Moonshine

Chapter 15- Antimetopízo

αντιμετωπίζω: antimetopízo
Greek
confront
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For only the third or fourth time in her life, Sanya was glad for how dark it had been, darker than any raven. The darkness had probably saved her life.
But, although she may be indebted to the dark now, she was beyond glad that there was light now in the thicket she’d been attacked in.

Interrogation was made easier when you could see the respondent’s face.

And what made it easiest was the fact that the respondent was a faerie, and thus could not lie.

“I don’t see the point of keeping your mouth shut.” Sanya said, as the faerie glared at her. She couldn’t tie him up, for she had nothing that would work as rope, but the threat of her sword (which she had, thankfully, found in the grass) and the wolf was enough to keep the faerie from bolting. “There are always ways to make people talk.”

She wished he just talked, though. Part of her wanted to hurt him, though a bigger part didn’t want to- still, surely he could understand that she might kill him? Was death truly worth whatever the reason was that he had attacked her?

“Talk.” She said for the fourth time, glancing at the wolf that lay curled up beside the faerie, his bloody jaw resting on his gut. Any moment, and Laash would rip out his entrails. If faeries had entrails, at least.

Almost as if the wolf knew that she had thought of him, there was a low sound from him, half a growl and half a whine.
Sanya had named him Laash. It meant ‘corpse’ in her mother tongue.

“About what?” The faerie sneered, one of his hands pressed tight on his bleeding neck. They were the first words he had spoken so far. “The blood on your face does not make you look intimidating, child.”

Clenching her fists, Sanya took a deep breath.
“Unless you want me to spill more of your blood, you’ll fucking tell me why you’re here and why you tried to stab me in the heart.”

He gave her a baleful look, “I do not care for your heart. Only lovers kill like that. I was aiming for your throat, to slit it open and spill forward the fountain of blood I deserve.”

Deserve?
“This is about revenge?” She had thought the woodland creatures might rise up against her, but a faerie whom she had never even met?
Was she dreaming? It seemed likely that she was- or perhaps hallucinating.
Why couldn’t she dream of or hallucinate Edmund again instead of whatever this was? Just once she wanted something to happen that she’d not abhor.
“For what? I do not know you.”

“You are not the one I seek revenge against.” He hissed, his orange skin flushing pumpkin-hued in his anger. It was not dissimilar to the colour of the sky.  “Your lover is.”

She blinked, “Edmund?”
What the fuck? But her husband would never have harmed a soul- not knowingly, not unless he’d been coerced.
What if this was about something he’d done when he had been under Jadis’s spell? But- the faeries had not joined the struggle and battle against the White Witch, at least as far as she could remember. She didn’t think Ed had even known faeries existed until after his coronation.

“Your mortal spouse is not the one I speak of.” He leaned ahead from the tree he slumped against, and Laash raised his head, baring his sharp teeth. “Calm, you. I know when I am bested.”

“Then who are you talking about?” She asked impatiently. She had had sex with more than a few people, but she doubted more than two or three of them had ever even met a faerie. “Thylle in the Dancing Wood? Countess Cassia? Captain Ishaahz of Azraq? Those two maids in Galma- no, I doubt it, they’d never been to Narnia-”