don’t you agree?”

    
I frown.  “No.  I don’t.”

    
She doesn’t respond, just continues smiling.  I stare at her long and hard, confused and frightened by what she must mean.  Eventually, the heat of the afternoon sun becomes too much to bear and we escape into the cool halls of the summer palace and nap for the afternoon.

    
When I wake, life continues as always.  I get up and do Roxel’s bidding as I have done since the cradle.  Day in, day out, I do as my queen asks of me.  Often, I sit and think fondly of my childhood memories – of Twyla holding me, of rainstorms in my room, of the fleeting memory of my
Aos Si
parents.  I apply myself to my studies.  I flirt with the
bean-sidhes
in court.  I love Otherworld.  I love
Tír na nÓg
and the Summer palace.  But mostly, I love my queen and will do anything she asks of me. 

    
When I am old enough – grown tall and strong, brave and honorable, a knight of the Summer Court – Roxel invites me to her chambers and asks of me something I’ve never done.  But I do it because I want to please the woman who has given me everything.

I come awake as if from a night of wine and merry-making.  I’m sluggish and I ache.  But it’s a good ache.  A good ache to accompany a troubled mind.  What strange dreams I’ve had. 

    
I reach up and press my palm into my eye.  It comes away wet.  These dreams…these memories…Are they mine?  They felt real, exactly alike in form and certainty.  I know them on a familiar level all my own.  But how can that be?  In one, the boy knows himself as Timmy and in the other the boy knows himself as Tamrin, but both know of Jean.  This Bend of Leah’s is out of control.  Even I’m uncertain of where the line between me and Timmy is.

    
Shivering, I draw Jean’s body tight against my own and bury my face in her hair, wanting to hide from how Timmy is slowly pressing into my mind, trying to possess me.

    
And I realize this is not right.

    
Not right at all.

    
Jean is in my arms, just as I want her to be…But her skin and this familiar feeling of being spent and happy?

    
Another dream?

    
I push up on one arm.  Woods.  All around us woods, the early evening twilight breaking through the leaves above.  We’re in Carver Hall Park.  With a gentle moan, Jean shifts, turning against me so her flesh caresses mine and I know this is no dream.  I look down at her and then myself, a lump gathers in my throat, tightening all the way to my stomach making a knot of dread pull at my intestines.  Having Jean here is not a dream and neither was knowing her body.

    
What have I done?

    
What did we do?

    
Confused, I cast about, searching for some indicator as to what might have driven me to break a vow I’d solemnly made to her.  She didn’t want this.  She wanted to wait.  It was a decision made on her faith…Something important to her. 

    
I put my hand to my head, trying to calm my racing thoughts.  So why did I do it?  Why did she beg me to do it?  What changed her mind?  And why didn’t I demand to know these things before I so joyously partook in the breaking of her maidenhead?  I stare down at the blood on my thighs.  Where did
my
honor go? 

    
I draw away from her, a sick feeling overlapping the elation at knowing I had her.  While what I remember tells me it was consensual and beautiful for both of us, something about the recollection is wrong…The memory is tainted with the aura of
Aos Si
Talent and the scent of Roxel…Mist…

    
Roxel was here.  I can tell by the scent…Roses.

    
Roses…

    
Gasping, I cast about for my bag.  There.  I crawl to it and praying to everything I know, pull open the flap and look inside.  Still here.  The rose is here.  Inside the bag, there are more petals than ever before.  Concerned, I lift the rose and touch the remaining petals.  One breaks away, the breeze catching it so that it floats across the distance between me and Jeanette and lands in her hair.  As I slide back to her, reaching for the petal, another dream memory flashes before my mind’s eye.

Someone is dabbing at my forehead.  I open my eyes and squint, trying to see.

    
“Honestly, he’s such a brute.  Look at my poor TimTam’s beautiful face.”

    
I go still.  I know that name.  And I know that voice.  I bat the hand away and rub at my eyes until I see clearly.  I’m in a big room with random, odd columns.  There’s a huge golden chair sitting alone on a raised area at one end of the room and here, where I am, a massive bed surrounded with tapestries and draping bits of fabric.  There’s a pair of open glass doors beside me.  Hot humid air leaks in, making the potted roses on the balcony sway and leak their perfume over me.

    
The Temptress is sitting beside me, and the other woman from the group of mounted riders stands behind her, holding a bowl of water.  I push myself up and stare back and forth between them.  They don’t look how I remember them.  There are weird markings that look like tattoos – on the face of the one with the bowl, on the bare leg of the Temptress…and both really do glow.

    
“Who the hell are you people?” I ask, then realizing I don’t really care.  “What do you want with me?  How do you know my name?”

    
Temptress smiles patiently.  “He’s a strong, smart boy.  This was a good pick, I think.”

    
The other one nods.  “Yes, Milady.”

    
Temptress sits back and puts the cloth she’d been using to dab at my forehead in the bowl of water.  “My name is Roxel.  This is Twyla.”

    
I shake my head.  The room spins and my stomach churns.  “I don’t care.  Take me home.”

    
She makes a false sad face.  “I can’t do that, TimTam Rhynn.  You’re mine now.”

    
I scowl at her.  “Don’t call me that.  Only Jean calls me that.”

    
She looks puzzled.  “Is that not your name?  The faeries tell me you answer to the name of TimTam.  And are you not the son of Rhynn?  The man who tends the forest and killed my stag?”

    
I narrow my eyes at her.  How does she know this stuff?  “My name is Timothy Tamson Rhynn.”

    
“Timothy?”  She wrinkles her nose and sticks her tongue out.  “I dislike that name.  I shall call you Tam.  Tam Rhynn.”  She daintily crosses her hands over her knees and gives a slight nod.  “Yes.  I like that.”  She glances over her shoulder and addresses the woman with the bowl.  “Let it be known.”

    
Twyla, the bowl lady, bows and disappears from the room.

    
“You can’t just change my name, lady.”

    
“Oh,” she breathes, looking pleased.  “Look at you being courtly already.”

    
I give her the whatever face Mom always yells at me for.

    
She straightens and squares her shoulders.  “I shall tell you, Tam Rhynn my ward, I can do anything I like because I’m the queen.”

    
I scoff.  “You?  A queen?  You can’t be queen, this is America.  We have a president.”

    
“Nay, boy.  This is
Tír na nÓg
and I am the Summer Queen.  Here, I am law and what I say goes.”