by James Fahy
“He is right, Truefellow,” Hawthorn said, agreeing with the newcomer. “Eris will kill the child. She will kill anyone she finds. The baby is worth too much.” He nodded towards the door.
“He is right. He is always right. We must go. To the Arcania chamber now. The Oracle will guide us.”
“Give him to me,” the voice said, and Hawthorn moved forward into the centre of the room to watch, allowing Robin's vision to slide tantalisingly to the side of the room. He still could not see fully but, from the furthest corner of his vision, he could make out his father opposite another Fae, dressed in identical armour but with a darker cloak. This man had darker, curled hair, but his face, like the face of Robin’s own father, was nothing but a maddening blur.
Robin saw the shape of his father bring the small bundle up to his own face. He may have rested his forehead against the blanket, or perhaps he laid a kiss on the head of the small child, it was too difficult to make out. But even swimming in the periphery of sight, the gesture was filled with an unbearable sadness. He saw the dark-haired Fae with outstretched hands, and his infant self being passed over gently.
“The mortal world,” the man said reassuringly, as though the words held magic of their own. “He will have a chance there. He will be safe. The Oracle has opened a way for me. I will take him to the woman. Your people need you here, for the evacuation.”
“Ride fast,” Robin’s father said, and his voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. “Protect him. He will live. Protect my son. Find a way to get him to safety.”
Robin saw the other man nod and bow as he cradled the baby. “With my life and my death,” he vowed solemnly. “Aut viam inveniamaut faciam.”
He turned and left, taking infant Robin with him, and Hawthorn began to walk over to Robin's father, arm outstretched to place a comforting hand on his shoulder. Sadness flowed from the Fae and Robin felt it roll over him as though it were his own.
And a piercing scream ran through his head.
GUILTY FACES
A disorienting flash of green and Robin felt his own fingers fumbling at his face. He tore off the mask, blinking rapidly. Erlking, his father…all was gone. He was back on Briar Hill in the dead of night. Cold autumn wind blowing around the dark eaves.
Hawthorn had stood, his sudden movement breaking off the strange window to the past. He looked worried.
Robin stared down at the mask in his hands. An inert, innocent piece of carved wood, but one that had just transported him across time and memory. He could still hear the echo of his father’s voice.
“What was that?” Woad said. He was also on his feet, Robin saw, his back to their small circle of firelight, staring off into the dark haunted shadows of the ruined buildings.
“What was what?” Robin replied groggily. He felt slurred, as though he had just woken from a dream too suddenly. He could still faintly smell the incense of Erlking, feel the sunlight on him.
“The scream,” Hawthorn said grimly. “Jackalope!”
Robin realised with a start that it had been the scream which had snapped him out of the power of the mask. He had imagined it had been somehow part of the memory, something from long ago, that cataclysmic moment when the world of the Fae was falling down around their ears. But no, it was here and now, and as he stumbled to his feet as well, the mask slipping groggily from his fingers, it came again. A shriek of pure terror, broken in voice. Somewhere in the darkness of the ghost town.
“That is Jack,” he said, eyes wide. He’d never heard such a howl of pure terror. “Where is he?”
“Trouble,” Woad said, setting off swiftly into the shadows without waiting for the others. “That’s where he is! Come! Hurry!”
Hawthorn and Robin ran after him, their feet scuffing up dirt and dust in the darkness. Robin’s heart was pounding. What was going on? Were the centaurs back? Had they somehow breached the walls of Briar Hill sometime in the night?
The dark streets and alleyways were a maze of moonlight and shadow. Woad scampered ahead, vaulting over low, broken walls and tumbled fences knotted with blackened ivy. They stumbled from light into darkness, picking hastily through empty shells of homes, dodging around rotted and warped furniture in the gloom, each calling out to the missing Fae. After the second scream, they had heard nothing more, and the longer their search continued, the more worry and fear built inside Robin.
“Where the hell is he?” he gasped, as the three emerged from the broken walls of a dwelling, finding themselves in a cobbled side-street, the ground half-swallowed by the relentless return of nature. “Why won’t he answer us?”
“Maybe he can’t,” Woad said grimly. He was sniffing the air in the gloomy street. “This is bad. This is a bad smell, Pinky. He came this way, but something is all over the top of everything else. Another smell on top of his. Blood and darkness and sharp sorrow.”
Hawthorn held out his hands, stopping the three of them together in the night-time street. “We will cover more ground if we split up,” he said. “It’s not a big place. He won’t have left the walls.”
“Split up?” Woad said. “Split up in the incredibly dark and spooky abandoned town in the middle of the night where we hear screams and I have literally just said the air smells of blood and sorrow?”
Hawthorn blinked at him.
“Works for me,” Woad shrugged. “I’m bound to find him first. I’m a champion finder of things. I found that mask, I found–”
“Not the time, Woad!” Robin said urgently. He pointed along the length of the street. “I’ll go this way, Hawthorn, the other. Woad, you’re the nimblest. Climb high, wherever it’s safe to do so. See if you can get a better view of the layout of this place.”
Hawthorn nodded and set off at a run without further question.
“If any of us find him, shout the others,” Robin called.
“Or scream in a terrified way, depending on the situation!” Woad’s voice floated back as he disappeared swiftly into the shadows of a tumbled hovel of old grey bricks, scrambling up the sheer wall of the house like a monkey.
Robin ran the length of the old street, concentrating on not tripping on the uneven, broken cobbles and dodging the thick determined tussocks of moorland grass which protruded obscenely here and there, slowly eroding the town of Briar Hill.
This was such a bad idea, he thought to himself. Split up? Have I learned nothing from pretty much every scary movie I’ve ever seen? But what choice did they have? Something bad had happened. They had to find the Fae.
The path he took led him through twists and turns between the timbered ghosts of old buildings. The only sound was the slap of his trainers on the slippery dark cobbles and his own laboured breath. Minutes passed. He couldn’t hear the others. His mana stone bounced against his collarbone beneath his t-shirt. Where the hell was Jackalope? Robin gritted his teeth. The older Fae was beginning to feel like more trouble than he was worth. When he wasn’t being snide or dismissive, he was a walking sullen silence. When he wasn’t irritating someone or other, he was disappearing in a huff, making them all panic.
But that scream had been so full of horror. Robin couldn’t imagine what would make a person make such a noise.
A spluttered whimper from a darkened doorway made Robin scoot to a halt so suddenly that he almost lost his footing. It had been a sob, the most pitiable sob.
Robin ran in through the doorway. The room within was shadowy and large. The ruined building must have been a warehouse once, a winter store for grain or supplies perhaps. It was filled with inky shadows, criss-crossed struts and beams, but much of the high ceiling above had crumbled and toppled in long ago so that the moonlight fell down in grey and ghostly shafts through a latticework of black timbers.
In the centre of this room, in a patch of bare earth, the figure of Jackalope lay. The boy was on his side, knees curled up and arms over his head defensively, as though he were taking a beating. Robin didn’t see why.
“Jack!” he gasped, a mixture of relief
and worry fighting inside him as he ran into the room.
The grey-haired boy looked up from behind his defensive arms. His eyes were wide with fear and wet. His face a mask of shock.
“No! Don’t come here. Run!” he yelled, his voice breaking.
Robin skittered to a halt, eyes darting everywhere in the darkness, trying to find the attacker. There was nothing. No danger he could see. There was only Jackalope, fetal on the floor in the middle of an open crumbling barn.
Robin edged towards the fallen boy, turning a slow circle as he did so. The hairs on the back of his neck were bristling. Jackalope whimpered quietly, drawing in on himself as if in pain. “Hold on, Jack,” Robin said. “I’m here. I’m here now.”
He reached out for the prostrate boy. In the shadows, he couldn't see any wounds, but the silver Fae whimpered again as though he were being cut open. He shuddered violently under Robin's hands, breath coming in tiny painful gasps. “Jack, we have to go!” Robin said desperately, wondering if he had had some kind of a fit. He tried to drag the boy up, but Jackalope was a dead weight on the floor. “Jack, please, there's nothing her–”
A movement cut him off. For a fleeting second, from the corner of his eye, Robin had seen something floating above them. Just a glance. It had been a white swish, stark against the gloom. He stared up at the open and broken roof in confusion, watching the shadows deepen as cloud banks drifted by. Jackalope had stopped gasping now but still refused to move from the floor. In fact, he huddled down tighter than before, head locked firmly under his arms.
I need Hawthorn, Robin thought. He would know whether Jackalope had tripped over a magical booby trap or inhaled guano or whatever was wrong with the boy. “I'll go get help,” he said to the stricken boy, giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He rose, spinning on his heel, as the clouds finally gave way and silvery light suddenly flooded into the room, illuminating Jackalope with a spotlight of moonbeams.
Horror crawled up Robin's throat, constricting his chest, as an apparition appeared. Illuminated by the moonlight, it floated directly above Jackalope. It was a shifting ethereal haze, purest white, a nebulous cloud with only the vaguest sketchy form of a person. The only seemingly solid part of it was its hands, long wicked claws which Robin now saw by the light were currently burrowing into Jackalope's hair.
Robin staggered back a step, drawing the thing's attention away from its quarry.
Twin pinpricks of eerie white light were all that told Robin that the creature had eyes at all, as it turned its head slowly and ponderously to regard this newcomer. It was utterly silent.
The horrible sight floated in the darkness above the Fae, white and sickly, a grim reaper in negative.
“Banshee,” Jackalope managed.
Robin, frozen to the spot in shock, opened his mouth to reply, but the hovering spectre had sensed his presence, and its glowing head whipped in his direction. Fear hit Robin like a cold wave, almost knocking him over. Pure, childlike fear over which he had no control.
I am the boogeyman, the silent creature seemed to whisper in his mind, wordless and primal. I am the thing under the bed, the darkness in the wardrobe. I am the tree-branch scraping your window pane at night. The face in the forest shadows.
Malevolence rolled from the airborne creature like dry ice, covering both Jackalope and Robin in a fog of terror and the banshee, distracted by this new morsel, left the cowering Fae in the dirt and swooped instead towards Robin, disappearing completely in the shadows.
Its speed was alarming after its languid hover. It darted through the air in a flurry of whispered movement, a silver fish in a dark sea, and barrelled straight into Robin, knocking him on his back on the floor.
The banshee, ghostly as it appeared, had substance. Enough to drive the boy down onto the ground, and to grip his shoulders with its long, horribly inhuman fingers. Robin felt them grapple him through his clothes, so cold they burned in agony. The greedy clutch was so tight he felt certain at any moment to hear the snap of his own collarbone.
A wordless cry escaped him, half panic, half horror, as his hands came up blindly to defend himself, but his grasping fingers found only fog and smoke.
All else was forgotten in the darkness of the old barn. There was nothing in the world but Robin and the nightmare which pinned him like a butterfly, seeping terror from his every pore. The banshee lowered its long neck down, closer and closer to Robin's face, and for a moment, he saw the creature's features swirl beneath the white fog, like muddled paint, lumpen and unformed. And then, as the long talons reached up and closed tight around Robin’s throat, the head of the monster jerked, and the smoke dissipated, revealing a face within.
Robin’s heart almost stopped.
It was Gran.
His own grandmother, dead and gone, stared back at him. The same sharp eyes, every wrinkle and crease of her face the same as ever, more real and detailed than even he could remember. But Gran had always smiled, her lips turned up lopsidedly, and her eyes, for as long as Robin could remember, had been much younger than the rest of her face, filled with a twinkle of mischief, set in wrinkles like crepe paper.
The Gran above him now, blotting out the world and choking him hard enough to make blurry dark spots appear at the edge of his vision, was different.
Her face was set in hard lines, stern and repulsed at the very sight of the boy struggling. Her lips were drawn back in anger, and her eyes…her eyes were like cold marbles, filled with fury, and a pure and fierce hatred.
“Dead!” she spat, her voice, so familiar to Robin, was tinged with a bitter malice he had never heard from her in life. “Dead! Because of you! You brat!” She shook him roughly.
Robin tried to respond, but all he could do was gasp for air, choking weakly. This couldn’t be real.
“All my life, wasted! To keep you safe? And for what? I’m worm food! A life of loneliness for me! Coddling a clueless, ungrateful, selfish brat! Never safe, never resting!” Her eyes burned with pure hatred.
“Not that you cared! Spoilt infant! I never wanted to take you in! Never! They made me! Threatened me! And then what?” Her lips drew back, her dentures grinding together so fiercely, she seemed like a wild dog. “What reward for me, at the end of my life? Protecting a worthless rat from an unkind world? Killed! Cast aside like some old furniture in the way, just to get to you, the special one, the chosen saviour! The only important thing in the world? Hah!”
Robin tried with shaking hands to prise the long claws from around his neck, but they held his throat like an icy vice.
“Not that you stuck around long to shed tears!” Gran spat, teeth grinding. “Oh no! Off like a rocket to a new life, couldn’t wait could you? Held you back, did I? Smelly old bat! Good riddance to her. Much better off without!” Her voice had risen, screaming hatefully at him. Her cold eyes blazing. “You horrible, selfish creature! You ungrateful brat! I am dead! Because of you! It is your fault!”
Tears were swimming in Robin’s eyes as he gasped for air. He shook his head as much as he could, squeezing his eyes closed against this horror.
“You’re … wrong!” he wheezed. “I didn’t kill Gran!”
Beneath the great weight of fear and guilt which pressed down upon him from above, there was something else rising within him.
The peppercorn of darkness, the strange, solid core of anger which had been flaring on and off since summer. It rose through the ghostly pressure of the banshee like a determined bubble in deep dark waters. For once, Robin didn’t fight it. He needed it, this alien anger deep within him. It was not cowed by this spectre. It was not afraid, but defiant. Robin welcomed it, feeling the rage flow through his system, a wash of bracing ice, wiping his panicked mind clean. It gave strength to his hands and suddenly he found himself prizing apart the grip of the banshee.
“I didn’t kill her!” he gasped, jaw clenched as he strained. “She would never say these things! It wasn’t my fault!”
The face above him wavered a little, as thou
gh in a heat haze, as the banshee struggled momentarily to regain its grip on him. The features blurred, and Gran disappeared, replaced with another face, dark and bearded, glaring down at him furiously. It was Phorbas.
Robin was so surprised that he flinched, losing his grip on the banshee. The creature with the satyr's face slammed his head down against the hard earth, making him dizzy and nauseous. From above him came his old tutor's familiar voice, filled with cold menace.
“Oh no?” he said, snarling down at his old student. “Maybe that helps you sleep at night, Master Robin. Poor innocent child, yes? But what of me? What of old dear Phorbas, eh?”
The orange eyes of the satyr were wide with rage and indignity. “Fool I was, to accept your aunt's calling! To agree to put my neck on the line, to shepherd a snot-nosed orphan! A brainless, hornless Fae without the sense to tie his own shoes? And look where it got me! Murdered before I ever reach Erlking! My body and soul torn apart!” His brow beetled furiously. “This is the fate of those who help the great Scion. All who stand with you, you will doom! All who aid you, they will die! You, Master Robin, walk ignorantly on a path of broken bones … and call it clover!”
Fighting off the overwhelming fear, Robin pushed back up against the creature. “Get away from me!” he screamed, horrified to hear his own voice in his ears, sounding more like the desperate whimpering pleas of a child than the defiant yell he had aimed for. “Please! Stop! I didn’t mean for Phorbas to die! I didn’t know … I–”
The banshee grinned down at him, cruel and cold. “Didn’t mean … Wasn’t your fault? Do you know how many have died for you, Master Robin? Do you know how many more will? Can you count that high? Can you bear to? You are the calamity of the Netherworlde, not its saviour! You will lead everyone to death! To ruin! Is it not easier to die now? Give in! Sacrifice yourself for them! Spare them the pain by doing the one decent thing you can! Die, and spare the world your selfish trail of des–”