by E. D. Baker
“I can’t do that either,” said Aislin. “But there are other things I can do that humans can’t.”
“This isn’t the time for jokes, Aislin,” Tomas told her. “This mission is important.”
“I understand that, and I’m not joking,” she told him. “You’ll see.”
Aislin would go with him, but it wasn’t that she wanted to help him with his mission as much as that she wanted to meet the fairy Baibre. It was time she learned all she could about the fairies her grandparents had left behind.
Chapter 14
Rory started complaining as soon as they put him on a horse, so the soldiers took Tomas’s advice and gagged the Prince of Morain. The group split in two, with the larger contingent taking all the horses back across the border. Two soldiers named Cadby and Marden went with Tomas and Aislin to find the fairy. Cadby wasn’t much older than Tomas, but Marden already had a few gray hairs.
“Do you have a map?” Aislin asked as they started walking down the road.
“No, but I do have directions,” said Tomas. “We have to look for landmarks. The first one is a pile of rocks that roughly resembles a sleeping cat. It’s up here a little way. I saw it out of the carriage window when we drove past. Ah, there it is. We turn here and go due east.”
They left the road then, being careful not to leave a trail into the woods. It was the first time Aislin had walked in the woods since leaving Eliasind and she loved it. She listened to the birds gossiping, the squirrels complaining, and the smaller creatures rustling in the underbrush. The shade of the deep forest felt like home, and she couldn’t help but look for the familiar beings within the branches. She was disappointed when she failed to see nymphs peeking out at her from trees, sprites blowing dandelion puffs, or gnomes carrying sacks of freshly picked mushrooms.
After walking for three quarters of an hour, they reached a steep drop-off. Tomas stopped to look around. “We’re looking for a waterfall and we should have found it well before now. I was told that it was about a mile from the sleeping-cat rock.”
“We headed due east, just like your directions said,” Cadby told him. “Maybe your directions were wrong.”
“The waterfall is probably where a stream or river plunges over this drop-off,” said Marden. “It should be around here somewhere. I think we should split up. Two of us should go north and two should go south. We can meet back here in an hour.”
“We’re not splitting up,” said Tomas. “There’s no telling what lives in this forest, so we need to stay together. And this is way too far from where we started. We probably passed the waterfall already. We’ll retrace our steps and this time we’ll listen carefully for moving water.”
They turned around and started back, stopping now and then to listen, but no one saw or heard a waterfall. All too soon, they spotted the sleeping-cat rock again.
Tomas sighed. “We’ll just have to keep looking. That waterfall has to be here somewhere. Let’s spread out this time, but not so far that we can’t see each other.”
They tried Tomas’s new approach, but found themselves back at the drop-off again. He was trying to decide what to do next when Aislin noticed a pebble on the ground. Perhaps it was time she started to help. Tomas and Marden were debating where they should go next when Aislin picked up the pebble. Closing her eyes, she let her mind sink into the tiny rock. Although it would have looked like an ordinary piece of granite to anyone else, to a pedrasi it was a doorway into another world. The little piece of stone talked to her, not with words, but with impressions and images. When she thought about where she wanted to go, the pebble linked up with all the other stones in the area, showing her where water tumbled over them. Some visions showed her the courses of rivers that had worn away at the bedrock for centuries, while others showed her newly diverted streams that had only just begun to cool the stones’ sun-heated surfaces.
When Aislin found a waterfall that wasn’t far away, she wondered how to get there. Inexplicably, the images went murky and indistinct.
Aislin sighed. Even for a pedrasi princess, reading stone wasn’t always easy. Her thoughts now slid to someone who could help her, someone who could tell her how to find the waterfall she sought.
Tomas didn’t notice when Aislin slipped between the trees and made her way through ferns and bracken to an old tree stump. When she saw the faint outline of a door cut into the bark, she knelt down and gave it three gentle raps.
The door opened suddenly and a gnome with a long white beard and bushy eyebrows popped his head out. “All right, all right!” he grumbled. “There’s no need to break my door down! Who are you and what do you want?”
“Directions, if you don’t mind, kind sir,” Aislin told the gnome. “I’m looking for a waterfall, but can’t find it anywhere. Would you please tell me how to reach it?”
The gnome squinted up at her while rubbing the side of his nose with his finger. He frowned and tilted his head to the side, still studying her. Suddenly he reached out and touched her hand where it rested on her knee. The gnome gasped and looked up at her face, as if seeing something new and completely unexpected.
“Fairy royalty!” he cried. “But that’s not all. You’re something else, too, I just can’t tell what.”
Aislin nodded. “I’m half fairy and half pedrasi,” she replied.
“Pedrasi! We don’t see your kind around here,” said the gnome. “Not many fairies either, but I’ve seen only one pedrasi my entire life and that was when I was visiting my uncle who lives by the Whitestone Mountains. I thought pedrasi loved the mountains and never left them.”
“That’s true of most of them,” Aislin told him. “My grandparents have never ventured out of their mountain home, not even when their daughter married my father. They weren’t happy when my mother left.”
“And here you are!” the gnome exclaimed. “My wife will be sorry she visited friends today and wasn’t here to meet you. What can I do for you, Princess? Oh, right! The waterfall. Are you traveling alone?”
Aislin shook her head. “I’m with some human men. Don’t worry, I came to see you without them,” she said when the gnome started looking around nervously.
“Then they’re probably armed,” he told her. “You’ll never find that waterfall from here. There’s a spell on this side of the forest. Anyone who carries weapons will be lost and never get where they want to go. The only thing you’ll find is the way back to where you started, which is precisely where you need to be. Return to where you began looking and make the humans leave their weapons behind. After that, you’ll find the waterfall easily enough.”
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” said Aislin.
“You’re welcome, Your Highness,” the gnome replied. “It was a real pleasure meeting a fairy-pedrasi princess. I can’t wait to tell my wife. She is going to be so jealous!”
When Aislin returned to Tomas, he was still talking to the men. “We have to go back to where we started,” she told him. “It’s the only way we’ll find the waterfall.”
“We’ve already done that,” Marden grumbled.
“Not like this,” said Aislin.
“What do you think we should do differently?” asked Tomas.
Aislin glanced at his men, then at Tomas. “I need to speak with you privately for a moment,” she told Tomas. “If you want my help, you’ll come with me.”
His eyes met hers for an instant. He nodded and said to his men, “We’ll be right back.”
After walking far enough that the men couldn’t hear them, Aislin turned to Tomas. “I just spoke with a gnome who told me what we have to do to find the waterfall. If you want to find it, you need to listen to me, unless you’ve come up with a better idea.”
Tomas gave her an odd look. “I don’t have any reason to doubt you, so we might as well try what you suggest. But tell me, if part of you is fairy, is the rest of you human? Are you really a princess?”
Aislin smiled. “I have no human blood, but I really am a princess. M
y parents and my grandparents are all royalty.”
“If you’re part fairy, you’re so much more than a princess!” said Tomas. “I wish Rory and those girls at the castle knew just who they were mocking! What did this gnome tell you?”
“We have to return to the sleeping-cat rock and leave our weapons there,” said Aislin. “As long as we have weapons with us, we’ll never find Baibre.”
Tomas glanced at the position of the sun in the sky. “Then we need to get started. We’ve already wasted a good part of the day walking back and forth.”
They knew the way back to the sleeping-cat rock so well that it didn’t take them long to reach it. The only difficulty came when Tomas told the men that they’d have to leave their weapons behind. “But we’ll need them,” said Marden. “I saw the marks of bear claws on a tree. What if we encounter a bear?”
“I saw a strange feather that couldn’t have come from any bird,” Cadby told them. “There are dangerous creatures in these woods. We need our weapons.”
“The animals won’t hurt us,” Aislin reassured them.
“You might believe that, Your Highness, but I don’t,” said Marden. “I’m not going anywhere without my crossbow and knife.”
“Then I think you men should stay here and wait for us,” said Aislin. “Keep well back from the road and rest. We shouldn’t be long now.”
“I don’t like this,” Cadby mumbled as Tomas and Aislin walked off.
They had retraced their steps only partway when they found that things didn’t look quite the same. The trees weren’t in the same places, the underbrush was lusher, and there was a well-defined path that they hadn’t seen before. “Do you think that heads toward the waterfall?” Tomas asked Aislin.
She shrugged. “It is going due east and it doesn’t have any magic to trap or trick us. We should be safe enough.”
“You can sense magic?” asked Tomas.
“Usually, although my father is much better at it,” she replied.
“Then your father is a fairy?” Tomas asked her. “What’s your mother?”
“A kind and lovely woman,” Aislin told him. “She’s pedrasi and has her own set of skills. I’m more like her than I am my father.”
“I’ve never heard of pedrasi,” said Tomas.
“I doubt there are many humans who have,” Aislin replied. “Pedrasi tend to keep to themselves.” She glanced at the trees around them, then back at Tomas. “I think we should take the path. We’ll leave it if it varies from where we want to go.”
“All right,” said Tomas, “but please tell me if you feel magic or see anything odd. I may not have a weapon, but I’m not completely helpless.”
Aislin couldn’t help but smile to herself. She wasn’t all that helpless either.
They took the path, which wound between trees while still heading east. Aislin heard the waterfall first and started walking faster. “It’s just ahead,” she told Tomas.
“How do you know that?” he asked. “I don’t hear it.”
“No, but I do,” said Aislin. “It isn’t far.”
Tomas frowned and hurried to catch up. When he finally heard it, he quickened his pace even more. They reached the edge of a small lake at the base of the falls only minutes later. Tomas frowned and bent down to examine the ground. “Do you see all these paw prints? It looks as if a lot of animals come here to drink. We need to be careful.”
“We will be,” said Aislin. “What are we supposed to look for next? Do you know what she lives in?”
“I was told that we’d find it once we reached the waterfall. What do fairies usually live in anyway?”
“That depends,” Aislin told him as she looked around. “I live in a castle, but I know fairies who live in flowers, and some who live in caves. Others live in large cottages or one-room huts. I don’t see any cottages or huts. Do you see anything that might be the opening of a cave? It will take us a lot longer to find her if she lives in a flower.”
“No caves so far,” he told her as he continued to look.
Aislin paused, sensing that someone was watching her. When she turned, she saw a man’s face peering out from among the foliage.
“Don’t look now, but we have company,” she told Tomas.
“Did you find the fairy?” he asked, trying to see where she was looking.
Aislin shook her head. “No, actually it’s someone very different. Stand absolutely still and let me talk to him.”
“Is that a man?” Tomas asked, studying the deep shadows.
The creature turned its head, focusing on Tomas. Wiggling its haunches, it bounded from the underbrush and landed only yards away, revealing its lion body and wicked, scorpion tail. When it opened its wide mouth, Aislin could see three rows of very sharp teeth inside. Its roar was like the blast of a trumpet and made both Aislin and Tomas clap their hands over their ears.
“That’s a manticore!” Tomas cried. “Quick, Aislin, get behind me.” Bending down, he grabbed a broken branch from the ground and held it like a club.
But then an ear-splitting screech came from overhead. Leaves and small twigs rained down on Aislin and Tomas as a griffin descended from the sky between the overarching branches. The griffin landed in front of the manticore, hissing and clacking its eagle-like beak. Its lion tail twitched and the muscles in its lion body quivered. With another trumpet blast, the manticore leaped onto the griffin, sending them both tumbling across the ground, raking each other with tooth, beak, and claw. It was hard to tell where one lion body ended and the other began. Tomas grabbed Aislin around the waist and dragged her out of the way.
“No!” Aislin told him, struggling to get free.
“We need to get out of here!” Tomas told her.
“No, I need to end this!” she cried. Letting herself go limp, she slipped from his arms and landed on the ground with her hand on a large, flat rock. Aislin closed her eyes, and focused on pulling strength from the rock into herself. Instead of directing the power into her arms, she raised her head, opened her eyes and sent the power out through her voice, shouting, “Stop fighting!”
The manticore and the griffin immediately rolled apart. Their hackles were down and their ears perked up when they turned and approached her, purring. Tomas’s jaw dropped when the two fearsome beasts began to rub against Aislin like a couple of oversized housecats. When Aislin scratched them behind their ears, their purring grew even louder.
“Why were you fighting?” Aislin asked the manticore.
“I saw the human first,” said the manticore, and his hackles started to rise again. “He’s mine to eat, not the griffin’s.”
“He’s no one’s to eat and is not to be touched,” Aislin told him. “The human is my friend and companion. Do you know who I am?”
The manticore bowed his head. “I heard it in your voice and saw it in your eyes. You are one of the magic ones that left long ago, yet you are different. How can that be?”
“I am a child of the old ones,” said Aislin. “My grandparents ruled the fey, and your kind as well. I require your help now, not your fighting.”
“What may we do for you, Your Highness?” the manticore asked, bowing so that its chin touched the ground. Taking his cue from the manticore, the griffin also bowed. “Birdbrain here will help you as well,” the manticore added.
“At this time, all I need are directions,” Aislin told them. “I’m looking for the home of the fairy Baibre.”
“Look up,” said the manticore.
Aislin did, and saw the tree house right away. It was larger than a good-sized cottage and filled the branches of one of the bigger trees.
“There’s a door in the trunk,” the manticore told her. “Be careful. Baibre doesn’t like visitors.”
“I understand, and thank you,” Aislin told them. “And next time, don’t be so eager to eat a human. My kind considered them friends.”
“Baibre is our friend. She raised me from a cub and him from a hatchling to be her protectors. She wants us t
o eat intruders,” said the manticore. “She says it keeps the riffraff away. But if it displeases Your Highness, we won’t do it anymore. Although, it was my turn.”
The griffin screeched, but Aislin interrupted before they could get into another tussle. “It was nice to meet you, and I thank you again for your help. You may go now.”
She didn’t move until the griffin and the manticore had disappeared back into the forest. When she could no longer sense them, she turned to the tree and began to walk around the trunk. She found a door standing slightly ajar on the other side.
“I can’t believe that worked!” Tomas said, still searching the forest with his eyes.
“I treated them with respect and they returned in kind,” said Aislin. “Sometimes being polite is all it takes.”
Chapter 15
The door creaked loudly as Aislin pushed it open. She shrugged and glanced at Tomas. “After the racket the manticore and the griffin made, we weren’t going to sneak in anyway.” When she peered inside, there wasn’t much to see other than a set of steep, narrow stairs that wound up the inside of the trunk. Knotholes let in the only light.
Tomas had to bend down to look inside. “Let me go first,” he said, and slipped into the trunk.
Although his shoulders brushed both sides of the narrow space, he climbed up the stairs like a squirrel up a tree. It wasn’t as easy for Aislin. Her legs were much shorter than his and the steps were so steep that taking each one was an effort. She knew when he reached the top because his footsteps grew silent and all she could hear was her own breathing.
Irritated with herself for being so short, and with Tomas for being so fast, she tried to hurry. When she finally reached the top, she was out of breath and it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.
The tree house appeared to be one large room with a single high ceiling and the floor broken up into different levels. Branches grew through the floor and up through the roof. Nests were tucked into every nook and cranny and birds of all sorts flew in and out through the window openings, while squirrels chittered at Aislin from the branches. One squirrel was perched on a small table, cracking nuts. Another was staring at a shape wrapped in spiderwebs with a large snake wrapped around its middle. At first Aislin didn’t realize that the shape was really Tomas.