Oberon's Children

by Hal Emerson

  Chapter Seven: Sides

  Ai’Ilyn began to fade.

  I thought at first I was imagining it. With the terrors of the Hunt behind us and the moon back in the sky the following night, life had returned to normal – or as normal as any of us really had a reason to expect. But several nights later, it was clear Ai’Ilyn wasn’t the same.

  I didn’t understand what was happening, nor, it seemed, did any of the others. We watched her the rest of that night, after that first stumble when she’d had to catch herself, and saw that with each hour she seemed to grow weaker. She led us down into the depths of the Bower as the waxing moon was ascending in the sky, and then into the deep caverns for another bath in the hot sulfurous springs maintained by the Urden. We were cowed by then – even the resistance that Tristan offered was often token, as if he’d fallen into the role and was now unable to remove himself from it – so we went easily.

  We followed her down the subterranean stair and into the cavern – this time close behind her, our eyes easily adjusting to the dark shadows even though we’d just come from the silver light of the braziers in the Hollowed Hall – and it happened halfway down the slope.

  One of the others was at the front that night – one of the others that I didn’t know yet – and at first I thought whoever it was had struck her from behind. She staggered, holding a hand to her side and throwing another out to brace herself against one of the rocky walls that formed the barriers on the side of our path opposite the distant pool.

  Some of us watched with glee, Tristan and Blonde Girl, whose name I’d later learn was Igrin, chief among them, but I couldn’t help but feel a rush of panic. I held no affection for her, but I knew her. I knew what set her off and how far away she had to be to make whispering safe, knew what to do to prevent her from punishing me. Who knew what the other Ilyn would do if they were charged with our keeping? Some of the other children we saw from time to time through the halls and at the moonlight gathering were constantly bruised, and the Ilyn who led them were brutal creatures who sometimes even tried to discipline us. Ai’Ilyn intervened when they tried, once pulling one of our boys out of a bigger Ilyn’s reach – an Ilyn of a deep red color similar to hers but of an angry, bloody shade. As soon as she’d stood between the boy and the Ilyn, the bigger male had stopped what he was doing. His lips had twitched, as if he wanted to snarl but had forced himself to stop. He had nodded to Ai’Ilyn, a quick bob of the head that cut off abruptly, and then had turned and shouted at his children to keep moving, slapping one of them on the back.

  Ai’Ilyn was as much our guardian as our jailer.

  She recovered herself that time, standing back up and straightening herself, leading us down to the Urden and the pools. But her health grew worse as the night wore on, and she refused to acknowledge it when she stumbled, even when she fell to the floor completely; she refused all help as if it were a point of pride. Her skin began to flake off in strange chunks, but only the white. The red and pink remained steady and whole, but the white faded into gray, giving her a sickly cast that was unmistakable as illness.

  She put us to bed one last time, and in the morning she was gone.

  That was when I met Ite’Ilyn.

  He introduced himself at the next moonrise by waking us up one by one in a soothing voice that was so jarringly different from Ai’Ilyn’s growl that it might as well have been a shout. His skin was so heavily tinged with green, a deep forest color that was oddly soothing, that there was barely any white.

  When we’d all woken, he spoke in a calm, simple tone of voice.

  “My name is Ite’Ilyn.”

  He inclined his head, a courtesy that was shocking all on its own. I was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes, and the ache in my shoulders from constantly cleaning gave a nasty twinge and shot a line of pain up my neck into my head, where a dull throbbing began. But even through the fog of sleep and discomfort I was unnerved.

  “Ai’Ilyn will be gone for a night,” he continued, not even pausing to absorb our silence, simply treating it as a matter of course. “I will not answer questions about her absence; her business is her own, as it is with all Ilyn. You will notice that I am unlike the others – it is because I am one of the oldest. I have been here a very long time, and my time is coming. I understand that there are many rules that Ai’Ilyn may enforce with you – silence being one. I have no desire to enforce such a rule – it requires far too much effort on my part. What is important to me is that you perform your tasks and perform them well; that you go where I tell you to go, and do what I tell you to do; and that you understand my word is law. Should you be willing to follow these rules, you may speak to each other at any time.”

  He looked at us each in turn, and when his eyes reached me I realized that what he’d said about being old was not an exaggeration. The weight of many years rested behind the deep green irises, as did the weight of untold knowledge and memories.

  “I will need an affirmative from each of you stating that you can agree to these terms before we leave this room.”

  He turned his eyes to the far side of the room, to Faolan, who immediately agreed in soft and quiet voice. The Ilyn’s gaze then turned to the biggest of our group, the one who looked as though he had already advanced into the early stages of puberty but who still carried himself with a child’s awkward innocence.

  “Yes,” the boy answered, his voice a surprisingly soft and gentle whisper.

  Ite’Ilyn nodded and turned to the girl next to him.

  “Yes.”

  He turned to the next.

  “Yes.”

  He went through each of us, and received ten ‘yes’ replies.

  “Very good – follow me.”

  Ite’Ilyn led us through our morning routine and took us to the dining hall. On the way, we barely spoke at all. I don’t know their minds for sure, but I am nearly certain that they were all having the same thought as I: It was a trick. All of us by this point had felt the stinging slap of Ai’Ilyn’s hand, and had no desire to test our luck.

  All except Tristan of course.

  “This is a tree.”

  His voice was rusty from disuse, but there were veins of excitement throughout the words. Ite’Ilyn, leading us, did not stop walking, did not turn around. There wasn’t even a hitch in his step to show that he had heard us; in all honesty, it seemed as if he’d forgotten we were even there.

  “Ha-HAH! WOOOOOOHOOOOO! What are you going to do?!”

  I watched, shocked, as Tristan turned to the side and kicked the wall of the Bower. His bare foot made a solid slapping sound, and though it made no indent, scratch, or mark, we all flinched as though he’d torn the wall down.

  “I knew you’d give in!” he shouted, his triumphant cry turning to the sickly-sweet baby voice he used when he spoke to the Ilyn, mocking even as he pretended he was nothing but an innocent child.

  We had all stumbled to a halt, backing away from the black-haired boy who had thrown back his head and was crowing at the top of his voice, even performing some kind of dance in the middle of the corridor. His eyes were wide and flashing like a maniac’s, and his face had split into a beaming smile, revealing rows of perfect, pearly white teeth.

  “What?” he asked, spinning around to look at us. “Come on – we’re free, MAKE NOISE!”

  My mind recognized movement, but had no idea where it came from. All I knew was that one second Tristan was standing in the middle of the hallway, crowing at the top of his lungs, and then he was no longer on the ground, but instead held several feet above it. I blinked to try and understand what I was seeing, and when my eyes opened the fraction of a second later, I saw the coiled iron strength of Ite’Ilyn’s arm, his almost-entirely-green skin blending shockingly well with the darkness so that he looked like a shadow come alive. The whites of his eyes were wide, and his mouth was open in a snarl.

  “So this is how you repay the gift of freedom,” he hissed at the boy, suddenly sounding very much like Ai’Ilyn. I tensed a
nd backed a step away, an action mirrored by the others.

  The beating would come next. It was inevitable; we all knew it. We grabbed at the wall behind us, trying to blend into the wood even though our off-white silk clothing made us stand out like grub inhabiting a fallen tree. I wasn’t thinking clearly at that point – none of us were. We were just reacting – that was all we could do.

  But the blows didn’t fall. The snarling tirade did not continue. The tall Ilyn simply held the child up in the air by the throat, and Tristan began to choke.

  The boy’s eyes widened as he realized the Ilyn holding him was not about to let him go. It wasn’t fear, only surprise. He began to gasp and struggle, but he kept his eyes locked on the Ilyn holding him, refusing to give in.

  Ite’Ilyn simply continued to hold him, the tendons on the back of his deep forest-green hand standing out like the roots of a tree, his grip unbreakable. The strain of the action didn’t even register on his face.

  Time passed with all of us frozen in that tableau, and Tristan began to gasp for breath. I noticed movement up the hall the way we’d come – turned and saw that other Fae had stopped and were watching the scene with veiled expressions. I glanced the other way, the way we were going, and saw that still more had stopped on that side. There was room to go around us, or even through us, and some of them likely would have if we’d been with Ai’Ilyn – but they were all watching Ite’Ilyn, and it was clear that it was his presence that made the difference.

  Tristan’s cheeks had gone white, and his lips were bloodless lines of a snarling grimace that defied the Ilyn’s power over him even as he was strangled.

  “You are here at the courtesy of the Erlking,” Ite’Ilyn said. His voice was quiet and orderly, the snarling quality gone out of it. It was a deadly purr now – full of violent expectation. “While you are here, you will treat this place and these halls with respect; if not for yourself, then because such respect is demanded of you.”

  Tristan’s eyes were rolling in his head now; he was hanging on to consciousness through sheer force of will.

  “There is no other option,” Ite’Ilyn continued, voice devoid of all emotion now, completely monotone. “You will learn discipline, or it will be forced on you. You will learn respect, or it will be forced on you. You will learn your place, or it will be forced on you. Here you are held to a higher standard. Rise to meet it, or you will be raised.”

  The hand opened and the boy fell to the ground. He began coughing and sputtering, his limbs jerking out at odd angles as he grabbed at the smooth wood floor for purchase that didn’t exist. The Ilyn turned to the rest of us.

  “One of you failed the test – but you as a group have not. The rules are changed – you may speak only during meal times and at no other point. If any of you, including this one, disrespect the Bower, the Fae, or the Erlking again, that freedom will be taken away as well. You are here, you are alive, as a privilege; the only right you have is to expect in return what you give out. Prove that you deserve more, and it will be given. Prove that you deserve less, and that too will be given.”

  He turned to watch us each in turn, his face and voice expressionless but for the smallest tinge of weariness, as if he’d said this many times before and couldn’t understand why he had to say it again.

  He bent over Tristan, who was just regaining normal color in his face, his hoarse choking noises fading to labored breathing. There was a dark bruise spreading around his neck, and his eyes were bloodshot and watering.

  “You have no power here,” he said to the boy, just loud enough for all of us to hear as well. “You must accept that you will never have power again. Every time you grab for it, thinking that it is just out of your reach, your hand will be slapped away. Over and over again you’ll try, and over and over we’ll teach you this lesson, until we tire of the game and simply removed the hand.”

  He placed one of his bare feet on the boy’s wrist and pressed down to make his point perfectly clear. Tristan winced in pain and tried to cry out or pull away, but his throat was too swollen to allow for it, and Ite’Ilyn too strong for him to pull away. He remained where he was, completely in the Ilyn’s power.

  “I hope I am understood.”

  The Ilyn stood and motioned to two of the other children in our group, the tall hulking boy and a lanky blonde boy next to him.

  “Carry him,” he said simply. “Keep up.”

  He turned and moved down the corridor, brushing past Faolan and me without so much as attempting to slow. The other Fae made a path for him, and then closed in around us and went about their business, barely noticing us, save for two Urden who grunted and buffeted a few out of their way with their massive shoulders.

  We hurried after Ite’Ilyn. I was once again in the lead, and I could feel my heart beating in my throat with every step, every hair on my body standing on end as his words rang through my mind over and over again.

  Prove that you deserve more, and it will be given.

  We passed through the Hollowed Hall, and through the far side into the refectory where the children prepared the food for the other Ilyn and ate their own in the small pod-like chambers that honeycombed the space. Ite’Ilyn led us to the same one we’d eaten in since our arrival – our large bowls of roots, berries, nuts, and fruit were all full and waiting, the honey drizzled over them shining in the silvery light that came from the glowing stone set in the ceiling of the chamber.

  “Eat; you do not have long,” Ite’Ilyn said simply. He turned and left.

  We all took our seats, Tristan collapsing into his as he pushed away the two boys who’d been carrying him without the smallest hint of gratitude.

  There was a half beat of silence between us all as we looked at each other.

  “We can speak during meals,” I said.

  Everyone stared at me, as if waiting for a root to come shooting out of the Bower wall and pull me into the hall where the Ilyn could beat me, but nothing happened. I bent my head, feeling my cheeks turn red, and began to eat. The food was delicious, as always, and covered in fresh dew that told me it had only just been picked from where it was grown.

  “We don’t have long,” someone else said – the blonde boy that had helped carry Tristan. “We should tell our names.”

  Everyone nodded as they began to wolf down their food, and we all stared suspiciously as one another until I spoke, once again surprising myself with my own daring.

  “Mol,” I said. “My name.”

  No one said anything profound; they simply looked at me and seemed to relax. Then one by one they introduced themselves as well, speaking quickly between heavy bites of food.

  Pinur Fe was the tall, broad-shouldered one who spoke gently and halting. Faolan I knew, though none of the others did, and everyone by now knew Tristan. The girl with blonde hair, the one who always took Tristan’s side, was Igrin, and even as she introduced herself, beaming the self-indulgent smile of those told since infancy that they are pretty, I decided to hate her.

  The others I knew on sight were Durst, the shorter blonde-haired boy, and Celin, the dark-haired, dark-skinned one who’d gotten in trouble with Tristan the day we’d arrived. The others, who’d all kept a low profile, were Gwenel, Brandel, and Aelyn. Six boys and four girls, all told. We ranged in height and size, color and complexion, but were all cut of the same general mold: children who’d reached ten years of age; children who’d been pulled from the streets of their homes by music that no one else could hear; children who found themselves players in a game they couldn’t understand.

  With the introductions finished, the questioning began. We had little time and we all knew it – when we were not shoveling food into our mouths, we were speaking to each other through honey-sticky lips, having three or four conversations at once. Many of them focused on me, the only one who’d had an extended conversation with one of the elder Fae.

  “Did she tell you where we are?”

  “No,” I whispered, frightened by the attention.

>   “We’re in a place called the Bower,” another girl, Gwenel, reprimanded the first questioner, Celin. “She won’t know anymore than we do.”

  “So what did the spider-woman tell her – anything useful?”

  I swallowed hastily, the last of the food gone. I stuck a finger in my mouth to get the last of the honey before I spoke.

  “Gwyn ap Nudd,” I said, trying my best to say the words the way I’d heard them.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You mean that’s what happened? That’s who was in the dark?”

  “What were the noises?”

  “Hunting,” I said, trying to sum it all up in as little words as possible. I wanted their attention to be elsewhere – off of me.

  I saw their faces cloud over with thought and anxiety at what I’d said, but before they could ask more, one of the others spoke:

  “My mother used to tell stories about him,” he said, the short blonde boy who’d introduced himself as Durst. “He comes in the night to take souls, and each new moon he hunts for those who killed heroes or lied or stole and takes them to the underworld.”

  “Whatever he is,” said Tristan loudly, “he doesn’t matter.”

  All of the other conversations stopped and we turned to look at him. He was scanning each of us intensely but quickly. Even he wasn’t foolish enough to waste the time we’d been given.

  “We have to work together,” he said quickly, drawing us in with his words and face and piercing eyes. I was the only one who backed away, feeling repulsed by him for no reason I could put into words. He made my skin crawl, the very thought of him and how he acted.

  “We must make an oath,” he said, standing up proud and tall from where he’d sat at the table. The marks around his neck from his near-strangling, added to the most recent of his beating-induced bruises, gave him the look of a heroic martyr, recovered enough to carry on the noble fight he had begun. He was a beautiful boy – even to this day I remember how his skin glowed from within, and we all seemed to shine with reflected glory when he worked his charms.

  “We must fight this tyranny,” he continued. I could tell that he was very proud to use that word – likely something he’d overheard said at his father’s table, something he’d been waiting for the proper moment to use. “They’re treating us like slaves! Making us work and scrub and go to sleep when they want, and run through moonlight – we have to work together to fight it. They’re trying to beat us and hurt us – we need to get away, and if we work together as a group, we can do it.”

  The others were caught up in his act, I could see it, but I was only further repulsed. The very idea made no sense to me. Fight what? Fight whom? The shadows themselves that seemed to give birth to more Fae along every corridor of the Bower? The music that had eradicated our thoughts and judgment and pulled us here regardless of our wishes? The Ilyn, the most noticeable enemy, who were faster, stronger, and more cunning than ten ten-year olds could ever hope to be? I have always been able to see through the lies of others – perhaps because I recognize something of myself in them, a dark commonality of disposition that goes deeper than blood ever could. But while I recognize the similarities, I have never felt kinship with those like Tristan, those who will use words and base desires to manipulate the innocent.

  “Yes,” one of the others said – Aelyn, I think.

  “Yes,” Igrin said at once, joining with Tristan as I’d known she would. I considered my hatred now well justified.

  The others were all looking like they wanted to join on, casting surreptitious looks at the door, knowing that Ite’Ilyn would return at any second, but feeling caught up in this new idea that they could band together and fight back like heroes in a story.

  “We’ll have to be quick about it,” Tristan said. ‘Tonight, during the moonlight ceremony, if we –”

  “No,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me, stunned that someone had the temerity to break this beautiful plan that had them on the way to some daring escape. Those with food halfway to their mouths forgot it, and the expressions of those who’d been staring, enraptured, at the charismatic Tristan puckered as if one of their sweet berries had revealed a horribly sour center.

  Slowly, Tristan’s eyes came to rest on me.

  “I won’t,” I said simply, watching him, knowing that he was the only one that mattered. Some people forget how vicious children can be – how black and white their morality when it comes to what they want – but I have taken pains to remember it, perhaps because so much of what makes up a person’s core is based on choices they made as children. For Tristan, the moment I’d spoken up I’d become the embodiment of everything that he was rallying the others against. I could see the darkening clouds in his black eyes as he gathered a mental storm against me, readying to break me with thunderous condemnations and floods of sweeping words.

  “I won’t fight,” I continued, just before he spoke, suddenly absolutely sure I had to defend myself or else risk alienation not just from outside the group but also from within. “I won’t fight because it’s stupid to fight right now.”

  They were the first words I could think of, and I realized my argument was coming out all wrong. Tristan’s upper lip twitched in contempt, but I pressed on, knowing I had to get as much out as I could before he started speaking again; I had to make sense to the others – I didn’t have charm to blind them with, but if I kept them from siding with Tristan until Ite’Ilyn returned, maybe that would be enough.

  “We just got here,” I said, trying my best to run the words together the way I’d heard others do. My voice sounded terribly awkward, like a strange bird trying to mimic a cricket. “We don’t know … anything about it. We don’t know … where we are. They give food, and they give beds.”

  Some of the others, Pinur Fe and Gwenel among them, were watching me with interest. I felt my cheeks burning, but I continued on.

  “I can’t fight – because I can’t go back.”

  I tried to put as much weight into my words as I could, tried to imbue the idea of back with everything it meant for me: back to a place where I lived on the whims of a irrational world, subject to fortune and nothing else. Back to a place where food was stolen, not laid out in earthenware bowls. Back to a place where backbreaking labor was rewarded not with beds and food but with coin that bought not nearly enough of either.

  “Don’t listen to a girl,” Tristan sneered. “She’s stupid – she wants to be a slave! No one rules me. I make my own rules.”

  “There are always rules – these make sense!”

  He blinked once, and a shadow of confusion crossed his face for a fraction of a second, followed by the wide eyes of understanding. It was the final confirmation for me that he didn’t care about us in the slightest – all he cared about was returning to his back, to his family, just as Ai’Ilyn had alluded to. He understood now that this was a new beginning for me, for some of the others, but that meant nothing to him.

  Prove that you deserve more, and it will be given you.

  I tried to find something else to say, but I didn’t have the words. He shook his head and looked ready to say something else, to launch into another speech I despaired of following, but he was interrupted.

  “I will not fight either,” Faolan said, not looking up.

  In the midst of all the questions I’d almost forgotten him, he’d been so silent. Every eye turned away from Tristan and myself and focused on the boy who hadn’t looked up at either of us; unperturbed, he continued to eat from his bowl, cracking his way through a final few handfuls of nuts and berries. A strange sense of finality saturated his words, making them heavy with surprising weight. That was the first time we came to understand his ability to make his displeasure known through the sheer force of silence. Whereas Tristan worked his charms with words and smiles, Faolan existed in counterpoint: his silent, steady disregard of anything he deemed foolish or beneath him worked to make others look foolish and beneath him too.

  Tristan’s
eyes flashed as they shifted from me to Faolan, suddenly wary. He’d figured me out, but Faolan was still an unknown.

  “Mol’s right,” Faolan continued. He spoke with an easy fluency that told me that wherever he’d come from he’d at least had occasion to speak with others. He never looked up from his bowl; he didn’t deign to grant Tristan anything close to a sign of understanding or acknowledgement. “We have a place here. There’s a reason. Think about all the children. The Ilyn must be used to stopping them from running away. There’s no way I’m leaving here to go back. There’s no back for me.”

  He finished the last berry and finally looked up, but not at Tristan: at me.

  “I eat more here than I ate outside in months. I sleep in the same place every night. I’m warm.”

  Unable to stop myself, I flicked my gaze to his cheeks, to the hollows that had been there, gaunt and tight, and realized he was telling the truth. He’d started out as malnourished as I had, but now his skin was smoother and his eyes peered out of sockets rounded with light gray shadows, not the deep black of true deprivation. He still looked like I’d felt all my life – like a rodent, half-drowned and scuttling about the world in a hopeless battle to stay alive – but the improvements were keenly noticeable. I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d look given another week – could barely even fathom the idea that we might be able to live here with consistent food and sleep not just for weeks, not even for months, but for whole years.

  It was more than I had ever dared to dream possible.

  There was movement at the entrance, and we all fell silent as Ite’Ilyn appeared there. The silvery light of the moonstones made his skin look like the dappled shadows of leaves shifting beneath the light of a full moon.

  “Stand. Your meal is over. Follow me and remain silent.”

  We did as told, fed and ready to start our night of cleaning, but as we approached the door I felt eyes boring into the back of my head, and I knew without looking that Tristan had marked me.

  Our paths were set for each other in that moment.

  Maybe they always were.