by K. C. Lannon
Deirdre came back from the surrounding woods with an armful of kindling. She dropped the sticks in a pile in the middle of camp, squinting at James. “You haven’t started setting up the fire yet,” she pointed out. “Did you forget how?”
“No fire, just to be safe,” Iain said. “I know it’s a little cold at night, but fire attracts faeries. If any Unseelies are around, a fire would be a dead giveaway we’re human.”
Deirdre blinked.
Was that… offensive? Iain wondered wildly. He’d never conversed with faeries before outside of work, and even then, any conversations he’d had were mostly one-sided or cryptic on the faery’s end. He’d certainly never encountered a faery that acted so human. Despite what he knew, she did seem like a normal girl to him at times.
But she just shrugged. “All right. I guess that makes sense.”
They divided up the food (if one could call packaged, factory-made, processed rubbish “food”) and ate quietly. James looked smug as Iain wolfed down a crumbly biscuit, probably waiting for his chance to get him back for snubbing prepackaged food all these years. It was still rubbish, but it did help to ease his hunger somewhat.
As they finished up their meal, James began to rummage through his pack and laid out his notebook, a map of the UK that was marked all over, and a few books. Finally James produced Mum’s letters, stacking them on the ground beside the map. Iain stared at them, wishing James would put them back for now.
“So,” James began, breathless, leaning forward over his papers and looking between Iain and Deirdre. “I’ve marked a path that will get us to where we’re going as quickly as possible while sticking to rural areas.”
Iain squinted at the lines James had drawn on the map. He’d scribbled notes along the path with information about the areas and reports of faery sightings. Some of the writing even overlapped, as if jotted down with haste or in the dark.
As James yammered on, gesticulating wildly with his hands, Iain listened but was preoccupied with his own observations. The notes were impressive and thorough—clearly James had put a lot of time and effort into his research. Iain had always hoped he could put those skills to good use someday, but he’d imagined that day much farther in the future at a university of some renown.
“The place we’re going is near the Peak District. Most of Mum’s vitsa, her extended family, moved from Neo-London to near where Sheffield used to be and settled their community there—that’s pretty close to the Peak District.”
“But how will you find them once we’re there?” Deirdre asked.
“Well,” James said, “everyone in the Roma community there should know of her. We’ll just ask for the Demeter family.”
Iain’s stomach did an anxious flip at the thought of meeting his relatives. He’d heard stories about them as a child—Mum’s hilarious stories of all the trouble she and her big sister, Delphina, got into—but he knew even then that they wanted nothing to do with him or his brother. Mum’s parents had made her choose between staying in Neo-London with Dad and him and being ostracized from their community or leaving with them and forgetting her life there.
But Delphina might help us even if the rest of Mum’s family won’t. She’s Mum’s big sister, after all. And they were really close. She’d probably do anything for Mum, to protect her…
Before Iain could phrase his concerns, Deirdre cut in.
“Wow, James. You really have planned everything! I can’t believe you researched all this.” She beamed at him.
James crossed his arms and puffed out his chest a bit. “Well,” he said, having the upbringing to at least sound demure, “I just had a lot of time on my hands—being basically shut in or by myself all the time.”
Iain balked but kept his bafflement to himself. Is that what his brother thought, that he’d been left alone and confined? Had he been planning to run away by himself for so long?
Iain remembered when he and James used to plan together how they would find Mum. But just as he had learned to let go of a young boy’s wish of being a knight and a young man’s ambition of being in the Iron Infantry, any real thoughts of finding his mum had been shelved with other unrealistic dreams.
Evidently James had never given up. He hadn’t questioned Marko’s intentions or the letters or doubted Mum’s motives for leaving. Iain was brimming with pride for his brother even if James had hidden all this from him and ran away. He had probably thought Iain wouldn’t have listened—to his credit, he would have been right.
But he was listening now.
As James began folding his map back up, Iain clapped him hard on the back, grinning. “Nice detective work, egghead,” he said. “Next time you have a genius breakthrough, involve me in it like old times, yeah? I want back in.”
James grinned back at him unabashedly. “Yeah. Count on it.” Then he perked up further, grabbing the stack of letters. “Speaking of genius breakthroughs, we should read the rest of these. Maybe Mum’s left us some clues that Marko didn’t find.”
Iain reached out and placed his hand on James’s arm, gently lowering it. When James shot him a confused look, he pleaded in a hushed tone, “Maybe we ought to read those later, yeah? When we’re alone.”
“Why?” James asked, not bothering to whisper.
“It’s personal, yeah? It should be kept between us—between family.”
He hoped James would understand. The letters contained private conversations only meant for Marko to hear. It was mortifying enough to be reading it themselves, and he did not fancy the idea of anyone else hearing any personal anecdotes that might be in the other letters.
“What? That’s dumb!” James scoffed. “Since I’m the one who took these, I think I should be in charge of who reads them. It’s only fair. And Deirdre wants to help, so she’ll need to know what we know.”
Deirdre looked between them, having apparently heard everything. She frowned but said, “If you think it could help, I’d be happy to read them.”
Iain hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, but he clearly had. He didn’t know many faeries to be sensitive. But she did not have any reason to know the details of their family life. Even if she was nice to James, he had only known her a few days, after all.
James reluctantly stowed the letters away, saying they would look over them once they were in town. Iain was grateful that he’d decided not to make a scene over it.
Wanting to change the subject, a thought occurred to Iain, and he asked Deirdre, “What about you? Do you, uh, have plans for how you’re going to find the Summer Court?”
“Hmm. The banshee told me I needed to find the Summer Prince and that he would get me in the Summer Court.” Deirdre shrugged, sucking in her lip. “So I guess I’ll just have to do that.”
“How do you plan on finding the Summer Prince?” Iain asked, leaning forward to meet her eyes. “I meant it when I said no one’s seen him for ages. He must have made himself scarce for a reason.”
After considering for a moment, she said, “You know, I’m not really sure.”
He couldn’t help but think it was a little naïve of her to just wander toward the Summer Court with no solid intention, off the word of a banshee. But the banshee fortune-teller, he realized, must have been telling the truth—about Deirdre and about Iain when he had gone to the same banshee years ago and she had told him he would see his mother again.
And Deirdre was a faery after all, so it shouldn’t have been odd for her to follow the advice of one. She probably knew more about magic than he ever would; maybe there was something he didn’t know about how faery intuition worked.
Or maybe she just doesn’t care that much about finding the Summer Court… If not, then what does she care about? Why is she here?
That was something that still baffled him—not why she was traveling but why she was traveling with them. He supposed she had no one else to go with, being new to the city and with no known family. She had claimed to be leaving with James with the intention of keeping him safe, which
he appreciated but didn’t quite understand.
There was a lot going on that he did not understand—with Deirdre, with James, with the state of Neo-London, and his father. His first instinct was to ignore it—to push everything away and let it roll off him like rain—but he didn’t know if he could do that anymore. He didn’t know if the wool could be placed back over his eyes now.
James butted in, saying, “I bet we can find someone to ask once we’re close to the Summer Court. I reckon the locals must know all about the Summer Prince.”
“That isn’t much of a solid plan,” Iain pointed out.
“Well what do you suggest then?” James asked though his tone suggested he didn’t want to hear what Iain had to say in the slightest.
“Deirdre might consider finding a guide, someone who knows the area and where the barrier starts,” Iain said. “We might even find a decent faery to take us. We could look somewhere along the way.”
“I didn’t think faeries lived in human towns,” Deirdre said. “I mean, Neo-London is one thing, but there weren’t any in the town near the orphanage.”
Iain shrugged. “They probably wouldn’t live in one, but sometimes they like to pass through little towns that are close to the countryside.”
He thought of the faery and the human in the cottage who had helped him when he’d asked. He thought of the little sleeping babe in the father’s arms, how the sight had oddly warmed his heart, despite all the fear that had crowded his mind that day after the first Fachan attack. Maybe he did not know as much about faeries as he thought he did if a human and a faery could live and thrive and parent together.
“I heard that back before the bombing,” Iain continued, “some faeries used to charge humans a hefty fee to guide them near the Court just for a glimpse of the Seelie Queen.”
“Did they ever see her?” Deirdre asked.
“Sometimes.”
James cackled. “I remember Dad telling us about that! He said one time a foreign leader paid for such a tour and claimed he got a kiss from the Faery Queen herself!”
“It was really just an actor in an atrocious costume—a famous comedian, mind you. It was news for months. Even the faeries thought it was a laugh, apparently. The poor blighter.”
Deirdre leaned in with interest, her hands folded in her lap and her legs crossed. She looked like a child engaged in an interesting picture book. “Was the Summer Court really that accessible back then?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve even read much about what it was like before the bombing.”
James’s expression was grim. “They don’t tell you much about faery and human relations before the Cataclysm at school or in textbooks. Everything they do tell you is complete propaganda.”
Iain somehow managed not to roll his eyes, thinking that he was about to hear a conspiracy.
Tilting her head, Deirdre asked, “Like what?”
“Well, um, things were a lot less regulated back then, but other than a few disputes over land—faeries stealing livestock from farms or humans building on sacred sites—they mostly coexisted in peace. The prime minister of the day even encouraged faeries and humans to live in the same spaces, claiming they could benefit each other.”
“Where did you hear that?” Iain asked after a pause, intrigued. He’d never heard anything like this before.
“In a book—an autobiography of one of the politicians of the time.” James’s grin was sly. “It was banned, of course, because it shows faeries in a decent light, but I managed to find a really old copy in a shop once. It was all blackened, like someone had tried to burn it.”
“Wow.” Deirdre’s eyes lit up. “That sounds really nice. About humans and faeries living together, I mean. Do you think faeries and humans could get along like that again?”
“It would be cool to be around all that magic and stuff!” James’s expression scrunched up, and he added, “It probably was nice until the prime minister was cursed anyway. He was cursed to push the button—you know, the nuclear button.”
“By the Winter Court?”
James nodded. “Most likely. It also might have been a rogue faery. They never caught the one responsible though. Dad says it could have been a Seelie faery just as easily, but no one else believes that. From what I’ve read, that wouldn’t have been the case at all.”
As Deirdre stifled a yawn with the back of her hand, and as Iain held a sympathy yawn back with difficulty, he stood up and suggested that Deirdre and James try to get some sleep. James had no objections, instantly lying back on his makeshift bed and twisting around to get comfortable.
Deirdre stood up, wiping her skirt off. “I’ll keep watch. After all, you and James had to stay up all last night while I slept for hours…”
Iain shouldered his pack, glancing around to find the optimal place to sit. He wanted to find somewhere where he could see anything coming from a distance. “You were passed out,” he pointed out. “You needed to sleep it off. Not your fault.”
“But aren’t you tired?” she asked, her brow pinched. “I mean, you look tired. Like, really, really tired. It’s not healthy to stay awake for so long.”
Iain was dumbfounded for a moment on realizing that she was concerned for him. He didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing for a full minute.
He wanted to tell her that even if he did try to sleep, he probably wouldn’t be able to. He wanted to tell her that he was the eldest among them, the only one with any kind of formal training, and the only one with a firearm. Most importantly, he considered the two of them his responsibility, with James being his little brother and Deirdre being an innocent civilian even if she did possess an awesome power. If she had to use her magic again, she might drain herself even further.
Instead, what came out of his mouth was a stumbling, mumbling, “It’s fine. If we encounter any kind of faery monster, I’d rather it be me to deal with it than you—you know, because of your magic…”
He wondered what he’d said to make her look so defensive all of a sudden. She stopped rocking on her heels, clasped her hands together against her chest, and narrowed her eyes.
When she spoke, her voice was trembling, and the sound made his throat constrict. “I know my magic is… weird and creepy, and I know you think I’m like other faeries, but I’m not like them. I know I’m not human, but I don’t even know what’s going on, or why this is happening. I’m… I’m just a person, like you and James. I’m a person!”
“I know that,” Iain said instantly. It felt right and true to say it. Then he just stood there, stunned, his body going cold. “That wasn’t what I meant when I mentioned your magic…,” he said, his voice soft.
James was either already sleeping like a log, or he was faking so he could eavesdrop. Iain guessed it was probably the latter, but either way, this was a conversation between him and Deirdre only.
“I know this is all crazy, but I’m not a bomb that’s about to go off!” Deirdre insisted, her cheeks coloring. She plopped back to the ground and folded her arms. “How would you like it if someone looked at you and talked about you like you had no feelings?”
He knew exactly what that felt like.
He couldn’t even imagine inflicting the same wounding feeling on someone else—it was unthinkable. But that was what he’d been doing since he told her he couldn’t trust she wouldn’t hurt them by accident or otherwise. He was sickened with guilt that he’d said it even if it might be true.
But he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything—couldn’t even seem to form words, which was unusual for him. Why that was the case, he could not even guess.
As she let out a huge, shuddering sigh and threw herself down on her makeshift bed, seemingly forgetting it was made out of hard ground and not mattress, he just let her be, convincing himself he should just leave her alone to avoid making things worse.
“Night,” Iain said.
All Deirdre did was let out a muffled groan, her face pressed against her mossy bed.
Then
he pushed down his regret. He let all of it go, focusing instead on how he could help ensure their security for the night. Even if he had made Deirdre feel unwelcome, he could at least make certain she and James were kept safe.
Iain hadn’t climbed a tree since he was a child. The last time he’d done it, he’d fallen out of it backward and nearly broken his neck. It was all done in the name of a quest appointed to him by James, who had been pretending to be the great wizard Merlin. After the grand ceremony in which Mum had knighted him with a broom handle as he knelt on the kitchen floor, he and James had raced to the park across the street to play. The quest had involved a great many feats, including jumping from park bench to park bench, retrieving a holy item from a deadly beast (a prized tennis ball previously stolen by their neighbor’s vicious dog), and finally climbing to the top of the tallest tree to grab the last leaf of autumn.
He’d fallen but not before he’d snatched the leaf first, which was all that had mattered to him. The leaf remained clenched in his fist proudly, even as he’d hobbled home in stoic silence and as James sniffled and cried, and even as his mother shouted at them after James confessed what happened. It had been a well-known fact in their home that Iain never refused a dare; James had often got in trouble for daring him to do dangerous and ridiculous things.
Now as the sky darkened, Iain climbed a tree to get a good vantage point of the campsite. He was just high enough to see the area but low enough so he could jump down at a moment’s notice. The tree was nearly bare, which meant there were no leaves to get in the way of his line of sight. Seeing James and Deirdre sleeping soundly below, he settled into the crook of the tree branch, and it almost felt cozy.
He had his firearm in one hand and his radio in the other. His headlamp was at the ready, but he decided to leave it shut off until he heard anything. If he heard anything…
They’d heard the Fachan’s steps, heard the whistling chain, but they hadn’t heard him sneak up on them—not until it was too late. The Fachan was dead, but there were many other monsters out there, ones that were sneakier and soundless.