As if on cue, a pair of Pegasi flew down from the midnight sky and landed in an area with straw on the floor and stalls like a barn. Their hooves hit the floor and I felt the impact when they landed. They shook their manes and tucked in their wings, and I had to say, “How cool is that? I’ll answer with ‘extremely cool.’”
“Fáidh Bean! How are ya lass? You’re looking as lovely as ever. And what is this with ya? Ye’re supposed to take the trash out, not bring it in.”
Erin laughed warmly. “Keeper! Let me introduce you.”
The man addressing us was about five feet tall. He was layered in brilliant white hair with his features fitted in between, almost as an afterthought. The white hair was shockingly bright and finely-trimmed on his face but untamed everywhere else. A thick tuft sprouted from the collar of his shirt. Then there was a beard across his chin, a smiling mouth, a bristly spray of a mustache, a round nose and mischievous dark eyes, eccentrically bushy brows, a broad forehead, and a final tuft of white to cap it all off. As if that weren’t enough, his Stain was a silver work of art with multiple ribbons of exquisite design interlinked. I looked down at my poor little band of a Stain and felt inadequate. His Stain was . . . magnificent.
“Keeper, this is Goethe Luck,” Erin said.
“Pleasure to meet you,” I said.
Keeper extended his hand, which took mine like a vise. More thick white hair covered his forearms.
“Oh, aye. I know who ya are, lad. I know who ya are. But I’m not sure you do.”
Kind of an odd thing to say.
“Sit yerselves down. We have a lot to talk about. I’m sure ye have some questions. Ye may have more by and by.” His speech had a certain brogue that caught the ear. But it was hard to listen closely as he still had my hand. It felt like it was encased in granite and he kept a hold of it as he escorted us to a big wooden table in a nearby corner. I was wondering if I was going to get my hand back and what condition it might be in once I did. Finally, after Erin and I were seated, he let me go. I put my hand beneath the table and squeezed it with the other one to make sure the blood hadn’t been banished entirely.
“I’ve been waitin’ for this day,” he said. He was looking at me with an appraising eye, and I felt he was seeing deep into the spaces where I kept my inner soul. “Make yerselves at home. And call yer friend, the raven. This concerns her as well.”
Keeper walked off in the direction of the kitchen. It seemed he knew a lot about me. “Midnight Dreary!” I called. Less than a minute later, she flapped down through the stars overhead and landed on the carved back of a chair.
“Just in time, Fiach Dubh.” Keeper had appeared at my elbow but I never heard him coming. He placed flagons of ale on the table. He also brought salt-and-vinegar potato chips and some cheese.
“Here are some starters, for starters,” he said. He had a bowl with grubs and berries in it, which he placed in front of the raven. In this setting, no dish was a surprise. Midnight Dreary waited quite politely until Erin had tasted a chip and sipped some ale. Then she began consuming her meal with delicate precision.
The chips were perfectly seasoned, and the ale and cheese complemented each other so well I could have made a whole meal of everything and been content.
Keeper disappeared and reappeared after a minute, catching me by surprise again by approaching from the other direction. He had a large book.
“Sorry to come between ye.” He rearranged the table so he could place the book where we could both see it. He turned the thick pages. They were well-preserved and smelled faintly of dust and parchment.
“Naturally, there are many history books concerning the Alder King,” he said. “Yer father was most insistent I show this to ya.”
Why not tell me himself?
Keeper mumbled, “I’m looking for . . . here we are. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”
Of course, I’d heard of Goethe. Ever since I could remember, I’d wondered why my name was the least pronounceable—and least cool—of the selections available. The Mama said the name came with me, but she never would tell me anything else. Goethe was awkward but Wolfgang was awesome. I could have told people I’d been named after Mozart or after a gourmet chef with the name Wolfgang. Even Johann was preferable to Goethe. There were Strauss and Bach, at least.
Keeper stopped on a page with a poem written by my namesake, in 1782, and titled Der Erlkönig.
“A poem about the Alder King,” I said.
“Aye, lad. You know it?”
“Oh, I’ve had an ongoing education about all things Goethe.”
“Well the original was in German,” Keeper said. He slid a piece of paper out from under the book and laid it across the pages. “I took the liberty of having it translated.”
Erin and I leaned in together and read.
Who goes riding fast in dark and wind?
The father ‘tis with his only kin.
He holds him tightly in his strong arm,
To hold him safely, to keep him warm.
“My dearest son, why hidest thy face?”
“My father, I see the Alder King’s grace!
The Alder King flies with crown and tail” —
“My son, it is just the mist so pale.”
“Come now dear child, come away with me.
The loveliest games I’ll play with thee.
Colorful flowers grow in my world,
Mother will dress thee in robes of gold.”
“My father, my father, canst thou hear
The King’s promise whispered in my ear?”
“Be calm, stay calm, my most precious child;
The wind in the leaves is sounding wild.”
“Wilt thou, handsome boy, fly with me on?
My daughters will treat thee as our son.
My daughters will dance with thee at night,
And sing you to sleep ‘til morning’s light.”
“My father, my father, see ahead
The Alder King’s daughters stand in dread?”
“My son, my son, all poor father sees
Is moonlight gray on the willow trees.”
“I love thee, thy form is strong and fair,
By force then now I shall take thee there.”
“My father, my father, feel his hold!
The Alder King hurts me in the cold!”
In horror, the father speeds along,
His shuddering child held in his arm
Through hardship at home they end the ride.
In his arms, the dearest child has died.
“I’ve read this before,” I said. “It’s the feel-good poem of the 18th century.” Actually, The Mama showed this poem to me. It was in a book that, like my name, came with me.
“It’s so haunting and sad,” Erin said.
“It’s a steaming load of twaddle,” Keeper spat. “’Tis tragic, aye. But the mortals got the details completely wrong. Goethe only wrote what he knew, of course. Can’t blame him for that. He was visiting a friend when a man rode by on horseback, carrying a feverish boy. The man was all but a stranger. He’d moved into a farmstead nearby with his wife and this child. They claimed the child belonged to some distant relative, and they’d been asked to take the boy to the countryside. There were issues with his health and he apparently had visions of the Alder King and his daughters. The boy did die that terrible night.”
I glanced at Erin, who was wrapped up completely in Keeper’s story. She was smart, for certain, and accomplished, but she let herself be a woman. Even better, she let herself be a human being. She was touched by the tale and I found the funny and soft sides of her incredibly appealing.
“Problem was,” Keeper continued, his audience now firmly in his granite grasp, “’Twasn’t their child. The man and his wife had stolen the child and run off with him, hoping to hide
the boy from his true father. The Alder King wasn’t trying to take the child, ye see. He was trying to take him back.”
“So who is the child?” I asked.
Keeper smiled. “Considering, I think ye have enough to put the two and two of it together,” he said. “’Specially since the boy didn’t stay dead.”
Erin who was much more accustomed to living in the fantastic, was quicker to draw a conclusion.
“Got, it’s you!”
Chapter Seventeen
Jeweled Gate
On some level, I knew Erin was right. But denial is always the first reaction to crazy.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“There are some, like me, who may know more about ya than ya know yerself,” Keeper said. “That’s what I’m a-tellin’ ya. Ya did die when only a child, didn’t ya?”
“Yes. But if what you’re saying is true, that means I died in 1782.”
“Exactly. As the mortals reckon it.”
“This is cocoa puffs,” I said. “Cuckoo for.”
Midnight Dreary, whom I’d momentarily forgotten, chimed in, “Caw-caw!” she said.
“My point precisely.” I gave her a nod. Her grubs and berries were all gone so I offered her a piece of cheese. She took it delicately at the tip of her shiny beak and tossed it back into her throat. “Good girl,” I said.
“I see ye’re having a hard time believing, lad. Ya say yer name is Luck?”
“That’s right.”
“How about ‘Laoch?’”
The way he pronounced it was, “Lay-ock” but I wasn’t going to quibble. “Close to the same.”
Keeper turned more pages. “There’s more in here about ya, when ya have time. But this is what the King is wanting me to show ya next.”
It was a simple entry, with the name of a hospital in Louisiana and my modern date of birth and a name, “Goethe Laoch.”
Some memories of my early life came floating up to the surface from a cornered abyss of my mind. “My foster mother told me I had a different version of my name when she took me in. I remember she said she just called me ‘Luck’ because it was simpler and I already had one name she couldn’t pronounce.”
“Aye, but ‘Laoch’ is yer name as given ye by the Alder King. It means ‘Hero,’ lad. Ye’re all but walking around with a label on yer forehead.”
Every day had a new shock, it seemed.
“I’m not surprised to find out that there are things in the world, unseen and magical, that I didn’t know were real,” I said. “I’ve always known there was more to our existence than everything we can see and feel. It’s the idea that I have some part of that world that’s more difficult for me to accept. I’ve always been just . . . me. And there’s all the strange stuff my foster mother taught us.”
“What do ya know about yer foster mother?”
“She’s The Mama. An enormous Cajun woman who cared for me and about five or six other boys at a time. She preferred to be called La Mere, but she’d accept The Mama. Once, I called her ‘Mother’ and she smacked me across the face with the back of her hand and kicked me out of the house until it was dark. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me until morning. I had to eat dinner outside in the cold. She told me I only had one Mother, and she was dead, and she didn’t want to be compared to a dead woman.”
Erin said, “Not exactly a good caregiver.”
“She had an interesting way of tracking how mad she was at you. If you did something wrong, she’d hit you and leave a bruise on your arm or face. She never bothered to remember what exactly you did wrong but she knew if you had a bruise on you, it was something she was supposed to be mad about. When your bruises healed, she wasn’t mad at you anymore.”
“That’s horrible!” Erin said.
“It had its own kind of logic. Except I’d sneak into her make-up and cover my bruises with foundation so I could have dinner in the house instead of in the yard. We had a real jerk of a kid come in for a while. He was a year older than me and stole my food. So I hit him and gave him a black eye. The Mama didn’t let him eat with us for more than a week, until his eye wasn’t swollen anymore. Kid didn’t mess with me again.”
Erin didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t misinterpret her disapproving expression. “Hey, it was dog-eat-dog. The Mama had a lot of weird ideas. Superstitions and rituals. She went to the Protestant church five miles away every Sunday, but she also had a whole lot of beliefs you won’t find in the Bible. She talked to the spirits in the trees and in the river. Sometimes too, in the dark, I’d see lights floating around the swamp outside. We often had visitors in the middle of the night. I’d sneak out of bed and try to see who it was. One of the visitors had a triangular face, and I thought her overcoat looked really funny. Then I realized she had wings like a dragonfly on her back. I grew up with weirdness. It made me believe. I figure that’s why I can see the Stain.”
“The what?” Keeper put his hand on my arm like a boulder on a stick.
“I can see patterns on certain people, like ribbons with designs on them. I’ve seen them for as long as I can remember.” I looked around the room. “Every living thing in here has a Stain. I don’t know what else to call it. I just made it up when I was a kid.”
“I have a Stain?” Erin’s brow was furrowed as if I’d just told her she had cancer.
“It’s beautiful. Like a forest of ferns and grapevines reflected in a rippling stream.” I smiled at her, reassuring. “Keeper’s Stain is like finely-crafted silver bands of chainmail with little symbols worked into the metal. Don’t ask me what mine looks like,” I glanced at my chest and my wispy Stain and bluffed. “There aren’t words.”
“And you’ve always seen it?” Erin asked.
“Yeah. As far as I know, I’m the only one. I only told The Mama I could see Stain because she believed a lot of stuff. She called it a gift from the Fae and told me to keep it to myself. I haven’t told anyone else until now.”
“That’s amazing!” There was a glint of something new in Erin’s eyes. “What does it mean?”
“I think it means there’s magic in the person. Or they’ve been touched by magic. I’ve seen the same Stain on a couple of different people now, and I think they’ve been enchanted by the same person.”
Keeper cleared his throat before I could continue and finally lifted his hand off my arm. “The Mama was right to tell ya to keep it to yerself,” he said. “’Twill be to yer advantage. The Mama’s in service to the Fae. Has been for decades. She cares for all the illegitimate children and orphans that are shunned to the mortal realm. All those lads ya grew up with, they had at least one Fae parent who either wouldna claim ‘em or had died. She kept your mind open to the idea of magic in the world. She did that for all the lads in case they came in touch with Faerie again. She wasn’t Fae herself, but she accepted the Good Folk and their children without question. Contact with the Fae might have made her eccentric, but there’s nothin’ wrong with her believin.’”
Huh.
“That explains a lot,” I said. “So, according to this, I was born sometime in the eighteenth century. And I was kidnapped by mortals?”
“With help, of course,” Keeper said. “Someone took ya from our realm and handed ya over to them.”
“Who would do that?”
“Someone opposed to the Alder King. Someone angry enough, or insane enough, to take the only male child he’d had in more than five hundered years and whisk him off to the humans.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about a father who would let his own son die so that other people couldn’t keep him.
As if reading my thoughts, Keeper continued, “Ya had to die, lad, to throw the enemy off their purpose. The King couldn’t kill the mortals. That’s against his own laws and how would he know if he got them all? But if the mortals and the Fae all think ya dead and gone, well, they don’t ke
ep looking for ya, do they?”
“I guess my father knew he could bring me back to life,” I said, chagrined.
“Aye lad. Your father took your spirit and captured it with a most powerful magic. Your body was buried that night and then taken from the ground by the King as well, with no one the wiser. Then ya were made whole again and kept out of the world for two hundred years and then some. Until the King felt the danger was passed. He sent ya off into the mortal realm again where ya could grow unmolested until yer ten-thousand dawns. Now ya can take care of yerself and ya have yer powers.”
There was a lot of weight to the information I was being given. A lot of responsibility. “So why doesn’t everyone call me ‘highness?’ I notice they call me ‘sir’ instead.”
“Aye, well. Yer father will have to declare ya his son official-like before that. He hasna done it yet, though we all know who ya are.”
“Hmm,” I thought for a long moment. “Still, great lengths have been taken on my behalf. A whole lot of trouble for one little Halfling.”
“Well, the Fae have trouble conceiving offspring. There’s many a reason for that. Part of it has to do with how few of us there are any more. There are very few full Eternals who are also fertile. And almost all of them are spoken for.”
I could think of one fertile female who was an Eternal and unattached. But who would want her? It was probably my right to choose my own mate anyway, but I was suddenly grateful I hadn’t been forced to marry Béil. Besides, she probably had all the partners she could trap at her disposal.
Keeper went on. “Another part of it is how few there be who believe in us. We were gods once. But the mortals and their science have killed us off and made our power dwindle as sure as any war might’ve done. Anyhow, we took to mating with mortals long ago as well as with each other. A Halfling is better than no child at all, and the fertility of the mortal stock gives us Eternals a better chance. The two of you, should ye conceive, could bring an ordinary mortal into the world. Most likely ye’ll have Halflings same as yerselves. But there’s a chance—a glorious and much-desired chance—that ye’ll have a full Eternal child. If that happens, it will mean a great deal to us all. A great deal.”
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