Oberon's Children

by Hal Emerson

I awoke some time later, feeling as though I was being pulled through a dense fog that wouldn’t part before me. Layer after layer of the wet soupy mist hit my face as I ran through the night, going somewhere I couldn’t understand, trying to escape from the place I wanted to be. The fog began to cling to me, and with every step more and more of it attached, sticking, weighing me down, cutting off my breath. I gasped out, trying to breathe, and pain wracked my body, shooting from my side. A sound was ringing in my ears that I couldn’t at first make out, but, as it became harder and harder to breathe, the dream of running through darkness faded into reality, a reality where I was thrashing wildly, my arms pinned against my sides and held immobile.

  “Damn it, nestling! By the Erlking – HOLD STILL!”

  A sharp blow struck the back of my head, sending stars flashing across the vision I still had of total darkness. It didn’t feel like my eyes were closed, which meant I was in pitch-black darkness or I had gone blind. Fear clenched my stomach into a tight fist of tension, but I stopped struggling.

  Light blossomed, a blurred line of silver tinged with gold along the edges, and then air rushed into my lungs as some kind of weight holding me immobile was removed from my arms. I lurched forward and smacked my knees against the edge of my nestle, sending myself sprawling across the floor on my face as my shoulders were wrenched back behind me.

  Gasping for breath and trying to understand what was happening, I turned and saw Ai’Ilyn holding the blankets from my nestle, her face a thunderhead of disapproval. We remained motionless like that for a long moment, and then she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  “ON YOUR FEET!”

  I shot up, both my kneecaps crying out in protest, and stood rail-straight. She threw the blankets that I’d managed to wrap around me into the hollowed bed with a sharp motion and strode forward; she thrust her face into mine, her teeth sneering at me only inches away from the tip of my nose.

  “By the Hounds of ap Nudd, what is WRONG WITH YOU?!”

  Her rage made me quake inside, but I held still, frozen to the spot by fear and a deep instinct that told me if I moved I would bring the anger to action, and then nothing would save me.

  Ai’Ilyn pulled back just far enough that she could stare down at me with her red-white eyes; I immediately looked down, knowing that to hold her gaze would be to challenge her. For a long moment I waited for the impending blow to form and fall. There was nothing I could do – if she chose to hit me, moving would only make it worse. I had to hang on to my wits – I had to hang on to who I was.

  She spun away from me with a howl of anger, shouting to the others to rise from their beds as well, casting baleful glares back at me, but I sensed a strange relief behind her eyes that made no sense. She had gleefully beaten Trouble Boy the day before; why did she look relieved to not be beating me?

  But that thought was quickly shoved aside as I cast my gaze at the rest of the room, trying to piece together what had happened. The moon was shining through the window once more, but the light was different – different enough to tell me, I who’d spent many nights under the open sky, that the moon was rising.

  Had we slept through another daylight?

  Ai’Ilyn had managed to rouse the others, slapping one or two of them who hadn’t complied as quickly as she’d wanted and arousing pained yelps from her victims. We were all still clothed in the silk we’d been given the night before, and, though it was sleep-rumpled, it still shone faintly with off-white luminescence. The others were now all awake as I, and we stood straight and attentive as Ai’Ilyn strode up and down the room, eyeing us each in turn.

  “Today you will begin your life as one of the Fae,” she said, watching each of us closely, daring us to speak. “That is the proper name for who we are – Fae. We are those who live on the edges of the world, those that lived in the world long before it gave rise to man. We live there no longer because we have no place there. This is our refuge, this is our home – this the Kingdom of Moonlight, the Realm of Oberon’s Children.”

  She stopped in front of me. The look from before was gone entirely, and she was once again sneering down at me as if I were a piece of excrement caught on the tip of her toe.

  “The rules are simple. You do as I tell you – you do as all the Ilyn tell you – and you do it as quickly as you can. If you disobey, you will be beaten. If you resist, you will be beaten harder. If beatings have no effect, we will find something else that does.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement that looked like a cringe, and knew it was the boy who’d resisted yesterday. I wondered vaguely if he was going to attempt to resist again – if maybe he was formulating a plan even now about trying to run for his freedom. The thought made no sense to me, considering how easily they had brought us here in the first place, but the boy had already proven himself to have less sense than any streetwise orphan had in their little pinkie.

  “There is nowhere to run,” she continued as if addressing my thoughts. “If you try to leave, you will be brought back, and you will be beaten within an inch of your life. Some of you may think that I can’t truly mean that – that I’m exaggerating the severity of your punishment. I am not. No one runs a second time.”

  She looked pointedly at Trouble Boy who was staring hatefully up at her.

  “You will be worked until you can work no more. You will clean when I tell you to clean, you will eat when I tell you to eat, and you will shit when I tell you to shit.”

  The profanity rolled off her tongue with such ease that I wasn’t even surprised by it. Some of the others were – if anything, it seemed to make them even more fearful, which made no sense to me. Bad words were much better than bad deeds.

  “You are not to ask questions of me or anyone else. You are not to interact with the other children here, either the older ones that came before you or the younger ones that are coming after you.”

  Younger ones coming after us? My mind began to buzz at this new thought, but I kept my lips tightly shut. We all did; we’d learned our first lesson.

  Ai’Ilyn made one more pass up and down the line, examining us all for any flaw, real or perceived, but what she saw must have satisfied her. She turned toward the opening to the room, and barked a single command over her shoulder:

  “Follow!”

  We did, me in the lead, the others close behind.

  When we left the room, we turned immediately to the right and stopped only several steps away. Ai’Ilyn pointed toward an opening in the wall I hadn’t noticed the night before. I stood awkwardly looking up at her for a minute, and then went where she had pointed. The others tried to follow, and I heard her stop them.

  It was a room, small and almost completely bare, save for a single round hole in the center that opened up into nothing. I went toward the edge and then looked down the hole – a hole that, just like everything else in this living structure, was not carved but grown, a simple divot in the living wood that went down and down and down into deep darkness – and my nose puckered. The smell that wafted up to me – the sharp smell of urine and the earthier smell of its waste-related kindred – was so strong I gagged and pulled back.

  “Hurry up, nestling!”

  At the sound of Ai’Ilyn’s command, I pushed my disgust aside and reached for the waist of my thick new pants and lowered then removed them in one quick motion. I straddled the hole, and did what I was expected to do. Oddly enough, I was somewhat relieved. I’d been forced to pee in much worse places before and I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to go.

  One by one, the others used the room as well, and one by one came out. A few of them looked horrified by the experience, especially Blonde Girl and Trouble Boy, but it was over soon enough. When we were all back together, Ai’Ilyn led us away, down the winding staircase we’d taken up the night before. As we passed through the maze of corridors, I wondered how big the Bower truly was, but I dismissed the thought when we emerged at the bottom of the stair and found ourselves once again in the Hollowed H
all. The tables were set now with food and my mouth immediately began to water. There were heaps of berries, fruits, and vegetables, alongside bowls of shelled nuts and grains. There was meat as well – far off in a distant corner, where I could see a number of Ilyn tearing at it with satisfied growls.

  But Ai’Ilyn led us past it all toward the opposite end of the hall. We passed through an opening that led to a curved corridor and finally let us out in a large room that could only be a refectory kitchen. Roots came in from the ceiling, hanging above us like subterranean worms, and rocks lined the walls, but food was in sight all around, being prepared, washed, stored, and served by children moving about in distinct groups led by Ilyn.

  Ai’Ilyn led us down by way of a wooden ladder grown into the side of the earthen wall, made out of what looked like intertwined roots. She led us then to a smaller chamber off to the side, one of several dozen such chambers that honeycombed the larger room. Here there were ten earthenware bowls laid out, and ten earthenware cups, on either side of a long slab of wood that seemed intended to serve as a table.

  “Eat,” Ai’Ilyn said, gesturing to where the bowls and cups lay.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I’d entered the Hall, but even that paled in comparison to the overwhelming joy of eating the fruit, berries, roots, nuts and tubers that had been chopped up and stuffed into the bowl until it was almost overflowing. I barely even remember going from the door to the bowl, so intent was I on the food, but, by the time I’d begun to eat, I’d made the important and life-changing realization that the heavy bowl I held in my hands was full of more food than I’d ever had in one sitting.

  Each bowl was stuffed full of raw produce, the kinds of things I had helped pick during the harvest season but been forbidden to eat. It tasted better than anything I’d ever had in my life. The sweet, sugary juice of the fruit rolled down my chin as I ate; the nuts crunched between my back molars, releasing a strong bitter-savory taste; and the cool water in the cups washed down my throat and eased tension from my body as if I were a wet cloth being wrung out. I attacked the food as if it were the last meal I’d ever have, and in no time my bowl was empty and I was left licking my fingers for the sweet juice and honey that had been drizzled over it, my stomach gurgling happily.

  But our reprieve was short-lived. Ai’Ilyn had us back on our feet as soon as the last bit of food had disappeared inside our mouths, and we were soon back out of the room, up and across the hall, and ascending once more into the upper levels of the Bower.

  I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I’d eaten, but at that moment I thought it out and realized it could have been as long as several days counting the time I’d been in the Bower. My mind was slowly working its way back to full speed, and I felt the full-body energy of a full stomach rushing through my limbs for the first time in what could have been months.

  My thoughts turned to the others and I started to wonder just who they were.

  As we moved through the Bower, I snuck a surreptitious glance over my shoulder.

  They were all walking behind me in a single-file line, and for the most part their eyes were downcast. But one pair of hazel eyes was up and they met mine as I looked back. I turned quickly around once more to face the front, eyeing Ai’Ilyn’s back as she walked ahead of us. She hadn’t noticed me turning, but I wasn’t going to risk it by trying again. The hazel-eyed boy – Smart Boy. I’d start with him.

  Other children passed us in the corridors, but, as Ai’Ilyn had told us we were not to interact with them, we made no noise or gesture of acknowledgement, and they too acted as though they could not see us. The older children, older only by a few years but still quite a bit taller and stronger, moved with ease, and their Ilyn said not a word to them. Watching their movements, I realized that what Ai’Ilyn had said really was true: if we followed what she said, we wouldn’t be struck. In fact, the Ilyn supervising the older children were barely even watching them, and some groups looked as though they were allowed to talk to each other as they walked.

  It was clear to me that they had grown up in the Bower. Their familiarity with their surroundings, the way they walked with purpose as if they knew exactly where they were going – their whole demeanor made it glaringly obvious.

  Three years living here? Four? The number seemed to vary, and some looked barely older than us, which I suppose made sense. I remember feeling confused – remember being baffled by the idea of living in one place for so long. I had never called a place home for more than a season before – I was always moving, as were those that shared the same life with me.

  What would it be like to stay here?

  We passed another group and I cut my eyes toward them. This group in particular seemed old – in fact, they seemed the oldest I had yet seen. The boy who’d raised his hand and pointed to the moon the night before was among them, and they all were talking quietly to each other, their Ilyn at their head, either unaware or uncaring. A sense of wildness clung to them, something that revealed itself in their unkempt, unruly appearances and the carelessly tossed phrases that seemed to bite and twist. They seemed different, and that frightened me.

  After we’d ascended a series of stairs, twisting and turning in almost-darkness, we emerged into a large chamber grown into the side of the tree’s bark. There were glassless windows in the far wall that opened onto the distant scene of the field far below us. I saw figures moving there, along the line of the towering trees at the edge of the clearing, but I couldn’t make out who they were or what they were doing.

  “Ai’Ilyn! You’re here.”

  I looked back across the room, toward the opposite side of the hall from the windows, and saw a short, slim creature with strange, olive skin that had a decidedly yellow tint. It had eyes that were wide and large, with pupils slit down the center like a cat’s. I realized she was female, whatever she was – she was curved and all of proportion to her diminutive stature, which made her look almost like a full-grown woman shrunk down to three-quarters size. Long black hair was pulled back from her face and tied behind her head with what looked like a thick vine. She was beautiful, even in her strangeness, like a perfectly crafted doll.

  She smiled at Ai’Ilyn, revealing sharp teeth like needles.

  “Fal,” the Ilyn replied, moving forward and inclining her head. We followed her, not knowing what else to do, and the small woman turned to us; as she did, something flittered in the air behind her, and I peered through the shadows that draped the room to see –

  Gossamer wings, like those of an insect.

  Her bright cat eyes, shining the yellow of a blooming flower in the darkness, saw me looking and caught my gaze. She said nothing, only smiled. My stomach churned inside me and I tried not to show my fear.

  “Let’s get them to work,” the creature said.

  Ai’Ilyn moved off to the side of the room, and a number of other small creatures with insect wings moved into the light, carrying hard porous stones and buckets, expertly woven of reeds, full to the brim with water and floral-smelling soap. We were set to scrubbing the floor of the chamber, working the porous stones back and forth over the smooth floor that now seemed to contain hidden bumps I’d never noticed. We smoothed these, sanding down the offending edges, until the patch was smooth. The winged Fae then told us to move forward, bringing us more soapy water. The process continued for what must have been hours, and we barely made it halfway across the floor of the room. My arms began to burn and ache to the point where I could barely lift them, but I didn’t dare stop. Ai’Ilyn watched us off to the side, leaning up against the wall of the Bower tree, face stony.

  The winged Fae called Fal drove us hard.

  “You missed a spot – start over there.”

  I gasped and returned to where she’d pointed and redid my scrubbing.

  “Again – smooth out that knot.”

  I went over it again, and then once more again. Nothing escaped her eye. The only part of the whole endeavor that in any way resembled
an upside was that when Fal moved off to the opposite side of the room to watch the others, I was left alone next to the hazel-eyed boy.

  When it first happened, I did nothing, thinking I’d be caught if I tried. Surely she knew that she was leaving us unattended. But minutes ticked past, and both Fal and Ai’Ilyn never turned their attention toward my side of the room. The winged Fae returned in time, coming back to critique us once more, and then she moved away again, toward the others. My heart was hammering in my throat by that point, but I forced myself to wait. I had to be sure. She drifted back again, coming closer to me but saying nothing when she saw I’d scrubbed my area to her satisfaction. She moved away and energy shot to the tips of my fingers and toes before I could calm myself. I swallowed hard, trying to wet my throat to allow a whisper out, and turned my head just far enough to the side that my mouth was angled toward the boy.

  “Who are you?”

  He paused briefly in the same act of scrubbing that I was performing, and barely titled his chin to the side to flick his gaze toward me. Our eyes caught, and then we both dropped our vision back to floor, staring at the ground we were scrubbing as if it were the only thing in our world.

  For a long moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me right, or, worse, that he’d decided not to answer. He was a survivor, like me. Maybe he’d decided to go his own way, to keep to himself –

  “Faolan.”

  The whisper was barely there at all, like the bare hiss of wind on a silent, still summer night, something you hope for so hard you think you’re imagining when it comes. He cocked his head to the side once more to look at me, and whispered something else:

  “Yours.”

  It wasn’t a question – it was a demand for an equal share of information. This was an exchange – he’d taken the risk of going first, and he was seeing if it was a risk that would pay off, seeing if I was someone that he could trust with this small and yet all-important knowledge.

  “Mol,” I whispered back, my voice as small as I could make it.

  I remember quite clearly how the sound of it shocked me. Up until that point, I don’t know if I’d ever spoken the name aloud. As an orphan and an urchin, the very idea of having a name was somewhat out of place. I never used it, had never told it to anyone in my memory – it was just something I knew myself as, like a marker that had been placed on me sometime deep in my childhood before I’d formed real memories, the way abandoned ruins exist until no one remembers what they’re from or why they’re even there.

  He nodded and continued scrubbing.

  I felt like I should say something else. I’d never been talkative before – never speak when you can listen – but I couldn’t leave the conversation there. If anyone in this group was worth knowing, it was he, and I had to make it clear I knew that. I had to say something to him.

  “Thank you.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I realized I’d said them, and I almost cursed aloud when Ai’Ilyn and Fal turned back toward us. I forced myself to keep scrubbing, pretending that nothing had happened. I wanted to scrub harder, to show that I’d been doing so all along, but I knew that to do so would be a dead giveaway that I was guilty. I continued the slow, deliberate pace that Fal had shown us.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Faolan doing the same. His hair had fallen in front of his face and around the sides of his ears – he had a lot of it – so I couldn’t see his expression, and I was convinced this was deliberate. He would hide however he could from the scrutiny of the two Fae creatures, and I couldn’t blame him for it.

  After what felt like an eternity they turned back away from us, focusing on the others at the far end of the line, stooping to point out something to Trouble Boy. I cringed automatically when he spoke back to them, his voice coming out in a syrupy-sweet, fake baby voice that made my teeth ache.

  Ai’Ilyn slapped him before he’d even finished the sentence.

  “Even if I had asked you to speak,” she hissed at him, “you will never speak in that voice again. Do you understand me?”

  The boy had recoiled from the blow, and he said something back, something longer than the simple “yes” that should have escaped his lips.

  I began to wonder, not for the first time, if he had a death wish.

  Ai’Ilyn growled deep in her throat and reached down to grab the boy by the front of his shirt. She hoisted him into the air with so little effort it was like watching a full-grown man pick up a kitten by the scruff of the neck. The boy shouted and lashed out, panic making him do what even he should have known not to, and Ai’Ilyn sneered.

  “See what I have to deal with?” she asked Fal almost casually. “You Paecsies have it easy – all you have to do is make sure they work.”

  “That’s hard enough some times,” the smaller woman-creature sighed, looking put upon and slightly disgusted by the display of emotion from the boy. “Do you want to punish him or shall I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Ai’Ilyn said with a grin that bore no softness to it now. “He should get used to respecting me – the clothes he wore here were rich. He’s the spoiled brat of some cuckolded lord, no doubt. He needs to learn his actions have consequences; needs to learn I mean what I say.”

  She smiled at him as she held him above her head and I felt a revolting thrill of excitement rush through me at her words. The feeling scared me more than Ai’Ilyn ever had – the thought that I was excited to see this rich boy beaten like I’d been so many times. Where was his protection now? Where was his father to keep him safe?

  A whispered voice broke through to me, knocking me from the staring trance into which I’d fallen, and I realized my hands were shaking as I clutched the scrubbing stone convulsively.

  “For what?”

  I looked over – the barest flicker of motion, not turning my head or any other part of my body even a fraction of an inch – and confirmed that it was the boy, Faolan, speaking to me. His hair had been pulled back on the side of his head facing me and one hazel eye was staring up at me.

  Ai’Ilyn set the boy down, turned him so that his small buttocks were facing her, and began to spank him, almost casually at first, telling him that she would stop as soon as he apologized for speaking out of turn. He cried out with every slap, but formed no words. I felt a thrill go through me and realized I wanted to watch, and then just as quickly revulsion followed. I swallowed hard and shook my head, turning back to Faolan.

  This was my chance – I wasn’t some rich boy idiot who would waste it.

  “Yesterday,” I whispered back, moving my lips as little as possible. “The pool. Pulling me.”

  I don’t even know if I would have been able to say more than that. I’d held so little conversation in my life that my voice came out tense and gruff, my throat aching, muscles long since atrophied from disuse – but he seemed to understand. I flinched as the other boy’s cries became more desperate. Between every slap against his backside, Ai’Ilyn calmly repeated that it would end when he apologized, and though he swore at her and spoke in depth about how what she was doing was unfair, the apology which would end the torture had yet to escape his mouth.

  She turned him around, held him up, and calmly began to slap him across the face. He started to cry out again, but still he didn’t yield, didn’t apologize.

  I am ashamed to admit I felt no sympathy for him, but knowing who I was then, I understand why I didn’t. Living the life I’d lived, seeing what I’d seen … and here was this boy who had the power to stop the pain; he had control. I cannot begin to express how much that matters. If he refused to give in, then he deserved every slap she gave him. She’d made the rules very clear. How could he complain that this was unfair? How many times had I seen a rich man beat a poor man for pleasure and sport alone? How many times had I heard what they might do to the unwary woman? And here he was with control in his hands, Ai’Ilyn offering for it to end, and he was screaming about how unfair it was. She’d even given him a warning!

  “You’re w
elcome,” Faolan, replied. He was still scrubbing, but had turned his head just enough to look at me. “Mol.”

  A single shiver went down my spine when he said my name.

  “Enough!”

  Fal was looking on as Ai’Ilyn continued to strike the boy, and she was the first to realize he had passed out. Ai’Ilyn hissed in annoyance and simply opened her hand and let him slide out; he fell, struck the floor, and puddled there. My heart lurched in my chest, skipping over a beat and making my head spin; my breath returned to normal as I felt a wave of shame roll over me.

  Ai’Ilyn reached down and grabbed one of the woven washing buckets and upended it over his head.

  Immediately he was up again, sputtering and coughing as he breathed in a huge lungful of half-air half-water and tried to retch it back up. She tossed the bucket to the side and I cringed as it struck the wall of the Bower tree. It caromed off in my direction and landed just short of hitting me, flinging up cold soapy droplets that splashed against my face.

  “Let me be abundantly clear,” she said as she reached down and grabbed him again. She wasn’t just speaking to him now, she was speaking loudly enough that we all could hear her very clearly, and her cadence had slowed to lend each word weight. “You are to do what I say, when I say it. You are to follow my orders in every detail. Whatever you were before matters not at all. You are one of us now – and I will break you, over and over again, until you learn discipline. That is what I am for – it is my only purpose in your lives.”

  The boy was awake enough now to hear her, and his gasping and sputtering had died down as he stared through a face red with slap-marks and already swelling with bruises. Bruises … but nothing worse.

  “You will only speak when spoken to – and you will respond immediately when I ask you a question. You will respond with the truth and nothing else. Do not test me – I’m one of the Ilyn. I can smell a lie from across the Bower. Do you understand me?”

  The boy was literally shaking with fear now, his hands grasping Ai’Ilyn’s hands as she grabbed doubled handfuls of his new shirt. He looked truly terrified, as if he were staring at someone who was attempting to murder him.

  “No blood,” Faolan whispered out of the corner of his mouth to me, and I couldn’t help but nod – I’d noticed it too. In the outside world, blood meant damage and fear. Blood meant risk of infection, and the chance of scars. Blood was real pain – anything else was somewhere lower on the scale. Ai’Ilyn had struck for shock value and to show she could, but if she had wanted to truly cause him injury I had to believe it would have been very easy for her. The tendons and muscles of her arm were standing out even now with iron strength, and nothing the boy did, no matter how hard he squirmed or pushed, made her budge an inch.

  I flashed back to the image of Ai’Ilyn’s face after I had woken that morning, the way she’d looked concerned, almost worried for my safety when I’d had the nightmare and woken nearly strangled by my own blankets. I hadn’t made a mistake – she had been worried.

  I caught Faolan’s eye and nodded. The corner of his mouth flicked up the tiniest amount at the edge, and I realized he was smiling. I smiled back with the same barely-there twitch of my lips, elated by the understanding that passed between us; we had just discovered the first rule of the Bower.

  The Ilyn were there to scare us, not to harm us.

  Ai’Ilyn was watching the boy in her hand expectantly, and I realized she’d asked him a question that I had missed and was waiting for the answer. The boy had tried to pretend he hadn’t understood her – and no doubt had tried to pull off some kind of cute I’m-so-innocent routine with his baby voice just moments before, but she had seen through all of it, and now the truth was clear. The boy’s eyes were blazing with hatred and intelligence, and I realized he’d been testing her all along, pushing the boundaries on purpose in order to discover the rules of this new place in his own way.

  I felt a grudging respect for him temper the budding hatred I’d been nurturing.

  “Just say yes, Tristan!”

  I snapped my head around and realized it was one of the other girls who’d spoken – Blonde Girl. I took a closer look at her and realized she was beautiful, with arching eyebrows and full lips, the picture of childhood perfection; she was staring emphatically at the boy, cowering back from the blow she knew must come from Ai’Ilyn.

  But the red-and-white skinned woman didn’t make a move toward her. Instead, she smiled widely, revealing her sharp teeth, and spoke at the boy.

  “I would suggest taking the girl’s advice.”

  The boy’s face was becoming more and more red as the balled shirt held in Ai’Ilyn’s hands cut off his circulation, and the first flicker of uncertainty appeared in his gaze. The silence lengthened, and still he didn’t speak.

  The slap rang through the room so loudly that I couldn’t help but flinch. My heart was racing in my chest - I hadn’t even seen her move! The only evidence that the slap had even happened, that we hadn’t just imagine the sound, was the red mark, deeper and darker than any of the others before, evident on the boy’s face.

  I saw tears well up again in his eyes, but I crushed the sympathy I felt for him. He had the chance to end this right now – all he had to do was say yes. Didn’t he see that this was all a test and he was failing? Couldn’t he see that there was something else happening here – that there was some other reason we’d been gathered? Why was it so hard for him to let go? Pride is useless unless you have power to back it up. In the Bower we had no power – in the Bower we could have no pride. Why couldn’t he see that?

  “Yes.”

  The word was barely a whisper, but it thundered in our ears. I felt relief surge through me, but I stopped it short, looking to Ai’Ilyn.

  “Yes, what?” she asked, sounding like a parent reminding a child to say ‘please.’

  The boy scowled at her, and I realized that the tears forming were tears of childhood rage, the kind of all-consuming hatred that knows no bounds. I thought briefly he’d take it back, thought that she’d have to go at him again, but then his expression flickered and I saw fear there as well.

  “Yes, I understand,” he whispered.

  She opened her hand and released him. He fell the few feet to the floor, scrabbling madly for purchase through the air before landing painfully his back. He gasped for air and tried to sit up. Ai’Ilyn ignored this.

  “Good,” she said, looking for all the world as though nothing had happened. She even looked bored now – as if the day’s only excitement had just come and gone and now there was nothing left but to soldier on until the end.

  “Get back to work!”

  It was the Paecsie who shouted this at us, her gossamer wings shooting open and launching her into the air above as she realized we had all stopped to watch the proceedings.

  “We have a schedule to keep! Don’t look at me – get to work!”

  We all bent back to our task with renewed vigor, attacking the floor with our stones and soapy water. Even the chastised boy, silent now as tears of shame rolled down his face, grabbed a stone and began to scrape it against the wood, clearing off the top layer that had been dirtied by the passing feet of so many Fae.

  The boy named Tristan.