More Than a Princess

by E. D. Baker

  “We fairies would like to give you something as well,” Larch told him. “May I see your amulet?”

  At first Timzy looked as if he didn’t want to give it up, but when she reached for it, he reluctantly held it out to her. Cradling it in one hand, she whispered a few words, then passed her other hand over it. Fairy dust sparkled around the stone for a few moments, then seemed to settle on it before melting away.

  “I’ve placed a protection spell on your amulet,” Larch told the prince. “It will alert you when danger is near and help you defend yourself.”

  Timzy looked excited when he took the amulet back from her. “Thanks!” he said, and hurried to his seat on the floor.

  He slipped the chain over his head. Aislin crouched down beside him. “May I see it?” she asked, her hand hovering inches from the stone.

  “Sure, but I’m not taking it off,” her brother told her.

  “You don’t have to,” she said, sensing the magic in it before she’d even touched it with her fingertips.

  “Isn’t it great?” he cried. “Now I can be super-strong, too!”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She knew the moment she touched it that this was in fact the right stone for Timzy. He was already in tune with it, and it would make him stronger (although not nearly as strong as her or their mother).

  “This was an excellent choice for you,” Aislin said, removing her hand from the amulet. “Take good care of it.”

  She was about to walk away when one of the newly arrived ogre children called out, “What is your special rock, Your Grace?”

  “I don’t have one,” she told her.

  “Then what is that stone you’re wearing?”

  Aislin glanced down at the cheery yellow stone dangling from the golden chain she never took off, and blushed. People didn’t usually ask about her stone, in part because most already knew what it was and why she wore it. “It’s a mood stone,” she said. “It was created especially for me. The stone changes color to match my moods.”

  “What does yellow mean?” the child asked.

  “It means I’m happy,” Aislin said, and smiled at her.

  “Why don’t you have a stone to make you stronger?” the little girl persisted.

  “Because I don’t need it,” Aislin replied.

  When the girl looked confused, Aislin walked over to the bench where four ogres were sitting with Jasper, the satyr. Planting her feet squarely on the floor, she tapped into the stone she was standing on, pulling its strength into her. The sensation was invigorating; she felt as if she was as connected to the stone as she was to her own body. Although the power that filled her was but a trickle at first, it quickly turned into a stream, making her cheeks flush and the strength of the stone course through her. Bending her knees, she picked up the bench and the people sitting on it. She wasn’t even breathing hard. Turning back to the child, she said, “I can draw from any stone.”

  A roar of approval shook the room as Aislin set the bench down. Jasper and the ogres she had lifted still looked surprised when she walked away.

  She had noticed that one of the rocks had tumbled under a nearby table when Fluric dumped them onto the floor. Pointing at the hidden rock, she said, “Return to the bag,” in a voice that had a strange quiver to it.

  The rock shook and began to roll across the floor. The children cheered when it disappeared inside the bag.

  “Our princess has many pedrasi skills, but we think it is her fairy side that makes her skills so strong,” said Nurlue as the noise died down.

  “What else can you do?” asked the ogre girl’s brother.

  Aislin shrugged. “The normal pedrasi things, like locate veins of rocks and minerals in the mountains, find fissures, and mend cracks.” Aware that too many questions were bound to ruin her good mood, she turned to where Nurlue was sitting. “Isn’t it time for some music?”

  “Indeed!” Nurlue said, getting to his feet.

  A fairy knight holding a lute stood up, along with half a dozen pedrasi men. The knight played a few chords, and the men began to sing. Their voices were deeper than most, their singing enough to make toes tap and people sway in their seats.

  The audience seemed to enjoy the music, though after two songs they began to get restless.

  “Princess Aislin, please sing for us!” called out a nymph. Other fey picked up the call and soon even the pedrasi men who had been singing joined in.

  With a nudge from Poppy, Aislin stepped to the center of the room. She waited until the Great Hall was silent. Like her pedrasi relatives, she loved to sing, but with the added element of fairy, her voice was special and unique. A blend of the nuance-rich tone of a pedrasi and the incredible range of a fairy, Aislin’s voice was glorious. She sang a happy song about the tricks flower fairies play on each other, and soon most of her audience was laughing, even though they had all heard it many times before. The only ones who weren’t laughing were the ogres, who had fallen into a blank-eyed, mouth-hanging-open stupor as soon as she began to sing, just like they always did. Aislin wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  She had just finished her third song when an eagle flew through an open window high on the far wall, carrying a fairy messenger. The moment his feet touched the floor, the messenger became full-sized. All eyes followed him as he strode to the dais where King Carrigan sat beside his queen.

  Aislin didn’t hear what the messenger said, but she could tell from her father’s expression that it wasn’t good. Her heart sank when the king gestured to his warriors, who all stood and left the hall behind him.

  As Aislin watched them go, Timzy came running over. “Is the party over?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she replied. “I just wish I knew why.”

  Chapter 2

  The mood stone dangling from the gold chain around Aislin’s neck glowed blue-gray against her sun-bronzed skin, but no one needed to look at it to know that the princess was worried. Only an hour before, the messenger had arrived with a summons from her grandparents, the king and queen of the fairies. King Carrigan and his warriors were about to leave for Fairengar, but Aislin still didn’t know why. She’d returned to her room to fetch her good luck charm so her father could take it with him, but so far her search had been fruitless.

  “Where is it?” Aislin cried, riffling through the clothes in the trunk by her door. The mirror on the stone mantel rattled as her agitation grew.

  “What are you looking for, Princess?” asked a voice from the shadows. A doll, about ten inches tall, slipped off a small chair and pattered across the floor to tug at Aislin’s hem. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “A messenger told Father his parents have summoned him and that he must leave right away,” Aislin told her. “He’s never received an urgent summons before, and I’m afraid something bad might be happening. I want to give Father my good luck charm to take with him, but he’s leaving in a few minutes and I can’t find it.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be all right,” the doll said, gazing up at the princess with amethyst eyes. A gift from the fairy queen, Twinket had quickly become one of Aislin’s closest friends and was always there for her.

  “I wish I could be sure!” Aislin cried. A tremor ran through the stone floor.

  “Your father is a very powerful fairy,” said the doll. “He can handle anything.”

  “So are my grandparents,” said Aislin. “Which means there must be something terribly wrong if they need my father’s help.”

  Twinket was startled when the floor began to shake in earnest, and she had to grab hold of a chair leg so that she wouldn’t fall down.

  There was one fairy quality that Aislin wished she didn’t have—her temper. When combined with her pedrasi strength, her emotional reactions could be dangerous to others. This was the reason her two grandmothers had worked together to create the mood stone. When Aislin was an infant, the stone had helped her parents know why she was crying; even now, it was useful to warn people about her moods. No one wanted t
o be near Aislin when she was truly upset. She was so in tune with the rock that had been used to construct the castle that even the walls and floor shook in sympathy.

  As hot tears stung her eyes, Aislin wiped them away with the back of her hand. Red eyes just wouldn’t do! She had to say goodbye to her father, and he would see that she had been crying. The king had enough to worry about without worrying about her, too. Even a fairy as powerful as King Carrigan had to keep his wits about him when traveling all the way to Fairengar.

  Aislin walked to a table, taking shuddering breaths and clenching her hands into fists while the floor continued to vibrate. “Are you all right?” Twinket asked, still holding on to the chair leg.

  “I will be in a minute,” Aislin replied as she poured water from a pitcher into a crystal bowl.

  When Aislin was first old enough to understand her power, her grandparents had tried to teach her to control her emotions. When she turned four, she was still prone to lose her temper, so her pedrasi grandmother gave her the crystal bowl and showed her how to focus her energy and use it to calm herself. She learned that washing her face in the water from the bowl could soothe her anger. Everyone in the royal household was delighted when it worked.

  The water felt cold as Aislin scooped it up with her hands, but it was just what she needed. Her agitation faded as she splashed water onto her face.

  Twinket sighed with relief when the floor stopped shaking. “Let me help you find your good luck charm. It’s small and green, isn’t it?”

  Aislin nodded. “The leprechauns gave it to me. It’s a charmed emerald and—wait, I think I know where it is!”

  Running over to a table beside her bed, she opened the lid of a small box. “I found it!” she declared, and stuck the oval stone in her pocket.

  There was a knock on the door. Aislin turned toward the sound. “Yes?” she called as the door opened.

  “Your father is about to leave,” an ogre footman named Skarly told her.

  Aislin started running. “Thank you!” she called as she dashed past him out of the room and down the stairs. Passing a window, she heard the sound of the fairy knights’ horses stomping impatiently in the courtyard. When she threw open the door, light from the torches lining the walls reflected off the silver armor of the fairy knights lined up behind her father’s stallion, Wind Racer, nearly blinding her. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to recover. When she could see again, she spotted her mother, Queen Maylin, kissing her father while Timzy waited for his turn. Not wanting to miss saying goodbye, Aislin hurried down the stairs.

  She had just reached her father’s side when Wind Racer stomped his feet, forcing her to take a step back. She had been brought up riding the gentle ponies bred in the pedrasi mines, and while she admired the fairies’ fiery-tempered horses, she had no desire to ride one herself.

  Her father saw her and drew her in for a warm hug and a kiss on her cheek. Taking the charm from her pocket, she handed it to him, saying, “Please keep this with you for luck.”

  He smiled and patted her cheek. “I will,” he vowed, tucking the stone into his own pocket.

  A moment later, he’d mounted his horse and was raising his fist to signal that the troop was moving out. Aislin stepped aside as Wind Racer led the way over the cobblestones. Joining her mother and Timzy on the steps, she watched the fairy knights leave. Aislin counted them as they rode under the portcullis. Her father was taking all the knights stationed at the castle with him. That fact alone was enough to make her worry.

  “Did you learn why Father was summoned?” Aislin asked when the last knight was out of sight and her mother had turned to go inside.

  Queen Maylin nodded. “The messenger told us. Join me in my solar and we’ll talk. It’s time for Timzy to go to bed.”

  “But Mother …,” Timzy began.

  “I let you stay up this late so you could say goodbye to your father,” said the queen. “You are not staying up any later.”

  By the time they’d sent Timzy to his room and had reached the queen’s solar, Aislin was bursting with questions. A bright, cheery space with more windows than most rooms in the castle, the solar was the princess’s favorite. There was no one there when they arrived, no ladies-in-waiting ready to cluster around the queen or minstrels ready to entertain her. Unlike the fairy royalty, pedrasi like Aislin’s mother (and her maternal grandmother, Queen Amethyst) didn’t believe in royal formality in their everyday lives. Thankfully, this meant the solar was one place where they wouldn’t be interrupted; it was a good place to speak in private.

  Mother and daughter headed toward the window seat, where they could see out over the forest. “You must tell me what the messenger said!” Aislin began.

  “He told us that someone has been trying to open the northern passes and that humans had been spotted near the Magic Gate,” said the queen.

  “They can’t open the gate, can they?” asked Aislin, alarmed. “I was always told that Grandmother and Grandfather used the very best spells on it.”

  “It’s true that humans can’t open it, but the fact that anyone is there means something unusual is going on in the human lands.”

  “Please tell me all you know about the gate again,” said Aislin.

  Her mother gave her a tired smile. “When the fairies decided that it was time to leave the human lands, they came here to see my father. Once he gave them permission to make their home in the great forest, he helped your fairy grandparents, King Darinar and Queen Surinen, create the gate using enormous boulders and powerful warding spells. No one has been able to pass through that gate since. Only the eagles that fly high between the mountains are able to go to the human lands to report back to the fairy king and queen. Perhaps the eagles have seen something, but we won’t know anything more until your father comes home to tell us.”

  “I hope he comes back soon,” Aislin said, turning to look out the window at the darkened forest.

  “So do I,” said her mother. “More than I can say.”

  Chapter 3

  Everyone in the castle was used to seeing Twinket accompany Aislin on her excursions out of the castle into the surrounding forest. The day after the king left, she joined Aislin, Poppy, and their friend Bim as they headed out to go mushroom hunting. Twinket rode in Aislin’s basket while Bim rode in Poppy’s.

  When the group reached the meadow beside Blue Lake, they spotted tiny fairies flying around with freshly picked mushroom caps on their heads. “Where did you find those?” Aislin asked one as she passed.

  “I’ll show you!” the fairy replied. “We heard you were coming, so we saved you some. There were oodles out here today.”

  Aislin knew all about mushrooms. When she was little, the fairies had taught her which ones were safe to eat and which ones she should never touch. Just because some were pretty didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, and some of the most boring-looking mushrooms were the most delicious.

  The fairy fluttered ahead, leading the way around the edge of the meadow to an ancient grove of oak trees. Mushrooms dotted the ground between the roots. As she drew closer, Aislin spotted more tiny fairies peeking out from under their new mushroom caps, adjusting them so they fit just right. Seeing the princess, the fairies darted into the air in streaks of color, swirled around her long enough to say hello, and flew off into the woods.

  Aislin and her companions were busy picking mushrooms when Timzy and his friends appeared, racing toward them from the far end of the meadow. The children laughed and shouted as they ran, and Aislin knew right away that they were playing one of her favorite childhood games—Magic Gate. It was a game in which “fairies” fled the “humans” until they had reached the magic gate; this time, it was a mulberry tree where someone had tied a scrap of red cloth.

  The game was so popular in part because it was based on something that had really happened in the fairies’ history. For as long as anyone could remember, the fairies had lived side by side with the humans, trying to stay friendly, but avoiding
involvement in their wars and conflicts. When distancing themselves became increasingly difficult, King Darinar and Queen Surinen decided that the fairies needed to move somewhere that the humans couldn’t find them. The pedrasi king and queen, rulers of the land under the mountains, were happy to have them as neighbors. Once the fairies had moved to their new kingdom, the gate was sealed using powerful magic. Fairies and pedrasi can live for a very, very long time; hundreds of years had passed during which the fairies enjoyed their isolation and hoped that the humans would either forget them or come to believe that fairies were a myth.

  A pedrasi child screeched and ran past Aislin. The children looked as if they were having so much fun that Aislin was tempted to join them, and she might have if she hadn’t promised Cook that she’d bring back mushrooms.

  Bim had no such reservations. “I’ll play, too!” the little sprite cried when he saw that other sprite children were playing.

  “Aren’t you going to collect mushrooms?” Poppy asked him.

  Bim looked down at his empty basket, then at the mushrooms. With a twitch of his fingers, a mushroom flew into the air and landed in the basket. “Here,” he said, handing the basket to Poppy. “I’ve done my share.” With a wave of his hand, he scampered off to join the game.

  Poppy glanced at the plum-sized basket. She sighed and shook her head. “One mushroom! I don’t know why we invited him.”

  “Because he’s our friend,” said Aislin. “We always invite him.”

  The number of children living in the castle was growing. For a long time, fewer and fewer babies were born to pedrasi and fairies every year. Children were precious to both groups, but they were becoming increasingly rare. When the daughter of the pedrasi royals married the son of the fairy royals, the newlyweds kept their union secret until they learned that they were about to become parents themselves. Hearing that their children had married without permission, the pedrasi and fairy royal couples were furious, but nothing could have softened their hearts faster than the news of impending grandparenthood.