by S R Ahuja
“Of course,” Sehali said, looking at Jade. “Your lessons will be different. They teach children differently in the Hamlet, although, if you’re lucky, one of the Nine Sisters will see some magic in you and pick you to go study with them. Then you might get to learn some of the same stuff I learn. I don’t know how the Sisters do their magic.”
The Nine Sisters had been one of the stops Jade had had to make to meet all of the Tribes of Avalon.
Sister Morgana was the one in charge, or she seemed to be in charge from what Jade could tell. She’d also met Sister Morgana’s eight sisters. She didn’t remember their names though. There had been too many names in those first few days to remember them all.
Azatae was the next oldest; she was eight. She and Caeci, the youngest at five, spent their days running around the forest and meadows with the other children, although they still studied with the elders once a week.
“But one time,” Caeci whispered to Jade confidentially, “One of the elder women from the Hamlet taught Azatae and me an old lullaby from the Northmanni world. That one’s my favorite, but we can’t sing it in the Village.”
“Why not?” Jade whispered back.
“Oh, the elders wouldn’t like it.” Caeci shook her head. “They wouldn’t like us singing the songs of a different people, but also, we’d get in trouble for going to the Hamlet.”
“What? Aren’t you allowed to go to the Hamlet? Don’t you get to play with the other kids there?” Jade responded, confused.
“Well, sure we get to play with those kids, but only if one of the elders takes us. We’re not allowed to go on our own.”
Jade digested this news for a moment. “Maybe you could sing that lullaby for me when no one else is around to hear it.”
Caeci’s eyes lit up. “Of course, your majesty!” she said excitedly.
After a very long time, the grass started to thin out and a dark gray fog started to settle over the land in its place. Jade coughed heavily as the air became denser.
“What is this place?” Jade asked
“It’s called the Fog Plains,” Sehali explained. “It’s the boundary between Avalon and the Other Kingdom.”
“What other kingdom?” Jade asked innocently.
The three girls exchanged another one of their looks.
“No one told you about the Other Kingdom?” Caeci asked.
“No,” Jade said, feeling uncomfortable under their gazes.
“The Other Kingdom,” Sehali explained, “is where all the bad creatures are. That’s where the boggarts and goblins and werewolves and vampires and powries and even dragons are. They’re all not allowed to cross the boundary into Avalon, so that we’re always protected from them.”
Jade looked up at the older girl with wonder, “Dragons are real? Can we go see them?”
“No!” Sehali exclaimed in horror. “That’s far too dangerous. Long ago the King locked them all away in their own world because a dragon killed a princess.”
Jade stared at her, wonder replaced by fear. “It killed her?”
“Yes. Many years ago, before any of us were born, there was a little baby princess, no more than a year old. She was out in the forest with her mother, the Queen, and the other elvish children. The children were taking care of the baby princess, but suddenly, a dragon came out of nowhere and scared all the little children away, and they left the baby princess all by herself. By the time the Queen and elders found the baby, she was already dead, and the dragon was eating her!”
“That’s why we can never go into the Other Kingdom,” Azatae finished.
Jade was a little scared of the story, which was probably what Sehali wanted, but that didn’t stop her from wondering about the dragons. She didn’t care if it was dangerous; she was going to see a real dragon one day.
They were all silent for the rest of the trip, but soon, the fog began to lift slightly, and Jade could see a tall cliff rising in the distance. As they got closer, she began to see the water pouring down the side of the cliff, pooling at the bottom. Before long, they had reached the pool at the base of the waterfall, and Azatae and Caeci began laughing and playing in the water.
“Stop!” Sehali cried, pulling the younger girls from the water. “Aren’t you worried about mermaids?”
“Mermaids?” Jade echoed.
“Tell the story! Tell the story!” Caeci called, clapping her hands together.
Azatae moved forward and sat down, and the other girls sat on either side of her. Jade sat crossed legged across from her, completing their little circle.
“Ok, once there was a young boy who was always disobeying his mother. She would tell him to stay inside, and he would go out. She would tell him to go play with the other children, and he would stay at home alone. Because he never obeyed anything his mother said, this little boy was always getting into trouble.
“Finally, his father had had enough. He told the little boy to leave the Hamlet and not to come back until he was ready to behave and listen to his mother.
“So, that night, the boy went out into the wilderness all alone. He was not far from the Hamlet, and he knew that he was safe, but he missed his mother who would always tuck him in at night. He knew that if his mother thought he was in danger, she would come to rescue him, so he stood up and yelled as loudly as he could, ‘Help! Help! Powries! Help!’
“His mother did not hear him, but others did, and they came running to his rescue. The boy was actually very disappointed that his mother did not come, but he did not want the others to see him upset, so he laughed and mocked them. Those who had come to help him were very annoyed when they discovered he was not under attack, and they left him to his loneliness.
“The next day, the boy changed his tactics. He knew that his mother always did the laundry outside at the same time every day, so just before dinner time, he called out, ‘Help! Help! Werewolf! Help!’
“Just like before, people came running to help, but none of them was his mother. Those who had come the night before were furious, and they were all very embarrassed to have been fooled by a young boy twice. They warned him not to call for their help again unless he was actually dying.
“The boy knew that his mother woke up long before the rest of the Hamlet to prepare breakfast, so he decided he would try next just before dawn. But dawn was still a long way away, so to pass the time, the boy decided to visit the Mermaid Falls because that was another place that his mother and father had always forbidden him to go. He reached the falls just before sunset, and the water looked cool and inviting as he stood baking in the late summer sun. He decided a swim would be nice, but before he could remove his clothes, something disturbed the smooth glass of the lake.
“He knelt on his hands and knees to get a better look at the water. As he leaned over the water, another face emerged from the dark glass.
“It was the most beautiful face he’d ever seen. She began to sing a foreign, unearthly melody, and he began to fall under her trance, but when her scaly hand touched his, he remembered all of the warnings his mother had given him about the dangerous, man-eating mermaids who would pull you down to their watery homes and devour you even while you were still alive!
“He called out, ‘HELP! HELP! MERMAIDS! HELP!’ but no one came. The people who heard him all thought that he was just trying to fool them again. No one came to save him when he really needed it. Instead, the mermaid pulled him into the water as he screamed for help. And no person ever saw that little boy again.”
The girls were all silent, waiting for Azatae to continue with her story, but she didn’t. That was the ending.
“That’s why you shouldn’t play in the water,” Sehali scolded the younger girls.
“But, it’s just a story,” Jade said, more to reassure herself than the others.
Caeci, not disturbed at all by the story, jumped to her feet then and pointed to the water. “Look! What’s that?” she cried.
The other three girls turned to the water’s edge expecting to see
a fish woman with large, sharp fangs crawling out of the water toward them, but there was nothing there that any of them could see. Caeci raced to the water and, before Sehali could stop her, thrust her tiny hand into the pond and pulled out a large, pink shell.
“It’s just a shell, Caeci,” Sehali told her.
Caeci wasn’t convinced though. She held it close to her face to examine it, and then, to the surprise of the other girls, put it up against her ear. She gasped and then a huge smile spread across her face.
“No, Sehali, it is magic. It’s singing to me!” she cried happily.
“Don’t listen, Caeci!” Sehali exclaimed. “That’s the mermaids singing! They’ll enchant you and drag you down to their watery castle to devour you!”
“Amalthea, listen!” Caeci rushed to Jade’s side and held the large shell up to her ear.
Jade listened. At first, all she could hear was a pushing and pulling sound that sounded like the waves against the sand, but as she concentrated on it, she found she could hear a quiet music weaving through the waves. She wouldn’t have called it singing because it really didn’t sound like a human at all, but there was definitely something more than just the sound of the water.
She looked up at Caeci in wonderment. “I think it is magic.”
Sehali was about to demand that they leave immediately and Azatae was just reaching for the shell to hear the magic for herself, when they all froze. From far above their heads, on top of the cliff of the waterfall, they heard voices. They all looked up. The mist of the waterfall clouded their vision nearly as badly as the fog had done in the plains, but they could make out three small figures standing at the top of the waterfall.
“Come on,” Sehali whispered, tugging the younger girls back toward the fog. “We can’t be caught out here.”
“But they’re just kids,” Jade whispered back. “They wouldn’t tell on us.”
Ignoring her, Sehali left them for the cover of the fog, and Azatae and Caeci followed, although they stopped just far enough in to still be able to watch what was happening at the falls. Jade could just make out the other girls through the haze, but she did not follow them. She stayed by the pool and continued to watch the three strangers. It seemed to her like they were arguing about something, but she couldn’t quite hear what they were saying.
“Amalthea!” the other girls called to her in harsh, hushed whispers.
Finally, dragging her eyes away from the figures, Jade turned back into the fog, and the four girls ran with all their might back to the castle.
When Menelwen was tucking her into bed later that night, she asked Jade how she had spent her day. Jade did not tell her about the adventures by the waterfall because she was absolutely certain Menelwen would not approve. Instead, she told her that she had spent her day reading in the library.
It was not such an awful lie, Jade thought to herself, because when you read, you go on adventures like the one Jade had really had. She knew it was wrong even while she was coming up with the explanation in her head, but still, she didn’t feel too guilty. It wasn’t like anything bad happened.
Menelwen kissed her forehead, and blew out the candle. Jade tossed and turned for a while, but eventually she fell asleep and dreamed of all the adventures in her future.
Chapter IV
Straight on ‘Till Morning
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Jade awoke much later. It was completely dark in her room when she startled awake. She didn’t know what had woken her, and she couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming about, but she felt prickles crawling up her back and shoulders, and she knew someone was watching her. She sat up and looked around her room. The light from a crescent moon was streaming in through her open window. She couldn’t see anyone, but the feeling of eyes on her back didn’t go away. She reached for the matches sitting on her bedside table. She struck one, and it gave off a warm yellow glow of light that didn’t wash away her fear.
There was a candle on the table, and she held the flame of the match to it. When the wick caught, she shook the match out and held the candle by its holder. She swung her feet over onto the floor and cautiously stood, looking around the room as she did.
“Hello?” she called out quietly. “Is someone there?”
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” a voice said from the shadows of the draperies.
Jade jumped so badly she nearly dropped the candle, but she tried to sound strong. “Come out so I can see you.”
He stepped out of the shadows into her little circle of light. The owner of the voice was a boy, no older than Jade; he was just an inch or two taller than her. His ice white skin was almost bluish even in the yellow light. His face looked sharp with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and very thin cheeks. His eyes were light brown, hazel, and very deep. Even though he looked so young, his eyes looked like he knew and saw much more than Jade ever had or ever would. His shorts rustled with every movement; they looked like they had been made out of fallen leaves, mostly brown with a few purples. He was barefoot and shirtless and looked, not unclean, but like a boy who had just been playing outside in the leaves might with splotches of dirt here and there on his bare chest.
“My name is Peter,” the boy said.
“I’m Jade. What are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?” she asked not in a mean way but really just curious.
“Jade? I thought your name was Amalthea, Princess Amalthea,” Peter said as he stepped toward her.
“Oh, yeah, I guess it is. I keep forgetting. My name used to be Jade, but I guess here I’m Amalthea.”
“Used to be?” Peter asked. He was now close enough to sit on her bed, and he did just that, perching on the edge with his feet dangling a couple inches above the ground.
Jade sat down as well, but she sat crossed legged facing Peter, covering her knees with her nightgown. “Yeah, when I lived in the Northmanni World with my aunt, my name was Jade. I like Jade, but everyone here calls me Amalthea. Why are you here?”
He smiled at her, and despite his very foreign appearance, his smile was one she recognized. She’d seen it on the faces of other children she used to know. It was a smile of genuine happiness.
“You are a smart girl. You couldn’t be as easily distracted as I thought you might be. Young princesses tend to be pretty easy to distract when you ask them about themselves.”
“Thanks, I guess. So, why are you here?”
He smiled at her again. “I have a special job here in Avalon. You see, when someone dies here, they have to walk the path to be with Avalon herself once more, and it can be a scary path, especially for children who leave this life too soon. Because I have walked that path before and know it very well, when a child dies, I go to that child and walk with them, hand in hand, to the afterlife. So, you see, I just like to know all of the children who live here just in case something happens and I come to walk with them. Then they know me and they won’t be so afraid.”
“Avalon is a person?” Jade asked.
“Oh yes, she was,” Peter said, nodding. “Have you never heard this story? She gave her physical body so that Avalon the Kingdom could have magic again.”
“Oh, won’t you tell me? I love stories,” Jade reached for his hand and held it in both of hers. His skin was very smooth and very cold from being outside in the cold air.
He looked at her hands holding his and then up at her face, not smiling this time. “I’m not a very good story teller. You should ask Menelwen to tell you that one. Me, I’m more into adventure myself.”
He smiled again that smile of pure, childish joy as he jumped off the bed. He seemed to hover in midair for just a moment before his feet touched the floor again.
“What do you say, Jade?” He winked at her. “Want to go on an adventure?”
She smiled back at him and jumped up too. “More than anything in the whole world!”
“Good, but there’s one thing you have to do.” The smile fell from his face as quickly a
s it had appeared.
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“You have to trust me and do whatever I say, or you might get hurt.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Who says I might get hurt? I can probably do whatever you can.”
He laughed again. “Well sure you can! But you haven’t been here very long. You might not know what to do if, say, an ice breathing dragon came at us!” He jumped toward her.
She jumped back but smiled all the same. “There are dragons that breathe ice?”
He smiled and extended his hand to her. “So, what do you say? Can you trust me?”
Some part of her made her pause. She couldn’t help thinking that she really didn’t know him and she probably shouldn’t go with him, but he was a kid just like her, and he was going to show her dragons!
She reached out and grabbed his hand. Immediately he pulled her to the window.
“Wait, what are you doing?” She dragged her feet, trying to stop him. “We can’t go out the window! We’re so high up!”
Still holding her hand, he pressed the index finger of his free hand to her lips. “Shhh. You’re going to wake up the guards, and they definitely wouldn’t let you do this.”
He used the bench to climb up onto the skinny windowsill. He tried to pull her up too, but she would only let him pull her up onto the bench.
“Come on,” he whined. “I thought you were going to trust me.”
“Yeah,” she hesitated still, “but I also trust myself, and myself is telling me that if I jump from this window I will go squish on the ground below and never get to see an ice breathing dragon.”
“I won’t let you go squish.”
She looked into his eyes for a moment. “You never said why you had to come meet me in the middle of the night.”
“Jade, just trust me!” He tugged on her arm.
She still wouldn’t budge.
“Fine,” he said and finally dropped her hand. He turned away from her and put one hand on each side of the window. “I’ll go adventuring without you. Girls never want to go on real proper adventures anyway.”