ELFLAND
Books by Freda Warrington
THE BLACKBIRD SERIES
Book 1: A Blackbird in Silver
Book 2: A Blackbird in Darkness
Book 3: A Blackbird in Amber
Book 4: A Blackbird in Twilight
THE BLOOD WINE SEQUENCE
Book 1: A Taste of Blood Wine
Book 2: A Dance in Blood Velvet
Book 3: The Dark Blood of Poppies
Sorrow’s Light
Dark Cathedral
Pagan Moon
Dracula the Undead
The Rainbow Gate
Darker Than the Storm
The Court of the Midnight King
AETHERIAL TALES
Elfland*
Midsummer Night* (forthcoming)
THE JEWELFIRE TRILOGY
Book 1: The Amber Citadel
Book 2: The Sapphire Throne
Book 3: The Obsidian Tower
*A Tor book
Freda Warrington
ELFLAND
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ELFLAND
Copyright © 2009 by Freda Warrington
All rights reserved.
Edited by James Frenkel
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warrington, Freda, 1956–
Elfland / Freda Warrington. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1869-5
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1869-5
I. Title.
PR6073.A75E44 2009
823'.914—dc22
2009012918
First Edition: August 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This novel is dedicated with love to Jenny Gordon,
who was with me every step of the way.
The Charnwood Forest of Leicestershire, England, is an uplands forest area characterized by some of the most ancient volcanic rocks in the country, rolling landscapes, charming villages, and country parks such as Beacon Hill and Bradgate Park. Cloudcroft, however, is a fictional village loosely based on real villages around which I’ve spent most of my life. Likewise, Ashvale can be seen as a geographically shifted tribute to that market town of noble fame, Ashby de la Zouch.
ELFLAND
Prelude
Life with the Cold Prince
A demon screamed and Ginny woke, heavy with fever. She was alone in bed. Outside the monsoon rain fell and she saw drenched, glistening blue light shining in the open doorway. She tried to rise but a shadowy weight pressed her down. Webs of mosquito netting held her.
She saw her husband on the verandah, framed in the doorway against the light. Rain fell silver around him. Beyond, the dense coils of the rain forest gleamed and dripped in a sinuous dance. With his black hair streaming, he roared soundlessly into the storm, summoning all the denizens of the Otherworld, all her nightmares. His hands wove a white spell. She felt his terror and defiance as he called upon them to do their worst; felt the jungle shudder as it disgorged horrors. The hot wet air swelled as they came.
He was in league with them, wild and mad. The invisible weight that pressed her down was terror. She tried to scream—
Ginny woke. Rain fell but all was dark, the door closed. Her husband lay breathing quietly beside her under the tent of netting. She sat up, gasping for a wisp of air in the humidity.
She looked down at Lawrence’s serene, carved face and knew that she couldn’t stay any longer. She had tried and tried but it was killing her. She was starving for England, with its cool green landscapes and kindlier faerie realms. Famished.
“Ginny?” he said, stirring.
“Something here hates us,” she whispered. “I can feel it.”
“Not this again.” His voice was heavy with weariness.
“I know.” She dragged her fingers through the raven tangle of her hair. “This isn’t me. I’m a grown woman, a mother, a fully paid-up life member of the wise and ancient ones. In a way, that’s the point.”
“What?”
“When I say that something wants to destroy us, it means it’s true.”
She heard him sigh. “And you would let it win by running away?”
“I am not the one running away, Lawrence,” she said softly. “I want to go home.”
His eyes were shining slivers, fierce and cold. Her beloved cold prince; her husband, and she didn’t truly know him. “We can’t go home,” he said. “Our life is here. Our business.”
“Your business is in New York and London. Your life, in England. Others could run this place for you, but you won’t let them.”
“You know why. I have to protect it . . . from Barada.”
“But he’s the one destroying us!” On previous occasions she had backed down, but now she was past caring. “Swallow your pride,” she hissed. “Sell it to Barada.”
“Not in a thousand years.” His voice was hard. “He couldn’t afford it.”
“The money doesn’t matter!”
“It’s not about money,” he answered, quiet as a razor. “You of all people should understand. I will not abandon my workers, or my birthright.”
“Is this truly about protecting your interests? Or about hiding?” Her words were vicious; he answered with the knife-edged hostility of his eyes. Ginny shrank a little inside. “I know the mine is everything to you. But Sam and Jon need us, too. Think of them.”
“They’re strong,” he said.
“No, they’re not.” Every time she put her toe under the waterfall of guilt, it tore her skin off. “They’re little boys.”
“Who must become strong, in order to survive in this world. I’m not taking them out of school.”
“I’m not asking you to.” Ginny reached out to touch his arm. He was stone under her hand, a statue of ice. “But I have to go home. This place is killing me.”
He did not respond. Her heart sank and grief congealed in the back of her throat. She let her hand fall away. The silence was an ocean of steamy rain and there were hours of sleepless fever dreams to cross before daybreak.
After a time, Lawrence’s voice came softly out of the darkness. “When humans dream, they create elves and angels, devils and vampires. But when we dream . . . when we dream . . . what do we create for ourselves?”
Interlude
Zeitgeist
“The fantasy of unconditional love,” Rosie said to her reflection, “the lie of unconditional love is that you can love someone from afar, someone who never even looks at you in return, and it’s okay; it’s pure and virtuous and noble. But it’s not okay. Fuck the fantasy!”
She was twenty-three; a perfect age, perhaps, to walk away from her youthful dreams and harsh disillusionments. Her Aetherial parents claimed that age meant little in the Otherworld, but it counted here on Earth, where she’d always lived. So, it was time to admit that if she kept offering her heart to someone who didn’t care, she shouldn’t be astonished to find it so bruised and broken. Time to grow up.
The face in her dressing-table mirror was deceptively serene; a creamy oval with bright silver-grey eyes outlined by kohl and plum eyeshadow, a strong nose and mouth, glossy burgundy-brown hair falling to her shoulders. She’d been told there was a touch of the Pre-Raphaeli
te about her, but she considered herself too short, and usually too scruffy from gardening, to be any kind of siren.
Pretty or plain? Depended who was looking at her. Human or Aetherial? Impossible to say. It was just her familiar self gazing back. Surprisingly calm, after what she’d witnessed. So this was the face of a young woman who knew it was time to discard all romantic delusions and make a practical, adult decision.
The luscious greens of the garden were framed in the window behind her. Outside, oak trees swayed serenely, oblivious of the quiet collapse of her world.
“How did it all go so wrong for us?” she asked. “Was it the closing of the Great Gates, or is that just a convenient scapegoat for everything?”
She touched a fingertip to a scar on the side of her neck, a thin, reddish mark the length of a finger. Still there, after all these years. She rarely thought about it, but today, for some reason, it disturbed her. She arranged a lock of hair to conceal it.
Rosie looked around the bedroom that had always been hers, with its stone fireplace and treacly wood paneling, thick cream carpet and king-size antique bed. On those bedcovers, she thought wistfully, she should have had wild sex with some demon prince—but she never had. Behind the door of her wardrobe, she’d once found a secret passageway into a chamber where a magical tree grew, its roots bursting the floorboards. Not a dream, but a manifestation of Aetheric reality.
The Dusklands had always been fluid, capricious as waves. Of late, she rarely dipped into them at all. Did the Aetheric realm fade for those who turned away from it? Or was she turning away because she couldn’t bear to see it fade?
Rosie didn’t know anymore.
Idly, she opened an old bottle of nail polish and began painting her fingernails. The color was dark and multihued, like a peacock’s feather. As she worked, she thought about her brother Matthew. Was he right to claim it was time to forget the Otherworld, since it was now lost to them? To accept that although it had been their parents’ birthright, it was not theirs? To dismiss it all, even the Dusklands, as a dream? We must go forward, he insisted, and live fully in the mortal world.
Making the decision to go Matthew’s way felt like an ax about to fall. Yet the other way was mist and darkness, and had brought her nothing but tears.
“What am I waiting for?” she murmured.
A memory surfaced. She’d been very young, five or six. She was playing in the garden . . . discovering the innocent wonder of the Dusklands, of stepping sideways into a world that was like this one but watery and full of mystery . . . then hands had grabbed her shoulders and yanked her back into the real world, and Matthew was shouting at her as if he’d snatched her out of danger.
She remembered her fear and confusion. To this day, she didn’t know why he’d been angry. It had been the first time, but not the last . . . Not that Matthew’s warnings had ever stopped her. Perhaps, after all, he knew something she didn’t.
Rosie sat back and studied the gleam of her painted nails. Each nail was different—navy, green, purple—and each one changed in the light, flashing magenta or bronze. She examined the bottle. The color was called Zeitgeist. German, literally “time ghost.” So, the spirit of the age was oily. Many-colored. Fugitive.
“Figures,” she said out loud.
“Rosie?” Her younger brother, Lucas, put his head around the door. “Are you okay?”
He looked worried. “Come in,” she said, smiling as she displayed her iridescent fingernails to him. “That’s us, that is.”
“What is?”
She moved her hand to show the color change. “Aetherials are like that. No one sees us as we really are.”
Lucas looked at her with a half-smile, and went to sit cross-legged on the end of her bed. At twenty-one he was dark-haired, good-looking and coltishly long-limbed. His presence soothed her. Of all her family—and despite the argument she’d had with him earlier—she was closer to him than to anyone. “Seriously, are you still furious with me?”
She sighed. “No, of course not.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “Don’t sit up here brooding, Rosie.”
“I’m not brooding.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“I’m standing at the crossroads. Deciding which way to go. Remembering everything that’s happened and realizing that I need to walk away from it.”
“And?” He sounded anxious. “Come on, what are you thinking?”
Brushing her hair aside, Rosie touched the scar on her neck. “About the day I got this.” She breathed in and out. “About the Wilders. Do you think we’ll ever be finally, completely free of them?”
A long pause. Lucas looked steadily at her, frowning slightly. “Do you want to be?”
1
The House of Broken Dreams
On Rosie’s ninth birthday, her father gave her the most beautiful item she had ever seen; a sparkling crystal heart that had captivated her in a jeweler’s window. It wasn’t her nature to demand things, but her parents had remembered. When she opened her present, there was the wonderful pendant, blazing on black velvet.
She wore it proudly on a sturdy silver chain. It was too dressy with her blue T-shirt and jeans, but she didn’t care. Its hard little angles bounced on her chest as she ran, playing football with her brothers.
It was a warm and gleaming spring day. The lush greens of their garden formed enveloping caverns, drawing them from the main lawn to smaller bowers, through the rose garden, the herb garden, to the wild places where their property blended into the borders; into huge oaks and sprawling hawthorn hedges. They abandoned the ball. Matthew led the way through a gap in the hedge to the woodland paths beyond.
A stream snaked its way past their garden. They knew full well they were supposed to stay on this side. Matthew, however, led the way across stepping-stones and began to climb.
Hearts pounding, Rosie and Lucas followed.
Matt was fourteen and always took the lead. He was bursting with energy, climbing fast through the steepest part of the woods so that they could barely keep up. Lately, Rosie noticed, he’d become restless and resentful, too old to play with his younger siblings but still constrained to watching out for them. Lucas, two years younger than Rosie, was their shadow.
At nine, everything was eternally new to her. Eons stretched between one adventure and the next. There were always new twists in the paths, rocks she’d never seen before, amazing patterns in the trunks of silver birches.
Although the Dusklands manifested most strongly in twilight, on intense days like this she could see the deeper reality shimmering like a heat haze over the surface world. The eyes of elementals peered from between the leaves, vanishing if she tried to look straight at them. She could feel Aetheric energies brushing her skin, tingling like nettles. Knowing she was part of it—able to enter this subtle dimension as ordinary children could not—thrilled her.
She and Lucas shared the experience without words. They’d learned not to discuss it in front of Matthew, who only growled and called it foolish.
Rosie came to the foot of a squat, majestic oak that spread a gleaming canopy over her. Instinctively she began to climb, her breath fast with exertion.
“Rosie!” came Matthew’s voice. “Get down, before you break your neck!”
His voice was distant; she slipped all the way into the Dusklands without thinking, entranced by the landscape turning bluish, mysterious and full of rainbow gleams. Leafy elementals snaked around the tree limbs, smiling at her as she smiled back . . .
“Rosie!” The voice was loud and angry. The next she knew, Matthew was grabbing her off a branch in a shower of twigs and leaves and setting her on the ground. “How many times have I told you not to do that? It’s not safe!”
“Get off!” she retorted, shaken and indignant. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
He pushed back his fair hair, glaring at her until the blue fire of his eyes softened. “Look, as long as I’m in charge of you, you’ll behave,” he
said firmly. “Follow me, and don’t wander off.”
Grumbling, she obeyed. Above the tree line, they waded through knee-high bracken, coming out onto heathland high above the village. Rosie and Lucas were gasping for breath. It was wrong to trespass, they knew, but a guilty pleasure. Even Matthew had never dared come this far before.
He climbed a spar of ancient rock and posed there. Massed clouds created an eerie light in which the greens of spring turned luminous against an iron-grey sky. From here they commanded a spectacular view across Cloudcroft and the Charnwood hills. Their own house, Oakholme, nestled below them, broad and friendly with cream-washed walls and black beams. The scattered thatch and slate roofs of the village were visible through a sea of budding oak, ash and birch, strung along the meandering length of a valley.
On the opposite side of the valley, green farmland gave way to the stark hills of High Warrens, wild with rocks as ancient as the Aetherial race itself. Beyond stood Charnwood’s main peaks; Beacon Hill, Bardon Hill grey with distance, Old John with its stone beer-tankard folly. Dark green pine forests spilled into the folds beneath, mixed with softer woodland and hedgerows.
On this side, the hilltop behind them was bleak. The grass was wiry, the soil fragrant with peat. Clusters of rock thrust out of the ground, wreathed in bracken. On the long, rugged backbone of the summit, there stood a house. It was built of granite and looked like a fortress. The roof was black slate. Behind it, rain clouds massed angrily.
“Is that Stonegate Manor?” Rosie said, startled. She’d only ever glimpsed the house from the road. It looked different from this angle.
“Of course it is, idiot,” said Matthew. “It’s where the Wilders live. The neighbors Mum and Dad talk about in whispers.”
Elfland Page 1