Fairy Queens: Books 1-4

by Amber Argyle

  She snatched a handful of river silt and scrubbed the blood and fluids from her skin. When she looked up, the snake fairy hovered nearby, watching her.

  Nelay pressed her wrists to her temples and pinched her eyes shut. She’d done the one thing her mother had warned her never to do—she’d captured the fairy’s attention. Terror pumped through Nelay’s body as the headless snake continued to writhe. And then she swallowed her fear. She’d ignore the fairy, as she always did. It was bound to lose interest in her eventually.

  As for the snake, she’d seen other creatures do this after they’d died—thrash as if their bodies didn’t accept their death. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to touch it again.

  Shaking, she stabbed the snake with her spear and lifted it up, carrying it as far away from her body as she could manage. It was huge, twice as long as she was tall. But pretty soon, her arms tired and she gave up on fear and instincts and just draped it over her shoulder, where the shedding skin moved weirdly against her and the greasy substance stained her threadbare robes.

  But even worse than the snake trying to curl around her was the incessant flap of the fairy’s wings. It was following her.

  Nelay hadn’t gone far when she heard Panar calling for her. She didn’t want to answer—he would be angry. But not answering would only make it worse. “I’m here.”

  He came running into view, his spear in hand and his headscarf wrapped around his face. Never breaking his stride, his eyes went over her from head to toe. “Where have you been? Father told us never to leave the sheep!”

  “You left them,” she shot back.

  Jerking back his headscarf, he stopped in front of her, sweat running down the sides of his face. She held the snake between them in an attempt to distract him. His gaze caught greedily on the meat and he took it from her without question, slinging it over his own shoulder. Then he grasped her upper arm and dragged her toward the waterhole. “How did you get this?”

  Nelay tried to pull away. “I killed it.”

  His head whipped around. “With what?”

  His fingers dug painfully in her arm, and she tried to pry his hand off. “With my sling.”

  A muscle in his jaw ticked. “That’s impossible.”

  Anger flared in Nelay. “Just because you couldn’t make that shot doesn’t mean I can’t.”

  He stopped, shame and jealousy flashing across his eyes in turn. “You think you’re better than me?”

  It would have been smart to deny it, back down. But Nelay had risked her life so they’d have something to eat, and all he could worry about was his pride. “I know I’m better than you.”

  He shoved her and she stumbled back. Before she could catch herself, he was on top of her, the snake’s body pinned between them. “Who do you think is going to get it when Father finds out I let you hunt a cobra?”

  She dug her heels into the dirt, trying to scramble out from under him. But he was too big. “One of us had to.” She shot out, meaning to hurt him.

  It worked. His hands clamped around her throat. “I hate you,” he said, his eyes clouded with fury. “Someday I’m going to get out of this cursed desert. I’m going to be an important man. And you’re going to be married and pregnant. That’s all you’ll ever be. The only future you’ll ever have. You understand me?”

  Like acid, black spots ate holes in Nelay’s vision. Her mouth worked, trying to scream at him to let go, to let her have air, but his hands were too tight. She squirmed, clawing at his fingers. He shook her as if that would force an answer out of her.

  So she spit in his face. She knew it was a bad idea, but he deserved it.

  His gaze narrowed and he squeezed harder, so hard her vision went dark and her muscles went soft. And then everything turned black.

  When she came to, Panar was gone and so was the snake. The ground felt hot beneath her, so hot it almost burned her, which meant she hadn’t been lying there long. Her ears rang. She sat up and gingerly touched her neck, feeling the welts where her brother’s fingers had been. She couldn’t see, but she knew bruises stained her skin. Tears blurred her vision, so she squeezed her eyes shut and forced the tears down.

  Her brother’s words rang in her memory, chafing more than the pain in her neck. She thought of her mother, pregnant with her sixth child. Bulging veins ran through her legs like swollen rivers, the skin of her abdomen torn in vertical lines. She thought of her mother weeping over three gray babies so small they fit in the palm of Nelay’s hand. Blood and tears—that was the lot of women.

  Was it the only future for her?

  She pushed herself up on shaky arms and locked gazes with the snake fairy. She made herself look away, but not before she noticed the fairy’s slitted tongue flick out of its mouth. “Burn it, bird, stop following me,” she muttered, hoping the fairy would buy the lie.

  Nelay wrapped her headscarf around her head and neck, then staggered back up the dry riverbed. When she reached the water hole, she found it had been dug out again. Panar was blowing on a nest of smoking, shredded bark, his flint and knife beside his knees. He didn’t glance up at her. She glared at him for good measure before discreetly scanning the area for the viper fairy. Not seeing it, she sagged in relief and slipped inside the tent to lie down.

  When she woke, it was because her mouth watered. She wiped the drool from her cheek and sat up. Smelling meat, she stepped outside, relieved when she still didn’t see the snake fairy. It must have lost interest in her. The worst of the day’s heat had passed, which meant the ovat was over. The fairy was nowhere to be seen. Nelay let out a sigh of relief and counted the sheep, most of which now grazed.

  Panar had gutted the snake and strung it above the fire. Its dark skin hung over a branch, drying. Her brother was already eating.

  Without a word, Nelay took her knife from her belt and cut from the top, hissing through her teeth as the meat burned her fingers. She bounced a piece on her palm and dropped it on a flat rock that had been scrubbed clean. That, along with the freshly dug water hole and dinner, was Panar’s way of saying sorry.

  Nelay ignored him, her way of saying he wasn’t forgiven. He was older and a boy. He expected to be better at everything. So every time her father praised her for finding a water hole, or hitting a target with her sling, or doing what she was told, Panar took it as a personal insult. And she was sick of it.

  She cut off pieces of meat, set them on the rock to cool a bit, and popped them into her mouth. Snake wasn’t bad. She’d certainly had worse—the beetles at midday, for example, were terrible—but she didn’t like the way the reptile’s bones stuck going down her throat.

  She and Panar ate without saying a word. Nelay ate until she knew she’d be sick if she took one more bite. Swallowing to keep her gorge down, she gave voice to the worry lurking silent and heavy just beyond sight. “Father isn’t back yet.” Her voice was gravelly, and it hurt to talk.

  Panar smacked his lips as he sucked the grease off his fingers. “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  He cut more of the meat off the stick, then set it on his rock to cool. “I’m going to go look for him.”

  Nelay still refused to look at her brother. “I’m coming too.” They had another six hours of daylight.

  “No. You stay with the sheep. There’s enough grazing for one more day. I’ll bring him back.”

  Nelay wanted to protest, but her neck was still sore, and Panar was right. “When are you going?”

  He stuffed the cooled meat into his food pouch. “Now.” He picked up his spear and climbed the embankment. Within seconds, he was out of sight.

  And Nelay was alone.

  Morning came with no sign of Panar or their father. Nelay watched the cold blue sky go from charcoal to pale blue. She glanced around the clearing—no fairies in sight. There usually weren’t after she lit a fire. They didn’t seem to like smoke.

  She hadn’t had time to properly cure the meat—that took days—but she had done the best she
could over the long, cold night. She rose to her feet, her sheepskin draped around her shoulders. Obviously, something was wrong. Her brother and father must be hurt or lost.

  Nelay took down their tent, then dug out the water hole until she stood in ankle-deep water. She drank as much water as her stomach could hold, wet her headscarf, and refilled her water skins.

  After tying the packsaddle onto Asat, she started off. But the sounds of a discordant bell made her turn. Blua, their lead sheep, was following Nelay, as she always did, making her trademark bleat. And where Blua went, the other sheep followed.

  Nelay tied Asat to a bush, which the donkey immediately started nibbling, Nelay took hold of Blua’s collar and led her back to the water hole.

  She ran her hands over the sheep’s ears, popping off any ticks she found, then rubbed the sheep’s head. Blua leaned into the touch, moving her head in time with Nelay’s scratches. Emotions rose in Nelay’s throat, but she held them off before they overwhelmed her. Using a string, she tied Blua so she could still reach the water. Then Nelay quickly walked back to Asat, tears burning her eyes.

  Refusing to look back as Blua bleated at her, Nelay walked along the embankment until she found a place Asat could manage. The donkey followed her up and over. Almost immediately, Nelay felt like she was being watched. But she could see no one.

  It wasn’t hard to find the tracks from the day before—there were broken branches and fresh mounds of pebbly sheep dung everywhere, her brother’s fresher prints superimposed over the older ones. But yesterday they’d taken a wandering route, following what little feed they could find. Now, Nelay cut straight through. And still she sensed someone was there, staring, following her, but every time she turned, there was nothing but dirt and dry shrubs.

  Along the way, she saw four fairies. A hawk fairy with a sharp, yellow beak and feathered wings. A lizard fairy with horns growing from her back. A scorpion fairy with a poisonous barb on her sectioned tail. The forth was another spider fairy.

  Nelay was drenched in sweat and dizzy by the time the ovat started. She wanted to simply drink her second water skin and press on—she wasn’t that far from where her father had broken away—but that would be foolish, the kind of foolish that could get her killed.

  There were rules to surviving the desert. One water skin before the ovat break, one after. Drink as much as you can at each water hole. Never stop looking for food. Always keep your sling within reach and your spear nearby. Don’t ever run from lions or hyenas.

  With a growl of frustration, Nelay hobbled Asat so he could find something to eat. She checked for venomous critters before settling down in the shade of a creosote bush. She let the last drops from her first water skin trickle down her cracked throat, careful not to let one drop spill.

  After rubbing her glass idol and whispering the invocation, she ate some of the cold snake meat—if possible it was even stringier and tougher than the day before. Nelay rubbed the grease on her chapped lips and lay down. Though she was exhausted, she couldn’t sleep for the worry pressing against her. After about two hours, the ovat passed, so she rounded up Asat, allowed herself another mouthful of water to soothe her aching throat, and started out again.

  Finally, she found where she and Panar had separated from their father not long after Snotty went missing. Nelay tied up Asat, then pulled herself up one of the steep sides of the tabletop mountain. She placed her feet with care, for snakes liked the shade under the rocks this time of day. When she’d gone high enough to see all of the low valley, she shaded her eyes and spied a thin line of smoke to the west, next to the table mountain. Her father and brother were the only people out here, so the sign of fire meant they were that way. After a full day without water, her father would be heat sick.

  Nelay hadn’t seen any water fairies, or the types of fairies only found around water, such as moss fairies or butterfly fairies. She scanned the area, searching for any tell-tale signs of green that might indicate water. Seeing nothing, she realized the nearest water hole was the one she’d left that morning. Nearly a full day’s journey away.

  Forcing down the foreboding rising inside her, she traced out some of the landmarks, making a mental map in her head, and trotted down the hill. It wasn’t terribly far to where the smoke came from, so picked up her pace. When she finally got close enough to smell the fire, she called out, “Father? Panar?”

  “Nelay!” Her brother answered, his voice cracking with emotion.

  She ran halfway up the rise leading to the mountain before she remembered to watch for snakes and forced herself to slow down. She pushed through some brush and could finally see her father. He was propped against the steep mountain face, his face ashen and part of his robe missing.

  Her gaze immediately went to his foot, which was bound in strips of cloth. A tourniquet gripped his thigh. Her mother would be angry that he’d damaged the robe she’d woven by hand.

  Shaking her head, Nelay dismissed the stray thought. “What happened?” she panted as she knelt opposite of Panar.

  “A snake bit him,” her brother choked out.

  Nelay noted the swelling through the bandage. There was dried blood on the ground. She followed it to see another dead snake cooking over the fire—even in such frightening times as this, they did not waste food.

  Her gaze went to the snake skin, laid flat over some of the rocks.

  It was a black mamba.

  “No!” she gasped, her head feeling light and heavy at once. Mamba bites were always, always deadly. Her wide gaze shifted to Panar.

  He was crying hard now, snot and tears running down his face. Nelay ground her teeth to bit back the bitter words she wanted to say. She hated him for crying. It wasn’t fair that he could break down, but she had to be the strong one. And afterward, he would only hate her for it. “You’re wasting water,” she ground out.

  Her father’s rough finger scraped across the top of her hand. “Water.”

  She gave him her water skin. He drank all of it, and Nelay knew how bad it was. Her father was unwavering in his water preservation.

  “Why didn’t you come get me?” Nelay directed her question at Panar.

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I couldn’t leave him.”

  Their father was twice Panar’s size. There was no way he could have carried him. “You should have! You needed Asat!”

  “Stop arguing,” her father said, his voice so low she could barely hear him.

  Nelay felt a hot wash of shame. “Did you ever find Snotty?”

  “No,” her father replied, and Nelay’s chest hurt. “Where are the sheep?”

  “I left them at the watering hole,” she said.

  Her father nodded, patting her arm with his hand. “Good girl. I knew you’d have the sense to leave them and bring Asat. It’s why I didn’t send your brother after you.”

  His praise made Nelay feel bigger, but she knew she would pay for her father’s implied dig at Panar.

  Panar pushed to his feet and stomped to the fire to turn the snake.

  Nelay braced herself and unwound the wrapping over her father’s foot. There were two perfect puncture marks, dimpled in skin swollen so tight it was shiny. From his toes to the middle of his shin, the flesh was an angry purple. “What do we do, Father?”

  After a moment, he took a deep breath and looked at her. “It should have killed me within an hour. But it didn’t. You have to get me to your mother. She’ll know what to do.”

  Nelay calculated their circuitous route in her head. “But that will take two weeks, at least.”

  Her father pointed to the north. “Not if we cut straight through.”

  Nelay followed his gesture, where their home lay two days’ walk away. “But we never go that way—there’s no water.” Not a river, not a spring, nothing. She pointed back to the southeast, where she’d come from. “But I found water in the dried-up creek, a day in that direction.”

  “Nelay, if anyone can find water, you can.” Her father’s eyes shone
with pride, and she noticed Panar’s fists tightening with anger.

  He hated her for being better. He didn’t know she wasn’t better because of any superior skill but because of her sight. And she couldn’t tell him. “I can’t find it if it isn’t there,” Nelay said in a small voice.

  Father shook his head. “We have to get to your mother before my leg dies—if it does, I’ll die with it.”

  Nelay saw the fear in his eyes. But even at the age of nine, she recognized that little of that fear was for himself. She and Panar couldn’t care for the sheep alone. How would they survive if Father died?

  She stared toward home, wishing there was a way to skip across the mountaintops—like she could gather her father in her arms and jump. Ten, maybe eleven jumps and they’d be home. Panar could walk.

  She sighed. There would be no jumping. If they traveled all night, they’d lose less water. They would be heat sick, but they would survive. There was no choice. They had to go. “What about the sheep?” she asked. Without their the coins from selling their wool, the family wouldn’t survive long. But it was more than that. The sheep were her friends—the only ones she had. It would be five days before they could come back for them. If the sheep muddied up the waterhole, they’d die of thirst before then. And that was if a wild beast didn’t kill them first.

  Panar knelt again but refused to look at Nelay or their father. “I’ll go back and tend them.”

  “Your sister can’t do this by herself.”

  “She can do everything else by herself,” Panar mumbled.

  Nelay felt the bruises on her neck, anger pricking her heart. She considered telling her father how Panar had choked her. But if she held the knowledge close, she could use it against her brother when she really needed it. Besides, she wanted to watch him squirm.

  Father shot Panar a sharp look. “And who’s going to help her lift me onto Asat after I pass out?”