Title: Magpie
Author: chaparral-crown
Rating: T
Disclaimer: A Court of Mist and Fury belongs to Sarah J. Maas and publisher Bloombury USA.
Description: Purpose, whispers her heart, shuddering at the magnitude of it. Amren, escape, and the gathering of treasures.
A little black thing in the snow,
Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? Say!"—
"They are both gone up to the church to pray."
The scrape of teeth on bones is a comfort in the dark, the yield of red meat making her hands shake in satisfaction. It is not fresh, but Amren is starving and the taste of something decay-soured is better than nothing. Her collection of meals from before shifts beneath her feet and it is lovely in its magnitude. The Prison is unyielding and lightless. It has been an age since the last creature stumbled this way.
She thinks she has always been here sometimes.
Below, at the bottom of her tall bone barrow-throne, a faerie is raucous with noise.
"Great lady," it says, stuttering with nerves and the tart smell of pain. "Permit me to bring you more, and pass down the halls behind you. I can find the exit, I can bring you to the surface again-"
A lie, something gnaws in the back of her mind distrusting. There is no count to the time she has waited.
The fae is pale haired and beautiful, in the delicate way of something -new-. (Unfurling flowers, a fawn's anxious fear of being left behind, the memory of sun and star and unstale wind. Your being trembles with want.) He is from the south, wherever that is in relation to here. The unlight of her hall casts a midnight-pall on him, the glow of her eyes barely lighting his face.
He is watching her lips close around the tender juncture of muscle to bone. She is watching the twitch of a vein in his forehead. The fae does not smell of dishonesty. Amren struggles to remain unmoved at the possibility, and clutches a handful of clicking bones beneath her with her idle hand.
"Please, my family will give you anything your heart desires. The corridor behind you calls of the ocean to me, of the Summer Court, my home. It surely leads to the sea. I will take you with me if you let me pass."
The wretched sea, the salt-water death. An older part of her beneath the flesh recoils and speaks of forgotten terror, of elder things than stone and air. She feels a sneer eat at her face.
The fae sees this as well and opens his mouth enough for her to see the gleam of clean white teeth, shining. (More, they whisper to you. More for you.)
She is faster than his excuses, and does not flinch at the feel of his ripe heart in her hand, cracking through his sternum like an eggshell. He might have screamed. Her ears are ringing. Amren does not bother with words. They do not speak as she does, the beautiful hateful language that always sits like a hot stone on the back of her tongue. (You speak their language, but hate it for the trilling soft thing that it is.) She instead feels the hot steam of blood and eats again.
She is so very hungry. The dry bones creak again beneath her weight, piled high. Hesitancy fills her at the thought of leaving them. (They are yours, they belong to you.)
Sleep comes to her often. Amren allows it, and feels less lonely and trapped for a time.
There are Others like her when she sleeps, grim and ancient and unfettered as they hunt like great beasts between the sunless rocks of the Great Mountain. Snow chills her hollows (you do not have feet) and the heat behind her eyes leaks out unchecked. It feels good, it feels different from the now.
Two Others are with her this time. Something in her knows that they are kin, older and zephyrous. She wishes she remembered faces, names, relationships. She would rush into them like a breath to be part of something again. Maybe Amren will not be hungry for a time.
The thunder of water is in her ears, a river coming down from above from the highest slopes. None know its source, no storm brings water to heights this great. It has poured for months, spreading on the land below, raising creatures and metal-bitterness of magic. It flows to the great sea beyond full of the things from before her being. The Others speak of vessels being spilt by god, of how they can break the great fount, writing at length how to do it. They create words on the stone instead of the quickness of breath. (You will learn later of Prythian's founding, and wish you had destroyed the mountain before allowing it to happen, no matter the love in your greedy heart for what it would bring you. You would unmake them to be free again. You feel no dishonesty in that.)
The two Others stand at its edge and look to its thundering darkness in the lands below.
Where are you going, she asks. Stay and hunt and be with me longer.
We must go away, one's thought glances across the surface of her mind. They pass into the mist and froth before them, and Amren feels something like panic despite an insistent pull to follow into the water.
Away. Away.
But she is afraid, and does not follow. The rocks are sharp and wet in the twilight, and the hum of the river rustles the fabric that makes her. She feels the Others drift down until she cannot feel them any longer, imagines that they have been broken and buried in the roots of the mountain, flowing under and out. The sea will take them in time and they will be no more.
Her throat burns with salt.
When she awakes to her Prison hall, the emptiness of it is crushing, even with the comfort of her bones beneath her, whispering their love and belonging to all of Amren. The press of a rib on her hipbone, the femur she straightens her back on, the teeth that rustle between her fingers more numerous than years. She does not eat well in the Prison, but none as well as her, save for another who's bone barrow-throne is not yet high enough for her to feel the sting of jealousy. (He will be here forever sings your heart, but never so rich as you.)
She smells the sea from down the corridor and shudders. She thinks of the empty void sky beyond and the mountain further still. Purpose, whispers her heart, shuddering at the magnitude of it.
She rises, and doesn't let the clatter of her bed startle her. It will still belong to her even if she leaves.
Amren wanders, following the brine-smell. How long she cannot say. She never sees another, finds no shafts of light, no stirring save her own quiet bare footsteps. Here she has nothing except that mindless purpose. When she feels the lapping of water at her feet, her throat closes to keep her heart from leaping out.
A pause. (You are afraid.)
Another step forward. (You aren't brave, just desperate.)
Eventually the path is filled with sea water, and she, up to her knees, stands undecided at the edge of the dark. Perhaps there is nothing down here. Perhaps the water has sat here for a thousand years untouched and she will drown looking for its confluence.
The Others did the same and she did not follow. Maybe this is her punishment.
She trudges forward, and swims beneath. She can see nothing, but feels the current pull her deeper. Where the surface is, she cannot say, only that the water is quiet and cold and humming with thoughtless power. Her chest burns, and the panic closes in.
The water pulls her on.
(Take me home, you think. Take me somewhere.)
There is nothing for a long time but the swell of waves distant in her ear. The cold has leeched into everything until there's only the buzz of her own quiet thoughts. Perhaps, Amren thinks, this is all that death will be, and feels resentful of the emptiness of it all. Nothing in this kingdom save for herself.
The sun comes as a surprise.
At first she is blinded and burnt, desperately closing her eyes against the heat and light of the day, swallowing mouthfuls of ocean water, stumbling on some rocky shore. The air is cold, but her skin is translucent and flayed by the sun after years of the dark. Confusion drives her like a dumb animal into the shadows of the sea rocks, where she grasps with greedy hands at the shells that line their bottoms, and their sharpness cuts her hands. Furious fingers scrape swaths of them away in resentment, leaving them to sink in the low tide.
Amren rests for a time, vomiting the hateful sea until her stomach and lungs are clear of it. (You breathe out of habit. You never breathed before this shell of a body trapped you. How weak of you to let it trouble you now.)
At night, she flees the coast to the dark forest beyond. The rush of wind against her face is victory, the brush of pine needles against each limb a blessing. The phantom ancient thing gliding beneath her skin sings at the promise of mountain ranges and the hunt.
The thing that gets her into prison in the first place is the thing that gets her caught again, but not before she has had hundreds of years of satisfaction doing it.
Amren is the consummate hunter. She gluts on the flesh of tall deer and taloned raptors and other predators, so much stronger than the small creatures of the forest, running through glades, toying with her food before allowing herself the happiness of her bone thin fingers ripping through feathers, fur, flesh. The ice water streams from the foothills wash the long years of rotted meat stench from her skin, her thin hair grows long and silky against her thin face. She keeps her favorite tokens of each; a long blue-grey feather of a sea eagle, the soft ear of a wolf that she runs her fingers over when the smell of the sea rises over the northern coast carried on a hateful wind, sometimes an unbroken hoof that makes her tongue press hard against the roof of her mouth at the memory of a graceful spotted doe.
The lesser fae learn of her quickly, but speak not for the nightmares that she feeds them, taking the edge of her reality off of their logical minds. Surely she is but a bad dream. They worsen with each word spoken aloud, until each eventually relents and learns to avoid areas of the mountains. She does not bother with the names of the land; she will outlive them and anything that remembers them. The certainty of that is both a point of pride and vacuous emptiness.
She builds a new bed of bones, and knows each. Her teeth rend any trace of sinew from them until they are clean and white each time. It is beautiful in the moonlit cliffs where she dwells. She would have more shapely ones if she could but find the right prey.
The younger kin, her hunger whispers, the ageless children will fill you again.
She ignores the thought for a time. The Prison is not yet forgotten, and the fear of return, of darkness without age. She has grown happy and red-mouthed in her mountain valley, and does not forget the magic stench of those who threw her into the Beneath.
But Amren covets the smooth white bones, the delicate fingers, the flowering vertebrae of a spine. It is the one thing she had Beneath that she does not have now.
The first kill, another hunter with icy eyes that widen at the sight of her tempest gaze and red lipped smile, is very satisfying. He tries to speak then, but she is deaf with hunger and anger. This is one of the ageless children that hid her in the earth like a corpse. She is growing back out from the dirt like a poisonous white crocus.
The pop of his tendons in the leg are loud enough to startle an owl nearby. Her hair grows longer, her mouth redder. She breaks the bones and sucks the marrow from them. On him, she finds a fine steel blade and a wedding band. (You feel surprise that you recognize it. You don't know what it's like to be bound by love. You're not sure you know what love is.) She wears them, sleeps on them even when the sword puts a wide red welt in her naked hip. She is lazy and content for some weeks after.
Each one that follows after maker her greedier, spreading the nightmares further. A farmer's wife, a young boy, a decorated warrior. From each she takes a treasure until she is clothed in silks and jewels and small trinkets. Weapons, tools, dishes and silverware line the rocks of her trove.
She is the greatest beast in the valley, and none will know of her until there is nothing left to be had here. Amren knows the days before the sun and moon, and will know the days after. Boredom troubles her in the times between meals, but does not let herself think on it.
If she thinks on the Others, she does not allow herself to dwell on that for long either.
When she comes up on a fae in the winter, during a long night, she is delighted to find that he sees her directly, staring with luminous violet eyes. (So little challenges you. You crack your fingers upon the rocks in anticipation.) Amren is disappointed in his simple black leathers, but wonders if she can keep his eyes instead.
"So then you are the monster," he says, simply, like she should recognize it as her name. She smiles thinly. He looks her over, and if he wonders at all at her nakedness, she cannot read it in him. "You are much smaller than I supposed you would be."
"I was not always so confined," Amren says, voice croaking with disuse. It's the first she's spoken since she was cast into the Prison. She feels a stirring of disappointment that it was not something grander, but boredom drives her to play with her food.
He nods, arms relaxed, though Amren can see the glint of a sword on his back, hidden in a scabbard along his spine. "The last scout I sent here went missing months ago, but not before sending back the thought of an ancient terror. I came here expecting something like the Suriel, and instead I get a small woman."
"The Suriel is very old, but not as old as I," and she draws out that last sound as long as it can go. She has coveted the Suriel's bones before. She will remember it next time she hunts. "Thank you for mentioning it. I had forgotten." They both stare at each other, watching curls of breath in the cold night.
"Do you know who I am?" he finally says, after a long pause.
"Will it matter?"
He laughs. "That all depends on how you intend to proceed. You will find it far more difficult to add me to your pile of bones amidst the cliffs. I suspect to be as old as you are, you are hardly foolish."
Amren feels her teeth with her tongue, feeling along the inside of her lips, wondering how fast she'll need to be. She barks out a laugh, and tries to contain her anger at the presumption. She saw the world made. It is no matter what he is. "Young lord, you will break my fast most admirably. I do like a little cheek with my meals." The shadows grow behind her, and she aims her thought at him.
Only to find his thought in hers. She widens her eyes, and smiles meanly. Amren is equally pleased to find the younger fae lord is surprised as well by her awareness of him.
"Go ahead," she says, slow like a promise. "Find what you're looking for. Find my name and my nature in there. You will find it's not as easy as you supposed."
He frowns, but his eyes are bright and full of power. Not like hers though, not shifting and old, old, old like night ether. Whatever he finds, he does not allow to show.
Amren finds herself intrigued. (You think you would allow him to live if it wouldn't ruin everything.)
"You are terribly lonely."
She stops, both her breath and her smugness with the game. Something rages inside, and flickers behind the cage of her face. She has no patience for this. "I suppose I would be less lonely were I not so terribly hungry," she whispers. "A pity."
"For a great many things. Have you no kin, or did you eat them as well?"
This wounds deep and red and she thinks of things other than the great mountain, of the metallic stench of waterfall mist, and she brushes him from her mind like a moth at a flame. He flinches, but shows no other outward reaction. She will seize his mind with nightmares for supposing himself familiar enough to ask. He will be nothing but a good meal for the winter. She feels her hands hot with menace.
He shakes his head, calm outwardly, but she sees his throat swallow, the bob of his neck. It is the only thing that gives him away, but Amren is a good watcher. "Wait."
"I have waited a long time already," she sneers. (You will wait more still.)
He shakes his head again. "It was wrong of me to ask. I have very little kin, and I certainly don't want to imagine your thousands of years without them. I am Rhysand," he adds, like that somehow clarifies everything. "The Lord of Night Court. I'd like to strike a bargain.""
Amren laughs, like that meant something to her. He frowns, but has the good manners of one used to disagreement. She blinks once long and slow in invitation to continue.
"I know of you, but not how you came to escape your Prison," he says, and sensing her tense at the mention of that place, he raises a palm. "I have no intention of returning you unless you wish to continue savaging the people in the hills here, in which case I will have no choice but to deal with you in whatever manner works best. I don't suppose you are such an easy kill, or else the Prison would have wasted you hundreds of years ago."
Amren knows that it is flattery, but finds herself flattered all the same, a cat with a pretty coat being scratched behind the ears.
Rhysand continues. "I will provide what you need in exchange for your strengths. The food, a home, whatever comforts you have wished for, and whatever insight I can find that binds you to this body." A pause, and a swallow. It's a big promise, and now the catch. "I have command of this land, but not it's people. The courtiers would see me dead a hundred times over if they felt they had the chance. I cannot afford for them to be entirely afraid of me, or else none will ever obey."
(He needs them to be afraid of you, your heart croons.)
The silence between them is hollow yet full of thoughts. There is no bitter-lie-taste in the air. "I suppose you'll need to call me something," she says after a great length.
And just like that, Amren is again in this game.
Servitude in exchange for freedom and food. No live game, unless she intends to hunt like all the other hunters for the beast of the woods. The thought makes her hands itch with restlessness, but she concedes at the possibility of someday shirking off this terrible fae flesh she wears. (You will show them what you are then, and yes, they will be awed and sorry and delicious. No river to wash you away, only the certainty of eternity.) As long as the meat and the bones and the blood is fresh, she can wait.
The real indignance comes when it comes time for him to find her a lair of her own. While the spells of knowledge concealing Velaris from the open world make her rankle, Rhysand's insistence that she not keep her collection of beautiful ("grotesque" he says) things makes her choke on jealous bile.
"You will not take the bones of my people into my city. Is that clear?" He is actually angry, and Amren's amusement is only dwarfed by the need to gather her bones back to her and hide them away. They are hers.
The apartment is a loft, small and triangular, but with open windows that look to the great Sidra that runs through the city. (The sea-brine is here in your room, but you cover that fear for now. You will not fall apart this close to mountains, to the hardness of rock.) A large bed is hers, soft and fluffy and utterly without the mess of trinkets that she has grown used to against her body.
A new treasure chest then, she thinks. I can come back to the old one once this act gets boring.
She cuts and combs her hair with a silver comb that Rhysand buys her from the plaza after he spies her coveting it. Perhaps he was worried she would steal it. (You would have.) It will be the first trinket for her new collection.
Amren's first day at the Court of Nightmares is entirely memorable for the fact that she puts her index and middle finger clear through someone's eye socket. They rush the throne of the young lord, and Amren begins to fulfill her deal. Rhysand looks vaguely sick at first, watching her go from joint to knuckle to wrist into the rival lord's skull.
"Anyone else up for a bit of sport? I'm afraid the young man here didn't plan his moves very well," she says blandly, eyes dancing with unseen wind within. She wants so badly to chew the skin clear off his shoulder, she almost shakes out of need. She can feel it's softness slackening in death with the hand that holds him in place.
Rhysand acts like he is pleased, and the mood across the room goes from volatile to obliging very quickly.
"Not this time, Amren," he says in a sing-song voice, but the redness of trauma and sickness is in his mind. There is very little she cannot see.
She thinks he will learn to regret this bargain, to realize he does not have mastery over her. (You wonder if he will grow to resent it before then.) She may even be his death. It makes her merry for some months.
She sometimes forgets that she is not fae. She spends so much time standing on the edges of them that it becomes easy to pretend. The usual reminder is when Rhysand is brave enough to bring her blood in a glass like he was pouring her wine. He schools his face to be expressionless, but to have brought it while it was still hot, he must have slaughtered the beast and drained it himself. The trauma of killing it slowly is still in his eyes.
"Dinner is served," he says blandly. "Though I do not understand why it is that you will not try the food from the main city. It's quite good, and much less messy. We get many spices that the rest of Prythian does not see, save in the Summer Court."
"It does not feed me," Amren says shortly, and reaches for the goblet. "You can spice a meat or place fruit before me all that you'd like, but it would not be what I need. I am not like you, though many of your kind once were and pretend otherwise," She finishes, fingers still outstretched.
Rhysand sneers, lips pulling back into a frown, but quickly schools his face back into neutrality. Diplomatic, her mind supplies. "They have moved on to new lives, more useful ones. We are not beasts. We can build on each other's strengths. Why else would you have agreed to my bargain?"
(The desire to be free no matter the circumstances. The fear of the Prison. The fear of starvation-)
"You forget the wickedness of the eternal, the endless need that no fancy court will ever fill with rules and propriety," she snaps, feral, hand withdrawing. "You would not need me if your logic was true. Your concept of a peaceful world is admirable, but does not change the nature of people."
"We are higher creatures than our base desires," Rhysand says patiently. "What good is immortality without ambition and conscience? Years of empty wandering and cruelty." (You recoil physically at this, and feel the span of your years and wrenching hunger in your gut.) "You suppose us to be as wolves, living day to day to eat and fuck and remain together for strength of force. I am certain we are more than that, and that poor leadership is the undoing of good men."
"But not I," Amren smiles, hungry, contemplating. "Not I. I am as I have always been."
Rhysand is smart enough to not tell her no, to reject her. But he is saddened and the shadow of anger clouds his star-bright eyes. He puts the goblet down on a nearby table, bids her good evening, and leaves in a rush of wings. Amren often wonders if she would be able to pluck them from his back before he knew what happened.
Youth is foolish, she thinks, and drinks deeply from the goblet steaming on the wooden table. She thanks him for it later, and doesn't mention his ambition again for many years. (You keep the goblet under the bed next to two dinner knives, a jeweled box, and a shawl you steal from a lord's lady in the shadows a week before, a glimmering soft thing that you smothered your face in and then shredded in a fit of wantonness. You wish it had been her flesh instead of her shawl.)
It entertains her to watch him try regardless, so she stays a while longer.
Sometimes Rhysand is too good, and it annoys her. Sometimes it makes her sad, like the thrum of the Great River is in his veins, and he follows it rather than waiting at the precipice's edge. She is thousands of years old, perhaps from before the count of years entirely, and she can't shake the uncanny feeling of having missed something. A day, a year, a conversation, a death, motherhood, family, a going-onward.
This part itches at her. She opens her own skin with her fingers on the occasions that it particularly worries at her edges, and feels better for it.
He brings her jewelry often, bright gems and chains and braided cord that comes in from across Prythian and the reaches of the sea. (You smell it on them, but the gleam covers your uneasiness.) She has stopped hiding her possessions under the bed when she realizes that he is not opposed to her collecting, but instead just prefers it not be bones. The antlers of elk and teeth of great cats occasionally end up on the dresser, but Amren keeps them tidy when she expects company. Long necklaces overtake her bedposts, brooches in her corners, a swath of coin belts and chain purses for pillows. She rarely wears them, but sometimes at night finds them a cold comfort to gather against her.
The next time he visits, she invites him to play a game of cards as she has seen him play with his Illyrian comrades. Even his closed expression cannot hide a hesitant happiness behind his hyacinth-fresh eyes.
Amren feels somehow dirty next to his earnestness, but does not allow it to keep her from enjoying the game. As she thinks often, she will see the moon fall from the sky long before she passes, and long before that he will have been forgotten by all save her greedy heart.
So it that respect, maybe his goodness will survive after all, if not Rhysand himself.
"I am sorry that you are still as you are," he says unexpectedly one night, and they are leaving a tavern that she has deigned to follow him and his friends to. (They are not yet your friends.) "I can't imagine being anything other than what I am. I wonder how differently I'd feel if I hadn't always been the animal that I am," he says, and his face is the grey softness of a cold moon. She thinks it very lovely. He is drunk perhaps, as he does when in Velaris and tired. Azriel and Cassian, her mind supplies, are often the same.
" I feel as I was," Amren says, "merely heavier. Away. Not the away that I ought to be."
(Away, away. The Others memory whispers to you anytime you're alone. You don't know how to follow. The river is no longer in the Great Mountain, only a red spider of a woman.)
"You are terrifying sometimes," he says earnestly, with a crooked smirk. "Old, but beautiful still. If you still are what you were, I can only imagine how much more it must be when not veiled in this body. You'll probably have to kill me were I to release you." Rhysand pauses, looking over the river, and contemplates. "I don't think you'd know not to."
Earnestness. Amren's dishonest heart withdraws from it, but pockets the memory.
"I'll kill you before, and save you the trouble of worrying what you had done," says she, admiring silver buttons at the edge of her pinned velvet sleeves. The wrists are thin and bony, but beneath she feels the blood pulse, desperate to move the things that make her through and out. Housing her being is a burden to the fae body. Did the fools that planted her here known what they had done, like this was punishment and lesson alike? She knows the feel of what the bones of her hand would be like in her teeth, chewed and swallowed with delight. Her eyes burn until she wonders if she can slip through them.
"Why do you trust me?" she says.
He doesn't know.
The thought is naked in the air, and she feels the brief shadow of Rhysand across it, aware. He laughs at his own discomfort, and it is then that Amren decides to keep him. He is made of stronger stuff than simple bones. He knows where this is going in a hundred years. A thousand years. However long it takes her to move to her next treasure trove.
(You have so little left, you must always gather what you can.)