Dreamseeker's Road by Tom Deitz

stared down at one he now knew was a devious Faery woman with her own complex agenda, which surely did not include loving any mortal, much less skinny, naive Alec McLean.
    He should have hated her, should have despised this wretch who had twisted his jealousy and caused such grief to older, more loyal friends. Yet as she lay there, her beauty awash with a pain she could only escape by death, he could not. “Farewell, my Alec,” she sighed, and spoke no more.
    She was one of the Sidhe, Alec’s dreamself reminded him. And the Sidhe could not die—not truly, not forever the way men did. Sooner or later she would return: sooner or later her spirit would build new flesh and Aife would once more walk the fields of Faerie.
    They’d be waiting for her, too: Lugh’s scouts and soldiers and spies would, they whose purpose it was to maintain balance and justice and order in Tir-Nan-Og. And since Aife had betrayed a king along with her mortal lover, that king would claim first vengeance, in whatever form revenge was enacted among the Tuatha de Danaan. Cursed to wear beast shape, she might be, as Ailill mac Angus had been. Or exiled to some island far from comfort and joy. Perhaps the Death of Iron, even, that severed soul and body past reunion—though that was unlikely, for mere traitors.
    Yes, all those were possible options. But what Alec knew far more certainly, felt more passionately, there in the heart of his self, was that he still loved her and wanted one last time to be with her honestly, with no deception on either side. She’d loved him, she’d told him once—and lied. She’d come to love him, she’d said again at the edge of death—and, he sensed, spoken true.
    So where was Aife now? How could he, Alec McLean, be with her again?
    As if in answer, the ruby-septumed stone that lay less than a yard from his head, that had drunk deep of the blood of wild beasts and tame boys, pulsed with scarlet fire…
    … “My Alec!”
    Alec blinked in bewilderment, for though he knew that he still dreamed, something more subtle assured him he dreamed true. And what he saw was the answer to his desire. Not where Eva and he had made love, or where she had died, but where she presently resided.
    “Come to me, my Alec, my dreaming boy-man-lover!”
    But Alec could only stare—first at the face of his lady, then at her body, where she sat clothed in shadow-gray samite on a padded velvet seat beneath a high, arched window, gazing out at nothing. And then at the larger room around her: rough stone walls and bare stone floor, across which splatters of furs and skins were strewn like storm wrack…
    And at a thrice-barred door, and a staircase leading to it, that spiraled around an open, dim-lit core…
    And a tower, ancient, scarred, and broken, in which the love of his life was imprisoned, for whatever space of days Lugh Samildinach deemed just…
    And a blasted plain around it, and beyond that a border of nothing, beyond which lay nothing save one Straight Track, along which the Winds between the Worlds both screamed and sang.
    And one wind found him and caressed him with a touch like a certain lover’s and spoke to him with her voice.
    “None may come here but through Tir-Nan-Og, my Alec—unless Mortal Men have learned to pierce the World Walls. And because my crime was born of love misguided and buried by love misused, I am doomed to remain in this tower until a mortal man who loves me finds his way here. And since but one mortal man has ever loved me, it is you alone, my Alec, who can accomplish this.”
    “Eva!” Alec cried to a cool but cloudless sky on an autumn afternoon. No one heard, though close by either hand his best friends likewise dreamed…
    *
    …Bloody Bald, Aikin thought sourly, was simply a mountain—a well-nigh-perfect cone, steeper-sided than most Georgia mountains, and solitary, as most were not—with sheer quartzite cliffs athwart its summit that caught the rays of sunset and dawn and blazed red as the