by Hal Emerson
The next time I woke I was swaying under a canopy of trees.
Leaves were whispering around me, making soft whisking noises as they rubbed against fabric and were pushed aside. Wind blew, too, playing with the autumn leaves of the trees above me, breaking some off and sending them spiraling down in trickles of orange, yellow, and red.
There were voices as well – both of them male. One was deeper than the other, and spoke more slowly.
“I didn’t tell her – she figured it out on her own. I don’t know how, but I’ve stopped underestimating her. What I put her through in the training should have killed a normal changeling. I did it to prove it to myself – I had to know that she was what I suspected.”
“When did you first suspect?”
The wind blew heavier as Robin paused, swirling the leaves and sending a vibrant spray of autumn colors swirling through the air.
“I suspected,” he said, “the night the madness came to Gwyn’s bastard – the one she said was named Faolan. When she found me with him – he’d attacked me when he changed, just the way they always do during their first moon, and then passed out – she told me to leave him alone. She was deep in the madness, so deep I don’t even think she realized what she was doing, but she’d imbued the words with power the way you do. Still, it shouldn’t have done much to me.”
“But it did.”
“It threw me twenty feet through the air,” Robin said. “I couldn’t understand it until later.”
“Fae blood – true Fae blood, not diluted through years of breeding. One of the old ones must be her direct ancestor – one of the ones of the deep forest, where the trees have never felt a human hand. No wonder she danced the moonlight so easily.”
“I wonder that she was never claimed.”
“I do not. I am of the old ones, but very different. They do not come to my Bower and I do not come to theirs. Some of them, Mab and Morwena, Annuwn and the Deadlords … they are mad in truth, and wish nothing but to live that way. They want nothing to do with mankind. It is strange that any of them would come from the forest long enough to have her. I feel something else brought them, but I know not what.”
“It is strange hearing this from you,” Robin said quietly. “It is strange hearing you talk openly.”
Oberon spoke with a smile in his voice, a brief ray of light in a dark conversation. “I am glad that I can share with you finally. Glad that you are my son again.”
There was a brief period of silence in which I swayed back and forth and the trees began to thin around us. We were now longer near the Bower.
“Who was the mortal parent?”
“I doubt we shall ever know. It is a higher chance the mother was mortal – the old Fae only carry children when they wish to. The mother must have been special, though, to tempt one of the old ones. Perhaps she was one of the Ilyn who left – perhaps a number of things. In the end, though, I doubt she or we shall ever know.”
“I thought as much,” Robin said quietly, his voice matching the sound of the sighing wind. “I know that old blood carries the madness in a way the new blood does not, and that if I gave her enough blood of mine, it would bond with her.”
“So you tested her?”
“Yes. It was … brutal, I must say. Much more than most changelings could have gone through. To be fair, she gave as good as she got, though I never told her as much.”
I cleared my throat and spoke:
“You deserved it,” I said, my voice cracking but loud enough to be heard, “because you’re an ass.”
There was a brief, stunned silence, and then the litter in which I was carried stopped swaying and was lowered to the ground. The world seemed to swirl around me as vertigo grabbed and spun my head like a top, but it settled after a moment. When my vision cleared, I saw both of them were standing in front of me, looking down. When I focused on Robin, he broke into a wolfish smile. His single crooked tooth stood out in the dawning light and made him look boyish.
“I can tell you a story of an ass if you really want to know one – it’s quite good.”
“Another time,” Oberon said solemnly, looking back behind them. “We’re too close to the edge and the sunrise will be on us soon. We cannot linger.”
“Where are we?” I asked. As I spoke, all the aches and pains from the battle came back to me, and a deeper pain, a deep ache in my chest where a shard of the iron dagger had pierced me, began to beat in slow agony. I could move, and I realized that while most of my torso was still heavily bandaged, my arms and legs were free.
“We are near the edge of Arden,” Oberon said. He had knelt beside me and was leaning over the litter. “All of us owe you a great debt. But I owe you most of all.”
“I owe you more,” I said, slowly. “You saved my life.”
“I did what needed to be done,” he said, his expression suddenly brooding and pained.
“I know,” I said simply, hoping that was enough to show him I understood.
His brows contracted and pulled together and his eyes were suddenly shining.
“It is why we are here on the edge of Arden. You cannot stay in the Bower – what you did, we can never repay you for. But if you stay, you will die. There is iron in your chest, bonded to you. If you stay, it will kill you. If you leave, it will lose its power and you’ll survive.”
I swallowed as the words sunk in and the reality of the situation closed over me. I wasn’t surprised – I think I’d known what would happen when I used the dagger on the moonstone, or at least suspected. I’d saved the Bower only to leave it.
“I understand,” I said softly, trying and failing to keep the pain from my voice. I felt tears well up in my eyes, but I held them back. He was staring at me with an echoed pain, and Robin sighed heavily and turned away, his smile gone.
“She’ll come after you,” Oberon said, his voice heavy. “She’ll come after you and try to bring the light to everything you do in revenge for taking Robin away from her. We’ll be watching you as best we can, so long as you are near the forests, but she will still come.”
I swallowed through my dry and aching throat, forcing my tongue and lips to move. “Then I will fight her,” I croaked. “I will fight her and anyone she sends.”
His eyes were full of a fierce pride, and it prompted me to continue.
“But I can’t go yet.”
He frowned, about to speak, but I cut him off.
“My year isn’t up. I have to follow the rules.”
Robin barked a laugh and rocked back on his heels, and Oberon managed a wry smile. “I think this time there is an exception to be made,” he said.
A wind passed over and around us, swirling the leaves. The light was strengthening; our time was drawing short, and we all three knew it.
“I won’t remember, will I?”
His jaw tightened and I felt the tears rise up in the corners of my eyes. I turned away from him and tried to hide my face, but he reached out and gently turned it back, the pads of his fingers rough against my skin.
“The strongest always remember something,” he said firmly, as if lecturing me on one final point, giving me one last lesson before I went. “The strongest remember how to embrace the madness – and they keep hold of the things that are most important to them. If you do that – if you hold onto the madness, then you can return. The iron will lose its power as time passes, and if you hold on, if you remember, then there is a chance you can return.”
“I’ll remember you,” I said, grasping at his hand. “I swear I will.”
He nodded, and just as I felt my strength returning to me my heart skipped a beat and the blood rushed from my face.
“She has to go,” Arandil said, coming around the side of my litter to look at me. There was another Fae with her, and I realized with surprise it was Ai’Ilyn, whose face looked ashen and grave. “If she doesn’t leave now, the iron will kill her, Erlking.”
“Very well,” he said with a nod. His face was stern and blank – the face of a king –
but his eyes were clinging to me with all the love of a father. “Save her.”
The spider woman began wrapping me in silk one last time, cocooning me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. I tried to protest, but two others appeared and all three bit me simultaneously. Darkness began to descend.
“I can come back if I remember?” I asked. “You promise I can come back?”
Oberon knelt over me once more, watching me with his gray-green eyes.
“I promise with all my power that if you remember we will come for you. If the iron falls away and I can bring you back safely, I will do so. Be you old and grey, bent or broken, I will take you in and welcome you. You are my daughter as much as Robin is my son, and I will never abandon you, for as long as you live.”
My final words came out in a whisper full of pain and longing.
“Goodbye, Oberon.”
I saw him smile, transforming his face into a beautiful tableau that I swore I would remember as the Caelyr venom swept through my brain and pulled my thoughts out from under me, sending me spiraling into darkness.
“Goodbye, my beautiful child.”
Epilogue: Return
I remember now, all of it. I remember waking after that in a field, not knowing where I was or where I came from. I remember the farm family that took me in and cared for me – the family I grew up with. How long has it been since I left the forest? Five years? Six? I am a woman now – can I return to the place of my childhood?
I remember Faolan.
I remember Brandel and Gwenel, and even Igrin and the others.
I remember Ai’Ilyn, Ionmar and the Urden.
I remember Robin, and Oberon.
Or do I? I sit here in my room, this small lean-to built onto the side of the barn I work in, and I cannot help but question my sanity. Can such things be? These memories have no more substance than a dream – they are like the final wisps of a broken spider’s web that I have tried to piece together.
The sun is rising; dawn is come.
The light hurts my eyes as it hasn’t before.
No … hurts my eyes as it used to in the Bower.
I feel faint. There is a fever on me – one that squeezes my head and makes me shiver. The pain in my chest, the pain that has been there since I can remember – it is gone entirely. Can it be true what I remember? Is this madness that I feel?
Or is madness a part of me, in my blood?
He said he would be waiting.
I must go. The forest where I was found – I must know for certain.
I will not return. If what I remember is a dream, then I do not wish to live without it. If what I remember is true … then I will be with him. I will find Faolan – I will find Brandel and Gwen – I will find the Bower.
It is where I belong.
About the Author
Hal Emerson lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he works as a writer. He started his career with The Exile Trilogy, and intends to continue it with many more stories before he is done.