Court of the Litterfey

by S. C. Green

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  THE COURT OF THE LITTERFEY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COURT OF THE LITTERFEY

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  THE COURT OF THE LITTERFEY

  A short faerie story

  S. C. Green, author of the Engine Ward series.

  Court of the Litterfey is an updated version of a short story originally published in Reflections Edge magazine, December 2008.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, found within are purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Grymm & Epic Publishing

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.grymmandepic.com

  Cover design: Vail Joy

  Copyright © 2014 S. C. Green

  All rights reserved.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  S C Green lives in an off-grid house on a slice of rural paradise near Auckland, New Zealand, with her cantankerous drummer husband, their two cats, and their medieval sword collection. She is the author of the bizarre fantasy novel, At War With Satan, (under the name Steff Metal) about metalheads fighting in the apocalypse, and the Engine Ward series - dark, dystopian fantasy set in an alternate Georgian London populated with dinosaurs. You can grab the first book in this series, The Sunken, on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N17VVZC

  Steff writes about music, her books, living off-grid, and her adventures with home-brewing on her blog www.steffmetal.com. Stay up to date with Steff's books by signing up to her newsletter at http://steffmetal.com/subscribe, or like her Facebook page at http://facebook.com/steffmetal.

  For Caroline,

  who taught me that faeries are real

  COURT OF THE LITTERFEY

  Tristan ...

  The breeze should never whisper your name like that.

  Tristan shuddered. You’re imagining it. He told himself, but he couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that he was being watched. He squeezed his baby sister Alice’s hand extra hard.

  They passed across the bridge over the expressway, kicking litter from underfoot. Cars whooshed underneath them, their hoods shining in the early sun. On the other side, as Tristan and Alice descended the steps onto the footpath that ran alongside what was left of Settler's Garden, a breeze from nowhere picked up, and a discarded newspaper sailed into Tristan's face.

  "Woah!"

  He threw it down, and that familiar headline glared up at him from the leaf-sodden pavement.

  THIRD TRUCK DRIVER DISAPPEARS ON NEW BYPASS.

  His stomach twisted. He kicked out his leg and the paper flew into the gutter, where it melted into a puddle and the inks ran into eldritch shapes. Good riddance. For as long as he could remember, all fifteen years of his life, he’d hated the Garden and the main highway, even before the road workers came and tore down half the trees, and the noise from their machines gave him headaches, and the gravel stuck between the toes of his sandals. But now the Garden was absolutely terrifying.

  He tucked a strand of curly brown hair behind his ear. His hand came away sticky with sweat. This is ridiculous. What am I so afraid of?

  "C'mon Twisty." Alice jogged ahead, already darting through the high stone gateposts marking the entrance to the Garden. "I don't wanna be late!"

  "Alice, wait. Let's go past the railway station instead." Tristan jabbed his arm down the street, in the direction of the abandoned train platform at the corner of the street. He could already hear the wind in the branches, bending and creaking towards him. There had been no wind when they left the house.

  "That takes too lo-ong. I want to show Suzy my new lip gloss before class. C'mon," she disappeared behind a sage bush. Alice was seven, and things like lip gloss were of the utmost importance.

  Tristan jogged towards the gates to the Garden, wanting to keep up. Mum had been so upset since Dad disappeared, he didn’t want to give her anything else to worry about. He’d said he’d look after Alice, so if she ran off into the Garden, he'd have to follow.

  If she disappeared like Dad, it would be all his fault.

  Tristan could hear her giggling on the path up ahead, but he couldn’t see her through the thick blanket of foliage that choked the garden beds on either side of the open gate. He paused at the threshold, gripping the gatepost with white knuckles and listening for the voice in the wind.

  Settler's Garden used to cover an entire central-city block. Soft-curved paths wound their way betwixt herb gardens and saplings of birch, elder and oak. Planters of cowslips and foxgloves lined garden beds blanketed in bluebells and hyacinth. None of these plants grew native in Kentucky, of course. They had been brought over by the Scottish settlers in the 18th century. And although the rest of the town had slowly covered its heritage with fast-food signs and satellite dishes, this place still smelled foreign, so different from the bluegrass fields and sycamore trees behind his friend Dave’s house.

  Wooden benches dedicated to the city's founders nestled under trees and in cosy groves. The pride of the city – a tall water fountain commissioned for their centenary from a Scottish artist – adorned the circular apse where the pathways converged. Its carved plinth depicted the Slaugh: Unseelie faeries with skeletal faces and clawed talons riding on the night winds, burning crops and stealing infants. Marble vines twisted around the stem, converging at a wooded bed where an elegant faerie Queen stood on a marble plinth. Her hands draped over the edges, water dribbling from her idle fingertips into the pond below.

  The park was important to the town, but not as important as progress. Five years ago, the main street needed an overhaul, so the town had paid for a row of shops to be built along one edge of the garden. The stone and iron fence surrounding the Gardens was protected by the Historical Society, so it had to stay, but they'd added a cycle lane and paving in behind it, and a parking area in front, and it now housed the butchers shop and a florist inside the boundary of the Garden. Now, a new highway was being built right through the centre of town, so they'd bulldozed several shops and over half the Garden to build the bypass. A small contingent of old-timers and environmentalists had rallied in protest, and the Historical Society had a fit about the fence being torn down and rebuilt around the edge of the new, smaller Garden, but the construction went ahead anyway. Tristan cheered silently as the diggers moved in and uprooted those towering oaks. He'd always found Settler’s Garden too foreign, too wild. He heard things moving in the bushes, chittering in the mysterious breezes, and felt eyes staring at him from the pond under the water clock.

  Reduced to a pale shade of its greatness, with half the garden bulldozed into rubble and the florist and the butcher’s shop still encroaching on its western boundary, Settler's Garden seemed even more menacing. Although perhaps everything seemed more menacing now that his Dad was gone.

  Tristan took a tentative step across the threshold, then another. Nothing happened. Feeling angry with himself for being afraid, he jogged down the path till he saw his sister. He watched Alice up ahead, ducking this way and that across the path, playing a game with rules only she understood.

  Sometimes he wondered if Alice felt them too, the things that he heard and felt in the Garden. Did she sense their shuddering touch? She was spinning in circles on the path, giggling as she twirled, her fingers collecting dew from the branches as she passed by.

  She didn’t understand what was happening. Their Dad was often away for weeks at a time, driving up and down the country, deliverin
g lumber or refrigerators. She didn’t know that this time was different. This time he might not be coming back.

  The police had found his truck parked in front of the butcher's shop, the cab open like he was only gone for a moment. But he'd been gone for three weeks at that point. No one knew why the truck was parked there, who had been driving it, or why it had been abandoned. He was the third truck driver to go missing that month. The other two cases were the same: trucks left undamaged, cargo intact, the drivers simply vanished without a trace. Constable Dennis, who showed up at the house frequently to check on their mom, seemed baffled.

  The breeze picked up, stirring the leaves and petals on the path, even though it was a cloudless day. Tristan sped up, racing to catch Alice.

  "Ow! Twisty, you stood on my foot!"

  He hadn't, but he didn’t have time to explain that to the seven-year-old. "Sorry. Alice, we’ve got to hurry. We'll be late for school, remember?" He gripped her arm and dragged her, protesting, outside the northern gate.

  ***

  Ms. McAllister had a Scottish accent, as thick and harsh as that funny comedian Dad let him stay up and watch on TV. She'd grown up in County Cork, but shifted from place to place, writing quilting books and children's tales before she moved to Kentucky and took up teaching. She claimed to be the daughter of a Lutin, as if that explained her capricious nature. She loved to tell stories in her booming, foreign tongue, and her favourite characters were the faeries. She told proper stories too, about the founding fathers, about the war of independence and the Union and all the stuff that turned up in exam questions. But the class had heard retellings of those stories since the first grade. Ms. McAllister and her faeries were much more interesting, and besides, anything was more interesting than algebra.

  Today, she scrawled 'Folklore' across the board, and asked the class if anyone could tell her what it meant.

  David’s hand shot up. "Like stories with magic and stuff?"

  "Noot quite, David. Harry Potter is a story with magic, but it nae be folklore. Think of stories, legends, myths and beliefs native to a specific place. Folklore often teaches lessons, like Aesop's Fables, or warns against dangers. Can anyone think of folklore from our oon town?"

  "Mr. Bibby's ghost?" chimed Kathryn. Tristan’s Dad often told the story of Mr. Biddy, an old man who’d lived in the giant, crumbling mansion at the top of their street, back when his Dad was only a boy. Mr. Biddy was a poacher, and he used to go off into the woods with his signature brown coat and an ancient hunting rifle. After he died, people would sometimes report seeing a man wearing a brown coat carrying a carcass through the woods.

  "The River Monster!" This was a story local kids told about a monster that lived under the bridge.

  "Aye, aye. Anyone else?"

  "The faeries," Tristan mumbled into his desk. He heard Ms. McAllister chuckle from her belly. She always did this before she talked of her faeries. They caused her great amusement, even the Unseelie and their cruel Slaugh.

  "Aye, Tristan, the faeries. Our town has many fey because people settled in Kentucky from different countries: England, Scotland, Wales, Scandinavia. The stories go that when their own countries became so overcrowded with the troublesome fey, they sailed off in search of new lands on ships of wood, held together with iron nails. Iron, as we all ken, is poison to faeries, and your ancestors knew this too. They were hoping to leave the fey far behind them, but their Green Children snatched rides on the backs of Kelpies, Fossegrim and Water-Nymphs and followed their humans, bringing their mischief to the far-off lands.

  "All the courts came: The Daoine Sidhe, the Plant Annwn, and the ethereal Seelie - the High Court of Faerie. Of course the fearsome Unseelie - the Dark Court - weren't far behind. Lashing together Fir-Darrigs ... what's a Fir-Darrig, Cassie?"

  "It's a faerie that's half man and half giant rat."

  "That's right. So, they made rafts of gnarled, loathsome rat monsters, and they pursued the ships, summoning storms and causing navigators to lose their way. When the first immigrants settled here the fey settled also, preferring to roam in the gardens and groves planted from the seeds of their homelands rather than venture outside the village walls." Her eyes leapt from face to face with excitement as she wrung her hands.

  "As the village prospered and became a thriving town, the fey multiplied with the seasons, and a new faerie brugh was born. For many years the fey wandered the area in peace, and the people respected their whims. After a while, the fey grew bolder, more sinister, and their faerie mischief was no longer tolerated by the townsfolk. After all, it was faerie mischief that had sent them across the seas in iron-protected ships in the first place.

  “The town elders set down a consecration spell and bound the faeries to a single brugh, where the Settler's Garden stands today. They placed a high iron fence around the outside to keep the Green Children inside. But now, of course, the Garden is smaller, because of the new bypass. Perhaps the faeries are getting crowded." She grinned at the idea.

  "My Dad says that people forget that faeries aren't nice."

  "Aye, Tristan. Your father kens. Faeries are right bastards, which is why it's important to preserve folklore, so people don't forget.” She turned toward the board and began writing in large, looping letters. “Your assignment is to research one aspect of the town's folklore and write it up as a report. You can work on your own, or in groups of two. We'll combine all the reports into a book, which we'll keep in the school library."

  Ms. McAllister always referred to the city as a town. She said that cities are sprawling forests of concrete and steel, smoking towers and gas-guzzling cars trapped in perpetual traffic stalemate, not quaint southern Kentucky farming hamlets with two grocery stores and only seven pubs.

  "Can we do illustrations?" asked Deidre, the best artist in the class.

  "Of course. I encourage it."

  The lunch bell rang. Chairs scraped across the linoleum, the scratches and scuff marks intersecting like ley lines across a sacred field. Tristan grabbed his book bag, shoving his notes deep inside. Dave slapped him on the back. “Mom packed me a lunch today. Want to eat outside?”

  Tristan thought of his lunch: a stale sandwich and an old apple he’d managed to find in the bare cupboards that morning. His stomach rumbled. “Sure.”

  Tristan’s mom used to pack his lunch every day: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (the peanut spread extra thick, just the way he liked it). An apple. Crackers and cheese. A container of cut vegetables and dip. Sometimes a slice of homemade brownie or a couple of cookies. In a school where most kids bought a slice of greasy meatloaf or ketchup-soaked fries in the cafeteria every day, he used to be embarrassed by his brown bag. But his Mom hadn’t made lunches, or dinners, or anything else since his Dad disappeared, so Tristan was in charge of that now. Alice complained he cut the vegetables crooked, and the cheese too thick, but at least she was still being fed.

  Tristan and Dave found a spot under the ancient oak tree behind the football field. "You wanna be partners?" Dave frowned at his BLT sandwich, fishing out the lettuce. Tristan ripped off the tough corners of his crust and threw them at the birds.

  "For what?"

  "The folklore project, numb-nuts. We could do that Queen, y'know, from the statue in the garden."

  Tristan grunted. Crumbs of sticky bread splattered across his lap.

  "Don't be like that. If we do it together we'll only have to do half the work. And you heard McAllister: we'll get extra credit if you draw a picture."

  "Why don't you draw the picture?" I don’t want to go in the Gardens. I don’t want to go in the Gardens ...

  "What, and have Old Mac confuse it for a ketchup stain again? Don’t be ridiculous, Tristan. You’re the best artist. You're almost as good as Deidre. Geez, what’s your problem?”

  As soon as he’d said it, Dave clamped his mouth shut, as though he were trying to trap the words inside. Tristan stared at the half-eaten sandwich in his lap, suddenly no longer hungry. He picked up t
he bread in his fist, squeezing it tight till the jelly oozed between his fingers. It made him feel slightly better.

  Dave broke the silence. “Don't worry about it, Twisty. I didn’t mean it.”

  Tristan sighed, wiping jelly on the grass. “I know.”

  “Come over to my place next week. My parents are going to be away, and my sister will be too busy with her new boyfriend to care what we do. We'll make a quick job of the project and hang out. I’ve got some new X-Box games we could try.”

  Tristan nodded, his chest still tight. “I’d like that.”

  ***

  Tristan had football practice after school, so Mom picked Alice up. She’d bothered to show up this time: a rare occurrence since their father disappeared. She waved at Tristan from the car as she drove past, and smiled, although the smile was forced.

  Tristan knew better than to hope it would last.

  Alice was oblivious, of course; she hugged her dolly and chatted about something-or-other in the backseat. She couldn't see how Mom's white knuckles clenched the steering wheel, or how the sags of skin under her eyes hung lower each day. Only Tristan heard the tinkling of the wine glasses at night, the click of the lock on Dad's office falling open. Only he looked into her eyes across the kitchen table, and saw an empty, vacant shell staring back.

  Nowhere was his father's absence more noticeable than on the football field. If he wasn't away on deliveries, he'd be watching Tristan's practice, gripping a can of soda in his large fingers as he cheered Tristan on. "You can do it, Tristan!" he'd yell, even if Tristan didn’t have the ball. Dad was a bit short-sighted from all those days of squinting at the road, and sometimes it seemed as if he didn't really understand the game at all.

  Dad usually missed a few games each season, but he'd never missed three weeks of practice before. Tristan felt the absence of his father's support on his shoulders, a pocket of empty air that should rightfully be occupied. His fingers slipped on the ball, his legs dragged behind him. The defence, usually his strongest position, buckled under his sagging shoulders.