Song of the Fairy Queen

by Valerie Douglas

  Alarmed, he looked at her. “Kyri…”

  But she was already turning, her wings opening to catch the moonlight as she stepped out of the tent.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  It was late and the village was asleep when the Hunters came, kicking down doors and shouting, their torches held high and flickering, casting a mad light and madder shadows everywhere. There were screams, cries in the night. Gawain was awake in an instant. Fear burst through him. Fire bloomed, flickering between the slats of the shutters.

  A barn or something was on fire.

  Hunters. It had to be.

  His heart pounded.

  Like him, his foster parents were awake. His foster father raced to slam the bar across the door to deny the Hunters entrance long enough for Gawain to escape.

  It wasn’t them the Hunters wanted, they all knew. They were old. The Hunters wanted strong young men and women to conscript into the army.

  Gawain had already lost friends to them.

  The door wouldn’t hold long.

  “Go, Gawain,” his foster mother cried softly. “Go.”

  Already Gawain was on the floor, scrabbling at the little latch that released the hidden hatch in the floor that every cottage had installed since Haerold had taken the crown. He squirmed through, pushing it shut behind him, flipping the wooden latch to hold it in place. There was no one else in the house of age. He’d been fostered here since his mother had died and they’d been kind to him, but they were old.

  He missed Liliane.

  Quickly and carefully, his heart pounding, he crawled through the makeshift tunnel, hearing feet kicking down the door above him. He feared for them, but he knew he couldn’t help them and would only make things worse if he tried.

  He looked out the little peephole at the back of the cottage, saw nothing but the darkness and bellied out.

  Someone snatched him up by the arm, somehow familiar, hauling him up out of the hole, clapping a hand over his mouth and cutting off the sudden, undignified squeak that burst out of him. At fourteen, with his voice was still changing, even in dire circumstances he was boy enough and man enough to be embarrassed by the sound.

  Panic hit, fear punching through him. There was an odd flash inside his head.

  Before he started to struggle, though, a familiar voice whispered in his ear. “It’s me, boy, shut up and stop fighting. It’s you they’re after. Now, run!”

  Gordon. The Miller, Liliane’s old friend.

  He’d taken Gawain under his wing after her death, teaching him how to use a sword.

  In shock from both the words and the means, Gawain ran, both of them making a bee-line through the bean poles and gardens for the cover of the distant row of trees.

  “Don’t stop,” Gordon said, hefting the pack on his back he’d hastily thrown together, “keep running. Once they don’t find you there in the village, they’ll start looking for you elsewhere. They’ll pick up our scent fast enough, for sure. Keep moving. You know your woodcraft, follow the stars. Here, here’s your sword. Don’t drop it.”

  Gawain didn’t drop it but it was a near thing.

  It was difficult to see anything beneath the trees it was so dark, not even the stars up through the leaves when you were running, but he ran all the same, Gordon grabbing him and yanking him to one side once and then they were beside the stream.

  “Go through it,” Gordon hissed.

  Obediently, Gawain nodded, splashing through the water.

  Then they heard the baying, the howling.

  A cold chill went through Gordon. It was too soon, far too soon, although he wouldn’t tell the boy that. Far too soon if they were to have any chance at all.

  “Keep running, lad,” he called, keeping his voice even.

  Gawain kept running, although the sound of the baying made the hair on his arms stand up and then he splashed up the opposite bank, still running. His lungs burned. It seemed as if they’d been running for hours.

  The girl came out of nowhere, angling to intercept them.

  She wore a tunic and trews like a boy, her hands held up to show she was no threat. Her hair was a longish cap of dark curls, barely seen in the dark. Her eyes were only a liquid shimmer in the night. A bow and quiver hung from her back, a small sword at her side.

  “If you would live, follow me,” she said.

  “Why should we trust you?” Gordon barked, wasting precious air.

  The howling increased.

  “It’s me or them,” she said. “Who would you rather?”

  Gordon looked at her. She hadn’t slowed a second, racing along beside them apparently effortlessly.

  “My life is as forfeit as yours now, if they catch us,” she said.

  There was that.

  Gawain nodded.“Go.”

  Like a deer, she sprinted off, leaped logs they couldn’t see, her paler clothing giving them a hint, an edge, something to follow in the darkness.

  Rain fell, a light drizzle, like insult to injury.

  In moments they were cold and wet.

  “Keep going,” the girl cried, leading them over a stretch of rock along a ridge and down the other side. “Can you swim?”

  The river. Had they run that far? It seemed too incredible.

  Gordon remembered. “It’s fast and strong here.”

  It was a risk.

  She nodded, “And will take us far in half the time and drown our scent, too, if you can stay afloat.”

  “In,” he said and they jumped into the icy, rushing waters.

  Still, the river nearly drowned them once or twice, but the girl was always there to catch them by the collar until they finally dragged themselves out of the water to collapse on the far bank.

  There was only the wind, the tree frogs and crickets.

  No howls, no baying. Not yet.

  “We can’t rest here too long,” she said. “They’ll follow the river until they pick up our scent again.”

  Dragging himself to a seated position Gordon winced and nodded. “God help my old joints.”

  In the early dawn light she could see him better, a tallish barrel-chested man of late middle years, his hair thinning and touched with gray.

  “What I want to know is, where are the Marshals?”

  Gordon stared at her. “Marshals? There are no Marshals, not anymore. Where you been, girl? There’s been no Marshals since Morgan disappeared, oh, two, three year ago. And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Two or three years? Had it been so long?

  Morgan. Her mind kept returning to him, her heart aching. What had happened? What had gone wrong? More importantly, where was he?

  He wasn’t dead, she told herself. Morgan wasn’t dead. She’d have known it if he’d died. She’d have known. Because she would’ve been dying herself…

  What had gone wrong?

  She’d been searching for so long. And then there were her people.

  One day had run into the next.

  “My name is Kyri,” she said absently, numbly.

  It was a fairly common name these days, many folk having named their girl children that these last years, although she looked a bit old for it.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Gordon, and this is Gawain.”

  Gawain’s breath finally came back. “What I want to know is why were they hunting me?”

  Frowning, Kyri looked at him in alarm, at Oryan’s son.

  Tall, he had the look of his father and his mother’s clear gray eyes. He was handsome, a fine strong young man.

  “They were looking for you by name?” she said, alarmed, “Specifically?”

  Gordon said flatly, “They were.”

  How had they found him? Did it matter?

  Perhaps.

  For the moment she decided it was probably best if Gawain didn’t know the truth of himself. Here was certainly not the best place to tell him, to explain, or to unlock his memories, but there was a place nearby and a sense of something…

&
nbsp; By the look in Gordon’s eyes, he guessed or knew something, though.

  Unfortunately after all this time Kyri had no idea where Oryan was and she had no way to find him unless he Called. And unless he had some sense that Gawain was in trouble, or looked into the scrying bowl, he would have no reason to do so.

  She opened up heart and soul, on the chance of finding some sense of him.

  And found something else instead.

  She went still. There was something, east along the river…something familiar.

  It nagged at her.

  “This way,” she said.

  Gordon looked at her, this slip of a girl. “Why should we follow you?”

  Tilting her head with something like amusement, she said, “You have someplace else you’d rather be?”

  At a loss, he looked at her. Where would they go?

  “I’ve done pretty well so far,” she pointed out.

  He had to concede that. Maybe they would follow her for at least a little while longer.

  It turned out she was pretty good with that bow, too, bringing down a young buck for their breakfast.

  They were all starving, or at least he and young Gawain were, until she started dragging the remains of the poor deer’s carcass about, smearing blood and entrails all around.

  “Hey there,” he protested.

  Gawain looked at her as if she was mad, his stomach churning.

  “What are you doing?”

  She looked up at them.

  “Those Hunters will be hungry when they get here like we were. They might stop to eat if there’s easy food and that will buy us time. The scent will draw other predators, too. Maybe a bear. A hungry bear won’t know what to make of Hunters but he will know what to make of someone trying to steal his dinner. It might slow them down, if only a little.”

  Gordon had to admit she was pretty smart for a slip of a girl.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Why had she been drawn here to this…to Oryan’s torched, abandoned and fog-shrouded city? Kyri wondered, staring down in stunned horror, puzzlement and shock at what lay below them.

  It was a ruin, a dark and shadowed place that looked far older than it was and far more deteriorated than it should be after so little time.

  Fog hung over it, not uncommon in these lands so close to the sea. Except that this fog was cold and dense, ominous. In the sky above them the sun shone high and bright. The fog should have burned off by this hour. Vines, thick, disturbingly tenebrous and verdant, clung or twined everywhere, swarming over the stones of the castle. They seemed to be crawling even as she watched, moving before her eyes.

  It made her shiver to even think of going into that dark and terrible place.

  What was Morgan doing here in the gray and ghostly ruins of abandoned Caernarvon?

  For it was Morgan she sensed.

  At last, after searching for so long.

  Hope, ever fragile, bloomed again within her.

  She’d known he wasn’t dead, but after so long…

  It was almost too much to hope she’d found him at long last.

  Not a stick of the town that had once encircled the castle remained, only a few tumbled stone walls, some holes in the ground, the castle and the moat. The sight and sounds of the sea beyond were muted by the equally tenebrous fog.

  The sense of Morgan was so much stronger here.

  Every instinct cried out in revulsion at the very thought that he was in this horrible place.

  “We have to go there,” she said, as much as she hated the very idea.

  Gordon shot to his feet and she wanted desperately to haul him back down out of the sight of the castle, as if it were a conscious thing and could see him.

  “What!” he cried, “are you mad? Why would we want to go in there?”

  Kyri nearly winced at every loud word, glad only that the sound was muffled by the fog and so didn’t echo. She didn’t want it to echo and wake whatever was sleeping there. Morgan was down there, so down there was where they must go, but she didn’t want to wake what was in that place.

  There was another reason.

  It was Caernarvon.

  She turned to Gawain. “Your answers are down there.”

  By the look of him, he was so much his father’s son, yet tall, almost gangly like his mother, with the slightly long face and nose of his father, save for his mother’s beautiful, long-lashed clear gray eyes. While Gwenifer had never been a beauty and Oryan could never have been named truly handsome, their son was both, a tall, well-formed boy on the cusp of becoming a man.

  Would he have even half the character, courage or strength his parents had, or that of both?

  That remained to be seen. So far, he’d acquitted himself well, neither dithering nor complaining, nor arguing when it made no sense, instead simply watching and observing.

  How had the Hunters found him?

  She had no doubt that Haerold had, indeed, found him, thinking on it. It seemed half the countryside had been roused, dozens of small, similar villages had suffered the same fate as his.

  Certainly Gordon seemed sure enough of it.

  “Don’t believe her, boy,” Gordon said.

  “I don’t lie,” she said sharply, her eyes on Gawain.

  He looked back at her.

  “Either way,” she said, lifting an eyebrow and nodding toward the castle. “That’s where I’m going.”

  “This is mad,” Gordon protested.

  With a sigh, Kyri looked down at what lay below and said, “I can’t disagree.”

  Once it had been a lovely place, filled with light and life, bustling and busy, warm and welcoming.

  Now it was a gray and awful place of stone and iron, no place for her or one of her kind.

  Her words silenced him.

  It was clear she didn’t want to go down there any more than Gordon did but she certainly seemed sure they must.

  “There are answers down there,” Gawain asked. “Answers to why they are chasing me?”

  Slowly, Kyri nodded.

  It wasn’t a lie, she knew that, too.

  There were memories down there in that fog-drowned castle. She remembered that long ago night.

  “Let’s go,” she said and then, “Wait…”

  Slipping a hand into her pocket, she withdrew a little crystal talisman.

  “Gawain.”

  Frowning a little, he looked at it as she put it in his palm.

  “It will protect you against magic,” she said.

  Startled, Gordon stared at it in shock and said, “Is that a Fairy feather?”

  She nodded.

  Gordon stared at her, astonished.

  A fairy feather was worth more than its weight in gold. Those things were a dear as his late mother’s soul and harder to come by. Yet she gave it away without a care or a thought.

  He shook his head.

  They made their way down the slope and the further they went, the worse the miasma became.

  From above, the vegetation had seemed almost too lush. Here it was desiccated, sere and dry, gray tinged. The only green to be seen was on the thick, fleshy vines crawling up the castle walls.

  They stepped to the causeway and Kyri wanted to cringe, looking up the long ramp at what awaited them.

  Guards stood at the gate, two of them, standing unnaturally still. Both had had their throats cut. Her breath caught. They were alive and yet not, their spirits trapped in their dead bodies, crying out for release.

  Her head turned a fraction of an inch, her neck so stiff that it creaked like an old piece of leather, to look down into the moat.

  The bodies were still there, less touched by time than the gray stone walls above them.

  Was the Hunter that Morgan killed still there, too? Or the one Jacob had?

  She looked up at the guards standing frozen on the walls.

  Against her will, tears sprang to her eyes, in sympathy for these poor souls trapped here, one slipping down her cheek to fall silently down among
the dead. Whatever they’d done, they hadn’t, didn’t, deserve this.

  No one did.

  Trembling, her fingers went to her lips.

  With an effort she pushed her emotions back and kept moving.

  Both Gawain and Gordon hesitated, horrified, but finally followed as she passed between the two dead guards into the castle proper.

  Neither of the guards moved but Kyri had the sense of their eyes following as she stepped past them. Her skin crawled and she shuddered.

  It was an eerie, horrifying place.

  Mist swirled around their ankles, cold and clammy.

  She stepped out into the courtyard, to find more of the dead standing waiting.

  A part of her cried out in revulsion as she looked at each face, some known, and she grieved to see them, terrified for fear of seeing Morgan’s face among them.

  Morgan wasn’t dead, she knew that, but still…

  He wasn’t there. She nearly wept out of sheer gratitude.

  Gawain and Gordon kept close to her, sensing the eyes on them, too.

  With an effort, Kyri pulled on one of the huge oak doors to the entry and the Great Hall beyond it and drew it open.

  It opened with a sound like the shriek of a damned and dying man. A sound that made her want to cry out in revulsion and disgust. She looked around almost instinctively to see if it had indeed raised the dead. To her greater horror, she realized the terrible vine was indeed growing before her eyes, forcing its tendrils between the stone and mortar, tearing it down slowly piece by piece.

  Light filtered weakly through the high clerestory windows as they passed through the inner doors, past the dead guards there and into the Great Hall.

  Once this room had been beautiful, filled with light and laughter, a place for celebrations, gatherings and holidays.

  Kyri had guested here often, once upon a time.

  There were the high seats where Oryan and Gwen had sat, watching and smiling.

  Here the toppled tables from the battle had been righted, some still bearing the char of the fires set to hold off the invaders.

  Between the high windows were the banners of those who owed fealty or stood as allies to Oryan, most of them faded. All save one, of a tall oak and pine.