The Castle of Earth and Embers

by Steffanie Holmes

  Dried blood splattered Blake’s face and his breath came out in ragged gasps. Flynn’s knife had bit into the flesh of his neck, and Blake winced as he opened his mouth to speak, his hand flying to his throat. He glanced at me, his eyes wide, begging for me to vouch for him.

  “Remember how I said he was a spirit user?” I said. “Well, it seems one of our powers – or at least, one of Blake’s powers – is telepathy. I heard his voice inside my head, telling me about the log. He was right. He helped us, so maybe we shouldn’t try to stab him.”

  “You sure it was him?” Arthur frowned.

  “Oh yeah,” I remembered Blake calling them my ‘Merry Men.’ “It was definitely him.”

  “But why is he trying to help us now when it’s his fault we’re in this mess in the first place?” Arthur demanded.

  “I’d like to know that, too,” I glared at Blake. “You took my voice.”

  “Only because you were about to reveal that I’d helped you,” Blake coughed out. “Bloody hell, you’re not very good at this subterfuge thing. Come on, we need to get out of here. They’ll figure out you’re not ahead of them soon enough.”

  “Will you take us to the children?” I said. “We probably all need weapons if we have to get through more of those guards.” I turned to Arthur. “Speaking of weapons, how’d you get your sword back?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You gave it to me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, Maeve, you did. We were in trouble. I was wishing inside my head that you could find a sword for me. I just had this idea that if you could hear me, and since you control the dream, that you could make it happen. And then the hilt just appeared in my hand.”

  I folded my arms. “Arthur, I was a little busy dealing with my father. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “But—”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Corbin growled. “We need to go back for the children.”

  “You’re in luck, witches. I’m going to make your whole night.” Blake gave me a weak grin. “I already moved them to a safe place. The fae back at the sidhe are guarding two pumpkins charmed with glamour to look like the babies. I’ve got the real tykes here in the forest. But we have to hurry.”

  “He’s lying. He’ll just lead us back to the king.”

  Blake snorted. “After what he did, you think I want to go back to that prick? I’ve lived for twenty-one years in this hellhole where everything is literally poison to me. I want you bastards to take me back to Briarwood with you.”

  “That’s not happening,” Arthur folded his arms.

  Blake folded his. “Fine, then I’m not helping.”

  “We’re wasting time arguing with this wanker,” Flynn held up his knife. “I’ll just kill the gobshite.”

  “No, stop!” I shoved myself between the, my fingers gripping Flynn’s wrist, holding the knife back. “Don’t hurt him. He’s a human, not a fae. He’s a spirit user who has helped us. I think we should trust him.”

  “He may not be a fae, but he’s been raised by them,” Flynn growled, trying to wrench the knife from me. “He’s given us no reason why we should trust him, why we should follow him.”

  “You should follow me because I’m your one shot of getting out of here alive,” Blake said. “There, you’ve got your one reason. Can we get going now?”

  “Let him go, Flynn.” I tried to pry his arm from around Blake’s throat. Flynn’s muscles relaxed under my touch, but not enough that I wasn’t still worried he’d kill Blake.

  Flynn’s expression wavered. “He nearly got us killed!”

  “No, I saved you from getting your arse beheaded on the spot,” Blake said. “When they took you back to the barrows, I was figuring out how to get you out of there. I was just about to step in and free you all, but your barbarian friend there got all stabby with that iron blade and sorted that out for me. Now, if you don’t mind…” he slipped out Flynn’s grasp and clambered for the log’s entrance. “We need to hurry.”

  “I’m also curious why you’re helping us,” I said.

  “I told you,” he said. “Back at Jane’s house. I explained it all.”

  “You really didn’t.”

  “Fine. I’ll explain when we’re safely back in your realm. But if you want to bring those babies back with you, we need to go now.”

  Flynn forced Blake to walk in front of us, his knife pointing into Blake’s spleen with every step. Blake led us back the other way, deeper into the forest. He followed no path. My stomach twisted with nerves as I realized that without him, we’d never find our way back out again. My hand patted the stone in my pocket. Maybe we wouldn’t have to get out again. As long as Blake was taking us to the babies—

  Blake stopped, his head tilted to the side. “We’re here,” he said, scanning the forest around us. He pointed ahead at a beautiful ancient oak tree, the trunk gnarled and twisted. Steps had been carved into the enormous tree and moss hung in long garlands like streamers. Blake darted up the staircase and reached into a hollow in the tree.

  “This your clubhouse?” Flynn smirked up at him.

  “Yeah,” Blake pulled out two tiny bundles, balancing them carefully in his arms as he clambered back down the staircase. “I needed some place to get away from the court and the princes and those damn intolerable drums. Here they are.”

  He passed a tiny bundle into my arms. I peeled aside a corner of the blanket, and a squishy sleeping baby face peeked into view. It opened one tiny eye, then the other, peering up at me with intelligent curiosity.

  Connor. I was pretty sure it was Connor. Babies kind of looked alike to me, but I recognized a bit of Jane’s brashness in his gaze. My chest soared. We’d done it. We’d found the babies, and they were alive, and safe.

  Now we just have to get them home.

  Flynn had the other baby in his arms. He made cooing noises and tickled it with a long, freckled finger. Something about the look in his eyes tugged at my chest, and made a lump form in my throat that wouldn’t dislodge.

  “What next?” Arthur asked me. He faced away from us, into the forest, his hand gripping the hilt of the bone sword he’d taken from one of the guards he’d slain. Even as his eyes scanned the forest for danger, his hand reached up and stroked Connor’s cheek. The baby cooed, and the lump in my throat grew larger.

  “How do you normally get to the human realm?” I asked Blake. The spell hadn’t exactly been clear on how we got back. I’d figured it would be obvious once we got here, but so far – like everything else in the fae realm – it was anything but.

  He shook his head. “There’s a gateway, but that’s a surefire way to separate your head from your body. By now, they’ll be guarding it heavily. Your only hope is to go back the way you came – through the dream.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Maeve?” Arthur asked.

  I stared down at Corbin’s lifeless body, my heart racing. “I just… I’m not really sure how to do this. The spell didn’t exactly explain how to return. Corbin usually figures this stuff out, but he’s…”

  “Okay, right.” Arthur rubbed his head. “Usually when you want to reverse a spell you have to actually… reverse the spell. So we just backtrack through the same steps we took to create the spell. You need a lock of each of our hair.” He whipped his hand up, and his blade chopped a long lock of gold hair. He dropped it into my hand. “You tie those around your wrist, then we all go to sleep, I guess, and you drag us back.”

  “Do we go to sleep, or wake up?” I asked, as Flynn carefully cut off two tiny locks of the babies hair and placed them in my hand. “Aren’t we all asleep now?”

  “I don’t feel asleep,” Flynn said. “I can’t wake up if I’m not asleep. And I don’t exactly feel like a nap right now.”

  “Shut up for a minute. I have to think.” I had theorized that what I was doing when astral-projecting was moving my consciousness through the multiverse into one of many possible realities, one of the “Many World
s” postulated in quantum phenomena, in which theoretically a counterpart of my own consciousness resided. There was an idea in theoretical physics that dreams were windows into events occurring in an alternate world seen through the eyes of our counterpart consciousness. But since my conscience was here, in the dream, then which world was I really existing in, and in which world was my counterpart consciousness? Was I asleep, or awake?

  My brain hurt. This was where Corbin would really come in handy. He had a way of being able to translate my theories into magical practice. I rubbed my temple, trying to play through the scenario in my head.

  “We have to wake up,” I said, firmly, although I wasn’t really certain at all. “Or, rather, I have to wake up, and pull the rest of you back with me. Quick, everyone, give me a lock of your hair.”

  Flynn lopped off a loop of his red curls, then bent down and chopped off a lock of Corbin’s dark hair. Meanwhile, Rowan tied one of his dreadlocks around my wrist and he plaited the other three together to create one loop.

  I turned to Blake. “Wake me up.”

  He grinned. “I knew you were going to ask that, Princess.”

  “You got us this far. And I know you can do this, too. You got inside my head before. Do it again. Wake me up.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know what that could do. Besides, I don’t want to knock about inside your head. It’s scary in there.”

  “Just do it, Prince,” I threw his title out. “Get us out of here, and as soon as we’re back, we’ll find a way to free you from the king. We owe you one for everything you’ve done.”

  Blake smiled. “Careful. You don’t want to be in the habit of owing favors to the fae. We tend to collect at really inconvenient times.”

  “You’re not fae.”

  “Now that is a matter of interpretation.” Blake’s eyes pierced mine and something shifted in my head. At first it was an itch at the back of my skull. Then the itch spread, becoming a dull, throbbing ache. Random thoughts and memories flared up – Louise Crawford coming out of the kitchen with an enormous rainbow birthday cake, eight candles burning on top, Kelly and I singing in the worship choir, me having a screaming argument with our science teacher after she insisted creationism was a valid scientific theory.

  “Wha—” I started to say, but the memories stole my voice. They flooded me, pouring over me like water, swirling over my joints, pressing between my ribs, cocooning me in parts of my life I desperately wished to forget.

  My parents texting me to meet them at the Ferris wheel. Me, screaming at that stupid fae, Kalen, when I should have been with them, the wheel falling, burning, buckling. The people screaming. My parents bodies burning. All because of me.

  The air crackled with heat. The smoke seared my throat. Every part of my body shook with the horror of it, as though it were happening again. It was…

  A nightmare. Blake had dug deep into my brain and fed me my worst nightmare in Technicolor.

  Behind every tortured face, between the mangled struts of the wheel, through the thick smoke of the fire, Blake’s eyes blared – fierce and determined, heedless to the pain they brought with them.

  A dark void opened up in the ground beside me, swelling in size until was a great gaping hole in the earth. Trees and roots disappeared into its depths, sucked away into oblivion. The Ferris wheel toppled in after it, and the ghost train, and my parents’ burned, charred bodies.

  Clutching Connor against my chest, I met Blake’s eyes. The connection between our minds sizzled – and a sharp pain tore through my skull. I screamed as Blake’s fingers tore deep into my consciousness, pulling out all the grief and guilt I carried with me, and threw it at me in a cannonball of sorrow and torment.

  My body shuddered as the pain hit me, and whether it was physical or mental pain I no longer knew. They were the same. I burned up in the horror of my life, torn open by my own internal horror.

  “What are you doing to her?” Arthur grabbed Blake’s arm.

  “Don’t—” I gasped, but Blake’s grip on my mind tightened, and he pushed. The push came from inside my body, like a parasite forcing its way out through my ears. My feet teetered on the edge, struggling to keep their grip. Flynn reached for me, his mouth moving as he yelled something, but the void swallowed all sound. Bright light filled my eyes, rolling toward me like a train coming into station.

  I fell.

  39

  MAEVE

  I toppled backwards and the world flipped around me, the grass falling over my head and the dark sky becoming a blanket beneath me. I toppled head over heels, my stomach lurching.

  I slammed into something hard and sat up with a start. Darkness surrounded me. I rubbed my eyes, and gradually, the room came into view – dark wood ceiling. Swords hanging from wrought-iron chandeliers, bare wattle and daub walls and iron hooks for tapestries. I was back in Briarwood, back in the real world.

  I glanced down at the bundle on my arms, peeling away the top layer of blanket. Connor’s big eyes stared back at me. His face was all scrunched up, and a tiny fist flailed out from one corner of the blanket.

  “Hey, little one,” I whispered, cradling him against my chest. “You’re home again. We’re gonna get you back to your mommy as soon as we can.”

  Bodies scuffled and couches creaked as the guys started to wake up. Flynn sat up and stretched one arm in the air, his lean body extending like a cat. The second baby in his arms mashed a tiny fist into his chest. Rowan’s dark lashes flickered open, and he rubbed his cheek where a long cut marred his dark skin. Arthur rolled over and narrowly managed to avoid impaling himself on his own sword, which he once again gripped in his trembling fingers.

  “We did it,” I grinned. “We actually fucking traveled to the fae realm in a dream and lived to tell the tale.”

  “You did it,” Arthur said, wincing as he touched a finger to a long tear across his shoulder. “That was some seriously powerful magic you pulled off, bringing us all into the dream with you and pulling us out right at that exact moment.”

  “I guess we know what your power is now,” Flynn said. “You are one badass dreamwalker.”

  I beamed. “So crisis averted?”

  “For now.” Arthur prodded Corbin’s still-sleeping figure with the toe of his boot. “After the damage we did, I doubt the fae will be coming back for more children any time soon—”

  “Um, guys.” Flynn said, his gaze focused on a dark shape on the floor. “We have a problem.”

  40

  MAEVE

  I whirled around. There, on the floor next to Flynn’s couch, his hands crossed behind his head and a flirtatious smile on his face, was Blake.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” This is impossible, and since everything that already happened today was already impossible, this is impossible on a monumental scale.

  “How the hell are you here?” Arthur said. “You can’t break our protection spells.”

  Blake grinned. He placed a boot on the corner of the table. “Maybe because I’m not fae.”

  “What? But—” Arthur looked totally lost.

  “Look,” Blake sighed. “I can explain it all, and I will. But right now you’ve got more important problems.”

  “Oh yeah? Global warming? Peak oil? Publican strike?”

  Blake pointed at the babies. “You need to give those babies a protection spell and return them to their mothers. And then you need to give the bossy one over there something to wake him up.”

  “How the hell are we going to do a protection spell without Corbin?” Flynn demanded. “He’s the only one who can find what we need in the library—”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. Let me do it.” Before I could protest, Blake grabbed Connor from my arms and pressed his hand against his forehead.

  “Don’t hurt him!” I tried to grab his arm, but Blake flung me away. He muttered some words in the strange, singsong tongue of his. Connor whimpered, but didn’t cry out.

  After a few moments, Blake handed Conn
or back to me. “There. Now I suggest you call the mother and the police and say you found the babies dumped in the forest. Then go outside and roll them around in the dirt and leaves. The fae won’t leave fingerprints, so the only evidence they’ll find on him is from you guys, which will make you prime suspects in his kidnapping for a while.”

  “We can’t go to jail for this,” I said.

  “No one’s going to jail,” Blake said, as he pressed his palm to the other baby’s forehead. “Not with spirit users in our group.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, but Blake’s confidence was infectious, and I was desperate to return Connor to Jane.

  “Right,” Flynn glanced from me to Blake and back again. “I’ll take care of the wee babies.” I handed Connor off to Flynn, admiring the way his eyes lit up as he juggled both babies in his arms. Flynn made for the garden, making funny faces and voices until Connor was cooing and laughing again.

  He’d make a great dad.

  Rowan was already bent over Corbin, a vial of some sweet-smelling poultice in his hands. He smeared some of it over Corbin’s lips, then sat back on his heels, his expression worried.

  Blake paced around the perimeter of the room, his boots crunching over the salt on the floor. He trailed his hands along the walls, pressing into the cracks between the stones. He stared up at the rafters and out the windows into the valley beyond. “So this is what it looks like from the inside,” he said.

  “Stop touching our castle! You’re not supposed to be here!” Arthur yelled.

  Corbin moaned. I ran to his side, practically shoving Rowan out of the way. “Corbin? Corbin, can you hear me?”

  Blake yawned loudly just as Corbin’s eyes flickered open. “Am I… am I dead?” he asked.

  Tears brimmed at the corners of my eyes. Fuck, we nearly lost him. I nearly lost him. “No, you are very definitely not dead.”

  “I feel dead,” he moaned, lifting his hand slowly and clenching and unclenching his fist. “I feel all… bollocksed up.”