Gif shaking head in disbelief

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Previous Chapter
Chapter Ten:
Heading back from axe combat training with Ceras, I detoured and headed to the lakeshore instead of the palace. Though I was right outside the gate, I wasn’t too interested in heading inside yet.
I wanted to sit in the sand and grass and wait to see if a ship carrying my girlfriend would sail by. It’d been a few weeks since Lily left Perth by boat for an assignment in the Tulip Court, and I’d missed her terribly since.
My bed was awful lonely, and I missed the late-night conversations we used to stay up and have, legs intertwined as we shared a chair and ate popcorn together.
Of course, I loved finally getting to spend some time with the queen as she’d been busy working on her proposal for Bliss. But Lily was a different kind of energy, and she occupied a separate piece of my heart, one that ached for her.
Pulling my legs up to my chest, I remembered that we’d be leaving for Kilgara, where every court in Faerie would meet on neutral ground while the rulers of each land decided who would host the upcoming Bliss.
I was to remain in my wolf form the entire time from the moment we left Featherstone until we returned for my protection of course. Supposedly, I would be harder to attack or capture when I weighed 200 pounds and had razor-sharp fangs and claws.
And I’m sure my inner wolf would appreciate the long spur to stretch her legs as we traveled beside the queen and put every wandering stare her way in its place.
That was two days from now, of course. And now. . . was now. In the moment, my heart, a piece of it, anyway, felt lonely. It missed the fae that connected with me on a more human level than the maelstrom of glamour that was her majesty.
While I sat there watching the occasional redeye buckfish leap from the water to catch a dragonfly on the surface, I heard a certain piskie approaching from the palace.
Barsilla’s wings buzzed as she flew around and into view, carrying the little clipboard she always had with her.
“Oh, hey Barsilla. Did you need something?” I asked, lifting my chin from my arms where it’d been resting while I sat there.
Varella’s left-hand lady cocked her head to the side, looked down at some tiny scribbling she had, and then stared back up at me.
“Ceras mentioned you seemed extra moody during your combat training today, and now I find you out here moping by the lake.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not moping,” I said, with all the convincing tone of a teenager stamping her foot. “I’m just. . . resting after a hard workout. That’s not illegal in the Raven Court, is it?”
Barsilla rolled her eyes like a mother dealing with a sulking teen. Dammit, what was that suddenly all I could think about?
“Your mortal emotions aren’t something the queen can afford to be distracted by right now, especially not with the summit coming up. And make no mistake, she will be distracted if she catches you moping. So, you might as well tell me what’s wrong so I can waste my time fixing it and avoid any diversions on the queen’s part,” the piskie said.
I let out a sigh and turned my attention back to the lake because my problem was simple to describe and impossible for Barsilla to fix. . . unless her magic included the ability to summon my girlfriend at the drop of a hat.
“I miss Lily. That’s all,” I said, putting my chin back down.
Barsilla opened her mouth and then closed it again. She thought before speaking, but I don’t think it did her a lot of good because she was still going to inevitably be a jerk about this.
“By the gods, you’re such a needy puppy!”
Then she rolled her eyes a second time.
“But that is a problem easily fixed. Follow me,” she said, and I stood, wondering what she intended to do.
Barsilla led me back into the palace and into a room I’d never been in before. Feathers stood outside the room protecting it but slide aside for Barsilla and me without a word.
The room we walked into was filled with paintings of ravens, crows, and magpies. Some sat in trees, some by rivers, and others under bushes, scavenging for fallen nuts and berries. There must have been about 20 paintings in different styles ranging from lifelike portraits to impressionist scenes.
“What is this place?” I asked, still looking around at all the artwork.
“This is the Hall of Winged Messengers. Our queen will sometimes use these birds to contact others discreetly,” Barsilla said, coming to rest in the seat of a large red velvet chair.
“She uses. . . the paintings to talk to other people?” I asked, scratching the back of my head and trying to picture how that would work.
Varella’s left-hand lady shook her head. But I did notice that she didn’t roll her eyes this time. That was progress. . . for me anyway. I tended to ask a lot of stupid questions. Or at least, questions faeries would find ignorant because I didn’t know any better.
Deciding to teach by example, Barsilla instructed me to select a bird and walk over to the painting it sat in. I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I found a magpie with black and white feathers and blue-tipped wings. The painting it sat in showed the bird huddled between several wildflowers, perhaps hunting for something to make a nest with.
“Hold out your hand in front of the bird and say, ‘Queen Varella commands you to carry my words.’”
I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I slowly held out my right hand in front of the painting, palm up flat. Then I said, “Queen Varella commands you to carry my words.”
At first, nothing happened. And I gave Barsilla a look of suspicion. Was she making a joke of me? It would be like the fae to pull a prank like this on a mortal unfamiliar with their ways.
She just motioned that I turn back to the painting. When I did, a magpie hopped off the canvas, suddenly springing to life in a three-dimensional world. It flew off the artwork as if the oil paint was being rewound in time, returning to its paintbrush.
But instead of turning back into paint, the animal kept its form and hopped down into my open hand. I felt its thin twig-like talons hop across my hand as its head tilted from side to side. The bird looked like it was waking up from a long hibernation. Then it looked up at me with its red eyes, black dotted pupils focussed directly on my face.
Looking back at the canvas, I noticed the bird missing from its scenery. Only the wildflowers and sky remained.
The magpie continued to hop around in my hand, stretching its wings and turning its head this way and that.
“I. . . is this a real bird?” I asked, looking at the piskie that was just half the magpie’s size sitting across the room from me.
She hovered closer, and I expected the animal to see her as prey given their size difference. But the magpie made no move to leave my hand.
“That bird is made from the queen’s glamour, as you carry in your wolfheart. Only those with her majesty’s magic can call forth these birds and send them out into the world,” Barsilla said, motioning to the other ravens and crows. It was a room full of carrion callers.
Despite my expectations that the bird would start chirping or cawing in some way, I found the animal strangely silent. It might occasionally look away, but otherwise, the magpie seemed to do nothing more than observe me.
“So. . . how does this work exactly?” I asked. “Am I going to write a message on a tiny piece of paper, and this magpie will carry it to Lily? Like on Game of Thrones?”
Barsilla furrowed her brow.
“This isn’t a game, pet. And you don’t need to use a throne to send your message either. I swear, you mortals say the weirdest things. The first thing you need to do is hold the magpie up to your chest.”
“Why?”
“So it can hear who your heart beats for, who you want to send a message to. I still find it strange that not only does our queen have a soft spot for a mortal, but she’s also willing to share her puppy with her subordinate. Still, it’s not my place to question her,” Barsilla said.
I slowly held the magpie up to my chest as instructed. Part of me felt like I was still being pranked. But the magpie just hopped over to my pinky finger and placed its ear against my breast, closing its eyes and listening to my heartbeat.
“I will question you, though, royal pet. Describe for me your heart when you think of Lily. Then tell me how it compares to when you think about your mistress. I simply can’t imagine being in love with both of them, a queen, and a spy,” Barsilla asked.
When the bird was finished listening to my heartbeat, it skipped back into the center of my palm and started watching me again, presumably waiting for whatever message I was going to give the bird to carry.
And it wasn’t bad enough that I had to figure out the exact words I wanted to send to Lily. I had to answer prying questions from Barsilla about my feelings? Fuck. Even I didn’t understand my feelings half the time.
Polyamory was a new thing for me. Being gay took me long enough to understand. I mean — I understood on some level what it meant to look at girls in my high school and think, Fuck, she’s so pretty.
The way talking to a crush left my heart jogging in place like it was warming up for a marathon took weeks and months to sort out. Then I had to try to figure out if a girl felt the same way about me, and fuck was that even more difficult.
But I did figure it out eventually.
Now here I was still trying to figure out how to love two women at the same time when each made my heart quiver in different ways. They made other parts of me quiver as well. But that was neither here nor there.
And Barsilla wanted, what? An essay on how they made me feel? Shit. I’d have an easier time lecturing her on quantum physics.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked.
“I want you to tell me how two fae ladies I’ve known for much longer than you make a werewolf howl in heat,” Barsilla said.
I scoffed. No way was I telling the piskie things Varella and Lily had done to make me howl in ecstasy. But the more I thought about it, I realized she wasn’t asking about deeds, but emotions.
Fae weren’t like mortals. Their understanding of our emotions and motivations was limited to what they observed when they took a vacation in the realm where time still flows.
That’s part of the reason I connected so deeply to Lily. She was half-human, and that meant it was easier to talk to her about my fears and dreams, really lay them out on the bed sheets in front of her. And she understood. Gods, she understood. Maybe that was what Barsilla wanted here. . . to understand.
“Well. . . Lily — see — she makes me feel like there’s no one in the world except for us when we’re together. Like reality and all its problems and the people who make them are so far removed because she’s taken my hand and guided me to a place of gentle love and sweetness.”
The piskie wrote something down on her clipboard and nodded.
“And your mistress? How does she make you feel?”
Taking a deep breath, I considered the morning we’d had a couple days ago.
“My mistress. . . she makes me feel like I’m in the eye of a hurricane. All the power in the world to destroy anything that tries to do me harm while I’m kept safe and sound at the center of the storm. With her, I feel like I’m going to be swept away at any moment, but when it happens, the place I’ll be swept to is in her arms. And I trust that whether I’m on the ground or in the sky she’ll protect me.”
Barsilla smiled as she took more notes.
“What was all that about?” I asked, cocking my head to the side like the magpie in my hand.
She finished writing something and then looked back up at me.
“Now you know exactly how you feel about each of them. No more wishy-washy shit humans do. Love each of them with the full confidence that you can love two people at the same time and be loved by each of them simultaneously.”
With that, she started to fly over toward the door. Barsilla stopped just before opening the exit and looked back my way.
“When you’re ready to send your message, hold the magpie up into your direct gaze and speak to it as if it were Lily. The moment you look away or lose focus, it’ll fly away to carry your message, regardless of whether you were finished.”
Then, Varella’s left-hand lady left me alone with the magpie. I felt a little nervous about getting my message cut off. It didn’t take much to distract me. I suppose that was something I had in common with the corvid I was holding. My brain could think, shiny! at a moment’s notice. Perhaps that’s how I fell in love with two different faeries in the first place.
But instead of getting distracted, I thought about my girlfriend, the lesbian faerie I missed cuddling with every single night, the gay girl who wasn’t just part of my dreams, but my waking world as well.
Holding up the magpie about a foot from my face, I looked deep into its crimson eyes and said:
“Dear Lily, I miss you more than you can know. And I hope the bird that tracks you down over in the Tulip Court doesn’t make me sound too clingy. I’ve yet to see how fae react to clinginess. But in case it’s negative, do me a favor and pretend this message is a lot more breezy and cool than it actually is.
“Featherstone feels lonely without you. I’m happy when I’m with my mistress, but in other moments, my heart pines for the girl who plays board games with me in my room and holds me close when I bolt awake after a nightmare about my father until I come back to reality, safe and sound.
“But I know your mission is important. I would never ask you to come home early and risk disappointing our queen. So instead I’ll just ask two things. First, think of me in the moments when that mask you wear feels a little too tight and smothering. Remember that I’m here waiting for you in a place where you just get to be Lily, my girlfriend. Not a wing for the Raven Court. Second, come back to me safely. Because even though I know you’ve been doing this for years, and you’re the best spy my mistress has. . . I might still worry.
“Oh, and bring me back a cool Tulip Court souvenir if you can. Maybe a tulip? Actually — scratch that, magpie. That’s three things, and I said I’d only ask two. Seriously. Don’t repeat this part to my girlfriend. It’ll make me look stupid, like I don’t know how to use a winged messenger. So you’re not gonna say this last part, right?”
I was interrupted by the sound of Barsilla’s raucous laughter coming from outside in the hallways and looked away for a split second, fearing she’d overheard me.
When I looked back, only a single black and white feather remained in my hand.
“Aw, shit.”

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Not the most welcoming sight.
I swear this was the background for a wallpaper I saw somewhere.
Yeah, it looks bad-ass... until you remember those fires are probably upwards of 400 degrees which means the character is literally cooking to death inside the power armor.
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Huh... interesting hair, Cait.
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AHH! KIll it with fire!!!
Just for fun I put Kellog's outfit on Nick... but now I can't remove it. Was there some cut content about Kellog in Nick's head I just glitched into to something?
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Um Good bye, Dogmeat. No one violates the law of gravity like you.
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I have no idea what's going on with Fahrenheit's hair... or her face. Is that supposed to be a burn? or a really funky tattoo?
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Is it just me or does it look like Garvey is enjoying standing in the midst of a firestorm?
I don't know who they pissed off, but damn.