Page 7 of The Fae’s Treasure

And it sounds like silk. Rich, dark, resonant silk. The higher notes glow. This organ was made for the times when you’re supposed to represent a heavenly choir, loud, proud, and bright.

“Ohhhh,” I breathe out. “This is gorgeous.”

“I think it’s a beaut.” Pastor Fortnum sits down and rocks the carrier gently from the little half pew in the organist’s area.

Sunlight streams in through the stained glass window that shows a lamb in the middle of a pine woods, a golden cross and crown above his head.

Jewel tones dance across my hands, and sun warms my back. My baby is asleep. My boss seems nice. Maybe this is a dream, after all, the kind you don’t have to wake up from.

Chapter Three: Dairmuid

“This is going to be simple, yes? We take the faeling and leave something in its place. Did you find a goat? Don’t humans like goats?”

“It’s a bit more noticeable to put livestock in someone’s crib. I got a dog,” Bonwit says and holds out a sleeping black and brown mongrel no bigger than a loaf of bread.

“All right. Slip it in, and take the child. Bring him to me,” I breathe, crouching in the darkness, surrounded by shrubbery. The mortal world is... well, it’s not as I imagined. Humans are not the sort of hapless, lolling things I pictured, content to play and toil at little tasks, rather inferior to fae. I see the world they’ve built, how different, how sophisticated, and yes, surely, they may have done it with fae help in some cases but not all.

What I have been missing?

Bonwit turns on me. “What? Me!? It’s your child!”

“Shhh! No one knows that.”

“Well, they will once you bring it back, won’t they?”

I wince. “Maybe not for a while. My mother...”

“Maybe it doesn’t look too much like a demon,” Bonwit comforts, patting my arm.

Such familiarity wouldn’t be tolerated by some fae, but I don’t bother with all that. I keep to my own interests and rules, at least as much as I can. Some rules are ironclad—and yes, some with literal iron. We fairfolk aren’t fond of it.

“You have more experience with humans.”

“Not breaking into their houses! I sit on gates and ask pretty maids for a kiss. I dance with them at Samhain, when the veils thin. That’s it, really.”

“Do it, and I’ll pay you handsomely.”

“You already pay me handsomely—which is to say, you pay me nothing, and I just take the gold I have need of, and neither of us seems to mind.”

“That’s true,” I murmur, suddenly straightening up. “Shh. She’s there.”

The woman who lives in the end house, the house on Balsalm, is suddenly just a few feet away through hard, sheer glass, standing over a tap that runs straight into the house, scrubbing at something furiously, and then measuring a buttermilk-colored powder into a bottle.

My son is there. But where?

I don’t see him, and my heart stops with fear. What does he look like? Is he well? Is Saz already in the house, pulling the strings of the human woman who now turns her back to us?

“She’s gorgeous, m’lord,” Bonwit whispers, eyes wide and transfixed like some lovestruck calf. “Look at her.”

I do, mainly to try to judge what sort of a woman has my child.

She is gorgeous, by human or fae standards. On the matter of her face, she looks like she belongs in the Autumn Court, with delicate, graceful features, features that I can envision as either serene or furious, although now they simply seem determined.

The longer I stare, the more I can see: her in gowns of pine green, fair gossamer wings on her bare shoulders. “She is a picture,” I murmur.

Long, lithe arms and legs. Tall and slender. Some might say a mannish cut, with fewer curves and more angles, but I like the subtlety. If I weren’t so badly burned in matters of the heart (or the loins), perhaps I would think about how delicious it is to discover something that isn’t blatantly on display, so different from Saz’s obvious, sensuous glory.

I’m looking merely as an observer, an explorer, a fae on ‘safari’ to the human realm, as I think the term might be. She’s just a new experience for my eyes.