The Boy Who Was Mistaken for a Fairy King
Page 7
“Would you like to hunt?” Carl asked and the gremlin perked up. Two more gremlins crowded close.
“You call Hunt?” one of the newcomers whispered, clasping their hands in excitement.
“What Hunt? What Hunt?” the other asked.
The trouble was, Carl wanted to call a Hunt, but he didn’t know the etiquette of calling a Hunt. He looked for the closest tree (that wasn’t a birch) and placed his palm against its trunk. He thought it was a maple. “Wake up,” he said. “Wake up, please.”
His palm warmed and a being stepped from the trunk, yawned, blinked, then blinked again. Carl introduced himself. “I’m Carl,” he said.
“Hello, Carl,” the being said, and Carl heard the confident voice of a somewhat tired oak. Carl leaned in and whispered what he needed to know in what he assumed to be the oak’s ear.
The oak frowned. “I’m afraid—” The oak paused, leaned down and reached a hand into the ground, all the way up to the elbow, enough to get to the root of the problem. “Oh,” the Quercus said. “Oh.” And then the oak taught Carl how to name his quarry and call a Hunt.
Carl did this as speedily as he could, since he wasn’t sure how much longer Evangeline could stand against a fairy horde.
Glee-struck gremlins frenzied at Carl’s invite, at their first Hunt! And since gremlins, as the trees had informed Carl, were everywhere, always, countless numbers descended upon the Erlking. They, in gremlin parlance, fizzited him good. The Erlking put forth a valiant effort and crushed more than a few gremlins, gored more, but the Erlking was right about gremlins being analogous to ants and, like ants, they had battalions to heap upon the Erlking’s single general.
Carl intended to find Evangeline and lead her to safety, but he was entranced by the violence of the hunt he’d called, and she ended up finding her way to him. “Gotcha,” she said, linking her arm through his. Bloodied, battered and bruised, she smiled at him.
“May I have this dance?” Carl said, embarrassed at his uninjured state. He might have bruises on both knees, and his ankle, where it had caught on the root, might be swelling, but he refrained from mentioning his minor cuts and scrapes.
“Ass,” Evangeline said. “Help me to the car.” She winced at a high-pitched cry of a dying gremlin. “How’d you get them to hunt?”
“I invited them.”
“So…” Evangeline side-eyed him. “…that mean you’re the new Erlking? Erlking’s dead, long live the Erlking?”
Carl shook his head. “I’m not a fairy. I’m a boy. With antlers.” Who might be the next Erlking. He wasn’t sure. The oak had been in deep hibernation and hadn’t been quite coherent. Carl wasn’t going to worry about that just yet. He was more preoccupied by what he should get Evangeline for Christmas. It needed to be extra special since she went to war for him, and he’d near run off on her.
Evangeline sighed. “I don’t get it. If the gremlins can soldier, how come they couldn’t hunt? They seemed so disappointed that they weren’t allowed to kill you.”
“Uh? Thanks?”
“You know what I mean. They’re, like, supremely good at it. Why wouldn’t the Erlking want them on his team?”
Carl had another concern: What was it that the gremlins had imprisoned? Tinker, tailor, soldier, gaoler. What, he wondered, would a fearsome thing like the Erlking fear? What type of creature did the gremlins have locked up? “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.
About the Author
HL Fullerton writes fiction—mostly speculative, occasionally about fairies and forests—which can be found in more than 50 anthologies and magazines, some located on an Internet near you (amazon.com/author/fullerton).
On Twitter as @ByHLFullerton.
About the Publisher
Annorlunda Books is a small press that publishes books to inform, entertain, and make you think. We publish short writing (novella length or shorter), fiction or non-fiction. Our publication criteria are simple: if we like it and it taught us something new or made us think, we’ll publish it.
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Copyright
Copyright © 2019 HL Fullerton.
Cover design by Meredith Dillman.
All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without express permission from the publisher or the author, except in the case of brief quotations.
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First edition.
ISBN: 978-1-944354-52-7