Caewen did.
The creature’s breath smelled like wet moss and heather on a winter’s morning, when the frost was just lifting. She dashed her lips with a touch of wet tongue and said words into Caewen’s ear. Strange words. Old words. And true. So very true. Caewen felt her eyes widen. She heard the ancient knowings and ways and kennings, she saw in them the arc of the stars, and the call of a grouse high up on a haughland brae, and the twining pathways of water down slopes, over rocks. She saw the creep of wild briar rose over and through a ruined, tumbledown house. She could taste the bones of the people who had once lived in that house, now hidden under their blankets of sod and wild flowers. She touched the secrets in the pith of the thorns and the soft pink-white petals.
The flowers all seemed to speak to her. Sleep is death’s younger brother, they chimed together in their tiny flower-voices. But her attention kept being teased away from the secrets of the flower. Behind the whispering flowers, beyond the house, there was a long grey road cutting the countryside like a knife-scar through old greening flesh. She did not want to look at the road, and she did her best to look away, to listen to the wisdom of the flowers, but the road demanded unwilling glances, again and again, all the same.
When the whispering stopped, Caewen stood up again, resuming her full height. She blinked back cold salt-laced droplets from the edge of her eyes, and she said, “I see.” Then shaking her head. “But there is a price. You didn’t say anything about the price.”
“Alas, everything has a price, my sweet-pea. Even nothingness has its price, for a person might have had something instead of nothing, but a person picked nothingness instead.”
“Is that at the end of the long grey road?” asked Caewen. “Nothingness? If I were to call on Faer arts over and over, again and again, would I eventually reach nothingness?”
“Alas,” replied Moggie, “No. For else I would have attained nothingness, and then I’d be a darned sight happier than the creature you see before you. It’s rather more of an almost nothingness. More like, hmmm,” she waved her hairy, mishapen left hand, “more like going on forever, all twisted and broken and scooped-out inside.”
“Caewe–” started Dapplegrim, but she waved him quiet.
“No. I will do this, but I will not come back to this well. I will not drink it’s grey waters. I understand that it is bottomless. A soul could dive a long way in, and never come up again.”
“And that is a blessing I’ve allowed you, young lady. A blessing I was not given. I chased off down the long grey road in ignorance, thinking there was power or wonderment at its end. But I do not choose that for you. Remember this, when the time comes. Remember that I was kindly.”
“What time?” asked Dapplegrim. The suspicion and worry had not left his voice.
But Moggie just shrugged and said, “Time is, when time will be. You will know. Indeed you will.”
Caewen turned to the half-laced gap in the tent wall that served as a door. She walked over to it, not quite stepping outside. The murky eyed, slack-faced people who stood outside all stirred as one, seemingly aware that their object of pursuit had moved herself just out of reach. She eased herself down onto her knees and shut her eyelids tight, scrunching the muscles hard, until the sockets hurt a little. Then, she felt inside herself and dipped her thoughts into the whispering wellspring of the Faer magic, into the patch of wild briar flowers that covered old bones. What she drew up to herself was just a bare puddle of secrets and knowledges, really, but it was enough to soak into her mind, to chill her, racing up her thoughts and into that place in the front of the skull where we feel our most inner self. Cold, hard grey sadness raced through her. Dapple was right. This power was never meant for humankind. It was not even of this world, not properly so. It was not of this creation. It was a leftover thing. A force of agency that had somehow crept through the gaps and chinks at the dawn of time, oozing out of the pre-existence into the new, living world. It was the last remnant of whatever it was that had been before the start of time. It could not exist in this world without something to ride within. It needed vessels.
She felt it clawing at her, trying to find purchase inside her mind.
And she knew deeply and truly that it would own her, and twist and remake her, if she let it.
With a shiver she spoke twelve words of power to the air and the sky and the earth. She listened for the air and the sky and the earth to reply. Using her left hand she drew three secret shapes upon the air. Crackling dead emptiness jumped between her fingertips. Awful darkness swam behind her eyes.
It started as a pain in the back of her throat, soon spreading and jabbing, then tearing its way forward. She instinctively shut her mouth, thinking she her gums and teeth were shattering, and might spill out onto the ground. Within a few seconds the pain grew too much and she had to open her mouth and let it out, while arching forward just as if she were vomiting. Sticky loops of dark red saliva and blood dropped from her mouth. She could feel the cuts and gashes on her tongue and against the roof of her mouth. It was like the fey-stroke in the maze, but much worse. So much worse.
And then it came out.
A tangled hard skien brimming with tiny spikes. At first she thought it was some part of her that she had coughed up. An organ from deep inside. But when it hit to soft soil, she saw its shape through half-blinding tears and understood.
It uncoiled, grew and spread. Tiny tendrils shot downwards, digging thirstily into the soil, even as coils thickened and grew upward, stretched. A hundred small buds burst into leaves, and then dozens of small pink flowers unfurled. Its growth took it hungrily towards the outside world and sunlight, where it grew faster than water spilling over the ground. Thickening. Growing. Creeping.
At first Caewen thought the unnatural briar-rose was simply going to tangle the waiting spell-thralls, or perhaps overwhelm them, and pull them down. But then the first of the dull-eyed people grew unsteady, and toppled over. Another and another fell. A sickly treacly smell was rising up from the still-growing briar patch. It was giving off a heady scent. Another person fell over, and another, and another, until hardly anyone was left standing outside the tent, and those that were looked as if they didn’t have long until they would succumb too. The next thing Caewen was aware of was the sound of snoring.
“Asleep?” she managed to say, though the word hurt her tongue.
Moggie had meanwhile shuffled up beside her. “Indeed they are. You will not be affected, being the worker of the enchantment. Your talking horse is not of sufficiently mortal blood to be affected. Both of you are quite safe to leave now.”
Caewen looked down at Moggie, squinted a bit, and managed to say, “Will I grow a tail?”
Moggie snorted, then laughed. She seemed to genuinely enjoy the question, taking a good few moments to get control of herself again. “Oh no. Oh no. It’ll take years and years, and many more Faer spells than that to make you grow a tail. Or horns. Or hoofed feet. Also, you have to be dead first, before you can turn properly Faer. It’s just the way it is. But,” she hedged, “You might find that at the end of your natural life, you will linger a little longer between life and death than you might have otherwise… and those last final not-quite-alive moments will be more grey and less, hmmm… less feeling, than they might have otherwise been. The Faer art has its price. It takes its toll. But it is also a patient trap. It only ever takes a little at a time.”
“I’ll not use it again,” said Caewen, though it felt as if she were talking through a mouthful of moss and blood and pain. “Still. Thank you,” she mumbled. “I don’t know how we’d have got free otherwise.”
“Oh no, miss. No no no. Don’t thank me. Repay me.” A smile. “When the time comes. For I am patient too. It comes of being Faer.”