Page 16 of Till Kingdom Come

“As soon as we can. He’s of marriageable age now so there won’t be any delay once we have him secured. You can keep a close eye on him, and we’ll take him as soon as possible.”

“And if it turns out he’s not the Elf king’s son after all?”

“Then we kill him and keep looking. Easy enough.”

I spent the next couple of weeks until Solstice thinking about the mortal from time to time and slowly planning what I’d do with him, once I’d taken him. I had no plans to kill him if he wasn’t the one we were seeking, though. I’d keep him as a concubine. I thought he’d make a fine one. The thing about immortality is that we immortals know we have plenty of time to act. We’re in no real hurry, even though the Dark Elven kingdom was slowly deteriorating.

I even went back to see Killian once when he was unaware. My magic allowed me to cross over into the mortal realm anytime I wanted just to check on my property and make sure he was behaving himself. Each time I went to see him, I thought his glamour was receding a little, getting less and less intense. He seemed to get better looking, or perhaps absence really did make the heart grow fonder, as they said.

I was determined there would be no other lovers for him, and so far, he hadn’t given me any reason to worry. I might have waited even longer and let him mature more before I fetched him—he was sure to be a great deal of trouble to me after all—if not for what I’d witnessed at the next tournament his father had given.

Killian was not a “champion,” like Lord Ellien had called him, for the simple reason that he wasn’t even a knight. Knights were commissioned by the English king, and they were usually soldiers or those who had done some service for the crown. His father, Sir John, was a knight, but his title wasn’t one that could be passed down to his children.

Honeywood used his sons as his squires and kippers, or foot soldiers—unpaid, of course. They took care of their father’s weapons and his armor, and if they happened, on a given day, to be acting as his squire, they might carry his flag or do whatever else he required of them.

A kipper, on the other hand, was traditionally a vassal—little more than a servant—employed by the knight. He could be a fighter of non-knightly status, or a kind of foot soldier as well. It was the right of a knight to seize the armor and weapons of a fallen opponent during a tournament. In the early days, tournament fighting was not much different from open, chaoticwarfare, with few rules, if any. They held no-holds-barred battles that they called amelee, and kippers were called footmen, but it was not their function nor their intention during ameleeto participate in the fighting.That would at least have been as honorable as anything else the knights did during a game—which is to say, not that much.

No, a kipper followed his knight into combat only to retrieve armoror weapons from fallen adversaries. If the adversary was not completely subdued or wounded or dead therefore and ready to surrender his weapons and armor, the kipper would bang on the opponent with various, blunt, non-lethal weapons, like heavy clubs, to knock him unconscious for the purpose of gathering the spoils without further protest.Were knights inadvertently killed by this? Most certainly, they were.

So, although it was the right of a knight to seize the armor and weapons of a fallen adversary during a tournament, as time went on, most people began to think of the practice as “unchivalrous.” I would have called it much worse than that. Words likewickedandcowardlycame to mind.

Killian sometimes acted as his father’s squire, if none of his other brothers were present. But most often he acted as a kipper, and his face always looked as if he hated every second of it.

Since Sir John also allowed his sons to practice outright robbery, as they did in thepas d’armes, I was not the least bit surprised to see Killian acting like a thief and a scavenger in the aftermath of amelee. One afternoon, a few days later at a tournament at Sir John’s, they were just finishing up after one of their barbarous mock battles and a knight who had been unhorsed was lying on his back in the field, clearly injured. His squire had collected his horse and a few of his weapons, leaving him lying alone and unprotected on the field. The knight had waved the squire away and told him to take his horse to safety first and then come back to help him with his armor and his bleeding wounds.

That’s when I saw Sir John take Killian aside and point the man out to him. They were too far away to hear properly, but I knew he must be telling the boy to go and take as much of the man’s armor as he could carry. Killian looked at the knight struggling to sit up, his face and head bleeding badly, and I saw him shake his head and try to hand back the spiked club his father was trying to force on him. His father pulled back his arm and with an open hand—a hand covered by an armored gauntlet—he slapped Killian across his face and knocked him unconscious and bleeding to the ground. He then strode off, heading back toward his horse.

Furious, I went after him, but by the time I got close to him, he had already received a blow from a passing knight that had knocked him flat, and the kippers belonging to that knight were already descending on him. Good enough for him—and too many witnesses for me to kill him like I had planned to do. I had no choice but to turn away, giving him a good kick before I left. My father didn’t like it when I took the lives of mortals, especially in front of so many witnesses, no matter how despicable they might be, because it drew unwanted attention to the Dark Fairies.

I stayed long enough to make sure that Killian was being cared for and then I left, unable to stomach any more of the so-called “sport.”

I decided that if I waited much longer to take the boy, the stupid mortal who was supposed to be his father might actually kill him. I didn’t see death sitting on my boy yet, but there was a gray cloud hovering nearby him that I didn’t like the looks of. I was determined to take him without any further delay.

I happened to be in negotiation at the time with Lord Ellien over the death of one of my soldiers inside his city. It had been an accident, but one caused by his soldiers, so I enlisted the help of Lord Ellien to negotiate my purchase of the boy so I could come and pick him up. Ellien, who lived near the boy, had made the arrangements with Sir John, who received gold for helping us lure the boy onto Solarian land. Ellien plied the boy with goblin wine and kept him mostly asleep for a couple of days until I could come for him.

The infuriating boy took far too many silly risks anyway. Just the day before, for example, when he saw me arguing with Lord Ellien, he couldn’t stay out of it. He’d come charging in to defend Ellien, though he was outnumbered thirteen to one. Yet he still kept mouthing off and taunting me. He hadn’t recognized me, because I’d been glamoured the last time he saw me.

He wasn’t a large mortal, yet he’d marched over to stand beside the worthless Solarian lord like some famous, legendary hero knight. He was a perfectly formed specimen, though at the moment, he was drooping down on top of the furs like a wilted flower nagging me with questions about how he had offended me and begging me to kill him, so he didn’t have to wait too long and dread it.

Because of the cold weather that he wasn’t used to, his cheeks and lips were rosy-red, chapped by the cold wind we’d ridden through the night before. It only served to make him look more beautiful. I supposed I’d have to make sure he was well-wrapped in furs in the future, since he was apparently of such a delicate constitution.

Even if he were only half some other kind of Fae, he was half Elf too and the combination was a striking one. Fae creatures had been known to use their beauty as a weapon, and anyone who thought they weren’t dangerous, no matter how mortal they looked or attempted to look, was only deceiving himself. But so far, he hadn’t tried anything. Unless this was an attempt to play on my sympathies. If it was, it wouldn’t work, because I didn’t have any. I was attracted to him, though—unreasonably so. He’d soon find out exactly what I had planned for him.

When we left Solaria, forgetting how fragile he was, I’d made him remove his cheaply made boots and leave them with the Fairy Lord. But then he’d fallen out in the snow after only about ten minutes of walking in just his woolen stockings. When I took off his wet stockings to put his feet in the spare boots I carried with me, I found them to be nearly frostbitten and already turning blue. They were pretty little feet for a man, small boned and well-formed with pearly toenails. Damn him—they were almost unbearably sexy. I took them in my hands to warm them so his toes wouldn’t fall off, and he gave kitten-like squeaks as I massaged the blood back into them.

He was proving hard to resist. I’d have to be careful not to wear him out once I had him living with me full time.

“Won’t you answer me? Or at least tell me what you plan to do with me?”

I gave him a smile instead. “You’ll know soon enough. But you won’t be going back to the mortal world.”

“What do you mean, I’m not going back? Do you mean…never?” he said, his voice almost failing him there at the last. He looked up at me with a fearful expression.

“You’ll be staying with me.”

“As in… indefinitely?” he asked, a little faintly.

“As in forever. You belong to me now.”

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