Gift first saw the lights as a baby. The faerie lights promised him a different life from the one he would know in the castle. But he couldn’t resist the pull of the mortal world. And that curiosity might change the course of not one, but two, kingdoms forever. An unforgettable story about magic, choices and love, which inspired part of the international bestselling Fey series.
“Changeling” by World Fantasy Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for free on this website for one week only. The story’s available on Kobo, Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and in other online retail stores.
Changeling
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The colored lights danced over his baptismal crib. He didn’t have words yet—he was only four days old—and the world still blurred before his half-opened eyes. He had been left alone for just a moment. His pagan mother, Queen in more than name, arguing with his Christian father over the necessity for the ceremony. The nurses huddled against the strong oak doors, listening through the cracks as the Queen vented her fears about the holy water about to be dripped on her son’s head.
The baby, whose father wanted to call him Sebastian and whose mother wanted to call him Elric, reached toward the lights, pudgy fingers grasping with the odd strength that only babies had. By accident, he touched a blue light and pulled his hand away with a startled cry. With the smell of sulfur and a bit of smoke, the blue light had become a tiny naked woman, with thin wings shimmering on her back.
“Got him,” she said.
The other lights stopped flickering and floated to her, each popping and becoming little naked people as well. The baby watched them, his fingers stinging with heat, and turning blue at the tips. He whimpered as the little people wove a gossamer net around him, but his nurses, intent on the argument that had just missed—by the width of a poorly aimed goblet—coming to blows, heard nothing. The net was soft and warm around him. As it lifted him in the air, his fingers stopped stinging, and he could almost smell his mother’s milk. The rocking and the milky scent soothed him. As the little people carried him to the window, he felt a calm he had never known before.
He turned his small head in its nest and looked down on his former bed. Another being had already taken his place, fingers curled over the baptismal blanket as if to hold it tight.
“Changeling,” the baby thought, marking not just his first word, but the arrival of his conscious being, born a full adult, thanks to the fairies’ magic touch.
***
Arianna opened the sash covering the window overlooking the garden. She climbed on the window seat, tucking her bare feet under her long dressing gown. Sunshine warmed her, and the scent of roses filled the room. She leaned back and closed her eyes, not wanting to see the tapestry-covered walls that she had seen every morning of her entire life. The thick featherbed leaning against the wall was rumpled—no one had come in yet to fix it or dress her—and the fire in the grate had burned to ash in the middle of the night.
But it didn’t matter. The morning was warm and beautiful, just as Mother had predicted it would be. Mother had been upset each time she spoke of the coronation: her bejeweled hands clasped as if in protest and her great green eyes filled with tears. She had never liked Elric, always claiming that he was not her child, something Father had laughed at, recalling the Great Baptism Debates and before that, the Awful Royal Birth Screams that had echoed from the chambers above.
Lord, how she missed her father. His calmness had been the perfect foil to their mother’s odd notions. Besides, he had always found time to spend with his children, even when their mother did not.
Mother had managed to stall the coronation for six weeks, but the Lords had finally overruled her. Mother had said nothing of it, but Arianna assumed that the Lords had threatened to overthrow her if she didn’t allow Elric to take the throne.
Not that Elric cared. Elric did whatever anyone told him, which should have pleased Mother, if she had wanted to retain power. All she had to do was order Elric to listen to no one but her.
Something rustled in the garden below. Arianna opened her eyes and leaned out, hoping to see a deer. She had seen one on the morning of her father’s death, and Mother had said that proved she had second sight, had seen the death warning, and failed to heed it. Arianna had said that it proved there was a deer in the garden and nothing else.
The rose bushes were in full flower. Red and white flowers stood out like drops of paint against the rich green leaves. Off to the side were the hedgerows, marking the delineation between the rose garden and the rest of the flowers. A bird burst out of a copse of trees to her left and Arianna started to turn away, thinking that was what she had heard, when she realized she had seen something else.
A shiny black head of hair half hidden among the cluster of white rose bushes in the center of the garden. She made herself turn back slowly, trying to ease the beating of her heart. When she was a child, her mother used to tell stories of tribes of evil woodsmen who beheaded children and used their hair for court wigs. Even though Nurse later explained that those were tales designed to keep the children on the palace grounds, part of Arianna still believed the stories to be true.
The hair moved, just a little, enough so that Arianna was convinced that it was attached to someone. She leaned out the window, careful to grip the cold stone sill. At that moment, the person stood, and she was startled to see Elric, surveying the garden as if he had never seen it before.
She pulled herself back enough to stay out of his view. Elric looked odd. His shoulders seemed wider, and his mouth had a curl to it, almost as if it would ease into a smile or snarl at any moment. His skin looked white in the morning sun and his black hair darker than it usually appeared.
But that wasn’t what surprised her. What surprised her were his eyes. They had a sharpness, an alertness, to them that she had never seen before.
“Elric!” she called. “You’re supposed to be in your rooms!”
He glanced up at her, eyes as wild as the deer she had seen, and then he shimmered and disappeared.
***
Caught. Seen by a switch of a girl no bigger than his aunt Fay. If they knew back at the Gates, they would laugh him from the Ring, and he would lose his chance to become king of them all at the Midsummer Frolic.
He crouched in the shadows of the trees. The girl still leaned from the window, searching the garden, trying to find him. She had a familiar look to her, a brightness to her eyes, that only those with a touch of Trueblood had. If she looked hard enough, she could probably see him, even now. Truebloods could not hide from each other.
She went back inside and he sighed with relief. He had been a fool coming here so close to the solstice, but he couldn’t stay away. After he became king, he would never return to the mortal world. He would stay in the Ring, protected by magic, until his powers waned and a new king rose to take his place.
A shiver ran down his back. In the shade, the ground was damp. He wasn’t used to being in the mortal world in the daylight. Birds flitted from tree to tree just as they did in the Ring, and the sun had a warmth he had never felt before.
Something about the castle drew him. Something that whispered at the edge of his memory.
Elric.
She had called him Elric.
(“Sebastian!”
(“Elric!”
(“Woman, I’ll have none of your heathen names for my son. He was born into a Christian household and Christian he’ll remain!”)
The People called him Gift. He remembered the naming ceremony around the fire. He had rested in a new cradle made of ferns and twigs and the remains of his net. They had called him Gift and thanked the forest gods that they had been able to save him.
He would receive a new name, should he be crowned in the darkness.
Elric, you’re supposed to be in your room.
He had been in this castle before. Flashes (another being in his place) had haunted him each time he stood in the garden. They would haunt him until he died.
Unless he settled it now.
She had thought him Elric. Elric he would become.
***
Arianna did not move as Lissa tugged on her hair. Mother had dictated the dress and the hairstyle: several long braids wrapped around her head and decorated in pearls. Arianna loved to have her hair fall free, but Mother said that was unbecoming to a woman without a husband. Mother’s husband had died, but she still wore her hair long and flowing down her back. Arianna wondered if she would ever be able to do the same.
Arianna’s reflection in the rippled glass showed a face white with strain. Lissa held her lower lip between her teeth as she combed. Mother had beat Lissa with a comb once when Arianna’s hair had tumbled down her shoulders during dinner. Lissa had vowed never to let that happen again.
Lissa pulled so hard that Arianna’s head wobbled. She would not cry out. She would say nothing. She wanted out of this room as quickly as possible. She wanted to see Elric.
If she closed her eyes, she could see him there, movements as wild as an animal’s. He had shimmered and disappeared, but as she had crouched down from the window, she had thought she saw him in the trees, staring at her.
Her brother had always been odd, but his oddness had never seemed purposeful before.
“Are you almost done?” she snapped at Lissa.
“I still have half the head, Highness,” Lissa said, “and it must be right for the Queen.”
“The Queen be hanged,” Arianna said, but not loudly enough for Lissa to hear. Arianna feared her mother’s wrath as much as the maid did.
***
The castle was cold. He thought it odd that mortals would choose to live in a place colder than the outdoors. The air smelled damp and musty, and strangely familiar.
He had never seen so much activity in one place. In the large kitchen, the only warm room he had found, women, wearing kerchiefs over their hair, tended fires in large stone boxes. The room smelled of cooked game and fresh bread. His mouth watered, but mortal food was not what he was after.
In the larger gathering rooms, servants added decorations to the walls. Up the flat stone steps, a woman with the shine of a Trueblood allowed another woman to help her dress. The girl he had seen sat before a mirror while another girl played with her hair. Men in other chambers helped each other dress. But only one chamber drew him, one he remembered being in when he was so tiny he could not speak.
The oak door was closed, but he spoke softly to the dying wood. It answered creakingly in great pain from the metal studs someone had poked in its frame. He brushed his hand along the scarred surface, easing some of the pain, and the door slid open for him, without a sound.
He slipped inside. The cold walls were covered with woven rugs, decorated with great care. Voices echoed from the inner chamber. He walked around the gilt edged chairs and made himself shimmer like light before stepping into the carved open doorway.
His shimmer nearly left him. He froze, cold as the surface of a pond on a winter day. Standing before him, wrapped in heavy woolen robes, was the being he had last seen as a baby. Only now it looked like a waxen image of himself.
Another man bobbed and danced around the image. “…bit warm, Highness,” the man was saying, “But lovely. Yes, impressive. The others will be pleased to see the wealth this kingdom has. You must walk firm, my Lord Elric, as if you own it all, since you do now. You do.”
Elric. You should be in your rooms.
Elric! ’Tis a royal name from my people! You shall not corrupt him by naming him for some misbegotten saint!
His fingers twitched and the sharp blue pain he had felt ever since he could remember returned. Lights. Lights. He had seen lights and touched them and then…
…he was beside the fire and they were calling him Gift. He was no gift. He was one of the many babies brought to faerie because the fey had grown old and corrupt and could no longer bear their own.
His shimmer disappeared and he had to catch the cold stone to keep himself from falling. No wonder Fay had to boost his magic when he confronted the adults. The little bit of Trueblood wouldn’t carry the magic required of a full Trueblood. He was mortal. He was mortal and they never told him.
A rustle behind him made him turn. The girl was there, looking older, the hair piled on top of her head and wrapped in pearls. Her dress clung to her chest, then widened at her hips until he could barely see her tiny slippers peaking out.
“Elric,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in a frown, “why aren’t you dressed?”
He grabbed the shimmer, pulled it back around him and pushed against the wall. Her frown grew. She reached out, and would have put her hand through him if he had not moved away.
“Milady Arianna?” the manservant spoke.
The girl shot a suspicious glance at his hiding spot, then walked into the other room. “Elric,” she said, looking at the waxen image. “Elric? Is that you?”
***
Because Mother had waited so long, the Lords had decided to hold the coronation in the church. Arianna arrived early, knowing she would catch her mother there.
The church was a miniature version of the castle. Made of stone and mortar, with towers on all four sides, it looked like a child’s play toy instead of a place of worship. Arianna had stepped inside only once—for her father’s funeral—and she had been very uncomfortable.
Inside, the church was colder than the castle’s closed east wing. The back pews were made of stone and were covered, just for today, with thin red cushions embroidered with the family’s crest. The front pews were wooden boxes, designed to hold and protect the gentry from the masses. The King’s box, rarely used, had a small platform leading up to it, so that the King would sit higher than anyone else in the room.
Arianna stood in the door for a moment, getting her bearings. Her mother’s voice echoed from one of the back rooms: high, strident, and forceful. Arianna didn’t know how the bishop could argue with her. No one argued with Mother.
Arianna walked down the stone floor. A rolled up red rug would be laid for her brother, but not until he appeared. The stone sent chills through her thin slippers, and she stifled the urge to sneeze.
Her father had lost the religion battle, just as he had lost most battles with his overbearing wife. Arianna sometimes thought he had died early, just to get away from Mother.
She followed the voices into a group of rooms of the King’s box. The rooms were done in gold and red, with plush chairs and big oak desks. Mother always said the church had money. Here was the proof of it.
The Bishop faced Arianna. He wore his white and gold robes, and clutched a staff so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. His round face held no expression at all except for two red spots on his cheeks. Arianna knew the feeling. Sometimes a club to the head might make Mother talk sense.
Mother towered over the Bishop. She had insisted on wearing her specially built shoes with the three-inch heel, making her taller than anyone in the Kingdom. Her dress, made with real gold thread, and heavier than the King’s coronation crown, shimmered in the candlelight.
“You will not touch him, nor will you douse him in holy water,” Mother said with such force that Arianna knew that she had repeated the sentence at least a dozen times.
“It is part of the ceremony, Highness, and as such, I cannot skip the ritual. The foreign nobles will know.”
“Foreign nobles be hanged!” Mother said. “He is not a Christian. He does not need Christian trappings at his coronation.”
“He will be a Christian king, Highness, ruling a Christian nation.”
Mother waved a hand and the Bishop winced. “If only his father were alive. He would come up with some kind of compromise.”
“If Father were alive,” Arianna said, “we wouldn’t be having the coronation.”
Mother whirled. “Arianna!” Her voice held relief. “Show him what holy water does to my children.”
Arianna swallowed. The burn marks ached. She had dipped her fingers in holy water after a ceremony held in the palace. Nurse had to put out Arianna’s burning skin with her skirt. Father had warned Arianna never to show the Bishop the scars. He said that would be grounds for a complete revolt against the monarchy.
“It makes us nervous, Bishop,” she said, ignoring her mother’s plea-filled gaze. “Perhaps you can wave—” she didn’t know the term for the equipment he used “—that thing over my brother’s head and pretend there is water in it. After all, we’re going to pretend that he’s a Christian king since none of us know the first thing about your religion.”
“Arianna!” Mother hissed.
“Quite right, Arianna, quite right,” the Bishop said. “A compromise worthy of your father. Then the other nations will think we have a Christian king, and I will not have shirked my duties.”
Odd that he didn’t worry about the reaction of his god. Arianna sighed. She didn’t have time to think about that. “Mother, I need to talk with you.”
Her mother glanced at the Bishop, then at Arianna, as if she couldn’t believe the argument had been so easily settled. “What is it?”
“Privately, Mother.”
“All right.” Mother shot another angry look at the Bishop, then left the room and followed Arianna out of the church. As they stepped across the threshold, Mother wiped her shoes to get the stench of holiness off them. “What’s so important?”
“I saw something strange in the garden,” Arianna said. She explained Elric’s odd behavior and the way the new image of him had disappeared twice, both times leaving a shimmer that she could barely touch.
“And you can see that shimmer?” Mother asked.
Arianna nodded. “It doesn’t go away, no matter what I do. If I squint, if I touch it, no matter what, it stays.”
Mother sighed and shook her head. “We need to take you home and get you tested,” she said. “I should have known when that holy water exploded on you—”
“Mother, please.” Arianna had been listening to that speech since the deer in the garden.
Mother smiled absently and patted Arianna’s arm. “If you see that shimmer during the coronation, I want you to point it out to me,” she said. “Then stand back.”
A small crowd of people had disembarked from a carriage near the gate. “What is going on?” Arianna asked.
Mother’s smile grew wider. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I think there’s magic in the air.”
***
He shimmered against the wall until the manservant left. The waxen image still stood in front of the mirror, unmoving. It appeared to be staring at itself, but he knew that it was waiting for someone to tell it what to do.
Mortals were such fools. They actually believed that lump was a real being? If he had not come back, the waxen image’s reflexes would have slowed to nothing. It needed power from its home source and he knew he was that source.
He was Elric.
The name suited him better than Gift. He wiped the shimmer off his skin and went into the dressing room. The waxen image turned at the sound. Elric approached and touched it, feeling the clammy skin, shivering at the lifeless eyes.
He let the image go. So he had been home here, once. Not long, though. They had taken him young, as they often did.
He had time. He hadn’t expected to find the answers so quickly. He would follow this image and see what its day was like.
***
Arianna sat on the altar beside her mother, staring at the Bishop as he repeated his admonitions to the new Christian King. Elric hadn’t moved from his spot in the back of the church. He looked normal now—a bit slow, and witless, the kind of man who would always do what he was told. Was that why the Lords wanted to speed up the coronation? So that they would have a malleable king? Did that mean that Mother would have to fight for her very existence?
Arianna sighed. She didn’t like thinking of the future.
The Bishop finished his lecture. One of the churchmen in the back signaled Elric to walk down the aisle. Two young boys walked before him, opening the red carpet. Elric walked as he was told: step, pause, step, pause; never taking his eyes off the front of the church. Mother stood and Arianna stood beside her, feeling a strange fear in the back of her throat.
Elric knelt on the steps leading to the altar. The Bishop walked down two steps to tower over his future king.
Something shimmered on the back of Elric’s coronation robe. Arianna tugged her mother’s overlong sleeve. “There,” she whispered, pointed to Elric’s feet. “There it is.”
Mother frowned.
The Bishop turned and dipped his staff in the holy water. Arianna turned white. He had promised. He had said she had come up with a good compromise. She started across the altar, her mother grabbing at her skirts.
“No, Arianna!”
“…e Spiritu Santu—”
She grabbed the Bishop just as her mother grabbed her, just as the holy water flew from the bulbous end of the staff. The water landed on Elric and splattered the back of his robe, the carpet and the people sitting in the front boxes. A drop landed on Arianna’s hand and a small fire flared, sending sharp pains through her skin.
She slapped it out. Another fire started on Elric’s robe. Elric himself looked up at the Bishop—and smiled, truly smiled for the first time in his life. Then he vanished, leaving only bits of clay and earth on the collapsing robe.
The nobles in front screamed. The church smelled of smoke. Mother had pushed the Bishop aside and was struggling down the steps in her too-tall shoes. The fire on the back of the robe had grown until it was the shape of a man.
Elric. It was Elric. Not the one who had disappeared, but the one she had seen that morning, with his lively blue eyes and strong quick-moving fingers.
The Bishop picked up the bowl of holy water and made to throw it on Elric, but Arianna grabbed his arm. “No,” she said, wincing as more water spilled on her. “It won’t put out the fire.”
Another flame sprouted on her arm, and she had to use the Bishop’s sleeve to put it out. He looked at her with such repulsion that she thought he was going to hit her.
Elric’s fire was out and he was cradled in his mother’s arms. She picked up the robe and wrapped it around him, murmuring, “My son! My son.”
One of the Lords stood. “I demand to know what has happened.”
“There is an enchantment—” The Bishop began.
“—which the Bishop broke,” Arianna replied. “That was why my brother was always so slow. The tears of Christ have made my brother himself again.”
A rustle of voices ran through the crowd. Elric staggered forward, held in place by Mother. She wasn’t going to let him go. He shot a glance at Arianna, a look filled with such panic that she felt her heart go to him. “What was that?” he whispered. His speech had an odd accent, a lilting, almost musical tone.
“Christian Holy Water,” she whispered.
“Christian?” He let out air, almost like a sigh, then began to struggle.
“Don’t move, you fool,” Mother hissed in her best command voice. “You can’t go back now. You can only stay with us. Best make what you can of it.”
“This is a Christian place?” His voice, mercifully, remained low. “I can’t stay here.”
“You have to,” Arianna said. “You’re being crowned King.”
“King?” He glanced at the door, then at the ceiling, then surveyed the burn marks on his skin. He looked at his fingers as if he expected something on them, but couldn’t find it. “I am mortal then.”
The Bishop yanked his sleeve from Arianna’s grasp. He looked at the crowd, then at Elric. Arianna could see the Bishop make a decision before he spoke. “Of course you’re not mortal, boy,” he said as quietly as his booming voice would allow. “You’re King—above man, above all except God.”
He waved the staff over Elric and spoke more Latin. The noble sat down, and Mother relaxed her grip. The coronation was done.
But Arianna watched that lively, intelligent male face. Her true brother. The coronation may have been over, but the fun was just beginning.
***
Elric had fallen asleep beside the fire, listening to the coo of his newborn son. He had been awake for nearly three days now, listening, waiting. The window open, the baptismal crib decorated just as he remembered it. He had banished the nurses and guarded the child himself.
Colored lights flew in the window. The baby’s coos grew louder as he saw the pretty colors. He reached for them, giggling as he did, accidentally touching one. A pop and the smell of sulfur filled the room, jarring Elric awake.
The fairy stopped her ministrations over the baby. She stood in midair and bowed to Elric.
“Human King,” she said in a mocking tone.
He reached for her, his fingers still heartbreakingly normal. The blue had been gone for years. “Take me back,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “You’ve been tainted,” she said. “I’ll take your son.”
He watched as the fairies wove a skein of light and wrapped it around his child. He wished he could speak to the boy, tell him that the world of magic was a better world than this, that there was hope there and—
The door burst open behind them. The fairies disappeared in a halo of light. Elric had to run forward and catch his son before the baby dropped back into the crib.
“They were here,” his mother said. “I smelled them.”
She reached into the air, touched a remaining light beam and winced as it popped. One fairy shook a fist at his mother and flew away. She turned on Elric. “You were going to let them take him.”
He stared up at her. She was Trueblood and powerful, but she had never scared him. She had chosen to give up her life for a life with humans. He clutched the baby to his chest.
“Yes,” he said. “I was going to let them take him.”
“Why? Don’t you remember? Don’t you know fairies can never love?”
He didn’t care about love. He was too fairy to know what it meant. But he remembered. He remembered the free flowing magic, the warm nights, the wonderful spectacle of lights. They hadn’t loved him, but they had given him laughter, which no one seemed to understand here.
He looked at her, and felt a sadness burn into his soul. “They’ll never come back now.”
“I know,” she said. “And now we are finally free.”
She took the baby from him and left the room. He went to the window and stared out, seeing lights flickering in the garden. He would call them back if he could, but he was mortal bound and ugly in their sight.
They would die off soon. Their line was too weak. He would never see them again.
“We’re not free,” he whispered to the uncaring wind. The lights around him winked out—one by one. “We’re all prisoners of our destiny.”
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The Book of Kings, edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg, Roc, July 1995
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Steve51/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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