Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  The other side, just like the monument, showed some component of their part of the battle. The near-photographic look and texture of the design made the perspective issues of their dramatic license all the more artful and poetic. Gordon’s mini-volcano seemed to capture his sense of depth and earthiness. Ferrin’s unpredictability looked inherent in the leap onto a wall, blasts of blazing chaos in one hand and flinging wide swathes of Faery’s Bane, cold iron, with the other. And Peter was sleek, confident, and, well sexy, throwing multiple magics along with his never-ending supply of Cahill throwing knives. Dad’s battle scene showed him just before the punch, his arms and chest tight with such potential striking power he might have stopped a rampaging elephant.

  My portrait was of me kneeling and talking to a brownie, just out of the picture. On the scene side, I’m afraid it was one of those times when I was a little too busy to remember what I looked like. It was the first casting of the geas. It had to be—couldn’t imagine making a face like that too many times, so fierce with intent. And above it, Gilán burned brightly. Quite literally. Shrank had selected a spherical stone for the ring and Gilán had reacted when Jimmy set the gem for them. It popped in the center of the setting and linked to its big brother currently hiding behind a façade of stone sculpture with a gently rolling fountain. Now I had its baby brother on my hand. The diamond actually turned in the setting with the sun. Phenomenal.

  “Seth? Are you okay?” Jimmy whispered, touching my shoulder lightly. I snapped the box shut quickly looking up. He was blurry until I wiped my eyes.

  “Uh, yeah, I’m great!” I muttered, turning back to the brownies. “Braedon, they are absolutely gorgeous! Thank you, all! I will treasure this for the rest of my life!” I let the truth of the statement and the emotions flow out through Daybreak and that odd new shirt I wore reacted. As I expected, it mirrored Daybreak’s reaction and showed everyone, surprising everyone but Peter. The faery were ecstatic. I rose to my feet with the box in both hands clutched to my chest.

  Lifting the platinum out of the box, I found the sixth ring, so small I hadn’t seen it nestled between theirs and mine. They remembered Shrank. I called the five of them forward as I floated the circles of metal in the air and presented them.

  “This is a gift to you from the Faery of Gilán,” I said. “Freely given and without obligation, they offer this token of their esteem for your part in their salvation.”

  The shouts from the faery covered any response they had as they picked the gleaming blue and silver circlets from the air and studied them as I had. Our families descended like vultures to see them, the noise too great to hear their comments, either. We gave them a few minutes to share the wonder, but there was a time limit.

  When Jimmy spoke up again, he managed the noise somehow, his voice distinct and easily heard. “The Faery of Gilán prepared many gifts for today, all but three did they find too little, but I overruled them. Tonight’s banquet was prepared from their attempts at past delicacies, so if anything is not to your liking, the fault is mine and I apologize. The second gift is this…” He shifted everyone to the monument en masse.

  Well, except me. He can’t really move me. Lifting the lid, I looked at my ring and felt more than a little selfish. Sinking back down and smiling at the clan of timid almost-humans, I slid the ring on my right middle finger and said, “It’s truly beautiful work, Ilan. Thank you. And thank you, Clan Braedon, for bearing the burden for as long as you did. But I’ve got to go now. They’re waiting on me. I’ll see y’all in a day or two. Bye.” Waving, I shifted to the monument, still sitting cross-legged, while dropping the box onto my desk in my office.

  Dampening my new shirt, I stood up and shifted Mike, Gordon, and Peter to the top with me, facing everyone. Kieran had stepped up to translate the first panel with Dad and they found themselves surrounded by avid listeners. Not many spoke or could even read in the Faery dialect and apparently Dad stumbled over a word or two. Then, as if by magic, Kieran found himself alone in front of the crowd and Dad at the back with Mother’s arm and a sharply curling grin.

  I looked down at him with my hands on my hips and said, “That looks like a challenge to me. Are you gonna take that off the old man?” I grinned and added, “Ethan, you want a shot at it?”

  “I don’t know that language,” Ethan complained. “I’d have to learn it first.”

  “I could give it a shot,” Jimmy said.

  “Shrank, get off his shoulder,” I told the pixie, perhaps a mite testily. “There’s no way he’s close to ready to speak that yet.” The familiar gold halo around the pixie lit up in Jimmy’s aura, shooting the brighter-hued pixie away at artillery speeds. The seriously overpowered command sent the poor little guy off of Jimmy’s shoulder nearly as fast as a bullet and he wasn’t built to withstand that kind of speed. I shifted him to me, absorbing the inertial differences into Gilán. Using a Stone shield, I held Shrank up while he got his balance, woozy at so many sudden changes of direction.

  I called down to Kieran, “Well, big brother, it’s you or me…” He grinned up at me and slipped in a word that would make most men blush, telling me effectively what I could do with that challenge. Well, I did blush and my father gasped, and possibly Richard but he had a different attitude entirely. Well, sort of, until we all caved, and laughed with him at the ridiculousness of it. “Sometime in the near future, you will have to explain how exactly that works. There seem to be a few laws of physics broken there.”

  “I accept Lord Daybreak’s challenge to translate for his friends and family. I trust that he also has some modicum of respect for his brother Ehran’s storytelling?”

  I nodded casually accepting whichever persona he adopted. “Certainly, brother,” I acceded. “Just remember the time...”

  Kieran started again on the first panel, the Formal Dialect rolling fluidly off his magically-assisted tongue. As we listened, there was a kind of reversal in Kieran’s magic, purely mundane and absolutely human. The Faery of Gilán listened to the story my brother told and told well. Kieran sang the Faery language beautifully. His phrasing and voice as good as any elf could aspire. In English, he was equal parts majestic, evocative, and emotional. He told a better story than I did.

  In the end, I thought it best to follow rather than lead. Setting up slightly less than two thousand echo stations, I made certain that all the faery could hear. By the third panel, Kieran had an audience of over a million, most of them nearly enthralled with him. Trust me, I know. And, impressively, not once did he mention the Rat Bastard. I cycled Mike, Gordon and Peter back into the audience at the appropriate time and moved Dad up.

  When Kieran came to the end, I looked up to the sun. I only had about fifteen minutes left. This was going to be close again. Placing a thick shield around my guests, I looked down at Kieran as he finished, smiling of course, and said, “Bravo, Kieran!” I shifted him beside me and gestured in a full circle. “You see what you’ve done, right?” Even the most energetic of them was just now beginning to rise up into the air.

  He laughed at the spectacle of so many tiny figures sitting still. “I am but the bard for the retelling, Lord Daybreak,” Kieran said, bowing deeply.

  “Well done and well met, Lord Kieran,” I said. “Gilán thanks you.” The Faery cheered again. Loudly. Hence the thick shield around my guests, the ground rumbled from the noise. Giving him a few moments of accolades for his masterful work, I shifted Kieran and Dad back down with the others. Shooing them back away from the monument, I knew I would regain quiet in time so I went ahead and started the reason we were all here. There were only six minutes left now before the sun sank below the horizon completely.

  This geas was little different from their last one, mostly language issues and purely cosmetic. The major changes, if they could be called ‘major,’ were mostly allowances for the Changed and for future Changes. In short, I was allowing for evolution to occur, something the other Courts didn’t allow apparently. Dropping down into my cavern, I pictured the
geas there, writing the script out long-hand and casting it into the darkness. It floated there in my mind in eerie blue light, just as I remember it, as Kieran and I worked it out last night. It looked correct. Line by line, word by word.

  I pushed it out into the sky before me and started it spinning. Three minutes left. I reached out to the Faery. One by one, I found each clan and touched it. Then I found each family and touched it. Then, each geas that I already held and touched it. I reached out, slowly at first, touched and picked up each and every brownie, sprite, nymph, naiad, dryad, fairy, and pixie that lived on Gilán, along with everything in between. And at that very moment, I held one point two million lives, quite literally, a hair’s breadth away from death. Truly this was the razor’s edge.

  But something wasn’t… right. This didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel the same. Beginning to panic, I searched through the faery hurriedly, but I couldn’t find a problem. Everyone looked healthy. The power fluctuations I found would be taken care of here. Less than two minutes left and I had no clue what the problem was. The Changed, maybe?

  I went directly to Arwene and Orlet, the first examples I saw, and looked harder. The two water nymphs hung in the air above their thin furrow of water, towering above their new kin, strong and powerful by comparison. Arwene was perfectly healthy, truly a strong nymph, able to shift the current of a powerful river. Definitely virile, his mate, Orlet, was expecting their first child, the very first child of the Changed. Orlet was healthy, too. And Orlet was – Orlet.

  Wow, that was the third gift Jimmy mentioned. That was what was different. Ouch, I didn’t want them to do that. It wasn’t necessary.

  I pushed the geas out and around the Faery of Gilán just as the sun fell below the horizon. I’d been on time. Turning in a circle I surveyed the drunken faery, dizzily trying to regain their feet. Last time, I missed this part, eager to get Dad back to Mom. A bright moon and starfield provided enough light for even purely human eyes to see, especially considering how colorfully dressed they were.

  Seeking out the quarry that the stone the monument originally came from, I cut a circular piece out about four feet tall and four feet across. Along the edge of the disk, I would inscribe the dedication, the amendment to the monument. The huge, heavy rock floated through the air over the heads of thousands of people, cast in an eerie blue light as it came toward me. It didn’t seem as massive in the distance, but as it descended at me, it loomed. How had they done this? The slabs I stood on weighed tons!

  Setting the new section atop the very center of the monument, carefully so I didn’t crack the other two, I considered what I wanted to put there. I couldn’t imagine a way to put a million faery sprites on a rock or express elation in bas-relief. Looking over the faery as they hit the peak of their festival, I decided. They’d given me a lot today and I could give, too.

  I started glowing. The T-shirt was reacting to the Faery Lord in me building as I pulled in energy to cast what I wanted onto the disk. Having an aura could be dangerous, but this wasn’t a time to worry. In the best handwriting I could manage, I wrote, “On the Day of the Great Claiming, the Faery of Gilán chose Seth McClure, Daybreak of Gilán. And he is happy.” On the top, I cast a holographic image of the Palace, embossing the intertwined sigils of Gilán and Daybreak at the center. There was a seal similar to this in the Palace somewhere, I just wasn’t interested enough to look at the moment.

  Kieran led a train of people around the monument again. He had a disbelieving look on his face. “How old are you?” he asked, seemingly with complete candor.

  “I’ll explain upstairs,” I said smiling. “It’s probably gonna be anti-climactic from here, but I do have a few things yet. If you wouldn’t mind indulging me for a few minutes longer…” I shifted all my guests into my room to the place that Jimmy had prepared, while I stepped into my closet. The T-shirt unwrapped from my body when I opened the display case, reforming to the muscular, invisible mannequin. The Palace stuff is cool. The mirror still led to my bathroom, so I washed up before shifting across the distance to the alcove.

  “Welcome to my… sanctum, I guess,” I said smiling out at everyone, counting and making sure I didn’t leave anybody out. Hurt anybody’s feelings. “Does anyone want anything? Food or drinks? Questions?”

  A burst of laughter followed ten seconds of garbled madness as ten people asked ten different, unrelated questions at once. Jimmy slipped a huge goblet of chilled water in my hand while they settled amongst themselves what to ask first.

  “Peter says there is a very touching story about these,” Gordon said, prompting me by tapping his new ring.

  “These were made by a single brownie smith,” I said looking up as everyone edged forward, “without a forge. It took his entire clan, four families to support him while he worked. By the time Shrank found him and called me, his body was so thick with metal that he clanked on stone. Ethan had shown me what I needed to help him. Ilan yi Braedon was the little guy riding on top of the box.” I heard my mother whisper the question of why that was impressive and touching to my father, but I missed his response.

  “A brownie did this?” Gordon asked again in disbelief. I nodded and he stared at his ring in renewed awe. “How did they size them? They all fit us well.”

  Shrugging, I said, “Who knows? Maybe they had spies in the Palace.”

  “So where’s your room in all of this?” Ian piped in, squeezing between Gordon and Marty.

  “This is it, as far as you can see,” I answered.

  “All this? How do you get around? Where’s the bathroom? Your bedroom?” he asked rapidly, finding himself with more questions than his tongue would produce. Marty was getting just as excited, but he was trying to manage his questions, ending up quiet instead.

  “Well, I have a Road that speeds things up a bit,” I said throwing a thumb over my shoulder to the Road. “And I generally don’t have a problem getting around Gilán at all.”

  I lit up the panels behind us then, chasing the dusk on one screen as it formed a solid line of light moving across the land. The center I set to sliding across the countryside, randomly picking landscapes to show and the third I put onto successive sunset shots. It was a beautiful hint into what lay in my realm.

  From there it degenerated into a party. Go figure. The banquet Jimmy brought up from the faery was unbelievable and both Dad and Kieran helped by explaining what everything was, for the most part anyway. There wasn’t much left by the end. Ethan and Jimmy were competing for chief glutton and I was a not-so-distant third in that contest.

  Using the Road I led a tour through a few of the more spectacular sites in my garden, knowing full well that I’d lose some of the younger to the thrill of the Road itself. Sure ‘nough, everybody under forty veered off and I could see Richard yearning to join his son and daughter in play. His desire for his wife’s company won out.

  Knowing we had to make an early evening I kept the tour brief. Gilán pumped up everyone today, so fatigue was an issue no one felt now but would later, at home at the castle, for instance. It wasn’t difficult to cajole Enid into taking Felix home. A quick call to Jimmy and all the boys and Justine came back to the panels alcove. And then the dance of “good nights” and “See you in the mornings” as my parents and the Borlands decided to follow and a morass of hugs, kisses and handshakes was everywhere.

  Soon, it was just my brothers and Jimmy and I was able to uncap the façade around Gilán’s crowning jewel.

  “All right, we’re dying to know,” Peter said, fidgeting on the side of the diamond well. “What was the third gift?”

  “What?” I asked, feigning ignorance, turning from the giant rock to him.

  “Jimmy said there were three gifts that the faery found acceptable,” Peter said. His look told me he knew I was faking confusion. “One was the rings and two was the monument. What was the third?”

  I sat slowly beside him, trying to figure out how to describe what they had done. “Well, the simplest way I can exp
lain it is to say they gave me their Names.”

  “What?” Kieran asked, sitting up straight across from us, shocked. “They gave you their Names?” I nodded, watching realization dawn on him. He understood what I was saying, either partially or completely, I wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t understand,” Peter said, looking between us. “What does that mean?”

  “Means we’ll be able to say ‘em now,” I said, grinning. “Which is what probably gave them the idea.”

  “So what’s the big deal with that?” Peter asked. “People change their names all the time. I’ve got two and a dozen or so nicknames.”

  “It’s much more personal than that, Peter,” Kieran said softly. “Much more. The name that a faery tells you is only part of his name. The rest is in their geas and in their history.”

  “I still don’t see what the big deal is,” Peter said, shaking his head.

  “They took a chain saw to the Tree of Life and pruned it to the ground,” I said. “Tossed millions of branches of their genealogy into the woodchipper. Broke themselves off from every other faery in the universe. And they did it just so Jimmy and I could say their names easily.” Light seemed to be dawning in Peter’s eyes.

  “There was an… additional affect,” Ethan said coyly from beside Kieran. He looked back and forth between Kieran and me, enjoying the confused faces for a moment. “Like everyone else, I was watching you when you were building and crafting the wild magic for the binding. Your style is much more dramatic and theatrical than Kir du’Ahn’s, by the way. Quite a bit of flare!” Grinning, he threw his arms back wide in imitation and, I hoped, melodrama. It wasn’t frenetic but it was definitely boisterous. Everyone chuckled at him for his mimicry. “I was probably the only one who saw the hesitation, but it worried me. That you might get lost in the wild magic or maybe just overwhelmed by the number, but you were fine and by that time you had released it. When I looked at a fae…?” He shook his head, grinning.