Tales of Arilland

by Alethea Kontis

  King Rumbold sighed dramatically. “From you, Velius, I expect nothing but chaos.” The king kept his jovial tone, but his wife and the rest of the Woodcutters remained tenuously silent.

  “Last night was a time of reunion and happiness,” said the duke. “I could not in good conscious ruin that for my king, my queen, or anyone else in Arilland.” Velius looked to Friday specifically, who nodded. Her aura was still bright and aflame with love.

  “Thank you for your consideration, Velius,” Queen Sunday said in earnest.

  “Besides, Erik stunk to high heaven. It was not a pretty sight. Or smell.”

  A few chuckles erupted in the room, including Erik’s.

  “Thank you for that,” said the king.

  “Can please I finish my story now?” Erik asked impatiently.

  Both the king and the duke motioned for the guard to continue.

  Erik addressed Queen Sunday. “Your Aunt Tesera is not dead; she has fallen prey to a sleeping sickness.” He paused, clenching his jaw before he spoke again. “I’m sorry, but your mother has also been struck by this affliction.”

  “Is it contagious?” The young Queen Sunday’s voice bordered on hysteria.

  “Is Saturday safe?” asked Friday.

  “When is Saturday ever safe,” said her brother Peter. “Is it a plague?”

  “Only if the plague’s name is Sorrow,” said Erik. “The suspicion is that she’s attacking all her sisters in order to steal their power.”

  “Can she do that?” asked Friday.

  “If it’s possible,” said the duke, “Sorrow will find a way. And none of us will like the outcome.”

  “How was Aunt Rose when you left her?” Princess Monday delivered her question from her perch on the edge of an overstuffed chair. In her voluminous white gown, she looked pretty as a portrait.

  “Determined,” said Erik. “She will do everything in her power to protect her sisters while they are under her care. She believes the Abbey is the best place to mount a defense as any. Sorrow will have less power outside of Faerie.”

  Conrad had never before heard of this fey Sorrow, but he was predisposed not to like her.

  “What of my other daughters?” asked Mr. Woodcutter.

  “Thursday’s ship had to leave without her when the ocean vanished, so she made her way westward, to the sea. Saturday and Peregrine traveled east to Faerie, to find Trix.”

  “Peregrine?” King Rumbold asked suspiciously.

  “Saturday’s boyfriend.” Erik broke into a stupid grin completely inappropriate to the situation.

  “You’re kidding.” Queen Sunday was clearly incredulous.

  “Afraid not, Your Shortness. They’re quite the pair. He’s a prince from some godforsaken township in the frozen country and has a golden-eyed chimera for a pet. They’ve been under a spell all this time, and Saturday rescued them.”

  Golden eyes, thought Conrad. Interesting.

  “That sounds like our Saturday,” said Friday.

  “You have no idea,” said Erik. “She wears pants, he wears skirts, and the two of them can swing a sword as well as any of our guards here.”

  “I take it our girl finally got around to practicing,” said Velius.

  “Not much else to do while trapped in the White Mountains, I suppose. Between them they vanquished a witch and woke the Dragon of the North.”

  “They did what?” yelled Velius.

  “Right,” said Erik. “I hadn’t mentioned the dragon yet, had I?”

  The guard didn’t have time to explain. There was a commotion at the door, and one of the two men stationed there poked his head in.

  “What is it, Sir Griffin?” King Rumbold asked.

  “Forgive me, sire, but there are three young people here to see you, and they will not be turned away.”

  “Send them in.”

  Conrad expected John, Wendy and Michael to come through the doors. Three slender, towheaded children entered instead. The eldest was a girl of about sixteen. The boy looked a few years her junior. The youngest was small enough to be only five or six. Their clothes were simple, but their elegance did not go unnoticed by Conrad. The children bowed politely before the king and queen.

  “We are Shear, Dart, and Pearl,” said the eldest girl, presumably Shear. “We bring you both good tidings and bad.”

  “Let’s have the good first, if you please,” Queen Sunday requested.

  “The esteemed seamstress Yarlitza Mitella is alive and well,” said Shear.

  An uncharacteristic whoop of excitement erupted from Friday at the news. “My dear mentor! How wonderful! She is safe?”

  “As safe as houses,” said the boy, Dart. “She broke her leg in the flood, but she still made it back home to us.”

  “She is our godmother,” said Shear. “She swore to care for us if our mother ever fell ill. Unfortunately, that day has come to pass.”

  “Who is your mother?” asked the king. “From whence do you hail?”

  “That’s the bad news,” said Dart. “Our mother’s name is Teresa.”

  Conrad thought he had misheard the name. Hadn’t the Woodcutter siblings already been notified of this aunt’s illness? But the queen and her sisters all gasped at once. Conrad recalled Erik’s announcement and realized that the name Shear spoken had been “Teresa,” not “Tesera.”

  “Aunt Three,” breathed Prince Peter, confirming Conrad’s supposition.

  “The third Mouton sister struck down,” said Mr. Woodcutter. “A sleeping sickness, no doubt?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dart.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Mr. Woodcutter. “Sorrow must be stopped!”

  Friday’s father, already a bit of a giant, seemed to grow even larger in his fury. Friday stepped forward and took the hand of Pearl, the smallest girl, to keep her from being scared. Velius laid a hand on Mr. Woodcutter’s shoulder and the large man calmed a bit, but his cheeks remained flushed and his eyes stayed wild.

  “We will do what we can,” said King Rumbold. “In the meantime, welcome, cousins. Please allow me to introduce you to your family.”

  “Thank you,” said Shear.

  “First, though,” Dart said excitedly, “did I hear something about dragons?”

  Once again, the room filled with laughter.

  Conrad had told Friday that as soon as the atmosphere in Arilland stopped being strange and wonderful, he would return to the road. Omi had told Conrad that his journey would end when he found the place where his heart waited for him. He knew, deep down, that his soul had yet to find its true destination, but for now, he planned to stay right where he was.

  Acknowledgments

  For John Skipp, who invited me into an anthology called Demons and inadvertently gave me the rug that pulled “The Unicorn Hunter” together.

  For Doug Warrick and Kyle S. Johnson, who invited me to write a story based on a Nick Cave song…and to my sister, Soteria, for choosing the perfect song for me.

  For Brandi Hamrick, who flipped through the tiny notebook I keep in my car and asked, “What’s a ‘Vampire Mermaid’?”

  For Jason Sizemore and Lynne M. Thomas at Apex, who were not afraid to publish a Romantic Young Adult Serial Killer Fairy Tale Retelling in a world when everyone else was.

  For Eric James Stone—again and always—for unwittingly challenging me to include every single nursery rhyme and fairy tale I knew into a story, thus creating a Whole New World my brain would be happy living in forever.

  And for Margo Mann Appenzeller, Casey Cothran, and Chris McCormick—because the geography of my world all started with the map we drew in high school. Arilland literally would not exist without all of us.

  My hope is that Aria and Llandyr may yet still exist someday beyond these pages.

  Continue on to read an excerpt from TRIXTER

  The Boy Who Talks to Animals

  One more step. Two. Three. Three more steps. It was going to take him days to cross this meadow. Years. A lifetime. He deserved it, t
oo, every moment of crippling agony, every scrape, every tear. Family didn’t do this to each other. And yet…

  Three days ago, he never would have put a sleeping spell on the stew and poisoned his sister, his brother, the man and woman who had raised him from a babe and never treated him like anything but their own. Three days ago, it never would have crossed his mind to do such a selfish and horrible thing. But three days ago his birthmother hadn't appeared in his dreams and called for him.

  Earth breaks; fire breathes; waters bless. Fly to me, my son.

  Trix knew what dreams looked like, the real dreams, the ones he was meant to pay attention to. They had more in them than the nothing-dreams of restless nights: more color, more feel, more sound, more taste, more cohesiveness, more details, more memory than memory. Real dreams did not fade upon waking but instead became more vivid, replaying themselves over and over in the mind's eye until the brain teetered on madness with the vision. Real dreams came from the gods. The gods knew how to make a point.

  The gods also knew how to abandon someone in their time of need.

  Trix would never have been able to convey the urgency of those dreams. The journey to Rose Abbey was one he needed to make immediately and alone. There was also a very good chance that the spell he’d put on the stew wouldn’t work. It’s not as if he had tried such a thing before—

  PAIN.

  Oh, the spell had definitely worked. Perhaps a little too well. Shame, too, because that stew had smelled delicious—one of his better accidental concoctions.

  “It would have been nice to leave on a full stomach,” he said, before recalling that no one was around to hear him.

  Between the Woodcutter family and his animal friends, Trix was never alone in the world. And yet tonight there did not seem to be a soul within sight. Trix heard barely a cricket chirp above his ragged breathing. The twilight he escaped into offered a rare solitude. It was at the same time peaceful and concerning.

  A silent Wood, in the main, usually meant trouble.

  Trix stumbled again, forced himself back to standing and stayed there for a moment, listening. The wind had picked up.

  Trix glanced over his shoulder—he could still make out the very top of the Woodcutter home just above the whipping, writhing grasses of the meadow. Dark clouds gathered in the west, swallowing the sun, but not before something in the tower window caught the fading light and flashed it back at him, like a lighthouse beacon on a foreign shore.

  Like a warning.

  The world fell completely silent then, as if Trix had stopped his ears with beeswax. The leaves were silent, his breath was silent, his heartbeat was silent. Even the wind was silent.

  A moment later, the silence transformed into ceaseless thunder: first a low grumble, and then a growl as the earth bucked and reared, furious and alive.

  The ground fell away before him. Trix came down hard on his knees. The meadow rolled beneath his feet, bending and waving like a sea of tall grass...on a sea of tall grass. He was caught up in the fray, helpless to regain his footing, so he tried to ride the earth as it slid and slipped beneath him.

  He failed spectacularly.

  About the Author

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a fairy godmother, and a geek. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, and ranting about fairy tales on YouTube.

  Her published works include: The Wonderland Alphabet (with Janet K. Lee), Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome (with Janet K. Lee), the AlphaOops series (with Bob Kolar), the Books of Arilland fairy tale series, and The Dark-Hunter Companion (with Sherrilyn Kenyon). Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines.

  Alethea’s debut YA fairy tale novel Enchanted won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012 and the Garden State Teen Book Award in 2015. Enchanted was nominated for the Audie Award in 2013, and was selected for World Book Night in 2014. Both Enchanted and its sequel, Hero, were nominated for the Andre Norton Award.

  Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea currently lives and writes on the Space Coast of Florida. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie. You can find Princess Alethea on all the social media and her website: www.aletheakontis.com. For up-to-date information on all future books, performances, and appearances, be sure to subscribe to Alethea’s newsletter.

  Fairy Tale Rants is made possible by the support of friends, fans, and viewers like you—if you would like to support Princess Alethea’s Fairy Tale Rants, please visit her Patreon page and pledge today!

  Connect with Princess Alethea:

  @aletheakontis

  princessaletheakontis

  www.aletheakontis.com

  akontis@gmail.com

  Also by Alethea Kontis

  Beauty & Dynamite

  The Dark-Hunter Companion (w/Sherrilyn Kenyon)

  Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome

  Wild & Wishful, Dark & Dreaming

  AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First

  AlphaOops: H is for Halloween

  The Wonderland Alphabet

  Elemental (editor)