by Cora Avery
“I don’t,” she said. “You know I don’t.”
“No, but you do love—”
Her finger flew up between them. “Stop. Search my memories again. I feel many things for Endreas, but not that.” She stepped back from him, allowing the tension to dissolve. “But what if he is right?”
“About?”
“About the war, about peace? If things are as bad as you say—”
“Submitting to the Elf King is not the answer,” he said. “Besides, you know there is something he is not telling you. If his intentions were as noble as he claims, he would be more forthright.”
“Maybe,” she said, watching Kaelan’s profile, the way the light and shadows melted over his face. “I wish had more time to think.”
“We should go straight to the Spire. Why are we wasting time going to see some tree demon?”
“Because Kaelan needs to know the truth,” she said. “And so do I. If he is the child of this prophecy . . .”
“I hope he is,” Damion said, coming closer. “You should claim him.”
“I can’t claim him against his will.”
“You won’t have to when you are in your Shine. He will want to be claimed then.”
“Well, I’m not, am I? And even if I were, I wouldn’t do that to him. I swore that I wouldn’t claim him.”
“That is a promise you cannot honor. Think of it, Magda. This Elf wants you. And we both know that he is not telling you the whole of his plans. You do not trust him, nor should you. You were right. Your feelings for him are only your instincts. It is not your fault. I must accept . . . Elves and Pixies are descended from the same people. Fine. But what you feel for him is only remnants of that. As you said, he is a Prince and you a Rae. That is the way of it. But he”—Damion pointed towards Kaelan—“is a Prince too.” Damion leaned closer. “And I know you are drawn to him as well.”
“Only because he is a Prince.”
“Exactly. So claim him. Don’t you see? It makes sense. This prophecy? If Kaelan is the one who will see the Elf King bow to the Crown, then how else would that come about but if he were the Crown’s Prince?”
“Now you want me to vie for the Crown too?”
“A nymph and a Prince can never be.”
“Like an Elf and Pixie can never be?”
“No matter what you choose, Mistress, I am your servant.”
“You are my family, Damion,” she said. “And if you ever wish to be released from my service, I tell you now, you are free. The decision is yours alone.”
Damion straightened his shoulders, gazing down at her for a long moment. “What is your wish, my mistress?”
“Wake the Prince and the nymph. We’re leaving.”
“Can you fight?” Damion asked.
Kaelan scowled at him. “You want to fight me?”
“If I wanted to fight you, you’d be dead,” Damion said as they left behind the high plains and descended again into a forest. The sun tilted past noon. Butterflies and fairies were thick upon the wildflowers, both ignoring the dragging band of travelers.
Sweat ran down Magda’s back and wetted her hair, but she pressed on towards the trees, Hero a furry, sweat-inducing weight on her shoulder.
“Why would I need to fight?” Kaelan said.
“Why?” Damion asked like he hadn’t heard correctly.
“Kaelan was raised as an imp,” Honeysuckle reported. “Imps don’t fight.”
“No, they only drop toads on nymphs’ heads.” Magda smirked back at him over her shoulder.
He glowered at her. He hadn’t spoken to her since they’d set out before dawn.
“That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Admit it.”
“He’s never dropped a toad on my head,” Honey said. “And he has no reason to fight.”
“He does if he’s a Pixie Prince,” Damion said. “And if the Elf King is hunting him.”
Magda stopped at the edge of the forest. The rest of the group slowed behind her.
“How much farther?” she asked Honey.
Honey twined a golden coil of hair around her finger, seeming to think. Though the rest of them were sweating and grimy, her skin remained powdery-looking. Her flowing gown never caught on a prickle or took up dirt, not even the hem.
“Not far,” Kaelan replied, speaking past her, as if Hero had been the one to ask.
If she had cared, she might’ve asked him why he was giving her the brush-off, but then, she doubted he would understand what that meant. The longer they walked, the darker her mood grew.
“Lead the way then,” she said. “This is your forest, isn’t it, imp?”
Kaelan strode into the woods without comment, Honey close at his heels. Damion frowned at Magda.
“What is wrong with you?” he hissed under his breath.
She tromped down into the gold-leafed trees. Rills of forest toads greeted them as they passed into the damp shadows of the trees. “Can’t I be in a foul mood if I wish?”
“Certainly,” he said, “but it’s not our fault that you have tender feelings for an Elf.” He lofted his brow and then strode ahead.
“He’s right, you know,” Hero commented, though his eyes remained closed.
“Thank you for sharing your opinion,” she muttered, allowing the others to gain distance on her.
“I’ve been thinking . . .”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yes. It is sometimes perturbing. I have been wondering though, why do you simply not return to the place you wish to be? Go back to the other world? I know you are unhappy here.”
“How is it you’ve become so eloquent?”
“You tell me.”
She sighed, watching Damion’s long, heavy strides and Honey’s skipping gait and Kaelan’s straight-ahead charge. She switched from verbal communication to telepathic. It took her a few moments, though, to separate the words she wanted from her stormy sea of thoughts and channel them towards Hero in a clear fashion.
“Even if I went back . . . I like to think I would be happy, but to be honest, I don’t know what would make me happy anymore. I’ve grown so accustomed to being responsible only for myself. Once there was nothing I wanted more than to be Radiant, but now . . . I was naïve then, short-sighted and self-centered, just like all the other Raes. I thought I understood what it meant to be Radiant, but I wasn’t thinking about my people or the Lands or the small folk. I was only thinking of myself. I felt because my mother had been Radiant I deserved to be also. I didn’t worry about whom to trust. I believed so firmly in myself. I was such a child. Now I worry I’m still a child, that I’m making the same mistakes of arrogance again. I shouldn’t have allowed Endreas to . . .” She tensed against the memories of him. “I can’t allow myself to be caught up like that, not even because I am a Rae and he is a Prince.”
“I do not yet understand the nature of your breeding habits.”
“That makes two of us.”
“The one who threw rocks at me, you will breed with him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, he’s in love with the nymph.”
“I don’t think I understand love. Please explain.”
“I’m not sure I understand it either,” she said.
“He desires to breed with you.”
She stumbled. Hero’s claws dug into her skin.
“Ow!”
Damion glanced back at her, raising a brow.
“Root,” she said, though the ground was littered with nothing but dead leaves.
Damion made a dubious face, but started walking again.
Once he had put distance between them again, she returned to her conversation with Hero.
“Why would you say that?” she asked.
“Say what?”
“About Kaelan?”
“He protected you while you were ill. Watched over you.”
“He was just being . . . kind.”
“And he puts out the mating
scent whenever you are near.”
A flush unfurled across her chest. “Again, it’s only because he is a Prince and I am a Rae. We are particular among our kind. Raes and Princes are drawn to each other sexually, but it rarely means little beyond that.”
“Isn’t that what you said about the other one?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because in both instances it’s true.”
“Then you will breed with both of them?”
“No!”
Damion shot another, more concerned, glance back at her. She frowned at him until he turned away.
“No,” she said again to Hero. “If I had my way, I’d be rid of both of them. But as it turns out, I might need Kaelan. If there’s anything more confusing than my kind’s breeding habits, then it is our social structures.”
“And the other?”
“He’s dangerous. I can’t trust him.”
“This one does not trust you.”
“Kaelan?”
“I heard him tell the nymph he is afraid you will go back on your word. He does not wish to help you. He thinks you are dangerous.”
“He’s right. I am.”
“We’re here,” Kaelan announced as he scaled a small rocky rise and then disappeared over the top of it.
Hero’s claws jabbed into her skin again. Why hadn’t she worn a jacket to Python’s that day? Now she was stuck in a tank top with rat claws burrowing into her bare skin every other step.
“What’s wrong?” she said to Hero.
Sharp currents of his anxiety passed through her, his tiny heart racing.
“Be careful. I will wait here.”
Without another word, he leapt down and disappeared into the underbrush.
Damion stood at the top of the rise. “Are you coming?”
She frowned after Hero, but then hiked up to the crest and joined Damion, startling a fat black toad, the size of a big tomcat, from the log where he’d been squatting.
Down the hill was a small hollow cradling a giant dead tree, gray and tangled, branches frozen in bent, writhing death-throes like a gigantic spider’s corpse.
At the heart of the dissected tree, a gaping wound of darkness.
Honey leaned against the tree, peering into the hole.
Magda and Damion shared an uneasy look and remained far back from the tree.
“Ouda?” Honey called. “It’s me, Honeysuckle. I’ve brought Kaelan and . . . some others.”
From the black depths, a long, slender hand appeared, followed by an arm of ivory, then a head, fair waves of gossamer hair and a delicate-featured face. Honey moved back, smiling.
“Thank you, Ouda, for giving us audience.”
Ouda smiled down at Honey as she emerged, taller than all of them, moving with a gentle grace like a sapling swaying in the breeze. She turned her washed-out blue eyes from Honey to Kaelan, then to Damion and Magda.
Her voice was like wind through a fallen log, deep and low, melodic in a haunting way.
Her smile widened. “Welcome.”
“I HAVE TOLD Kaelan the truth of his origins,” Honey said to the willowy creature with the bone-white skin. The ragged hem of Ouda’s translucent gown fluttered as she bobbed above the ground.
“So the time has come,” Ouda said. Her gaze moved more slowly than her head, as if the two were experiencing a lag between them.
Damion edged behind her, walking in a slow, casual manner. As he passed, he murmured under his breath, “No shadow.”
Once Damion was on the other side of her, hands behind his back, already in his shadow’s vault, she allowed her gaze to flick to the dry-packed earth under Ouda. Golden sunlight pooled in the hollow and gleamed off of Ouda’s pale hair, but though the dead tree’s shadow fell gropingly over Honey, Ouda cast no shadow herself.
Pixies had an old saying, shadowless is soulless.
But Magda had never actually encountered a creature without a shadow.
Kaelan did not seem to fear the wispy creature. He strode right up to her.
“Is it true?” Kaelan asked. “Was I brought to you by a sylph? Was I stolen from my parents?”
“I only know what was told to me by the wind spirit who bore you to me,” Ouda said. “That you were the child of prophecy and hunted by the Elf King. That you must be hidden until you came of age. And . . .”
Ouda waved her skeletal fingers in a slow arc. From out of the hollow arose two swords, black, tooled sheaths dusty from disuse. They floated down before Kaelan and landed, crossed, before him. He knelt to inspect them.
“These were brought with you,” Ouda said.
Damion edged closer, his chin canting to get a better look at the swords.
“And you warned me not to fall in love with him,” Honey said, sagging.
This time Ouda’s eyes moved before her head, like an owl.
“Yes. I did,” Ouda said. Her eyes seemed to grow larger, or perhaps it was only a trick of the light. “You are quite devastated.”
Honey dabbed at her eyes with one of the sheer layers of her dress. “No, I’m not.”
“The sylph told you nothing more?” Kaelan asked.
“Two things more,” Ouda said, never taking her eyes off of Honey. “The first, that if you survived, you would have a hand in the new age of Alfheim and the end of the Throne, which is why I helped you. The King is poison and must be defeated. And the second, that when I gave you these swords, I would be freed from the magical bond the sylph placed upon me and I could take my reward for assisting you.”
Slowly, Magda began to release her blades.
“Reward?” Kaelan said, taking a sword in each hand and rising. From the way the handles of the blades knocked together, it was clear he had little experience handling swords.
“Yes,” Ouda said. “And your friends will do nicely for a start.”
Damion drew his swords. Magda took a step forward.
Ouda opened her mouth, and opened and opened and opened it.
Magda blacked out or felt as if she had. One moment she was about to rush the spindly white woman, and in the next, Kaelan smashed into her and both of them crashed to the dirt.
“Damn!” Magda grimaced as her shoulder crunched against the ground.
Kaelan’s green eyes were wide. He scrabbled to pick up the swords that had fallen between them.
Magda pushed up to her feet. Damion stood frozen in place, swords in mid-arc, brow like a hawk’s. Ouda drifted over to Honey and placed both of her hands on either side of the nymph’s face. The black maw that had been her mouth was almost as big as Honey’s head. The nymph, like Damion, was frozen, her heel fixed above the ground, just about to step back.
A high-pitched whine from Ouda’s throat needled into Magda’s ears, muddling her thoughts and stiffening her body.
Kaelan’s shoulder bumped into Magda’s as he regained his feet. The contact loosened her limbs and cleared her head.
“It’s you,” she said to him.
“What’s she doing?” he said as Ouda’s mouth fixed around Honey’s face. Ouda’s petrification-inducing whine was dulled and Damion’s arms moved slightly, but as if in slow-motion.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Magda muttered.
Kaelan lurched forward, shaking one of the swords loose from its sheath.
Magda retracted her own blades, clamped down on his arm, and ripped the sword out of his hand. “Hold onto me.”
“She’s killing Honey!”
Magda took his hand and hooked his fingers into her waistband. “Don’t let go.”
She charged forward, dragging Kaelan like a Pixie Prince-shaped anchor. When she stopped, he slammed into her. She wobbled, trying not to topple into Ouda.
She sliced Kaelan’s blade through Ouda, but the fine curved sword simply passed through her stomach and out her back. The creature didn’t break away or even flinch from Honey, who had lost rigidity and hung slack, only held upright by Ouda’s leeching mouth.
As she feared . . . a normal sword wasn’t g
oing to stop this creature. Fortunately, her blades were not normal weapons. Each was unique, each had magical properties. She just so happened to be in possession of a blade made for less substantial creatures.
She unleashed the tiny ghast blade from her left pinky, thrusting the bluish knife up into Ouda’s side, and was rewarded with the pressure of the blade hitting something solid.
Ouda’s mouth broke away from Honey, who dropped to the ground in a heap.
Ouda spun, clutching the wound in her side, which did not bleed, but shone with white light. She shrieked at Magda. The force of the howl threw Magda and Kaelan up and away to the very rim of the hollow. Magda landed on top of a fallen log. A black toad hopped over her back, leaving a slimy puddle of glue-like stickiness dripping between her shoulder blades.
Ouda’s whine started up again, thickening Magda’s thoughts and making it impossible for her to sit up.
“Magda.” Kaelan gripped her arm, breaking Ouda’s power over her again. “Look.”
Magda lifted her head with a groan. Down on the forest floor, Lavana and a dozen of her warriors were frozen in mid-dismount.
“Fuck.”
Kaelan dragged her up off the log. “You hurt her with your knives.” He gave her a bit of a jerk, as if he was going to fling her back into the hollow. “You have to kill her.”
Ouda floated down over Honey again, lowering her oversized mouth to Honey’s slack face once more.
Kaelan’s fingers dug into Magda’s arm. “You have to help her.”
“I know! I know!” She rolled her shoulders. The toad’s ooze was starting to harden. The fat bugger had the nerve to hop onto her foot, staring up at her with its bulbous smirking toad eyes. She glanced down at Lavana, locked in mid-stride.
“Grab this toad,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Do it!”
He reached down with his free hand, never releasing her. The toad let out a startled erping sound and tried to jump away, but Kaelan caught him.
“Come on.” She jerked him down the opposite slope towards Lavana.
“What about Honey?”
“She’ll have to hang on or we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter! Just keep a grip on me and don’t touch Lavana.”